Category Archives: Life of the Mind

Stir It Up: Rebecca Schuman Lands Some Punches

Posted on by under Authors, education, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

Back in April, Rebecca Schuman published a piece on Slate titled “Thesis Hatement.” (Come on, lulz: low-hanging puns can be great.) Dan actually mentioned it as part of a “Saturday Links” blast. Despite the fact that it is sane, reality-based, and urgent without being shrill, “Thesis Hatement” caused a lot of Slate commenters (including a fair number of academics), to go batshit. She addresses the haters in a delightfully acidic response on her blog, Pan Kisses Kafka, which is part of the rapidly emerging “postacademic” community. (Post-acad stuff from other writers here and here and here and here, for starters. And also a recent piece RS wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education).

Given the seething response the essay got from some quarters, it bears repeating that Schuman’s piece is a humane, valuable polemic. I re-read it today as I sat in my studio apartment, just after I paid this month’s student-loan bill, in fact. (Back when I started graduate school I actually believed insane bullshit like “Student-loan is good debt.”). Her work is based on personal experience but is not narcissistic or even all that autobiographical. It is precise and witty. And it underscores some dreadful things that any reasonable person (even many tenured Boomers!) with a functional knowledge of US academic culture would have a difficult time refuting: that the present labor environment at too many American colleges and universities puts terrible psychological and social demands upon too many faculty, especially younger PhDs and graduate students; that it offers little material incentive for facing these challenges; and that it trains the tormented not only to accept their torment as a professional duty, but to view any escape from that torment as a personal and professional failure.

A bummer, I know. So here is a picture of Iggy Pop vacuuming his living room. Cheer up, y’all: it’s the weekend.

Today in Foil Shrines and Monkeyshines

Posted on by under Life of the Mind, Visual

Call me John Ruskin, but when it comes to home decoration, whether aesthetic or functional, it’s hard to beat the work of an obsessive craftsman. Sometimes having a limited set of tools makes for human creations that are even more astonishing. Just look at this! (h/t Dan Pecchenino, co-editor of TGR, and to Slate.com’s The Vault, where you should click some links) The fact that it was made for Henry Ford has kept me chuckling for the past 36 hours.

It reminds me of James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. Googling this miracle will make you proud to be human and American. Plus it’s the title of a good (well, often) poetry collection by a fantastic American novelist. A win-win for you.

Et tu, Obama?

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

As is usually the case in these matters, I agree with everything Ryan wrote the other day about President Obama’s farcical plan to “win the future” by devising a federal rating system for colleges and universities. No doubt the President and his mandarins will be able to create a totally ungameable system that will not encourage waste, fraud, and abuse, the holy trinity of government cliches. University administrators will definitely see it as an opportunity to invest in high quality undergraduate education, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Obama’s doubling down on the kind of systematic education policies of the Bush administration is right up there on his list of follies with his failure to close Guantanamo and his fulsome embrace of the surveillance state. And, like Ryan, I say this as someone who voted for the guy twice, and who thinks he’s done some helpful things in the face of unprecedented opposition. But good grief, whenever he opens his mouth and talks about higher education, I cringe. Like Jonathan Chait, Obama appears to think universities should be like factories where “skills” are fastened onto students like lasers onto toy robots. I doubt his own college career at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard bore much resemblance to the melange of MOOCs, huge classes taught by adjuncts, and standardized tests his new gold-plated system will inspire. We’re well on our way there already.

I know we’ve said it a thousand times, you guys, but if the politicians and pundits who profess to care about college and college students so much actually did, they would sit back and think about what made their own college experiences so helpful: difficult, small courses taught by secure faculty members; a focus on cultivating critical thinking skills by making students read and write about hard texts, some even written a long time ago; universities that actually thought of themselves as universities, not mini-hedge funds; and an administrative class that didn’t wag the dog, or at least that was staffed by people who cared about undergraduates.

