August 6th, 2010
Education News
Roundup
Articles posted by five reliably interesting sources of
news about higher education.
A sustainable future for open
textbooks? The Flat World
Knowledge story
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53058
August 6th, 2010
John Hilton III and David Wiley describe the model
of Flat World Knowledge so far. "Many college students
and their families are concerned about the high costs of
textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential
solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A
company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives
away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be
financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of
the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open
source textbook model." John Hilton III and David Wiley, First
Monday, August 5, 2010 4:23 p.m. [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Help for State Higher Ed
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/states
August 6th, 2010
WASHINGTON -- With state revenues stagnating and
unemployment stuck at high levels in most states, the budget
outlook for public higher education in the 2011 fiscal year
remains rather bleak. But college leaders in most states are
poised to get a gift from the nation's capital this week, in the
form, oddly enough, of $16 billion in Medicaid funds.
The money was part of legislation -- which was approved by
the Senate Thursday, and which Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi has called her colleagues back to town to consider next
week -- that would also provide $10 billion to states to save
"education jobs." While logic might suggest that that would
be the portion of the measure with implications for higher
education, it really isn't; that money is set aside to help ward
off the elimination of as many as 138,000 elementary and
secondary school teaching positions.
But the $16.1 billion that Congress would provide to
extend for six months federal Medicaid support for states'
share of their health care programs for the poor would
Published by: philosophyandrew
have clear implications for public colleges and universities.
Obviously none of the Medicaid money would flow directly
to postsecondary institutions (except to the extent that they
have teaching hospitals that provide medical care to indigent
patients). But governors and legislators in more than half of
all states had built the expected Medicaid money into their
overall 2011 operating budgets, and many had warned that
if the money failed to come through, the budget agreements
reached in many states would collapse, with dire ramifications
for many state agencies and services.
"The cuts that I have proposed ... are absolutely devastating;
they break my heart," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a
speech in late June, as the Medicaid extension seemed doomed
to fail amid partisan disagreement. "But if Congress fails to
extend the [Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentages] we will
have to find an additional $1.8 billion in spending cuts in
health care, in education, safety net programs and so on. The
federal money is critical to preventing deeper pain and deeper
job losses."
The potential ramifications for public higher education,
particularly, are severe. In Pennsylvania, for instance, state
leaders had vowed that if the state got none of the $850
million in Medicaid money on which it was banking, they
would ask Education Secretary Arne Duncan for a waiver from
the federal "maintenance of effort" requirement that compels
states to maintain higher education spending at previous
levels. Removal of that maintenance of effort requirement,
said John C. Cavanaugh, chancellor of the Pennsylvania
State System of Higher Education, would have put the
commonwealth's public colleges "on the cut table" along with
other discretionary programs there, and virtually assured
major spending reductions.
The apparent agreement to approve the additional federal
spending on health and education -- which was made possible
after Democratic leaders agreed to offset the spending with
cuts to other domestic programs, winning the support of
Maine's two moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins
and Olympia Snowe -- would represent only a partial
solution to the kind of dire consequences that face California,
Pennsylvania, and other states. That's because the $16.1 billion
contained in the compromise legislation is not quite two-thirds
of the $25 billion that state and federal officials had argued
was necessary to make states whole on Medicaid.
States that had built their budgets in part on the Medicaid
funds won't get all they hoped was coming. Pennsylvania, for
instance, had counted on receiving $850 million, but instead
is likely to get $600 million, assuming the deal goes through.
While it's still too early to say for sure how political leaders
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August 6th, 2010
there will react, Cavanaugh said he expected that rather than
seek a waiver, Pennsylvania politicians are more likely to "look
at other aspects of the state budget" to try to close the $250
million gap that the scaled-back Medicaid money will leave.
But that $250 million hole is a heck of a lot better than the
$850 million chasm that Pennsylvania would face without the
FMAP money, Cavanaugh said.
"This certainly seems like good news for us," he said of the
state's public colleges. "Seventy percent is a whole lot better
than nothing. It could well result in [legislators] being able
to figure a budget out without asking for an exemption" that
would ensure big cuts to colleges.
Maine faces a similar situation, said Richard V. Pattenaude,
chancellor of the University of Maine System. The $8.3 million
cut that the Maine system would face in its budget if the
Medicaid money falls through "would necessitate extreme
budget measures -- stopping purchases that have already been
made, canceling classes that are already scheduled for the fall."
Even if the state gets only two-thirds of the money on which it
is counting, "with a smaller number like that, we think we can
handle it," Pattenaude said, just as it has handled other recent
rounds of budget cuts.
"That's a much more doable number," he said. The funds
will be especially helpful given that Maine, like virtually all
other states, is phasing out the federal stimulus funds that has
helped keep it afloat the last two years.
As is so often the case these days, even comparatively good
budget news like the pending Medicaid extension might
not be enough to bring fiscal relief to California. The most
recent budgets put forward by Schwarzenegger in May and
by Democratic legislators this week count on an enormous
amount of Medicaid money ($3 billion and $4.1 billion,
respectively), and while a good chunk of that could still emerge
as soon as next week through the Congressional compromise,
political leaders in the state are "pretty far apart" on an overall
budget plan, said Patrick Lenz, vice president for budget at the
University of California system.
The governor's budget plan would restore a $305 million
cut that the UC system has absorbed in recent years (and
a comparable amount for the California State University
System) and provide an additional $65 million to allow for
enrollment growth. It's not clear how much the public colleges
would receive if, as seems likely if not certain, the federal
Medicaid contribution is less than anticipated.
So the federal aid is far from a panacea for California, Lenz
acknowledged.
Interestingly, the Medicaid money could represent a bigger
boon for the 20-odd states that did not bank on receiving
it. (This article on Stateline.org contains two charts showing
the amounts that states did and did not build FMAP money
into their budgets.) For those states, like Ohio, Minnesota,
Tennessee and Wisconsin, the Medicaid money could mean
avoiding midyear cuts if revenues fall short of expectations
or, imagine this, actually give legislators some unexpected
funds to add enrollments or otherwise bolster public higher
education.
Published by: philosophyandrew
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Open
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53057
August 6th, 2010
The current EDUCAUSE Review is a blockbuster. I'll just
publish the chapter headings:
The Open Future: Openness as Catalyst for an Educational
Reformation , David Wiley. "As institutions and as individuals,
we seem to have forgotten the core values of education:
sharing, giving, and generosity."
The Open Student: Questioning the Future of the Open
Student , Vicki Davis. "Open content is not yet changing
students' lives because there are questions that should be
answered first."
The Open Course: Through the Open Door: Open Courses
as Research, Learning, and Engagement , Dave Cormier
and George Siemens. "Online open courses can leverage
communications technologies and open the door to learners to
fully engage with the academic process."
The Open Faculty: To Share or Not to Share: Is That the
Question? , Maria H. Andersen. "Open digital faculty do more
than just share and participate in open resources; they transfer
their approaches to the teaching space."
The Open Ed Tech: Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great
Web 2.0 Swindle , Brian Lamb and Jim Groom. "Has the
wave of the open web crested? What does "open educational
technology" look like, and does it stand for anything?"
The Open World: Access to Knowledge as a Foundation for
an Open World , Carolina Rossini. "The right to be a creator,
the right to govern and develop one's own knowledge, and the
right to share with others are fundamental freedoms for the
Internet age."
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August 6th, 2010
Also, Openness: A Core Value for Making Higher Education
Great , Diana G. Oblinger. Various Authors, EDUCAUSE
Review, August 5, 2010 4:20 p.m. [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Washed Up
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/google
August 6th, 2010
Google Wave was supposed to make class discussions richer
and more coherent. It was supposed to make research
collaborations easier. It was supposed to break down walls
between offices, disciplines, countries. It was even supposed to
give learning-management systems such as Blackboard a run
for their money.
Instead, it is kaput. Just over a year after being rolled out, the
much-hyped Wave has crashed on the shores of indifference
and is now set to recede into obscurity. Google said Thursday
that it will stop selling Wave as a product and close the host
website by the end of the year, citing a dearth of users.
Google Wave was a Web-based platform where groups could
have conversations (live and asynchronous), share media files
and documents, and collaborate on projects. It was marketed
as an antidote to e-mail threads, where information is more
liable to get lost, discussions are fragmented, and people can
get cut out of the loop by accident. As far as the breadth of what
it could do, Wave stacked up favorably against the prevailing
collaboration technologies — e-mail, Google Docs, wikis, and
asynchronous discussion forums.
The expectations for Wave were as high in academe as
anywhere else when it debuted in May 2009. Some higher
ed bloggers suggested that professors might use Wave as a
foundation for “whole interactive courses.” Citing chatter from
enthusiastic early adopters, the education blog ReadWriteWeb
suggested that collaborative note-taking on Wave “will lead to
smarter, better performing students.” Some even mused that
Wave could challenge learning-management systems — if not
their information-management features, then perhaps their
online classrooms. “Because Wave includes so many modes of
communication and inter-operates with other applications, it
could significantly enhance the way students collaborate and
communicate,” read a primer from Educause, the higher-ed
technology group.
