What's Really Happening in the Professor-Student Dynamic?

Google around long enough, and the teaching of college students can seem like an exercise in avoiding a tripwire.

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It would appear that professors must cower in fear of offending students — on the left and the right — who are itching to shut them down. But that version of higher ed is a caricature. What’s really happening is more complicated, and so are professors’ feelings about it.

Over the past several decades, and accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the student–professor power dynamic has undergone a sea change.

Traditionally, faculty members have been viewed as the rulers of the classroom. They decide what gets taught and how. That could mean expecting students to tackle tough assignments on tight deadlines and to wrestle with ideas and information that upsets them. The underlying assumption is that students defer to the professor’s judgment (or, as some view it, the professor’s dominance).

But for a confluence of reasons, student attitudes have shifted. For one, what’s considered appropriate for a college professor to say and do in the classroom has changed dramatically, especially around topics of race, gender, and other forms of identity. For another, student deference to their teachers is not nearly as strong as it once was.

Students can be quick to judge a pedagogical choice as harmful, offensive, or superfluous to their education, say some professors, who question if their colleges, which they describe as having adopted a “customer is always right” philosophy, will have their backs if and when the customer is wrong.

In some circumstances, the choices or behavior criticized by students would have been “regarded as benign not very long ago,” said Angus Johnston, a historian of American student-activism who teaches at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York.

While this power shift can be “discombobulating” and “scary” for faculty members, especially older ones, he said, “that does not mean it’s a bad development.”

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A lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley told The Chronicle he has complicated feelings about the climate for teaching difficult issues on campus. (He asked to remain anonymous because he feared the consequences of discussing a contentious topic.) On the one hand, he wants his students to feel included in the classroom, and he’s open to discussing when they think he’s fallen short. But right now, he says, “there’s not a healthy space to figure that stuff out” because political tensions are so high.

Ultimately, at the “neoliberal, service-oriented” university, “we gotta keep the customer happy to keep those checks coming, and that undermines the ability to have a real conversation about education.”