Weekend Edition: “Professor, About My Son’s Answer to Question 3 On The Final …”
From Friday’s Wall Street Journal ($ req’d):
… A new generation of overinvolved parents are flooding campus orientations, meddling in registration and interfering with students’ dealings with professors, administrators and roommates, school officials say.
… A number of colleges and universities are having to assign full-time staffers or forming entire new departments to field parents’ calls and email. Others hold separate orientations for parents, partly to keep them occupied and away from student sessions.
The University of Vermont employs “parent bouncers,” students trained to divert moms and dads who try to attend registration and explain diplomatically that they’re not invited. At one parent-student orientation session in June, more parents than students attended, swamping the meeting hall, says Jill Hoppenjans, the university’s assistant director of orientation.
At the University of Georgia, students who get frustrated or confused during registration have been known to interrupt their advisers to whip out a cellphone, speed-dial their parents and hand the phone to the adviser, saying, “Here, talk to my mom,” says Richard Mullendore, a University of Georgia professor and former vice president, student affairs, at the universities of Georgia and Mississippi.
And do those same parents wonder why the kids move back home after graduation?
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July 31st, 2005 at 9:20 am
Craigslist Good for Something
I found a link to this site in the Rants and Raves section. It’s the newest addition to my blogroll.
July 31st, 2005 at 2:56 pm
While it can be overdone, some colleges have become areas of endoctrination instead of teaching.
As a parent of three, oldest being seven, I am very worried about what college he will go to already.
I want my children to learn when they go to college, not be forced to listen and be taught a professor’s personal agenda.
If parents are going to be paying the tution that some colleges require nowadays, they have every right to know what is going on. While it can be overdone by parents, I would rather them to be over-involved that not at all.
As parents, we are responsible for our kids and how they grow up. Sure, by the time they get to college, they should be shaped fairly well by that stage, but as a parent, I don’t want all my hard work undone by a handful of activist professors. There needs to be a balance.
July 31st, 2005 at 3:31 pm
I wonder how many parents make a petard out of themselves at these orientations and yet don’t step in and stop their kid from majoring in comparative folk dancing.
July 31st, 2005 at 8:29 pm
My children will not go to Univ. of Colorado or any school affiliated with Ward Churchill. That’d be like letting Oliver Stone direct a movie about 9/11. Oh, wait…
August 1st, 2005 at 8:43 am
The list of colleges my kids will be allowed to attend is very short to be sure.