A number of professors experimented with Wave. Raymond
Schroeder, director of the Center for Online Learning,
Research, and Service at the University of Illinois at
Springfield, used Wave to bring together students from
two of his classes — one on the cultural impact of the
Internet and another on energy studies — to discuss how
the prevalence of the Internet ties into perceptions of energy
sustainability. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of English and
media studies at Pomona College, made collaborative note-
taking a requirement for one of her courses. Both Schroeder
and Fitzpatrick reported encouraging results. “To a person,
[the students] liked it,” wrote Fitzpatrick in a blog post.
“Most of the students seemed to catch the enthusiasm of the
instructors in using this technology,” wrote Schroeder. He
says his university also used Wave in public health and public
administration courses.
Published by: philosophyandrew
Why the Washout?
Schroeder and Fitzpatrick were, alas, in the minority. A study
released in May by the Babson Research Group and Pearson
revealed Wave to be one of the least popular Web 2.0 tools
among professors; fewer than half of respondents had heard
of Wave, and not even 5 percent used it. The number of
adopters in academe was “not as many as we had hoped,” a
Google spokesman told Inside Higher Ed on Thursday. He
would not say what specific criticisms Google had heard from
its academic customers about Wave. (Joshua Kim, an Inside
Higher Ed blogger on educational technology, suggests that
part of the problem may have been too much hype and not
enough of a connection between Wave's services and what
academics most wanted.)
“The platform was too complicated and too clunky for most
users and uses, and it didn't integrate well with the ways people
actually use the web today, nor did it fill a gap that wasn't being
served by other technologies,” offers Fitzpatrick, noting that
she was nevertheless saddened to hear Google had decided to
shut it down.
“My feeling is that Wave was mostly misunderstood, and
not least by its own development team,” she says. “If the
Wave team had pitched the package differently, it might
have succeeded. They described it as a redesign of e-mail,
integrating this form of communication with newer social
technologies — but that… made it seem as though Wave was
meant to be a general-purpose communication technology
that everyone would want to adopt.” Realistically, its uses were
narrower, she says — group work relating to specific projects,
mainly.
Schroeder agrees that the sophistication of the tools in Wave
might have scared away some non-techie professors. “For
those who took time to learn the capabilities, it was truly a
game-changer,” he says. “But for those who could only tolerate
a ten-minute learning curve, it was frustrating and confusing.”
Steve Bragaw, a professor of American politics at Sweet Briar
College, last fall mused on that Wave might take a bite out of
the learning-management market. Bragaw says he still thinks
cloud-based learning-management tools are the wave of the
future, but that this Wave just did not function well enough
to turn those early adopters into evangelists. “It was twitchy,
and it crashed a lot,” he says. “If you’re going to use it in the
classroom, it’s got to be reliable.”
Still, Bragaw says he thinks there is a market for Wave-like
technology on college campuses, and that if a company is able
to develop a product that works smoothly and is not so scary
to academics, it could gain a following. And he would not be
surprised if that company is Google.
For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow
IHEtech on Twitter.
Location: Cedar Valley College A full-time position in the
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East Georgia College wishes to announce we are receiving
applications for the position of Web Services Specialist. Duties
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August 6th, 2010
The Center for Mentoring and Learning (CML) and the Office
of the College Professor of Adult Learning and Mentoring
(CPALM) seek a Faculty Development ...
Location: Richland College A part-time position in the (Mon
- Thur 8 a.m. - 12 p.m.) World Languages, Culture and
Communications Department. Duties ...
Language and thought
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53056
August 6th, 2010
Does language influence thought, and does the way we speak
influence the way we think? Well, yes, obviously. But that's
because the way we do anything influences the way we think.
Anything else that we did as much as we read, listen and
speak would influence us as much. Photography, for example -
being a habitual photographer has changed the way I look and
landscapes and street scenes. I literally see them, and think
about them, differently. The real question is, "Can we think of
an object, or a concept if we don't know the words to use for
such?" i don't know, maybe if you hum the tune I'll pick it up.
There is, in my view, nothing special about language in thought
except for volume. You can think in images, you can think in
musical arrangements, you can think in vague formless flow
charts. Henrick Oprea, Doing some thinking, August 5, 2010
4:08 p.m. [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Seductions of Sedan Delivery
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/08/06/potter
August 6th, 2010
It's difficult to think about it while we still have three to four
precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people
who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure
-- for a second -- a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as
you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience
the fear as you go into class half-prepared! Recall being
fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another
search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly
through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-
righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture students that
they could get their work in on time if only they would get
organized!
Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in
academia who has a job description that would give them a
reasonable sense of where a professor's job begins and ends.
Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a
full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in
pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it
off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about
being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously
and say, "You just have to learn to say no to things!" (subtext:
say no -- except to me) as if you are overworked because,
somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.
Published by: philosophyandrew
The result is that even many of us who actually have tenure
end up hard-wired to do far too much, far more than we really
want to do or are capable of doing well, even though we don't
really have to anymore. We believe that we are powerless
to keep unwanted responsibilities in check, that there are no
grounds -- not to say no, but to figure out what and who to
say no to -- and the result is a work overload. Inevitably, our
health, our peace of mind, our good temper and emotional
availability at home, and the pace of our scholarship takes the
biggest hit. If you are like me, these marathons of overwork
and frustration can produce moments when you start to hear
Neil Young warbling:
Sedan delivery is a job
I know I'll like;
It sure was hard to find.
Hard to find a job!
Hard to find!
But never fear. How can this year can be different? How can
you create a plan of action that will make this year different?
The answer is: Take charge. The answer is: Write your own job
description, using these principles.
Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your
overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out
what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to
manage, and what the department average is for each category
and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body
management," I am counting major advisees, non-major
advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other
person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students,
other faculty). These categories can overlap -- but count them
twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a
major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that
cannot be folded into the same hour of your time.)
Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably
under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the
basic outline of your job description, because whatever people
say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students.
That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how --
particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an
underrepresented field (more on this below) -- you are going
to say no to students that you don't have time for; and you
will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them.
Liberal arts colleges have chairs, field advisers, and honors
committees whose job it is to help these students; research
universities usually have a director of undergraduate studies
as well. Whether you are new faculty or a full professor, don't
kid yourself that you are turning a student out like one of the
little lost animals of FarmVille if you refuse to take hir on as
an overload.
If you have a joint appointment, total the activities of each part
of your appointment and divide them in half. This means that
you don't do all things in either place except go to department
meetings, for which you should repay yourself by taking one
fewer thesis, or two fewer advisees.You have to figure this out
annually, and you must do so with both chairs in the room;
if you are tenure-track, your mentor should be part of the
conversation. The reason that joint appointments usually end
4
August 6th, 2010
up as more burdensome is because it is often assumed that
"full participation" means full participation in both "homes."
Not so. It means doing the equivalent of one job in two
places. You did not decide the terms of your appointment: the
university or college did, and it is up to them to make their
expectations clear without, as they say in factories, "speed-up."
If one chair needs more participation from you for a reason,
the other chair needs to graciously give way. There may also be
years when a particularly large amount of activity in one home
pulls you away; that can be repaid the following year.
If you are a visitor or a postdoc, do your job well and politely
decline to do favors or spend time on anything institutional
you have not been hired for. Read your letter of appointment
carefully, and have a meeting with the chair at the beginning of
each semester to go over your responsibilities. You should also
know that most students don't know the difference between
permanent and temporary faculty, so that although their
desire for your attention is a great complement, it should be
firmly and kindly resisted. Don't take on advisees of any kind
unless you have contracted to do so; don't go to department
meetings, even if you are invited to them (believe me, no
one really wants you there); don't agree to meet with job
candidates unless they are friends of yours who need the inside
skinny; don't get involved in campus or faculty politics; don't
let an extra body into your class; don't have unlimited office
hours with students who love,love, love you; don't listen to
veiled hints that if you go the extra mile for this person or that
person that there might be a job authorized in your field this
year and you would be a great candidate (this is a lie); and don't
bust your a$$ to be the best-est, most creative, Mr. Chips-iest
teacher on the planet.
Limit the number of recommendations you agree to write,
and be clear with students what they need to do for you.
Inevitably, we end up writing recommendations off the clock,
and you must set aside some time in your schedule after
October 1 for getting this work done at the office within
business hours. When done correctly, a recommendation takes
between an hour and two hours to write; tailoring an old
recommendation for a new purpose takes at least half an hour;
and uploading a completed recommendation to an electronic
system takes about ten minutes for each school. Insist that
law school applicants use the services provided by the Law
School Admissions Council. It is also worth your while to
have a document, either on your web page or that you can
send to students, that tells them exactly what you need,
what they must do, and what lead time you need to get the
recommendation done.
Inevitably, those of us who teach more students and have
more advisees end up writing more recommendations too.
This is because students have good reasons for seeing us
as allies; because they are comfortable asking for something
that is part of our job but that many colleagues treat like
a favor; and because -- well, pretty much all students need
recommendations for something. But the fact that you are
already working too hard, and have no time, does not oblige
you to write recommendations that you also do not have time
for. Develop criteria and stick to them (for example, that you
only write grad school recs for people who have done advanced
work with you.) Be honest with a student when you have
Published by: philosophyandrew
no basis for an evaluation, or if you can't honestly write a
good one. Do not write recommendations if you are not a
permanent member of the faculty. Do not "feel bad" when you
have reached your fixed and immutable limit and must say no:
that's what the other faculty are there for.
