Faculty should give students a chance

Author: Dan Morosani '05

I would like to point out what I see as a problem with our College. At guest lectures, faculty members habitually monopolize the period of time allotted for asking questions, even as students sit and wait, their hands raised, hoping to get called on. One might think that such a problem is inconsequential. However, I believe that it is significant and that we should pay it some attention.

The tendency of faculty members to dominate the question-and-answer period at the end of guest lectures is a problem for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that visiting speakers come to Middlebury primarily to enrich the educational experience of the student body. Since students are the intended beneficiaries of these talks, it follows that our questions should be given priority.

The second reason may be less apparent to our professors. There are noticeable differences between the questions asked by professors and those asked by students - generally, professors tend to challenge the speaker more, with complex and long-winded questions. This is completely understandable - almost our entire faculty has a Ph.D. If a faculty member attends a department-sponsored talk, his or her doctorate is probably in the same field as the visiting speaker's and he or she is likely to know more or less what the speaker is going to say. Meanwhile, we students are still working toward a bachelor's degree and often walk into guest lectures knowing little more than the speaker's name.

Despite the obvious differences in our respective academic qualifications, however, it is still intimidating following a professor's nuanced query - often garnished with inside jokes and myriad obscure references - with a simple question based merely on an hour's worth of attention to the speaker's arguments. Many students who raise their hands when the floor is opened soon give up after a few minutes. On several occasions, I've thrown in the towel because I did not want to pose what I thought would seem like a stupid question within the context of what a professor had just asked.

I am not saying that our entire faculty is part of this problem - there are some professors who make a point of waiting until their students have been called on before raising their own hands. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is no value in faculty members asking questions at guest lectures. Often, their questions illuminate the topic, open up a new avenue of discussion or prompt the speaker to rephrase one of his or her arguments in a way that makes more sense.

However, just as often, the "questions" professors ask are in fact statements intended to make themselves look smart and/or make the visiting speaker look misinformed. This unfailingly results in the visitor embarking on a long digression to save face by showing how much he or she knows about the subject at hand. Intentionally or not, professors frequently turn what should be a time of clarification into a game of academic one-upsmanship with the dubious goal of inflating their own reputations.

The solution to this problem should not be legislation. Rather, faculty members should take it upon themselves to give students the first crack at asking questions at guest lectures, even if it results in occasional awkward silences. I propose that we make it a tradition at Middlebury that the first 15 minutes of question-and-answer at guest lectures are reserved solely for students.

One of the greatest tributes any professor could hope to receive is to hear one of his or her students demonstrate the quality of a Middlebury education by asking an intelligent, thought-provoking, informed question of a visiting speaker. If our faculty could put aside their egos every so often and let us have the floor, I think they would be surprised.