Dissertation Idea

Okay, so it’s a little early to think about a dissertation (hello, Faith In Five Years!) but I’ve been inspired by a book I just read: Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year. Nathan – a pseudonym – was a professor or anthropology at a large state university, and felt that she was disconnected from her students. They fell asleep in class, didn’t do the reading, and basically didn’t seem to care much about school. So she decided to investigate undergraduate culture from their point of view – she moved into a dorm and enrolled for a full freshman courseload.

I greatly admire Nathan’s ambition. In fact, this is something I can say for anthropological ethnographers that I can’t say for composition ethnographers – they put themselves out there. They take risks. I would love to do a project like this, except instead of aiming to discover all of undergraduate culture, I would be more interested in learning about how the freshman experience relates to student writing. How does the freshman composition course compare to the other courses the students are taking? How does the intellectual activity of writing fit in with their other activities? Where does comp fall in their list of priorities? Nathan took five classes with five professors and three teaching assistants, which meaning that in one semester there were eight people making rules and structuring her day. It’s little wonder that students feel overwhelmed trying to meet so many different expectations. Since writing is always “for an audience” I wonder how these different demands influence students’ writing as well.
Nathan discusses some interesting ethical issues she faced: with very few exceptions, she didn’t reveal her true identity. She even paid for the whole thing herself so she wouldn’t have to turn over her notes to anyone. I think I would have an advantage over also be able to pass for a freshman, whereas Nathan was in her fifties. I wonder, however, if I’m not distanced enough from the culture to see it objectively.

Some of Nathan’s insights:

Students are working more than they ever have (or have had to) in the past, and their jobs not only take up a large part of their time but also play a large role in their social lives. A student once told me that she kept missing my class because she had to work late and this made her either (1) tired or (2) sick. And she had to work forty hours a week to pay for school. Though I sympathized, I wondered why she was working so hard to pay for classes she didn’t go to.

Nathan believes that the lack of “community” on typical college campuses (e.g. poorly attended hall events) stems from the overabundance of competing options as to how students can spend their time. She explains “it is hard to create a community when the sheer number of options in college life generate a system in which no one is in the same place at the same time” (38. Students can choose where to live, their major, their extracurriculars, their classes, where to eat, what to do with their free time, where to study, etc. This has gotten to the point where just because you go to the same school as someone doesn’t mean you have anything in common. She writes, “Seen from the level of the institution, ‘community’ is a lofty ideal but with few common activities, rituals, or even symbols to bind together its diverse inhabitants” (40).

Besides work friends, students also seem to form networks based on “shared circumstances and shared demographics” rather than “personality” (57). I thought this happened just at UW because classes were so large, but she reports that in her research “classroom contacts figured relatively little into the social networks of students” (57). In fact, “the most significant relationships are formed either before college or either very early on in one’s college career, most often in some shared affiliation, whether voluntary or not, such as freshman dorm assignment, special freshman summer program, ROTC, ethnic club, or sorority and fraternity rush” (58).

She has some great ideas about why students are hesitant to speak in class. “Equality” is an unconscious norm of the classroom, meaning that students strive not to be “too noticeable . . . It is fine to do well in a class, performing better than others, but only if you do it unobtrusively” (91). She links this to campus activism that doesn’t engage in dialogue with anyone, despite its attempt to be “in your face.” I was thinking of Bascom Hill at UW-Madison, which was variously littered with signs, crosses, pink flamingoes, all in the vague name of “awareness-raising.” Nathan calls these “assertion without direct dialogue, an ‘in your face’ argument without a real face at the other end” (96).

Nathan also points to the depressing reality that “academic life is tangential or at odds with peer culture,” which as been a finding of many studies of campus culture. When she wandered the halls of the dorm, students were talking about sex or boys or drinking. Aside from meetings, like those for group projects, “none of the talk . . . concerned either the substantive content of a class or any other topic that might be labeled academic or intellectual” (99). This also offers an explanation for why students don’t seem to think it’s a big deal to miss class or not do their work. If academic isn’t the number one priority in their lives, it makes sense to them that going home for Easter or being sick or drinking with their friends is a good reason skip school. She said that one of her most sobering insights was that intellectual life just didn’t matter that much in college.

Ultimately, Nathan argues that college needs to be a site of “liminality” or a rite of passage for students. In order to do so, it must resist the world, which is becoming more market-driven (hence the multitude of options for students. She says, “we would not want a university to become so immersed in the world that it can neither critique that world nor proffer an ideal vision of how else it might be” (153).