Teacher Teacher

An interesting article at Liberties Journal opens by quoting some college students lamenting the quality of instruction they were receiving. Professors were disengaged, they meandered during their lectures and frequently explained material poorly in response to student questions.

The hook is that this discussion happened almost a hundred years ago, in a meeting of delegates from 20 colleges held at Wesleyan University in 1925. To the extent today's students care about learning anything in between bacchanals and indignant protests, they could probably say similar things. A few do, says article author Jonathan Zimmerman, but those "paying customers" are widely outnumbered by the ones who want a memorable experience (much of which they will render themselves unable to remember) and a credential for a job that will put them comfortably in the upper middle class.

Zimmerman, a former professor at New York University and now at the University of Pennsylvania, names the usual suspects: A research-dominated faculty culture, little or no training in actual pedagogy, grade inflation, etc. To this he adds a feature from our modern age, in which professors are afraid to present challenging ideas in certain areas of discussion for fear of stirring up a mob against them for their clearly fascist bigotry -- even in fields that discuss nothing that could honestly be described as fascist or bigoted.

My own time as an undergraduate is some 35 years ago and while some of these trends had started to curve upward, I proudly possess a transcript that proves grade inflation had not been adopted by several professors. Most of my time in campus ministry has been in smaller regional universities, where students are far more likely to encounter instructors more interested in teaching than in advancing in their field through research. 

The irony seems to be that the value of the college as a credential for where one starts in the world seems to vary inversely with the likelihood that one might actually be taught something. Professor Zimmerman would like to see a world where more colleges offered that likelihood -- and maybe things at prestige universities or large state research schools will one day break down so much that such a world will return. It happened in response to student critique and dissatisfaction a hundred years ago, at least for awhile, and maybe it will happen again.

Conferencing

At whatever your preferred sports news website, you may read speculation, an actually tiny bit of certain knowledge, opinion and full-throated blatherskite about the idea that the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas might be invited to join the Southeastern Conference. I picked The Athletic, and learned what I could learn here.

What I didn't learn there, and what I wouldn't learn anywhere, was what academic changes this move might entail. Because of course it involves none. Whether either school's athletic programs have competed in the Southwest Conference, Big Eight Conference, Big Twelve Conference or whatever other alphabet combo cobbled together to soak up TV money has made absolutely no difference to the primary reason either school -- if indeed they still desire to be called such -- exists.

The only question about such alignments or re-alignments is which individuals make money off of the efforts of unpaid young people, often members of minority groups. Since the odds that those unpaid young people won't be among those making money, what difference does it make which "athletic conference" an institution belongs to?

Erm...

Colleges and universities are places of learning, where people go to acquire knowledge and sometimes to develop specific skills though training and education.

The people who provide this information are called, variously, professors, instructors, doctors, lecturers and so on. They share the characteristic of extended study within a field and the task of communicating some of that study to students who enroll in their classes. Outside their fields their knowledge is often no better or worse than any average person, even though some of them will claim that their expertise in, say, entomology (specifically butterflies) means their understanding of population theory merits the same deference to their policy ideas despite evidence to the contrary. In other words, colleges and universities employ as instructors people who are really smart and knowledgeable in one or two directions and more or less average in most other directions.

Outside the classroom, though, colleges and universities employ people who think that indoor balconies in a college dorm are a good idea, which would indicate that those people are dumb in every direction.

Irrational Sentencing

The impending sentencing for actress Felicity Huffman, who paid someone to correct the answers on her daughter's SAT test to ensure the young woman's admission to college, has drawn a lot of comment. Much of it is very dumb, and I suppose the main reason that my opinion will not add that much to the dumbness is that it will not be as widely read as the rest.

