You know how I know this is a cut-throat program? The other day in class - and this is a lecture with around 150 people in it, including every person in my program, the two directors of the program, and our preceptors (PhD students who lead our discussion groups) - we were talking about a play we had all gone to see, and the lecturer asked something along the lines of, "What do you think the director was trying to do by staging the play in such a way that it blurred the lines between the time in which it was written and present-day?" A woman raised her hand and responded something like this: "I think she was trying to make us realize the importance and relevance of the play for a modern audience, to help us understand that the themes apply to our culture, not just that of Roman times."
Okay, now, I know enough not to give this response. It's the easy response to "Why are the arts important?" But it could just as easily have been a question to which I didn't know the answer, and thought I did. This woman could have been me.
The lecturer said, smiling, "Well, um, any time someone makes a comment like that I - like Nietzsche said - I reach for my gun," and he made the blowing-my-brains-out gesture. But that wasn't what made me realize that no one here cares about any other person's success or well being. It was this: Almost everyone in the lecture hall laughed. I could feel humiliation burning my tear ducts and my temples, turning my face red. I can't imagine that that did anything less than break that woman's spirit. I watched her for the rest of the class, and she kept shaking her head at what he was saying, with a sneer on her face, and making comments to the person sitting next to her, loud enough so that I could hear. Things like, "That's not what he said before."
I'm just going to keep my head down, write my papers, and only raise my hand if I'm sure I know the answer.
2 comments:
wow... what an absolute douchebag.
i am really glad you are on the track you're on, because i think you can be so much better at relating to college students than him. i'm convinced you'll be a great professor one day.
Thanks, I definitely hope to be a better teacher than that guy. That's important to me, but it's not important to him, and I'm fine with that. I don't expect him to care; that's not what he's here for.
But he's not even the problem, for me. The problem is that this is a program that operates on fear. The message is, Yes, you got into this school, but barely. You don't deserve to be here, even though you're paying more money, per year, than almost any other student here. Because that's exactly what got you in, the fact that you're sucker enough to have paid to be here. You will take whatever we give you, even if it's humiliation, because you're lucky we're even allowing you to sit in our classes, and even luckier that two professors are dedicating an entire quarter to teach you things you'll never understand.
The reason everyone in the class laughed is the same reason no one told me they spilled coffee all over my stuff: they're afraid of being singled out. Our status in this school is lower than anyone else's because we only get to be here for one year. Enough time to scramble and put together a thesis that might be good enough to get us into another school (or this one, if we can take the punishment).
I feel fortunate to have recognized their tactics for what they are, because by doing so, it completely loses its power. The joke is on them: I get this school's name on my resume, I get letters of recommendation from respected professors, and I get to participate in classes at one of the best schools in the country.
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