My freshman year: What a professor learned by becoming a student.

Rebekah Nathan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2005
ix, 186 p, notes, references. $24.00 (cloth)

reviewed by

HERVÉ VARENNE

This book will probably be remembered for Cathy Small’s failed attempt to pass as “Rebekah Nathan,” or, as she put it in the Anthropology News, “to protect the students” she had spent a year with. For reasons that initially sound plausible, Small decided to conduct her study of college student life as a student, applying to the university where she is a faculty member, paying tuition, taking courses, living in a dorm. She did this for a year and the experience was successful–as far as she is concerned. As the title of the book states, she “became” a student. From her own evidence, I am not sure. She mentions at least twice that she kept being identified as a “mom.” She also states that she remained a “partial observer owing to my age.” This may not be surprising but it opens the question of whether the whole attempt to pass was worth it, methodologically and theoretically, if not ethically.
Given its limitations as anthropology, the book will probably be most useful in discussions of anthropological ethics. The research was approved by the university’s IRB–so the legal requirements were met. Small ends the book with an “afterword on ethics and ethnography.” There, she gives a brief account of issues not raised in the IRB, her decision to go beyond IRB strictures, and summaries of cases when she “disclosed her identity,” By writing this way, Small acknowledges that she never achieved a student identity, and that the revelation of her “secret” would always produce difficulties. She quotes a bona fide student telling her that she had been “fooled” by Small not telling her she was a faculty member. This is the tone of the reaction to the full public revelation. Still, there is no evidence so far that anyone was hurt (though the case is not closed). To that extent at least, my sense is that her decision was ethical.

But was it worth it anthropologically? Small is convinced that what she wanted to learn could only be learned through deception. But she does not actually develop why it should be so. Her justifications are phrased in terms of “what I learned personally,” not in terms of what her anthropological community might learn. She compares what she knew before the experience to what she learned. She wrote the book first for herself, and, secondarily, for college professors as teachers (rather than researchers). Her research questions were variations on “Why don’t students do what professionals expect them to do?” She was looking for explanation of absences. Like generations of anthropologists, she went looking for a lack in her natives. She returns to tell academia: There are good reasons for the lack; it has something to do with the natives’ “culture”; “understanding this culture” would make it easier for those in authority to deal with the natives.

Generations of anthropologists have criticized this discursive process, but Small ignores it. Even if one stays within her own problematics, secrecy does not add to understanding and may limit it: She keeps mentioning that much of her observations cannot be reported precisely because those whom she observed were not aware of her as researcher. This may account for, among other matters, a lack of reports on relationships among the students–perhaps because Small did not go so far as actually to be the kind of friend to whom one confides. To flesh out her reports, she refers to various anthropological studies of college students, particularly Moffatt’s (1989). Moffatt did attempt to pass, but only briefly. He, also, lived in a dorm but all knew he was a faculty member. At the end, he gives more details about college life than Small does. Moffat’s remains the work of reference. Small’s chapter on “Community and Diversity” is original. It gives a sense of the hegemonic ideologies students sometimes resist. The chapter on “time management” may be useful to college professionals. But the book as a whole does not add much.

Anthropologically, the work may be useful for discussions of what it does not face, that is the possibility of “passing” as a theoretical concern. What are the mechanisms for passing? What can we learn about social processes when someone does pass? I look to follow-up articles where Small/Nathan tells what exactly she did: What was she asked? What convinced students that she was a bona-fide student? What is a bona-fide student, professor, woman of a certain age, friend? Answering these questions might tell us more about students, America, and anthropology.