A Good Conversation Starter: “A Machiavellian Guide to Destroying Public Universities in 12 Easy Steps”

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, here are the first four steps:

  • Denigrate public education, and public institutions in general, as drains on private wealth and “job makers” to the point that no one would dare ask for increased support. This will assure that public universities are relegated to second-rate status with inferior facilities and loads of part-time faculty members, and will forever have a negative stigma placed on them relative to private universities.
  • Take advantage of economic downturns to instigate “taxpayer outrage” in order to remove support from public universities so that they must either raise tuition or cut back on their programs. Afterward, condemn those institutions for raising tuition in order to support lazy, socialist professors teaching irrelevant subjects like anthropology and philosophy.
  • As state support recedes, encourage a student-loan system that will create a “market for higher education.” Saddling students with lots of debt will make them enterprising and rational consumers of educational products and will encourage them to safeguard their economic interests. Refer to these changes as “empowering students.”
  • Install new public-management tactics borrowed from public-interest theory to wrestle control from faculty governance systems. However, to quell widespread discontent, keep university senates in place as giant, irrelevant “suggestion boxes.” Be sure to talk a lot about the importance of shared governance as these tactics are introduced. Label the faculty cynicism that will undoubtedly emerge as “consensus.”
This entry posted in Education. Bookmark the permalink. 

41 Responses to A Good Conversation Starter: “A Machiavellian Guide to Destroying Public Universities in 12 Easy Steps”

  1. 1
    Elusis says:

    Install new public-management tactics borrowed from public-interest theory to wrestle control from faculty governance systems. However, to quell widespread discontent, keep university senates in place as giant, irrelevant “suggestion boxes.” Be sure to talk a lot about the importance of shared governance as these tactics are introduced. Label the faculty cynicism that will undoubtedly emerge as “consensus.”

    Ouch.

  2. 2
    RonF says:

    My daughter went to a private university, as did I. My son went to a public university, as did my wife. My wife got an Education degree, my children and I all got STEM degrees.

    My wife and I went to school during the Vietnam War. My wife’s school was basically in the middle of cornfields well away from any urban center. There were some demos, but there just wasn’t a lot of political activity. My school was in the middle of Cambridge, Mass. It was an epicenter of political activity, some of which I participated in. But that activity was balanced out. I had professors who were dead set against the war – although he was never my professor, this was when Noam Chomsky began to make a name for himself outside of his academic research. I had another instructor who had been in the Israeli army during the 6-day war and regaled us with tales of action. But overall the instruction was not suffused with the political stance of the instructors.

    It is my understanding, though, that the public perception of public universities is that this has changed – that political opinion and opinions about American culture suffuse a lot of instruction at them, and that it’s quite unbalanced. It is this perception that is causing public universities to lose public support, I think. Public universities are no longer seen as places where all viewpoints are taught and aired and where American culture is emphasized and respected. They are viewed as places that are hostile to America and that enforce the acceptance of a limited set of views.

    You may disagree with that. Or, you may agree and think that such a course is the correct one. But that’s the perception, and that is what in the end is eroding public support of public universities.

  3. 3
    Ziffel says:

    (1) The kind of silly joke is that math, physics and chemistry etc. were once considered part of “liberal arts”. Today that phrase just means “the easiest stuff I can take and still get a college degree”.

    (2) I don’t really understand the flack about taxpayers wanting to know how their money is spent. A “porn professor” from PCC in California, after admitting that he wanted to sleep with the porn stars in front of his class, will probably be terminated by his college for other reasons (Hugo Schwyzer). Just as an example.

    (3) I don’t think the public is worried about anthropology and philosophy. More like dogmatic crap from “angry studies”.

    Personally, I don’t think that education should be so narrow as to only be career training, but keeping to reality would be nice. If you point out something clearly wrong in physics, they WILL eventually pay attention. If you point out something clearly wrong with women’s studies, you WILL eventually be attacked and dismissed.

  4. I get awfully tired of the canard which says that public universities are a hotbed of, have been taken over by, exist to promote and promulgate anti-American, “angry studies,” and I get especially tired of it when it is used to justify the systematic defunding of public education that is taking place throughout the country. It’s not that I think there are no problems in the academy of the sort that RonF and Ziffel point to; it’s that the issues at stake are actually much deeper than that. The struggle over who gets to control curriculum, over what it means to earn college credit, for a particular course of instruction to be credit-worthy, over the nature of academic freedom, over who should be paying and how, and how much, they should pay for education–all of these things impact every discipline within higher ed, even the ostensibly cut-and-dried subjects like math or physics.

    I don’t care whether you are conservative, liberal, or the most radical of radical marxist lesbian feminists (which I choose only because it hits a couple of the hot spots of people who comment here), you should be very concerned about the points made in the article I quoted, because the phenomenon they are an argument against is not simply about the problems represented by the Hugo Schwyzer’s and “angry studies” of the academy. It is rather an attempt to change the fundamental nature of what public education means, and that is not something one should blithely support-by-default through dismissive comments about the allegedly one-sided nature of what goes on in public universities.

  5. 5
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    RJN,

    Public universities have (wrongly, I think) an image problem. But they also have a response problem, and they bear a lot of the blame for the image because the way that they’ve chosen to respond to accusations.

    I get awfully tired of the canard which says that public universities are a hotbed of, have been taken over by, exist to promote and promulgate anti-American, “angry studies,”

    Tired of the accusations or of the classification? Do you think it’s entirely false?

    Here’s an example:
    Higher education is responsible for pedagogy, especially in the younger students who are mostly trained by education-school graduates as opposed to PhDs or MAs. There are plenty of reasons to argue that “social justice” and “diversity” and similar initiatives are beneficial. But there’s little question that the framework of what is being produced in the education schools is different, often substantially so, to what used to be there.

    Again: This may be a GOOD thing. The teaching may be beneficial to society overall. Perhaps we should be training all future teachers to work towards social justice, for example. And perhaps we should be doing that even if the academy’s views of social justice are different from the beliefs or goals of a big hunk of society. But if the academy is surprised by the resulting opposition, or can’t understand the reasons for it, or can’t see it as legitimate… then that suggests that the academy, as a body, is sort of clueless. Which isn’t a great motivator for the “trust is to run things” meme.

    and I get especially tired of it when it is used to justify the systematic defunding of public education that is taking place throughout the country.

    Well, I don’t think public education should be defunded. Neither do I think public education should be severely limited, i.e. restricted to STEM or job-skill stuff. I’m personally comfortable with a very wide range of training in liberal arts, though I also concede we need to watch out for costs.

    But plenty of pro-academic reasonable people will think there should be SOME limits on what type of education the public will fund. And it seems vanishingly rare for people in the academy stand up and be willing to set those limits, or even acknowledge that it’s reasonable to think that those limits should exist. If I think that there should be limits (albeit very very broad ones) and you don’t seem to think that there should be any, then I’m not going to trust you to supervise them.

