Thread by @tressiemcphd

That was the Dryfuss thing. Now to the original news item of Chua et al.

The reason professors at social reproduction institutions - the elite universities designed to reproduce elite status cultures - court the students as “friends” is because they’re courting the parents.

They are correct when they behave as if doing this kind of thing is a perk of the job. The institutions are built that way and implicitly managed that way. Court the young elites for favor with their elders. It’s a professional strategy.

The problem is multi-fold. The elites set the norms downstream. So the guy from grad school is trained in the ways of Harvard but ends up teaching at...not Harvard. That’s one problem.

Another problem is that elite institutions, under pressure to diversify, cannot always hold the center for the students groomed for predatory professorships and those who are not ie the lower SES students.

Another problem is that even the elite students have changed. They have new expectations around consent and power and boundaries.

Many professors at elite unis do not want to professor like the rest of us because being special is a significant perk of the job. But that’s changing, rapidly, as we see. And it is generally for the better.