FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. Why do college students seem allergic to intellectual
debate? Why do they all seem to run away the instant class ends? Do they date?
And did the dog really eat the homework?
As these judgments masquerading as questions began striking Cathy A. Small,
an anthropology professor, she realized that she had heard similar ones as a
student 30 years earlier.
But instead of giving in to the creeping alienation her questions suggested,
Professor Small, a compact, energetic woman, reached into anthropologys kit
bag. She enrolled as a freshman at Northern Arizona University here in the
2002-3 school year, determined to apply the same techniques she had used in
studying tribal societies to understand the 18,000 students on the campus where
she teaches.
I took my alienation as the springboard for this project, Professor Small
said. It wasnt so much to observe undergrads, as to be an undergrad and see
what they come up against.
Professor Small envisioned her study as a very little book, but My
Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, published under
the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, has gone through five hardback printings. A
paperback edition, put out by Penguin Books this month, exhausted its first run
of 14,500 copies in a week and is into its second printing.
Theres some kind of chord that its striking, Professor Small said
recently over a dinner of Thai chicken soup, with mushrooms and coconut milk, a
blend that recalled her years in the South Pacific, where she lived on Tonga.
People want to have this discussion.
Her book found todays students not as elite, not as prepared for college
as earlier generations, she said, and burdened with debt. Theyre more
practical in their education, she said.
Up close, she found that they could be intellectually engaged, but that
rather than engaging in political or philosophical discussions, students were
more likely to talk about how they pulled off specific assignments, often with a
minimum of effort. They saw fitting in to campus culture as crucial, and purely
academic or intellectual quests as only tangential to their education.
I think people are more engaged than the veneer suggests, but there
definitely was a push to show ones disinterest in the academic side of life,
Professor Small said.
And they seemed indifferent to values like diversity.
Although college is, Professor Small, said, a liminal experience a place
of enormous creative potential, where new identities can be forged and destinies
transformed she found a pervasive, if tacit, emphasis on conformity and an
undercurrent of cynicism.
Professor Small, a native of Brooklyn who practices both Judaism and Buddhist
meditation, did her doctorate on the impact of immigration on the people of Tonga.
To do the research, she lived on the island for three years, participating in
a co-op of women who created cloth from the bark of the tapa tree, to be used in
ceremonies. A large sample of this work hangs along a second-story walkway in
her home, visible from the living room below.
Writing her book is not the first time Professor Small used her anthropology
background in a modern-life situation.
In 1993, she created a catalog to help Native American tribes market their
crafts without middlemen.
In My Freshman Year, Professor Small called Northern Arizona AnyU,
describing it as a midsize, not particularly selective, public university. A
reporter at The New York Sun, piecing together clues in the book, revealed her
identity last year.
At first, she said, she refused to confirm that she was the books real
author, worrying that doing so would violate the promise of anonymity she had
given her subjects. But eventually, she decided that holding out would
jeopardize the privacy of individual students, especially after a journalist
threatened to seek school records under the Freedom of Information Act.
It helped, she said, that her universitys president, John D. Haeger,
publicly praised her work, and has used My Freshman Year as a framework for
making changes to student housing and academic life.
Now, Professor Small speaks to groups nationwide about the implications of
her findings for colleges and universities, especially about how to promote
diversity.
Im representing the angst that my own generation is having in dealing with
students these days, she said.
Fieldwork for her project meant leaving her nice home to live in a student
dorm, taking a full course load and trying to make friends. It meant giving up
her coveted faculty parking space and making her way around the sprawling campus
by foot and bus. But mostly it meant losing her status as a professor, and
trying to see the world from the level of her students.
Initially, the prospect was frightening. Her first night of orientation,
Professor Small said, she took her cue from other students, many of whom packed
up their pillows and went to stay with their parents in hotel rooms around town.
She headed home.
I was, like, panicking, she said, slipping into college-student cadence.
Its very disorienting to be out of your place.
But she was back the next day, gaining insights on matters from how students
decorate their dorm room doors to their social lives.
Federal studies have shown that college students today spend less time
studying than previous generations, but also less time socializing. So what are
they doing?
Professor Small learned that many on her campus were struggling to balance
academic demands with long hours in jobs off campus. She also found that the
university had unintentionally fragmented the student body by offering a
plethora of options on many aspects of student life. Everything from course
loads to living arrangements can be tailored to suit individual tastes, but the
results reduced the chances that undergraduates would mix with people unlike
themselves.
During her research, other students assumed that the friendly, short, trim
woman with graying curls must be down on her luck: 50-something, perhaps
divorced, taking classes because she suddenly had to make her own way in the
world. But they avoided questions.
They didnt know what it was, but they were sure it was a sad story, she
said, and laughed.
In her book, Professor Small wrote about the art on dorm room doors, which
she sees as personal billboards, advertising the occupants as carefree,
spontaneous, fun-loving and sexually adventurous. One door to a womens dorm
room had a sign up board for male classmates to say hi, and condoms for the
taking.
On the womens doors, there was usually a white message board, where notes
from friends were seldom erased. Men would post affectionate or saucy letters
from women. Each was a way of broadcasting the popularity of the person within,
Professor Small said.
She found the students were highly practical, with friends calling on one
another for shopping trips, meals and lifts to classes. And she noticed that
most friendships were forged early in the freshman year, so that she, living
among upperclassmen, made friends mostly among other outsiders, including
transfer and foreign students.
As an anthropologist, Professor Small does not believe she knows the natives
better than they know themselves. But she said that in taking a step back to
describe their world, she hopes her book will give students perspective.
I didnt write it for freshmen, but there are things about seeing the way
culture works that I think gives you some freedom when you realize it, she
said. You may not make any changes, but at least youre aware that what youre
doing is a cultural prescription, and it gives you a kind of
flexibility.
