Category Archives: the polis

Fake-Bold, Real Dumb: Obama’s Higher-Ed Fantasies

Posted on by under education, the polis

A couple of days ago, President Obama rolled up to the University of Buffalo to do something that presidents love to do: unveil Big New Plans for education.

He wore a cool blue robe, he spoke in that soothing voice, the students cheered a lot, and everybody took smartphone pics to put on Instagram, but among teachers and scholars who actually work in higher ed, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, as it should be, because the plan is a salad of PowerPoint-ready ideas that will get praised by Thomas Friedman without doing much to help American students.  In fact, Mr. Obama’s plan is likely to damage public colleges.

I don’t think Obama is a cynical man. If I did, I wouldn’t have voted for him twice. Further, he is right about many facts on the ground. College is too expensive; the student-loan system (which his administration has done little to improve long-term) is an economically debilitating scandal; graduation rates are too low, especially at two-year schools and non-flagship state universities; and it is unclear how to actually determine the fundamental utility of mass college education within the current cultural and institutional environment.

The problem is, Obama’s grand gesture fails to address the present situation’s core problems. Here are some of those.

1. Obama shows little sign of doing anything concrete about the main reason tuition is so high: the collapse of state support for university education. (Thanks, Governor Reagan!) He also fails to offer any solutions to the problem of administrative bloat or the fact that too many schools spend too much money on football stadiums and flowerbeds.

2. He has nothing to say about the appalling reliance on part-time instructors and enormous lecture-hall classes, especially at public schools. Both of these trends seriously degrade the quality of undergraduate instruction.

3. As one blogger has already pointed out, the fetish for Big Data behind Obama’s plan is similar to the reasoning that gave us the No Child Left Behind catastrophe. Rating scales are rating scales; how do you quantify the value of a seminar on Latin American history? Of an ethics class? Of a first-year writing course?

4. These Whither Higher Ed? debates are pointless if the public K-12 system keeps wheezing along, pumping out students with underdeveloped critical-thinking skills.  Obama’s concern about graduation rates is worrisome, because it could pressure schools to pass undergraduates who aren’t ready to be in college. We already do plenty of that.

5. Again with the MOOCs! Teachers may despise them, but if you’re a powerful person whose daughters’ education will continue to consist of small classes taught by expert teachers at wealthy schools (just like your own was), this reality might be hard to see.

The awful irony is that while these grand, splashy efforts to rationalize the market within which consumers make choices about education make for great speeches and flatter America’s sense of itself as a meritocracy that just needs some technocratic intervention to get back on track, they are actually examples of small-bore, short-term, cowardly thinking. They don’t require us to consider our culture’s underlying values or the long-term budget picture in a debt-ridden nation with a dying middle class.

What would require real ambition, courage, and commitment is putting college students into intimate, challenging classes taught by full-time professionals who aren’t treated like drones on the Subway line. But that doesn’t sound cutting-edge and cool. It sounds downright old-fashioned. It would cost lots of money, money that could just as easily be spent on a new deanship or used to subsidize the F-22. It would ask Americans to stop freaking out about how college isn’t worth anything unless it consists of career prep that leads to a job three hours after graduation.

And it would mean our President, who often played a populist on TV in 2008 and 2012, mounting something besides a bus tour where he goes around scolding those bad colleges.

Now to go chill on my oceanfront property in Kansas while I await this renaissance.

Free and Clear

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, the polis

Returning to our old hobby horse of higher education, I recommend that you read this excerpt in The Chronicle of Higher Education from Robert Samuels’ latest book, Why Public Higher Education Should be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities (Rutgers UP, 2013). I haven’t read the full book yet, but I plan to soon. Bob is someone I worked with, and I respect his opinions on how to make higher education better and a better deal for students, particularly those who don’t swim in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. Although I am not sure that making public colleges entirely free is the best idea, I do think we could streamline the way public money ends up getting spent on education to bring costs down to reasonable levels (i.e., take the ridiculous and predatory loan system out of it). Any move toward tuitionless higher ed would have to come with really stringent guidelines about who schools could let in and what students would have to do to stay enrolled, as simply providing universities a per-pupil payment seems like an invitation for administrators hungry to replicate themselves to let in completely unprepared kids just for the government cash they represent, only to dump them in ever-expanding classes taught by bedraggled adjuncts and grad students. Honestly, that wouldn’t be good for anyone, save the new Vice Deans of Provostial Studies.

