Laurence Thomas, a Syracuse University philosophy professor, is sick of students who text or read newspapers in class. If he catches a single texter, Thomas walks out. The class is over. From Inside Higher Education:
Last week, when a student in a large lecture — in the front row no less — sent a text message, Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen†disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.
While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. “One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor,†Thomas wrote.
Thomas, who’s won awards for teaching, is black and Jewish. I suspect he’s off base in thinking his race has anything to do with disrespect. Many professors complained of students who don’t know how to behave in class. University of Chicago law professors have banned Internet use during class because so many students were surfing for non-legal sites. My daughter, a second-year student, is learning to adjust.
I’m waiting for one of them to pull out a remote control to try to change my channel to another subject.
Why didn’t he just order the student to leave?
Mollo, I was wondering the same thing. It seems far more mature and RESPECTFUL of the rule-abiding students.
Although they’re illegal in the US, I’d love to get my hands on something that would interfere with cell phone signals.
I think the professor’s angle is that minorities should stick together and it’s even more disappointing because students of color are not demonstrating adherence to the group goal. I.e. Students of color should be beholden more to teachers of color.
Kim hit the nail on the head. People of Color must stick together if they are to overthrow whitey’s stranglehold of power over their lives. I think we can include women and male homosexuals here also, i.e., everyone except white heterosexual males.
So if a student is in class and doesn’t want to listen, so what? It’s the professor’s job to deliver the material, not to worry that some student isn’t giving him respect by hanging on his words. If the student misses something he needs to know, that’s the student’s problem. If a student is making noise that would affect other students, that’s certainly objectionable. But if a student is sending a text message without any noise being involved, that’s no different than if he’s sitting there making his grocery list in his notebook instead of paying attention to the lecture. The professor seems a bit too thin-skinned about demanding respect, IMO.
Yeah, but…walk into class every day and have a student who’s texting, who’s ignoring the class discussion, who gets into “side conversations” with other students that have no bearing on the topic at hand.
Then have that student come in at the end of the semester angry because they earned a D. And then have their parents call you up to ask why their “child” is getting a D.
Contributes pretty fast to a sense of burnout. I do think there’s a minimum standard of respect a person should show a fellow human being. I wouldn’t pull out my cell phone and call a friend while a student was in my office trying to get help from me.
I’ve never walked out of a class (or thrown anyone out), but I have stopped and pointedly STARED at the people having a side conversation, said “I can see you from up here in the front” to the pair of students canoodling in the back row (yes, I’ve seen it happen), made my displeasure with the sheer level of noise in the classroom very apparent.
The students who give a darn seem to appreciate it. The ones who don’t – they seem oblivious.
And like Mike, I’m waiting for the day when someone pulls out a remote and tries to change the channel. I try to make things interesting but there’s only so far you can lead a horse to water; you can’t push his head under the surface and say, “Drink, damn you!”
It never ceases to amaze me the behavior students exhibit in class. I see now that what I have observed in high school has now carried on to the college level. My regular ed classes are full of students who enter class and sit there with their arms folded, with not a notebook open or a pencil in thier hands at the start of class. Some don’t get the idea until half way through a lecture that maybe they should be writing this down. And guess what, just about all of these kids are going to a “college” somewhere. What amazes me is that this takes place at Syracuse, a fairly prestigious large university. This isn’t Podunk State U, where most of my regular ed students will be occupying space.
I worked with Laurence as his head TA. I attended every session of that class for five semesters with him. During that whole time, he walked out once because a student was reading a newspaper near the back with her feet up on the back of the chair in front of her. He doesn’t do this very often. On that occasion, he stopped lecturing when he saw her and stared at her for something like 20-30 seconds, and when she didn’t look up he just walked out. The rest of the class was extremely mad at that student, because almost all of them absolutely love the class. It’s a very effective method of getting the student who disrespects him to face some pretty irate peers, whether you agree with the method or not. I wouldn’t ever do it myself, but I have to give him credit for achieving the desire effect.
