January 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is now February!

January has been a bustling but useful month.  Article II is reformatted and back out, hopefully to better luck this time in the review process.  The reformatting process isn't entirely trivial: every academic journal typically has its own format expectations.  Sometimes these are very strict, sometimes they are relatively broad, but in any case the expectation is that the article's author is going to make sure the article conforms to those expectations.

The differences can be particularly significant for journals originally in other languages.  While most academic journals in ancient history and classics now publish in English (and often in English, French and German), there are usually a lot of formatting assumptions based on what the original primary language of the journal was - different languages, after all, handle titles, quotations, punctuation and so on differently and journals often want uniformity.  All of which is to say that it took a few days to get all of the format work done.

At the same time, classes are now in full swing.  Omicron spent most of January hitting much of the USA pretty hard and so the opening weeks of classes were a little bit bumpier than I might normally have expected.  On the one hand, the university was open in-person and so I was expected to teach in-person as both of my classes are fully in-person classes.  On the other hand, there is both a clear moral need and also a practical demand to help everyone manage their sense of risk and exposure.

Some students might very much want to be in-person, other students might feel uncomfortable cramming into a lecture room, even with masks (which are no-exceptions, no-excuses required) and vaccines (my university's student body is overwhelmingly vaccinated; 90+%).  And I also have to consider my TAs (teaching assistants, see below) who I am supervising.  For my own part, I am pretty risk tolerant here: my wife and I are both double-vaccinated with mRNA vaccines and boosted, in our 30s and healthy making our COVID risk extremely low.  As I've seen the statistics, with vax+boost, we're more likely to be killed on the bus ride to campus than by the omicron variant.

My solution has been to teach in person but to set up my laptop to broadcast the lectures to the students via zoom (sadly, before someone asks, no I can't share out the links or recordings more broadly, because you all haven't paid tuition to the university which is (barely) paying me to teach this).  Students can attend in person, or they can watch the zoom.  Attending in person is pretty clearly the superior class experience and the one that everything is focused on, but offering a 'good enough' alternative is pretty strongly welcomed by students who might not be confident being in person just yet.  The situation for my TAs is trickier - they have to get permission to teach their discussions remotely; there's not much I can do here because as an adjunct I don't have any kind of tenure to use to shield them if they want to break policy, but so far all requested exemptions have been granted.  So I've had some TAs in person and some remote; due to <good reasons> that state of affairs seems likely to continue in some form for the whole semester: some TAs in person, some remote.

So it all largely works.  Still, managing the extra complexity has been, well, extra-complex.

At the same time, ACOUP has had its busiest month in terms of page-views, breaking 300,000 for the first time, mostly on the strength of the "Decline and Fall?" series which - as you may recall - the members of the ACOUP Senate voted on.  So, you know:

(Obligatory I-am-a-Roman-history-teacher note: the Roman Senate was not a democratic institution, it was if anything an oligarchic institution.  The democratic element of the Roman Republic, such as it was, were the popular assemblies: the comitia centuriata, the comitia tributa and the concilium plebis (and very rarely the comitia curiata).  The Roman Republic is best understood not as a democracy but as a 'mixed constitution' somewhere between pure democracy and pure oligarchy.)

In any event, since teaching is starting back up again and I have teaching assistants for both of my courses, I thought this might be a good time to talk about what teaching assistants do, at a research university in the humanities.

First off, at least at a research university, teaching assistants are essentially always graduate students.  I have heard of schools, particularly those without graduate programs, occasionally having advanced undergraduates work as teaching assistants, but this is rare.  Instead, for research universities with graduate programs (the two go together), funded graduate students generally work in one of three roles as a condition of their funding: research assistants (RAs), teaching assistants (TAs) or graders.

Research assistants are very common in STEM fields but rather rare in the humanities.  Instead, humanities departments tend to use their graduate students as force-multipliers on the teaching side, either as graders or TAs.  In both cases, the expectation is typically that the graduate student puts in an addition 20 hours a week or so on these tasks as a condition of their funding.

Graders are the easiest to explain because they do exactly what it says on the tin: they grade.  Usually graders are assigned to courses that only have a lecture component plus assignments (no breakout or discussion sessions) and involve a lot of subjective grading that has to be done by hand (particularly essay grading).  That structure allows a single professor to teach a much larger class, offering a significant 'force multiplier' on the enrollment the department can support.  A single grader, because they do nothing but grade, can typically be assigned something like 80 students (expectations vary by departments; I've never supervised graders but I was one during my MA and as I recall roughly 80 students was about my load).

Teaching Assistants typically have more complex roles.  In many cases their assigned to classes that have a mix of components, where there is value in both big lectures and also smaller breakout discussion sections, typically of 15-20 students.  Here, graduate TAs allow the instructor to offer those breakout discussion sections (typically scheduled late in the week as the third class meeting in place of a third lecture) which would be impractical to do at scale for just a single professor (I did my own sections for a 45 student class once, and it was a ton of work, since it effectively doubled my in-classroom hours).

