Does Your Professor Respect You?

— Richard Cocks

Interestingly, when I googled this question the responses I found involved advising students how to address respectful emails to their professors. One response took the intuitively plausible line that since in emailing your professor you are likely to be asking for something, you should do so politely. However, on teaching evaluation forms, the question is as asked, although the exact wording may differ.

To respect someone is to show them the appropriate degree of social honor. If a child goes to see the high school principal, I would like to imagine that a parent might hope that the child was properly respectful, not; ‘I hope the principal showed you respect.’ Imagine a student approaching a karate or kung fu master, asking to be instructed, and then demanding that the teacher respect him. Or, better yet, a new army cadet telling his sergeant major that he is hoping to be treated with all the respect he deserves. What a malicious gleam in the eye that sergeant major could be expected to have and what respect the new recruit would be obliged to show the toilets with his toothbrush.

I teach Hesiod’s Theogony on a regular basis. The topic of hubris dominates the narrative. Usually the hubris involves a god of a lower status or a human vis-à-vis a god, not showing the proper respect. Occasionally, however, the minimal respect and social decency is not shown by the god with the superior status. The Titan Kronos, having castrated his father Heaven (Ouranos), eats his own children in fear that they in turn will overthrow him, which of course, they eventually do. This cannibalism is also hubris; a parent must not eat his children and is definitely being wicked in doing so. But nobody in their right mind would imagine that respect between a parent and child is one involving an equal relationship. Parents punish children, and never the reverse. Likewise, professors owe their students normal politeness but to pretend equality is politically correct nonsense and turns the teaching environment likewise into a nonsensical place.

It took me a long time living in the U.S. to discover that Harvard professors are of lower status than their students. The former are necessarily financial failures compared with the Wall Street careers of their students. This, I thoroughly dislike, but can understand in some way. However, I teach at a private college where, on several occasions I have been accused of being arrogant. I really and sincerely have no idea what the students have in mind when they say this. The context is a freshman level class in philosophy. I’m the expert and they are the novices.

I am very aware when this is not the case in my own life and in fact rather enjoy it. This is not the case when I endeavor to be instructed. Or when I go to buy a house or a car or deal with a lawyer. Now I am the novice and the other is the master and I am fully aware of it. I know that I am in dangerous territory. I’m wet behind my ears and the expert does this for a living. I don’t imagine that my opinion is as good as his, that I have any insights worth sharing or that we are on any kind of equal footing. In the case of buying expensive things, I do my homework and hope I can avoid poor decisions.

My impression is that the students at the expensive private school, who differ in no academic regard from the state school where I also teach, are expecting some kind of obsequious subservience on my part. Perhaps some self-mockery? A few of my students may end up making considerably more than a professor, but their prospects are not anything like those Harvard-educated CEO wannabes. I seem to not be doing something that other professors are doing but have yet to figure it out. I never ever call anyone a fool or imply it. I behave professionally and appropriately.

My suspicion is that my ‘arrogance’ is a difference in style. The popular MO seems to be the Mommy professor – endlessly solicitous and understanding and feeling the students’ pain. My MO is the Daddy professor – pressuring, cajoling and encouraging the student to engage in the painful process of thinking and doing some work. I don’t think they need more people around them being ‘understanding.’ I think we all understand why the homework was handed in in a slipshod manner, or late, or not at all. Where there really truly are extenuating circumstances, I’m only too happy to consider them.

One thing I do that might be considered controversial is that I don’t solicit their opinions on exams, although I do in class. The reason is that I want to forestall students from simply answering questions off the top of their heads in a way that they could do without having never attended a single class. Secondly, those untutored in philosophy end up simply repeating ideas to be found in popular culture. Thirdly, philosophy is an exercise in high culture. The point is to familiarize oneself with the thoughts of some of the most intelligent people who have ever lived about questions that we must all ultimately face one way or another.

When it comes to questions about the human condition, the notion that what you have to say will be original and true is mind-bogglingly unlikely. The only originality I myself can hope to lay claim to is to read lots of other philosophers and then to make some kind of amalgam of different views that make the most sense to me personally and thus may be somewhat idiosyncratic. I see my job as a professor as modeling how to do philosophy. How to get beyond ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion,’ and move to ‘let’s see if I can provide an argument for this assertion.’ Some of my students object to hearing my ‘opinions.’ Fortunately, I’m not in the opinion game, but in the argument game. If you don’t like my argument, all you have to do is to find the flaw in it and/or provide your own.

Socrates’ description of what he did with his friends was to read those thought to be wise, searching their writings for nuggets of insight and to share those with his friends. This is what I perceive myself as doing with my students – treating them as my friends in this regard. If these nuggets are rejected, that’s fine. I’ve done my duty. But I might ask you to reproduce these nuggets on the exam along the lines of familiarizing yourself with the thoughts of your intellectual forebears rather than getting you to substitute your untutored responses. I don’t think I’m being arrogant in doing this.

