He also describes himself as quick to snub convention because he thrives on experimentation. As the CETL director, he works closely with his colleagues at GVU-from faculty and staff to administration-to promote innovative teaching and effective learning, particularly the ways teaching and technology can be integrated.
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at GVU
Karly Good is the Instructional Technology Specialist in the CETL. Good believes Gannon is particularly gifted in bringing some of the more complex and potentially controversial topics from his discipline into the Center’s focus. She praises his willingness to take on tough topics and discussions-for example “when is it okay to put more and more appropriate work on your students than on you, the instructor?”
Good believes Gannon is helping professors continue to benefit their students but while “working smarter, not harder” and helping them obtain their teaching goals more effectively. Good adds, “Much of that is in how you and your department prepare their program goals and how those align with course objectives. These are the grey areas for many instructors. In other words, the Center staff also act as instructional designers to help meet larger university goals – such as assessment, evaluation, and improvement. After all, we are trying to engage, equip, and empower our students (the university’s mission).”
Dr. Josh Call, as Assistant Professor of English at GVU, explains that Gannon is “one of those rare colleagues capable of situating a conversation about historical racial and economic privilege in ways that are both highly critical and highly inviting.” Call believes this approach is powerful and effective for students because they have an opportunity to learn without “being personally implicated in ways that shut down discovery, growth, and change while still taking responsibility for the current implications of these things.”
Call notes that Gannon has long been an “active champion of academic freedom in classroom pedagogy, while still serving as a mentor to faculty that struggle with taking on new ways of teaching. His support is always grounded in both research and practical application.”
Finally, Call adds that Gannon has recently been leading the campus charge at Grand View University in “team-based learning and digital pedagogies.” As these are new areas for many of their colleagues, Gannon is working with many educators one-on-one so they feel the freedom to move at their own pace as he helps build “teacher-leaders.”
History, Race, and Memory
Just a few of Gannon’s courses include “Civil War and Reconstruction,” “The Age of the American Revolution,” and “The History of Capitalism”-courses steeped in rich history, certainly, but also courses that can include potentially volatile topics and current events. For instance, when debating some current questions about the modern relevance of the Confederate flag, many of his students speak to the ways the Civil War was part of the “very fabric of their lives.” Gannon navigates these discussions by offering students historical context. Having taught similar Civil War courses in Texas, Massachusetts, and Iowa, he’s been privy to a wide variety of regional attitudes and belief systems.
As a historian, Gannon also views these debates and conversations through a particular lens, one that helps students have some distance. He wants his students to feel safe and valued, but he also wants them to be willing to critically examine their own beliefs and become more skilled at supporting their beliefs with reasoned evidence. Careful not to cast a dismissive shadow on the longstanding values these students bring with them into college, instead he models the questioning that a college education should support. “Why do we tell stories that way?” he asks his students, and they are challenged to come up with the answers.
Former GVU student Lauren Haugh, who currently works at GVU as an Academic Advisor and adjunct, saw firsthand how skilled Gannon could be when navigating potentially explosive topics. “He wants his students to think for themselves,” she explains. “He challenges people to think but not in a way that makes them get defensive” because he is careful not to attack their beliefs.
Instead, he wants them focused on working with evidence and strong rhetoric, challenging them only to be open-minded when exploring prickly topics such as “race, religion, and societal constructs.” In fact, Haugh believes this quality benefits more than Gannon’s students in the classroom, but everyone he impacts as a “teacher, colleague, mentor, and friend.”
The Good Fight
There are many public challenges to higher education right now, and Gannon is highly attuned to many of them. He’s examining the state of the current discourse about the value and purpose of higher education, and he’s studying the trends. When noting the many politicians who seem to have hands in determining the fate of institutions of higher learning, he reminds us that “critical thinking can be dangerous to politicians.”
In a recent post on his popular blog The Tattooed Prof, “Fighting the Good Fight; or, I Didn’t go to Grad School to Make Apparatchiks,” Gannon acknowledges that higher education is currently in trouble- particularly Liberal Arts and the Humanities.
Bemoaning Louisiana’s eighty percent loss in funding and Wisconsin’s battle to maintain their long-esteemed institutions of higher learning, Gannon writes, “Gone is shared governance, gone is tenure, gone is any meaningful semblance of the Wisconsin Idea-and gone is a massive chunk of funding as well.”
Gannon explains that proponents of these radical changes to the nature of higher education are quick to speak of “efficiencies,” along with programs that presumably guarantee college graduates a position after graduation; he shares, “apparatchiks trot out metrics that trace average career earnings, and bright-eyed legislative aides who majored in pre-law and Milton Friedman pooh-pooh programs that don’t lead to some sort of immediate ‘deliverable’ or ‘job creation.'”
