By Peter S. Cahn

In the last days of the semester, the gulf between students and faculty members seems even larger than usual. Professors trade stories of escalating outrage about the latest sign that undergraduates care little about their studies. They turn in final papers riddled with misspellings and a bibliography consisting only of Wikipedia entries. They cram all of their studying into the night before a final, sending panicky e-mail queries time-stamped 2 a.m.

Surely, we tell ourselves, education was the top priority in our student days. We understood the importance of time management and professional presentation.

But I've begun to wonder if the halcyon days of self-motivated students ever existed. For evidence, I need only to look at how my colleagues and I behave in our current positions. We are equally guilty of every offense we accuse our students of committing.

A few months ago, I joined four colleagues in a seminar room to conduct an oral examination of a Ph.D. student. He arrived punctually, but the chair of his committee called ahead to say she would be five minutes late. When everyone finally sat down around the table, one professor excused herself for eating a bowl of cereal because she did not have time to finish breakfast. Another professor turned to me and asked if he could borrow a pen to take notes.

The oral examination itself ran smoothly, although I noticed as it continued into the second hour that one committee member was sneaking glimpses at his iPhone. In the end, we advanced the student to candidacy with several suggestions for how to make his dissertation stronger. Still, I couldn't help noticing that the faculty members in the room behaved much like the students we so often complain about.

I decided to look deeper to see if this pattern of emulating the worst habits of our students held across the university.

One of the most common symptoms of student indifference is high absenteeism in class. How well do professors fulfill their attendance obligations? The Faculty Senate at my home institution meets once a month during the school year, and the minutes each May contain a summary of members' annual attendance. In the 2008-9 academic year, the senate held eight meetings. Out of 49 senators, only 14 attended every session. Ten senators missed one of the eight meetings, 17 missed two, and 8 missed three. Other years show a similar distribution.

The pattern extends beyond any single university. Teachers regularly fume about how students wait until the last minute to finish assignments. I recently served as a grant reviewer for a fellowship program open to faculty members from multiple disciplines in many countries. Because applicants submitted their materials online, their files arrived in PDF form with an automatic time and date signature. The application deadline was September 30. The earliest of the five applications, and, perhaps significantly, the one from a scholar based outside the United States, bore the stamp of September 25. The next two went into the system September 29 and September 30 at 10:20 p.m. The final two arrived in the early-morning hours of October 1.

When students finally turn in their assignments, we often gripe that the supposedly finished products read like first drafts. Even cursory proofreading would have caught some of the egregious errors that find their way into student papers.

It would seem then that faculty members should be especially attuned to polishing their work before turning it in. Yet Tom Boellstorff, editor in chief of the flagship journal in my discipline (anthropology), wrote in a recent issue that manuscripts routinely come in with "a shocking number of typographical and grammatical errors." Other authors forget to erase comments left by previous reviewers using the track-changes feature, littering the margins with rainbow-colored text. Come to think of it, one of the applications I reviewed for the fellowship program misspelled the name of the grant agency.

Such slip-ups do not automatically disqualify a grant application or consign a manuscript to the reject pile. Pushing the limits of a deadline could be a sign of rigorous revisions to clarify the proposals' ideas. Nor do I have evidence that the efficient working of my university's Faculty Senate suffered from the frequent absences of its representatives. Perhaps the missing members advocated for faculty causes in less-formal settings. As for the colleague who brought cereal to an oral exam, I suppose it's true that a nourishing breakfast is the foundation of a healthy day.

What these examples show is that all of the criticisms that professors levy against undergraduates have their analogue in faculty behavior. I am not exempt. I encourage my students to supplement their learning by attending talks with visiting scholars, but when it comes to my own schedule, I often prefer to go home after a day on the campus than to sit for another hour in a lecture hall. The times when I overcome my lethargy to attend a talk, and see few undergraduates in the audience, I just shake my head at another piece of evidence that they lack intellectual curiosity.

Of course, those who supervise faculty members are already aware of how feebly we live up to our own ideal of diligent, attentive scholars. In his polemical Save the World on Your Own Time (2008), Stanley Fish justifies the high salaries of administrators by comparing their work habits favorably to those of petulant faculty members. And so the cycle of disparagement continues.

As the new semester starts, we all need to replace grumbling with realism and humility. A little empathy will reduce the antagonism between deans and faculty members, both of whom suspect the other of freeloading. It will make students seem more familiar and strengthen the mentor relationship.

That empathy does not mean we should relax classroom rules about attendance, deadlines, or spelling—just be more understanding when those rules are violated. After all, the students who fail to show up to class and turn in late, sloppy papers might simply be in training for an academic career.

Peter S. Cahn is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.