Re-setting the Table: Academic Ableism, Precarity, and Teaching Stein in the Pandemic
Volume 8, Cycle 4
https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0301
It was September 24, 2020, and my “Gender and Care in Modern US Poetry” class had just had a tough conversation. For the first three weeks of the semester, the students had been remarkably engaged. But something shifted as we moved into week five. My carefully conceived arc from eugenic modernism to the “crip” poetics of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons fell flat. I stopped class and asked what was going on. After a quiet minute, students started to talk about exhaustion, fear, and a shared sense that school didn’t matter at all. I listened, thanked them, and told them I would figure out how to make a change. That weekend, I revised the syllabus to focus immediately on the politics of self-care in Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light and the literature of HIV/AIDS. Student engagement shot back up. Students thought hard about how literary texts can be sites of care—and began to experience them that way when it really mattered.
This is a true story and it was an experience that enabled me to practice what I will broadly call a pedagogy of care in a more authentic way than I ever have. There is a lot of terminological slippage between several different student-centered and equity-focused approaches to teaching that account for the multiplicity of backgrounds and learning styles in the classroom: accessible pedagogy, inclusive pedagogy, universal design for learning (UDL), and pedagogies of care. Broadly speaking, “accessible” and “inclusive” name the goal of these approaches while UDL offers a template for practice: multiplying the means of representation, engagement, and expression in the classroom. “Inclusive” tends to focus on racial and socio-economic difference among learners; “accessible” conceives its target student population in terms of bodymind variance or disability. UDL is more often associated with “accessible” pedagogy, but practitioners are increasingly recognizing that its iterative approach to course design can help achieve higher education’s broader equity goals. I am adding “pedagogies of care” to this list, and suggesting that it might encompass the others, but not uncritically. Pedagogies of care are rooted in Black Feminist ethics. bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress is a foundational text here.
I love teaching new classes—I’ve designed about fifteen of them in my twenty-two years on the job—but I’ve never undertaken a radical revision mid-semester. Doing so helped me loosen my death-grip on the sanctity of my own preparation and think more openly about incorporating feedback and iterative design into my courses. Listening to my students and reconceiving my course in response to their needs required me to admit to them that my initial design might have worked well in 2019, but was inadequate to the realities of 2020. My vulnerability elicited their own caring responses and this appeared to increase their sense of engagement with the course and each other, an association corroborated by research on transformational and dialogic learning.[1] Our zoom class began to enact its own version of the mutual aid practices that we were studying among Black and women of color feminists of the 1970s–80s and disabled artists and activists collectively surviving Covid-19.
But this isn’t the whole story. Here, I think more fully and skeptically about the role played by pedagogies of care in academic institutions where disabled, femme, and multiply-marginalized students, and a teaching class that disproportionately shares those identities, exist in a relationship of interlocking precarity. As a veteran full-time-non-tenure track (FTNTT) faculty member, advisor on disability to the Vice President of DEI, mother of an intellectually disabled young adult son, and person who manages depression and chronic illness, this is the space in which I live and work. After sketching the origins and impact of the pandemic on the problem, I look towards repair in a somewhat unusual way: by returning to Tender Buttons in order to explore what teaching “difficult” modernist texts like it might reveal about resisting academic ableism and creating more sustainable conditions for the labor of care in higher education.
***
Disabled students represent the largest minority in colleges and universities—nineteen percent of undergraduates report having a disability.[2] And yet their progress towards meaningful inclusion is clearly limited. Among other salient indicators, thirty-five percent of students with disabilities drop out by the end of their second year.[3] In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage argues that their fate is built into the foundations of the University: “Disability has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education.”[4] Using the metaphor of “steep steps” to indicate the structural role of inaccessibility and exclusivity in the architecture of the University, Dolmage traces the relationship between the rise of eugenics and the growth of the University in the twentieth century and shows how contemporary higher education builds on this history by creating “doctors and special educators and therapists who learn how to rehabilitate or cure disability” (20). Seeing disability as “fixable” undermines the capacity to understand disabled identity and embrace people who hold it.
Without designating ableism the ur-system of oppression, we can see how ableist ideals intersect with other dimensions of the University’s caste system and the fortunes of disabled and multiply-marginalized students converge at multiple junctures with what Karen Cardozo calls the “casualized and predominantly female teaching class.”[5] Cardozo suggests that “the emergence of a two-tier faculty system can be reframed as one between faculty positions that retain the cultural, economic and social capital of ‘productive’ activities and those devoted primarily to caring labor” (408–9). At my R1 institution, Georgetown, more than sixty percent of courses are taught by NTT and adjunct faculty members. Nationally, 53.9 percent of NTT faculty are women. More than seventy-three percent of faculty positions held by underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities are off the tenure track.[6] In other words, mostly women and disproportionately BIPOC NTT faculty perform the reproductive labors of teaching, student support, and service, creating the conditions for TT faculty to secure grant funding, conduct research, and publish—to produce. Teaching is identifiable as a form of care work, “not only because it develops human capabilities or because faculty may develop emotional attachments to their students, but also because the creation of a devalued teaching class is consistent with the social construction of caring labor historically” (Cardozo, “Academic Labor,” 407). Precarity structures and circulates within relations of care, and this is true both inside and outside the University.
