Democracy and science - hand in hand

Here's a link to a very interesting article; TPP has been thinking along similar lines for some time, but this article is pretty well written and makes many of the points TPP would cover.  With the GnOPe in charge there is a strong anti-science and anti-democratic flavor to many of the issues and positions they take.  Clearly public higher education is not so valued because thinking tends to mess with many conservative positions.  The snuggier government is with fundamentalist religion, the worse things are for science, and for public education.  Read it and see what you think. 
TPP's blue collar, rural family back ground saw public higher education as a means of changing your relative position in society; and some of the manufacturing jobs (GM, Kodak) that were in the offing, while looking pretty good from the perspective of 1970, have not even lasted for one academic career's amount of time.  Presently "choice" really means damaging public education to favor people who can already afford private education; for TPP public schools were a real choice and a path to a very different type of career. The funding of higher education says it all; politicians do not support that which they do not value, and state support has been declining for TPP's whole career.  And now many politicians argue against the value of higher education because they can point to one or two success stories who were entrepreneurial, ignoring all the rest.  
 

Higher Education, the GOP doesn't have much use for it

TPP has read several articles that say the majority of GnOPe voters do not think higher education is a good value or a worthwhile undertaking.  No wonder higher education does so poorly in GnOPe run states.  Democratic voters still thing higher education is worth while.  Thinking about this while weeding and watering the garden resulted the conclusion that this difference is based on very different value systems and expected outcomes.  At present the simple-minded thinking of today's GnOPe only uses one scale to measure everything, and the unit is money.  The more money you have the smarter you are, so naturally T-rump thinks he's pretty smart, certainly smarter than you because he's richer than you.  And he's certainly smarter than us dumb-ass college professors who try to tell POTUS that we actually know something even if it doesn't neatly fit into conservative ideology, a sure sign it's true.  Damn, teaching that fake knowledge again!  TPP understands people's concerns, education if quite an investment now that the student or their parents are expected to pay rather than being state supported for the good of all.  A young fellow wanted to know if it would be worth it to study botany when it came to the salary bottom-line.  TPP did not choose botany because he thought he'd get wealthy, but because he liked it and some lucky people made a living with botany.  And as annoying as some of the common curriculum requirements were (they can be way more flexible and still work people), knowing about literature, and music, and art turn out to be good things. So that's the 2nd big difference, higher education is not training you to do a job, they are educating you to appreciate your culture and your world, and to generally have a more fulfilling life.  When the "2 guys and a truck" were hired to move some heavy furniture for us, these strong backs nonetheless appreciated our art collection.  The whole school of business thing has made people think that higher education is about career training, and while it's a great idea to keep careers in mind, I wanted to tell this young fellow, "Kid, your values are screwed up."  And should you venture into philosophy and other areas that teach you to think, why then you become a truly dangerous person, someone who easily sees through the simple-minded thinking of modern conservatives, someone who knows ideology is no way to govern, and yet they keep trying, and it keeps failing because money actually doesn't trickle down, and if the government didn't waste so much money on the military and their toys, it would easily have enough money for health, and education, and the environment.  Hopefully enough education will survive this era that our culture can recover from these disastrous policies.

A teaching manifesto of merit

The tattooed professor is new to TPP, but TPP likes this guy, and we likes his teaching manifesto as well. For the first 2/3 of his career TPP taught in large introductory biology classes, both majors and nonmajors, and how well he remembers needing summers to recharge until finally it got to the point where that burned out feeling would not go away. Only then did TPP begin a second career teaching botany to people who wanted to learn it. 
As a long-time observer of higher education here in Lincolnland, the cost of higher education is not because of the high salaries paid to lazy faculty, it's not because of having too many administrators, and it's not because of inefficiences and waste, it's because a long time ago, 30 or so years, our legislators decided to shift the responsibility of paying for higher education to the student and their families. They did this by simply gradually withdrawing state support. So tuition had to cover the difference and real cost increases and unfunded mandates as well, as a result tuition has been rising faster than the cost of living.  TPP has seen state support drop from around 60% of the cost to 16% of the cost, to no state support at all this past year.  So higher education is no longer affordable to many people, and this was a choice our state made, but not by coming right out and saying it. Cleverly the very people who made these decisions found it easy to criticize the educational institutions themselves, blaming the educators!  State supported colleges and universities have been great equalizers, and TPP appreciates the opportunities they afforded him; no ivy-league or private schools in TPP's background, just plain blue-collar botany bought and paid for by his own effort.
But at least it was possible. It should be again.

