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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover to find out why her students kept sleeping in her class. She learned some very strange lessons.
Sep 13, 2005 | After 15 years of teaching anthropology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Cathy Small was feeling more out of place as a college professor than she had when she studied social stratification on a remote Polynesian island. Befuddled by a student population that seemed increasingly disrespectful and uninterested, Small decided that the best way to understand her students (and improve her teaching) was to become a university freshman herself.
So, in fall of 2002, when she was 52, Small enrolled at NAU, moved into a dorm, signed up for a meal plan, handed over her faculty parking pass, and told family and friends that she wanted to be as lonely and homesick as the typical freshman, and thus wouldn't be able to hang out much during the school year. Assuming that students and professors would treat her differently if they knew about her study, Small constructed a persona for herself: Hoping that people wouldn't push her for more specific information, she became a writer with an undeclared major, "born and bred in New York," who was at school to "see what college was like." With few exceptions, she didn't disclose that she was an anthropology professor at that very university.
For one year, Small took classes, hung out in the student lounge (where she once got busted by the R.A. for drinking beer), participated in pickup volleyball games, and asked her fellow students a lot of questions. In addition to her own "undercover" observations, she pored over research and conducted formal interviews with more than 50 students, over half of whom eventually figured out that she was a professor at their school. Those "informed" students signed consent forms saying they could be quoted, though not by name. Small says that she didn't quote anyone who knew her only as a fellow student, but that she did use the observations she made while undercover to formulate questions to her informed interviewees.
The result is "My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student." To protect the privacy of her students and her university, Small published the book under a pseudonym, Rebekah Nathan, and referred to NAU as "AnyU." In an afterword on ethics and ethnography, Small wrote, "I certainly would have preferred to put my real name on my work, and I am not terribly worried about the possibility that, in time, that information will come to light. But for now, while student friends are still in school ... this affords another level of both ambiguity and privacy."
Or so she thought. Two weeks before the book's Sept. 1 publication date, an article appeared in the New York Sun in which journalist Jacob Gershman correctly surmised that "AnyU's" Rebekah Nathan was really NAU's Cathy Small. Media outlets around the country jumped on the story, and Small's project sparked numerous debates about the ethics of going undercover at a university, about the intellectual laziness of college students, and about Small's career motives for writing the book.
Salon spoke with Small last week over coffee in a Manhattan cafe.
Your main reason for embarking on this project was that you felt out of touch with your students, that they had become "increasingly confusing" to you. What was confusing about their behavior?
They would eat in the middle of my lecture -- sometimes a full meal. Or someone would put their head down on the table and sleep. The primary questions I got in class would be, "Is it going to be on the test?" "Should this be double-spaced?" I would be careful to have plenty of office hours at convenient times and then sit in my office waiting, and no one would ever come.
So you decided the best way to learn about students was to become one.
I felt like I was looking at students as if they were Martians, or from a different culture. Given that I'm an anthropologist, I knew the best way to get insight about a different culture was to go and live like them. Not just by talking to them or observing them, but becoming them and seeing what I came up against.
You seemed disappointed to learn that students don't really discuss the content of their courses outside of class -- you write that more frequent topics are "bodies, bodily functions, and body image," relationships, personal history, pop culture, alcohol and drug experiences. When they did talk about class, it was to complain about the amount of work, compare grades and test answers, and assess their professors attractiveness or likability. Did this really surprise you?
There is an awful lot of conversation about nonacademic, nonpolitical, nonphilosophical things, but I saw something very interesting also. Anyone who said they did have a philosophical conversation might qualify it, like, "Yeah, we were really drunk that night, so we got into all this deep philosophical stuff," or "Yeah, sometimes I get into this dorky mood and then I talk about deep topics." When you hear that as an anthropologist, you think the students are responding to a criticism that isn't even being made, that is in their head.
What do you mean? What's the criticism?
Students don't like to sound like they're trying too hard. That's what I would see in the pre-class conversations. You know, "How'd you do?" "Pretty good. I got an A, but I barely studied." Or "I did well, but it's amazing, because I thought I totally bombed this." You have to seem like [success] is effortless, or like you haven't put a lot of work into it. And that becomes part of the culture. I think a lot of students want to have [more substantial conversations], but they don't feel comfortable doing so.
Do you think that is specific to your university? Northern Arizona University is a fourth-tier, non-elite public university that, you write, draws most of its students from within the state. Do you think students at, say, Yale, are having more intellectually passionate discussions in and out of class?
I absolutely don't. I think AnyU is "any U." I've had conversations with someone from Duke, for example, who said the exact same thing: "You can't seem like you're trying too hard. You don't want to make out like you're dorky and that you spend all your time studying or that you're really into a certain topic." I really think this holds true across the board.
