Tag Archives: college

“Where does the hate for colleges come from?”

February 23, 2018 By in Academia, business Tags: , , 2 Comments

In an online discussion someone asked where the “overwhelming hate” for colleges comes from. I don’t think (many) people hate college or colleges, but many are baffled and unhappy about the higher-education situation—for good reason. I’m immersed in these issues, so to me the answers are obvious, but it’s useful to recall that some points “every knows” in one sub-culture are totally unknown in the wider culture. Plus, there may seem to be more hate towards colleges online because people online are systematically filtered for a set of opinions pretty far outside the mainstream; I suspect most normal people retain a pretty high and pretty positive view of college, colleges, and universities, while those who are familiar with the absurdity that is the modern student loan system and some other common challenges may be less positive. I can enumerate some culprits behind unhappiness with college as it’s presently constituted, including:

1. College costs have been outstripping inflation and wage growth for decades. This is well-known and obvious.

2. It’s not clear that most colleges are actually teaching much most of the time, per the book Academically Adrift—which also matches my own anecdotal teaching experience.

3. Related to #2, it seems that most colleges have evolved non-educational tracks for those who want them. Students who enter those tracks without realizing what they’re doing may regret their choices later, especially when they have to pay off student loans with low-value degrees that do little to build human capital.

4. See Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education, which argues that most of the education system is about signaling, not human capital formation. If that’s true, we ought to work harder to find other ways to signal—among other things we ought to do differently.

5. It’s not clear where the money for college is going. It’s not going to instructors or instruction. So where is it disappearing into? Many blame administrators, sports, Title IX, bureaucracy, Baumol’s Cost Disease, etc., but I’m not sure what the real answer is.

6. The logical arguments are mostly in books, not online.

Some degrees still make a lot of sense: wages for many kinds of engineers and computer scientists remain high, as do wages for economics majors. The overall college premium is still high, but most of those average college premiums fail to account for major.

Note that the WSJ article, “U.S. Colleges Are Separating Into Winners and Losers: Schools that struggle to prepare students for success losing ground; ‘The shake-out is coming'” observes, “the pay advantage for college graduates over high-school graduates declined” in the past few years. That may be because the signaling value of a degree isn’t as strong as it is when it’s scarce. That may in turn be driving some to get graduate degrees—or to signal in alternative ways, like projects or online portfolios. If education is really a big IQ, conformity, and conscientiousness test, as Caplan argues, then it may be that more people who score low in those traits are still now managing to get degrees, lowering the overall and total premium.

I think the student-loan burden is underrated, too, especially considering the psychology of many undergrads and their families. When I was an undergrad, student loans felt like something to worry about… later. You, dear reader, can point out that this is irrational and stupid, and while you are correct, that mindset also seems to be very common. Apocalyptic language like, “I have seen an entire generation destroyed by student loans” is overwrought but also has some truth. Schools, in the meantime, are mostly party to the problem and have done almost nothing to substantially restrain costs (from the perspective of students). I’ve wondered out loud, “Why hasn’t someone tried to build or fund a very low-cost, very high-quality college?“, and so far I’ve not seen any really good answers.

I’m a very small, unimportant part of the college system, and I’m not seeing a huge amount of the massive amount of money spent on higher-ed come my way. If I had a good I had a good, actionable idea to fix the cost problem from the student and adjunct perspectives, I’d go attempt to implement it—but I don’t. If I saw a company that I thought could really reduce the cost of college, I’d try to go work for it.

At the same time, many if not most students contribute to the challenges by being almost totally uninterested in labor market signals or genuine learning; Caplan covers this as well. Again, yes, I’m sure that you, the person about to leave a well-thought-out comment about how you are/were different, are correct, but you are also a minority.

This comment is also useful, about why academic culture is messed up and incoherent from the grad student and young professor perspective. An incoherent, destructive culture doesn’t matter that much if prices are low. When prices are high, they matter a lot. The tenure system has a bunch of other pernicious problems and outcomes, but this piece is long enough, so we’ll table them.

Violence and the sacred on campus

June 27, 2017 By in Links, Philosophy Tags: , 3 Comments

Read Dan Wang’s “Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror,” before you read this essay, because I’m going to agree slightly and disagree slightly with it. Wang writes:

Where should we expect Girard’s predictions for mimetic crises to run most rampant? At places where values are confused and people are much the same. To me, that description best fits one place in particular: the American college.

I agree that American colleges are homogeneous and that homogeneity can create mimetic conflict, but I also think that kind of mimetic conflict is limited to a relatively small group and, in a political sense, they’re mostly activists (I argue something very similar in “Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it’s that last five percent,” which is based on my experience teaching college students). Ninety-five percent of college students are not that susceptible to mimetic contagion for many reasons, an important one being that, most have no idea what’s going on (and I include myself when I was a college student and arguably now). Most college students at most colleges are more interested in self development, partying, getting a job, and getting laid than they are in mimetic competition for status-oriented pursuits.