And here's a nugget of advice: develop boilerplate
recommendations for the B.S. credentialing letters that study
abroad programs require. All they care about is that the
student can pay, and that s/he is not nuts in some way that will
cause harm to self or others.
Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are -- whatever
your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who
finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for
someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make
everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go
away and consult your job description before you go all Do-
Bee on everyone. It isn't your job to see to it that everything
gets done -- it is the chair's job, and believe me, s/he will figure
out how to do it.
Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no
obligation to extend themselves without end to underserved
students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin'
obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier,
more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their
scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are
of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are
feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for
what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent
the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O'Brien
and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend
(and that partly inspired this post) "Innovation is Overtime:
An Ethical Analysis of 'Politically Committed Labor,' " We are
the ones who advertise our universities' "diversity" when we
labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students
seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn
in high school. We are the ones who students "like us" and
the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in
droves.
Face it: certain faculty lines and programs have come into the
academy as add-ons, and there is no intention at most colleges
to use what we interdisciplinary scholars know to transform
the disciplinary paradigms that 95 percent of faculty are hired
to support. There aren't enough of us, our faculties aren't
diverse enough, and the culture wars of the 1980s permanently
intimidated university administrations from appearing to be
"too radical" by allowing what we do to impinge on core
curriculums. As an individual, you can't fill that dissonant
gap even if you worked 26 hours a day trying to do so. It
isn't your fault that there are too few classes in x; that the
program in y is underfunded; that you are one of three z
faculty. You didn't make the decision to grant a line to the
underwater basket weaving department for a replacement
who will teach 10 students a term in the traditional field of
Renaissance wooden needles that the administration just can't
conceive of mounting a curriculum without -- while you are
faced with sending 40 students away from your Native studies
survey. Worse, the generative political urgency in the various
fields that make up American studies, women's studies and
ethnic studies often moves us to throw our personal energy
5
August 6th, 2010
at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term
institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain.
Don't make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing
yourself. Don't. The academic world is littered with broken and
bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect
was only temporary.
The best thing you can do for your field is get your damn
writing done, get tenure, become famous, acquire influence
at your institution in a way that all those suits in the
administration understand, and go someplace where the
institution is committed to your intellectual commitments.
Which leads me to my final piece of advice for writing your
own job description:
Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between
25 and 30 percent of the time you allot for work during the
week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should
do this -- and yet, many of us see our writing as the thing that
we have time for when our family, teaching and committee
responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off --
sometimes fatally -- for months at a time, causing us to get out
of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at
various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has
now become a burden.
So the next time you get angry about your perception that
you are doing more work than other colleagues, remember:
their "normal" is guaranteed by your overwork. Write your job
description -- write it now, knowing that you will have to revise
it and rewrite it as you figure out how to balance your life.
Leave some space for things that may, in the end, be necessary
tasks -- and if that space doesn't fill, use it for writing. And
while you are performing that exercise, listen to this:
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Google Wave Is Dead: Now
What?
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53055
Published by: philosophyandrew
August 6th, 2010
Google Wave has been discontinued after a year of being
ignored. From my own perspective, while I thought the
idea had potential, it seemed to me that it imported all
the usability problems of Google Groups, which (especially
after using flawless Yahoo Groups) I really dislike. I never
understood why we would want to put all our discussion
into one single (Google-hosted) thread. But maybe Ray
Schroeder sums it up best: "Wave is a complex tool. Those
who took the necessary time to learn the tool, found it to
be especially robust and useful for many situations. Those
who could only invest ten minutes in learning Wave were
frustrated and confused." Karim R. Lakhani, at Harvard
Business, meanwhile, thought Google's decision to shut down
Wave showed "strong innovation management" following the
market's indifference to the tool. Discover Magazeine offers
four reasons why people didn't like Wave. Ian Paul, PC World,
August 5, 2010 3:55 p.m. [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Newly Tenured ... at Baldwin-
Wallace, Roger Williams,
Maine-Augusta
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/tenure
August 6th, 2010
Dallas County Community College District
Location: El Centro College A full-time position in the Arts and
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Texas Southern University
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North Carolina Central University
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Champlain College
The Core Division at Champlain College is charged with
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6
August 6th, 2010
Common Sense: Journal of
the Edinburgh Conference of
Socialist Economists
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53054
August 6th, 2010
Intended to be "a journal of a wholly new type," this journal
ran from 1987 to 1999, beginning as "bundle of different
articles can then be stapled together and put between simple
folded covers" with a circulation of a half dozen or so. The
idea was to take advantage of technology, dispense with the
gatekeeping functions, and publish what they wanted. Twelve
years later, the editors, burnt out , called a halt to the now
much more mainstream journal. Digitized and posted by Joss
Winn , the journal is now reaching its objective of being read by
the world. It's not necessarily the content that I celebrate here -
like any other journal, there will be good stuff and bad - it's the
spirit of the publishers. This is the kind of thing (complete with
hand-stapled editions) I would have done had there not been
an internet. Joss Winn, Website, August 5, 2010 3:42 p.m. [
Link ] [ Comment ]
More Than a Paycheck
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/08/06/rose
August 6th, 2010
In just about every speech that President Obama and his
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan give on the subject, the
primary purpose they cite for education, and for education
reform, is an economic one. The same is true from statehouses
to local school boards. We send our kids to school to enhance
their position in the economic order and to secure the nation’s
economic future. This appeal is especially true when the
president and his education secretary are making a pitch
for college, and a fair amount of that effort is aimed at the
community college, a site for skilled occupational training or a
course of study leading to transfer to a four-year school.
“[T]he power of these institutions [is] to prepare students for
21st-century jobs,” the President said last year at a community
college in Troy, New York, “and to prepare America for a 21st-
century global economy.”
I am sitting in on an orientation to a vocational program at
an urban community college that draws on one of the poorest
populations in the city. The students in this program have had
pretty sketchy educations, and they read, write and calculate at
a ninth grade level or below. The program will both help them
improve those skills as well as provide occupational training.
If ever there was a population suited for the economic appeal,
it is this one. They desperately need a leg up.
The director of the program stands at a desk and lectern
at the front of a large classroom. The walls are bare, no
windows, institutional cream, clean and spare. Behind her is
an expansive white board; in front are 25 or so students sitting
quietly in no particular order in plastic chairs at eight long
Published by: philosophyandrew
tables. The students are black and Latino, a few more women
than men, most appear to be in their early 20s to early 30s,
with one man, who looks like he’s had a hard time of it, in his
mid-40s.
“Welcome to college, “ the director is saying, “I congratulate
you.” She then asks them, one by one, to talk about what
motivates them and why they’re here. There is some scraping
of chairs, shifting of bodies, and the still life animates.
The economic motive does loom large. One guy laughs, “I don’t
want to work a crappy job all my life.” A woman in the back
announces that she wants to get her GED “to get some money
to take care of myself.” What is interesting, though — and I
wish the president and his secretary could hear it — are all the
other reasons people give for being here: to “learn more,” to
be a “role model for my kids,” to get “a career to support my
daughter,” to “have a better life.” The director gets to the older
man. “I’m illiterate,” he says in a halting voice, “and I want to
learn to read and write.”
The semester before, students also wrote out their reasons for
attending the program — as this current cohort will soon have
to do — and their range of responses was even wider. Again,
the economic motive was key, but consider these comments,
some written in neat cursive, some in scratchy uneven (and
sometimes error-ridden) print: “learning new things I never
thought about before”; “I want my kids too know that I can
write and read”; “Hope Fully with this program I could turn
my life around”; “to develope better social skills and better
speech”; “I want to be somebody in this world”; “I like to do
test and essay like it is part of my life.”
Over the past eight years I’ve been studying the cognitive
demands of physical work. That includes comparatively high-
end jobs such as surgery and physical therapy, but mostly
blue-collar and service occupations, such as plumbing and hair
styling — the kind of occupations the people we just heard from
hope to enter. Our society tends to make sharp and weighty
distinctions between white collar and blue collar occupations,
between brain work and hand work, “neck up and neck down”
jobs, as one current aphorism has it.
But what I’ve found as I’ve closely examined physical work is
its significant intellectual content. This content is no surprise
if we consider the surgeon, but the carpenter and the hair
stylist and the welder, too, are constantly solving problems,
applying concepts, making decisions on the fly. A lot of our
easy characterizations about work just don’t hold up under
scrutiny. Hand and brain are cognitively connected.
While doing this research, I’ve spent a lot of time in high
school and college vocational programs watching people
gain expertise. These observations have given me a valuable
perspective on current economic and education policy aimed
at getting young and no-so-young people back to school,
particularly those who are academically underprepared and
typically come from a lower-middle class to working-class
backgrounds.
People, affluent as well as poor, go back to school for all kinds
of reasons, but our current policy incentives and the rhetoric
that frames them don’t capture this rich web of motives.
7
August 6th, 2010
One consequence of this narrow understanding is the missed
opportunity to create a more robust appeal for returning to
school. As we just witnessed, people sign up for educational
programs for economic reasons but also because further
education pulls at their minds, hearts, and sense of who they
are and who they want to become. The prospect of a good job
is hugely motivating, but it can seem far off, especially during
the first difficult months of returning to school.
