I think ultimately the MBA/administrator class have to be chased out of the universities, and their backers in the legislature have to be voted out as well. They established a foothold, and now they're looting it, like they loot everything else.
On a more philosophical level, it concerns me how completely the university has become a vocational school for the middle class. Ideally, it's supposed to shape you into citizen. But apparently now from cradle to grave we're either assets of Job Creatorz, or being prepared to be so.
On the plus side, there seems to be some serious pushback this time.
This guy was admirably plain spoken.
They established a foothold, and now they're looting it, like they loot everything else.
I suppose that's why the adminstrative class is getting so hot and bothered about MOOCs, despite the fact that there's absolutely nothing new to the idea of watching pre-recorded lectures.
Just imagine, universities that consist of nothing but administrators and youtube videos! The Yglesias/David Brooks dream come true.
It's amazing what a diverse set of people are united by a burning hatred of anyone who has ever actually taught a class.
3
It's amazing what a diverse set of people are united by a burning hatred of anyone who has ever actually taught a class.
Lots of people don't have fond memories of their school days.
if you're going $10K in debt
If only. Turns out the current average is $22,900, or maybe $25,250 though these appear to be mean figures, and the median might be lower.
3.1 is the only reason why I think on-line education has a chance of taking over, even though it makes no sense on its own.
I'm being flip about it, but I loathe the impulse to run colleges and universities more like businesses....
Not sure exactly what you are objecting to. There are certainly going to be lots of things in common between running an university and running a similar size business which will require similar methods and skills to do well. And in both cases a boss can be popular with the workers and customers but also running the organization into the ground financially.
What is "running the organization into the ground financially," when it comes to public universities, are the state governments that have effectively abandoned them.
6
3.1 is the only reason why I think on-line education has a chance of taking over, even though it makes no sense on its own.
On-line education makes all sort of sense if you think the purpose of universities is to teach.
5: That's the average among people who took out loans, however.
There's also the fact that colleges are balancing their budgets disproportionately on the backs of their bottom quintile students, who are the only ones who pay full sticker price. Those guys get walloped with 50K+ in debt, and are least likely to graduate, and are least likely to be informed on what a terrible burden they may be embarking on.
bottom quintile students
Bottom quintile of what?
For us, it's the bottom quintile of students we accept who generally pay wildly more than everybody else and have terribly low retention rates.
And the things that work to retain these students and get them through to graduation are resource-intensive. That is, we've seen higher retention rates of bottom quintile students by pouring resources into academic support and first-year programs. (Which is definitely worth it, but not the kind of long-view trade-off that the budget-cutters are ever going to invest in.)
They rank the whole incoming class by ass-quality and those who sag the most don't tend to study well.
8
What is "running the organization into the ground financially," when it comes to public universities, are the state governments that have effectively abandoned them.
Any organization may have to cope with adverse circumstances out of its control. Consider Eastman Kodak. Pretending that there is no need to make changes is probably not the optimal response.
Troll someone else, James. I'm not playing.
Any organization may have to cope with adverse circumstances out of its control. Consider Eastman Kodak.
He's right. You know what else is totally financially unfeasible? Elementary schools. Talk about a money sink. Time to quit throwing good money after bad.
On-line education makes all sort of sense if you think the purpose of universities is to teach.
But it's been feasible to do distance education affordably for decades. Why didn't replace the traditional model already? The only thing new here that I can see is that people get to use the word "online", which I suppose is still considered to be some sort of magical invocation in some circles.
17: I was completely unprepared for the job market after elementary school. Reforms are long overdue.
the bottom quintile of students we accept who generally pay wildly more than everybody else
This is probably very obvious and I'm just not getting it, but I still don't understand why some students are paying more. Because they aren't getting merit scholarships? Or because the tuition is higher for them in some other way? Does bottom quintile refer to economic status when they come in or academic/qualification status in relation to the rest of their class?
18
But it's been feasible to do distance education affordably for decades. Why didn't replace the traditional model already? ...
Perhaps because the purpose of the traditional model isn't actually to teach. Harvard isn't about teaching.
but I still don't understand why some students are paying more. Because they aren't getting merit scholarships?
Yes
20: In other words, 80% of our students receive financial aid. The bottom quintile refers to those with the worst test scores and high school GPAs, and without any redeeming features explained in recommendations/essays/etc. I think they run the gamut insofar as financial backgrounds, but plenty of them are from low economic backgrounds where it can potentially be disastrous for them to rack up that kind of debt.
I should say, 80% of our students receive some kind of scholarship from Heebie U.
Okay, that explains my confusion. There's a pretty strong division in my head between financial aid ( = related to the "demonstrated financial need" from FAFSA) and monies that students are granted in some way related to "merit" (test scores, GPAs, essays, etc).
But it's been feasible to do distance education affordably for decades. Why didn't replace the traditional model already?
Short answer: because nobody has made the necessary investment to make it possible to replace the traditional model.
Sorry, right. I should have clarified grants, not loans.
Also because it's much, much harder as a student to hang in there when its an online course. So if students self-select for online education sometimes, things might be okay, but if it becomes the de facto method of mass education, drop-out rates will sky-rocket.
James, what would you say if states suddenly stopped funding high schools? Would you say those schools should just adapt to changing circumstances and start aggressively fund-raising and trying to operate like a business?
I should have clarified grants, not loans.
Does your school give non-merit-related grants, that is, grants as part of financial aid packages?
29, James is just trying to spread misery and discord, like that William Galston guy at the New Republic website.
30 - I don't really know. I bet we give murky blurry scholarships, ie suppose there are two 2nd quintile students, one who is wealthy and one who isn't. The second student probably gets some "merit" grants which would not be available to the wealthy student, nor to a 4th quintile non-wealthy student.
Now this is interesting (via LG&M):
a major donor involved in pushing President Sullivan overboard, billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, has close ties to a company called Education Mangement Corporation, a for-profit online educational content provider . . .
One of the things that administrators seem not to understand is that almost all the really serious life-changing oh-my-god-i-get-it-now teaching happens in office hours. This is the first time I've really been supported enough to hold meaningful all-day office hours at least once a week, and the learning curve is so much steeper for students who take advantage of that. You can see it in their work.
Was I a good teacher when I was an adjunct popping in to do a few classes before biffing off to another campus? I was fine. Learning happened. But not the development of multiple serious long-term projects leading to lasting research relationships.
It's like when they think of college instruction, they think of the shittiest professor they can imagine, and then say, "I could replace him with a YouTube series and a TA with a modem." There's no attempt to imagine what teaching could look like with support and trust.
SLACs 4 lyfe. (?)
I agree about office hours. I also find them totally exhausting. It's essentially an extra 6 hours/week of teaching, where instead of getting to perform in front of the classroom I have to channel all my energy into following the student's frame of mind. It's very boring to do it well (in math at least) because it requires so much staying silent and concentrating on watching a student struggle, slowly, with a problem, without interrupting them. It's hard, tiring and has very big pay-off.
My first year of teaching I required all students to attend office hours at least twice before the midterm. Once to say hi, and once with a math question. It was very successful for getting students in the habit of attending office hours. I was monstrously swamped and ended up having to schedule endless extra hours, because I can't help more than about 5-6 students at a time.
I wish I had a better handle on what's going to happen to state education in the medium-term. It seems likely that the amount of money coming from the state will shrink to close to 0 as a fraction of school's budgets. However, since the land and facilities were owned by the state, it also seems likely that the states will successfully demand to still have significant control over the universities despite not funding them. It's a somewhat volatile situation.
My best guess for what happens in the long run is that in exchange for letting the state cut their budgets faster, schools will get a deal where the state allows them to be essentially private except for requiring specific contractual obligations to take a certain number of in-state students and give them a certain discount (adjusted for inflation).
Online education does have some advantages over traditional correspondence courses. Exercises that provide immediate feedback are very useful in some subjects.
Also the internet is infrastructure for distributing high quality audio and video cheap and in a form that people are now used to. Sure, in the past you could mail audio and video cassettes to people, but that required more effort than having the material right there where people get their cute cat pictures.
34, 35: Obviously I have never taken a sufficiently difficult course.
My best guess for what happens in the long run is that in exchange for letting the state cut their budgets faster, schools will get a deal where the state allows them to be essentially private except for requiring specific contractual obligations to take a certain number of in-state students and give them a certain discount (adjusted for inflation).
This is essentially the deal that Kasich has offered public universities in Ohio.
35: They're seriously gruesomely hard, and at least half of them are spent working on some little pill who is a pain in the ass and hates me. But it's also been the thing that's turned a number of them around and got them to take control of their experience.
If college education goes in the direction it's going for much longer, that kind of teaching is going to be a thing of the past, or entirely the work of intransigent liberal arts programs. And the people that hurts are going to be disproportionately the ones who are trying to class-jump through education.
I agree about office hours. I also find them totally exhausting.
At Oxford and Cambridge, this is called the tutorial system. Essentially the distinction between teaching and office hours is elided; except that this way of doing things is centuries older than the more common classroom based approach. It's a fantastic way of educating students in circumstances where perhaps 3% of your population go to university.
Ca/nterbu/ry is a rather funny example of this. The earthquake lead to a lot of content delivered online. Which is a thing that no one can go back on, really. And in the classic `never waste a crisis' way management is making sure to use the impending financial difficulties to try and kill off and departments they don't like. Like American Studies (sorry guys.)
Also, look! A discussion of charges to enter art galleries in the Lords that is actually quite cogent and possibly to the point here, as an example of corporatism and Thatcherism.
(The link, of course, is that Jennie Lee, who speaks above, was instrumental in the setting up of the OU.)
since the land and facilities were owned by the state
What?! We could sell those off and not have to raise taxes for a year.
One of the things that administrators seem not to understand is that almost all the really serious life-changing oh-my-god-i-get-it-now teaching happens in office hours
Maybe they figured out that students that have "serious life-changing oh-my-god-i-get-now" experiences are likely to fall in love with a field of study and want to devote their life to studying it -- in other words, academics, -- and that is the last thing our society needs more of.
Alas, all my memories of vising professors during office hours are about feeling socially awkward, no learning at all.
41: I think that video lectures (possibly where you're required to watch them in certain locations) plus oxbridge-style tutoring is a very sensible direction for higher education in the medium-term. Obviously depending on budgets you'd have to have to make it worse in some way (fewer hours of tutoring than at oxbridge or one-on-few instead of one-on-one), but I still think it's better than having 200 person lectures.
39: Do you have a link for that? (Not doubting you, but google didn't seem to produce a good article saying what you're saying.)
...because it is a recipe for barbarism to say that the priorities of a civilised Government must not make at least a small provision for the things of the spirit.
Yes, Jenny. And now we are confronting barbarians.
at least half of them are spent working on some little pill who is a pain in the ass and hates me
What is your motivation for bending over backwards to help students who hate you?
I also have no good memories of office hours, as a student. Always awkward, unhelpful, or at most the professor would talk a mile a minute, and I'd take crazy amounts of notes, and try to figure it out later. That last one being mostly in graduate school.
Alas, all my memories of vising professors during office hours are about feeling socially awkward, no learning at all.
Did you wear pants?
the last thing our society needs more of
Really? The very last thing? That wouldn't be, say, creators of financial products? Yes, yes, definitely educated thoughtful people with careful, historically-informed solutions to problems are over-represented in our culture. It's so annoying how much influence they have in public life.
For a moment of levity in this otherwise depressing story, I highly recommend local Charlottesville blogger Waldo Jaquith's "Rector Dragas' Statement, Translated into Plain English".
So, so good.
one-on-few instead of one-on-one
One-on-one has always been fantasy. Some Oxbridge traditionalists used to argue that the optimum number of students in a tutorial was two, because then the tutor could make them argue with each other, but three or four was never uncommon.
More seriously to 34 and 35, in the classes where I've learned the most, the instructor had a precise, well-honed routine of lectures and assignments, based on paying close attention to what worked and what didn't work in previous years. They did not deviate much from the plan in response to the students, because they didn't have to.
But most classes I've taken weren't like that; the instructor was phoning it in (metaphorically), or summarizing the material instead of thinking clearly about how to get us to learn the subject matter. I think that I would have learned much more in total, if all of my courses had been taught by the best instructors, with the aid of partial automation (e.g. videotaped lectures, perhaps even some automatic grading). This even though the quality would be slightly less than that of the best courses taught by the best instructors in person.
48: My motivation is that, about 2/3 of the time, they change. It changes how they are in class. I had this little pill in one of my classes last semester who had a look on her face like she was falling asleep while eating something nasty for the first few months, so I summoned her to my office. We had an uncomfortable first few minutes where she was trying to make it clear to me that she's too cool to read or whatever, and then it turns out she was having a post-year-abroad crisis that she hadn't sorted out. And she doesn't actually hate everything. In fact she's totally interested in X. Every class after that, she came prepared and eager and became a great contributor to discussion.
It sucked, the actual meeting, but it was totally worth it not to have to stare into the yawning grimace of hatred for the rest of the term.
Of course that still leaves open the question, whence are the new courses to come? It doesn't seem feasible for all courses in any subject to be taught in an automated way, as the experience of a live classroom seems to help the best instructors figure out how to instruct.
But we should have some automation, and more than we do now.
This afternoon the main opposition, both inside and outside this House, has come from trustees, directors and curators who have never had any experience in the charging for museums. Few, indeed, have had any experience of employing well-tried commercial methods in making their institutions more viable.
Wanker.
Fuck Lee's good.
But we should have some automation, and more than we do now.
As someone whose job you're trying to eliminate, you'll pardon me if I tell you to go fuck yourself.
59: Actually I don't have any idea how we'd automate what you teach.
46: I'm basing that on the report to our faculty senate given by our representative to the statewide faculty senate.
Actually, what he said was something like "Kasich offered the four year schools a deal where they could raise tuition as much as they want, but they will be getting a lot less money from the state." (As if tuition at The State University of Ohio was currently quite low.)
automatic grading
I can't even tell you how far I want this shoved up the asshole of every dickwad who has never taught a day in their fucking lives who thinks they know ANYTHING about what we do and how personal, individual, well-considered, and important it is. Why don't we get robots to nurse all the babies so we can maximize productivity?
how we'd automate
Who exactly is "we" in this sentence? What "we" do you think knows more than I do about what I teach and how to teach it effectively? If not my classes, then whose? Which college courses do you feel qualified to "automate," then?
63 is quite discipline-specific. I am quite happy to hand over huge portions of my grading.
Which is really not meant to undercut 63. I am horrified by the programs which claim to grade essays. Writing and math are wildly different beasts.
