To the Editor,
The August 28 AP newswire article entitled “Colleges Try to Deal With Hovering Parents,” about over-involved parents who constantly call administrators to complain about professors, grades, housing, etc., reminds me of an incident when I was an RPI student. I was a teaching assistant for the Engineering Lab II course in 1986. At about mid-semester, the professor who ran the course asked me to calculate a student’s grade to that point. He told me that the student’s parent had called the administration and asked for mid-semester grades from all of the student’s courses and asked that the student not be told of the request.
I asked the then Dean of Students if he thought the parent’s request was ethical, and he said that parents had a right to the information since they were paying tuition, and that there was “no need” to inform the student and cause conflict. I cooperated. I wish that I had had the courage then to write a letter to The Polytechnic.
Twenty years later, being a middle-aged suburban parent myself, I find many things wrong with what happened. The whole point of going to college is to be an independent adult getting an education on your own drive. Who pays your tuition is a technicality that should not affect your courses, your relationship with your professors, or the privacy of your grades. If your parents want to know how you’re doing in a course, then it should be up to you and no one else to tell them. And finally, it was absurd that a parent had the power to make five professors go out of their way to calculate mid-semester grades.
Joseph Czapski
ALUM ’86
