At an academic function several years ago, my wife and I spotted a group of colleagues engaged
ALSO SEE:
Colloquy: Join an online discussion on whether too many professors despise their students.
in a conversation in which everyone seemed to be chiming an “amen” to each speaker’s jeremiad.
Their topic was easy enough to guess, even from a distance, by the affirming gestures of drinks and heads: They were talking about what was wrong with their students.
I joined them and tossed in a few of my own stories about stupid, arrogant, or shiftless students. A good time was had by all.
Driving home, my wife, who is not an academic, said, “To hear you all talk, an outsider would think you despised your students.”
I’ve been wondering about that remark ever since. I realize that “despise” seems extreme, but I’m beginning to think it fits the relationship of teacher to student in higher education. Our true feelings typically leak out in exchanges of anecdotes about clueless or conniving students. We have all told or heard stories about students who skip class for a month, then drop by the office to ask, “Did I miss anything important?” More lurid but equally common tales concern shameless grade grubbers, inept plagiarizers, slackers, hilariously bad writers, and historical or cultural ignoramuses.
I am certain that many of the anecdotes are true. I have met students who think, or claim to think, that “you know” is a required link between all verbs and their modifiers, that we beat “that Hitler guy” in Vietnam, and that simply listing “the Internet” as a source for suspect information is quite acceptable.
Other stories sound contrived but still plausible. Perhaps when a political-science professor told his students that he remembered where he was when Kennedy was shot, one kid really did say, “I knew that plane didn’t just crash on its own!” And there may actually have been a student who said he had injured his wrist, brought a laptop to an exam, and printed out his answers to the essay questions after only two minutes. I can even imagine a student turning in a term paper with the address of the Web site where he bought it printed at the bottom of every page.
In the more-extreme stories, however, the teller’s tone is bitter, perhaps even tinged with martyrdom. We professors -- and I mean all of us, from leftist Arnoldians to cultural conservatives -- are talking about our students as if we were 19th-century Hapsburg-court officials discussing the “filthy, ignorant Slavs,” or a coterie of exasperated colonial administrators complaining about “slothful heathens.”
Yet students are the people to whom we have dedicated our lives -- or so we tell ourselves. Perhaps one reason we complain about them is that, because we love them, we are hurt when they don’t appreciate the knowledge it took us so many years and so much effort to acquire.
I recall the first class I taught as an assistant professor. It was a writing course. The students taught me, in turn, the basic lesson of modern academe: Education is the only business in which the clients want the least for their money.
My students’ first papers were abysmal. The thinking, writing, annotating -- even the typing was poor. I covered the papers with red marks. I believed -- my naiveté seems pathetic now -- that they wanted to improve and would be grateful to be set right. Instead, they rebelled. “Don’t you want me to correct your errors?” I asked. “No,” they chorused.
One student explained, “I don’t want you tell me what’s wrong with my work. I want you to tell me how good it is.” And why not? For 18 years, their egos had been stroked. Who was I to demand such tawdry details as accurate grammar and syntax, good writing, clear thinking, and adult behavior?
Our resentment against undergraduates also comes from our perception that the shift in power has gone too far in their direction. What anthropologists define as “tales of decline,” told by older hands, support that perception. For instance, I read in Paul Fussell’s autobiography, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, that at Harvard University in the early 60’s, if a proctor observed a student cheating, that student was instantly expelled, without appeal. To discipline a student today is to enter into a morass of procedures, forms, and committees, to say nothing of the terrifying prospect of a lawsuit. We may talk in the classroom about equal rights, but in practice, power is a zero-sum game: Granting students greater rights diminishes the professor’s authority. The most direct impact that students have, of course, is that their evaluations affect our livelihood.
Our anger has built up like steam in a cooker because it has little or no outlet besides the “amen” echo chamber. I recall older professors in my college days in the 1980’s who castigated ignorant students and humiliated foolish ones. Nowadays, that sort of behavior would result in a long deposition at the human-resources office.
We are even urged to respect our students’ minds. As one young colleague (who tells as many tales of undergraduate stupidity as the rest of us) announced, “I have just as much to learn from my students as they do from me.” A reply to the effect that “then they should get half your salary” is too churlish. But why should anyone pay money (or let the state and their parents pay money) to be educated by equals? If professors don’t know more than our students, why are we here?
So here we stew, smugly convinced that we are infinitely better than the innocents we preside over, and brimming with resentment at our fall from power. We are angry that we face classrooms filled with students who are, as Miguel de Unamuno put it, “incapable of marrying a great and pure idea and raising a family with it.”
Something has to give. I have come to believe that all our complaints, whatever momentary release they provide for pent-up tension and resentment, are in the long run destructive to our students, our profession, our institutions, and ourselves.
Despising someone is satisfying -- it makes you feel superior. But it is also dangerous. For professors to despise students lets us off the hook: If our students truly are hopeless, why should we try to be excellent teachers? That argument doesn’t hold water when we apply it to other professions, though. We expect lawyers to defend the stupidest clients, and doctors to treat patients even if they don’t like them. We should try to be the best teachers we can be, regardless of whether our students appreciate us.
In thinking back to the teachers who impressed me in high school and college, I wonder what they thought of me. I occasionally come across old term papers from my undergraduate days, and I cringe now at the grammatical and factual errors, the pretentious diction. I remember a poorly scheduled hiking trip for which I skipped two weeks of classes in my sophomore year; an exam on which I misread the instructions and answered every question wrong; a history course throughout which, for some reason, I assumed that Parsifal was a dessert topping. Did my professors classify me among the clueless and the shiftless?
The teachers who impressed me loved their subjects and were serious (and often humorous as well) about the excitement of thinking and writing clearly about knowledge and ideas. In high school, there was Linn Carpenter, the English teacher who looked and talked like the harpooner’s mate on the Pequod. He could make a chill run down your spine when he recited Yeats’s “The Black Tower.” In college, there was Robert Palmer, whose course on the early Roman emperors was quirky, fascinating, and directly relevant to modern politics. And Larry Gross, who taught me about the confluence of visual art and mass communication, and who inspired my present teaching and research on the interplay among images, government policy, and public opinion. I remember watching him at the lectern flicking slides like a master juggler, and sounding so learned and so engaged that I thought that teaching must be the most rewarding of professions.
None of those professors got any instant gratification from me when I took their courses. If they despised their students -- and, in retrospect, I see that we certainly gave them cause -- they didn’t show it. They channeled their energy into positive action, going full-speed ahead, damning the torpedoes of despair. We should do the same.
Incongruously, Yeats’s poem about the black tower, whose yeomen guard it even though their king is dead and their cause lost, offers the greatest incentive to hope:
Say that the men of the old black tower
Though they but feed as the goatherd feeds,
Their money spent, their wine gone sour,
Lack nothing that a soldier needs,
That all are oath-bound men.
Just because our students don’t know as much as we want them to know, don’t care to know it, and don’t perform to the standards of excellence to which we have come to subscribe at middle age does not mean that they are clueless or worthless. It means that we, as men and women bound by the modern equivalent of an oath to the values of academe, must treat their antics with humor and forbearance, as we maintain our standards and strive to be as good teachers as we can be.
David D. Perlmutter is an associate professor of mass communication at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. His most recent book is Policing the Media: Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement (Sage, 2000).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B20