56: That makes sense. I was certainly imagining a different scenario entirely for being the object of a student's hate.
This is, of course, the Governor's action. Half the board was appointed by him, the other half have their terms ending during his term of office and if they want to be reappointed will do what he wants. Dragas herself will be up for reappointment July 1st. I assume someone whispered in her ear what she would need to do to get reappointed. Whether she gets reappointed is another question. Do not look to princes for gratitude.
McDonnell has covered his tracks well. He was surprised to hear what the board wanted to do, but if that's what they thought best .... He did urge them to appoint an interim president quickly, which they duly did. That makes sure Sullivan can't be reinstated.
And UVA isn't unique. The new president of George Mason (in Northern Virginia), appointed by a board with the same structure, has as his main qualification that he's run a standalone business school. As far as we know the old president wasn't forced out. He had reached 70 and retired. But the thought process behind his successor's selection is the same.
My opinion is that for large lecture classes (say larger than 50, but certainly larger than 100), we'd be much better off having the best lecturers teach 100,000 students instead of lots of mediocre ones teaching 100. You still need to compliment this with smaller classes or tutorials taught by actual people.
52: I thought you would agree. Isn't 1000 highly qualified applicants for every academic job sufficient?
It's also possible I'm not entirely serious.
I was mainly thinking about math and science. I've of course taken some terrible multiple choice tests, but I've also taken some where clearly a lot of thought was put into them, and they allowed the teacher to test more students, more frequently, on more material, than would have otherwise been possible.
Automation is what lets you put more energy into the parts that can't be automated.
It's always important to remember that (many of) the people who rule the world were B students who took gigantic econ or business lecture courses, never went to office hours, and got ahead through a combination of grit, sociopathy, luck, and connections. It's not too surprising that these people think that video lectures could work just fine, because it probably would have -- for them.
I personally very rarely went to office hours in college -- the professors seemed to see it as a chore and dispense some short, clipped advice that wasn't helpful, so it seemed like a huge waste of time.
67: IME, the students who act like they hate me, and often think they do hate me, usually have something else pretty intense going on that has nothing to do with the course, and once we establish that they need to take care of that shit on their own time and focus on their work as much as they're able, they get over it, and I'm relieved of the burden of being the object of hatred.
The students I really resent are the ones who smile broadly every day, just with their mouths, and say how much they're learning and enjoying the class, and then reveal on eval forms that they were miserable. We could have done something about that, you know!
I don't think robot nurses are an obviously bad idea. You'd still need parents, but certainly you could imagine robots helping out and making parenting less stressful and demanding.
The ritual of lectures may be important.
I miss my wire mommy robot.
73.last could you? The times I was truly miserable in courses were courses that were fundamentally fucked up, and saying that I was miserable would have done nothing at all useful. And I know people who did say things, got fucked over, and then learnt their lesson, as it were.
My opinion is that for large lecture classes (say larger than 50, but certainly larger than 100), we'd be much better off having the best lecturers teach 100,000 students instead of lots of mediocre ones teaching 100. You still need to compliment this with smaller classes or tutorials taught by actual people.
This sounds so unpleasant and awful on the teacher side of things.
I think I can lecture really well, but lecturing to 100,000 students means I can't read anyone's body language or see if they're actually working on the example when I shut up and give them time to work on it. Or, on the tutorial side of things, you never get to design the course or really do much besides office hours, which are exhausting to do well.
The whole division of labor sounds miserable.
70: On the contrary, when you have an educated population of people who have knowledge they are eager to share on a variety of important subjects, we could consider offering them venues for sharing that knowledge and expertise rather than treating them like stray dogs. I.e., more and better academic jobs to support increasingly ambitious students, and more and better non-academic jobs that put the education of PhDs (esp those less gifted or motivated as teachers) to work.
I simply cannot understand why we are ashamed of having "too many" people who have devoted their lives to learning and cutting-edge research, rather than watching Family Guy and passing out on the couch.
The whole division of labor sounds miserable.
Once again, the sort of idea that comes from people who have NEVER FUCKING TAUGHT A CLASS.
My killer robots will have a sophisticated understanding of how to marshall sensitive undergrads through the first, tentative steps towards a robust critical appreciation for the role of literature in the intellectual life of their society mounted beneath the laser cannons.
Outside of the very most introductory classes, I don't see how you can automate grading math. I'm, in retrospect, even more impressed than I was at the time by the extreme patience of the TA for my analysis classes, who went through all the 15-page-long sets of proofs we turned every week and made correct and insightful comments on where we went wrong.
I would be strongly in favor of having standard national calculus exams which were graded mostly automatically. It'd put me on the same side as the students (instead of being their enemy) and would eliminate a lot of really annoying work on my end. I think all the premed classes would be better off with more standardization.
Writing is totally different (including math writing, you can't automate grading in a proof-based class).
Automation is what lets you put more energy into the parts that can't be automated.
Nope. What lets you put more energy into education is better funding and making education a priority. The instant you de-prioritize education in one area, the rest of it seems more expendable. We've seen this happen over and over in academia.
Outside of the very most introductory classes, I don't see how you can automate grading math.
Most math classes are very introductory. Probably 90% of higher ed math classes are before Calculus.
The final grade curve will be determined via ranked deathmatches... of the mind!
I've had a decent amount of experience with online grading for beginning language. It is a nightmare. Even when the programs try to build in a range of responses the students could give, they never ever get around all the different ways a student could read a question, or the myriad orthographic mistakes they could make. Why did the student capitalize the one-word answers in this color identification exercise? I don't know, but I'm not going to count the entire answer wrong! Why does the program only accept 'schwarz' as the color of the smoke coming out of this factory? Because it assumes the students will only use words they've already been taught, rather than looking up 'grau' in the dictionary! The instructor has to monitor the work and the computer grading VERY closely, to override the things it marks wrong that aren't exactly so, and to leave constructive feedback. And this in addition to checking the free response parts that are meant to be the only thing the instructor looks in on. And they usually have a crap user interface, if not for the student, still definitely for the instructor side. And even aside from those things, you can't just have the computer grade it and wash your hands of it, because daily homework performance is one of the best ways to guage what grammar concepts students are having trouble with.
I've taught 100 person classes several times. I'm moderately good at it, but there are people who are much better. And I'm certainly wasting a lot of effort each year that someone who had the luxury of spending a year preparing a high quality lecture series with a nontrivial budget could do once and for all.
I find the idea of replacing time spent lecturing with time spent doing small group teaching quite appealing. I'm surprised that you two don't. Do you really find teaching a rooms of 100 people the same material over and over again to be so fun?
77: I believe I could have, yes. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. If the bad experience for a student is "I don't know how to read" or "I hate the topic of the course," there's not much I can do. But that's never the problem in my experience. At least if they're miserable about something else, they can figure out a way to use the course as the part of their life that's not about whatever miserable hellscape they're enduring.
Grading exams is one thing. Grading assignments is something else. There's no automated grader can figure out what weird idea prompted the student to make a wrong step even in a calculation, let alone proof. It's hard enough for a human.
You're deluded if you think that anyone is spending the time to sort out what weird idea prompted a student to make a wrong step in a calculation in their homework for a large calculus class. At Berkeley we didn't even grade the homework because there was no budget for it. You just checked that they handed in something that vaguely resembled homework.
79. I personally agree that having more people with intellectual capacity that they use is a good thing. However, I think that this is an unpopular view. For example, Obama did not mention that he was a law professor much in his campaign.
iI simply cannot understand why we are ashamed of having "too many" people who have devoted their lives to learning and cutting-edge research, rather than watching Family Guy and passing out on the couch.
Those are mutually exclusive?
91: My calc professor in college did exactly that. He figured out where I was going wrong and mentored me in getting over blocks in my thinking. It was a huge class. I still love that guy.
Office hours in general aren't well-attended, are they? I only went once when I was in college. And there've been an awful lot of times in recent years when I've been in someone's office talking to them and they say "oh, my office hours are starting, we'll have to take this up some other time if anyone comes by" but then no one does.
I think I went to office hours, uh, twice, maybe? I think I tried a third time but they were meeting with somebody and sent me away.
I'm a pretty damned motivated person, and I can't imagine making myself watch lectures online. I took a class this past spring semester, and several times I skipped the lecture, intending to watch it later online, and I never did. I just don't find it engaging.
I never watch TED talks either, no matter how highly they're recommended.
94: This was in office hours? I mean sure if you're one of the 6 people out of a 100 who goes to office hours you can certainly get this sort of attention. The whole point is that if we cut down on lecture and prep time then we could have way more one-on-few situations like this where the real learning takes place while still using the same number of teacher-hours.
89: `you' is the wrong word there; I should say that most lecturers are not as good as you are, and most of the time (in my experience) there's not much to do with shit courses but keep your head down and write a scathing evaluation at the end in the vague hope someone will be embarrassed enough to do something at some point.
I did follow a massive first year intro course by recorded lecture. (Directly after the quake, everything was online, you see.) I found it far better than actually going to the lectures for that course. Of course, I wasn't at all taking it seriously, 'cause I wasn't in fact a first year student, and I wasn't doing the work.
People can be engaged by a live lecturer more than a taped one, the same way that live music is more engaging than pre-recorded music.
That said. I've been looking for ways to incorporate really good videos made by other teachers covering standard topics into my courses. The main problem is that I haven't found any that are better than what I can make myself and cover the simple, boring topics. People put energy into making videos on fancy topics.
Really, I'd like to see the Khan Academy for parts of college level philosophy. I like the Khan Academy
My opinion is that for large lecture classes (say larger than 50, but certainly larger than 100), we'd be much better off having the best lecturers teach 100,000 students instead of lots of mediocre ones teaching 100.
I find it very unlikely that these rare and valuable jobs will go to "the best lecturers". Who makes that determination?
I can definitely understand pre-college remediation programs, or summer remediation programs, for college purposes, but only so that college students can take higher-level courses more competently. Like Rob's 100, if I had a clear program of books to read and lectures to listen to on some foundational ethics, maybe I could get permission to take Rob's once-in-a-lifetime fall course on environmental ethics, even though I'm a sophomore government major. But I don't think it's a good idea to automate any courses for actual college credit.
101: I would guess that there's a strong correlation between wanting to teach large classes and doing it well.
Automation is what lets you put more energy into the parts that can't be automated.
We do not live in a universe in which automation will free up instructors to focus their efforts more effectively. We don't even live in the same neighborhood as that universe.
We live in a universe in which automation will be seen as an excuse to do away with face to face instruction entirely and basically University of Phoenix-ise everything.
It's total nonsense be pretend otherwise.
Ideally one could speak of online lectures as freeing up teacher hours for one-on-(one|few) tutoring, but in reality this is not going to happen.
I don't know about instructors, but automation sure makes my work more pleasant.
AcademicLurker with the interception.
Put another way, "Youtube videos. Huzza!" is being pushed most aggressively by the likes of Matt Yglesias and David Brooks.
Do you really suppose that freeing up instructors to focus their efforts more effectively is what they have in mind?
105: there must be some cases where online learning does fill a socially useful function. At my institution, for instance, it meant that courses could continue within weeks of one of the worst disasters in national history, and that a comparatively functional university continue. Obviously that is an extreme example, but there has to be slightly more nuance here than just University of Phoenix as soon as etc.
108 makes the best point. On many issues they may differ, but those two share a sort of Laffer Curve approach to the employment market, in which making it easier to fire people is always good because it also makes it easier to hire people.
109: I think it would have been a huge help in my rural high school.
There's actually a ton of room for improvement in the methods of college education and higher (at least in magical pony-land), and there's really interesting, open-ended discussion to be had about it, because the current system is incredibly old-fashioned. Like someone alluded to upthread, it hasn't changed too much since an era when less than 3 percent of the population got that kind of education. These days, more than half our country gets some kind of post-secondary education, and there's (technically) bipartisan consensus that absolutely everyone should. Completely different worlds.
That being said, the idea that we could help students or otherwise improve things by running existing schools like a business is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who says so is either lying or just plain stupid.
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This is OT here, but the thread about writing is dead and off the front page by now, so I'll ask it here anyway: what do people think of this? My opinions about it are here.
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104, 105: Exactly.
I don't know why people here keep saying, oh, well, AWB, of course we don't mean to automate your job. You're a gifted and passionate professor who cares deeply about challenging your students to do original, self-motivated research! You'll always have a job.
But I don't. I don't even have a job now. I've never had a job that lasts longer than a year, and I might never get one. Every time I apply for a job that says they're looking for passionate, hard-working instructors who love one-on-one mentorship of undergrads, that job goes to someone who I know from my field who has either never taught a class or has TA'd once or twice.
Why is that? Could it possibly be that college professors are not, in fact, hired for the purpose of doing engaged, passionate, polemical mentorship of undergrads? And that, in fact, the entire endeavor of higher education is motivated by forces other than the effective instruction of undergraduate students?
I'm certainly not the only one. I'm not special. In my cohort from graduate school, when I look at the people who cannot even get adjunct employment with a PhD and publications, those are always the people I know to be the most tireless, brilliant instructors I've ever met, people who teach one-of-a-kind courses that inspire students to do all kinds of amazing things with their lives.
I'm so sick of hearing that I'm some kind of outlier, some unlucky loser who must be dynamite in the classroom and is a brilliant writer and thinker, and whoopsy-daisy, she can't get a fucking job that lasts more than a year, and is lucky to have employment at all, by the skin of her teeth. I am not an outlier. This is the academy that we're in. We did not end up here because professors were encouraged to be great at their jobs and hire people to be great at their jobs. We got here because no one cares if undergraduates learn anything that can't be learned from a YouTube video.
I want to make some kind of connection to the recorded lectures in J R which I started reading after seeing these links to the sillily-named #OccupyGaddis, but I've been too distracted to read very far into it yet.
Office hours in general aren't well-attended, are they?
My office hours are hugely well-attended. Generally 3-8 people at every one. At 8 people, the room is really crowded and extra students tend to glance in the door and then not enter.
114: I'm at the same point in J R! I need to catch up.
And the 3-8 students is when I'm teaching about 50 students total.
Like someone alluded to upthread, it hasn't changed too much since an era when less than 3 percent of the population got that kind of education.
This is not actually what was said, at all. That was specifically describing the Cambridge tutorial system.
101 and 104 are so obviously true that one must seriously question the bona fides of anyone proposing automation or taking it seriously. There are all kinds of things that would be great in ponyland. Acting like they might be good in realityland is like the cliche liberal who won't even take his own side in an argument.
As always, objectively anti-pony.
