On the salaried profundity of university professors

It is almost always the case that we humans are way more quick and eager to complain than we are about appreciating and thanking.  At work, or at home, or at stores, or wherever.

Which is why I watch out for what students have to say about me.  After all, if the negative feedback is what is usually expressed, then it is all the more easy for me to get an idea of patterns and common threads in those complaints about my teaching.  Which can then be the basis of a better and improved version of me, right?

Maybe we ought to have such mechanisms for friendship, for family relationships too.  Imagine a website where your friends can give you feedback, and anonymously. "The jokes you had on Jane Doe were below the belt" can make you reflect on whether you are always having jokes at somebody else's expense.  "I hate the purple dress you wore to the party because you looked like a cartoon dinosaur" could potentially make you re-think your idea of dressing up.

But, then a friendship or a relationship is not based on an economic exchange.  Teaching is an economic interaction, as much as I hate to think about it that way.  As this essay, which is a review of a book on Adorno's life and thoughts, notes (ht):

we live in a “false society”, where everything is “totally organised” and people are treated as things, and things as people. There was no value except exchange value, and it had infiltrated our lives so completely that we had forgotten how to love anything for its own sake. We had even lost the ability to give thoughtful presents: the act of making a gift had degenerated into a tactical ploy, a grudging exchange of objects executed with “careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other, and the least possible effort. 

But, false or true society, it is what it is and there are people paying for a service.  If I am lousy at providing that, well, it is not the best deal for students, yes?

Thus, every once in a while I go to ratemyprofessors.com. I go there fully expecting dissatisfied students complaining about me.  Over the years, I have picked up plenty of feedback from students and, I often joke with students: "if you think I am a horrible faculty now, you should be glad you were not in my classes even a few years ago!"  I even have a videotape from one of my old televised classes as evidence of how much worse I was back then--thankfully, nobody has VCRs anymore to play that tape!

So, it was after a long time that I checked in with that website.  Turns out that it is not only complaints there.  Positive feedback, too.  Maybe I have become a better teacher, after all.  Fat chance, you say?

The first comment includes this:

I had never had a prof. who encouraged critical thinking so much. This is one class where it was worth paying for the college class.

Awesome. I can call it quits on this high note. Mission accomplished if even one student got that message about critical thinking.

The rest of the comments there didn't even register in my mind.

If even a couple of students become independent, original, critical thinkers, I think I would have done enough and more to keep my salary, right Adorno?

The strenuousness of original thinking had been replaced by the “salaried profundity” of university professors, who train their students to harmonise their judgements with those of their colleagues so as to earn a living as “spokespersons for the average”.

When the term ends, and when the academic year ends, I bet I will get more feedback from students. If jams and chocolates and tea and thank-you notes and wedding invitations are useful and reliable indicators, then they and the website seem to tell me I am doing alright.

The salary is almost a bonus, which I cannot live without ;)