MS. REBECCA ROBERTSFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your community with the world. I'm Rebecca Roberts sitting for Kojo.

MS. REBECCA ROBERTSA little less than a generation ago, going to college was a pretty cut and dried experience. You studied hard, took your exams, wrote a final project and graduated. But these days, professors say many students view college not as a privilege, but a purchase. And students are coming to class expecting top marks, but not the hard work involved in earning them.

MS. REBECCA ROBERTSThis "customer is always right" attitude has academics frustrated and flabbergasted. From the syllabi they distribute to the exams they give, professors say students are protesting or negotiating down their higher education. The phenomenon is so widely reported that a study by the University of California-Irvine put data to it, finding that a third of students surveyed thought they deserved a B just for showing up to class.

MS. REBECCA ROBERTSBut is this really a phenomenon of the current generation or were professors saying this about our parents, our grandparents, us, when we were all on campus? Joining us to discuss this from the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison is Aaron Brower, professor and vice-provost for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

MR. AARON BROWERThank you. I'm glad to be here.

ROBERTSAnd from member station, WLRN, in Miami, Florida, Elayne Clift. She's a writer, journalist and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. Elayne Clift, welcome to you.

MS. ELAYNE CLIFTThank you for having me.

ROBERTSAnd of course you can join the conversation, 800-433-8850 or send us e-mail, kojo@wamu.org. You can also get in touch through Facebook or tweet us at kojoshow. Elayne, let's start with you because you recently wrote a column in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" about a semester from hell at a school you politely declined to name. But you had some fairly harsh words for your students. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

CLIFTI did. I was teaching in a program that exclusively for graduate students and so obviously expectations are higher or should be higher. And I really was astounded at the level of animosity among the students towards me and the workload that was expected.

CLIFTOn the very first night of the , I was sort of accosted because they thought my syllabus was too hard although it was premised on a prior syllabus from the same school. Throughout the entire semester, the behavior of the students was stunningly rude and, in fact, some students even came to me and said they didn't know where it was coming from and I didn't really deserve that.

CLIFTBut there was a clear sense that showing up and just sort of turning in inferior work was supposed to be enough to take off the pass box. And it really collimated for me an experience I've had in a number of other schools because I teach adjunct. And I've seen it increasingly over the 20 years that I've been teaching and that's why I wrote the piece because I think that there is a crisis in higher education that's not being addressed in the same way that the sort of crisis of K thru 12 is being addressed.

ROBERTSSo you have taught in a lot of schools in a lot of places over 20 years. Would you say this a pretty linear trend or does it pop up in certain places, in certain programs?

CLIFTWell, I can only speak from my own experience, of course, and there are wonderful students out there still. But I would have to say that because I've taught everywhere from community college to graduate level Ivy League schools, that I am troubled at the trend that I see because I do see it across the board at all levels and all universities and colleges that I've been teaching.

CLIFTAnd I know also that my colleagues are talking about it and feeling very frustrated by it so I would say there's something happening out there. Whether it's a trend or a new sociological phenomenon, it's a very worrisome thing. And I think also I hope we can talk about the fact that it isn't just the student behavior, but also that administrators are letting it happen, are not setting standards of performance, standards of excellence and standards of behavior.

ROBERTSYou mean for the students or for the professors?

CLIFTYes, for the students.

ROBERTSAaron Brower, at University of Wisconsin, one of your roles is to help students transition from high school to college level work. How do you help manage expectations about what college is going to be like?

BROWERWell, I would say Elayne is right. That there -- that you see this phenomenon more and more with students. One of the things that's important to understand is the change in demographics of students coming to college is such that going to college is now normative.

BROWEROver 70 percent of high school graduates or those with GEDs go onto some form of higher education and that's a relatively new thing. A generation ago, when I went to college or when -- I don't know how old the two of you are, but you know, as recently as 30, 40 years ago, the percentage was more like 20 to 25 percent. And prior to World War II, it was around 8 to 12 percent.

BROWERSo the expectation of college being the next step, kind of almost the next non-thinking step after high school, is really a phenomenon that we're dealing with.

ROBERTSWell, this isn't necessarily about expecting to go to college, this academic entitlement phenomenon, it's expecting to excel at college without working very hard. That's a different thing entirely isn't?

BROWERRight, one of the rules, the rules so to speak, of succeeding in K-12 is maximizing the bang for the buck that you have. In other words, what's the least amount of work I have to do in order to get the grade that I want to get. So students naturally apply that when they come to college, assuming it's just next thing.

