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(Tenured Radical)

Monday, February 12, 2007

As a Class...

...professors can be hard to take. Most people don't like them; many people heartily dislike them. Their representations in American culture are almost always negative -- oddball, arrogant, lazy, childish, shabby...

On balance, UD rather likes professors. She's lived among them all her life, and she has chronicled them rather closely in this her blog, and though more than a few of them are jerks, as a group they can be funny, smart, and subversive in socially useful ways.


Look, for instance, at how some of them are acting at Duke University these days. Like a high-profile marriage that's suddenly and sordidly ripped apart, professorial Duke, post-lacrosse, is really showing its pro-athletes/anti-athletes seams.

Yet in many of their comments and activities, faculty members there are making UD proud.

Here, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, are a couple of examples:


(1.) One Duke professor,

[w]hen asked whether he "welcomes" all students to his classes... dismisses the word itself. "I admit students to my classes. I do not welcome them," he says. "I am not at the door shaking people's hands. They just come in and take their seats."

Besides, he says, athletes would never take his classes. "I do not give quizzes," he says. "I give very hard reading."



This man understands that serious university classrooms are not Phil Donahue studios. Course evaluation forms that ask whether your professor made every day feel like Valentine's Day, and other make-nice pressures from consumer-driven administrations, have led a lot of professors to give up teaching for ass kissing. This is a very bad trend, and UD's pleased to see this guy growling about it.

(2.) Another Duke professor

...started an effort to help faculty members better understand the athletics program. He pairs professors with particular sports teams. Each professor goes to a few practices, spends time with the players (including men's lacrosse and the high-powered men's basketball team), and travels to away games when possible.

"This was for the purpose of trying to increase communication and participation," [he] says... "If you're going to do that properly, you really have to understand what's going on."

...With a few exceptions, he says, the program has gone smoothly, and he thinks it has helped defuse tensions. The responses of his colleagues, however, have been all over the map: "Some are highly supportive, some are curious, some are skeptical."

Frederik H. Nijhout is among the skeptical. The biology professor, calling [the] program "wrongheaded," argues that athletics always takes precedence over academic matters at Duke.

If anything, he says, those in athletics need to take the academic side more seriously.

And so Mr. Nijhout and Richard M. Hain, a professor of mathematics, wrote and distributed a parody of Mr. Haagen's program. Instead of faculty members' being assigned to sports teams, coaches would be invited to attend classes and watch students do research in order to "increase understanding among the coaching staff of academic life at Duke."



Also pleasing to UD.