Tag Archives: Universities

The validity of grades

February 17, 2010 By in Academia, Essays, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Marco Arment writes at Marco.org (proving that he was prescient when it comes to domain names) and created the awesome web service Instapaper, which I use solely for its Kindle export feature. One of his favorite posts is “School grades are hopelessly broken.” It’s worth reading, and Marco is probably right: school grades are too high and don’t reflect real knowledge, but like healthcare or the military, there’s no easy way to fix them.

Although Marco’s essay is mostly right, it also doesn’t propose any real solutions to the problem he describes—because there aren’t any. The incentive for parents in high school is to want their kid to get the highest grade possible; consequently, they will often fight for their kids, leading to an overall negative equilibrium, and one that I benefited from in late middle and early high school when I decided to effectively fail math as an ill-conceived protest against my parents. At the time I didn’t consciously realize this dynamic, or that protesting in ways that chiefly hurt me aren’t terribly wise, but I was also 13 – 15 at the time and didn’t know any better.

For most teachers, the easiest thing to do on an individual level is inflate grades, which reduces complaints from both parents and students. This isn’t optimal on a societal level, which generates posts like Marco’s, but it is on an individual level, and I don’t see an easy way to generate incentives to change this (more on that later). Marco says:

Grades don’t reflect your aptitude, intelligence, or understanding of the subject matter. You don’t need to actually learn much useful material to get good grades. (And many of those who learn exceptionally well don’t get good grades.)

This is probably true. But if grades don’t reflect all this, then imagine what the people with really low GPAs are like. Grades aren’t good at stratifying the high end of the curve, but they at least show some of where the low end is. And I suspect the really high end, especially in hard college majors like engineering, CS, and so forth, are still reasonably good guides to aptitude. Marco says, “You can understand why I don’t trust the validity of grades.” You shouldn’t trust grades fully—but that’s because grades aren’t supposed to be the full measure of man. Nothing is, except maybe life, and what does that really mean?

I see a lot of comments about colleges, high schools, grades, and how to improve those kinds of issues on sites like Hacker News and Slashdot. Most are good at identifying problems; Chris Smeder, for example, tells us how to improve college teaching in three major ways. He’s probably right about all of those, but he misses an important point: most universities are not set up (or, if you like buzzwords, “incentivized”) to reward teaching.

Smeder misses the main point, which isn’t identifying the problem; a gazillion people in the Chronicle of Higher Education have said virtually the same thing at various times. The real problem is solving the problem, which requires changing the incentives that drive professors. At the moment, hiring and tenure decisions at virtually all universities (and all the big ones you’ve heard of) are made mostly on research and publication. Teaching simply doesn’t count for much. Therefore, the people who succeed in getting hired and getting tenured optimize for what they’re being judged on: research and publication. Teaching is secondary. Heroic individuals and people who want to practice better teaching will help somewhat, but they aren’t enough to change the system as a whole.

Once you’ve realized this incentive problem, the question becomes, “How do you change the incentives?” I have no good answers for that, but it’s the real question you should be asking if you’re genuinely interested. And it might keep you from generalizations like this one, which is back to Marco’s essay:

Most people from my generation can’t really do anything else in the real world except bullshit jobs because nobody ever held them to very high standards.

This probably is true of all generations, and the rhetoric of most people during most generations (consider, for example, the New York Times’ Generation Me vs. You Revisited). I suspect that not all the jobs Marco assumes are bullshit are bullshit. And even if all this is true, schools aren’t going to be offering the kind of information he’d presumably like GPAs to show.

I’d get near-zero homework grades because I’d never do it, so I needed (and usually got) near-100% test grades to make up the difference. I’d barely pull through and get a C most of the time.

This works for some people, especially who start their own businesses. Most people don’t and never will. So their grades count. I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s comment from “What You’ll Wish You’d Known:”

In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that’s against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.

By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. So just keep playing.

Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don’t just do what they tell you, and don’t just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it’s pretty sweet. You’re done at 3 o’clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you’re there.

The right thing to do is your homework, because it’s presumably easy, and then do the rest of your work on your own time. And although GPAs are broken, they’re also the best we’ve got. As Joel Spolsky says in his advice to Computer Science majors:

Never underestimate how big a deal your GPA is. Lots and lots of recruiters and hiring managers, myself included, go straight to the GPA when they scan a resume, and we’re not going to apologize for it. Why? Because the GPA, more than any other one number, reflects the sum of what dozens of professors over a long period of time in many different situations think about your work. SAT scores? Ha! That’s one test over a few hours. The GPA reflects hundreds of papers and midterms and classroom participations over four years. Yeah, it’s got its problems. There has been grade inflation over the years. Nothing about your GPA says whether you got that GPA taking easy classes in home economics at Podunk Community College or taking graduate level Quantum Mechanics at Caltech. Eventually, after I screen out all the 2.5 GPAs from Podunk Community, I’m going to ask for transcripts and recommendations. And then I’m going to look for consistently high grades, not just high grades in computer science.

Marco can be largely right in a micro sense and still be wrong, or at least doesn’t really deal with what should happen in a macro sense. If you’re the principal of a high school, or a college president, or an individual employer, or any number of other positions, what can you do to change the presumed brokenness of grades? How can you transform the system producing said grades? Until you’ve answered that, you’ve done a lot of the work that’s already been done (see, e.g., here for an older view of school problems) without facing the hardest part of the task.

The Art of Teaching — Gilbert Highet

February 15, 2010 By in Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

For reasons not clear to me, The Art of Teaching is regularly recommended to teachers or people who want to be teachers. It’s not very good; skip it and read Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom instead, which has advice that’s both more practical and more theoretical than The Art of Teaching.

Highet says that “This book is called The Art of Teaching because I believe that teaching is an art, not a science.” He might be right. But he doesn’t present much evidence as to why it is, or how one can become a better artist in a significant way. A lot of his advice is obvious or vague. Among the obvious parts:

The first essential of good teaching… is that the teacher must know the subject That really means he must continue to learn it.
The second essential is that he must like it.

Among the vague parts:

Learn the peculiar patterns of [your students’] thought and emotions just as you would learn to understand horses or dogs—or other animals (for there are all kinds of different animals implicit in children: the very small ones are often more like birds)—and then you will find that many of the inexplicable things they do are easy to understand, and many of the unpardonable thing easy to forget.

What does it mean to “learn the peculiar patterns” of students’ thought? Highet never says. And I’m leaving aside the double aside he uses, or the fact that he compares students to animals. What’s next—the freshman whisperer?

The Art of Teaching is big on ideas and short on execution. There’s not much to say about it other than a warning to stay away from it.

Problems in the Academy: Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

January 21, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The problems in American universities are mostly structural and economic, and the biggest are occurring on the faculty side of the liberal arts and social sciences: since around 1975, too many professors (or at least people earning PhDs) vie for faculty slots relative to the number of undergraduates. Menand says (twice) that “Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900.” Undergraduates clear out of the system in four to six years; graduate students who get PhDs (presumably) stay or wish to stay for whole careers. Since 1975, college enrollments have grown much more modestly than they did from 1945 – 1975, and the department that’s grown most is business, since so many undergraduates now major in it. But grad programs haven’t scaled back, leaving humanities types to fight for scarce jobs and write polemics about how much it sucks to fight for scarce jobs.

Menand doesn’t identify the supply/demand problems as the major root cause of the other issues around political/social conformity, time to degree for academic grad students, and so forth, but it’s hard not to trace “the humanities revolution,” “interdisiplinarity and anxiety,” and why all professors think alike to supply and demand. Each of those topics are each covered in a long chapter, and Menand’s first, on “The Problem of General Education,” seems least related to the others because it is mostly inside baseball: how we ended up requiring undergrads to take a certain number of courses in a certain number of fields, and what academia should be like. But the others make up for it.