BROWERAnd, in fact, those students, I find, those students that were best in high school are often the ones who are most embedded in those rules as they come to college. And it is a shock when they get here and they realize we are expecting different things from them and we expect them to do work at a different level.

ROBERTSIt sounds like what you're saying is the sort of standardization of high school experience that there's a certain score you need to get on a certain test and that achievement is definitively measured, is hard to translate into a college context where it's about critical thinking and linear narratives and things aren't necessarily quite as quantifiable.

BROWERYes, it's a very much -- I mean, I'm over generalizing, but it's very much a checkbox mentality. And you do see that in college as well as, you know, what are the courses I need to take here and to succeed to a major and check. And do I do a study abroad, check, and, you know, it changes the nature of what we wish college would be.

ROBERTSElayne, what is your priority or your policy on students who say, what is it that I need to do to get an A and why won't you give me one?

CLIFTWell, I try not to go down that path because it makes me defensive. But rather to talk about what it means to be a college student and what skills people think you have when you come out of an institution with a piece of paper, you know, that says you have a skills set that you don't have.

CLIFTI have a lot of students who are very angry at the fact that I make them write well or I try to make them write well and I try to help them think logically and present and defend a case, no matter what the subject matter is. And they'll say, well, why do we have to do that? This isn't a writing course or whatever.

CLIFTAnd so I really spend a lot of time and energy, you know, editing and outlining for students and stuff that you just wouldn't expect to have to do in college. And some students really appreciate that if they want to learn and be stretched. But I don't think that they're necessarily concerned with excelling. They're concerned with getting through, getting out, getting the piece of paper.

CLIFTYou know, I'm here, I paid for it, I deserve it, it's mine. And it's very challenging to work with students like that because you put, -- you do put out so much effort as a teacher to try and give them that skills set and then when you get that bounce back hostility, it just is pretty stunning.

ROBERTSMy guests are Elayne Clift. She's a writer and journalist and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. And Aaron Brower, professor and vice-provost for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We're talking about whether or not there is a growing sense of academic entitlement among specifically college students.

ROBERTSAnd I know it's the middle of the day and I know that it is finals week in a lot of places, but if there are college students out there who would like to defend themselves or professors who have a different perspective or parents who feel that there is some entitlement necessary when you're paying a great big bill for college, give us a call, 800-433-8850 or send us e-mail, kojo@wamu.org.

ROBERTSYou know, in reading a lot of these issues about academic entitlement, one of the things that keeps coming up is the informality that technology introduces. That e-mail and texting your professor makes him or her seem more like someone you can argue with than someone that you should just take direction from and that student-driven professor evaluations sometimes play a role in this as well. Aaron Brower, would you agree with that?

BROWERI think technology is playing a huge part in college these days, but I actually would characterize it somewhat differently. First of all, getting back to the original point here is I think that if you're asking the question of how students learn what the expectations are for college, there is very little. There aren't very many places where they do learn those things until they get to college.

BROWERAnd so the burden is on us to provide those expectations to students. You had asked originally about transition to college. So through the transition programs, through socialization and first-year courses, et cetera and re-enforcing those in every course we're in and through the discipline policies, et cetera that administrators have.

BROWERBut the thing that technology is doing is the Google world has changed the nature of what education is. Everyone has, essentially, the same information and so education based on conveying information really is no longer relevant. And I would say that we haven't quite caught up with that in higher education to put the emphasis more on integration of knowledge, application of knowledge, discerning good knowledge from bad, you know. We're all in awash in a sea of knowledge.

ROBERTSRight, right.

BROWERVersus the...

ROBERTSThe amount of knowledge is not necessarily the critical thing here?

BROWERExactly. So, you know, I just, I think we need to catch up as universities and colleges and then the role that technology plays in the communication between students and faculty really has changed, too. The immediacy expectation, I send you this e-mail at, you know, 9:30 at night and by 10:30 I should have an answer. Those expectations on our side as faculty, we have to make it clear that we're not waiting for e-mails 24/7 just to respond to our students.

ROBERTSAnd if conveying information is no longer the most important job of higher education, how do you replace that and with what?

BROWERRight. That's a really good question. And there are some good models now, project-based learning is one that has been there since the inception, since John Dewey 100 years ago. But doing more of that capstones, research experiences, the writing intensive programs that I think Elayne is referring to, all of those things, getting students away from just amassing knowledge and spitting back knowledge, that's the piece that really is, I think, drives us all crazy.

