This story is part of a series about Teaching Gen Z. Read other stories here, here, and here.
There was a time when Maiya Villanueva was excited about learning. She loved every subject she studied in high school and imagined becoming a lawyer or entering medicine. Her parents never went to college, but they made sure education was her first priority. “They wanted for me to always have a better situation than what we were in,” said Villanueva, a native of Fort Myers, Fla.
Excitement is hard for her to muster these days. Her dream school was Florida State University, but Villanueva pursued an associate degree, partly to save money, before moving on to Florida Gulf Coast University, where she is majoring in business administration and management — which seemed her most practical career path. Along the way she has studied under a few caring and dynamic professors. But for the most part her coursework feels repetitive. She’s worried that she is not learning real-world business skills. College has come to feel like a chore.
This last academic year was particularly frustrating. She had to retake one course because she got mired in campus bureaucracy as she tried to get help accessing a digital textbook. In another course, the instructor, who she didn’t think was very good, joked that he could do a puppet show instead of teaching and nobody higher up would notice. “Those surveys you guys do at the end of the year,” she remembers him saying, “they don’t care.”
When she juggles assignments that feel like busywork, attends classes in which instructors read off of slides, or misses out on extracurriculars because she works 28 hours a week and lives at home to cut down on expenses, Villanueva wonders what it’s all for. “It’s so much time out of my life, and money, for me to not even get what I need. People I know who have done a trade are already working in their career and are making more money than me right now, or that I might make in the future.”
“The only reason I didn’t drop out,” she said, “is that I’ve come so far to finish this degree.”
Villanueva’s experience is just one story in a developing crisis in higher education. It’s not the kind of drama marked by congressional hearings or Supreme Court decisions. But a smaller, subtler crisis that plays out every day in classrooms across the country.
Students seem increasingly cynical about the value of college, transactional in their approach to learning, and frustrated by their coursework. On college tours and in admissions literature, they are promised an exciting experience on the path to economic security — an emphasis echoed by parents and policymakers. Yet many are stressed out before they even take their first class, fearing the prospect of financial failure if they don’t get the right job after graduation. They talk about college as “playing the game” and describe living in a post-capitalist economy in which resources like jobs and affordable housing are scarce.
Once in college they might encounter overworked adjuncts and burned-out professors, and academic requirements that seem like a waste of money. Some spend so much time working to pay for college that they can’t take advantage of all it has to offer.
Faculty members, meanwhile, are experiencing the downstream effects of the way students are encouraged to see college as a means to an end. Rather than taking risks and exploring new subjects, students are laser-focused on maximizing GPAs and building résumés. Some are so fearful of messing up that they panic over poor grades, sending desperate emails and demanding second chances. Others see cheating as a defensible response to time and money pressures, or feel that the high cost of college entitles them to more of their professor’s time.
For contingent faculty members, who — despite what Villanueva’s professor said — often depend on positive course evaluations to stay employed, the incentive to go easier on students is strong. And some professors report pressure from their administrations, or their colleagues, to pass students along.
This version of education, in which students see themselves as customers, or are treated as such, has led many professors to despair about what their profession has become. And it has led many to ask whether they are still expected to challenge their students or just make them happy. It also raises a larger question: What’s the point of college?
How widespread is this crisis? It’s difficult to know. Professors frustrated by these dynamics fear being accused of undermining student-success efforts on their campus if they publicly criticize students’ work ethic or challenge their behaviors. And students rarely speak openly about why they feel disengaged or shortchanged by their education, or why they are inclined to cheat.
But a key study, described in the 2022 book The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be, sheds light on some aspects of these evolving dynamics. Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, oversaw a five-year project involving interviews with more than 1,000 students and 1,000 professors, administrators, parents, and others to better understand people’s thoughts about college. They conducted the interviews across 10 campuses, ranging from highly selective to more open access.
