by Glen Wright
Week 7 We could easily Fix this Mess with some Basic Math
Week 8 This Field is Sexist and Racist to its Rotten Core
Week 9 What is Theory without Praxis?
Week 10 THANKSGIVING BREAK. If You Can Call it a Break.
Week 11 Look, if Everything is Socially Constructed, then Nothing is
Week 12 Can you Believe we didn’t Read any __________?
Week 13 Conclusion: This Whole Project was an Exercise in Symbolic Violence
READ THE SYLLABUS
As the number of students in a class increases, the probability that someone will ask a question that is already answered in the syllabus approaches one. Exasperated, a few cheeky teachers have taken to testing whether the class is reading the syllabus by inserting unusual requests:14
• Joseph Howley, an assistant professor of classics at Columbia University, asked students to email him a picture of the character Alf from the popular eighties sitcom ALF (with the subject line, ‘It’s Alf!’). He said that the Easter egg ‘yielded quantitatively dismal results’, but had nonetheless resulted in some amusing emails.*
• Damian Fleming, an associate professor of English and linguistics at Indiana University-Purdue University, asked his students to send him a picture of a ‘cool medieval tattoo’. Around half of his students humoured him with a response.
• Adrienne Evans Fernandez, an adjunct professor of biology at Ivy Tech Community College, in Bloomington, Indiana, asked her students to send her a dinosaur picture. About 25% of students did.
MAKING THE GRADE
Perhaps the only aspect of academic life more maligned than teaching is grading. While grading is unlikely to become exciting anytime soon, there are a couple ways academics have tried to make it interesting.
Every year since 2008, Professor Dylan Selterman of the University of Maryland has presented his class with a prisoner’s dilemma:15
You can each earn some extra credit on your term paper. You get to choose whether you want 2 points added to your grade, or 6 points. But there’s a catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points.
Meanwhile, a screenshot of the following grading policy has been doing the rounds on social media:
Some of you think that attendance is not necessary to pass a college course. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you’re looking for an easy A, I can tell you I don’t have your easy A but what I do have are a very special set of skills. Skills which I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you attend classes regularly, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will grade you.
Academics’ disdain for grading is equalled by student superstitions surrounding exams. At Royal Holloway, University of London, a painting hanging in the exam hall is shrouded in superstition. The painting depicts the mysterious demise of Sir John Franklin’s fabled 1845 Arctic expedition, showing two polar bears devouring the remains of a ship and its occupants. Ever since the first exams in the 1920s the painting has been associated with failure. ‘If you sit directly in front of it in an exam, you will fail – unless it’s covered up,’ says Laura MacCulloch, the college’s curator.16
In the 1970s a student refused to be seated near it and a massive Union Jack was found to cover it. The flag has adorned the painting every exam period since. The legend has morphed over the years, with a recent version being that a student had stared directly into one of the polar bears’ eyes, fallen into a trance, gone mad and killed herself, though not before etching ‘THE POLAR BEARS MADE ME DO IT’ onto her paper.*
Superstitions surrounding exams elsewhere are less macabre. In the town of Göttingen in Germany, recently minted doctoral graduates rush off to kiss a statue of Lizzy, aka ‘Goose Girl’, at a fountain in front of the medieval town hall, while in Wisconsin students have been placing plastic pink flamingos on the main lawn at graduation since 1978.
RATE MY PROFESSORS
Rate My Professors (RMP) has exploded in popularity since first being launched in 1999. For its target audience it is a godsend, with students logging on to figure out where the easy grades are, or, less cynically, where they might get a great learning experience.†17 For academics it can be a mixed bag. Often it is more berate than rate, and RMP has confronted many an academic with the uncomfortable truth that they aren’t as popular with their students as they thought.
Reviews calling professors ‘useless’ or a ‘general moron’ are common, and relatively polite compared with:
• ‘…horrific teacher. No one shows up to class because it’s so miserably boring. When I actually do go to class, halfway through i begin to hate God for giving me the legs that brought me there. You could walk into this class rolling on E, and by the time the second slide comes up, you’d be sober.’
• ‘Once or twice, his theory talk was interesting, but other than that the only thing that keeps the blood in my brain flowing is wondering what the hell is up with the fanny pack.’
• ‘Whatever you do . . . AGREE with her on ALL issues, praise her and tell her she is the greatest, fall down to your knees and worship her, then maybe, just maybe you might make a B.’
• ‘Take him if you need the class. But come prepared with an energy drink and a coloring book because that is the only way you will last.’
• ‘If I had a choice between taking another one [of his] classes and being saturated with brown gravy and locked in a room with a wolverine that is high on PCP, then I honestly believe that I would choose the latter.’*
Not only are these all real reviews, I could have filled an entire book with them.
