Mind v. Body for Students

In her chapter, The Corporate University, Jane Juffer describes her idea of space regarding women who are professors at universities. She laments that because professors are expected to be essentially a "mind without a body" that it limits the private ambitions of women in the field, as having a personal life with children is essentially out of the question for the esteemed intellectual.

While Juffer stuck primarily to the affects that it has on professors, I would submit that professors similarly hold the same idea of a "mind without a body" towards students. While at CSB|SJU many professors have good relationships with students, where they actually know things about each others lives, there is still a good degree of seperation. Professors assign homework with the expectation that students will do it. While this is obviously the role of the student, it tends to blank out that students are not able to be the intellectual at all hours of the day. It runs with the assumption that "student" is a full time job at that 8 hours of intellectual work per day should be the norm.

It is here where many professors fall into the same ideologies that Juffer is pointing out. Students are separated from their social and private ambitions by the drive from professors to make us be "minds." Students, generally trying to challenge this ideology, simply end up doing only part of the work, skimming readings, or blowing off assignments that they think they can get away with. It isn't so much that students are lazy, as much as the mind v. body question is taken from a different prospective. Students want to try to balance personal and intellectual lives just as much as professors who would like to be mothers, but are not supported by their institution. I'm not claiming that professors should reduce workloads, as their primary goal is to teach, but rather that professors should become aware of their ideologies so that their expectations for students reflect a more realistic model of how students work.