The Marketplace of Ideas is worth reading for knowledge and style: the book has the feeling of a long New Yorker article—Menand is a staff writer there—and if he occasionally pays for it with the generalization that gets coldly stamped out of peer-reviewed writing, the trade-off is worthwhile. Menand is also unusually good at thinking institutionally, in terms of incentives, and about systems: those systems tend to evolve over time, but they also tend to harden in place unless some catastrophic failure eventually occurs. Such failures are often more evident in business than in public life, since businesses that fail catastrophically go bankrupt and are much more susceptible to competitors and regulators than governments. The academic system is, as Menand points out, something out of the 19th Century in its modes of tenure, promotion, displinarity, and so forth. But it’s unlikely to go anywhere in an immediate and obvious way because public universities are supported by taxpayers and even private ones are most often nonprofit. Furthermore, whatever problems exist, universities do well enough, especially from the perspective of students, and having a glut of PhDs to choose from doesn’t harm universities themselves. Consequently, I don’t see as great an impetus for change as Menand implies, very loosely, that there is.

Take, for example, the PhD production problems from earlier in this post. The logical conclusion would be for fewer people to enter PhD programs, for universities to close some programs, for degrees to take less time (the natural sciences often end up requiring five years from entering to conferring degrees, while humanities programs creeping above ten years), and so on. But there’s no real incentive for that on the part of an individual university: having graduate programs is impressive, grad students are cheap teachers, and people keep applying—even though they know the odds (this basically describes me).

Thus supply and demand stay out-of-whack. University departments can remain perhaps more insular than they should be. Publishing requirements increase as publishing becomes more difficult. But there’s little need to change so long as enough students enter PhD programs. Menand suggests shortening the time to graduate degrees, making them more immediately relevant, and closing some programs—none of which seem likely in the near future unless students stop enrolling. But they don’t because, once again like me, they see professors and think, “that looks like fun. I’ll take a flyer and see what happens.” Nonetheless, the professoriate is already changing in some ways: about half of students, as Menand observes and the Chronicle of Higher Education does too, are now taught by part-timers. With as many choices among instructors as universities have, that trend seems ripe for further acceleration.

Menand says that “For most of the book, I write as a historian.” He also says that he’s “not a prescriptivist” and implies pragmatism, rather than polemic. That’s wise: identifying the problems are probably easier than finding those pragmatic solutions to them. He uses English as an example of what’s going on more broadly, and he is an English professor at Harvard. Part of the crisis is within English departments—what exactly does it mean to study “English?”—and part of it is external. The part outside English departments has to do with rationale and economics—as Menand says, “People feel, out of ignorance or not, that there is a good return on investment in physics departments. In the 1980s, people began wondering what the return on investment was in the humanities.” Note his “people feel” formulation, which is unsourced but occurs throughout; most of the time, speaking of a common culture feels right because Menand has his finger on the intellectual zeitgeist enough to pull off such comments, and elsewhere he has the numbers to back those comments up, especially regarding the flatlining and even decline in the absolute and relative percentages of English majors on campus.

The other interesting thing is the word “crisis,” which I’ve used several times. The Oxford American Dictionary included with OS X says that crisis is “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.” The word “time” implies that crises should pass; but in English, the one or ones Menand identifies has lasted for more than a generation of academics. According to “The Opening of the Academic Mind” in Slate, “The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that’s always in crisis.” In Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, the protagonist, Renee, thinks:

In the great boom of the late fifties and early sixties, graduate departments, particularly at state universities, had expanded and conferred degrees in great abundance. But then the funds, from both government and private foundations, had dried up, and departments shrunk, resulting in diminishing need. Suddenly there was a large superfluity of Ph.D.s, compounded by demographic changes […] The result has been a severe depression, in both the economic and psychological senses, in the academic community.

