This paper presents a commentary about the discourse of sociologists on students. An impressionistic reading of a random sample of statements written between 1972 and 1988 by sociologists, producedfour categories of commentary about students: the incomplete and the missing; the defective, the remedial and the reparable; the filled, the empowered, and the competent; and the aruious and the unmotivated. It is suggested that sociologists'discourse on students is silent about several characteristics of students and inconsistent about others, and that even though the discourse concerns students, it is really about sociologists who teach them.
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Dean S. Dorn (1990) studied this question.
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