Quote of the day, on Larry Summers and economists

Summers is unquestionably brilliant, as all who have dealt with him, including myself, quickly realize. And yet rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy. For the past two years, I have immersed myself in those worlds in order to make a film, Inside Job, that takes a sweeping look at the financial crisis. And I found Summers everywhere I turned.

Oooooh .... "burn," as my students say :)

The author, Charles Ferguson (director of the new documentary Inside Job and the 2007 documentary No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq) argues that Summers is not the only one, but perhaps the most important among those at an unholy intersection:

Summers's career is the result of an extraordinary and underappreciated scandal in American society: the convergence of academic economics, Wall Street, and political power.

He makes it sound almost as if these modern day academic economists peddling to political and financial powers are the very "economic planners" that those in favor of deregulation and free markets critique.  Another instance of hating somebody so much because of the intense love within? muahahaha

Now, for a mighty blow to the profession:

Over the past 30 years, the economics profession—in economics departments, and in business, public policy, and law schools—has become so compromised by conflicts of interest that it now functions almost as a support group for financial services and other industries whose profits depend heavily on government policy. The route to the 2008 financial crisis, and the economic problems that still plague us, runs straight through the economics discipline. And it's due not just to ideology; it's also about straightforward, old-fashioned money.

All right!  Am enjoying this intellectual assault. I am sure there will be plenty of responses at different places.  All in time for the Prize in memory of Nobel. 

Whoever said that intellectual life is a bore.  When it comes to ideas, there is always a battle or two beginning. 

The only problem: these are not mere intellectual discourses in a seminar room, but have profound and mostly disastrous results as policies. 

The bait and switch in academia

One day when a couple of TA's groaned about grading essays while trying to complete their own papers, he said, "If you ever have to choose between your own studies and the freshmen, shortchange the freshmen. They aren't the reason you came to Elite National University."
When the director of the first-year composition program tells his own instructors that they aren't at the university to teach, what more truth could a grad student ask for?

Read the entire essay here.  And, yes, read up the previous installments in case you missed them.

Bye bye to liberal arts colleges :-(

Back in 1990, David W. Breneman, an education economist then at the Brookings Institution, stirred debate in higher education by publishing an article titled “Are We Losing Our Liberal Arts Colleges?”

A paper being presented here today at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association looks back at his study and answers his question with an emphatic yes.

It is interesting that Breneman examined this question that long ago. Anyway, the Chronicle report adds:

Mr. Breneman was concerned at the time that many historic liberal-arts colleges were shifting away from their emphasis on the arts and sciences and were instead becoming “professional colleges,” which train a large share of their students to enter fields like business or nursing. He worried that such transformations were diverting the colleges from their traditional missions and undermining the intellectual coherence of their offerings.

In their paper, "Where Are They Now? Revisiting Breneman's Study of Liberal Arts Colleges," the researchers updated Mr. Breneman’s analyses using federal data from the 2006-7 academic year on the degrees that colleges awarded, by discipline. They could not find data on nine institutions that he listed. Of the remaining 203 colleges, 67 were found to offer too many graduate degrees or too many degrees in professional fields to be classified as liberal-arts colleges under his terms. Of those, 37 had drastically changed their missions, with 19 now being classified as comprehensive colleges and 18 as master’s universities. A few others had been subsumed by larger institutions.

BTW, I work at a university that promotes itself as "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education." The majors with largest enrolments are business, criminal justice, ....

Putting two and two together .... hmmm...

Earlier this morning, I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that there has been a sudden decrease in the number of students who have taken the GRE--when an increase was expected.

The nonprofit organization that administers the Graduate Record Examinations is projecting that the number of tests given this year will dip—despite a slowing economy, which typically pushes people into graduate school.

And then, later in the day I read another news item that:

World Education Services, one of the largest foreign-credential evaluators for American and Canadian universities, has revised its assessment of India’s three-year undergraduate degrees, putting those rated A or higher by a national accreditor on par with American undergraduate programs. Until now, students in India needed to complete 16 years of academic work to be eligible for admission to graduate programs in the United States.
The move could sharply increase the already-high number of Indian students who apply to American universities.

I realize that there is zero chance for any conspiracy here. But, it is too damn juicy not to spin the stories as: universities figured out that a neat way to increase graduate student enrolment in the US is to accept India's three-year undergrad programs as being on par with the four-year programs here in the US. And thus the graduate school money-making schemes can continue on :-)

Myron Rolle: A role model student-athlete

What an awesome news about the fantastic achievements of this guy from Florida State: to have been named a Rhodes Scholar, and also projected as an early-round NFL draft pick. Simply outstanding.

