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Article: Getting Schooled in Student Life
Three years ago, while a tenured professor on sabbatical, I conducted research by enrolling as a freshman in my own university. Going “under cover” for two semesters, I, who had graduated from college three decades ago, moved into the dorms and took a full load of courses, living among undergraduates as one of them. Based on that research, I wrote a book about college life, using pseudonyms for both myself and the institution. In the process, I learned a lot about not only higher education but also about ethical issues in research -- and how questions of disclosure can entail a host of unanticipated decisions about what are legitimate data to report and even how to write.
How did the book come about? I am a cultural anthropologist and have spent most of my professional life living overseas in a remote village location, learning the language and customs of another culture, and writing “ethnography” -- or descriptive accounts of the day-to-day life of a people. Anyone who has spent much time overseas knows that such an experience makes you reconsider your own culture. After returning to this country and more than 15 years of university teaching, I found that students had become increasingly confusing to me.
Why don’t undergraduates ever drop by for my office hours unless they are in dire trouble in a course? I began to wonder. How could some of my students never take a note during my big lecture class? And what about those students who bring whole meals and eat and drink during class? My colleagues and I continually tried to make sense of what seemed to be bizarre behavior. Were we like that? Are students today different?
In addition, students’ attitudes about their education had special significance to me because what they want and how they understand their education are becoming more central to the shape of the modern university. To compete for students and accommodate their tastes and wants, higher-education institutions across the country are changing not only their dormitories and student services but also their course delivery, pedagogy, scheduling, and degree offerings.
A final impetus for my research came when I sat in on a couple of colleagues’ courses that I wanted to audit. I came to class regularly, took notes, and did the readings, although I skipped the papers, tests, and other evaluative measures. To my surprise, I became privy to a world that my students hadn’t shared with me before:
“Psst ... psst ... , excuse me ... were you in class on Friday? Listen, I cut out and went skiing. Can I borrow your notes?”
“Hey, do you know what he said was going to be on the test? I was zoned out while he was telling us.”
It dawned on me that I had gone through the looking glass, so to speak. I heard about weekend parties, and how someone wrote a paper between 3 and 4:30 in the morning while drunk, and how unfair the grading was. I found myself writing down little snippets in my course notebook to remind myself after class of the conversation topics. “I mean, when are you ever gonna use Nietzsche at a cocktail party?” was one of my first notations from someone who obviously didn’t feel that a philosophy course was worth the time.
It was then that the idea of becoming a student occurred to me, an approach that I thought might give me unusual insight into questions like: What is the current culture at AnyU (my pseudonym for my university)? How do students negotiate university life? What does college really teach?
So in the spring of 2002 I applied to my own university as a student with an undeclared major, using only my high-school transcripts as evidence of my education, and was accepted shortly afterward. I did not discuss the project with university officials in advance or design it in tandem with their interests. However, as a matter of ethical science, I sought and received approval from the Institutional Research Board at the university to do research on human subjects as one does for any research project.
I decided to try to be as much like a typical student as I could. I opted, as most freshmen do, for a campus meal plan and on-campus housing. I signed up for a centrally located coed dormitory, consisting mostly of 19- and 20-year-olds, although I requested and received a single room on my floor. I hesitantly peeled my faculty parking sticker off my car, shelved my faculty ID, and began my new life.
Early on, I realized my approach had potential ethical dangers. It was clear to me that if I entered student life announcing that I was a professor, I would compromise some of my purpose in doing the project. But my commitment as an anthropologist is to refrain from misrepresenting myself to the people within the culture that I am studying. Issues of honesty and trust underlie any research relationship, and I wrestled with how I could honor those qualities without fully disclosing my identity.
Somewhat suprisingly to me, in daily conversations with students almost no one ever asked me directly about my life. (Two student friends confided to me later that they thought it was a little sad for an older woman like myself to be living in the dorms and didn’t want to ask me questions for fear that there was a horrific divorce story attached.) At the same time, I never had any doubt that I would follow basic ethical protocol whenever I formally interviewed people or recorded anyone’s words: I would explain that I was a researcher, that I was doing a study of undergraduate culture, that my research was not for a class or independent study, and that I intended to publish the results. The Institutional Research Board at my university and I concurred that it was not necessary to identify my job as that of a professor at the university.
That is, I had decided, unless people asked. One commitment I made was not actively to lie or otherwise fabricate the details of my life. If pressed about what else I did, I would say that I was, “among other things,” a writer and that writing about college life was one of the reasons why I was living in the dorms. If doubly pressed, I would say that I was a professor. That happened only once -- and the questioner was a journalism student and friend whose shower of personal queries seemed to warrant a more complete answer than I at first had given. I asked her to keep my confidence, and she did. Most people, however, just weren’t interested.
