Princeton Students Take Over President’s Office, Demand Erasure Of Woodrow Wilson

Parents Forum
921

This argument is so backwards:

Let me get this straight. I’m a student in your class. I can learn what I need without sitting through your lectures, by looking at your Power Point slides, working through old exams and solutions to problem sets. But you’re suggesting you should withhold those things from me, and force me to sit through the lectures, because… why? Isn’t the solution here to make lectures worthwhile, rather than to force me to go to them even though I could learn better in a different way?

It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that the standard academic way of learning, where professors lecture and students take notes, is a bad way to learn for most people. It’s just bad. People tune out after about ten or fifteen minutes. It’s bad, and it doesn’t work, and teachers need to learn a more interactive way of teaching that promotes better learning.

922

Students are not employees and unless they’re on full FA/scholarships are themselves/have families paying to attend.

Also, the only folks they are screwing by skipping classes is essentially themselves in lost educational opportunities, likely bad/failing grades, and lost FA/scholarship packages due to the second factor.

A more relevant analogy is someone not taking advantage of a gym membership they/others have paid for and then suffering the likely negative health consequences. No skin off the noses of the gym instructors and staff.

923

^to me this comparing acquiring an education to your job is a sort of similar argument to" you don’t need education if you can make money without it, because money is the measure of success and any education that doesn’t make you money is pretty useless."

and I think education is valuable in and of itself
and that acquiring knowledge is an enjoyable and worthwhile lifetime pursuit, apart from any jobs we do to make a living

924

“It loses its oomph when the student skips AND the prof gives an A and publishes the paper.”

I said the professor gave me the A, I think. She may have marked the ‘A’ grade, and then lowered it one letter grade because she could. The publishing of the paper was not a unilateral decision on the professor’s part, it was a decision reached in committee, and she supported my paper reluctantly during the deliberation phase, but then fully when the panel was mostly in consensus.

How do I know this? She told me. She said she supported the final decision to publish only because she had no doubt I had written this particular paper - as it contained the exact same formatting error as the others. To her that was my signature mark. (The guys in the computer lab would stay late just to stop me from having a melt down when I was trying to print.)

Her seeing the formatting error, consistent with that which she had seen in my work before in papers submitted to her , should have done no more to relieve her of her doubts that some ghost writer was doing my work. I suppose she figured I would be paying someone mightily to do all of my work for me, so she consented to the publishing on the strength of the paper, and against her inclination to disbelieve it was my work.

But the initial tone of her congratulatory call to me would never have yielded that information had she not “magnanimously” decided to share it.

Perhaps some people here feel that there is no insult or injury if “it all works out in the end.” That is not the way that the human psyche works.

“You know, it strikes me that in light of the racism that black kids DO face, you’d think that a thoughtful one would want to engage in behaviors that dispel a stereotype, not further it.”

What would be the stereotype that is furthered here, Pizza? And how, pray tell, does a young person carry on her back the mission to prove to others that they can have positive feelings about Blacks, or youth?

Additionally, as she started our first point of contact with her “remedial” comment, you seem to have missed the point that she had decided I was unfit to be there even before I showed her the comments she’d written on my paper. She looked at me and thought, “Oh, I know what this is about. So tired of these kids coming here unprepared to do the work.” She struck pre-emptively, out of a gut place. That stank.

925

This is what keeps playing over and over in my mind: You, singled out in front of your classmates, and treated in that manner.

926

@alh @Waiting2exhale I completely agree that it was unacceptable for the teacher to treat you that way! My father was accused of not writing a paper he turned in, and he’s been upset about that on some level for sixty years.

927

@sorghum: “I don’t take as 100% objective truth the account of a student who repeatedly emphasizes their own extraordinary talent, while claiming to have suffered from a teacher who gave them A’s for everything and chose their essay for publication in an anthology, and phoned them to tell them about it.”

There was nothing extraordinary asserted, I did the work I knew I could do, and my work supported and reflected my preparation for being there. There were students who were brilliant, to be sure, but they are not the subject of what I am sharing.

On “claiming to have suffered…”

This is something which goes to communication skills, empathy, and disregard. Someone who has been hurt and shared that with me has not made a “claim” to have been hurt, but experienced hurt.

The facts are as I have laid them out. If you find no reason for the student I was to have taken from her points of contact with the professor the understanding that said professor was bigoted and acting from a racially based impetus, I would say that it is easier to be attuned to these things when one is inside of the moment.

Believe me, the professor’s phone call was her way of making herself feel big, not me.

928

@tiger1307

It’s not only currently or even recently. The vast majority of my uncle’s undergrad engineering/STEM classes at Columbia SEAS along with some humanities/social science distribution courses back in the mid-late '50s were also lectures with practically no class participation.

Most of them were also structured such that the only graded work was often the midterm and/or final. He and most of his classmates skipped many/most of the lectures depending on how well they facilitated their understanding of the material or not. Despite admitting he wasn’t exactly the best student, he still managed to graduate and do well enough to be allowed to continue there for another year for a Masters and later on, one of the few in his graduating class to pass the exams necessary to become a fully licensed engineer*.

