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The angry student narrowed her eyes at the professor and growled, "Remember, you work for me."
The professor smiled, tilted her head to one side, placed her hand on a cocked hip, and replied, "Honey, I work for your parents."
This exchange was recounted to me with some delight by the professor in question. It made me wonder: who exactly is my boss? Technically my check is handed over by the University of California Regents, but as an instructor to whom am I accountable in the end?
The answer for me is "the students." However, my willingness to be their servant has changed considerably as I've matured as an academic. I've spent the last couple of years learning to say no to students--no more scheduling 30 hours of student appointments in the week before a paper is due; no more opportunities for rewriting substandard work that should have been good enough when it was due; no more handing over my lecture notes to students who missed class. Call it my "tough love" initiative. I want to stop coddling students, no matter how much some of them want the hand-holding at every step. (Confession: I did buy students who showed up for my midterm today the candy bars of their choosing. I'm not heartless, after all.)
I'm not the only blogger who's been thinking lately about to what degree we need to meet students' demands, where we should draw the line between reasonable and unreasonable student needs, and whether we're part of an inviolate system that prizes intellectual freedom and autonomy above all else, or whether we're service providers in a free market system.
Lisa of The Paper Chase struggles with how--or whether--to broach the topic with her students:
There is much written in the blogosphere and elsewhere about how higher education has become commodified. Of course, I agree; it's hard not to. But I am also pragmatic enough to realize that any amount of kvetching about this in this classroom makes me sound like either an idealist or kind of a jerk. After all, when students come to you with a belief that they are buying something from you, the last thing they are going to hear is a sermon from you about how they should value learning for its own sake. Even if they should.
The always articulate Oso Raro of Slaves of Academe weighs in on the uglier symptoms of what Lisa of Paper Chase calls "the consumption model of education":
Yet, this is what university education seems to be up against, and increasingly capitulating to: instant gratification. You see it in surly students with credit-card attitudes and mealy-mouthed administrators smoothing over ruffled feathers. You also see it in the classroom, as professors, even in tenure-line positions, play up to students and grade high, to ensure good evaluations and glowing comments on RateMyProfessor.com. While our intellectual practice is archaic and quaint in many of its values, the brutalism of either Mammon or Stalin, broadly put, strikes me as an even more unpleasant venture. I do wonder, however, how long we shall be able to hold onto our values and approaches, our peculiar Wunderkammer, as the institution, like our society, changes and shifts and transforms, as both the Left and Right march forward with demands for empirical evidence, facts on paper. Yet, teaching remains intangible, mysterious, complicated, compromised.
What are your thoughts?
Leslie Madsen-Brooks blogs about motherhood and the life academic at The Clutter Museum.
