Mar
4
So, Um, What’s the Value of a Liberal Arts Education Again?
Filed Under academia, education | 3 Comments
From John Lingan’s “They’re All Zombies,” about a new craze sweeping colleges nationwide:
Now that the game has been embraced by students at a dozen-odd other colleges, we can see its proponents for what they really are: kids who view college as a four-year playground.
These students exists at any school—hence the popularity of H v. Z at bigger campuses like the University of Maryland and Bowling Green State—but it’s telling that this game originated on a 1350-person campus like Goucher’s; something about the self-contained small communities of liberal arts colleges enables students to waste their time in such needlessly complicated ways. As a recent alumnus of such a school, I’ve seen that most undergraduate humanities majors were able obtain a GPA in the B range while doing barely any work. (The same can’t be said for science majors, it should be noted.) I have no idea what kind of work ethic Temkin and his cohorts have, nor do I know the average grades of H v. Z players, but they are familiar types insofar as the Post portrays them.
Their confidence suddenly boosted after leaving high school (and home), these proudly “weird” kids find themselves with a dearth of necessary schoolwork and a whole new audience to impress with their superficial quirks. Maybe they wear a funky hat or cut their hair into a Mohawk. Maybe they stop wearing shoes around campus or start throwing a Frisbee in obviously inappropriate spots. Or maybe they buy 10 Nerf guns and stop going to class, the better to focus on their 24-hour-a-day zombie fantasy. “[A] player’s life can be entirely consumed by the game” during H v. Z, writes Quindecim interviewer Asa Eisenhardt. The Post article abounds with descriptions of the participants’ months-long preparation, the time-consuming strategy involved, and, of course, the necessary hours spent convincing the administration that H v. Z is a legitimate way to spend time.
I wasn’t the greatest student in undergrad, I admit. I was terrible at German and while I read lots of books, I didn’t read any of them well. Still, I posted this elsewhere on the Internet, and it’s definitely true:
Between sophomore and junior year I felt dumb, so I read all three of Rousseau’s Discourses that summer, the Social Contract, as well as Mill’s “On Liberty” and “Utilitarianism.” Then that junior year, I had Western Political Thought, so that was Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas (each in brief), and then the second semester junior year was a course on Wittgenstein (the C+ I’m proudest of), and I wrote some 30 odd pages on “Paradise Lost,” which I must have read something like 10 or 20 secondary sources (about 3 or 4 full length books were just a few of those sources) on.
And from then on, I took as much philosophy as I possibly could – the semester after that was Descartes, Locke, Leibniz; an intro to logic course that was fairly demanding; a classical phil. course that covered the Presocratics, some Plato, some Aristotle… you get the idea. Again, I didn’t read much well, but no one can say I didn’t try. So it is heartening for me to see statements like John Strassburger’s “For the Liberal Arts, Rhetoric is Not Enough:”
The faculty developed a two-semester program required of all first-year students, what became known as the “Common Intellectual Experience.” It involved professors from across all the departments teaching in small sections, having students reading seminal thinkers from East and West to confront the “big questions”—those reflecting on the meaning of life, purpose, and values.
Over the years, writers like Plato and texts such as Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and the Bhagavad Gita, along with those by Descartes, Darwin, and other leading thinkers have ignited heady discussions among students.
Creating that two-semester course around the big questions supposedly at the heart of liberal education was more or less a leap into the pool without checking for water first. It was an act of faith. But it turns out that what we suspected all along is, in fact, true. Anyone spending time with 18-year-olds knows that they are consumed with moral questions, mostly in terms that Immanuel Kant would recognize. They want to know about their obligations to their families, girlfriends, boyfriends, or teammates. They wonder if being rich will bring happiness, or whether happiness will be found in relationships or through serving others. Of course, they also wonder if they will be good at something—good enough to make a decent living or even to excel—and whether they will become wealthy or famous. [emphasis mine]
Strassburger’s statement is good enough that I would use it as my own introduction to the liberal arts. And yet, you will notice that one of the colleges Strassburger cites as working in his own school’s vein is Goucher, the school that brought us the H v. Z game.
I can preach all day, but I’d rather leave off here and go into Philadelphia and take a walk. Comments are requested. I’ll just say this: I do poems on the blog because 1) they’re entire texts, despite being short 2) they push you to speak another’s voice aloud and see as they see, hear as they hear. Moral questions are important, so important they probably need to be the center of campus life, and most certainly part of daily life. Of Socrates it was said that he never stopped asking what justice and virtue were.
Dec
17
Kevin Carey, “That Old College Lie”
The article is excellent and should be read by as many as possible as soon as possible. The primary call is for information:
American colleges grant more than 300,000 bachelor’s degrees in business every year. Whose graduates are most successful in business? There are anecdotes, but no available, comparable data. Nobody really knows. Which teacher education program best prepares candidates to excel in the classroom? Nobody knows. Nearly every college teaches introductory courses like calculus and English. Where are the best calculus and English professors? Who is most successful in preparing students for law and medical schools? Whose graduates make unusual contributions to philanthropy and the arts? Who teaches writing well, given the academic preparation of the students they enroll? Who teaches anything well? Nobody knows.
