Like Kit­ten­loss said in her or his com­ment on Dead­Spin, where I found this story – thanks to my friend Amy King–I expected, based on the title, NYU Busi­ness School Pro­fes­sor Has Mas­tered the Art of Email Flam­ing, to side with the stu­dent, but the details con­vinced me oth­er­wise. The grad­u­ate stu­dent, and the grad­u­ate part is impor­tant, walked into Galloway’s lec­ture one hour late on the first day of class and Gal­loway asked him to leave and told him to come back the next day. This is from an email that the stu­dent sent to Gal­loway com­plain­ing about the late­ness pol­icy – you can’t enter class if you’re more than 15 min­utes late – and explain­ing his lateness:

As of yes­ter­day evening, I was inter­ested in three dif­fer­ent Mon­day night classes that all occurred simul­ta­ne­ously. In order to decide which class to select, my plan for the evening was to sam­ple all three and see which one I like most. Since I had never taken your class, I was unaware of your class pol­icy. I was dis­ap­pointed that you dis­missed me from class con­sid­er­ing (1) there is no way I could have been aware of your pol­icy and (2) con­sid­er­ing that it was the first day of evening classes and I arrived 1 hour late (not a few min­utes), it was more prob­a­ble that my tar­di­ness was due to my desire to sam­ple dif­fer­ent classes rather than sheer complacency.

Here are  the barely tongue-in-cheek first para­graphs of Galloway’s response:

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15 – 20 min­utes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 min­utes late), left that class (again, pre­sum­ably, in the mid­dle of the lec­ture), and then came to my class. At that point (walk­ing in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “both­ered” you.

Cor­rect?

You state that, hav­ing not taken my class, it would be impos­si­ble to know our pol­icy of not allow­ing peo­ple to walk in an hour late. Most risk analy­sis offers that in the face of sub­stan­tial uncer­tainty, you opt for the more con­ser­v­a­tive path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the pro­fes­sor has an explicit pol­icy for tol­er­at­ing dis­re­spect­ful behav­ior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lot­tery win­ner that is your recently crowned Mon­day evening Pro­fes­sor is teach­ing Judge­ment and Deci­sion Mak­ing or Crit­i­cal Thinking.

In addi­tion, your logic effec­tively means you can­not be held account­able for any code of con­duct before tak­ing a class. For the record, we also have no stated pol­icy against burst­ing into show tunes in the mid­dle of class, uri­nat­ing on desks or tak­ing that rev­o­lu­tion­ary hair removal sys­tem for a spin. How­ever, xxxx, there is a base­line level of deco­rum (i.e., man­ners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admis­sions depart­ment have deemed tomorrow’s busi­ness leaders.

The rest of the let­ter is worth read­ing as well.

For me, what jumps out here – aside from the obvi­ous ques­tion of whether Gal­loway is just being a dick, which I think he is not – is the degree to which this stu­dent seems to take for granted that, as a cus­tomer of the col­lege, he has the right, because the cus­tomer is always right, to do what he did. I have run up against the “I am a cus­tomer of this school and you have there­fore to give me what I want” think­ing a lot over the past cou­ple of years, and it trou­bles me. There are ways in which stu­dents are and should be treated as cus­tomers: they have a right to ade­quate park­ing, to clean and com­fort­able facil­i­ties, to access to tech­nol­ogy, to com­pe­tent teach­ers who come to class pre­pared, etc. But I a not a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive and I resent the hell out of it when stu­dents treat me that way.