The thread of life

Unlike in most other countries, American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate.

Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

All those expensive real estate developments have been idle since last March.  And there is very little chance that significant usage of those facilities will begin even in early 2021.

The landlords universities are in distress, and the Republican Uncle Sam couldn't care less.

My own university also has to reckon with the tightening dollars and cents.  As a result, some of us faculty, too, are bound to lose our jobs before the next academic year ends.

Should that day arrive way earlier than I had planned, I will be thankful that I was/am one of the lucky few on this planet who was able to pursue for quite a length of time what truly interested me.  Thanks to some dumb luck!

In my agitated and angst-filled younger years, I was convinced that somewhere out there were the answers to the big questions.  Somewhere.

Even in the first couple of years of graduate school, I was confident that I was on the way to the answers.

I did find the answer.  It was a non-answer of sorts.  Life is full of wonderful ambiguity.  That's it.  We have to live through it all.

Every once in a while I succumb to the temptation of the answer, but almost always I just want to breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.  I love those damn wicked problems!

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

A concern and worry that I have is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.  Perhaps that is also a reason why 63 million responded with a favorable vote when a demagogue yelled and screamed that he alone had all the answers,

The following poem by Oregon's own William Stafford is how I want to end this note on the delightful pursuit of ambiguity:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

A possible lesson from Covid: Sports is sports, and education is education

Two months ago, in May 2020, which seems like two decades in the age of the coronavirus, I wrote in this post:

In response to COVID-19, if higher education is forced to stay focused on its mission and reduce its extravagant expenses on athletics, then it will be one of the few benefits to come out of this global catastrophe.

Ahem.  It could happen.

First was an announcement from the Ivy League, which became the first Division I conference to suspend football for the fall:

The presidents said in a statement that sports could not be played under campus-wide policies that include restrictions on student and staff travel, social distancing requirements and limits on group gatherings.
“With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk,” the statement read.

Of course, Harvard and Yale are not the champs who win the ultimate prize.

And then the Ivy on the west coast, Stanford, had more news:

Stanford will discontinue 11 of our varsity sports programs at the conclusion of the 2020-21 academic year: men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball and wrestling.

Yes, synchronized swimming.  You read that correctly.

And you know well where you have watched synchronized swimming.  In Hail, Caesar ;)



Ok, you perhaps have not watched that movie.  But, surely in the summer Olympics. Yes?

In the US, universities are the prep schools for wannabe Olympians!  And, Stanford is a leader in that:

USC topped the list at every Summer Games from 1928 through 1964 (tied with Cal in 1948). UCLA’s run went from 1968 through 2004. Stanford had the most in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Now, it does not mean that Stanford coaches only US athletes for the Olympics.  Nope.   Athletes come from all over the world to "study" at American universities so that they can get access to all kinds of personnel and infrastructure support.  Remember the scene in Bend It Like Beckham where the young women celebrate getting the soccer scholarship to an American university?

This bizarre aspect of American higher education investing gazillions on athletics is truly an awful American Exceptionalism!  I will quote this again:

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

Will the novel coronavirus eventually lead American universities to a better system?  I am not holding my breath on that!

“School teaches you only to be better at school"

It was an email from a student who graduated three years ago.

"But, I wasn't even her favorite instructor.  I thought she did not like me and the classes that she took with me."

Yep, those were my immediate thoughts.  I am by now used to not being anybody's favorite.  Popularity is simply not my thing.

And, yet, there it was. An email from her.

I wrote "I will gladly assist you" in my reply to her request that I participate as a guide in her professional pursuit.

And I added more.

After all, if a student has taken two classes with me, then for certain I remember them well--sometimes way too well for their liking!

I wrote in that email, "BTW, perhaps you have forgotten that I used your remark in class in one of my op-eds." And expanded on it.

A couple of days later, she replied. "I actually forgot about the op-ed (and my cheeky comments in class). Hopefully, I can teach my students more than just to be good at school!"

She will be a fantastic teacher.

Here is that op-ed, from May 2016.
*****************

“School teaches you only to be better at school,” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment.

The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

Without even knowing it, the student was channeling Ken Robinson. In a highly entertaining TED talk back in 2006 (way before “TED talk” became a part of our everyday vocabulary), Robinson noted that “you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The composition of the academic credits toward a college degree itself easily gives this away — a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be wrapped up within a year and a half after high school.

