To find one's place in this beautiful world

When I was in high school, the old country was a long, long way from becoming the world's digital back office.  Even landline telephones were a luxury back then.  In that old India, professional opportunities were scarce and, thus, most kids who were academically smart were encouraged, pushed, and even shoved into engineering or medical colleges.

I didn't need teachers or parents to tell me that I had enough and more in me; every subject came easily to me, especially math and physics.

Though, there was one--and only occasion--when my father commented, indirectly, by drawing on the story of Hanuman.

In the Hindu mythology, as a child, Hanuman gets enamoured of the orange ball that the sun was in the sky and he takes off--as in flies--to grab the ball. And as a young one with way too much energy and immense superpowers, Hanuman plays too many pranks on the sages.  All these result in a curse that Hanuman would remember his powers only if and when he were reminded about them.

My father, perhaps respectful of my off-the-beaten-track ways towards education and life, suggested that I was capable of achieving a lot and that he was reminding me of that as much as Hanuman had to be reminded.

Without any real enthusiasm, I agreed to my classmate and neighbor, Kiran's suggestion that we could prepare together for the IIT entrance exams.  He was very keen on it.  I faked it as much as I could.  We split the cost of the test-prep tutorials that came in the mail.

He became one of the very few who knew well that I didn't care for IIT and that I didn't care for engineering either. 

One day he expressed his concern that we were splitting the cost but that I was not making use of the tutorials.  He suggested that he pick up the entire cost of the remaining tutorials.  Kiran was such a nice guy, even at that young age.  Of course, I did not let him repay me.

Decades later, an email or two after informing me about Kiran's tragic and fatal accident, his sister recalled, among other things, my anti-engineering sentiments that she had gathered from her brother and how I had stopped preparing altogether.  I can imagine that Kiran shared this with his family.

A friend who did rush to IIT with awesome achievements withdrew from that institution halfway through.  And he has withdrawn from the world too :(

I wonder why the elders, who should know better, don't advise their kids that there is a lot more to life than credentials from some elite institution. 

The world has gotten only more competitive and maniacal about "credentials" since my high school years.  In India and here in the US, and in the rest of the world too, students are finding it more and more difficult to understand who they are and what they might want to do with their lives, even as they rush towards the prestigious colleges.  The competition has become so intense that the elite of the elite colleges in the US have eye-popping rejection ratios.

Which is why the admission process at Harvard has come under such intense scrutiny.  Qualified students not getting admitted there complain against the affirmative action practices there.  Of course, any systematic discrimination is a bad practice; but, it does not seem like Harvard discriminated in that sense.  I can understand a 17- or an 18-year old thinking that "Harvard or bust" is the bottom-line.  But, seriously?

It is like with love and marriage.  My grandmothers always claimed, believed, that there is always a match for everyone--this was in the old traditions of "arranged marriage."  When it comes to colleges, too, "there is very likely a place in the best schools for you."  The key is not to worry about the "best school" but the idea of "for you."

Life is one long struggle to find our respective niche in this cosmos.  A struggle that begins at high school.  It is a never ending struggle, which is all the more why life is beautiful and exciting.

May you find a comfortable corner to enjoy it all!

Let them eat cakes ... the college edition

Conan O'Brien commented that when he was contacted by fundraisers from his alma mater, Harvard, he asked them why Harvard needed more when it already had plenty in the bank. (I am lazy to track down a link; do that yourself, dear lazy reader!)

Harvard's endowment was $37.1 billion back in July.  I assume it has increased in value even more since then.

The university where I teach also has an endowment.  The amount is--sit down before you read this--about $15 million.

Go ahead, and do the math to figure out the ratio of Harvard's endowment to my university's.  You don't have to have a Harvard degree for that simple arithmetic!

Public universities like the one where I teach are rapidly being gutted because of a lack of taxpayer support.  Meanwhile, the uber-rich continue to donate to institutions like Harvard, which is where typically the rich and the powerful pursued their education.

the disproportionate fundraising dominance of the top 20 institutions shows no signs of abating. According to the CAE, these schools—the top three fundraisers were Harvard, Stanford and Cornell—raised 28.1 percent of all 2017 gifts.

Pause for a while to think about it.  Three already phenomenally affluent institutions were the recipients of more than a quarter of all the money that was donated in 2017.

