What it's like being a political communication professor right now

Misgivings, Grievances, and Thanks as I look ahead to my fifteenth year.

The new semester at GWU starts next week. This will be my fifteenth year as a professor, and my thirteenth with the George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs.

All told, it remains the best job a person like me could have. My old friend Chris Anderson once described academia as “the only profession where people are paid to think slowly.” That has always stuck with me. It is such a tremendous gift.

It is even moreso a gift because jobs like mine have become vanishingly rare.

My peers and I didn’t exactly pull up the ladder behind us or anything. It’s more like we ran across a crumbling bridge. We arrived at the tail end of American government treating higher education as if it were a priority worth investing in. Tenure-line professorships aren’t cheap. Once you start treating academia as a business and trying to identify cost savings, you’ll eventually decide to try educate those student-consumers cheaper-and-worse via a more precarious workforce. (Mark this down as another example for the “we can have nice things, but they either won’t maximize profit or they won’t last” file.)

And the job itself is, well, fraying.

Most of the headlines I see about higher ed these days focus on the AI problem. For me, the much bigger issue is the authoritarianism problem.

---

Ian Bogost has a new piece in The Atlantic, “College Students Have Already Changed Forever.” He notes that this year’s graduating class will be the first to have spent their entire collegiate career amidst ChatGPT. For Bogost, the changes have been extraordinary. I’ll admit that, at least in my particular classroom, they have been more modest.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is pedagogy. Most of the learning that happens in my classroom happens in the classroom itself. For two and a half hours a week, I have my students’ attention, and I try to make that mean something. There are readings and papers to grade, but the readings are meant to set up classroom discussion, and the papers are an opportunity for the students to demonstrate what they’ve learned.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the parallels between teaching and stand-up comedy. The core challenge for both the professor and the stand-up comedian lies in holding, maintaining, and shepherding an audience’s attention. Watch Mike Birbiglia or Hannah Gadsby or any of the other masters of the craft. They are competing with your second screen, and they are winning. They do this through a mix of crowd work (in the classroom: socratic exercises), set pieces (lectures) and improvised segments (group activities). By the end of one of their sets, a good standup comic has imparted some new knowledge or perspective — one that is memorable enough to last.

The comparison strains if we push the analogy to hard, of course. The best comedians spend a year or longer perfecting a single hour of material. They perform it relentlessly. In each of my classes, I perform 35 hours of material over 14 weeks. I teach two classes every semester. That’s 70 hours of material, with no repeats. (Also, uh, most of my jokes don’t exactly land. Tough crowd, what can I say?)

Still, at least within four walls of the classroom, my job is to hold onto my students attention, and help them learn something worth remembering. ChatGPT hasn’t fundamentally changed any of that. It has just degraded the learning experience around the edges.

---

And then there’s the Trump carnage.

I gave the SMPA commencement address last May. One of my favorite lines in the speech was that our discipline consists of, basically, staring into the void and coming up with something clever to say about it.

Professionally, I don’t get to avert my eyes.

Every semester in my strategic political communication class, we begin with a segment unpacking what we saw in the news over the past week. It’s a nice exercise in normal times. The idea isn’t to debate which party has the better policies, but to talk about the tactical and strategic choices that political actors are making to build power and win victories.

We do not live in normal times any longer.

Over the weekend, masked federal agents arrested a delivery guy in Logan Circle. Passersby asked what agency they were with. They asked to see badges. They were denied. A bystander remarked “You guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” One of agents responded, “Liberals already ruined it.”

It has been less than eight months since Trump retook the office of the President. We now have masked agents kidnapping people in broad daylight. And they are so confident that they will face no consequences that they feel comfortable saying shit like that on camera.

What strategic lesson are we supposed to take away from events like this? What strategic lesson should we draw from Trump pausing his meeting with Zelenskyy and European heads of state to take a 40 minute call with Vladimir Putin?

My confidence that my subject matter still applies to American politics as-it-is-fast-becoming has started to flag. I teach my students Saul Alinsky and E.E. Schattschneider, Marshall Ganz and Hahrie Han, Andrew Chadwick and Sarah Jackson et al. These are foundational frameworks that have stood the test of time.

Saul Alinsky said that ridicule is our greatest weapon. But that was because his political opponents were capable of feeling shame.

Does framing or lobbying still matter when a few billionaires purchase all the news organizations and then decide for themselves how the news should be framed? When the White House Press Corps is replaced by Breitbart and Gateway Pundit? When the president just nullifies laws and Congress and the Courts shrug?

I’ve given some thought to how I teach a class like this amidst these times, and I have mostly come up empty. It occurs to me that, if I were living in Chile under Pinochet, a very different syllabus would be required. Or, more likely, I wouldn’t teach it at all — Either because I wouldn’t be permitted to, or because the field that I have spent decades contributing to has few answers to offer.

For now, I’ll just keep teaching. And I’ll try to figure things out. My syllabus a year from now will probably look different than it does today. I’ll adapt it to the times, just as soon as I can figure out what these times call for.

---

Amidst it all, I still keep thinking about how I’m one of the lucky ones.

The whole of American academia is getting throttled. Things are worse than you realize. It isn’t just the NSF and NIH cuts, and the blackmail demands against the Ivies and UCLA. University budgets were already strained to the breaking point post-pandemic. Now they’re denying foreign student visas. (And meanwhile, my peers at public universities are getting their syllabi FOIA’ed by bored assholes looking to impress Chris fucking Rufo.)

But as I prepare for my fifteenth year, the overwhelming sense that I have is that things are getting worse. The water level rises. The center holds, but only barely, and not for much longer.

It’s a good life, lived amidst awful times.