Huffman plead guilty and wants to be punished by a fine and significant community service. The prosecutor wants her to spend 30 days in jail, and we see the dumb rear its head very quickly. I am not under any illusion that house arrest within her mansion is any kind of punishment for Ms. Huffman unless we are talking ridiculous amounts of time. The prosecution's recommendation to the judge takes snarky note of the unremarkable fact that a rich person lives in a nice home in making the case for some kind of incarceration. But let's not pretend that 30 days in jail will amount to anything other than a pinion in the Panama for the prosecution. The sentence is about the same theatrics behind the dawn raid on Huffman's home, in which FBI agents felt it best to arrest a test cheater over the sights of drawn weapons.

Huffman will be no more or less employable because of such a sentence -- Hollywood has already sentenced her to being a non-Meryl Streep woman over 50, so her roles will start to shrink soon. It will be of no material benefit to the federal government or jail which houses her. SAT test proctors will not breathe a sigh of relief that they are protected from offers to to switch a few of those penciled ovals from wrong to right for a stack of cash. A jail sentence will not signal to those tempted to cheat that it's wrong -- they already know it's wrong just like Ms. Huffman did, but they, also like her, think they won't be caught. They still will. Federal prosecutors will parade Ms. Huffman's incarceration-ish stint in jail because it's a rich person behind bars, not because any element of society will be any safer or better off if Felicity Huffman gets a monthlong wardrobe change.

Ms. Huffman's letter to the judge makes a couple of telling points. No matter what happens to her in the judicial system, she has a life sentence of her daughter knowing her mother didn't think she could get into college on her own. Sure, she's an actress and knows how to play a role, but it's tough to believe that's all part of a script. She makes a good argument that the overall balance of right and wrong is probably better served by her paying a significant fine and finding community service work to help undo some of what she's done -- but she doesn't seem to be aware that she's hardly the best one to make that argument stick.

Ms. Huffman's former Desperate Housewives castmate Eva Longoria wrote a letter in support of her friend's request for leniency which, in true celebrity fashion, made good points about Ms. Huffman's character while also giving herself a starring role and taking digs at other former co-stars, who aren't named. Actor William Macy, Ms. Huffman's husband, unsurprisingly argues that his wife should not be sentenced to jail and mentions in support how she acted partly out of the stresses and excesses of motherhood and maternal love.

As always, when the pyramid of stupid needs a capstone, one may turn to Joy Behar of The View, whose response to an item on Mr. Macy's letter was: “Who wrote that speech? It's, like, out of 'Desperate Housewives.' ” She thought it was funny, you see, because Ms. Huffman used to star in Desperate Housewives and it was kind of a soap opera and Mr. Macy's letter was a little overwrought and Ms. Behar's SAT answers could use a couple of "proctors" themselves.

Unlike some other wealthy families involved in this admissions scandal, no students were displaced by Ms. Huffman and Mr. Macy's daughter. She gained admission to a college which did not require the SAT, but that offer was rescinded when the scandal broke. Should some folk spend time behind bars for their roles in this? Sure...unless we can show that fining them would be more productive. Either way, we shouldn't pretend that a monthlong sentence for a wealthy actress will do anything for society as a whole, in spite of what the people who actually will benefit from it tell us.

A Wardrobe Out of This World

For an early celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing at the Explorer's Club, Buzz Aldrin wore a suit printed with rocket ships, one blue sock with white stars and one with red-and-white stripes.

As you can see in this Business Insider photograph, there's no cool like Apollo cool. Also, if Buzz Aldrin didn't exist, we'd have to invent him.

$chool

George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen offers an opinion on the recent revelations that some people don't know how to buy Junior's admission to college. Cowen suggests the scheme -- which involved direct payment to university officials who could guarantee admission to the briber's children, rather than the hint that mom and dad think a new library would look awesome on campus -- shows a weirdly dualistic view of college.

On the one hand, the parents obviously wanted their kids in top schools (although as an Okie, I have to wonder about those parents willing to break the law to get their kid into the University of Texas). Which means that the kids' presence in those schools, and whatever benefits accrued from it, was something the parents valued.