Even the preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important — skills like writing, thinking, communicating, researching and more — are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about.

Yet the myth persists and, despite all the research, there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others. Of course, that is the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs like elementary school teaching, for instance. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best — unless one wants to be a college professor.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young and, hence, the country’s future, then the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than art history, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers.

Instead, society needs to pay attention to whether students are mastering the skills that are needed to be gainfully employed, along with a broad understanding in order to be caring citizens. Else it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Computers and efficiency: Here's my middle digit!

The curriculum proposal process at my university is now paperless and all electronic.  We upload documents, which are then routed through the process and the personnel ... all in the name of efficiency.

Is it really more efficient?

When it was time for me to submit proposals, I ran into dead ends, one after another.  And every time I had to email two people, who then spent time fixing the problems.

Another colleague wrote to me about his experience:

I was just about to email you that any frustration in my last email isn't directed one bit towards you but rather to this new "more efficient" process. What used to take me five minutes of behind the scenes paperwork will now take 30 mins of emailing and portal submission, plus waiting on the CC to meet etc. And that's going to be true for every dang term going forward. You and I both like reading articles about automation and the future of work, and this new process reminds me that just because a computer process can be programmed doesn't mean it's an improvement.

As if I needed more evidence that "digital" does not always mean more efficient.  I am all set to extend my middle digit to those who claim otherwise ;)

At least my work is not about life and death, which is the case in healthcare.  Atul Gawande writes about this in "Why Doctors Hate Their Computers."

Something’s gone terribly wrong. Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.

Welcome to the club, Dr. Gawande!

Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with “field required” alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.

Doesn't this sound similar to the experiences I described about the curriculum process at my university?

Gawande talked to others, like Susan Sadoughi, who is a primary care physician.  What was her experience?

Early on, she recognized that technology could contribute to streamlining care. She joined a committee overseeing updates of a home-built electronic-medical-record system we used to rely on, helping to customize it for the needs of her fellow primary-care physicians. When she got word of the new system, she was optimistic. Not any longer. She feels that it has made things worse for her and her patients. Before, Sadoughi almost never had to bring tasks home to finish. Now she routinely spends an hour or more on the computer after her children have gone to bed.

Efficiency,my ass!

The software “has created this massive monster of incomprehensibility,” she said, her voice rising. Before she even sets eyes upon a patient, she is already squeezed for time. And at each step along the way the complexity mounts.
“Ordering a mammogram used to be one click,” she said. “Now I spend three extra clicks to put in a diagnosis. When I do a Pap smear, I have eleven clicks. It’s ‘Oh, who did it?’ Why not, by default, think that I did it?” She was almost shouting now. “I’m the one putting the order in. Why is it asking me what date, if the patient is in the office today? When do you think this actually happened? It is incredible!”

Seriously, how and why do people so fervently believe that digital means more efficient?

Gawande reviews the research on computers and productivity and writes that "one of the strongest predictors of burnout was how much time an individual spent tied up doing computer documentation."

This is awful!  And we let this happen!

We can retune and streamline our systems, but we won’t find a magical sweet spot between competing imperatives. We can only insure that people always have the ability to turn away from their screens and see each other, colleague to colleague, clinician to patient, face to face.

Face to face, yes.

Recently, I met with a student who was trying to get transfer credits for a course he had completed elsewhere.  I told him to meet with the person in-charge.  "Email to set up the appointment, but discuss the issue in person," I advised.  He did.

The Best Way Out Is Always Through

The following is a copy/paste from my essay at Inside Higher Ed.
*********************************************************

I wish I had learned a number of things that I didn’t in graduate school, including what it means to be a faculty member advising students. If only I had been told what I know now: faculty advising and office hours are not really about the classes, per se!

I started teaching economic geography at California State University, Bakersfield. When students came to my office, it was not to talk about agglomeration economies, central place theory or international development (my favorite). Instead, they often talked about their own lives. Earl, a United States Army veteran, talked about his experiences as a homeless person sleeping under bridges. I still recall Frank getting teary as he spoke about his homeland, Sierra Leone, which he had to flee. (I have replaced real names of students in this piece to protect their identities.) And there were more, whose names and faces are fading away in my memory.

