Professors: Stop blaming your students' distraction on smart phones

maybe you just suck?

What are lectures for? Most academics don’t seem to have an answer. They go up in front of teenagers and do all sorts of boring things. The ones that are regarded as “good” demand superficial forms of participation, often drawing on the latest fads. The “bad” ones rely heavily on their notes or even resort to reading slides. And yet, to an inordinate degree, these professors complain about students preferring to scroll through their phones rather than follow along with the lesson. But in all honesty, if I were sitting in their classes, I’d probably prefer my phone, too.

We academics have to remember who we are. A normal person does not pursue a PhD. To many employers, a PhD indicates that you will do everything in your power to avoid the labor market. If they hire you, you will leave as soon as you possibly can. Why do employers think that? Well, in many cases, it’s because it’s true. Many people with PhDs have them because they’ve found a subject they love. This love cannot be explained in pragmatic, economic terms. It doesn’t make sense from the point of view of ordinary rationality. It’s a love that drives those that possess it to engage in strange and bizarre activities – in what we call “research.” It inspires some of the brightest people in our society to damage their earning potential. They choose a discipline over what an ordinary person would regard as “a life.”

The lecture is an attempt to share this discipline – this alternative form of life – with students. Students are trying to figure out what they care about. They are trying to make major decisions about what to do with their lives. They’re in that lecture theater in no small part because they want to figure out if the thing you love is something they might love, too. Should they do the economically rational thing? Or should they commit to a discipline? Should they try to be normal, or should they cross into the great beyond?

The only way the student can sort this out is to witness the love that drives us to become the weird little freaks that we are. But many of us don’t share it with them. Many of us have forgotten why we’re there. If we don’t remember why the subject is worth our attention, can we really expect students to figure it out?

When you give a lecture in your field, about your object of devotion, the light of agape (or bhakti or ishq or whatever) should be pouring forth from you. It should be evident to everyone in that room that this discipline is your artistic medium. You’re not simply “transferring knowledge” – you’re displaying a form of life. The student isn’t captivated by the substantive content. The student is captivated by the way you relate to the content.

You should be utterly lost in your object of devotion. You should lose all awareness of what is going on in that room. You shouldn’t know what the students are doing. You shouldn’t see their phones, even when they come out.

To know what they thought of your lecture, you should have to ask them about it after the fact. That’s what student feedback is for. It makes up for the fact that when we are in our element, our eyes do not see the sensible world. To look upon it is a betrayal. We must forget what time it is. We must wander past whatever practical destination we once had. To ordinary people, we appear absent-minded, because our minds are somewhere else. The lecture is your opportunity to show students where you go when you appear not to be here. It is an invisible door to a sacred place.

Only some of them will decide to come with you. The rest will be captivated by the utter strangeness of it. They will go into employment, but they won’t forget what you showed them. It will remain with them as a path not taken. It will sit there, in the recesses of their minds, periodically suggesting itself to them. Got a dead-end job? Need a hobby? Want something to do when you retire? A memory of a great lecture asserts itself in such moments. It offers a glimpse of another world, another way.

Now, it is true that academic life has deteriorated. The universities look to monetize our research. They pressure us to produce too much of it, too quickly. They assess its impact rather than its quality. They give us too many students, and they admit students who are often unprepared for university life. They make us teach the wrong stuff. It can be hard, especially on bad days, to remember why you did your PhD. Some of our lectures will be better than others. Sometimes, we’ll try to open the invisible door, only to discover that today, there’s nothing there.

But when that happens, it’s never the fault of our students. When that happens, we have to try again. And when it’s happening far too often, we need to act to defend our disciplines, to prevent them from drowning in the same commercial logics that dominate so many other areas of social life. Anger at the students, anger at technology, and anger at the society that produces both only further estranges us from the love that we need to access and operate in.

There is an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps what’s on that phone is genuinely better than the lecture. Perhaps we’ve become so lost that the students really do learn more, faster, by running around on the internet for an hour. If that’s true – or if it even has the credible appearance of truth – we have only ourselves to blame. For we have allowed the university system to become so deformed that it produces loveless academics. Out of fear of being without an academic job, we have failed to defend the disciplines that are our objects of devotion. We have allowed ourselves to think the same way everyone else thinks: in terms of economic rationality. If we become like everyone else, why should anyone else make the sacrifices we made to become what we are?

When we lecture badly, when we offer such a poor display, how can we expect the people who witnessed our lectures to care about our disciplines? And, if they don’t care, why shouldn’t they consider defunding our research? After all, our research is weird – even freakish. If we aren’t able to show people that it matters, why on earth should they protect our freedom to do it?

This is the situation for many of our disciplines today. The whining about the phones is a symptom of our inability to make a positive case for ourselves. This case begins in the lecture theater. It begins in front of the teenagers who will one day be voters, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. Will they remember our lectures? Will they care about us? Will they make a case for what we do to those who did not get the chance to hear us speak?

All of this only happens if we make it happen. Students have to feel a real connection between what we do and that which is most profound. If we set about trying to diminish the meaningfulness of human activities – if we adopt an overly ironic, critical, or pragmatic posture – we not only fail to produce this connection, we generate cynicism. We make our students into the very people who will sell us out.

Then what will happen? We’ll have to do the worst thing imaginable – get regular jobs. And why is that the worst thing imaginable? Why was it that you could do nothing else? If you can’t remember, if you can’t make a case for yourself, who are you to deny them the right to scroll past you?