Also, people on Unfogged saying "I never went to office hours and I did fine" is on par with saying "Doesn't everybody have a secret community full of brilliant Jeopardy winners and novel writers? I know I do."
There's actually a ton of room for improvement in the methods of college education and higher (at least in magical pony-land), and there's really interesting, open-ended discussion to be had about it, because the current system is incredibly old-fashioned.
I am very interested in this conversation. A big question I am interested in is "How could we use these new tools, assuming we can keep the influence of these b-school, bottom-line assholes to a minimum?"
I don't think this is magic pony land. I think this is a question we have to answer if we are going to seem like anything other than obstructionist defenders of the status quo.
The humanities academy is a disaster these days and the labor market in general is deeply screwed for the past few years. Those are two important and very real problems. But that doesn't somehow mean that the way we're teaching large lecture classes is automatically the right way to do it.
One-on-one has always been fantasy. Some Oxbridge traditionalists used to argue that the optimum number of students in a tutorial was two, because then the tutor could make them argue with each other, but three or four was never uncommon.
Counterexample - With one term's exception, every tutorial I had at Oxford was one-on-one. The exception was one-on-two.
there has to be slightly more nuance here than just University of Phoenix as soon as etc.
There's a very real risk that the ideas of "online higher education" and "for profit higher education" will come to be seen as synonymous. That's why I'm so grateful that Stanford, Harvard, MIT and others are taking steps to show that it can be done by a proper not-for-profit institution (can be done pedagogically, at least; the adaptation to a degree-granting model might well be done first by a second or third tier non-profit).
I think the U.Va. story is an outrage, and I am sympathetic to all the arguments about the irreplaceable qualities of in-person instruction. But I caution that Luddism is a very dangerous stance for higher education to take. The cheerleading of Republicans for for-profit universities is not just a result of vulgar bribery. To movement conservatives, universities are of a piece with unions, charitable foundations, government employees, trial lawyers, and Planned Parenthood: a source of institutional support for the enemy. This is an underappreciated fact.
(And 113, although resisting agreement with the proposition that AWB is not special.)
We got here because no one cares if undergraduates learn anything that can't be learned from a YouTube video.
That was exactly my point.
@112
There's actually a ton of room for improvement in the methods of college education and higher (at least in magical pony-land), and there's really interesting, open-ended discussion to be had about it
Of course there is. The trouble with both secondary and higher education is that the field is so plagued by bad actors, grifters and ideologues who just plain hate the whole endeavor and want to destroy it that it's very difficult to initiate changes that don't get perverted to some counterproductive end.
I've always felt bad for education researchers (as in people who actually study pedagogy and its effectiveness). The only time anyone pays attention to them is when their results can somehow be twisted into an excuse for punishing actual teachers who actually step into a classroom on a regular basis. It must be depressing.
119, 104: I can't really speak beyond math, but it seems that schools give a lot of leeway in exactly how math departments want to run their calculus classes. If a department wanted to try out a system that was work-hours neutral and involved a significant video component and more small group interaction, and it proved to effective and liked, I think schools would be happy. There's already huge variations between schools that teach entirely in sections, have mixes of sections and lectures, etc. The people cutting budgets aren't looking at the level of budgeting exactly what happens in individual classes, they're just cutting the overall expenditures.
One last thing, and then I have to go teach my intimate three-person summer course:
Why is it that when we think about the ineffectiveness of the 100-person lecture course, the response is to think about ways to make it cheaper, rather than how to make it better? Whose side are you on?
What I always hear from hiring committee members is that they know they aren't hiring the best teachers for TT positions. It's a shame, and it gives them sleepless nights, but the admin wants to see what the admin wants to see, and no one in the departments wants to piss off admin. Coincidentally, since they know they weren't hired to be great teachers, it doesn't benefit them to have great teachers hanging around the department. (I was told by my chair that I really need to lower my standards and cut things from the syllabus--not because my students weren't doing amazing work or because people got bad grades, but because that wasn't the level at which our department pitches its courses. "We're looking for more of a '3 out of 5' difficulty rating, and you're more of a 4.5.") There are ways to change this culture, and suggesting possible shifts in values and priorities in the upward, rather than the downward, direction, would show at least some slight interest in our undergraduates and their future.
"I had bad teachers in giant classes who never met with me, so let's make sure our kids never get the chance to have a meaningful classroom experience" is vindictive, capitalist, unimaginative, and unethical.
although resisting agreement with the proposition that AWB is not special
Not that she isn't awesome, but claiming her as a special case is somewhat insulting to the academics here who have left the field for lack of work / unwillingness to do the year-to-year thing (with its expectation of cross-country moves each year).
130: Exactly. It's insulting to dozens of people I love to suggest otherwise.
I very much agree with 124.1.
This is what I like so much about consciously modeling things on the oxbridge model. It's a prestigious model that has been proven effective over a long time, but one that can be improved with technology in a way which doesn't destroy the university. There may be other models that would be better, but they involve more risks and would be harder to sell as prestigious. Furthermore, it's key to the university model that we continue to have students living at universities. So you really want to have a good model that incorporates some of the improvements of online teaching while still allowing universities to exploit the fact that parents are willing to pay good money for 18-22 year olds to live the place they want to live.
You can insult people much more efficiently online.
129: The point of my model is to make it better, not to make it cheaper. You replace mediocre lecturers with better lecturers, and you increase the amount of teaching time that's spent on things where being there in person is more useful.
127 is a sort of internalisation of failure, that inevitably leads to further and worse failure. Why not organise? Why not fight this one? Why not fucking win? Why not make use of these technologies as best we can, instead of sticking heads in the sand and giving up?
You replace mediocre lecturers with better lecturers
Then why not hire them? It's not as if they don't exist. Just hire people who are good teachers. There aren't just five good teachers in the world.
You replace mediocre lecturers with better lecturers
Except that what AWB is saying -- and I agree with her -- is that the solution is to hire better lecturers, not to replace 100 lecturers with 4 of them.
Also why is it a bad thing to make higher education cheaper? At present it is unsustainably expensive. One way to make it easier to access is to increase state subsidies, which I am all for and am probably far more crazily left-wing than anyone around here on, and the other is to make it intrinsically cheaper. If we can keep quality similar, but spend less money, we can let more people access higher education. Why is that a bad thing?
How do you tell which 5% of current lecturers are the ones who are worth employing? The ones with a following of devoted acolytes, I guess.
I agree that liberal arts colleges should hire better teachers and have small traditional classes. That's the way that model is supposed to work, and they should just ride it until it dies. The schools I have in mind when I'm talking about the oxbridge+video model are the AAU schools.
What are liberal arts schools looking for if not good teachers? I think the creep of high research expectations into liberal arts colleges is dangerous and should be fought against.
And when I say cheaper, I don't mean spend less. I think we should spend more on higher ed. I mean get more out of what we do spend.
140: I guarantee I would not be hired in any system looking for the 5 best teachers or whatever. They'll hire the way they always have, by prestige. No one wants some so-called great teacher who has never even been able to get a fancy TT job. I heard some of her students think she's way too demanding.
Seriously, I have to go teach. Stop being wrong on the internet, everyone!
the creep of high research expectations into liberal arts colleges is dangerous and should be fought against
By whom? How?
I don't really know enough about the situation to know how or by whom, but I do agree that it's a problem. Not only because there's a trade-off with teaching quality, but also because it produces too many mediocre papers which then need to be refereed and purchased by libraries.
130, 131 -- I don't know those other people, but will take on faith that they are awesome as well.
I tend to think I'm awesome, it's true.
Random procastinatory bits:
I always hold office hours in a big long block on Monday afternoons, for various reasons. Last fall this was very from when homework was due weekly, and I got maybe 6 attendees all semester, out of a class of forty. This spring it was the day before homework was due, and I got 10--15, and sometimes even 30, of a class of eight-odd attending every week. But they were also rather different classes, and I'm not sure what the moral is.
I think it is possible to design a good multiple-choice test for the kind of things I teach. But what that means is thinking through how students would reason about the problems, and coming up with answers which will be differentially attractive depending on what they misunderstand, so that the responses actually have some diagnostic value. (Example.) This is often more work to write than a non-multiple-choice exam.
My department is involved in a couple of courses through CMU's online learning center, but I don't know much about that, and this is convincing me that I probably ought to.
Also, AWB, I think you underestimate the number of courses that are already impersonal, miserable, unpleasant, and hard. (And are designed to be, as far as anyone knows, including the lecturers.) I won't be particularly unhappy to see some of them go.
On the other hand, there's at least one thing that I can think if that is basically impossible to teach except by one on one and small group tuition in person, and has been taught basically so since long before Socrates thought he'd go for a stroll and maybe have a chat with some mates. So.
@127
127 is a sort of internalisation of failure, that inevitably leads to further and worse failure. Why not organise? Why not fight this one? Why not fucking win? Why not make use of these technologies as best we can, instead of sticking heads in the sand and giving up?
I'm not opposed to trying to improve instruction, but context matters. In this particular case, who exactly is pushing to move things online matters.
Put it this way, for any given company whose employees have a union and a pension fund, there are probably, in theory, more efficient ways to manage and administer the fund, to maximize benefits, financial stability over time & etc.
If George Will and David Brooks come along and say "Hey! There are ways to improve on what you've got now. If you'll just agree to dismantle your current system and embrace change and dynamism you could be getting a better return. Let us help you out with that!", you're a hopeless fool if you response is anything except "F*ck off".
151.last is totally true. Luddism has much to recommend it.
If George Will and David Brooks come along and say "Hey! There are ways to improve on what you've got now. If you'll just agree to dismantle your current system and embrace change and dynamism you could be getting a better return. Let us help you out with that!", you're a hopeless fool if you response is anything except "F*ck off".
Because they have way more influence than you with the people that control the money, and you would just be tilting at windmills, you mean?
Math Ed folks have had an extremely difficult time showing that any technology actually improves learning outcomes. Most of the work has been done K-12. At best, they can generally show that technology does not make student learning worse.
Having a teacher in a room with 20 students isn't Luddism for the sake of Luddism.
If George Will and David Brooks come along and say "Hey! There are ways to improve on what you've got now. If you'll just agree to dismantle your current system and embrace change and dynamism you could be getting a better return. Let us help you out with that!", you're a hopeless fool if you response is anything except "F*ck off".
1. That's a false dichotomy
2. The G.O.P. is going to try to dismantle your current system regardless, and they already have the power to do it in many places. They also have wealthy allies in the for-profit sector to help them in the endeavor.
3. You have a better chance of protecting what is good and right in the traditional university by fixing it first, including figuring out how to realize the benefits of productivity-enhancing technology, than by putting your heads in the sand.
My friend in chemistry ed has told me about a lot of work showing that HS chemistry teachers don't understand basic elements of chemistry. (Difference between melting and dissolving, for instance.) A big element in improving chemistry ed is to better educate the people who are planning to become teachers in the super basic things, at the concept level.
154: 20 person classes are great! I'm all for them. But lots of schools already aren't teaching 20 person calculus classes (or any number of other large lecture intro level classes in other departments).
My only experience with lecture-by-video was in the bar review class. Law schools don't teach you how to pass the bar exam, so you pay a private company to reteach you things you supposedly learned in law school in anticipation of the exam.
The lecturers the company finds are super-charismatic, effective lecturers. You could watch them at home, but they'd also screen the videos in very large lecture halls. I thought it was great -- infinitely better than a mediocre live lecture, and better than a pretty good live lecture. I stopped noticing it was on video pretty quickly.
Obviously you would need to continue to have (lots) of small sections with personal contact for video lectures in higher education generally. But that experience made me think that a fair number of introductory course lectures could be replaced with video, and that this would benefit students.
impersonal, miserable, unpleasant, and hard
Hire better teachers. If the field is some magical outpost where no good teaching has ever been developed or studied in any way, study it, teach it, train good teachers.
I have seen a few studies that suggest that using interactive online supplements (that is, wikis, blogs, etc., NOT YouTube lectures) to in-class instruction can be better than in-class alone or online alone. I have worked at a school where this study was then used to fire college instructors and replace them with 100% online content. How could that possibly happen? Surely administrators always have students' education and future at the core of all of their decisions, right?
157: Sounds to me like we must be overproducing educated people in academic fields, huh? /bittersarcasm
My class starts in 20 minutes. I cannot resist you.
Hire better teachers. If the field is some magical outpost where no good teaching has ever been developed or studied in any way, study it, teach it, train good teachers.
Surprisingly, hiring better teachers doesn't work, because that is not in fact the problem. The problem (in the cases I am thinking of) is a horrible structural mess that is mainly independent of, and even resistant to, any skill at teaching people might have.
A field you can't name in which good teaching cannot possibly exist does not seem like useful evidence for dismantling an academic system older than capitalism due to capitalist pressures.
Teaching people is overrated. I've been employed by universities for over a decade now and with the exception of one class, I've never taught anybody anything.
By whom? How?
By the faculty at those institutions, by publicly reducing (or holding steady) tenure and promotion standards.
@162
The problem (in the cases I am thinking of) is a horrible structural mess that is mainly independent of, and even resistant to, any skill at teaching people might have.
Are you thinking of "gut" courses in the hard sciences?
I don't know whether or not it's impossible to teach Organic Chemistry well enough that all of the students pass, but I do believe that there is a tacit understanding that Organic Chemistry is a class in which a certain percentage of students are expected to fail.
Moving things online would do exactly nothing to change this, however.
I.e there is no way to make courses that only let the top n students advance to the next level into much more than grade grubbing, rote, zero-sum idiocy. They will always have that intrinsic structural problem. At best you can minimise it, but heaps of lecturers are ok with that. And sure you can try and eliminate that kind of course design (but at least here, it exists in at least three different bachelor's degrees, and is pretty much baked into two, one of which is almost impossible to change) but really, that's just as hard as designing good online content.
Gut courses in the hard sciences, first year law and engineering, first year in fine arts (although that one is one that is impossible to change really), medicine, various others.
I do not think that the US university teaching experience is in any meaningful way older than capitalism. I think it is maybe older than this century, perhaps, but even then I think as most people experience it is a pretty recent (i.e post-war) thing.
123: The exception was one-on-two.
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?
And of course by putting it online you are not doing much worse and if you are very lucky you might be better off.
By the faculty at those institutions, by publicly reducing (or holding steady) tenure and promotion standards.
That's what I would say as well, but I wasn't at all sure that's what UPetgi meant.
I was challenging myself as to why I think "You have to offer an alternative, you can't just go to the barricades for the status quo" applies in the case of higher education and not in the case of, say, Social Security, where I 100% supported the blockade strategy advocated by Josh Marshall back in 2005. I think the difference is twofold.
