I’ve never read an ethnography before. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read any anthropology works. I kind of thought this would be an undercover journalism kind of piece, and it was. But it was more than that. I have no idea if it’s a true ethnography, or if the format and content are hugely different in this book targeted at the mass market. Nevertheless, the large amount of substance in the book, and relative lack of pontificating, made this quite enjoyable to read. I learned a ton, and it’s not so long since I was a college student myself.
Rebekah Nathan (Cathy Small) is an anthropologist who teaches at AnyU (Northern Arizona University). Puzzled by the strange ways
of her students, she enrolled as a student during her sabbatical year to study students up close. I put strange
in quotes because things that seemed strange to her were things like cutting class, not asking any questions, etc. Answers that are fairly obvious to anyone who has been in school recently. These aren’t necessarily because students are lazy, though that can be a large part of it. But even hard-working students are overwhelmed by the large amount of work involved in school, and so they prioritize. Any recent student also knows that speaking up in class much makes you a target. A target of your fellow students for being different, and a target of the teacher’s increased expectations. Who wants to be expected to be the best participant in class every time?
Anyway, she learned all this while being undercover. But explaining student academic behavior wasn’t where her book is the strongest. The best part is her exploration of AnyU’s efforts to promote community and diversity, and how and why these efforts mostly failed. Although some of her observations are contradictory, she found out that students form small close-knit groups of friends, often before arriving on campus. Efforts to integrate them into a wider community as well as expose them to greater diversity failed because the efforts detracted from these groups of friends.
Students also saw the purpose of college very differently from administrators and professors. Students were there to learn, but primarily in the context of job prospects. The other main purpose was to create friendships and to have fun with these friends. They saw this as valuable learning. Students were not there, by and large, to expand their minds generally. Consequently, things like the university community
didn’t appeal to them.
The book had the feel of touching on the highlights of the things she learned. I was also heartened by the statistics she included which tended to bolster the information from her personal experience. She knew when to use each, and neither overwhelms the book. Being relatively short, it’s very readable and the material is surprisingly informative for not feeling particularly dense.
Title: My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student
Author: Rebekah Nathan (Cathy Small)
Publisher: Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 186 p., includes index
Publication date: 2006 (2005 in hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-14-303747-1
Subject: College students — United States — Social conditions — 21st century
Subject: Adult college students — United States — Social conditions — 21st century
LC classification: LB3605.N34 2005
