Is student-bashing acceptable/expected?

Question

After reading some popular comments on this site it seems that many users consider students (students as a group, not individuals) to be irrational ***holes:

• students cannot reasonably expect - I see you're applying logic to an illogical group, a common rookie mistake.

  18 votes so far

• @PsySp, you seem to be too much concerned with this student. Students are free to hate and bad mouth their lecturers. This is the modus operandi of a typical student: complaining and criticizing lecturers. I wouldn't think too much of this.

  21 votes

As a former student I feel this is user hostile behaviour, by a more powerful group towards a less powerful group, more suitable at a gripe session in the pub than in a friendly public forum. As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged and removed.

I'm not sure where this is going. Are these comments not considered rude? Is there a huge amount of popular lecturer-bashing which has passed me by? Obviously some part of the community will consider this too thin-skinned, but it seems this kind of behaviour

1. doesn't add anything positive or useful to the discussion and
2. could discourage some users from participating.

Answer 1

I am having trouble answering this. At the heart of the issue is As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged and removed students are not a minority or a disadvantaged group, they are the entire population of individuals being taught. The comments are not suggesting any sort of preferential treatment be given to one group of students at another groups expense.

For example, saying students (or any other group) make bad customers because they are illogical is inappropriate since it implies preferential treatment should be given to non-students. Saying jobs in sales are hard because customers are illogical, however, is fine. What the comments are essentially saying is that teaching is hard because students are illogical.

I disagree with your point that the comments don't add anything positive or useful to the discussion but I agree with your point that they could discourage some users from participating. It is important for new teachers to realize that some students are illogical/emotional and that others will complain and criticize. Therefore, I believe the comments add value. That said, the comments could have addressed the fact that not all students are illogical or prone to complaint and criticism, that students are not necessarily more emotional than any other group, and that each student should be treated as an individual. That is a lot to pack into a comment on the off chance that a student would be offended that students are stereotyped (fairly or unfairly) as emotional.

Answer 2

A few thoughts on this:

Are these comments not considered rude?

The second example you use is a bit rude, but the first is clearly a joke, and a pretty minor one at that.

Is there a huge amount of popular lecturer-bashing which has passed me by?

If you mean on the site, there isn't much. But in life?

Consider the very existence of ratemyprofessor.com. Additionally, there's a lot of concerns about the quality and impact of student evaluations and complaints - there's some evidence of some pretty serious gender bias, these things are potentially used in hiring decisions, and there's a whole genre of essay recently that's essentially boils down to "Student complaints are out of control". I have my own issues with the conclusions of those essays, but they're definitely a thing.

As a thought experiment, try applying these comments to basically any minority or disadvantaged group and see how quickly that gets flagged and removed.

Students are neither a minority nor inherently disadvantaged, which makes this at best irrelevant.

doesn't add anything positive or useful to the discussion

This is where I think you're wrong. Some notes that student complaints are often fickle, make sweepingly ignorant assumptions about what a professor's job actually is, are often biased or needlessly cruel, and often outright insane are useful things for faculty to encounter. "Oh good, it's not just me" is a very powerful thing.