To pick up where I left off, something else has also changed about students. Okay, maybe it hasn’t changed, and it’s only me, and my experience, but as this is also my essay, it’s only fair that I get to say that. You can write your own essays and disagree accordingly.
Anyway, having taught on all levels, involving all (st)ages, covering the basic, the intermediate and the advanced level courses, I have a feeling that students aren’t as willing to put in the hours anymore, to grind, even though, I’d say, there’s no other way to get better at something.
To be clear, this is not to say that students are somehow worse these days. No. I’d say it’s about the same, give or take. Overall, they might even be better these days. That said, that’s not the same as willing to put in the hours, to work hard to achieve something. So, I’d rather say that it’s a mixed bag. Some things have changed for the better, whereas other things have changed for the worse.
Now, before I expand on this topic, why working hard is what’s often missing these days, I do want to add that this does not mean that all university students are like that, nor that they are simply lazy. I’ve witnessed students put way, way more effort into something than what was expected of them. It might be unnecessary and, in some cases, working smarter is better than simply working harder, but, anyway, my point is that this does not apply to all students. Plus, I’d say that this also applies to a lot of people who aren’t students or are no longer students, so this is not just about students, even though I’m focusing on students.
And it’s not only just me who’s noticing this. Ian Buchanan also mentioned this in a fairly recent interview with David Nicholls. He noted the same thing. In his view, his generation did more and was expected to do more. To be more specific, he isn’t fond of how students these days respond to challenging texts by complaining about the difficulty, like how it’s unnecessarily difficult, without considering that they might need to put in more effort to come to terms with the text. I agree. I’ve noticed this as well, where it’s like, well, this isn’t written in a clear and concise way, so could we have something else please. To be fair, at times they have this feeling or sensation that there might actually be something to that difficult text. It’s like if only they persisted, they might get something great out of the text.
I’m at a loss when I encounter this kind behavior, because it’s like saying why can’t something hard simply be easy. I’ve run into this type of people a number of times, not only among students, where it’s still sort of understandable, but also among experienced academics who look at you all puzzled: like why all this theory, like why do insist on complicating things, why not just get to the point instead?
Ah, but that’s presupposing that language works like that, that words refer to things and just select the right words and that’s it. That’s why it’s bizarre how someone like John Searle, known for speech act theory that heavily emphasizes that, as J. L. Austin would put it, we do things with words, went on to say something as silly as:
“Where questions of style and exposition are concerned[,] I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly[,] you don’t understand it yourself.”
Note how I was bit of an a-hole there, fixing his terrible style and exposition, just to make a point. Anyway, while he (x) is, at times, cited as having expressed that in introduction to one of his books, ‘Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind’, that’s not the only thing he (x) had to say in that context:
“But anyone who attempts to write clearly runs the risk of being ‘understood’ too quickly, and the quickest form of such understanding is to pigeonhole the author with a whole of other authors that the reader is familiar with.”
So, while he is in favor of clarity, very clearly so, to the point that he gets ridiculed for it, he has also always been aware of how that’s not as clear cut as many people would like it to be. In other words, okay, there’s something to it, that you try your best to make people understand you, but, at the same time, if you simplify things too much, if you dumb it down, that can also lead to people missing your point.
This is exactly the case with landscape. If you say or write landscape, this and/or that, blah, blah, blah, all casually, it is indeed exactly in that way that Searle (x) points out that it gets understood. It seems so self-evident to people what a landscape is that doing the exact opposite, explaining the concept, in great detail, seems like you don’t know what you are talking about, even though you do, and they don’t.
It’s, of course, the same with other ‘big concepts’, like nature, culture, ideology, economy, structure, and the like, as I’ve pointed out at least a couple of times in the past. If you don’t explain them, you indeed risk doing what Searle (x) warns us not to do. We could say the same of language and discourse, so that we account for both landscape and discourse, the name of this blog. That’s also particularly apt in connection to Searle, considering that while he, perhaps, isn’t considered the most radical of philosophers, he, much like Austin, weren’t just going to be content with how language is understood. No. They totally went against the grain. He was like no, I’m going to write about this and not like a short essay and that’s it, but like entire books. While perhaps clear in style and exposition, at least in comparison to others who do the same, or something similar, I wouldn’t call his works casual, easy to grasp, like light bedtime reading. Oh, no, no, no.