On the other hand, they didn't value it enough to take advantage of the many legal advantages they had that would have made admission to a preferred college more likely. Tutoring, test prep, résumé-enhancing activities -- there's a long list of options open to folks who have the money to pay for them. And each of those options is a leg up on the average applicant. In one sense, admission was only worth buying -- it wasn't worth earning.

Several of the news stories focused on how many of the students concerned might not have qualified for admission had their ticket not been purchased under the table. Of course, universities admit academically suspect students all the time in exchange for revenue -- it's called college athletics. While most smaller schools and many sports fill their team rosters with true student-athletes, quite a few of the schools involved in this scandal have have shown up in exposés of young people who made it onto campus without being ready for anything but the playing field. And when they excel on that playing field, all kinds of money rolls into the school coffers and coaches' pockets via endorsement deals and the like. None of it rolls to the students, of course, because the school is already offering them the benefit of a highly useful degree.

It's an immense mess, which makes it kind of ironic that it can really be described in one word: Ick.

Word

Thanks to the efforts of the good folks at Mental Floss, you can learn a couple of neat things about that invaluable friend of English comp writers, the thesaurus.

The one that interested me the most was the knowledge that Peter Mark Roget, the man credited with the development of the modern English thesaurus (the best-known of which bears his name today) was also a medical doctor. His birthday of January 18 is observed as "Thesaurus Day."

And he invented the log-log slide rule, a specialized version of that old mathematical tool that displayed the logarithm of a logarithm and thus allowed the user to directly manipulate roots and exponents in calculations.

My doctor's pretty cool, but I don't see him branching out like that.

Brochure Booboo

An art school in France is blaming its U.S. communications company for darkening the skin of some of the people in a photo featuring its student body, and replacing some of the actual students who are white with darker-skinned folks who don't attend the school.

College brochures, of course, work hard to make sure that they feature a nice variety of melanin and both X and Y chromosomes in the promo pictures. Preferably sitting around outside on a manicured green lawn, absorbing knowledge from the cool, laid-back prof who isn't afraid to teach outdoors when the weather is nice. I used to work at a college, and I can count the number of non-art profs who would teach out of doors on one hand -- subject retention went through the basement when the lecture was presented in the great outdoors with its myriad attractive distractions, not to mention its distracting attractions.

Another thing that the brochures at the college where I used to work would leave out: International students. I worked there for five years and I can count on the other hand the number of international students I saw in any promotional literature not aimed specifically at that pool of recruits. The dearth was one of the marketing office's blind spots. Another was the careful attention paid to properly camouflaging the school's connection to a church denomination. It has a top-level set of programs in the performing arts and the admissions office for some reason believed that being too overt in mentioning the church that founded the school would make it harder to recruit the top students for those programs.

One of the several focus groups and such that tried to create mission or branding statements for the college met with different groups of employees and students to test out some of the ones they had developed through surveys. We were shown five or six and asked to respond to them in different ways, as well as pick which one we thought best described the mission of the school. "Well, none of them describe the mission of the school for my community," I said. "The people in my denomination's churches would figure on some mention of faith, or a life of faith and none of these do that."

"Well, if you had to pick one," said the market research company employee who was probably not happy he drew the group with the associate chaplain, "which one would be closest?"

I shrugged. "But I don't have to pick one," I said. "And none of them include what I think ought to be essential to the mission of a church-related university." After some silence he moved on; I saw his co-worker make some mark on her tally sheet but I have no idea what it was. In any event the new mission slogan came out a month or so later and I think lasted for almost a year before we had a new strategizing routine tossed at us to develop a new slogan. I can't recall what either of them were, of course.

Unclear on the Concept

What makes a university? I've attended two and worked at another, but I don't know if I could say.

That's OK. Neither can the University of Akron.

Science!

I had always been a little curious about the "Stanford Prison Experiment," a supposed exercise in which two groups of people were assigned to be either guards or inmates. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University in 1971 and claimed to show that just that minor exercise of power brought out innate cruelty in the group acting as guards.

