Last semester (Spring 2007) the father of one of my students left me an abusive voicemail.  He was screaming, threatening, pounding his fist on a desk or table top, and finally hung up demanding that I call him back and "explain yourself to me."  This was a first, although I have been aware that teachers and school administrators are being asked to accommodate a parental presence that is more hovering than in the past.   I attribute his behavior to the forgiveness of the telephone.  If you know me personally then you know also how unlikely it would be for a college Dad to break bad with me face-to-face.

In some ways, it was fair for him to be upset.  The student, his daughter, had been in a car wreck and needed to miss some classes.  I misunderstood how many she would need, something we cleared up in about four seconds with two or three lines of email.  He thought I was going to grade her down for missing class to go to the doctor.  This is the kind of thing a college teacher works out with students, not with Moms and Dads.  But, still, it was his kid and I understand he was upset.  The thing I don't understand is how he could have left a voicemail that so clearly betrayed the very principles I imagine he has tried to impress upon his children; how he let his temper rule his sense of place, person, propriety, and in my case, as I suggest, his own personal safety.  The truth is he shouted things into my voicemail he would never have let himself say to a doctor, lawyer, merchant or anybody else I can think of besides a college professor.  He allowed himself this moment of emotional off-loading because I'm a professor and a teacher and thereby somehow am asking for it.

I feel like this whole episode bears on the complicated and double-edged status of our profession these days.  I think he talked to me the way he did because he shares a perception with the public at large that college professors are both haughty and fumbling, in the world and out of it.  We are "authorities" summoned to say smart shit in the news and on public television, we're the last word that settles disputes or defines historical data (Did Shakespeare write all those plays?); but at the same time we're authority figures just asking to be brought down.  He left a number, but of course I never called him back.  I don't talk to parents, and am in fact prevented from doing so by federal and state privacy laws in place to protect the student. 

But I did contact the student, and her response also surprises me.  I told her in an email some guy claiming to be her father left me a nasty phone message and that its hard for me to believe the parent of one of my students would behave in such an embarrassing way.  But, I wrote, if by some fluke she knew this guy would she please ask him to come have the conversation in person.  And the kid did nothing.  She never replied.  And she showed up in class and at other school functions, as if nothing had happened.  This, as I say, surprised me because I thought she would be more worried that her Dad's idiot interruption of our relationship would cause me and the other instructors here to lose respect for her.  She was pretty innocent in all this, after all: just a kid who got in a car wreck.  But by allowing her father's intervention to stand I think she sacrificed a very important measure of dignity. 

Imagine this were you.  You'd have to know I made a copy of the tape and perhaps even imagine that I would play it for the Dean or for my colleagues, or at least for the university attorney's office, just in case this asshole did come by looking for a fight.  Would you want to walk into the classroom knowing your teachers, and perhaps even your peers, now thought of you as hiding under Daddy's bad temper?  How easy would it be for you just to say, "My dad was really upset.  I'm sorry"?  I was surprised not to hear anything from her; but in retrospect when I put her behavior together with her father's, things make a little more sense.

There is a question on the teacher evaluation forms students here fill out at the semester's end that asks "Did the instructor show respect for the students?"  Although I understand and absolutely approve of the need for a question like this, I think also that the whole notion of "respect" shifts its weight under the sort of pressure it gets from an episode like this one.  How can an instructor "show respect" for students who don't respect themselves?  How can "respect" have any operative meaning at all in a context where the student allows it to be thought that its okay for her Daddy to lose his temper and scream over the phone at her teacher?

When Governor Bush said a few years ago that his top priority in education was "accountability," the public heard "accountability of teachers."  There are behemoth substructures working in state universites -- information technology, development, human resources -- all kinds of middle management jobs that never get the kind of critical scrutiny that teachers do.  Most of the people teaching in Florida are underpaid and overworked state employees, like most employees of most states.  But the "authority figure" myth adheres to us like smoke from a brushfire: "explain yourself to me." 

I'm not complaining about the tensions that queer the job for us.  On the contrary: I think that the greatness of what we do lies precisely in the odd contradictory roles that are imposed on us from without.  Okay, I like the smart guy stuff (Yeah. Shakespeare wrote the plays.) But the question of respect is very real to me, even if it seems to fall back on very narrow and shifting public perceptions.  I'm not sure where all this will go, but if students don't know respect when they see it, if they come to college from a social and educational system that can't tell the difference between being respected and patronized, how can they be asked to evaluate an instructor's respect for them?