People need other, complementary motivators: engagement
with the work in front of you, the recognition that you’re
learning new things, becoming competent, using your mind,
doing something good for yourself and your family. It’s
common in occupational programs — from welding to nursing
to culinary and cosmetology — to hear participants express
with some emotion their involvement with and commitment
to what they’re learning. In the high-testosterone world of
the welding shop, for example, I hear one guy after another
talk about the “beauty” of a weld and how much they “love”
welding. There’s more than a financial calculus involved here.
The second and more troubling problem with the narrow
economic focus of the educational policy we’re considering
is the way it plays into a longstanding undemocratic
tendency in American education policy, and that is a narrow
understanding of the lives and work of working class-people.
The approach to schooling for them has often been a functional
one heavy on job training and thin on the broader intellectual,
aesthetic, and civic dimensions of education. And since policy
influences the content and philosophy of programs — new
programs particularly — this narrow understanding can be
reproduced for new generations of students. The most striking
and consequential example of this tendency was the split in
the curriculum between the academic and vocational course of
study as the comprehensive high school was developed in the
early 20th century. This split has led to all sorts of problems
with the education of the children of the working class, an
education that often failed to address a wide range of human
learning.
But, of course, working life provides the thought and action
sold short in the typical school curriculum. The electrician
forms a hypothesis about a faulty circuit and systemically tests
the variables. Through a hole in the wall of an old house,
a plumber feels the structures he can’t see, visualizing them
from touch in order to figure out where a blockage might be.
A hairstylist plans a cut as she talks to a client and examines
her hair, “and at the end,” as one stylist told me, “you’ve got
to come up with a thought: 'O.K. it’s gotta be this length, it’s
gotta be layered here, it’s got to be textured there, it can’t
have a fringe.' ” Another stylist tries to fix a botched dye job
by speculating about what the previous stylist was trying to
achieve. A woodworker looks at old desks on a computer to get
some ideas as to how to repair a customer’s antique.
And, as we saw with the welders, aesthetic concerns arise
frequently and in surprising settings. An electrician rebraids
the wires of a perfectly functional assembly because they’re
“ugly.” A contractor admires the “pretty” shaping of conduit
under the eaves of a roof. A plumber one more time runs his
finger over the caulking of a newly installed toilet to “make it
look nice.”
Published by: philosophyandrew
These aesthetic concerns are related to a commitment to
craft and to what I’d call an ethics of practice. Consider this
young carpenter showing me a small flaw along the base of
a bookcase; it’s in a place no one will see once the bookcase
is upright. But he’s fixing the problem — a tiny gap where a
strip of wood warped — because “I want it to be right.” Such
behavior reflects and reinforces one’s sense of who one is.
Cognition, aesthetics, craft, ethics and values, identity. And
this is only within the realm of physical work itself. We haven’t
even begun to consider the stuff of a traditional academic
curriculum — art, science, literature, history — and the ways it
could be integrated into, or, for that matter, emerge from work
of the hand. We need to work harder than we have yet to create
a vocationally-oriented education that at its core involves the
intellectual, civic, and social goals too often found only in
liberal studies. There’s no reason why the tests and essays that
earlier students longed to master shouldn’t be imagined as
being part of all these students’ lives.
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NCAA Grades Coaches
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/coaches
August 6th, 2010
Hoping increased transparency will encourage head coaches
to take seriously their players’ academic performance, the
National Collegiate Athletic Association has released a
searchable database of the Academic Progress Rates of all
teams coached by current and former Division I coaches in six
major sports since the NCAA introduced the scoring system in
2003.
A team’s APR is determined on a 1,000-point scale based
on whether its athletes remain academically eligible to play
and if they progress toward graduation according to NCAA
expectations. The NCAA uses the four-year average of these
scores to levy penalties against teams and institutions whose
athletes are underperforming in the classroom.
In January 2009, NCAA officials announced their intent to
create a database that would easily allow users to see how
teams performed academically under individual coaches. In
addition to providing access to year-by-year APRs -- only a
database of four-year averages was available -- NCAA officials
hoped to create a specific APR that would follow a coach
from institution to institution throughout his or her career.
This would serve as an academic “career batting average” for
coaches, as one official put it.
8
August 6th, 2010
Thursday, the NCAA finally unveiled the new database of
single-year APRs for baseball, football, men’s and women’s
basketball, and women’s indoor and outdoor track teams,
which is searchable by coach name. Though the database sheds
new light on how well athletes perform academically under
the leadership of individual coaches in certain years, it does
not include the so-called “career batting average” for coaches,
showing the mean APR of teams under a particular coach.
Walter Harrison, chair of the NCAA Committee on Academic
Performance and president of the University of Hartford, said
the “career average” idea was scrapped because of concerns
as to how the data is collected and whether such a measure
would have been fair. For instance, any coach who holds his or
her position during an academic year -- from August 1 through
July 31 -- is assigned that team’s APR for that year. In these
instances, the databases notes years in which multiple coaches
were assigned to a team and assigns the APR to each coach.
“You can draw your own conclusions” from the list of a coach’s
single-year APRs, Harrison said of how database users should
judge the academic influence of a coach on his or her players.
Still, Harrison said the availability of these year-by-year
figures to recruits and their parents would provide them with
valuable information to make a decision about whether to
select one individual institution or coach over another. He
added that it would also enhance the “culture of academic
preparedness and accountability” in college athletics.
For example, Harrison noted that, in new contracts for
coaches, a growing number of institutions are setting APR
benchmarks that head coaches’ teams must maintain. Though
such decisions are left up to individual institutions, he said
he supported the idea of setting such expectations in coaches'
contracts.
There are no individual penalties associated with the new
listing of team APRs by coach. And though some critics have
expressed concern that existing APR penalties, levied against
institutions, let coaches who presided over academically
underperforming teams off the hook, Harrison said he was
“comfortable” with there not being coach-specific penalties at
this time.
“We’re calling attention to the success and relative success of
coaches,” Harrison said. “I believe that’ll have a good effect
informing people and informing transparency.… I wouldn’t
favor going further.”
Many coaches, however, are not pleased with the new database
and the attention it draws to them. Some of their ire, in
particular, is focused on the NCAA’s view that “most people
in intercollegiate athletics agree that the head coach is the
primary influence on a student-athlete’s success in college.”
Jim Haney, executive director of the National Association of
Basketball Coaches, noted that his organization has concerns
about the fairness of the APR, particularly in instances where
there are multiple coaches for a single team. And his doubts
do not stop there.
“Another concern is creating and making public a coach’s APR
insinuates that the academic success of student-athletes at any
institution is on the coach’s shoulders and the coach could
be cast in a negative light,” Haney wrote in a statement to
Published by: philosophyandrew
Inside Higher Ed. “The success and performance of a program
is really a body of work affected by institutional decisions.
While the spotlight is on the coach, others at the institution are
responsible for funding and providing support.”
Report Says Students Don't
Study Enough
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/qt/
report_says_students_don_t_study_enough
August 6th, 2010
Students these days study only about 14 hours a week, down
from 24 in the early 1960s, according to a report released
Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute. The report,
"Leisure College, USA," rejects the idea that technology has
decreased the need for studying, and suggests that colleges are
failing to assign enough work and to enforce requirements.
"[T]his widespread deterioration of the standard for student
effort demands attention and considered action from all
who have a stake in the quality of higher education in the
United States," says the report. The data are not substantially
different from those reported in the National Survey of
Student Engagement.
Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and
public affairs at the Association of American Colleges and
Universities, said that many in higher education are in fact
working on these issues, but that the changes that are
needed go beyond just assigning more work. She noted
that educators in her association have focused on "high
impact practices" (such as undergraduate research and senior
capstone courses) that "ask the students to participate in
high-intensity, extended-effort assignments." These kinds of
experiences "force students to spend more time and more
engaged time with their work." But she added that "if we want
to reverse the patterns of underachievement, these practices
need to become common rather than rare,"
A Major Push on Advising
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/portland
August 6th, 2010
In an effort to improve its disappointing retention rates,
Portland State University will increase its team of academic
advisers from 10 to 24 this fall. The move follows a decision
to make advising a mandatory element of the incoming class’
college experience.
“If we’re going to require students to seek advising, we
should have more advisers,” said Mary Ann Barham, director
of PSU’s Undergraduate Advising and Support Center. She
said the decision is in line with the priorities of the new
president, Wim Wiewel, and stemmed in part from recent
faculty research showing that students are more satisfied
when they have access to professional advisers, rather than
just faculty advisers, as had previously been the case. The
new advisers will be distributed throughout the schools and
departments to work in collaboration with faculty advisers for
students who have declared a major.
9
August 6th, 2010
Barham says that efficient advising is one of the first steps to
success and retention, and the new advising process is meant
to help students find their way through college by helping them
with everything from registering for classes to applying for
financial aid. All new students will also now be required to see
an adviser during their first term, whether they have declared
a major or not. Until now, advising was optional; students
could register for classes, change their majors, and go through
college without ever seeing an adviser if they didn't want to.
“They need to have clear pathways, and they need to have
people to guide them along those pathways. This is the first
step in that direction,” Dan Fortmiller, associate vice provost
for academic and career services, said.
