WTF is a semicolon, eh! "Death to high school English"

No, it is not about my high school English teacher, who on two occasions slapped the life out of me for no reason at all.  Nor is it about how he knocked up the attendant in the chemistry lab and, as a result, married her.  Oh, it is definitely not about his embezzlement later on, for which he and his wife were fired.  (editor: anything else you have to publicly trash him? Awshutupalready!  editor: why all the fretting and fuming; what is this post about then? will you shut up so that I can get to it?)

My students know all too well that I want them to focus on the mechanics of writing, even though I am not a language instructor teaching them how to write.  I typically refer them to George Orwell's fantastic essay on how related writing and thinking are.

While I am not one of those grammarian colleagues I had in California, who said her favorite bedtime readings were books about the art and craft of writing, I am always fascinated by discussions on this topic.  And sometimes I actually do understand them!  A few years ago, when Lynne Truss' book came out, I quickly purchased for myself a copy and was so close to making it a required reading for one of my courses until a colleague pointed out that students might not easily relate to the British examples and language that Truss discusses.  I was, like, er, WTF :)

Which is why it has been a good Saturday morning--I read two commentaries that deal with different aspects of the English language and grammar.

In this essay in Salon, from where I have borrowed the quote in the title of this post, the author notes:

after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.
For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

One more reason to wonder if college is for everybody, and if college, then what exactly do we want students to get from that experience.  Oh well ... a discussion for another day, I suppose.

Anyway, the author finds out from the English teacher at a large school district on what exactly is going on in high schools these days:

"It's very hard to get a lot of teachers to teach those things, especially grammar. We have such a need to engage students. There's such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it's like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that. They prefer class discussion, which is great but to a certain degree, goes off into the wind."

So, then even this foreign-born geography faculty ends up teaching grammar?  Why do we emphasize writing, and why don't students want to learn it?

When I ask her why she thinks there's such resistance to prioritizing and teaching writing, given its numerous applications, given its overlap with critical thinking skills, analytical skills, basic communication skills, she hesitates for a moment, then answers in three words: "It's not fun."
True, but then, teaching (and for that matter, learning) isn't always fun. Changing my kid's dirty diapers isn't fun. Dragging my fat ass onto a treadmill isn't fun. Helping my grandmother "fix" her computer isn't fun. Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.

Oh well ...

And even when do get students who are careful about grammar, grammarians make it difficult for us and we have to worry about where to put that damned question mark in the quote--inside the quotation marks or outside?  And today I find out there is something called "logical punctuation" that sounds more of an oxymoron than anything else :) 

the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least the 1960s a common designation for that style has been "logical punctuation."

British and logical? You got to be kidding!  And in a language in which, as Bernard Shaw pointed out, "ghoti" can be pronounced as "fish"?  Hey, notice that I placed the question mark after the quotes? Haha!

Women rule in Bengal and Tamil Nadu! Communism dies!!!

Jayalalitha (left) leads her party to one ass-whooping victory over the geriatric Karunanidhi.  Not that I am a supporter of either, but the margin of victory is simply awesome.
The defeated Karunanidhi said, “The people of Tamil Nadu have given me rest.”

All the way across, Mamata Banerjee routs the Commies from power.  A 34-year rule by the same folks.   She said it was "a victory for maa, mati, manush [her party slogan that translated reads: mother, soil, people]”  I suppose all over the world we love alluring alliterations :)

Perhaps the end of "democratic" communism in India?

Somewhere down the line in a fast-changing world the communists, many believe, began losing their way. After the first wave of farm reforms had exhausted its potential, they needed fresh ideas as governments cut back on spending, and private capital was touted as the main driver of growth and jobs. Land reform had run its course in Bengal, and farm produce prices were falling. Peasants, with enough food in their bellies, now aspired to better lives.
But a largely gerontocratic and hidebound leadership - already stunned into stasis by the break-up of the Soviet Union - "lost its way coping with the pressures of a globalised market", says social scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya.