Still, I suspect that, the richer the students and the society, the more prone we are to mimetic conflict. In the absence of real problems, humans tend to invent ones, including status driven ones. “Inventing problems where none [or only status-driven ones] exist” is one of the more charitable readings of Trump as president: we’re so rich that we feel we can elect an unqualified buffoon to office and get away with it. If we felt we were facing real crises and problems, we’d be warier of electing a buffoon.

Back to Wang:

Mimetic contagion magnifies small fights by making people focus on each other. These processes follow their own logic until they reach conclusions that look so extreme to the outside world. Once internal rivalries are sorted out, people coalesce into groups united against something foreign. These tendencies help explain why events on campus so often make the news. It seems like every other week we see some campus activity being labeled a “witch hunt,” “riot,” or something else that involves violence, implied or explicit. I don’t care to link to these events, they’re so easy to find. It’s interesting to see that academics are increasingly becoming the target of student activities. The Girardian terror devours its children first, who have tolerated or fanned mimetic contagion for so long.

Remember, though, that the crazy campus protests and the abuse of the campus bureaucracy occur among a small number of students at a small number of schools—to return to an earlier point, the students at Yale are rich and satisfied enough to go bonkers over Halloween costumes; students at community colleges are too worried about paying the rent to ignite mimetic rivalry. Most students, to the extent they think about free speech, respect and admire it. Most get the importance of free ideas. Those events that “so often make the news” make the news because they’re pretty uncommon, even at rich, well-marketed schools.

On problem campuses, more reasonable students are often reluctant to challenge the crazier, noisier ones—which is a problem. At the same time, the growing contingent faculty (like myself) are reluctant to explicitly challenge the crazier and noisier students,  because when college administrators see a ruckus they above all else want that ruckus to go away. One easy way to make it go away is to make sure there are no extra sections next semester for any contingent instructors who are involved with problems. The problem student soon graduates and the adjunct goes away even sooner. Ruckus solved! On to seeking donations and good PR and collecting a fat salary.

Don’t get me wrong—those mimetic-rivalry driven events are bad and the administrators (and sometimes faculty) should stand up for the freedom to speak and think. But always consider the incentives facing the actors in a given situation when you start applying highly abstract moral reasoning from outside the situation.

Wang notes many of the ways that students engage in zero-sum competition:

Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs.

There’s a lot of truth there, but I’m not sure fraternities and sororities are good examples. I think the students are less in the grip of mimetic contagion and more in the grip of simple libido (which brings us to an easier supply-demand story and perhaps evolutionary biology story—as I argue at the preceding link). Frats and sororities have zero-sum qualities, but people can and do start new fraternities and sororities, and I don’t know that most fraternities and sororities have the kinds of hard caps that make them truly zero sum. They do practice a lot of exclusion, again primarily on sexual and sexual desirability grounds.

I’d say that the worst mimetic crises are actually experienced not by undergrads but by humanities grad students (Wang addresses grad students towards the end of his essay). In the humanities, there are almost no real jobs after graduation. The field has become highly political and grad school has become cotillion for eggheads, even more than it used to be. The dearth of jobs and challenges in getting them is one reason grad students are willing to do and think whatever their professors say: the students need to do everything right if they’re going to have an even remote chance of getting a real gig. Over time you get nonsense like most of “literary theory,” “intersectionality,” and Alan Sokal debunkings.*

Science isn’t immune to mimetic crises, but at least scientists have the real world as a fairly objective measuring stick. From what I’ve observed, the humanities have the most serious crises, followed by the social sciences, and followed finally by the hard sciences. Business and law schools are probably somewhere near the rank of the social sciences (and Wang’s Thiel quotes about MBAs are great).

Then Wang shifts to talk about Big Little Lies, and his reading of the show is also excellent:

I haven’t watched much TV recently, but the new show I’ve liked best is Big Little Lies on HBO. Rich suburban moms, with desires mediated by their children, are incited towards violence against each other in gorgeous Monterey, California. Who can resist?

I can! I watched a couple episodes and while the murder premise held my attention initially, the stultifying atmosphere of stupendously rich, childish idiots drove me away. It wasn’t funny enough to justify itself. In other words, I dislike it for some of the reasons Wang likes it. But seeing it through that Girardian lens makes me like it better, or at least understand it better. You could also do a good Girardian reading of the first season of UnREAL, which is my favorite recent TV show.

Then there’s this, which is just important and probably underrated:

Because acts of youth are more easily recalled, our future elites will be made up of people who’ve managed to keep their records unsullied. What happens when most records of our life are accessible via Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or blogs? I think that makes it so that our future leaders will be selected for whether they were willing to be really boring in their 20s, who have no recorded indiscretions that might derail a Senate confirmation. Are these the people we want to be governed by?

Among my friends I hear a common joke or refrain: “I could never run for office after last weekend.” Or: “I could never run for office after the pics I sent her.” Except it’s not really a joke (though in the age of Trump I begin to wonder how true it is: maybe the electorate is more accepting than I’d previously thought). And you know what? I could never run for office. I also have a terrible personality for politics, but many people who show political promise can’t run in a polarized world that remembers everything. Not until the culture changes.