    I personally think that the academy could recover a lot of the public trust if it made some very small steps to demonstrate its understanding of its opponents.

    It’s not that I think there are no problems in the academy of the sort that RonF and Ziffel point to; it’s that the issues at stake are actually much deeper than that. The struggle over who gets to control curriculum, over what it means to earn college credit, for a particular course of instruction to be credit-worthy, over the nature of academic freedom, over who should be paying and how, and how much, they should pay for education–all of these things impact every discipline within higher ed, even the ostensibly cut-and-dried subjects like math or physics.

    Eh. Sure, sort of. But it’s a canard to suggest that these impacts aren’t enormously larger in the context of the social disciplines than in the hard sciences.

    Colleges can teach all sorts of things: they can teach you to listen to authority or to question it; to take what you can or to share; to respect government or to disrespect it; that America is better or worse than other countries; that we should or should not try to “fix” the past by compensating the injured; etc.

    Students who graduate as atheist social justice marxist feminist democrat agitators, or as conservative christian capitalist american-exceptionalist econ-major bankers, may have been leaning that way when they went to school. But they’re usually pushed farther, enabled, and trained by the faculty. (You’ve said it yourself. You don’t just “teach English,” right? You also teach your version or morality, and world view, and so on.)

    Nothing is wrong with that, but–again–if you don’t openly deal with the reality that this is really focused in social genres then you don’t stand out as a good negotiating partner.

    I don’t care whether you are conservative, liberal, or the most radical of radical marxist lesbian feminists (which I choose only because it hits a couple of the hot spots of people who comment here), you should be very concerned about the points made in the article I quoted, because the phenomenon they are an argument against is not simply about the problems represented by the Hugo Schwyzer’s and “angry studies” of the academy.

    You don’t care? You should care. Because I don’t think you do a great job understanding or acknowledging the conservative viewpoint, or dealing with it.

    It is an unfortunate reality that what many people care about the most (and especially what many conservative people care about the most) is “angry studies” a/k/a “paying my taxes to have you teach others to dislike, disrespect, or work against the interests and desires and possessions of me, or people like me.”

    Is this a surprise? For a group of smart and highly educated people who presumably should know how to deal with this, the academy has done a horrible job of responding to what people want. Can’t someone in the psychology department point out that “telling people that they shouldn’t be upset” is rarely successful?

    It is rather an attempt to change the fundamental nature of what public education means,

    I don’t actually agree with this. I think that people would, by and large, support the concept of flexibility in learning, if they were at least somewhat reassured that the academics were walking in the same reality as the public, and weren’t up in the clouds on an ivory tower. That reassurance is hard to come by, sometimes. Especially from the perspective of the public.

    and that is not something one should blithely support-by-default through dismissive comments about the allegedly one-sided nature of what goes on in public universities.

    I will say this: the responses of the elite academy to the large non-elite public outcry are often far more dismissive than the reverse.

    Take this. You have called it a canard and suggested that the responses are dismissive; you have suggested that people “blithely” dismiss it as if they don’t know better. Read as a whole, you seem pretty happy to dismiss the arguments out of hand.

    But what you haven’t done anywhere in your post, as far as i can tell, is concede that the opposition even has a leg to stand on. Or that they may have some valid points. Or that some of the opposition stems from a real, reasonable, and relevant morality (even if it’s one which you and I may disagree with.)

    Why don’t conservative people trust the academy to self-manage? Why don’t they trust them to accurately take their views into account?

    Because of posts and responses like this.

    And I am NOT saying this as a conservative! I have a liberal arts education and I would encourage all of my kids to get one too. But sometimes the ivory tower nature of the academy is so obvious, like in discussions like these; it’s almost as if you folks are so sure you’re right that you don’t even think it’s worth discussing.

  6. 6
    JutGory says:

    While I would echo G&W’s comments, here is where I have a problem:
    RJN @ 4:

    you should be very concerned about the points made in the article I quoted

    I don’t even understand the points the article is trying to make. I see 12 straw men parading around like an argument. No, they are not even straw men. I do not know whether they are parody, or sarcasm. But, they barely resemble any actual good-faith arguments against the public university.

    Leaving aside the educational content arguments, here are my problems with the public university system.

    1. It is too expensive. Public universities are supposed to be cheaper than private ones, and generally they are. But, even at public universities, the cost of tuition outpaces inflation. More on that later.

    2. The increased costs are the result of an increased bureaucracy. Hire all the lazy anthropology professors you want, but, reduce the number of non-teaching administrators. If that is what the article means by “cutting programs,” so be it.

    3. The students suffer from these increased costs. The article (Point #3) suggests that those that want to destroy the public university want to encourage student loans. This makes no sense to me. The only reason why higher education can charge the rates it charges is because we have a student loan program. That allows the school to charge just enough that they can get every single penny the student can borrow (leading to a need to increase student loan limits, leading to another increase in tuition).

    So, I had a bit of a problem trying to identify the people the article was attempting to caricature.

    -Jut

  7. G&W:

    There’s a lot to respond to here, and I will not be able to get to all of it. So first, some piecemeal responses:

    Higher education is responsible for pedagogy, especially in the younger students who are mostly trained by education-school graduates as opposed to PhDs or MAs.

    Are you talking about teacher-training here–as in the education-school graduates teach younger teachers-to-be–or are you talking about the work that is often done by TAs, who are themselves PhD or MA students? It’s hard for me to know how to respond to the point I think you are trying to make because I am not clear about this one thing.

    And it seems vanishingly rare for people in the academy stand up and be willing to set those limits, or even acknowledge that it’s reasonable to think that those limits should exist.

    In my experience, the issue is not that people in the academy fail to acknowledge financial limits and the reasonableness of setting limits–though there are plenty of people who do fail in this way, and some of them are unfortunately and disproportionately vocal. In my experience, the disagreement is over how those limits ought to be defined and set. At my own institution, for example, we (the teachers union) offered a multi-million dollar package of financial concessions that would have come out of our paychecks, current and future, in order to save the administration money that would have allowed them to do a number of things: save some full-time jobs (everyone agreed that some people would likely lose their jobs), not cut student services, not overload classes, and a couple of other things. The administration refused even to look at the proposal in large measure because they were more interested in the power struggle over curriculum, faculty governance, etc–and that power struggle was not about money. (This you’ll have to take my word for; I have neither the time nor the inclination to spell out the specifics here.) It was absolutely about the nature of public education at my institution.

    I recognize that putting this in the context of labor versus management changes the context a bit, because of course my union’s concessions were also self-interested. My point is, simply, that the issue at stake was not the money; it was about something else, and–here again you’ll have to take my word for what it’s worth–what the administration did was use the question of money, and everyone agreed that the college was in a financial crisis, as a smokescreen for everything else they were trying to do.

    But it’s a canard to suggest that these impacts [of struggles over curriculum and academic freedom, etc.] aren’t enormously larger in the context of the social disciplines than in the hard sciences.

