Customer Reviews

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

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Like other reviewers, I have misgivings about the ethics of "Rebekah Nathan's" undercover exploration of student life. Anthropologists may become participant observers but certainly her fellow students might feel betrayed.

At the same time, I couldn't stop reading. Few university press books combine academic discourse with readability as well as this one does. I was a college professor myself for 20+ years, but in the business school. And I didn't find a single surprise -- except, was Nathan really unaware of her students as much as she claims?

Several years ago, I remember a summer school student complaining, "You give too much work! Who has time for this? I have a wedding in my family and my folk dance lessons..."

Nathan's glorifies international students, who criticize Americans for shallow friendship and lightweight classes. But I taught international MBA students who said calmly, "We won't be in class next week. We're going sightseeing. It would be a shame to come all this way and then not see [a local attraction]." And some international students have less than ideal motivations -- not to mention disregard of female professors.

Nathan bemoans the lack of student participation. In the business school, we were encouraged to motivate students. I rarely had trouble getting students to participate: discussion groups, in-class activities and more.

But she's right about so many elements of student culture. I returned for my PhD when I was in my 30's (deemed the "older woman" by my professors - I wish I were kidding). So in a way I experienced some of her frustrations, including time management, conflicts, inexorable deadlines and arbitrary administrative policies. I also realized that students knew the university better than the professors; as a professor, I remember one student getting annoyed because I had no idea where the bookstore was.

And she's depicted student networks in a fascinating way. Students rarely made new friends after freshman year. Many retained ties to high school friends. And she's captured the businesslike way today's students approach college life: like a 9 to 5 job, she says, and she's right.

I would have expected Nathan to dwell more on educational values in society, which may account for a great deal of student lack of academic interest. In the US, the appearance of intelligence can disqualify us from jobs and political office. Corporate recruiters have told me, "I don't want the egghead A student -- give me the hard-working C+ student, who's also working and joining a fraternity." In what may be the most fascinating and revealing anecdote in the book, Nathan shares an exercise she gives her students. Okay, we know there are no witches. But if there were a witch in this classroom, who would it be? Inevitably, she say, the most motivated students get named.

Mostly I was surprised that Nathan doesn't discuss faculty evaluations from the student perspective. Many academic weaknesses, I believe, are directly attributable to the role of faculty as entertainers rather than educators. In fact, an adjunct at a non-traditional school acknowledged, "To keep this job I live and die by student evaluations. I've become an edu-tainer."

Fear of negative evaluations has led to some dumbed-down courses and discouraged faculty. Study after study shows students don't take these evaluations seriously, yet professors have lost tenure, rank and jobs when students express dislike, for whatever reason. That's why students get away with disrespectful behavior and why they rarely get C's, let alone D's and F's, even when they don't study. When faculty believe grades are correlated with evaluations, they take note. Students have even said, "I can't evaluate my professor till I have a sense of what my course grade will be."

I remember a student who wrote on his evaluation, "The course was no good. You had to read the book to pass." As a colleague pointed out, his evaluation -- rating me from 1 to 5 -- counts just as heavily as the scores of a motivated student.

And I remember teaching a class while I was still a graduate student. My students were commuters who worked full-time, often at demanding jobs. One young woman said, "I like this class. Can we have a party?" And we ended up with a potluck, where students brought in homemade dishes. (My rule was that I wouldn't cook.) It was an amazing experience, creating the kind of community Nathan yearns for.

Yet not a word about this event appeared in the student evaluations -- all that's real to the university administration.

Nathan mentions the gulf in understanding between students and faculty. But I think she overlooks some elements in systems and society that drive a wedge between those committed to intellectual enterprise and everybody else.

I urge potential readers to ignore the harping over perceived intellectual slights suggested by many reviewers of Rebekah Nathan's "My Freshman Year". The intent of the book was to help students in their college experience by informing faculty and administrators about the current student culture, both its limitations and its potential advantages to learning. As such, the book deserves to be read by all parents of college- bound high school students, college students, teachers and professors, and administrators interested in giving students the best education possible. I too am a college professor and find that the intellection aspirations of my freshmen are now different than my pedagogical expectations. Nathan's book provides at least some answers for the differences, which I rapidly am using to make my classes more accessible --while still providing students the content they need and deserve.

So, I am frankly astounded at many of the reviews I have here read, which center not on the content of the book, but on how Nathan got her information--by posing as a freshman to make students feel comfortable around her. As a physical scientist, I am dumbstruck that some social scientists and others think this approach was somehow "unethical." Nathan went to great lengths to avoid reporting things that might be construed to be improper, didn't report actual names, certainly was not "spying" (the intent to do harm or gain advantage over those in the dark), and even became friends with students for whom she obviously had great affection and respect.

