On the first day of “Sociology from E Street: Bruce Springsteen’s America,” our professor gave us an overview of his class and then said, “When I tell people I teach a class on Springsteen, the first thing they ask me is whether Springsteen comes to visit us for a class... Let me just say that if Springsteen was coming to visit, I would not give you any forewarning.”
Springsteen never came, although my classmates and I held out hope until the end of the semester that he might. As we prepared for our final, we joked that we would walk into our exam room to find Springsteen and our professor, Professor Duneier, prepared to have a final discussion in lieu of an exam, over bagels and coffee.
In large part because of the Springsteen class, I came to appreciate the dedication of the Princeton faculty to teaching undergrads. The university brags about its commitment to undergraduates in its promotional material but, at least when I was deciding where to go to school, these numbers felt abstract to me and I didn’t grasp how they would affect my studies. Now that I have taken small seminar classes with amazing faculty, I recognize the effect of the University’s commitment to my experience.
One of my professors this semester explained to me what a course buyout is. They are a mechanism for professors to get out of their teaching obligation by paying the university to hire someone else to cover their course load. Normally, that pay to the university comes from a research grant. The grant builds in this cost to allow the professor receiving the grant to devote more time to research. Prior to coming to Princeton, the professor who explained this to me almost never taught undergrads, and now he does every semester. When hiring professors, Princeton vets prospective faculty to ensure they have an interest in teaching undergraduates, and buyouts at Princeton almost never occur.
No class I have taken has been more indicative of the faculty’s commitment to undergraduates than the Springsteen class. The class had 11 students and was taught by Professor Mitchell Duneier, the chair of the Sociology department. Each class focused on a different topic that Springsteen sings about—veteran’s issues, immigration, industrial decline, and social deviance for example. We read Springsteen’s memoir, his song lyrics, and other book chapters and papers related to these topics.
Professor Duneier was committed to making the class into a community. The class was enrollment by application only to make sure students would be engaged in the course. We did things classes don’t normally do: When the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere came out, the entire class, along with Duneier, went to see it in the theater. (About a week after we saw the movie Duneier wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on how what we talk about in class is reflected in the movie.) For the class on immigration, Duneier flew in a former student of his who is an expert on immigration to teach the class. And at the end of the semester, Duneier had us over to his home, and we ate dinner and watched the Springsteen-inspired movie Blinded by the Light. In the Spring, Duneier is planning to take us on a tour of Springsteen’s hometown on the Jersey Shore.
I feel like I now know Springsteen well, although we didn’t end up meeting him. I’m definitely no superfan, but I recognize Springsteen’s genius and appreciate his life story. I’m very grateful to have taken this seminar, and all the seminars where professors pour a lot of time into a small group of students. I take more out of them than just the material we learn—I find the connection with a small group, and the resulting classroom culture, very special.