Well, in my part of India, communist leaders were never exciting anyway.  In Tamil Nadu, elections were simply way too fascinating for me when I was a kid.  It was fantastic rhetoric and theatre. Even at local campaign speeches, the guys--rarely a woman leader those days--would go on for hours, and even throw in more than one challenge to the United States.  Literally, sentences such as "I am warning the US President ..."  But, boy, some of those politicians had wonderful command of the language, with quick and biting wit.  When I watch the C-Span speeches at Congress, I can't believe our politicians are as boring as the fabled Soviet leaders were!

The family lore is that as a four year old kid, I wanted to go watch MGR (Jayalalitha's boss, co-actor, lover, ...) at an election rally.  This was in Sengottai, where I spent most of my upper-kindergarten years.  With grandma saying no, apparently I sneaked out while it was raining, stood at a corner lost for a while, until somebody brought me back home.  Promptly, it was a high fever the following morning, which was then referred to as "MGR fever."

 So, to mark the occasion, here are MGR and Jayalalitha, who were both movie idols before switching over to politics, in one of my favorite songs featuring them

Confessing my thirty-year love affair!

A high school classmate, "S," suddenly went off the cyberspace, and a few days later explained his absence:

I'm back here again after a small hibernation in Beirut & upcountry Lebanon. Business ....huh..

Lebanon. Beirut. Aah, I have been in love with the country and that city from my early high school years!

As a young teenager, I realized that I had a deep-seated yearning for understanding the world outside the small little part that I had been exposed to.  As I noted earlier, my window to the world was through the radio and the print media--after all, the internet had yet to be invented!

Thus, it was perhaps in my eleventh grade or so, I wrote two letters.

The first one was to the West German embassy in New Delhi.  In the letter, I requested information about possibilities for undergraduate studies in West Germany.  With the characteristic German efficiency, which I would personally experience two decades later, I got a thick envelope from the embassy with a whole lot of information.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that fluency of the German language was required. And, that was it.

The second letter was to the American University in Beirut.  Yes, the Beirut of the horrendous civil war that was dominating the pages of The Hindu those days.  I couldn't care about the war, and I figured that there wouldn't be any language issue with the American University.

When a thickly padded envelope arrived, dad was flummoxed, and may have said something along the lines of "you want to go to a country that is in the middle of a war?"

I suppose I had a difficult time explaining my fascination for Lebanon--it was all because of Khalil Gibran.

I had borrowed The Prophet from the only library in town, and found Gibran's writings very intriguing.  It appealed a lot to the brooding teenager that I was, like most teens!  Even though, I wasn't able to quite fathom Gibran's philosophical and mystical words.

But, Gibran had me all worked up about Lebanon.  A few other essays I read talked up Lebanon as a Venice, as an exciting place where the West met the East.  I wanted to be there,civil war be damned!

I might have made it there, but for the truckloads of money that was needed.

So, no Beirut.  Instead, I went to Coimbatore, via Nagpur.  Oh well, Beirut, Coimbatore, ... all the same, right? :)

A little over five years after the first time I ever went to Coimbatore, I reached America.  Lebanon and Beirut always managed to pop up in my life at regular intervals.  Towards the end of graduate school, a friend, Praveen, who returned to India after completing his doctoral work, presented me with Gibran's Tears and Laughter.  It kept the Lebanon flame alive.

A few years later, one of the people we met in our work lives after graduate school, and who later became good friends, was a couple from Lebanon.  Samir, who suddenly died of a heart attack way too young, fondly talked about his growing up years in Lebanon, and about the cedars and the figs.  Sam, as he was known, did his part to stoke the fire inside for Gibran's land.

It is now more than thirty years since I fell in love with a place and its peoples I had never met.  The email from "S" reminds me that it is a love affair that was not a mere teenage crush.  Maybe soon I will be in Lebanon.

For now, I will satisfy myself with this one stanza from Gibran's "Leave me, my blamer"

Let me sail in the ocean of
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow
Comes, for tomorrow is free to
Do with me as he wishes. Your
Laying is naught but shadow
That walks with the spirit to
The tomb of abashment, and shows
Heard the cold, solid earth.

PS: had to re-do the post because Blogger went down for hours, and when it came back up, my last two posts had vaporized :(

"We were as close as two pees in a pot"

Did the title of this post make you re-read it? 