While some in the academic community are understandably critical of the site and dismissive of such venomous evaluations, professors at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and Simon Fraser University, British Columbia had a better idea.18 No doubt inspired by a popular segment on the Jimmy Kimmel Show where celebrities read out nasty tweets accompanied by REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’, they posted videos of staff reading their negative RMP reviews.
‘Hes hot in during the lecture, but after lecture hes super cold,’ reads Peter Tingling, associate professor of management information systems in one video. ‘Before I attended his class, I thought he was a women prof,’ says Enda Brophy, a male assistant professor of communications.
The deadpan deliveries are the best. ‘I found this course to be tediously boring, and Steve was useless, although he is a very nice guy,’ reads Stephen Collis, professor of English. ‘Consolation prize,’ he says, smiling and giving a cheeky nod to the camera. ‘Awfully boring class if you’re not interested in environmental engineering,’ reads Kristen Jellison, associate professor of environmental engineering who was teaching ‘Introduction to Environmental Engineering’.
Todd Watkins, a professor of economics, reads a review referring to the university’s Integrated Product Development (IPD) programme: ‘This says I’m useless to the IPD programme and a general moron . . . Hell, I started the dang IPD programme!’ The reviewer then complains that Watkins rambles too much, to which he responds by rambling quite deliberately to the camera.
Dannagal Young, associate professor of communication at the University of Delaware, appeared in a RMP video produced by students at her university, though in her case the shoe is on the other foot: her reviews are uniformly positive, and in the video she pretends to mock her students for liking her course. Young’s research is on the uses of political humour and satire, and she reckons that the key to making such videos funny is to find a suitably offensive comment and ‘own those sentiments proudly . . . Once empathy is activated, it undercuts the joke.’
Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, created a tool to identify the frequency of word usage in RMP reviews by discipline, using a database of words drawn from 14 million reviews. Th
e tool was intended to highlight differences in how students address male and female faculty, and even a brief dabble can be quite disheartening.♀19
Several positive words, in terms of academic reputation, appear far more frequently in reviews of male professors than of female professors: ‘Smart’, ‘intellect’, and ‘genius’ all appear with greater frequency in reviews of male professors in all 25 disciplines for which data is available.*
Words more commonly found in reviews of female faculty tend to fit certain stereotypes, both positive and negative, such as ‘bossy’ and ‘nurturing’. Fashion-related words are also common, and female profs are also more likely to be called ‘demanding’, except in a few disciplines.
Not all words are so strongly gendered though, and there are some less predictable gender differences in word choice: female professors are more likely to be called ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’, while male professors are simultaneously seen as more ‘funny’ and ‘boring’. The descriptors ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ remain satisfyingly gender neutral.
Gender imbalances aside, a lot can be learned about the academy from typing in random phrases. The physics faculty is top of the class for hairiness due to an unexplained preponderance of hairy females, while the hairiest men are overwhelmingly in education and philosophy. A search for ‘bad teeth’ reveals a high prevalence of odontophobia among male anthropologists and female historians. ‘Irritating’ professors are to be found in anthropology, fine arts, and communication, while ‘awesome’ professors teach criminal justice and psychology.
Even the most unlikely words and phrases have been used in a review somewhere. The terms ‘tea bag’, ‘sand castle’, and ‘baby food’ all make an appearance for example.*
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
As if the barbs of disgruntled students on RMP weren’t enough, a Republican Iowa State Senator tabled an ill-considered bill targeting professor performance that the President of the American Association of University Professors called, ‘The most outrageous proposal I have heard from a legislator anywhere.’20
The bill would have required professors at public institutions to be rated by student evaluations, and goes on to say that if the professor fails to attain a minimum threshold of performance based on the student evaluations, the institution shall terminate the professor’s employment regardless of tenure status or contract.
One bizarre provision is more reminiscent of The Hunger Games than higher education: the bill would have instituted a system of public voting to decide whether to terminate the employment of professors that met the minimum standards, but were in the bottom five performers. According to the proposal, their names would be published on the institution’s website and students would vote. The professor with fewest votes would then have their contract terminated, regardless of tenure status.
The bill died a swift death in committee, but nonetheless exemplifies the growing student-as-customer mindset that has many academics worried.
Notes
For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).
* Note: there are nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
* Members of the counselling staff presented a slide to football coaches saying, ‘We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which: They didn’t go to class; They didn’t take notes, have to stay awake; They didn’t have to meet with professors; They didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material.’
† Boxhill is also a philosophy professor and has written books about ethics in sport.
* Goldsmith wrote Traffic, a collection of traffic reports arranged as poetry, and read sections of it (compellingly, I might add) at a poetry event sponsored by President Obama (who can be seen laughing heartily in a video of the reading). Goldsmith’s attempt to poetically remix Michael Brown’s autopsy report at a conference in 2015 was less well received. Another of Goldsmith’s courses, ‘Uncreative Writing’, promises students that they will learn to employ ‘strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering’ as writing techniques.