What they heard from students alarmed them: a preoccupation with grades, jobs, and institutional reputation; little discussion or understanding of the intellectual opportunities campuses present; feelings of alienation. The findings troubled them enough to issue a warning: “While in fact there remains much to admire in U.S. higher education,” they wrote, “the sector has lost its way and stands in considerable peril.”
Jobs and grades and stress and anxiety are words that came up much more than any professor’s name or a single book they read.
The authors found that 45 percent of students interviewed saw college as a route to a job or graduate school and focused on doing what was required — and no more — to get them there.
About half of the students in the study who talked about their academic goals described them exclusively in terms of external measures like getting a degree or securing a high grade-point average. The more transactional their attitude, the authors found, the less able students were to analyze, reflect on, or communicate about issues of broad interest or importance. While more seniors displayed these high-level skills than first-year students, they noted, “in many cases the academic benefits of a college education prove difficult to demonstrate.”
In an interview, Fischman, the project director, and Gardner, a research professor of cognition and education, said they paid as much attention to what students did not talk about as to what they did.
“Jobs and grades and stress and anxiety are words that came up much more than any professor’s name or a single book they read that moved them or opened them up to new ideas,” said Fischman.
One of the most difficult of the 40-plus questions students were asked, in fact, was this: If you could refer a book to a graduating student, what would you recommend? “This became the most uncomfortable question,” Fischman recalled. Students would stop, perhaps look over at a bookshelf, or just say, point-blank, that they didn’t read. Those who did come up with book titles often chose one typically considered a high-school-level work, such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies.
They not only struggled to discuss books, they infrequently mentioned research centers, libraries, study groups, or academic subjects.
“The striking part wasn’t that we necessarily didn’t hear about the classroom all the time, but we also didn’t hear about meaningful exchanges with other students,” Fischman said. “Netflix was the most common activity that students said they wanted on campus.”
Students’ transactional views aligned with those of parents, alumni, and trustees, which the authors found telling. It suggested that society as a whole has moved toward this view of higher education. Colleges themselves played a role in that, the authors concluded. At the campuses they studied in depth, including by participating in campus tours, they found that much of the messaging focused on nonacademic services and activities, such as clubs, internships, and job placements.
Professors did not hold such transactional views. But their students missed out on academic opportunities, the authors concluded, because administrators, fueled by external pressures, had layered so much on top of the college experience that its core mission of educating students was overshadowed.
That’s why Fischman and Gardner believe that higher education is in peril: If students and their families no longer see learning and academic exploration as the cornerstone of the college experience, and if there are faster, cheaper routes to a career, it’s awfully hard to make the case for college.
While highly selective colleges are unlikely to experience this dystopian future, students at these institutions describe an environment in which the pressure to succeed can also lead to a transactional attitude.
This past spring, Niheer Patel, then a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an opinion piece for the student newspaper describing this ecosystem, “Where Dreams Come to Die.” Patel came to Penn expecting to find people who were highly driven and hoping to do good in the world. But the drive he found was toward landing jobs in consulting and finance, the dominant careers for recent graduates.
“These career fields do not excite the vast majority of students. They aren’t the subjects of the impassioned rant sessions that resonate in the residence halls,” he wrote. “In fact, they aren’t even the subjects of the personal statements that got students here. We are killing the things that bring us joy (and good to the world) in the pursuit of the false god that is absurd wealth.”
In an interview, Patel said he was spurred to write the essay, by his account the most-read opinion piece by a columnist on the newspaper’s website, because of how “soulless” many of his classmates seemed to feel toward their coursework and how much disdain for learning they displayed. Many students he knows are both directionless and deeply worried about economic stability. That’s understandable, he said, given what his generation has lived through, starting with the 2008 recession.
Penn, he said, taps into that fear. “It’s not that these students didn’t have a drive to make money before they entered school, but rather school reinforces that both through the economic makeup of the students who are there and through career fairs and like, ‘Oh, here’s what all the upperclassmen are doing. Here’s the roadmap. This is easy. This is the path laid out for you.’ Because again, stability, from what I’ve observed, is a very important factor for a lot of students.”
