Guest post: We are supposed to text them, tweet them, and friend them on Facebook
Originally a comment by iknklast on 13 administrators.
And does she think the professors are her substitute parents?
In a word, yes. This is actually the message being given to many faculty. I have recently sat through a 2 day faculty meeting where the main message to professors at our school was to be “best friends” and “parents”. We talked a lot about making students happy, making them feel at home, about enhancing relationships, and zero about increasing the rigor of our courses, achieving high standards, or ensuring that our students got the education they came for. We are expected by our students and by our bosses to be substitute parents, substitute best friends, and personal life coaches/counselors. If we have any time left over, well, maybe we’ll get to teach them a thing or two before we leave. We are supposed to text them, tweet them, and friend them on Facebook.
I have heard students complaining about one of the English professors here who tells them up front he is not their friend, he is their instructor. As far as I can see, he is accessible, helpful, and a good teacher. But this is too much for them. How dare he? The fact that I don’t put myself out there as surrogate parent also gets some bad vibes from my students occasionally, even though most acknowledge that I am friendly and approachable, and that I do a lot to help them survive my class (Survive is not overstating in their world; I am told my tests are lethal).
The fact is, if education means being made a bit uncomfortable, we are supposed to move the other direction. After all, education is a business, and students are customers. That’s the current picture. Make the customers happy.
Man, if they thought just saying “I’m not your friend” is bad, they’d hate my favorite college professor from undergrad (and to be fair, most of his students did too). Every class I took with him, on day one in his introduction, he’d say, “I don’t care if you disagree with your grade. I don’t care if every single person in this room rips me apart in evaluations at the end of the semester. I earned tenure because I do a good job, so I don’t give a shit if you don’t like it.” And he stuck by that. He threw kids out of lecture for chatting online (if he had suspicions, he’d stop talking and wait to see how long it took them to stop typing and notice). He chewed people out for showing up late. People absolutely hated him, and I knew exactly one other person who took more than one class with the guy.
But he was FANTASTIC. He was the only professor in the entire history department who taught the area I wanted to study, and he knew it inside and out, forward and backward. While he had less than zero tolerance for people slacking off, he could somehow tell when someone was trying and struggling. I did my best work under his supervision, including an independent study that I still keep as a work sample.
Of course, at the same time, I was also in support of another professor at the school, one Ward Churchill, so I think I’m already on the wrong side of the debate…
Although I have severe misgivings about the academic standards of the Architecture faculty at TUDelft (The Netherlands), the instructors and teachers were emphatically *not* parental substitutes. About half of the end-semester ‘crits’ ended with at least one student crying after having their work ripped to shreds. But maybe this is a predominantly American trend?
Yes, I think it is. Shamingly.
David – I don’t know if it’s an American trend; I know that it is related to our current tendency to view education on a business model, bottom line standard. We are constantly told the most important things are “completion rates” and “student retention”. Oh, of course, we are told to maintain high standards, but that is not the message routinely being given the loudest. It’s about “butts in seats”.
Some years ago some bright person at my campus came up with the idea of moving day. Fall semester only faculty and staff are supposed to show up and help students move into the dorms.
Seriously.
I do a lot for my students. I do not help them by carrying their boxes upstairs.
This pressure to parent adults also is more expected of women faculty.
Is this a recent change in expectations? As in, within the last decade or so? My last experience with academia was about that long ago, and nothing of this sort was happening then (at least at my university). Especially with undergraduates, there were so many of them that I often couldn’t match names to faces, much less form any kind of friendship. Nor would I have wanted to; there was too much to do just to teach the material, hold office hours, and grade—and that’s not even considering my own work.
ZugTheMegasaurus@1:
Since you mention Ward Churchill, you were at the same university as me, at about the same time. It sounds like you don’t remember these kinds of expectations there, either.
It looks like an American trend to me – at least I haven’t seen it anywhere in Europe. We certainly don’t have it here at my university. Even though occasionally I do function as a parent figure (one of my grads – probably the best student I’ve ever had – is so hopelessly inept in almost every practical respect that it’s just too heartbreaking to observe his incessant series of failures!), this is an exception and not a rule. And I’ve never felt any pressure; whatever I do, it’s voluntary.
Then I’m curious whether your administration has any clear conception of what it is exactly that they are selling.
Anyway, all of this is rather weird. On the one hand, what you are describing sounds to me like a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, I definitely *do* associate top American universities with high scientific standards and good education. At the moment I’m just not sure how to reconcile these two perspectives.
To me, this is the essence of higher education, and should be part of high school as well.
