Undercover at AnyU

My Freshman Year is the tale of an anthropology professor who decides to learn more about the student perspective by immersing herself as a new student at her own university. For a sabbatical research project, Rebekah Nathan (the author’s pseudonym) applies to her own institution (referred to as AnyU) using her high school transcripts. She is admitted, moves into the dorms, attends orientation, signs up for a standard load of five classes (not in any way connected to her field), does the work, makes friends, and observes everything very closely when she’s not bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. (Yes, she did get IRB approval and includes a section on Ethics and Ethnography detailing her methods.)

Rebekah’s institution was large enough such that the students she was living with and taking classes with did not recognize her as a professor, thinking that she was an older student. In a few instances during move-in and orientation week she was mistaken as a parent. Fellow students soon started to treat her as one of their own, and that is where she starts to get inside knowledge of what students do and think in college. The book is now ten years old, so her research was done close to the time I was a resident faculty member at my own institution (not AnyU).

It was interesting to compare and contrast her experience with my own when I lived on campus. There are some key differences. I’m at a private, smaller institution with a different student demographic than hers. There are very few older students – I’ve only had two older than me in all my years of teaching (and I typically teach 100-200 students every year). Also, when I was living in the residence halls, the students knew me as a professor, and thus I’m sure I was treated very differently (and deferentially) because of that. During that time, I was occasionally mistaken as a student, but not often. I wasn’t a classmate, and everyone who lived on my floor knew I was the professor. This was probably because of the sign on my room door indicating (when closed) that I shouldn’t be disturbed between 9pm to 9am unless there was an emergency. Two explicit points followed: (1) Finishing homework is not an emergency. (2) My keycard does not open your door if you’re locked out.

I wish I read Rebekah’s book earlier. It would have explained the topsy-turvy observation of how common spaces are used in the dorms. When Rebekah and I were students, the common space was where people would hang out to be social. There were comfortable chairs or couches and sometimes a big-screen TV. (These were old, bulky and heavy back then so no one was interested in stealing them.) If you wanted privacy and quiet, you stayed in your room. But for students in the new millennium, the situation is reversed. When Rebekah talked to fellow students in the common room, it turns out the common room (which was mostly dead) was where students went for some quiet time – student rooms (and probably exuberant roommates) was where all the social activity was taking place. I had a similar experience – although I managed to lure students out with a coffee hour and pastries once a week in the evening. Students were encouraged to come out and study amidst snacks and unobtrusive background music. (The iPod had only just been invented and not in the hands of that many students.)

Some of Rebekah’s observations were already well known. Students don’t spend as much time on schoolwork and studying as they did in the past. In chapter 6 (“The Art of College Management”), she describes them as “practical and careerist in their approach to education”. Extra-curricular activities were often chosen for how they would help the student’s CV. (I meet many students who think they are pre-med and behave similarly.) Students are more interested in grades, and this occasionally leads to “closer surface connections with faculty”. A key part of college life seemed to be life-management. Time-management was a huge topic during orientation week and the message seemed to be: “College is demanding but you don’t need to be a drudge. The key to succeeding at college is effort and good planning. If you plan your time well, you can have it all.”

Rebekah was surprised that “going to school was a time management nightmare [requiring] much more and a very different kind of juggling than life as a professor, even with its demands.” Given that some classes had separate lab and/or discussion instructors, she found in her first semester that there were eight different people to adjust to “each with his or her own quirks, schedules and predilections”. I now better understand why registering for classes is so stressful for students as they attempt to shape the “perfect” schedule. (Read Rebekah’s book for a detailed treatment.) The advice on “the care and handling of professors” given to students by RAs and other fellow students also explains why certain students interact with me the way they do. At a university-sponsored freshman presentation, students were told that professors “think the world revolves around their subject, so they want you to get it. They want to see effort, and they want you to voice an opinion. So give them what they want and you’ll get what you want too!” Careerist and instrumental indeed!

My favorite part of the book was chapter 4 (“As Others See Us”) which details conversations interviews with international students, resulting in Rebekah’s reflecting on her own culture and assumptions as an American. In other chapters, there are interesting sections on diversity in the dining hall, student cheating, and classroom conventions. It turns out that there’s a strong cultural convention not to “stick out” in class, probably working in concert with the norm of consolidated responsibility. I won’t spoil the details, so I’ll just recommend reading her book if any of these topics sound interesting to you.

There’s a very interesting reflection on “Student Culture and Liminality” in the final chapter. I’m just going to quote sections her since I found it beautifully-worded. “It is in the middle or ‘liminal’ state – the ambiguous place of being neither here nor there – that anthropologists see profoundly creative and transformative possibilities. [These states] lift the normal constraints on behavior and bring participants into new relationships with one another. In the U.S. college, as universally, liminal people who might otherwise have differential status in the society become equals, and those who share the ritual experience of lowliness, homogeneity, and comradeship establish strong emotional, almost sacred bonds. Undergraduate culture itself becomes this liminal communal space where students bond with one another, sometimes for life, and, amid rules of suspended normality and often hardship, explore their identities, wrestle with their parents’ world, and wonder about their future.”

I’m skipping a few paragraphs to get to her set of questions at the end of the section: “Will the liminal life of college culture allow students to arrive at inspired new ideas for society and transformative visions of our world? Or will it simply train young people to become adults who take their place in line in the workforce of the existing society? Can it do both? And how will we know when college culture is tilted too far in one direction or the other?”

These are indeed the million-dollar questions. While she doesn’t have the answers, the author reflects on these in a short final section on student culture, the mission of the public university, and the broader culture in America. If you want to know which way things are headed, “follow the money”, for good or ill.