“Well, you’ll just have to deal with it,” Professor Fendrich said to me, her overworked secretary, as she grabbed her laptop and walked out the door for her extended Presidents Day holiday. Having a soft faculty job, she gets all the regular holidays off, plus fall and spring breaks, plus that eon between semesters, plus summers. And because she once showed a slide of a Joaquín Torres-García painting in class, she also has special permission to take off Simón Bolívar’s birthday. I work 50 weeks a year and it costs me a personal day if I want to take off both Christmas and New Year’s. Socialism for university faculty, capitalism for all the rest of us, I always say. (And please don’t let me get started on tenure.)
Anyway, she printed out all the comments she wanted me to respond to and attached a Post-It to each. Her handwriting is mostly illegible, so what follows is a selective reconstruction of her answers along the lines of the “restoration” of Leonardo Da Vinci’s mural, The Last Supper, in Milan.
The B-Minus Reigns Supreme
J: It is a bit specious to do a lot of hand wringing about grade inflation but ignore the power and role of student evaluations in all of it. … All of the material incentives that the system has to offer lay with inflating and none reside in not. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.
Professor Fendrich does not ignore reality — nor the difference between the present and past tense in the verb “to lie.” But she does not believe that such odious realities as grade inflation should be timorously accepted because they constitute “reality.” She notes that change often demands courage — even from college professors.
Just Hangin’ Forever, Dude
C.J. Smith: [W]ow, to read the above writeup, makes me wonder whether the writer is a lisbo, a punk, or a bitter frigid individual.
I can testify that Professor Fendrich is not a punk (she hates the music), nor a bitter frigid individual (she always gives Valentines). She is also not Portuguese and has never even visited Lisbon.
Kevin Erickson: I don’t need another mother, I lived with one for 17 years before I went off to college. … I didn’t work hard in undergrad, I’m not going to work hard in Law School for the next 2 years, just for someone to benefit from it, just because she decided to spread her legs. … If I want children one day, I can easily adopt, I can easily get a surrogate mother to bear my children.
There are times when Professor Fendrich wishes that her field were abnormal psychology so that she might compose a scholarly article, from case histories such as Mr. Erickson’s, on the intersection of animosity toward one’s mother, fear of being ripped off by a woman who “decided to spread her legs,” and preferring not to be in a committed relationship with the mother of one’s children. She regards it as wholly unsurprising that Mr. Erickson wishes to become a lawyer.
The Political Is Personal
David: You’ve mixed up being a professor with being a mom. How in the world do you know that disclosure x is of the essence of being a professor and disclosure y is not?
Sometimes, people who are both professors and mothers simply know these things.
AJ: However, there is no need, after a physics professor answers a student’s question with the response “I voted Republican” for the student to say anything which may impact on the student-teacher relationship (although a student who could honestly say “me too” might exploit that circumstance by volunteering the same. … [D]oes the author not suspect that, in stating “I have positions on issues from global warming to health insurance” she would implicitly suggest her party preference, for example, in this November’s election?
Professor Fendrich left a note indicating agreement with the likelihood that a physics professor would indeed vote Republican. She noted that if the student responds not with, “Me, too,” but with a gulp or a rolling of eyes, he just might have blown any possibility of catching a break on the razor’s edge between a B— and a C+. Her stating “I have positions on issues from global warming to health insurance” might well indicate that she is a knee-jerk liberal. But it also might indicate that she believes every word Bjorn Lomborg has ever written, that market forces will ultimately solve any health insurance problem, and that her space in the faculty parking lot is occupied by a full-sized Hummer with a NUKE THE GAY WHALES bumpersticker on it.
Case-Hardened: How about those other “power imbalances” students will encounter after graduation? Will their bosses in the corporate world refrain from political discussion and pressure? How about the senior partners in their law firms? Their superior military officers? Why shelter students from the expression of political views?
You’re absolutely right. In post-graduate life, students will be summarily fired and told to clean out their desks by lunchtime, so professors should treat them similarly. They’ll also be asked by senior partners in their law firms to change that $75 receipt for a lap dance to one for lunch with a client, so professors should ask students to say that their professors kept office-hours appointments when they didn’t. And their superior military officers will send them into hostile countries, so professors should schedule field trips in high-crime areas, late at night. One can never be too prepared.