Their success stands in contrast to ongoing divestment in state universities and community colleges, raising recurring concerns about the issue of funding inequality across the higher ed space. And while the discrepancy is rather stark, it should be viewed within a larger context.

The poor students at the lowly public universities and community colleges can go eat cakes!

Meanwhile, the paper that always celebrates competition and the free market applauds the decimation of the small public universities as survival of the fittest in which "U.S. Colleges Are Separating Into Winners and Losers."

Rich people's kids go to good elementary and high schools. They then go to "winning" colleges and universities.  These college graduates go on to make a lot a money, on which they want to pay as little tax as possible.  You know, the taxes that make it possible for poorer students to go to college.  Instead of paying taxes, those wealthy folks would rather donate to their rich colleges and universities.

Like I have always said, choose your parents well! I did--I chose my affluent educated Brahmin parents, thanks to which I lead a comfortable life!  So long, suckers, if you chose to be born to poor and marginalized parents!

It is not my responsibility! Or, is it?

After watching "I Am Not Your Negro" I told the friend that she has it easier than me--this atrocious history of my adopted country piles on top of the atrocious history from the old country.  Unbearable burdens that will weigh me down until the end.

I have blogged in plenty about racism and slavery.  In 2016 alone, leave alone the earlier ones.  How could I not?  Right from the time Obama won the elections, white Republicans brought racist discourse from their closeted spaces out to the open, and it reached feverish intensity over Obama's final two years.  Since the election in November, "I have a dream" has become "we have nightmares!"

It is all because we are yet to make peace with that second sin--slavery--that followed up on how we practically wiped out the Native Americans.

My favorite public intellectual on these issues, Ta-Nehisi Coates, sums it up succinctly:

We talk about enslavement as if it were a bump in the road. And I tell people: it’s the road. It’s the actual road.

It was at a recent conference at Harvard.  One might think that Harvard is up in Boston, far away from the South and, therefore, it had nothing to do with slavery, right?

Wrong!

The conference, entitled “Universities and Slavery: Bound By History” and sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is the latest in a series of efforts Harvard has taken to confront its ties to slavery. A year in the making, the daylong event featured historians and representatives from several universities, and a keynote address by The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. University President Drew G. Faust announced plans for the conference in March 2016.
In her opening remarks, Faust called slavery “an aspect of Harvard’s past that has been rarely acknowledged and poorly understood.”
“Harvard was directly complicit in slavery from the College’s earliest days in the 17th century,” Faust said. “This history and its legacy have shaped our institution in ways we have yet to fully understand. Today’s conference is intended to help us explore parts of the past that have remained all but invisible.”

This is a significant milestone even within academia.  Remember the posts on Georgetown??  Other universities looking into anything does not gain the attention as when Harvard does.  It is Harvard, dammit.

Caption at the source:
The enslaved Renty, pictured in 1850 and used by a Harvard biologist to support theories about racial difference.

The historical connections between universities and slavery first came to the fore in 2001, when a group of Yale graduate students issued an independent report aimed at puncturing what they saw as the school’s selective celebration of its abolitionist past.
In 2003, Ruth Simmons, then the Brown University president, announced a major effort to research that school’s extensive historical ties to the slave trade. While the move grabbed headlines, “there wasn’t a single peep from another university,” James T. Campbell, the historian who led the Brown effort, recalled during one panel.

Harvard being Harvard, the research into its own past are also being shared on a website.  I will end this will how Harvard's president frames it for all of us:

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore. In more fully acknowledging our history, Harvard must do its part to undermine the legacies of race and slavery that continue to divide our nation.

This highly unequal world where the rich get richer!

Why stray away from higher education, when writing about it is such a stress reliever! ;)

As if I needed yet another piece of evidence that we ain't no Harvard comes this report:

Harvard, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded in 1636, is the oldest and wealthiest college with an endowment valued at $36.4 billion as of last June.

$36.4 billion.  Billion!  And two days ago, I had a tough time imagining what $17 million means!

The gifts to Harvard show that the nation’s wealthiest colleges are attracting a disproportionate share of higher education philanthropy, cementing their competitive positions, even as less fortunate universities find their finances weakening as they look for customers to afford soaring tuition. Such inequality is growing, said Ronald Ehrenberg, an economist at Cornell University.

Yep, "attracting a disproportionate share" is nothing but an euphemism for what we who are down in the trenches refer to as "the rich get richer."