I intuitively know that if Nathan's freshmen had been aware that they were being observed, they'd have behaved quite differently. Look at Reality TV to see my point, as one extreme of a continuum of "behavior modifications" when being watched. The great anthropologist Margaret Mead was even duped by the islanders, who knew they were being studied, in her classic investigation in the South Pacific.

Nathan did no harm in "My Freshman Year," but rather, did a great collective good for students and faculty alike. Read this book.

This book is oriented to the relationship between today's college students and their academic work. Thank goodness it skips the juicy bits that attract journalists: binge drinking, date rape, fraternity hazing. Instead, it wonders, why are students so disengaged from the world of ideas? Why do students almost never ask to have a word defined? Why do they assume deadlines and strictures against plagiarism and cheating infinitely elastic?
The traditional explanations by college profesors run along these lines:
(1) It's all the fault of K-12 teachers and administrators;
(2) The new generation is just no good.
This book looks at the passage of today's college students from consumerism (as entering freshmen) to careerism (as graduating seniors), and observes that this particularly modern transition never quite passes through the life of the mind. There are also discussions of conformity, community and diversity, and the views of Americam students given by foreign-exchange students. We find that pairing hard and easy classes, and grouping classes into two or three days a week, are perfectly rational time-management techniques, and don't pose particular problems once the students master their use.
If you're a college professor you'll find this book filled with insights about your students, and why they do what they do.

It is refreshing to see something about today's students that isn't simply about drugs, sex and alcohol. This book helped me (as a fifty something myself, who has taught the college level) appreciate many of the trials and tribulations that students today face. I'm heartened to know of a teacher who would take a year out of her life to understand her students by trying to do what they do. I liked that she neither whitewashed students nor condemned them, but rather kept an outlook of true empathy and interest in them. She seemed to really learn something as a teacher, and so did I from her account.

Northern Arizona University anthropology professor Cathy Small decided to enroll as a freshman there during the 2002-2003 school year. This was to be her sabbatical project -- an ethnographic study of college culture at a public university. She turned in her faculty card and parking permit and lived in a coed dorm, attending classes and taking careful notes -- on those around her. She became a participant-observer, going to classes, reading the graffiti in the women's restrooms and probing feelings about cheating.

Taking the pseudonym "Rebekah Nathan" and calling the school "AnyU" to protect those she studied, Small compiled her findings into a book. (According to an article in the New York Times, a New York Sun reporter revealed her true identity last year.)

"My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student" is no dry-as-dust study, but rather an insightful and delightful portrait of ordinary student life. My copy is a hardback published by Cornell University Press ($24) but the book is also now in paperback ($14) from Penguin.

Part of Small's story is about her own ethical concerns over how to handle things told to her by students who think she is (just) a fellow student. She decided not to lie; yet she needed to reveal her true purpose only a few times.

Those around her in the dorms were just not that interested in what a 50-plus student was doing at the school. She was a writer, too, she said, and was going to write about student life.

True enough, and that seemed to suffice. Small determined that her book would not contain descriptions of sexual or drinking practices, and her comments on the group discussions in her sexuality class are kept general since they were confidential.

There is nothing lurid here. Instead, Small draws on previous studies and her own reflections to paint a nuanced picture of contemporary student culture.

As a professor, she writes, "It always comes as a surprise to me that students appear clueless about what happened in the last class, that only a minority of them have done the reading assigned, and that almost no undergraduates ever show up for my office hours unless perhaps they are failing."

After her experience as a freshman, she says, "I see now what I didn't see before. In the time between my Tuesday and Thursday classes in introductory anthropology I have taught only one other class, and I have spent at least some time on Wednesday arranging my Thursday class presentation. By contrast, my students have had at least four other classes in between, maybe more, and they have completed many other reading and writing assignments. ..."

They've gone to work, they've played, they've talked. What Small found was that instead of figuring out how to cram in all the needed study (two hours for every class hour is the expectation), students blocked out a limited time for homework and then asked a series of questions to determine whether this or that assignment merited the investment. Will there be a test on the reading assignment or will the student need it to do the homework or answer a question in class? If not, why read it?

There is a certain logic here, though Small's book is no apology for freshman culture, which has surprisingly little to do with academics.

Students want good jobs; their professors want them to be thoughtful citizens. Can the two, Small asks, be reconciled?

Copyright 2006 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission.

A REAL story about college life. Insightful, honest, and true. I found it comforting (and a little disturbing) to hear about college through the eyes and ears of an observer living it day to day. This book tells it like it is, something very few books on college life achieve. Another title I can't recommend enough is The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College. Another non-fiction account of college life, right from the mouths of students from over 100 college campuses (author is Harlan Cohen). I read it and then gave it to my daughter. Both are 5 stars.

Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym) has written a book that faculty, administrators, parents, and campus ministers should read and discuss. Why? Because she went "undercover" by enrolling as a freshman, living in a dorm, taking a full load of [5] courses, and sharing life with her fellow students. And she did all of this as a professional cultural anthropologist, with the skills & tools to study what she saw, heard, and experienced.

This book's real value lies, however, not in its description of student choices and lifestyle, but in her explanation of those behaviours--she uncovers some of the *why*, rather than merley describing the "what".

Learning, for example, of the plethora of choice facing a collegiate (e.g., major, minor, schedule, intramural sports, dorm, work, other interest groups) helps me understand the lack of large-scale "community" on a university campus--few students live or experience college life together, even if they are roommates. She also helps me understand why students want to identify "easy" profs or courses, or why they work so much. They work to support the lifestyle that they knew before college, and to reduce their post-graduation debt; the constraints that work and many other factors put on their schedule mean that they need a "breather" course to enable them to keep up their gpa.

Some of the other reviews discuss the ethical issues of her research--I'll leave those to the ethical experts. I found this enlightening, very helpful and well-written, and a lot of fun to read (along with some heart-wrenching sections). I recommend this *most* highly.

I can't believe how many people have criticized this book. This teacher wanted people to see what a Freshman goes through. I am a student at Northern Arizona University unlike most of you and don't like people who don't even ATTEND NAU trying to speak for us students. You should judge the book for its content, not how the information was gathered. I speak for a lot of students when I say a job well done.

I came across this book by accident - I am glad I did. It fit with various themes that had been bouncing around in my head since I read a report on student intellectual life at the school where I work. "Prof. Nathan" does a good job in documenting the enormous gap between the experience of college for faculty, administrators and students. Put quite simply, we inhabit different worlds. I think many college professors and administrators already know this, but "Nathan" puts some meat on the speculative bones. (Note on a pet peeve of mine: for "Nathan," as for many of the professoriate, staff - the non-student, non-faculty denizens of AnyU - never register on her radar.)

"Nathan," in her student guise, learns some interesting lessons. For example, "building community" - in the sense of trying to create spaces and opportunities for large groups of students to interact - is much more important to "Student Affairs" types than it is for the students for whom they are trying to build that community. In fact the students are very content with the community they already have, usually consisting of small homogeneous groups of friends that they met early on in their college life. The frenetic work of RA's to create opportunities for broader civic engagement usually come to naught - few students register interest, even fewer actually participate.

I don't know enough to say that "Nathan's" experiences at a large southwestern public school are representative of the experiences of today's college students in general. I am guessing that there probably are significant differences from college to college (e.g. by size of institution), and from student to student (e.g. their economic circumstances, or the degree to which they have a major or a professional destination in mind). But I think the perplexing refusal of students to "buy in" to the experience that well-intentioned faculty and SA administrators have crafted for them will resonate with many campus "adults."

I think that most students, as "Nathan's" experience demonstrates, do not experience college as the linear experience of intellectual and moral development that most faculty and administrators would want it to be. The four years of undergraduate study are less a progressive dinner than a smorgasbord of varied offerings, in which some items are eaten - as "Nathan" relates - only because they are available in a convenient time-slot. Should we be surprised? If nothing else, isn't it arguably a preview of what most graduates can expect after college? Do most college faculty and staff experience their college work - or their lives in general - as a mapped-out journey towards a defined end?

Overall assessment: a stimulating read. Recommended.

Rebekah Nathan's book, "My Freshman Year" brought to light a number of thought provoking trends that are the underpinnings of undergraduate student culture on many U.S. college campuses today. Nathan, who has a degree in cultural anthropology, enrolls as an undergraduate at the institution where she has been teaching for fifteen years. She not only enrolls in classes, but she also courageously lives in the freshman dorms, a place where hundreds of young adults live, study, party, and find creative ways to define themselves. A consistent topic that Nathan explores, and explores superbly, is the rift that exists between the perspective and experience of college students and college professors. Despite having taught at her current undergraduate institution for years, now as a student, she begins to understand the importance of selecting classes, not so much for content, but because they fit nicely into a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, schedule. Through her own process of balancing various class demands, she sees why most students do only the minimum of what is required, and to her surprise, after searching hopelessly for a class in a building that she has never set foot in, she realizes the limited scope of her knowledge about the academic institution she has been a faculty member at for nearly two decades.

While not Nathan's focus, an interesting subtext emerges throughout the book which begins to bump up against the ways U.S. economics and the greater American culture are shaping the experiences and choices of college students today; many students work while in school to help cover the high costs of tuition, books etc, and most see higher education simply as a means to a career and financial security - not as an important end in itself.


The book is a fun and insightful read, without a doubt, a great way to return to undergraduate life without the homework