One, Social Security isn't really on an unsustainable course. A few modest tweaks and you can keep it solvent forever. So you can leave the problem to simmer until you're in a position to fix it from a position of strength, without negotiating with people who fundamentally want to destroy Social Security as it exists. Higher education, by contrast, really does have out of control cost growth. I recognize that this isn't actually the fault of Baumol's disease or spending on teaching, and that the real culprits are elsewhere. But the impact is the same: higher education is fast becoming an unaffordable luxury. So there has to be a liberal alternative that bends the cost trend -- just as there had to be cost controls in the ACA to make universal coverage sustainable over the long term.
Secondly, the Republicans never really had the power to gut Social Security. GWB bluffed and made like he did, confident (with good reason) that the Democrats would quiver and cave. But the voting public put a high priority on maintaining Social Security in its current form, and once the Dems woke up to that fact, they were able to avoid being stampeded into signing on to changes that would weaken it as a universal public program. Higher education is different. It has much weaker public support, and such support as exists is highly conditional: companies want research with commercial (or military) applications, employers want competent wage slaves, etc. But for all practical purposes, the population for whom financing the study of English and history is a voting issue is zero. So the scope for mischief by a GOP that has it in for higher education (see 124 above) is large.
Bottom line: this is one of those cases where you can't sit back and hope for the best while your adversaries out-maneuver you.
Christ, much of the BCom schedule is like that.
104 is the single biggest takeaway from this whole affair. I think there's an immense amount of value to things like the online Stanford or MIT lectures (or for that matter, Khan Academy), which are a) free and b) not being treated as a replacement for standard college classes. means that a bright girl in a high school in rural South Dakota or Tanzania can get a better physics education than what would be available to her. There are incredible online resources now for things like learning computer programming, which is basically one giant lab session. And there are well-done distance learning programs like Western Governors University, which basically imo substitute for community college (except in offering a 4-year degree).
But for the people who can go to a Virginia, let alone a Stanford or an MIT, they're not going to produce the same educational results, and if that's the direction that Virginia is going, they're strip-mining the state's educational resources. And this is precisely what we'd expect given the behavior of America's elites over the last twenty-odd years, isn't it?
I have to say I am attracted by UPETGI's Oxbridge style tutorials+video or online lectures with super-charismatic lecturers from outside of the institution model. Invest faculty teaching time into personalized attention in smaller groups, rather than the presentation of knowledge per se in large lecture classes. That seems like a good way to go.
The reality -- which is horrible, but is the reality -- is that public education funding is collapsing along with the rest of funding for state government. That sucks, but is the reality. Figuring out ways in which doing more with less in terms of teaching can work is horrible and awful and enormously unfair to academics, but I don't see any realistic way that won't continue to be the case going forward. Which doesn't mean it's not worth putting up a good fight, just that some accomodation to technology and different teaching models is going to be necessary.
I've gone through a career switch (to programming/web development from previously being on an academic/PhD track) that has involved taking a mixture of online and in-person classes in extension schools and CCs (and an even larger part of just learning stuff myself through online documentation and tutorials).
In the actual college classe I've taken, I've probably gotten more out of the online classes than those with in-person lectures, though this is balanced by taking 4 in-person classes with one great teacher who was a completely anomaly (she was an MIT PhD who just really wanted to teach community college).
So far, the only online lecture course I have gone all the way through is Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History.
I've just recently started Shelly Kagan's course on death and I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it. I've also started Tamar Gendler's course on philosophy and the science of human nature and I'm much more excited about it.
Coincidentally, since they know they weren't hired to be great teachers, it doesn't benefit them to have great teachers hanging around the department. (I was told by my chair that I really need to lower my standards and cut things from the syllabus--not because my students weren't doing amazing work or because people got bad grades, but because that wasn't the level at which our department pitches its courses. "We're looking for more of a '3 out of 5' difficulty rating, and you're more of a 4.5.")
I don't think this exactly has to do with resisting great teaching. Is it by necessity terrible to want to offer courses of moderate difficulty rather than high difficulty at a certain level? Why?
I would imagine that most people here got very high quality educations, and were academically very good. We may not be the best people to think about how to design courses for B- students who just want a fucking degree so they can get a job.
So far, the only online lecture course I have gone all the way through is Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History.
I've just recently started Shelly Kagan's course on death and I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it. I've also started Tamar Gendler's course on philosophy and the science of human nature and I'm much more excited about it.
This time with links that work!
I, of course, think of myself as a mediocre teacher AND a mediocre researcher, so I should be first up against the wall for sure.
179: it is with grace and good humor that I take on the mantle of unfogged commenter officially designated to think about those problems.
176: We need to have web developer gang signs so we can distinguish ourselves from the lawyers and academics.
183: can I still be in the gang, guys? Can I? Can I? Look, I have php documentation open in another tab!
165, 171: That's certainly the obvious people, but since I haven't had substantial interactions with a liberal arts college since I was 15, I didn't want to assume that was the only driver. It's plausible to me that say government funding bodies are somehow pushing it as well.
184: PHP? Eww. Go hang out with the grad students, dork.
It's not my fault it was legacy cooooode don't maaaake meeeee...
[ goes back to discovering 'parfor' in matlab ]
Ooh, shiny!
B- students who just want a fucking degree so they can get a job.
This is truly the part that makes me insane. The combination of the increasing utter impossibility of getting a bachelor's degree for free and the increasing implausibility of getting any kind of living wage without one is just FUCKING RIDICULOUS. I wish we could just pour vast quantities of money into public high schools and wave a magic wand to remove higher-ed requirements from jobs that shouldn't require them. Bringing back actual public universities would be nice too, of course.
I am not entirely joking in 179. What's wrong with people who don't want to be inspired at uni? What's wrong with just wanting to do a solid bare minimum, and get an ok job somewhere?
Ladies and gentlemen, to mediocre education!
What's wrong with people who don't want to be inspired at uni? What's wrong with just wanting to do a solid bare minimum, and get an ok job somewhere?
Nothing much, aside from the fact that it is appalling that they are required to spend all that money and time doing it just for the required signifier.
I, of course, think of myself as a mediocre teacher
I'm sure that no one here believes that to be true, but for the record, ratemyprofessors.com strenuously disagrees.
183: Mixing web development and tribal signifiers is a dangerous road.
I wish we could just pour vast quantities of money into public high schools and wave a magic wand to remove higher-ed requirements from jobs that shouldn't require them. Bringing back actual public universities would be nice too, of course.
Yes. I must say that the current crop of undergrads appears to be particularly fucked -- hey, your tuition is going up, there are fewer jobs, but in order to even have the potential for getting one of the fewer jobs you have to pay for this super-expensive degree (that may not pay for itself, and that will have effectively no relevance to the job you will be doing!). It's a pretty screwed up system, aided and abetted by the universities themselves, the student loan industry, and a whole lot of inertia.
175.1 and 175.2 seem to present a mixed message.
Are online lectures desirable because they genuinely allow for improved instruction (more ability to focus effort elsewhere & etc.), or are they a necessary response to our docile acceptance of the fact that public resources will continue to be looted, and so maintaining the old quality isn't feasible?
194 -- I'd say both? Structural pressures mean that things just will have to change, so why not start by changing in an area that will not reduce (or, IMO may actually enhance) quality.
PHP? Eww. Go hang out with the grad students, dork.
This may be the first time php users and grad students have been binned together.
182 -- Don't go thinking you are without competition in non-awesomeness of undergrad performance.
The other day in discussion with my advisor I found myself simultaneously explaining why python is way aswesomer than PHP (and plenty as awesome as matlab) and why we're variously using PHP and matlab for all our projects. I'm not sure I even successfully convinced myself.
197: it would probably be bad form to have a contest, right?
199: Especially without inviting me.
Underwhelming to our more diligent friends, that's for sure.
197 et seq.: I'm in there. I mean, I got fair grades (barring Latin), but man, was I wasting my time in undergrad. It's a shame, really -- I'd think I'd be the sort of person who'd get a fair amount out of higher education, but somehow phoning it in was what happened.
was what happened
Obviously, I bear no responsibility for this.
Hey, I sucked too. But more on the LB plan--well "fair grades" when I showed up or bothered doing the work*.
My youngest is now a pretty diligent student at my old school. It is actually somewhat disorienting to watch, "Wow. So you like go to class, and do the reading and stuff?"
*To be fair I also did do a lot of reading and "discovery" outside of classes via the general college resources that were available as well as fellow students and professors outside of the classroom. Intangibles of the residential college experience.
Hey, I sucked too.
Under no circumstances should this be read in conjunction with this comment.
I was told by my chair that I really need to lower my standards and cut things from the syllabus--not because my students weren't doing amazing work or because people got bad grades, but because that wasn't the level at which our department pitches its courses. "We're looking for more of a '3 out of 5' difficulty rating, and you're more of a 4.5."
Someone said this to you with a straight face? At your current position?
Oh, I see a few comments later that you have to go teach. Well, maybe you'll get to my question later.
While you're waiting, amuse yourself by reading Kieran Healy's take on the UVA thing, which is good.
209: I expect that Kieran must have written something non-great at some point. But if so, I haven't seen that thing.
Not that anyone cares, but I think 124.2 is a really important point. The GOP's war on higher education, along with its war on public education, has been going on for about four decades now, but it's obviously going to get much, much uglier in the next couple of years. With that said, I don't think preemptive concessions to market-based reforms represent a very good strategy.
Good line from Brian Leiter on Katehi v. Sullivan: "Now if [Katehi] had been involved in pepper-spraying on-line students, that would have been different!"
Who was on the senate subcommittee that recommended firing her? Pin a medal on those people!
Would I prefer to see Katehi fired or Leiter pepper-sprayed? I'll have to get back to you.
I agree with 209. Very good post. Maybe I should go to CT more.
It was both a fun satire, and more informative than I would have expected. It made me realize that this U-Va story is probably a lot bigger than I thought. Maybe the only error there is my assumption about how big it was, but still.
207: Yes, at my current position. My department doesn't exactly cover itself in glory in the heroic struggle against ignorance. They all hate evaluation-worship, but they've gotten too cynical to resist it.
The problem with your argument, Knecht, is that these productivity-enhancing technological applications to higher education probably don't exist. If they did exist, they would have been invented by now. If it was easy to make an awesome video lecture course to teach calculus using a super-charismatic lecturer, then someone would have made one sometime between the invention of film and now. Making a high-production video is not exactly a new art form that couldn't exist before the Internet.
The 100-student lecture course is an inferior product. The only reason it exists is the purpose of the product is to screen students out. This part of the curriculum could probably be automated, but that's because education is only a secondary purpose of the course. (There are also 100-student lecture courses that are basically forms of entertainment that fill out diversity requirements. Here the live performance is probably part of the appeal, so I don't know if they can be automated.)
178: If I can get students in intermediate and advanced classes to do serious work, and teach them how to do it, why should I teach them to do boring shit? The other part of that conversation was about how I give too many A-s. That's the level of work I got from them. So the way to succeed at my college, if I were tenure-track, would be to lower the bar, get evals that say I'm a nice lady, and then fuck them on grades. That's what students and faculty report as SOP.
"material pitched at a less difficult level" and "boring shit" aren't the same.
That's what students and faculty report as SOP.
Faculty report this? "Yeah, I teach a gut course, and then I'm a totally mercurial asshole on grades."
I don't know if I've ever heard the phrase "gut course" before.
Making a high-production video is not exactly a new art form that couldn't exist before the Internet.
This is what I've been thinking as well.
Why did everyone suddenly start talking about recorded lectures as though they were some brand new thing?
It's almost like we're back in the 90s when you dazzle everybody simply by inserting "online!" into any statement. I'd have thought that people were at least somewhat over that by now.
I guess if not all the students can expect to get As or Bs, it can't be a gut course.
Why did everyone suddenly start talking about recorded lectures as though they were some brand new thing?
I think the idea is that watching a recorded lecture is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and more productive now that you can post something about it in an online forum.
If it was easy to make an awesome video lecture course to teach calculus using a super-charismatic lecturer, then someone would have made one sometime between the invention of film and now.
People have their priorities. We've invented a way to capture and display moving images! What should we record? Here are the ideas we tried out, in rough order of appearance.
1: People fucking!
2: World leaders.
3: Famous plays shot with a stationary camera.
4: Oh, lets go back to people fucking again.
5: Charming stories shot with some editing and visual sophistication.
6. People fucking, shot with some editing and visual sophistication.
7. Cat videos.
8. Calculus.
Some thoughts, while you're all having fun thinking of ways to protect AWB's job while getting rid of mine:
1) I think for most lower division classes, a great online lecture combined with a small group discussion and review could be fantastic, if done well. At least for most people they're going to be better than a 200 person lecture with some TAs for now.
2) Unfortunately, what you're most likely going to get is what our legislature wants here, which is "so we could just have our students watch MITs videos for free and then, like, hire some master's students for grading? why do we need PhDs?" Pity, as I could rock the fuck out of an Oxbridge-style tutorial.
3) The people who get such lecturing jobs are not going to be the best lecturers, any more than the people who get hired by the SLACs now are the people who are the best instructors in their pools of candidates. No one cares about teaching that much.
4) Completion rates for online classes is much, much worse than F2F. I suspect it's a combination of students thinking "online, easy! wait, you mean I have to read the book", most people not being the sort to motivate themselves without a schedule, and because it's much, much harder to help a student who is flunking out online than in a classroom.
5) 4) is a bonus if you think the point is to generate revenue by washing students in and out of online programs. Less so if you want to teach them anything.
6) I can't see it working for upper division philosophy classes at all, because I want them arguing with each other. But in general I think the problem is less with the content delivery system and more with the attitude that the point is to take a lot of federal loan money as fast as possible.
Weird, I would have expected your current school to use the standard "upper level small classes for majors give only A and A- unless students deserve a C (in which case they get a B+) or failed (in which case they get a B)" grading scheme. Or are they supposed to be on the "half the students get A or A-, and the other half get B+ or B, with most of them being A- or B+" scheme, and you're not giving enough B+'s?
If it was easy to make an awesome video lecture course to teach calculus using a super-charismatic lecturer, then someone would have made one sometime between the invention of film and now.
I kind of disagree with this. Aren't there good videos with charsimatic calculus teachers available right now? I mean, as I said above, I have personal experience with really excellent video lectures.
"upper level small classes for majors give only A and A- unless students deserve a C (in which case they get a B+) or failed (in which case they get a B)"
Isn't that the generally recognized grad school grading scheme (except a grad school really bad grade is B-)?