    I’m not so sure this is true; they may be more easily visible in humanities and social sciences, but I don’t think the impact is larger–not when you start to talk about, for example, the privatization of some kinds of scientific research and how corporations have tried to place limits on what and how the researchers they fund can publish their funding, and not when you think about questions like when and how and whether cutting edge research in the “hard sciences” ought to be taught and to whom. (I think about this a lot, since I teach at a community college, but the question applies at four year schools as well, especially when you consider initiatives like CUNY’s Pathways and SUNY’s seamless transfer–each of which are worth a post in their own right. (For a very partisan view, you can check out this blog post that I wrote in my role as union communications coordinator. And here is my personal disclaimer: that post represents the position of the executive committee of my union; it is not my position. I agree with much of it, but I don’t know if I agree with it in its entirely–because I have not had the time fully to reflect on the issue; I’ve been inundated with the material the union has given me to write about it from their perspective.)

    You’ve said it yourself. You don’t just “teach English,” right? You also teach your version or morality, and world view, and so on.

    Have I written that? I’d be curious to see it again, in context, because I am very careful in my classes not to teach my version of morality and so on. I will not deny that my teaching is informed by my world view–anyone’s teaching would be–but I do not expect my students to learn my way of seeing the world or to reproduce that world view in the work they hand me. When, in class discussions, and this is not often, my opinion becomes part of the discussion–either because my students have asked me directly what I think, or because it is relevant as part of an explanation of something–I am always, always, very careful to point out that it is my opinion, not the right; and I also make an effort to present students with essays and other reading material from a variety of perspectives. Now, does this mean that my world view, as it informs my teaching, has no impact on the students in my classes? Of course not; but that is a very different thing from teaching my world view.

    Because I don’t think you do a great job understanding or acknowledging the conservative viewpoint, or dealing with it.

    This is a discussion that moves away from the article I quoted in the original post, because I actually do think that some of the conservative critique of what goes on in the academy is valid, but I don’t think that critique–in its reasonable form–is driving the process the article is addressing. When I said I didn’t care what political perspective one comes from, what I meant, simply, was that I think the issue of the harm that process does transcends those political boundaries. You may disagree with me–and I will agree that a whole lot of conversation needs to happen before people on all sides can see that–but that is a much longer conversation.

    it’s almost as if you folks are so sure you’re right that you don’t even think it’s worth discussing.

    Well, no. If you want to discuss the critiques like the one RonF brought to the discussion above, I am happy to do so, but I would prefer to have that conversation based on substance, not anecdata, whether the anecdotes are mine or theirs–and arguing from highly publicized examples like Hugo Schwyzer and others is arguing by anecdote, not substance. I do think there is something to be said for the conservative critique of academia; indeed, I know not a few people who are in no way conservative who see quite a lot of merit in some of what it has to say. I think, and I see this in my own institution all the time, that there are a lot of faculty–though I think this is true of faculty of all political stripes–who remain willfully ignorant of the fact that education, public education, is an institution, not just a collection of individual classrooms–if that distinction makes sense–and that there needs to be such a thing as institutional accountably across a whole range of criterial; and I think those people don’t only give academia a bad name; I think they often do a disservice to their students and the institution as a whole.

    I will say this: the responses of the elite academy to the large non-elite public outcry are often far more dismissive than the reverse.

    I don’t disagree with this.

    So this has turned into something more than a piecemeal response, clearly, and so I think I will end there. I am off to grade papers.

  8. 8
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Are you talking about teacher-training here–as in the education-school graduates

    yes; sorry if I wasn’t more clear.

    ….In my experience, the issue is not that people in the academy fail to acknowledge financial limits and the reasonableness of setting limits…

    They don’t really like to acknowledge that there might be limits on what is taught. Finances affect “how many courses can we offer.” But once you get to the “…and therefore which ones should we cut?” question, it’s not about finances any more. It’s political.

    The administration refused even to look at the proposal in large measure because they were more interested in the power struggle over curriculum, faculty governance, etc–and that power struggle was not about money

    Isn’t this to be expected? The power struggle over curriculum and governance is always going to be more relevant. Even if they agree to limit course sizes, which courses do they offer? Even if they agree to expand departments, which classes/teachers benefit from expansion? And so on.
    This is why people care about Democratic control of the senate more than they care about the particular language of a particular bill. Over time, governance and control are the most important things.

    My point is, simply, that the issue at stake was not the money; it was about something else, and–here again you’ll have to take my word for what it’s worth–what the administration did was use the question of money, and everyone agreed that the college was in a financial crisis, as a smokescreen for everything else they were trying to do.

    I entirely believe you, but isn’t it both sides who did that? You seem to be saying that your union offered them money to achieve its larger non-monetary goals, and that they rejected the money to achieve their own, non-monetary, goals. I fully agree that the money isn’t the “real” issue though it’s a big one. The administration knows that for sure. So, presumably, does the faculty.

    I’m not so sure this is true; they may be more easily visible in humanities and social sciences, but I don’t think the impact is larger–not when you start to talk about, for example, the privatization of some kinds of scientific research and how corporations have tried to place limits on what and how the researchers they fund can publish their funding,

    I certainly don’t disagree with you here. I didn’t see this as within the scope of this particular debate, though in principle I’m happy to discuss it.

    What I meant can best be illustrated specifically.
    I’ll start with two STEM examples
    List of courses in the Math department
    List of courses in the Biology department
    Now, a few examples of departments that are frequent targets of conservatives:
    List of courses in the African American Studies department
    List of courses in the Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies department

    What I mean by a “canard” in this context is that the Math and Biology course catalogs aren’t really subject to trimming except for pure financial reasons. Multivariable calculus or Marine Microbiology just are what they are. They’re pretty apolitical and although people may argue about things they aren’t the focus.

    Trust wise, BTW: I chose that school and those departments BEFORE I read all the courses. So when I start giving specific examples of the things that the haters flip about, it wasn’t pick and choose.

    3042. Baseball and Society: Politics, Economics, Race and Gender. Baseball in historical, political, sociological, and economic contexts. Topics may include: impact on individuals and families; racial discrimination and integration; labor relations; urbanization; roles of women; treatment of gay athletes; and implications of performance-enhancing drugs.

    Without impacting academic freedom, and without knowing a damn thing about the course: If Jo takes the position “that course is simply not an appropriate use of public funds” I do not think that Jo’s position can simply be dismissed. Nor should Jo’s position be ignored because Jo is not one of the people in the faculty of that department.

    Or, to continue in that department, I would compare these two sequential ones:

    3501. Ethnicity and Race. Ethnic groups, their interrelations, assimilation, and pluralism. Culture, and identity that arise from differences in race, religion, nationality, region, and language.

    That sounds pretty much like what the public would expect in a department that studies ethnicity, right?

    White Racism. The origin, nature, and consequences of white racism as a central and enduring social principle around which the United States and other modern societies are structured and evolve.

