Anyway, halfway through the volume, I find a compendium of sexist comments made to women graduate students at the University of Chicago. I thought it would be worth reproducing here, since I haven’t seen this text before and I think it’s good to have this sort of discourse out in circulation. While the general lines of this sort of sexist thought are pathetically familiar, the horror is always in the particulars.

THE HALLS OF ACADEME

The Women’s Caucus, Political Science Department, University of Chicago

Several of our professors have made these comments—some of them in jest— without realizing how damaging comments like these are to a woman’s image of herself as a scholar:

“I know you’re competent and your thesis advisor knows you’re competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you’re doing.”

“The admissions committee didn’t do their job. There’s not one good-looking girl in the entering class.”

“Have you thought about journalism? I know a lot of women journalists who do very well.”

“No pretty girls ever come to talk to me.”

“Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the only decent book I’ve ever read written by a woman.”

“Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook.”

“They’ve been sending me too many women advisees. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“I hear I’m supposed to stop looking at you as a sex object.”

“We expect women who come here to be competent, good students but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original.”

Student: “No, I wouldn’t stop teaching if I had children. I plan to work all my life.”
Professor: “But of course you’ll stop work when you have children. You’ll have to.”
Professor to student looking for a job: “You have no busi­ness looking for work with a child that age.”

Some people would say things are better now than they used to be. Well, are they?

Coda: Anthropology of Digital Cultures

Let’s start out with a definitional question. Does this expression, “digital culture,” actually mean anything? In one sense, a digital culture is really just a culture. All cultures have technology. All cultures have media. All cultures therefore also have ideologies about their media, which enable people to actually communicate (or have communications breakdowns). So “digital culture” just becomes a synonym for “the world you live in.” That we live in.

The class has thus been partly an exploration of the social world writ large. That’s why we’ve talked about what it means even to have an identity. (Is your identity your difference from everyone else? is it your uniqueness? or is it also your commonalities with others? your belonging to something shared?) We’ve talked about how people show their status (with their follower counts), try to mask their status (like with their credit scores), then try to show them again. We talked about what memes are — ironically, the Internet Memes that everyone thinks of as “memes” are themselves a meme, in the general sense of a little reproducible unit of culture. We talked about the funny histories of user interfaces – the obsolete tech, the magnifying glass or old-school telephone handset that’s been turned into a computer icon that we all recognize, even though we practically never encounter the original thing.

Part of the agenda has been about demystifying. That’s why I’ve tried to teach you a very little bit about how the technology actually works. We noted early on that the internet is not the web — the internet being something like a series of “pipes” that move data back and forth, “the web” being a specific type of data (and a form of culture and interaction) that moves across these pipes. We saw what happens when you actually load a web page in your computer. (You guys all remember what a DNS lookup is, right?) More recently we saw some of the nuts and bolts of how an internet connection can actually reach an out-of-the-way place, like a distant reservation in the mountainous deserts of San Diego County. We saw what it would look like to try to “hack” something: it looks boring, unlike the movies, like a bunch of text scrolling across a computer screen. You don’t need to know much of anything to be a hacker, you just download something and press go. We saw the campus server equipment: it just looks like a bunch of machinery with flashing lights. You don’t learn much from looking at the flashing lights; you learn more from looking at the people interacting with them, like the full-time staff whose job is to get anxious if the server indicators aren’t all green. I emphasize that my purpose in talking to you about how things work is not to make you tech experts. It’s just to insist to you that this stuff is not very mysterious. If you want to understand what’s happening around you, you can. It’s built by humans; it’s mostly still understandable by humans.

But our agenda is also about showing how things get mystified. This for me is why The Matrix was worth watching in our class, even though it’s getting old: because it dramatizes a digital world where blatantly dehumanizing things are going on. If you’re an online personality, or even an everyday user of social media, you can find yourself branding yourself, “selling” yourself, crafting an image that you get stuck with… Even when that’s lucrative, it seems to push people into sad forms of self-concealment, stuck with a personal brand based on “sharing everything online,” even though it’s always impossible to actually share everything. Authenticity is often an act — and perhaps web technology tends to make that easier, not harder. We talked about how things start to seem natural — through repetitive motion, through habit — even though they aren’t. I guarantee you that in a previous world, that gesture that Katie so excellently observed, where people kind of sneak their phones down into their pockets or try to hide them (say from the teacher), did not exist. We also talked about PostSecret, a site where people disclose things to an anonymous internet public at times, perhaps, to avoid actually having to apologize to people close to them whom they harmed. Digital worlds are full of forms of concealment.