Yes, but I thought the grad school scheme also generally applied to classes for Juniors and Seniors in the major at private schools.
222:I don't know if I've ever heard the phrase "gut course" before.
At Harvard the sophomore tutorials might have between 4 and 6 people. Junior year, in some honors programs like History of Science, it's one on one.
229: They want to see lots of C's and B-s. The class the chair complained about was an intermediate class in which I really pushed them hard, so they said it was too difficult, but really, genuinely, the top half of the class was in the A/A- range. The rest were Bs and Cs. They want to see less difficulty, more Cs. That just sounds like a recipe for lazy, bad teaching.
I watched an intro psych class at Yale. I don't think that I'd have learned much more from being there in person. So, I'm glad that I watched it and glad that I took small seminars and classes in college.
233: what, I'm not allowed to be forgetful?
237: what, I'm not allowed to mock?
I mean, you are free to be whichever of the seven dwarves that works for you.
"Fora" or "forums"? Quick, which is better?
That's really quite odd. Is the point that they want to keep the number of majors low and this is the course that they use to do that?
Forums.
It's not that odd.
They might think that a course that's a 3/5 on the difficulty scale should still be producing the number of Cs and Bs they desire. If that's the case, then a course that's 4.5/5 on the difficulty scale should be producing yet more. The demands "less difficult; lower grades" make perfect sense in that context.
The problem with your argument, Knecht, is that these productivity-enhancing technological applications to higher education probably don't exist. If they did exist, they would have been invented by now.
I composed a number of snarky responses to this, but in the end I decided to forebear and simply note that this is a transparently ridiculous argument.
If it was easy to make an awesome video lecture course to teach calculus using a super-charismatic lecturer, then someone would have made one sometime between the invention of film and now. Making a high-production video is not exactly a new art form that couldn't exist before the Internet.
Who says that a super awesome video lecture course is the answer? It might be, for certain applications. But technology enables us to do more than record and replay words and images. Frankly, I would rather that the Stanfords and the MIT's of the world create truly innovative and useful pedagogical applications of technology than allow a bunch of fly-by-night for-profits to occupy the high ground.
230 -- Bar review covers in 3 days what you spent 16 weeks covering in regular session. Which works (a) because they're not playing hide the ball games 3/4ths of the time and (b) because you had the 16 weeks not that long before, and can presumably remember most of it with only a little reminder. Of course you can put together a fun and interesting review video. It's another thing entirely to create a good canned 16 week lecture course on torts.
I mean, to the extent that it makes sense to demand a given grade distribution in advance of seeing the actual work produced at all.
241: No. It's that our department has a reputation they are proud of for being one of the hardest to get an A in. Seriously. It's like an ethical principle for them. *We're* not going to be like those *soft* departments that inflate grades.
What they seem not to realize is that sometimes grades have some relationship to the quality of the work my students do. They also seem not to realize that I desire to see students do the best work they can and learn as much as possible.
That "super-difficult" intermediate class got about 10 new majors who were on the fence to join the department. This was considered a bizarre anomaly. How strange that this would happen. Hm. Must have nothing whatsoever to do with the professor of the class, who will cease to exist to us in 5.... 4.... 3....
247.1: Yes, my immediate thought was on why no one ever finds $5.
247.1: Yes, my immediate thought was on why no one ever finds $5.
But such arguments have long standing!
I don't know if I've ever heard the phrase "gut course" before.
I have, but I thought it meant "course that everyone passed easily", while apparently it means the opposite.
no one ever finds $5
Reading the comments around here, you'd think it happens all the time.
Timothy Burke has a reasonable take on the "MOOCs - awesome idea or most awesome idea?" question.
248 -- I learned a whole bunch of new subjects for the first (and only) time in the video bar review lectures, including some that I use professionally. Which tells you something about my law school, but there you have it.
The recorded lectures I've watched from the new-style online course systems (all beginner-level cs/programming) are in fact done better than other recorded lectures I've watched, and mostly better than instructional books/writing I've used. The main improvements are that 1) they're only as long as they need to be for the topic, rather than, say, 50 minutes all the time because that approximates a class period and 2) they're paired with exercises where you actually write code and get feedback and get explanation videos that go over possible solutions.*
They're certainly not something to go replacing college with, though. I took a beginning college cs course a few years ago and they did auto-grading there too, but people could ask questions in office hours and in lectures, there was partial credit - feedback wasn't great, but they took into account comments and degrees of correctness - and the exams were handwritten, which seems odd, but really did force you to think about just how each step in your program was going to work.
*For the solutions, usually there's only one that they give, but they sometimes discuss and work through alternatives. The feedback isn't detailed, but they'll tell you if there's a test case you failed and it helps for both debugging and for teaching you how to create test cases. They could do a better job with that, though. You don't get feedback detailed enough to tell you if your solution is worse than alternatives on some scale (efficiency, human readability, etc.).
Oh, and you get certificates that look like something you could draw up yourself. Legitimacy!
230: I learned calculus in high school by reading a calculus textbook from cover to cover. Since we have textbooks, why do we need university courses at all?
The only bar subject I didn't take was T&E. So naturally, i ended up spending years on that EDNY trust case.
I'm not advocating getting rid of the university. Or, anything, really. I do think that video/internet lectures with excellent lecturers, combined with in-person tutorials or seminars, probably has an important pedagogical role to play in the future.
I didn't have the discipline to do my high school calculus homework every day. But somehow I had to the discipline over winter break to do all of the assignments from January until late March by doing about 7-8 per day for a week or so. That left me with only a few more assignments to do before the end of year review started up.
Both the Healy post in 209 and the Burke post in 255 are very good.
Still, need to catch up on the thread, but skimming, I am so on board with reducing tenure standards. Everywhere. Please.
259: Some kinds of knowledge are writing-soluble and can therefore be transmitted by book.
Other kinds of knowledge are not writing-soluble, but are speech-soluble.
Also it would be more impressive, and a stronger argument if you'd learned to read by means of a textbook. Therefore, since you did not, your argument is weaker.
259: Did you at least do the problem sets?
267: No, he derived the problems themselves from first principles.
247: This is the exact bullshit "but now its online!" argument that AcademicLurker was referring to earlier. Imagine the productivity-enhancement from the fact that we can now order pet food online! Only Luddites would disagree!
Whenever people talk about what you can do in online education, 85% of the time they talk about stuff that's been possible for at least 50 years (video lectures), and 10% they talk about standardized testing, which is not exactly new either. The other 5% is the incremental improvement that the Internet provides. But the main piece is the increasing returns-to-scale that centralized video lectures provide, and that's been possible forever. And yet we've seen it make zero headway in the marketplace until now.
A few comments appear to imply that small liberal arts colleges aren't hiring people primarily on the basis of teaching ability. That's counterintuitive to me. Isn't that their raison d'etre?
I did not do the problem sets. And yet I passed the AP Calculus exam! Thanks to online education, every calculus student can be just like me.
High-end SLACs also want people who'll be "research active", to some extent, at least, though not as much as high-end "R1" schools.
270: That's what they say. But they will hire the best researcher who will have them who isn't a complete putz in front of the classroom.
OT: I think this Holder contempt ruling disproves politicalfootball's conspiracy theory.
I suppose they could have had an agreement that the Eepublicans kept long enough to make any investigations by the White House look political an out-of-the-blue, and which they are now breaking during election season.
And yet we've seen it make zero headway in the marketplace until now.
I'm not sure how much headway they're making in the marketplace even now. They get a lot of press and a lot of sign-ups, but attrition rates are really high. Also, my impression for the CS courses, which of course could be completely wrong, is that the students are adults already out of college looking to brush up on skills or learn a new language, high school students at schools without CS courses, or - looking beyond the US - adults from outside North America who might not have access to the same kinds of courses either in college or post-college. College students already have college courses.
Part of the reason, aside from wanting to learn new things and being unemployed, I'm trying to do a bunch of these now is that I really doubt their business models, if they have any, are going to allow these courses to remain free for very long. I figure they'll either go to some kind of paid structure or collapse. It would be nice if they don't take down any university with them.
The heart of the issue is way back in 1, I think:
On a more philosophical level, it concerns me how completely the university has become a vocational school for the middle class.
If it's not the university, some set of institutions is going to have to perform that role.
Online higher education is poorly suited to training people to be scholars in traditional academic disciplines, but it might be the most affordable and scalable means of providing a "vocational school" for professions that require mastering bits of technical material and a lot of practice solving problems within their given domain.
Interesting. Almost no research in my field comes out of SLACs; one person comes to mind who's a definite exception, and a few more at a school that I don't quite know how to categorize since it does have a small graduate program. I guess I do know several people who were pretty active in research, got jobs at SLACs, and then pretty much stopped producing any research, though.
Yeah, I'm doing a couple more online courses now, and they really seem to lean completely on being things that can be automatically graded. That doesn't apply to very many subjects.
I think video lectures have failed in the marketplace for university lecture courses largely because universities have refused to use them. Is it realistic that any major university today would simply replace a major introductory lecture course with a video of a charismatic lecturer from another institution? Not very, because that's just not how things are done, although maybe that's changing. Is there any market for a company to put such a thing together (for use by actual students)? Not much of one. It's the institutional conservatism of the universities that's the cause, not some inherent defect of video lecturing.
273 is definitely true for Cala-and-AWB C. It's very research-heavy for an SLAC. That's great in a lot of ways, and I deeply respect my colleagues as scholars. I do think they could stand to place some methodological demands on our students.
they really seem to lean completely on being things that can be automatically graded
But surely that's not an inherent feature of the form. You could easily have an online/video lecture combined with a small group tutorial, which is where grading and homework would happen.
Further to 281, our C gave a student of mine a TON of money to travel around doing archival research on a project we're collaborating on. I couldn't get that funding for myself because I'm not TT, but my student, who is a truly dynamite kid, is getting a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I keep trying to warn him that, no, this is not how grad school is going to be.
282: Classes that are online are often advertised as needing no classtime at all. Flexible! For parents/nontrad students/those who cannot change out of their pajamas! So I suspect a move to "Watch this lecture online, and then come in for intensive writing and thinking tutorials" is really not in the business model. It's not an inherent feature, no, but the attraction is entirely the cost-reduction.
those who cannot change out of their pajamas
That most delightful of afflictions.
`"a vocational school for the middle class."
If it's not the university, some set of institutions is going to have to perform that role.'
Why not (a ) family and friends and (b ) working your way up from being a clerk/proofreader/data entry/monkey tester/intake aide?
I think I read somewhere that Stanford has been doing internal online video lectures for years. Not canned lectures, but you could skip class and watch that day's lecture later.
Also, I think there have been some faculty who have taken a video lecture/in-class tutorial approach, but for their own classes. The problem is really that the people who want to scale things up want to axe or not even think about the tutorial part. Forums for all!
It is really funny that despite 26, the Open University has been basically entirely ignored in the ensuing discussion, especially given that the OU does a whole lot of really awesome stuff about making learning accessible that traditional universities fail miserably at.
I'm sorry we aren't all as well informed about the open university as you, Keir.
Yeah, you fuckers should have come from a middle class British background where a substantial portion of the books where OU set texts. Then you'd be better at this.
Why not (a ) family and friends and (b ) working your way up from being a clerk/proofreader/data entry/monkey tester/intake aide?
Because our economy is really, really not set up for that kind of apprenticeship model.
I have somewhere between 2-10 young people working for me in any given year. They require an enormous, enormous amount of support and guidance to be able to be useful to my organization -- and it's not because they're not smart, thoughtful, invested people who are trying really hard.
It's because if you didn't get certain social and intellectual capital from your family and friends, and a LOT of people don't/can't, it's very expensive to acquire as a young adult.
Keir is saying important things about OU, which I suspect would be easier to hear if there were not such perfect correlation in the US between techno-utopians and people who actively oppose the values of our current educational system. Did I mention that the University of Phoenix sent SIX lobbyists to our governor's fundraiser not long ago?
29
James, what would you say if states suddenly stopped funding high schools? Would you say those schools should just adapt to changing circumstances and start aggressively fund-raising and trying to operate like a business?
I would say they should do the best job they could with the resources provided. I am tired of the endless entitled whining from the educational establishment whenever they don't get every last dollar that they think is their due.
Question for AWB or Cala, or anybody else in the humanities: if you could choose, what would you like your job to emphasize?
Teaching tutorials (1-4)
Teaching classes (5-20)
Teaching lectures (30+)
Grading
Research
Conferences
Some mixture of the above which changed every year depending on the needs of the department
113
... Could it possibly be that college professors are not, in fact, hired for the purpose of doing engaged, passionate, polemical mentorship of undergrads? ...
Isn't this obvious? Why do you think the saying is "publish or perish"?
294: I'd like my job to consist only of entitled whining.
Seriously though, something like 218 is hugely frustrating when you know that the OU did exactly that, decades ago, and the confident assertion that such a thing Just Couldn't Happen is wrong.
247
I composed a number of snarky responses to this, but in the end I decided to forebear and simply note that this is a transparently ridiculous argument.
I agree.
Actually, scratch that, I have a better question.
If we're thinking about trying to re-imagine the academy job-path towards something saner, while making it easier for people like AWB, Blume, & Cala to find work, let me ask what you think is the best thing for mid-to-late career academics who are smart and talented but burned out to be doing with their time (and who should be paying them).
Looking from the outside, one of the challenges of the academy (like public schools, actually) is that somebody who's been teaching for 10 years and still more-or-less enjoys teaching/research doesn't have a lot of options. The traditional model has been to give those people job security, keep paying them, and let them figure out some way to contribute. But, budget fights have often ended up pitting tenured faculty against adjuncts/lecturers, and I'm curious if there's any way to make that less of a zero sum game.
Is there any way to give the mid-to-late career academic enough options other than holding on to their tenured position with both hands.
I don't know if I'm just reacting to a stereotype, and if this isn't a problem at all. But from talking to people who work in higher ed, I don't think I'm just making this up.
287
I think I read somewhere that Stanford has been doing internal online video lectures for years. Not canned lectures, but you could skip class and watch that day's lecture later.
My current employer has something like that. I have immediate access at my computer to numerous recorded talks. I think this is neat (and it is definitely something that was not possible 50 years ago).
At Stanford do you just have access to the lectures in the courses you are taking or can you for example review the lectures given by a visiting professor 5 years ago?
112
... These days, more than half our country gets some kind of post-secondary education, and there's (technically) bipartisan consensus that absolutely everyone should. ...
A lot of people think this but it isn't a consensus.
299: I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve. Can you explain?
301: I think you're absolutely right. I think there's an emerging consensus among movement conservatives that, for many of the reasons Knecht outlined above, only elites should receive higher education.
