The minutes preceding Econ 101 are the same every day: the lilting notes of ABBA, Professor Nechyba’s favorite band, fill the massive Griffith Theater, often at deafening volume. As 500 students settle into their seats, small talk only adds to the noise in the room. But when the clock strikes 11:45 and Professor Nechyba begins class, the music stops. The chatter, however, does not.
It doesn’t stop when Nechyba taps patiently on his mic, signaling for quiet, and it doesn’t stop when he launches into lecture. For the next 75 minutes, there is a steady stream of students talking. Sometimes it is low and easy to tune out, but frequently—especially on Fridays, in anticipation of the weekend—it is raucous, so loud that it becomes difficult to distinguish or concentrate on Nechyba’s microphoned words.
Students don’t just whisper one-off comments to each other; they have full-blown, high-volume conversations. The first time I observed this, I was shocked. To be fair, I didn’t expect every single person in a 500-person lecture to maintain laser focus the whole time. I don’t even expect that of myself—in last Wednesday’s class, I found myself engrossed in the online shopping of a girl two rows down, and I played the Wordle alongside the boy in the seat in front of me (GLARE, a fitting word for the look the TA sent him as she noted this). Oftentimes, my thoughts in the last ten minutes of class are more consumed by what I will mobile order than the notes in front of me. The point is, I recognize that it is normal to get distracted in class. But coming to Duke, I anticipated taking classes alongside the nation’s most engaged students. In other words, I expected a certain level of desire to be here, so naturally it alarmed me that a professor could be standing at the front of the class, asking patiently for attention, and students simply wouldn’t care.
Last Friday, Nechyba acknowledged the problem directly. Tapping on his mic, he smiled goodnaturedly and encouraged students to “try to stay committed!” But his smile was a tired one, especially when he acknowledged that “it’s a constant push and pull,” and that talking was a problem the previous semester as well. This begs the question: for just how long have people been talking over Nechyba? Posted recordings of 2023 lectures are markedly devoid of ambient noise, suggesting it might be a fairly recent development, or at the very least one that has recently intensified.
That day, Nechyba refused to start class until the noise subsided. The problem with this approach, however, is that the noise didn’t subside. He waited a full minute or two, and students continued chatting. It was mortifying. I genuinely believe a class of kindergarteners would do a better job of quieting down. Eventually, the conversations petered out just enough that Nechyba decided to start lecturing. But once he began, they crescendoed again.
At some point, I had to ask myself why this kept happening—why no amount of polite reminding seemed to work. Ironically, the problem here can be framed pretty simply in economic terms. The costs of talking to your friend throughout class are incredibly low, virtually non-existent. At the very worst, a TA might walk by and ask you to stop. But the benefits—real and perceived—are relatively high: maximized personal enjoyment in the short-run, and the autonomy to engage in a conversation you find more exciting than the supply and demand curves of perfectly competitive markets. But these individual cost-benefit analyses add up to create negative externalities—that is, costs imposed on third-parties who were uninvolved in the original choice (in this case, people who don’t talk through class). It’s worth noting here that the majority of Econ 101 students don’t talk over Nechyba. But several small conversations, even if quiet enough to be harmless on their own, together create enough noise to drown out Nechyba.
As with many problems, however, economic explanations only take you so far. While I’m not here to wax philosophical, Econ 101 increasingly seems to me a microcosm of a broader cultural shift away from earnest engagement with, well, anything. Our generation jokes about being nonchalant, but I do think there is something telling about how desirable it has become to seem like you’re above caring. It’s striking that it’s perceived as cooler to hide your phone from the TA than to take notes, to book it to the door the second attendance is taken rather than take your time packing up, to talk to friends instead of paying attention to Nechyba. Perhaps no moment better encapsulated this for me than when—in that same class where Nechyba delayed the start of lecture until it got quieter—Nechyba explained that a student had come up to him after a previous class, asking if there was some way he could make students talk less so it’d be easier to hear. In response, I heard a few snorts from the crowd, and the guy behind me muttered to his friend, “f*cking loser.”
I can appreciate that many students may have taken AP Econ or similar classes in high school, and that this class is pass/fail. But Nechyba has insisted that his course offers more than AP Econ—that he’s worked to infuse the curriculum with case studies, interdisciplinary applications, and the perspectives of esteemed guest speakers (notably, students talk just as much even in the presence of such guest speakers). And moreover, the course shouldn’t have to be especially innovative or groundbreaking in order for students to respect it at the most basic level. Students consistently and constantly talking over professors shouldn’t be a problem at any institution of higher learning, let alone an elite one.
A less charitable analysis of the problem might conclude that, at this point in many Duke students’ lives, “no” is not a particularly familiar word. Talking over a teacher may not seem especially taboo because Duke students can get away with doing it time and time again without consequence. From this perspective, the talking in Econ 101 is merely a symptom of a much greater disease—a culture of entitlement pervading Duke’s campus. In that sense, I worry that the epidemic of talking over Nechyba reveals that we’ve lost sight of something vitally important: who do we really want to be as people, and why do we go to college if not to cultivate that?
Nechyba began lecture this morning by addressing students’ cheating on the attendance policy. In doing so, he directly responded to the more cynical view of students in elite institutions I’ve just outlined. His words resonated with me: “Help us make the case to the world that you’re not as entitled as they say that you are. That it’s just not true about you. I refuse to become cynical. You can’t do it to me.”
I don’t know that his message landed, though. Students in the back seemed to be talking too loud to hear it.
by Lauren Blake