My older friend and former supervisor in one of my first post-college jobs was also an engineering major at another college and recounted feeling very tempted to skip all sessions of one Electrical Engineering(EE) course with the vast majority of students back in the mid-late '70s because the Prof spent practically the entire semester talking about his political campaign for local public office in some small upstate town near the NYC limits rather than cover the EE course material.

The entire class had to practically teach the EE course material to themselves via textbook and when possible, attending one of the other already overcrowded sections of the same course with other Profs who were much more professional. Multiple complaints were filed against this particular EE Prof over the last several years before my friend started. Unfortunately, said Prof was a senior tenured Prof who was nearing retirement and while a great and highly professional Prof in the first decade and half of his career…threw all of that aside once he developed a taste for participating in local political campaigns.

  • IMO, he was being excessively humble when discussing his undergrad years with me.

** Most engineering majors never get that license because their jobs/career paths don’t require it or because they failed the first part of the two part exam. Exam is structured so first part is taken right after/not too long after graduation from engineering school. The second part after several years working in the engineering or related field. Both parts must be passed to get the license to become an officially licensed engineer.

929

“Waiting2exhale: Was what you describe a common experience for you? Could you find professors that didn’t treat you in this way?”

@alh, no it was by no means a common experience for me, though this professor generated no love with the small number of Black students there.

Most of my professor-student points of contact were “normal,” with nothing outsized happening between us that left me with any sort of lingering feeling about the contact on a personal level. Of course, there were the instances where…

  1. A history professor made a comment each person sitting in the room, had they all been gathered there in the 1800’s, surely aspiring to be a slaveholder.

I stood up in that class, told him he had clearly forgotten that the demographic and complexion of the university had changed in the last 50 years, and that his words demonstrated a poor understanding of that change, and no respect for what it took for me to be sitting in the classroom on that day. I walked out as he spilled whatever the hell it was he was drinking from his mug.

  1. A music professor (beautiful, gorgeous tall accomplished Black man with straight, silver-white hair, cashmere mock neck and sport coat) who decided that while the group of us sang ‘Ave Maria’ with grace and commensurate lilt and power, our empty and divorced-from-the-truth-of-the-angst-and-grace, the dignity of the supplication and the perfection of praise that Ellington wrote into ‘Come Sunday,’ made him sick, so comfortable were we in our lives that we clearly did not even know the struggles the forebears of today’s Blacks had gone through.

I walked out of that class even as he railed on. Others followed when they saw I was seriously headed toward the door. The firestorm after that one I will write about at another time.

930

^ I will look forward to it. Thank you.

931

No, I think you are deliberately missing the point. I have done several things that make it easier for students who avoid lectures to do reasonably well. Many others faculty members refuse to do those things, for their own reasons; it is not for me to judge.

A student is free to forego the additional learning that occurs in the classroom, but I continue to believe that he or she is missing out on part of the experience, It may not catch up with them now, but it will soon. I am not threatening to withhold all manner of assistance that I currently provide; rather, I am noting that the value added of lectures diminishes when that other assistance is provided. That is a fairly small but obvious point.

932

That’s assuming all Profs’ lectures are equally valuable from an educational or even academic standpoint. An assumption which isn’t always the case as shown by my uncle’s and my former supervisor/friend’s experiences in college in the 1950’s and 1970’s.

How is an EE Prof who spends the entire semester discussing his political campaign for a local office in a small upstate town educational or even academically relevant to a course which was supposed to be covering Electrical Engineering??

933

Nope that professor was so bad he deserved being rude to. Really. He was pathetic.

I was notorious for never skipping class. People used to borrow my notes for classes I was only auditing. I never went back to that class and never regretted it. The sections were great though. I’d never ever skip a seminar.

934

While I personally wouldn’t have acted as your classmate had, I would defend a student’s right to skip his/her lectures if they’re ineffective and/or the student could find comparable/better ways of learning the material without them.

While an admittedly odd duck in this respect, I would be inclined to continue attending the lectures. However, I reserved the right to find ways to liven them up…whether its mentally connecting them to funny/absurd cartoons or combination of ideas connected to the topic to asking humorously loaded questions related to the topics being discussed or to play devil’s advocate and start debating the Prof in class.

In HS, such antics factored into my abysmal GPA. In contrast, undergrad Profs actually liked that and graded me accordingly.

Incidentally, I had a good Prof for a Shakespearean lit course. Admittedly, I couldn’t resist asking some humorously loaded questions somehow connecting one Shakesperean play with deli cold cuts and another with the predilection for psychedelics among some students on campus. Prof took it with great humor and the entire class had a great laugh while digging deeper into the plays. :slight_smile:

935

@Waiting2exhale One thing that struck me about your story is that you were lucky that you were very good, so good that the professor couldn’t ignore that. I think the hardest part about talking about implicit biases is that it’s easy to second guess people’s experiences. You see it here, when people are focusing on the fact that you skipped classes. Unless you are perfect, it is hard to convince people that these problems are real. Otherwise, they will point out the ways in which you fell short. Actually, I have a hard time convincing myself, since I can be quite self-critical. I’m sure this is true for others.

