YOUR JOB IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

If you are stuck in the basement of the ivory tower, the tension between having to drop the hammer on the Distressed Material whilst dealing with the imprecations of the deanlets who see something noble about admitting unprepared students and calling it access is no end of stress.

Professor X has the commuters and the returning students and the non-traditionals, the usual gondola-load of Distressed Material, but he doesn't get down on them. Page 37: "My students were unskilled and unpracticed writers, but they weren't stupid; they knew what the point of the comparison essay was. The devil was in the doing." So it is. Professor X does not use his book to develop a coherent evaluation of the forces that left so many of his charges unprepared to do the writing. He has an opportunity, page 79, to question the constructivist nonsense that I maintain is a fundamental cause of academic decline, but passes on it. "No one would expect to pass a calculus class if he had not yet mastered basic arithmetic. Why, then, are most attempts to adhere to basic standards in the use of the English language in college courses heaped with scorn?" Perhaps the answer comes at page 144. "Our American unwillingness to count even the most hopeless of us out in the educational marathon may be one of the most debilitating ideas in contemporary culture, a jagged gash through which vitality and truthfulness and quality slowly drain away."

From her post, probably far from the basement, Duke's Rebecca Vidra reflects on twenty years of taking those imprecations to heart, and despairs.

I have now been teaching at Duke University for 20 years. I have been through all kinds of teaching fads—active learning, team-based learning, alternative grading, service learning, etc. You might assume that I have become a better teacher over these many years. Yet I am noticing a curious trend in my course evaluations: Some of my students like me and my courses less and less.

As a teaching faculty member, this matters greatly to my own career trajectory, and so I’ve wondered and worried about what to do. Why am I struggling to teach well and why are my students struggling to learn?

Looking back on the past two decades of my teaching and reaching further back into my own college experience, I see six clear differences between now and then.

Let us count the ways.

1.  Access to information.
2.  Attention. 
3.  More Lectures, Please.
4.  Sense of Entitlement.
5.  Assessment Confusion.
6.  Our Students are Struggling.

Her lament about access to information includes a telling phrase.

Today, my students show up in my course often having taken AP Environmental Science, with access to unlimited information about the course topics, and with AI assistants that will help them organize their notes, write their essays and prepare for exams. I have had to shift from expert to curator, spending hours sifting through online articles, podcasts (SO many podcasts) and videos, instead of relying on a single textbook. I look for content that will engage students, knowing that some may also spend their class period fact-checking my lectures.

It's called course preparation.  Textbooks are so obsessively edited and revised that any one of them is probably equally bad, which is why a good course outline will have supplemental readings, and any good opening to the course will include advice on how students might best learn to distinguish the useful from the nonsensical.  The professor's job is to recognize the basis of the most popular arguments, and to ask questions of students posing more obscure arguments.  And class participation becomes fact-checking?  Is she teaching, or issuing position papers?

And those fads of the past twenty years?  The "guide on the side" might as well be the floorwalker at the store.  "My students seemed not to see the value of small-group activities, gallery walks, interactive data exercises and discussions. They felt that they were not learning as much, and some of them assumed that meant that I didn’t know as much."  That might have turned them into the incompetent grade-grubbers we have always had with us.

While I teach at a private elite university, my colleagues across a range of institutions have backed this up: Some students seem to not have much respect for faculty. The most common way this shows up is at the end of the semester, when students send me emails about why my course policies resulted in a grade they think is unfair, or after an exam, when they argue that I did not grade them fairly.

Yes, and it tends to be the least-engaged students that spend the most time whingeing.  There's value in noting "If you'd devote half the time you do to whingeing to working on the material, you'd be so proficient you wouldn't have to whinge."  The deanlets, though, have lost sight of the mission.

Then, two things happened. We faculty got all excited about alternative assessments, trying to make our classes more inclusive for more learning styles. And the students started rebelling about their exam grades, nitpicking our grading for a point here and there, angry that, as one student put it, I was “ruthless” in my grading. Students didn’t show up at my office hours eager to understand the concepts—they wanted more points.

And that learned helplessness probably contributes to the emotional fragility of Dukies.

We all know that our students are struggling with more mental and emotional health issues, perhaps due to COVID-related learning loss, the state of the world and so many other things. Many of us include mental health resources in our syllabus, but we know that’s not enough. Students are much more open about their struggles with us, but we aren’t trained therapists and often don’t know the right thing to say. Who am I to determine whether or not one student’s excuse for missing a class is valid while another’s is not? How can I keep extending the deadlines for a struggling student while keeping the deadline firm for the rest? Sure, there are suggestions for this (e.g., offer everyone a “late assignment” ticket to use), but I still spend a lot of time sifting through student email requests for extensions and understanding. How can we be fair to all of our students while maintaining the rhythm of course expectations?

Life has always sucked, and it will always end.  When you enable helplessness, you get more of it, and there is fairness in being tough on everybody.  All those "struggling students" do is drag everyone else's performance down, and that eventually drags Duke's reputation down.  "Ultimately, it will come down to market tests. What good does it do for Ashley to find some good catch at a prestige school, only to discover that all the cum laude in the world doesn't keep them both on Daddy's health insurance and in Mommy's basement well into their twenties?"