Archive - May 2007 - Story

Call them ‘gen. eds.,’ core curriculum, liberal arts requirements. Whatever the name, most colleges require students to take a range of basic courses in the humanities, arts, social sciences, math and natural sciences. Although these courses tend not to be directly related to many majors, administrators believe the requirements benefit students in the long run, and surprisingly, many students do too.

Whether there is truth to these stereotypical associations or not, the solid community service presence and the leadership qualities developed through Greek life are often overlooked by extreme pledging rituals and instances of hazing on campuses throughout the country.

The deep root that Greek life has in tradition makes it difficult for university officials to crack down on extreme activity during recruitment. It also presents problems for current members who want to break away from these stereotypes.

After seemingly endless hours of class, homework and studying, all college students deserve the opportunity to unwind in their free time. For many, relaxation results from exercising, partying, sleeping late, watching a movie, or simply spending time with friends. Some students, though, escape stress in a different fashion – one not normally associated with typical college life – through spirituality and religion.

Bruce Coriell, chaplain and part-time professor of religion at Colorado College, says the amount of students engaged in spirituality is greater than most believe.

“In the last 10 years, I’ve seen more and more interest on the part of students on spirituality,” Coriell says. “It is on lots of people’s minds.

“In terms of the life issues that kind of come along for college students, [religious] questions arise on a regular basis. They’re just kind of part of becoming an individual.”

In fact, 70 percent of American college students say religion plays an important role in their lives and one in four report an increased spirituality since entering college, according to a study conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics .

Coriell says most people are naturally drawn to some kind of faith or belief system, so it is not surprising that many students are religious or spiritual.

“[Spirituality] gives people a chance to find some sense of balance or harmony or coherence,” he says. “Lots of what happens is that people have that sense that there’s got to be more than just me. That’s definitely a kind of question of spirituality.”

Students across the country spend their free time attending church and temple services, prayer sessions and meditation classes. They may not always relax in the stereotypical college manner, but still find respite through their own means of rest and enjoyment.

As part of the religious student community of America, the following three students represent those who escape college stress and find a sense of community through faith and religion. Though their personal beliefs may differ, all three say spirituality is an integral part of both their academic and personal lives.

A Christian Life at Brigham Young University
Ashkan Mamarian (left) of Brigham Young University. Photo courtesy of Mamarian.
A traditional Christian, Ashkan Memarian of Orange County, Calif. always believed in God and Jesus, but his beliefs are more important to him now than ever.

“My life as a Christian is inseparable from my student life or any other part of my life,” Memarian says. “The other stuff in life is so temporary. The only things that matter are people being saved and what’s going on between you and Jesus.”

Memarian grew up attending church with his brother and parents and says he is inspired by the personal faith of his mother, “the spiritual rock of his family.”

Now a senior at Brigham Young University (BYU), Memarian attends church services every Sunday morning and a Bible study each Tuesday. He is the president of Christian Fellowship, a student-run organization dedicated to fostering relationships among Christians and the study of the Bible. He also records Christian hymns and contemporary pieces in his free time.

“My life doesn’t depend on school. But I know that God has called me personally to do school at this point, so I am going to do the best I can.”

According to the BYU website, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon-based church, founded the college and continues to support it today. Though not Mormon, Memarian still agrees with many of the important values of the college.

“I am very much in the minority being traditional Christian, but I get along with most everybody just fine.”

While he enjoys being a member of an organized religion, Memarian says he often questions the meanings sometimes associated with certain religious communities.

“It’s our human nature to self-justify. Organized religion sets up rules so they [people] can feel safe. We all have this need… organized religion often fills that need with pride, and that’s scary.”

Memarian says he is not prideful in his faith, but rather “a slave by choice.”

Having faith in something, or someone, he says, helps him and can help others feel rested and calm while studying and working at school. But even though his personal faith is a driving force in his life, he says he is not much different from non-religious students.

“I'm a pretty normal kid except for the fact that the basis for the decisions in my life is Jesus, and I really just want to see people saved.”

Jewish Community at The College of New Jersey

Most freshmen arrive at college feeling apprehensive about making friends and finding a sense of belonging in an unknown place.

Freshman Emily Vasile of Haddon Heights, N.J. didn’t have that problem.

Hillel students at the College of New Jersey build a Sukkah. Photo by Elizabeth Getman.