When I was in middle school, my teacher put me in a remedial reading program to help people who were on the verge of passing the major standardized test. I’m sure she was well-meaning, but looking back I wonder how much I needed it. I ended up getting one of the highest scores possible, and even did fairly well on the reading part of the talent search I did that year, at least for a middle schooler. At the time, neither me nor my parents questioned this. I was always stronger in math and science, and since my parents are not native English speakers, they were always worried that I would be disadvantaged in English. And no matter how you good you, extra practice is always helpful. This isn’t a very egregious example, or particularly interesting. But it’s an example where it’s unclear why things happened the way it did, partly because I wasn’t the best English student ever.

936

Well, you sound like a student who seeks insult wherever it may not be.

Maybe, in case 1, if you stayed you could have a productive discussion about black slave owners, and whether people opposed slavery, or simply opposed being a slave. Or whether the foreign student from Hungary sitting in the room is even less likely to be descended from slave owners.

Maybe, in case 2, the silver-haired dude actually knows more about music and suffering than you do. Of course, if you throw a hissy fit and walk out, you won’t risk learning new things.

937

I have absolutely no doubt posters on this thread have experienced racism in academic environments. The problem I have is that I think it can sometimes be hard to tell when something is racism and when it’s simply a clueless teacher or a misunderstanding.

Here are some experiences my kids have had:

An elementary school teacher who told the class, 90% of whom were of my child’s race they all “smelled like goats.”

Another who questioned my child’s very high IQ test, asserting that it must have been the result of scoring error. 2 years later a more extensive battery of testing resulted in an even higher score.

A high school teacher who ascribed my child’s mediocre semester grades to laziness, instead of the tremendous environmental stress the kid was under.

A teacher who didn’t seem to see my kid at all, didn’t understand them in the least, ascribed any difficulty to lack of effort instead of the diagnosed LD, and used the “kids like that” line.

The thing is, my kids are upper middle class white kids and the teachers in question were all white. While these were unpleasant interactions they were clearly not the result of racism.

938

"had a good Prof for a Shakespearean lit course. Admittedly, I couldn’t resist asking some humorously loaded questions somehow connecting one Shakesperean play with deli cold cuts and another with the predilection for psychedelics among some students on campus. Prof took it with great humor and the entire class had a great laugh while digging deeper into the plays. "

Dear CC Parents, I’m a sophomore at an LAC. I’m taking a Shakespeare class and really enjoy it. The prof is great and I love the discussions that my fellow students and I have in class; it’s really enriched my understanding of these great works. I am curious as to how you would handle this situation I have, though. There’s this one guy in class who continuously derails these great conversations by completely unrelated asides. Last week, he tried to relate The Merchant of Venice to Oscar Mayer deli meats and the week before, Romeo and Juliet to LSD. Then he talks about the Vikings, to boot. You can tell that the prof is handling it gracefully and tries to get us back on track by humoring him, but you can also tell he wishes this guy would stop trying to be the class clown. I really value what I’m learning and it’s frustrating to me and my classmates when this guy’s antics disrupt our conversations. I’ve considered saying something to him, but I don’t want to be rude. Nonetheless, it’s just not anywhere near as funny as he thinks and I’m here to learn, not to goof off. What should I do? Signed, Shakespearean Soph

939

And that underscores warbrain’s point here:

It’s also a phenomenon some activist friends in anti-racism, feminist, and other groups point out is a double standard often applied by dominant majorities against marginalized groups when they discuss/recount systemic racism/sexism/discriminatory behaviors which causes them to be wary of discussing this with individuals from those majorities who manifest this tendency.

Especially when their previous experiences has been that individuals from dominant majorities often do this with the goal of disrupting and shutting down such discussions and discounting the idea systemic racism/sexism/discriminatory behaviors are still quite present in many areas of American life.

And if those from the dominant majorities who have a tendency to second-guess accounts from marginalized groups in life say “But my [marginalized group] acquaintance/friends never said anything about it so it can’t be a serious issue”…they often fail to realize one strong possibility that their very tendency to second-guess such accounts in other instances or in passing creates a very strong incentive for those acquaintances/friends from marginalized groups to NOT CONFIDE IN them.

When most people…especially those in marginalized groups confide in a close acquaintance/friend about an extremely negative experience in their personal lives, the last thing they’d want…or expect from a social etiquette standpoint is to be treated explicitly or implicitly as if they are lying or “imaging things” though second-guessing as that in itself is another means to marginalizing their experiences.

In fact, a few acquaintances and a friend* I’m trying to help come around who second-guess others when they discuss personal experiences…especially negative ones without restraint usually find they are bereft of close friends…or practically any friends for that manner and are often regarded by mutual acquaintances and my friends/their ex-friends as obnoxious jerks at best.

  • In his case, it's mainly due to his being extremely socially inept along with unexamined assumptions from growing up extremely sheltered in an upper-middle class suburb.
940

I think both can be true, that some experiences that seem to be race-based are not, and that people who have experienced racism in their lives are disheartened to hear their experiences minimized or explained away.