In recent weeks we have seen the renewal of a faculty theme that has recurred over my twelve years here: complaints about “the culture of Trinity.” Of course, the complainers really mean the culture of our students. Various faculty members have felt free to stereotype athletes, full payers, fraternity members and, by strong implication, whites – in other words, many of my students. It is a mystery to me how most faculty think they know enough about student culture to make such sweeping condemnations. Certainly, it is not from personal experience. The plain fact is that the vast majority of us have little contact with our students outside our classrooms and offices. On my own all-too-rare visits to the campus for various events on weekends, I see few other faculty.

Last week was “argument week” in my course PBPL 202, Law and Argument. If you had come into Peter B’s any night, you would have found my students debating their assigned constitutional law cases with their partners or upperclassmen-coaches. After counsel teams met separately with me from 8 to 10 Wednesday evening, most worked far into the night. Some could not sleep. One young woman told me she fell asleep going over her answers to questions she thought I might ask. On Thursday we had seven hours of intense argument in which teams of two students stood up for ten to fifteen minutes while panels of student justices and coaches as well as I peppered them with questions. Most students did splendidly and loved it.

The thirty-eight students in my two sections of 202 come in all shapes, sizes and the full glorious rainbow of colors. Some belong to fraternities or will join them, and many are athletes. As students, they are a wonderful team – and that is how they think of themselves. They are just as distressed by the recent racist outburst as we faculty are. In the breadth of their tolerance, their work ethic and their common sense they give me hope for the future. I hate to think how they would feel to read some faculty members’ half-baked stereotyping of them. But of two things I am certain. They would understand that this is the very sort of thing that their faculty is paid to warn them against. And – whoever the target of the stereotyping – they would join together to condemn the practice.

There is an easy tendency to reduce fine students like mine to still another stereotype. They are the “stars” – the exceptions. “If only other Trinity kids were like that….” That is a convenient way of letting ourselves off the hook. And it is nonsense. My experience is that most people will rise to meet high expectations and sink to meet low ones.

As someone who spent a career in management worrying about the cultures of government agencies, non-profit organizations and a failing Fortune 500 corporation, I urge the faculty to devote a little more attention to the culture we know best: our own.

In the space of one week this semester I had visits from two students who were considering transferring out of Trinity. They might have been speaking from the same script, and it is one that I have heard regularly over the years. Both complained that their friends did little homework, looked for classes that would require minimum effort and rarely discussed academic subjects outside of class. BOTH said to me, “I thought college would be harder than high school, but it is easier.”

It is relevant to add that the two students were solid performers but not “stars.” If students such as these think that Trinity is easier than high school, it seems to me undeniable that the fault rests squarely on the shoulders of some members of the faculty. For students looking to do a minimum of work, there are apparently courses – and professors – to accommodate them.

A few years ago one of my more irreverent advisees came to discuss his courses for the next semester. He told me that he wanted to apply to teach the course of Professor X. I played along and asked him if he really thought he was qualified to teach Professor X’s course. “Sure, I am,” he responded. “I’ll just spend classes reminiscing and telling stories and instruct the students to read the textbook for the exam.”

As Talmudic scholars say, “for instance is not proof.” Such faculty burnout cases are rare, but they illustrate a fundamental problem that appears to shape the culture of this faculty. Not long ago we did a survey of Trinity students that reported, if memory serves, that forty percent of them did ten or fewer hours of academic work a week outside of class. What if we did a comparable survey of the faculty? Never having served on a faculty committee, I do not know all that the faculty has done about the problem of underperformance by students AND faculty. But from what I have observed, penalties for faculty underperformance in teaching are rare and insufficient. If that is true, doesn’t it cast doubt on the institution’s claim that teaching is our core mission?

It seems to me plain as day that we need to set and enforce higher minimum standards for student learning and faculty teaching.

If you had made a list of the “best” colleges in the country the day I graduated in 1960, it would have looked much like such a list today. Except for the rise of NYU, few schools have undergone a dramatic change in their reputations. Unlike the rest of the economy, elite colleges have been largely insulated from competition, and to the extent they do compete, it is often based on status.

But “the times, they are a-changing.” The time is coming when places like Trinity will have to answer the sorts of questions that drive markets. “What is my child getting that is worth $55,000 a year?” “I read your faculty newsletter. Why so many ‘achievements’ in research but so few in teaching?” “How many people read all this research, how much does it advance knowledge, and how does it benefit my daughter?”

There are answers to such questions, and they may well justify current practices. But it is no answer to say, “We do this just because this is the way things are done.”

What troubles me is that in the twelve years I have been here, the faculty as a whole has rarely deliberated on fundamental questions. That omission is of a piece with the faculty’s recent decision to take a pass on a discussion of the vital question of position-allocation criteria. From all I hear, faculty spend many hours in committee work. I accept – on faith – that much of this is necessary. But if “faculty governance” doesn’t mean addressing larger questions, I am at a loss to know what it does mean.

To change our students, we first have to change ourselves. Where might we look for models?

Because I was interested in athletic coaches as teachers, I talked to about a dozen of them last year. These conversations were fascinating, rewarding and even inspiring. Three things stood out: how hard the coaches work, how much time they spend with their student-athletes and how well they know them. Coaches know more about our students the day they arrive on campus than most of the rest of us do the day they graduate. Of course, we play a very different role than coaches, but we can learn from them.

Consider race prejudice. From all I have heard from coaches and players, the football team is a model of student cooperation and respect across lines of race and class. What might we learn from this and our other teams?

Or take recruiting. Coaches told me of the many hours they spend on recruiting phone calls to high school coaches, players and their parents all over the country. What if faculty recruited for history, science and the arts as coaches now do for football, squash and field hockey? Of course, our recruiting methods would be different. But what if each faculty member recruited just one bright, lively student a year who would otherwise have gone elsewhere? Imagine the consequences in our classrooms!

What if we set out to transform Trinity by demanding substantially more of our students? What if the Trinity faculty decided to raise the bar across the curriculum? What if the word got around that students who began to party on Thursday night risk flunking out in rapid order? What if we taught two and half additional hours each week so as to split big courses into smaller sections? What if we taught more courses on Mondays and Fridays – which might put a damper on the Thursday night party? What if students were called on in every class and penalized if they were unprepared? What if the second and each subsequent unexcused absence from class meant loss of a grade step? What if we calculated how many pages a typical student now writes in a year and doubled it? What if we extended each semester by two weeks?

A college that did some of those things would get plenty of national attention and in time almost certainly would become a magnet for more serious-minded intellectually engaged students.

And such changes might have another salutary effect. They might make for a happier faculty.

Ned Cabot
Adjunct Professor
Public Policy and Law