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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Sometimes, when she reads her beloved…

New York Times, UD wonders: Was this piece necessary?

It’s usually a “lifestyle” (evil word) piece… usually a piece focusing a laser-like beam upon some beyond-trivial element of a yuppie’s day… like… the emails UD gets from her students!

And you know, UD doesn’t shock easily, but she was shocked by this:

A few professors said they had rules for e-mail and told their students how quickly they would respond, how messages should be drafted and what types of messages they would answer.

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.

"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.


The first part of this is just the standard weird thing of a lot of Americans, who insist on formalizing everything -- rules for this and rules for that. It’s almost always a mistake -- a recipe for aggravation. But it’s the second part of this that gets me. You must say: Thank you! Miss Manners meets Monty Python!

Not to mention that the whole point of the article is that the student, with his or her hectoring, demanding emails, is now the more powerful person…


But even more -- UD’s experience of students’ emails is not at all like that described of professors generally in the article, who indignantly and incredulously report getting emails like this one:

"Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I'm a freshman, I'm not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your recommendations? Thank you!"


Well, hell, she said thank you… And is this really so awful? It’s a freshman, asking for a small spot of advice. I’d just answer it, wouldn’t you? Rather than, like this professor, refusing to, and saving it for the day a New York Times reporter asks you about your most outrageous student email?



The article then goes on to list phenomena like constant in-school faculty evaluations and Rate My Professors and student Facebook groups, and the way tenure and promotion ride on some of this… so that, among other things, faculty feel pressure to respond to the “barrage” of student emails they receive.

For what it’s worth, UD’s student email has never seemed anything like a barrage -- though it’s true that she doesn’t teach big lecture courses. Nor has it ever been rude or demanding in the ways the article describes as routine.