Why Your Professors Suck

Sources for previous experience?

Did the author plagiarize Noam Chomsky?

---

In this way, faculty are like columnists for major newspapers. Columnists for, say, the New York Times are perfectly free to write whatever they like (within appropriate professional guidelines, of course). But the range of opinion expressed in those columns is terribly narrow. The problem is not that the Times is exerting pressure on its columnists. The problem is that in order to be a columnist for the New York Times to begin with, you have to be the kind of person whose opinions already fall within a specific range. The same goes for faculty. Universities are generally pretty good about not exerting overt pressure on faculty and their research. Intellectual freedom is generally respected. But the university doesn't need to exert any pressure, because it's already filtered out the people who would need to be pressured. Those who survive are, for the most part, narrow specialists who care little about what's happening outside their own area of specialization.

---

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.

I think you're taking that conversation the wrong way. When I saw the exchange, I sympathized with the author immediately because I've been in this situation many times. It's very distracting when a professor is giving an in-depth lecture, then suddenly, the "good student" pops their face up from their daily planner and raises their hand in the most conspicuous way possible. "Oh, man," I think, "the professor was on a roll; this question better be good."

"Um, will this be on the midterm, and by the way, when will that be?"

Every time this happens (and it actually happens a lot), you can physically observe the lecturer's train of thought derailing and exploding into a mangled pile of molten wreckage. If the professor manages to answer all of the disruptive student's concerns, they then have the difficult task of re-engaging the other 25-100 students whose concentration has since gone elsewhere.

It's incredibly rude to ask a professor whether or not the material that they are covering will be on an exam. What you're essentially asking is, "do I need to be paying attention to you right now, or can we all just zone out while you talk at us?" That thought process represents a very immature mindset that still thinks you're paying for "an education" and not paying to actually learn.

That said, I don't think that this is something that most people will understand given the rise in tuition costs and the (flawed) notion that students are paying for a 4-year "educational resort and spa" experience. As someone who got an undergrad degree then worked for a few years before going back to grad school part time, it's amazing how much I learned to appreciate the classroom environment. IMO students must not realize how infrequently after graduation they'll have the opportunity to learn new things from someone more knowledgable than themselves.

Teaching programming sounds very rewarding. How did you get started?

I have friends who firmly believe that getting high grades is all that matter and that surely university is taking care of making them employable.

Arguing with them on that point proved useless in the past, but now that I get interesting internships while they don't, I believe they are somehow waking up.

At least, focusing on being a 'good student' is not the worst strategy out there. If one day you come to be aware of it, it's not an irrecuperable situation.