… you’ve produced a species of cheap irony:  A management professor who cannot manage his management class.

Whatever the back story, UD would argue that a professor who sends his students a long rant denouncing them and puffing himself up, and who announces in the same email that he’s failing every last one of them and deserting the class (he seems to have handed it off to someone else on the faculty) is un p’tit peu out of control. Texas A&M Galveston has a strategic management problem on its hands.

Sure, some professors occasionally walk out of their classes in the middle of a lecture or discussion. Scott Jaschik reviews a few such cases here. In these examples, however, it’s about something very specific — students texting, or watching films on their laptops. In the Galveston case, the professor’s email (assuming the paper covering the story has published the correct email) shades off into the paranoid, with talk of whisper campaigns against him and his wife, and of needing police protection to teach the class.

UD doesn’t doubt that this guy’s got some shitskies in his class. You’re not supposed to deal with them by going nuclear.

… were. So what if UD has lived here most of her life. Walking to her first class yesterday (Modern British Poetry), skirting the Mall and the cherry blossoms, she was amazed at the spring, and she couldn’t imagine any students would show up to her class.

As she said to them a moment later (they all showed up):

Are you kidding me? [Looks out the windows.] No contest!

Let’s have class outside, one of them said, and others took up the cry.

I have, UD explained, an extremely long list of reasons why I don’t teach outside.

Such as? They wanted to know.

Such as even if this is in absolute urban terms a small well-mannered city it is still loud. There will be incessant airplanes taking off and landing. There will be sirens galore. Traffic will consist of groaning FedEx trucks and honking limos. If we go to the outdoor classroom (GW has an outdoor classroom, complete with podium and seating) we will almost certainly displace many innocents who have just set up their laptops in the sun. Groups of students and groups of kiddies from the childcare centers all around will drift noisily about. There are simply too many distractions.

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So we went.

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My students crowded into elevators, then followed, sheeplike, UD the shepherdess, past twelve or thirteen Starbucks. We tried our luck with the designated outdoor classroom, and there it was, glistening in the mild spring sun and – as anticipated – populated by various students. I felt guilty – but then I noticed a sign just under the podium asking students to please give way if a class wants the space, so okay.

UD made her voice louder than usual (UD has a very loud voice already – something about which Mr UD often has occasion to complain – but UD just as often explains that she grew up in a large loud Jewish family and then became a singer so what do you expect) as she talked about “Notes from Dialysis,” one of the many wonderful dreary British poems we’re studying. I thought of Hugo Williams inside inside inside, hour after hour after hour, so many days of the week, and sometimes gazing past the clinic’s windows at a world like this one – full sun, the flowers already coming up, and everyone milling about amazed… And within UD‘s view there were few people older than twenty-two…

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On her way to this poetry class (before she allowed herself to be persuaded to go outside), UD overheard the following conversation between two guys, two GW students, who were walking close behind her.

You know there’s not enough food here for the birds, right?

Well, we’re talking about the negotiations.

Because we are all drawn into the world of the Internet, someone needs to step in and break that distraction. That responsibility falls on the shoulders of Saint Joseph’s University and its faculty. Many of my professors do not allow laptops and make that clear in the syllabus, but many others allow students free rein. These professors that allow laptops, however, often scold people for being on their cellphones. Why? Because they’re distracting. Then why not ban the laptop, a device that not only distracts the user, but also those around them?

More and more, American university students are forced to point out the obvious to their professors. Stop doing this.

It’s pretty unseemly – students having to tell their professors how to be responsible.

And responsible professors have, for the most part, stopped it.

What’s mainly left are the proprietors of what UD calls the morgue classroom, professors who keen over a PowerPoint while their students nod off to Netflix.

Everybody all tucked in and ready for bed.

As ever, the blessings of the wired classroom.

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Bringing it into the classroom is not very smart. Get rid of laptops in the classroom.

I wonder if university administrators will ever get the message.

Sarah Collins, [a University of Southern California] sophomore, said she wished more professors required laptops and phones to be turned off during class. “It was just nice [in a recent no-laptop classroom] to have everyone in the present, and it led to more participation.”

Brown University, USC… Students are beginning to ask their professors to help them out here.  Will their professors listen?

