Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College Contents On Kicking the Authority Habit •••••••••••••• Lawrence Owen 3 On Freeing Oneself Up From the Dependency-Domination Game: Or, Living With Withdrawal is the Price of Becoming Free •• Brady Tyson 7 ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• John Rezmerski 15 A Letter from Mexico ••••••••••••••••••••• Amado Lay 21 How to Read the Newspaper • • • • • • • • • • • • William Dean 23 Some Thoughts on Population Control ••••••••• Wendell G. Bradley 25 Ishmael ••••••••••••••••••••••• Elmer F. Suderman 27 For Dolly Madison Hanging Where Jerry Ford Lives •• Kathryn Christenson 28 Recommendations from an Enthusiastic Jogger •••• David V. Harrington 29 Faculty Academic Prestige Precipitated the California Lutheran Football Trip ••••••••••••• Lloyd Hollingsworth 35 Faculty Notes, XXIV (1974-1975), No. 5 Editor: Horst Ludwig Assistant Editor: Michael Maione The back-cover "Exquisite Corpse (Cadavre Exquis)" is a co-drawing by Gene Buckley, Bruce McClain, Donald Palmgren and Pornpilai Buranabunpot. Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College 3 ON KICKING TI-IE AUTHORITY HABIT The addict kicks his habit cold turkey and experiences withdrawal pains, miseries, tremors -- sufficient bad stuff to have earned an abstract name, tne highest honor our civilization can bestow on concrete experience. I kicked the habit of authority this semester and the withdrawal symptoms are intense. Team teaching has received favorable press from innovators and renovators. Two, three, or four are, according to the advocates, supposed to be able to do the teaching job better than one. Three persons from the same or different disciplines bring three distinctive perspectives to the inquiry, thereby increasing the chances that the subject being studied will be fairly and fully viewed. The students will enjoy variety in the teacher personalities laboring away before them. If the day's topic is controversial -- and what day's topic isn't -- the team members can honestly air their opposing views or consciously assume opposing views for the sake of encouraging student involvement. The spectacle of professors arguing is supposedly healthy for the students, who somehow have the notion that professors don't disagree. The professors are forced into making joint decisions about grading policy, reading and writing assignments, and daily conduct of lessons. Joint decision making is put up as a model of community, community is preached as model for state, states will join an international community, unicorns lie down with lambs, tigers lose their stripes, and most miraculous of all -- teachers will become human. Prior to January Term 1974, I team taught three January Term courses, each time with one other professor from another discipline. All three courses proved satisfying experiences for me: the other profs didn't complain, and students bitched about the usual stuff -- grades, textbooks, work -- but not about deleterious results of team teaching. Four English profs team taught a January Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College 4 Term course in 1974, and the experience warned me that team teaching can pose a serious threat to the teacher's authority. During a few irregular planning sessions, it became clear that the four English profs were waiting for one of the four to step forward as team leader. Some trivial matters didn't get the quick decisions trivial matters deserve -­ no one was delegated to submit book orders to the bookstore, room assignments were not negotiated with registrar, a film order was not placed, the students were not divided in four discussion groups until the last minute. Snafus like these occur frequently in my own classes so they didn't agitate me as a member of the team, but others on the team were tidy. We worked a syllabus out, agreed on texts and topics, and arrived in the classroom on the appropriate Monday. Imagine the scene: forty students are in their places; the teacher's desk is nicely centered at the front of the room with the teacher's chair tucked in place at the desk; the profs come in and pull student chairs up to the front of the room but off to the side of the teacher's desk; the chair of authority is vacant. At center front is a hole. Sitting two on each side of the hole are the profs. A power vacuum. I could feel that teacher's chair sucking at me like a great magnet. None of us budged, though, and class began without an authority figure in residence. The absence of a leader slowed things slightly as the month passed, and a few more trivial matters went unattended, but the course worked rather well. The blessings of team teaching showered on us well, at least they sprinkled a little. A wonderful safety device operates in January Term in the knowledge that February