As a point of comparative method, I’ve tried to strike some kind of balance between letting you explore your personal experience and showing you things you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Many of you wouldn’t otherwise encounter The Matrix or the weird Conscience of a Hacker. I was also more interested to see that you largely are quite far removed from professional tech culture, of the affluent San Francisco/Silicon Valley type. Even though that’s right here in California, it’s really still a different world. And that’s an interesting thing about digital cultures: they keep us separate from people who are practically right next to us. How many of you use Snapchat to communicate with the residents of those homes just across the street from campus on Philadelphia? (Only one in twenty-five, I observe.)

It’s hard to get outside your comfort zone, and that’s just as true in the digital world as in the physical landscape. Exploring isn’t something that just happens. The world is too overwhelming and too vast. We don’t know where to start. That’s why one major part of the class has been to talk about how to do research: it helps you focus your attention, helps take you someplace new. That’s why I’ve had you make scrapbooks and why we talked a lot about what makes a good question. How are things gendered? How are things racialized? How are things classed? What gets left unsaid? Who’s really in charge? Who profits and who labors? What kinds of rationalizations are getting fed to you?

This gets to the last part of the class, which has been to break down a bit of the mythology around education and teaching. You all know that if I could invent a utopian classroom, it wouldn’t be organized quite like this one. It would have less bossiness, less authoritarian structure, less of a divide between teacher and student. But we’re in a college where classes are taught a certain way, which is hard for us to stray from, and I’m certainly not criticizing anyone for their style of inhabiting actually-existing educational institutions. I’m just suggesting that you should make a point of not naturalizing educational scripts that are fed to you. That raises further questions: What is education really for? Does it really make any sense? Do you really need to respect the teacher’s authority? When is that a good idea and when is that arbitrary? Again, I’m not here to tell you the answers to these questions. Just to encourage you to ask them.

Thanks for coming, everybody.

“In this respect teaching was exactly like sex for me — something that you weren’t supposed to talk about or focus on in any way but that you were supposed to be able to do properly when the time came. And the analogy doesn’t end there. Teaching, like sex, is something you do alone, although you’re always with another person/other people when you do it; it’s hard to talk about to the other person while you’re doing it, especially if you’ve been taught not to think about it from an early age. And people rarely talk about what the experience is really like for them, partly because, in whatever subculture it is I belong to, there’s no vocabulary for articulating the experience and no institutionalized format for doing so.”

I’m most struck by her description of the public solitude of the teacher. As if teaching were a kind of isolation among others. (She doesn’t ask herself whether being a student is like this too, but it often can be, of course.) Tompkins thinks that this kind of isolation is the product of an institutionalized system of value in which professors fixate on the excellence of their own pedagogical performance as the sole criterion of the success of their class. In the “performance model,” as she terms it, all that matters is that ((the teacher recognizes that) the students recognize that) the teacher was well-prepared, was smart, and was knowledgeable about the material. As Tompkins points out, such a pedagogy is ultimately deeply self-centered for the teacher, and teaches people to value their students’ and peers’ opinions of themselves above all else.

This actually strikes me as a case of a very typical inversion that occurs in systems of value and evaluation — where the objects of evaluation cease to be valued as such, and become mere means for the attainment of high prestige, value, etc. And the initially valued objects, whatever they were, are generally distorted by a process that values the prestige of a high evaluation rather than the content of what’s evaluated. This, by the way, is what the advocates of standardized educational tests like No Child Left Behind never seem to get: that in teaching the test rather than the material, the material becomes nothing but a instrument for getting good scores on the test, and is distorted in the process. The same might be said about various forms of scholarly research assessment, especially the more quantified ones.