ROBERTSAnd Elayne, what about the professor evaluations from students? Do you think that plays a role?

CLIFTYes, you know, it's really interesting. What's happened in my experience is that I'm sort of put on trial for the grading that I do rather than -- I don't feel supported by the university or the college or the system I'm employed by. I feel that I have to defend myself against student allegations and that was very much a part of what happened when I -- before I wrote that piece.

CLIFTAnd, if I may, I'd like to go back to some of the things we've just been talking about. One of the things that's happening because of the Internet is plagiarism is rampant. And I think that we need a better segue between high school and college in terms of training around these issues.

CLIFTBecause without that partnership, without that continuum, we end up with students who've -- the teachers have kicked the can down the road and then, you know, it becomes very difficult for us to cover all those bases. Also, I think that one of the things that's happened with IT -- just two points I'd like to make. One is that colleges, I think because of revenue, are increasingly loading online classes. And students think that they are easier, but they are not easier and they are wicked hard for teachers. And we spend three or four times, as much time trying to deal with those classes, but we're not compensated at that level. In fact, I wrote a prior piece for the Chronicle about why I'd never teach online again.

CLIFTBut the larger point that I would like to make is that I really believe that IT and technology and the information age, whatever we want to call it, has changed us and is mutating us as a species in ways that we're seeing symptomatically through the things that we're talking about. In other words, we are -- we no longer take time to do things. We no longer delve deeply. We no longer find pleasure in finding answers. We want everything in a quick fix. And we'd have less and less face-to-face communication so we don't think we have to be courteous and nice to people anymore. And this is really a big issue for me. I see this as translating into these kinds of behaviors.

ROBERTSThat's Elayne Clift. She's joining us from member station WLRN in Miami. And from the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, we also have Aaron Brower. We are talking about academic entitlement. And if you'd like to join us, call 800-433-8850. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more after this.

ROBERTSWelcome back. I'm Rebecca Roberts sitting in on "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." I'm talking with Aaron Brower, professor and vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Elayne Clift, writer, journalist and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. We're talking about whether or not there's a growing sense of academic entitlement among college students. You can join us at 800-433-8850 or by e-mail at kojo@wamu.org. And we've got a bunch of calls. Let's hear from Brian in Washington, D.C. Brian, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

BRIANHello?

ROBERTSHey, Brian, you're on the air.

BRIANHey. I -- in college, I've had a kind of a foot slap from what you're describing as where I am expecting a higher performance from the university but, you know, what I received is kind of a low-level amount of education and input from my professor. And they kind of just, you know, pushing me along through the, you know, the course load to get me out and get me, you know, get my, you know, graduation. But I don't really feel like there is a high level of performance that is required and that's just something that I feel like has disappeared as well.

ROBERTSAnd what do you think you're missing, Brian? I mean, what would you like the university to do that they're not doing?

BRIANI just feel like in a way it's almost like that they're playing to whatever the publisher has provided them, you know, in terms of learning material. Like, my classes aren't actually created by a professor, they're just -- they got some PowerPoint slides from their teacher's edition. They're going to throw it up on, you know, the projector, overhead projector, talk about it and then maybe have a guest speaker come in and they're actually not even engaging the class in anything whatsoever.

ROBERTSBrian, where do you go to school? What are you studying?

BRIANI go to school at American University and I'm in the Kogod School of Business. I also feel like a lot of the students kind of had the same feeling, but don't really care as long as they get their degree or certificate or graduate degree. They're just kind of moving along, too. And I feel like it was almost like you're sold to this idea that if you go to school, you'll, you know, better yourself, you'll get a degree, you'll get an education. But it's just kind of like a disconnect on both ends.

ROBERTSBrian, thanks for your call. So, there's a perspective, Aaron Brower, from someone who was actually expecting to be more challenged and more engaged.

BROWERYeah, there's actually an interesting book, I would say, a funny book that Murray Sperber wrote about 10 years called "Beer and Circus." That his point is that we are distracting students with alcohol and big-time sports to -- from how lousy their education is. I don't fully agree with that. But he has this idea in there of the non-aggression pact between students and faculty. You don't expect much from me and I won't expect much from you and we'll get along just fine. I think that, you know, there is some of that. I certainly wouldn't want to say there isn't. But to me, it really comes down back to two things.