Ban laptop use in our classrooms, the Brown University editorial board tells the leadership of that school. Don’t pander to us anymore; laptops are creating morgue classrooms. Make us get rid of them.

Other universities have shut off the wireless connection in lecture halls so that students cannot log on to the Internet while in class. This is not an attack [on] technology but rather a modification tactic to improve the dynamic of the student-professor relationship in class. Brown is not immune to these problems and should take action to promote more constructive classroom environments.

A rather disgusting situation, no? Even though all universities are aware that research overwhelmingly demonstrates the astounding damage laptops in classrooms do, most universities cynically and lazily keep to them. This forces the victims of laptops – students themselves – to beg universities to do something about the situation.

Ah, the morgue classroom. This Brandeis student is experiencing, in “four out of the five classes that I am taking this semester,” what UD calls the morgue classroom, where the professor gazes earthward and intones, while the students gaze at their laptops and drift off.

The morgue classroom is as silent as the grave – more silent each class session, since, as this student goes on to note, there’s no reason to attend.

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Yes, those who attend the dying body, that drifting keening Greek chorus, become fewer and fewer, ultimately stranding the designated mourner at the front of the congregation, humiliated by her aloneness.

Of course you know – don’t you? – that most morgue classrooms feature mandatory attendance policies. How else can you keep them gathering, again and again, at the dark silent river?

Shall we gather at the river?

Give me one good reason.

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You’ll flunk the course if you don’t.

Another slow-witted tech expert finally bans laptops from the college classroom. Turns out

Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.

Turns out

[D]esigners and engineers have every incentive to capture as much of my students’ attention as they possibly can, without regard for any commitment those students may have made to me or to themselves about keeping on task.

Turns out

[M]ultitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.

Turns out

Allowing laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class — it lets each person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.

Turns out

(To the people who say “Students have always passed notes in class”, I reply that old-model notes didn’t contain video and couldn’t arrive from anywhere in the world at 10 megabits a second.)

Turns out

Anyone distracted in class doesn’t just lose out on the content of the discussion but creates a sense of permission that opting out is OK, and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their peers. In an environment like this, students need support for the better angels of their nature (or at least the more intellectual angels), and they need defenses against the powerful short-term incentives to put off complex, frustrating tasks. That support and those defenses don’t just happen, and they are not limited to the individual’s choices. They are provided by social structure, and that structure is disproportionately provided by the professor, especially during the first weeks of class.

Wow. Who knew.

Everyone. A decade ago.

In my freshman seminar, weeks passed with all of us typing aimlessly on our computers and staying silent when my professor asked questions to the group. Finally, she had all of us stand up as she walked by and checked our computers. At most, two students were actually typing up notes. She banned computers from then on, and class discussions improved drastically.

A Dartmouth student recalls her very wasteful freshman seminar professor.

Professors can avoid this scandalous waste of time and money by investing five minutes acquainting themselves with the state of research on laptops in the classroom.

And no, it doesn’t matter whether students are connected to the internet during class or not. Research was done with

the laptops … not connected to the Internet. This means the results are not due to students spending time checking e-mail or surfing the Web. In most settings, such distractions will only impair performance even more. Indeed, prior research has found that laptop multitasking impairs learning and can even have negative effects on non-laptop users sitting nearby.

If you ask UD, who has been railing against classroom laptop use for years (see some of her posts here), this activity is on the face of it obviously any idiot can see plain as the nose on your face socially as well as intellectually destructive. A lot of professors – for murky reasons – have been sitting on their asses waiting for the research we all knew would come out to come out… But even with insane amounts of research confirming what anyone with common sense would have known a decade ago, plenty of professors will cleave to the laptop. Why?

(And by the way don’t even think about fully laptopped/online degree programs and their capacity to teach people anything. There’s a reason UD calls online programs cheesy.)

Well, the reasons aren’t pretty. Let’s see.

