Señor Ben Chang taught a Spanish course on the television show Community in which he called his students “morons.” George Feeny, a quintessential old-school teacher and professor on Boy Meets World, refused to call his students by anything other than their last names. Maggie Walsh, a tough psychology professor on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made herself even more intimidating by sending a couple of demons to kill a student.
They may be fictional characters, but their small-screen images may affect students in big ways, says one researcher. Barbara F. Tobolowsky, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, found that television’s image of the professor is intimidating, uninterested, and generally old, boring, and white. She is scheduled to present a working paper on her research, “The Primetime Professoriate: Representations of Faculty on Television,” this week at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
That “prime-time professoriate,” Ms. Tobolowsky says, may shape students’ expectations about the college classroom. And to the extent it does, she adds, the fictional images of faculty could contribute to the number of first-generation students who don’t return for a second year of college. Because some students enter college believing classrooms are hostile and professors intimidating, they may be afraid to seek help until it’s too late.
“A lot of research shows that, particularly for young people, if they don’t have other information sources, they rely more on what they see in television content,” Ms. Tobolowsky says. “They learn early that faculty aren’t friendly, that they aren’t helpful.”
Sweater-Vests and Gray Hair
While previous studies of television have focused on how much time students spend watching TV and not studying, Ms. Tobolowsky looked at the content of those television shows. In her study, Ms. Tobolowsky, who has a master’s degree in film history and criticism and who previously worked in the film industry, analyzed 10 shows that aired from 1998 to 2010 and were geared toward the 12-to-18-year-old demographic group in the Nielsen ratings.
Scrutinizing professors in those shows, she examined characters’ clothing and ways of talking, camera angles and background music, and a variety of other film nuances to break down how enthusiastic the faculty were and how they interacted with students, along with other criteria.
On the whole, she says, professors on the television shows tended to be relatively old, white, and traditional, wearing sweater-vests and sporting graying hair. Young, female, and minority professors on the shows tended to teach only at arts-oriented institutions or community colleges. Most were intimidating or, at the very least, distant, throwing a scare into characters like Matt on 7th Heaven, who worried he’d seem weak if he asked a question in class.
That image doesn’t match reality, and it isn’t changing much either, Ms. Tobolowsky says. On TV, getting hired was a quick and easy process. For Zelda Spellman, a physics professor in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the hiring process happened so quickly it wasn’t even described—a far cry from the lengthy process that’s the norm in academe. Also in TV land, lectures were uniformly boring. A few more female professorial characters have cropped up in recent years, but other than that, the faces of fictional faculty have hardly changed.
For students who would be among the first in their families to go to college, and who haven’t had any direct exposure to higher education, such television images may frame their points of view and college expectations, Ms. Tobolowsky says.
Some television professors have even developed a following based on their spurious personas. Web sites, Facebook pages, and T-shirts devoted to the old-school professor on Boy Meets World bear the slogan, “Everything I need to know in life was taught to me by Mr. Feeny.”
Reinforcing Stereotypes
The precedent for television shows’ shaping worldviews exists. Crime studies have found that people who watch television frequently are more likely than those who do not to think they will be crime victims. Other studies have shown that students’ expectations influence how successful they become.
“You can see it when there are students who struggle,” Ms. Tobolowsky says. “There’s some problem there, but they didn’t let you know.”
If further studies prove students’ college-classroom expectations are influenced by television, Ms. Tobolowsky says, then colleges should do more to break down the stereotype of the boring and hostile professor. If colleges were able to do so, she says, it could even help them retain more students. More interaction between students and professors during orientation events might make students less afraid of their professors, she says, and allowing more students to sit in on classes during campus visits might change expectations about the college classroom.
The professorial image on television probably won’t change anytime soon. For as much flak as higher education gets for evolving slowly, Ms. Tobolowsky says, change is even more sluggish on the small screen, where shows often reflect public perception and reinforce stereotypes.
Audiences reject plots and characters “that are too far from their view,” she says. “Because the producers and the writers want people to watch, they don’t want it to be too far-off.”
In the meantime, Ms. Tobolowsky worries that some students will remain hesitant to reach out to professors in part because of what they see on television. “They’re resistant because they’re afraid of you because they don’t want to be stupid,” she says.
After all, she adds, that’s exactly what Matt on 7th Heaven worried about.