I think there's an re-emerging consensus among movement conservatives that [...] only elites should receive higher education.
At Stanford do you just have access to the lectures in the courses you are taking or can you for example review the lectures given by a visiting professor 5 years ago?
I don't know - the story I remember reading was one of those "kids are watching lectures in their rooms!!" kinds of stories.
I'm not opposed in principle to outsourcing large lectures, but I don't see how it leads to tutorials. Say I have 150 people in a lecture that meets 3 times a week--- which is seriously lousy for teaching. So I find the perfect charismatic lectures available online, and assign them for homework. Then I have 150 minutes a week to have tutorials with 150 students. That's what--- groups of 10 for 10 minutes each once a week? The problem isn't the lecture, it's the 150 students.
303: yup, that's right. Cold-war-era paranoia coupled with the popularity of the GI Bill opened a window in the 50s and 60s when it seemed like everyone should have access to higher education. But now, if we want to compete with China, we'll need a huge class of uneducated workers who, after the unions are all gone, won't mind making $12/week.
Those are my views, by the way, not my sense of what movement conservatives think. You can tell because all of those uneducated workers are circumcised in my mind.
299: I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve. Can you explain?
Yeah, I wasn't clear, and I'm still sorting out the train of thought. But let me try this argument:
1) One of the problems faced by the academy is that it's facing an era of budget constraints.
2) This is partially an excuse for MBA types (mentioned in comment 1) and people who dislike the academy to put the screws to the enterprise. That should be resisted.
3) It does however reveal a real lack of flexibility within the academy.
4) Several people have argued strongly, on this thread, that it is wrong to argue that professors who believe in the value of traditional sized seminar classes are cause of this lack of flexibility.
5) I wonder (vaguely, and without a lot of evidence) if one of the challenges the academy faces is that there are a lot of incentives for people in mid-career to make a claim on resources and resist change. Those mid-career academics may change their pedagogy and classes (or may not) but they have every reason to resist institutional change.
6) The problem isn't necessarily tenure (which gives those mid-career academics a strong claim on resources) but also that the academy doesn't allow many opportunities to move to a different path mid-career (you can become a dean or an administrator, but that's relatively limited). Which means that people who are genuinely smart and talented but burned out on teaching and research have every incentive to do mediocre teaching and research and stay in their position.
7) If you could open up more tracks beyond, "stay in tenured position until you're old enough that you fall asleep in class" it might take some of pressure off of disputes between tenured faculty and adjuncts for resources.
8) That could increase the flexibility of the whole system to support people experimenting with different arrangements of teaching *and* make life easier for AWB/Cala/Blume, etc. . .
I really doubt that all 8 of those statements are true, but I'm curious if there's enough truth there to be worth chewing on.
Okay, that makes some sense, but I think the real issue is that the budget problems are largely (almost entirely) a byproduct of legislatures cutting funding to public universities. Increase funding = budget problem solved.
That said, there are a host of other problems, some of which have been identified in this thread and some of which you identify in your comment, facing higher education. I would include the existence of dead wood among those problems. But I see that issue as largely distinct from the issue of budget shortfalls. I mean, sure, if you got a bunch of senior people to retire, that would take some pressure off an institution's finances, but not enough (at least not enough in the UC) to come close to solving the budget problem. Not to mention, there's less dead wood out there than the caricatures of higher education suggest.
Having said that, as Halford (I think) noted above: universities might also die from all the self-inflicted wounds. But again, those wounds are distinct from the deeper problem of budget shortfalls -- at least in the case of California, which is the case I know best.
308
The problem isn't necessarily tenure (which gives those mid-career academics a strong claim on resources) but also that the academy doesn't allow many opportunities to move to a different path mid-career (you can become a dean or an administrator, but that's relatively limited). Which means that people who are genuinely smart and talented but burned out on teaching and research have every incentive to do mediocre teaching and research and stay in their position.
I think a lot of these people think a perk of tenure is to be able to coast for the rest of their lives without working hard. They don't want a way out. You would need to bring back mandatory retirement ages to get rid of them.
308: What I'd like to know, regarding these hypothetical burned-out, tenured, mid-career academics who teach mediocre classes and/or do mediocre research, is just how many of them are there? Seriously, I don't even have some kind of conventional wisdom best guess here. I know some academics, here and IRL, but it's a pretty tiny sample, and even then, I'm not sure if my evaluations of their skillz are correct.
If BOTMCAWTMCAODMR are really prevalent in the US academy, then clearly we have a problem. If, however, they are the equivalent of Cadillac-driving welfare queens with 12 babies, then I think we probably want to look elsewhere for solutions.
At some point, this all gets a bit Malthusian, both in terms of mythologies and reality. Obviously, doctorizing 3 (or 5, or 20) people for every 1 tenured professor that retires is not a good plan, unless we can massively increase educational funding, which seems like a poor way to bet right now.
Not to mention, there's less dead wood out there than the caricatures of higher education suggest.
My thought is that there are two types of dead wood. (a) People who are more or less useless and (b) people who would be more productive in a different job but can't see any way to get there from where they are.
Obviously both of those types exist in any large institution, but I just wonder if the higher education career track leads to higher-than-necessary instances of (b), and if there's any way to improve that.
308: They don't want a way out. You would need to bring back mandatory retirement ages to get rid of them.
So, in this respect, tenured professors are identical to about 95% of middle-management, low-level corporate executives, government bureaucrats of all descriptions, and small-business owners.
I mean, seriously, have you ever talked to a landlord? They're all whining little momsers who think they're doing their tenants a huge favor by taking their money and refusing to put any of it back into the property. They treat everyone they do business with like shit and then expect everyone to kiss their ass because their name's on a deed. The laziest, vilest, most tedious tenured professor is worth more than any 100 landlords.
313.2: I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so. The vast majority of senior scholars I know* are productive researchers and absolutely essential to the institution because of the service they do. And while they whine a hell of a lot, I think you'd have a real struggle on your hands if you tried to convince one of them to change jobs with, well, just about anyone. I, for example, would be willing to become a NBA point guard, a celebrated and generously compensated public intellectual, a Supreme Court justice or US senator, and I think that's about it. Other than those jobs, I'll stand pat, thanks.
* This is a small number of people, of course, most of whom have some of the best jobs in the world of academia.
317: they have to reproduce somehow.
Increase funding = budget problem solved.
Yes, but the road from here to there sure doesn't look too promising. If you think the UC is bad, you should see the Court system ["When would you like your urgent motion heard? Our next available date is next October."]
Further to 318: I am, however, seriously considering whether I want to leave my current job and find something at a SLAC. Training graduate students, which I love, has begun to feel borderline unethical to me, and I'm not sure I can imagine doing it for much longer in this job market.
320: I think, as I've said before, that we need to murder the boomers in their sleep. Yes, all of them. Some good ones will be mourned, to be sure, but not as many as you'd expect.
Dude if you go to a SLAC you'll not only be abandoning the grad students, but also public education undergrads, for a bunch of rich fucks. Don't do it.
313
Obviously both of those types exist in any large institution, but I just wonder if the higher education career track leads to higher-than-necessary instances of (b), and if there's any way to improve that.
The higher education career track is that you have to work extremely hard (and be a bit lucky) to get tenure but that once you get it (at an elite research institution) your reward is thereafter you basically only have to work as hard as you want to and many people given the choice find the virtues of hard work overstated.
Kidding aside, I really do believe the problem is generational and thus won't be solved for at least a couple more decades. Which is why death panels are such a great idea!
I mean, they might be very pleasant folks who happen to be rich. But I'm guessing mostly rich fucks. I guess you could teach at Berea College.
323: that's the problem in a nutshell. All I ever* wanted was a job in the UC. Unfortunately, I got one just as they decided to tear the place (and the profession more broadly) down. Oh well, I got mine, I guess.
* Since starting grad school, at least.
Most people who get tenure have to keep the nose to the grindstone if they want to make full professor and keep grants.
328: stop with the reality checks, Moby! James has a vision, and you shouldn't cloud it!
Today I was making fun of [ midwestern state ] for some reason and my advisor said "don't make too much fun of it; you might get a job there!" and in my head I said "haha, fuck no."
Federal judges are who can really tell the world to fuck off and still get paid.
330: If it's Nebraska and you do get a job there, I'm something of a connoisseur.
Moby has 63 different words for corn.
328
Most people who get tenure have to keep the nose to the grindstone if they want to make full professor and keep grants.
How much difference does this make financially? What fraction make full professor and/or keep their grants.
I am sure lots of tenured professors keep working hard out of habit if nothing else but I also expect a lot start coasting at some point.
Grants are everything where I am. Even a full professor can't lose them and keep working.
335: here too. On the other side of campus, I mean. In the humanities and social sciences, it's a very different game.
336: That's where we get work-study students from sometimes.
330: If it's Minnesota and you do get a job here, I'm something of a philistine.
335
Grants are everything where I am. Even a full professor can't lose them and keep working.
What does this mean? Does the university stop paying him?
340: Yes. This is in medical school. You'll be a professor who has tenure but only gets paid if you get grant funding (on your own or someone else's grants*). They got maybe 5 percent effort for teaching. Seeing patients works for income, if the professor is a doctor, but that isn't part of tenure.
*And that isn't a realistic prospect for someone senior who has had their own big grants.
341
... This is in medical school ...
Not that I know a lot about it but I don't think this is typical. I think a tenured math professor without grants is usually still getting a salary.
342: No, it's really pretty common in the sciences, especially the biological sciences.
Medicine is just biology with too many covariates.
Don't listen to them, James. Real tenured professors really do sit in actual ivory towers all the day long, eating Cheetos and playing WoW.
Plus, your balls shrink if you don't get grants.
Real tenured professors really do sit in actual ivory towers all the day long, eating Cheetos
I saw both of these things today.
Or maybe it's that your balls shrink if you take steroids and you get back acne if you don't get grants.
I saw both of these things today.
But no WoW?
305: You're forgetting to include prep time and office hours. That's another at least 5 or 6 hours per week. If you could automate exam writing and grading, that'd free up a bunch more time. Furthermore, if I understand right, in the Oxbridge system you have fewer tutorials than you have lectures.
352: I still don't get how that got to be a meme.
354: In 2005 there were memes, but there was not yet a memocracy.
209: It's one of the best things I've read on the internet in a very long time.
Real tenured professors really do sit in actual ivory towers all the day long, eating Cheetos and playing WoW commenting on blogs.
FTFY.
The ivory trade is deprecated. Some of us prefer to work in aluminum-clad(?) towers, thanks.
That isn't very towering, so far as towers go.
358: Steel. And its layout is apparently a "metaphor for California's geography".
In the original design, the plants on the bottom level were to be tomatoes and other local natives, like California bunchgrass. But the extreme heat from the reflective steel proved too much for some of them.
359: Well, the stakes are notoriously low in academia.
Moby just has high standards for academic towers.
This is an interesting development:
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Several members of the University of Virginia's governing board spent Wednesday quietly counting votes and plotting a move to reinstate Teresa Sullivan after the popular outgoing president informed them that she wants to remain if Rector Helen E. Dragas resigns, according to current and former board members briefed on the conversations.
Sullivan holds such broad support among professors that the Faculty Senate chairman held out hope that she could be reinstated following the resignation of one of her critics on the governing board. She has also indicated to board members that she would seek other changes were she to return, including communications with them.
"It's not over," law professor George M. Cohen, who leads the Faculty Senate, said in an interview. "Have you counted the votes?"
Sullivan's supporters on the board think they are close to the eight votes needed to reinstate her. They note that only eight votes are needed since Mark J. Kington, the vice rector who teamed with Dragas to orchestrate Sullivan's ouster, resigned Tuesday, leaving just 15 members on the board.
Right, I forgot--the local Height of Ignorance.
363: The interim guy is quoted as saying that he did not condone or agree with the removal, He did take the role, but apparently refused to be considered for the permanent position when approached by the Dragas and Kington last week.
But the extreme heat from the reflective steel proved too much for some of them.
A metaphor! Also, if Sullivan is reinstated, that will: a) be wonderful; b) send a useful message to the forces of darkness that the forces of light aren't totally cowed (except maybe at ag schools like UC Davis); c) probably signal the beginning of a very, very ugly period for Mr. Jefferson's University.
365: the interim guy comes off looking like a complete tool. If you didn't condone Sullivan's ouster, why take the gig? Yes, I know, I know: for the good of the institution. Spare me, climber.
I don't think soft-money faculty positions really are that common outside of medicine, actually. People without grants won't get summer salary, but they'll still get paid. Most professors are expected to teach, after all.
367: Yes, a profile in aspirational courage gone wrong, I guess he was demonstrating his use of "knowledge-based sources of competitive advantage". But leaving off the personal judgmentalism for a moment*, his signalling that may be an indication that re-instatement might happen. But agree that the bed is most likely well and truly shat, no matter what.
*I know, what's the fun in that.
This seems to be much bigger news than the Lariviere firing at Oregon last year. Is this just because Virginia is better known and on the east coast, or is there something especially worse about the Virginia situation?
Is this just because Virginia is better known and on the east coast, or is there something especially worse about the Virginia situation?
With this one everyone gets to make their points via appropriate quotes from Thomas Jefferson, so there's that.
My understanding was that Lariviere was pushed out in a power play by the legislature, which decided that he was too good at his job (securing money for the university in a state that HATES to fund education). In other words, it was a pretty traditional power play. Also, Phil Knight backed Lariviere and was, if memory serves, outraged that he was being ousted. In this case, a small group of very, very rich people -- the opposite of the ostensible populists in Oregon -- has pushed out Sullivan. The coup is being led by Phil Knight, in other words, which I think is where some of the outrage is coming from. That and UVA is a much better school than Oregon, which, yes, is in the wrong time-zone to make news.
"if you didn't get certain social and intellectual capital from your family and friends, and a LOT of people don't/can't, it's very expensive to acquire as a young adult."
Thanks, Witt. A mildly depressed thanks, as I was hoping that the employability-certifying part of college could be dispensed with, saving lots of people lots of money (though leaving current academics on the hook as the teaching jobs dry up, ouch).
Colleges do provide social and intellectual capital? Skills? Manners? Such as? I ask as one who TAs, and would like to be able to point out which parts of the class are likely to be work-useful.
363: Someone has to say `learn to count' pretty fucking soon. God I hope they can get the votes; that would be one of the most beautiful bits of inch by inch academic politics I have seen.
The laziest, vilest, most tedious tenured professor is worth more than any 100 landlords.
