Personal Irresponsibility on Campus.
This was written for Campus Magazine online
I finished my undergraduate degree in 1999 and having returned to the same University for work and graduate school, I’m amazed at how things have changed. As a side benefit of working for the University, you can take any class you want free of charge. I have been extremely free in using this benefit.
However, I learned very quickly that undergraduate courses were a waste of time. Not because of the material presented but because of the teaching methods. Most classes offer gratuitous amounts of extra credit and assign group projects with abandon. In the first case, this permits students to avoid feeling the full brunt of their excess drinking by allowing them to “make up” for poor performance with busy work. In the second case, it allows for students who would care not to do the work to be carried along by those who do care about their grades. In both cases, the bottom-feeders are not compelled to feel the full force of personal responsibility.
It’s easy to blame the administration for treating students like children, however that might not be entirely fair. Many students simply refuse to take responsibility for themselves and they are looking for the University to be their “momma.” They’ve spent years being told that every problem is someone else’s responsibility in the public schools. Sex Ed is a great example. If you can’t manage to get to the corner Walgreen’s and buy a pack of condoms for yourself, perhaps you ought not be having sex. Instead, the schools say “well here you go; we know that that trip of a few miles is too much so we’ll give you condoms instead. Thank the American taxpayer.”
Another example is all the complaining that university tuition is so expensive, it seems that all students are looking for is a handout for someone else to pay the bill. Granted, I don’t pay tuition now, but I did make sure my tuition was covered when I was an undergraduate. The primary beneficiary of a college education is the degree recipient. It’s almost a guarantee of higher earning in life. Why shouldn’t they pay?
I few short years ago I managed to pay the entire bill myself without help from my parents. Yes, that involved loans. Loans which accrue interest at a rate below inflation, and even that interest is tax deductible. My loan payment is roughly $100 a month on $20,000. That’s hardly insurmountable.
By the time some students arrive at college, they are incapable of taking care of themselves. Binge drinking and fornication are just signs of this. The University of Illinois has an annual tradition of “unofficial St. Patrick’s Day” which is little more than an annual campus binge drinking session. (The actual St. Patrick’s Day usually falls during Spring Break). Last year, a young woman died because her boyfriend was driving his motorcycle drunk and she fell off the back of it.
As a result of the incident, the University and local towns started to investigate ways to curtail the rampant drunkenness. In the aftermath, the student group that sponsored the event “Irish Illini” was suspended by the University. The bars will likely be forced to open later and close earlier. It isn’t likely that the current alcohol laws will be enforced on the revelers.
In all this, the University fails to recognize that the direct cause is that students are given the ability to act like children and misbehave without consequences. Until the University, inside and outside the classroom, insists that students behave like adults and be responsible for themselves students will continue to behave like children and get themselves killed. Is this the legacy the University wants to send into the working world?
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Hear, hear!
When I began teaching at a business school, everybody told me, “business students are a different breed, you’ll see,” and frankly, I thought it was nonsense.
My first academic year, however, was enough to show that they had been right, and I had been wrong.
Business students have their own set of problems, but they are, indeed, very different from your garden variety university student. They’re highly competitive, they work like dogs, they display little sense of entitlement, they’re driven, and they will often (not always) take responsibility for their own failures.
The point of all this is that after being at a business school all these years, the contrast when confronted with liberal arts students is, well, just depressing. Even if it were an option, I could not go back to dealing with those students. No way. I’d be in the Dean’s office in no time if I did.
Comment by rightwingprof | October 7, 2006