letter to a bureaucrat

Professor,

It is ironic that I receive your end-of-year comments on my “performance” at the same time that I received a 25-year service thank-you note from Loyola, with a Seiko watch as present. I thank you and the administration for the 100-dollar Seiko watch (Amazon's price).

You really think that you’ll “improve” my “performance” by letting me teach five days a week at 8:00 and by having “colleagues” attend my courses? You’ve already unfairly increased my load, rejected my promotion, and froze my salary to an associate professor level. Why not treat people with dignity, and tell them we don’t want you with us anymore? Why this stupid game of forcing someone to quit by pushing him to unbearable working conditions? You call that a “plan”? Let’s think of it as a deathtrap.

You must be thinking that people have no dignity, that they could be pushed around and humiliated no matter what their core beliefs are.

My core beliefs have been clearly stated since I joined Loyola 25 years ago in every page that I’ve written for my students and to the outside world, and in every photograph that I did. I received my tenure in 1998 based on those principles.

I wonder whether Loyola has core beliefs that it is defending. If a university respects itself it will not appoint a professor on tenure when he is unable to teach, write, and publish. Moreover, the university only insults itself when it tells that same professor, a couple of years before retirement, that you cannot teach, write, and publish, and your colleagues will teach you. A university must be clueless when it tells a professor right before retirement that we’ll teach you how to teach, and that your students will tell you how to teach, and whether you teach well. Have you thought of grade inflation before you get me into one of your sinister “plans”? Maybe this professor has become the objet petit a of the university, or its dark consciousness. You’ll have to convince a judge in a court of law that, mutatis mutandis, you’ve kept a professor for 25 years in service “in spite” of poor performance. Or maybe because of it? Maybe the judge will tell you that it must be the university’s performance that has been going downhill! The Wall Street Journal had us ranked at 194 in 2017. We’ve always been low, but not that low!

The department must have a copy of every syllabus I taught since 1992. Read them and let me know if my teaching has degraded. Samples of those syllabi are posted on my private website and are available for the world at large. I do not usually receive from readers comments on “incompetence,” but more of the kind, I’m surprised you can do all this in a university like that!

If I cannot “do all this” anymore it’s because the working conditions at Loyola have degraded, at least since 2013. It has become difficult to even get the minimum required enrollment of 12 for most of those syllabi. Out of the five yearly courses, four are core, and the core is not a core anymore—more like a Persian bazaar with a hodgepodge of incompatible courses. Even a bazaar has more coherence, personality, and decency than anything we call core at Loyola. We’ve never had the luxury conditions of our friends in Hyde Park, but at least the room was open for experimentation. We’re now into a sinister machinery called the Core—with a capital C! I’m sure Loyola is making more pennies, and the WSJ will have us lower in 2018!

I find it wicked that you’re trying to “improve” my performance by assigning me five times a week at 8:00—when I expressly told you and David that I cannot teach that early, because never in 25 years did I teach that early, and because I work late at night and suffer from certain health conditions, which is not unusual at my age.

With the Syrian wars, I am under lots of pressure. I want to produce a book that matches the gravity of the conflict. Thank you for worrying about my Regenstein hours, but I need something more than your prayers: a good night sleep, the ability to work and concentrate, and days where I stay at home to write.

Rather than give me lessons of “ethics,” I want you to question your ethical line, assuming you have one: Are the 8:00am assignments really there to “improve” my teaching, or are they an overt attempt to make my working conditions unbearable? Is there any consciousness left in you?

So let’s come to business, which is what Loyola likes doing most, albeit clumsily.

I cannot accept any 8:00am assignments. You can do whatever you want with the two h104 sections, but I won’t be able to teach them myself. Let’s not waste time on this. Unless I’m brought back to the fall MWF 2017 schedule, I will only attend the course on the modern middle east in fall 2018.

I only accept my students to attend my courses, and will not approve anyone else attending, certainly not Stasi "agents" planted by the department to write dubious spying "reports." Let them work on improving their own courses. My syllabi are public on my personal website, and anyone can comment. Syllabi are too important to be disparaged by the macabre reclusiveness of academics.

