Despite not just months but years of budget cuts and hints of more to come, the flagship institution of the University of Georgia System has won national recognition for its excellence. Unfortunately, this award reflects our prowess in drinking rather than thinking. "We're No. 1" when it comes to partying at least, according to the Princeton Review. This accolade represents the culmination of an upward trajectory. We claimed the #4 slot last year, but twelve months of committed beer-ponging, Jaeger-bombing, Jell-O-shooting, knee-walking and projectile puking have brought us our just due in a category where excess and success go hand in hand. Realistically, having our athletic director hauled in for drunk driving with a lap full of red panties probably didn't hurt our case either.
Back in my day, when Playboy put us on a party-school pedestal all by ourselves because it seemed unfair to compare professionals to rank amateurs, we undergrads wore the ultimate party-school label as a badge of honor because, let's face it, it was the only badge anyone would give us. Those were the days, of course, when we were known, and pretty much rightly so, for a student body thirsting not for knowledge but a good cold beer. This began to change even while I was still an undergrad here in the 1960s as major funding increases fueled faculty and library enhancement and enrichment. (The History Department faculty grew from eighteen to forty-four during my undergraduate tenure, 1965-69.) The coming of the Hope Scholarship Program in 1993 meant that Georgia high school students with a B average could attend any public institution in the state system tuition-free, and parents who once would have sent their kids off to the Ivies or snooty little liberal arts colleges outside the state or region had good reason to reconsider the University of Georgia, a reality reflected in a fifty-point rise in average freshman SAT scores in the first five years of Hope's existence (1993-98), Currently, the top 25 percent of UGA freshman scores average out to roughly the ninety-second percentile nationally. Clearly, we're not putting any serious heat on the likes of Harvard or Princeton yet, but none of these numbers seem to suggest the hard-partying capital of the academic world.
Unfortunately, there are some numbers that do. To me, the most damning of our Princeton Review rankings is not the number-one spot in overall party-hardiness (We're rubbing shoulders with some pretty good company there, including UT-Austin, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc.) but the number nine slot in the fewest hours per week devoted to studying category. The credibility of this response comes through in the latest available figures showing that among incoming freshmen with Hope Scholarships in the fall of 2003, 27 percent had lost them (by failing to maintain a "B" average) after the first two semesters and less than 60 percent managed to graduate with their Hope Schollys intact.
There are still all sorts of possible contributing factors here, including grade inflation in high school, SAT score inflation, and the fruits of intensive SAT prep courses aimed at securing higher SAT scores than high school performance might predict. There is also the likelihood that as students have gotten better, professors have turned it up a notch. One thing's for sure, for students who have excelled at every turn in K-12 (or at least been told they have), things are supposed to come easy. Consequently, every September, about a month into the fall semester when the first exam rolls around, our student counselors are reportedly overrun with kids who received what may be their first-ever indication of inadequate performance in any aspect of their lives, academic or otherwise.
The typical response isn't pretty. Upset that that contemptible old fart Professor Bloviator has shown the temerity to give her a "C" on her first test, Suzy makes a beeline to drop his class, never considering that next week's biology exam might yield a result suggesting that perhaps she has punted the wrong course. Thanks to the damnably ubiquitous cell-phone glued to the side of Suzy's head, she has quite likely phoned Mom in tears, leading Mom, also in tears and with no apparent hesitation, to call Professor Bloviator and demand to know how he could treat her daughter--who got all "A's" in high school, by the way--so unfairly. Scholar and gentleman that he is, Prof. B. will patiently inform Mom that it has long been his policy to speak only with the students themselves concerning their academic performance in his course. His rationale being, as he further explains, that he tries to treat his students as adults, since, after all, they are in college now. Mom is seldom satisfied with this response, of course.
