One of my professors has assigned every single thing he's ever written, everything he's contributed to, and even a private email correspondence between him and a politician on the subject of our course. He then spent nearly the entire class talking about his idyllic childhood, the arguments of all his books, how his books were received (badly), why his critics are totally wrong, how unjust it was that he did not win an award for which he was nominated, how the person who did win did not deserve it, and so on. Then, while contemplating what to remove from the syllabus, he came to a week in which all the assigned reading was written by him, paused, and said, "Well, no, we can't get rid of that. What would I get out of the class then?"
For serious.
On top of that, it turns out you have to pay money to switch courses.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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17 comments:
You have Alan Dershowitz? (Kidding. But he totally did this also. For a required 1L crim law class.)
As I said earlier, self-importance is not a distinguishing mark at Harvard. Maybe not dorky glasses either. Maybe you should pretend to be Elle Woods?
Look on the bright side - at least he does not, at least once a class, play a song by his favorite musician (and whose -ology he lists under "research expertise" on his cv), who is not to everyone's taste, and then link the song, however irrelevant or inappropriate, to the day's subject matter.
Amber: Well, at least you could commiserate w/ your classmates. I have only one classmate in this class. Maybe I should've taken the sparse enrollment as a sign...
Withywindle and Arethusa: I was actually OUTRAGED by this behavior today. I have never encountered such a thing, and moreover, it's not even a required course--I should've gotten out while I could! You all make light of my woe.
How much does it cost to change? Some things are worth paying for.
I would feel sympathy were I not sitting in Federal Income Tax at 9am.
When preparing a syllabus, I agonize over whether to include anything I have written. I generally decide in the negative. As I have remarked to Paul Gowder, I continue to believe that the general failure to even attempt to cultivate the virtue of humility in the academy is one of worst features. This failure leads to all sorts of harms, personal and social. I would be equally as outraged.
This is what you get for staying in that class. Any moderately sane person would have run.
I had a professor a bit like this for a (non-mandatory) law school course; he liked to assign and lecture on cases in which he had been involved. When the time came for the exam, I printed out all his recent articles (that were not already included in the class casebook) and quoted them liberally in my exam. Got one of the few As of my law school career. Cheap, but reliable.
I make light of your woe because it confirms all my worst suspicions about Harvard. My delight at having my prejudices confirms, sadly, outweighs my sympathy with your misery.
But is what the professor writes actually good stuff?
Losing any special respect you might have felt toward the professoriate is an indispensable part of grad school. They never mention that on the web site, though.
Julia: $10.
Mark and PG: The difference in law school is that you have 40 people to mope with. I have only myself and an undergrad studying "the history of sadomasochism."
Daniel Goldberg: I don't know, grad school is certainly making me feel inferior and unworthy, though still willing to criticize others. Maybe soon that last capacity will also wither, and I will become fully humble.
Alex: True.
Withywindle: If I agree that Harvard is a bad place, can I have sympathy?
Alpheus: But this incident was egregious, so maybe it's just an exception.
Miss S-I,
Grad school is designed to make you feel inferior and unworthy. (I am not joking; check out the extensive and, to my mind, horrifying literature on the psychosocial impact of grad school on grad students).
The connection between this and the demonstrable lack of humility seems fairly plain to me; whether one wishes to chalk it up to overcompensation or an inferiority complex, the basic mechanism seems ineluctably tied to the effect insecurity has on human behavior. The fact that the imposter syndrome is apparently so widespread in the academy, including among persons who have, by any measure, become wildly successful, lends some support to this.
I myself admit to struggling more than a little between the need to cultivate humility, and my own academic insecurities.
MSI: You have sympathy. Just mixed in with other stuff.
These comments underscore the essential paradox of American curriculum and instruction: the only level of teaching that does not require training and certification is the tertiary, a realm in which publishing trumps pedagogy.
The fact that one knows his/her material intimately (because (s)he has written all of it or studied it for decades) does not necessarily mean that (s)he can be effective conveying its nuances to others. However, the prevailing mythology at American universities seems to be that one can emerge from a doctoral program in a subject area and step to the other side of the desk seamlessly.
I am with Goldberg about assigning my own publications. This semester I am assigning for the first time a piece I wrote in my "Violence and Terrorism in Central Asia" course. I will be interested to see how it works out.
MGC: Well, on the one hand, doctoral programs do require teaching, though the extent of the requirement varies by school. On the other hand, I'm not sure there is much evidence that such training and certification in pedagogy as now exists for primary and secondary education is that effective in making good teachers either, so it's not clear that subjecting academic grad students to a similar program would be beneficial. It might help if universities could better determine their own purposes, or if anyone could figure out what was important for professors to learn to teach, but these developments do not appear to be forthcoming.
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