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Printer-Friendly ModeStudent-professor communication necessary to form community
submitted by Peter Brian Barry
February 25, 2008 —
Ratemyprofessors.com has recently added a "Professors Strike Back" feature that allows professors who view their reviews and evaluations to respond in kind - perhaps not so kindly. Perhaps this is appropriate: a Web site dedicated to providing students with information about professors at their institution may as well provide information solicited from those professors themselves. And why shouldn't that generally be the case? Why shouldn't any source of information about a university include some input from professors at that institution?
So here we are and here it begins.
The Vanguard, as a student paper, should find its contributions coming from students. But why not solicit the thoughts of faculty on occasion as well about matters SVSU-related and otherwise? Indeed, the Vanguard has decided to do just that - to allow faculty to contribute in a series of opinion pieces. I hope to be one of those faculty contributing on a regular, or at least a quasi-regular basis. My own interests lie in the areas of ethics and legal philosophy, but I hope to have things to say about life at SVSU generally as well as some commentary about the relationship between students and faculty and the life - or lack thereof - of a younger professor.
Some sort of commentary is probably needed. The reaction of students that I meet outside of the university setting rarely fails to amaze or disappoint. If I had a nickel for every time a current or former student reacted with amazement or shock or horror upon seeing me at a coffee house or restaurant or grocery store, well, I'd have a whole lot of nickels. It isn't that odd that your professors might be on a date, is it? That they might go to see a movie or meet some friends for a drink in a bar? Perhaps I've spent too many nights with my nose buried in a book or busily typing away at my laptop, but not all of them are spent that way all of the time. Perhaps some of it is our fault. Perhaps we as faculty have not done enough to ensure you that we are neither hermits nor aliens, that we too feel the campus walls closing in from time to time and need to leave the confines of University Center. Or perhaps a university is, of necessity, an institution that both produces and re-enforces distinctions between the One and the Other, ensuring a dialectic generating its own anti-thesis as a result of internal contradictions between ultimately yielding a new synthesis of ...
Whoa, sorry, went into philosophy mode there. Actually, I abhor 19th century German idealism as much as you do. But that's another story for another time.
This much is clear. Any university is a community of scholars and students, with a decided emphasis on community. A group of people who merely happen to be in close physical proximity to one another often is a community only in the most strained sense of the word. If we - you and I - are SVSU as the posters and advertisements suggest, then we had better have more in common than the fact that we both spend a fair bit of time in these halls and classrooms.
A community surely requires communication and interaction. A community surely includes individuals with shared interests. A bit more communication between students and faculty will hopefully go a long way to ensuring that all of us recognize our status as a community of students and scholars. I hope to be part of that dialogue.
And no, I do not make a habit of checking my reviews on ratemyprofessors.com. Unless, of course, someone tells me about a really juicy comment or a spike in my chili peppers.