You hear cell-phone conversations everywhere: movie theaters, commuter trains, even public restrooms. But what do professors do when a ringtone pierces the calm of the lecture hall? Stanford queried several faculty.
A little humiliation never hurts.
“If a cell phone rings in lecture, I typically stop and wait for them to turn it off, which tends to cause everyone to stare at them, which is embarrassing,” says sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway. Students know better than to take out their phones in Gail Mahood’s class. “I’m known for being pretty good at the turn-around, lob chalk shot,” says the professor of geological and environmental sciences. Physics professor Mac Beasley invokes fire and brimstone. “I have been known to make reference to Dante’s Inferno,” he says. “But that’s just the ex-dean in me showing off.”
Sometimes broader lessons can be drawn.
When a mobile phone rings during political scientist Terry Karl’s lectures in Global Politics of Human Rights, Karl, ’70, MA ’76, PhD ’82, is apt to equate the interruption with abusing the rights of others. Sylvia Yanagisako, a professor of cultural and social anthropology, relies on a venerable cultural curse: “giving what those of us from Hawaii call the ‘stink eye’ to anyone whose phone rings in class.” One associate professor of classics and of art and art history, who doesn’t own a cell phone herself, has a certain admiration for their design and derivation. “I’ve even remarked on the likelihood that the word ‘cell’ is etymologically related to ‘cella,’ the internal room of the Greek temple, within which the cult statue of the god or goddess stood,” says Jody Maxmin. But do phones ever ring in her classes? Nunquam.
Ringtones matter.
Biological sciences professor Robert Sapolsky says he is “mostly crazed” when a mobile phone chimes during lecture, but his response is “somewhat mitigated when the ringer music is truly bizarre—like if it’s a few measures of a contemporary orchestral piece called Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, nothing but high-pitched violin screeches.” Which is music to the ears of Chris Chafe, DMA ’83, director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, who hears only instructional vibes when phones go off. “It’s good ear training for my Computer Music students,” the composer/cellist says. “Especially since many ringtones are using FM synthesis, invented at Stanford and a class topic.”
Demographics do too.
Mechanical engineering professor Tom Andriacchi is so used to the sound of silence in his labs that he’s begun to wonder if there’s an unexamined disciplinary differential. “Perhaps engineering students have fewer cell calls than anthropology students?”
Maybe they’re just more adept at silencing their phones—as, it would appear, are students generally when compared to their instructors. “I’ve seen plenty of disruptions of meetings caused by faculty getting cell-phone calls, but almost none of classes caused by students getting calls,” says linguist Tom Wasow. Ditto philosopher John Perry: “Now that you mention it, the only cell phone I remember ringing in a class is my own.” Electrical engineering professor Brad Osgood recently adopted a simple in-class cell-phone policy: his own must be turned off. “This fall it rang right in the middle of my lecture,” Osgood recalls. “I answered and said that I couldn’t really talk because 150 people were listening—hanging on my every word, I like to think. Then I held the phone up and invited the class to say ‘hello,’ which they did.”
