Imagine walking into your dormitory freshman year and discovering that someone on your hall was about your mother's age.
Such was the case at Northern Arizona University last year when 50-year-old anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover as an undergraduate as part of a research project. She used the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, filled out the application to the university with her high-school transcript, got accepted and enrolled.
For one year, the professor lived in university dorms, dressed down to jeans, a T-shirt and a backpack, gossiped with students who would have otherwise taken her courses, and enrolled in classes outside her area of expertise to become like any other struggling beginner.
Small got the idea to switch roles after feeling like she lacked an understanding of the mentality of students.
Professor Small wrote My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, an account of her adventures as a middle-aged undergraduate. Cornell University Press published it, but Small decided to keep her identity concealed to protect the students she talked about in the book.
Penn Anthropology professor Gregory Urban said, "I never felt that disconnected to my students, although the relation to students has changed as age differences increase."
But, he said, there are inherent difficulties with such research.
"Cathy Small must have given considerable thought to the ethics issue," Urban said.
The book summarizes her findings on the basics of student life. Small found that in public, students often regarded the dedication that is required of academic work with apathy, but when confronted privately confessed to being interested in it.
Small also found that most successful students attributed their effectiveness to being able to balance their academic life with their extracurricular interests and part-time jobs. This was attainable by knowing what assigned work was really necessary and what could be skipped.
"Some of her claims might seem obvious to [students], but keep in mind that they might not be as obvious to others," Urban said.
Eventually -- although not before her book came out -- Small's identity was discovered.
Jacob Gershman, a reporter for The New York Sun, was able to establish her identity through clues the professor left in her book. Whether these were left by choice or by accident remains unknown.
The three most important clues, Gershman said, were that the school was near Las Vegas, that she was specifically a cultural anthropologist, and that the University she worked for had a hotel-management program.
Uncovering the professor was not exactly detective work, he said.
"It was easy to find out because the author of the book said that she wanted to be identified," he said. "If she really cared, she wouldn't have left so many clues."
"We saw it as a challenge for us. A book came out published anonymously, and we wanted to find out who it was," Gershman added.
Shortly after the Sun published the article, it was confirmed that she had been the anonymous author. "We worked hard to keep her anonymous ... but it was too late to keep denying it," Northern Arizona University spokesman Tom Bauer said.
The reaction from her co-workers has been positive, so much so in fact that Bauer said the president of the university wants to make her book required reading.
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