“The richer institutions are pulling away from everyone one else in terms of their endowment resources and the vast annual giving sums they generate, much of which goes towards building their endowments,” Ehrenberg said. “At poorer places, you need the money for current operating and also for construction projects.”

 Yep, at poorer places--like the university where I work--there is always that problem with not enough money for operations, leave alone the endowment.

How rich are these elites?

Of the 832 total isntitutions [sic], the top 10.9% with endowments of more than $1 billion each hold 74% of all endowment assets.

At least Harvard correctly refers to the governing board as Harvard Corporation.  The best and longest running corporation ever!

Harvard is a real-estate and hedge-fund concern that happens to have a college attached. It has a $32 billion endowment. It charges its rich students — and they are mostly from rich families, with many destined to be rich themselves — hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition and fees. It recently embarked on a $6.5 billion capital campaign. It is devoted to its own richness. 

And, as any corporation, it knows well that its "nonprofit" status is a wonderful tax-shelter!

If the school lost its nonprofit status, it would owe the state of Massachusetts $80 million a year. (The $350 million donor owns $100 million of real estate in Harvard Square, by the way.) For now, it owes close to nothing on its land or its investment portfolio. 

The richest get insanely even richer.

Source: seriously? You need me to tell you, again?

Meanwhile, the tired student at my university juggles being full-time at school while working nearly full-time at a little more than minimum wages.

Source: oh, come on!

Of course, if I were to compare Harvard with a typical college in, say, India, it might seem as if the two institutions are on two different planets.  Oh well.  Such is life.

It is not China's or India's problem that we outsource

The sudden populism over outsourcing reminds me of a Chinese saying that I recently came across: "If we don't change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

Twelve years ago, when I taught at California State University, Bakersfield, I assigned a class of about thirty‐five students the task of figuring out, through rough calculations, whether Bakersfield could compete against Bangalore, in India, when it came to call‐centers that the local leaders were pursuing as a growth strategy. At that time, outsourcing hadn’t entered the everyday political and cultural vocabulary, and Bangalore was unknown to most in the United States—after all, Thomas Friedman had yet to publicize these through his bestseller, “The World is Flat.”

Working in teams, the students independently arrived at the same conclusion—Bangalore will beat Bakersfield any day! My hope was that most of the class would have understood through this exercise how their economic futures could become increasingly dependent on developments in other parts of the world.

Well, we have now almost ended up where we were going—economic activities that might have generated many middle‐income jobs in the past have migrated to other countries that are equally, or more, interested in their development. Therefore, unemployment rates in the United States do not seem to be coming down despite all our attempts. And, yes, “outsourcing” is now a part of our lexicon and for which politicians have suddenly developed a fondness.

Yet, we seem to be talking about outsourcing not in any constructive manner. Outsourcing is being used to portray China or India as some kind of bad actors, when, in reality, they are far from any real competition to us. The average Indian earns barely five percent of the per capita income here in the US. The average Chinese is in a much better position than the average Indian, but the per capita income there is only a tenth of the American per capita income. India and China are not our competitors, but are much poorer countries where people are eager to improve their economic conditions.

Outsourcing economic activities to India or China or any number of countries has made possible goods and services at remarkably low prices. From t‐shirts to smart phones to customer support, we would have to pay a lot more than we currently do if there were no outsourcing at all.  It is not China’s or India’s problem that we failed to change our own direction over the years when we enjoyed the abundance of goods and services at affordable prices. Obsessed by the internet bubble, the events of 9/11 and then the wars, and then the housing bubble, we continued to keep going without even attempting to alter our course, seemingly oblivious to how the economic structures all around the world were rapidly changing. Should we then be surprised that it has become extremely difficult to generate gainful employment that will keep alive the American Dream for the middle class?

Outsourcing blips only when it conveniently fits into political calculations. Senators John Kerry and John Edwards angled for votes by referring to outsourcing and offshoring when they were on the Democratic ticket for the White House in 2004. Now, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are talking about it, but for all the wrong reasons that don’t seem to reflect in any way the much valued Harvard credentials they both have. Obama beats up on outsourcing in order to imply that the Chinese and Indians are taking away “our” jobs, which is a highly screwed up interpretation. And Romney doesn’t seem to recognize that outsourcing and the globalization of the economy have not translated to real economic betterment for the middle class.

If at all, since the Great Recession, I have increased the intensity with which I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated. Unfortunately, a captive audience does not always mean an attentive audience.

