Comments on: Those Who Won’t Teach

By: David

David — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:19:15 +0000

But I really wonder if this is the whole story? In my experience, administrations at large schools are incredibly reluctant and slow to act… except in areas relating to money, of course. Failing to pay a parking ticket or a tuition bill, or to sufficiently prove one’s in-state status, brings the full institutional wrath down upon a student’s head more or less instantly. But if an emotionally-troubled student starts acting up in a classroom, administrators’ default response is almost always nonaction—wagering that the problem will likely “go away” by itself somehow, probably, without the administrator having to put themselves on the line by confronting the student in any way.
So would an angry email from a hockey coach really be enough by itself to set an expulsion in motion? (and who cares about Div III hockey, anyway??) What administrator would want to risk that? And–sure enough–SUNY-Oswego came away with a huge black eye, which is every administrator’s personal paranoia.
So I wonder if there is a back story. Was the student known to be difficult already? Was this a ‘last straw’ (pushed by frustrated professors), but that fact got lost when the case was taken up by free-speech advocates? If not, it’s hard to fathom how Oswego could’ve bungled it so badly…
(And for contrast: at my Div I football factory–err, research state university–there is a large, paid, professional staff of the Athletic Department–“fixers”–dedicated to smoothing exactly this sort of thing over before it gets anywhere near the media, by managing head coaches’ huge egos & statements, gently diverting professors’ criticisms, resolving athletes’ academic-issues with intensive tutoring, etc.) But I guess Oswego is Div III…. and therefore perhaps so are their “fixers”?
(ahh, if I could only go back in time and somehow prevent the Faustian bargain with football…)

By: CarlD

CarlD — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:24:54 +0000

Yeah, I agree completely. Not to muddy the analysis but I thought the same thing about some of the central features of the Pine breastfeeding case – that treating the student journalist like a full-fledged, empowered professional was, in that context, a category error. And reflective of a wider pattern among some of our colleagues to see students as adversaries, even sometimes as depersonalized avatars of adversary groups. Which they may well be, but for us the vocation makes them students first, and the opportunity is to teach.

I’ve also been thinking about this in relation to my uni’s endless gen ed reform. One of the key, but virtually undiscussable cleavages is between those who think of the students as irredeemable barbarians who need to be desperately browbeaten with the time-proven wonderments of civilization, and those who think the students are folks who don’t know some good stuff and could productively be invited to learn. It seems that the former attitude fuels a dialectic of reciprocal resentment that may be identity-affirming for everyone involved, but works against us in the longer term. Certainly the instant case is part of that dynamic.

By: Matt_L

Matt_L — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:48:40 +0000

Based on the initial expulsion from campus it seems like the student was in trouble for lese-majesty rather than academic misbehavior. The reasonable punishment would have been to have him to the assignment over and to apologize. Looks like they got there eventually (according to Gawker), but only under duress.

Clearly the student made several awful mistakes. But if you can’t make mistakes in college and learn from them, where can you?