Question (from "Carla"): Is it weird and cheesy for professors to be on Facebook, sending social notes to their students after a long day at school?
My colleague ("Brando"), in his mid-50s, has a Facebook site connected to the 60-plus students we see every day in our very intense program. I wonder how Brando has time to "play" with students like this on the Net. Is this a newfangled ploy to establish popularity and "coolness"?
I struggle to make students understand that I'm not instantly available by e-mail. Brando's site undermines my efforts, and students haven't a clue as to how sad this really is. In our big university (8,000), he is the only faculty member on Facebook.
Students learn professionalism from us, which should include keeping away from time sinks and temptations. One of our troubled graduates was recently arrested for chatting up underaged students online, and it turned out he also had a cache of child porn -- all of which makes me even more uncomfortable with my colleague's activities. He says he understands my position, but keeps up his Facebook activities anyway. Am I a hopeless prude?
Question (from "Luanne"): Teaching at a community college, I create open, friendly relationships with my students, who feel comfortable sharing personal problems. We bring food, I appreciate them and their cultures, and I share my personal experiences about challenges they also face, such as financial difficulties, relationships, and violence against women.
Students always volunteer to help me carry equipment, but last semester, "Nosey" abruptly asked if something was going on between me and another student, "Ray," because "Ray's always following you to the computer center and here and there." A few weeks earlier, someone had stolen my work ID card in class, and Nosey said Ray must've done it, because "he's always after you." I told Nosey there was nothing going on between me and Ray.
But it was close to the end of the semester, and I got panicky and angry. When Ray came late to class and said his grandmother had died, I told him he had to stay in class and do some work if he wanted to pass. He did, but started using his cellphone. I got upset, raised my voice, and stopped all discussion. Ray left, slamming the door, calling me paranoid. During the final exam, he cursed me, claimed I was harassing him, and threatened to report me to my boss, which he did.
I was not hired to teach at the college the following semester ("unsatisfactory performance," they said). What went wrong?
Answer: Mulling over these scenarios, Ms. Mentor wonders if "closeness" between professors and students is ever really needed. Maybe we are not meant to be pals.
Yes, she knows the histories of bundling and coupling (Socrates and Plato were probably more than friends). She's also heard the rumors about elite institutions where faculty members reportedly view students as their "playground." But now, please, she would like to drop the subject of professor-student sex with just one word: Don't.
Be friendly, but be a grown-up, says Ms. Mentor.
Consider your institution's culture. At small liberal-arts colleges, profs are supposed to be socially available and invite students to their homes. At universities, customs vary, but at community colleges, professors are less likely to share their personal lives. Many students at two-year colleges are working adults, and many faculty members are part-timers themselves, racing from one job to another. Nowadays, online teachers, the fastest-growing faculty group, never see their students at all.
In between, though, are many micro-decisions. If students come to your office hours, do you keep the door open? (Most faculty members do.) If students want to talk about their personal tragedies, should you try to solve their problems? (Probably not, but offer sympathy and the name of a good counselor.) If students send you very passionate or suicidal e-mail messages, what do you do? (Tell someone, quickly.)
Even the youngest instructors, those fresh-faced 25-year-old prodigies, are officially grown-ups. They must cast off childish things, and hang out with their elders.
That does not mean Facebook.com, a cheerful, teenagey venue in which students create groups ("Metaphysicians Who Barbecue"), post photos, and leave greetings on each other's "walls." Ms. Mentor does wonder why Brando, some 35 years older, is hanging around in that adolescent playground. Ms. Mentor thinks he should be playing with people his own age, rather than appearing to be desperately lonely or in need of some illicit lovin' that could wreck his career and derail the aspirations of students. Since his colleague Carla cannot stop his "weird and cheesy" behavior, Ms. Mentor will direct him bluntly: Knock it off. Now.
As for Luanne's saga: At first it looks like another "No good deed goes unpunished" story, with an innocent and generous professor targeted by malicious Nosey and troubled Ray. Luanne's last and biggest mistake was certainly her in-class meltdown. When you lose your temper, and the warmth that makes students care for you, there may be nothing left but grief and anger.
Still, "what went wrong" may have been Luanne's approach to the job. Luanne seems to have tried to be a mom or a sister -- instead of a teacher. Her classes sound like parties or support groups, evidently with international students who may have misinterpreted her. To a lonely young man, thousands of miles from home, an open and friendly American woman may seem to be inviting romance. And while Nosey and Ray were vying for Luanne's attentions, there was an ID card thief in her classroom, and Ray was failing the course.
Ms. Mentor wonders if Luanne misunderstood her own role as the teacher. Maybe she was also lonely. But it isn't up to students -- or faculty members -- to fix each other's lives, or to keep each other wildly entertained or romantically fulfilled or even well fed (except in the mind).
A simpler job description, "Just teach your subject matter," might be a good mantra for those who think discretion and propriety are somehow prudish. But there are always colorful characters who want to create their own scenarios in which they are the nurturers, the heroes, the lovers, and the clowns. If they can do it without scaring anyone, or getting themselves arrested, or getting fired, Ms. Mentor salutes them . . . but usually, in the stuffy precincts of academe, they can't. She, too, is a hopeless prude.
Question: Raised by a pack of grammar perfectionists who were constantly haranguing one another, I cringed when my colleague said he "snuck" somewhere. How does Ms. Mentor feel about "snuck"?
Answer: Yuck.
Sage Readers: An alert correspondent thinks she may be the "Earie" in last month's column, the student who wore costume animal ears, because (she writes) she had lost a friend and wanted to cheer herself up. She also thinks that observers who are curious about her motives for wearing animal ears should simply speak up and ask her. Another reader informs Ms. Mentor that ear wearers may be "furries," a growing set of "cosplay" (costumed role-playing) students who dress as furred creatures for fun and fetishism. Ms. Mentor would still recommend discreet and silent gawking, rather than asking a stranger, "Are you grieving or do you have a fetish?"
Meanwhile, nearly three dozen letter writers have now outed themselves and their friends as fans of Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, that hugely underrated movie about a women's studies professor. Ms. Mentor had thought it was her own little fetish. Instead, she's gotten boasts from locals ("the jungle is on campus at UC-Riverside, and I watched them film it!") -- and she's heard from "I-laughed-my-head-off" devotees in a dozen other states, including an 85-year-old man who says it's his reason for living.
As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes queries, rants, and trashy recommendations for this column and her forthcoming book, Ms. Mentor's Perfect Wisdom for the Academic Soul. She rarely answers letters personally, and identifying details are always discreetly disguised.
Ms. Mentor directs eager readers to her archive, to The Chronicle's online forums, and to her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia.