Having students rely primarily on faculty advisers was a
mixed experience Some faculty members were well-versed
in all aspects of the university, while others had too many
responsibilities to make advising a priority, Barham said.
“What I would like to see is that all students will say, ‘I have
an adviser,’ and they know who that might be, and that they
don’t just take advantage of advising if they want to,” she said.
“I would like to see that their advisers are trained very broadly
about all the things they need to know to support students.”
Of the 1,523-person class matriculating as freshmen in 2008,
only 68.9 percent continued into their sophomore year –
well below the 77.2-percent average across 13 comparable
institutions. On average, 75.4 percent of students who
transferred to PSU stayed at least another year. The freshman
retention rate held steady at about 68 percent from 2005-8,
while six-year graduation rates have been at 32 percent since
2001, also below average according to a 2007 university
report. Although recommendations to hire more advisers had
been made in the past, financial constraints hindered the
process.
Self-reported adviser ratios from colleges and universities
nationwide show that, on average, there are about 300
students for every full-time adviser in a four-year public
institution. Barham said Portland State was aiming for 600
students per adviser, but was denied sufficient funding. The
university allotted $1 million for the hires, which provides one
adviser for approximately 1,000 students – not close to the
goal, but certainly an improvement.
“All the literature shows that students who are connected
with a representative on a regular basis are more likely to be
retained and more likely to persist to graduation than those
who are not,” said Charlie Nutt, executive director for the
National Academic Advising Association.
Nutt added that despite many universities’ goal of a 300-to-1
ratio, no official ratio recommendation exists. A university’s
advising needs depend on the institutional model, its mission,
and the types of students, he said; nonetheless, the more
advisers, the better.
Portland State hopes to have all the new advisers hired and
integrated into the campus environment by November.
Description The Manager of Academic Advising will lead
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A Prof the Right Loves to Hate
Will Retire
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/06/qt/
a_prof_the_right_loves_to_hate_will_retire
August 6th, 2010
William Ayers is retiring from the University of Illinois at
Chicago, after more than 20 years of teaching there, the
Chicago Tribune reported. At the university, Ayers has been a
respected education professor, teaching and publishing books
on education policy and lecturing nationwide. But his role as a
one-time leader of the Weather Underground made him more
of a political lightening rod after Republicans attacked him
in the 2008 for allegedly close ties to Barack Obama. While
the neighbors weren't actually close, the repeated focus on
Ayers has led to his lectures off-campus drawing protests and
sometimes being called off.
If Only We Had a Government
Capable of Making Rules...
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/
confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/
if_only_we_had_a_government_capable_of_making_rules
August 6th, 2010
By Dean Dad August 5, 2010 9:21 pm
As regular readers know, I used to work in for-profit
university. I fled it for various reasons, but still find some of the
commentary about them unhelpfully reductive. Naturally, I’ve
been following Senator Harkin’s hearings -- and the responses
to the hearings -- with interest.
Broadly, the hearings are addressing abusive and/or
misleading and/or illegal recruitment practices at various for-
profit colleges and universities. The stated idea is to prevent
taxpayer money (in the form of Federal financial aid) from
being squandered on diploma mills or colleges that charge far
too much for what they deliver. The unstated idea seems to be
to have a referendum on the very idea of for-profit education.
It seems to me that it would be a lot more productive to focus
instead on the rules of the game.
In my time at Proprietary U, there was a chronic internal
tension between Admissions and Academics. The folks in
Admissions were accountable for hitting their numbers --
10
August 6th, 2010
they did somersaults and backflips to explain how that wasn’t
commission pay, but it was commission pay -- and some of
them did pretty much whatever they had to do. On the positive
side, that meant helping students set up carpools, navigate
paperwork, and get scheduled. On the negative side, it led to
some pretty dramatic overpromising, some really unhelpful
denigrating of the gen ed classes that students still actually had
to take, and a level of ‘message management’ that sometimes
became silly.
On the Academic side, we had to actually teach the students
who got recruited. The numbers by which we were judged were
retention percentages and job placement statistics. As some of
us never tired of pointing out (hi!), those two numbers often
pointed in different directions. Those of us who believed that
fighting attrition by lowering standards was a bad idea would
cite the employability of graduates, but we weren’t always on
the winning side.
When the market was booming, the conflict was more stylistic
than substantive. Students stayed in programs because they
saw the payoff; retention efforts amounted to little more than
open discussions of starting salaries. (For a while there in the
late 90’s, the truth was good enough that you didn’t have to
sugarcoat it.) Since the institution charged more per student
than it cost to educate each student, growth was a source of
profit, so it could grow quickly to meet mushrooming demand.
On the national level, that growth has continued, and has far
outpaced anything happening in the nonprofit world, where
growth is typically a cost.
When the market turned, though, things got ugly fast. And
this, oddly enough, is where the nonprofits have an advantage
(or would, if the states would step up).
In most public colleges, there’s an allocation from the state
and/or county and/or city that goes directly to the operating
budget. In practice, if not in theory, that allocation is
usually pretty independent of enrollment numbers. During
enrollment booms, that means that the percentage of the
budget paid for by the students directly increases. But during
declines, there’s at least the cushion of some revenue that’s
independent of tuition.
The for-profits can grow much more easily, but they have a
harder time dealing with decline. That’s because they don’t
have the enrollment-independent cushion of funding that the
non-profits have.
Now it’s certainly true that the state-provided cushion is
proportionately much smaller than it used to be, which means
that declines hurt more now than they once did. But a drop
that might register as ‘difficult’ for a community college could
put a for-profit out of business altogether.
That is, unless the for-profit does what cornered animals tend
to do. I’d expect to see any ethical gloves come off in times of
decline, as they fight and scrap for every single student.
And this is why my position on for-profits is neither ‘for’ nor
‘against.’ It’s that they need to be meaningfully regulated. If
they’re forced to fight fair but still manage to thrive, then
presumably they’re adding value somewhere. At that point,
the sober objection to their existence seems to fade away. But
leaving them alone to do as they will is madness. Left to their
Published by: philosophyandrew
own devices, they’ll act much like the cable tv monopolies
did when they were deregulated; it’s naive to expect that they
wouldn’t..
In the hearings, the for-profits have raised some fair points
in their own defense. The one I find most compelling is
the (correct) contention that the investigation doesn’t have a
control group. Do we really, honestly believe that unethical
behaviors are confined to the for-profit sector? Do we really
believe that desperate tuition-driven nonprofits won’t do
whatever they have to do to survive? For that matter, do we
really believe that every accredited nonprofit actually provides
a quality education?
But there, too, my response is that picking one side over the
other misses the point. The point is a need for rules of the
game, evenhandedly enforced, that will punish institutions for
giving in to the temptations of untoward behavior. That’s true
whether the institution is publicly traded, church affiliated, or
state-identified. If a college is incompetent or corrupt, I don’t
much care that it’s not for profit.
Ideally, the nonprofits would learn from the best elements of
the for-profits. Is the agrarian calendar really cast in stone?
Might a ‘career development’ style class make sense as a
requirement, at least in some majors?
And ideally, higher ed will get past the kabuki of outrage at the
existence of profit and actually address the rules of the game.
If only we had a government capable of making rules...
Information Ethics, Blogging,
and the Non-Fiction Novel
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/
information_ethics_blogging_and_the_non_fiction_novel
August 6th, 2010
By Barbara Fister August 5, 2010 9:00 pm
I just had to do some housecleaning among my RSS feeds.
Some of my favoriteblogs had moved from Scienceblogs
to Scientopia in the wake of PepsiGate. (If this -gate is
unfamiliar, here it is in a nutshell: Bloggers who wrote
for a respected science blog aggregation site were upset
when the management offered paid blog space to corporate
spokesfolks - in particular a Pepsi blog on nutrition - without
distinguishing it from the other blogs, which many bloggers
felt unethically blurred the line between science commentary
and advertising. Though Scienceblogs relented, the damage
was done.)
It made me revisit a rather savage description of the situation
published in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday.
Virginia Heffernan, who writes a kind of "tech/fashion"
feature for the magazine, thought the bloggers who were
making such a fuss unfairly used their status as scientists
to engage in classist anti-Christian bigotry. "Hammering
away at an ideology," she wrote, "substituting stridency
for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia:
ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting,
peak-oil crowd . . . science blogging, apparently, is a form
of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws
bad-faith moral authority from the word 'science' and from
occasional invocations of 'peer-reviewed' thises and thats."
11
August 6th, 2010
In a comment to a blog post analyzing her unusually dyspeptic
analysis, she explained that she has no training in science,
but was surprised that scientists would engage in the kind of
grudge matches that are so common on political blogs. She
also issued a correction of sorts: among a handful of blogs she
recommended in her article, she hadn't realized one of them
was a vehicle for denying human culpability in global warming.
As she put it, it was a well-written blog with lovely images and
she "frankly didn’t recognize the weatherspeak on the blog as
'denialist'; I didn’t even know about denialism."
Yet she recommended it, and the purpose of her weekly feature
is to point out what's new, what's cool, and what to check out
online. I think we have a trifecta, here: a tarnished teakettle
complaining about a pot calling a kettle black.