From his perspective, as one of the many passionate educators invested in Liberal Arts and the Humanities in general, Gannon is concerned by what he sees as a worship of salary combined with a glorification of pre-professional programs, a mixture that is both dangerous and “depressingly familiar.” Even though some research bears out that graduates with degrees in the Humanities are doing well, even when compared with their “more marketable” peers, he points out that the research that presumably supports the value of a Liberal Arts education just reinforces the concept that if there’s not a “quantifiable and commodifiable outcome” attached to any endeavor, then it’s not worth our time.
Gannon believes the same people bringing this “Greek-style austerity” are the ones aiming to make higher education efficient above all else. “For this reason,” he explains, “we can’t defend the humanities as a greater good by holding them to the same narrow standard of ‘earning power’ that its critics do- even if we end up looking OK in the process.”
He speaks of his experiences and the experience of so many other Liberal Arts professors who witness firsthand the intellectual and personal growth that comes from students’ seeing subjects in a new light, adding that all faculty members have similar anecdotes to share. However, while those stories illustrate the tangible benefits of abstract ideals, they matter little to forces invested in using higher education to create “the next generation of mid-level economic functionaries for the late capitalist landscape.” He finds this a “soul-crushing proposition,” one all proponents of a Liberal Arts education must resist.
One such meaningful story is shared by Haugh. Gannon was her advisor in her time as a student, and his mentorship was life-changing. When she arrived in college as a first-year student, like many of her peers across the nation, she had an idea of what she would major in-ideas that resulted from being unaware of the potential options. She did not know that a subject would inspire her and a professor’s passion for teaching would change the life she had previously charted.
Haugh finds this one of the most compelling benefits of a Liberal Arts Education, a benefit that has never been more important because students are making decisions too soon and then sticking with those decisions for all of the wrong reasons. Then, those students are leaving college with a degree in a field they don’t enjoy, looking for employment in that same field, and saddled with what might amount to crushing debt.
Further, Gannon believes we have found ourselves inside a system that resembles one from five decades ago, the same one that produced mid-level Soviet bureaucrats who promoted “excellent technical training coupled with a stunning lack of nuance and critical inquiry.” The environment, he explains, sets up economic austerity as a good, even when lives are less valued than rigid and dogmatic beliefs about economic systems. The “warm and fuzzy” stories about changing students’ lives through education quickly become obsolete if those same bodies aren’t maximizing profits.
The Janus-Faced Character of Public Discourse on Higher Education
What has been disheartening, for Gannon, is that as we try to defend Liberal Arts, its most ardent believers have “surrendered the terms of the debate,” and-even worse-the staunch advocates of the value of a Liberal Arts education have stopped pointing out the “Janus-faced character” of this country’s higher education discourse where “political and economic elites extol the virtues of education in the abstract, but their concrete actions betray a murderous desire to quash education’s chief virtues.”
He stresses that educators who believe in a Liberal Arts education need to “reclaim our turf,” becoming activists for a vision of higher education that is firmly rooted in a liberal-arts tradition. For him, that means providing our best teaching to all students-not just the ones in upper-level courses-and working toward a scholarship of teaching and learning that invites these concepts from their current place on the “back porch” into the front parlor, when we are evaluating faculty on their service and scholarship.
In addition to a commitment to the best teaching practices, Gannon encourages a commitment from faculty to show professional courtesy to adjunct colleagues as part of this reclaiming of the best practices. “They are us, and we are them,” he states, adding that treating adjuncts as an inferior caste is not only unethical but self-defeating, as adjuncts are the ones working most often with first and second year students. He argues, “If we mean what we say about educating the next generation of leaders-and I believe we do- then this is how we win the long game.”
Gannon believes that we have a bizarre way of approaching higher ed in the public discourse right now, where everyone seems to revere education until the time comes to write a check. Then all of that tolerance for ambiguity with a focus on deepening empathy and understanding is replaced with a laser-focus on “linear, vocational training.”
Looking for ways to connect discipline-specific learning with goals of their institution Spotlight continued at GVU has “awakened the fire” in him to fully explore both the way we teach in higher education and what that tells us about our larger goals. He is also driven by a question: “How do we protect what needs protecting?” He asks himself constantly how he can meld disciplinary work with good pedagogy, in service of that goal.
Gannon asserts that we all could do a better job of explaining the value and necessity of a Liberal Arts education to potential students and their families. Part of that value could be modeled by certain behaviors within an institution’s faculty and staff. If tenured faculty worked to “lift” contingent faculty, for instance, he believes the result could be powerful. Because Gannon believes private institutions suffer when public institutions are depicted negatively in the media, he sees an inner-relatedness to all levels of higher education that others may not recognize.
As part of this recognition, he urges others to see that threats to higher education may not yet feel personal, but they soon will. If these pushes to change the very nature of higher education are successful, or are deemed a success by those who make the changes, we could all feel similar pressures sooner rather than later. Gannon concludes, “We need to do a better job of recognizing what unites us.”