As I have said more than once, it seems pretty ironic that one of the big concerns back during my youth and young adulthood was how to narrow the "generation gap" with our parents. Today, I'd give anything if somebody would figure out how to get folks operating on the "Mom-as-Sis, Dad-as Bro'" parenting plan to establish a little distance with their offspring and quit trying to relive their own collegiate experiences through their kids'. Parents who fret more about Suzy getting into Chi-O than finding an academic major that will challenge and fulfill her or simply break into a sly grin when that fake I.D. slips out of her purse are a far bigger problem for Suzy than her innate capacity to do what it should take to earn a college degree. If there is one thing that today's bright, comfortable, middle-class young people don't need, it's further reinforcement of their sense of entitlement.
This brings me to my annual review of my student evaluations attendant to kicking off my thirty-ninth year of college teaching. (This would explain comments like, "He seems more knowledgeable than others since he's about 20 years older than most other professors.") As with a number of recent classes, I noted this time there were also some complaints that I didn't use "PowerPoint." Since I use the computer to put up all the key terms we discuss during each class, along with maps, illustrations, etc., I was puzzled by this criticism until conversations with students led me to realize that by "PowerPoint" they meant simply putting up my notes as "bullet points" so that all they had to do was copy them off the screen rather than actually use their brains to interpret what I said in terms of its meaning and significance. Hence one student simply laid it out there that what she "liked least" about my course was "How we have to take our own notes."
Actually, against my warnings but totally beyond my control, a great many students don't take their own notes at all but simply buy them from a local bookstore, which has employed someone in the class as a note-taker. I've seen these notes, and frankly, they're not bad. In fact, they sometimes make me seem almost coherent and even, dare I say, knowledgeable. The problem with store-bought notes and with simply putting my own notes up on PowerPoint is that going this route allows students to escape the necessity of actually comprehending what's been said well enough to write it down in their own words. Some students can simply memorize these purchased notes well enough to get by on the exam, but whether they have learned as much as they would have from taking and studying their own notes is another question.
Since the notes are for sale, many students see no real need to come to class and object strenuously to my mandatory attendance policy, as in "The attendance policy is upsurd [sic.]. I pay to come here." Yes, you do, but your payment doesn't automatically entitle you to course credit and neither does your ability to memorize somebody else's notes and eke out a "C-"on the exam. Obviously, no instructor can ever test you on the entire content of the course, but receiving credit for the course should at least mean exposure to its content, and clearly that can't happen if you only show up when you feel like it or at exam time.
I don't mean to suggest here that we at UGA are entirely without responsibility for the woeful gap between how well many of our students should be performing and what they are actually doing. Faculty and administrators alike have been far too hands-off in allowing the vestiges of the old "Nobody wants to party with 'Smarty'" mentality to hang around. [WARNING! PET PEEVE HARANGUE TO FOLLOW:] No one who cares about the University of Georgia's instructional mission should rest until all activities associated with recruitment of students into fraternities and sororities is postponed at least until the second semester. The current practice of holding sorority rush before classes even start and handing out bids on the first day of classes mocks everything we like to say about academics coming first on this campus. Finally, instead of summer orientation pitches like this, our incoming freshmen should be reminded again and again that putting their newfound social freedom ahead of their new responsibilities as college students is the quickest way to ensure that UGA will soon be partying on without them.
PS. Based on responses to previous bloviations, I knew you faithful readers would be disappointed if I didn't share a few zingers from a fresh set of evaluations; so here they are, even before you asked:
"Your jokes aren't funny. You get only pity laughs. Work on your delivery!" [This one doesn't sting as much as you'd think. I've been living on "pity laughs" for years.]
Under "What did you like most about the class:"
"Cobb's outfits always gave me something to laugh about." [This was a big year for sartorial comments. See below.]
"Jim Cobb's belt buckles." [No doubt, this is a reference to my $90 Luckenbach, Texas, model.]
"Dr. Cobb's shoes." [Take that, all of you who disparaged my Sanuks."]
As you old pros know, I indulge myself with one warm and fuzzy one:
"Hard-nosed and fair, very interesting and engaging. One of my favorites. I wish I was his best friend." [Aw shucks. Forget all that cynical stuff above. Bring the little darlings on, old Prof. B. can't wait to get the semester underway!]