All of which made me think about writing and reading and
one too often neglected part of "information literacy" (a phrase
I don't much like, but which seems to have become the
dominant shorthand for being able find and use information
critically in the pursuit of inquiry of all kinds), the part
that has to do with ethics and epistemology. One goal of a
liberal education is that our students embrace a disposition
to interpret critically, value evidence, and not only let their
minds be changed by it, but be willing to represent issues
fairly when they make a claim. We don't want them to rush
to judgment. We don't want them to cherry-pick evidence.
We don't want them to ignore facts that are inconvenient, or
engage in unfair oversimplification of issues in order to score
a point. But those values are not unique to scholarly forms
of expression, nor to traditional journalism. Bloggers should
also be fair-minded and check their facts. As Bora Zivkovic, a
saddened ScienceBlogs defector, explained, blogs are media,
and as media they have responsibility. I would argue we all
have a responsibility to do our best to triangulate the truth, or
at least treat knowledge ethically, whether in writing or in any
other form of discourse.
It's pretty obvious when I write up research for a peer reviewed
journal that I am expected to adhere to scholarly standards.
But I write a lot of other stuff, too, including occasional
features (that are more like reporting than scholarship or
opinion) and blog posts like these. In this medium, I will be
opinionated, I will even be snarky, but I will not knowingly
misinform or write about something without checking it out
first. The stylistics of the medium are strikingly different, but
the underlying sense of responsibility is not.
Another kind of writing I do is genre fiction. And guess what
- it may be by definition whoppers told in the service of
entertainment, but there still is a need to get it right. I'm
not talking about random bits of information of the kind
that earn you fact-check e-mails pointing out that you put a
building on the wrong corner, you moron, but the underlying
representation of social issues and human behavior. It's not
just that it's ineffective to use straw men as characters, it goes
deeper than that.
A fair amount of interesting research has been done on how
readers process fiction, and among the sobering findings
is that readers do not cognitively shelve fiction separately
from non-fiction. The less they know about a topic, the more
Published by: philosophyandrew
likely they will fold what they encounter in fiction into their
knowledge base. This is one reason why so many biblical
scholars were offended by The DaVinci Code; too many
gullible readers thought it was well-researched and based
on fact. In fact, as I write this, I am amused to discover
that Wikipedia describes it as a "mystery-detective non-fiction
novel." I should probably edit that right now, but it's just too
perfect as it is.
So I hope, as I write fiction, I'm not filing misinformation
on the shelves of my reader's knowledge base. And when
I work with students learning the ropes of research, I
hope that what they learn about choosing good sources and
writing responsibly is not something they only counts when
completing assignments, but that making ethical choices
about information is fundamental to being free and thoughtful
human beings in a society where first impressions, hasty
judgments, and a stubborn resistance to evidence are all too
common.
So let's be careful out there, and use your snark responsibly.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_of_venus/
be_careful_what_you_wish_for
August 6th, 2010
By Denise Horn August 5, 2010 7:45 pm
My career has always been important to me, but I never wanted
it to dominate my personal life. Early on, I instated my “8
o’clock” rule: if it’s not done/read/written/graded by 8:00 pm,
it would have to wait until the morning. This was the time
when civilized people had a glass of wine and ate dinner with
someone they loved.
I fell in love with someone who understood my work, and
indeed, was proud of it. He lived abroad with me when I had
research to do. He read my book manuscript thoughtfully,
and worked on the index for me. He listened to my ideas for
lectures and gave me tips on how to use technology more
effectively. He took care of the dog when I was away for weeks
at a time. He listened to hours of anxiety regarding my reviews.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see that my successes exacerbated
his difficulties in finding his dream job. As someone freshly
minted into the (non-academic) job market, he was finding his
prospects dismal. That year abroad failed to land him the NGO
job he’d hoped for and may have hurt his chances when he
returned to the States. I didn’t see that my ability to pay bills
and have money for dinners and trips highlighted his inability
to do so. While he lauded my little triumphs, he wallowed in
his own perceived failures. Despite our (often) happiness, the
guilt and anxiety for him was too much, and in the end, he
moved on to find what opportunities he could.
There is a trend at work here. The July/August 2010 Ideas
Edition of The Atlantic boldly proclaims “the end of men,”
as Gen-X women come to dominate the workforce, college
admissions, and management fields. Young men coming of
age during this Great Recession are finding that they are
either severely underemployed or not employed at all, for long
stretches of time. They are struggling in every way imaginable,
while we women are finding our niches in our careers. Gen-
12
August 6th, 2010
X men are being laid off while their wives retain their jobs,
but the psychological toll on younger men is incalculable:
prolonged unemployment in the early stages of one’s working
life is closely associated with dim future prospects, including
lower pay over one’s lifetime and limited access to upper-level
management positions.
In the classroom, and indeed, across the board at the
university, the dominance of women has become apparent.
My program, International Affairs, is one of the largest majors
in the College and is disproportionately female. We struggle
every year to recruit more men to go on our international
programs, but every summer I find myself traveling abroad
mainly with young women. The Atlantic article points to a
sense of lethargy that seems to plague young men in the
classroom, and I can attest to that. I know talented male
students who admit to feeling hopeless in the face of their
prospects, and I see them float through classes while their
female counterparts take charge.
As a feminist, I am thrilled that we may be fulfilling the
promise of the women’s rights movement. As a professional
woman in her 30s I feel empowered in a way that my mother
never did. But when I see young men I care about flounder
and suffer, and when I see the toll my professional success
has had on my personal life, I find it all so bittersweet. The
promise of our movement was that women and men would
all succeed, and that we would live in a society that valued
the talents of everyone, and that we wouldn’t have to give up
personal happiness for professional satisfaction.
I wished for a lot. That civilized glass of wine at 8 o’clock now
represents a solitary toast to my success.
Denise Horn is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs
at Northeastern University in Boston. She is a founding
member of the editorial collective at University of Venus.
Math Geek Mom: “It’s
a Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood…”
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/mama_phd/
math_geek_mom_it_s_a_beautiful_day_in_the_neighborhood
August 6th, 2010
By Rosemarie Emanuele August 5, 2010 7:36 pm
There is a concept in mathematics that shows up in calculus
and geometry, the concept of a "neighborhood." Like its real
life counterpart, it is a designation of all points within a
certain distance from a particular point. That distance is often
represented with a Greek letter, such as “epsilon” or “delta,"
and these play important roles in the definition of the concept
of a limit, which is the cornerstone of calculus. I thought of
these concepts recently as I realized how lucky I am to live in
the (geographic) neighborhood in which our house is located.
I admit that we stumbled upon our neighborhood by chance,
because we liked the house that we ended up buying that
was in this neighborhood. When the former owners told us
about a neighborhood association, it was one added feature,
but not of primary significance to us at the time. Back then,
we were looking for a house that would be a welcoming place
Published by: philosophyandrew
to bring a child home to, and the big trees and presence of
sidewalks said more to us about a family-friendly place than
did the association of people in the neighborhood who planned
activities and threw parties. It didn’t take us long, however,
to realize that the camaraderie among the neighbors in this
development was a true selling point for living there.
Soon after moving in, we attended a neighborhood block
party and met many of the people who live near us. Most
of the original owners of the homes had retired or moved
to Florida, and a whole new generation of owners was
planting themselves there, many with young children. It was
immediately clear that any child we would welcome into our
home would be welcomed by the whole neighborhood, which
was the case. When we brought our daughter home, neighbors
stopped by with gifts and food and extended offers to babysit.
My daughter still uses a blanket that one neighbor gave her
as a tiny infant, and takes particular interest in the life of one
teenage girl who used to help me by entertaining her while
I worked from home during the summer when she was very
young, but also very active.
Although we have no pets of our own, my daughter got to know
all of the dogs in the neighborhood, saying hello to them by
name as their owners walked them each evening. When one
neighborhood dog died when she was about 3, I think I cried
almost as much as the owner, as I knew that my daughter
would miss the dog tremendously.
Almost immediately, my daughter and the other children in
the neighborhood discovered each other- the little boy across
the street and the girl whose yard was separated from ours by
only a low fence. Soon that fence was being hopped over on a
daily basis as she and the siblings who eventually joined her
come over almost daily to play on our swing set. A bachelor
friend of my husband’s had given it to us when he purchased
a house with the swings in the back yard. He was so anxious
to remove it from his “bachelor pad” that he brought it over in
a trailer and set it up for us himself. My daughter became so
proficient in mastering the monkey bars on it that I often say
it is too bad there is no Olympic sport in it, as she could, I am
sure, earn a medal in “Monkey Bars”. Instead, a neighborhood
team formed for t-Ball, coached and managed by people in the
neighborhood.
One day, I saw a woman who lived across from us getting a
small boy about the same age as my daughter into her car. I
stopped to ask her how it was going with her young child, and
we immediately bonded over being moms of small children.
That little boy and my daughter became best of friends almost
immediately, and when the family took him to Disney World,
he told his relatives there that what he really wanted to do the
next day was play with my daughter.
And now the neighborhood has something new to celebrate, as
that woman, who currently has two beautiful (and fun) boys,
is expecting another child. Soon our neighborhood, and my
daughter, will be welcoming a new little girl. If I could talk to
her, as I will someday soon, I would tell her that she not only
chose a wonderful family, but that she also chose a really cool
neighborhood into which to be born.
