Just a quick note before school starts, as I have to pick my brother up at the airport in MSP at 6:00am and won’t have time to add anything for a few days.

During the Presidential address in our university’s Convocation Week activities, I was reminded of how lucky I am to have the career I have. I haven’t been away from higher education since I was an undergrad, and sometimes you forget just how special this whole education thing is. I was reminded of my past students and professors — caught up in quite a bit of reflection, and it was very good for the soul.

In thinking of the high points, you can’t help but also recount the low points. I remembered one incident that happened at my previous job at Northern Michigan University. I watched a screening on-campus of Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about as negative a portrayal as one could paint of a company. None of the benefits are discussed whatsoever. Wal-mart is simply an evil corporation out to destroy the world. Last Fall, we watched it in my Economics of Film class, actually taking the film a step further and talking about more than just the one-sided portrayal. Having already seen it several times before, I knew the arguments, so when we watched it as a class, I was able to focus on the movie-making aspects of it. I earned a new appreciation for the film-making techniques that went into making Wal-mart look like so horrible. Victims of Wal-mart tell their stories to soft music. When Wal-mart managers talk, it is to violent drum beats. When people vote to keep a Wal-mart out of their town, the spokesperson used is a pastor and a gospel choir sings hallelujah in the background. It is as if Wal-mart is so evil that even God hates it. That movie gave me a better appreciation for the way that music can be used in a film to elicit feelings that advance the goal of the movie-maker.

But I digress – back to the story. A few months after the original screening at NMU, a professor from another university (can’t remember who or from where) was invited by the College of Business to come to campus and talk about the movie. There was a classroom screening of about 20 professors and 50 students in Jamrich Hall and we watched about the first 2/3 of it. After that, the professor gave her take on things, basically parroting everything the movie just showed and provided a few more horrible facts about Wal-mart. Some of the people in attendance were not as biased against Wal-mart as she was, and some worked for Wal-mart and actually liked it.  I asked a few questions of her, trying to get her to at least admit that there were some good results for consumers, since none of that was in the movie. She did not rebut any of the facts I presented (I always come armed with facts to these kinds of things). Instead, she dismissed my arguments outright, basically saying, “Well, that may be true, but the bad stuff they do dwarfs that in comparison.” That’s a normative judgment, but she was stating it as fact.

When the session was over, she was escorted from Jamrich to the College of Business office by someone who worked in their office (we’ll call her Ava), who coincidentally also happened to be a student of mine. The professor mentioned something to Ava about the student in the front row asking all the questions. Ava told her, “Yeah, that wasn’t a student — that was my economics professor.” The professor then said something to the effect of, “Oh, I’m sorry, I wish I had known he was a professor. I would have taken his arguments more seriously.”

I don’t think I have to tell you how pissed off I was when Ava told me that. It was indicative of an attitude that, frankly, too many professors have. They start looking down on their students, thinking that students couldn’t possibly be right if they don’t agree with the professor, and are simply hindrances on their quest to publish papers. I was more mad at that statement than I was at her dismissing my comments.

Students: you have a right to be heard. You have a right to have your thoughts taken seriously by your professors. Some of you abuse this and try to dominate a classroom discussion. Professors should be acknowledging your opinions, explaining their arguments and having you explain yours, and taking you seriously. But at some point, they have to move on and teach the rest of their class — further discussion can be done in office hours.

Professors: you were one of those very students once. Remember? You were smart, inquisitive, and questioned the professors who taught you. You thought you knew everything. Looking back so many years later, you now know just how little you really knew back then — but you did know something. You had some valid arguments, you made insightful observations and your professors learned from you. Had they dismissed you outright, you both would have been done a disservice. Well now that you’re a professor, give your students the benefit of the doubt — they might be smarter than you think. Their points may be just as valid as they would be if they were coming from a collegue. The best part of my job is when students come up with new ways of thinking about things, or new examples that I had never thought of before.

To me, university education is about learning how to think and how to critically analyze the world around us. It is not about learning to parrot a professor’s argument. It is about challenging the conventional wisdom, and in doing so either disproving what we take as an assumption so that our analysis is more accurate than before, or sharpening the argument in favor of the status quo. When students ask questions and are taken seriously by their professors, who are then forced to examine their claims and justify their own arguments, we all win. And if we can do it respectfully, even better.