That was published in 1983. People are still publishing the same basic argument today, only now they often do it online. Perhaps the real lesson is that academics are great at learning many things, but supply/demand curves and opportunity costs are not among them, except for economists.

The problems are exacerbated in the humanities and social sciences because grad students in those fields don’t have industry to fall back on, but the natural sciences are not immune either. As Philip Greenspun points out in “Women in Science,” America seems more than willing to source its science graduate students from developing countries, which takes care of supply from that angle (if you read his essay, ignore the borderline or outright sexist commentary regarding women, even if his point is that women are too smart to go to grad school in the sciences; pay attention to the institutional and systematic focus, especially when he points out that “Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States”).

Of course, even as I make myself aware of works like The Marketplace of Ideas, I continue working toward that PhD, convinced that I’ll be the one who beats the odds that are still better than Vegas, though not by a lot. But I’m also part of the imbalance: too many people seeking PhDs for few too jobs, particularly too few jobs of the sort we’re being trained to do. Yet academics still provide a vital function to society in the form of knowledge, and in particular knowledge that’s undergone peer review, however difficult or abstruse peer review may have become in the humanities (for more, see Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism).

The question of what academia should be like is to some extent driven by what professors think it should be like, but it’s also driven by what students think it should be like. Students ultimately drive academia by choosing where to go to school. An increasing number of them are choosing community and online higher education. It’s not clear what this shift means either. Still, professors have blame as well: as the aforementioned Slate article suggests, “[…] Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals, initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.” True. But given that they have tenure, control departments, and confer the PhDs necessary to become professors, it seems unlikely that major change will come from that quarter.

Late November Links: Academia, artistic dangers, reading, and more

November 28, 2009 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal.

* A Little-Known Occupational Hazard Affecting Writers: writing (or wanting to write) outside your field.

* When Great Artists Dry Up.

* Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, on how technology is or is not reshaping romance in the digital age. I don’t really buy the argument, but I find it suggestive nonetheless.

* James Fallows has a typically nuanced, brilliant series on Obama’s trip to Asia, and especially its Chinese implications.

* Das Keyboard is sponsoring the Ultimate Typing Championship. Do you have the “fiercest typing skills around?” Me neither. But those who do can win $2,000 at the SXSW festival in Austin. The e-mail I got says, “Oh, and don’t forget to sign-up yourself to compete! At a minimum, it’s an opportunity for bragging rights among your friends and co-workers. :)”

Alas: I’m a relatively slow typist at 50-ish WPM. Usually the problem isn’t typing speed—it’s thinking speed, and I haven’t found a hardware solution for that yet.

* Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. Like me, Clay Shirky finds it more than a little difficult to believe that cheap hardcover books are bad for readers, even if they might be bad for publishers as they currently exist.

* What the iPod tells us about Britain’s economic future.

* Secret copyright treaty leaks, and it’s bad. Very bad.

* Sunday afternoon at the Shenzhen Public Library. As James Fallows says at the link, “No wonder Shenzhen is on the rise.”

* Gossip Girl might be worth watching again.

* Are too many students going to college?

* Learn your damn homophones.

* No one wants America to be the sole global superpower, but no one wants to share the load.

* I love it: the bookstore Lorem Ipsum is having an “anti-sale.” As they say: “Everyone like’s a sale, right? But does anyone like an anti-sale? We hope so!

What’s an anti-sale, you ask? It’s when nothing in the store is on sale. We’re proud to announce that none of our items are on sale, instead they are for purchase for regular price. We think it’s ground-breaking.”

* Inculcating a Love for Reading: Children’s books that might help repel the armies of electronic distraction.

* From Oxford to Wall Street: what the rising number of Rhodes Scholars in business and finance means. Or, according to actual Rhodes scholar, maybe not.

* Are U.S. Wages Too High?

* Why are some cities more entrepreneurial than others?

* The Writing Habits of Great Authors.

* Hilarious search query of the day that brought someone to The Story’s Story: “bookworms sex.”

