Save Professional Development For Those Who Need It

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Any college faculty member will tell you that teaching higher education would be much easier if all we did was teach. Instead, we’re forced into committee work, volun-told duties, and worst of all, professional development.

Administrators tout that professional development is to sharpen our pedagogical skills and keep our teaching relevant, but we know why professional development truly exists: to make people’s degrees not seem so worthless. There is no bigger culprit of that than professional development in teaching English.

English degree holders have all heard the jokes; there are still French fry oil stains on my English degree. Yet it is truly baffling to me how bored we must be where we have been regurgitating the same talking points within the English field for the past five or ten years. I have attended countless professional development sessions about AI in the classroom since 2022, and they all seem to blend. No new insights, not even a new takeaway. Aren’t we supposed to be the department of discourse and inquiry? Also, while any degree is valuable, an English PhD does not make anyone an authority on AI. Where are the AI experts or developers in these two-hour rant sessions about ChatGPT being the devil? Are we too afraid of their pushback? What happened to encouraging open dialogues? Lastly, just let faculty members think and choose for themselves. We’re all adults here. It’s not fair how we encourage critical thinking in our students, yet are forced to sit and be told how we should think about AI. If the guy next to me wants to use it, that’s not my problem. We still get our paychecks at the end of the day.

Professional development sessions on any kind of identity politics have been what sealed the deal for me. First of all, I’d be lucky if the speaker is a POC like me. I’d be luckier if the session’s message goes beyond “don’t be racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic” dressed up in theories such as “reclaiming language.” Yes, these lessons are important and I have already implemented them, but let’s be pragmatic here: if any professor stood up in a room shouting slurs, they’d be shown the door. They don’t even have to do it in the classroom. One Tweet or Facebook post off the clock is all that’s needed today; just turn to any news outlet as evidence. Even the most problematic and outspoken faculty know to bite their tongues for the sake of their job. By all means, I am not here encouraging faculty to harbor discriminatory beliefs. The issue is that all educators nationwide have heard this same song and dance for the past 10–15 years. I can assure you that most working in higher education already know how wrong discrimination in education is, especially us millennial professors. We wrote the book, after all.

All of this highlights a problem not just in academia but in society: we’re not directing our messages to those who need them. With how much college administrations tell students to “step out of their comfort zone,” they can’t seem to do that and stick to these self-congratulatory dialogues as a part of performative activism. Critics are not wrong when they assert that higher education has become a central hub for virtue signaling. As much as colleges love to stick their noses up and deny it, these masturbatory sessions dressed up as required workshops are not helping these allegations.

Instead of roping all faculty into the same pool, let’s be smart with professional development and give it to those who clearly need it. With how much higher-ups love to gossip, micromanage, and keep tabs, this shouldn’t be a problem. And if I’m going to be subjected to 20 hours of professional development a year, at least pay me for it. That’s 20 hours of not doing my actual job, where the real “development” happens.