“Think of yourself as a prison warden or as a dog trainer,” said someone who has just made Full and who is an enthusiastic teacher of freshmen. “I have absolutely no interest in identifying, even for a moment, with either of those roles,” said I, and therein lies my defect. I am far more pitiless.
I say that if freshmen need prison wardens or dog trainers, no attempt should be made to make the classes they take interesting or fun because that means putting something of oneself into them; since freshman are rude and cruel people (or, if they are criminals or pit bulls) the best policy is to put them in a large lecture hall with a distant professor and an impersonal textbook. Let them be rude to a robot website and not to me; I am really not a good caretaker, prison warden, or dog trainer and I do not want to become these things.
It is as with the new faculty boys. All of these people are 18 and above. I should discipline them better, I suppose, but what I resent is that it needs doing at all. The idea that “it is your responsibility to articulate your expectations to people, as they are not mind readers” is completely bogus, invented to justify boors. If you are over 18, or over 21 I expect adult behavior and I doubt I am the only one who does.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I can empathise, sadly, with the resentment at having to instil the kind of discipline in college students — currently I deal with them outside classrooms, where it isn’t much better — that was instilled in me before middle-school was over. It’s partly the surprise element — I expect better of them. But the resentment comes, mainly, I think, from
a. having had more on my platter at their age simply because we were brought up to be comparatively more capable.
b. having the extra charge of imparting that training, which I didn’t envisage as part of my duty until such time as I chose to have children.
It’s why one needs crack TAs or hired senior majors to deal with these people. It doesn’t work to be both professor and mother, and relegating them to the instructors only teaches reinforces the idea that professors are prison guards and mothers.
One is supposed to hate the deadwood fulls and the administration, but I hate the deadwood freshmen, the deadwood instructors, the whining assistant professors, and the Creationist, anti-intellectual governor and, perhaps, all his Rhodes Scholar friends.
The thing is too, Priyanka, that we actually had *less* responsibility; they have responsibility to many anti-intellectual projects and entities and we did not have so much responsibility of that type; that is the difference.