My curiosity came from wondering how ordinary folks degraded so quickly. Certainly there are people in authority who abuse their power. Professions in which one is a part of a group that has power over another group that is essentially powerless can tend to draw people who like to exercise that power or abuse it. But not everyone's a closet sadist, and the idea that just a few hours of being on the top side of a massive power imbalance would prompt abuse never really sounded true to me.

Turns out that the experiment, like a lot of famous psychological experiments that are supposed to show how rotten people can be, was fabricated. It had always been given a bit of a side-eye based on questionable ethics and such, but writer Ben Blum dug deeper into the records of the experiment, following the trail of French documentary moviemaker Thibault Le Texier who had researched and prepared his own exposé.

Blum's interviews show that one of the supposed breakdowns that stopped the experiment early was faked. The cruelest guard deliberately went over the top and crafted a character based on guards from Cool Hand Luke, even faking a southern accent he didn't really have.

Writing for Vox, Billy Resnick notes several other famous psychological experiments have problems being reproduced and seem to feature coaching from the experimenters which probably skewed the results. Although many of these experiments are decades old, information eroding their credibility is only lately being confirmed. Some required many years of work and research to be debunked.

Which effort, it seems, according to both stories, pales in comparison with getting the fraudulent or suspect findings out of the classroom. The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to have been clearly refuted, and it only took forty-seven years. It may take another forty-seven to get it out of basic psychological textbooks.

Campus Shenanigans

So some students at Reed College have made a list of demands to change the curriculum of a couple of basic-level courses most students take. They want the courses to study more writers and people of color and other marginalized groups -- in fact, that's all they want the courses to cover, zeroing out white and European writers entirely.

I thought one facet of the modern wired-up generation was their innate connection to irony and ability to sniff it out in situations that unhip old people would take seriously. But now I'm not so sure. Because I may have this wrong, but aren't these students demanding to pay to be taught only what they want to be taught?

Sure, most of the time people only want to hear what they already want to hear or believe to be true. It's called confirmation bias, and it explains 90% of the audiences of people like Sean Hannity or Lawrence O'Donnell.

Almost everybody can or has been guilty of proclaiming that this or that news organization or person offers the unbiased truth, which just so happens to coincide with their own worldview. A liberal person suggests that someone who wants to find out what's really going on in the world should listen to or read mainstream news outlet coverage like one of the old Big Three networks or well-established papers such as the New York Times or Washington Post. Those are trusted names without a real heavy ideological lean.

But just 7 percent of journalists called themselves Republicans, while 28 percent called themselves Democrats according to this Washington Times story from 2015. But you can't take that story seriously, because the Washington Times is an identifiably conservative-leaning news outlet and they skew the facts. And so on.

Most of the time, though, a responsible person tries to combat their own confirmation bias by taking in information from other sources -- responsible ones, of course, but sources that he or she knows come at things from a different ideological point of view. The Reed students, on the other hand, want to double down on their own confirmation bias. Part of their goal makes sense -- we learn more about humanity the more human perspectives we consider. But they want to replace what they see as silencing of marginalized perspectives with the silencing of what I suppose they would call privileged perspectives. What if the perspectives were the same? What if it turns out that some long-dead Greek philosopher is actually an ally of the oppressed when we learn what he had to say about them in his own time? Might a long history of the same idea and the same critique of power strengthen its case?

Well, because Reed students can't be bothered to learn ideas they don't want to know, they won't know. And they'll have spent close to $2,300 per credit hour to do that. Reed's website says it has a program in economics, but it doesn't seem like the student group making these demands has sampled any of those courses.

Keep on Searching

Writing at The Sports Economist, Kurt Rotthoff outlines how the current playoff structure for bigtime college footbal's championship an easily be expanded to a 24-team field, adding only one more week of play.

Rotthoff suggests that current schedules would work just fine if conferences got rid of their own championship games and left an open week for the extra layer of playoff games.

