Distinguished Professors

When students sign up for college courses, they are not only responding to the catalogue course description. They know that the background and expertise of the instructor plays a part in the educational experience.

It may be true that, as Penn State President Graham Spanier told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “There’s no national test that Penn State Students could take that’s going to help us educate them better or make us more accountable.” Nonetheless, professors nationwide have said some very revealing things, and if you take a class schedule, broken down by departments or subjects, and insert them accordingly, you get an interesting snapshot of the professorial mindset today.

Government. “Political discourse has subtly and symbolically framed Social Security as an issue of race—as, in fact, a privilege of whiteness, says Nicholas J. G. Winter, an assistant professor of government at Cornell University,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Conversely, he contends, ‘subtle and symbolic’ linkages have framed welfare in a way that associates it with blackness.”

“Mr. Winter studied two decades of national survey data about the role of race in public opinion, and the ways that it has figured in Republican appeals to blue-collar, conservative ‘Reagan Democrats.’” Funny, I don’t ever remember getting that pitch.

Literature. “I asked some teacher friends if they have withdrawn their sympathies from certain books because of racism, sexism, homophobia, or ableism of the texts,” Lennard J. Davis, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes in the Chronicle. “One person told me she had stopped teaching Hemingway, Ovid and Boccaccio because their works disgusted her with their overt misogyny.”

“Another insists that he will never stop teaching books just because students want a book to be a particular way or portray a particular reality.”

Psychology. “In my own field of clinical psychology, for example, to do a good job as a researcher and scholar, to understand the content of my field, requires attention to cultural factors, a skepticism about the generality of one’s own experience, and—I contend—a lively ambivalence about individualism,” David Schuldberg writes in The Montana Professor. Schuldberg is a professor at the University of Montana.

Earth Science. “Although I have flunked only perhaps a dozen students (who tried their best, but failed) in over a quarter century, I commonly flunk a dozen or more each semester who choose to fail (I term it ‘academic suicide’),” Montana State University professor W. W. Locke writes. “If the syllabus specifies a limit ‘missing four or more labs will automatically constitute failure in the course’), they will push that limit until failure is inevitable, then seek to point the blame elsewhere.”

“Their most apparent problem is not the intellectual capacity to complete college work successfully—it is the motivation.” How did this professor get in here? There’s always an oddball in every group.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.