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March 28, 2024

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Spring Housing Guide

Can professors fall prey to favoritism?

Even though I have only completed a meager 32 of the required 122 credit hour points I need in order to graduate from BGSU, I’ve learned quite a deal from my freshman year of college.

I have become more aware and more tolerant of other people’s varied and unique lifestyles, and I have learned how to better respect other people’s interests and needs.

I now have a greater understanding of how important it is to study sedulously and to adapt to strict grading criteria and irreversible deadlines.

And I’m now aware of how human behavior, emotions and sentiments, preconceived notions and subjective judgments, can make every single student’s college experience completely different from anyone else’s.

This upsets me.

But it has also assisted me over the past two semesters, in one way or another.

What I’m specifically addressing is how we humans, with our innate individuality and our tendencies to make things more subjective than objective, can almost turn college into more of a four-year adaptation exercise than an educational experience.

Not to say that I haven’t learned much in the past eight months; I am significantly more knowledgeable now than I was in August of 2007. (And I’ve received a crash course on how professor-to-student relations work, to boot!)

What I am saying is that sometimes the acclimation and assimilation processes which all students must undertake in order to begin college life can interfere with learning and can turn an unbiased scholastic environment into a special preference-riddled academic nightmare.

Sounds disturbing.

OK; maybe I’m putting this a little too harshly. After all, professors are opinionated just like everyone else, and the boogie-train of ultimate destruction from my wildest dream-screams has not yet crossed the inter-dimensional gateway from dreamland to rural northwest Ohio.

What I mean to indicate is that I have received very small amounts of special treatment (in the whole “I know that you exist” sense) from some of my professors as a result of my efforts to maintain good rapport between them and myself.

I talk to them after class (to let them know I exist), and I get a better understanding of what is expected of me in the class. Plus, I sometimes get additional advice or direction cues as a bonus. Good for me, but when I go about doing so, I immediately (and involuntarily) start building a social barrier between myself and the other students in the class.

Do they deserve this? After all, I am no more special, talented, or hard-working than anyone else simply because I might choose to engage in more substantial conversation with my professor. Such behavior on my part could also lead to favoritism, which is often regarded (at least by myself) as the nastiest side of college subjectivity.

Favoritism on the part of the professor can have negative effects on the student class body as a whole. Now I’m not saying that any of BGSU’s professors are people who would innately treat certain students differently based on how often those specific students would choose to make themselves heard, but I have seen a few instances of favoritism, however small, in action during my time at college.

From paying more attention to the student who seems to be more “into it” than the others, to being ever-so-slightly-more-lenient on a specific student’s grades when finals roll around, such subjectivity can serve as the hot, destructive, corrosive, sticky glue of unnecessary bias to the well-oiled clockwork gears of academia and postsecondary education.

Then again, I must be sounding too foreboding and Arnold-Schwarzenegger-ish in my subtlety; any example made using the whole “corrosive, sticky glue” theme is too brash to make even a modicum of sense. After all, university professors are highly-trained individuals who are rigorously prepared for their responsibilities as educators in colleges all around the world.

Besides, I have reason to believe that professors-in-training would go through some sort of anti-favoritism conditioning before receiving their degrees.

Looking back on what I’ve written, the favoritism which I have so blatantly lambasted for having such a detrimental effect on the educational process might actually be nothing more than a little bit of kindness on the part of professors (or possibly favoritism in a very mild form).

Hmmm.

All of this self-contradicting is making me hungry.

Anybody got some hummus?

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