— Comments —

John West writes:

Prof. Cocks’ students seem to think as respectfully of him as he does of them.

Laura writes:

Most of the complaints seem to be that he makes them work hard. And I wouldn’t say, judging from the above, that he is disrespectful of his students.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I too have been the object of the “A-Word.”  On the first day of the current semester in my freshman composition course,” I began by apologizing for four typographical errors in the syllabus, pointing them out and asking the students to pencil in the corrections.  I described my vision of the course as a workshop, in which students might strive to gain mastery over the genre of the essay, the one literary genre, I said, that almost any person can learn to wield effectively.  I noted that I myself was entirely untalented as a poet, a story-writer, or a novelist, but that with diligence over the years I had become a fairly good essayist who could point to a notable publication record and a small but intelligent audience.  I added that I thought it essential to success in the course that students not regard it as an occasion for subjective expression, emoting, or the retailing of opinions.  Opinions, I said, were invariably unoriginal, and generally not worth the air it would take to pronounce them.  My job was to help them in the formation of judgments; theirs largely was to accept criticism as constructive, not taking it personally, ever.

Later that day, while checking my institutional email, I found a message written evidently by the mother of a student.  I am paraphrasing, but the lady said that her “child” was another one of my “victims.”  The students knew, she wrote, that I was more educated than they were, and therefore it was rude of me in the extreme to remark on the fact.  The language was intemperate verging on the psychopathological and I had the impression of the writer as a bloody-eyed, snake-haired Medusa with evil-looking long black fingernails.  The “A-Word” was about every third word of the bilious indictment.

I had and still have no idea who the student might have been.  The classroom population always fluctuates at the beginning of the term and it always takes me two or three weeks to stabilize my association of names with faces.

When the object of such vituperation begins the lecture that inspired it with an explicit apology for having let go four typos in his syllabus and still somehow qualifies − in the student’s eyes, I suppose, and then by amplification in mommy’s eyes too − as monstrously “arrogant,” then one is justified in wondering, as Richard Cocks does, what in God’s name “arrogance” might mean.

My explanation is cultural.  The reigning liberalism fanatically despises hierarchical differences and the reigning narcissism clings with equal fanaticism to its “opinions.”  Anyone who visibly omits to supplicate himself before these two idées fixes or who explicitly repudiates them identifies himself as a wicked patriarchal oppressor whereupon the venomous, hissing response is automatic.  The situation is exacerbated by the fact that colleges and universities, not to mention the Internet, grant students the opportunity to pour out their distempered guts in total anonymity, whereas the professor (so to speak) signs his name when he assigns a grade.  As usual, modern arrangements abet the basest of behaviors (omit to turn in any assignments and then blame the teacher for the inevitable result) and make correction almost impossible.

When I was a teaching fellow in English at UCLA in the 1980s, another graduate student showed me one of the “evaluations” he had received from a student in his class.  The language was entirely plaintive and the little screed came to its climax in the disgusted expostulation that, “this guy [i.e., the graduate student instructor] acts like he knows more than anybody else in the class.”  How dare he!

I should say that I count Professor Cocks among my friends.  I owe to him an amusing notion that is worth publicizing.  One day over a congenial pint in one of Oswego’s finer taverns, Richard noted that in jury selection the lawyer for the defense and the public prosecutor each get three “peremptory dismissals.”  That is, each can ban three people from the jury without being required to say why.  Richard suggested that, as students may drop a course well into the semester, that is, fire their instructor with no requirement to say why, it would be fair for the instructor, like the court officer, to get three “peremptory dismissals” at the beginning of each semester − the privilege, that is, to ban three students right at the outset without being required to say why.  Capital, Richard, capital!

Dr. Bertonneau adds:

It is not coincidental that the vocabulary of anonymous student complaints at various public ditches of the electronic realm is extraordinarily restricted.  The most frequent words are unfair, hard, mean, disrespectful, and conceited, along with the latter’s near-synonym arrogant.  They are all words associated with the expression of resentment or more accurately of a particularly childish type of resentment; the object of resentment would be any insistence that the student conform himself to an objective standard, any criticism of the student’s work (which the student interprets as personal), any evaluation thereof (interpreted again as personal), any refusal to compromise with recalcitrance, or any demonstration of a hierarchical difference between the instructor and those who are there to be instructed.

In its shrunken way, this vocabulary expresses the emotional existence of a Heroic culture, such as that which Homer depicts in Iliad and Odyssey.  The classicist E. R. Dodds noted in his study of The Greeks and the Irrational (1950) that Heroic culture is “shame culture.”  The Hero is entirely absorbed in the pursuit and aggrandizement of his status, the signs of which are respect and deference and what he regards from his entirely egocentric point of view as his fair treatment by others.  Dodds contrasted the “shame culture” on view in the behavior of the Homeric heroes with the “guilt culture” that emerged with the growth of philosophy, the flowering of which was the authorship of Plato straddling the late-Fifth and the early Fourth Centuries.

