Bending to the breaking point

Old buzzwords never die; they just get repurposed to meet new challenges. I give you nimble, agile, flexible, and resilient, the buzzwords trotted out in 2020 to inspire the heroic efforts required to shift quickly from face-to-face teaching to pandemic mode. We nimbly flexed and demonstrated resilient agility, and if the effort wore us out, at least we knew that when push comes to shove, we can be as nimble as the next guy.

Now the same old buzzwords are pushing and shoving their way into meetings called to respond to staffing issues caused by cuts in positions. Departments, I've been told, will need to be nimble, agile, flexible, and resilient to find creative ways to staff essential courses, and that might require some of us to teach outside our areas of expertise.

Which, sure, is a nice idea. My primary area of expertise is post-Civil-War American Literature, but when I first started teaching here, I spent a significant amount of time developing new expertise in postcolonial literature because we felt our students needed exposure--but this was feasible only because I was building on a foundation of study and research from grad school. And I suppose that if it were necessary I could teach an introductory-level survey of early American literature, but I haven't taught or thought about most of those texts for 30 years! And forget about upper-level courses outside my area. I always include a Shakespeare play in my Comedy class, but only a fool would expect me to teach an upper-level Shakespeare seminar. May as well ask me to teach organic chemistry.

No one would be foolish enough to ask me to flex that far outside my field, but recently I heard a suggestion that we could offer a little training to equip faculty members from other departments to teach first-year composition. No one would suggest that a little training would equip an English professor to teach chemistry, but apparently teaching first-year composition is so simple that a little training could equip anyone to do it. I'll bet my colleagues with degrees in Rhetoric and Composition are just kicking themselves for wasting all that time and money on grad school.

Like many of my colleagues, I am willing to flex--but flex too far and something's bound to break. Then we'll need nimble people agile enough to pick up the pieces.