Thinking simple thoughts, drifting toward academic disaster

     Think of the Professorate as comprising a vast spectrum. With regard to teaching load (i.e., how much a professor teaches per semester), community colleges are on the high end. For instance, my load (at Irvine Valley College) is five courses. (I could teach more but choose not to.) Each of my courses has 45 students. That’s a lot. (And, no, I do not make $100,000 a year, despite teaching at this college for 24 years.) (I'm ignoring for today the plight of part-time teachers, the slave labor of academia.)
     But the picture isn't a simple one, even at community colleges. Some of my colleagues—e.g., writing instructors, who typically teach four courses—work very long hours at their teaching, if only because they are buried in papers to grade. It amazes me the hours these people put in. They seem to be the work hours champs.
     But others manage to teach their classes without giving much or any written homework. That's not so good.
     Some—our math department is notorious for this—have managed enduring scams in which tenured instructors are paid extra for large-lecture courses that typically dwindle to regular size. For years, the math faculty at IVC (some of whom are also richly encumbered with scandals of a less pecuniary nature) blocked new hires to protect their gravy train. Some of these jokers make well over $200,000/yr. plus rich benefits.
     They’ve been protected by their friends in administration. Not sure why. It’s demoralizing.
     They’re scum. If our college leadership had a clue, and if they cared at all about teacher morale, they'd deal with this sort of thing. But no.
     Boy am I sick of it.
     But let's get back to the bigger picture. The differences and details between college instructors won’t matter as our society stumbles forward with its disastrous and unguided “destruction of higher education” project. Caricatures and Straw Men will be the only kinds of professors on most Americans’ minds. As usual. We're incredibly stupid.
     Caricaturing comes up in a book review article by Christopher Shea that appeared a couple of days ago in the New York Times. I'll leave to you the judgment whether it's fair.

The End of Tenure?