I wonder what Natilo thinks of a certain Cal professor (who is certainly not lazy, at any rate).*
* no affirmation of any other descriptions of the professor in question is implied by the absence of their denial.
With this one everyone gets to make their points via appropriate quotes from Thomas Jefferson, so there's that.
Particularly annoying: the LGM types and others going "Jefferson would not have approved!" Yeah, right. Jefferson would never have compromised on his firmly-held principles for financial reasons. Better moral exemplars pls.
321: You've hinted at that before - whether intentionally or not - and I can see the appeal of moving to a SLAC, but it would be a huge loss for the UC if you left.
376. Things You Cannot Reasonably Ask of Americans Unless You Want a Bar Fight, #24:
"Question the dogma that Jefferson was the pre-eminent intellectual among the younger generation of founding honchos."
Better moral exemplars pls.
The Founding Fathers are all fairly problematic as moral exemplars in various ways, which makes the American tendency to idolize them (especially as a vague collective) exceptionally annoying. Even given that standard Jefferson is particularly bad, though.
I don't really get 378, though. Who would you nominate instead? Jefferson's a pretty terrible role model in all sorts of ways, but he was undeniably a very smart guy.
378: I'm sure he was a bright guy, but one of the three or four things that everyone knows about Jefferson is that when he was given the choice between betraying his principles and suffering a personal financial loss, he voted with his wallet. Which makes him a bad moral exemplar in general, but in particular in this case, where the whole topic of contention is a university's decision to apparently abandon principles it shared with its founder - the value of studying the Classics - for financial reasons.
"I don't really get 378, though. Who would you nominate instead?"
Madison, obviously. Gouverneur Morris was a much bigger deal at the time than subsequently. Among the anti-Federalists, I've always been partial to Col. George Mason, author of the original VA Bill of Rights.
Yes, I would nominate Madison. Jefferson was a big ideas man in a situation which gave unparalleled scope to big ideas people, but Madison strikes me as both more astute and more thoughtful in terms of considering practical implications.
Jefferson's much vaunted polymathy is all very well, but it would have been unremarkable in a European of his class at that date - reincarnated, I doubt if he'd appear all that outstanding on this site for instance.
As an intellectual, my second choice would be Benjamin Rush.
but one of the three or four things that everyone knows about Jefferson is that when he was given the choice between betraying his principles and suffering a personal financial loss, he voted with his wallet.
I've got some bad news about what everybody knows.
My favorite founding father is either Edgar Allen Poe or Bono.
Are we talking about how Jefferson kept with slavery despite his work for American independence or the time he bet against Lewis and Clark getting to the Missouri alive.
It'd've been more fun to hang with Marshall. And Burr.
Franklin was great, except for cheating on his wife, and maybe being racist against Norwegians.
We watched Margin Call last night, btw. They were selling what they thought were crappy overvalued assets to friends at other outfits, clients, 'your own mother if she's buying,' and expected to be thought unprincipled. There's a hint that the basis of the overvaluation was an equation for which they had some responsibility, although that was far from clear.
The Demi Moore character could have been fleshed out way better. Obviously smart enough to understand stuff when presented, and obviously a somewhat unprincipled climber. But not enough narrative, really, on either.
Was Franklin racist against Norwegians? Kudos to the guy for having heard of them at that date. But not perhaps one of the younger generation?
That little Jennings book on Franklin is great fun.
the time he bet against Lewis and Clark getting to the Missouri alive.
That, I didn't know. Was there some kind of formal Exploration Futures market in operation on Wall Street? ("Long Ross! Short Franklin! Long on a securitised basket of earnest Scottish Evangelicals in West Africa, and hedge the tail risk with a position in the equity tranche of the Enderby Brothers!")
Madison strikes me as both more astute and more thoughtful in terms of considering practical implications.
Apart from the implications of the whole "Let's declare war on Britain and invade Canada! What could go wrong?" thing.
Was Franklin racist against Norwegians?
Sure he was. Just look at his sayings.
"A penny saved is a penny available to fund the buring of Oslo."
"Fish and visitors from Norway stink after three days."
"We must hang all Norwegians together."
384, 386: the slave thing. He could have freed his hundreds of slaves, but he liked being very rich too much to do so. (Also, note the Kosciusko inheritance. Not a man to be trusted, clearly.)
Here "Homicide: life on the street" city there have been endless war of 1812 celebrations during the last few weeks.
I wonder what percentage of the attendees have any idea what a hare-brained fiasco the whole thing was.
395
the slave thing. He could have freed his hundreds of slaves, but he liked being very rich too much to do so. ...
It is my understanding that Jefferson was not in actual fact very rich although he liked spending money as if he was. As a result his slaves were mortgaged which meant he could not for example free them in his will like Washington.
399 gets you to the same place as 395, but by a slightly more circuitous route.
399: He got great odds betting against Lewis and Clark, but obviously that didn't finish in the money.
395: Yes, this bit from an 1805 letter puts him more in line with the sentiments of the interim UVa president. "[weary sigh] What is there that one man could do?"
I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject. Should an occasion ever occur in which I can interpose with decisive effect, I shall certainly know and do my duty with promptitude and zeal. But in the meantime it would only be disarming myself of influence to be taking small means.
The people on NPR are lamenting the death of the newspaper with the rise of the internet, and how this is a tragedy for democracy.
From my perspective it seems obvious that the death of the newspaper is self inflicted, and comes largely from the fact that they weren't doing their job in a democracy.
I am not allowed to draw analogies here.
Gallatin was presumably holding the other end of the bet. What would he have said?
403: Newspapers are dying because there's no more Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes.
395 is an interesting detail that I did not know about, quite telling.
Vaguely related question:
What kind of technology do you working academics use to read digital text like UP books and PDFs and whatnot? Are your standard ereaders even useful at all for academic work?
I remember someone saying that iPads were teh awesome for academic reading. Tweety, maybe?
Me, the only e-reading I do is genre fiction on my phone.
Crooked Timber seems to support the iPad theory. Okay!
I have a Kindle, but I've never used it for work. I just use the computer screen or I print it.
Sorry, Franklin levels the the charge of swarthiness against the Swedes, Spanish, Italians, French Russians, and non-Saxon Germans: "And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion ; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth."
408: I have been struggling with this issue for a long time.
Most of the electronic texts that I deal with are in .pdf form, to the extent that if for some reason I get an etext in some e-reader form, I do everything I can to switch it to .pdf.
Mostly, when I read .pdfs, I just read them on a laptop using acrobat reader. But I'm not at all satisfied with the way I can annotate it. Honestly, I would like to be able to annotate ebooks using the exact same system I have developed for writing in paper books, which I guess I could do if I had a tablet computer. But I'm not sure I could do that on a .pdf file, and I'd like to preserve all that portability.
410: Maybe I should get an iPad. I've been resisting buying expensive, fancy electronic toys.
Also, 403 seems about right to me.
I read many papers on an iphone. I basically keep track with delicious and the URLs; in fact I don't do much annotating, rather keeping track of what works or doesn't for other people. Useful exchange of information for me is data or computer programs rather than paragraphs describing ideas, so this minimal infrastructure is OK. ipad would be better, but my kid is looking at maps basically always. I haven't bought my own yet.
I've been resisting buying expensive, fancy electronic toys tools.
414: I've been thinking of starting a business in which if somebody sends me $10, I'll send them an email threatening to blow up the moon if they don't buy an iPad.
I think the real issue is whether annotations are stored as part of the document or externally. Part of the document is poorly supported both technically and causes storage problems- which drive, home or work? and how to find and extract a paragraph of ideas for sharing? So I think links to primary docs and internet storage of notes.
408-410: I love Papers on the iPad, yeah.
405 -- 'War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.' In a Genevese accent, of course.
412: Wow, Franklin goes for some odd imagery in that piece (while arguing to keep America "the lovely white and red").
And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people?
412: "in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion "
The Russians? The Swedes? Good grief.
421: This statement brought to you by Lumberjacks for a High-Albedo America.
421: Jesus. What if the Martians are swarthy??
Also I LIKE woods.
420: 'And you've got to pay for the fucker as well.'
For all the craziness of that paragraph, it ends on a reasonable note, and Franklin was on eventually on the right side of slavery, becoming president of an abolitionist society.
I'll admit that I have some black-haired Swedish relatives who can tan.
Swedish armies in the thirty years' war did not raise their country's reputation, which was just over 100 years before Franklin wrote. There was a destructive war between Sweden and Russia early in the 1700s, no idea what Sweden was like after that, but that's two major failed military expeditions in 100 years.
I do not think that the contemporary image of Scandinavians obtained then, at all.
What if the Martians are swarthy??
They would obviously learn about earth by starting blogs consisting of half-baked questions leading to meandering conversations.
429: well, that might explain why Franklin didn't like them but it wouldn't explain why he believed them to be Guilty of Swarth.
Brookhiser reviewing Jennings on Franklin mentions Franklin's beef with Germans: He was scathing about the Germans. "Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens?" A special reason for Franklin's ire against the Germans was that they had their own printers.
A special reason for Franklin's ire against the Germans was that they had their own printers.
Whereas he had to stand in line to use the MFD at the end of the corridor, like everybody else.
432: Per beamish's link that looks to be from the paragraph immediately preceding the 'What will the planetary neighbors think?' one.
What kind of technology do you working academics use to read digital text like UP books and PDFs and whatnot? Are your standard ereaders even useful at all for academic work?
A Nook (the Barnes and Noble e-reader) will read pdfs no problem, however the format is not great (the screen is too small so pages and lines can spill over many screens, and diagrams and charts are iffy). Still, you can at least get the gist of a pdf on a Nook, even if you wouldn't want it to be your only resource for reading them. Amazon Kindle has a closed format and will not read pdfs, I don't know if there is translation software available.
A tablet with internet access will always handle pdfs I think.
433 wins whatever it is we're doing.
375: I wonder what Natilo thinks
Actually, I was remembering last night that the worst landlord I've ever dealt with was also a professor.
What if the Martians are swarthy??
Well, then they wouldn't have been superior beings, see 421.
Anyway, Mars, being further from the sun, is less likely to engender swarthification in its denizens.
Martians are ruddy. Everyone knows that.
Someone cleverer than I can pull something together with a swarthy Moor to unite a number of subthreads.
Mars, being further from the sun, is less likely to engender swarthification in its denizens.
Martians come in a range of colours.
I am not allowed to draw analogies here.
But helpy-chalk, we can link!
Kindle will convert text-based PDFs to their internal format (not necessarily complicated, image-based PDFs), and then you can fiddle with the typeface. I haven't done anything elaborate with them, but I really like reading on a small hand-held device, and I really like the E-Ink (which I guess they are going to stop making soon because color). I can leave it on the sofa or bed and read it at a glance without my glasses (or with them, I'm going to need bifocals soon, I think).
I bought the now likely discontinued Kindle DX for reading PDFs, which does it's job remarkably well. Especially if you read outdoors a lot (woot! freelancing at the coffee house).
441: "The traditional Martian lifespan of 1,000 is based on the customary pilgrimage down the River Iss, which is taken by virtually all Martians by that age, or those who feel tired of their long lives and expect to find a paradise at the end of their journey. None return from this pilgrimage, because it leads to almost certain death at the hands of ferocious creatures".
Martian Social Security is expected to remain solvent indefinitely.
Finally caught up with the thread. This--
his slaves were mortgaged which meant he could not for example free them in his will like Washington.
Thank you all for your answers to my ereader questions. It was for a question at my work and is now entirely moot, as so often happens at my work.
448: especially since, like much Shearer content, it is not true - his friend Kosciusko had left Jefferson a great deal of money in his will with the expressed desire that Jefferson should use it to free slaves (including Jefferson's own) and Jefferson didn't do so.
Freeing slaves in your will always struck me as a really morally weak thing to do - doing the right thing only when it won't cost you anything to do so. A distant ancestor of mine married into a sugar plantation in Jamaica and thus became the owner of 200 slaves (or "a leading investor in human resources" as we like to say nowadays) whom he freed, not in his will but while still alive. I've occasionally wondered whether this explains the surprising number of Jamaicans who share my last name (freed slaves would often take the surname of the man who freed them, not generally having one of their own).
Freeing slaves in your will always struck me as a really morally weak thing to do - doing the right thing only when it won't cost you anything to do so.
I agree, and Washington's doing so doesn't really earn him as much moral credit as people often imply. Still beats the hell out of not freeing them at all, though.
Now I'm guessing ajay's surname is either "Bolt" or "Levy".
Still beats the hell out of not freeing them at all, though.
Or running out and enslaving more people.
450: well, this is true. But at least someone who doesn't free them at all has the courage of his convictions.
"Ajay Bolt" has a rather good ring to it. A kind of inferior Bollywood ripoff of John Shaft.
"He's a complicated man
And no one understands him
But his dear mother whom he loves very much".
It's not clear to me that Madison comes across much better than Jefferson when you start to dig into post-founding. People talk about federalists vs. republicans but on some level it's more like hypocrites vs. wannabe aristocrats.
Despite being patriotic and parochial in the manner of most American lawyers, I've pretty much been convinced that the American revolution was a bad idea. I still don't really like Canada, though.
How do you feel about the War of 1812?
I don't think anyone feels good about the War of 1812. Maybe Stephen Harper.
I think the Canadians are into the War of 1812, aren't they? It kind of secured their independence -- thus creating the greatest disaster in world history. OK that might be an exaggeration.
Have I ever talked here about my college internship with the branch of the US State Department that deals with fish? Those guys really genuinely do hate Canada -- there's been a low level fish war with the Canadians basically since 1783. I mean people had desk ornaments with the circle with the line through it over a Canadian flag.
The 200th anniversary of the beginning of the war was 3 days ago.
Canadians are *really, really, really* into the War of 1812.
As long as it isn't Bryan Adams again.
They weren't really into him. It's just that they were forced by law to listen to his music.
(I have CA's brother half-convinced that O was named after "our great hero" Oliver Hazard Perry*. I plan to keep this up as long as possible.)
*I told someone else** recently he was named for Oliver Heavyside.
**Not anyone I know or anything.
Obligatory link to this, which is pretty great.
That was pretty great.
The most pointless front in the War of 1812.
466: Wow, had never heard of that, and bonus Herman Melville tie-in when he comes along 30 years later to the same place (setting for Typee).
No love for Oliver "Cynic's Calendar" Herford, Oudemia?
Freeing slaves in your will always struck me as a really morally weak thing to do - doing the right thing only when it won't cost you anything to do so.
considering that they were a huge capital asset and people want to provide for their kids it does seem to have some significance though. Kind of like leaving a lot of your money to charity when you die.
