This happened in a university class, right? In my opinion, folks in a scholarly setting should not let their friendships with one another prevent them from offering genuine differences of opinion or pointing out situations where they believe someone else to be in error.
Virtually everyone in my university’s history department, both faculty and grad students, gets on with one another fine. The department luckily has very few tensions, and none of the overt hostility that i’ve heard of in some other places. But when we’re all together in the seminar room, everyone is willing to make their opinions known, and if it involves disagreeing with others, then so be it. I’ve seen some pretty lively disagreements between people who get on fine, and no-one takes it personally.
Of course, it is possible, even in places where rigorous debate is encouraged, for people to step over the line. Some people have less tact than others, and have a seeming inability to disagree with others without sounding haughty and condescending. It’s possible your friend is one of those people. But if your main beef is that he disagreed with you in public, in a university class, you need to get over it.
This is a university? It sounds like you are about 11 years old.
So far as I am concerned your friend didn’t stab you in the back; he merely disputed your use of a term and the lecturer agreed with him. Nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly legitimate, perhaps even demanded, in a scholarly setting.
And your use of the word “wrongly” leads me to suspect that he might have been right.
It does stink the first time it happens to you especially if you’ve never experienced anyone doing this to you before. I suspect the older you get the more you’ll experience this type of thing unfortunately.
I suspect your friends are a little more worldly and street smart than you are. Nothing wrong with being a nice guy but learn to trust your instincts about people. 9 times out of 10 your first instinct is the right one.
Son of a black woman here–and I was damn near breast-fed on those words! (And yeah, Mama, I’ll swear on pain of death that you generally attend to the sweet, Southern, country girl angel of your nature.)
I’m not going to use that line about how you owe me a new keyboard ‘cause now it’s all sticky with vodka (Smirnoff’s Cranberry flavored, FYI), b/c I know that some Dopers ain’t diggin’ it right now, but…damn, that gets you points for being both unexpected and funny!
It appears I have to go against the consensus of this thread.
ExtraKun, your “friend” was a jerk and obviously he wasn’t really your friend. Friends are supposed to support each other not tear each other down. You knew that; he didn’t.
As for the idea so many people have that this is “normal” behavior, I’m amazed. I guess I’m lucky to work in an environment where people genuinely work together.
First of all, they aren’t working together. They’re on separate project teams. Second, this is an educational setting. A basic value of education is free exchange of ideas, which includes expressing disagreement, opinions, and criticisms. Third, it was a presentation to classmates, and the audience, apparently, was given the freedom to comment. Why, then, should they not? Fourth, these projects are academic exercises and the only real thing at stake is the opportunity for all involved to take advantage of opportunities to improve their knowledge and analytical skills.
Don’t you see that expecting that people listening to your presentation will keep their criticisms to themselves actually results in your missing an opportunity to take advantage of the educational experience?
First off, you need to go back to the lecturer with proof that you used the term correctly, if he’s assuming you didn’t.
Second, if I want to have a good working relationship with someone, I’m not going to tank their presentation publicly unless there’s a damn important reason to do so. I don’t know if this topic was critical to the presentation or a side issue, but if this was trivia time, I would have kept my trap shut and maybe spoken about it privately afterwards. Even if you’re not working together today, you might be tomorrow.
Third, if you’re going to assert that you are definitely correct, and the presentation is definitely wrong, you had better be absolutely sure your facts are straight. Assuming he was wrong, that would be bad news in a business environment, nobody appreciates a know-it-all who’s wrong.
I, too, am surprised at the consensus. Sure, in academia, friendly debates and disagreements happen. This was not a case of a friendly disagreement. It was a case of a friend calling him WRONG on a graded assignment.
Which, if you will note, he was not. So he didn’t learn the correct definition, he knew it already.
I swear, this is how mad scientists get their start, only you’re not taking science.
"Fools! Blind, dull-witted sheep! They laughed at me! They mocked me! They said I was misusing everyday business jargon, twisting it, to suit my own perverted ends! How little they know…I could be using the phrase ‘first-mover advantage’ any way I want by now – as a greeting, an ethnic slur, to describe the romantic way the mist creates warm halos around the streetlights in the evening, even as a euphemism for ‘excessive sweatiness’ – were it not for those meddling kids!
"I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! When my business plan is complete, and the venture capitalists of the world are begging to be my slaves, when the time is just right and I’m on the cover of Maclean’s, then I shall unleash my army of pinstriped zombies with their spreadsheets of doom! MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
“And for my “good friend,” the traitor, the Judas, who turned the mob against me…I shall have a special reward for him, one that will have him filling out requisition forms for the sweet release of death, in triplicate, without any carbon paper or copying equipment! But that must come later, after the module on marketing…”
If you consider people offering one another relevant scholarly and intellectual criticism in a university environment to be “tear[ing] each other down,” you are sadly mistaken.
And such an exhange of ideas and opinions is, in fact, normal behaviour at any institution of learning worth its salt. Personally, i’m glad i work in an environment where people are able to disagree with one another and offer alternative interpretations without feeling like there’s some personal pissing contest or backstabbing involved.
I’m not arguing that academia is perfect; far from it. There are plenty of egos and self-important assholes with tenure, and there are some academics who tend to be selfish and destructive, rather than generous and constructive, with their criticism. I was at a seminar a couple of years ago where one of the interlocutors described the paper that had been presented as having “all the dramatic impact of a wet noodle.” That sort of put-down was unnecessary; it was perfectly possible to offer advice and criticism without beiong a dickhead about it.
Just out of interest, what should the OP’s friend had done in that situation? Should he have shut up and let the error (if it was an error) go uncorrected, just for the sake of the OP’s fragile ego? That would have been a disservice to the OP, and to the rest of the class.
As for you, ExtraKun, apart from whining about it on this message board, you should have handled it in class.
If your friend was wrong, as you assert, then you should have pointed out that he was wrong, and explained why your definition of “first mover advantage” was the correct one. You could have done this politely, while at the same time demonstrating to him, to the class, and to your professor, that you knew about your topic.
Cheesesteak, i agree that the OP should make clear to the professor that he was right. Actually, i’m curious as to why the professor didn’t know that the OP’s friend was wrong in the first place. If this is a business course, then “first mover advantage” should be part of the lexicon of every student in the class, and the professor should certainly know what it means.
I also concede that it’s possible that the OP’s friend did what he did just to make himself look good, and that his manner of criticism might have been inappropriate. But the idea that one should refrain from criticism or differences of opinion in these sorts of setting is just pointless and counterproductive, and it seemed that this was what got the OP so worked up, as he implies with his assertion that “The issue is not that you are right or not, though.” As far as i can tell, the OP would have thought his friend did the wrong thing, even if the friend’s definition of “first mover advantage” was correct.