Late September links: Little to do with books, much to do with life

September 27, 2009 By in Academia, Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* The best I’ve read concerning “overrated” novels, courtesy of the Little Professor.

* The humanities are in the same state financial markets were in before they crashed. Assessing the growing mountain of toxic intellectual debt, Philip Gerrans considers going short on some overvalued research.

Except that I’m not sure his analogy works, since “intellectual debt” doesn’t have to be “repaid,” doesn’t hurt anyone, and might point the way forward regarding ideas in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious at the time such “debt” is being produced/acquired.

* What kinds of inequalities bother people, and what kind do not?

* In Conniptions from me on urban economics, Tyler Cowen lists his opinions on urban issues, which I essentially agree with save for number 3, which I know nothing about:

1. I would not have brought the U.S. down the path of water subsidies, many of which are pro-suburban. (Admitted they are not always easy to repeal.)

2. I think pollution externalities should be priced in Pigouvian fashion; this would penalize many suburban developments.

3. I oppose the widening of Route 7 at Tysons Corner and I expect a disaster from the current plans.

4. I favor school choice and charter schools, which would make many U.S. cities livable again for couples with children.

5. I would price many roads for congestion, although as Bryan points out this could either help or hurt cars as a mode of transport.

6. I would allow U.S. cities to become much taller, thereby accommodating more residents. I would weaken many urban building codes in the interests of a greener America.

7. I much preferred the time when I lived near a gas station and a 7-11.

* Laws have become too vague and the concept of intent has disappeared. Notice in particular this problematic line: “Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.” If the theory is that everyone is a criminal if you look hard enough, something very serious has gone amiss in our notions of justice.

* A chat with blogger Penelope Trunk:

Ben: You blog about sex a lot. Why?

Penelope: I think about it all the time. So it comes into my head a lot when I’m writing blog posts. I sort of wonder why it doesn’t come into more peoples’ heads when they are writing blog posts.

Ben: People censor themselves.

Penelope: Yeah. Well. I censor myself too. I guess it’s just we each have different types of self-censoring….

Ben: Alain de Botton has an interesting point on this. He says the professionalization of writing — novelists who write fiction full time — has made it so much fiction is disconnected from life as it’s experienced by most people.

Penelope: Totally agree. And the French have this problem more than any other culture.

* I wasn’t going to write about Dan Brown till I found this hilarious discussion of his expert style. One day I hope to be as great a writer.

* Dvorak keyboard devotees and their battle with smartphones.

* Population growth drives innovation?

* Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic makes the pitch for print. I subscribe to The Atlantic and recommend that others do as well.

* America can’t be the world’s tech leader without immigration reforms.

* The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives has died.

* Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias on education, in a post I almost completely agree with.

* Wow: from I was an Ambassador and Taken Hostage by Militants:

I learned a lot from my time as ambassador and Marine. Paperwork means stuff to people: really important stuff. Thinking you have to solve every problem on your own is an additional problem to your other problems: one that makes all the others worse. No matter how much you love something, it’s not going to make a square peg fit into a round hole. What people experience in the service has to do with the type of work they do and the unit they are in. Hidden assumptions hurt. A lot….

This “bad experience” changed a passive, wait-for-life-to-happen person into and active, go-make-it-happen person.

(Emphasis added.)

I wish I’d realized the power of paperwork earlier, or how important documentation is in a modern, complex, and bureaucratic society.

* Two kinds of libertarians.

What I like in this essay is also an acknowledgement of its limitations (the “cartoon” version of libertarian), but also the acknowledgment that those limitations are useful in describing broader phenomenon.

* The value of a college education.

Laptops, students, distraction: hardly a surprise

December 28, 2008 By in Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

This post grew out of a comment responding to the question, “What Restrictions Should Student Laptops Have?” I’m a graduate student who teaches English 101/102/109h and takes classes at the University of Arizona.

The short version: leave restrictions or lack thereof to the teachers or instructors.