Being an experienced researcher, I also understood that I should try to protect the source of any information that might be revealed. I anticipated that, as a student, I’d be likely to witness or hear about activities that are either illegal or against university policy -- pets in the dorm, affirmative-action violations, cheating, drinking, using drugs. Although I intended to act as any student would, to try to give good advice when asked and to avert impending disasters that crossed my personal path, I did not want to be or behave in any official role as a representative of the university. Nor did I want my work to be viewed as public property that could be solicited by the administration for investigative, policy, or planning purposes.
Thus, while the administration did not approve my research plan or know specifically where I was and what I was doing on the campus, it was aware that I was conducting internal research. I gave formal notice that I would “relinquish my role as an officer of the university” (faculty members are such officers) and submitted advance letters indicating that I would neither record names nor report any violation of university policy or public law. I also decided to pay for my tuition, room and board, course fees, and books myself rather than apply for internal or external grants because I was uncertain what rights to my notes or other data financial supporters might then be able to claim. It was my most expensive year of fieldwork.
I thought that I had covered all the ethical bases. But once we are living and working with people -- making friends, sharing confidences -- the sensibilities that guide us in our lives, as opposed to the rules that apply in our statements of professional ethics, come to bear. Such particulars changed my rules somewhat.
In most circumstances and for most relationships I encountered, it was comfortable and easy for me to withhold the facts of my nonstudent life. Because few people actively asked me for personal information, I felt no moral or social pressure to volunteer details about my life that would very likely jeopardize my research. It did not seem to be dissimilar from earlier fieldwork decisions to make no mention of my Jewish heritage, for instance, in an overseas Christian community that was largely anti-Semitic. But several situations arose in which I felt that I had to disclose my identity.
For instance, one night, a study mate with whom I was fairly close talked with me about an academic-scholarship application he was writing that required reference letters from three faculty members. He said that he couldn’t think of a third one and asked me whether he should ask a teacher who’d given him an A in a big lecture class but probably didn’t really know who he was. “I don’t think he’ll give you a strong and personal enough letter,” I told him honestly. In my heart, I knew that the right faculty “character reference” was me. A few days later, I let him know I had something surprising to tell him. It wasn’t easy to explain that I was really a faculty member -- at first he thought I was joking -- but I did end up providing his third reference.
The second case involved my sexuality class, in which small, intimate discussion groups were bound by strict confidentiality agreements not to reveal the information that people divulged during the course. More than halfway into the semester, we were given the assignment of interviewing one another about intimate sexual issues and beliefs in our lives. The people I interviewed were very forthcoming about their personal histories and attitudes, as was I.
Of course, I had no intention of using any of this material for my book. Yet I began to feel that if the other students learned later that I was a professor writing a book, it could trigger alarm and betrayal. I therefore “came out” to my small group, explaining that our class agreement of confidentiality would remain rock solid and that nothing about their lives or the details of our discussions would ever appear in my book. The fact that I had confided my own personal information eased the situation, and the others reciprocally assured me that they would not share aspects of my sexual life with my future students!
A third situation involved the resident assistant in charge of the corridor on which I lived. In my second semester, I dropped some courses to allow time to conduct my formal interviews. The RA became worried that I might be having academic problems and approached me with an offer of help and advice. Because of her genuine concern, I took her aside and told her that, while I’d give her the full story at the end of the year, she ought to know that my situation was not what it appeared. I was a person with advanced degrees, who had come back to college for reasons to do with my writing interests.
New questions also emerged about what constituted legitimate research data, of which mine took many forms. There were formal interviews, accompanied by signed consent documents, as well as observations of public spaces (like cafeterias) and public discourse (like graffiti). Those seemed relatively unproblematic. Yet I also overheard many dialogues through the thin walls of my dorm room. Almost every night I went to sleep to chatter and laughter from the adjacent rooms and was privy to informative waves of gossip and drama. While I learned plenty from such conversations, it was clear to me that I should not take notes or otherwise record what I heard.
But what about public conversations in the halls, in my classes, and in my study groups when the information was shared with me on the assumption that I was a student, and only a student? The questions regarding my data seemed to grow more numerous as time went on. I realized that my level of comfort and certainty was shifting with the depth and quality of my relationships and with seeing the data in their human context -- as incidents, stories, and conversations attached to real people. When the writing process began, push came to shove, and choices had to be made.
As I wrote, I tried to keep in mind the students with whom I’d gone to college. Would I be comfortable saying what I was writing that moment, in that chapter, if I were saying it to them? I tried projecting, too: Would I be comfortable if I were a student and recognized in a book, written by a professor at my own university, an informal conversation that I thought I was having privately with a classmate? Those considerations radically changed how I wrote, and new “rules” of a sort emerged.
For instance, I had had some fascinating and spontaneous discussions with students about the idea of cheating and recorded the conversations without mentioning names in my daily field notes. The students’ words and stories would bolster and complement the points I wished to make. But I began to feel uncomfortable about relating the details of those anecdotes or directly quoting from student conversations, because I had partially obtained that knowledge as a result of being regarded as a fellow student. It became clear that I couldn’t repeat those stories or precise words.