The difference between the later, rationally mediated, “guilt culture” and the “shame culture” against which it had (and undoubtedly still has) to pit itself is that the subject of “guilt culture” is capable of introspection and of self-subordination with regard to concepts and institutions.  He can measure himself against impersonal, abstract benchmarks.  The subject who feels guilt experiences that guilt as a defect, which, in a spirit of atonement, he wishes to overcome.  The idea occurs in the very name of philosophy, which means “the love of wisdom” − not, as Socrates explains, the possession of wisdom, but rather the recognition of one’s ignorance accompanied by the determination to overcome it.  “Guilt culture” is associated in part with the cognitive transformations effectuated by literacy; “shame culture” is associated with the oral mentality of the pre-literate societies.

It is quite likely that all adolescent society is based on “shame culture.”  This fact would be correlated with the unfinished educational state of the adolescent.  College students, like the ones who make vocabulary-restricted comments at anonymous public resentment websites, are akin to the boastful, hypersensitive, radically other-directed protagonists of epic and tragedy.  The collision between the students and their teachers is the perennial replay of an old conflict between the default-mode of human consciousness and the truly civilized mode thereof.

Laura writes:

Fortunately, there are no “rate my parents” websites.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

Laura writes:

Ha! Too true.

Michael J. Jose writes:

I think I can see where Thomas F. Bertonneau’s come from.

This statement:

Opinions, I said, were invariably unoriginal, and generally not worth the air it would take to pronounce them.

seems a little dismissive to me.

I think that one can point out that opinions are not relevant to the subject or course at hand, and that success in the world is much more impacted by one’s ability to make judgments and to support an argument (the essence of an expository essay is the ability to marshal facts to make a case for a proposition), without essentially telling students “your opinions are worthless.”

It seems the point he wanted to make was “it takes no skill or effort to come up with an opinion, and doing so will not in itself get you anywhere in life (with the implication that what takes skill and effort and has practical benefits is the ability to argue for a position by presenting multiple facts – preferably from multiple angles – that support it in a compelling way).”

Instead, it sounds like “it’s a waste of time for you to ever voice an opinion to anyone.”

Mr. Jose adds:

However, I will say that I agree with the general idea that today’s colleges are not nearly hierarchical enough.

I always found it distasteful that most of my professors insisted that I refer to them by their first names, rather than as “Professor [last name].”  It seemed way too familiar.  I did refer to them that way, as ultimately I decided it showed more respect to honor their wishes than to abide by a formality they abhorred, but still it seemed wrong and unpleasant to me.

Dr. Cocks writes:

Thanks to John West for reading and taking the time to comment. I concur with Laura that the Rate Your Professor comments are mostly to do with how demanding I am (that’s the Daddy Professor notion), not about whether I respect the students or not. I try to avoid reading such things partly because worrying about one’s popularity is likely to interfere with doing your job and have a corrupting influence. In many respects this is similar to parenting. If parents’ primary preoccupation concerns being liked instead of doing what they consider to be in the best interests of the child, then they are failing in their duty. Mostly importantly, I suggest that John West’s comment misses the point that respect in connection with students and professors should not be based on an assumption of equality between the two which his comment seems to imply. Since I’ve addressed this notion in argument, it does not seem sufficient to simply contradict the assertion without providing substantial reasons. To continue with the parenting comparison, one might be asked if one respects one’s parents; it would be in very strange circumstances in which it was asked if they respected you. Being proud of you would seem more appropriate as a positive emotion.

Dr. Cocks continues:

In response to Mr. Jose:

I know what you mean about wishing to respect the proper hierarchical order of things. When I was a child, my mother decided that she didn’t want my eldest sister to assert any of the rights associated with being bigger, stronger and smarter (due to being older) than her younger siblings. That sister, however, was still saddled with the attendant responsibilities of the older and thus superior, for the younger. Once when my eldest sister and I coincidentally began speaking at the same time, I attempted to defer to that sister. My mother, who was present, kicked me in the backside in disgust. My mother’s attempt to unnaturally promote my second eldest sister to a state of preeminence in the family caused nothing but fights and screaming arguments which I detested.

I think since then I have been a fan of respecting hierarchies when appropriate and not oppressive including authority that meets those requirements. For my classes, I have chosen the text, written the syllabus, formulated the rules of the classroom and I am the official expert relative to the students on this particular subject matter and I am responsible for providing students with an opportunity to learn. In this context, but not in others, I am the eldest sister, to continue the comparison, and am owed a certain deference to go along with my increased responsibilities. Partly for these reasons, as explained in the article, I enjoy acknowledging when someone is my superior. I don’t require, out of some weird resentment, that any respect shown be equal.

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