Now, I’d wager this potential problem of free public colleges being overwhelmed by students who aren’t prepared could be solved by radically reforming K-12 education. If we actually focus on making a K-12 education system that hones essential critical thinking, language, writing, quantitative, technological, cultural, and interpersonal skills, we might end up with a population that is prepared at 18 to either enter a tech-heavy workforce (everything from Silicon Valley to auto repair) or go to college. This will require more, not less, personal attention given to each student, active engagement by parents in the lives of their kids and local schools, the toppling of the “testing” and AP regimes, the firing of teachers who (after being given multiple chances and the tools to succeed) have proven not up to the task of educating, and the end of schools being run by administrators rather than the best teachers. No small task, I know, but so many of our problems in higher ed are the result of our largely failed K-12 system. So let’s fix it before we’re a nation of people with 4.4 GPAs who can’t write a coherent sentence in English, Spanish, French, or any other language.

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.

The Cost of Tenure

Posted on by under education, the polis

Being a young teacher who is lucky enough to have full-time work but not fortunate enough to be on the tenure track, I occasionally romanticize the material existences of the actual institutionally certified professors I know. Not the adjuncts; not even the lucky lecturers; no, the real professors who have tenure or who can maybe get tenure someday. Those folks. They must have houses to themselves and own their Priuses outright. Right?

Right?

Oh dammit. No, reports Katherine Harris, at least not if you teach at a public university. Her poignant, pragmatic essay is worth reading. Still, as Doc Sportello would say, Bummer.

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.

Boooo MOOCs

Posted on by under education, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

When a culture endlessly suggests to its children that the humanities are frivolous and effeminate, and when that culture looks the other way while institutions conceived in the Enlightenment ruthlessly downsize the support given to people who safeguard and pass along humanity’s intellectual traditions, you end up with an economy-strangling clusterfuck distinguished by “not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.”

Given how much TGR has covered the decay of American higher education (hey, it’s the sector we know best), this sounds like something Dan or I would say. But since it isn’t, the quote is probably from some idealistic niche publication, like n+1 or the New Yorker. Maybe even Slate. Yeah? The kind of outlet that gets links on Arts & Letters Daily.

But no. It’s Business Insider. Turns out that some corporate managers are terrified by the applications they’re getting from the current labor pool. Turns out they’re desperate for art-history romantics and inveterate readers.

If you are a liberal pro-marketeer like me, as opposed to someone in favor of anti-market corporate oligarchy, you’ve shivered while surveying the road map adopted by American university regents over the past few decades:

1. Cut funding for undergraduate education. In other words, spend less on giving your students (who pay more in tuition every year) access to classes that have been lovingly curated by experts who are intensely dedicated to the education of those students.

2. Build a gym or a stadium or something.

3. Cut funding for undergraduate education.

4. Stock up on administrators.

5. Cut more funding.

6. Keep cutting. Exploit or invent a crisis if you have to.

7. Realize that enough members of the public are slowly getting wise to the fact that this shitshow doesn’t actually teach kids to be rational, creative adults who can participate in a mature democracy. Schedule some press conferences, preferably with rich people who work in Silicon Valley/have given TED talks/are the governor of California.

8. Announce frantic, heavily funded effort to have private companies fix things because the public sector is so poor and dumb and inefficient. Emphasize gigantic online “classes.”

9. Hope that people, even those in a position to send their kids out to get four-year degrees, are too busy fighting to keep their health insurance to care about the solution not being a solution.

One of the grimmer ironies of the past decade is that the decay of American higher education, and in particular the decline of its commitment to humanism and the core sciences (i.e., the liberal arts), has moved a number of professors to write excellent books, articles, and blogs about said collapse. For example, there’s Chris Newfield’s  Unmaking the Public University; Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors; Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island; Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works; Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty; and Bob Samuels’s “Changing Universities” blog, which focuses on California and has for years tirelessly mapped the dangers of joining “the Republican desire to shrink big government and privatize public institutions . . . with the Democratic need to be associated with progress and private-public joint ventures.”

On that note, from The Awl back in January, here is Maria Bustillos with a fitting title: “Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea for the Future of College.” The depressing takeaway:

Now California state universities are set to begin enrolling students in MOOCs for credit. Earlier this month, the president of San Jose State University, Mo Qayoumi, announced that his institution will commence a pilot program: 300 students will receive course credit for online classes in remedial algebra, college algebra and statistics. Qayoumi was joined at the press conference by California Governor Jerry Brown and Sebastian Thrun, the controversial ex-Stanford prof and co-founder of Udacity, which will supply classes for the program at the cost of $150 per customer, er, student.

“This is the single cheapest way in the country to earn college credit,” Thrun “quipped.”

It’s not quite free, as early MOOC proponents began by promising. It is worth mentioning, too, that Udacity is a venture-funded startup, that classes will be supervised not by tenured profs but by Udacity employees, and that Thrun declined to tell the Times how much public money his company will be raking in for this pilot—or what more may have been promised should the pilot prove “successful.”

Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?

A more recent post here on TGR deals with how this pilot program turned out.

And take funding back to prior levels? I feel like the cop in that scene from The Big Lebowski where the Dude goes to retrieve his car from the impound lot. Leads!