The President should work on fixing our broken economy so that people who don’t actually have any interest in going to college don’t feel like they have to take out huge loans to enroll in online classes that are basically just cut and pasted from Wikipedia and a few out of date textbooks. If our choices in life are college or McDonald’s, we’re no superpower. Or he could start pressuring states to fix our criminally mismanaged K-12 systems. Or (here comes the pipe dream), he could start talking about the virtues of higher education being difficult and not for everyone. He could use the bully pulpit to make Plato, trigonometry, James Baldwin, coding, and Spanish, seem like things worth working hard to understand because they will help you lead a more interesting life and figure out a way to make decent money because you’re a well-rounded, savvy, likable person. He could talk about these things. But he won’t.

Make That Paper… Or Two

Posted on by under education, Life of the Mind, Other Critics

I recommend you read this little post by Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor at Shimer College (which sounds like an awesome place, by the way). The following paragraph sums up Kotsko’s point, and it’s something Ryan and I have been saying to each other for years: most grad students have some skills that could be useful in the private sector, but few actually figure out a way to make use of them there. Kotsko writes:

In terms of making this work, you first need to think about the skills you have as a grad student. You have research skills. You have writing skills. You are basically an information processing machine. You hopefully have some language skills. Depending on your discipline, you might also have some advanced math or stats skills — in any case, you probably know how to use standard office software better than the average office worker does. You’re almost certainly anal-retentive when it comes to grammar and usage. These are things that don’t take any pre-existing special skills, and there are plenty of companies that need help with all of that. (And if you do have pre-existing special skills like programming or web design, then that’s just another advantage.)

Kotsko goes on to suggest that grad students make two resumes, one of their private sector work, and one of their academic work, as both spheres are irrationally hostile to what they think happens in the other, thus somehow tainting the mind of the person who has strayed beyond the borders of either. A lot of grad students I knew did something like this, but most still touted their academic credentials and work on their non-academic CV. They shouldn’t have, at least not in the language of academia.

One of the changes that needs to occur in humanities and social science graduate programs (the sciences are better at this for pretty obvious reasons) is advisors coming to grips with the fact that most of their students won’t become tenure-track professors. This has always been the case, but people still act like all of their young (and old) charges are going to work as “academics.” This fantasy leads advisors to almost never mention that grad students pursue work other than adjunct teaching, save maybe for volunteering at politically correct non-profits. Folks who work in the digital humanities are better about this, but even they don’t often tell their students how important it is to cultivate non-academic professional relationships, build marketable skills, and MAKE MONEY. This has to change soon, or else many grad programs and the people they churn out will insulate themselves out of existence.

This Will Get Ugly

Posted on by under education, Life of the Mind, Other Critics, the polis

Jonathan Chait has dashed off a piece in New York Magazine that’s a perfect example of how uninterested most MOOC boosters are in actually improving the quality of higher education. His post is a response to an article by Jonathan Rees (two Jonathans will enter, but only one will survive!) in Slate about how MOOCs are a bad deal for both students and professors. Predictably, Chait mostly focuses on the part where Rees bemoans what MOOCs threaten to do to the the employment prospects of faculty members. Most people are unsympathetic to the idea that we should preserve the current structure of higher education to keep a bunch of eggheads in their houses. Hell, I’m not even very sympathetic to that argument, and I have a vested economic interest in supporting it!

But Chait basically ignores everything Rees writes about why MOOCs will be a disaster if what one cares about is ensuring that people actually learn useful skills in college courses. Rees writes:

How do you teach tens of thousands of people anything at once? You don’t. What you can do over the Internet this way is deliver information, but that’s not education. Education, as any real teacher will tell you, involves more than just transmitting facts. It means teaching students what to do with those facts, as well as the skills they need to go out and learn new information themselves…

What makes this possible is that MOOCs, at least from an educational standpoint, are designed to run themselves. The lectures are pre-recorded. The grading is done either by computer or by other students in the class, should they choose to do the assignments at all. The average drop-out rates for existing MOOCs is about 90 percent, so while Coursera may offer access to higher education anywhere in the world where potential students can get the Internet, it offers no guarantee that anybody will actually learn anything…

While MOOCs may serve a purpose as nerdy edu-tainment for people who are so inclined, a workforce trained without close contact with professors of any kind might as well not attend college at all. Going to the library and reading a bunch of books would be equally effective, and probably a whole lot cheaper.