    This sounds pretty much like a course in hating white people. Yes, I’m sure it’s NOT ACTUALLY a course in that. But it sure sounds like one. How surprised can the academy be if people ask “why should I be paying taxes to have a school teach their students this?”

    and not when you think about questions like when and how and whether cutting edge research in the “hard sciences” ought to be taught and to whom.

    That’s certainly a debate which is interesting to have. I’m not sure it’s inherently limited by finances and public university type controls, though.

    For a very partisan view, you can check out this blog post that I wrote in my role as union communications coordinator.

    It’s a good post. And it sort of sums up the issue in the first line:
    Central to the principle of shared governance is the idea that curricular and other academic concerns should fall under the purview of the faculty.
    Um… why?
    I have a lot of PhD-scientist friends and relatives. They work at drug companies and schools and NIH-funded labs. Many of them have postdocs and grad students working with them constantly. Why on earth would they need to start “officially” teaching students in order to have an voice about, say, when/how a budding biology major should start trying to absorb the latest and greatest research? I’ll take it a bit further: If Joe PhD has been working as a tenured faculty for 15 years at a smallish public school and teaching mostly the same classes while doing a bit of highly specialized research, Joe PhD may be much less qualified to judge “how biologists should be learning” than a PhD who is active in a non-faculty lab with constant contacts on the high front of science.

    When, in class discussions, and this is not often, my opinion becomes part of the discussion–either because my students have asked me directly what I think, or because it is relevant as part of an explanation of something–I am always, always, very careful to point out that it is my opinion, not the right; and I also make an effort to present students with essays and other reading material from a variety of perspectives

    Yes, I believe this. It is one of the many things that makes me respect you. However, it is common but by no means ubiquitous among the academy.

    I am off to work again.

  9. G&W:

    Me: Are you talking about teacher-training here–as in the education-school graduates
    G&W: yes; sorry if I wasn’t more clear.

    I think that the piss poor state of teacher training–and it is unconscionably poor–is a much larger issue than the one we’re talking about here, not that it isn’t related–but it goes to the nature of what we think K-12 education should be, etc. more than it goes to what we think public higher education should be.

    They don’t really like to acknowledge that there might be limits on what is taught.

    Yes, and you’re right. It is political and those politics cut in all different directions and often make the way people in higher education deal with such issues look more like junior high school students running for government–though the junior high students might actually be more mature in some cases–than members of the professoriate seriously trying to wrestle with the question of what education ought to look like for undergraduates. But that is why academic/faculty senates exist, and why shared governance is so important. When it works well–and in my own experience it works well more often than it does not (though right now my school is in a situation where I think it is not working well)–you do end up with the right kinds of limits on what ought to be taught put in place.

    You seem to be saying that your union offered them money to achieve its larger non-monetary goals, and that they rejected the money to achieve their own, non-monetary, goals. I fully agree that the money isn’t the “real” issue though it’s a big one. The administration knows that for sure. So, presumably, does the faculty.

    Sure, but two things: My reason for raising this point had to do with the question of taxpayers wondering about where their money goes. The administration claims to be representing those taxpayers, in a strictly monetary sense. In fact, they have a whole other agenda. I was not trying to argue for the altruism, or whatever, of my side over and against their side (Except perhaps to say that when they said it was about money, we offered money. In other words, I think, in this case, my side was more honest. Though that’s not really germane to this discussion.)

    What I mean by a “canard” in this context is that the Math and Biology course catalogs aren’t really subject to trimming except for pure financial reasons.

    Well, yes and no. Within a major at a four year school that might be the case. At a two-year school, it’s a little more complicated. At my school, for example, under the pressure of SUNY Seamless, there is the question of whether or not one lab science can be removed from the AA degree. Right now students need two. (I think I have these numbers right, but let’s just assume they are.) The argument over this will, at my school, absolutely devolve into a question of which subjects matter more, and why and how, etc.

    3042. Baseball and Society: Politics, Economics, Race and Gender. Baseball in historical, political, sociological, and economic contexts. Topics may include: impact on individuals and families; racial discrimination and integration; labor relations; urbanization; roles of women; treatment of gay athletes; and implications of performance-enhancing drugs.

    Without impacting academic freedom, and without knowing a damn thing about the course: If Jo takes the position “that course is simply not an appropriate use of public funds” I do not think that Jo’s position can simply be dismissed. Nor should Jo’s position be ignored because Jo is not one of the people in the faculty of that department.

    No, Jo’s position should not be ignored out of hand, but what happens when you explain to show, with all the necessary illustrations, that, given the important of baseball in American culture, of baseball players as role models, given its importance in the history of race in the US (Jackie Robinson only scratches that surface), etc., given its history as a tool of US imperialism in Latin America (I think I am remembering this correctly), given its role as an instrument of goodwill in other places–given all that, baseball is certainly worthy of study. What do you as the university do if after saying all that, Jo willfully puts his fingers in his ears and says, “La, la, la, la, it’s just a sport; stop wasting my tax money?”

    More to come.

  10. 10
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    What do you as the university do if after saying all that, Jo willfully puts his fingers in his ears and says, “La, la, la, la, it’s just a sport; stop wasting my tax money?”

    At some point of majority, one would assume that you should do what Jo is asking even if you think it’s a bad idea. After all, the concept of taxes is that the taxpayers are supposed to have some say in how they’re spent. We can’t have a “majority rule unless they make a stupid decision,” or it’s not a majority rule.

    Otherwise: Jo sees the “white racism” course and has no avenue to express dislike: the faculty is dismissive and insular and the administrators don’t answer to the public. What is Jo to do except fight with the tools that Jo has available?

    If the college professors won’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) and the college presidents don’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) then Jo has little choice but to resort to Jo’s elected officials. It’s the only weapon Jo has.

    And the elected officials can’t affect the course choice either (because the faculty asserts academic freedom.) So therefore they are forced to resort to the only weapon THEY have, which is the budget, or their ties to the administration. And so they start the cuts and the push for adjuncts, because there’s no “academic freedom of tenured faculty” for adjuncts and they don’t want to piss off Jo too much.

    It is not so surprising.

    Well, yes and no. Within a major at a four year school that might be the case. At a two-year school, it’s a little more complicated.

    I agree that things are different for CCs. I’m a big fan of CCs (and a long time reader of Dean Dad.) I’m well aware that they are really getting screwed, largely IMO because people have very warped ideas of how to designate the proper metrics for CC “success” given their goals and student population. Your average CC does a lot more educating per dollar than your average university.

  11. 11
    Ziffel says:

    I’m not sure where this fits in here, but I thought I would toss it out with regard to “humanities” and the like.

    There is a fairly famous story about a woman who wanted to organize a conference as “STEM meets liberal arts” or the like. People in the liberal arts may have some difficulty with the hard sciences, but scientists and engineers are naturally deficient in the humanities (and socially awkward to boot).

    So she lines up some scientists on the STEM side, and then she is really looking for a great humanities guy for “the other side”. And she found one: The guy was an expert on Mayan culture, apparently very well-read and brilliant in humanities in general and, in addition, a great bongo-drum player.

