A LAMENT FOR A DEGRADED COMMON CULTURE.

Or perhaps it's no common culture at all.  It's back to school time, maybe, and Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has his annual suggestions for drafting the conditions of carriage, er, the bloated course outline that flies under the inflated term, "syllabus."

When the rules are written down and made known to the students, then they know what the expectations are.  Unwritten rules tend to be much more legible to students with the cultural capital to just “know.”  In practice, that group tends to skew by race and income in predictable ways.  Students who come from other backgrounds may import the assumptions that worked in more familiar settings, like high school or minimum-wage jobs.  Spelling out the assumptions in writing, and taking a moment to explain them if students are confused, gives the ones who might be the first generation of their family to attend college something closer to a fair shot.

That's a bundle of points. First, what the article primarily refers to is fairly standard stuff, such as penalties for late assignments, firmness of deadlines, advising the professor of absences.  That stuff might get lost among all the other stuff that Student Affairs have imposed upon faculty recently, including the special education provisions, the diversity statements, the pronoun protocols of the alphabet people.

It is not to those things that I direct today's observations.  Rather, I want to call attention to that "students who come from other backgrounds."  Gosh, if only the common schools would do more to inculcate the habits of the middle class, and the Student Affairs types would stop (condescendingly?) applying an implicit set of deficiencies that comes bundled with first-generation-non-traditional-diverse incoming students would understand that due on time means due on time, examinations take place as scheduled, and matriculants are capable of reading, writing, and figuring at the college level.