The "Soft Skills" Revisited –
Student Behavior in the Classroom and Faculty Integrity
By Dr. Ken Hunt

In traditional four-year college institutions across the country, the collapse of propriety in society at large has invaded the classrooms. Students come to class late and leave early; they talk amongst themselves and ignore the teachers’ efforts to maintain order and teach. Worst of all, the misbehaving students contaminate the attitude of other students who see discourtesy, disrespect, and disorder become normal.

There is some justification for taking the view that many undergraduate students in traditional universities who perform miserably do so because they are not in college to study. Instead, they see college as an inexpensive and convenient base camp from which to pursue their recreational agendas.

It is the opinion of the Nevada Campus Department of Academic Affairs that the students who arrive in our classes today are different in many ways from those who were in our classes 20 years ago. Some of today’s students are brighter, more technologically oriented, and in many respects, more cosmopolitan than their predecessors. Today’s students, however, come from a different society which has different values and does not reprove disregard for civility, self-indulgent behaviors, lack of respect for others, and an attitude of ‘me first.’ Where these students come from, in your face is the prevailing idiom and we should not be surprised if some of them – not all of them, of course – assume it is also the lingua franca of the University Campus. Therefore, one may argue that today’s problematic students act as they do because they simply don’t know any better. As bright and promising as they may be, they merely reflect the deteriorating decorum and propriety of the social milieu from which they come. When these attitudes and behaviors are found in students who are not committed to academic goals, we have noisy, disrespectful, inconsiderate, and disruptive students in class.