The comments, now removed, said: “My student’s papers are making me dumber, so very stupid; by the minute. Please, make them, stop. They are infecting me with there huge and apparent stupidity, and I fear they will start to effect in my opinion the way I myself right papers (sic).”That says more about the poster than it does about the students.
The university's response says more about the university.
"It’s a much wider and more systemic problem of respect on campus, and in many ways it just reflects the same attitude and comments many tenured faculty and senior administrators encourage," says [Hans] Rollmann, a PhD student in women’s studies who is in his second year of being a tutorial assistant in social science.Perhaps that's Canada, and perhaps York exists primarily as a graduate and research department. If so, that's a tremendous waste, as there ought to be some spark in each undergraduate, whether or not that spark is an interest in the professor's or graduate assistant's field of study. Division of labor is a source of prosperity, and the point of group requirements, or of a core curriculum, is to allow each student an opportunity to discover a comparative advantage, whether that's in culture studies or herpetology or complex analysis. (Bracketology and ferroequinology are probably better left to recreation time.)
"That’s the exact thing we hear from tenured faculty, from department heads, from deans, from senior administrators, it’s this … continuous disparaging attitude toward undergraduates on campus," says Rollmann.
On the other hand, perhaps we're seeing frustration with the fruit of access for its own sake; with doing the work the high schools, nay, the middle schools, should be doing; with the disengaged and uninterested students dragging everybody else down. The original poster might have, in a clumsy way, been venting about the very spelling errors that provoked the post.
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