August 23, 2006
Anthropologist among the freshman.
How would you feel if that older woman in your classes turned out to be an anthropology professor, studying you the way she once studied the natives of Tonga?
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The NYT states this observation of the Freshmen students she encountered: "And they seemed indifferent to values like diversity."
Of course they were! - who could be surprised at this? (Except perhaps a professor from the arts or social sciences or a NYT journalist...).
Yet so many US universities state 'diversity' as the most prominent value on their websites.
For example, UW Madison has as the very first thing on the Student Life section: 'UW-Madison is a community that embraces diversity', as if this was the universitiy's major selling point, or as if diversity was the major attribute that students (or their parents) were looking for in a college.
What about admissions standards, academic rigour, class size, quality of faculty, academic reputation, tuition costs... There must be a dozen things more important to choice of college than diversity.
For the administration to emphasize diversity in this way is sheer incompetence, in terms of promoting a place like UM-Wisconsin. In fact, it is simply putting the advertisment of moral superiority above the well-being of the institution. But this seems to be the norm among US colleges.
I suppose it is just another example of the many ways in which the US 'liberal elites' are out of touch with the rest of the nation...
Has she learned nothing? Her foolish violation of the Prime Directive has already led to the collapse of the natives of Jenga!
Goodness, Dave. This is hardly a deathknell for the academy.
Actually, despite my innate libertarian scrooge-iness, I think this is pretty cool. Certainly a more productive use of anthropology department resources than her PhD thesis.
And some observations are spot on. (I was a ugrad only a few years ago.) Friendships forged early freshman year. Don't care about diversity. Professionally oriented - school is just a serious of hoops to jump through to get to whatever it is you really want to do. Rather than change the system, they figure out how to glide through it while still getting what they want. The kids have common sense, and if something is stupid or pointless, they immediately recognize it and dismiss it. If a prof has a political agenda, you write what they want to hear, get the A, move on.
Oops, I meant to say "series" not "serious."
Real life catches up with fiction. The Onion is there:
Girls Gone Wild Released Back Into Civilization
How would I feel once I learned I was being studied like some new species of insect?
I’d get all broken up inside.
Then I’d hurl a few thunderbolts and the Enterprise would phaser my temple. Then I’d give my version of a robot death speech and spread myself upon the winds to reunite with my fellow gods.
But hey, that’s just me.
All depends on what the definition of "study" is....
-5 hardback printings and she is on the lecture circuit - she is seeing something the rest of aren't
Oh, riiiight, professor, you wanted to be anonymous. You didn't want to sell a bunch of books and rake in the lecture dollars.
In a nutshell, college freshman act like high school students, because they have only recently graduated therefrom. I am heartened by her "angst" that the kids want practical value from their education and couldn't give a flip about boomer causes. There's hope for the republic!
“I’m representing the angst that my own generation is having” in dealing with students these days, she said.
ugh.
Is there not an ethical problem with her doing research without giving notice to the participants that they are in fact being observed? At my husband's academic institution, he must fill out human subject forms for all studies, which in turn have to be approved by the University before he can continue.
I didn't find reference for her doing so, and find it troubling.
And they seemed indifferent to values like diversity.
That's because diversity is an artificial value created by the 60's generation, of which I presume she is a product. Of course they are indifferent. We want to be with people who reflect ourselves. I know.....not PC. But true and has been for millenniums.
Bee said...
Is there not an ethical problem with her doing research without giving notice to the participants that they are in fact being observed?
I agree with Bee. The first thought I had was that you can't have human research subjects without having them know and approve of being in the study. Seems like an extreme violation of academic ethics.
I think it's intriguing to get a do-over.
Every now and then I'd like one myself.
Sounds like an interesting book to me, even though it sounds as if she didn't follow appropriate protocols for human subjects research. From the article, her observations are basically the same as my experiences with teaching undergraduates. Anyway, thanks for the link - I just went to Amazon and ordered a copy of the book.
i'd think it was great. maybe i'd learn something about the mechanisms of that culture.
also, perhaps i could read the text and learn how to get in on those secret rituals....
I would speculate that a dispropostionate number of folks that aren't interested in diversity are white. Most people like to be with other people that are most like them. That means that all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria. It also means that minority students like schools with lots of other minorities.
White people tend to do this too, but don't always realize it, because it tends to be the default.
So if you were an ethnic minority, you might be more interested in a school that says, "You're not going to stick out like a sore thumb. You will find other people like you here."
I think that's the intention anyway.
That's right, Bee. I'd like to know what their IRB thinks of this study!
http://www.irbforum.org/
I would speculate that a dispropostionate number of folks that aren't interested in diversity are white.
On the contrary, the vast majority of people I've met who are interested in "diversity" have been white. I've never heard any minority express an interest in "diversity," per se. Or at least, not until I started working in the real world (or a close approximation thereof), at which point the "diversity" buzzword did enter peoples' actual speech, if not their normal conversation. I'm not sure whether there's an interest in "diversity" itself, though, apart from the corporate-speak.
That said, your point about not sticking out like a sore thumb is true. But that just means we're interested in a place where there's lots of people like us, not that we're interested in a place that is "diverse." Few Black students object to Howard because it's full of Black students. Few Asian students object to Berkeley or UCLA because they're full of Asians.