For background, read “Why I ban laptops in my classroom,” “I Don’t Multitask,” “professor vs laptop,” Paul Graham’s “Disconnecting Distraction“and finally “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This is not a new issue. If Paul Graham and other writers and hackers find the Internet ceaselessly distracting, what hope do freshmen have? I hear friends and other grad students say they feel like they can’t go more than a half hour without poking around the Internet, which hurts their writing time. Laptops in general and Internet connectivity in particular might cause greater problems than those they’re designed to solve.*

While I sympathize with some pro-laptop comments, I will point out that paternalism is not always bad; sometimes it’s a necessary component of developing discipline, fortitude, or tenacity. Banning laptops could help students develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material. In classrooms I’ve been in—including graduate classrooms—where virtually everyone had laptops, they were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out happy hour, messaging, and messaging about the incompetence of the person speaking, checking the score, and a variety of other things that promote continuous partial attention.

The jokes are coming: you must’ve been a dumb student, gone to a bad school, had bad professors, be weak minded, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one’s attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake in your kitchen. Sure, you’d never lie on that mortgage application about your income—but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little… The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make it harder to separate the bad professor from the difficult material. And so on.

Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops. I’m aware of the counter-arguments and alluded to them above: if you’re not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can’t get their attention in the first place? What if you’re trying to impart something important but that doesn’t have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. The Slashdot commenter would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that he could get by anyway: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can’t.

All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. For some classes they may be necessary or helpful, like programming classes. Still, not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them.

“Here’s the dilemma — how much freedom do you give to students?” you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards “let them do whatever they want.” Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them. If the teacher doesn’t want them to have Internet access, let the teacher have a kill switch for the room’s wireless router. That way, you’ll be allowing as much flexibility as the situation calls for.

Outside the school, students’ autonomy should be complete, and schools shouldn’t impinge on students’ rights to conduct themselves how they will. Many students will use computers in ways that seem wasteful, but a few will also hack them, use them for self-expression, and let the computers become assistants rather than crutches for thought.

Did you see what Randy Pausch calls the headfake in this essay? It’s partially about students, yes, but it’s really about how to create and learn. Computers can help those processes, but too often they seem to hinder. And when they hinder, they should be discarded. The real scarce resource in modern life is sustained attention.

EDIT 2015: Vox reports on a study that says “you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop.” The study claims that participants who wrote by hand had better recall, especially of complex concepts. Don’t take one study as definitive but in this case anecdote and research match.

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World discusses similar topics. Distraction and defeating it will be an ongoing saga for many decades.

* I haven’t gone as far as Paul Graham, who describes his solution:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)

My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. When I have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, in my case at least, that it’s hard to spend more than about an hour a day online.

And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting.

Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education — Murray Sperber

December 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Federal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) like the Grant Competition To Prevent High-Risk Drinking or Violent Behavior Among College Students are like sheets of paper held up as protection against the hurricane of larger social forces. The program aims to “develop or enhance, implement, and evaluate campus-and/or community-based strategies to prevent high-risk drinking or violent behavior among college students,” but it’s facing a campus culture that, as Murray Sperber describes in Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education, has shifted to drinking and fanatical attention to sports in lieu of learning (I couldn’t help but think of a classic piece from The Onoin, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which sums my feelings about sports I’m not actually playing).

The “How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education” subtitle is slightly misleading: big-time college aren’t themselves crippling education, though they are a contributing facto. Rather, they combine with shifts in university priorities toward research, curriculums, graduate departments, and star professors that, combined with a negative feedback loop thanks to big-time sports and decreased state and federal funding support, leads to inferior undergraduate education at many big schools and big public schools in particular. Hence the “beer and circus” formulation that alludes to bread and circus, with beer deadening thought and circus in the form of sports. Sperber’s argument is not a bad argument, although it’s overstated—universities are not as callow as he makes them out to be. Furthermore, if students in the aggregate didn’t want beer and circus, they would vote with their feet and wallets, as many of the financially able and academically inclined do.