I think this is, perhaps, easier to grasp in terms used by H. P. Grice, as he also explains how people come understand one another in terms of maxims. So, as he (45-46) explains this in ‘Logic and Conversation’, we have four maxims or, to be more precise, categories: quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. To summarize all of them, because I don’t want to get tangled up on that again, as I’ve written about all that in the past, at least a couple of times, the point is that to help others make sense of what we say, we must say enough, not too much, not too little. We must also say only what we believe to be true and we must have evidence to support that. We must also avoid being all over the place in the way we say something, as well as stay on the topic.
If we apply Grice’s criteria to a lot of texts, including my texts, my ‘proper’ articles and my ‘improper’ essays both included, I’m far from being clear and concise, happily flailing all over the place, albeit sometimes more, sometimes less. Ah, but even Grice would recognize that we routinely avoid fulfilling his set of criteria. Why? Well, because we make meaning as we speak, or as we write, or, to be as inclusive as possible, as we express something. That’s what he (43-45) calls the implicature, which is a fancy pants way of saying that we imply something when we say something.
It would be tempting to think that we may mean what we say and, in some cases, imply something else than what we say, but that’s an untenable division. It’s rather that we often assume that something is the case, based on what we know, like saying this, or that, typically means something, whatever it is, while being aware that it might not be the case and that there might be a good reason for that not to be the case. Humor is the textbook example of this. It’s silly, hyperbolic, ironic, sarcastic, happily all over the place, but what matters is that it works. It has that function and that’s to amuse you. If you take it literally, you miss the fun of it. So, in short, you don’t find or uncover a meaning, as it if was hiding or concealed. Instead, you make sense as you express something, so that you produce meaning, not alone, but in connection to others.
But, hey, aren’t academic texts supposed to be serious? Well, yes, if you say so. If you insist on that, but, again, that’s you insisting on it. But there isn’t anything inherently wrong about amusing your readers.
Anyway, no matter what, Grice was smart enough to leave it up to you to decide whether someone meets the criteria or not, without giving you any clear-cut criteria that you could rely on to judge whether the meaning is conveyed clearly to you, or to some other reader of the same text. As you’ll notice, it depends, and we cannot universalize that.
For example, what is enough? What is too little? What is too much? What counts as evidence and how much of it does one have to have to not get called out for lying or claiming to be sure when you aren’t sure? What is relevant? What is obscure anyway? What do we mean by orderly?
My answer is that it all depends on the context. It’s all circumstantial, which means that no matter what you do, you cannot universalize it. That’s what I mean when I insist that meaning or sense is not something pre-existing, but something that is made or produced, there and then.
To expand on that, for one person, it’s enough to just utter a couple of words and they get the point, whereas someone else may need a longer explanation. One person is less adamant about the extent of the evidence, knowing that certain kinds of evidence are convincing, whereas someone else isn’t at all convinced and demands more evidence. What is obscure to one person, like technical manuals, is crystal clear to another person, because they are an expert on that and know all the relevant jargon. What might also come across as irrelevant to one person, might be highly relevant to another person, because, again, they are, perhaps, more familiar with the matter and are therefore better at assessing that, there and then.
But, see, see, you can’t universalize that. No matter how hard you try, there’s gonna be someone who’ll object to it and claim that the person they are dealing with is being uncooperative. Okay, maybe I’m too sure of that, so let’s say that, instead, there’s always that possibility that someone is unconvinced by it, now or some time later on, because what might be clear right now might be obscure in the future.
If you want a concrete example, think of your relationship with this essay. Is this text easy to understand? Or is it difficult to understand? Either way, ask yourself why that’s the case. It might be that you know all or most of this already and that’s why it’s easy. You might also have stumbled upon it, thinking, what in the world is this fellow on about, like he doesn’t make any sense. Or it could be the way of writing that makes it difficult or easy to you. Maybe I’m too all over the place and that makes it difficult for you. Alternatively, that’s how you prefer it, all over the place, so it’s easy for you.
You might also return to this essay in the future. Maybe you didn’t get it the first time. Maybe it even angered you. Ah, but lo and behold, now it makes sense to you. Now you get it. Again, ask yourself why that’s the case. The short answer to that is that the circumstances have changed. Oh, and you are, of course, part of those circumstances.
It might also work the other way around. You might get this, right now, and be like yes, yes, and yes, hallelujah, amen brother, and what not, probably because you are as hippy dippy as I am (or was, at the time I was writing this, there and then), only to think of this as embarrassing drivel in the future. That can happen and you just got to accept it. It is what it is.