I’m not a Girardian and whenever I’ve started his books I’ve felt torn in two: some passages and sections are brilliant and some are idiotic, and sometimes brilliance and idiocy are right next to each other. Is the latter the price of the former? I just looked for my copy of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, but I can’t find it and suspect I must have donated it somewhere along the way, assuming that I’d never read it again. My copy of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World seems to have also disappeared.

Still, after the thousand words above, I do wonder if it might be a good idea to tell college students that they are susceptible to mimetic crises. I also favor explicitly telling students that some majors and paths to graduation are pretty bogus in terms of learning and are mostly there to keep students happy (they get a degree), professors happy (they get a job), and administrators happy (they get tuition money). One could at least conceive of colleges telling students to be wary of mimetic desire. One cannot conceive of them telling students to be wary of the incentives the college itself faces.

EDIT: I also thought, and maybe still think to some extent, that sexual attractiveness is not that subject to mimetic desire, at least among men. But while reading Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success I came across this passage, which supports the sexual aspects of mimetic desire (though not mimetic crises):

neuroscientists have examined the process by which people change their ratings of facial attractiveness in response to cultural learning. In one experiment, male participants rated 180 female faces on a seven-point scale from 1, unattractive, to 7, attractive. After each rating, they were then shown what they believed to be the average rating for that face by other men. In reality, however, on 60 random faces this rating was generated by computer to be 2 to 3 points higher or lower than the participants’ ratings. The rest of the time, the ‘average rating’ was calculated to be close to the participant’s own rating. Then, a half an hour later, participants underwent brain scanning while they rated all 180 faces again, though no average scores were provided this time. The questions are, how did seeing others’ attractiveness ratings influence their subsequent ratings of the same faces, and what was going on in their brains?

As usual, participants raised their attractiveness ratings when they saw higher averages from others and reduced them when they saw lower ratings. The brain scans reveal that seeing the different ratings of others altered their subjective evaluations of those faces. Combined with data from other similar studies, it appears that shifting to agree with others altered their subjective evaluations of faces. Combined with data from other similar studies, it appears that shifting to agree with others is internally (neurologically) rewarding and results in enduring neural modifications that change preferences or valuations. (265)

So we have at least one experimentally verified example of mimetic desire operating on men’s views of women. The faking of other people’s evaluations is a particularly nice touch!

This may also argue that we have much stronger incentives to manipulate user reviews than I’d previously thought. If so, that in turn applies we should not trust Amazon reviews that much.

* It’s still possible to find humanities articles that would make the kinds of moves that Wang does in his post: take someone interesting, comment on its relationship to some larger society, and tie it into some work of art in a novel-but-readable way. Today, though, that style of peer-reviewed article has mostly disappeared under an avalanche of bad writing and “theory.”

Links: The new atomic age, universities, pens, The Joy of Drinking, and more!

December 3, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 1 Comment

* “The new atomic age we need,” a particularly useful piece given the venue.

* “Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs.” Or, alternately, “Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.” Can both be right? And at what margins? I tend to buy the first link more than the second.

* The Generic City: Boring landscapes impede on our biological need for intrigue. So why are so many buildings so hideous?

* University President: ‘This Is Not Day Care.’ A point that is useful and yet depressing that it is worth making.

* Why the ballpoint pen was such a big deal.

* What happens to countries that vote for socialists.

* SM on what’s happening among humanities peer-reviewed journals.

* In light of recent events: “A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths. ”

* The Joy of Drinking.

Briefly noted: Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life — William Deresiewicz

November 30, 2015 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Excellent Sheep is great though polemical—snide remarks about tech companies are neither true nor useful—and one gets a sense of its contents from “Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts,” which went viral for the best of reasons (as opposed to the worst, which is more common). “Eros in the Classroom” is also good, though curiously erotically attenuated, and could be read profitably in tandem with Laura Kipnis’s “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” The two point to the need for satirization of contemporary academic mores, but that satirization is already so thorough that its failure to make much of a dent inside academia is obvious.

excellent_SheepBut Excellent Sheep is comprehensive, despite its overreach. But major orators know that if they have the audience the audience will forgive much, as such is the case here. The book is situated as one that fills a need and one that speaks to the author’s earlier self:

This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self. It talks about the kinds of things I wish someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college—such as what the point of college might be in the first place.

I was like so many kids today (and so many kids back then.) I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank. College was the ‘next thing.’ [. . .] Up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth, getting to the top—in a word, ‘success.’

