Thursday, July 23, 2015

20150723.0649

Today will complete the first week of my teaching for the summer bridge program; classes only run four days a week, leaving three days for the students to work and get their outside experiences in. (It also leaves three days for faculty to attend to their own affairs). It is a good system, I think, for the purpose it serves: helping students transition from high school life to college. And while I am aware that many will think that colleges and universities "go too easy" on students now--I have had such thoughts myself on occasion--having the easy entry that the bridge program facilitates is a good thing. Perhaps if we had such a primer for more students, we would be able to push a bit harder in the regular classroom.

I know that one objection which may well present itself is that of money. Asking who will pay is entirely valid. I teach at a state school in a state that is cutting budgets, which suggests to me that individual taxpayers are not inclined to contribute more, despite it likely being a good investment (since people who are in school and feel like they are being welcomed into and by the school have motivation to behave responsibly and are more likely to come out of schooling better equipped to discharge the duties of responsible and informed citizenship, both of which support the public good). College is already costly (as I well know), so asking students and parents (and, ultimately, taxpayers whose dollars underwrite student loan and grant programs) to pay more can understandably be thought to cause balking. And while some might suggest that those who do the work of teaching should be paid less so that only those who love the work will do it (a line of reasoning that seems only to be applied to those who teach--never to those who fight, say, or who legislate), good teaching requires good thinking, and good thinking does not usually occur amid a frantic scramble to survive; those running the program need to be paid for their labor--and the question of whence the money comes remains.

The summer bridge program for which I teach is underwritten by a number of companies that hire graduates of the academic programs to which the bridge ostensibly leads. (I say "ostensibly" because students switch majors. It happens. There is nothing wrong with it.) Some of those companies have unsavory reputations even in the United States, let alone elsewhere in the world where they have been known to intimidate less-powerful governments into allowing depredations to occur, where they can exploit less rigorous regulation of labor and environmental practices to make more money more quickly--consequences be damned. So there is an ethical dilemma even in something so seemingly benign as helping students get ready for college (aside from the ones already attendant on the American university systems, which need more treatment than I am able to provide at present): To what extent, if at all, does the good done in the bridge offset the evil done by those who underwrite it? Ultimately, is the program worth pursuing, not at the individual level (where I think it is--but I benefit from it, so of course I do), but at the global? Does it allow more harm than good? Does it cause more harm than good (since I acknowledge the differences of degree, at least, among omission, permission, and commission)? And if it is, on the whole, bad, how much blame do I bear for my complicity in it?

It is a comforting set of questions for the morning, is it not?

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