UAA professor's research on contra-power harassment featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education

"When Students Become Class Bullies, Professors Are Among the Victims" is an article by Audrey Williams June in the August issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It includes research by UAA professor Claudia Lampman. Here is an excerpt:

Katherine Almquist is certain that, every semester, at least one of her students will push the limits of classroom civility and the professor-student relationship. The wild card, however, is just how over-the-top the incident will be.

"It's all about acting out aggression now. They don't hold anything back," says Ms. Almquist, an associate professor of foreign languages at Frostburg State University. "Dealing with it is just part of my job."

She is not exaggerating. The topic of student incivility on college campuses has not been exhaustively studied, but some recent surveys indicate that most professors can recount a moment when students have been excessively rude, threatened them or even made them fear physical violence. Female professors are more likely to be seriously affected by those encounters than are men. The incidents cause some to consider quitting. And those who report such behavior to their department chairs or deans are frequently frustrated by a lack of action; a more effective route seems to involve the dean of students as well.

Claudia Lampman, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska at Anchorage who has surveyed professors about the extent of student incivility, says a run-in with a student six years ago triggered her research. While she was teaching a class on the psychology of women, a student glared at her the entire semester from a desk right in front of her and would communicate with her only by notes, which he had handwritten in an angry tone. He refused to do his assignments or take exams, and he threatened to sue her if she tried to make him do them, she says.

"I was just so freaked out and unnerved by his presence in the classroom," Ms. Lampman says. "Once I let class out early without even realizing it. I just wanted to get away from him."

She didn't report his behavior until just before giving him a failing grade. She waited because she was worried that reporting him would make the student even more angry.

"It was just a really, really bad experience," says Ms. Lampman, a professor at Alaska for 19 years. "Even after that class was over, I still felt that kind of primal fear that sometimes a woman can feel."

But after talking with colleagues about her experience, especially women, Ms. Lampman found that she wasn't alone. She began some formal surveys on her campus to learn more about all the ways that students intimidate, bully and threaten their professors-behavior known as "contrapower harassment." The results were eye-opening.

Out of 399 full- and part-time faculty members at Alaska, about 30 percent said a student had yelled or screamed at them, and almost one in four had received hostile or threatening e-mails, letters or phone messages from students. More than 60 percent said a student had answered a cell phone, interrupted them continuously, or challenged their authority in class. And roughly one in five said he or she had received unwanted sexual attention from a student.
Read the full article here.