Corporate & Securities Law

Spanking Students (Figuratively)

By Stephen Bainbridge

Duke political science chair Michael Munger reports the following exchange on his blog:

I am lecturing in the course John Aldrich and I are co-teaching. Student in front row (in FRONT ROW!) is holding up newspaper in front of his face. People behind him crane around to try to see. This is not the first five minutes of class. THis is 45 minutes in. The kid just got bored.

Me: “You know, I have to give credit where it is due. Most people, if they are going to disrespect the prof, and read the paper, would do it in the back. I guess I should be impressed, though: This gentleman cares so little what I think that he opens the paper up right here in front. Let’s give him a hand, folks!”

(The class gives an enthusiastic hand for this show of juevos. But juevos boy himself turns a deep purple - red, for about 30 seconds).

Two of my favorite academic bloggers left the following comments on Munger’s blog:

• Steven Taylor: “Kudos, maestro.”
• The Unknown Professor: “Nice.”

It’s old school, that’s for sure. It reminds me of the time one of my professors at the University of Virginia tossed me and a buddy out of class for collaborating on a cross word puzzle (and we weren’t even in the front row!). (To this day, s/he denies it happened. But I was there! Or, rather, I was there until I got upstairs to the Deans’ office and dropped the course.)

Yet, it’s not something I would recommend for the untenured and risk averse. I know from painful personal experience that the students may laugh today, but this sort of a wisecrack often ends up backfiring by making the student into a martyr. There was the time, for example, when one student kept leaving in the middle of class. Suggesting that he look into Depends if he couldn’t hold it for an entire class period got a big laugh, but that class also gave me the worst teaching evaluations of my career. And, perhaps, deservedly so.

Civility and respect are two way streets. I don’t pretend to have easy answers to the problem of incivility of the sort Munger witnessed. I’d like to think that there is some middle ground between ignoring incivility and responding in kind, but finding it is damned hard.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the problem is likely to get worse. One of my colleagues recently used a term with which I was unfamiliar to describe today’s students: Millenials. There is a school of thought that says:

Millenials have more of a tendency to see themselves as consumers of education; at the same time, many feel under enormous pressure to succeed. This may make them more demanding than previous generations of students. And millennial students really do multi-task, so they probably see reading email during class as an efficient use of time.

So kudos to Munger for having the chutzpah to do something I’m sure we’ve all wanted to do it. But as the guys from Mythbusters say at the start of every show, don’t try this at home.

Full post as published by BusinessAssociationsBlog.com on January 28, 2008 (boomark / email).