Defining Professor-Student Relationships

In today’s post on his blog “Durham in Wonderland,” Prof. Johnson takes the “Group of 88” to task for their role in the Duke Lacrosse case. Citing their “listening statement” published in the Duke Chronicle in the first of April (this statement seems to no longer be available on the web), Johnson goes on to single out professors for their comments -- or lack thereof -- on the case.

At the heart of this post is an understanding about the basic relationship between students and faculty. As illustrated in this comment, “I know of no other criminal case in which the statements and behavior of the students’ own professors constituted grounds for a change of venue,” the students’ “own professors” have a responsibility toward their students, one that was betrayed by the listening statement.

It is first worth noting that the professors that signed the listening statement did understand their relationship with their students similarly, though they thought that it called for a different response, one attentive to the concerns of a different subset of students: in writing the statement, they hoped to stand up for women and minorities that felt silenced or otherwise marginalized in the student body, several of whom were anonymously quoted in the ad. (Again, I’m sorry that this statement seems no longer to exist, for as a touchstone for the controversy it is worth a second look and close reading.)

But a larger issue that this post itself has implicitly raised -- as has the controversy surrounding the case itself -- is what relationship should the university have with its students? How should the faculty of a university treat its students? What things should students expect from faculty, and faculty students?

There are some easy immediate answers to these questions -- respect on all sides, of course, goodwill and the like -- but the larger structural relationship is hard to define. Should universities adopt an in loco parentis relationship toward their students, as was historically the case? Or do contemporary models of student-as-consumer offer more appropriate cues? Still further, how is this relationship complicated in the age of the “helicopter parent”?

There are obviously legal ramifications to these questions, some of which are reverberating through the Duke Lacrosse scandal. But there are also institutional and pedagogical questions that go to the heart of the college experience that deserve some examination: bent on providing a positive college experience and bound to offer a rigorous scholarly curriculum, what responsibilities does a college faculty have toward their students? What (if any) responsibilities do students have to their professors? What about students toward their peers? Or professors to other faculty members?

All too often the professor-student relationship is covered over with the hazy word “mentorship,” a word that is defined in a number of conflicting ways and with a variety of possible interpretations. At root, it seems to be a kind of in loco germanitas (“in place of brother/sister”: excuse me for some made-up Latin), where the professor serves as a kind of older sibling to the student, one with a weight of moral obligations that go beyond the basic legal connotations of the relationship. As such, while the professor is professionally and legally responsible for providing certain educational training, they are also understood to be morally bound to extend a number of extra-educational services to the student, such as being a role-model, offering academic and professional guidance, being available for personal consultation, and generally serving as a kind of scholarly older brother or sister for the student.

In many ways this is good, as mentorship acknowledges the way in which education takes place across a number of different relationships, some less purely academic. Thus, it implicitly defines education and learning as activities that transpire throughout the wide spectrum of collegiate activities, ones that cannot be reduced to the classroom, lab, or library. This is excellent, of course, as one of the purposes of higher education is to cultivate in students a thirst for learning that permeates every aspect of his or her life, and that moves far beyond the all-too-rigid confines of the university campus.

But the question remains: how far can this relationship be drawn? To what extent is the professor responsible for the behavior of his or her students? To what extent can the student expect professor oversight? At what point does oversight become meddling? To what degree are professors beholden to their students?

These seem the questions that underlie Prof. Johnson’s blog, as the 88 professors who signed the listening statement are criticized not only for their views, but more importantly because they are professors, and specifically professors at Duke. Taking, for a moment, Prof. Johnson’s assertion (and, by extension, those of his many anonymous commentators) that these professors somehow failed Duke’s students, can we use this incident to define how we see student-faculty-administration-community interaction at the university? This case shows that this issue has immediate and important ramifications: possibly its time to revisit some of these structural discussions.

I hope to do just this in my future writing. I think that the fact that the "listening statement" has provoked such a impassioned response is evidence enough that this relationship is not always understood similarly on all sides of the issue. In short, the reaction against the 88 professors seems to be as much because they 'betrayed' 'their' students as for the anything else they might have said. Anger over the possible inaccuracies of the statement or -- even worse -- a perception that it might be convicting then-unindicted players in the court of social opinion (even at a time when few facts of the case were publicly known), is easy to understand; anger over 'betrayal' seems to point toward an understanding of how professors are supposed to relate to their students that deserves further investigation.

[Edit: After some more poking around I found a saved copy of the 'Listening Statement' here. Knock yourself out.]