Professors struggle to rout out rudeness

On the other hand, some suggest that the rudeness problem is overblown and may be mostly professors' fault.

Timothy Juntilla, a professor of English at Cerritos College, a two-year institution in Norwalk, Calif., is upset that "alarmists in the academe" exaggerate the problem. And news-media spotlights on certain incidents, he says, may frighten away good teaching talent.

"The real question is what are these professors doing to cause these students to react," he says. "Sure there are going to be a few lousy students screaming and throwing stuff that have to be removed. But if others are showing up late every day and talking all the time - you have to ask yourself: 'What am I doing to allow this behavior to continue?' "

Sam Minner, a professor of education at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, also says he hasn't noticed any growth in the small percentage of students who cause trouble.

Professors on the periphery?

What Dr. Minner does see is a "power shift" going on in higher education.

"In the old academic model, power was vested with the professors," he says. "Now knowledge is much more broadly distributed throughout society. Students have many alternatives to gain that knowledge, so the relationship with the professor becomes more tangential."

Dr. Davis at the University of Nebraska agrees there can be a tendency among professors to "student bash." But he and two colleagues have been studying student and faculty attitudes and have found that the groups are speaking different languages.

"Students often just don't know what's going on after they arrive at college," he says. "There's a cultural disconnect, as if they're being dropped in a country with a foreign language." So, while he agrees with Dr. Stone that students are increasingly arriving with consumerist views, he also sees a failure on the part of universities and professors to actively acculturate students during orientation and in the classroom to their new learning environment.

'Sink the sub'

In large lecture classes, or in required courses with a visiting professor, Dr. Davis says, the result can be something akin to what sometimes happens in K-12 classes on the day when a substitute teacher shows up: "sink the sub."

That may be what happened at Dartmouth recently, Davis speculates, referring to the high-octane class of 178 students, dozens of whom were charged with cheating. (The charges were later dropped because it was unclear which students had taken answers to an assignment off an unsecured Web site. That the answers were posted prompted some students to accuse the teacher of trapping them.) "Intellectual ability doesn't necessarily mean students automatically understand the difference between academic and high school culture," Davis says.

The need, says Minner, is for professors to do a better job communicating, get better training in teaching techniques and classroom management, and let go of the expectation that everyone in a class automatically will give them their attention.

*Email claytonm@csps.com

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