“Office Hours”

But perhaps the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most students don’t fully get that. They’re not very good at identifying the professors worth knowing — the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring — and then getting to know them well….

The study has not found that attending a private college or a highly selective one foretells greater satisfaction. Instead, the game changers include establishing a deep connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project and playing a significant part in a campus organization. What all of these reflect are engagement and commitment, which I’ve come to think of as overlapping muscles that college can and must be used to build. They’re part of an assertive rather than a passive disposition, and they’re key to professional success.

The next week the Times published the letter that I wrote in response:

To the Editor:

Frank Bruni is correct that getting to know faculty members is critically important for getting the most out of college. As a faculty member, I would add two further words of advice.

First, most faculty members actually want you to attend their office hours, to learn more about you and to help you learn. Getting to know students and watch them grow is probably the most rewarding part of my job; sitting alone during office hours is among the least.

Second, don’t talk to faculty members because you are thinking about future benefits, although those might come incidentally. Go because it will help you to learn more and better, both by keeping you engaged in the class and helping your teachers help you. Reach out to your professors: Everybody wins.

Michael L. Satlow
Providence, R.I.
The writer is a professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University.

I received some feed-back about this.  Given the 150 words or so that the Times allows in their letters, it wasn’t possible for me to elaborate the thinking behind the letter, but I am happy to have the opportunity to do so here.

“Critically important” may have been an overstatement.  Most students emerge from college with fine educations having had very little contact with faculty members outside of class.  The issue, though, is what we mean by an “education.”  If receiving an education is taken to mean mastering a body of knowledge and set of skills, then seeing faculty outside of class is helpful but ancillary.  But if education is taken to mean engaging in a process of deep self-formation, well then I do think that “mentoring,” in its widest sense, is a necessary ingredient.  Self-formation happens in dialogue.  In college, that dialogue can, and should, take many different forms.  It can be a ruthlessly Socratic atmosphere of a seminar; a set of conversations with a mentor; and (most commonly and importantly) regular conversations with peers who bring new challenging perspectives.

This usually unarticulated tension between educational expectations – whether students are there to acquire knowledge, skills, and credentials or to develop as whole human beings preparing for a life of meaning and flourishing – is at the heart of the matter.  The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but students (sometimes encouraged by the rhetoric of college administrators) often lose sight of the latter.  This leads students to think that the only time that they should visit their professors is when they are either struggling with material or concerned about a grade.  Bruni encourages students to visit professors because they can serve as powerful advocates.  This seems to me to be crassly utilitarian.  No matter how expert the “calibration” it is clear when students try to develop relationships with the sole underlying motive of helping them to get ahead.  What I tried to convey in my letter was that the best learning (and, thus, the best recommendations and support) takes place in the context of relationships, not transactions.  One can acquire a set of marketable skills in college without forming relationships with faculty, but they can also acquire much more if they do form them.

This emphasis on relational over transactional learning raises two thorny issues.  The first is that of boundaries.  On the one hand, the most productive relationships, even in the classroom, require some level of vulnerability (which I’ve mused about here).  On the other hand, the teacher-student relationship is a bounded one.  Some of those boundaries (e.g., romantic) are marked with an unmistakably bright line.  There is no question that the issue of boundaries plays out differently for men and women, as students or teachers.  Others are fuzzier.  It is in many ways a unique relationship that will play out in an infinite number of ways, but the important thing is that it is playing out rather than being put aside in favor of transactional learning.

The second issue is practical.  Professors have demanding jobs with many responsibilities and not enough time.  Many are overworked adjuncts with classes that are too large and compensation that is too small.  We are human beings with good days and bad and, yes, it is certainly possible that a teacher has neither the time nor energy at a particular moment to explore with a student his or her dreams, aspirations, and learning challenges.  That said, though, it has been my experience that most professors went into the profession because they had teachers who took an interest in them and inspired and that they themselves aspire to pay it forward.  For most of my colleagues, it is the possibility of making a difference in their students’ lives that is at the foundation of what they do.

I do not want to misrepresent myself as a paragon.  I try to encourage students to make an appointment to visit me outside of class but I am not always as available as I would like to be.  I have scrapped regular office hours, which today seem quaint and inefficient, in favor of Google Calendar Appointment slots for which students need to sign up in advance.  This has helped me to avoid sitting in my office alone and is more convenient for students, but I know that students need to be a bit more proactive to take advantage.  I invite students to my house for dinner with my family (although this makes me feel extremely vulnerable) but continue to keep in touch with only a small handful of students after they graduate.  In many ways, I feel like I’ve failed to cultivate precisely the kind of relationships for which I am advocating here.  I am still trying though.

So I would reframe Bruni’s suggestion.  I strongly advise students to seek out all of their professors outside of class for even a brief conversation (this is advice that I give also to my children, two of whom are in college) and see where it goes.  Do it, though, because it is fun.  You can learn something by talking with a professor outside of class, and professors – believe it or not – often enjoy learning from you.  It may lead to material rewards, intellectual rewards, or neither.  But I really do believe that talking with students in a non-transactional way enhances my life, and I hope theirs as well.