‘Go, unlearn the lies we taught you’

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Professors have got to be nuts

By Ted Pease
© 1998
Updated 4/29/11

As has been my custom ever since I started teaching, every year about this time, as my students froth and gambol their way through final exams toward summer break, as seniors suddenly start smiling again (some for the first time in my experience), I am drawn to revisit an old theologian.

Confronted by the end-of-year angst of both students and faculty, Jake sometimes sounds like one seriously burned-out, cantankerous old crank.

Back in the 1980s, when he was a professor of religious studies at Brown University, Neusner sent an article to the student newspaper. It was a commencement address he knew would never be delivered, but which he believed needed saying anyway. I reread it every Spring as a way to reflect on the school year just completed, and on what I have chosen to do with my life.

Neusner, a noted scholar and the kind of no-nonsense professor that most students avoid like the plague, lamented the erosion of standards in higher education, not only among students but in the ranks of faculty, who he said could restore academic excellence, but won’t. Or anyway don’t. It is the kind of complaint that simultaneously offends and resonates with professors.

“We the faculty take no pride in our educational achievements with you,” Neusner told his phantom graduating class. “We have prepared you for a world that does not exist, indeed, that cannot exist. You have spent four years supposing that failure leaves no record. You have learned at Brown that when your work goes poorly, the painless solution is to drop out.

“But starting now, in the world in which you go, failure marks you,” he said. “Outside Brown, quitters are no heroes.”

I think a bit sheepishly of crusty old Professor Jake every year at commencement time, when we the faculty bless our students, help them shift their tassels from the left to the right (or is it the other way around?), and send them on their way from their cloistered academic careers into the real world. I wonder if I’ve really prepared them for the “Outside,” or if I’ve just helped them get by. Some will set the real world on fire, but others (we know) will crash and burn.

One of the reasons I dug through my files to find Jacob Neusner this year is that I have received messages from several students that call him forth. One came from a senior, who gave the university a C after her four years here — perhaps a more honest grade than we professors are willing to give. “I can’t believe the poor writing I saw from students in my group!” she wrote. “These were seniors. There should be more writing courses.”

Amen to that.

I don’t know where Neusner is these days, or if he’s still living [Note: Professor Neusner was alive and well, apparently, at Bard College, blogging in March 2011] but he would have loved the letter I got last week from a student who had been forced to read one of my columns, and took exception to it. I wrote back, commending him for getting mad enough to send what was at least a well written letter, even if he missed the point.

The piece was called “The Dumbing of America” when it came out in September 1996, and it seems that embattled English 200 students are required to read the thing as an example of persuasive writing. It makes some of them mad, I am pleased to report.

The column was about a UCLA study that found that U.S. students are “increasingly disengaged from the academic experience,” “frequently bored” in their classes and “considerably less willing to work hard” at learning than they were a decade ago. My point, coming at the topic from the perspective of someone who tries to teach, was that while this was hardly news to us in the trenches of academe, it may be for parents, employers and the larger society. Certainly, if true, it bodes ill for all of us.

My letter-writer thought I was making fun of students; he found the column “degrading,” he said, and pointed out that there are many factors involved in making unmotivated students, including poor teachers, bad facilities, early class times and the fact that some students shouldn’t be here anyway, but came only for social life or to find a spouse. He actually said that.

I’m thinking that he got my point — and Neusner’s — quite well, even though I really wasn’t criticizing students as much as myself and my colleagues. Whose fault is it, after all, if salesmen can’t sell, if welders can’t weld, if teachers can’t teach — the buyer’s, the metal’s, the student’s? No, as grumpy old Father Jake put it: we teachers have been pulling a fast one on students for a long time.

“For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded,” Neusner told the Brown University students who never got to hear him. “When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When your work came in beyond the deadline, we pretended not to care.

“Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. When you were garrulous and talked to hear yourself talk, we listened as if it mattered. When you tossed on our desks writing upon which you had not labored, we read it and even responded, as though you had earned a response.

“When you were dull, we pretended you were smart. When you were predictable, unimaginative and routine, we listened as if to new and wonderful things. When you demanded free lunch, we served it.”

The reason we professors let students get by, Father Jake said, was that we get worn down. “Despite your fantasies,” Neusner wrote, “it was not even that we wanted to be liked by you. It was that we did not want to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense: smiles and easy B’s.”

Well, as the 1997-98 academic year concludes, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Professor Jake’s unhappy harangue. Despite what lawmakers think about the cushy life of academe, having scores or hundreds of 20-something-year-old bosses who can’t pay attention in class because they were out late “studying,” whose homework was eaten by the dog, who can’t make the exam because of a surprise family reunion in Cancun . . . well, it’s wearing. And many of us feel more than a little wrung out at the end of the school year.

But then come the farewell messages from other students, like this e-mail I received yesterday from one departing senior, who has come through: “I have nothing to gain any more by sucking up, so this is for real: thank you. (And I’m sorry I gave you such s**t about the ethics class.) Thanks.”

As I pointed out to my English 200 critic, we don’t disrespect or even dislike you, and keep in mind that we keep coming back. Some of us, like Jacob Neusner, finally burn out and probably need a sanitarium and about a decade of sabbaticals. But most of us were right there for our students when classes started last Fall, and we were there yesterday at commencement, cheering and teary right along with the Class of 1998 and their parents. You students may drive us nuts sometimes — and I know we make you crazy, too — but we’ll be back for more when classes start again. It’s a little warped, maybe, but it’s what we do.

—Ted Pease (ted.pease@usu.edu) is head of the Department of Journalism & Communication at Utah State University. This column originally appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald Journal (6/7/98).