I suppose we seem to be hell bent on making sure we will end up where we are going.

Harvard prepares Presidents, judges, and China's commie leaders?

A follow-up to my earlier post.  Matt Yglesias corrects Niall Ferguson with this simple graphic (HLS is Harvard Law School, and Harvard's business school is HBS)

So, Harvard is tightening its grip on the Executive branch, it has more than a choke-hold on the Judiciary! And they are prowling on Wall Street, too!

Hmmmm ...

If Harvard is that good, well, it should not surprise us then that Harvard "is training the next generation of Chinese Communist Party leaders"

The Harvard curriculum, specially designed for this program, resembles a midcareer executive course. Housed at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center—the same graduate school Bo Xilai’s son attended—Harvard faculty teach Chinese officials leadership, strategy, and public management. Some of the lectures are given by big-name Harvard professors, including Roger Porter and Joseph Nye. Although the classes are restricted to Chinese officials, these party members have ample opportunity to mix with the school’s faculty and general student body. Borrowing from the case-study method made famous at the university’s business school, the coursework zeroes in on specific topics such as U.S. policy and government, how the media operates, negotiation strategy, and even social media. The classroom work is supplemented by site visits to places like the Massachusetts State House, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and larger institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. Besides its main leadership program, which lasts eight weeks, Harvard runs more tailored courses, too. One is focused on crisis management. Another is entirely devoted to the Shanghai municipal government. A new energy program will bring together executives from the China Southern Grid Power Corporation. “The goal is to help the Chinese government work in this environment of globalization,” says Lu. “To catch up.” 

Harvard specially designed a curriculum for this? As Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"  The difference, however, is that this this Harvard story ain't funny. 

BTW, the graphic interests me for another reason: I will add this to my venn diagram collections--well, this be only the third!   The Venn diagrams that my math teacher, Vimala Sitaraman, taught us a long, long time ago :)

Harvard says everyone doesn't need a college degree

And my thought is: it took this long for Harvard to figure it out? (ht)  Even I have been blogging about it for years!  The report is clear:

Our current system places far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college after completing an academic program of study in high school.

Yes.  An overemphasis, which has resulted in higher education becoming one huge ponzi scheme. 

Our fundamental problem is that our system has not evolved to serve young adults in this radically different world. Behaving as though four-year college is the only acceptable route to success clearly still works well for many young adults, especially students fortunate enough to attend highly selective colleges and universities. It also works well for affluent students, who can often draw on family and social connections to find their way in the adult world. But it clearly does not work well for many, especially young men. In recent years, a yawning gender gap has opened up in American higher education. Men now account for just 43 percent of enrollment in our nation’s colleges, and earn only 43 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Not surprisingly, women also account for 60 percent of the nation’s graduate students.23 Similarly, among the low-income and young people of color who will make up an increasing portion of the workforce of the future, this single route does not work well either. Many of these students are frustrated by an education they often find irrelevant and removed from the world of work. And given the barriers—including weak or nonexistent career counseling, rising college costs, inadequate financial aid, and the frequent need to balance their courses with jobs that are often totally disconnected from their programs of study—it is a minor miracle that so many still manage to complete a degree

So?

We also need to elevate the critical importance of relevant work experience in a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. The workplace is clearly the place to “try on” or test out a career choice. It’s also by far the best venue in which to learn the “21st century skills” so critical to success in today’s economy. And work-linked learning can be extraordinarily powerful in engaging students who are bored or turned off by conventional classroom instruction. Yet in comparison to many other advanced countries, America has largely neglected this highly effective learning method. We need to revolutionize our approach.

Ok. This is all more of the obvious--obvious to people like me who have been trying to get people's attention all these years.  The report engages only in wishful thinking.  But, a useful first step--after all, when Harvard says there is a problem, then things happen.

Bill Clinton at daughter's marriage :)

Funny :)

To me, this theme is like the cop/doughnut theme jokes--there is no end to good jokes ... as long as we have creative comedians and cartoonists.

In all fairness to him, media reports have always been that papa Clinton was a wonderful father to his daughter.  And the guy looks great after losing more than the weight his daughter ordered him to shed in order to get ready for the wedding.