As for his motivation, I don’t think he’s suggesting that they’re disrespecting him because of his race. He’s just saying that you’d expect minority students to respect him more “for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality”. In other words, the language and issues minority students so often throw around would seem to make them the sort who would respect a black professor given how uncommon it is to have a black philosophy professor. But it’s all talk. P.C. language is just language. It’s not actual respect for people.
By the way, Laurence is very conservative on race issues. He opposes affirmative action because he finds it insulting to those it attempts to help. He’s constantly complaining about black political figures who regularly spout out victimhood language when they’re wearing a thousand-dollar suit and being driven around in limos. The African-American Studies Department won’t cross-list his American Slavery and the Holocaust class. It’s a Judaic Studies class, and it’s a philosophy class, but even though it’s a perfect fit for their department they’re so opposed to him that they won’t give AAS credit for it.
I’m very sure that he wouldn’t appreciate the suggestion that this is about some whitey stranglehold of power. It’s even possible that he might find the assumption that he holds such views, merely on the evidence that he’s black, to be racist. I certainly do.
I recommend those who haven’t done so to read two comments on the Inside Higher Ed discussion at the bottom of the article, one by Larry James and the other by Michael McFall. Both of them worked with Laurence, neither at the same time I did. Mike was in the same position I was in as TA Coordinator, and he did it almost twice as long as I did. I especially want to draw attention to Mike’s comments about this being the exception and not the rule and about the atmosphere of respect that Laurence Thomas commands.
I have the same question as mollo — why leave yourself, rather than instruct the texting student(s) to leave? Laurence’s actions seem to reward the texting students and punish the respectful students who want to learn things. Demand that the student perform up to YOUR level as the prof.
If you’re in Laurence’s class and don’t want to be there, then what you do is pull out your phone and start texting in full view. Instant class cancellation. And if you’re of that mind already, you probably won’t be ashamed that class is cancelled because of your actions.
Robert peer pressure is a powerful thing. If a student is disrespectful enough to start texting in the class having the professor asking them to leave isn’t going to make much of an impression. The ire of a couple hundred of your peers who were actually paying attention is a pretty good deterrent though.
But why should the “couple hundred” students have to do the professor’s (or the university’s) job?
They paid, to the university, to attend a lecture by the professor. They upheld their end of the contract. The professor (and hence, the university) violated his/its end of the contract.
The offending student should have been dealt with (office conference as a first step; expelled from the course, if needed), and the other students should have received the teaching for which they paid.
Personally, as a parent, I’m sick of educators burdening students/peers with classroom ‘discipline’ problems — especially since students have no authority to do so. I think it is a weak cop-out to expect fellow-classmates to maintain the learning environment because the teacher/system refuses to do so. It is a bad lesson to the students, and self-indulgent on the part of teachers/administrators.
cj, that’s a bit much to extrapolate from this one incident don’t you think?
While I can sympathize with professors who may feel disrespected by some students’ classroom behavior, I see this incident as another in a long line demonstrating the common misconception (on both sides) of the business of college. Had I been a student in a classroom where the professor cut-short the lesson on such grounds as another student’s behavior, I would be angry with the professor for short-changing me. As a student – I mean CUSTOMER – of an institution of higher learning, I would have had to pay for the privilege of being in that classroom. As long as the ignorant students reading the paper or playing with their cellphones are not directly interfering with my ability to learn, I do not care what they do. The professor, on the other hand, has an obligation to perform.
Here’s a fun story related to this topic: I once had a professor who often voiced his dismay at the dwindling classroom attendance, and frequently asked those of us who attended regularly to prod the no-shows to attend more regularly. One day, only about five of us showed up for a lecture (out of an enrollment of about 25). The professor walked into the room, asked each of us how our weekends had been, and then told us about the amateur volleyball tournament he had played in. He explained that he had been playing volleyball since he was a child, and that he though it was by far the most engaging sport around. He then proceeded to the lecture. Two weeks later on the mid-term exam, he asked “What is the professor’s favorite sport?” The syllabus clearly stated that all classroom content was fair game for the exams.