My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Hard Truths from an Undercover Student

Reviewed by George D. Kuh

Rebekah Nathan. 
Ithaca, N.Y.:  Cornell University Press, 2005.

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student is an attempt to discover what today’s undergraduates are really like. Knowing this, the author promises, will help us become better teachers. On the former score, this little book succeeds, though it pales in comparison to the richness and depth of anthropologist Michael Moffatt’s foray into the collegiate culture of Rutgers University (Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture), anthropologists Dorothy Holland and Margaret Eisenhart’s sobering account of a gendered academy (Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture), and higher education professor Peter Magolda’s ethnography of Western College at Miami University (his 1997 About Campus magazine essay, “Life as I Don’t Know It”). On the latter score, My Freshman Year fails. Its recommendation that faculty reduce the amount of assigned reading because students are too busy is wrong for many reasons. Its suggestion that class assignments be made more relevant to students’ lives, while always a good idea, is too little, too late.

Other shortcomings exist. The presentation is disjointed in places, such as when a short summary of historian Helen Horowitz’s 1987 work on the history of student cultures in American higher education (Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present) is inserted more than halfway through the book. Focusing exclusively on first-year students is understandable, but suggesting that this group represents all of  undergraduate student culture is misleading. References to national surveys are interspersed throughout, apparently to convince us that what the author describes is “true.” We never get to know any students well enough to understand and appreciate who they are. If the author had had a key respondent to help interpret the words and experiences of the “natives,” like Doc in William Foote Whyte’s 1943 classic work of ethnography Street Corner Society, the story line would have been thicker, richer, and more informative.

The one character we get to know well is the author herself, an anthropology professor who goes undercover—presenting herself as a first-year student (albeit obviously an older one), taking classes, and living in the dorm for a year at an unidentified state university. She assumes the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan. The hornet’s nest of ethical issues imbedded in this approach will surely animate discussions in methodology courses. Nathan, who has since been identified as anthropology professor Cathy Small, assures us she did no harm, and perhaps this is so. Still, the rationale that would convince a university’s Institutional Review Board that it is acceptable to pretend to be something one is not is difficult to imagine. Whether anyone should even try to do so is the more pressing question.

These serious drawbacks aside, Nathan is around students enough to discover some hard truths—about them and us. This is the strength of the book. Much of her description is not new or surprising. Yes, few students embrace and revel in the intellectual trappings and cultural traditions of university life. Many are from backgrounds starkly different from their predecessors and professors. Few students gravitate to the extracurricular activities that once were the collegiate backbone. The majority easily repel efforts by student life staff to entice them into participating in “community-building” activities, much preferring to spend time alone or with their small circles of acquaintances pursuing (almost always) nonacademic interests. Most students work, in part because college is more expensive today and in part because they need the money to pay for the many accoutrements to which they have become accustomed.

Occasionally, Nathan feeds us a hard, evocative truth, including a few we would rather not know. The lives of today’s students are more complex than those of their predecessors. Students have overdosed on popular culture for eighteen years, and now that they are in our midst, and we have a chance to make an impact, we ask relatively little of them. The curriculum is such that they rarely take the same courses or read the same books. No wonder students spend little time outside of class talking about matters of the mind: they have little intellectual or academic substance in common. We can explain why students today are the way they are when they get to college, but more difficult to explain is why we do not try to do something about it.

Another ironic truth is that most professors and administrators overstate the importance of academics in student learning. Indeed, as sociologists Howard Becker, Blanche Geer, and Everett Hughes demonstrated a half-century ago in Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life, an important function of student culture is to stand apart from the academic culture—to subvert or manipulate it, or hold it at arms’ length. Even so, the fact that “student-teacher relationships play a relatively minor role in the experience of undergraduate life at a large university” is both troubling and embarrassing. Many faculty members are co-conspirators, tacitly endorsing this arrangement. We embrace seemingly legitimate explanations: our classes are bigger, so we cannot get to know many students as well as we would like; we are doing more research and writing today than ever before. But this Faustian bargain exists because many faculty members like it that way: “I won’t hassle you by asking that you re-write that poem or report as long as you don’t ask me to explain what I mean by the comments in the margins of your paper or talk with you about your career plans.” Neither party starts out with this tacit understanding, and both are shortchanged by it.

Nathan reveals other truths that are difficult to accept, such as classroom discussions devoid of serious ideas and controversy; the academy’s confused and occasionally contradictory position on individualism, diversity, and materialism; and the isolation of international students from the larger peer culture. No easy solutions exist. But promising practices abound, such as learning communities, active and collaborative teaching approaches that engage and motivate students, and so on. Some institutions are doing these things at enviable levels of quality and scale, as I report in my 2005 book, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter.

We can debate whether Nathan should have pretended to be someone she is not or quibble about how well she spins a yarn. What indisputably merit our attention are the hard truths she describes.

George Kuh is Chancellor’s Professor and director of the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University Bloomington.

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