If Clinton had been a professor, I bet thousands like me would have enjoyed his classes.  Over the years, I have watched so many of his lengthy and serious talks and interviews and have always been blown away by his intellect.  One of my favorites is his speech at Harvard:

More on Kagan

More on admissions at the elite universities

In an earlier post, I remarked at the craziness of 93 percent of applicants being rejected at Harvard and Stanford.  Greg Mankiw posts this graphic from another source:

I am all the more convinced that it is not about the education itself, but is about the "brand name" ...

But, what was the story even ten years ago?  Mankiw adds this:

This is part of a longer-term trend.  Here are the admission rates from about 10 years before this graph begins:

Harvard: 12 %
Princeton: 14 %
Yale: 20 %
MIT: 27 %
Stanford: 19 %

Admissions at Elite Universities

The undergraduate stratosphere gets further rarer with every passing year.

Take Stanford University's recent announcement about the class of 2014: The university reviewed 32,022 applications from "the largest number of candidates in its history," and sent offers to "just 7.2 percent" of applicants—an admission rate that "sets a university record."

Hmmm .... that means the number of students who received rejection letters from Stanford is .... aaaahhh, who cares!

I recall reading in Nicholas Lehman's article, back some time ago in the Atlantic, that the SAT score remains forever in the student's memory.  It is such a defining number of one's life at a critical fork in the road--where to after high school? I mean, think about the "Stanford rejects" given this piece of data from its class of 2013:

nearly 20 percent of the Class of 2013 posted perfect scores in the SAT Critical Reading and Math exams, and two-thirds of the class earned a GPA of 4.0 and above.

And this was the case when Stanford's admit rate was 7.9%, compared to this year's 7.2%.  Ouch!

Of course, Standford's 7.2% admit rate is bested, ahem, by that old school on the east coast: Harvard

For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students applied to the College, leading to an admission rate of 6.9 percent for the Class of 2014. Letters of admission (and e-mail notifications) were sent on April 1 to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants....
... more than 3,000 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT Critical Reading Test; 4,100 scored 800 on the SAT Math Test; and nearly 3,600 were ranked first in their high school classes.

93.1 percent of the applicants were rejected .... how many of them knew even beforehand that they didn't stand a chance, but applied anyway?  According to The Daily Beast, Stanford leads the way in being the most stressful environment for students :(

BTW, the average SAT scores at the "flagship" university of the system where I teach ...

How about an anti-trust to bust the academic monopoly?

Perhaps you ask yourself whether:

an academic can be a great prose stylist, and that a journalist doesn't have to be a dilettante—and that having a commitment to one community enriches one's contribution to the other. 

Well, read this then :)

Making (non)sense of healthcare reform

When a pretentious and half-baked nincompoop like me in the academic backwaters of a state that is often mispronounced has opinions on healthcare reform, then surely the Dean of Harvard's Medical School has opinions on this, right?  And when it comes down to it, I bet this Dean's explanations on what the reform entails will have more credibility than mine; wouldn't you think so too?

Which is why I am worried about some of the points that this Dean raises:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.
Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.
In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult.

All too confusing this healthcare reform is.  So, as always, I turned to the only real source of news and wisdom: The Onion:

Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital

What Econ newbies are up to, coast to coast

I wish I knew the answers to all of the following questions from Brad DeLong's midterm exam:

For each of the ten events, tell us (a) when it happened (within a ten year window) and (b) what its relevance is to a course in twentieth century economic history:

1. Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union
2. Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression
3. Gandhi's “Salt March”
4. “The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad
5. George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan”
6. Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six”
7. The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping
8. Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain
9. William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R]
10. Start of Mexican Revolution

I am confident about my answers to six, and I think I might be right about two more, but have no clue about the other two.  And these are from his freshman course!  Hmmmm .....
Across the continent, Greg Mankiw has these for freshmen :-)

Oregon is no Harvard

“We are no Harvard.”

Harvard, the country’s oldest university, is managed by the Harvard Corporation. This executive body is formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College and is, according to the university, the “oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Yes, this educational corporation is older than any of the American multinational business corporations that we are familiar with. To phrase it in another way, Harvard is the oldest multinational corporation!

On the other hand, the public university system in Oregon, and in other states as well, reflects a different notion that higher education is a public good. And the idea that citizens should not be deprived of an opportunity to gain higher education simply out of lack of money—the kind of money it would take to attend a private university like Harvard.

In case you are wondering, the tuition, fees, and dormitory expenses for four years at Harvard works out to about $52,000 for 2009-2010. For all practical purposes then, expenses for a year at Harvard can pay for all four years at any campus of the Oregon University System!

