Professors Strike Back

We’ve all been there before—gleefully typing away in the comments section of the CUE guide, relating in excruciating detail how painful the professor’s lectures were, how incoherent the problem sets, and how ludicrously cruel the grading policy. Sweet, sweet catharsis. But it seems that professors relish their schadenfreude too.

Professors have been venting their frustrations on new blog RateMyStudents.com, where they can rate their students, CUE-guide style, producing such gems as:

• “At the Wisconsin college where I teach, the collective density of our students creates an intellectual black hole where anything resembling brains is sucked away through a rip in space-time. By summer, I feel dumber” (an English instructor from Wisconsin)

• “Avoid this student if you can. She spends more on eyeliner than she does on textbooks. She wears more face powder than a 60 year old stripper. She believes she’s destined for greatness. She’s destined to work at a Laundromat” (a tenured professor of History in South Bend).

Though no Harvard professors aired their scorn on the website, we here imagine a series of entries from five distinguished professors claiming membership of the Faculty, “at a private Ivy League institution in Cambridge, MA”:



A tenured professor of Government, Machiavellian by nature, writes:

I try to project a manly ideal as an example to my students. Sure, I occasionally giggle, but I’m working on it. In any case, I tried to scare off all the women from the course, but this one girl didn’t seem to get the message (culinary school). Her first paper started off, “As a woman…” I stopped reading and gave her the “Gentleman’s C.”



A tenured professor of Government heading the most popular course at his university writes:

Now I don’t want to sound conceited but it’s just a fact that my last lecture of the term heralds a regular standing ovation. It just happens. I don’t expect it as such, but it’s so often now, well, it’s become…almost a class requirement. You see, the majority of my students possess enthusiastic, brilliant minds that understand exactly the importance of all I have to preach teach them and appreciate my weekly performance. And I don’t want to sound bitter but, after all, it’s just a little galling when one killjoy fails to rise with the rest. Did I do something to offend the brat?



A university president, tenured at the age of 12, writes:

1,649 applications for my freshmen seminar. I’m not here to write about a student in one of my courses, but the student who failed to demonstrate interest. There are many scientific hypotheses for why this student failed to apply to my seminar—socialization, reproduction schedules, biological differences. Or maybe she’s just an emotional wench.



A candidate for the Brazilian presidency writes:

I may not be teaching any courses right now, but that’s no excuse for zero enrollment. Do these students realize that I am the past and the future of the left? Plus, my courses are easy. I only have one lecture. One lecture!



A non-American, American imperialist and tenured professor of History writes:

In between lunching with Lord Patten and filming BBC docu’s, entertaining kiddies is just about putting on a good show. Strut your stuff in that projector limelight and you’ve got their admiration for life. It’s nice to have their adoring faces gazing up at you, hanging on your every word. I only wish they wouldn’t pop in and out the lecture hall at will—it’s not in the script! This never happened at Oxford.