Tompkins tells us that she eventually started teaching along more participatory lines, making each class taught by a group of students, trying to bring her expertise to the table without aspiring to produce a great pedagogical performance. Eventually, she taught a course on emotion. (I note in passing that reflexive topics like this, ones that are experientially accessible to the students, seem to lend themselves particularly well to reflexive pedagogy: pedagogical form and content can resonate together.) In describing the course, which was apparently tense and in some respects a nightmare, she also produces a memorable description of her pedagogical utopia:

You see, I wanted to be iconoclastic. I wanted to change the way it was legitimate to behave inside academic institutions. I wanted to make it OK to get shrill now and then, to wave your hands around, to cry in class, to do things in relation to the subject at hand other than just talking in an expository or an adversarial way about it. I wanted never to lose sight of the fleshly, desiring selves who were engaged in discussing hegemony or ideology or whatever it happened to be; I wanted to get the ideas that were “out there,” the knowledge that was piling up on shelves, into relation with the people who were producing and consuming it. I wanted to get “out there” and “in here” together. To forge a connection between whatever we were talking about in class and what went on in the lives of the individual members. This was a graduate course, and the main point for me was for the students, as a result of the course, was to feel some deeper connection between what they were working on professionally and who they were, the real concerns of their lives.

This may sound utopian. Or it may sound child-like. But I did and do believe that unless there is some such connection, the work is an empty labor which will end by killing the organism which engages in it.

So the idea is to institutionalize a more experimental, affectively rich pedagogical situation, one which leads (in C. Wright Mills-esque fashion, since he also advocated this sort of joining) to a “deeper connection” between the professional and the personal, and whose stakes of failure are death at the hands of “an empty labor.” As if only the personal could “fill up” one’s labor with meaning, and its absence left things empty.

Because this was my first officially designated women’s studies course, I thought it had to be “truly feminist” in content and form… Instead of being the source of knowledge and socially distant, I would become a peer and facilitator of knowledge. Thus, I perceived, as have others, that the “truly feminist” classroom is one in which I would give up my official trappings, merge with the class, and, in the classic sense of “instructor,” become invisible.

By playing such a passive role, I set the stage for the following dynamic that emerged early in the semester. The feminist majority, or those students with a strong background in feminism, began to use their knowledge as a source of power. As a group, they were articulate and dominated the class discussions. They often talked at rather than with the other students and, as a consequence, effectively silenced the nonfeminist minority. Thus, rather than sharing ideas and learning from each other, the students used differences in knowledge to create a distinct hierarchy in the classroom, with knowledge being a source of power over others. In other words, the feminist majority defined the class as their class and soon became the new caste of ‘men,’ while the remaining ‘women’ sat passively, accepting their subjugation.

Subsequently, there emerged a series of classroom comments in which many students said they didn’t feel like they belonged, they didn’t feel solidarity with each other, and so on. They also

…suggested that I become “more visible” and assertive and  that I provide more structure, synthesize ideas and  comments more often, and “wrap things up more tightly.” Thus, they wanted me to reclaim my professorial authority and share my expertise, or, as one member of the class commented, “You need to act more like a teacher and less like one of us.”

The teacher decided to take a more active role as a discussion moderator and eventually concluded:

I learned that to define a “truly feminist” classroom as one devoid of any authority is a great disservice to the instructor as well as to the students. As Culley pointed out:

“It is only in accepting her authority — by this I mean the authority of her intellect, imagination, passion — that the students can accept the authority of their own experiences. The authority the feminist teacher seeks is authority with, not authority over.”

It took me some time to realize experientially what Culley meant.  “Authority” can, indeed, be a source of empowerment. As I learned to accept mine within the classroom, the students learned to accept theirs, and we all benefited.

So professorial authority shifts from vile symbol of patriarchy to source of empowerment. This odd contradiction is diagnosed to some degree by Lauren Berlant, in “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy” (1997):

Feminist/countercultural work in the university was imagined paradoxically: in a moment of disbelief in institutions and in the notion of a meritocracy this was also a moment of faith in the kinds of personal values and critical social knowledge radical teaching and institutional activity could ratify. The promise was that the counterknowledge and donated activity of feminists would create a new meritocracy, somehow without the violence of hierarchy, fear of difference, and disciplinary defensiveness that frequently serve as a bar to recognition of subaltern talents, knowledge, language, and experience. It would change knowledge, change the world, create new norms of expertise, and reimagine the practice of authority. This was at once a radical claim but also reflected a belief that the intentions of good people could radically modify institutional power/knowledge relations while also training students to wield authority and compete with each other in the public sphere.