“I joined Hillel over the summer,” she says. “I adjusted to college quickly. There was no searching for a feeling of community. Having talked to a bunch of people in clubs definitely helped ease some of my nerves.”

A member of The College of New Jersey’s chapter of Hillel, a nationwide organization for Jewish college students, Vasile believes in reformed Judaism . She participates in different activities with the group and attends Shabbat services every Friday.

Students who belong to the TCNJ Hillel chapter are mostly reformed and hold similar beliefs and views of the Jewish religion, she says.

“To me, Judaism means community. It’s like a family. Most reformed Jews are very open-minded about life and always encourage questioning. I feel like you can ask any question and someone can give you an explanation that makes sense to you.”

Vasile was raised celebrating both Jewish and Catholic holidays because her mother is Jewish and her father is Catholic.

“Although I did celebrate both, I only consider myself a Jew,” she says. “I went through Hebrew school through the seventh grade and then became a Bat Mitzvah.”

The reformed Jewish community is a less “hard-core” and more “open-minded” form of organized religion, she says.

“I think most organized religions are too strict. I think if people believe something, they should be able to believe it without having to live their lives by a strict set of rules.”

Though the main reason Vasile follows Judaism is for the sense of community it brings, she says she understands the importance of faith in students’ lives.

“I think it [faith] guides us in life. It is a way for people to relax and someone to pray to if they’re in need of a listener.”

Buddhist Meditation at Princeton University

Unlike Vasile, Princeton University senior Ian Petrow does not participate in typical organized religion activities. However, that doesn’t mean he’s not a spiritual person.

Murray-Dodge Hall, a religious center at Princeton. Photos by Elizabeth Getman.

“I think many people tend to make a bigger distinction between the two [organized religion, spirituality] than is need be,” Petrow says. “On the one hand, one shouldn’t blindly accept whatever one is told, yet at the same time it is necessary to have ritual and rules as a container , so to speak, for spiritual practice. A little bit of both is important.”

A Zen Buddhist from Charlotte, Vt., Petrow says he practices meditation almost every day and is the president of Princeton Buddhist Students’ Groups (PBSG). PBSG is the only Buddhist group at Princeton, but one of many student religious organizations on campus, including a Christian Science organization, Muslim Students’ Association and Hindu Students’ Council.

Petrow says he was exposed to different spiritual paths growing up, but did not consider himself a religious person as a child.

Buddhism is different from other religions in several ways, especially regarding the significance and meaning of faith, he says.

“I guess faith isn’t something we talk about in Buddhism…yet it is important. I suppose that it’s important to get one through tough times, when all your work and social life is crashing down on you. We’ve all been there.”

Petrow says the most important part of his Buddhist practice is meditation, which helps reduce stress in both his student and spiritual lives.

“It [meditation] helps to clear my head and calm and center myself,” he says. “I try to bring awareness and mindfulness I develop in the meditation room into my daily life, too. Doing so helps me connect with the present moment and see more clearly into reality.”

Professor Ryan Claycomb is a victim of student rage.
“As best as I can tell from grammatical tics, it was a particular student disgruntled with his low grade,” he says. “[He] posted six times about how bad I was.”
Such is the curse potentially felt by over 770,000 rated professors on ratemyprofessor.com, a Web site that keeps track of student evaluations of professors' ease of course, helpfulness, clarity, and -- because it would hardly be a true representation of student assessment without it -- their attractive factor, so appropriately marked by a chili pepper.

It may be harsh reality for some professors, but then again, it allows the professor to know how well they’re actually doing."

- Kevin Nho, junior at UC San Diego

“I printed the page out and posted it on my office wall as a reminder of two things,” Claycomb says. “How personal the classroom can feel to everyone involved, and how vitriolic feedback can look a lot more pervasive than it really is.”

After seven years combined of teaching as a Lecturer at the University of Maryland and as an Assistant Professor at George Washington, Claycomb is now in his second year as an Assistant Professor at West Virginia University. And RMP has been kinder to him since the multiple-posting outburst.

“I’m pretty proud of my RMP rating here at this moment, which rates me high on helpfulness and clarity, but pretty low on the easiness scale,” he says. “It’s the chili pepper, or absent chili pepper, that cuts pretty deep.”

