Today I will address some of the responses to my contention that greater academic rigor would help reduce binge drinking among college students, reining in the ‘Woo People.’
By way of overview, I found it interesting that the only readers who took offense at what I’ve been writing were students since I was trying, in those two columns, to take some of the blame off the students and put it on the faculty, myself included.
One colleague offered this tidbit in support of making school tougher: “I once asked a group of Honors College students how many hours they studied a week. The answers shocked me: 4.”
Since this comment appeared on a listserv, it prompted another reader to note that Penn State freshmen are advised to work two hours per week for every hour of class time. That works out to a 45-hour work week if you’re taking 15 credits – in other words, a full-time job. The writer pointed out that such a work schedule “still leaves 123 hours in the week to divide between sleeping and playing.”
Another colleague wanted me to add online classes to my list of party culture “enablers” that featured no early-morning classes, no mandatory attendance and light workloads.
I concur. While I wouldn’t go so far as to do away with online classes altogether, I’m not a fan. The very existence of online courses sends the message that the classroom experience is not terribly important; what matters is doing the required work.
Online instruction also devalues face-to-face communication. I maintain that two of the most undervalued and undeveloped skills in our digitized culture are the ability to listen and the ability to sit in a room with other people and have a civil conversation.
Which brings me to the comments from students who were incensed by my recommendations. To them I say, first of all, thanks for reading! One cited a handful of negative reviews on ratemyprofessors.com (um, I’ve taught almost 2,000 students to date) in attacking me as a crummy instructor. Leaving aside the question of whether my inferior teaching abilities have driven Penn State students to drink, I can assure this poster that no one evaluates my teaching more harshly than I do. It continues to be the most challenging work I’ve ever done — but it would be a lot easier, not to mention more gratifying, if one were teaching people who actually wanted to be taught.
Another poster wanted to know if I spent 24 hours per day in the library when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t, quite, but the writer raises an important point about the professor-student relationship.
Most of us professor types are where we are because we were good at school – liked it, even. Most students, I suspect, are like a friend’s daughter with whom I recently chatted. She’s a junior at another university and, she didn’t mind telling me, she’s hating every minute of the academic side of it.
This is a perfectly intelligent girl, with all sorts of talents that I do not possess, but she doesn’t like and isn’t any good at the two activities that most college classes require of her: reading and writing. Why, she wanted to know, can’t she just get training in her chosen field (early childhood education)? Why does she have to take all these classes she isn’t interested in?
I don’t have a good answer. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) thinks many leading universities aren’t making students take enough classes that they aren’t interested in. When it comes to requiring “core” classes in the arts and sciences, ACTA gave Fs to Brown, Cornell and Yale, Ds to Harvard and Penn and a C to Penn State. A story about ACTA’s report cards in the Washington Post raised the question, “What, if anything, should America’s college students be required to learn?” What, indeed?
Should my young friend who wants to be a kindergarten teacher suck it up and become educated in a well-rounded, exposed-to-Shakespeare-and-Aristotle way? Or should there be more kinds of colleges and universities so students can seek narrow training rather than a broad education? I think we’re moving toward that kind of diversification but in the meantime, we have a lot of students who aren’t particularly interested in learning what we have to teach.
No doubt students would say they aren’t interested because their classes are so boring. Their profs find that students are predisposed to be bored. Many faculty members, I imagine, prepare to the nth degree, find that their efforts go unappreciated, and so devote most of their energies to their research. Thus the Penn State paradox: We’re a party school, a football factory, a diploma mill – and a world-class research institution.
Students, you need to take better advantage of all that faculty expertise. Faculty, you need to care as much about your undergraduate teaching responsibilities as you do about your research. And all of us need to treat each other with more respect and greater civility, even in cyberspace.
Related content