    Spoiler: It turns out that he is Richard Feynman, professor of physics and the 1965 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.

    The moral of the story? I dunno. But maybe education should be pushing people to learn things that they wouldn’t otherwise learn by watching Dr. Phil and The View on TV. Maybe the humanities crowd could improve their brainpower with some of that ucky science and math stuff.

  12. 12
    Ziffel says:

    At my college, the STEM people were required to take a certain number of units in humanities and social science. You could freely choose from any of the courses, and the anecdotal evidence was that some of the engineers were just acing the upper level humanities classes. Cake walk.

    On the other hand, the humanities people had to take a few STEM-type classes. But the joke was that they had “special classes” for humanities. Something like “science for humanities majors”, in which they learned very simple – and most likely useless – concepts that they maybe should have learned in 9th grade in high school. The brightest learned to add fractions.

    I realize that everyone should be able to get a college degree today, and college has to be appropriately dumbed-down, but a realization of reality may be cool here. Reality is that not all majors have the same degree of difficulty.

  13. 13
    Harlequin says:

    Reality is that not all majors have the same degree of difficulty.

    Sure. But “difficulty” and “importance” are not the same thing, and neither are the relative difficulties of undergrad degrees vs graduate degrees in all fields.

    As far as the STEM-people-are-better-at-humanities-than-humanities-people-are-at-STEM meme: I think this is exaggerated by two things. One, many humanities topics make neat hobbies in a way many STEM topics don’t; a good friend of mine (a professor in “angry studies”) has a master’s degree in statistics and worked as a statistician for a bit before going back for her Ph.D. in a totally different field. But she doesn’t, like, sit around and calculate the odds for different games of chance, so unless you get her talking about it you’d never know. And two, there’s a general lack of respect for the difficulty of high-level humanities concepts. I’m a scientist, but I have a bunch of friends who aren’t; sometimes they’ll be sitting around discussing something, and I’m following along and following along and then it’s like a switch is flipped and it just…stops making sense, because they’ve reached the limit of my understanding. (Which also makes me wonder how well I was really understanding the conversation to begin with.) It’s easier to describe in common language what they do, though, so people think even the highest-level concepts must be that easy, for some reason.

    (And, of course, it’s hardly fair to compare the average faculty member at a university with Richard effing Feynman, one of the smartest guys of the last century in the field of physics.)

    It’s a problem for public educational funding, though, I agree, when lots of people think they’re funding useless degrees in puff topics, regardless of the truth of the matter. It feeds quite nicely into step 1 above.

  14. 14
    Jeremy Redlien says:

    Alright, this is a general response to some issues raised above, but first some background on myself.

    I have a bachelors degree in Philosophy with a minor in Mathematics from a public university. Currently, I am working towards a 2nd bachelors in Criminology at a private university. While I was working on my first B.S. degree, I changed majors several times, and for a time was majoring in Mass Communication, Physics, and Math. My course work has included both intro and upper level courses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Physics.

    So I hope people will forgive me for comparing STEM courses to Humanities and Private vs. Public in general, since those issues have come up.

    I’ll start with the Public vs. Private. Both colleges I have attended now, are similar in size, (the public college grew from 4,000 to 6,000 while I was attending, the private college is about 3,000 I believe and growing now as well). Overall, the quality of the professors is comparable and the courses at both colleges are *about* as rigorous when comparing similar fields. Although, I feel like the Inro. to Sociology was a little less *rigorous* than the Intro. to Psychology and Archeology courses I took at the public university.

    There are some differences though. I feel that the private university tends to baby the students a little bit more. For example, both degrees required “capstone projects” (well, the Philosophy degree called it a Senior Thesis, but same idea). For the Philosophy degree this was a single course taken over one semester. For the Criminology degree it’s a three course sequence, where two of the courses are learning all about the stuff you need to learn to do the “capstone project”. From my perspective, it seems a little bit like overkill, but then I’m thinking that the capstone project at the private university may be a little bit more rigorous overall, but then it can be, given the three semesters involved.

    In short, what I’m getting at is that the students at the private college may be paying $30,000 per semester in order to have a nicer student’s services office to deal with, which is the main advantage as far as I can tell. I’m not paying that since I’m related to one of the faculty here and therefore get free tuition (although I still have to pay some fees) in exchange for filling out some extra paperwork saying we’re in a civil union. Of course, with extra paperwork, there are extra things that can go wrong, and when they did, they were *much* easier to fix, then when things went wrong at my old school. But that’s it, that’s the main advantage of the private college that I can see.

    Which brings me to the issue of STEM vs. Humanities. As a student of philosophy, regardless of the difficulty between the fields, it is very common in my experience for people in the hard sciences to fail to understand or appreciate basic philosophical concepts that apply to scientific thought. Not always the case, but sometimes.

    To use an example from popular culture, would be the widespread belief that science supports the atheists view that “there is no god”. This can sometimes, (although admittedly not too often) be found being espoused by actual scientists, such as Richard Dawkins. As a philosopher, I find this very disheartening because it fundamentally misunderstands what the limits of science are and why they are necessary in order for science to be of any use in the first place. Namely, the idea that science can’t prove (in a general sense) that things don’t exist. Which if one understands basic logic, then one must understand that science cannot prove “god does not exist”.

    In short, what I’m getting at, is that there are definitely academic scientists (Dawkins) out there, who fail to understand the most basic principles that can be found in a philosophy of science.

    There were similar issues I found when taking Personality Psych last semester, where I frequently found myself wanting to go through the text book and write “THIS IS NOT SCIENCE” in the margins, such as when the text said that one of the goals of personality psychologists was to determine the total number of personality traits possible. This was just one example of many.

    Admittedly, it may have been a combination of the textbook introducing things badly but frequently due to experiences both from that class and elsewhere, I have found myself wishing that philosophy of science was a required course for anybody wishing to major in any kind of science (be it a hard science or a sociological one).

    In short, I really wish before writing off the humanities and philosophy as “too easy”, that actual scientists (and others) would actually bother to understand the most basic and easy to understand of philosophical principles that apply to scientific endeavors. The above examples are just a few of many that I can cite if I had time.

  15. 15
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    To use an example from popular culture, would be the widespread belief that science supports the atheists view that “there is no god”. This can sometimes, (although admittedly not too often) be found being espoused by actual scientists, such as Richard Dawkins. …
    In short, what I’m getting at, is that there are definitely academic scientists (Dawkins) out there, who fail to understand the most basic principles that can be found in a philosophy of science.

    Um. Dude, are you serious?

    Not to side track this too very much, but if you seriously think that Dawkins (or any other competent scientist) actually believes that science has proved (or can prove) the absence of God, I assume your intro philosophy class has not finished yet. I haven’t even read Dawkins in ages, but the first link at a Google search of “dawkins science cannot disprove existence of god” shows that you’re simply wrong.

