Slow Professor: Challenging The Culture Of The University

In “College Pressures” written by William Zinsser, the author analyzes the stress that college students faced in the late 1970’s, centering his attention on four

In “ College Pressures,” William Zinsser discusses four types of pressures college students go through. Even though he wrote this in 1978, college students today still experience all four of the pressures. The four pressures Zinsser discusses are economic, parental, peer, and self-induced. Today’s college students are becoming more and more disconnected with their passions and are being thrown into the world of practicality. College should be a place of experimentation and discovery, but instead it’s turned into feelings of stress and fear. students are becoming overwhelmed and stressed with the same “economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure and self-induced pressure” Zinsser speaks of in his essay. College students today undergo even more then the college students from Zinssers ' time.

Mark Edmundson, the author of “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”, is an English teacher at the University of Virginia who expresses his concerns about the trajectory of the universities and colleges in America. Edmundson depicts how college students today have “little fire, little passion to be found,” towards their classes (4). In an effort to find the source of this lack of passion, Edmundson describes contacting other professors about this issue while refining his own ideas. Ultimately, Edmundson comes to a conclusion. He believes that the consumer mindset of college students has hindered American universities as a whole. My target audience is my professor, Professor Chezik. Looking closely at his wording, formation of sentences, and idea structure, one can see a recurring theme throughout Edmundson’s essay. Edmundson uses fragments, specifically at the beginning of his paragraphs, to start his point, pose counter arguments, and to have a poetic refrain.

College pressures dominate our lives. They begin to levitate around us and slowly derail our lives. William Zinsser elaborates about the college pressures that modern generations are facing. He reveals multiple commonalities that the typical college student encounters on a daily basis. Zinsser states, “They want a map-right now-that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security, and presumably, a prepaid grave” (12). He is spot on, the pressures demand my attention and won’t take no for an answer. So far I’ve gone head to head with these pressures every day since I started my freshman year in college. For the time that I’ve been here, my mind is overwhelmed and distraught with the amount of stress that gets piled on top of me every single day. I drown in these unrealistic expectations written in those faulty suggestion bars about how to be successful in college and college 101 tips. College pressures surround me like a dull gray cloud. It showers me with expectations and unfinished checklists. College itself is similar to carpooling to hell and back, but with no actual guarantee with a ride back.

Lukianoff and Haidt explain that the new trend in censoring what is said and taught in classrooms are slowly institutionalizing how professors and administrators

Unfortunately, notwithstanding poet Louisa Fletcher's desire to start over, colleges and universities in the United States will not at any time soon access the Land of Beginning Again. Those institutions must enact meaningful change transitions from where they exist today, and there is much change that is needed. To wit, innovator and strategic management consultant Fred Buining asserts that higher education is in the "eye of the hurricane," which means that leaders, scholars, and educators are not doing enough to meet the challenges they face. Buining suggests that there is "no critical mass" in terms of the changes that are needed in higher education. Moreover, he believes that while today's student in colleges and universities are getting younger the professors and instructors are getting older, issues like cultural diversity and commercialization threaten institutions of higher learning. This paper reviews and critiques scholarly sources that address issues of diversity and commercialization on college and university campuses. Thesis: colleges and universities are in many respects becoming very much like corporations, and this is truly the wrong direction for higher education

Washington University. Columbia. University of Pennsylvania. Harvard. Brown. Yale. It’s no surprise that these top-ranking, prestigious schools also rank among the nation’s most stressful universities. Stories surrounding these schools spread like wildfire, reporting of students committing suicide, or dropping out of school due to the overwhelming expectations set for them. This is the life of one particular Columbia University student, Nayla Kidd, who decided to escape a life of stress. This past April and May, completely cutting herself off from outside contact, Kidd staged a “disappearance” in order to isolate herself from school and pursue a nontraditional lifestyle. Overnight, she became an example for students everywhere, inspiring them to life the lives they want instead of conforming to what society wants them to be. Though difficult to see amongst

In his book Why Teach?, Mark Edmundson constructs an argument about the paradoxical consumer culture surrounding education. The Virginian professor takes a stance on the problems that he has both experienced in his own classroom and observed on campuses, and he approaches each problem in turn, making significant claims which are assigned appropriate blames. His essay, “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment,” originally published in 1997, is broken into six sections and begins with his experience at his own university before branching out to all those across the country. Following this is a deduction of student culture as well as professors. He gives hope to the idea of the acceptance and praising of “genius” (as opposed to the alienation students endorse so well) towards the end of his essay, narrowing his argument down to a more specific change that could possibly cause a domino effect from individual students to universities across America. The scale of the situation is much too large to be easily fixed, and it is clear that Edmundson’s purpose in writing this essay is to inform those who are engulfed in the academic world. More specifically, it seems, he targets professors and higher-level students, and even possibly their parents. By singling out these people and making the problem of consumer culture in universities known to those who care exponentially about educating the youth, it is much more likely that Edmundson’s argument will trickle down to said youth in the process