That is one of the many real sentences from students' works that are collected here.

Some of my other favorites from that site:

• Sex is contact between male and female gentiles.
• During the nineteenth century women had to be domesticated while their husbands went out into the social world.
• The potato literally encouraged the Irish to overbreed.
• The rebel and onion armies showed grose negligence by having many of their battles right inside national parks, like Gettysburg.
• Like a woman seduces a horny man, Hitler captivated the people of Germany.
• As an archipelago, Indonesia’s islands are constantly surrounded by water.
• The less educated tending to be ignorant and doing stupid things, wasting their lives because they did not even want to stay in school to gain the value they could from the knowledge they would be taught.

 Ah, the wonderful world of education!

Flag burning in India. Look, it is not the American flag! ... but Australia's?

Over the decades, we have gotten used to photographs of protesters around the world burning "Old Glory."  And, often enough, effigies of American presidents as well.

So much so that the only time photos of flags being burned get my attention is when it is not the American flag. Which is how this photo of the Australian flag being burnt makes it an interesting news.

No, the Australian government didn't launch any military operations to incur the wrath of these protesters.  And, no, it is not because of Oprah's gazillion dollar trip down under along with a planeload of adoring fans.

The Aussie flag was burnt because images representing the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, were used on swimsuits by Australian designer Lisa Blue

Swift was the response:

A statement attributed to Lisa Blue Swimwear, headquartered in Byron Bay said: "We would like to offer an apology to anyone we may have offended and advise that the image of Goddess Lakshmi will not appear on any piece of Lisa Blue swimwear for the new season, with a halt put on all production of the new range and pieces shown on the runway from last week removed.

"This range will never be available for sale in any stockists or retail outlets anywhere in the world. We apologize to the Hindu community and take this matter very seriously".

(editor: ahem, by reproducing those images here, aren't you attracting criticism as well? 
If it does, it will be no different from the nasty comments that a couple of readers left in response to my post on Islam and modern art!)

This is, yet again, a reminder that religion is alive and well in the public spaces of the world.  I keep telling my students this, and I hope some actually pay attention--economic development correlated with a secular public space in the West, and we assumed it would be the same case everywhere.  But, it is increasingly turning out that economic development and globalization are actually strengthening religions and their institutions.  It is a completely different paradigm.

Here is Timothy Samuel Shah:

Modernization and globalization are bringing increasingly rapid social and moral change to people all over the world, especially those prosperous enough to consume satellite TV and the internet. Such innovations are widely welcomed, but they also help create a pervasive perception among modern publics that traditional ways of life are getting lost -- a perception the Pew Global Attitudes Project has identified in almost every society in the world.
One way some groups try to offset the perceived decline of tradition is to identify with religious revivalism. This dynamic is one factor behind the strong and consistent support for Hindu revivalism among large segments of India's urban middle class, as well as a similar pattern of urban middle-class support for Buddhist revivalism in Sri Lanka.
It is relevant to note here that combining advanced modernity and religiosity is hardly new: The U.S. is probably the most salient and longstanding case of a society that has consistently combined intense modernity with relatively high religiosity, private and public. As we discussed in the article, at least some evidence from both the Pew Research Center and the World Values Survey suggests that both private and public religiosity have, if anything, become more robust in the U.S. in recent years. Religion is showing signs of new private and public vitality in many places in the world, not just among people that are economically insecure and underdeveloped

Thus, the following BBC news doesn't surprise me at all:

The Allahabad High Court has issued notices to the Hindustan Times group for publishing the photos that show female models wearing the swimwear.

Oh well, I might as well end this post on a "cheeky" note :)

Music video of the day: MGR and Jayalalitha, "Aayiram nilave va"

A wonderful song that perhaps is even better if one doesn't watch MGR in his exhibitionistic short-skirt like outfit :)  Kind of weird and ironic that it is the male whose wardrobe malfunction that one worries about in this video!
Even more bizarre that these two went on to become chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and, for all we know, Jayalalitha might yet again become the chief when election results are announced in a couple of days.
Life is infinitely stranger than fiction.