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August 6th, 2010
Pacific Rim views on global
education: Hong Kong+Seattle
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/
pacific_rim_views_on_global_education_hong_kong_seattle
August 6th, 2010
By Gray Kochhar-Lindgren August 5, 2010 7:05 pm
Editor's note: this guest entry was kindly produced by Gray
Kochhar-Lindgren, Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and
Sciences, as well as Director of the First Year Experience,
at the University of Washington, Bothell. During 2009-10,
Gray served as a Fulbright Scholar in General Education
based at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong
Kong America Center. With Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, he is
currently working on a book entitled Designing the Global
University. Our sincere thanks to Gray for a tantalizing entry
that sheds light on some of the opportunities and challenges
of fashioning deeper forms of internationalization, especially
those of a partnership nature. This is an issue that Nigel Thrift
also addressed in a recent blog entry ('Internationalization is
difficult') in the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as
via recent comments he made in the Times Higher Education
('Global future: together alone'), and one that I will deal with
via a series of entries about international collaborative degrees
(coming in September). Kris Olds
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Having spent September 2009-June 2010 serving as a
Fulbright Scholar in General Education in Hong Kong , I
have now returned to my responsibilities at the University
of Washington, Bothell, as a Professor of Interdisciplinary
Studies and the Director of the academic side of our First Year
Experience. All the universities in Hong Kong are moving from
three to four year degrees and UW Bothell started first and
second year programs in 2006 and is now rapidly expanding
its degree options. On both sides of the Pacific, curricular
and administrative structural reform are moving forward at a
sometimes dizzying, but always invigorating, pace. What are
the connections and asymmetries involved in such an effort?
As in other parts of the world, a very similar
language is emerging in both Seattle and Hong Kong
around curricular reform, including the familiar rhetoric
of student-centeredness; outcomes-based assessment;
interdisciplinarity; writing, quantitative, and IT literacies;
cross-cultural competencies; interactive pedagogies; and the
development of new administrative structures that can serve
the university as a whole instead of reproducing only
department or College level concerns.
The most difficult challenges include how best to shape faculty
participation in governance, teaching, and administration
Published by: philosophyandrew
of the curricular shifts; how to change the culture of the
university so that teaching is valued as highly as research
productivity in promotion and tenure decisions; how to change
faculty behavior toward more interactivity in and beyond the
classroom; what forms trans- or interdisciplinarity teaching
and research take; and, of course, how best to resource the
curricular changes in terms of money and people.
In addition to these similarities, each site has its material
and cultural specificities. It is, for instance, much easier to
do student projects on different moments of urbanization in
Hong Kong and on biodiversity of wetland habitats in Bothell.
The University of Hong Kong, where I was based last year, is
an English-language institution, but the language politics of
Hong Kong as a whole, which has Cantonese as its primary
language and the use of Putonghua growing quickly, involves
issues quite different than in the Pacific Northwest of the
US. The global position of the US and the “one country, two
systems” of Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of
China, create different sets of questions for teaching, learning,
and university reform in each case.
As an outsider-insider in Hong Kong there were always, and
inevitably, blind spots I did not even recognize as well as
a torrent of learning from daily life, reading, conversation,
teaching, and the curricular work itself. As we all learn to
work more effectively across global sites, we would do well
to think much more rigorously about our theories of cultural
translatability.
Finally, there is the formation of interdisciplinary and cross-
cultural research groups. I am in the very beginning of this
process, so I am immensely curious about how it will unfold. I
am collaborating with scholars in Hong Kong, Seattle, Macau,
and elsewhere to collect a series of essays on Global Noir, with
its affiliations with cities, political economy, the tradition of
the genre, and a reconceptualization of the concept of noir.
On a larger scale, I, along with Robert Peckham, the Co-
Director of the Centre for Humanities and Medicine at HKU,
are forming a research project called “Transnational Asian
Cities: Health, Virtualities, and Urban Ecologies” that will
involve scholars from multiple disciplines in Hong Kong,
Seattle, Shanghai, and Mumbai. How will we construct the
object of study? How will we stay in touch? What types of new
understandings will we produce and in what media? How will
such effort be judged and assessed? Such questions must, in
our globalized but still localized contexts, be asked time and
time again.
All of these efforts, which are part of redefining the
contemporary globalized university, require leadership,
visibility, inventiveness, collaboration, faculty and staff
development, and consistency of effort over time. We will
all have to learn to articulate spatial-temporal consistencies
and asymmetries, a host of rapidly shifting variabilities of
culture and language, and a series of nodes of Intensity
where we collect, share, and move our work ahead. What,
in other words, does “Seattle+Hong Kong” signify? How do
we actualize the links as new curriculum and new university
structures? How do we move back and forth across the Pacific?
As with any organizational change at such basic levels, there
14
August 6th, 2010
are difficulties, frustrations, and successes, but the necessity
for change is clear. Ready or not.
Are These the Lessons
Learned by the Demise of
Google Wave?
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/
are_these_the_lessons_learned_by_the_demise_of_google_wave
August 6th, 2010
By Joshua Kim August 5, 2010 4:15 pm
What do we learn from Google's decision to kill the Wave
• Perhaps next time we will curb our enthusiasm about the
teaching and learning possibilities of a new Web 2.0 tool.
• The LMS is proving difficult to dislodge as the core
technology for teaching (and hopefully learning) on
campus.
• We pay for our learning technology tools one way or
another. We pay in licenses or we pay by bringing on risk.
Free Web 2.0 tools can disappear.
• The real opportunity for Google in higher education is to
offer a robust, cloud based LMS. Moodle seems custom
made to turn into gMoodle. What if Google had invested
all the dollars spent on Wave on an LMS?
• Is it possible that the death of Wave is a sign that Google's
ability to innovate, or at least innovate in a manner that
is relevant to academic technology, is diminishing?
• Was our excitement about Google Wave an indication
that in academic technology we are still putting the
"technology" cart before the "learning" horse?
• Has any product or service ever experienced a hype-
to-implementation ratio to the degree of Google Wave?
Everyone talked about Wave, but I don't know anyone
who actually used Wave for core teaching and learning
tasks.
• Is Google asking us what we really need? I'm all for
innovations that we would not have asked for, but on
campus we have lots of needs and desires that Google
could help us with if we could only get a seat at their table.
What do you think we should all learn from the short but fast
life of Google Wave?
What Was It Now? Oh, Yes:
Memory
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/
the_education_of_oronte_churm/what_was_it_now_oh_yes_memory
August 6th, 2010
By Oronte August 5, 2010 4:15 pm
Published by: philosophyandrew
A piece in the Times recently was titled “The Web Means the
End of Forgetting.” Thank god, we’ll finally be able to find Mrs.
Churm’s keys when she needs them.
Of course author Jeffrey Rosen doesn’t mean that kind of
forgetting. He’s wondering, “Can we imagine a world in which
new norms develop that make it easier for people to forgive
and forget one another’s digital sins?” “Sins” in this case is
mostly ironic and means merely “bad taste” or “questionable
judgment”:
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher
in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster,
Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her
at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic
cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering
the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the
photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville
University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled,
said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-
age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled
graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.
Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her
First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly
legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district
judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a
public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public
concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
In truth, Rosen says, we care less about scrutiny of our online
lives than we do about controlling our reputations, since
“the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means
there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a
scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve
done is often the first thing everyone knows [through, say, a
Google search] about you.” He mentions ReputationDefender,
a company that “automatically rais[es] the Google ranks of…
positive links…[and so] pushes the negative links to the back
pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find.” Of
course this spin comes at a price, subscription to their services,
which the company sells with fear: “Your life could go viral
at any moment.” A video on their site, titled “Why you need
ReputationDefender,” is, they claim, “only lightly terrifying.”
(The ad is somewhat convincing, showing Facebook-style
photos of a shirtless guy with a beer bottle sitting upright on his
enormous gut and a naked couple with their[?] cats covering
their genitalia. I instantly regretted posting them here at the
blog. But elsewhere the company’s visual rhetoric is confused.
Under the category of “[the opinion of] bosses” there’s the
famous still photo of Elvis in creepazoid mode with nasty
Richard Nixon. Does this imply I should suppress knowledge
of my pill-popping so I can become a bloated narc for a corrupt
government? Under “partners” the video shows Roosevelt
and Churchill with Stalin. Does this mean to suggest, even
jokingly, that Stalin’s reputation would be good-to-go if only
his genocides could be pushed to the end of search-engine
results?)
Rosen quotes “cyberscholar” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who
claims that “In traditional societies…the limits of human
memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten.”
He’s never worked in my department.
15
August 6th, 2010
It is true that sins are forgotten in human memory—or
else transmuted into nostalgia; see the case of Billy the Kid
—but sometimes that’s only long after the individual who
stands to suffer for them is gone. Sometimes grudges and
rumors actually fester and become more poisonous before they
fade, since they amplify or confuse original events. But Scott
Fitzgerald overstated the case when he said, “There are no
second acts in American lives.” In the digital age, as it’s always
been, there are second acts but not for all, only some, and it’s
hard to tell how the play will end. (“You die and then you rot,” a
friend used to say, in which case online reputation might grow
less interesting to you.)
