Flagstaff, Ariz. – If you’re an anthropologist and you want to understand an alien culture, the place to be is in “the field,” as they say.
Which is how Cathy Small, a 50-something professor at a large public university, found herself three years ago this month hauling a laptop, a TV and other must-haves to the dorm, standing alongside hall-mates in a shower line and scrambling to find classrooms on the campus where she has taught for more than 15 years.
Over the years, she says, she had grown disconnected from students.
Why, for example, did no one come to office hours? Why didn’t they bother with assigned readings? Why did some kids eat entire meals in her class? To find out, she took a sabbatical and enrolled in her university.
Now, she chronicles her observations – under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan – in the soon-to-be-released “My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student” (Cornell University Press), a first-person account of student culture today.
Small, who teaches at Northern Arizona University, used her real name throughout her freshman-year experience but says she chose a pseudonym for the book to protect the privacy of her subjects.
The experience, she says, has made her a better professor.
And oh, what many a parent might have given to have walked in her shoes that year. She was privy 24/7 to the sights and sounds of college life, from the ubiquitous beep-
beep of video games to bathroom graffiti to late-night bull sessions.
Yes, she saw plenty of behavior that gives college students a bad name: drinking, cheating and political apathy. But overall, she says, she developed a greater affection and respect for students. “And the more I knew the students, the more I felt that way,” Small says.
The age gap presented few barriers. In fact, she got the idea for her project after auditing a few courses and finding that classmates readily included her in conversations.
Though the author avoids judgments, her anthropological eye quickly noticed contradictions between popular perceptions of college students and what happens in real life:
Students, especially young men, like that wild-and-crazy image – their dorms were peppered with jokey references to alcohol, sex and parties. But daily life was far more mundane. “On a typical weeknight, more than half of dorm residents were in bed by 11:30 p.m.,” she writes.
It is uncool to appear to care about academics. (Overheard: “I mean, when are you ever gonna use Nietzsche at a cocktail party?”) Yet in intimate settings, they demonstrate a stronger commitment to studies.
Though students showed little interest in politics, “My Freshman Year” suggests they aren’t so much apathetic or lazy as pragmatic and busy.