To which Chait responds:

But, uh – are we sure the only way to teach people what to do with facts is face-to-face? This seems like something that could at least conceivably be taught to more than one person at once. I can remember lots of professors teaching me what to do with facts via lectures in extremely large auditoriums, which is not that different than a lecture you watch online. Nobody claims that the technical barrier has been solved, but it’s amazing that Rees is already declaring it unsolvable…

The goal of the system ought to be making higher education effective and affordable for students. Rees waxes poetic about the joys of in-person liberal education, and I greatly enjoyed my classic college experience, with the gorgeous campus green and intramural basketball and watching campus protestors say interestingly crazy stuff at rallies. But insisting that’s the only way a student ought to be able to get a degree, in an economy where a college degree is necessary for a middle-class life, is to doom the children of non-affluent families to crushing college debt, or to lock them out of upward mobility altogether.

Chait’s equation of MOOCs, which are supposed to replace entire courses, with lectures is instructive; it reveals something that few of the MOOC boosters like to discuss: lectures and the information they transmit are only one small component of any college class worth its salt. The careful, personal evaluation by trained professionals of the material produced by students is why college is useful as anything more than a simple credentialing process. Even Rees referring to this as “grading” misses the point. The development of rhetorical, quantitative, and creative skills requires that someone who knows what s/he’s talking about explains to the student not just that they have done something incorrectly, but how and why they have done so, and how they can fix this going forward. Doing this well takes a lot of time per pupil, and this is why small class sizes are essential is some disciplines (any course that has a significant writing component, higher math, advanced science courses, art). Why do you think people send their kids to small, insanely expensive liberal arts colleges?

But the quality of the education received by students doesn’t really matter to Chait and other MOOC maniacs. He never defines “effective” because it’s only important that people get credentialed. Whether they can write or reason their way out of a paper bag is immaterial, so long as they have a BA. If Chait (and President Obama, for that matter) actually cared about improving the quality of higher education, they would understand that the solution to colleges offering too many large impersonal lectures for credit is not to make courses even larger and more impersonal. Information has never been more accessible than it is today. This is great, and everyone should take advantage of the internet to become more informed people. But information does not an education make. If we want education to have any real value we must invest in it, not in techno-fads masquerading as education.

How Not to Support an Argument (or a Culture)

Posted on by under education, Life of the Mind, the polis

We’ve written a lot recently about the funding, management, and technological problems (all related to one another) currently affecting higher education. This discussion largely avoids what is going on within individual majors or disciplines. Frankly, I don’t know enough about what’s cooking (to borrow a phrase from Oppenheimer) in most fields to have an opinion about the usefulness of what happens in, say, a biochemistry class. I do, however, have a pretty good sense of what occurs in literature classes, in spite of the fact that I haven’ t taught one in almost two years now. And this is why I am slightly torn as to what to make of Lee Siegel’s recent article in The Wall Street Journal. 

I am generally skeptical of pieces about education and the humanities published in the WSJ. It’s a prejudice I should probably get over (Thomas Frank used to write for them!), but I doubt I will. And Siegel’s piece is very much in line with the ideology of the paper’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, in its call for literature to be removed from the largely public (and quasi-publicly-funded) realm of college curricula so that it can “flourish” in the private lives of individuals. Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, Siegel is essentially calling for the defunding of humanities education because, according to him, it doesn’t provide any skills that can be monetized. He writes:

The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

Such ruminations always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.