    We atheists don’t deny that god may exist. It’s within the realm of undetermined possibility. It’s just that we consider it about as probable as fairies, unicorns, vampires, dinosaurs hidden in the Amazon, and a Ford Fairlane orbiting Jupiter (all of which are also impossible to disprove.)

  16. 16
    Ruchama says:

    One difference that I’ve seen between public and private universities (at least the ones that I’ve attended and/or taught at) is the maintenance of the buildings and classrooms. At the public university where I’m teaching now, one of the classrooms doesn’t have air conditioning, and my request for a fan was denied, and for the first several weeks of classes, it was at least 90 degrees in there. Most of the classrooms (except in the business school) have decades-old chalkboards that are so scratched up that students have trouble reading anything I write on them. Classes are routinely assigned to classrooms where there aren’t enough desks for the number of students enrolled. None of this would have been tolerated at the private universities I’ve been at.

  17. 17
    Robert says:

    “…we consider it about as probable as…”

    Probability – even estimates of probability – are data-driven math. What are your numbers, and where do you get your data?

    To put it another way, I also believe that there are no Ford Fairlanes orbiting Jupiter; I believe that because all of the known spacecraft to have gone to Jupiter published their cargo and instrument packages, and lots of people who empirically, provably know what a Ford Fairlane looks like also looked at the manifest of the space probes, and there are too many of those people to keep a secret, so it’s very unlikely to have happened.

    When you assign a probability assessment, as an atheist, to God’s existence, are you in a similar position of having a large amount of confident data? You know what God looks like, and you’ve looked in the places where He could be?

    It seems to me that the atheistic/agnostic position of “there’s no proof or disproof, either could be true, I’m not going to worship a possibility, pass me them there atheist chips and turn on the atheist TV show” is perfectly defensible as a rational belief.

    “There’s no God, I’m 99.99% sure of it, based on, um, stuff.” – that’s faith.

  18. 18
    Ziffel says:

    ” ‘There’s no God, I’m 99.99% sure of it, based on, um, stuff.’ – that’s faith.”

    Well, that same argument can be applied to the existence of Zeus and Apollo and Poseidon.

    If you approach the problem as “every culture develops its own ideas of deities / a deity”, then the issue starts to look different.

    The way you are arguing, Robert, indicates to me that you may be a Christian, so deep within you believe in the Judeo-Christian god over Roman and Greek gods.

  19. 19
    Robert says:

    True. Relevance?

  20. 20
    Ziffel says:

    “True. Relevance?”
    _____________

    I’m not sure, other than the fact that an objective person / person who is not invested in a particular deity /deities may view all of the systems like you view Roman and Greek gods.

    Then the probabilities start looking different, I guess. You don’t really believe the Zeus throws lightning bolts, do you?

  21. 21
    Ziffel says:

    … or whatever it was that Zeus did. I’m not sure about the lightning bolts.

    Personally, the god described in the New Testament sounds reasonable, but the god in the Old Testament sounds kind of like a spoiled, impetuous child with too much power (worship me or I’m going to smite you with no empathy). Those are hard to reconcile.

  22. 22
    Ziffel says:

    Back to public universities:

    The general public rightfully gets skeptical about universities today when there is more and more nonsense that is not connected to reality. Anything connected to reality seems to be “career training”, even physics, because it can be useful in the world.

    “Seeing something through a particular lens” (read: interpreting everything in my dogmatic way according to my overarching, narrow “narrative”), as happens a lot in angry studies, may have some use if it is reality-tested, but it often isn’t. Sometimes it’s even flat-out objectively wrong, but still taught anyway because it fits the narrative.

  23. Ziffel,

    I’m going to ask you to stop using the term “angry studies,” which paints with way too broad a brush and disparages, ad hominem-like, well-established fields in which an awful lot of very good scholarship and teaching has been and is still being done.

    G&W: I still owe you some replies. I’ve just been caught up in work. I will get to it soon.

  24. G&W:

    At some point of majority, one would assume that you should do what Jo is asking even if you think it’s a bad idea. After all, the concept of taxes is that the taxpayers are supposed to have some say in how they’re spent. We can’t have a “majority rule unless they make a stupid decision,” or it’s not a majority rule.

    But then you would have to allow a similar kind of scrutiny, and apply a similar kind of rule, to every course, on a course by course basis, even those in the ostensibly objective “hard” sciences. Baseball and all the baggage that is attached to it is, objectively, to the degree that anything can be objective, a fact no differently than, say, evolution or the law of thermodynamics. Would you argue that if a majority of people said we ought not to teach those two things that public universities ought not to teach them? My point here is not argue that there are no differences between studying baseball and studying evolution; of course there are. My point is that you cannot apply one rule of the sort you’ve suggested to so-called “soft” disciplines and a different rule to so-called “hard” ones. (And there is, of course, a whole argument to be had about the ideological underpinnings of that distinction, but that is for a different post.)

    If the college professors won’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) and the college presidents don’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) then Jo has little choice but to resort to Jo’s elected officials.

    Actually, we don’t know that “they don’t.” At my school, where there have been precisely these kinds of controversies over art exhibits and courses in human sexuality–and I am not talking about anything even remotely resembling the controversy surrounding Hugo’s porn course–the college president took quite a bit of time to respond to community concerns, both in the media and, when they brought suit, in court; and I know that we are not an isolated example.

    Me from this post on another blog: Central to the principle of shared governance is the idea that curricular and other academic concerns should fall under the purview of the faculty.

    G&W: Um… why?
    I have a lot of PhD-scientist friends and relatives. They work at drug companies and schools and NIH-funded labs. Many of them have postdocs and grad students working with them constantly. Why on earth would they need to start “officially” teaching students in order to have an voice about, say, when/how a budding biology major should start trying to absorb the latest and greatest research? I’ll take it a bit further: If Joe PhD has been working as a tenured faculty for 15 years at a smallish public school and teaching mostly the same classes while doing a bit of highly specialized research, Joe PhD may be much less qualified to judge “how biologists should be learning” than a PhD who is active in a non-faculty lab with constant contacts on the high front of science.

    I think this shows a lack of understanding of how governance works, how departments work, how academic/faculty senates work and, finally, about what it means to craft a disciplinary curriculum. Academic/faculty senates are democratically elected bodies within an institution that are charged with the task of, among other things, overseeing (not quite the right word) and managing the academic side of the institution’s operation. Why someone from outside Universty XYZ should be able to have a say–not express an opinion about–but have a say in what the biology major, or courses for non-majors, should look like at that university?

    The question of governance and how it works is actually a pretty complex topic, since it involves, in New York anyway, state education law, as well as individual college policy, but I don’t have time to go into it more deeply.

  25. 25
    Ziffel says:

    “Why someone from outside Universty XYZ should be able to have a say–not express an opinion about–but have a say in what the biology major, or courses for non-majors, should look like at that university?”