464: I'm sure there's still time to get tickets to the coming Crosby, Stills & Nash benefit concert in Erie which has some sort of tie-in to our man Oliver.
470: Not even The Young Heroes of Our Navy could get me to a CSN concert. (I have been to a Taco Bell in Erie. It's no Clarion!)
462: I just read that. Quite a thing: Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed president of Purdue. Something is wrong, I believe.
471: I suspected you would not be impressed.
I've spent more time than might be considered optimal in Erie. Mostly standing on the sidelines of soccer fields (or doing the same not that far away in Edinboro). Flattest part of western Pa, so you can have the big multi-field complexes.
What is going on at UVa?
Oh yea. Bob McDonnell being asked to step in, says he refuses to meddle in the Board of Visitors matters to come to the add of UVa's first female President.
Yet, Bob McDonnell pressured the Board of Health members during their meeting to attempt to shut women's health clinics down.
Seems to be a common thread...now what is it?
Why would you go to Clarion when you could go to Brookville?
472 - I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be upset that a politician became president of a university. Unlike firing a new president because [insert still undetermined reason that sounds better than "wouldn't sell the university name to Goldman Sachs" or "refused to shut down the German department"], this isn't a new development. Even beyond Ike, I can think of two current reasonably prominent examples (Robert Gates, who was at Texas A&M between running the CIA and running the DoD; Dan Boren, the former governor of Oklahoma, who is now president of the University of Oklahoma), and I seem to recall that one of the Mass. congressmen was angling after a university presidency in order to be prised out of office.
In fact, running a university seems like a good match for a post-political career, since more than half of what you're doing is slavering after donations. Is the complaint just that Daniels is a jerk who cut Purdue's funding? And a Republican? I've read nothing but good things about Western Governors University, which I mentioned upthread, and I think Daniels was pretty heavily involved with WGU's expansion to Indiana.
You could imagine a president/provost division of labor where having a career politician as president would make sense. After all fundraising and lobbying are what politicians do best. Nonetheless it seems like a terrible precedent. University administrators should have prior significant university experience. We're not talking about Larry Summers or Robert Reich here, or even Obama.
You could imagine that it could play out well, if Daniels is cynical enough that now that he works for the university he actually takes the side of the university inside republican state politics. It's not worth the risk, you should assume that someone who was against you in office will continue being against you, but maybe he can be bought off and this was the price.
Or maybe he'll just make sure that the other universities get screwed over worse than Purdue...
The situation also has the appearance of corruption (and perhaps actual corruption) because he appointed the board making the decision.
476: Is the complaint just that Daniels is a jerk who cut Purdue's funding? And a Republican?
Possibly, so far, at this point. I don't know enough about Daniels' record on state-funded education as yet. That he's among the half-dozen or so Republican governors who've been gung-ho to strip public institutions in the interest of pumping up the private sector is worry enough.
From the link Apo provides in 462, Daniels is way less qualified than the previous president, anyway. Would the idea be that she may have had all those credentials, but she sucked at slavering after donations? I don't know.
478: Something very like this is the arrangement at Oxbridge. The chancellor is a very well connected dignitary that mostly schmoozes and fund-raises but doesn't make governing decisions. The vice chancellor actually runs the place.
Gates has a Ph.D. and worked at universities in various capacities, including a several year stint as an interim dean. Not the strongest academic resume, but clearly nontrivial university experience. He's really not comparable to Daniels.
Yeah 466 is awesome and got me stuck in wikipedia for half an hour.
My impression was that Chancellor was an honorary position, rather than a fundraising and lobbying position. Surely it's unseemly for the Prince consort to engage in fund raising and lobbying? I thought vice chancellor was completely equivalent to president here.
485: Yes, the job is less fundraising and lobbying and more sitting there being dignified; they certainly don't grub around for alumni donations. But they do do a fair bit of advocacy on the university's behalf, I believe.
I can't believe 466 wasn't used as the basis for the plot of a Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin novel. Maybe it was, the plots all get confused in my head.
Wasn't President Eisenhower, not particularly well-known for his academic background, president of Columbia U. right after the war?
Indeed, Eisenhower was president of Columbia. That's a good parallel. Also seems to have been a bad idea.
And let's not forget the storied reign of Bob Kerrey at the New School.
That's why you never hear of anybody going to Columbia these days.
I was just about to post 490. Also a mistake.
Billy Bulger's tenure at UMass was not entirely without controversy.
Clicking through links in 466 reveals why Valparaiso, Indiana is so named, something I always vaguely meant to look up some day.
My alma mater has been ruled for nearly all of its relatively short history by conservative, fundraising hacks, and it's justifiably known far and wide as a spectacularly shitty university.
481: I love this from the quick summary in the right hand column in Wikipedia: Result: United States victory, Tai Pis and Happahs defeated, Madisonville abandoned in May 1814.
USA! USA!
I can't believe 466 wasn't used as the basis for the plot of a Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin novel.
The Far Side of the World uses the set up, but not the events.
It's "Heaviside", Oudemia, and you could pick a worse namesake!
The portrait of Eisenhower in Butler Library at Columbia is Babylonian in scale. Ike's famous smile, however mild, very distracting at that size.
AWB-
Thank Allah for teachers like you.
That said I think I know where administrators may be coming from.
The tallest stalk of grain is the one that gets cut.
1. Charisma and enthusiasm are rare. Which means that you make the normal teachers look bad, and the administration looks bad for hiring them.
2. The effects of charisma, and enthusiasm are somewhat zero sum. That is if impossibly all teachers had your abilities then students wouldn't put forth the effort you get in any of their classes.
3. Charisma and enthusiasm tend not to last. People can't generally keep up the same high level for decades in the same job.
4. If people worked hard in every class they'd have to take fewer classes.
5. As has been said before they want you to put that energy into publishing.
Don't encourage her, man. I need a B- or I'll get cut from the lax squad. Lax to the max, bro!
Like Oliver Reed!
There's something one doesn't read every day.
469: George Washington didn't have kids. Interesting alternative history: If he had had a higher sperm count (Martha was a young widow with kids when they married, so) would he have freed his slaves? would he have accepted the position of King? Would he have become President, but arranged for his son to succeed him?
The pedia thing says Heaviside was a borderline shut-in who never left home.
Genius, sure, but...
Grudge match: Heaviside vs. Henry Darger. Falls count anywhere. Who ya got?
Disclaimer: Flippanter Turf Accounting does not offer wagering on hypothetical combat. However, we are still taking prop bets in the Internet-vs.-that-show-no-one-likes contest.
If he had had a higher sperm count (Martha was a young widow with kids when they married, so) would he have freed his slaves?
Who knows? He could have willed them to Martha's kids.
would he have accepted the position of King? Would he have become President, but arranged for his son to succeed him?
The fact that he stood down after two terms in real life suggests otherwise.
I've always liked Canada. Didn't stop me from whistling, while raising the Canadian flag every morning for a hotel I worked in, this fine old tune.
The fact that he stood down after two terms in real life suggests otherwise.
Yeah, although as noted above I think Washington gets too much credit for posthumously freeing his slaves, I do think he deserves all the credit he gets and then some for voluntarily giving up power and setting an important precedent. That said, part of the backstory there that generally gets glossed over in the popular accounts is that both he and his administration lost a lot of their popularity during his second term. I think he still would have won a third one against any plausible opponents, though.
If only George Washington hadn't gotten the mumps, we would know the answer!
I know you're not supposed to read newspaper comments, but a commenter on one of the Daniels stories noted that Daniels apparently considers becoming president of a public university a return to private life after a career in public service. Which seems to sum up the current problems with public higher education administration.
I'm not saying appointing politicians to run universities is a great idea idea; I'm just saying it seems like a common thing to happen, particularly in the south.
In addition to Ike, some thinking and googling delivers Terry Sanford (governor of North Carolina; president of Duke); Roy Blunt (governor of Missouri; president of Southwest Baptist University); David Boren (governor of Oklahoma; president of OU); Kenneth Starr (Republican appartchnik; president of Baylor); and John Delaney (mayor of Jacksonvile; president of the University of North Florida).
So, I mean, Mitch Daniels may destroy Purdue, but higher education has muddled through this particular scenario so far. Appointing random dudes with no particular experience to run your university and shut down your university press strikes me as a much more novel problem than appointing well-connected hacks from outside academia but with large Rolodexes. Seriously, Missou?
Did we already note NMM to Akbar and Jeff?
512: I tend to agree with you. I think the key difference is whether the politician considers running a university to be public service in the interest of a broad public or an opportunity to slice off parts of the university that can be tied more closely to private interests.
From the link in 512:
In one interview, Wolfe compared the situation to an independent store going bankrupt and a Walmart moving in. The same products are sold, he explained, but Walmart has a better business model.
The actual issue aside, that comparison doesn't even come close to making sense. What is WalMart supposed to represent?
The best that has ever been bought and sold.
A proof exists that Walmart has the better business model, but their margins are too thin to sustain it.
Also:
President Wolfe's spokesperson, Jennifer Hollingshead, said that comparing the press's subsidy to the football coach's salary makes no sense.
It's like "comparing apples and bowling balls," she said.
Yes, exactly. For example, bowling balls are much larger than apples.
Katha Pollitt's friend (whom she is quoting in these excerpts) has a good response to that one:
Of course, you can compare any two things--a university press and Walmart, for instance. And apples, we know, are natural, various, and the source of humanity's knowledge, while bowling balls are uniform, unyielding and used to knock things over.
Zing!
The issue isn't that Mitch Daniels is a politician. It's that Mitch Daniels is Mitch Daniels.
513 -- I hadn't noticed that. Sad, although Life in Hell had been terminally ill since, I dunno, about 1990.
464 *I told someone else** recently he was named for Oliver Heavyside.
Because it's true, right? Please tell me it's true! That would be the best!
Some math teacher in my formative years got me convinced it's pronounced like "heave aside" but everyone says "heavy side". As does Wikipedia. Oh well.
Wikipedia makes getting biographical oddities so great. Who knew that the dude who cast Maxwell's equations into the form we love ended his life deranged in nail polish with granite furniture?
Because Amazon is being annoying about letting me Search Inside it, I can't find the part of Wandering Significance where Mark Wilson mentions Heaviside's apparent custom, late in life, of furnishing his home with large stones. That book—or comment on it—is also the only place I've seen the excellent remark "logic is eternal, so it can wait" attributed to Heaviside (said to be about his unusual and at the time untheorized mathematical procedures).
Some math teacher in my formative years got me convinced it's pronounced like "heave aside" but everyone says "heavy side". As does Wikipedia. Oh well.
Huh, I'd been pronouncing it "heviside".
523: And like everywhere on the internet, someone had to bring up quaternions for no good reason.
1052: haha, I know. Are octonions even used for anything?
512: but higher education has muddled through this particular scenario so far
I'm not seeing how this counts as reason enough to figure it's fine. No, it's not novel. Yes, it's objectionable in our current political climate.
Why, just look at the bang-up job Daniels did as Bush's budget director. Bodes well!
His record as Governor worries me more. From the wikipedia entry on Daniels:
Daniels' campaign platform centered around cutting the State budget and privatizing public agencies
Basically, I don't think we should be normalizing this behavior.
Pardon me, but holy fucking fuck (pardon, pardon), I didn't realize it was this bad. The wikipedia article continues:
On his first day in office, Daniels created Indiana's first Office of Management and Budget to look for inefficiencies and cost savings throughout state government. The same day, he decertified all government employee unions by executive order, removing the requirement that state employees pay union dues by rescinding a mandate created by Governor Evan Bayh in a 1989 executive order. Dues-paying union membership subsequently dropped 90% among state employees.
449
especially since, like much Shearer content, it is not true - his friend Kosciusko had left Jefferson a great deal of money in his will with the expressed desire that Jefferson should use it to free slaves (including Jefferson's own) and Jefferson didn't do so.
The wikipedia article on Jefferson says:
Jefferson in his will of 1826 also freed three older male slaves who had served him for decades; all were related to Hemings. Jefferson had incurred great debt because of the low price of tobacco, his patterns of spending, and family problems, which he did not pay off before his death. The remainder of his 130 slaves were sold after his death to settle the debts of the estate.[182]
|| Holy moly. Emily Yoffe has written an article about the three times she was molested in her childhood -- the last, at 18, by anti-war activist and social-justicey progressive hero Fr. Robert Drinan.
So can any Brits supplement the above speculation with some comment on whether the Open University, pedagogically speaking, has accomplished things that more traditional community and correspondence colleges don't?
I'd rather not rush to the scene in order to gawk.
538: so don't, but try and let go of the preening.
Parsi, I'm surprised that you're surprised to find gambling at the casino. It's bad faith in every way, all the way down.
Our local U drama is completely different. Is getting rid of several VPs and deans, and the general counsel, enough to save the president? We're about to find out. Does EM have a view she can put on the internet?
I mean, Drinan was still an extremely good man, by the standards of doing good works in the world. Still, there is none righteous, no, not one.
538: are you talking about the Yoffe piece? Or are you clutching your pearls about something else?
539 also works to Mitch Daniels
542: I was talking about the Yoffe piece. I don't engage in pearl clutching, as far as I know.
My family did view Fr. Drinan as a very good man back in the day, but that was family lore, and I have no idea whether it was accurate in any way. I was told that.
533: OK, Shearer, you have just betrayed yourself as being deliberately deceptive.
Because in exactly the same source that you cite, it says: "On a visit to America in 1798, Kościuszko collected his back pay and entrusted it to his friend Thomas Jefferson in his will, directing him to spend the American money on freeing and educating black slaves, including Jefferson's. Kościuszko died in 1817, but Jefferson never carried out the terms of his will, nor did a friend to whom he transferred the executorship."
Be ashamed.
This just in.
Anything the Yanks can do, the Brits can apparently do too.
Fun news from Neil the Ethical Warewolf: The public statement by Helen Dragas on Sullivan's firing does not have Dragas's name in the document author field. It has the name of a VP of a public relations firm that has previously done work for big tobacco and the Church of Scientology.
My fingers are crossed that Dragas is toast (or at least won't be reappointed when her term expires on July 1) and that Sullivan will be reinstated when the BoV meets on Tuesday. Lots of people are taking the news that the BoV scheduled a meeting to mean they have the at least eight votes needed to undo the Dragas fracas, but I'm pessimistic enough not to take it for granted.
Also: there's a big rally happening on the Lawn on Sunday; I'm interested to see how many people turn out. The FB event shows 600+ confirmed, but FB RSVP numbers are laughably unreliable.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand the board just voted unanimously to reinstate Sullivan. No word on Dragas yet.