He goes on, predictably, to blame the decline in the quality of literary education on tenured radicals (I must be the luckiest guy on earth to have never had one of these as a professor in my ten years of undergraduate and graduate study), and it’s clear Siegel thinks he’s making a devastating point when he starts using his own experiences as evidence that not only does one not gain much from taking literature courses in college, but that taking them actively “extinguish[es] the incandescence of literature.” And that’s really what the essay boils down to: Siegel found his college literature courses so allegedly dispiriting that he thinks we should simply get rid of them, but not dispiriting enough that he refrained from studying literature in graduate school. It is the flimsiest of reeds upon which to hang an argument, especially when Siegel doesn’t even bother to address whether writing about complex works of art in a context where one can get constructive criticism of said writing might help one become a better analytic and descriptive writer. He simply asserts that it doesn’t. Finally, don’t even get me started on these unsupported (because unsupportable) passages:

Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector’s infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

…

The notion that great literature can help you with reading and thinking clearly is also a chimera. One page of Henry James’s clotted involutions or D.H. Lawrence’s throbbing verbal repetitions will disabuse you of any conception of literature’s value as a rhetorical model. Rather, the literary masterworks of Western civilization demonstrate the limitations of so-called clear-thinking. They present their meanings in patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions. There are sonnets by Shakespeare that no living person can understand. The capacity to transfix you with their language while hiding their meaning in folds of mind-altering imagery is their rare quality.

…

Anyway, we have all been sufficiently sparked and stoked by literature to make it part of our destiny by the time we graduate high school. If there is any hand-wringing to do, it should be over the disappearance of what used to be a staple of every high-school education: the literature survey course, where books were not academically taught but intimately introduced—an experience impervious to inane commentary and sterile testing. Restore and strengthen that ground-shifting encounter and the newly graduated pilgrims will continue to read and seek out the transfiguring literary works of the past the way they will be drawn to love.

So why am I even a little torn after read this mostly vapid, abstract, and culturally clueless piece of criticism? Because I think Siegel is right that there are things wrong with the ways we teach literature. Literary “theory” is indeed “that fig leaf for mediocrity,” and the value given to it by a few professors is sad. Most of what Derrida, Butler, and Foucault (and even Freud) said that is of any use can be boiled down to a few sentences. And some professors don’t do a very good job of making clear connections between what students read and write in their classes and the lives they’ve led, are leading, and will lead once they leave the university. Siegel’s most salient critique though is of literary education on the high school level.  While I am not sure what he means when he says that survey courses should not be “academically taught,” he is right that we need to introduce students to an ever-expanding canon of great works (from the Bible to John Rechy and beyond) in their formative years. Siegel manages to botch even this simple point though, as he fails to mention the reason why even our smartest students are coming out of high school unable to write about or even really feel connected to complex works of literature: AP testing. Instead of cutting literary study out of the college curriculum, we need to eliminate AP literature courses that teach students to think about literature in terms of multiple choice tests and timed, short essay exams, and we need to eliminate these evaluative measures at the college level as well. Instead of helping students think about literature, these forms force students to focus on how to best “beat” the test. It becomes a game, and many of the kids I teach spend enough of their time playing games. The study of literature needs to be hard in order for it to be useful, so I thank Siegel for (kind of) gesturing toward this fact, even if most of what he says is laughable.

And this is where I come back to the fact that this piece was published in the Wall Street Journal. It seems that the mode of modern conservatism is to be as profoundly unconservative as it can be. Instead of trying to fix higher education and the social safety net (to say nothing of the social fabric of which its made), modern conservatism prefers to blow things up and “let the market sort things out.” This is a great strategy if you’re insulated from the market’s often violent reactions, but not so good for everyone else. If you care at all about culture, you try to pass it on to as many people as you can. You don’t write gushy paeans to ignorance.

“A Natural Breather Time”

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind

Looks like San Jose State’s outsourced MOOC adventure is off to a bright start. In fact, things are going so well that the school is going to do what American University already has, and just chill for a bit.

Translation from provost-speak to English: “Umm, we decided to do this, and facts aren’t going to change that now. Move along. As soon as you people stop paying attention to what we’re doing, we can go back to doing it.”

