Last week, along with 19 faculty colleagues, I was fired without cause as a casualty of Columbia College Chicago’s continuing “adverse circumstance,” called at other institutions “financial exigency” and the only “legal” way a private college can fire a tenured professor for no reason. While this is a personal reflection on my teaching career, it must be said (or my students will give me copious notes) that the personal is political. The end of my life’s work is collateral damage from over a half century of defunding higher education, the devaluing of intellectual and artistic life, the denigration of expertise and knowledge and rampant anti-intellectualism in service of technocratic rationality that sees education in the liberal arts and sciences as job training rather than life training for a functioning democracy -— all tragic markers of a nation in decline.
My 27-year career at Columbia College has ended, much to my dismay. Those in academia know that this doesn’t merely end my job. It ends my career because there are no jobs in academia to apply to if you are a tenured professor in mid to late career. All colleges are now facing the “demographic cliff,” and currently, one private college closes down every week in North America. This is an unfortunate situation since I — and many of my terminated colleagues — are still too young to collect full social security benefits. I would have never voluntarily ended my life’s work before retirement age because this is my vocation.
My life’s work as a teacher has been what the Catholic nuns who educated me called a vocation. I have put my entire energy, being and passion into that vocation. The single word that has appeared most frequently over decades of my student course evaluations has been “passion.” As Hegel correctly explained, “Nothing great can be achieved without passion.” [Es ist nichts Großes ohne Leidenschaft vollbracht worden.] Passion for ideas, for the arts, for justice and for the wonder of existence itself. Philo-Sophia [φιλοσοφία] literally means love of wisdom. And I have that love in spades.
These passions have animated me and my classroom; the results are such that I can carry them with contentment, pride and gratitude. Gratitude first, to my own beloved teachers who gave me the keys to this wonderful life. I thank with my whole heart each and every student who has stepped into my classroom and into my life for the past 38 years since my work as a professor began.
When people inquire what I actually do, the most direct explanation is that I teach people to read. Whether we were studying a photograph, a film, a meal, a painting, a poem, a protest, a philosophy text or a punk song, we were learning how to read and decode the world so that perhaps we could rewrite it. One student evaluation this past semester said, “Ann is the most concise and thorough explainer of texts I’ve ever had.” I am honored by that observation. Our wonderful students, who will go on to tell the stories of this culture, need to be rigorous critical thinkers.
In the classroom together, we have asked questions, learned to resist simplistic answers, and become comfortable with nuance, complexity and contradiction. The drive toward simplistic absolutes is the foundation of all fascism. Learning to think carefully and analytically, to see the world more precisely, is how we resist injustice. Critical and ethical thinking is the antidote to anti-intellectual authoritarianism. Together, we strove to perceive both the sublime and the terrible. We connected the life of the mind to creative work, community and everyday life. We unlocked the powerful intellectual toolbox of generations of thinkers and writers before us. What excitement it is to discover that a millennia-old text or a film from across the world can teach me how to live well today! We discovered the incredible social power of arts and media as well as the accompanying responsibility to use that power ethically. We learned to be astonished by existence. That work was a shared and communal task. When that work is done well, it is magic; it engenders joy and agency. It empowers artists and makers. What we did in learning together was a profound privilege and has meant the world to me. You all have meant the world to me.
Every one of my course evaluations for every class for every single semester for over a quarter of a century at Columbia College Chicago has been exemplary. My former students are found all over the world; they are engaged citizens, kind people, scholars, professors, parents, lawyers, editors, filmmakers, musicians, directors, social workers, dancers, designers, novelists, artists, writers, activists, illustrators, journalists and patrons of the arts. Thus, my greatest honor is not found in my two Fulbright Scholarships, public lectures, scholarly awards or my publications.
For me, all of that is incidental to winning the college’s “Excellence in Teaching Award” in 2017. That is all that needs to be said. I’ve been creating these outcomes without exception for my entire career, offering transformative teaching that changes lives, inspires enthusiasm for ideas, empowers students to live life fully and shapes arts and media creatives into ethical actors and thinking human beings who imagine a better and more just world. The rest is irrelevant. I did this work with love. I have done what I was meant to do.
While this turn of events obviously pains me individually, it is an institutional loss. We are now seriously at risk of killing the patient to save them. This is the third round of faculty layoffs since 2019, and even bigger cuts to dedicated staff. I am truly saddened by the knowledge that this collateral damage does not serve the institution, our students or the transformative teaching that empowers them to thrive as learners, artists, citizens and human beings.
Ann Hetzel Gunkel was an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies & Humanities at Columbia College Chicago. She had been teaching there for 27 years, and was a founding member and past director of the college’s Cultural Studies Program. Gunkel has a Ph.D. in Philosophy.
Copy edited by Emma Jolly