But how does that work? Like how does that vary like that? Doesn’t the text, the essay, stay the same? Well, yes, the text, the essay, stays the same, inasmuch it isn’t subsequently edited (which can also happen as I do edit these at times, fixing typos, marking concepts in italics etc.). That said, assuming the text isn’t altered or isn’t altered in any substantial way, the context does change. I change. You change. We all change. Everything changes, even the language. Oh, and sometimes the language changes to the extent that something that’s considered obvious is just odd or perplexing in the future.
To swing back to speech act theory, what matters in language is not what an utterance is, what it means, as if it were fixed, like it means this, whatever that is (see how I’m struggling with that, going in circles, unable to fix it), but what it does, what it makes happen. So, a text may then well be difficult or expressed in a, at least supposedly difficult manner, perhaps defying the expectations, not because the author seeks to hide something and/or the author is poor at expressing it, albeit that’s certainly possible, but because it has a different function altogether. Instead of giving you some, supposedly, correct answers to what it is that you are interested in, the author might, in fact, be pushing you to think.
What’s my take then? Well, I don’t think I can solve that for you, nor for anyone. That’s pragmatics for you. There’s no right or wrong, as such, when it comes to expressing something. Do what works for you and if that bothers others, too bad. Of course, if you seek to publish in someone else’s publication, it might be that you need to adjust your style.
That’s also how I think it works with understanding the expressions of others. It’s all there, as a text, in a certain a context. You can’t change the text, but you can change the context. So, if a text, let’s say an article, a book chapter or a book, isn’t working for you, it’s often not the case that it’s poorly written. While that can be the case, fair enough, it’s most likely that you just don’t get it and, on top of that, you aren’t willing to put in the hours to get it.
That’s definitely something I’ve noticed recently. Students aren’t any worse than they used to be, or that’s my view of it anyway. It’s rather that they aren’t willing to put in the hours. But why aren’t they willing to put in the hours? Well, like I pointed out in the previous essay, if you work at the same time, there just isn’t as much time you can spend on your studies. Plus, if you want to have, erm, some sort of life in addition to your studies and work, there’s even less time for you to spend on your studies.
To be fair to the students, I think it’s also worth pointing out how I’m critical of just about everybody, not just them. I’d say that this is even more applicable to people who have fancy degrees. I don’t like the attitude where you just adhere to the past masters in your field. That’s lazy and parochial. I’ve given such people plenty of flak over the years. If you’ve read my essays, I’m sure you’ve noticed. That said, I must acknowledge that this is not as simple as people choosing to act in such ways, doing just more of the same. To make sense of that, I think you need to ask why that’s the case. So, why is that the case? Well, in my view, there are multiple answers to that. Firstly, if you have already landed a sweet gig, it’s not like you need to put in more effort. I get it. It’s like why bother if you don’t have to. The problem with this is that it’s also in their best effort to police others, to prevent them from putting in the hours. How so? Well, if others put in more hours than they do, there’s the risk that they end looking lazy. That’s not a great look, so, yeah, I get it. I don’t approve it, no, no, but I do get it. Secondly, there’s only so much they can do. I don’t know how things are abroad, in different countries, but at least here everything is run on a shoestring budget. That means that many academics just don’t have the time to put in the hours. That also means that the people who you’d think would put in the hours, the people who the students expect to know a lot, simply don’t have the time for it. There are simply too few people to handle the workload, which means that a handful of people do all the teaching and/or research, plus most of the admin. The problem with this is that in this way the academics, me included, fail not just our students, as we often do when we lack the time to expand our horizons, to familiarize ourselves with what it is that some students are interested in, but also ourselves. If we don’t have the time for something as basic as reading, beside what is expected of us in a certain field or discipline, it’s unlikely that we’ll come with anything new. To combine the two then, this means that it’s just more of the same or, to be more accurate, more of almost the same (as nothing is ever, strictly speaking, the same), year after year. It’s like a feedback loop.
Now, to practice what I preach, instead of mere criticism, there needs to be constructive criticism. So, what can be done about this issue? How can we make sure that people put in more hours? Now, as you might have guessed, I don’t have any silver bullets for this. That said, I think there are things that can be changed.