Some corporations may not hire based on what they see
floating around in the clouds of the new technology, but it’s
just as true that many people will never change their opinions
on someone even after seeing hard evidence to the contrary
on the web, and others will never sift through all the data
to discover the truth. Mayer-Schönberger’s claim that online
material “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it
impossible, in practice, to escape them” is almost triumphalist
in its perception of technology’s power over the human. It runs
in the same vein as an esteemed writer’s claim that humans
have “evolved” in a few decades with the invention of digital
storage and is even related to the seemingly opposite belief that
new technologies will always come along to fix what the old
ones screwed up.
(The Industrial Revolution produces greenhouse gases that
warm the planet; “geoengineers” clamor to fix the problem
by bombing the upper atmosphere with sulfides to reduce
solar radiation; “a failure of the geoengineering scheme
[leads] to rapid climate change, with warming rates up to
20 times greater than present-day rates”; the entire surface
of the earth breaks out in volcano-sized canker sores in the
year 2041; it gets hard to find all-you-can-eat fried shrimp
specials; McDonaldland scientists announce on Fox News
they’ve developed a new Soylent Shrimp Meal; etc.)
When Mayer-Schönberger regrets that “societal forgetting” is
a thing of the past, I sympathize then add that society—that
plastic mass of people over time—will also forget, ignore, lie,
and get bored with dissecting the same events and turn to other
things.
Mankind writes its story in more and more diffuse ways.
With the web and other recent technologies the book grows
exponentially larger, but who can read the whole thing? Who
would want to? “[T]he Library of Congress recently announced
that it will be acquiring—and permanently storing—the entire
archive of public Twitter posts since 2006,” Rosen writes. Will
anyone care what @Churm 8 4 lunch in 2010 when there’s no
fried shrimp in 2041?
Technology may insist we not forget anything, but with that
much data it’ll be harder to discern which stories matter. One
man’s madeleine has always been another man’s meat house.
***
Speaking of never forgetting: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the
California Institute of Technology invites you to put your name
and zip code “with others on a microchip on the Mars Science
Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!” Presumably you’ll
be fondly remembered by that robot forever, or at least until
Published by: philosophyandrew
our sun dies in the year 5,000,002,010 and leaves behind only
“the lonely cinder of the former planet Mars.” The death of our
solar system is brought to you by Bud Light.
***
The Internet should, in theory, keep humankind from losing
old processes that might otherwise have died with their
practitioners, but it’s still something special to watch them
practiced by people. I don’t know how lost the skills of timber
framing, stonecutting, and masonry ever were, but let’s take
a drive over to the Ozark Medieval Fortress, where the next
two decades at hard labor will give retro meaning to the term
“brick-and-mortar business.”
***
As IHEreported a couple of weeks ago, writer Frederick
Barthelme is being let go from the creative writing faculty of
the University of Southern Mississippi. “Barthelme said he is
being pushed out prematurely, but university officials said that
—facing cuts in funds—they have been forced to set priorities
for other programs, and not to continue ‘phased retirements’
like the one Barthelme wanted.”
Barthelme writes, “Having been delicately ousted from my
slot as editor of Mississippi Review print and online editions,
where I toiled these last several decades, I have invited my
close colleagues who worked with me on the online version of
the MR to join me here at a new venture….”
Forget MR Online. Say hello to Rick Magazine.
Bread crumb the fifth - On the
highway, at the theater
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting_to_green/
bread_crumb_the_fifth_on_the_highway_at_the_theater
August 6th, 2010
By G. Rendell August 5, 2010 3:30 pm
Yes, I own a car. I also own a truck. Neither one is a hybrid,
and both were built in North America.
I buy used vehicles, on the theory that it's a form of
reuse. Reusing isn't as good as reducing, but it's still pretty
good. Buying used is an affordable way of acquiring reliable
transportation (if you're careful what you buy) -- reliable
private transportation is a necessity when you live on a
working farm and spend your weekdays at Greenback U --
there is no public transit where I live. And buying a used
conventional car might well (I can't prove it) impose a smaller
ecological burden than buying a new hybrid.
I don't buy hybrids because I can't afford them. A lot of faculty
here can. A good number of students could, but seem to prefer
imported sporty cars or luxury SUVs. But I'm staff. Relatively
cheap, relatively reliable, relatively good gas mileage is the best
I can do.
Anyway, I was driving my car west along the north bank of the
St Lawrence River, and I happened to notice signs for the St.
Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott, Ontario. The very
fact that there exists a professional (Equity) theater festival in
a little town on the edge of Thousand Islands cottage country
got me thinking.
16
August 6th, 2010
Professional theater (supported, no doubt, in part by
government funds) is an investment in something that doesn't
last. In an experience, rather than a physical object. And I was
raised in the tacit belief that, on the basis of lifespan alone,
objects are inherently better personal investments. It's just one
of those beliefs that's been so basic I've never really considered
that it might not be true. But maybe it's not. I'm told that as
people age (even more than I have), what they remember most
fondly -- their happiest memories -- are always of events, never
of objects. Things they did and people they did them with, not
stuff they owned. So if the value we receive from spending
money is in the form of enjoyment and life enrichment (as
opposed to growth in a financial portfolio), maybe buying
pleasurable experiences is a better use of (limited) funds than
buying stuff. And, if the experiences are delivered efficiently,
their environmental impact might also be lower.
Now, would attending the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival
be a pleasurable experience? That's a personal call. I suspect
it's pleasurable for the actors involved, and the local residents,
and a portion of the folks vacationing in the Thousand Islands.
And I suspect that it's a net contributor to the economic and
social sustainability of that region. So, on balance, it might
be a good thing. Of course, it would be improved by a transit
system which doesn't require people to drive private fossil-
fueled vehicles to get there. Nothing's perfect.
Motherhood After Tenure:
Admission
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/mama_phd/
motherhood_after_tenure_admission
August 6th, 2010
By Aeron Haynie August 5, 2010 7:53 am
This week I rewarded my productivity by reading a totally
engrossing, satisfying novel: Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission.
Korelitz's deftly-written novel, which portrays a Princeton
admissions officer, isn’t a parody of the ridiculous ways that
desperate students (and their parents) try to win acceptance
into Ivy League colleges (hint: baked goods will be eaten but
will not help a student get in), but a moving novel that centers
on the double meaning of the title. As one character explains,
“Admission. It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.”
The main character, who has been guarding a traumatic secret,
avoids her own feelings by engrossing herself in the narratives
of aspiring applicants. One of the side pleasures of the novel
is reading the excerpts from fictional application essays that
begin each chapter. They range from the poignant, to the trite,
to the sublime.
While the main character’s deep responses to these
applications will resonate with all of us who regularly read
student papers, the novel raises larger questions. How do
we define academic “success?” What happens to teenagers
when we expect them to show evidence, not of promise, but
of extraordinary achievement when they are only 17? Do
we believe that our current system of higher education is a
meritocracy? If not, what is the value of an elite education?
Parents of college-bound high school students will shudder
when they read in this novel how difficult it has become to gain
Published by: philosophyandrew
admittance into highly selective colleges. “These impressive,
compelling kids, enormously likable kids -- they’re the ones
we don’t take. This amazing, extraordinary kid, that’s the
kid we take.” With an increasing number of college-bound
students, each generation faces a higher bar. Select colleges
also encourage (and even recruit) students to apply purposely
in order to increase the total number of applicants, and thereby
to improve their ranking. It’s not enough to be a well-rounded,
academically strong student; according to the novel and to
other nonfictional analyses of admissions trends, colleges are
more interested in composing a heterogeneous freshman class
made up of disparate “markers.” A college might not need
another well-rounded student with a high g.p.a., lots extra-
curricular activities, and glowing letters of recommendation;
perhaps they need a tuba player or would rather admit a
math genius who floundered in other subjects. (The concept
of the well-rounded student, by the way, was a response to the
increasing number of Jewish students whose top test scores
were winning them entrance to Ivy League colleges at an
alarming rate in the 1920s.) So much for a meritocracy.
Full disclosure: I did not attend (nor even think to apply to) an
Ivy League college. I did not experience the incredible pressure
to achieve perfect SAT scores and grades while simultaneously
excelling at sports and engaging in heroic community service.
I was unmotivated in high school and my (divorced) parents
had no money, so I was quite grateful to be accepted into a
competitive state university where I flourished. My younger
sister, on the other hand, worked diligently through high
school and received a full academic scholarship to a good (if
not Ivy) private college. However, she was exhausted from
working so hard in high school, and from the pressure of
managing the rising costs that her “full” academic scholarship
didn’t quite meet. In the end, my sister did not enjoy college.
What do I dream for my own child? Although I went to a large
state university, as an educator, I’ve learned the value of small,
liberal arts colleges. Yet, as a previous blog mentioned, college
professors (along with many other parents) may find it difficult
to afford the tuition of a private college. A recent article in
U.S. News and World Report indicates many colleges admit
giving preference to students whose parents can afford the
tuition. Affluent students already attend better high schools,
are coached and encouraged by educated parents, and enjoy
countless opportunities to increase their odds of getting into a
selective college. My daughter will have the advantage of living
in a “print rich” home and having a mother who is a professor
who can guide her through the application process. I hope that
she has abundant choices, but I also hope that she does not
equate her intelligence with the status of the institution that
“accepts” her, and equally I hope that she doesn’t assume she
is smarter or better than those who had worse fortune.
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