Professors try hard to convince students of the value of their subjects, Patel said. But once an undergraduate is locked into a path focused on securing a high-paying job, it’s impossible to compete by presenting a future of intellectual and personal fulfillment.
All of this has a negative effect on students’ academic experience, Patel argues. “If something doesn’t have an immediate payoff, it’s not going to get done,” he said. “And learning is one of those things that does not have an immediate payoff.”
Few of his classmates do course readings, or care about the material they’re learning, he said, and cheating is common. At the same time, students are also extremely grade conscious. Professors yield to this dynamic, he believes, by lowering their standards. He’s been in class sessions where the faculty member spent the bulk of class time rehashing the readings because few students had done them in advance. They curve grades heavily. Or they set the floor at a C or a D.
“I am fully convinced that there are people who learn almost nothing and graduate with a degree,” he said.
Students and faculty members at other highly competitive institutions report similar attitudes. That includes expectations among students that they need, or should receive, a perfect GPA yet must devote a significant amount of time to extracurriculars.
Junius Brown, a former graduate-student instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, described a steady uptick in grade disputes between the time he started as a TA in 2017 and when he graduated, in May.
“Students will write long, multi-paragraph emails to make these demands, with the tone ranging from deeply distressed to openly hostile, and will often argue back when I explain why I can’t do as they ask,” he wrote to The Chronicle — one of 50 responses from readers who were invited to share their thoughts on the relationship between colleges and students. “More and more students are adopting a tone where it’s the teacher’s responsibility to give them the grade they want, and any negative assessment of their work must be mistaken.”
“Being on the receiving end of these requests feels a lot like customer-service work, and is very emotionally draining, to the point that I dread the end of the semester,” he wrote. Yet he understood what was behind those disputes. Graduate schools and employers, he noted, are setting such high standards that even a B can feel detrimental to someone’s career. But the requests can border on harassment, aren’t fair to those who don’t complain, and don’t teach students the skills of self-improvement and reflection. Some faculty members and TAs, he believes, just raise grades across the board to sidestep such disputes.
One of Brown’s former students, Caelyn Carlson, witnessed this dynamic in another course, where she did “amazingly well,” she said, partly because of what amounted to grade inflation.
Many of her fellow students complained in class that the professor’s reading quizzes were too stressful, so the professor “dumbed down” the quizzes, said Carlson. It was still a good course — the professor was a “masterful” lecturer, she said — but the incentive to do the reading for the quizzes evaporated.
If we’re going to spend this much money on it, I can’t just start working at a coffee shop.
Carlson is sympathetic to the stress her classmates feel, which is partly derived from the fact that they’re so busy: “No matter who you are, you’re always feeling like you’re not doing enough. Everyone is the president of something.” She has been able to resist some of that pressure, which she attributes to her unconventional path. She was homeschooled, studied at a community college, and lived abroad before enrolling at Berkeley. That helped her focus on what she wanted to get out of her education, rather than feeling like it was something she was supposed to do.
Still, as a recent graduate, she admits she is stressed. “The cost of university is so expensive. Like, it’s obscene,” she said. “And so if we’re going to spend this much money on it, I can’t just start working at a coffee shop.”
How did we get to a point where education feels like a product and colleges increasingly worry about student satisfaction? In his recent book, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, Neil Kraus, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, attributes the change to decades-long disinvestment in the public sector and a corresponding rise of the use of business practices to run public services such as education.
“One of the goals of neoliberalism, or the political economy of the last few decades, is to move in the direction of tuition-funded public higher education. That’s what austerity, at the end of the day, is all about,” Kraus said in an interview. “This is kind of where public higher ed is right now. We have to treat [students] as customers because they’re keeping the lights on and the heat on, basically. So that puts us in this impossible place.”
Disinvestment has also destabilized the faculty, he noted, leaving most of them in financially precarious, contingent positions. Their judgment is constantly challenged.