That happened many times, and involved a plethora of topics -- and not just those like cheating that were “edgy.” For instance, I participated in several student groups in which we critiqued our classes or discussed social life, campus issues, and more. But when I went to record such data, I felt as if I were literally telling tales out of school. The material was not controversial, but it was based, again, on the assumption that our interactions were taking place among friends, peers, and nothing more. Thus I found myself consciously and significantly narrowing the field of information and experience from which I was willing to draw for my book. I have, in my notes and my memory, rich and more intimate knowledge that informed my writing but does not always appear as it occurred.
In general, the way I presented information related to the way I obtained it. For instance, in seeking international students to interview, I sent a bulk e-mail notice through the auspices of the international-student office. It was one thing for students to assume that I was a student because I was in their class behaving like one; it was quite another to present myself via an e-mail message as a student to people whom I did not know. So I didn’t, which meant that international students spoke with me knowing that I was a professor. For that reason, I felt empowered to use their words verbatim. I also used more direct quotations when the source of my data was focus groups, which I solicited through a similar public process.
Although I took greater license with those whom I formally interviewed and from whom I had obtained consent forms, even those interviews proceeded on the assumption that I was a student. As a result, the text may have some unusual features for an ethnography. I often used public, rather than private, information. For instance, my discussion of cheating is presented less through students’ personal stories than through their anonymous graffiti, public Web sites, and national studies. Similarly, I was more likely to repeat a comment made aloud in class and other public utterances than I was to relate a similar remark spoken privately.
I also decided to aggregate data, with the intent of masking personal comments, and to “translate” scenes, either by paraphrasing conversations or by modifying my descriptions to minimize their voyeurism. That meant, for instance, that I occasionally substituted my view of my sexuality class for student dialogue because of the delicate subject matter and the need for privacy. It meant, too, that I regularly walked the reader by the hand through my own perceptions of situations, sharing what I heard and saw rather than what other people said and did. There is occasionally only a fine line between the two approaches, but that became my way of dealing with the problem of appropriating other students’ conversations and lives for my book.
In the final analysis, did my willingness to cross over a great divide and “see how it really is as a student” bear fruit? Certainly I learned a lot about campus culture, which I describe at some length in my book. Moreover, after completing the project, I see more clearly in hindsight that my journey into student life was also a way of combating my own alienation as a professor, and, in that sense, my quest was largely successful. I wish that more teachers could see students and student culture from “the other side.” They would be privy to more of the hopes and trials, dreams and tribulations, bravery and kindness that call on our own humanity. Teachers would come to know that when a student invents a story about why the paper hasn’t been written on time or snoozes in class, that is the small stuff, the workings of a culture. As hard as it may be to realize sometimes, it is really not personal.
For their part, I wish that students could more readily see that classroom bureaucracy arises from the recurrent behavior of the thousands of students who have gone before them, that their silence in class can make an enthusiastic professor lose her energy and a new teacher doubt his abilities, and that finding a student cheating is not a triumphant moment, as one student suggested to me, but an upsetting one. Teachers, after all, are human, too, but perhaps it will take a student-turned-teacher to credibly tell those tales.
As for my method of research, I cannot be certain that my internal sense of appropriateness and trust will satisfy every person whose words and stories I used, or who might imagine that I used their words and stories. I cannot be sure that students reading a book about a university, a class, or a conversation that they might recognize would not feel betrayed.
The semester after I finished my research, I was walking out of a building just as a student from one of my freshman task groups was walking in. We exchanged warm “how you doin’?” small talk. Then my friend asked where I was headed, and I told her that I was going to class.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh, an anthropology class ... actually I’m teaching it.”
“No kidding!” she exclaimed. “How did you get to do that? I want to take it!”
“Well,” I answered sheepishly, “it’s ‘cause I’m actually a professor, too. I was a student last year to do some research, but now I’m back to being a professor.”
“I can’t believe that,” she responded and then paused. “I feel fooled.”
We have talked since that time about what I did and why, and I believe that her feelings have evolved. But her initial reaction moved me. I imagine that a few other fellow students, with whom I won’t have the opportunity to speak, may feel the same way.
My insurance in such inevitable cases of unanticipated student reactions, on the one hand, and misjudgments in my writing decisions, on the other, was to make not only the university but also myself as anonymous as I could. Using my real name would automatically identify my university and, by inference, the field of people whom I am writing about.
I would have preferred to put my real name on my work, and I am not terribly worried about the possibility that, in time, that information will come to light. But for now, while student friends are still in college, while dorm mates may recognize what they wrote on graffiti boards, or while classmates may spot familiar conversations, I want to offer another level of ambiguity and privacy. Under the circumstances, a book about a university with an alias, written by an author with a pseudonym -- however strange that may appear -- seems a reasonable offering to the gods of propriety.
Rebekah Nathan is the pseudonym of a professor of anthropology at a large public university. This essay is adapted from My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, to be published next month by Cornell University Press. Copyright © by Rebekah Nathan.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 47, Page B11