The standard use for these discussion sections in a history class is close reading primary sources.  The professor presents the general narrative and features of the period or topic under discussion in lecture, with students then reading either primary source material (documents from the period in translation) or secondary source analysis (academic articles or chapters) and then discussing them in depth, typically over a roughly 50 minute meeting.  The TA facilitates that meeting, either moderating a student discussion or teaching miniature class.  Because the value of those discussion sections is that they are small (to enable discussion), TAs typically will have multiple meetings - so that 50 student load may be split between 3 15-18 student sections.

Of course the professor has chosen the readings in advance and any professor worth their salt is meeting with TAs each week to coordinate exactly what they want the discussions to get out of the readings and so on.  Sadly, many professors can be a bit AWOL on this, but I really do think it is irresponsible not to (even if I know that, as a TA, I sometimes wished my professors scheduled fewer of these meetings).  TAs then also function as graders for their smaller sets of students; the reason they don't grade as many students as a grader would is of course they're spending a lot of time actually running these classes.

Personally, I think TAs can be a very positive thing for students, especially in large universities.  Many universities like to play down the degree of teaching their graduate students do (often to an insulting degree), but the fact is for these sort of entry-level introductory courses, a graduate student is perfectly qualified to lead discussions and grade papers.  Frankly I'd trust most of the TAs I've supervised to teach the courses themselves, hook, line and sinker, especially if provided with a syllabus in advance.  First or second year graduate students are already more than qualified to walk students through My First Primary Source, especially with some guidance from the professor; your fifth year ABD graduate student is almost comically overqualified to do so.

But TAs offer a lot to the students.  Their smaller discussions create the opportunity for discussion in a way that wouldn't be possible in a larger class.  At the same time, getting face-time with a professor that may have hundreds of students can be difficult and it is very hard to build a relationship in with the professor in those big classes.  Graduate TAs can be more approachable and also can offer more individualized assistance because they've seen all of the student's work and participation.  Right now, I am teaching two classes of 90 students each; it is very hard for me to even get to know most of my students, much less have a sense of where they all are in the class, but my TAs do have that sense (also, I am terrible with names when it comes to still-living people).

(The one exception there is when students are aiming to build relationships with the goal of getting recommendations for their own application to graduate school.  Here, prestige matters, though in practice what students need to be doing here is taking the smaller, much more advanced classes in order to build a reputation with the professors themselves.  If you want to do graduate school, after all, you ought to first show you can handle an advanced undergraduate class.)

Now of course this all also has a significant economic impact for the department and university.  By way of example, a normal teaching load at top-tier research universities is the 2/2 - two courses in the fall, two in the spring.  Single-professor classes generally top out around 45 students or so in this environment, so that single professor can teach perhaps 180 or so students a year.  Let's assume that professor is tenure-track but not tenured, so they may cost around $70k (+benefits) to the university at flagship state-school.  That's about $380 per student per seat in wage costs.

Now let's instead add TAs - let's give the professor a more normal load, still a 2/2, but now one class each semester is a introductory class with 4 TAs assigned to it and the other is a smaller advanced class with just 35 seats.  Those 4 TAs can each cover, as mentioned, very roughly 50 students, so that lecture now has 200 seats, with the total seats per year for this five person team now being 470.  The TAs might get something like $16k a year, plus their tuition remitted (another $8k or so, but with wild variance for in-state vs. out-of-state), so they each cost maybe $24k (+ benefits, but not nearly so many or so nice).  So the total cost of our group is now $166k, and our wage-cost-per-student has dropped to just $350 or so.

Moreover, if you watched closely, our professor's workload has decreased!  He used to lecture 2 classes and grade 90 students a week; now he has two lectures but only grades 35 students directly.  Especially if our professor has taught these classes before (or has more than one class with the same 'prep' - two sections of the same course), grading is often the single largest work component, so this system allows the prof. to focus that time all on the advanced class (or on research).

Now let's take one of those two big lectures and instead of TAs, assign it four graders.  We now use the same number of people to teach 590 students a year and our cost-per-seat is down further, around $280.  And of course in theory the graduate students are getting valuable experience teaching in a supervised setting and our professor has more time for their research.

Overall, I don't actually think this is a bad system, but it does have some flaws.  The first is that much is dependent on the supervising professor actually doing their job and - as I discussed in ACOUP talking about graduate school - there are very few systems to make that happen.  Professors that act terribly unprofessionally to undergraduates are increasingly - and this is good, to be clear - an endangered species on college campuses, but graduate students, because of the different nature of the power imbalance, have fewer options or protections.  Of course all I can do here is strive to be a model of professionalism and charity here.

 The other problem, of course, is that this is clearly an apprentice system.  Ideally a graduate student spends a year or so as a grader before transitioning to being a TA and then  late in their graduate career (during the dissertation) teaches classes themselves as the instructor of record (a 'graduate instructor') all as preparation for becoming a professor themselves.  But of course, as again we've discussed, there are no jobs.

Speaking of which, the final sour note to end this out on is that despite a heartbreaker of a close call, it looks like the Fall 2021 job season is a bust.  That's not a huge surprise, it was a really lean year, even in the context of the fact that every year since 2009 has been, historically speaking, a lean year.  The Spring season is typically when departments advertise for adjuncts and other short-term postings, so that is the next adventure, starting with sounding out my current department.  Fortunately ACOUP and your support gives me the security necessary to keep at this and continue doing this thing I love (even if it doesn't quite always seem to love me back).