I was perhaps slightly less blank but barely so. That being said, I often try to talk to current college students about what college is about and usually get resistance. So it may be that Deresiewicz’s twenty-year-old self wouldn’t listen to older Deresiewicz anyway. And, like almost any book of this sort, Excellent Sheep probably won’t be read by many of the students who could most benefit from reading it. Many who might be handed it might resist it. Slightly analogously, I’m struck by Emily Nussbaum’s description of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: “In 1988, when her short-story collection Bad Behavior came out, it became a dorm-room bible for women I knew: Finally, here was a fiction writer unafraid to walk straight through the feminist battlefields of that very strange period.” I’ve assigned it before and it’s not been treated as a Bible; some students cottoned to it but some strongly resisted, though I also don’t think of it as dealing with “the feminist battlefields” of anything: I think of the stories as being about individuals, not dreary ideologies or ideological think-pieces.

Deresiewicz has a keen grasp of what’s happening in contemporary academia and, often, life itself. He writes of a “system,” or “a set of tightly interlocking parts,” including “private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants, test-prep courses and enrichment programs; the admissions process itself; [. . .] the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the BA [. . .]” and of course much more. But this paragraph is the most interesting:

What that system does to kds and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it—those are the subjects of this book. I was teaching a class at Yale on the literature of friendship. One day we got around to talking about the importance of being alone. The ability to engage in introspection, I suggested, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. My students took this in for a second—introspection, solitude, the life of the mind, things they probably had not been asked to think about before—then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you just saying that we’re all just, like really excellent sheep?”

He goes on: “The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.” I’ve noticed those things. They are of course not pervasive. But I also find them impossible to miss.

Excellent Sheep is a truer work of philosophy than 99% of the stuff published under the banner of “philosophy.”

Already I’ve chewed through a thousand words and two long blockquotes and have gotten to page three of Excellent Sheep. That should speak to the book’s quality. To attend to its every argument would be to almost write another book. As I said before, don’t trust everything. But do read it. It is also interesting to me that this article about Peter Thiel describes his mistrust of the education system, which partially evolved from his unhappiness with a track-based life and system. Yet this system persists for reasons, some of which Megan McArdle articulates in “What Really Scares Helicopter Parents.” The system has been in construction for decades. Startups are one route around them. Self-publishing is another. One can no doubt imagine more.

Many people are bad at being and bad at purpose. Including, possibly, me. Excellent Sheep challenges them, which is to say, us.

 

What incentivizes professors to grade honestly? Nothing.

January 13, 2015 By in Academia, Links Tags: , , , 8 Comments

“Same Performance, Better Grades: Academic achievement hasn’t improved much, so why are college-goers getting higher GPAs than ever before?” doesn’t cite Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, though it should. Both the article and the book observe that grade inflation is real and doesn’t reflect increased student knowledge. But neither book nor article bring up an obvious question: What incentive does an individual professor have to grade honestly (or, as students might call it, “harshly”)?

When an individual professor grades students harshly, the students give low evaluation scores (which the article does, to its credit, note), but more importantly they can create a lot of extra work in the form of emails to be answered and, to a lesser extent, office hour visits generated. Much of htat work is not rewarding, intellectually or remuneratively, although office hours can be. Professors are rewarded primarily by producing research and in some schools to a lesser extent for getting high student evaluations, and grading honestly is counterproductive for either of those goals; it’s like a professional athlete honing his knitting skills.

Helicopter parenting may also contribute to student expectations around grades, and administrator expectations that students’s input will be valued in terms of who to hire, fire, and promote. I haven’t experienced helicopter parenting first-hand, but I have heard the stories, and I have heard about grad students and adjuncts going to meetings based on low grades; the message gets disseminated even if it isn’t stated explicitly.

I’ve gotten lots of unhappy emails and, more rarely, calls from students. The perhaps most interesting ones come from students who plagiarized papers but thought I should excuse the plagiarism. In middle or high school perhaps that would be appropriate, but not college, and their efforts take time and mental energy to deal with. If even the plagiarizers want a hearing and elaborate negotiations and second chances, imagine the students who just wrote weak papers!

There’s no check on giving high grades, especially in squishy humanities courses like the ones I teach. The article says “Ultimately, grade inflation has severe consequences,” but then lists extremely un-severe consequences, like difficulty “for employers to vet the caliber of an applicant” (do employers actually do this?) or misleading students, “who often use their grades as benchmarks to help diagnose their strengths and weaknesses.” Some students do that but many don’t. The “severe consequences” paragraph feels like it was invented by a student for a paper.

Finally, the much-ballyhooed shift from tenured faculty to adjuncts means that even small or unjustified complaints can mean the difference between a given adjunct getting a course or not getting a course, if the opportunity is down to two, or a small number, of potential instructors. I’ve not heard of any adjunct, grad student, or instructor getting static for giving overly high grades. Give low grades or run a demanding class, though, and it can and does happen. Many adjunct decide to buckle up for safety’s sake, instead of going wild by not wearing that seatbelt.

Colleges mostly know that the students will pay tuition (or rather, their parents and their loan originators will) if they are happy with the educational product, and professors know they are more likely to keep getting paid if they have fewer student complaints rather than more. Colleges have set up programs that are designed to graduate students with limited skills but real tuition money. Paying for the Party by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton describes the consequences.