According to the Chronicle,

Mr. Rolle (pronounced "roll") won the prestigious scholarship, which sends 32 American students each year to the University of Oxford, and jetted to the game on a Florida State booster's private plane. Although there was no timeout, no announcement echoing across the stadium, ESPN cut away from the action to Mr. Rolle's arrival in its national broadcast of the game.

Florida State's cheerleaders met him at the locker room door, as did his parents, whom he hugged. In the stands, Seminoles fans chanted "MY-ron RO-ole" and waved signs: "Congratulations, Mr. Rolle" and "All Rhodes Lead to Rolle."

My favorite part of that news item was this: after the final interview, and after he was informed that he won the scholarship, Rolle had to rush to the football game at Maryland. "a University of Alabama at Birmingham police escort, using full lights and sirens—raced him to the airport and onto the tarmac." He deserved every bit of that royal treatment :-)

Professor in Chief

Siva Vaidhyanathan noted that "professorial" was being used in the media as if it were a horrible way of life. Well, whatever incorrect connotations the media and some of the public might have employed, Richard Monastersky notes that there is now a Professor-in-Chief:

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January alongside his running mate, Joe Biden, it will be the first time in history that the president, vice president, and both of their spouses have worked in higher education.
Taken together, the Obamas and the Bidens have amassed decades of experience at colleges and universities. Mr. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 until 2004, when he took office in the U.S. Senate. His wife, Michelle, has worked in the administration at the same university and is on leave from her job as vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
The Bidens also have spent considerable time in academe. For the past 17 years, Mr. Biden has taught as an adjunct professor at the Widener University School of Law. His wife, Jill, is an English instructor at Delaware Technical and Community College's
Stanton-Wilmington campus.

So, who are the bitterest members of academe?

The bitterest members of academe are the midcareerists, the snarlers who've gotten tenure but now discover that they don't have lifetime goals or passionate pursuits to buoy them through the next decades. They've gotten what they always thought they wanted — but what will they do for their next trick?
They should develop long-term research projects, or concentrate on deepening their teaching techniques, or create new programs in service learning. They could make their work lives startling, unpredictable, and full of genuine excitement.
But some will insist on boring, bedeviling, or frightening newbies with tales of old feuds and future disgraces. They're obsessed with former colleagues who flamed out, suffered student mutinies, or escaped to warmer climes or better-paying jobs in the Real World. Snarling remains the refuge for those who lack the energy or courage to do something really original or dastardly.

Thus spake Ms. Mentor in the Chronicle

Tenure as a 30-year contract

I have blogged a few times about tenure and the increasing number of years we hold on to faculty jobs. This is an issue about which we can be in denial for as long as we want--the downside is that external forces are then going to shape the discussion and the eventual decision as well.

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who is the chairman of the higher-education practice at Korn/Ferry International and a president emeritus and university professor of public service at George Washington University, adds his views in an essay in the Chronicle. He opens with:

Something is wrong with tenure, and we need to make it right. Abolishing it altogether is not politically or culturally feasible, or even likely. Any such attempt would set the many academic constituencies against all the rest simultaneously and, like the famous circular firing squad, leave everyone at least grievously injured and possibly some higher-education institutions dead.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least consider changing some of the ways that tenure works.

Yes, I would love to discuss this with colleagues, if it were not the fact that I will "not be given the same level of consideration" because I am not one of them. In fact, I was told to "then please shut up." I suppose I should be happy that there was a 'please' added to the directive that I should shut up. ha ha ha. So much for the view from the outside that being tenured gives us real First Amendment rights :-)

The latest insult word: Professorial!

Professorial must be the insult of the season. ... When and why did professorial become an insult or a political liability?

That is Siva Vaidhyanathan trying to make sense of the idiocy with which the media uses the word "professorial" to imply that we are not "normal" and can't connect with "normal" people. He then writes,

The presumed communicative disorder of professorial speech seems to be the root of the problem. Of course, there is no such thing as a uniform professorial style. My field of media studies is filled with dull, timid, dense lecturers. But it also has its share of stirring orators and provocative interlocutors. Some of us are math geeks. Some of us are policy geeks. Some of us are poetry geeks. Many of us are not geeks at all.

I should poll my students on whether I am a geek :-)
But, I think we have a wonderful context to think about what it means to be a professor these days. After all, as Vaidhyanathan notes, we are a diverse lot. But, there has to be something in common, right?
Well, that is the question that Stanley Katz tackled a couple of years ago. He asserted that:

we have lost something along the way. We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together — "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research. We have lost a belief in the relevance of teaching undergraduates for the health of our democracy. We have lost confidence that what we do in teaching and research is inherently good, and not primarily a utilitarian occupation. We have lost the conviction that we have a calling, that as professors our duty is to profess.
We have also, manifestly, lost our sense of belonging to an ascertainable and manageable community of teacher-professors. Along the way, we have lost our commitment to the particular universities in which we work.