Piquant vegetable icons aside, for UC San Diego junior Kevin Nho, ratings – positive or negative – are justified.

“It may be harsh reality for some professors,” he says, “but then again, it allows the professor to know how well they’re actually doing.”

Chris Cavalli, an astronomy professor at Austin Community College, agrees.

A list of funny reviews on the site.

“This type of information has been available to students forever,” she says. “This is just a more convenient way to access it.”

Though not a member of RMP, Cavalli has accessed personal ratings from pickaprof.com, a similar website, ever since her daughter told her about it. Cavalli has since used the information to her advantage.

“[The grading ratings] helped me decide when maybe I was being too lenient or too harsh,” she says. “And I [made] corrections in my grading to stay [at] a reasonable place.”

Claycomb’s own faith in the rating system is not so strong.

“Because it depends on voluntary sampling, and because students can post multiple times, those results are statistically a mess,” he says. “Those ratings are usually made by those very happy or very angry – the other 90% of students may all be perfectly satisfied, or not. It’s impossible to tell.”

For “The Professor,” a tenured professor in the humanities at a small liberal arts college in the South, colleagues in his field deserved a place on the Web to rant back. In November of 2005, rateyourstudents.blogspot.com (RYS) was born. But just three months later, an unshakable hacker infiltrated into the blog several times over a two-week period.

“The Professor got tired of the technological hassle of keeping the blog going in this momentary spate of technological tomfoolery,” says a RYS moderator, one of three others to whom the now-distressed Professor handed the site and its archives.
“We [moderators] are all college professors, all readers of the first version of the site, and all fans,” the moderator says.

However, there is a distinct difference in format of RMP and RYS. Unlike the more than 6.2 million ratings in RMP’s databases, RYS chooses but one post a day from the e-mails received by readers.

“We get about 30 percent e-mail from college students, and the rest from college faculty,” the moderator says. “We welcome posts from anyone interested in the mission of the site, which has something to do with making the modern-day college classroom a better place where understanding is increased between faculty and students.”

But the posts on the blog suggest the majority of this supposedly increased understanding is among the faculty members alone. Phrases like “hellish situations” caused by “disruptive students” are mild compared to some choice vocabulary used to describe the particularly unruly scholars. A group of anxiety-ridden professors even advises readers to hammer down alcohol in the title of their post (“We Recommend the Margarita. Actually A Couple of Them. Step Away From the Computer, And Go Get Something to Drink Right Now.”) prior to reading.

Cavalli is not sure how she feels about the site.

“We professors discuss students in private,” she says. “But I think this is a bit more problematic and unprofessional.”

Claycomb, on the other hand, finds RYS “comparatively harmless.”

“No one’s mom is ever going to Google their child and find a harsh statement on RYS,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s the image of a professoriate I want publicized, but at least it acknowledges that faculty are human, too, if perhaps a bit more discreet than the students who use RMP for revenge.”

Molly Wilson, a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, does not take offense in the RYS website. Instead, she sees blunt humor.

“I love it!” she says laughing. “We do it to them, so why shouldn’t they retaliate? I’m sure they want to rant about bad students just like we rant about bad professors.”

And the ranting rage, fueled by creative liberties only an angry college student could fashion, sears the online message boards. Among the most expressive comments on RMP include “His class was like milk, it was good for 2 weeks,” “BORING! But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling,” and “She hates you already.”

Still, there are the responsible students who read and post in sincerity for the sake of a better collegiate experience. Kristen Brunello, a sophomore at Ithaca College, is one.

“There is a difference between bashing someone and giving feedback,” she says. “[Bashing] is immature. It’s uncalled for.”

But as it is with any other public forum, discretion for any ranting or raving website is at the mercy of the users, and with time, the fury will subside and emotional scarring will fade. The scary truth remains that responsibility lingers in the fingertips of the livid or elated raters. Those wary of bruised egos have no choice but to avert their eyes or toughen up – and even they probably won’t stop using RMP.

“For professors with better tools at their disposal, no, it’s not a legit way to evaluate our teaching,” Claycomb says, “but it doesn’t stop the criticism from stinging and the praise from being gratifying.”

Have you ever considered a major in limnology or gerontology? Maybe a major in adventure recreation and leisure services sounds more appealing. How about dedicating your college career to a major in biblical languages, historic preservation, or food sciences?