Miss Manners Writes

Dear Miss Manners:

My students enter my office and do not take their baseball hats off. They send informal messages (anthony ... cld u ... cheers) when a proper letter is required. I consider this disrespectful. Many of them do not know how to behave in professional settings and appear to find interacting with people other than their peers very difficult. Am I out of touch or I should expect better? What should I do?

Gentle Reader:

Your aim is to educate your students for professional success. This means to equip them with the technical knowledge, the intellectual frameworks and the transferrable skills that will permit them to achieve their potential and make a difference economically and societally. They contribute hard work and the drive to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them. And yet.

And yet. You and I know that professional success is not wholly attributable to all of this. Successful professionals have a social ease, the ability to 'get on' in unfamiliar social and cultural settings and the 'good manners' to smooth difficult transactions. These professionals are comfortable with their peers, their subordinates and their superiors. They are fluent in the niceties that allow groups to achieve the social cohesion that is the prerequisite for effective joint work. That is, good manners and good form. Business has room for the prickly, talented, individualist who defies social convention, but it is limited.

There is clearly a causality issue here that must be addressed. Does professional success require social ease or provide it? By analogy, does an expensive public school education confer social ease through the experience it gives its pupils, or does the financial and social background of those who can afford such an education mean that their sons and daughters possess it already? Do Oxford, Cambridge and the officer corps of the armed forces, whose 'graduates' seem commonly to display some of these social skills, select for them or deliver them? Probably the relationship runs both ways; but, at least we can say there is some positive relationship between success and social ease and some role for education in providing the basis for good manners and good form. Good manners and good form can of course be seen as barriers artificially erected to exclude the 'wrong sort': typical tools of class prejudice. I do not take this view. Rather I think of them as the agreed forms that enable the delicate balance between equality of treatment and mutual respect to operate. Snobbery is never good manners.

My analysis suggests it is an important role of a university education to provide a social training. Etiquette classes, if you like. Indeed providing such training is critical to an access mission in which university education is extended to those who hitherto did not benefit from it and who, in particular, have not had as many opportunities during their schooling. Now, of course I am not suggesting that it would be a good idea to lecture on good manners. Some skills might however be provided in a structured way: how, for example, to write a business letter, to run a simple meeting with agenda, minutes and rules of order, and some basics of international business etiquette (cultural sensitivity). Perhaps the simple tactic of exposing within the educational setting students to cocktail parties, formal dinners, professional meetings and so on, is most effective. Student societies have an important role to play in promoting opportunities for broader social engagement.

It might also be sensible to be more demanding of good form within the university, and to have a low tolerance for poor form or disrespect (this cuts both ways, for staff and students). One of the most basic rules of good manners is of course polite tolerance of a breach. It is not considered good form, for example, to call attention to a poorly framed letter or awkwardness in social interaction. In a university however, academics are not peers, they are educators. The responsibility of a educator is to challenge and to promote the development, social and intellectual of their students. Pointing out that conventions matter and how respect can be manifested in the forms of social intercourse is part of that responsibility. So, gentle reader, if a student enters your office wearing a baseball cap, or if you receive a semi-literate message, you can and should do something about it.