In the past, I’ve talked about how prejudiced faculty members can be a barrier for students who are just trying to get through college without having to experience racism or sexism or whatever. But here is another piece: what happens when students alienate faculty members?
So, I used to go to a very “intellectually-rigorous” school; the student body was mainly composed of white upper-class individuals. Many were genuinely smart people who cared about intellectual discourse, but there were definitely some people whose parents had bought them education and schooling. One semester, I signed up for a course in African History that covered the slave trade, colonialism, and modern-day post-colonial issues. My class was pretty typical of the rest of the university: white upper-class prep-school graduates.
The professor was the chair of the department, and he had a PhD in the medical history of an African region (which I won’t name because I want to maintain my privacy). He had been studying African History for thirty or so years, and he had actually grown up in Africa, so I definitely respected his knowledge and range of experiences. One of my friends who had taken one of his classes said that he was very good at bringing in all of his knowledge and experiences – for instance, he told stories about the atrocities that colonizers had forced his grandparents to do, and then he’d tie it back to the lesson. So I was looking forward to the class.
However, from the very first day, many of the students acted as if they had superior knowledge to him. They were smart enough to get into this elite school, so they acted as if they were the smartest people in the world – which is a common problem at Ivy-League type schools. It’s just insulting how little they respected his expertise – it’s like a group of first-graders thinking that they are smarter than their teacher. Even if the student is naturally bright, the teacher still has more experience.
I don’t know if the students realized just how prejudiced and rude they were being, but they often would just keep carrying on the discussion among themselves instead of letting the professor chime in – they’d often talk over him, too. They would talk about their interpretation of the text, which was often full of racist and inaccurate notions that had absolutely no basis in fact. And they would often disrespect the terminology that my professor had outlined at the start of the semester – for instance, he pointed out that it is offensive to call African countries or ethnic groups ‘tribes’ because of the association of African peoples with primitive peoples, but the students would constantly say “tribe” in a context where it was not appropriate.
On the last day of class, our professor just didn’t moderate the discussion at all. He just sat back and let all the white kids say crap about Africa. That discussion was pretty horrible.
Throughout that entire semester, it was clear that the students’ unconscious or conscious racism – “black men are unarticulate and unintelligent” – was leaking through and affecting the class. It was awful. I had no idea how to handle it at the time. I ended up not doing anything, which I probably wouldn’t do today. Our professor often seemed weary in class, as if he dreaded coming to class – and, honestly, with that hostile attitude of the students, I don’t blame him.
It was disappointing because he couldn’t share his knowledge and expertise and experience. I did learn a lot from that class – for instance, we had to read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, which caused me to completely rethink the relationship between Europe / the US and Africa. But I really wish that my fellow students could have respected my professor enough to let him share the knowledge that he had gained over his life of studying African history.
