Getting students’ attention

Matthew Gerring | Staff Writer
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Why is it so easy for a professor to get a cheap laugh out of City College students?

You don’t even have to make an actual joke. All you have to do is use some kind of profanity. Even the word “breasts” can draw a few chuckles.

It’s surprising because, at least among my peers, profanity is a huge part of everyday discourse. We use profanity like punctuation, and it usually passes without notice. I certainly couldn’t use the word “s****y” as a punch line, as one of my professors once did, and get anything more than an eye roll.

Yet, we always laugh, as if we’re all 8 years old and we just heard our older brother use the “F” word for the first time.
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For this reason at least, profanity can be a useful academic tool – It’s an effective and immediate way to grab students’ attention. When nothing else can
get the class to look up to the front and stop text messaging, a well-placed four letter word is a reliable standby. But that still doesn’t explain why we laugh. It may be surprising to hear a professor swear, but that doesn’t make it funny.

There is a concept in theater called the “fourth wall” that describes the invisible separation between the performer and the audience. In a way, there’s a fourth wall between professors and students as well – an informative, engaging, and well-executed class meeting has many of the same characteristics of seeing a good play.

There’s also a fourth wall of authority – a professor who has knowledge that you care about, or knowledge that’s hard for you to grasp, can seem somewhat inaccessible. You’re separated from being your professor’s peer by the gap between your knowledge and theirs, and it can be slightly intimidating.

So maybe when we laugh, it’s because of our relief at the breakdown of the fourth wall, and that sudden realization that our professors, for all their lofty words and concepts, are the same as us. Using profanity in this way can bring a professor down to the level of the students, so it can also be a useful tool to the extent that it makes the subject of a class more accessible to the students.

Or maybe it’s just the dissonance between phrases like “new structuralism” and “f**k” that makes us chuckle. Who knows? As long as students continue to respond to it, using profanity in academia is a great f*****g idea.