The dictatorship of the weak

New times

My life turned out so that, being a graduate of the Soviet University, I have been working in the Western Academic World for more than twenty years. For about ten years I worked at the Australian National University, and now I teach at the South Korean University of Koreo mostly mixed groups of South Korean and Western students. The terrible crime of the associate professor of St. Petersburg State University Sokolov, about whom it seems that everyone has forgotten, and the fresh cases of accusations in Harassment made me once again feel how different Russian university realities from the Western and South Korean.

For all the stories that roamed on the Web, relating to the associate professor, I was most struck by the video in which Sokolov in the presence of a huge number of observers hysterically screamed at the student who asked some wrong question during the lecture, and literally pushed him out of the audience. This conflict, which at one time in the media, did not prevent the teacher from continuing work at the university. As in the case of his idol, Napoleon, the nasty nature and scraping of Sokolov did not interfere with his career: on the contrary, even somewhat added popularity in some ways.

In the modern West and in the strictly next South Korea, it is impossible to present such behavior of the teacher. In the conditions of the Sokolov, with his psychopathic inclinations, he would simply not have reached the provision of the associate professor of the country's leading university. He would be shot down far on the approach for the oblique look towards the student, an arbitrarily set assessment, a slippery compliment of a graduate student. And no charisma, no intellect would help him.

If a rock star or a major league football player in the West may well give free rein to his irritation and publicly fight with a motor driver who had not missed their motorcade, as Sokolov did during his reconstructive games, then a teacher of the Western university, no matter how hysteroid type he was, was deprived of such an opportunity.

And the point here is not that the Western University is the concentration of intelligence and spirituality. Just the social status of a university professor there is not close to the status of celebrities.

The massive spread of higher education in the West and South Korea led to the fact that it ceased to be perceived as a privilege of the elect, but has become a democratic service proposed by a specific university among many others. Accordingly, teachers ceased to be considered impregnable priests of science. They turned into ordinary maintenance staff fighting for customers with competitors. The fact that the client does not come for potatoes, but for knowledge, does not play a practical role.

"Change the diapers"

I ask the professor’s friend how he works in the new position of the head of the department of one of the leading American universities. “All the same. We change the diapers for the kids, ”he waves his hand. By kids, he means students, for the fragile mental balance of which he has to answer. With the student, you must be smiling and charming, like a seller of Herbalife. Otherwise, the child will write a complaint, noise will go, the university rating will decrease - in other words, the level of sales will fall.

My university position is much lower, however, I constantly have to "change the children of diapers."

Even on a precious weekend, it takes me a lot of time for correspondence with students. Only one day to illustrate. In the first letter coming, the student asked me to repeat that I told him about his presentation yesterday: he actually heard what I said in the class, but somehow forgot. The other was going to meet me and asked to remind me of my office number, which is on a university website. The third asked him to send him material, which is also on the site. The fourth asked if it was possible to go home half aester earlier, without passing the exam, but so that the assessment was not lower than the four.

Instead of sending all this fraternity away and doing my immediate work - writing an article, the deadlines of which are pressed, I sit down and write letters to them, polite, respectful, informative.

A day before that, like all teachers, I was asked to have an official conversation with malicious truants: to meet in person and recall that it is not good to skip the lectures. After that, fill out the official paper indicating the place and time of the conversation and transfer it to the dean. If this is not done, at the end of the semester, the truant can roll the complaint that the teacher reacted to him so much and did not warn that he could not skip.

A couple of years ago, one of my students decided not to appear for the exam, but instead go to rest in Miami. When he found out that he did not give a course, he was terribly indignant. He was not warned that we had to come to the exam! Since then, in my description of the course, an additional item has appeared “failure to appear for the exam without good reason, leads to the non -incommunication of the subject”.

Like any institution of service, Western University acts on the principle of "client is always right." At the end of the semester, students write reviews for the course. Having received a negative remark, the teacher is obliged to fill out another official paper - how he is going to reform the course in order to prevent such a review in the future. And it doesn’t matter if the remark is from the forever carotid and it will sound like “well, there was nothing at all, but somehow it was not very inserted”. The teacher’s duty is to formulate clearly and specifically what he will do to avoid such criticism.