My conditions are final and nonnegotiable. You can do whatever you want with me—that’s the sinister aspect of clueless bureaucracies—but you won’t be able to harm my dignity.

dept. of education

Chicago, 5 April 2013

Dear Dean Reinhard Andress,

Thank you for receiving me in your office in mid-March, and I apologize for the delay in responding to your email.

During our conversation, I made it clear that a major reason for my reluctance to submit my annual assessment form to the Chair of the History Department since January 2010 was the unwillingness of our department to make public the relevant data that would correlate teaching evaluations with grading and other matters.

In the last few years, beginning with the departmental committee report that evaluated my request for promotion to the rank of professor, and further assessments by the Chair, the students’ evaluations have become the most contentious issue. In our meeting last month, you read to me what you perceived as “negative comments” by the students, and in your letter you mention that “your teaching is problematical because of a significant number of negative comments by students.” And you add that “I see you as not fully complying with your teaching responsibilities.” First of all, I don’t know what “significant” means here, since the department has failed to provide us with any relevant figures that would correlate evaluations, grading, and the quality of teaching. In effect, since the students’ evaluations have become computerized around 2005–06 through a new system, I’ve requested from the Chairs of our department to provide us with relevant data that would situate the evaluations for each professor in relation to his or her colleagues. Such data would include at the very minimum the class average for grading and assessment; the standard deviation for each course/seminar and the overall average; the correlation between each professor’s performance and that of the department; and the distribution of grades for individual courses and seminars and the department as a whole.

To wit, there is a national problem of grade inflation, well documented in the academic and journalistic literatures, and to which the department and university are willingly not paying much attention. Consequently, those of us who have our courses and seminars structured on rigorous readings and grading of papers and assignments are punished for not fitting with the mysterious and unpublicized “general curve” of grading and behaving. It is no secret, however, notwithstanding absent data about grading and the performance of students and their professors, that 50 percent of Loyola’s students fail to receive their bachelor degrees within the four-year period normally assigned to them, and that this may in turn point to a major structural weakness in the performance of students, in spite of Loyola’s lenient requirements.

Should professors like myself, who have been at the service of the university for 20 years, be punished just few years before their retirement, simply for assigning first-class readings, and for providing rigorous comments and grading to their students’ papers? During our conversation in your office, you have quoted what you perceive as so-called “negative comments” by some of my students, which were randomly accumulated by the departmental Chair. Besides the fact that such statements would only produce circumstantial and anecdotal evidence at best, they should not be used for purposes of tenure/promotion and the renewal of contracts, unless, of course, they are substantiated by statistical evidence for the totality of courses and seminars offered by the department in a semester. Moreover, the so-called “negative comments” are taken for granted for what is perceived as negative. When, for example, a student claims that “the professor’s lectures are too long and incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we inquire further and check whether this student has read the assignment, cares about the content of the assignment (the assigned book), and if so, whether his/her dissatisfaction stems from any differences of interpretation, or is indicative of something else? Or when a student claims that “the essay’s prompt is vague, if not incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we pursue the question further and ask her whether she has read the texts upon which the prompt was based? And if so, does she care about the texts she has read? Do they mean anything to her?

Why are you confronting me only with the negatives? Why not look at what “positive” comments have to say, and, again, confront such comments with a rigorous test of quality in order to see what they have in turn to say about what Loyola has to offer—or what it fails to offer?

There is the desire of a consumer society to avoid learning curves. This tends to result in dumbed-down products that are easily started but compromised in value and application. Shouldn’t we contrast this with teaching experiences that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow students and teachers to become well versed in reading and writing? For over 20 years I’ve committed myself to demanding learning curves in my writing and teaching, and I want to pursue along that path.

Sincerely,

Zouhair Ghazzal

Professor of historical and social sciences

Department of History

zghazza@luc.edu

Post-Scriptum:

Regarding my writing and research, I prefer to be read rather than simply graded. For that purpose I made public all my contributions since 2009–10:

http://luc.academia.edu/ZouhairGhazzal

Additional material is available here:

http://zouhairghazzal.com/