BROWEROne is how technology is changing things. You know, the way Brian's describing a faculty member putting up a PowerPoint or going through lectures that are based solely or primarily from a text is exactly the kind of old-fashioned way of knowledge that we don't need to have anymore with the technology and the Google world. And then the other part, again, is how we're not communicating effectively what college is for and what it should be for and what we should do and what students should do and, you know, all that.

ROBERTSLet's hear from Samuel in Washington, D.C. Samuel, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

SAMUELHi.

ROBERTSHi, you're on the air.

SAMUELLong time fan. I was just going to kind of also come in on that -- on the other side of the coin. I believe that when people pay a certain amount of money for education and a lot of professors that have been there particularly for a long time have a standpoint that it's their particular point of view and their particular way of presenting the information. And that's the way they want to see it when they evaluate you, as opposed to whether or not it's correct.

SAMUELThen you get into a mood where you just regurgitate the information that they give you, which is not really learning anything. So, not to say that that's the way that the majority of professors operate, but there are a lot of them that do. And so, anytime something is repeated, it's going to become habit. I would also say that just in terms of the university experience, the way that most of the administrations are run is so terrible that you learn more in a negative sense from how to cut through red tape than in the classroom. And so you're real job in college is to figure out how to escape with your degree, not that you're being pushed through.

ROBERTSSamuel, thanks for your call. I have to say as someone who recently went to graduate school almost 20 years after my undergraduate degree, there was that moment in my first couple of classes of remembering, right, I have to remember how to parrot back what it was that the professor wants to hear. And it was a skill that I had mastered 20 years ago and really hadn't used since.

ROBERTSAnd there was a certain feeling that, right, there's something about being a student where you have to take your cues from the professor, realize what it is they are trying to get from you and parrot it back to them in on their terms. It was remarkable how that was a constant 20 years later. Elayne, do you think I'm being unfair?

CLIFTWell, I don't think you're being unfair. It was your experience, but I'm sort of stunned by that because, you know, one of the principles of adult education, adult learning is that it should be experiential and participatory. And I mean, I really work hard myself to try and make that happen so that it's meaningful and so that the student is, you know, that I am guiding or facilitating a learning experience. And I just don't teach to the book.

CLIFTI mean, I really try to make it interesting and exciting and lots of kind of field assignments and so, you know, that's certainly not how I teach or some of the people I know teach. I'm sure there are lazy teachers. There are teachers who would rather spend their time on research or consulting or something. But for those of us who really love teaching, I think we really work hard not to do that.

CLIFTNow I will say for someone of my generation, I have some catch up to do on, you know, how to use the internet and how to use -- I'm told not that PowerPoint is completely old hat just like Facebook is for old people now. It's hard to keep up with all the technology. But I think most of us, I hope, most of are making a really, you know, an in earnest attempt to make learning meaningful and interesting and even fun, you know, and not teaching the old way.

ROBERTSYeah, and I don't want to be unfair. I'm delighted I've gone back to graduate school. I've had a wonderful experience. I've learned an extraordinary amount, much more than I necessarily anticipated. I think there's just something about that role of student versus professor, where you spend a little time assessing what it is the professor's looking for and then providing it. And that's not necessarily just pure excellence on your terms. It's every professors just has slightly different expectations in terms of what way they want the learning objectives presented back to them.

CLIFTOne of the things, by the way, that I try to do is conduct no matter the size of the class is conduct in seminar fashion. And I'm actually delighted when students take a different point of view from me, as long as they can defend it and they work to defend it. That's learning, you know? I'm not offended when somebody doesn't agree with me. I just want them to not agree with me in a really strong way.

BROWEROr in a very stupid way. You know, I don't quite mean that the way it sounds but I -- you want people -- part of education is bringing data and logic and reasoning to bear. And, you know, that is all part of the educational experience.

ROBERTSLet's hear from Jennifer in Rockville. Jennifer, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

JENNIFERHi. So I just wanted -- I'm a student and well almost done. And I was in a JD MBA program and I just wanted to chime in and say that I noticed a complete difference in the students in the law school and versus the business school. In the law school, everyone's really motivated and worked really hard, you know, and knew that they had to do really, really well to achieve the grades they wanted. But in business school, it's, you know, okay, let's break down the syllabus. I need this, you know, test is 40 percent. This assignment is 10 percent.

