Academic common room
Unreasonable requests from students: Sense check
LaChanticleer · 22/01/2022 15:09
Just a place to moan really - in the last week, I have received the following requests from students:
- that I come down (2 floors) from my office to the entrance of our security locked building to let them in for a tutorial they had booked with me because they couldn't find their id card (you know -slide the id card in the card reader to gain entry to an unportered building)
- after sending out an email to my students in a module with a link in the email to my tutorial booking website and put in bolded letters "KEEP THIS EMAIL" and also putting the link in my email signature, several emails from students asking me to send them the link.
I politely responded NO to all of these requests, but what I really wanted to say was:
grow up
you're an adult
I am not your secretary
AIBU as an academic? (btw, I'm a senior professor). Do these students realise that they're behaving quite rudely & unprofessionally?
But beyond my own frustration at them treating me as if I'm their servant, just how do we prepare them for a workplace, where behaviour/requests like this would really land them in the shit? if they asked a senior colleague or maybe their boss, or someone who was funding them, they'd be given short shrift, and probably have a bit of a black mark against them ...
twofrozenshoulders · 10/02/2022 16:38
@LaChanticleer is,I think, just giving examples. The totality of this stuff is the problem. Contrasting my experience as a Senior Lecturer with that of DH, as a Professor, we fit the gender pattern that @Covid CorvidCovid spoke of at the top of p 11.
Though DH is very nice he has virtually never gotten any of the shit OP implied. His office hours are virtually unattended. I am regularly asked to tutor not only my own modules but those of my male colleagues.
Students claim to be afraid to approach them. The women in my Department are provably overloaded on formal pastoral care and expected to suck this kind of thing up in addition.
I did not read the OP as a post about two things. I read those two things as examples of seemingly thousands of requests that UGs. make of female but not male academics. I frequently end up doing my job between dealing with inappropriate student requests my male colleagues cannot begin to imagine. On the whole I like UG students but yes it has gotten much worse over time.
It would be fair to ask about research contributions vs formal pastoral duties, but in my case and several others the pastoral overload and resulting exhaustion significantly preceded a lowered quality and quantity of research. And students don’t know this, or care. As @CovidCorvid says, it is well documented that that they behave more independently and respectfully for men.
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