“Fine, then may I please have your lunch money.”

In an article in this month’s issue of the AAUP’s magazine Academe, Angela Walmsley and Jeffrey McManemy argue that “It’s time we set some expectations for our students that go beyond the syllabus.” They proceed to discuss something they blithely label “character dysfunction,” which they define as a “deficiency in social skills necessary for successful professional relationships,” and which they then argue “often leads to communication disruptions and unsatisfactory interactions between students and faculty and staff.”

I’ve always thought that “character” is a noun, rather than an adjective, and that it concerns the overall moral and ethical quality of a person, rather than a set of particular, atomized social attributes. When we say that someone “has character,” or “lacks character,” we mean, essentially, that the person has good character or bad character, as a totality. Questions about how character is molded, or to what extent it can be molded, or when exactly in a person’s life it can be molded, have been the subject of contentious disputes throughout history, and the answers — judging from the endless, unchecked parade of wicked human beings on the planet — clearly lack exactitude, let alone certainty.

Our notion of character derives from the stern Romans, rather than the effete Greeks. The Romans saw character as something that could be developed (in a man — they hadn’t yet heard about women’s liberation) through an early education that emphasized duty, obligation, and obedience. (This education is in stark contrast to our modern educational system, where the goal is self-realization.)

Walmsley and McManemy posit “character” as a neutral thing, like an ignition that won’t start the car on a cold day. To them, “character dysfunction” among college students is manifested in such examples as the “inability to demonstrate ‘boundary control’” (translation in plain English: “bullying”), or not knowing how to “interact socially without expecting others to meet one’s needs immediately” (translation in plain English: “whining”). Professors are exhorted to employ “strategies” to correct the “character dysfunction” of their students, such as to “clearly communicate expectations with students and allow for feedback.”

The most disturbing aspect of this article lies not in the authors’ tips to professors on how to handle socially problematic students — they’re fairly helpful, although obvious in the extreme, e.g., “Exercise consistency and fairness as guiding principles.” (Is there a faculty member out there who aims to exercise inconsistency and unfairness as guides to conduct?) Rather, it lies in the consequence of their profound misunderstanding of the nature of character.

In replacing the word “character” with the pseudo-psychiatric term “character dysfunction,” the authors reach the erroneous conclusion that students’ bad characters can be cured by helping them improve their social skills. Talk about dangerous delusions!

Improving the social skills of a bully, whiner, liar, and thief will only make them more effective and devious than they were before. The bully with improved social skills won’t cease threatening you, but rather will threaten you more subtly. The whiner won’t stop whining, but will become more rhetorically convincing in arguing that perhaps the grade on the paper might indeed be too low. The liar will have you thinking that maybe the dog did eat the homework. And the thief will say, very politely, that no, he wasn’t in your office when the coffee-pool money disappeared.

There are many ways professors can mitigate the bad behavior of students, but it will take a lot more than fuzzy academic language and numbered bromides to change their characters.

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