     In tough economic times, it’s easy to gin up anger against elites. The bashing of bankers is already so robust that the economist William Easterly has compared it, with perhaps a touch of hyperbole, to genocidal racism. But in recent months, a more unlikely privileged group has found itself in the cross hairs: tenured professors.
     At a time when nearly one in 10 American workers is unemployed, here’s a crew (the complaint goes) who are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, routinely get entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students and produce “research” on subjects like “Rednecks, Queers and Country Music” or “The Whatness of Books.” Or maybe they stop doing research altogether (who’s going to stop them?), dropping their workweek to a manageable dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year. Ready to grab that pitchfork yet?
     That sketch — relayed on numerous blogs and op-ed pages — is exaggerated, but no one who has observed the academic world could call it entirely false. And it’s a vision that has caught on with an American public worried about how to foot the bill for it all. The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
     The debate over American higher education has been reignited recently, thanks to two feisty new books. Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It (Times Books, $26), by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist (and contributor to the science section of The New York Times), is if anything even harsher and broader than the cartoonish sketch above. It is full of sarcastic asides like “Say goodbye to Mr. Chips with his tattered tweed jacket; today’s senior professors can afford Marc Jacobs.” But its arguments have been praised in The Wall Street Journal and given a respectful airing on The Atlantic’s Web site. They are also echoed in Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, $24), which is more measured in tone but no less devastating in its assessment of our unsustainable “education bubble.”
     The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,” while Taylor, a religion scholar who recently moved to Columbia from Williams College, has taught courses that Allan Bloom would have gagged on (“Imagologies: Media Philosophy”). And these two books arrive at a time, unlike the early 1990s, when universities are, like many students, backed into a fiscal corner. Taylor writes of walking into a meeting one day and learning that Columbia’s endowment had dropped by “at least” 30 percent. Simply brushing off calls for reform, however strident and scattershot, may no longer be an option.
     The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them. If some programs were phased out, teaching loads might be raised for some on the tenure track, to the benefit of undergraduate education.
     And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators. At Williams, a small liberal arts college renowned for teaching, 70 percent of employees do something other than teach.
     But Hacker and Dreifus go much further, all but calling for an end to the role of universities in the production of knowledge. Spin off the med schools and research institutes, they say. University presidents “should be musing about education, not angling for another center on antiterrorist technologies.” As for the humanities, let professors do research after-hours, on top of much heavier teaching schedules. “In other occupations, when people feel there is something they want to write, they do it on their own time and at their own expense,” the authors declare. But it seems doubtful that, say, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the acclaimed Civil War history by Princeton’s James McPherson, could have been written on the weekends, or without the advance spadework of countless obscure monographs. If it is false that research invariably leads to better teaching, it is equally false to say that it never does.
     Hacker and Dreifus’s ideal bears more than a faint resemblance to Hacker’s home institution, the public Queens College, which has a spartan budget, commuter students and a three-or-four-course teaching load per semester. Taylor, by contrast, has spent his career on the elite end of higher education, but he is no less disillusioned. He shares Hacker and Dreifus’s concerns about overspecialized research and the unintended effects of tenure, which he believes blocks the way to fresh ideas. Taylor has backed away from some of the most incendiary proposals he made last year in a New York Times Op-Ed article, cheekily headlined “End the University as We Know It” — an article, he reports, that drew near-universal condemnation from academics and near-universal praise from everyone else. Back then, he called for the flat-out abolition of traditional departments, to be replaced by temporary, “problem-centered” programs focusing on issues like Mind, Space, Time, Life and Water. Now, he more realistically suggests the creation of cross-¬disciplinary “Emerging Zones.” He thinks professors need to get over their fear of corporate partnerships and embrace efficiency-enhancing technologies.
     Taylor’s eyes also seem to have been opened to the world beyond Williams and Columbia. After his Op-Ed article appeared, a colleague from a cash-short California State University campus wrote to say that the “mind-pulping” teaching load left no room for research of any kind, even if it fell short of the five-courses-a-semester load at some community colleges. “This is an extremely unfortunate situation,” Taylor writes, “because the escalating cost of higher education is driving more students to these institutions.”
     Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.

James Corbett has a message for the high-IQ club

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." 

–Ralph Waldo Emmerson*

     Yesterday, I noticed the Register piece on James Corbett, the hapless Capistrano Valley High School history teacher, who was sued by a student a couple of years ago for trashing Christianity in class. (Intellectuals must 'push back,' urges teacher sued by student.)
     I was in no mood to write about Corbett, who strikes me as the wrong guy to be a poster child for K-12 academic freedom. I do wish he’d go away.
     As near as I can tell, he continues to be the wrong guy.
     He’s got a message. It’s about “intellectuals.”
     Where does he promulgate his message?
     At a Mensa convention.
     You probably know that Mensa is that silly society that exists to satisfy the alleged needs of the high IQed. (Poor lonely devils.) My late brother Ray was a member (in the San Diego chapter, I believe). Ray was smart, and I loved him, but he was disturbed and profoundly unwise. His membership in Mensa and his activities there didn't leave a good impression of that organization. (Corrupt former OC Sheriff Mike Carona and Holocaust denier James von Brunn appear to be members.)
     Really, Dr. Corbett? Your message is about intellectuals and you want to spread it at Mensa meetings?
     That’s stupid. It plays right into the right-wingers’ hands, what with their endless yammering about “elites.” I’m not sure what to make of Mensa, but I don’t think anybody denies that “intellectuals” refers to a kind of well-educated, scholarly elite.
     One of the Mensa “intellectuals” who heard Corbett speak had this to say:
     "I enjoy hearing an educated person talking … He is very articulate and makes me wish I was a lawyer and can go pro bono and help him out."
     Well, IQ isn’t everything, I guess.
     Part of Corbett’s message is on target, I think. He refers to conservative “anti-intellectualism.” (The term “anti-intellectualism” owes whatever currency it has to the classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” by historian Richard Hofstadter, published in 1963.)
     Clearly, the phenomenon of conservative anti-intellectualism exists and thrives. Does it ever. But Corbett evidently hasn’t noticed that it thrives, too, among liberal and progressive elites (and non-elites).
     In my classes, I sometimes explain the reasons for skepticism of various popular philosophies, including the embrace of so-called “alternative medicines” and organic farming and the fear of genetically modified foods. The latter are more or less a part of the progressive (and pro-diversity) world view.
     It never fails. No matter how carefully I talk about the best evidence regarding these ideas and the fallacies and sophisms that make them popular, students—often some of my best students—declare that I am mistaken, for so-and-so says so. “You should see this video,” they often say, referring to something they viewed in another class. Or: "You should listen to Professor So-and-So."
     They simply ignore the evidence I have presented. Evidence schmevidence.
     I get the feeling that my "truth" is, um, incorrect. (Admittedly, I get more flak about my other, allegedly "conservative," incorrectnesses.)