Instructors who responded to The Chronicle’s request for comment described in writing what this looks like on their campuses. Many pointed to their dependence on students’ course evaluations for contract renewals, or administrators’ concerns about doing whatever it takes to keep students on track.
Faculty like me are now often caught in between students and an administration that makes promises and then expects faculty to “make it happen.” This past semester I found myself frankly having to tell both that I couldn’t re-teach 10 weeks of material that a student had missed.
Faculty and staff at my institution are urged to complete customer-service training, yuck. I’m dismayed that my college sees faculty as providers of services to customers, not providers of education and mentoring to students.
Universities are less likely to back up professors than they used to be. … They’re worried about money and they’re worried about lawsuits.
Some instructors wrote that while they did not feel the customer-service mind-set had pervaded their campus, it was an uphill battle to encourage students to view education as more than a transaction.
Sometimes it feels like I am still working at Home Depot trying to up-sell a customer the product, even though I can point at my former students as proof that the university does good work.
Others said that students are on the losing end of this transactional approach, as colleges don’t offer sufficient services to help students in need.
They tend to treat students more as a cash cow than as customers — “customers” tends to convey a level of respect that our administration does not actually show to students.
Americans have become almost numb to the slow-and-steady deterioration in public support, Kraus said, treating the problem as essentially unfixable. Yet only a few decades ago that equation was very different. “We wouldn’t stand this type of employment system in medicine or law,” he said, “but adjunctification is ‘just how things are now’ in higher ed.”
Another force shaping these shifting behaviors, professors and teaching experts have noted, is the move toward holding colleges accountable for students’ retention, graduation, and future earnings — the pillars of “student success.”
That emphasis has contributed to many positive changes in teaching, such as more professional development for instructors and more engaged and inclusive classrooms. But accountability can get mixed up in this increasingly transactional relationship, faculty observers say, in ways that people have yet to reckon with.
Jody Greene, associate campus provost for academic success at the University of California at Santa Cruz, sees this on their own campus. Faculty members have said they felt undermined by students or colleagues, for example, when they want to keep certain practices they think are necessary for learning, only to be told that this isn’t centering students’ needs or worth fighting for if students complain.
Even if a professor is earnest in wanting them to learn, that college is a business that needs to keep its customers happy.
Students are keenly aware of those tensions, said Amanda Graf, vice president for student affairs at Christendom College. For her dissertation on cheating, Graf conducted in-depth interviews with 14 students at a Catholic liberal-arts university. Undergraduates made comments, she said, along the lines of: My professor doesn’t go after students for cheating because they know the college won’t back them up. They know that colleges can’t afford to lose the students they’ve got.
“Even if it’s not what would actually happen,” said Graf, “the students have the perception that even if a professor is earnest in wanting them to learn, that college is a business that needs to keep its customers happy.”
That’s not a new tension, she noted. But students are more attuned to it now. “They know that’s the game,” she said. “You can play the university off of the professor, if at the end of the day you need to.”
In Greene’s view, while colleges are being held accountable, the same can’t be said of students or their families. Parents complain that they are paying a lot of money, so their kid should be doing better. But those parents, Greene said, “are not beating down doors to ask us to do more active learning. Sometimes it’s the opposite, because those modes of education that require a lot of students sometimes themselves yield complaints.” The concern, in short, seems less about how much students are learning and more about what grades they are getting for their money.
Many professors struggle with these changing dynamics, unsure of where their authority lies and what their responsibilities are. A big part of their dilemma is understanding what motivates students to behave the way they do.
Is a student asking for a grade change because they don’t like how much work the professor has expected of them? Or was the grade legitimately unfair and the student is more comfortable speaking up than someone might have been a generation ago? Perhaps the student was so used to getting good grades in high school that they have an exaggerated fear of failure and are panicking. Or maybe they face a real risk of losing a scholarship or not graduating on time.
