Call me mister - criticism of egalitarianism in college professor/student relations

National Review, March 5, 1990 by Jeffrey Hart

ALL MY college and university professors during the 1950s addressed me as "Mr. Hart." As in, "Mr. Hart, this examination was less than your best." As a student, I addressed professors as "Sir." An extraordinary egalitarian change has taken place since then, dating primarily from the mid 1960s. Full professors at major universities now address their students as, for example, "Chris" and "Jim." Even in the precincts of the Ivy League, full professors show up for class wearing blue jeans and even ponytails. (I'm speaking of male professors here.) The students address such people as "George" or "Tom." Teaching is a complex activity that sends out all sorts of signals. The way a professor comports himself may be more important in shaping his students' behavior than what he says about his subject matter. (Indeed, the way he comports himself may say quite a lot about the intensity of his own intellectual commitment.) Even the way he arrives at his classroom is important. Is he on time? Is he well prepared and organized? Is he interested in what he is teaching.?

The egalitarian manners that gestated during the 1960s communicate an evil message. For one thing, everyone knows that they are in bad faith, even though they parade under the banners of "honesty" and "equality." The professor in the ponytail and leather jacket and jeans, but who has nonetheless done his dissertation on Christopher Marlowe, knows more about Marlowe than the student, Chris, who probably doesn't know what century Marlowe wrote in. The egalitarian lie, the bad faith, resides in the pretense that Chris's opinion about Marlowe's place in English literature is as valid as the professor's.

Such egalitarianism is also untruthful about the power relationships. Th professor in the jeans and ponytail i required to make an evaluation of hi student, to deliver a grade. Both par ties know this. A lot attaches to it, things like admission to law school or medical school, or God save us, the academic profession. In an egalitarian Jim-George relationship, all of this is lied about daily.

There are still further problems. In the elite private colleges today, students who are not on scholarship pay as much as $20,000 a year in fees. I myself, a professor at Dartmouth, discern a visible sense of disappointment when the man the students are paying so much money to meet doesn't appear to be a professor in his presentation of himself. The man in jeans and ponytail who comes across as just another guy like you"-"hey, call me Tom"-is thought to be something of a cheat. Only the rare student has a genuine commitment to any subject matter, but in the social roles of "student" and professor" the student still expects such commitment from the man on the other side of the lectern; he expects something different from what he is being given by much of the professoriate today.

It is not altogether clear when the vast slide occurred. In his important collection of essays entitled The Culture We Deserve, Jacques Barzun writes that "Right now, for example, one can ask whether all over the world the idea of the university has not been battered without hope of recovery for a long time."

Mr. Barzun traces the slide to the passion for specialization in the college curriculum at the turn of the century. Surely another factor has been the vast amount of money pouring into the universities, which has made the academy a growth industry, so that people now are going into the academy and even running it who have no love for the academic vocation. They are in it for power and status and, often, big bucks.

AT THE SAME TIME, because of this comprehensive lack of vocation, the academy has begun desiring to be an "action" institution. If Karl Marx thought that the job of philosophy was not to understand the world but to change it (which is precisely wrong), so does today's academy. It has constituted itself as a political party, not an agency of understanding. We hear all the time about "divestment," but very seldom about the history of South Africa.

Through my own field-glasses at trench level, I think the students may tip the balance in a useful direction. It is only the very rare student who will always and under any conditions be brilliant and unpredictable. But even the student herd now seems tired of the guy in jeans who has a "Marxist perspective." I have been considering offering a course from a "Ptolemaic perspective."