SPB's voice is so youthful in its tone--it was his debut into movies.  And, boy, what a career he has had!
Here is ஆயிரம் நிலவே வா 

I never imagined reading a Hitchens essay would make me teary. Now I know

In a moving essay, that is rich with intellectual references that are all new to me, Christopher Hitchens writes about how the cancer is robbing him of his ability to speak.  Oh, please do read the entire essay (ht).  Hitchens concludes:

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

"freedom of speech" ...

In the essay, Hitchens refers to poems and essays, and to Leonard Cohen's “If It Be Your Will.”   I tracked it down on YouTube, and listening to it, I can immediately see why Hitchens notes "it’s best not to listen to this late at night."  Here is one version of it:

She sells sea shells in Seychelles

My high school classmate, "M," who has lived and worked with her husband and kids in different parts of the world, tells me that of all the beaches that she has been to, there is nothing to beat the sands and the waters of Seychelles.

I will take her word--I have never been to Seychelles.

But, I do have a personal connection to Seychelles, from my high school days in Neyveli.

The radio and the print media were my connection to the outside world.  Whenever I had free time, I fiddled around with the radio--a big, diode/triode valve radio--and tried to listen to foreign radio stations on the shortwave frequencies.  That was how I accidentally tuned into a radio station from Seychelles--Feba Radio.  Turns out that there is now even a website for it, though I am not sure how much of it now is the same as the station that existed then.   

If memory serves me well, it was partly an evangelical station.  But, they had interesting secular programs as well.  If only my memory were clearer!   During one of those programs, they read out names and brief bio info on listeners.  So, I mailed them a card with my information.  It must have been when I was in the ninth or tenth grade.  A few days later, I got a reply from the radio station--that my name would be featured on a certain date and time.

I was excited. I mean, this was a huge deal for the 14 or 15 year old teen that I was.  I told my parents about it.  They thought I was a nutcase (and they certainly were right on that one!) and didn't seem to care much about this at all.  The day came.  The evening hour arrived.  And I sat next to the radio with the station blaring away.  My heart was beating away like crazy ... and then, yes, the sound of my name through the radio.  Oh, what a thrill that was!

Radio Seychelles was a minor interest compared to the BBC and the VOA.  But, for some reason, every once in a while those signals would fade away completely and I would then have no option other than to shut the radio down.

Such was my excitingly geeky teenage years!

One day, as usual I headed out to my friend's home, from where we went to the library, or lazily biked around especially past a few "special" homes.  My friend, Srikumar, said that he had heard the strangest news on VOA--American helicopters had crashed in Iran.  It was like a huge news scoop!  The following morning, the newspaper had lots of details on the ill-fated American attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran. 

Decades later, as I read what I have written, all these sound strange even to me.  It is quite unbelievable how much everything has changed in a matter of three decades. There is a good chance that kids in Neyveli don't even bother listening to shortwave radios anymore.  I am not even sure how many of them read newspapers.  After all, for those who are interested, as I was and as my friend was, now there is the internet. 

I wonder what changes are coming over the next three decades.  More than that, I hope Seychelles will still be around, and not go under.

Photo of the day: Japan, two months after the tsunami

Caption at the source:

Wakana Kumagai, 6, waits for her mother Yoshiko after visiting the grave of her father, who was killed by the March 11 tsunami, at a temporary mass grave site in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture, April 21, 2011, after attending an entrance ceremony of Omagari elementary school. ... Her father, Kazuyuki, called his wife Yoshiko just after the March 11 earthquake to tell her to take the children to Omagari elementary school which was serving as a shelter. He was found near the shelter four days after the tsunami (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

It is beyond my imagination as to how people carry on after such a catastrophe.  I suppose humans are far more resilient than I think ...

Hitchens takes on Chomsky. Go Hitch!

Two days ago, when I read this Noam Chomsky piece on Osama bin Laden's death, I tweeted that Chomsky has gone off the deep end, and that it is high time he retired.

I may have as well not vented about it, because there is the mother of all responses to Chomsky, from the debater extraordinaire, Christopher Hitchens, who writes that Chomsky is "offensive, inconsistent, and ignorant." 