Each of those requires a different response. But it can be hard to determine the appropriate reaction. Stephanie Mackler, a professor of educational studies at Ursinus College, a small liberal-arts institution, said she has seen a significant shift in students’ willingness to advocate for themselves, which she considers healthy. But at times it can feel manipulative.
“You get a lot more emotional behind-the-scenes of their personal lives: divorces, cancer, death,” Mackler said. “They can’t connect that what we’re doing is just an objective response: ‘You cheated; you got caught.’ ‘You did poorly on the paper, so you got a bad grade.’ … They seem to think they have more excuses.”
She recalls one student whom she confronted for using AI dishonestly in an assignment. At first the student denied it, then he evoked family problems and said he couldn’t risk getting in trouble for this.
She doesn’t believe students have nefarious motives. Rather, they have been conditioned to place a priority on their emotions. Meanwhile, faculty members get so much messaging about taking care of students’ mental health that Mackler said she panicked when dealing with this student. What if he hurts himself, she wondered.
“In the old days I would have just called him on his BS and said, ‘You cheated, end of discussion.’ Now I’m reaching out. I’m setting up a meeting. I’m making sure he’s OK,” she said. “I’m not sure that’s actually what’s best for them.”
Mackler turned the student in for cheating but told him she would explain to the provost’s office that it was a fairly minor infraction. As it turned out, this wasn’t his first time. “I am hoping that he got scared enough that he won’t do it again,” she said. “But I decided I just had to hold him to it, and I had to be strong while also being compassionate.”
College, it seemed, was just the next stop on the conveyor belt to adulthood.
Fischman and Gardner’s study sheds some light on students’ emotional states. When they talked about mental-health challenges, for example, they typically spoke in terms of extrinsic measures of success, such as grades. About one-third of students also expressed feelings of alienation. Among students who held a transactional view of college, those feelings were more than twice as common compared with those who saw college as a place to explore or become transformed.
Cyndi Kernahan, a psychology professor who has taught at UW-River Falls for decades, believes that the pressure students are under to move through college efficiently and get good jobs “supercharges” tensions between what might seem like good teaching to the professor versus what students expect.
In the minds of some students, families, and staff, student-centered teaching has come to mean that the professor’s job is merely to provide content. That can feel like education on demand. The pandemic reinforced that way of thinking because instructors would, in fact, post videos of lectures and be generous with attendance and deadline requirements to help students through trying circumstances. In that scenario, the belief that learning requires a relationship between the professor and their students, needs context in which to develop, and is necessarily challenging, Kernahan said, falls away.
Kernahan remembers one undergraduate this past academic year who became irate that she wouldn’t post videos of her lectures or teach from a textbook in her discussion-based course. “‘I am paying for this,’” Kernahan recalls the student saying. “She was so angry at me.”
But Kernahan gets it. Just ask today’s students if they think they’ll ever be able to buy a house and you’ll see the pressures they are under. College is the chance to build something of their lives, yet the goal line moves ever farther away. “It raises the stakes for students and families in a way that is like, OK, this just has to work for me.”
One of the most demoralizing aspects of teaching today, many professors will tell you, is the prevalence of cheating, especially now that generative-AI tools enable students to cheat so casually and ubiquitously. Instructors have scrapped the use of discussion boards because students use ChatGPT to write their posts. Many no longer give take-home exams. And essays are put through plagiarism-detection software to evaluate their likely originality, which makes instructors feel like they’ve become the cheating police.
Students themselves are keenly aware of how common cheating has become.
“I know lots and lots of kids who basically do every single assignment with ChatGPT,” said Patel, the University of Pennsylvania student.
“It’s a known statement from a lot of students that ‘Cs get degrees.’ That’s where this generation is at,” said Villanueva, the Florida Gulf Coast University student. “A lot of students are like, well I’m just doing this to pass, not to learn.”
But what leads students to cheat in the first place, and how might that tie into students’ perceptions of college? In interviews for her dissertation, Graf found that students did not see cheating as a moral issue.