Very powerful interest groups within the university, of course, do not want any information about what their students learn and its utility to be shared at all:
To get colleges to participate in their surveys and tests, NSSE and the CLA had to strike a bargain. Colleges would control the results–the data would remain secret unless colleges chose otherwise. Then, in 2006, Mark Schneider, the commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. If the college answered “yes,” and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed. For his temerity, Schneider was nearly fired.
And I don’t think I need to tell any of you how serious a crisis we face in American education as a result of garbage like this:
….When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year.
….The average graduation rate at four-year colleges in the bottom half of the Barron’s taxonomy of admissions selectivity is only 45 percent. And that’s just the average–at scores of colleges, graduation rates are below 30 percent, and wide disparities persist for students of color. Along with community colleges, where only one in three students earns a degree, these low-performing institutions educate the large majority of Pell Grant recipients. Less than 40 percent of low-income students who start college get a degree of any kind within six years.
….A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in “prose literacy”–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example.
….Ten percent of the U.S. News rankings are based on spending per student, with additional points for high faculty salaries and other costly items. If an innovative college found a way to become more efficient and charge less while maintaining academic quality, its U.S. News ranking would actually go down.
….The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently found that the total increase in college tuition from 1983 to 2007 (439 percent) far outpaced the rise in median family income (147 percent) and even the medical care costs (251 percent) that are threatening to bankrupt the nation.
Alright. I do have some quibbles with the article:
- Yeah, it’s elitism, but it needs to be addressed – no amount of information can tell you who can or cannot be taught if you neglect that issue from the very beginning for egalitarian reasons.
- Related to that: this article does not take seriously whether colleges admit too many to begin with.
- A utilitarian model strictly can only help those in fields like mine – political philosophy, for example – indirectly. While I’m all for greater access to information, I do worry that an already materialistic public will become even worse. Higher learning does have to be “higher” in some sense.
- There are some reasons to believe that colleges are actually quite good: I mean, one does get to work with people who strive for new knowledge in their fields and are experts. Again, the fact that students from our grade school and high school systems cannot appreciate what they’re getting should be a concern. I do believe in higher education reform, but is a college really in the business of teaching people how to read? That seems to be what the article is implying. Education reform has to be complete; there are failures all over the system.
Josh and I were talking about the issue of what could have made college better, and I think we concluded that some sort of comprehensive exam given senior year would have been a huge help. Definitely in grad school qualifying and comprehensive exams helped me put a large number of issues from various classes into a whole that had to be defended. It’s not just a useful exercise: it pushes the school to be a bit clearer about what it is educating in, while allowing students to take a reasonable diversity of classes. (Schools may have to institute a few core classes to have such an exam, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all – the core at the University of Dallas works in my experience. I would never insist a school do the exact same thing as Dallas, but a bit of openness to that idea wouldn’t be a bad thing).
Moreover, if a school takes the exam and its preparation seriously, it should realize that it has something with which to sell its students to employers and graduate schools: “look, our students learned X,Y,Z and passed proficiency tests.” A good school should be marketing its students and working to get them employed; that for-profit colleges don’t care whether their students get employed is a sign of what a racket higher education has become. Which brings us back to the main point of agreement between Mr. Carey and I – if a school cared, the students would be better and they would be treated better by the school and the world at large.
Dec
12
The last two or three days I’ve been writing drafts for blog posts on the topic of academic cheating. I wanted to address how it seems to me our very culture encourages people to cheat, how valuing a piece of paper more than actual knowledge has become the default way we value anything. Of course I didn’t publish any of the drafts; they got too shrill and preachy and didn’t contain enough insight to warrant an audience. I did reread Nick Mamatas’ excellent “The Term Paper Artist” and wondered about people like the following:
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments. I don’t believe that most of them even handed the papers in as their own, as it would have been obvious that they didn’t write them. Frequently I was asked to underline the thesis statement because locating it otherwise would have been too difficult. But that sort of thing was just average for the bottom of the barrel student-client. To really understand how low the standards are these days, we must lift up the barrel and see what squirms beneath. One time, I got an e-mail from the broker with some last-minute instructions for a term paper — “I told her that it is up to the writer whether or not he includes this because it was sent to me at the last minute. So if you can take a look at this, that is fine, if not I understand.” The last-minute addition was to produce a section called “BODY OF PAPER” (capitals sic). I was also asked to underline this section so that the client could identify it. Of course, I underlined everything but the first and last paragraphs of the three-page paper.
