Arbitrary Exclusion Hurts Education

This is a letter demanding the reasoned and careful exercise of authority. Recently a couple of friends have complained to me that they or fellow classmates have been excluded from courses. Maybe just another harrowing shopping period fable, or maybe time to put our collective foot down. One colleague related to me the story of a professor who requested that all freshmen and sophomores should immediately leave the classroom because this course "was simply over their heads, it would be a waste of time for you to take it." Her reasoning was that successful contribution to the course required a somewhat developed knowledge of gender theory. A student told the professor that she was a sophomore, but had already taken a 90-level seminar and had been exposed to advanced gender theory. The professor told the student to leave. She only wanted juniors and seniors. That was the end of the conversation. The student left, albeit very bewildered and disappointed.

Another student not three hours after I heard the above story told me that he had just crept inside the door of a classroom when another student entered. The professor, already dismayed at what he perceived to be intolerable over-crowding, demanded that the student leave immediately. The student tried to manage some sort of breathless defense, but the professor did not relent. "Leave now. There are too many of you. You are taking up all the oxygen." This student then left, albeit very bewildered and disappointed. The professor then instructed all freshman and seniors to leave the room; they would not be considered for enrollment in the class. The reasoning? "Freshmen don't know anything, and seniors don't care." The professor then collected all the names of those present and proceeded to call out the names of those students who would be accepted into the class. My colleague states that he felt it "was a matter of whose name he liked the most."

A professor wants only those students in his or her classroom who are in a position to benefit from the course and contribute to productive class discussion. They seek to exclude all those who are under-prepared and under-qualified. They understandably don't want dead wood floating in their educational sea. It is not the cruel truth that shopping period is often an exercise in exclusion and disappointment that needs to be challenged. It is the methods of exclusion, which seem to me almost arbitrary and whimsical, that need to be questioned.

To exclude students simply on the nominal basis of class year is a ghastly presupposition that homogenizes all those students whose only real transgressions are being born under the same Chinese astrological sign. To exclude students based on their year makes some sense, but only if all students in the same year were the same person. I'm sure some informed professorial exclusions do save both the student and professor from the student asking in an advanced seminar on Derrida what this whole "deconstruction thing" is, but the point is that without more information other than the student's name or year, a professor is arbitrarily wielding his or her authority irresponsibly and to the possible detriment of a potentially well-qualified participant.

I think professors have to be held most responsible for their avoidance of difficult decisions. They, like most of us, don't want to have to make controversial decisions and then stand by them eve when a student comes to their office hours snootily demanding an explanation. They don't want to deal with students on an individual basis wherein they would have to come to terms with the possibility that a sophomore could possibly be qualified for their course. It disturbs me to think there are professors who don't want to take the time to have their students present their interests and qualifications on paper, so that they can make informed decisions about people rather than things. They would rather construct objective mechanisms of exclusion whereby they can say anybody born a Rabbit, Dragon, or Pig is out. --Jed Silverstein '97