Rather, for some it was a rational response to the high cost of college. As one said to her, “I’m not paying tons of money just to fail a quiz.” Others, she found, simply didn’t care enough about what they were studying. College, it seemed, was just the next stop on the conveyor belt to adulthood.
But this transactional approach doesn’t explain it all. Based on her interviews and previous research by others, Graf argues that if undergraduates approach cheating amorally it’s because, “in their lived experience, integrity has not been highly valued, leading them to be distrustful or apathetic toward authority and rules.”
“Unfortunately, many students seem to have little confidence in the ability of the older generation — the generation that brought them Enron, the collapse of Wall Street, two unpaid-for wars, and a myriad of other issues — to serve as moral exemplars,” she writes. “Students seem to be cynical when members of the older generation express any degree of moral superiority, either practical or intellectual. Many seem to feel the older generation has had its chance and failed.”
In an interview, Graf said she wanted to explore students’ mind-sets because of the widening gulf she felt between academics like herself (she is a millennial) and this generation of students. She believes that their heightened cynicism — well-earned in her opinion — an increasingly online adolescence, and the hypercompetitive college-admissions process have shaped students’ views toward formal education.
The relationship between the schools and students is kind of broken.
Students want to develop life skills and intellectual skills to become contributing members of society, she said, but they don’t necessarily see college as the place to do that. Rather, college is a game to be played and a set of rules to be followed — or circumvented. Millennials may have felt similarly, Graf notes, but “the conversation is a little louder for Gen Z.”
That seemingly intrinsic distrust unsettles professors. How can students who consider instructors to be opponents be open to learning? The answer is straightforward, Graf believes, although difficult to achieve: teach with authenticity and transparency.
Students were highly attuned, she found, to whether their professors seemed to care about their subject and about their students. “The amount of times [students] brought up their professor and the ‘vibe’ the professor set and how they were perceived by the professor and how they perceived the professor was a huge surprise to me,” she said. “In some ways it’s a good surprise. They’re picking up on everything.”
When describing the context in which they cheated or not, students talked about whether they trusted the professor, meaning, Graf said, that they felt the instructor was fair and the class was appropriately challenging. That trust was broken if professors assigned large amounts of reading they never discussed, gave tests that most students failed, were unaware of the gaps in subject knowledge or interest between them and their students, or seemed attentive only to high-achieving students, among other things.
If a professor showed they cared about students’ learning, however, students said they were less likely to cheat because they did not see the instructor as their adversary. One recalled a strict professor who would make his students write out assignments by hand in person.
“You could tell it was because he generally just wanted us to learn something,” the student said. “He was like, ‘Why would you pay all this money to waste time, waste your own time, waste my time?’ Which made sense.” Graf describes this move as “pulling back the curtain” on the teaching-and-learning process, which students appreciated.
Gabriel Rubin, similarly, sees students as desperate for connection. Through wide-ranging interviews, Rubin, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University, has found that students perceive the world — and their future — to hold great risks, and college as just one of the many institutions that doesn’t care about them.
“The relationship between the schools and students is kind of broken,” he said in an interview. Students share the opinion of many people who don’t go to college: “That these are predatory institutions that load you up with high-interest loans. It’s too many years. It takes too much time. You don’t always learn the things you want to learn.”
Students watch videos on YouTube and TikTok portraying formal education as something designed to turn out unquestioning factory workers. It’s not true, Rubin noted, but to this generation it feels true. To them “college is part of that education system that is there to break you down and make you a cog in the machine, which is kind of the opposite of what I thought of as college in my personal experience,” he said. “I thought it was about finding your passion and exploring things, not beating you down and forcing you to have a 40-hour-a-week job at a desk.”
He is deeply concerned by the growing gap he sees between professors and students. He hears it all the time from other faculty members: This is the lost generation. They cheat, they don’t read, they don’t talk in class. In the minds of some professors, he said, they have become the enemy.
