Student, you're lazy! Professor, you're a zero!
IN RECENT YEARS, college students have been giving some of their professors bad marks in anonymous postings at ratemyprofessors.com. The site has become as much a part of college life as course catalogs, with students consulting it for the inside word on who's hard and who's easy.
The professoriate struck back at rateyourstudents.blogspot.com, where, without naming names, academics vented about lazy students, overindulged students, students who have no business being in college.
What do such online body slams tell us about generational differences and the state of higher education today?
Current asked MICHAEL SKUBE, a journalism professor at North Carolina's Elon University, and EMILY SCHWARTZ, a student at Elon, to debate the question by e-mail. Their exchange has been condensed and edited.
Skube: To anyone who attended college in the 1960s, anonymous online reviews confirm the belief that higher education has mutated beyond recognition. Many changes have been for the better. But vulgarities such as ratemyprofessors and rateyourstudents are crude degradations of what used to be higher education. Yet they are products of our time; that is, they reflect a culture that devalues intellectual curiosity and values, above all else, consumption and entertainment.
Schwartz: There's a rumor going around in academia that the professors are revolting. They're sick and tired of these lazy, lifeless heaps -- students, that is -- taking up space and absorbing as much as a pile of rocks. Indeed, ratemyprofessors and rateyourstudents play to the tune of intellectually vapid entertainment, far from any respectable standard of higher education. But professors, why fuel this demon? You're more mature than to contribute to such ridiculous vulgarities. Think about the real image being reflected here.
Skube: But the questions are: What gave rise to anonymous online reviews, and what do so many of the thoughtless postings reflect? What gave rise to them is the unexamined assumption that students are in any position to judge how well they are taught. And what such reviews reflect is the complacent belief that students are to be made happy, that education centers not on the subject matter but on whether they enjoyed the experience. If a student didn't like a course -- for whatever reason -- it couldn't possibly be his fault. It must be the professor's.