Want more serious grades? Provide the incentives to give them. Almost no one wants more serious grades.

See also “Subjectivity in writing and evaluating writing” and “The validity of grades.” Moreover, the NBER paper “Why Have College Completion Rates Increased? An Analysis of Rising Grades” finds that “grade inflation can explain much of the change in graduation rates. We show that GPA is a strong predictor of graduation rates and that GPAs have been rising since the 1990s. We also find that in national survey data and rich administrative data from 9 large public universities increases in college GPAs cannot be explained by student demographics, preparation, and school factors.” The paper seems consistent with anecdotal impressions.

Finally! Someone else notices that the best instructors aren’t necessarily the most credentialed

September 25, 2014 By in Academia, Culture Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Finally! Someone else notices that a lot of academic practices don’t make any sense: “Pictures from an Institution: Leon Botstein made Bard College what it is, but can he insure that it outlasts him?” makes me like Bard; this in particular stands out: “In the thirty-nine years that Botstein has been president of Bard, the college has served as a kind of petri dish for his many pedagogical hypotheses [. . . including] that public intellectuals are often better teachers than newly minted Ph.D.s are.” Why isn’t anyone else following the Bard model?

The question is partially rhetorical. College presidents and trustees are probably systematically selected for conformity, but I’ve gotta think there are other people out there who are going, “Aping the Ivy League model is not going to work for us. What can we do differently?” The current order of things, driven by bogus ranking systems, discourages this sort of thinking. Colleges love the rhetoric of being different, but very few follow that rhetoric to actually being different. Perhaps rising costs will eventually force them to be differentiate or die. Then again, the article says that Bard may be on its way to death or drastic restructuring because of financial problems. Still I don’t see overspending as being fundamentally and intrinsically linked with other issues. Instead, it seems that being a maverick in one field may simply translate to being a maverick in many, including places one doesn’t want mavericks (like finances).

A few weeks ago I wrote about donating to Clark, my alma mater. Although I still think Clark a good school, I’d love to see it move in a more Bard-ish direction. the current President and trustees, however, appear to have come through the system and do not seem like shake-it-up types, regardless of their rhetoric.

Why I don’t donate to Clark University, and thoughts on the future of college

September 2, 2014 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I went to Clark University, and a couple weeks ago I talked to someone from their “development” department (read: they ask alumni for money) about what I’d been up to, what I thought about Clark, and then, finally, in the “Will-she-sleep-with-me” moment, whether I’d give more than $10 a year. I won’t. Even if I magically made Zuckerbergian billions, I wouldn’t give much more because while Clark is a good school, it isn’t in a position to solve the most pressing problem(s) in higher education: cost and access. Clark can be a wonderful and amazing experience for individual students but it will never be widely accessible due to cost and its model is not replicable for the same reason; the major problems in education are cost and access, which I’ll return to below.

Right now I give a little cash because of bogus rankings like those by U.S. News and World Report; here’s a good piece by Malcolm Gladwell on their bogosity. Nonetheless, despite them being bogus, people love rankings—even very bad rankings. When I was in high school, someone—the villain U.S. News again, maybe—ranked high schools simply by the number of students divided by the number of AP tests (or vice-versa). My high school came out well in that regard and parents and administrators and even the students themselves (to some extent) ran around saying “Oh wow we go to one of the best high schools in America!!” Which was bullshit to anyone who stopped to think for 30 seconds, but the meme propagated anyway and the number of people infected with the counter-meme (“Most school rankings are bullshit”) was and is much smaller than the number with the first meme.*

Maybe nothing short of a cultural change in views on college can alleviate the obsession-with-ranking problem. Some of that cultural change may be in the air: here’s one of the articles about Google’s decreased emphasis on college degrees. Maybe more firms will move in this direction. Certainly I would be more interested in assessing someone’s blog, books, or other material in hiring them than their degree. I’ve met a lot of PhDs who are morons. That is not to deny the value of education—it is easier and more pleasant for most people to learn in the context of someone who can select material, judge material, and accelerate learning. But too few teachers seem able or willing to do that. Alternate signals may emerge.

To look at one alternative to the present education system consider Western Governors University. This is one article on WGU, though there are many others. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the major problems in contemporary higher ed emerge from rising costs, Baumol’s Cost Disease, weird cross subsidies, and related factors. Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation is good on these subjects. I obviously like and generally support Clark but I don’t think the school is the answer to the biggest problems in higher ed today. There may not be one single answer. We may be seeing the researcher-teacher hybrid model splitting back into their constituent pats as well, since, as has long been observed, someone very good at one may not be good at the other.

The “teacher” point is important too, because teaching well is expensive and difficult. It’s not clear to me that the current structure of higher education is sustainable regarding teaching. Here is one well-written and half-right, half-wrong piece about how “Teaching Is Not a Business.” In some sense everything is a business whether we want it to be or not.

