Daily Blague

First it was $12,000 garage renovations. Now it's outrageous email written by students with poor ideas of boundaries. Jonathan D Glater's "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me" had me spluttering this morning. The students who, having missed class, request notes. From the professor! The students who pre-submit their term papers for comments. Consider:

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.

"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.

I'd have thought that students raised in a house with indoor plumbing would have the sense to know what Professor Worley has to teach. The question may be whether students understand that they are the less powerful persons. As more and more families regard the university experience as a service that is purchased with the price of tuition, students will come to see themselves as customers, placing the burden of instruction squarely on the faculty. This is the ultimate trivialization of education, which can have no intrinsic value under such circumstances.

When I went to college, students proved themselves - or not. Nobody would have put it this way, but tuition bought the chance to fail. Where there's little or no chance of failure, degrees, including degrees from Harvard, don't mean a thing.