Of course there are crucial differences in degree between the low pay and exploitation of NTT professors and home health aides and other domestic workers. And the disparity in social stigma and cultural capital is even more pronounced. But recognizing contingent teaching faculty as care workers is critical for understanding the ineffable combination of economic coercion, ethical commitment, and affective drive that keeps us in our jobs. Add to our complex care commitments a nostalgia for a time in the academy that most of us never experienced, structurally diminished self-regard, and the tantalizing proximity of our more lauded and much better compensated tenure-line peers and you get some sense of why our jobs are so sticky. While the Great Resignation hit academia hard and many colleagues in student services left for careers in industry sometimes at up to triple the salaries, the implications for faculty aren’t fully clear.[7] Tenured professors may be “disengaging,” an option obviously unavailable to contingent faculty. I don’t have space or access to the current federal turnover data to develop this point, but I predict that when the dust settles, the teaching class will bear the burden of the pandemic economy changes in higher education, taking up an even greater proportion of care for our increasingly high-risk students. Recognizing our place in the “social construction of caring labor historically” helps explain why, as a group, TT faculty don’t stand with us; like the proverbial great woman, they need us behind them.
Disability justice, Black Feminism, and other mutual aid traditions teach us that we need to find common cause among participants in our care webs, organizing across job categories both inside and outside of academia.[8] Historically, conditions of enforced scarcity have compelled disabled people, care workers, and their advocates to compete for resources, but for complex reasons including shared physical vulnerability, the pandemic seems to be engendering a new kind of solidarity among these groups.[9] The Accessible Campus Action Alliance, a national group of disabled faculty, allies of disabled university community members, and scholars of disability, health equity, institutional policy and inclusion, released two statements on University Covid policy in 2020 and 2021. Among other institutional changes, the statements demand “designing accommodations policies that include household members’ health and caregiving responsibilities as the basis for adaptations such as remote work” and “adjusting expectations for scholarship and service based on the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic according to gender, race, disability, class, family status, and other differences.”[10] There is some evidence that universities, at least wealthy ones, are beginning to meet these demands. At Georgetown over the last four years, NTT faculty members finally secured paid parental leave on par with TT faculty, and during the pandemic, dependent care and emergency relief grants were extended to all employees, regardless of rank or job status. These changes came after student government and labor solidarity organizations joined the NTT faculty who had been organizing for them for years. But faculty can’t operate alone; a care web approach also requires investments in student services, including substantial increases in funding for disability resource offices, as well as for counseling and psychological services and student health more broadly.[11]
Beyond resource allocation, the change has to start deep within our conception of access itself: who needs it and who provides it. Higher education, like most industries, takes an accommodationist approach to access, maintaining a skeletal apparatus for student services and only retrofitting spaces and practices when required for compliance. In figuring disabled people as exceptional “misfits” in need of finite interventions, this approach to access ignores the ways in which our vulnerable body-minds move in and out of illness and wellness, debility and capacity. Fully reckoning with this reality means that, as Price puts it, “we cannot rely on some individuals to articulate ‘needs’ and others to bestow ‘accommodations,’” instead we need to create flexible structures that enable “collective accountability.”[12]
***
Odd as it may seem, I want to suggest that teaching “difficult” modernist texts like Tender Buttons can help create structures of accountability and resist the competitive, individualized notions of productivity that fuel academic ableism. In the isolation of the pandemic in particular, writerly texts like Stein’s helped forge what Tanya Titchosky calls an “interpretive relation between bodies” necessary for collective access.[13] In the Fall of 2020, before I interrupted my class to ask what was wrong, a small group of students was getting excited about tables and “A TABLE” in Tender Buttons (1914) even as others went quiet or turned off their cameras or stopped writing in the chat. “A TABLE” is one of the many short prose poems in the “Objects” section of the work, whose writing process Stein described as “tak[ing] objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try[ing] to get the picture of it clear and separate in [her] mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.”[14] Spreading out horizontally, apparently without plot or subordination, the object/poems in “Objects” invite engagement as exemplification; the text is, as Stein puts it in the first poem of the series, “an arrangement in a system to pointing.”[15] Without the pressure to raise one’s hand in a certain order, the time of reading opens up and relaxes. The trick is to create the conditions for students to surface the text’s systems of sense-making relations (sonic, visual, meta-poetic, etc.) collectively. Within those structures, they have room to try and fail, deliberate and remedy.
