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"To the Editor:
Re “What’s the Point of a Professor?,” by Mark Bauerlein (Sunday Review, May 10):
College students need not revere professors, and I am very glad that they do not want to become our disciples." according to Glenn Sklarin, Professor in the Philosophy department
at St. John's University, Jamaica, NY.
 |
| Stina Löfgren NY-Times-op-ed |
Students
have many sources of knowledge and are free to come to my office for
advice. I encourage that. But most of my students have jobs; many of
them are also breadwinners for their families.
Those
idyllic ’60s that the writer mentions are very different from today. We
should not talk about the role of professors without mentioning that
about three-quarters of current professors are part-time (adjunct)
faculty who do not have the time or the resources to leave their door
open and require students to come to their office hours. At best they
have shared offices; at worst they need to run to their next class,
often at a different campus. Class sizes are also larger than ever,
making one-on-one contact even harder...
CHLOE HAWKEY
New York
The writer is a rising senior at Barnard College.
To the Editor:
Mark
Bauerlein accurately defines the state of faculty-student relationships
in higher education today. Teaching a required course in introductory
philosophy each semester to a classroom filled with tweeting,
texting-obsessed young minds is an Olympian challenge, which I find both
exhausting and exhilarating.
Why
the latter? Well, in every class, I discover a small group of students
who are taken with my pitch that I am not there just to impart the
wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, but, rather, to engage them in
self-reflection, to refine their communication skills, and to assure
them that the next 50 years of their working and personal lives will
require these talents if they are to have meaning and value.
Somehow,
I manage to reach some of them, and that alone provides the impetus and
inspiration to look forward to the next semester.
Source: New York Times
