[lbo-talk] teaching the pampered rich at Harvard

Joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Jul 22 22:28:55 PDT 2008


Yes, I had a friend who taught at Stanford for about twelve years. Toward the end, she got called in a couple of times for giving a few C+s. It was patiently explained to her that kids didn't come to Stanford to get C+s and that she should straighten up or ship out.

Oh, and she was paid almost nothing. I was very, very happy to get her a job at Apple.

I did not run into any of this "entitlement" at UC Berkeley, University of Santa Clara (catholic), or SUNY Plattsburgh in the late eighties. But it was true that the SUNY kids were very uncomfortable with calling me anything but doctor or professor. My sense of that was they felt it to be a mark of respect, but also that it raised their own status that they were dealing with doctors and professors. I might suspect that it had something to do with my colleagues at SUNY being hysterical about their status (which they were), but I also remember how reverently my grandparents spoke of "professors" -- and this was not from any pressure -- in Romania it seemed that academia constituted a kind of aristocracy.

Joanna



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