In the Martin’s article, Jerry Martin discussed the “The degree to which professors feel compelled to refrain from saying in public things they say (to their best friends) in private is extraordinary. It can only be compared to how intellectuals behave in dictatorships.” Politically right discourse approaches don't permit teachers to express disputable assessments on touchy and essential parties, confining understudies from empowering and facilitating uninhibited talk inside of the classroom environment and eventually vitiating scholarly opportunity. By undermining the vocations of teachers, with or without residency, who don't consent to the politically remedy philosophy, college organizations warrant a title generally connected with tyrannies.

In this essay, “Other Voices, Other Rooms”, Professor Gerald Graff offers that education at a university could be exciting and rewarding for students. However, it applies to those who have developed the skills at summarizing, weighing arguments and synthesizing conflicting points. Unfortunately, not all students possess these skills and as they start getting confused they will care more about appeasing the professor in order to obtain good grades. In return, they will give their professors whatever they want even though it seems contradictory to their beliefs (339). Graff believes that not all college students possess the skills necessary to be successful and that professors are only making the issue worse by teaching in a vacuum.

The reason why people go to a college or a university is because they want to further their education. However, this cannot always happen because professors at many colleges and universities are less focused on teaching and more focused on research. The documentary explains that the reason professors are focusing on research more than teaching is because the professors want to receive tenure. Tenure is a permanent job contract granted to professors who accomplish extensive research under the name of the university he or she teaches at. As a result of wanting rewards such as tenure, professors are too busy working research instead of focusing on their students. Brian Strow, Assistant Professor of Economics at Western Kentucky

With an increased demand for skilled labors, many students nowadays find themselves needing to complete some form of higher education at college to ensure their success in the workplace and their future career goals. Although freshmen students often enter college with high expectations and ambitions, many eventually drop out of college. Why does that happen? In an ever-changing and more competitive environment, the demanding expectations on college students now soar at unprecedented heights, creating stressful and unpleasant experiences for many of them as they try to keep up with all the burdens inflicted upon them. In their writings, Dr. Christine B. Whelan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alan Schwartz, and Nisha Ramachandran explore and illustrate some of the stress-creating challenges that freshmen struggle with today. Even though many factors contribute to the huge list of problems for first-year students, many of the problems that create stress for college freshmen fall under the categories of academic factors, (what adverb to add) teachers, and personal-life conflicts.

Corrupt college professors are ruining students’ chances of getting a quality education. Students will typically get that hunch that a professor might be out the get them, but in reality those professors are actually out to get the whole student body. When these decrepit professors are in the classroom, they are not hip on modern teaching methods. This is detrimental to a student who just needs a quality education to keep up with the competitive working world that we have come to today. The article “Dear Students: Don’t Let College Unplug Your Future” is an effective argument to convince incoming freshmen at Brigham Young University and current BYU freshmen not to let the academic tradition get in the way of their learning by the use of allusions, colloquial diction, anecdotes and humor to establish a bond of trust between himself and the reader.

Stress is no new phenomenon. It’s been around as long as man and has captivated scholars and physicians alike. With the growing demand for degrees in the professional world comes the growth of the number of college students. The relationship between stress and college students has become the subject of on-going research. Several studies show that stress in college students is increasing with time and the authors of those studies are attributing this to an increased number of students. Other research seems to indicate that it isn’t necessarily the stress that is increasing but the awareness of it. Increased awareness of stress, and its unique toll on individuals, allows colleges and students to recognize

Psychological stress is pressure placed on a person to adapt, cope, or adjust to a situation (Rathus, 2016, p.284). The result of prolonged stress can affect a person’s mood, pleasure experience, and have harmful effects on physical health (Rathus, 2016, p.284). Society in the twenty first century places high demands on people. Technology makes it very difficult to separate work life, school life, and home life. Today, society places a high value on a busy lifestyle for individuals. For example, many places of business are open twenty-four hours a day. In addition to societal pressures, attending a university adds to the stressors a person may experience. Going to school not only includes classroom time but it also includes homework,