People around the internet are having a lot of capital-R Reactions to this satirical piece at the Chronicle. Here's a thing I didn't know about higher education until I became a professor: most of my students are great. They are usually motivated and together -- more together, actually, than I was as an upper-level undergrad. Here's another thing I didn't know about higher education until I became a professor: a small number of my students are going to do jaw-dropping things. And not, let me hasten to clarify, the happy kind of jaw-dropping.
The jaw-dropping students have a disproportionate influence on my syllabi and on the way that I draft assignment instructions. They're the reason I write new policies and tighten old loopholes. The large majority of students would never dream of coming back to me and say "But you didn't say that my grade would take a hit if I didn't follow the instructions, so it's not fair for you to penalize me." And yet there is a reason that I now spell it out: failure to follow the instructions in this paragraph will result in a grade penalty. The jaw-dropping students have an even more disproportionate emphasis on my state of mind. They take up vast amounts of brain real estate during the busiest times of the semester. Sometimes it's like Problem Student = Central Asian Steppes (in terms of both massive size and inhospitable climate) and Everybody Else Combined = Liechtenstein. And so when I complain about my job? I'm usually complaining about the antics of a jaw-dropper.
Once I was talking about technology policies with some other faculty and I joked about writing a technology policy that said "Offenders will be zapped with my laser eyes." Of course I'm sympathetic to techno-distractions. Of course I get it that students on their laptops are going to check their email now and again. Of course I do not have laser eyes. I did once, though, teach a freshman who seemed unable to stop engaging in behavior that I found overtly disruptive. She has long since disappeared from our program, but she continues to influence the way I write syllabi.
I am sure that my plagiarism policy causes distress to some of my strong students. They worry a lot about accidentally plagiarizing, despite my active encouragement to talk it through with me during office hours. Did you already guess that it exists because of the 1%, the students who insist that the 80% overlap between their submission and the Wikipedia entry is entirely coincidental and only a super-mean meanypants would fail them for it?
The more irate reactions I have seen to the Chronicle piece seem to assume that its author is actually requiring her students to provide multiple forms of documentation -- that she is routinely treating students like adversaries. A professor who consistently treats students like adversaries needs to re-assess, sure. But a professor who is kvetching about the 1%? I think that's probably okay.
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