Left unaddressed are all of the official and unofficial opinions brought up to tell us how a playoff is the only way we can determine an actual national champion. Rather than trying to figure out which two teams should play for the title, we'll have four teams to make sure the qualified teams get the chance to play.

But if Rotthoff is right, then not only is a four-team playoff inadequate, so would an eight-team playoff be. No, we need to have a 24-team playoff series in order to learn who the real national champion is.

Oh well. At least the players will all have useful degrees with good employment prospects.

NCAA -- Being and Nothingness

You may have read a couple years ago about a deal where some classes on the schedule at the University of North Carolina turned out to be, strictly speaking, fake. They didn't really meet or exist or anything, but students signed up for them, got course credit for them and often posted pretty good grades.

Oh, and almost half of those students were also UNC student-athletes. You probably don't need me to tell you that student athletes make up nowhere near half of its student body. But if you do then it might be that you work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which earlier this month decided that the fraud UNC committed against academic standards, the idea of education, the taxpayers and supporters of UNC and its own students was not its problem.

You see, it turns out that because half of the students who gained from the fake classes weren't student athletes, then by gosh and golly the NCAA sees this as a matter for the school to decide itself. After all, it says "Athletes" right there in the name and far be it from the NCAA to get itself mixed up in the academic side of university life. That's "school stuff," and the NCAA knows it's out of bounds. And the outsized role UNC plays in men's college basketball has absolutely nothing to do with it, you nattering nabob of negativism.

Shannon Watkins, who wrote the Noble Center article linked above, brings the proper amount of dripping scorn to bear on the mummer's dance of a university at Chapel Hill. She points out that even though the fake class mess has been cleaned up, all of the conditions that spawned it still exist. Student athletes are still admitted to UNC even though their grades and test scores fall below the minimum standards for college readiness. They're still expected to achieve above-average marks in classes paced for students with higher scores who don't have the equivalent of a full-time job in the form of athletic practices and competitions. And they're brought on without any concern for what this might mean for their future if they aren't among the microscopic percentage of athletes who play their sports professionally.

Sure, the chances are good that someone would sue the NCAA if it went ahead and dropped the hammer UNC earned right smack in the middle of its Tarheel tail. And given the technicality around which the organization wound its invertebrate self, the chances are also good that a judge would toss any sufficient penalty and rend the tattered sackcloth of its credibility even more.

So UNC will be allowed to keep the gasoline and matches that started this fire as long as they promise to never play with them again. And the kids who signed up for the fake classes get to keep their fake A and B's.

Whether or not they can identify any of the letters that come after them, though, is apparently not anyone's concern.

Getting Closure

I am trying to figure out a reason not to shut Olympia, Washington's Evergreen State College down, burn the buildings, salt the earth and erect a memorial saying, "Here died free speech, common sense, the rule of law and Western civilization at the hands of thug toddlers, cowardly administrators and the fact that no one involved had a single damned clue."

I'm having a hard time doing so.

Up Side, Down Side

On the up side, Middlebury College is saying that it actually took some disciplinary action against students whose near-riot prevented a professor from speaking on their campus and sent another professor to the emergency room. Middlebury says that no description of the sanctions will be released until all of the students identified have been dealt with, and that as far as they can tell no Middlebury faculty were involved with the events once they proceeded beyond the ugly but physically harmless shout-down phase.

Their decision to wait until everyone's been handled seems pretty wise -- announcing what happened to certain students now could open them up to legal challenges if punishments for subsequent malefactors were different from what had already been handed down. I'm thinking these li'l darlings might be prone to suing, and Middlebury is going to take every step possible to cover its institutional behind.

On the down side, the chairman of the school's political science department apologized to "the wider Middlebury community" for co-sponsoring the original event. No word yet on what his response was to young children whom he may have forced to eat their vegetables without consulting their desire to supersede said vegetables with ice cream.

RIP, Library...

Replacing library books with digital materials is...neither the best nor the worst idea in the world. But it makes some kind of sense from a particular point of view, and it does still involve research materials and information.