In the Fall of 2020 this was going pretty well, but I missed it. We were in the darkest days of the pre-vaccine pandemic, the protests for racial justice, and the run-up to the election. I was committed to making each class matter. I wanted to teach them something. When I first described this moment, I said that my “carefully conceived arc into eugenic modernism and Gertrude Stein’s ‘crip poetics’ fell flat.” On reflection, I realize that I experienced the quiet that came over those neat zoom rows as a fall not because nothing was going on, but because I was so invested in a neat trajectory that would gather Jim Crow, intelligence testing, the sterilization of intellectually disabled people, the New Woman, cubism, and literary modernism up into its affirmative arc, bringing a full class of clearly engaged students along for the ride.
I’ll never know what might have happened if I approached that silence differently and no amount of solitary close reading can approximate the experience in that particular Zoom room. Nevertheless, I want to reread “A TABLE” now in order to suggest how doing so can help create the “interpretive relation between bodies” that forms the basis of access as collective accountability.
In its entirety, the poem/section reads:
A TABLE.
A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change.
A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake. (Stein, Tender Buttons, 26)
“A table means” frames the object hermeneutically; approaching it, we join an “interpretive relation” already in progress. We hear bits of that relation embedded in the apostrophe—“does it not my dear”—though it is not at all clear who is speaking and who is being spoken to, or whether someone is asking or stating. The word “mean(s)” occurs six times in “A TABLE,” joining several other words that multiply throughout the poem. In her 1934 lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein famously claimed that in anything that is “actually existing” there is “no such thing as repetition;” instead, “we have insistence insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating.”[16] When we animate a text in the act of reading, we do so with bodyminds that are always changing, falling out of sameness with themselves.
The language of change in “A TABLE” alludes to this, and also to the desire for what Stein’s mentor William James called “habit.” With its simple construction and regular use, particularly at mealtimes, a table can “mean a whole steadiness,” “necessary places,” and “a stand where it did shake.” Sitting down to eat at the same time each day creates structure, a Jamesian “habit of mind” and body that punctuates the flux. While for James, habit creates the capacity to be more productive on intellectual work that really matters, Stein is less interested in the outcome of habits than in the pleasure and security of engaging in them, as Liesl Olsen notes.[17] The repetitive rhythms of domestic life, refracted in the rhythms of Stein’s prose poetry, are valuable in themselves, though for Stein they aren’t primarily a matter of individual choice. Mealtimes pace our days and pleasantly interrupt our solitude, but they can also be opportunities for dominance and social control. Stein is ambivalent about the habits of everyday life. Tender Buttons celebrates, reproduces, and occasionally disrupts them.
Contemporary feminist readers of Stein tend to valorize those disruptions as producers of novel and revelatory meaning. But what if “the repetitive task” is not in fact productive? Elizabeth Freeman explores this question in “Committed to the End,” a gorgeous essay rooted in the experience of caring for her dying mother in which she explores the relationship between what she calls “nonhermeneutic” re-reading and care work.[18] Freeman wants to understand how these apparently low-yield or “disappearing” practices, “acts of conservation rather than transformation, often relegated to unpaid or low-paid women” matter, that is, have material effects in the world even though and perhaps because they don’t make it new (34). Linking “uncritical reading” and the kinds repetitive care tasks bent on sustenance rather than development, Freeman claims that these practices “create attachment and hence a thicker social tapestry” crucial for the most vulnerable among us, whom she names “chronics,” and who, as the disability community saying goes, will include all of us, if we are lucky enough to live into old age (34–35, 37).
In the view of the modernist critical elite, Stein herself was a chronic; powerful contemporaries sought to tar her with the deeply stigmatizing brush of intellectual disability at the height of the popularity of eugenics. Wyndham Lewis called her work “a gargantuan mental stutter,” describing it as “like a confused, stammering, rather ‘soft’ (bloated, acromegalic, squinting and spectacled, one can figure it as) child.”[19] T. S. Eliot feared that Stein’s writing would herald a future that is “more simple” and “more crude,” concluding that it is “not good for one’s mind” (Parkinson, “Useful Knowledge,” 8). Offensive as they are, I want to lean into these assessments. Tender Buttons achieves its value through the “interpretive relations between bodies” that its rhetoric invites, and not because that rhetoric promises revelation if we’re smart or work hard enough. As I realized anew in reading Stein with my students in the Fall of 2020, her work more often makes readers “feel stupid.” If I could do it over, I would have us all sit longer with that feeling instead of pushing it away or seeking frantically to transform it into brilliance. What if we welcome the chance to strengthen our openness to opacity, textual and human? As Stacy Clifford Simplican has argued, as opposed to feminist care ethics’ ideals of transparency and nurturance, “when opacity grounds our relationship with another we make room for each other—room to flourish, regress, hurt, and surprise.”[20] Grounded in a commitment to forgiveness, we can ease up on the relentless drive to know and, in its place, make more robust connections. I’m not arguing that we give up on the structural transformations to the University that are necessary to achieve full inclusion and equitable labor conditions. Instead, I’m suggesting that the lived experiences of disability and care can—given time—yield powerful, intersectional coalitions capable of even more revolutionary change.