JENNIFERSo if I get a C on this test, then, you know, a 65 percent on this, then, you know, I can pass the class. And that's kind of how I -- the students seem to take business school versus law school. And I also wanted to say that about the hostilities that your guest had mention that she faced with some students and I can speak from just my personal experiences. You know, I feel really used and abused by the school. I mean, I'm getting an education, but, you know, at a great, great, great expense.

JENNIFERBooks are going up and, you know, it just seems like it's really frustrating when a teacher says we need you to buy these three books and it's going cost $500. But we're not going to really read them and, you know, it's kind of a waste of money. So I don't know. It's kind of like the teachers are the face that the students really see from the school. So when they're angry about the, you know, the debt that they're getting into, sometimes it's taken out on the faculty.

ROBERTSJennifer, thanks for the call.

BROWERThat's true. I hear that from my colleagues quite a bit that some of the frustrations that they're hearing from students aren't really directed at them. But they're the, as you say, the face of the university. You know, one of the things -- sorry. One of the things that you're raising, which is really important here, is there is no -- the one student or the one student experience and there is a tremendous diversity of students and their experiences and of faculty and universities that do a good job of setting expectations. And, you know, it's just -- I want to help us not overgeneralize from this conversation.

ROBERTSRight. No, I don't think that anyone wants to just sort of say, oh, kids these days, they don't know the value of, you know, and leave it at that.

ROBERTSRight, right. Elayne, you were trying to get in there.

CLIFTWell, I was going to say that being an old Washingtonian myself and an activist that I really often advise students to make their feelings known towards administration, whether it's in a meeting or, you know, a polite letter. And I think there's -- I think a partnership to be built between students and teachers. Because, you know, we're all set up to not do well or to not feel good about what we're doing. And when -- this is what I meant early on when I said, you know, there's also administrators playing a role, whether it means they're overlooking plagiarism or they're filling online classes for revenue or whatever.

CLIFTI mean, just by way of example, when I had this experience at the college I don't want to name, I did write -- I wrote a three-page letter to the administration about what my concerns were and what my experience had been and I didn't hear back from anybody. I sent it to three key senior administrators and I did not hear back from any of them.

ROBERTSWell, you know, it's interesting this idea of our students feeling more entitled. Is there a different sense in the classroom? It's squishy, it's anecdotal, it's hard to quantify. And there is actually a study. It's now a couple of years old, but there was an empirical study at University of California Irvine that tried to quantify what they abbreviated AE, academic entitlement, and tried to asses just through progression analysis what sort of factors were associated with AE.

ROBERTSAnd interestingly, AE was not significantly associated with GPA, that cutting corners or cheating or plagiarizing was. But it did not result in better grades. And complaining to professors and, you know, grubbing about your grades was associated with it. But that didn't result in better grades either. So there is at least from this study some implication that it doesn't even work. That you're unpleasant, you're not learning much and you're not even getting better grades for it. Let's take another call. This is Kenneth in Frederick. Kenneth, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

KENNETHHi, I'm going to start this from a different direction. I have taught anatomy, physiology and rehabilitative medicine and I've had this discussion with a friend of mine who teaches neuroscience at a major university in the Midwest. And what we have found is that we can no longer expect students to be coming in having read the assignments and being prepared to do the work. And it's especially true of American students. When we get students from places like India or Taiwan or China, they do brilliantly and they do the work and they do prepare and they engage in critical thinking, which we don't see from American students.

ROBERTSElayne Clift, this certainly mirrors your experience, that not only are people hostile and entitled, that they're actually not doing very good work.

CLIFTYeah. And there is certainly a cultural dimension. I taught in Thailand for a year at a university where I had students from all over Asia, but also from Brittan and the U.S. and so forth. And there is just an extraordinary difference in how -- again, I'm going to generalize. But Asian students that I taught, their whole respect for the academy and for the professors -- now obviously, kids talk behind your back and all that. But they took it so seriously and they were so grateful to have that education and they, you know, worked hard and they wanted to be stretched. And it's just an extraordinary thing to see in that culture and to see it not happening here is very worrisome.

ROBERTSAnd do you think that there was some golden age of American higher education where it was that way? Or has it always been thus?

CLIFTYou know, I'm in my 60s, and so I graduated high school in 1961 and went on to college. And certainly I see a difference from -- and I think that your other quest was mentioning that too that, yeah, in the days when it wasn't, you know, you go to high school, you go to college. but rather you were tracked either as academic or as vocational. If you wanted, yeah, if you wanted an education, you really worked for it and you valued it. And it was exciting to learn and discover new things. I think there is a sea change.

