mowabb: education

Good Ol' Tenure

So you thought academia was a meritocracy, huh? You thought the smartest people, with the best ideas and abilities, who worked really hard, were the ones who ended up with tenure? Think again: More and more people (especially women) are being denied tenure because they're not nice enough or don't "fit in" with other faculty. In academia, if you play nice with others you're called "collegial," but:

"Historically, collegiality has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm," the statement [from the American Association of University Professors] said. "An absence of collegiality ought never, by itself, to constitute a basis for nonreappointment, denial of tenure or dismissal for cause."

However:

Because tenure reviews are confidential, and based so deeply on personal judgment, it is often difficult to assess precisely what went wrong with a particular candidate.

As if the Humanities job market wasn't bad enough, now you have to be nice, too? :-) The fact that promotions in academic fields (particularly the Humanities) can so easily become capricious and personal only proves the truth of Noam Chomsky's assertion that American universities are normalizing (read: brainwashing) institutions:

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it[base ']s generally true of corporations. It[base ']s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It[base ']s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don[base ']t adjust to that structure, who don[base ']t accept it and internalize it (you can[base ']t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don[base ']t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don[base ']t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren[base ']t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

After nearly 20 years of formal education (gasp!), I still feel like I haven't learned how to think the right thoughts and how to behave like a member of the upper classes. More evidence that I need to find a new gig.

Blogs to Teach Writing

Scripting News pointed to this academic who blogs. She gives several good pedagogical reasons for using blogs to teach writing. Some of these I've considered, others are fresh ideas for me. I'll be teaching a summer class beginning next week; between now and then I'll give more thought to how I might use blogs to teach "business and technical writing," but at this point I'm still thinking it might be more trouble than it's worth. (Battery dying, must run...)

Is Solipsism the "Infinite Jest"?

Hang with me here, book lovers. This may go nowhere, but it seems worth noting. First, you have to understand that I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace and his epic and genre-defying novel, Infinite Jest (easily one of my top 5 books of all time). Even though I haven't read it in a while, I think about it often and follow conversation about it on the Wallace discussion list. Recently that list pointed to an interview with Wallace in which he said that he loves Wittgenstein because

he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. And so he trashed everything he'd been lauded for in the "Tractatus" and wrote the" Investigations," which is the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made. Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons (that's why he spends so much time arguing against the possibility of a "private language").

One of the main subplots of Infinite Jest revolves around a character who goes by Gately and who ends up living in an addiction-recovery halfway house (Ennet House, I believe it's called, though it's been too long since I read the novel to be sure about all these details) and spending a lot of time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. So Wallace is clearly concerned with both issues of solipsism and addiction/AA. That's why I immediately thought of him and IJ when I read this Chronicle of Higher Ed. article about AA, addiction, and academia, in which the anonymous author basically concludes that, like Wittgenstein's "Investigations," AA is basically an argument against solipsism:

It's true that AA addresses individual problems rather than the larger problem of addiction in culture. But the same could be said of any therapy or medical treatment. More than that, the standard leftist critique of "fetishizing the individual" over-simplifies AA's model of recovery. The paradox of AA is that while it focuses on the individual, it works only in the context of a relationship or a group dynamic, one drunk talking to another. And a social dimension is built into the 12th of the famous steps, which charges us to take action, to spread the word, and to keep an eye out for the next alcoholic. For me, that was the impetus to write this essay, and to "come out" to a student who is addicted and in trouble.

The similarity between DFW's comments about Wittgenstein to the above thoughts on AA lead me to conclude that Gately and the AA/addiction parts of IJ are at least to some degree arguments against solipsism and for community. AA becomes for Wallace a trope for language itself. Also, by extension, any argument against solipsism might also be an argument against the kind of poststructuralism/postmodernism that was circulating in literary communities when DFW was working on IJ. So while I've often heard IJ described as "pomo lit," I wonder if it's actually anti-pomo, which might only make it more seriously pomo in that it incorporates arguments against itself into itself. At any rate, it's interesting to think of AA as a sort of antidote to the fear that we've "lost our way" in the world, that we can't know anything, etc. This suggests an explanation for AA's late 20th century growth and mainstream acceptability, as well as the rise of addiction that makes AA necessary in the first place. Is addiction the ultimate expression of solipsism?

Curmudgeonly Fish

Stanley Fish says reporter do a poor job covering higher education.

A university is a complex entity that does not yield up its mysteries to casual observation. ... Typically reporters understand nothing of the tenure and promotion process, but they are certain it is unfair and operates at the expense of students. They understand even less of the budget, but they are certain that money is being squandered or misspent on nonessential frills. They have no acquaintance at all with the latest theories in any field, but they know they are faddish and a waste of taxpayers' money. They have no sense at all of what it takes to prepare and teach a course, but they are confident that they could teach at least six in any semester.