It did not take long for me to understand that advising would involve dealing with the anxieties, vulnerabilities and emotions that students struggle with. I was unprepared. I had to quickly learn and improvise. And I did.

I became a listener.

All through my life as a student, and until I became a member of the teaching profession, I had never had such experiences. In my undergraduate years in India, I found no equivalent of “office hours.” Other than during classes, when I tried my best not to fall asleep through the lectures, I rarely saw my professors, let alone talked with them. It is not that I did not walk around with emotional baggage of my own; at times, the weight of my baggage seemed unbearable. But I had no one to talk to about my anxieties that included an acute fear of public speaking, worry about my family’s financial stress due to my father being unemployed and -- the biggest one of them all -- my intense feelings of unhappiness and depression about my electrical engineering program.

Perhaps my formative years would have been less anxious if India had continued with a variation of the old tradition of gurukula. In the gurukula system, the student (shishya) almost always lived in the home of the teacher (guru) and his family. The guru and his wife were, for all practical purposes, a second set of parents, and provided a home -- a remarkable alma mater -- that made possible the shishya’s intellectual andemotional development. In complete contrast to the gurukula, my college professors and I were total strangers in India’s modern higher education system.

Though not operating a gurukula in Oregon, which is where I have been living and teaching for the past 16 years, I am convinced that faculty members can -- and should -- play an important role in students’ emotional as well as intellectual development. News reports empirically validate the struggles of the students whom I come across in my teaching. The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has been surveying first-year students across the country since 1966, notes a significant decline in the emotional health of college students. Life has apparently become even more complicated than it was when I was a teenager worrying about my future.

At the surface, it might seem like the three-legged academic stool -- teaching, scholarship and service -- does not include dealing with students’ feelings. But teaching does have a place for it. After all, we are not dealing with automatons but human beings with emotions. The life of the mind, which serves as an unofficial motto for higher education, includes anxiety and sadness.

I fully recognize that I am not a counselor. I suggest to students to meet with the counseling professionals on the campus if they are not able to work out their problems. One student, Valerie, who does work with counselors, wrote to me recently: “I don't plan on being broken for the rest of my life though. Well, it is not like I am planning it now, but things will be better soon.”

It seems like students want faculty members like me simply to hear them out and not necessarily solve their problems. Listening to students in my office, when they engage me about their life concerns, compels me to walk a fine line -- fully engaged and relating to the person yet detached enough from the emotions and the person so that I don’t get entangled in their lives. Depending on what students tell me, I sometimes share with them some of the anxieties that I experienced as a college student. Always, they are surprised to learn that I, too, was once a walking bundle of nerves.

A few days ago, I met with a student, Gina. As we discussed her classes and the need to look for summer internships, I sensed that something was troubling her. Thanks to the years of working with students, I knew that I should not force the issue, and that if a student really wanted to share their troubles with me, they would. The more we talked about her academic plans, the more I could see her gaining confidence that she could trust me.

She paused and looked away. And then Gina slowly talked about her problems dealing with anxiety and depression.

I listened. We talked about her worries and her interests. I latched on to her mentioning poetry. I told her about a line from Robert Frost that is comforting and encouraging when we struggle with problems: The best way out is always through. “I love Frost. I will look it up,” she replied with a smile.

But then, all of a sudden, her facial expressions changed. With her fingers covering her mouth, and looking deeply apologetic, she asked, “Is it OK to talk with you about these? These are my personal problems, right?”

“Of course, it’s OK,” I replied. She relaxed more when I added that advising and office hours are not merely about classes but -- and more important -- about such issues. And that’s a profound truth that I had not known as a graduate student when I was excitedly looking forward to a life as an academic.

The Conceptual Penis in Breastaurants

So, yet another gotcha! moment in the academic world of "research."

In case you missed it, because you were preoccupied with the teetotaler pussygrabber defending a beer-drinker by claiming that Jews were ruining the country, well, you are correct in ignoring the latest tempest in the academic teapot.

But, we shall address that here.

Yawn!

To me, this is merely yet another dog bites man story.

Note that in the opening sentence I wrote "yet another" ... because the one that really should have alerted academia was the original--by Alan Sokal.  That was more than two decades ago.

However, academe couldn't be bothered.

Academe didn't change because of the entrenched publish-or-perish culture.  Publishing intellectual masturbation as "scholarship" is a requirement for promotion.  These days, it is a requirement to even get the first job in higher education--in contrast to the old days when intellectual masturbation began after getting hired!