…Central to the feminist project was a feminist version of the nostalgic rhetoric of the charismatic teacher. Slightly more collaborative than the traditional patriarchal forms, the feminist discourse about teaching has almost entirely been concerned with the responsibility of the teacher to have and to yield–but not entirely–her charismatic authority. The teacher’s very talent–her imputed intimacy with theoretical and practical knowledge, her capacity to contain and rework the world in language and other forms of knowledge and activism, the resources she has committed to merging everyday life with political desire–is posed as the student’s central resource, a relay between a real world of injury and a possible world of dignity. (153; my emphases.)

The point about about yielding professorial authority but not entirely is really important because, as Berlant wants to point out, there’s a basic contradiction in the project of making students liberated, or conversely, of relying on a charismatic teacher for liberation. In Gardner, Dean and McKaigwe’s piece, we can see this contradiction stretched out over time, spread over the following sequence of events:

1. The democratic teacher yields up authority to students, tries to make everyone co-equals.
2. Students are unhappy, feel a lack of “structure,” perhaps develop hierarchies of their own, and ultimately demand that the teacher resume his or her authoritative role.
3. Teacher resumes a certain degree of authority, perhaps using their power more actively to facilitate a more collective discussion, or even to neutralize emergent inequalities among the students.

So, as Gardner, Dean and McCaig put it, the precondition of their students coming into their own authority as participants is the teacher accepting their own authority as teacher. But this, as Berlant points out, is really only a revised version of the old-fashioned scenario in which the teacher is the fundamental authorizing force of classroom action and legitimate knowledge, a scene, as she says, only “slightly more collaborative than the traditional patriarchal forms.”

Ultimately, Berlant argues for withdrawing somewhat from the “mania for the intersubjective” that yields fantasies of complete intimacy between teacher and student, looking instead toward a revised concern with the ethics of professionalism and the politics of academic labor, towards recognizing the “limits of faculty magic.” Not that this represents the abandonment of the utopian. But it’s worth juxtaposing another case study here: one in which the chaos and uncertainty of ceding professorial power yields, not a pragmatic resumption of that power, but rather an agonizing but ongoing process of renegotiation and authority transfer.

In “Participation, action, and research in the classroom” (1997), collectively authored by Johan Elvemo, Davydd Greenwood, Ann Martin, Lisa Matthews, Aleeza Strubel, La urine Thomas, and William Foote Whyte, we get a more polyvocal view of what happens when teachers try to cede their authority to the class: half the class contributed to a joint publication reflecting on their experience. Importantly, this was a class on participatory action research, in which:

Social research expertise is mobilized in a non-authoritarian fashion. The social researcher contributes to the process as a facilitator and teacher, as well as a team member who assists in the deployment of methods and in the development of the analysis…

PAR is based on the assumption that all human beings are knowledgeable about their own situations and capable of analytical activity that can contribute to the generation of new knowledge and plans of action. It is also based firmly on the assumption that, while knowledge of research methods and models is valuable, the complexity of social problems is such that no outside research expert can ever become as knowledgeable as a team of ‘insiders’ can about an organisation or situation.

Now, what’s interesting here is that, while Davydd Greenwood (who was later one of my teachers) began teaching the course in a traditional manner grounded in his professorial authority, a student eventually challenged that pedagogy, on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the democratic process of inquiry that PAR involves. In other words, the course’s dissonance between form and content became the ground for student demands for classroom democracy. Apparently, at first this only affected the content, and some weeks later, a crisis over gender and dissatisfaction with the class precipitated a women-led effort to create much more equal structures of classroom participation. If I understand correctly, the idea is that women’s prior experience with institutionalized sexism left them more conscious of problems in classroom participation, and women-only discussions created solidarity needed to act on this consciousness.

At any rate, it seems that the desire for fully democratic participation was never simply or unproblematically realized, and the problem of the professor’s authority remained an actively debated issue throughout the rest of the semester. Here, I want to quote from the participants’ extensive reflections on classroom authority and expertise, starting with Lisa Matthews, Aleeza Strubel and Ann Martin’s conversation:

AM: In many ways Davydd was our expert.

LM: Definitely. And as the expert I think he had the burden, the responsibility of grasping the whole context and of understanding what each person’s place in that context was. And despite his greatest efforts to not be the leader or the expert, he was. There are responsibilities incumbent upon that position.

AS: Isn’t that sort of hypocritical of us to put him in the expert role?