I'm sure Fish is right in places, but he's certainly not fighting the good fight if he wants to pretend that the tenure and promotion process is fair, or that it never hurts students. Nor is it accurate to claim that a great deal of money in public university budgets is not "squandered or misspent," nonessential frills or no. Higher education in the U.S. is absolutely compromised, so journalists are also at least partially right when they depict it that way. I'm starting to wonder, though, if higher education in this country -- especially in the form of public universities -- is almost necessarily compromising. Currently, people like Fish are asked to serve two masters:

Higher education is supposed to be concerned with something called knowledge -- with its production and explanation and distribution. This is often somewhat abstract by definition, and really requires what often seem to be obscure theories (which are not "faddish" so much as "new" and therefore more interesting and potentially productive than what's come before*), as well as a certain remove from practical considerations of direct application -- either in marketplace or elsewhere.
Increasingly, higher education at public universities is also supposed be concerned with the practical application of "knowledge' as well as with producing good workers for the marketplace. This second, more "practical" concern comes as universities are asked to pay for and justify their very existence in to a degree that would have been unheard of even 20 years ago.

Because higher education is being asked to serve these two, largely contradictory, masters, it's a big target for reporters and critics of all persuasions. For example, it's easy to say that tenure, which is designed to encourage faculty to focus on the first concern, sometimes does "hurt" students because a concern for abstract "knowledge" and an expansion of the mind contradicts many students' (and parents' and legislators') goals of a practical education that will pay for itself. However, while Fish and his kind condescendingly deride journalists for doing a poor job, the value our culture places on the kind of education Fish believes in is steadily falling, and I'm afraid his condescension will do little to change that. *(On the question of "faddish" theories, we shouldn't forget that things like evolution were once deemed crack-headed and loony, as were "theories" about things like the human circulatory system or the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Lots of theories are proposed, tested, and thrown away, revised, or accepted, but the process requires that initial flurry of activity and "buzz" which can make a theory look like a "fad" just because everyone happens to be talking about it for a while.)

Grading Gaffes

Harvard still doesn't get it. According to The New York Times, Harvard faculty voted to change its grading system so that fewer students will get A's and graduate with honors. At a closed meeting, the faculty voted in favor of two sweeping changes. First, Harvard will switch from an idiosyncratic 15-point grading scale to the more conventional scale in which a 4.0 is an A and a zero is an F. The change will narrow the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus, which the faculty hopes will make a B more palatable. Second, Harvard will limit the number of students allowed to graduate with honors to 60 percent of a class. Nearly 90 percent of the students in Harvard's class of 2001 graduated with some form of honors. Great. They're trying to make a B more "palatable." Not more meaningful, but more palatable. The trouble with grades is that they don't mean anything. What does a B mean? It means something different to every single faculty member at Harvard, and it means something different to every single student at Harvard, and it will mean something different to every single person who ever looks at a student's transcript. What Harvard doesn't get (or at least doesn't acknowledge), is that grades have simply become the easiest way to reduce people to a numerical scale which can then be used to divide them into their appropriate work track. This sick reduction of people to numbers (changing them from ends to means, if you want to get Kantian) serves no one but owners of businesses who are trying to increase profits by hiring "good" workers. Of course, that's something Harvard probably doesn't care about, since the vast majority of it's enormous endowment comes directly from those business owners. It's sad. There's this idea that once institutions of higher education once attempted to increase knowledge in the world, to enlighten people, to push humanity to greater achievement. Whether that was ever true I don't know. But what's undeniable now is that institutions of higher learning have been themselves reduced to worker factories for big business. Welcome to McHarvard. What kind of McDegree do you want today?

Experiments in Education

Education Week reports that Similar to the United States' creation of public schools, such as charter schools or alternative schools, that operate outside the regular public school system, the Mexican government has established an informal set of schools intended to improve education for two groups of Mexicans[~]children in rural communities and youths who can't afford the living expenses and fees required to attend even a public high school or university. Classes are taught by Mexican youths who have completed at least 9th grade themselves. Teachers live with community leaders in the small villages in which they teach. In exchange for two years of teaching they get a stipend to attend a university for six years. Sounds great in that kids who might not otherwise get an education can now do so, not to mention the benefits for the teachers to go on to even higher education. On the other hand, it seems like this might create (or perpetuate) a sort of under-educated (but not completely ignorant, in the sense of having zero education) under-class with only the minimal skills required to become productive cogs in a capitalist machine. In other words, these schools seem better than nothing, but they also seem unlikely to seriously change the massive poverty and unequal distribution of resources from which they spring.

Experiments in Education

Poetry and (blogging) Hypertext?