Of course, identifying those who outright do not belong in college or any educational establishment only begins to reveal the manifold problems we face today. There are lots of people who are intelligent enough but do not have the discipline or willingness for higher learning; there are people who are very smart but very unappreciative, and can encourage contempt for learning by making everything seem arbitrary. And even when one gets beyond issues of intelligence and discipline, there is still the fact that attitude, trends and perceived necessities play a gigantic role in closing more minds than they open.
Which brings me to MTV’s Jersey Shore, which I read about recently (Troy Patterson’s Slate review quoted below; h/t Josh for the link) and had the experience of viewing. If you’re asking whether there are people like this in Jersey -
Some of the douchebags with the hot chicks could further be defined as guidos, which brings us to MTV’s Jersey Shore. Here, eight Italian-Americans descend upon Seaside Heights, N.J., from Rhode, Long, and Staten Islands and other such locales for a sunny season’s worth of binge drinking, casual sex, and open hostility. (As the Washington Post put it in an extremely delightful 2003 story, “Guidos belong to summer, and summer belongs to guidos.”) What does it mean to self-identify as a guido (or, his female equivalent, a guidette)? One of the Jersey Shore stars, Pauly D, has a ready answer: “It’s just a lifestyle, it’s bein’ Italian, it’s representin’, family, friends, tannin’, gel, everything….”
Pauly D’s housemates include Jenni, who encourages the nickname J. Wow, transliterated JWOWW; Mike, whose sobriquet derives from his abdominals (“My abs are so ripped up, we call it The Situation”); and an unfortunate little person calling herself Snooki. Early in the first episode, Snooki wasted little time in gearshifting “from stupid to, like, incoherent,” as Vinny said. Sloshed, shrieking, and despondent that the male housemates repelled her groping advances, Snooki wobbled off to the roof deck alone. “You don’t understand how I feel!” she bawled, either to herself or the hammock. “It’s so not fair at all!” Shortly thereafter, she snooked into the hot tub with the guys while wearing her underwear, attire deemed incorrect by Angelina: “A thong bikini would have been a little bit more classier, if you’re gonna wear anything at all, you know what I mean?”
- I mean, it is true these individuals are from the New York area, but short answer: you could have fooled me. The people I knew in undergrad were probably smarter than these: they were getting grades and degrees and working hard to pay tuition and for their lifestyle. Did they act in identical ways? Absolutely; take away an hour or two of studying from their daily lives and many were animals who could stay just clean and organized enough for the reality tv cameras to film.
I’m not saying everyone has to be perfect: heck, I found “Jersey Shore” entertaining up to the point they went to the local bars for the obligatory club/bar drama that every reality TV show has to illustrate the poverty of America’s conception of having a good time. I suspect many of you would turn off this garbage if it appeared on your monitor or TV screen lest one gets a disease from watching it electronically. I do know the biggest difference between the educated and uneducated is that a truly educated person can ask serious questions about what they consider good; they don’t just think that partying and generally behaving in a manner they thought awesome at 15 or 16 holds good for the entirety of their lives. I wonder if reality TV or our everyday lives came first: it seems our everyday experience has always been a lifestyle that expects the camera to follow us around. After all, if you already think you know what is most important, you are saying that your life is worthy of emulation, that it should be broadcast into everyone’s home.
Nov
29
From Michael Lewis’ “The Ballad of Big Mike,” in The New York Times:
His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”
He had had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade-point average of 2.05. Amazing as that was, however, it wasn’t enough to get him past the N.C.A.A. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.
Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.
From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!
Thus began the great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved Sue Mitchell grinding through the character courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Memphis public school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assignment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or “I Love Lucy.” But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, thinking it might spark Michael’s interest, picked “Great Expectations.” “Because of the character of Pip,” she says. “He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. She tried “Pygmalion.” Again, he hadn’t the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. “He does wonderful memory work,” Mitchell says. “It’s a survival technique. You can give him anything, and he’ll memorize it.” But that’s all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she says, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the league.”’
I’m not quoting any of this to pick on Michael Oher, who really is an awesome force on the football field and – even more impressively – worked hard for the education he has. Toward the conclusion of the article: “He could read and write… Drowned in nurture, his I.Q. test score had risen between 20 and 30 points.” I’m not going to knock the B.Y.U courses, because truth be told they helped give exposure to things like Lincoln and Pygmalion and Great Expectations that either didn’t get through in high school (most likely) or weren’t taught (elite schools generally tend to have some very surprising gaps).
I’m more interested in Oher’s lack of interest in the material, which is obviously excusable for a number of reasons in his case. He was more than likely interested in getting to do something he was good at (football) at a higher level soon, and given the rest of what we’re told, there are plenty of excuses. The thing about the disinterest: I run into it far too often among people who can’t make excuses, and what’s surprising is the people we’d label “educated” who also have that sort of disinterest. One thing that’s shining through what I’ve excerpted – it’s possible to do well at a number of tests, get A’s and general knowledge, and not relate to knowledge on any deeper level whatsoever.