ROBERTSAnd what is the professor's role in this? I mean, if kids are there for four, five years and moving on, the constant of the academia is the professors themselves, right? Aaron Brower?

BROWERYeah, you know, I would -- yes, there's a real role as professors we need to play as we're setting expectations in our classrooms. And it's larger than that too. The university does set expectations through every little, you know, communication it has with students, the view book -- starting with the view book to the way it runs its summer orientation, through again socialization through freshman courses, you know, all the way up the line.

BROWERYou know, I can tell you one of the things that we're doing at Wisconsin is trying to address this by being very clear about what our expectations are for students, and then trying to reinforce that at every level. And you -- that does have an impact, and it also is really hard because it means that particularly at a large university like Madison, we have to have conversations across 2,000 faculty and 6,000 academic staff, and 28,000 undergraduates. And, you know, it's exciting but really difficult too.

BROWERIf I could make one more point on this. I think we sell students a bill of goods the way we're advertising the value of college now, which is about getting the degree rather than what you're doing when you're in college, or what you're gonna want to do with that degree. We kind of say to them all you have to do is get your degree and that's it, you're set for the good life. And that's just not true.

ROBERTSWe have an e-mail from Ingrid in Washington who says, among other things, "I believe that the notion of college being a stepping stone to a career rather than a place of learning and letters and the free and open exchange of ideas contributes to the overall atmosphere of entitlement and a lack of academic rigor on the part of college students today." Elayne, what's your reaction to that?

CLIFTYeah. I think that she really has a good point. And I do think that we shouldn't be just coming down on the student side of this. I mean, I do think that teachers and administrators also bear some responsibility and have a lot of work to do to overcome this and to swing it around. A lot of these big schools, I guess, Madison would be one, but, you know, big state schools or even big private schools, they are huge bureaucracies and they run by -- run as bureaucracies and mismanaged as bureaucracies.

CLIFTSo I think that, you know, it's all well and good to have an orientation or to have a handbook which says plagiarism will not be tolerated, but it's like in the sense being a parent. You have to say what you mean and mean what you say, and you have to be willing to follow through on it. And again, I've had experiences -- just one quick anecdotal thing is that I taught a course in a very well-respected private New England college in which a senior -- a graduating senior who didn't show up for class, and who was a woman of color and never did any of the work, the dean said to me it was absolutely up to me whether she passed or failed.

CLIFTBut he made it very clear that they did not make a racial incident out of a graduating student. So, you know, you get mixed messages. You, you know, you have to mean what you say and you have to stand behind it, and you have to support and value your faculty. Again, as an adjunct, I mean, one school I taught at, we were 38 percent of the faculty, but we had no support. We were, you know, the pittance of a payment. They really tried to keep us from unionizing.

CLIFTSo, again, you have to sort of work as a team and really mean what you say and work together across the board, students, faculty, and administration if we're gonna change any of this culture.

ROBERTSThat's Elayne Clift. She's a writer, journalist, and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. I'm also joined by Aaron Brower, professor and vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin. We're gonna take a quick break, but we will continue our conversation about academic entitlement after this. I'm Rebecca Roberts. You're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

ROBERTSWelcome back. I'm Rebecca Roberts sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. I'm talking with Aaron Brower, professor and vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Elayne Clift, writer, journalist, and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. We're talking about academic entitlement. If you'd like to join us, give us a call at 800-433-8850. I want to take a call from Ray in College Park, Md. Ray, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

RAYHey, hi. Thanks for letting me on.

ROBERTSSure.

RAYI'm a professor at College Park at the University of Maryland, and I started my teaching career in the early '70s, so I'm in my 60's now and was a graduate TA. And my observation is that all of these issues were around. I remember complaining about them to my fellow TAs that students couldn't write, couldn't think, they can't solve math problems either very well, and I don't think it's changed. In fact, at the University of Maryland, I would say students are actually getting better over the years, and that's not because I think the student general population in the country has changed, but the university is a little more selective than it was.

RAYSo I'm really quite positive. I thoroughly enjoy teaching. I have good relationships with my -- most of my students. That's not to say if I teach a big class with 150 students in it, I don't expect 150 of them to be totally interested or even to attend. On a typical day, there might be 80 or 90 out of 150 actually in class. But those 80 or 90 are paying pretty close attention. I've discouraged, you know, the surfing on their computers while they're online -- in class, and that kind of thing.