The Western professor should be modest, friendly and affordable. My colleague is regularly caught by students, for some reason always near the toilet, and they are starting with him long conversations. A colleague puts a mask of bright enthusiasm on his face and obediently talks, sometimes twenty to thirty minutes. I do not know how to withstand this test of his bladder. But no one can blame him for being inattentive to the needs of the student.

Love last, evening dawn

In Russia, there is an idea that in the West, under the influence of evil feminists, novels between students and teachers are impossible. This is not quite consistent with the truth. The archetype of the speaker-Zlatoust and his young fan, the romantic union of mature wisdom and young enthusiasm, is too deeply laid in the human psyche, so that any ideological innovations can burn him to the ground.

However, modernity still imposes its paw on the eternal plot of Mazepa and Mary. With a new order of things, any university “sire” who decides to contact a young fan, by definition, puts himself in a dangerous and dependent position. Even with the full consent of the parties, the novel will need to be hidden in every possible way, because the relationship between the teacher and the student is illegal. So there will be no public waltzes. Ordinary gatherings in the evening cafe in the city center can bring lovers under the monastery, as happened with one of my charismatic colleague. By the way, his student was a couple of years older than him.

If something in this secret novel goes wrong, Maria can contact the disciplinary commission and accuse Mazepa of harassment and psychological violence. And her voice - the voice of the dependent and lower - will be much stronger than any arguments of the professor. And the disciplinary commission has a heavy hand.

Therefore, most of my western colleagues are always on the alert. None of them would have occurred to talk in private with a student with a key of the door and give some evaluative, even the most positive, characteristics of the girl’s appearance, with which he is not associated with a romantic relationship. In the conditions of the Western University, to call a student a beauty and kiss on a cheek - this is not a sweet old -fashioned flirting, but a deadly game of a Russian roulette. Even in women's toilets there are posters calling the sisters of the gender to eradicate manifestations of sexism, harassment, lucism and gender discrimination. And there is always a risk that the seductive “beauty” suddenly cleanses the machine gun and will stare it to death with this terrible plug.

This is how the dictatorship of the weak, which today covered Western and South Korean universities. Like many of my colleagues, I am often annoyed by this “marvelous new world”, which makes me mess with hopeless lobotes, to emphasize the permanent attention of the next Transgender student and avoid comments about the excess weight of the North Korean leader in the presence of an eternally chewing girl weight tightly for a hundred kg.

But then I recall that the new world still has its advantages.

Thanks to the new policy of democratic openness, not only the dusking truant with a message about her monthly, who prevented her from attending my lecture last week, but also a shy freshman who turned out to be a big smart man with whom we were able to discuss an interesting project, came up. Fifteen years ago, when the University of Koreo was the kingdom of the Confucian hierarchy, the students had neither monthly, no panic attacks, nor “stresses of the first year”. On the other hand, such a student would quietly hide in the back row.

And most importantly, when a new world is angry with me, I recall my student and graduate years. Here is the same “Napoleon”, who taught us the archeology, who screams on students and drove them five times to retake his subject, each time with new, unexpected demands - he really liked to outstall people. I recall the old satire-teacher, to whom the girls went to take the tests in short skirts and with a low neckline-he did not complain modest. I recall the teacher, who for some reason seemed ridiculous to the color of my sweater and who found it extremely witty to call me from the lecture “Girl in a strip”.

I recall how already in the 1990s in the South Korean graduate school the teacher called me to the office on some issue and during the conversation he simply put his hand into his pants and began to scratch his household with a grin.

In the west and in South Korea, these types evaporated, went into an irrevocable past, taking with them pain and humiliation of lower ones. New rules of life are more logical and humane. Neither Napoleons, nor satires, nor just hammams here, and this is good.

Tatyana Gabrusenko, Korea historian,
Professor of the University of Koreo (South Korea)