LM: No.

AS: But the whole point of the PAR process is that we’re all experts in some area. Are we saying that his area of expertise was in terms of the whole PAR process and therefore it was okay to put him into the role of the expert?

LM: Until he had imparted his knowledge or until we had access to his knowledge, yes.

AS: But the point is that we did all come with experience and knowledge.

LM: I think you’re right, but there are certain things that make PAR work and certain things that don’t let PAR work. The expert of any PAR group has the background and knowledge to understand what is going to get a group up and running. I think one of our biggest problems was that Anthropology 620 didn’t get up and running until the last session. It seems to me that because there are certain things that make a PAR group work, the expert needs to utilize that knowledge and then he or she can step back and be an ordinary member.

AM: That picture is quite a different picture from the way we perceived and treated Davydd in the beginning, isn’t it?”

LM: Yes.

AM: In that sense he was the expert and I think the discovery we made was realizing that we were experts too. We had the knowledge and the experience. But the model we were following and the role that we were putting him in weren’t appropriate.

AS: Part of it for me was stripping Davydd of his expertise. He had done the Mondragon work and not only was he the Professor, but he was the ‘Expert’ on PAR. Then I realized the gender issue was slipping by him, and that I was the ‘Expert’ on this subject, or Kym Fraser or Ann, or any of the participants who cared enough to really think and work through it was the expert. It dawned on me, maybe it’s not so much that Davydd was no longer the expert, it was just the changing notion of what an expert was. It is really connected to issues of power because I was underestimating my own expertise. (8-9)

What I find crucial here is that, for AS, the definitive moment was when she found it in herself to strip the professor of his expert role. Hence: it isn’t enough for the professor to cede power; students must also take power. It isn’t enough for teachers to cede expertise; students have to find grounds for acting on their own expertise. Note that, contrary to the first scenario I mention here, student empowerment did not follow from Greenwood resuming his authority more actively, but rather from the teacher abdicating authority long enough for the students to take advantage of the opportunity. This seems to presuppose tolerance for the anxieties and frustrations brought about by a prolonged lack of structure — a tolerance which may have been legitimated by the fact that uncertainty and compromise are, in this case, also intrinsic to the course’s subject matter. PAR, after all, is a mode of inquiry predicated on lengthy grappling with complexity and ambiguity,  and hence not susceptible to positivistic simplifications.

Greenwood then commented on his own ambiguous role: one where total abdication of authority was impossible, and yet where a lot of waiting and self-restraint seemed ethically and emotionally necessary to him:

It felt senseless to me to discuss and advocate participation without modeling it to some degree in the classroom. I doubt that it is possible for anyone to learn about participatory processes in a meaningful way without engaging in participatory processes themselves… It is possible to lecture on this subject… I have been told how to participate in the most authoritarian ways but the dissonance I experience under such conditions profoundly upsets me. (17)

I faced continuing pressure from some members of the class to retake the standard faculty position. There were repeated offers for me to do that, right up to the end. I found myself spending some energy resisting the pressure to do what would be easiest for me and apparently for some members of the group, namely to take charge again.

…This raises complex issues about the kind of leadership that a teacher should exhibit in these settings. If the teacher abdicates entirely, then the advantages of his/her experience and knowledge are lost. If the teacher does not work to eliminate the standard hierarchical pattern, he/she cannot facilitate the participatory process very effectively.

…Another dilemma in the class was a strong tendency to assume that participation would mean the end of leadership and the creation of some form of radical equality. This is consistent with a common American mind-set that equates democracy with radically homogeneous equality and that equates active leadership with authoritarianism. Frankly I was surprised by the strength of the notion that participation is somehow posited on homogenization… I reject the idea…

[Also] I was struck by a very strong tendency in the class to believe that democratically-developed solutions should produce harmony, which is to say that they should be satisfying to all members. Such an expectation assumes that democracy works because people are basically quite similar or at least can be satisfied by similar measures. If we assume that people are fundamentally dissimilar, then the notion of democracy as a noisy place where harmony and simple consensus are unlikely and where most solutions are compromises for everyone involved, comes to the fore. (19)

(Note in passing the critique of the assumption that democratic participation=radical equality or that democracy=consensus and agreeability — certainly this is sound in practice, even while consensus and radical equality still seem to me occasionally plausible political ideals.)

