“The faculty/student nonagression pact”

From a 2004 review by George Leef of Patrick Allitt’s book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student:

[M]atters might improve considerably if the rest of the faculty were also fighting against the student aversion to reading, but few of them probably are. Allitt doesn’t say much about his colleagues, but I suspect he knows that many of them have given in to what Murray Sperber calls the faculty/student non-aggression pact: Students get light assignments and good grades in return for expecting little instructional effort from their professors. Allitt’s willingness to stay and fight when much of the rest of the faculty has surrendered is commendable, but if only a small number of professors insist that students read and understand, the college experience is just the skeletal remains of its former self.

The bolded passage is a dead-on appropriate term for much of what goes on under the guise college teaching and learning these days.

Sounds like a good book but one which might be too depressing to read just before the semester starts.

Filed under: Education, Higher ed, Life in academia, Student culture, Teaching , college, learning, students, Teaching