It happened a few years ago, but history professor Tamara Hunt remembers it like yesterday. While laying out the ground rules of a take-home exam for her university class, a student suddenly confronted her: "This test is too hard," he blurted out loudly from the front row. "You shouldn't be asking us this stuff. You have to change it."

Momentarily stunned, Dr. Hunt recovered quickly by telling her 15 students their only option was to take the same test in class. The group chose to take it home. The young man sat sullenly.

Another professor recalls how she recently had a student "get up during class and walk out right in front of me - twice." Still another had to tell a student, also seated up front, to quit spitting tobacco juice into a can on his desk.

Minor indiscretions? Perhaps. But griping, chatting, laughing, sleeping, eating, reading newspapers, foul language, spitting - even outbursts at fellow students and professors - are all part of the incivility that surfaces in American post-secondary classrooms, educators and students say.

Of course, rude behavior in class has existed to some degree in higher education since the university's origins in 12th-century Europe. Back then, students shuffled their feet or threw pebbles at professors who did not keep their attention. Yet some suggest that low-level "classroom terrorists" may be more prevalent today as increasing numbers of students arrive ill-prepared, undermotivated, and with expectations out of sync with the norm for a college classroom. If problem behavior is growing, higher education will either attempt to educate students in spite of disruptions - or regroup and insist on a baseline of classroom civility, observers say.

"Obviously the majority of students come into class ready to learn and behave well," says John D'Amicantonio, librarian at California State University at Long Beach. "But there are a growing number of students who come into class with a different perspective on how to behave."

The possible explanations for rudeness range from a short-attention-span "sitcom mentality" to a corporate-style approach to higher education that pulls professors off their pedestals and gives students a feeling of being in control as consumers.

Though he teaches no classes, Dr. D'Amicantonio has heard all the horror stories. From 1993 to 1998, he chaired a faculty committee formed to remedy a campus trend toward incivility - including students coming to class late, leaving early, bringing children, eating, sleeping, and just generally indicating they did not want to participate or listen.

Dust-up at Dartmouth

Such cases pop up in some surprising places. Earlier this month at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., for instance, a cheating scandal in a computer class revealed some rampant rudeness. Students said they had been openly disrespectful to the visiting professor in the run-up to the cheating incident.

"We were blatantly rude to him," Jennifer Greene, a sophomore, told The Boston Globe. Students said they read newspapers and passed around pornographic magazines as the class devolved into an atmosphere of noisy conversations and jeering at the professor.

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