The university says all teaching sessions are compulsory. But have they misinterpreted their role in our lives, and even if they haven’t… are they doing it right?
At exactly 25 minutes past 10 on an anonymous Monday morning, the usual program of History module HST21015 was broken when the lecturer said something quite interesting. The unmistakable squeak-crash-footstep-footstep-bag-seat-laptop cacophony of a latecomer scarcely raises eyebrows, let alone actual concerns in a lecture hall. Most of us have been that latecomer ourselves. The lecturer’s sudden bark of reprimand, however, was worth adding to our notes.
“Official heritage is distinguishable from the unofficial in the sense that bureaucratic administrations can protect IT’S TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES PAST TEN YOU KNOW, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! and maintain community heritage, where unofficial heritage is a less…”. From here on, the lethargy of a Monday morning lecture was free to resume.
I can only speak as a History student, but the sense I get from general inquiry is that being ticked off for tardiness by a lecturer is a very rare occurrence. But why? The student was late, the lecturer was probably irritated by the interruption to her flow which was, admittedly, an impressively unbroken filibuster. She came over all vigilante in a moment of understandable aggravation and the whole thing was a non-event.
On closer inspection though, one of two things was in evidence here; either the lecturer was bang out of order, or she and all other teaching staff are being completely undermined by the department and university administration at large. It could be a bit of both.
University is not school. The latter is mandated by the government, the former is not. The cost of further education is charged to individual students, whereas schools are bankrolled by the state or parents. More fundamentally, university students are legal adults. Which confers a degree of self-accountability onto us, something we notoriously can’t be trusted with, but hey, how else has anyone learned adulthood if not the hard way?
Chapter 1 verse 1 of the basic principles underpinning society (maybe verse 2, just after ‘thou shalt not kill’) suggest that students shouldn’t be shouted at for turning up late to a lecture. University education is more independent and less regimented by nature. Students are charged nearly ten thousand pounds a year for tuition; no skin off the university’s nose if we fail to take full advantage. Bollocking latecomers is a much greater disruption to the lecture than the latecomers actual entrance. Our rogue member of the History faculty was probably just having a bad day.
The university’s official policy is that all timetabled teaching sessions are compulsory, and lateness or truancy will be policed by the department. But it enforces this ironclad rule with such limp-wristed uncertainty that from some angles, they seem to be actively undermining their teaching staff.
The uni’s attendance monitoring system is so clumsy you could easily mistake it for a relic of the early internet era; the unfortunate lecturer has to find a code, write it on a board somewhere, then wait for everyone to get their phones out, navigate to the iSheffield app, enter the code, and probably check their Instagrams whilst they’re at it. (Incidentally, what are students without smartphones expected to do? I genuinely don’t know).
The code remains valid for the full lecture, and can be entered at any point, implying that the university acknowledges students are late sometimes after all. Except do they? If so, why have their staff started shouting at people for this offence? Perhaps lecturers and departmental hierarchies alike would prefer latecomers to write off the lecture entirely if they risk interrupting, using Encore lecture recordings on Blackboard to learn material instead. Except if recordings are a viable alternative to in-person attendance… aren’t students being offered an authorised excuse to grab another hour of sleep? Maybe we should just get our mates to text us the attendance code whilst they’re at it?
Trying to enforce compulsory attendance in an educational culture that has never been conducive to such infantilization was not going to be easy. But if the uni has decided that’s what needs to be done, they’re going about it very badly: using an attendance system that encourages lateness, employing lecturers who encourage promptness, but providing lecture recordings which encourage outright truancy.
Is university an authoritarian nanny state, administering centralised academic justice to the benefit of one and all under its jurisdiction, with our best interests at heart? Or is it a laissez-faire bastion of negative liberty, where if the slackers slack off they’ve only themselves to blame? Both have their merits and demerits. But currently, it’s trying to be both, and succeeding at neither.
Universities have always been inherently optional – enrolling in the first place, but also attending teaching sessions. They are institutions for people of a certain intellectual maturity, otherwise none of us would get in. They are also the places many of us have decided to go to because they are a canapé of adult accountability we will need to engage with properly soon enough. As the costs relentlessly rise whilst tangible academic provisions deteriorate, university’s role as a crumple zone between adolescence and the real world becomes basically their only unique selling point.
If we get drunk on Sunday night and turn up late and hungover to our Monday morning lectures, the damage to our education and later grades, is our problem. Sheffield University management seems to feel they have a duty to intervene, and they definitely have a point, if not a mandate. But the means of doing so should not come in the form of a clunky attendance code system, which they undermine by duplicating lectures online anyway. And in either case, I don’t think lecturers should give latecomers the old what-for. That kind of public humiliation serves no purpose or benefit to anyone.
Image Credits: Unsplash