Does it bother you that I repeatedly refer to intellectual masturbation?  It should.  I am being intentional here.  As I wrote in an essay in the Chronicle Review, 17 years ago, almost to the very date, most of the academic "research" is pretentious work that will not sell even for penny, or for a kopek according to Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" that I quoted in that essay.

I had always hoped that the financial urgency will force higher education to review its bizarre facade of scholarship, before the public figured it out as much as Uncle Vanya figured it out.  But, academic "scholars" could not be bothered with all that.  The intellectual masturbation continues with cries of orgasmic pleasures within the walls of the ivory towers!

In this essay in The Chronicle Review, the authors note:

We need policy makers and grant makers to focus not on money for current levels of publication, but rather on finding ways to increase high-quality work and curtail publication of low-quality work. If only some forward-looking university administrators initiated changes in hiring and promotion criteria and ordered their libraries to stop paying for low-cited journals, they would perform a national service. We need to get rid of administrators who reward faculty members on printed pages and downloads alone, deans and provosts "who can't read but can count," as the saying goes. Most of all, we need to understand that there is such a thing as overpublication, and that pushing thousands of researchers to issue mediocre, forgettable arguments and findings is a terrible misuse of human, as well as fiscal, capital.

The authors list a few suggestions for reform.  What is their bottom line?

Best of all, our suggested changes would allow academe to revert to its proper focus on quality research and rededicate itself to the sober pursuit of knowledge. And it would end the dispiriting paper chase that turns fledgling inquirers into careerists and established figures into overburdened grouches.

Here is the ultimate kicker: the authors are, implicitly, referring to the research universities.  If this is their set of observations on the happenings at research universities, then one can easily imagine the state of "research" at the vast number of universities that are not research universities but teaching universities, like the one where I teach.

In another essay, Arthur Levine noted that rapidly widening gap between "Digital students, Industrial-era universities" :

[It] is important to ask how much colleges and universities need to change. In 1828, facing industrialization and a Connecticut legislature that disapproved of Yale’s classical curriculum, the Yale faculty responded with a report which asked, in part, whether the college needed to change a lot or a little. This, Yale’s faculty said, was the wrong question. The question to be asked, they argued, was: What is the purpose of a college? This remains the right question today.

What is the purpose of college, and what is the role of "research" that faculty do?

Money, sex, and entertainment ... today's American university!

In an email to my colleagues, in which I shared with them an informative video, I wrote:

People pushing STEM while systematically marginalizing the humanities and the social sciences need to understand such a big picture, which is what the idea of liberal education is all about.  If any of you want to share this video with the institution's STEM-pushers, feel free; I have long given up on them.

I then wonder why I don't make friends ;)

Apparently there is one set of higher educational institutions where the humanities and the social sciences are alive and well. No, not the Ivy Leagues and other private elites.  There, the best and the brightest are feverishly in the pursuit of fame and fortune via Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

So, where are the humanities and the social sciences prospering?

I’ve only found one large class of schools where humanities enrollments have held steady: historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently most of the rest of us do not care about "crafting a philosophy of life."

 In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped. Of all the statistics on the humanities I’ve seen, I find this one the most depressing: For the past 40 years, the percentage of first-year college students who think highly enough of crafting a life philosophy in the course of their studies to muster the energy to fill out a bubble indicating as much has flatlined below half. It’s little wonder that so few major in the liberal arts in the end.

Across the board, there has been an ever increasing interest, a passion, a commitment, to one part of higher education: Athletics--football, in particular!  No scandal shall ever stop this deep-commitment.

Most of the big-time football schools are public--yes, taxpayer funded--like the U of Alabama, Ohio State U, ... an endless list. Many of them still referred to as land-grant institutions:

Each of these universities is a land-grant institution, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which was sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Their guiding vision was to offer the highest quality of teaching, research, and service to communities across the country. These institutions have given our nation the greatest public-university system in the world.

Good ol' Abe will be shocked at how these institutions that he helped found have now become altars for entertainment, where coaches earn gazillion dollars, and scantily-clad women cheer the men on the field!

Do we have to then wonder how we ended up with this presidency, when even institutions that supposedly are about learning couldn't care a shit about life and truth?