Becoming a Professor Again

Travels in the land of Gen Z

The last academic year has seen me back in the university classroom in the role of professor, following a two decade-long hiatus. The last time I was “Professor Aiyar” was in 2002-2003 when I taught English newswriting to students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. My latest stint in the classroom has me lecturing on Global Media Perspectives to students from a variety of prestigious U.S. universities, who are doing a semester abroad in Madrid, as part of their degrees.

The idea is for me to introduce global events from multiple view points. Over the previous semester, we looked at the Rise of China, The Russia-Ukraine War, Covid, the #MeToo movement, the repatriation of colonial loot, immigration to Europe, and climate change, among other topics.

I have discovered that the land of North American Gen Zs is as exotic a destination as I’ve been to, in my already well-traveled life. I’ve had to learn a new language and become accustomed to a new culture – one that harks back to a less literate, more oral time.

Before the start of classes in September of last year, there was a staff meeting during which I met colleagues who had been at the job for many years and had the psychological battle scars to show for it. When they discovered that it would be my first-time attempting pedagogy with Gen Zs, they gave me pitying looks. The bouquet of adjectives with which my new wards were described left me alarmed: lazy, rude, entitled, ignorant, illiterate, complacent, fragile.

It would not be a lie, dear reader, to admit that there were moments during the next few months when I would have cause to agree with every one of these descriptors.

After the first introductory class I had a young lady with a long fringe that almost covered her eyes, a hairstyle that made her mumblings even harder to comprehend, sidle up to me. She muttered something about needing accommodation because it took her longer. I was befuddled about why she might imagine I could help with her lodgings and directed her to speak with the lady in charge of administration to inquire if she might not find her a dorm room that was closer. The student looked (as best I could make out under the fringe) as confused as I felt, but the conversation ended and the young lady dropped my class.

Photo credit: Unsplash

The next day I received a letter from the university informing me that various students in my class were granted “accommodations” ranging from extra time for assignments and exams, to the right to use laptops even if I required pen and paper, to the use of noise-cancelling headphones to minimize distraction etc.

Without going into details, several students in my class of 15, had official accommodations and I had to take a crash course in mental-health vocabulary. But my learnings had only just begun. Soon I realized that my wards did not read books. At most I could expect them to rush through two short, feature-length articles ahead of class for which I needed to send them multiple reminders, including on the day of class itself. They had almost no ability to remember assignments or deadlines without constant prompting. Their writing was horrible, badly constructed, and occasionally, incoherent (although I took solace in the fact that given the poor quality it must be their own and not Chat GPT’s).

They also knew very little about most things. None of them had heard of Guantanamo Bay, for example. None, except for one student, read newspapers. TikTok was their primary source of information. As I’d been warned, Gen Zs were fragile. A student wrote to me over the weekend that Iran sent drones and missiles to Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of Iran's embassy in Damascus: “If you plan to discuss this in class, I would like to be excused from attending because it is too upsetting for me,” she (a Jewish student) wrote.

 The students were entitled. One young woman whom I gave a B+ to on a mid-term assignment send me an email saying, “she could not afford a B+” and that I needed to figure out a way for her to redo her assignment for a higher score.  

All of this said, dealing with culture shock is a skill I’ve had some practice honing. My advice to travelers has always been to appreciate the land they find themselves in for what it is, rather than focusing on what it isn’t. And the same principle must be applied when it comes to today’s university students. There is a temptation to judge young people by the standards of our own generation. After all, our formative environments have a stickiness that even decades of travel can’t fully dissolve. But changing the yardsticks by which we judge, is travel’s greatest gift, although even gifted travelers struggle to accept it.

Next week’s post will continue on from today’s. It will describe how once I learned to adjust my expectations and start appreciating Gen Z for itself, instead of comparing it to whatever generation I came from, I was better able to teach them and to learn from them. That said, it is a fraught environment to navigate for a teacher, and the room for free expression is shrinking. There were moments, I felt were almost reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.

Part 2 of this newsletter will only be available to paying subscribers, to express my gratitude for their support. However, the majority of the Global Jigsaw of the future and past remains free to read.

Hasta pronto,

Pallavi