But replacing them with nap pods? Yeah. Life of the mind my grumpy middle-aged tuckus.

Smashin' Passion

A college professor, writing at The American Interest, muses on some of the problems going on in modern campus political life. Specifically, the problem of groups of students shouting down campus speakers they don't like and in some cases engaging in behavior that actually endangers people.

The professor, Flagg Taylor of Skidmore College, works his thoughts through last month's riot at Middlebury College which put one professor in the hospital so the students wouldn't have to listen to the controversial Charles Murray. He recounts a discussion of the incident between two writers, one of whom says he has trouble because he does "want to salute the passion of the students" even though the Murray talk ended in violence. The other writer counters that it's too bad that the students had never learned "any virtue carried to an excess becomes a vice."

And there, Taylor says, is the problem. Students, whose forebrains are still developing and who sometimes are shaky on consequences as a result, might indeed develop passion and engagement but lack the wisdom to know how, when or how much to deploy them in any given situation. It's possible to be passionate about something awful, as Reinhard Heydrich and Mohammed Atta demonstrated quite clearly. Student activists are nothing like those evil men, but their inability to govern their passions will one day lead to a confrontation of some kind in which someone will be seriously hurt or even killed.

There's a phrase I've heard before that says one goal of a person seeking enlightenment is to learn how to keep his or her passion "within due bounds," or to "circumscribe" them. Passion, engagement and commission are valuable tools in achieving goals or making needed changes in society and the world. The idea behind an education, of course, is cultivating the mind to be able to best use these tools. Anything else is a tantrum.

And the problem when full-sized people throw tantrums is that no one thought that child-proofing their environments was necessary and something's going to get broken.

In Reverse

Apparently, attending Middlebury College in Vermont will flip the education process end for end and make students who attend there dumber than they were when they started school.

Middlebury's residents -- "students" seems like a misnomer for them -- shouted down, ran out and then later attacked a guest speaker on campus, Charles Murray, Murray may or may not be someone you want to listen to, given some of his earlier work and his tendency to simply report results without giving much attention to how his reporting may be heard by others.

But when you decide to stage a live-action version of "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2," then you pretty much crossed the line and lost even the microscopic fig leaf of political action that the "heckler's veto" grants you. Middlebury's residents are just thugs. And that's the charitable interpretation.

(I Don't Care That You) (Can't Get No) Satisfaction

This article at Spiked is talking mostly about universities in the United Kingdom, and it front-loads with some of the usual items about stupid trigger warnings.

But it does have a pretty important point at the end of the story, which is that a lot of this nonsense stems from the idea that a university's mission concerns the satisfaction of its students. If that's the case, then just give them the diploma and 4.0 they want and send them on their way.

If, on the other hand, a university decides to concern itself with the education of students, well, then, there will be times when they are not very satisfied. Which is not the crime that some university administrators seem to think it is.

Vamoose, Verbal Varmints!

I have no idea about the academic standing of Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula area. I suspect that lower Michigan residents, some of whom are related to me, probably call it "U-per U" now and again.

But they provide one of the finest services known to speakers of the English language each year when they suggest words that should never be spoken or written again. The number of stupid ways of saying stupid things, especially online, is progressing faster than the infinite number of monkeys can type them. But LSSU stands bravely in the gap with their list. Its ultimate impact may only be symbolic in the face of the torrent of first-time-clever, second-time-not-so-much, nth-time-stupid-and-really-not-all-that-clever-the-first-time-anyway phrases and words we see.

Perhaps some rich person should consider funding an entire research department at LSSU dedicated to this task, offering classes and degrees in it. The major could emphasize clear and simple communication, the use of words in organized formats to explain, persuade, illustrate or entertain, and increasing students' abilities in the area by examining the work of others who demonstrate special skill or talent in it.

Sixty years ago that would have been called an English department, but considering what goes on in those programs you could probably call it whatever you wanted these days.