I think I don't have much to argue with his points. Well, except for one thing: if we think it is that highly valuable for democracy, then we--taxpayers--ought to pay for it. The current system stinks. Further, the context has changed--society and students see college education in strictly utilitarian terms, which means employment, and the health of democracy has no place in it.
Anyway, Katz further notes that

Too frequently even the most thoughtful academics are fixated on academic freedom as the crucial challenge. Academic freedom — the freedom to teach and to learn — is central. But it must follow from an acceptance of the duties of professionalism. We have such academic "rights" only if we embrace the duties of a public profession — to instruct the untrained and to create knowledge. That includes the obligation to identify the standards by which practice can be assessed and to enforce adherence to them. Seen from that perspective, professionalism is the core of democratic behavior, since it entails the acceptance of the principled provision of public services, without
which a modern democracy cannot be expected to succeed. ....

I would like us to consider whether there are not recoverable values and practices in the world that we have lost — and also new ones more appropriate to the 21st-century professoriate. Shouldn't we at least be asking Dewey's question: "But have we not come to a time when more can be achieved by taking thought together?"

Yes, now is the time to discuss these issues. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening at the university where I teach--what can be discussed is strictly defined by one group that shall not be named.

Academe's Ax Murderers

In addition to dealing with academic bullies, according to this author we need to watch out for academic "ax murderers" also. Hey, I survived some ax murderers, who are still practicing their craft!

"Remember that every department has at least one ax murderer, but you won't know in advance who it is so you'd better be on your guard."
... what has become a lamentable fact of faculty life: Many academics regularly engage in a kind of "gotcha" politics.

Can students and faculty discuss politics?

"Here are some tricky situations that might arise when the classroom conversation turns political, and what to keep in mind," writes Robert O'Neil. He notes:

• A student asks about your political views. Take care in responding to such a query. Be conscious that students of a persuasion different from your own might be offended by an offhand reply ... Moreover, the risks of apparent proselytizing — given the implicit lack of parity between professorial and student opinions in a classroom setting — inhere in any such revelations.
• A student asks you to comment on a colleague's opinions or behavior. [Disparaging] a colleague's scholarship ranks not far below plagiarism on the list of faculty transgressions. ... [Declining] to comment at all in class might often be the wisest course.
• A student wants to know how you feel about a current political crisis. The professor can, and sometimes should, invite students to express such political views in class, although seeking to maintain balance and distancing them from the podium. She should especially avoid demeaning or disparaging a student's view in class — even one that may seem to her to be disingenuous or reprehensible.
• A student asks you to comment about a pending issue that isn't a crisis. [Suggest] a private discussion outside class, noting the risks of displacing the assigned subject matter and escalating existing differences.
• A student wants to know what you "really think" at the end of the semester. If the maxim that "one can never get into trouble speaking in the past tense" is as useful a guide for college professors as for politicians, it may be equally true that one gets into substantially less trouble by speaking one's mind on the final day of class.
• When professors' speech crosses the line. [While] students do not enjoy academic freedom comparable to that of faculty members, they are entitled to a learning environment in which they may freely question and challenge their professors' views on politics or other matters. ... Yet it is the professor's responsibility to ensure that students are free to form and express their own views, however intense and deeply held those of the professor may be.

Academic bullies

[In] academe, where some faculty members prefer to hole up with their books
rather than interact with colleagues, an aversion to conflict is not uncommon.
Those who have been bullied will often elect to keep quiet rather than risk a
nasty public battle.

Amen!
That was from the Chronicle of Hr. Ed.

Not Smart Enough for College

A letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
David Glenn's essay on the wage gap between college graduates and high-school graduates ("Supply-Side Education," The Chronicle Review, July 25) misses the central point: Not all people have the intelligence to complete a college education.

Some basic intelligence must be required to complete a respectable college education. Otherwise we will not only dumb down higher education, but the benefits of a college degree will be subsumed under a tide of educational mediocrity. One would need a graduate degree to truly be credentialed. If the big wage gap today were between graduate degrees and bachelor's degrees, would we suggest universal graduate school as the solution?

The truth is that there are students who don't belong in college. There are students who don't even belong in high school. Not only do they benefit marginally, if at all, but their presence reduces their peers' education as teachers are forced to slow down and give them more attention.

Many well-paying jobs require skill but not intellect. Some plumbers, carpenters, and electricians earn more than some professors. Pressuring everyone to go to college would gradually destroy the quality of higher education in America, and therefore of our society in general.

Scott Salvato
Valley Stream, N.Y.

After reading this, I thought it might be interesting to check the name with "Fundrace" that I blogged about earlier. Click here to find out about Salvato's political donation.