Do whatever you want! I’m afraid of you… I want a good course evaluation… The university is worried about attrition rates and has decided to give in to all of your demands… You pretend to be taking a class, and I’ll pretend to teach. This won’t put a strain on either of us… Lecturing is authoritarian. The last thing you want is some Hitlerian up here talking to you as if she has something to impart that you don’t already know or can’t find on your computer… You’re all too timid to look up from your screens and contribute to a discussion… Thank God for the laptop, which allows you to hide behind your screens and keep to yourself during class rather than be challenged in the unpleasant way of the seminar!…

And if you have a professor with a fully laptopped classroom who also depends almost exclusively on PowerPointed lectures where she (head down, monotonally) reads from each slide? Yikes.

Or, as its originator put it, There’s no there there.

How do you make a university disappear?

In the age of the simulacrum, there are many ways.

There’s the process this blog has long called Online Makeover. You phone it in. You put it all online. You go the University of Phoenix route. Plenty of respectable universities are well on their way to this form of disappearance. Their professors outsource their grading to a drudge in India. They outsource the actual running – call it teaching – of the course to for-profit vendors under contract to their university. Vendor-provided “facilitators” do everything, and professors do nothing; they merely clock in to their online course occasionally to satisfy their supervisor that they’re doing something … For, as the language of an AAUP draft report on online changes notes:

Online teaching platforms and learning management systems may permit faculty members to learn whether students in a class did their work and how long they spent on certain assignments. Conversely, however, a college or university administration could use these systems to determine whether faculty members were logging into the service “enough,” spending “adequate” time on certain activities, and the like.

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And speaking of professors as supervised clockers-in, reason number two for the disappearance of the postmodern American university can be understood by considering what’s going on lately at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: mandated spot inspections of classes.

To prove the legitimacy of classes, administrators have fanned out to hundreds of classrooms to verify that students and professors are present. Some departments even discussed bringing in photographers to document classes, according to one professor, Lew Margolis, a faculty member in public health.

As the real university ceases to exist (in UNC’s case, under the weight of hundreds of no there there courses for athletes and assorted others), professors must do their bit to persuade accrediting agencies their university does actually exist…

We DO believe in UNC! We DO we DO we DO we DO!

See, here’s what they’re up against:

[One University of North Carolina student took a class] in the fall of 2005 on Southern Africa that never met. He was a Florida native and undergraduate student paying out-of-state tuition at the time. He wrote the university seeking a tuition credit to make up for the education he did not receive.

[Julius] Nyang’oro was the professor…

“I visited (Nyang’oro) once, when he approved my topic and told me we would not have any scheduled meetings or talks, only that I could contact him if I had a problem,” Ferguson wrote.

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Universities aren’t universities because they can show that they have coaches; they’re universities because they can show that they have professors. Thus professors, at the postmodern American university, become – symbolically – the most important group on campus, routinely wheeled out to show the world that their university exists. While contract facilitators gradually take over the teaching, it will be the postmodern professor’s job to pace the campus pensively, ideally wearing an academic gown, as the professors at the College on the Hill, the central location in Don DeLillo’s iconic postmodern American novel White Noise do.

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Even when the postmodern American classroom exists, it may not really be anywhere in any meaningful sense. I’m talking about professors who do meet their students, human being to human being, but then instantly turn out the classroom lights, fire up the PowerPoint, put their heads down, and read out loud, while their students gaze at sports and porn on their laptops, play on their smart phones, or take advantage of the setting to get much-needed sleep.

The sleep thing goes to a third significant way in which universities disappear: They go from party schools to party businesses.
A professor at simulacral University of West Virginia explains the shift:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

There have always been party schools; the new thing, the thing that makes the party school go from partying to disappeared, is the university as party business, the recruitment and retention of students largely as a function of the provision of alcohol. Places like the University of Iowa, which are basically already distilleries, have had to weather a little dissent from students and faculty, but you can’t argue with the revenues, and UI is clearly recruiting students big-time on the basis of its alcoholic rep. So the synergy here is hung over students plus PowerPointing professors… At the distilleries, there’s really no reason to hold any non-virtual class. These schools will go, or are going, online. The one surviving form of human to human contact at these schools will take place in their stadiums.

This Quinnipiac University student has a point. It makes no sense for professors to have strict attendance policies in classes where attendance is pointless.

But of course precisely classes in which attendance is useless tend to be those with the strictest attendance policies. After all, the entire class – not just this student – can reason their way to non-attendance of a class in which attendance is pointless. And they do; they do.