    ______

    Because people actually doing the science know where the current limits are and know more about the specific science overall. That’s the whole point – you want to teach reality and not some encrusted resemblance of it that is constructed by a person insulated from reality. It’s counterproductive to teach the ether in physics if Michelson and Morley can point out current problems with that.

    Frankly, it’s odd that this has to even be pointed out. Why “teach” something that’s wrong?

  26. 26
    Ziffel says:

    Medicine 506 – Theory of Evil Humours and Demons as the Basis of Flu

    C’mon let’s get some feedback from practitioners in the field!

  27. Ziffel:

    Because people actually doing the science know where the current limits are and know more about the specific science overall. That’s the whole point – you want to teach reality and not some encrusted resemblance of it that is constructed by a person insulated from reality.

    Which suggests that you know precious little not only about how college curricula are actually designed, proposed, and approved, but also about what faculty in higher ed–from community colleges through research one institutions–actually do.

    Medicine 506 – Theory of Evil Humours and Demons as the Basis of Flu

    C’mon let’s get some feedback from practitioners in the field!

    Which demonstrates that you are not actually interested in arguing in good faith. Stop it or stop commenting on this thread.

  28. 28
    Sebastian says:

    To use an example from popular culture, would be the widespread belief that science supports the atheists view that “there is no god”.

    Yer what?

    Do you realize that anyone remotely familiar with the scientific method realizes that the hypothesis of a omniscient, omnipotent being is non-falsifiable? People who profess this ‘widespread belief’ are as much scientists as you are a philosopher, and let me tell you, Dawkins in not one of them.

    You have a degree in Philosophy from a public university? Well, I have to say that no post in this thread (which admittedly I have not finishing reading) has swayed my opinion one way or another as much as yours.

  29. 29
    Ruchama says:

    I have certainly heard people say things like “Science proves there is no god,” but almost none of those people have been scientists. (I haven’t read enough Dawkins to have any knowledge of whether he’s ever said that.) Some of them have been people who’ve read a bunch of pop-science books and thus fancy themselves “scientists,” but actual scientists, with degrees in a scientific field? No.

  30. 30
    closetpuritan says:

    I had a response to the atheism-and-probability conversation, but didn’t want to derail this one even more, so I put it in the open thread.

  31. 31
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Richard Jeffrey Newman says:
    October 7, 2013 at 6:36 am
    But then you would have to allow a similar kind of scrutiny, and apply a similar kind of rule, to every course, on a course by course basis, even those in the ostensibly objective “hard” sciences.

    There clearly can’t be democratic rule; the closest we might get is some sort of republic where the wishes of Jo are expressed indirectly. That’s why Jo ends up calling his representative.

    Baseball and all the baggage that is attached to it is, objectively, to the degree that anything can be objective, a fact no differently than, say, evolution or the law of thermodynamics.

    Sure, in many ways.

    Would you argue that if a majority of people said we ought not to teach those two things that public universities ought not to teach them?

    Yes.

    Of course, I think that they “ought” (my own preference) to be taught nonetheless, but I don’t think that we are obliged to teach those subjects any more than we are obliged to have public universities at all. That’s the point of public government. It would be stupid to stop teaching math just as it would be stupid if we stopped subsidizing vaccines, but both are clearly within the public’s power to do.

    My point is that you cannot apply one rule of the sort you’ve suggested to so-called “soft” disciplines and a different rule to so-called “hard” ones.

    No, but you might easily apply a rule that functionally splits them, including one which takes majority ideas into account, or age, or prevalence, and so on. The rule of “curriculum is chosen by an elected faculty senate” is facially neutral, and produces a particular result. Other facially neutral rules, such as “curriculum is chosen by a randomly selected group of students,” would produce dramatically different results.

    If the college professors won’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) and the college presidents don’t listen to Jo (and we know they don’t) then Jo has little choice but to resort to Jo’s elected officials.

    Actually, we don’t know that “they don’t.” At my school, where there have been precisely these kinds of controversies over art exhibits and courses in human sexuality–and I am not talking about anything even remotely resembling the controversy surrounding Hugo’s porn course–the college president took quite a bit of time to respond to community concerns, both in the media and, when they brought suit, in court; and I know that we are not an isolated example.

    hmm. I’ll concede it’s nonzero in number, but I’ll say that the general defensiveness and entitlement to autonomy in the faculty means that this is an exception and not the rule. The schools sometimes deign to reply, and they can be forced in limited circumstance. But generally, they have no obligation to do so.

    I think this shows a lack of understanding of how governance works, how departments work, how academic/faculty senates work and, finally, about what it means to craft a disciplinary curriculum.

    I’m not sure if it’s a lack of understanding, or a lack of agreement ;) I’ve spent a lot of time at a lot of schools, talking to a lot of people. I’m certain that you know more than I do about your school and your state, but if we’re talking generally I think I’m sufficiently knowledgeable not to be talking entirely out of my ass.

    Academic/faculty senates are democratically elected bodies within an institution that are charged with the task of, among other things, overseeing (not quite the right word) and managing the academic side of the institution’s operation.

    They ARE. I don’t dispute that. They don’t HAVE TO BE. Hopefully you don’t dispute that.

    Imagine that you have a democratically (subject to internal politics) set of faculty (subject to exclusion of adjuncts, and subject to tenure) who may or may not be focused on teaching as opposed to research and who may or may not have the interests of the students (as opposed to their own departments) at heart. They get to choose Curriculum A.

    Simultaneously, an administrator (who gets to talk to anyone she wants, including faculty) chooses Curriculum B.

    There’s no obvious reason why Curriculum A must be better. Perhaps it would–or not. The fact that we use method A is more one of tradition than necessity.

    To illustrate that, I would like to list four skills:
    1) Work in one’s field;
    2) teaching others how to work in one’s field;
    3) teaching others how to teach in one’s field; and
    4) designing a curriculum that takes into account multiple fields.

    Those are four very different skills. Why do almost all professors think that they have all of them? Almost nobody has all four. Yet academia routinely conflates them–we hire people based on skill in a field and assume they can teach. Or, we hire people who are good at teaching a skill and assume that they can teach others how to teach the same skill. And so on.

    It reminds me of my property professor. He was a brilliant property guy and my favorite professor. He was crap at statistics, though. If you asked him, he’d have told you that he was just as good at “turning raw scores into letter grades” as he was at “property law” as he was at “teaching property law.” But he was wrong. Mathematically wrong.

    Why should someone from outside University XYZ should be able to have a say–not express an opinion about–but have a say in what the biology major, or courses for non-majors, should look like at that university?

    I’m not sure how you are distinguishing “express an opinion” and “have a say,” but (perhaps I am misreading) this seems a bit at odds with the anecdote about your college, the media, etc.

    Anyway, why should they is the wrong question: since it’s a public university in a republic/democracy the default is “public participation” and it’s on you to justify the exception, i.e. why shouldn’t they. But in any case, the public should have input at some level for the same reason that they should have a say at some level in everything else, from whether the state will build a highway to whether the government will go to war with Iran. It may be indirect; it may be delayed; but it’s there.