Hitchens points Chomsky, who claims that there isn't evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11, to the ever mounting evidence against bin Laden, and not all of it is from the US government either:

Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?

It is this bizarre anti-war left of the Noam Chomskys and Arundhati Roys that then makes the anti-war people like me even hide ourselves in a closet.  Because, normal people think that anybody who is anti-war has to be a fanatical nutcase like a Chomsky or Roy!  And the Chomsky faithful think that people like me are sellouts, to whom I know not!

As Hitchens writes, "With the paranoid anti-war "left," you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next."  He knows it all too well--after all, he was a darling of the left crowd until he pissed them off by turning colors soon after, and in response to, the events of 9/11.

Hitchens summarizes a Chomsky (world)view as thus:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

Stage left, Professor Chomsky. And his populist sidekick, Michael Moore, too. 

Quote of the day: Krugman on the Ryan plan for Medicare

Here’s an analogy: think of Medicare as a footbridge that is deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe. You could propose structural repairs to fix its faults; Ryan doesn’t do that. Instead, he proposes knocking the bridge down and replacing it with trampolines, in the hope that pedestrians can bounce across the stream. And the Post declares that he deserves credit for pointing out that the bridge is falling down, and proposing a solution. Um, we knew that the bridge was in bad shape — and his solution is a fraud.

Ah, the imagery of 80-year olds jumping on trampolines is priceless; can I use Ryan coupons to pay for that imagery?

Krugman's bottom line?

Republicans are proposing to destroy Medicare; saying that clearly isn’t scare tactics, it’s simply pointing out the truth.

When Calvin and Hobbes met Swami and Friends

Oh, Bill Watterson, you have messed up my life, twice; first by creating this little devilish character, and then by abruptly walking away from it all!

And then, listen to Calvin opine on the opiate of the masses:

I have lots of memories of my childhood. There was no Calvin and Hobbes in it.  Instead, I had Swami and his friends in Malgudi.

Swami had none of Calvin's crazy aspects.  Swami's adventures were all I could relate to--given the very similar cultural background in which I grew up.  Years later, here in the US, I bought myself a copy of Swami and Friends.  It is now a treasured book along with various Calvin and Hobbes collections.

Oh, yes, I read the usual Enid Blyton books, the Hardy Boys, and even Nancy Drew.  But, as much as I enjoyed them, I couldn't quite relate to those characters and the settings.  Even the foods they ate.  I remember my sister and I once tried to figure out what the ham and bacon were all about.  These appeared all the time, particularly in the Enid Blyton books.  We figured it was from pigs.  But, what then was the difference between ham and bacon.  There is a limit to imagining foods of a different culture, particularly in those primitive days before the internet, before the television, and when telephones were rare.  So, I figured out a solution to the puzzle: bacon and ham had to be something like idly and dosai, which are from the same ingredients but look and taste different from each other.

With Swami and his friends, there was no need to imagine the foods they ate.  Because I ate the same kind of foods. Like Swami, I too hoped to have a good cricket game every single day.  Swami's grandmother reminded me a lot of my own grandmothers.  I mean, I could absolutely relate to this fictional kid in a fictional town.  The pains and pleasures of his were mine as well. His Malgudi was my Neyveli, plus Sengottai, plus Pattamadai.  It was neat.  He just didn't seem to have the girl problem that I had though :)

But all those were when I was a kid.  I don't recall reading any RK Narayan books in the five-plus years between high school and coming to America.  I came to America, and was in comic character heaven, with Calvin becoming my favorite. Turned out it was great timing--the syndicated comic strip began in 1985, and I arrived here in 1987.  It was a different culture now, with different foods, and different games.  But, both at the surface level of the joke, and at the deeper issues, I could easily relate to Calvin.

Now, I am much older--way older than Calvin's dad in the comic strips.  But, whenever I read the old strips, I find that it is Calvin that I still relate to and not to the father.  I feel sorry for the parents, but Calvin rules because he gets me.

The best thing now: when I read Swami and Friends, I can still relate to Swami.  A couple of years ago, I found an Enid Blyton book, and I can relate to the Famous Five too and their favorite drink is mine too--ginger beer.  How lucky am I to be able to a whole bunch of characters from across so many different cultures and eras!