I guess my questions are:
- Can we really institutionalize education and learning? To some degree, we have to, but where do the tests and classes start failing spectacularly?
- What about the need for focus? The more one focuses, the more practical learning gets. Not the worst thing, but the more practical you get, the less educated you are and not because we still have some liberal-artsy prejudice about educated people needing to know lots of useless stuff. It’s more like: if you’re educated, you can formulate questions about problems people don’t even realize exist.
- What about the appeal to honor? Combined with question 2, the appeal to utility, it seems to be a powerful motivator: “I got to do it to get to the league.” But we’re clearly seeing a case where honor and utility collapse into each other above. Moreover, it isn’t just Michael Oher who may not have cared for learning – the reason why I’m bringing this up is because there’s a frightening number of zombies around who will jump through hoops for certificates and official looking pieces of paper. A slightly different question from the first: to what degree is education a self-making?
Sep
30
What does success on the Internet look like?
Filed Under academia, blogging, education | 3 Comments
Still thinking about how all this adds up, if it does. I’m aware there are gaps in the reasoning.
1. Been saying to people recently stuff like “look at the top bloggers, look at Kos, who basically transformed the Democratic party into his vision – no one knows who these people are, yet you can nearly rule the world from here.” I’m not saying I’m right, but that’s one starting point for this inquiry.
2. The other could be this wonderful interview with Felicia Day (h/t Josh), where she says this:
Wired.com: Has The Guild helped your acting career?
Day: It’s very funny. No. It’s a little frustrating. Having done this for two years, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s not going to cross over. Occasionally I’ll see a writer who knows about the show. I have fewer auditions now than before I started The Guild because I have less time to concentrate on my acting career. In an ideal world, people would be offering me roles or at least I’d get more appointments and so would my cast members.
Wired.com: How about the other cast members?
Day: I would love them to work more as actors. It’s very weird to live in two different worlds — where we’re very popular, almost celebrities. And then when I go in to audition, the people in the waiting room recognize me as Felicia Day, the person who does The Guild, but when I go, in very few of the people who could hire me to do the job recognize what I do. It’s a very interesting place to be and I’ve gotten over the fact that that might not change.
3. Finally, a brief note about what those formally invested in education are doing (the case of established success):
In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today’s dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.
Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.
That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits.
Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that’s precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone. Yet none of the brilliant new people and buildings and land were used to give more undergrads a Harvard education.
4. Let’s start adding this together: we know there are real world needs and wants, and we know that there are content-producers on the Internet that can help satisfy (i.e. “The Guild” can help other people relate to more intense gamers; if you read everything I have on Dickinson carefully you’d probably be much better in your English classes, or at least sound like a nutcase) and – this is the kicker – satisfaction is had, actual power is obtained, attention is gotten yet no knows who you are or how they can even use you.
The weird thing about the Internet is that you’re getting attention from a select group of people, but it’s like you’re operating in another spectrum of mass media. The Internet is mass media, but it doesn’t cross over into the continuous tv/cable stream or newspapers or radio the same way those things get spliced into online culture. It makes a lot of sense to talk about the “entrenchment” of more traditional, mainstream media: it isn’t like the content offered is of the highest quality: it’s pretty clear there’s a lot more that goes into some 5 minute shows than to much on television currently.
I think it also makes a lot of sense to talk about “money” and how far that goes. I brought up Harvard because Harvard isn’t merely symbolic – it is the literal instantiation of our reasoning that money creates educated people. We may think, when we actually focus on the problem, that such an assumption is absurd. But the truth is we’re operating on that premise – or something very close to it – every day. It’s no shock to me that Kos got a lot of his power by showing he could fundraise; money commands the attention of those who would rule. And Day is pretty clear that a little bit more money for her show can go a long, long way, although there is a limit of diminishing returns that can be reached quickly. Part of the reason why mainstream media is entrenched is that money established a mode of discourse, a mode of thought: no one talks about political issues the way I do on television. There’s a format, people are used to it, they can get the gist of what everyone’s saying without paying attention to a single word.
No amount of money is going to help the Web break that last monopoly, not for some time. What money represents – its impact on all our education – is that learning can be convenient, politics can be user-friendly and entirely about expressing oneself, and entertainment need not challenge us to be better. When you consider the labor of love it takes to do anything well (read the Day interview and contrast with what most Harvard students are up to) it becomes clear that money isn’t corrupting necessarily, but sets the stage for the worst sort of complacency.
So what success on the Internet looks like is what it is now: for the most part, fairly modest even when one gets a “hit.” One gets attention because one is authentic for the most part. When success on the Internet changes, we’ll have to look for a new medium entirely for the sake of cultivating the things that matter.