Saying that teaching is not a business is another way of saying, “We can pour an infinite amount of money into this endeavor without asking what we’re getting it.” There is a magic to teaching and I’m susceptible to that feeling, but teaching is also a system and set of institutions and many other things as well. Not surprisingly most members of the guild want to retain the mystique and a lot of outsiders appalled at rising costs want to de-mystify and improve. The overall trajectory of the last two or three hundred years makes me think the latter are eventually going to win, even if the definition of winning changes and the win takes decades to play out.

This is getting far afield from the point about donating to Clark, but the biggest issue is that I don’t see how most of the current version of higher ed is rewarding teaching adequately. Some like “The Minerva Project” may be the answer. It and Western Governors University are both very consciously doing a lot of things very differently than the standard college model, which Clark follows in important ways. Clark has a high cost structure and can’t avoid that. As I said above it is a good school. If I had a kid and could afford to send them I would.

But how much does Clark cost?

Somewhere within Clark, someone has the minimum number of dollars per student the school must take in in order to stay afloat. If I had to guess, I’d guess that number is between $25,000 and $30,000, and Clark must hit it whether Joe pays $15,000 and Jane pays $40,000 or vice-versa. Every college has this number somewhere. For a few schools it’s probably zero, counting endowments. Until we get more clarity about that number, however, it’s hard to get a meaningful value for it.

This began life as an e-mail to the Clark development person. Most of the answers she gets are probably more emotional than my somewhat cerebral / systems-based thinking, but part of my dissertation is about academia and I’ve now worked in, around, and for a lot of colleges, as a student, instructor, and consultant. The inside of the sausage factory is not a pretty place and the romantic notions I may have once had regarding the college experience are now dashed. I still retain hope and even optimism—I would be teaching as an adjunct this semester if I didn’t—but the ugly reality is that relatively few existing institutions have the structure or infrastructure, literally or intellectually or politically, necessary to make real changes. Whatever spare cash I might have one day—ha!—is unlikely to go to existing providers. It’ll go to whoever is trying to augment or replace them. Right now I don’t know who that is.

It’s not you, Clark. It’s it.**

* These sorts of idiocies persist. When I was in grad school, some girl in the University of Arizona’s Rhet Comp (or “Rhetoric and Composition”) program claimed that they were “number two in the country.” Being the obnoxious person I am I asked, “As ranked by who?” She didn’t know. “As measured how?” She didn’t know and didn’t like me. To be fair I thought she was dumb and didn’t see her manifesting evidence to the contrary while I was around.

** See also “Ten Ways Colleges Work You Over;” I doubt any individuals at Clark approve of the competitive college race, but they are also relatively powerless to stop it.

What is college for? Matt Reed’s hypothetical and following the money

August 12, 2014 By in Culture, Teaching Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Matt Reed’s post “Parity” asks this, partially as a thought experiment and partially as a proposal: “What if every sector of higher education received the same per-student funding? Right now, the more affluent the student body, the more public aid money the sector receives.” He’s right. He goes on to say, “From a social-justice perspective, that’s counterintuitive.” He’s right about that too, and he eventually asks: “What is the argument for spending the most on those who have the most?”

I can’t guarantee this is the argument—and indeed there may not be one, since the higher-education system evolved by accident rather than being planned by design—but one possible answer is that the current system evolved primarily to subsidize and conduct research. If the purpose of the fiscal structure of universities attempts to maximize research rather than social justice, then it may make sense to spend the most money on universities and programs that produce a lot of research. That obviously isn’t community colleges, whatever their other merits.

The idea that universities are primarily about social justice seems to have come along later than the idea of universities as research labs. In the U.S. at least, universities have had a couple major phases: first primarily as seminaries for the clergy; then as finishing schools for the wealthy, which usually coexisted with ways of spreading knowledge about agriculture and teaching; then, during and after World War II, as research hubs; and in the last couple decades as ways of rectifying real or perceived inequality. Reed’s third paragraph starts with “From a social-justice perspective,” and that may not be the dominant perspective among legislators, whether state or national. Certainly during much of the Cold War period from 1945 – 1975, when money poured into universities per Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, it wasn’t.

My dissertation is on academic novels and I’ve now read a huge amount of material related to the conception of universities from 1945 – the present. One persistent theme is that intelligent people in every era disagree both what universities as a whole are for and quite often on the discipline or department level what each discipline or department is for. In this respect Reed’s post is a continuation of this discussion.

My favorite answer about the question of what universities for has been attributed to various people, and here is one rendition: “a university is a happy place if the administration provides football for the alumni, parking for the faculty, and sex for the students.” Incidentally, in all three regards and certainly for the first and last, flagship public universities far outperform their Ivy League peers. It’s nice to be number one in some domains. Murray Sperber’s Beer & Circus argues that sports and sex have been central preoccupations for a very long time; perhaps nerds like me have the wrong perspective.

I wish I had a neat transition into this point, but I don’t while still thinking it important to note: tne problem or virtue with universities comes from the way all sorts of weird cross subsidies happen at all kinds of levels, to the point that I’m not sure it’s possible to disentangle what’s happening fiscally.