RAYSo I find the students that have an interest in the topic are really quite engaged. And the best students are as good as they've ever been, highly creative, really hard workers going way beyond the call of duty. And then you always have, you know, some that fit the profile that your guests have been talking about, but I find that to be actually a minority.

ROBERTSRay, thank you for your call. Elayne Clift, I know that you've written about the students that have driven you crazy, but I assume you have excellent students still as well.

CLIFTI do. And can I just say that University of Maryland is my alma mater twice. And that some of my role models for good teachers certainly come from University of Maryland, and actually are still my friends. And I'm also friends with a lot of my students. I've lost your question, but I do, you know, I do have wonderful friendships with students, and it doesn't mean that they're always the best students, but they're the well-motivated students, and the ones who respect what we try to do as teachers and who want to be stretched and who want to grow.

ROBERTSWe have an e-mail from Ellen. Actually she posted this on our website kojoshow.org. She says, "Education takes humility and faith. You have to believe your professors mean you well and know more than you do. Arrogance and inflated egos make that impossible. As an employer who's worked with kids just out of school for more than 20 years now, I can tell you that the recent college graduates over the last two to three years have been so self-important and so disrespectful of authority, that they've been a trial to work with. I can only image what they had been like to educate.

ROBERTSAnd again, Elayne Clift, that mirrors your experience that there's no sense among at least the class that you write about in "The Chronicle of Higher Education," that you had something to teach them.

CLIFTWell, again, I had probably 16 students, and of those 16, maybe 12 drove me nuts. I had some good students there, too. But, yeah, I mean, I actually had a student say to me in a very angry tone that just because I was a teacher, and just because I was older than him, I didn't have the right to tell him he was wrong. I mean, he was wrong, factually wrong, you know. So when you come up against that kind of thing, it's like, oh, my God, where do I, you know, how -- where do I go from here? How do I deal with this?

CLIFTAnd it's very -- it's very de-energizing, you know. When a student works with you and wants to learn and gets excited because you show them something new or you taught them how to construct an argument or something, that's so rewarding. And to be honest with you, I'm sort of at the point of just not teaching anymore. But every semester there's at least one student who is such a joy to work with, and who says to me that, you know, I really sort of gave them a career direction or whatever it is that they're saying to me. It just keeps you hanging in there because it's so wonderful when it happens.

ROBERTSLet's...

BROWERYou know, Elayne is putting her finger on something that's really important, which is the need to, first of all, find the inspiration with the students that you can, because that's really what drives us forward as educators anyway. But the other is, when students say ridiculous things, it's up to us to confront that ridiculousness. If there's factual errors, it's up to us to say that and that goes with the plagiarism, it goes with, you know, poor scholarship, all the way down the line. And I feel -- as an administrator, feel badly that she was given the mixed message that she was about plagiarism with the anecdote you mentioned, because that was simply wrong. An administrator should say, our job is to educate, that's what we're here for.

ROBERTSLet's here from Mark in Fairfax, Va. Mark, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

MARKHi. I'm a returning student and, you know, I've got to say the idea of academic entitlement, I think, was around when I was first a student 20 years ago. And, yeah, it's still around, but I don't think it's really any worse. I'll also throw out that honestly, I think maybe the teaching has gotten actually better over the last 20 years, particularly in mathematics where -- and again, a lot of that could be just because, you know, I'm a lot more mature coming at it. But things are just a whole lot easier now. Anyway, just wanted to throw out that maybe -- maybe some optimism.

ROBERTSMark, thanks for your call. I have to say, as a returning student myself, either I've gotten a whole lot smarter in the last 20 years, or it's amazing how well you can do in a class when you actually show up and do the reading, which maybe I wasn't quite as diligent about when I an undergraduate. Going to school in your 40s is definitely a very different perspective. But that brings out what you were talking about, Aaron Brower, too, that one of the things undergraduates, in particular, especially right out of high school, undergraduates are doing is learning how to be adults in addition to learning whatever, you know, academic information is being taught.

ROBERTSAnd learning that you are occasionally wrong and learning that you do need to have some humility about your own opinions is part of growing up. The question is, how responsible are professors for ensuring that happens?