* * *

     If you’ve got anything on the ball upstairs, teaching isn’t easy. (If you’re a dolt, it’s amazingly easy; but you’re likely a lousy teacher.) You want to encourage skepticism, but not too much skepticism. You want students to know the things that are known, but you also want them to maintain the appropriate doubts about the mechanisms of knowledge-production and pseudo-knowledge production. A kind of moderation is important, I think. If possible, I say, take things slowly and easily. (Once again, uselessly, I declare, "See? I am a conservative.")
     That’s why I lay so much emphasis on, not knowledge, but the methods of attaining it (deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, scientific method, avoidance of fallacies, etc.). I often tell my students, “I don’t care what you believe, I really don’t.” And that’s true, more or less. “I do care how you believe and how you arrive at your beliefs. If you reason well, I will be impressed, no matter what you believe. I will pay attention to what you say.”
     One problem with this approach is that you undercut yourself when you refuse to reveal the products of your own careful efforts to arrive at the truth. So, to varying degrees, I allow myself to disclose them. When students ask me if I believe in God, I will answer them (I am some manner of agnostic), but, first, I typically explain that my opinion isn’t relevant. What’s relevant are the arguments, the evidence. And when we cover a topic such as the existence of God, I never bring the class to some big declaration of the truth. Whatever truth there is anyway tends to be “nuanced,” as they say.
     Here are the sorts of things I tend to say during, and at the end of, the “existence of God” unit in my Introduction to Philosophy course:

“Yes, the traditional arguments for God’s existence turn out to be pretty shaky, but, remember: that in itself is not evidence for the non-existence of God. Possibly, there are good arguments that have not yet been discovered or formulated.”

“Theists are obliged to present a coherent picture of the world, and, thus far, their efforts seem satisfying only to believers. Their account needs to succeed with those who do not already believe that God exists." 

“Often, atheists’ point about the problem of ‘evil’ is simplistic, but there are non-simplistic versions of the point, and we need to consider those.”

“David Hume noted that, since we have no experience with the creation of universes, it is difficult or impossible to speculate about the cause of our own. Perhaps that is correct. It’s hard to say.”

"Please remember that the history of humanity is a history of arrogance--of assuming that we are far less prone to error than the generations who came before us. But, thus far, that has never been the case. It is important to maintain some humility, especially with such important questions."

     Yeah, that's what I actually say. I refer to my own views no less than to students' views when I make that point about arrogance and humility. The point is important to me. Nevertheless, unsophisticated (and intermittently present) students hear only, “belief in God is stupid and illogical” repeated over and over. "Only stupid people believe in God," says that rat bastard Bauer.
     Listening to some of these bizarre-of-hearing students, you’d swear I show up to class telling students to take off their goddam “Jesus glasses” and urging them to combat the right-wing, religious, capitalist cabal!
     Gosh, I hardly ever do that.

*Stolen from a Susan Jacoby piece.
Photo from the OC Register.