One of the great virtues of the University of Massachusetts is that because of its considerable size, there is a wealth of opportunity for students and educators alike. However, one of the flaws of UMass’ overall expanse is a general feeling of anonymity within the student body, that among the other 300 people in a lecture hall, you’re not really very connected to your professor.
Perhaps that’s the initial reason why I was so shocked and disappointed at what happened in my small class yesterday. The class, a high-level journalism class taught by one of the department’s finest instructors, was small to begin with, at only five students. When two more dropped the class, we were left with a three-hour period of very intimate and interesting interaction with our professor. In short, for anyone who has toiled away in Bartlett 65 or Mahar, my cozy four-way discussion (counting the professor) is a godsend – real contact with the instructor, and the ability to truly get your point across in a setting that isn’t more befitting a summer movie than education.
However, while we were more than an hour into a film that related heavily to the class material, a constantly growing cluster of students began to mill around expectantly just outside the door. Though I noticed a few students peering into the classroom, I paid it no mind. Minutes later, the door suddenly opened, and a well-dressed man walked in. He didn’t introduce himself, and while there’s no reason to post his name here, it took my professor’s insistent asking to get him to say it. He loudly and incredulously asked, “There are only four people in this class?” as if we had broken a code of conduct by being so small.
“Yes,” my professor answered, and after I got up to pause the film because it was clear that the man wasn’t going to be cordial, he requested – nearly demanded – that we leave the room and find another space so that his class could move in. In retrospect, perhaps we should have put up more of a fight, but it was such a jarring series of events in the setting of a classroom that I believe we were all a little too taken aback to say anything.
Before I go on, I should clarify that this wasn’t some rogue operation, a group of nomads just skirting the rules and finding their own place to be. In fact, the class had been bumped from their original room by what he described as a small number of people in a Judaic Studies class. Why he didn’t barge in on them, I couldn’t guess. So, the instructor and his merry band of learners took up residence in our room, the room we were assigned at the beginning of the semester.
It should also be noted that my class had been planning to make little use of the room for the rest of the semester. Because we are essentially just a small group of friends meeting for discussion once a week now, we’ve decided to start having class semi-regularly at a coffee shop. So it’s not the intention of this writer to say that moving our small group out of a regular-size classroom in the Herter building was some sort of outrage – in fact, I suspect that none of us would have spoken a word of protest if we were asked to meet in an office or find another, smaller spot every week. No, this isn’t about any insult I felt because I was forced to pack up my things and move to another room. We survived, and went next door where we finished the film, and our discussion of it.
My outrage (and that of my classmates) springs from the absolutely callous and offensive way we were treated by someone who is expected to hold some sort of dignified demeanor, at least within the university walls. We were rudely interrupted, talked over, and finally asked to leave a classroom we deserved to have, as if our learning experience was somehow lesser than his students’.
What’s the point of my rant, you ask? Sure, the slighting done that day was only minor, and the 10 feet of hallway we had to traverse to complete our mission of watching a video for class wasn’t exactly a daunting distance. We made it to the next room safely, and finished our video, before walking away in disgust.
It’s not that I had to pack up my things and move, it’s not that we had to briefly pause our movie. It’s in the message sent by someone who should be sensitive to the issues of such a large school. UMass students are accustomed to being herded around, dealing with too many people on the SPIRE network at once, and not being able to graduate on time because the required classes are too full with people who will eventually drop out anyway. So it sends a frightening and disenchanting message when a professor, someone who has certainly dealt with some of UMass’ ills firsthand, would be so cavalier in demanding a group of bright, driven students to discontinue their work so that his class could take over the room. Certainly, the fact that the professor’s lecture was inadvertently bumped is a problem, and using our assigned room was understandable. But for him to treat us as if we were less important, simply because there were fewer of us speaks to every legitimate gripe students have about this school.
Andrew Merritt is a Collegian editor.
