Professors struggle to rout out rudeness

The professor, Rex Dwyer of North Carolina State University, could not be reached for comment. Several Dartmouth officials said the behavior in this class was not typical of how students treat visiting or faculty professors. Ed Berger, dean of faculty, stated for the college paper that "this is a unique situation in almost every way.... There was absolutely no reason to expect there was going to be anything like this."

Losing control may not be an everyday occurrence, but a number of professors worry about it more than ever.

"My students are polite on the surface to me, but I can't say that would be the case if I wasn't pretty tough," says H. Charles Romesburg, professor of forest resources at Utah State University in Logan.

Large classes seem to be more likely than small ones to create opportunities for sleeping and reading, he and others say. The gender of the professor also sometimes affects student behavior. Dr. Romesburg, for instance, notes that his female teaching assistant had trouble with his classes until he informed them that she, too, was empowered to lower their grades for insubordination.

Still, Romesburg says he does everything possible to prevent confrontations in the class. He lays out strict ground rules at the start of the course and assigns seats to learn names. Students can't just get up and leave expecting he won't know who they are. "Avoiding a classroom confrontation is really important," he says. "In this state, students have the right to bring guns to class."

Though relatively rare, serious confrontations do happen. Scott Glotzer, who until last year taught history at William Paterson University in New Jersey, witnessed one in a computer-science lab. "One of the professors was sort of conducting a workshop, and one of her students came in the door just screaming at her," he recalls. "She was trying to calm him down, telling him they could work out a way for him to turn in the assignment. He just stormed away."

It is more common for students to grouse over grades or express the feeling that a professor's demands are unfair.

Marta Stone, associate professor of Spanish at Quincy University in Illinois, says students may often see themselves as mistreated consumers rather than young scholars being required to struggle and thereby grow intellectually. "There's a distinct feeling," she says, "that 'I'm paying my money and I want a degree in exchange. It doesn't matter how I act.' "

Roger Davis, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Kearny who is conducting a multiyear study into the roots of student incivility in class, agrees.

"If students arrive with a strong sense of identity as a customer, then in today's environment they have rights," he says. "They're not supposed to be hassled. They're supposed to be kept happy. So you may show up with that frame of reference because that's what the admissions-department literature tells them - but then part of the college environment is to challenge your core beliefs...; then you get upset students."

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