When I was at Stanford in the early ’60s, everybody had to take Western Civ. The second or third lecture was by a classics professor, and demolished the cherished myth we’d been taught about Athenian democracy. That required class—since discarded as insufficiently diverse—constantly challenged deeply held beliefs and value judgements. I still have some of my texts and haul them out once in a while.
Let me preface this by saying that in the specific case driving this (I think) the commentary on the Halloween memo, I fully support the faculty that were just making the case that there should be some room for freedom of expression. But on the “friend” thing specifically:
I think part of it, frankly, is that the word “friend” has lost a lot of its specificity. It does not mean “someone who’s nice to me and helps me in the ways I expect”. There should be room for a whole web of different types of cordial relationships that come with a variety of responsibilities, ethics and obligations.
There are plenty of people who have obligations to treat someone with respect, even nurturance in a way that is not friendship. A good parent is not their child’s “friend” though perhaps that’s something to aspire to at certain times of the child’s life, it’s not what being a parent is about.
A good professor is not a friend to their students, they are a teacher. This doesn’t mean that a teacher has a license to be cruel or dismissive or go on power trips. But they are charged with delivering tough messages from time to time. This can be done in a supportive way. I’ve advised struggling students to drop my class for their own benefit, which was not a fun conversation, but ultimately was the best thing for them. Students also look to faculty for career advice. These are things that professors should be prepared to help with regardless of their personal feelings of like or dislike for a student.
So I agree, that a student should not expect “friendship” from a professor. But they should expect some supportiveness. It’s more akin to parent/child, but it’s not that either. It’s it’s own unique thing.
IMHO, some of that is attributable to differences in institutional quality, and some of that is the difference between undergrad and grad study in the US. AFAIK, it’s grad study in the US that really drives the reputation of American universities abroad, with some exceptions for premier (and hard to get into) undergrad programs.
No. They are selling diplomas. The faculty is “selling” education. This has become a big trend, and if you watch the presidential debates, you will see it there (especially Republican), though not necessarily about being friends, but about being businesses.
Latverian Diplomat – I think there is a difference between undergraduate and graduate programs; but I don’t know how long that will last. This does seem to be somewhat of a new trend, and as our undergraduates who have received this sort of approach become graduate students, they will expect a continuation of that. It is a ripple effect. I think it showed up first in K-12, but I can’t swear to that, because my son finished high school in 2000.
Mark Edmundson wrote a very good piece about the student as customer about 20 years ago, I think in Harpers.
Ya, 1997. Paywalled.
http://harpers.org/archive/1997/09/i-as-lite-entertainment-for-bored-college-students/
“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”
All value judgements in final analysis stand only on human needs, which are basically moral “axioms”. I want things like equality, respect, and kindness. For me these things are not up for debate. I don’t care what kind of a “case” someone can make against them: if someone wants to do that, I don’t even want to talk to them.
Saying “you are only entitled to what you can argue for” puts minorities in the position of constantly having to defend that they are fully human. Fuck that!
Latverian Diplomat, I think the word describing the relationship between a professor and a student is ‘mentorship’. I had several of those as an undergrad. I found professors whose teaching was interesting and asked them questions after class. I got reading recommendations. When I was looking for a lab in which to do my summer internship I asked their advice. Their labs were full, but I got recommendations for other labs to intern in. And I got invited to the journal club that was normally open to faculty and graduate students. When it was time to look for a graduate program they helped me with advice and letters of recommendation. Over time we got to be on very friendly terms (as in, we didn’t talk only about science), but they were never parent-substitutes.
Anat, that was my experience, too. I value those relationships, and still keep in contact with some of my mentors. I have students that want that sort of relationship with me, and I value that, too. I think that can be a very important part of teaching. It’s the constant “be an entertainer”, “be a friend”, and other things we are expected to do that are more parental than mentoring.
I was the one who asked this question. I’m actually in my middle years and in college, and it doesn’t seem like this is so much an issue locally.
Not that I’m saying it doesn’t happen, but that I see modern community colleges and universities that function just fine on a more professional level. State colleges. Which makes me think that class privilege and being spoiled is part of the problem.
Samantha – I teach at a state college. State colleges are being run as businesses in many states, especially as the funding is reduced by cost-cutting governors and legislatures.
And if it is class privilege and being spoiled, then that has extended way down into the working classes, which is where a lot of my students come from. A lot of them are first generation in their family to attend college.
Learning to think critically involves examining arguments–your own and others’–and evaluating evidence. An educated grown up should damn well know how to defend their opinions, and if they never learned how, they’ve been shortchanged.
Value judgments may be especially tricky to argue but it can be done. In fact, I believe there’s a discipline dedicated to that, starts with a P, PH…anyway I hear it manages to be pretty rigorous in the argument department.
