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In recent months I have been noticing what seems to be a lot more student disrespect for professors alongside the helicopter parent phenomena and a lot of childlike student behavior. University students increasing are using laptops, of course, in the classroom and it does seem that many of them use the new technology to check email and Facebook as much as for anything else. I know of two recent incidents where unpleasant faculty-student conflict resulted from faculty attempts to ask students not to use laptops in class in disruptive ways. Myself, I have tended to ignore this kind of thing, making the tests hard enough to catch students who are not paying attention. At the same time, I can respect and support faculty who take this issue on in their classroom, hopefully with the support of administration. They are doing work in the classroom that I should probably help out with, creating a good learning environment for everyone.

                Another issue that has come to my attention recently is the inappropriate involvement of student’s parents in undergraduate grading and graduate student supervision issues.  I personally know of one case where a parent came with their adult child to meet a professor with the intention of pressuring the professor for a higher grade, resulting in an extremely unpleasant interaction and complaints to the department chair. Many parents now seem to believe that the fact that they pay tuition gives them the right to directly intervene between the professional relationship between faculty and student, raising questions about how we conceptualize both the teaching profession and the institution of parenting.   I have also heard about a case of a graduate student who came with their mother in order to gain access to a bus pass as part of a faculty research grant that required doing interviews on the phone. The parent or the graduate student, or both, wanted to have the faculty member pay against her will and expressed instructions for a bus pass so that interviews could be done in person, a creative way to defray schooling costs at the expense of the junior faculty member’s hard earned research funds. And the parent had no qualms about coming down to the university to fight for the rights of her bus pass daughter.    

                And then there is childlike helpless behavior on the parts of students. I recently received a note from a student in the 4^th week of class, asking for a list of the readings! I hand out courses descriptions, of course, at the beginning of class but after the second week the students must get the course descriptions on-line. The class web-site is a bit of a mess, because of the administration’s incompetence during a transition to a new system, but all the course descriptions are up on line on the department web-site. The student who has not being doing the readings for 4 weeks could not find the course description on the department web-site (it is easily found with a couple of clicks, and common sense) or ask a fellow student for a copy of the course description and wanted me to get it for her. Perhaps I am stubborn, but after 4 weeks I am not running around to find the final version of the course description somewhere on one of my computers, when the student should have gotten this as well as the required readings at least 3 weeks ago (maybe they missed the first class, for some legitimate reason). And over the past few year I have also dealt with graduate students who can’t figure out how to do a basic electronic search for readings by a particular author on the on-line sociological abstract system, wanting me to help, feeling this is all so complicated.

                My complaints here are based, of course, on examples from my own experience – basically unsystematic observations. Clearly we need just the kind of systematic empirical evidence of problems and student non-involvement outlined and discussed in Ivory Tower Blues (2007) and James Côté and Anton L. Allahar’s web-site/blog http://www.ivorytowerblues.com/. Without in any way denying the importance of empirical evidence, such as surveys, field work and focus groups, I do think we need to think about some of these problems outside the box, to some extent, of mainstream social science and draw on some of the insights of the major social critics of late 20^th century and early 21^st century social life. Christopher Lasch once argued that we lived in a “culture of narcissism,” where adult social relations were declining in importance in light of an adolescent culture. Daniel Bell also argued that we are dealing with the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” where the culture of the protestant work ethic was being undermined by the consumer orientation of a society dominated by advertising and instant gratification.  Myself, I prefer the democratic socialist critiques of consumer culture and “positive thinking” that we see in the work of Erich Fromm, Cornel West and Barbara Ehreinriech to the neo-conservative and culturally conservative writings of Lasch, Bell or more recently, the New York Times’s great sociologically oriented conservative op-ed writer David Brooks. These political and intellectual differences aside, I think it would be a mistake to try to talk about our ivory tower blues as if it were simply a professional and organizational matter, divorced from the larger context. We would, of course, have to talk about the specifics of how these cultural trends towards consumerism, narcissism and extended childhood play out, in the Canadian context. But I do think we should talk about the issues  with as broad a cultural and sociological framework in mind as possible.

 

About Dr. Ken Cramer
Dr. Ken Cramer is a full professor at the University of Windsor in the Department of Psychology. While teaching several large classes of introductory psychology, Dr. Cramer's research interests include teaching technologies, effective engagement of students through active learning, and the impact of Maclean's rankings on student welfare.

 

About James Côté
James Côté is a full professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, where he has taught since the early 1980s. In addition to Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, which he co-authored with Anton Allahar, he has also published numerous journal articles on student experiences with higher education. His research interests overlapping with higher education include the sociology of youth (Critical Youth Studies, Pearson Education, 2006), and the social psychology of identity (Identity Formation, Agency, and Culture, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002). These interests dovetail in a critique of contemporary culture where forms of human development are arrested or misdirected by special interests and outmoded institutions that undermine both people’s potentials to reach their full developmental capacities and the democratic potentials for the society as a whole.

 

About Neil McLaughlin
Neil McLaughlin is an associate professor of sociology at McMaster University, where he teaches sociological theory and writes on the sociology of intellectuals, ideas and knowledge. He has published cases studies on the German critical theorist Erich Fromm, the American sociologist David Riesman, the literary critic Edward Said, the essayist novelist George Orwell and the financial speculator George Soros. He has also written on the history of the Frankfurt School, op-ed and book writing among academics in Canada, comparative questions regarding "public sociology" and the institutional history and health of Canadian sociology.

 

About Tetyana Antimirova
Dr. Tetyana Antimirova is an Assistant Professor and a current Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Physics at Ryerson University. Her current interests include Physics Education Research, Curriculum Development, Science Education and Outreach. Her current work is focused on the impact of technology (clickers, real-time data acquisition using probeware, video-based motion analysis, tablet PC, computer simulations, etc.) on students’ learning in undergraduate physics courses. She also studies the gender effect and the impact of high school physics experience on the learning outcomes in the university introductory physics courses. Tetyana credits her interest in physics and her career choice to her high school teachers.