Professors at Dickinson have recently united to announce a protest against students not talking in zoom classes, saying students on Zoom “are more boring than thought possible” and “worse than Neil Weissman in a Faculty Meeting.”

This comes from a statement released by professors in protest of poor student engagement in online classes. The professors plan to sit silently and glare at their webcam until students speak up. 

“We will stare at those tiny rectangles on screen for as long as it takes to end this awful silence. Enough is enough,” the statement said.

One Professor said, “If students can sit there and stare blankly for every class, why shouldn’t professors be able to, too? It’s not fair, and we need to change this.”

“It makes me miss those days where students in the back of class would talk and ignore the lecture,” another Professor said, “At least then you knew that they cared about the participation grade enough to show up. Now you have zero clue. They could be off eating donuts or scrolling through Instagram.”

Professors offered no immediate solutions to encouraging students to participate, though they have established a committee to survey the literature on the subject this semester and report to the campus community. “Though this constant silence on Zoom is painful, we are optimistic that we can get through this,” the statement read.