A learning experience
TO BETTER understand her students, Cathy Small, an anthropology professor at Northern Arizona University, did what she has done so many times in villages in Tonga: She lived among the people. But this time, the village was her university campus in Flagstaff, and the field work involved enrolling as an undergraduate and moving into a dorm.
The resulting book, ''My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student" -- published this month by Cornell University Press -- is an insightful, riveting look at college life and American values.
Writing under the pseudonym ''Rebekah Nathan" and calling the school ''AnyU," she reveals a world where students are often exhausted from overloaded academic schedules combined with jobs to pay off mounting college debts. She describes students ignorant about geography and ethnic diversity. They live in a culture that does not encourage freewheeling political or philosophical discussion but rewards pragmatic souls who want to know what is going to be on the quiz.
One of the most troubling quotes comes from a star student who said the key to success was figuring out what the professor wanted to hear. ''If you write what you want to that prof, you're gonna end up with a bad grade," the student is quoted as saying. ''Whereas if you write to them, you win."
What happened to the give and take of intellectual debate? What if the professor is just plain wrong? Small, who got her undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1971, said in a phone interview that there is a lot less questioning of authority now, and a sense ''that you are negotiating through a system."
Her findings should appall educators whose goals should be to light the fires of critical thinking in young minds. She has heard from colleges and educational organizations that are taking her book to heart and looking at changing campus culture. Northern Arizona University is doing the same.
Small's book has blasted out of what had been expected to fill a quiet educational research niche and is in its fourth printing. Neither author nor publisher envisioned national attention for what Small described as ''a personal quest."
She didn't expect to be hammered in pre-publication criticism for posing as a student, either -- criticism that she said has cooled since the book came out. Small documents her scrupulous attention to protecting students' privacy, her statements to students that she was doing research, her securing of written consent for interviews. She said she was following standard protocol in her field by disguising the identity of school and did not expect a New York Sun reporter to ferret it, and her, out.
Such is the tenacity of the press. Here's hoping academia will be as tenacious about reinvigorating the joy of learning.