But better “customer service,” a term he has heard from administrators on his campus, is the wrong solution. Because what “customers” might just ask for is to get through school as efficiently and as quickly as possible.
Rather, he said, colleges should focus on what students need. Having interviewed dozens of students for his project, he has a far better understanding of what that looks like. “They’re craving advice, mentorship,” he said. “They don’t always know that. But that’s why they’re there. They really want those relationships and those role models.
“If college doesn’t have that, if instead it’s like: Do your homework, I’ll give you an 85. [Students will ask,] Why am I paying for that?”
This student-as-customer model is unlikely to change on a broader scale, observers of higher education say, as long as college is treated as a business by the public, policymakers, and government funders. One reason Kraus, of UW-River Falls, said he wrote his book is to challenge this narrative. “This is all just politics,” he said. “There’s nothing inevitable about any of this.”
“Everybody accepts austerity in public higher ed and the state is never going to come back. It’s a tuition-driven system forever,” he noted. “A lot of us are saying, Wait a minute: 30, 40, 50 years ago, public higher ed was almost free, in most states.”
But voters often aren’t aware of this history. “They don’t know that it used to be very inexpensive to get a degree from a public comprehensive in their state,” Kraus said. “They just know their kid is borrowing a lot of money to go to a public school, and that they’re going to pay it back and they have to get a job.”
Is it possible, though, to acknowledge these pressures in a way that helps move students toward a more open mind-set? Can colleges reverse their transactional reputation before even more professors and students feel like they’re pawns on a chess board?
While Fischman and Gardner’s finding that 45 percent of students they spoke to viewed college as transactional is a bleak one, more than half of the students thought of it as a place to explore or become transformed — although that type of student was more often found at highly selective institutions. In their conclusion, the authors argue that colleges should spend more time directing new students’ attention to their academic pursuits and less on nonacademic features like clubs and sports.
Professors who have had success found, as Graf observed, that transparency and authenticity help. Students want more from their education, even if they don’t immediately believe they need it.
Amy Shuffelton, a philosophy professor at Loyola University Chicago, described a breakthrough she had this past spring with students in a course on ethics and education. It started out with a stilted discussion about an old controversy at Yale University and ended with a frank discussion of whether colleges actually care about their students.
She told her class the story about how, after an intercultural-affairs committee cautioned Yale students against wearing Halloween costumes that played on stereotypes, two residential-college leaders pushed back — only to be met with anger by students. At first, when Shuffelton asked her students whether it was necessary or appropriate for a college to try to regulate what they wear, she felt stuck in a conversational loop. They kept returning to a single talking point, on the importance of student safety. It seemed false to her.
“Finally I looked at them and I just stopped and I said, ‘You guys, you are killing me,’” she said. “‘Everybody is always saying that you are just a bunch of sheep going along with social-justice pieties. Surely you are not like that, right?’ I made it very personal. Sort of like, how can you do this to me? I feel like you’re not telling me what you’re really thinking. But it was also like, tell me these people are wrong about you, because I like you.”
That opened the floodgates, she said. Hands shot up in the air. Students told her that not only do they not take seriously — or even read — any emails that come from college administrators, they do not believe colleges care about them. Anything coming out of the mouths of officials felt patronizing, whether it was one email expressing concern about student safety or another arguing that they should think for themselves.
“‘Why would we believe anything the university tells us?’” they asked Shuffelton. “They know universities talk big, talk about social justice and bright futures, while the reality is that they’re paying a lot of money for a degree in order to get a job.”
They felt insulted, talked down to. And don’t be such a fool, they told her, to think we don’t know it.
Sure, it was a cynical view, she said, but it was an honest one. And it led to a fantastic discussion in what turned out to be one of her favorite courses. “They really do value the meaningful stuff that we have to teach them,” she said. “What it took was me putting my own thoughts and feelings on the line. And sort of saying, I’m on your side here.”