EDIT: Malcolm Gladwell’s article “The Order of Things, about the impossibility of ranking heterogeneous colleges in a fair or objective way, is also relevant here:

The U.S. News rankings turn out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. [. . .] There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values. It’s a matter of which educational model you value more—and here, once again, U.S. News makes its position clear.

I admire Reed for raising the question. But it’s also important to recognize the priorities any division of resources like the one among colleges entails.

The ignorance and ideological blindness in the college sex articles: Kathleen Bogle and Megan McArdle

May 9, 2014 By in Academia, Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A spate of mostly dumb articles, like this one by Kathleen Bogle: “The Missing Key to Fighting Sexual Assault on Campus,” have been wending their way through the blagosphere; most argue or seem to argue that universities need to act much more like police.* Bogle writes, for example, that “The key is [for colleges?] to make clear exactly when it is a crime to have sex with a person who is too intoxicated to be capable of giving meaningful consent.” But Bogle also writes, in a more pragmatic vein:

most cases of drunken sex will be—and, probably, should be—beyond the reach of the law. Young women need to know this. They need to know that the law treats sex after drinking as assault only in extreme circumstances.

(Emphasis added.)

Bogle, like most writers on this topic, ignores an obvious contradiction between current criminal law and what changes these writers want to see universities do: drunkenness is not a defense against any criminal act. No matter how drunk you get, if you kill someone you will be eligible to be charged with manslaughter or murder. If you can legally be said to have the mental state necessary to be accountable for the ultimate, irreversible crime, you presumably legally have the mental state necessary to accountable to consent to sex.

Few writers mention this.** More writers—though still too few—point out other questions: what if both parties are blotto drunk? Do they then legally rape each other? Do both get charged? Will they be in the real world? When discussing matters in the abstract these issues might seem like unimportant edge cases but moving from idea to implementation will make them very serious.

There aren’t good, intellectually coherent administrative solutions. Megan McArdle is right: “Rape on Campus Belongs in the Courts.” Courts have centuries of practice in attempting to balance the need for justice with rights for fair trials. If a serious crime has been committed, university administrators are the wrong place to go: they’re supposed to handle academic and administrative matters, not horrific crimes—for which they don’t have the infrastructure or legal authority. If universities do set up kangaroo courts, one will wrongly sanction someone and that someone will sue the university and wins in real court with real rules. Criminal and civil rules are fucked up in various ways, but they are at least reasonably consistent and reasonably public.

Moreover, Bogle and others like her forget their own ideological preconceptions. I would like to make some of mine explicit, as they are stated by Camille Paglia in the first pages of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson:

Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminists, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau. [. . .]

This book takes the point of view of Sade, the most unread major writer in Western literature. [. . .] For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our nature culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would be to give free reign to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check.

Drinking weakens the power of social force, the social contract, and the super-ego—which is why people do it. The dangers are real and well-known. Yet we don’t want to acknowledge the darkness. Slate writer Emily Yoffe emphasized those dangers in 2013, and the current bout of jabber isn’t really moving past that. We as a society should be pointing out the perils of too much drinking. We also shouldn’t kid ourselves about why we like to drink: to turn off our super-egos. To live in the moment instead of the future. To take the risks and do the things we’d like to do sober. We try to banish the knowledge of darkness that lurks in the soul, only to see that darkness reflected and reëmerge in novels, movies, TV, music. Paglia is the rare critic who will name and describe the darkness. For that she is castigated.

The other underlying reality is that women are less inclined to want to have sex with a large number of random strangers than men, for reasons grounded in evolutionary biology. This is not a problem that affects both sexes equally, despite the gender-blind way that modern laws are supposed to be written. Relatively few men appear to be sexually assaulted by drunk women. But a lot of the essay-writing set either knows nothing about evolutionary biology or doesn’t want to acknowledge it, so some of the real mechanisms underlying these articles remain buried, until annoying gadflies like me bring them up.

EDIT 2016: For some historical context, which is largely missing from the discussions that have flared up in the media, see “A Sex Scandal from 1960s Yale Is a Window Into a World With No Internet.” The Internet has made many things better, but certainly not all of them, and it seems to empower some of campus’s loudest, angriest neurotics.

* I wrote about another instance in “If you want to understand frats, talk to the women who party at them (paging Caitlin Flanagan).”

** Hypocrisy in the law, however, is not an impediment to instituting it anyway. In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Judith Levine writes: “One striking pair of contradictory trends: as we raise the age of consent for sex, we lower the age at which a wrongdoing child may be tried and sentenced as an adult criminal. Both, needless to say, are ‘in the best interests’ of the child and society.” Teenagers—usually black males—are adults when they commit crimes and “children”—usually white teenagers—when they have sex. This demonstrates more about culture and economics than anything inherent about people in the age range 13 – 17.

