by Raven Lebeau

Created on: September 25, 2007

A problem? No. A challenge? Yes. But then again, being a college student is all about learning to surmount challenges.

All professors are human, and therefore have biases. My English composition teacher (and I kid you not!) would not allow five-paragraph essays because they were considered trite. It's a silly, frivolous prejudice, of course, but I didn't have a great deal of difficulty adjusting the length of my essays accordingly. A math instructor I had in graduate school disliked the wording the textbook author used when writing proofs. Again, my professor was clearly being fussy, but I adjusted my wording in order to get full credit for my solutions.

A humanities instructor of mine made it quite plain that he had no use for speculation regarding what Enlightenment philosophers would think of contemporary culture or politics. He regarded any attempts to make connections between modern day thinkers and iconic writers of earlier eras with open contempt. I wanted to write my final paper for the course on the subject of how the movie "Fight Club" illustrates the fundamental contrast between the ideas of Voltaire and those of Rousseau. However, knowing my professor's dislike of such things, I chose a different topic instead.

All of these experiences contributed to, rather than hindered, my education. Life is full of arbitrary, capricious policies. Follow the company dress code, don't park in the boss's spot, finish projects according to arbitrary deadlines, etc. My husband could tell stories for hours about QA auditors and how each one has their own little rules for how to word things and show calculations.

Part of existing in a society is compromising in order to "fit in". That doesn't mean abandoning all personal morality in the name of popularity or giving in to unreasonable demands by a peer or superior. It does mean picking your battles. Usually, conforming to someone's quirky preferences won't hurt you or sacrifice the quality of your work, so it's best to just go along with all simple, harmless requests.

Yes, professor's are biased. But so is the rest of the world. If you're learning to alter your work in order to fit someone's strange specifications, then you're getting a good education.

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