From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

“Just why the college crowd continues to drink so heavily” is no mystery to this teacher. Students can get away with it. Increasingly, the college or university campus presents young men and women with an environment in which they can indulge in all manner of irresponsible behavior without consequence.

Witness the large number of students who typically miss Friday morning classes because they’re still sleeping off Thursday night’s bacchanalia. Or the multitudes who regularly fail to complete assignments on time, blithely assuming that their hackneyed excuses actually excuse their behavior.

If these kids had real jobs, this sort of nonsense would get them fired. College kids will stop drinking as soon as teachers and administrators allow them to suffer the consequences of their misguided priorities.

John J. Holden
Albany, July 1, 2009
The writer is an adjunct professor at Hudson Valley Community College.

Note from KBJ: I have read this letter five times. I still don't know what the letter writer is advocating. Is he saying that instructors should make attendance a part of each student's grade? Many instructors already do that. Is he saying that there should be no excuses for failure to complete assignments? Who accepts excuses? The rules in my courses are clear, simple, and uniformly applied. If you don't do the work, for whatever reason, you don't get a good grade.

Comments

[robert allen]

As a tenured professor, you do not have to worry about reprisals from disgruntled students. Not so Prof. Holden and rest of the 66% of college instructors working as adjuncts. They live in fear of bottom-line minded administrators who base hiring decisions on the popularity contests known as student evaluations. The rules in their courses could be as "clear, simple, and uniformly applied" as yours. However, without administrative support, those policies can do nothing to deter bad behavior on the part of students, leading the decline of academic standards.

[Keith Burgess-Jackson]

People that fearful and cowardly should not be teaching in college, Robert.

[robert allen]

Keith,

You entirely miss my point. It's not how academics react or should react to adverse working conditions- we can agree that they should not lead to a lowering of standards. Why, though, should those conditions exist in the first place, that is my concern and I think it is a legitimate one. A business model where students are treated as customers is inapplicable in academia. The problem described by Prof. Holden simply did not exist until that model was imposed upon us by administrators out to profit from what should be a non-profit enterprise.