comes soon. If the class seems to be going badly,you know that it won't go bad for· long. You can also attribute failure, if the thing seems to be failing, to another. I enjoyed that January Term. The team teaching worked fairly well; it didn't last long; and the course's shortcomings were Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College 5 caused by others. But right at the center of my memory of the course is an empty chair. Unwittingly, I went cold turkey on my authority habit for this whole semester. A year ago, three English profs committed ourselves to team teach­ ing a course in literature about war and peace. The course began February 10. Brady Tyson, this semester's visiting professor in peace education, wanted to participate in a team taught course which sounded exciting, so I signed on and that course began February 10. The third course assignment requires little of me other than attendance at weekly seminar meetings. I don't "have" a course, not one. I can't close a door and berate my colleagues. I can't put my students to work on a library project and go off silently to marvelous conferences. I can't assign five papers in February, due at 20 day intervals, then cancel one in March because of unforseen pressures. My bluffing and whiffling will have to be done more skillfully because peers are there. Come May I will be unable to privately assign grades to students -- every grade will result from group decisions. I can't plan a ten-day campaign against a specific ignorance because Ron, Brady, Marylou, Elmer, Kevin, Bernard, Esby, Claus, Claude, or someone else will get to interrupt and mess up the rhythm. Habit is rhythmic, biological, and my command rhythms are messed up. For nearly twenty years, I have known February as a beginning of authority month. On a Monday in a February, I would meet with some students and take charge. This is being written on February 15th, and I have the shakes. A gland inside me somewhere is pumping out boss juice, order hormones, but the voice accustomed to processing them is silent. At 3:00 a.m. this past Thursday, my wife awakened me saying, "Honey! Honey! You were twitching and sweatingQ What's wrong?" A nifty argument about justice had me taking notes for use in class, then I realized that I couldn't arbitrarily stick in it because my colleagues would be there to Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College 6 ask how it fits. If I want to change the order in which the books are studied, I have to persuade two or five professors rather than simply make an announcement. I'm not running a single show, not dealing for the house in a closed game; there are three blooming, buzzing bunches of students and profs running free from my control. I gave my power away and it hurts. A psychologist heard the description of my withdrawal symptoms and attri­ buted them to a diffusion and loss of responsibility. He predicted that chaos would increase in the classes until responsibility is clearly accepted by one person. Certified authority, which we enjoy merely by walking into a class­ room, is granted and guaranteed by the legal contract defining our employment. It is clear that we are responsible for meeting classes and assigning grades, choosing textbooks and conducting classes, but what else are we responsible for? We each personally accept the responsibility for teaching well, but to whom are we accountable? We can earn our authority by convincing students that we are authorities on the subject, then gain their respect by relying on earned authority rather than certified authority. Does earned authority beget a sense of responsibility different from that which accompanies certified authority? These abstractions are getting me down, distracting my thoughts from the felt pain of not being sole boss-manager-chief honcho-authority in my classes. It is now late Saturday night. For many years now, if I were to think of Monday classes on a Saturday night, I enjoyed the certainty that those classes were mine. But tonight I am wondering what Elmer will do at 12:30 on Monday, and what Brady will do at 2:30. Instead of going in for my injection of authority, I have to go cold turkey. Lawrence Owen Digitized and Provided by the College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College 7 ON FREEING ONESELF UP FROM THE DEPENDENCY-DOMINATION GAME: OR, LIVING WITH WITHDRAWAL IS THE PRICE OF BECOMING FREE Down deep we have all experienced what Larry Owen has described. We know that we enjoy the power over other people (students) of being a professor, but we also sense that in some way this is a degradation of the art of teaching. (Maybe Larry should quit trying to kick the habit and become an instant celeb­ rity and write two books: Joy Through Domination in Teaching, and More Joy Through Domination in Teaching.