What’s, perhaps, most important is that the people who run the show need to figure out what it is that they think the universities are for. In other words, they need to define what their function is. To give you a bit of context, in Finland universities are quasi-state universities. They are public corporations or foundations that operate independently from the state, but they are nonetheless heavily regulated and largely funded by the state. In other words, they can be also understood as quasi-private universities, having been detached from the state not that long ago. Long story short, they are expected to operate like a corporation, that is to say balance their budgets, yet they must do what the state wants them to do, to carry out research and provide education. The problem is that neither is good business in Finland. Education is free and most research doesn’t make any money. That means that what the state wants the universities to do doesn’t make any money for the universities, nor for the state. This means that the state reimburses the universities for research and students, according to a certain set of criteria. The more and better research a university does, the more money it gets. The more students graduate on time, the more money it gets. The problem is that the universities don’t have enough researchers, nor teachers, yet they are asked to publish more and award more degrees.
Now, you might think that there’s an easy to fix. Simply hire more people and voilà! Ah, but not so fast. The thing is that the state defines the funding for the universities. This is basically a certain sum of money, a pot, if you will. It then allocates this money to the universities, dividing it among them according to how well the universities have performed. So, if one university hires more people and manages to produce more, that means more money to it. That also means that the other universities won’t get as much money as they used to get, which means less resources for research and teaching, likely in the form of various cuts. In other words, if the pot isn’t increased to accommodate for the increase in performance in one university, then the other universities will suffer. Hiring more people in hopes of better performance may also backfire, which means more cuts in that university and thus more money to the other universities.
There’s also additional public and private funding for research. That basically works the same way. If you produce more, it’s likely that you get rewarded and, conversely, if you don’t produce more, it’s unlikely that you’ll get rewarded. This makes balancing the budget even trickier.
The idea behind this model is to make the universities perform better by having to compete more with one another. Simply put, the idea is to reward good ideas. That may seem like a good idea, but it isn’t. Why? Because the universities are, nonetheless, quasi-state universities, as I pointed out already. They are all tied to the state. They are simply playing musical chairs.
If you assess the education aspect of it, as I do, as a lecturer, the state doesn’t really seem to understand what the function of university education is. It’s bizarre really. It asks the universities to balance their budgets. The teachers are an easy target when it comes to making budget cuts because, well, they aren’t producing anything, right here, right now. That’s true. A teacher doesn’t produce anything. I admit it. As a teacher, I don’t produce anything. In that sense, I’m paid for nothing. There’s no surplus that I can point to. But that’s the thing, a university is not a factory.
If you wanted to make the state, including the municipalities way better in terms of their performance, it would totally make sense to fire all the teachers, yes, all of them, because they aren’t producing anything. Why pay anything to anyone who doesn’t produce anything? Now, that said, imagine going to your local council with this idea, proposing that we fire all the teachers, all the principals, all the support staff, on that basis, because they are massive financial burden to the municipality. Something tells me that they’d react to such proposal by pointing out that schools are not factories, like duh. It’s like we want people to be educated, to have certain know-how that is beneficial to them, and to others, so we hire other people that already have a certain know-how to educate them.
To be clear, the legislators are aware of this. It is clearly stated in the official unofficial translation of the Universities Act (558/2009) that:
“The mission of the universities is to promote independent academic research as well as academic and artistic education, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large.”
As you can see, the universities have a dual function. Firstly, the universities do research, no strings attached. Secondly, they provide higher education. Note also how this education is supposed to be research based. This means that universities need research staff and teaching staff. If you make cuts in research, then, well, you are bound to fail to provide research-based higher education. If you make cuts in teaching, you are still bound to fail to provide research-based higher education. Plus, to connect this to the burdens shared by the students and the staff, if you make cuts that result in the staff no longer having time to put in the hours to learn more, be that through research or by simply reading articles, book chapters and books, you are, once more, bound to fail to provide research-based higher education. In other words, if we simply just keep doing what we do, like more of the same (I know, I l know, it’s almost the same, not the same, but you know what I mean), we are not really providing our students research-based higher education. To connect this back to the students, if we fail at that, if we fail in our mission, we fail them and, in the long run, when they succeed us, as they eventually will, it’s only likely that they’ll end up failing their students.
Okay, maybe things are better in other departments, other schools, other faculties and other universities, but, like I pointed out in the previous essay, I don’t see how we can currently succeed in that mission set by our legislators. Why? Because the state, the real force behind the universities, does not provide the universities the necessary resources for their staff, the researchers, the teachers and the supporting staff, to succeed in that mission. For whatever reason, it thinks that universities are factories. This is so stupid to even have to point out, but, no, they are not factories, nor are they corporations that have certain expenses, notably the workforce, that then produces something that balances the books or, more ideally, results in surplus.