Greenwood agrees here with Gardner, Dean and McCaig: participation doesn’t mean that there should be no leadership. However, what seems to be different is that, in this case, the teacher’s leadership is supposed to be used above all to set the process in motion, after which there is ideally a transition to collective leadership rather than individual professorial authority. As Laurine Thomas observed:

Initially the majority of the group seemed to want Davydd Greenwood to have the final say when decisions had to be made. However, many including Davydd himself, soon became uncomfortable with this view. Yet, the fact remained that the majority of us were students, who outside of the PAR situation, are inferior in the academic hierarchy to professors. Furthermore, several noted that Davydd was by far the most experienced with PAR in the group.

Consequently, despite his protests, we were generally unwilling to ignore the difference and permit him to assume another role. In one memorable exchange during the meeting, one individual criticized him for being oblivious to her discomfort with the way the seminar had been proceeding. Others wanted to know why he had not exerted better control in certain situations. Throughout the seminar, when we were confused we tended to turn instinctively to him for clarification and guidance. In short, we magnified the real power he possessed and developed a perception of him as the ‘expert-in-charge’ when in reality we were all experts-in-charge.

Interestingly, Davydd seemed perplexed at times about the exact nature of his role. Early in our discussion he referred to himself as ‘the democratic police’ for the seminar, yet he later stressed how important he felt it was that ownership of the seminar was turned over to the entire group. Presumably we agreed with him yet, as one member observed ‘delegating authority whether as a professor or a manager, often results in feelings of uncertainty’ on both sides.

… We eventually reached a consensus which was captured in the following observation ‘Getting rid of the leader does not eliminate leadership. It merely means that leadership is now within the group. Leadership responsibilities now revolve around the group.’ This acknowledgment perhaps provided a measure of relief to all concerned, but it also raised new questions regarding each participant’s role and responsibility in what had occurred earlier in the seminar and what was yet to come. (23-24)

The start of this description is fascinating because it gives a tiny glimpse of the phenomenology of classroom authority: a world of deference, of “magnified” distortions of the teacher’s real power, of critiques and complaints directed to the teacher as if they are  the sole judge, of teachers’ uncertainties about their power. I note, also, that this description is interesting especially because it is written by students, who are practically never included in the metadiscourses on teaching that appear so often in journals like College English, and whose own thoughts on their pedagogy are relegated to the fairly impotent confines of ratemyprofessors.com. This lack of dialogue on teaching is only highlighted by the absurd multiple-choice course evaluations that many colleges treat as a substitute for student engagement in pedagogy.

But the end of the description I find more inspiring. Can there be effective group leadership in a seminar? Yes, problematically, in a way that “raise[s] new questions regarding each participant’s role and responsibility.” This would look more like:

1. Teacher cedes authority. Ambiguity and unstructure ensues. Teacher resists demands to take a more authoritative posture.
2. Students come to the realization (perhaps catalyzed by the course content) that they can enter the field of classroom authority by developing their own intellectual authority (perhaps as experts on gender, for instance).
3. A shaky sort of group authority emerges, with the ethical imperative to lead the classroom spread across the participants. Presumably everyone suffers from more net pedagogical obligation than would obtain if it were all left on the shoulders of the legitimate professor.

Now, this is a nice scenario, but not one I’ve ever experienced in a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago. Most of my classmates really, truly, honestly, and totally unreflectively believe that the disciplinary expertise of the faculty should translate unproblematically into a professorial dictatorship of classroom process. (In other words, they can’t imagine the PAR axiom that content expertise needn’t translate directly to process expertise.) Most of my teachers are not ready to facilitate the kind of metadiscourse on classroom authority that is a prerequisite of this situation. Ingrained student deference is coupled to an ingrained faculty habit of preferential entitlement. Even in very tiny classes that made substantial space for student input, students are mostly too hesitant and disengaged to be effective classroom leaders.

To be sure, participatory pedagogy is not a panacea. It won’t alleviate other kinds of institutional realities: economic inequity, class prejudice, overcommitment, overambition, fatigue, etc.

But the sad thing is that mostly it isn’t even tried. Instead a routinized standard of student “participation” — typically, leading one seminar discussion per  course and uttering a certain number of utterances — is translated into a bureaucratic condition of one’s seminar participation grade.