† A neologism meaning ‘Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response’: a combination of pleasurable physical and psychological affects, primarily relaxation, experienced in response to external stimuli, especially whispering or soft-spoken voices, or precise movements on a visual plane. Search the term on YouTube and you will find a great number of videos dedicated to lulling you into such a state, including titles such as ‘Maria spends 20 minutes folding towels’, ‘Long Hair Brushing Session for Relaxation’, and ‘~♥~ Let me take care of you ♥~’. The internet is weird.
* 21 October 2015, the day that Marty McFly ends up in when he uses the time machine.
† The original page has now disappeared and has been replaced with a notice stating, ‘After many years of studying the future, the Department of Transtemporal Studies has now closed due to unforeseen circumstances. It will reopen in 2045.’ The original page can still, rather appropriately, be accessed using the Wayback Machine.
* The term ‘underwater basket weaving’ has long been used as pejorative designation for any university course perceived as being useless or absurd, or to describe a perceived decline in academic standards more generally. In 1919 one writer lamented: ‘Higher education is becoming very practical indeed. It includes everything nowadays – excepting, of course, Greek and Latin – from plumbing to basket-weaving’ (‘Studying National Parks’, The Watchman and Southron, 6 August, 1919). There are many references in the 1950s (incidentally, many of these concern sham courses given to student athletes), including: ‘These may include courses in life-insurance salesmanship, bee culture, square-dancing, traffic direction, first aid, or basketweaving’ (‘Magna cum nonsense’, New York Times, 16 March, 1952). A 1956 edition of American Philatelist noted, quite seriously, in a piece on a remote Alaskan community, that: ‘Underwater basket weaving is the principal industry of the employables…’ The phrase later came to be used to describe courses that young men took to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War. Wanting to get in on the joke, many universities have offered one-off courses in underwater basket-weaving.
* If that were the entire course description, I would think it quite amusing, but the actual course description is reminiscent of the headache-inducing academic writing seen earlier: ‘Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology [is] a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life.’ Call me stupid, but I don’t understand what this course is about.
* One student noted the apparent contradiction between the request and the edict that email ‘should be approached as a professional communication’.
* Well, that escalated quickly.
† Studies confirm that this cynicism is warranted: there is a strong correlation between students’ rating of easiness and quality on the website, i.e. students perceive easy lectures to be of better quality than hard ones.
* Phencyclidine (PCP), also known as angel dust, is an anaesthetic, brought to market in the 1950s, but banned in 1965 due to the high prevalence of dissociative hallucinogenic side effects. It continues to be distributed illegally as a recreational drug. PCP can numb the mind, cause aggressive behaviour, and induce feelings of strength, power, and invulnerability. You do not want to be locked in a room with a wolverine that is high on PCP.
* I know ‘data’ is plural, but ‘data are’ just does
n’t sound right to me. English is a flexible language, so it may be time to accept that ‘data’ is a welcome exception to the strict rules (but if you try to take away my Oxford commas, you will have to pry them from my cold, dead, and lifeless hands).
* These terms appear in the following reviews: ‘Biggest tea bag ever. She never helped anyone in office hours and didnt teach anything that was covered on her exams. SWITCH TO ANYONE ELSE. if you take her, your done.’; ‘He wears the same shirt for weeks and likes to play with the chalk and rub it in his hair and afterwards he likes to drain his tea bag with chalky hands.’; ‘His lectures are death but make sure to listen and read slides. Midterm is hard, final is baby food.’; ‘In a word, BORING. His is the kind of creative genuius it takes to build a sand castle.’
1 @TheSnee and Raymond Vagell (@prancingpapio).
2 Jaschik, ‘Failing the Entire Class’ (2015) Inside Higher Ed.
3 Jaschik, ‘Should Profs Leave Unruly Classes?’ (2010) Inside Higher Ed.
4 Adapted from a real email sent to Indiana University student Tamara Millic. See Kagan, ‘The Real Story About The Lover of Puppies in Party Hats’ (2016) BuzzFeed.
5 Wainstein et al., Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2014).
6 Waldman, ‘Frontier of the Stuplime’ (2015) Slate.
7 ‘Department of Transtemporal Studies’ (2015) University of Leicester website.
8 ‘52-2725J Zombies in Popular Media’ (2015) Columbia College Chicago Course Catalog 2015–16.
9 ‘Beckham in Degree Course’ (2000) BBC News.
10 ‘Broadcasting Major (B.A.)’ (2008) Montclair State University Undergraduate Catalog 2008/2009.
11 ‘What If Harry Potter Is Real?’ (2011) Appalachian State University, First Year Seminar.