What We Have Lost, What We Have Gained

Since my previous entry about my late former colleague Robert Dana, I’ve had several interesting conversations with colleagues, friends, and the president emeritus of a distinguished liberal-arts college about the apparent disappearance, or at least the increasing scarcity, of professors like Robert Dana on the small-college scene.

I’m a graduate of a liberal-arts college that at the time had about 1,350 students. I served on the faculty of a slightly smaller liberal-arts college for 10 years, and am now at an institution that has about 900 students on the campus. In total, I’ve spent 16 of the past 28 years at such small institutions. I have been taught by and worked with a lot of small-college professors.

The kind of liberal-arts-college professors whose disappearance I lament have a number of common characteristics. Most important, they are intensely dedicated to students, though this dedication may show up in a variety of ways. Some such faculty members are gruff and unyielding, while others are friendly and personal. They tend not to preserve a strict separation between their lives outside the institution and their lives inside, and thus are the people who will give students rides, have them to their homes for meals, hire them to babysit or pet sit, take them to the hospital when they get really sick, and generally treat students, on some level, as friends.

The profession, though, seems to be moving in the opposite direction. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the higher priorities placed on scholarly or creative accomplishment, even at small, teaching-oriented institutions, militate against the kind of casual, time-intensive work with students involved in this earlier model of faculty life.

The general culture that determines the way interactions between faculty members and students can occur has also changed in the past 20 years or so. Sexual-harassment laws and rules have made easy, personal relationships between faculty members and students more difficult and complex. Attitudes toward alcohol consumption have certainly changed on campus, in all sorts of ways. The Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, and other communication technologies have weakened the communal glue of the small campus. On many campuses, more students have cars and don’t stay around on weekends. Residence halls are more comfortable, sometimes reducing interaction in a campus’s public spaces.

A lot of these changes are for the better. Taking more care to prevent and punish sexual harassment and exploitation is obviously the right thing to do, and it’s clear that some faculty members can’t or won’t understand what’s appropriate without bright lines. Drinking on campus is definitely a problem, and being more restrictive in that regard is safer and avoids a lot of problems. Still, these changes have entailed loss as well. The communal spirit built by a more free-wheeling faculty life was a real thing in both my undergraduate institution and at my first job. This life had costs that we’re no longer willing to bear, and I am pretty sure we’re right in that decision. But we need a new model that has some of the magic, without the adverse outcomes.