Published: April 1, 2010

Often extolled as the cornerstone of its liberal education, Fordham’s core is designed to give its undergraduate students a well-rounded taste of its different disciplines, so that they are well-informed when they choose their major. It sounds great in theory, but then, why are our pivotal first two years of school often being taught by graduate students, just a few years older than we are? The first four semesters of school, students scramble to fulfill their core classes, and often have to sign up for classes taught by graduate students, of whose teaching record we know nothing, and whose very name we often don’t learn until a week before class starts. At the very least, Fordham owes its undergraduates the opportunity to feel that they aren’t throwing caution to the wind when they sign up for a graduate student’s class.

Fordham might start by providing its students with a brief biography of each graduate student, much like each department has for its full-time faculty on departmental Web sites. Often, preemptive sites like ratemyprofessors.com have no record of graduate students, whether because they haven’t been teaching for very long, or because they haven’t established a reputation at the school. Without the university’s help, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves its undergraduates in the dust.

The first graduate student whose class I took was a young, bearded 20-something with a limited range of facial expressions. I was skeptical of his ability to hold the attention of the class, especially at the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. However, he managed to make the class thought-provoking and engaged us in conversation about a wide array of literary works. We read Hemingway and talked about how much of the author’s own life and ego were bound up in his work, and stories by Updike and Denis Johnson which explored unlikely and sometimes unlikable heroes. The class was a thoughtful introduction to college-level English courses—but then came the others.

The next graduate student to come my way did not win my favor, but her time with my class was brief. We had been given advance notice of her coming, which was to be during a conference held by my professor, out of the country. The class was my favorite and most challenging course, a study on how wars have shaped America. Usually, the intense political divide of the class led to lively debates, which my professor loved and which allowed us to sharpen our individual beliefs. On this particular day, however, it took all of 10 minutes for the 12 of us in the class to band together against her. As we attempted to discuss the biography of a young slave woman who lived just a few years prior to the Civil War, she chose awkward moments to interrupt us and bruised the flow of conversation. Frustrated, we spent the latter portion of the class staring at each other in glum silence.

When my professor returned next class and cheerfully asked what we had thought of the graduate student he held in such high regard, we guiltily begged him never to bring her back ever, ever again. She had been just as uncomfortable as we had, and she wasn’t ready for the classroom. It was the first time that I was confronted with the lesson that no matter how knowledgeable he or she is, not every scholar can teach. Even if they know the material backwards and forwards, that doesn’t come with the ability to share it.

For my next graduate student, I had an English professor who was a doctoral candidate and who taught the next freshman core requirement. We had an inauspicious beginning which lead to a frustrating rest of the semester. She catered the material of the class to her own preferences, with a strong emphasis on feminism. While the material was interesting, we could never escape discussing each work in terms of her own interests.

The longer I stayed in her class, the more we disappointed each other. She was unable to explain to me why the three-paragraph essays on the difference between connotation and denotation were necessary when we had just spent the entire class period discussing their differences, and I was unable to convince her that our homework hours would be better spent actually incorporating the elements of connotation and denotation into our creative writing assignments. My writing seemed to regress as I submitted to her will. As an English major, I couldn’t help but think that if her methods were the ones I was supposed to follow, I was in the wrong field. As she was quick to assert in the beginning of the semester, she was only a few short years older than we were, and she could relate to the issues that were important to us. But it soon became clear that even beside my lack of progress, she and I had such similar personalities that we couldn’t debate with each other, only at one another. We got along whenever the conversation didn’t deal with curriculum, but the more I got to know her, the more it seemed we were too close in age and experience for comfort. She was still a student first, and so absorbed in her own interests that the core material she was supposed to teach us fell by the wayside. The class quickly became more of an exercise in how she could expound on her own concerns than help us lay the base we needed to develop ours. Since the core takes up most of a student’s first two years at Fordham, this theoretically means that the majority of the two years could be spent without the distinct benefit of a well-established, full-time faculty member to guide us.

This past semester, I took another core, an Art History course in which the professor’s erratic lecture style seemed frequently to make him lose command of his vocabulary (“this sculpture is worth-notey” once escaped from his mouth), or questioning his research methods. He too, was unable to teach without catering to his own preferences and rebuffed contributions from the class that he didn’t agree with. For the midterm, he promised us that he didn’t care for the dates of specific works of art, as long as we could effectively discuss their significance using the appropriate terms. Then, on the day of the midterm, we were asked first to date each work before making any observations of them. His Power Point presentations were composed almost entirely of material copied and pasted from Wikipedia. When he did venture to provide his own opinion, it came in the form of gems like his insistence that the band Iron Maiden derived its name from the juxtaposition of the delicate feminine ideal and the gravity and strength of steel. When I brought up the infamous eponymous torture device, he told me he’d have to look it up.

If the university expects its core curriculum to be as fundamentally important as it claims, shouldn’t its students have the benefit of its more established and knowledgeable faculty? Furthermore, if Fordham wants its students to believe that the core really matters, assigning our classes to graduate students about whom we know nothing is bad publicity. As it stands, being corralled into an anonymous graduate student’s class makes the core seem more like grunt work for them, and less than essential for us. But, if Fordham does insist on having graduate students teach the core, another option might be to offer students a discount on those classes. It’s not a revolutionary concept. If a graduate student isn’t making the salary of a full-time professor, then what are we paying for? In other disciplines where rank is especially important, such as medicine, clinics are often used as teaching and practicing grounds for medical students, and in turn, patients pay significantly less for treatment, if not nothing at all.

They are students first, and that requires a certain selfishness that I know well. As years of teachers won’t let me forget, I’m here to learn. The problem, of course, is that our very narrow generational gap means that our selfishness must conflict, and our student-teacher relationship is inherently troubled. As it stands, placing graduate students in charge of what Fordham regards as its all-important core curriculum makes the situation very tenuous. And if the core is as critical to Fordham students as we are made to believe, we should be getting the experience we pay for.