To paraphrase David Spade, I liked this book the first time I read it, when it was called "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". At least Crowe limited himself to writing a good book and selling the movie rights, rather than inflicting a speaking tour about the angst his generation was having dealing with high schools students on us.
I lived amongst the freshman in '01-'02 as a 32 year old returning student living in a dorm (I was the oldest in my building, but not the oldest in the dorms, there was a 40+ grad student in a different dorm)
I should have been an Anthro major, instead of paying the campus for staying in the dorms, I could have got them to pay me for the research I was conducting, oh well.
Also, I concur with Balfegor's observations about 'diversity'. As a 'mixed-race' person myself, I am deeply offended on a personal level by identity politics. On the one hand the diversity pimps emphasize the 'social construct' nature of the concept of 'race', and rightly so, but at the same time they continue to divide peoples by these false social constructs and are determined that collective guilt for the 'privileged' and individual absolution from responsibility due to the guilt of others for the 'underprivileged' are concepts that should be championed.
In attempting to channel my inner Freshman....I've got to say that it probably wouldn't have affected me that much. Two potential exceptions:
1) She was particularly attractive (haven't looked at the article, so I don't know if there's a picture or not),
-or-
2) She was one of the people bombarding the Professor / TA with questions, proving that she either didn't do the reading or didn't understand it.
Beyond those two subsets, chances are she'd just have been one of the nameless faces in a giant lecture hall. Isn't that what Freshman year is all about? (That, and learning to write what your TA wants to read / grade.)
She would have saved considerable time had she read Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons.
But I can't wait to read her me-too version. Especially where she discovers cheating, beer, sex, music, parents, university politics, and the fear of graduating. Should be an exciting read.
Next project? She gets a real job and finds out it sorta sucks to be paid minimum wage, so 'stay in school, kids'. It's been done? So what?
Couple things.
First, I returned to college in my late 30s to finish my BS. That was 20 years ago. Students then were pretty much like she describes now, except it was a flagship state uni and they had to study harder at that time. They were very concerned with grades, but not necessarily with academics. Very job oriented. Very inexperienced in very many ways.
Second, I currently teach about 80 freshmen a semester, and she could have learned most of this (as interesting as it is) by teaching a big intro class, paying attention to the frosh, and having a lot of them come in for office hours. With the exception of the door coverings and message boards, I have seen everything she reports this way.
Third, although I am 'of her generation' and am a veteran of the '60s and have more than occasionally looked like a hippie, I don't share what appears to be the belief set many of the commenters here attribute to her. Yes, the Boomers think that all the important stuff in the world started and remains with them, but we're not all Boomers in that sense. Many of the Boomers being complained about indeed have not MovedOn.org and simply seem unable to consider what might be underlying the behaviors of our current young people, but not all of us.
Finally, if you believe (as I do) that your intro class has and should have value to your students now and in their future, it is up to you to communicate this very early in a way that makes sense to them.
Balfegor-
Point well taken in regards to "diversity" and well, actual diversity.
That said, it seems pretty rational for universities to make themselves as attractive to as wide a base as possible as it allows them to 1)tighten admission requirements while maintaining rolls to increase prestige or 2)maintain requirements while increasing rolls to raise revenue.
I realize that that's not strictly how diversity promotion programs work, but again, I think the concept is sound.
“I’m representing the angst that my own generation is having” in dealing with students these days, she said.
ugh.
knoxgirl, I agree. Ugh. It sounds like she thinks angst is a *good* thing.
I heard a student giving a tour to incoming freshmen..."and we're very divergent here, so you can always find someone to hang with."
Divergent! LOL.
Housing is hard to come by these days in New Orleans, and a lot of faculty at my university lost their homes when the nearby levee broke after Katrina. Some of those have found apartments or are living with friends, others are living in tiny, rickety trailers that they have to flee in rough weather. Still others have been allowed to rent apartments in our condo-style student housing development.
I know it's better than the trailer.
But I think I'd rather live in my car than with my students. I love them, really. I enjoy them, the sad and messy and the perky overachievers alike. But I don't want them down the hall from me. Unless I could write a book and make some bucks on it. I wonder if any research is going on over there?
Kirk:
It doesn't matter if she's performing dangerous experiments or not. If she plans to publish based on her research, she needs to develop a human subjects proposal and send it through her institutional research board. The principle is to ensure that researchers protect their research participants through informed consent, through anonymity if necessary, and through secure data storage.
It's an onerous procedure, and my grad students are always wondering if it's really necessary. It is, both regulatively and ethically.
In the article, Cathy Small said that she published under a pseudonym so that she could protect the anonymity of her participants. That didn't work out so well, did it? And some of the participants could be materially harmed by loss of anonymity, especially the ones who rely on parents for support or who told secrets that they did not expect to be published. A competent IRB could have examined the anthropologist's procedures, recommended better ways to preserve anonymity, and provided institutional support should these procedures fail, as they did.
cspinuzzi,
I'll second what you said. I would imagine the admin at her institution is quite nervous right now about an audit.
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