But, the commitment to a notion of affordable and accessible higher education has to be followed up with extensive public subsidies because knowledge, like most things in life, has costs associated with it. Unfortunately, we do not have enough loose change in the state’s coffers--yet another consequence of Measure 5, and the decisions of citizens to vote down funding proposals since then.

Thus, it is a no-brainer that when state governments decrease allocation for higher education, universities are then forced to suddenly increase tuition and fees—even if that were not in prior plans, and even if it means disastrous public relations.

The lack of state funding has, therefore, resulted in the shifting of the cost burden on to students and families. This increase over the last thirty years in Oregon is more than three times the increase in inflation over the same time period, mostly because of the decrease in state-support, which has worsened particularly over the last twenty years.

If because of dramatic reductions in state funding we are now making it more expensive for students to attend public universities, what happens then to the original political notion to ensure that Oregonians should not walk away from higher education for lack of money? Or, perhaps worse, what if students are graduating with debts, which is the reality now? The average debt that a graduate of the Oregon University System carries is now more than $20,000!

The current chaotic approach then forces universities to manage their way through uncertainty, when it comes to planning for beyond the biennial budget horizon. In a recent research paper, Professors William Doyle (Vanderbilt University) and Jennifer Delaney (University of Wisconsin, Madison) conclude that "the costs of an increasingly volatile system, with unpredictable finances for institutions and unexpected tuition increases for students and families, are too great to continue to ignore."

It appears that we are at the metaphorical fork in the road where decisions made could result in lowering the quality of our universities, or making higher education inaccessible, or both. It is quite possible, therefore, that it is only a matter of time before Oregon and, perhaps, the rest of country decide to consciously walk away from the goal of providing quality higher education that is accessible to everyone.

In no way do I mean to suggest that there is an easy way out of the conundrum. But, I would prefer public discussions on our commitment to public higher education, instead of relegating this to backroom budget negotiations at the Capitol.

I suppose we can take comfort in the news that Harvard, too, is having a tough time with the economic downturn. Its endowment has taken a huge hit and has lost $11 billion over the past year. The Harvard Corporation now has an endowment of only $26 billion to manage. Wait a second, $26 billion?

One reason for the crisis: MBAs

MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management By Accident. For today’s purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the Business Apocalypse.

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”....

Given the present chaos, shouldn’t we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health?

If doctors or lawyers wreaked such havoc in their own professions, we would certainly reconsider what is being taught at medical and law schools.

Amen!
Read the entire piece in the Times (London). BTW, the author of that commentary, Philip Delves Broughton, is a class of 2006 Harvard MBA, and the author of What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, published by Viking

Thanks to my favorite site: A&L Daily

Professors, study thine own teaching

After many years, I am convinced that I am a reflective practitioner, and blogging is yet another way in which I can be that kind of an academic. Of course, the seed for such a behavior came a long time ago when I read Donald Schon's book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

It is, therefore, logical that I should value the scholarship of teaching and learning--after all, in a teaching university my primary responsibility is to teach, and reflecting on that is nothing but the idea of scholarship of teaching and learning. I now have one more person to quote on this topic: Derek Bok, who was once the president of Harvard, for quite a few years actually.
In the Chronicle, Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview.
"They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

All right, Dr. Bok, please spread this word :-) And he doesn't stop there ....

Mr. Bok blamed much of the failure of faculty members to teach effectively on their graduate-school education.
Graduate education, he said, focuses almost entirely on the knowledge and research techniques of specific disciplines and devotes little attention to teaching students how to teach. Having earned their doctorates without the benefit of solid pedagogical training, many college faculty members end up simply emulating the professors who taught them best, which leaves them repeating the instructional methods of the past rather than adopting effective new approaches.

Big Paycheck or Service?

Remember the article in the NY Times a week ago?  It was about Professor Howard Gardner's seminars to "encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges."

Well, the paper has published a few letters in response to that piece.  I found this to be the most interesting:

To the Editor:
After a career in public service, I regretfully say, I would not do it again.

Philosophy and point of view led me to doing good instead of doing well, so I never expected to become rich. But now that I’m in my 10th year of a frozen judicial salary — less than summer students are being paid at law firms — I have concluded that whatever I may have accomplished for the public, I have wasted 25 years of my life by serving on the bench.

Emily Jane Goodman
New York, June 23, 2008

The writer is a New York Supreme Court justice