@MrFancyPants: I definitely don’t remember these sorts of expectations there at all when I was there. I do remember it being a common joke from professors in upper level courses every time there was a new batch of incoming freshmen, that they were all too often dealing with students coming from glorified daycare centers. But even with the Ward Churchill thing, I distinctly remember that there was more support for him than calls against him, and it seems like there were more options among his detractors than “sack the SOB” (though there was plenty of that).
The history professor I mentioned took particular glee in shutting down students with an entitled attitude. I was taking a class with him the summer before I graduated and he caught a student plagiarizing. He informed her that she was failing the course and would be reported to the dean, which is, of course, exactly what students know will happen. This particular student made a REALLY bad decision to instead tell her parents that he was out to get her for no good reason. I guess mom and dad were well-off and spent a boatload of money on a lawyer to defend their poor little innocent child. The day the meeting was set up with everyone, the professor came to our morning class with a grin just plastered across his face. He showed his visual aids for the meeting: HUGE photocopies of the entire sentences and paragraphs this girl had copied verbatim, next to the source text with bright neon yellow highlighting. I assume that student had a really bad time.
I had a similar situation this last year. I was told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t prove it, no matter what. I also had the exact sentences, the exact paragraphs, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. I had to give the student an A; she had been earning a C without plagiarizing, but that wasn’t good enough. And her mother was in constant contact with me, insulting me, and eventually filed a grievance against me because I wouldn’t give her daughter special accommodations beyond what she was entitled to have. Eventually she got what she wanted, but not from me. It was given to her by the higher-ups.
I doubt this is a uniquely American trend. It’s been some time since I taught in UK universities but some of my friends still do. In my day (yeah, I’m old) when a student in a lab tutorial asked a question, we tried to steer them toward the answer rather than just giving them the answer. To be clear, the most common question was something along the lines of “why won’t my program compile?” and the ‘answer’ (you missed a semicolon) wasn’t as useful as going through the process of how to debug which – for some reason – wasn’t covered in classes.
My friends tell me that these days they have to give the proximate answer – the semicolon one – rather than take the opportunity to actually teach. And by “have to” I mean that they’re expected to; by the students, their fee-payers, the university…
My friends also say that they have to give students all the course material – and make it available on the web – before the class even starts. There’s no need for students to actually attend lectures or tutorials or to listen or take notes if they do. At best, lectures are an opportunity to ask the lecturer questions, but the lecturers are ‘encouraged’ to be available at all times (as if they didn’t also have to do research, admin and have lives) in case students who couldn’t be bothered to go to the lectures have any questions.
We’re not selling what we pretend we’re selling. We’re not selling educations, we’re – as someone else here said – selling diplomas. In the UK we used to have a grant system; people with sufficient qualifications could apply for a government grant that paid their university fees and – usually – a living allowance. This doesn’t usually happen now. When student grants were stopped, lots of people argued that diplomas would become a commodity and learning would suffer. They were right, that is precisely what happened.
It seems only a matter of time until lecturers in the UK are helping students move. They’re becoming flunkeys, a terrible idea.
FUCK THIS KIND OF THING.
While I agree with the broader sentiment here (that a professor is meant to be an instructor, not a combination parent-surrogate/BFF), this is not exactly what this particular comment is responding to.
Here’s the sequence:
From the quoted story in Ophelia’s original piece:
Then we have Samantha Vines’ response in the comments:
The problem is, the student is actually right.
http://yalecollege.yale.edu/campus-life/residential-colleges
The job of “master” at the residential college is thus very much exactly what the student says. One can reasonably argue that Yale might be better served by employing non-professors in that role, or even that the job shouldn’t exist. But it does, and Christakis’ response makes it pretty clear that he does not, in fact, want to do the job he signed up for. (In fairness, the student should have used the word “just”–as in, “it’s not just about creating an intellectual space here”. Setting up extra-curricular activities to create an intellectual environment is also part of the job.)
(Note: I understand the how the confusion occurred–what Yale calls a ‘college’, most schools would call a ‘dormitory’ or ‘residence hall’. So it sounds like the students are demanding that Christakis give up his professorship–but actually, they’re telling him that he’s failing as dorm poppa, a different thing entirely. It’s certainly possible to disagree with the students on that point, but it misses the conversation entirely to accuse them of something they didn’t do.)
@Lady Mondegreen:
“In fact, I believe there’s a discipline dedicated to that, starts with a P, PH…anyway I hear it manages to be pretty rigorous in the argument department.”
That’s a pretty bad argument, and you can drop the condescension.
Perhaps you would care to explain why those departments with a P… who are so good at rigorous argument are particularly sexist, have an amazingly low representation of women and minorities, and manage to (almost) completely ignore the work of women or indeed anyone who isn’t a white male? If you don’t want to take my word for it, check here, here, or here.