Remembrance of things past: on a couple of old Tamil songs

After talking to "D" for a long time last night, I suppose I keep going back to various India memories ... One of them was about old songs.   I went searching for an oldie, "Raman eththani ramanadi" sung by P. Susheela, I think.  But, dammit, YouTube didn't have that.  Lots of memories associated with that song going back to maybe when I was maybe ten years old.

After a few unsuccessful searches, to cheer myself up, I watched the following classic மறைந்திருந்தே பார்க்கும் மருமம் என்ன from தில்லானா மோகனம்பாள் ("Thillana Mohanambal")



Padmini and her classical dances were always talked about at home, so much so that when I was young I thought she was a close relative of ours!  Well, she certainly deserved all that attention.  This entire song and dance sequence is a pleasure for so many reasons: the melody, the lyrics, the dancing, the expressions, and, most of all, the humor throughout.  Including the puns in the lyrics.  Am glad that unlike with Hindi songs, here I can actually understand the lyrics :)

It turned out, much to my disappointment, that Padmini was no relation after all.  But, we do have other connections to this movie.  "Thillana Mohanambal" was adapted for the screen based on a novel by Kothamangalam Subbu.  My sister is married to Subbu's brother's son.  There, finally, if not through Padmini, we have some real connections to this movie :)

Speaking of Subbu, one of the serialized novels that my parents had collected and bound was "Rao Bahadur Singaram."  It had all the elements to draw in a young reader--a bull-headed young man in the countryside, falling in love with a rich girl, all the complications that arise when they get married, and then through hard work the young man and his bride becoming rich ... wait, this is a story that can work well even here in the US, right?

Here is one of those classic not-related-to-me Padmini's dance sequences, which many times my parents have referred to as nothing but "jalilo jimkaana"

Mother's Day: Icing on the cake

The Icing on the Cake from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

“Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.” The ponzi, er, higher education

Yesterday, I re-connected with yet another high school classmate, "D" and, of course, catching up included details about our respective education and careers since high school (not the musical!) ended 30 years ago.  I told her about how and why I quit engineering, and how I am doing something now that is truly my calling, which I would do even if I were not getting paid for it. (editor: you might want to remind your colleagues, who regret not being able to get rid of you, that not getting paid is metaphorical!)

I lucked out with having found a tenured position in a university.  Luck plays a huge role, and increasingly so, even for those graduating from prestigious universities.

At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

The ponzi scheme is simply awful.  It works like this:

• We convince every high school grad that there is no life for them if they don't get to college
• At the same time, we convince everybody that professors in universities, even the ones at Podunk U, that their worth will be measured by their research
• Most of the research, particularly outside the natural sciences, is nothing but intellectual onanism.
• At "research universities" this means that somebody has to do the teaching
• So, universities recruit a whole bunch of students in their doctoral programs
• These graduate students do not realize that it is a pyramid scheme, and think that there are going to be plenty of jobs out there for them when they graduate
• And then comes the day of reckoning--no jobs in academe
• Intense competition for the few available ones
• And the degree and qualification are useless for most non-academic settings

If only professors and departments will think differently, right? Dream on:

You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?) As Louis Menand puts it in The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), the system is now designed to produce not PhDs so much as ABDs: students who, having finished their other degree requirements, are “all but dissertation” (or “already been dicked,” as we used to say)—i.e., people who have entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar’s life.
If anything, as Menand notes, the PhD glut works well for departments at both ends, since it gives them the whip hand when it comes to hiring new professors. Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply.

Defenders of this ponzi scheme--the essay in The Nation is no exception--often like to argue that all the adjunct positions need to be converted to full-time tenure-track positions.  In other words, to solidify the ponzi scheme, and not address the root cause of it all: the hyped up overselling of higher education.  

The best lines in the essay are these:

of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore.

Not so fast ... remember that even the likes of Thomas Friedman writing about the efficiency in decision making in one-party countries like China? 

Crap, I am beginning to sounding like some old curmudgeon! (editor: "beginning" is incorrect. Awshutupalready!)