You may have heard from Legal Blog Watch (here and here) that we're giving a Golden Asshole Award once a month to the individual making the greatest contribution to reducing assholishness in the [legal] profession. See You Park Like an Asshole here.  The prize is a free copy of A is for Asshole, the Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution.  

Today we're creating a Silver Asshole Award for the individuals (there will always be two) who best illustrate the proposition that an asshole is not a person but a behavior and not one person but two.  Given the reduced qualifications for the Silver Medal, we'll be sending the winners a .pdf of the first chapter of the ABCs - A is for Asshole.  This month's winners are an unidentified yawning student at Cornell (whose name, rank and serial number I will keep confidential if s/he wishes to pick up the prize) and his/her professor, Senior Lecturer Mark Talbert.

What is an Asshole?

As the first chapter of the ABCs of Conflict explains, an "asshole" is a person who has broken the social compact of civility. Because uncivil behavior tends to lead to fisticuffs, everyone tends to discourage it and many people make an example of others who engage in it.  Take the unwritten folk rule of "first in time, first in right."  The guy who steals another motorist's parking place is violating that rule. He doesn't own the space, but he's been waiting the longest for it so he gets to grab it before anyone else. This "first in time, first in right" rule is so important to us that people are killed every year in fights over parking spaces. (see, e.g., Detective Killed in Fight for Parking Space).

Break these rules and people lose it.  

Another folk rule meant to avoid the violence that can arise from incivility is the imperative that we do not shout at one another no matter what the provocation. We do not use profanity and we do not hurl insults or epithets at the other guy's crew. Check out "R is for Romeo" in the ABCs of Conflict Resolution for the fatal consequences of the Prince's failure to police uncivil behavior on the streets of Verona.  

Rarely, however, does anyone violate these rules without provocation. If our dinner party companion interrupts our story about our trip to Viet Nam to tell his story about his trip to Aspen, he's breaking a different turn-taking rule ~ the one that says conversation is a dialogue not a monologue. Everyone gets to talk and everyone gets to be heard.  Shoot, that's pretty much a complete distillation of procedural due process!

The Story at Hand

The story of the Cornell "Professor" (sic) shouting at a yawning student is all over the news, the blogosphere and the social networks (Facebook, Twitter and the like) this week.  A teacher who shouts at his students may be uncivil, but it rarely makes the local, let alone the national, news.  Nevertheless, the Huffington Post picked up the story last week in an item entitled Cornell Professor Freaks Out.  This unremarkable event did not became news because it happened. It became news because it was uploaded to YouTube. ("The way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all, oh yeah.")

The "Teaching Moment"

The Huffington Post correspondent purposely - for "news" value - or inadvertently - due to Fundamental Attribution Error (?) - mis-told the story of the Cornell "Professor."  If you watch the video, and listen to it very carefully, you'll hear a "yawn" that seems more one of derision than an unstifled inhalation arising from sleep deprivation. If you listen to the "Professor's" rant, you'll also hear him say that this is not the first time he's suffered this particular form of disrespect. He wants to know who the yawner is and demands his identity.  When that tactic fails, he tries talking about civility.  But his inability to out the miscreant only makes things worse. He asks his students for help.  They sit mum.  

Then he loses it.  

Why We Care

The Cornell professor video has been viewed 482,366 times.  Other videos of everyday, non-newsworthy uncivil behavior include the incident in the car park (3,360,599 views); the old lawyer fight (297,252 views); and, the bus driver fight with the kid (21,602,339 views).

Why are we drawn to this behavior?  Is it simply the car-wreck phenomenon? Rubber-neckers at freeway accidents, we are horrified but morbidly interested in this brief preview of a catastrophic loss we all fear. Seeing the wreckage allows us to continue believing that misfortune of this magnitude is visited upon others, not ourselves.

(for other reactions see the Cornell Insiders' post ~ Talbert's POV here and Stephanie West Allen's Idealawg post here)

No, watching YouTube videos of people behaving badly has little to do with catastrophe and calamity.   Observing, sharing, discussing, condemning, understanding, empathizing, and judging the behavior of our friends and neighbors in response to the daily bump and grind of life lived at cross-purposes helps us identify and clarify the outside boundaries of acceptable community behavior.  

As scholars Baumeister, Zhang and Vohs explained in their 2004 paper entitled Gossip as Cultural Learning,

On the surface, gossip consists of stories and anecdotes about particular other people, perhaps especially ones that reflect negatively on the target. . . [A] less obvious function of gossip is to convey information about social norms and other guidelines for behavior.  [G]ossip goes beyond educating the hearer about social norms; it also affirms them.

The very act of repeating a particular story implicitly signals that the teller regards it as significant, and this significance is often elaborated further insofar as the teller comments on the behavior as proper or improper. . . [G]ossip serves a valuable function in helping people learn about life in their culture, and so nature may have instilled a penchant for gossip as one generally useful adaptation toward cultural life.

[G]ossip can be effective regardless of whether it presents the target in a positive or in a negative light. We would therefore predict that some gossip would not be derogatory or pejorative. Still, the cultural learning view would predict that the majority of gossip would be derogatory. Norms are perhaps best conveyed by focusing on violations, as are laws and other rules. A story about law-abiding behavior may fail to reveal what the underlying laws were, whereas a story about breaking the law illustrates the sense and intent of the law.

What We Can Do About It

Anthropological explanations for our fascination with people-gone-bad videos aside (see drunken Las Vegas Lawyer here) what could Mr. Talbert have done better here?  

First, like any good negotiator, he could have learned what student interests were driving the behavior, including their refusal to "out" a misbehaving student (folk rule #357 ~ you don't rat out your own kind). He could have paused in his teaching to have a heart-to-heart about civility in the classroom.  He started down that path when he began talking about the difference between casual conversation and disrespect. He didn't, however, appear to know where to go from there.  

Professors, Judges, and others in positions of authority are so used to "teaching" and telling and exhorting and judging that they forget to ask their students, subordinates or petitioners to explain the source of the trouble being voiced for many by a single member.  Teachers from elementary to graduate and professional schools continue teaching in the manner they were taught ~ a teaching style suited for a culture that ran at 33-1/3 rather than right this second. 

This is not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of poorly paid "Senior Lecturers" who are required to teach more than 100 students at any given hour of the day.  The University itself should be investigating, experimenting with, and giving workshops about new technologies and teaching methodologies that fit the lived experience of their students ~ an experience so vastly different from our own that we can barely imagine what it must be like to be a student in the 21st Century.

For the immediate problem in Mr. Talbert's classroom, I'd recommend the creation of small discussion groups to ascertain the many sources of conflict that have resulted in marked disrespect for the Lecturer over an unknown period of time.  Mr/Ms Yawn is the canary in the mineshaft not only of Mr. Talbert's pedagogy, but of the entire University learning experience. 

Use the conflict - the dispute - as a means of exploring frustrations of both students and teacher.  What challenges other than openly rude students does Mr. Talbert face?  Are his students (like mine) cruising the internet during class, texting their friends, staring out into space, chatting with their neighbors?  The teacher-student relationship is not a one-way street any more than any other relationship is.  If the students are to learn, they must be engaged.  What do they believe might engage them?  And if they stop thinking about Mr. Talbert merely as the authoritarian "adult" with the power to reward or punish them with the all-important grade, and start thinking about him as just another human being with the same need for respect as they have, we are on the road to resolving the very human problem shown in such a raw form here.

A .pdf of the first chapter of the book will be winging its way to Mr. Talbert and if the Yawner will send me an email address, I'll be happy to send it along to him/her as well with a promise of complete confidence.