If you need to argue about everyone’s full humanity, you’re deep in bigots’ country, and there’s no argument that will convince a bigot.
I do not see how the open letter by Christakis’s wife in any way endangers “the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college” or goes against the duty to “foster and shape the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college.” That does not require the couple to shield the residents of Silliman from anything they may disagree with or that challenge cherished beliefs.
“Fostering educational life,” as several have pointed out here, occasionally involves exposing young minds to ideas that are different. This makes some people very uncomfortable; such is life.
Quite frankly, though I don’t agree with everything Erika Christakis wrote, this overreaction is on a par with the claim that thoughtful discussion of the nuances of gender is somehow responsible for drunken hooligans beating trans women to death.
Gee, I don’t know–perhaps for the same reason the sciences have those problems?
Saying “yes, students need to learn critical thinking, and no, your (unevidenced, merely asserted) opinion is not worth much in the classroom” is not saying “the disciplines that teach these skills use them perfectly and are free of sexism and racism.”
I do not need to argue about everyone’s full humanity, thank you. Pieter’s quote was not about “arguing about everyone’s full humanity.” It was about learning how to argue, and how to think. I certainly agree that some propositions, such as those regarding people’s full humanity, should be beyond argument and taken as axiomatic–but when up against people who deny that, it is probably best to have a reply that goes beyond “Nuh uh, IMO you’re wrong.”
@Lady Mondegreen
“Gee, I don’t know–perhaps for the same reason the sciences have those problems?
Well it certainly goes to show that being good at arguments or reasoning does not help with value judgements which you were arguing earlier.
If some propositions are beyond argument, then you are in fact disputing that “you are only entitled to what you can argue for”. Regardless of what the speaker had in mind, those two statements directly contradict one another. And in the current conflicts about racism on campuses, students are being made to argue their humanity, and their right to be welcome in their colleges.
Well it certainly goes to show that being good at arguments or reasoning does not help with value judgements which you were arguing earlier
Not being perfect isn’t the same as not helping, but what I actually said was that value judgments can be argued. Whether or not critical thinking helps people form better value judgments is another question. At bottom our values may well rest on foundations that have little or nothing to do with reason, but we go to school in order to learn to think.
Before that, the speaker said, when you walk through that door [of the classroom]
Delft, I think we’re arguing past each other. We probably agree on the basics, but I think you’re reading something into Peter’s quote that isn’t there. All students need to learn how to think critically, how to evaluate evidence, how to argue effectively. Hell, it’s especially important for people who have our humanity questioned to be able to do that. I agree the school shouldn’t be questioning anyone’s humanity. But it should be giving students the intellectual skills to fight back substantively to anyone who does.
Blockquote fail, sorry.
Oh, shit, also misspelled Pieter’s name SORRY PIETER NOW I OWE YOU TWO BEERS.
It is sort of unofficially expected at our school that we will hand students copies of all our PowerPoint slides and give them the notes they need. I unofficially ignore that and expect my students to take notes. Then I found out they don’t know how to take notes because most of them have never been required to; they can’t keep up with a normal lecture, and they blame me.
I found a way to deal with it. I provide them with a study sheet which requires them to take notes, but helps them out. I make it such that they can’t fill it in without coming to class. And since I tend not to just read the book to them, but actually give them a lecture that draws on other sources, including my own working experiences, they’re not able to keep up if they don’t.
The day will come when a student will complain to my boss because I don’t give PowerPoints or notes like other instructors, and I will be ordered to do that…all while they say I’m being given full autonomy to make my own choices. At that time, i will have to face a major life decision. I hope it waits until I’m old enough to retire, because it’s very difficult to get a job at my age. Everyone wants people just out of school with no experience, because they are “young”.
The students actually explained their position in one of the linked articles. Essentially, it boils down to their allegation that, when they have tried confronting other students wearing costumes that belittle their race or culture, treating them as little more than a stereotype, they were not, in fact, rebutted with the sort of discussion one gets at the college tea, but were subjected to physical intimidation and even physical retaliation. (Note: Since we don’t have details on these incidents, I can’t attest to their veracity, and make no claim to. I simply am making sure the full argument gets heard.)
In such an environment, it hardly seems inappropriate for some of the faculty to take action, making it clear what sort of conduct is expected of students, even during their extracurricular life. It is not fair to put the students who are already in the minority of dealing with the choice of either risking an unsafe confrontation or letting the blatant and yes, dehumanizing insults pass. The key here is that as Master of the college, he is responsible for taking an ~active~ role in making certain the students feel safe, not merely not impinging that sense of security himself. From these students’ perspective, his reaction to being challenged amounted to a dereliction of that duty.