Laurie Schaffner makes a similar observation in an essay collection about regulating sexuality, “[…] in certain jurisdictions, young people may not purchase alcohol until their twenty-first birthday, or may be vulnerable plaintiffs in a statutory rape case at 17 years of age, yet may be sentenced to death for crimes committed at age 15 [….]”

If you want to understand frats, talk to the women who party at them (paging Caitlin Flanagan)

February 20, 2014 By in Academia, Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Caitlin Flanagan’s well-researched and -argued “The Dark Power of Fraternities: A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame” does everything an article of its nature should do except for one important thing: talk to the women who go to frats.

The minute women stop going to frat parties, frats are going to either disappear or shrink to irrelevance.

I taught at the University of Arizona for four and a half years and unlike Flanagan have talked to lots of college women about frat parties, few of whom harbor illusions about frat parties or their purpose. Many sororities apparently tell women not to get drunk, since being drunk makes them easy victims, and to go in groups. Women would sometimes say—including in class—that they wouldn’t go to frat parties except in groups. Why? To protect themselves (from themselves or from the frat guys is sometimes an open question).

I’d sometimes ask why they’d go places they felt were sufficiently dangerous to require a group. Usually there wouldn’t be a real answer; it was as if I’d broached a new, un-analyzed subject for the first time. One woman did answer, however, and said simply that “It’s where the party’s at.”

(c) Stephanie GA of Flickr

(c) Stephanie GA of Flickr

Ten points for honesty, but I think that if I were a woman I wouldn’t go. Yet college girls keep going, despite apparently being aware of the dangers. Flanagan mentions “the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers” but doesn’t note that most women seem to know someone who had something unfortunate happen to them at frat houses, and yet knowledge doesn’t seem to deter many of women.

This absence a huge, obvious blank spot in her otherwise fascinating article. Women are not stupid—at least I don’t think they’re stupid—and most know what they’re doing when they get drunk and/or go to frat parties. I’ve written as much here and here (“It seems that many people go through a two-step process to get what they really want: they drink, which gives them an excuse to decry their actions while drunk at a future date while achieving their hedonic ends—which are often sexual.”)*

Men are interested in frats because they offer a way of forming a cartel that in turn attracts women. I remember talking to a student in a frat, who was giving me the usual bullshit about frats when I stopped him and said: “Let’s conduct a thought experiment: if instead of increasing the probability of a guy getting laid, joining a frat decreased the probability by 1%, do you think anyone would?” There was a long pause. He wanted to respond but he also knew that his intellectual credibility was on the line (he was a bright guy).

There’s another important flaw in Flanagan’s article: while she does cite a horrific rape of a woman identified only as “Jane Doe,” in Doe’s case justice does happen: the perpetrator is caught, arrested, and convicted. The system worked in this instance! The frat helped the cops get the guy. As such it’s a curious example in an anti-frat article.

I’ve also suggested to women in sororities that, if they don’t like frat parties, why don’t the sororities hold parties, and invite men to them? The immediate responses tend to be baffled puzzlement, and sometimes muttering about not wanting to do the work. I leave possible implications of this to the reader.

She does note one thing that deserves more frequent mention:

Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities.

A lot of 18-year-olds like to drink and take other mind-altering substances, and, regardless of whether legislators and/or lobbyists like MADD think they have the capacity to make that decision, many do make it anyway. Perhaps we should continue to try to hector them into stopping using the legal system, but, to my mind, their making of the decision indicates that they have the capacity…to make the decision, since they are making it (I understand and am trying to emphasize the circular reasoning). One way to chip away at the appeal of frats, for both men and women, would be to legalize drinking; based on what I’ve heard a lot of frat boys and sorority girls drift away from their Greek affiliation when they turn 21. Some of that probably comes from the dawning realization that real life is en route but some probably also comes from the opening of different avenues for drinking and mating rituals.

College presidents have realized as much and launched the Amethyst Initiative, which is a plea to drag reality back into law and politics. Apart from the Amethyst Initiative, I’m struck by the level of dishonesty and pretending that attends this whole conversation. All the relevant parties know exactly what’s going on, and pretend to not know what’s going on.

Anyway, the minute the Flanagans and college presidents and parents of the world can convince women not to show up at frat parties is the minute we’ll see the end of frats. Based on America’s bipolar feelings about drinking and sexuality in general, however, I doubt we’re going to see it.

EDIT: I should add that I’m not pro-frat, as one of two people suggested; I’m also not anti-frat, although years ago I wrote this snarky letter to the editor of the New York Times (“Although the fraternity system as it exists is flawed, it does serve one important purpose: it voluntarily segregates a large number of drunken fools from the rest of the student population — some of whom may be interested in novel concepts like learning and academics”). Today I mostly think that frats serve an evident need or want, and although I myself wouldn’t want to join one—I don’t have the right personality—I see why many others do.

* A sorority girl once told me that her sorority cohort didn’t want to attend sober events with frats because the other girls didn’t know how to talk to boys, or talk to boys without the aid of booze.

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