BROWERWell, it's up to us to play a role. It's not the entire thing, of course. It happens in the residence halls and it happens in un -- you know, regulated student-to-student interactions and student organizations, et cetera. But it is our job in the classroom to be clear about what our expectations are, to help teach civility, whether students should have had it beforehand or not. But that is our job. You know, the interesting thing -- I -- part of my job is teaching our faculty how to teach better and supporting their work.

BROWERAnd one of the interesting things is that we -- those of us that are teaching in higher ed aren’t like the one and two percent of our class that really liked the classes and did the work and was really excited by the -- by what we were doing. And the other 98 percent, some of your callers have said the same thing, I don't know that it's that much different than it was. They were -- back then they were kind of floating through and doing the minimal amount of work too.

BROWERThey may not have been as vocal about it, or as kind of uncivil, but, you know, we're -- we were in the minority then, and we're still in the minority now.

ROBERTSLet's hear from Nicole in College Park. Nicole, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

NICOLEYes. I am a former adjunct, taught nine years at the University of Maryland. Did not have the problem because of what I told the students the first day of class. You're in college now. If you want to get an A, you have to study one hour for every hour of lecture class. And if you want to get an A in a lab class, you have to study two hours for every hour of class. I told them I did not grade on a curve, and I sent them to a study skills lab if they had trouble.

NICOLEAnd that bit of advice, knowing I had to invest that much time studying outside of class, took me in '79 from academic probation to when I returned to school 10 years later, to honors. Because students just don't understand how to study for college.

BROWERMm-hmm. Yeah, it's very true. There's actually national studies of time students spend studying, and on average, students are spending between 10 and 12 hours a week on their class work, which is for most students it's a 15-hour contact hours in the classroom. That's way too little. And you're absolutely right. It's just not enough time to really do the work let alone do well in the work.

ROBERTSAnd Elayne Clift, we haven't really talked about grade inflation, at least not directly. Do you as a professor feel there's pressure to give higher grades than there used to be?

CLIFTWell, there's certainly an expectation from students, I guess, that you're gonna do that. I don't get that sense from administration, but I will not grade inflate, and I do not curve and I make that very clear to the students. And, you know, one of the things I tell them, I was a returning student. Both my undergraduate and my graduate work. And, you know, I -- I wish we had the gap year like in England where before going to university, young adults have to go some -- go do something, either, you know, do a learning experience, or work for a year, or -- to really sort of ease into that adult world, and to come to school thinking, well, gosh, I don't want to do a boring job the rest of my life.

CLIFTOr, you know, now I'm fired up to learn about something. Because I think -- I remember in my day, you know, it was the returning students who were primarily women, who were going nuts at home, who really, you know, upped the curve as it were. So I always say to students, you know, when you get out of here, your piece of paper is going to say that you can do what I can do, and I worked my but off to be able to do what I can do. So I don't feel too happy about you have the same piece of paper when you can't write a sentence, you know.

CLIFTSo I -- and I tell them that I have very, very high standards, but that if they work with me, I will do everything I can to make their learning experience meaningful and useful. And I really do that. I work hard to do that. And that's why I have a wonderful relationship with some of my students, and I'm very -- my evaluations are very polarized because, you know, lazy students don't like me, and students who want to be stretched love me. But I just refuse to lower my standards because I had to work so hard to -- my master's was a killer. People can't believe what I had to do for my master's.

CLIFTSo I value that, and I want other people to value it, but I really do think if we have a more institutionalized kind of gap year or something that made students appreciate what it means to, you know, to learn, and to be able to go out into the world and do these things and to excel could be useful. But, of course, you can't mandate that.

ROBERTSAnd Aaron Brower, we're gonna give you the last word here, because if there are parents listening, the academic year is starting to wrap up here, maybe they've got students starting college in the fall, or returning to college in the fall, or there are students listening, what do you need to know to not be shocked by what is expected of you in college?

BROWERMy best advice is sit in front. You know, all of a sudden it makes the class small whether it's a giant lecture or not, and you're engaged. You can't help but not be engaged with the instructor in front of you.

ROBERTSThat's Aaron...

BROWERReally, the question is to take thing seriously, to take your education seriously.

ROBERTSFrom the studios at Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, Aaron Brower, professor and vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We were also joined from member station WLRN in Miami, Florida by Elayne Clift. She's a writer, journalist and adjunct professor at Granite State College in New Hampshire. Thank you both so much for joining us.

CLIFTThank you.

BROWERYou're welcome. It was a pleasure.

ROBERTSI'm Rebecca Roberts sitting in "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." Thanks for listening.