In the ableist academy, and especially for NTT faculty who rely on positive student evaluations to keep our jobs, there is no time to sit with what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings.”[21] Research has shown that students reward female faculty for caring for them in more affirmative ways: responding to their needs, being nice, etc.[22] While I don’t regret revising my syllabus in the middle of “Gender and Care in Modern US Poetry,” I have to admit that even 20 years into my career, I didn’t feel as if I had a choice but to perform that transparently caring labor without adequate compensation or institutional support. And the quick shift to Audre Lorde’s Burst of Light has its own logic here. Lorde was denied a reduced teaching load and medical leave at Hunter College while she was going through and living with the aftermath of cancer treatment.[23] The people who perform the labor of care and the people who rely on it most are intimately connected not just personally but structurally, through the ableist practices of the institutions within which we operate. Recognizing this connection, we can mobilize to achieve meaningful access and the sustainable working conditions that it requires. We’ve already seen this happening outside the University in response to the pandemic. While disability rights organizations have always understood that higher wages for care workers yield higher quality care, private caregiving agencies and fiscally conservative lawmakers have controlled the purse strings and the terms of the policy discussions. The Arc and the National Domestic Workers Alliance have recently worked together to push for joint investment in the care infrastructure and self-determination for disabled people. Within higher education, the Accessible Campus Action Alliance represents a similarly powerful coalition.
Notes
[1] Caroline Walker-Gleaves. “Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? Exploring the Conceptual and Practical Impediments to Operationalizing Care in Higher Education,” in Higher Education and Hope: Institutional, Pedagogical, and Personal Possibilities, ed. Paul Gibbs and Andrew Peterson. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 98.
[2] NCES Fast Facts, “Students With Disabilities,” National Center for Education Statistics, accessed April 16, 2024.
[3] Dahlia Shaewitz and Jennifer R. Crandall, “Higher Education’s Challenge: Disability Inclusion on Campus,” Higher Education Today, October 19, 2020.
[4] Jay Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 3.
[5] Karen M. Cardozo, “Academic Labor: Who Cares?” Critical Sociology 43, no. 3 (2016): 405.
[6] “Data Snapshot: Full-Time Women Faculty and Faculty of Color,” AAUP Updates, December 9, 2020.
[7] Kevin R. McClure and Alisa Hicklin Fryar, “The Great Faculty Disengagement,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 19, 2022.
[8] Maggie Levantovskaya, “Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education,” Current Affairs, April 6, 2022.
[9] Akemi Nishida, Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022), 12–16, 44–7, 58–71.
[10] Accessible Campus Action Alliance, “Beyond High Risk: Statement on Disability and Campus Re-Openings,” August 25, 2021.
[11] Sally Scott, The AHEAD Biennial Survey of Disability Resource Office Structures and Programs, Huntersville, NC: The Association on Higher Education and Disability, March 2019.
[12] Margaret Price, “The Precarity of Disability/Studies in Academe.” Precarious Rhetorics, ed. Wendy Hesford, Adela Licona, and Christa Teston (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018), 191–211, 205.
[13] Tanya Titchosky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 3.
[14] Gertrude Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 25.
[15] Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914), 9.
[16] Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1935), 166, 171.
[17] Liesl Olsen, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth-Century Literature 49, no. 3 (2003): 329–330.
[18] Elizabeth Freeman, “Committed to the End: On Caretaking, Rereading, and Queer Theory,” in Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment, ed. Scott Herring and Lee Wallace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 25–45,
[19] Isabelle Parkinson, “Democrat or ‘imbecile’? Gertrude Stein's Useful Knowledge and Discourses of Intellectual Disability in the To-day and To-morrow Pamphlet Series,” Journal of Modern Literature 43, no. 3 (2020): 5, 7.
[20] Stacy Clifford Simplican,“Care, Disability, and Violence: Theorizing Complex Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 226.
[21] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[22] Christine M. Bachen, Moira M. McLoughlin, and Sarah S. Garcia. “Assessing the role of gender in college students' evaluations of faculty,” Communication Education 48 (1999): 193–210.
[23] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The Shape of My Impact,” The Feminist Wire, October 12, 2012.