Strange Bedfellows

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

As Ryan has pointed out, it’s hard for us to not comment a lot about the state of higher education because we both have a vested interest in seeing it not completely destroy itself. It’s a topic that makes for strange bedfellows and challenges the political categories we all too easily apply to ourselves and others. For instance, Bob Samuels is the president of UC-AFT (the union that represents non-tenured faculty in the University of California system), while Alan Jacobs teaches at Baylor University and writes for The American Conservative. By conventional metrics, one is a progressive and one is a traditionalist Christian conservative, but both have written a lot about how the push toward eliminating small classes in favor of MOOCs is a terrible idea for students. Both Samuels and Jacobs are educational conservationists. These aren’t people opposed to making meaningful changes to the way universities are run (everyone but administrators admit that administrative bloat must be reversed), but rather people who want to conserve what higher education does best:  introducing students to new ideas and people through lectures, personal instruction, debates, and meaningful face-to-face social interaction. Having to share space with someone and their ideas is a really powerful thing. As anyone who reads internet comment boards knows, the web specializes in letting us (and training us to) talk past one another because the other person isn’t actually there to respond. This is one of the reasons why segregation, whether written into the law, de facto, by choice, or via technology is so awful: it prevents us from doing the messy work of having to argue with others, defend our own positions, and think on the fly. There is no lag-time in real life, and no substitute for having to look someone in the eye and treat him as a real, valid human being, even as he says things that challenge your sense of how the world works. That’s an education, and the kind that will benefit one in almost any career.

Similarly, the folks running down traditional educational models and/or pimping MOOCmania are also an eclectic bunch. From Ivy League-educated “libertarians,” to the virtuous conservative Bill Bennett, to the mostly Democratic mandarins of Silicon Valley, the crew trying to tell us how traditional models of education are outdated is hard to pin down politically. So, to borrow a term from one of our favorites here at TRG, Evgeny Morozov, these folks can best be understood as “solutionists.” They see a problem (and as Ryan and I have made clear, there are tons of problems in higher ed that have nothing to do with MOOCs), and their first instinct is to blow things up. They also love blaming professors, as if professors run universities (or even university systems) anymore. There are reformers who aren’t “solutionists,” like Vance Fried, and while I don’t agree with some of his ideas (consolidating all of the humanities into one major is dumb, and he seemingly thinks teaching 5 writing-intensive classes is the same as teaching 5 sections of algebra), I at least get the sense that he understands that education is about much more than the transmission of information. People of good faith can disagree about how to fix things, but they must sincerely be interested in fixing things in order for the conversations to be productive.

The latest smart take from the “hey, maybe we should be a bit more critical of MOOCs and the people who are pushing them” camp comes from Scott L. Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College. His basic thesis is so simple and obvious that I am amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me:

The corporate world recognizes the virtues of proximity in its own human resource management. Witness, for example, Yahoo’s recent decision to eliminate telecommuting and require employees to be present in the office. CEO Marissa Mayer’s memo reads as a mini-manifesto for close learning:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Why do boards of directors still go through the effort of convening in person? Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.

Newstok’s entire piece is worth reading, as is Alan Jacobs’ response, wherein he reminds us to spend less time listening to the solutionists, and more time observing them:

If physical presence is as important in education as the technologists’s actions say it is, then perhaps their energies are misapplied. Instead of looking for ways to eliminate or bypass brick-and-mortar schools — and, not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so — maybe they should bend their considerable intellectual powers to the more challenging, less destructive, and far more meaningful challenge of making college education more affordable for everyone who can truly benefit from it.

And lest you think that conservationists are simply trying to prop up traditional learning models in order to line their own pockets, and are therefore no different from the Silicon Valley folks trying to tear these models down, keep this in mind: 75% of people teaching at American universities aren’t tenure-track, will never make salaries comparable to what people in the tech sector make at mid-career, and could actually probably make a lot more money by jumping on the MOOC train now.