(1) Given all that has happened on so many campuses over the last few years,

游客2023-11-25  24

问题    (1) Given all that has happened on so many campuses over the last few years, it’s hard to pick the one that has been roiled (扰乱) the most by struggles over political correctness. But Oberlin College would certainly be in the running.
   (2) A widely discussed series of events there included the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading "Antigone" ; complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall; and a petition, signed by 1,300 students, calling for a semester in which the lowest possible grade was a C, so that anyone skipping classes or skimping on studies to engage in social activism wouldn’t pay too steep an academic price.
   (3) In the view of more than a few observers, these students were taking liberalism to illiberal extremes. But their actions were arguably proof of something else as well.
   (4) Students at Oberlin and their counterparts elsewhere might not behave in such an emboldened fashion if they did not feel so largely in charge. Their readiness to press for rules and rituals to their liking suggests the extent to which they have come to act as customers—the ones who set the terms, the ones who are always right— and the degree to which they are treated that way.
   (5) Twinned with colleges’ innovations to attract and serve a new generation of students is a changed relationship between the schools and the schooled. It’s one of the most striking transformations in higher education over the last quarter-century.
   (6) It’s manifested in students’ interactions with colleges even before they enroll, as those institutions, intent on increasing the number of applications they receive and on snagging as many valedictorians (致告别辞的最优秀毕业生), class presidents and soccer captains as they can, come at them as merchants, clamoring for their attention, competing for their affection and unfurling their wares with as much ceremony and gloss as possible.
   (7) And what wares those are. Colleges have spruced up dormitories and diversified dining options, so that students unwind in greater comfort and ingest (咽下) with more choice than ever before. To lure students and keep them content, colleges have also fashioned state-of-the-art fitness centers, sophisticated entertainment complexes and other amenities with a relevance to learning that is oblique (隐晦的) at best.
   (8) But amenities aren’t all that is different. The interactions and balance of power between student and teacher are as well. I don’t recall ever filling out a professor evaluation when I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-1980s. It’s possible that such forms existed, but they were not used consistently or presented to us with any sense of urgency.
   (9) The opposite was true when I taught at Princeton in the spring of 2014. Students could not see their grades for a given class until they had filled out an extensive report card, including numerical ratings, on the class and on the instructor or had formally declined to do so, which few did. The instructor was privy to those ratings, with the students’ names erased.
   (10) I’m told by many of the professors I know that this practice is more or less the norm. Coupled with websites on which students rate their teachers, it has enormous bearing on how fully enrolled an instructor’s classes are, on his or her reputation and—thus—on his or her career. And what is perhaps the greatest driver of student satisfaction with a professor? The greatest guarantor of glowing reviews? The marks that the professor doles out. Small wonder that grade inflation is so pronounced and rampant, with A’s easy to come by and anything below a B-minus rare.
   (11) Students get the message that they call the shots. Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar, told me that when she began teaching in the 1980s, students never came in to complain about grades. " And back then," she added, "you could get a C. "
   (12) "Now students will come in and complain about a B-plus," she said.
   (13) That’s not all bad. Students should absolutely have a voice in their education, and guaranteeing them one keeps professors and administrators accountable. " Faculty can be very resistant to change," Mr. Schwartz said, "and ’entitled’ students apply needed pressure. "
   (14) The old approach certainly wasn’t perfect. "Professors used to be a bit of a priesthood," Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has written extensively about campus unrest over recent years, told me. "That could dissuade challenge and argument. " Both are essential to learning.
   (15) The rightful passing of that paradigm created a need for new ones, and Mr. Haidt said that the two in vogue now were "the therapeutic model and the consumer model". In accordance with the first of those, students regard colleges as homes and places of healing. In accordance with the second, they regard colleges as providers of goods that are measurable and of services that should meet their specifications.
   (16) And that has imperfections all its own, the best laundry list of which appeared in Customer Mentality, an essay by Nate Kreuter, an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University, that was published by Inside Higher Ed in 2014.
   (17) He noted a "hesitance to hold students accountable for their behavior," be it criminal or a violation of what is too frequently a " laughable university honor code. " He noted an expectation among many students that their purchase of a college education should be automatically redeemable for a job, as if college were that precisely vocational and the process that predictable.
   (18) "That’s simply not how life works," he said in a recent interview. " So we have a lot of students who are disenchanted (感到幻灭的). "
   (19) But what does the customer model do to their actual education?
   (20) "There’s a big difference between teaching students and serving customers," said Mr. Schwartz at Swarthmore. "Teachers know things, and they should be telling students what’s worth knowing and what’s not, not catering to demands. "
   (21) Too often, he said, "we’ve given students a sense that they’re in just as good a position to know what’s worth knowing as we are, and we’ve contributed to the weakening of student resilience, because we’re so willing to meet their needs that they never have to suffer. That makes them incredibly vulnerable when things go wrong, as they invariably do. " He was speaking in the context of sharp upticks (上升) at many colleges in the number of students reporting anxiety and depression and turning to campus mental health clinics for help.
   (22) "I see this as a collective abdication (放弃) of intellectual and even moral responsibility," he said. [br] The phrase "in the running" in Para. 1 probably means______.

选项 A、in the future
B、in the way
C、on the list
D、on the road

答案 C

解析 语义题。文章第一段第二句提到,欧柏林大学肯定会“in the running”,该短语原意为“(在竞赛中)有取胜的希望”。结合上一句句意,鉴于过去数年间在如此多的校园内所发生的事情,很难说哪一所学校因政治正确性的争斗而被搅得最乱,由此可知该句是指欧柏林大学肯定是因政治正确性的争斗而被搅成最乱的大学之一,因此“in the running”与[C]“on the list”意义相近,意为“在排行榜上”,故[C]为答案。[A]“将来”、[B]“妨碍;挡道”和[D]“在旅行中;在途中”明显与原文不符,故均排除。
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