That last designation, “academically inclined,” is an important one: Sperber discusses the four loose categories students tend to fall into, with the collegiate wanting parties, Greek life, and sports, the academic wanting knowledge, the vocational wanting a better job, and the rebels looking for life fulfillment. I might add the “lost” group, or those who wandered into college as an extension of high school and don’t really know why they’re there except that their parents told them to go. These categories aren’t rigid, and students can shift from one to the other and carry traits from more than one, but they’re useful nonetheless. Sperber cites research efforts to explore the composition of schools based on those categories, and it appears that, at many big public schools, the collegiate and vocational students compose the vast majority and have at least since World War II. Schools in turn began shifting their priorities, which accelerated in the 60s and early 70s, and appears to have reached its apotheosis sometime around there.

There’s some danger of propagating a myth of the golden age, but Sperber does seem to have found a genuine shift, especially when he’s discussing funding priorities. The most useful section might be devoted to the culture gap between many of those who control university departments and their undergraduate students. In this respect, the academic outsiders of undergrad eventually become the professors. Here’s where I wonder if the mythological aspect is rising, since, as a percentage basis, the academically inclined might not have dropped any or much, but the sheer number of them simply hasn’t kept up with the collegiate or vocational, and consequently, their influence might have waned. Academic-types also probably can’t connect with professors as easily as they once might have and are more likely to be left adrift in vast classrooms Sperber analogizes to mass transit stations, with all the charming behavior that implies. At the same time, the gulf between undergrads and professors grows: most professors came from the academic culture, while their students don’t. Conflict naturally arises, and I’ve now experienced it—most often indirectly but occasionally directly; the instructors will snicker when they (we?) hear excuses like, “I couldn’t come to class because my sorority kidnapped me…” Such excuses can be especially galling when they come back to back with students who have real problems, like family medical emergencies. How should one respond, I can’t help but asking? There doesn’t seem to be an ideal way, in part because of different values—and I can’t help believing mine are superior. And it’s not easy to inculcate those kinds of values regarding critical thinking, writing, and the like on an industrial scale to people who chiefly want to party. The question becomes, “What should be done?” and the answers—discussed briefly below—seem likely to remain in the ethereal realm of ideas rather than the practical realm of implementation.

Obviously I’ve spent some time considering Sperber’s conclusions and reasoning. But, alas, a book like Beer and Circus reminds me of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why in that both are unlikely to reach the people who need them most—in Bloom’s case, people who don’t or seldom read, and in Sperber’s case, people in positions of power at colleges or who are choosing colleges. The kinds of people most likely to read Beer and Circus are the academics, who are already opposed to the beer and circus mentality and don’t need to be convinced. We find a paradox: someone insightful enough to read this book and who knows something about large universities in the United States will probably already understand the problems it describes, while those who don’t see the problems or like beer and circus aren’t likely to read it.

So how could you decrease campus drinking and such? By now, the game-day culture is sufficiently entrenched that you probably can’t, but one could allocate more money to universities with the stipulation that the money a) not supplant existing teaching funds and—here’s the critical part—b) go entirely to support teaching, rather than research, athletic centers, administrators, and the like. It’s likely to be more effective than approaches like trying to prevent high-risk drinking or violent behavior through band-aids that don’t fix the fundamental problems underlying the behavior: a persistent focus among faculty on research, among undergraduates on each other, and with almost no one but grad students (like me) minding the undergrads. Small schools and honors programs help somewhat, but Sperber justifiably calls them “lifeboats.” Real change would cost more, take more time and effort, and require more full-time teachers and professors who are actually rewarded, socially and otherwise, for teaching. All that seems improbable: what’s more probable is business-as-usual, with books like Sperber’s marking time in unused libraries while most of the student body spends time on the field and in the stadium.

(Oh, and for more Onion-related mockery: see Shitload Of Math Due Monday, which is not unlike many comments I overhear at the gym.)