Which leaves the professor in an embarrassing position. She comes to class to turn out the lights, put her head down, and read aloud her prepared PowerPoint script. She seems to think that’s what Quinnipiac is paying her for: She is to appear twice a week, set up a PowerPoint, and read the slides out loud.

But if there are no students in the room, she not only enters, twice a week, a theater of the absurd; she also worries that word will get around that although her enrollments look fine, the reality is that no one attends any of her classes.

No one is going to be more frantic about mandatory attendance than this woman; it’s the only way she can maintain the fiction that she’s a professor and not a robotic data dumper. Of course she’ll encourage her students to use their laptops during class (she’s way tech-friendly; it’s so cutting-edge… So much better than turning on the lights and looking at people and talking to them … ), which will soften the blow for them… Give them something to do while she’s reciting the alphabet.

I quoted this in a post a long time ago, and its source – Truman State University’s newspaper – no longer has it online.

I’ve always been moved – angered – by what that student found it necessary to plead. Her Teach us something! haunts me. It’s so easy to put away the PowerPoints and the laptops and smartphones and the rest of the other barrier technologies and just turn the lights back on and look at people and talk to them. Assuming you have something to say beyond a verbal data dump. The PowerPointed plus laptopped classroom is what UD has long called, on this blog, The Morgue Classroom, where everyone ‘s dead – instructor and students.

We can expect more outbursts like this one in our secondary schools and colleges – more Teach Us Somethings – as teachers and professors continue their dance with death in the classroom. The outburst has gone way viral; Jeff Bliss’s statement (“They need to learn face to face.”) is getting national and international attention.

It’s icing on the cake that this happened in Texas, one of our most ignorant states. What are they up to in Texas high schools that’s making the news? A one million dollar football scoreboard.

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(UD thanks JND and UD‘s sister.).

Hilarious article in, of all places, a legal journal, by bad boy Brian Tamanaha, who has broken the decorous silence we’re supposed to maintain about the greed and hypocrisy of American law professors. Tamanaha rightly targets progressives – like the Critical Legal Studies (Crits for short) people – who pat themselves on the back for their advocacy on behalf of the world’s oppressed, but who jealously guard their own wealth and status — all the while ignoring the oppressed in their own classrooms.

Tamanaha isn’t the first law professor to go there – that would be Kristin Luker – but he’s way farther out than Luker.

As the cost of legal education rose to astronomical heights, loading more and more debt on the backs of students, erecting an enormous economic barrier to access to the legal profession with major class implications, the Crits said nothing. Like other law professors, they have been playing in the academic sandbox, enjoying the increased income and release from teaching that followed from and was funded by the immense rise in tuition.

“How,” asks Tamanaha, “could developments so contrary to progressive causes occur at a time when most law professors are progressives?”

His answer:

Why we did not resist is straightforward: we benefited personally. Tuition increases meant yearly salary raises, research budgets to buy books and laptops, additional time off from teaching to write (or to do whatever we like), traveling to conferences domestically and abroad, rooms in fine hotels, and dining out with old friends. A sweet ride it has been. After becoming accustomed to such treatment, it seems normal to desire even more pay, and not think twice about traveling to Hawaii or taking the family to the annual Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference, held every summer at a luxury resort.

He concludes with a series of questions, among them:

Can we tell our friends in [progressive legal organizations] that it is unseemly to attend a conference about the future of legal education in Hawaii when so many law students and recent graduates are struggling desperately in the here and now, and can we suggest that they should have fought the rise of tuition as hard as they fought to preserve job security for professors?

Can we ask the liberal law professors at California-Irvine how they can preach to their students that they should engage in public service when they charge $50,000 tuition, loading students with debt, while insisting on getting top dollar for their own professorial services?

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At least conservative professors, like Todd Henderson, tend less toward hypocrisy. Henderson likes money, wants huge amounts of it, and seems to resent/consider himself in competition with people who make more than he does.

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The progressive law professors’ quandary recalls, for UD, the immortal statement of one who has solved it — Fulvia Morgana, the sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World:

Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.

… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.

This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.

But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:

Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.

If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…

And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.

Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!