Someone needs to remind the legislators, namely the government as that’s the majority that makes the decisions in the parliament, and the ministry of education what the mission is and that, currently, we are already failing. There’s no way I can honestly say that me and my colleagues, in my department, are able to provide our students “research-based higher education” that enables them to “serve their country and humanity at large.”
As I pointed out in the previous essay, it’s so streamlined now that we risk reducing the students to one-trick ponies. Like we really need to think what we include in a certain course. Why? Because that might be the only course where they can learn what they can later on use in their theses. That’s bananas. We have to be like, should variationist sociolinguistics be part of the course that covers sociolinguistics, discourse studies and pragmatics. Of course it should be in that, not necessarily because it’s the most relevant approach these days, but it’s kind of silly if you graduate never even having heard of such. For us, as teachers, the problem is that it’s difficult to make much use of that at this level due to research ethics, so it’s bound to be cut from the course in the future.
Plus, as you may have noticed, there’s basically one, yes, just that one course dedicated to those areas of research. We do not have separate courses for them. It’s pretty wild that we end up, for example, covering speech act theory in one 90-minute lecture, basically split between Austin and Searle, and then that’s it. That itself would warrant its own lecture series, but we don’t have that kind of resources. In fact, we never had that kind of resources. I don’t imagine we ever will have that kind of resources, fair enough, but it’d be great if we could have separate courses at least for those areas, not because I want to teach all those courses, but because it’s pretty silly that we have to combine those three areas of research into one lecture course. I know there’s overlap between them, again, fair enough, but we aren’t doing our students any favors.
This issue is particularly problematic, because the students do want us to change the course content. While what we provide our students is a solid foundation on those areas of research, we barely scratch the surface. What we include is pretty good, but it is also pretty old school. While I don’t mind that, don’t be fooled by the date of publication when you read something, it is 2024 now and what the students are interested in is what happens in 2024. For example, that one course covers conversation analysis or, rather, the basics of it, but no one really gives a hoot, not me, not my closest colleague, nor the students, because it doesn’t help them, here and now, to grapple issue that concern them, here and now. The tools they get from that don’t help them to “serve their country and humanity at large”, as the legislators would like them to do. They want tools to deal with how language is connected to, for example, ableism, anthropocentrism, racism, and sexism, or, more broadly speaking, (m)any kind(s) of discrimination, but are they getting those tools from us? Well, no. Okay, they get some tools, but, again, that’s like one lecture among other lectures, so no, not really. To be positive, we are making some changes. This may annoy others, because we aren’t doing traditional or old school linguistics, but I think we need to stick to the mission. We can’t live in the past, thinking that research and education are about adhering to some past masters from decades ago, when it’s clear that it’s not relevant to what the students are interested in.
We can and do offer more courses as independent study units, which is a fancy way talking about book exams, but that’s hardly ideal. When I did teacher training, it was pretty ironic how we had this major book exam, with like four books, if I remember correctly, while the people teaching us kept telling us that book exams are hardly ideal when it comes to learning and assessing that learning. Haha! Did I fail it? Yes. Yes, I did (and that’s not the only exam in life that I’ve failed). I complained, not because that wasn’t totally on me, but because, come on, that is ridiculous (I think they ended up changing that format though, and, yes, I did pass that exam in a retake). To be clear, I love a good book. I just don’t like the idea of telling students that they can do this other stuff, this cool stuff that isn’t mandatory, but the only way of doing that is to read books and then take an exam where they get asked some random questions about the books.
If I had any saying (I don’t, nothing has changed about that in a decade), I’d like to make universities actually more equal or, should I say, more collegial. It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of students are adults, yet at least I feel like they are often treated like children and, somehow, they also acquire a similar mindset where they think that the people working at the university are the adults. I fully understand that the dynamic is different between people if they are in such relationships where one is a superordinate and the other is a subordinate when compared to people of equal standing. I just find it a bit … well I just don’t like it when other adults think that I’m, somehow, better than them just because I have a certain job or some fancy academic title. I don’t like it because it distances me from them. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that I want to be buddies with all the students, no, that’d be just … exhausting. It’s rather that I feel like I end up in an odd vacuum where the only people I’m supposed to deal with are other academics. That’s just, well, condescending and awfully boring.
References
- Buchanan, I. (2023). The Top 5 books that have influenced me (Interview with David Nichols 2023). Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68JYTl8eLc
- Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York, NY: Academic Press.
- Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
References (legislation)
- Universities Act (558/2009).