    Also, the other valid reason is that it deters a runaway self-reinforcing cycle, in which a pontificating professoriate, possibly perpetually, preferentially proposes new members who share the views (and who support the choices) of the existing ones, thereby giving “support” to the “proof” of the accuracy of their initial views.

  32. 32
    closetpuritan says:

    On the off chance that Ziffel’s latest comments can be attributed to stupidity and not malice: the science faculty at universities are doing science research. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have their jobs in the first place. Haven’t you ever heard of “publish or perish”?

  33. 33
    Ziffel says:

    “… the science faculty at universities are doing science research.”

    Sure, and that’s a good point. A lot of what goes on in the world is not found at universities, however. An example would be Intel vis-a-vis an electrical engineering department.

    My point is that curriculum committees *should* be taking the real world into consideration in their choices, and information about the rest of the world can only come from practitioners in the field.

    There is also the aspect that academic “administrators” (who are presumably not doing the research) can kind of freeze up into mutually accommodating groups of people who simply enjoy all the endless, useless meetings and committees and busy work as pontificating, bloviating windbags. That becomes a concern when taxpayers are paying for the useless bloviating and pontificating.

  34. 35
    Ziffel says:

    “Which demonstrates that you are not actually interested in arguing in good faith.”

    _________

    Sometimes I like to take a fictional extreme example to bring out how I think. It is arguing in good faith to me, but I can see how it could be taken as sarcasm. I will note that you don’t want any of that on your thread, Richard Jeffrey Newman.

  35. 36
    Ziffel says:

    Ruchuma: Thank you for the example demonstrating my point. That is an example of outside influence, and I am in favor of that type of thing.

  36. 37
    Ziffel says:

    Also, Richard Jeffrey Newman, you are focused on describing how things *are* in curriculum committees (in your opinion), but are not appreciating that I am arguing about how things *should be* (in my opinion).

  37. G&W:

    I’m not sure how you are distinguishing “express an opinion” and “have a say,” but (perhaps I am misreading) this seems a bit at odds with the anecdote about your college, the media, etc.

    Ah, careless writing on my part. I meant to distinguish “have a vote” or some other form of “shaping power” over the curriculum from expressing an opinion that might or might not be taken into account.

    The rule of “curriculum is chosen by an elected faculty senate” is facially neutral, and produces a particular result.

    But that is not the rule. Curricula are designed in individual departments by people with the qualifications to teach/research in that field; then there is an entire process by which curricula move forward through both faculty and administrative review; eventually, they reach the faculty/academic senate (they are not the same thing and do not necessarily perform the same functions; I am using them interchangeably here for convenience sake), where all of the work that has gone before is voted up or down, or returned to committee for further work. If the curriculum has been designed responsibly, the question of whether, how, and when to include the latest research (in whatever field) will have been carefully considered–and so the views and experience(s) of the people doing the cutting edge research, some of whom might even be part of the process I described above will have been taken into account. If the curriculum has not been designed responsibly, that is not necessarily a problem with the particular system of governance; it is more likely a problem with the people involved.

    At bottom, I would say this about governance: the devil is in the details. You (general second person plural; not you) can propose any alternative that you want. What ultimately matters is how power (and money) get distributed throughout the system you create. This article in Inside Higher Ed, for example, makes that point in what is, generally, a supportive critique of the Seamless Transfer initiative that SUNY has passed.

  38. 39
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Are we discussing different things, now?

    We got into this in the context of (I thought) certain courses which I will term “outliers.” Your post seems more akin to a discussion of things like the core curriculum which all graduates must take to qualify for a degree. That’s always been a complex and (relatively) well-thought out process, both in terms of establishing “what level of languages, math, and art should we require?” and “what language, math, and art courses do we consider to satisfy those requirements?” Similarly, the departmental question “what should be the minimum requirements for a degree in Biology, and what courses should satisfy those requirements?” are also fairly well thought out. What you state (and what I knew, and agree with) makes much more sense than what you said before: It isn’t just the faculty who makes those decisions. Moreover, those things tend to be relatively slow to change, for obvious reasons.

    However, that level of input, review, and consideration is much more wonky at the margins. There probably wasn’t nearly as much oversight about the decision to offer Baseball as there was about the decision to “require a 100-level English course for all freshmen.” There is often almost no oversight in higher level seminars–which makes sense if you have no budgetary shortfall, but which makes little sense if you (like most schools) could use those teachers or funds somewhere else. The less oversight there is, the more likely it is that the result will produce something odd.

    Now, I don’t actually dispute that baseball can be a relevant thing to study. Maybe this Baseball course is great! But that’s not the question: there are an infinite number of things which are relevant, and there are highly limited funds with which to pay the staff.

    So it’s really a “better than” issue. The question should be whether or not it is beneficial enough, relative to the alternatives, so that it would justify using public funds to pay a teacher to make Baseball available to undergraduates at a publicly-funded university, rather than paying this (or some other) teacher to teach some other course.

    I don’t dispute that Baseball could be valuable. I don’t think it’s a bad course and I wouldn’t blink if it was offered at Harvard or any other private school.

    But this is not a private school, nor one with an unlimited budget: http://www.ctmirror.org/story/2013/07/29/uconn-taps-reserves-close-budget-shortfall

    What ultimately matters is how power (and money) get distributed throughout the system you create.

    Yes, i agree.

  39. 40
    Ruchama says:

    I don’t dispute that Baseball could be valuable. I don’t think it’s a bad course and I wouldn’t blink if it was offered at Harvard or any other private school.

    But schools do have to offer some sort of upper-level courses, which pretty much by definition will be more specialized. Any upper-level course in just about any field would be something that only a small percentage of the people majoring in that field would be interested in, so an even tinier percentage of the general student body.

  40. G&W:

    First, what Ruchama said about upper level courses, but to flesh it out a little bit. Yes, I know you specifically chose a course that might be considered by some an outlier, but even those courses–which I will distinguish in a moment from a “special topics” section–generally have to go through a pretty rigorous review process. All kinds of questions need to be answered, including how the course fits into the department offerings, whether or not there are people who are qualified to teach it, whether or not there is a need for the course (in terms of student demand), whether or not it conflicts with other components of the undergraduate degree, whether or not it will transfer to other schools–this is very important!–and so on. These questions are answered by the same bodies that make the decisions about core curriculum and so on.

    This is different from what is often called “special topics,” which are “shell courses” that professors can fill with the topics of their choice. These are usually highly specialized and open only to juniors and seniors (mostly seniors) and so the audience for them is self-selected. Here is where you find the courses the content of which does not require any of the kind of review that I have described.

    For me, the fact that you think the Baseball course would be fine at Harvard, but is questionable at a public university raises a whole other issue about whether or not people who go to public institutions deserve the same quality in their education as people who go to private schools, and I would argue that the capacity for an institution to offer a course like the Baseball course does in fact have something to do with the quality of education that an institution can offer. That, however, is a whole different discussion.