Dive into Mark recently discussed an article at Kuro5hin about misleading emoticons. Mark included the "Waka Waka" poem, which I had never seen but which I think would be great for teaching poetry to poetry-shy contemporary students (for many of whom poetry is like Latin -- a "dead" language). From Dive into Mark: First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):

<> ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _

% * <> ~ # 4

& [ ] . . /

| { , , system halted

In English, this reads:

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash bang splat equal at dollar under-score percent splat waka waka tilda number four ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash

In a related vein, more and more people are posting their creative writing (short stories and novels, as well as poetry) online. This is nothing new -- vanity pages devoted to poetry were among the first (and often worst). But there's some great stuff out there. The best (and most experimental) I know of is Douglas Rushkoff's Exit Strategy. Today markpasc.blog links to a new novel (in progress) for our enjoyment (this one posted via Radio: American Invisible. If you read this and know of other online novels/short stories -- especially those posted or developed with blogging software, please let me know.

narrowing the range of acceptable speech: Today The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that New York University settled a claim on Monday with a former professor who was denied tenure after voicing support for a graduate-student union drive. The university agreed to expunge all records of his tenure denial and pay him $15,000. Of course, the university maintains that Joel Westheimer's pro-labor testimony had nothing to do with the fact that he was denied tenure, despite the fact that prior to that testimony, Westheimer had unanimous support from his department for his tenure bid. Whatever. It's funny -- NYU wanted to limit what Westheimer could say in public about his employer, yet NYU also apparently thinks its free to lie in public about its actions. This kind of hypocrisy happens all the time in Corporate America, but why does higher education have to operate by such unprincipled "principles"? Sorry, I'm a little bitter about higher education right now.

Oprah's Contribution: As countless others race to be the first to imitate it, Kathy Rooney meditates on the significance and demise of Oprah's book club. The whole article is really worth reading for its thoughtful analysis and well-researched insight (Rooney says she recently completed a thesis on the subject). Rooney mentions both those who were sad to see Oprah bow out, as well as those who are now gloating. She concludes that: While it lasted, the club was an unquestionably encouraging phenomenon, indicative of an American impulse toward intellectual self-improvement and a hunger for the kind of seriousness and stimulation that good literary fiction can offer. Such a story as that of the Oprah Book Club should not suffer from so weak an ending. The closing of the book before a satisfactory denouement represents a tremendous loss to the promotion of active readership. I couldn't agree more. Robert McHenry takes a slightly different pathto largely the same conclusion. (Now I wish Radio gave me an easy way to find and link to the other posts I've made on this topic. How do you do that?)

Protests and Marches: Dave Enders, a junior majoring in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has written a great piece about his experience protesting at the April 20 war protests in D.C. Apparently, the protest wasn't quite what he expected. Enders writes: I joined a group in front of the Washington Monument to listen to speakers and wait for the planned afternoon march to the Capitol. But as Martin Luther King III addressed the students seated on the grass, the scene felt more like a reflection of things past than an indication of things to come. Asked why they were in Washington, most students gave vague answers about stopping the war, but they were unable to explain how milling about in front of the monument would do that. This is a great point: What do "protests" and marches do today? At one time, they seemed to be a radical statement, but now their efficacy is less clear. As Enders' later observes, "Washington is used to these sorts of disruptions." In other words, massive protests may have become almost status quo, making it difficult for them to disrupt the status quo in any way. I don't think that's the case completely, and the way a protest or march is run can have a significant effect on its success. Enders thinks the protesters should have been more confrontational; I agree. Why didn't the protesters storm the capital building? Why didn't they demand access to the senate chambers and make their demands from the Speaker's Podium? Why didn't they form human chains around the monuments and refuse to let anyone enter (i.e. the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, etc)? Those actions would have certainly resulted in more arrests, and people might have died if the police got out of control (which they likely would have). Yet, perhaps that's what it's going to take to shake up this system (that's what it took in the '60s). As Kathleen Christison has noted, At a time when the United States is officially engaged in a war on terrorism, which is officially defined as war against evil and evil-doers, moral arguments have a great deal of resonance. Right now those "moral arguments" are so deafening in one direction, that people who feel otherwise need to make a lot more noise to be heard. At any rate, Enders leaves us with a lot to think about. He says: I came to Washington looking for other students who, after a few years of college, have, like myself, become impassioned about what they see as social injustices. What I found were people looking for leadership. I wonder when they (we) will realize that if we want leaders, we have to be leaders. (A related question: Why don't students like this show up in my classes? If they did, how would I know it?)

Putting knowledge to work for the public: Apparently not all academics like living in the "Ivory Tower" and are working hard to put their skills and knowledge to work where they're needed most. Clem Price, a professor of history at Rutgers University at Newark, challenged academics to put their scholarly abilities to work in the public interest. Today the Chronicle reports on "four doctoral students who took time away from their graduate studies to work in internships at civil-liberties and human-rights groups." (registration may be required...)

Working their way through.

The American Council on Education is releasing a report today about current trends in higher education. The report itself sounds interesting, but equally interesting is the way it's being reported (or not). I can't find any headlines through Google or Yahoo News (Reuters), but the two places I have found coverage are taking completely different angles on the report. First, Morning Edition is emphasizing the report's finding that only 40 percent of four-year-college students now follow the traditional route to a degree, enrolling right after high school and relying on their parents and on loans to pay the bills. But The Chronicle of Higher Education is leading it's coverage of the report with the fact that institutions' retention data "greatly understate" the rate at which students actually complete their undergraduate educations. The two points are obviously closely-related, but NPR's coverage seems to focus on the fact that students are working their way through college for some purpose. I wonder what that purpose might be... At any rate, the Chronicle article is definitely worth reading. [Later:] Here's a more complete summary of the ACE report from the AP.