Don't pick on philosophers

These days higher education and its practitioners are neither respected or valued, and TPP has thought that our conservative politicians express such disregard because they don't like people who can think, especially those that might think, and vote, differently from them. From this perspective the humanities, which never seems to get respect, and the sciences, which are no longer trusted by conservatives, have never been closer. And the rising cost of higher education also annoys and troubles people, leading them to further question the value of higher education, but the primary component of the rise in public education cost has been the withdraw of state support thereby transferring the cost to the student since higher education is no longer seen as a public good, and in a grand bit of politicking, it's the universities that get dunned for something they have little control over by those who caused the problem. At any rate, the latest bit of this bashing of higher education comes from an undistinguished senator from Florida who doesn't think the world needs philosophers. No surprise really. A conservative in-law from Florida recently asked TPP what good was a degree in philosophy, the same uncle who advised TPP to not go into higher education many years ago, so this is by no means a new or surprising attitude on his part, or his party's part, but if you're going to criticize a literate field of thinkers you had better be prepared for some well-written blow back.  Honestly, botanists would fare no better if politicians ever thought of us at all. 

How to run a university - Adminspeak

Once you've been around a college or university long enough you learn Adminspeak. For those of you new to this jargon, here's a few pointers.
"Strategic reorganization" - This means "we're going to fire some people and the way we're going to do it is by reorganizing to make a division, department, office, etc. disappear on the organization chart".  Yes, rather than just fire people, terminate jobs, admins like to reorganize such that the desired object for termination ceases to exist.  Poof, no more job, so no more person in that position.
"Performance assessment" - In higher education, everything must be assessed. This is why people in higher education collect and count beans. Never mind that there are no complaints, no problems, no omissions, no excuses, no evidence of anything but a job well done, you must be assessed. The problem is they don't know how to do it. Do you never, sometimes, often miss deadlines? Yes, assessments eat up my time that could be done doing something useful.
"Special Study Group" - Groups like this are formed to reinforce preconceived notions and deliver expected results. Some times 2 or 3 such groups must be formed and dismissed to get the desired result. Then the Admin can announce, "A special study group has recommended ...".  TPP had a chair who constructed a new curriculum this way.
"Shared Governance" - Mostly this means faculty are thrown a few bones, placed on committees and such, where their input can be ignored. While membership on a committee can look quite inclusive, unwanted opinions are frequently, conveniently, left out of reports by the lapdog appointed chair. You can also just be left out of strategic discussions, candidate interviews, etc. And that's only if the organization pays any lip service to shared governance at all.
"Program review" - This is the academic equivalent of strategic reorganization. Tenured faculty are hard to fire, but read the fine print. You can be terminated if your program ceases to exist, i.e., it is deemed out dated, too small, too expensive, too specialized, etc. based upon "assessment", which is really bean counting. The lesson here is simple, only make big, broad programs for majors. Minors are always suspect and liable for cutting, as if this was anything but a bookkeeping problem, so make sequences which can accomplish the same thing for students but are not on admin radar.
This is just too depressing to continue.  But maybe you have some suggestions to submit in the comments?

Infantizing college students

TPP taught biology to freshman non-majors and majors for a long, long time, for over 20 years total. So just about every intellectual student-faculty interaction you can think of has happened along at one time or another. Over the years, especially among non-majors, you run into students who have been taught a lot of nonsense about evolution, and some have frankly said that they don't believe in evolution. Now to a point TPP was OK with this; he did not allow any student to imply or out and out state that he was being dishonest. Changing their beliefs was never an educational objective, however the students were obligated to show that they understood why science said what science said. And when some clearly could not demonstrate such understanding, a few cried "religious discrimination" and asked to be let off the hook. This particular attitude has become way more prevalent and unfortunately the most common administrative response has been to tell faculty to be more accomodating, to be more concerned about students' feelings, and to just feed them with a bigger spoon. TPP's basic philosophy was that while you are entitled to your beliefs you are not entitled to avoid discomforting or contradictory ideas, you are not entitled to a free-pass when it comes to a critical analysis of beliefs like yours (individuals were never picked on). After all this is about education. These days parents and students still want the higher education passport, a degree, to jobs and careers, but the current attitude is that when parents present you with a narrow-minded, anti-science, parochial, self-satisified, entitled little twerp, the twerp is to be returned in the same condition, which seems totally antithetic to higher education. Apparently though business schools are pretty good at doing this; the sciences and humanities not so much. Our administrators, protectors of quality higher education all, give faculty advice about providing trigger warnings and the rules to follow if students want to "opt-out" of discomforting parts of your courses, so religious students can avoid learning about evolution. The only way to do this in TPP's opinion is to not take biology at all and yes, medical schools may object, at least so far. This is all the more troubling because one of the few things where the old USA was really number one was in the size and affordability of our public education system, and the way basic research and scholarship was encouraged. This system is being dismantled as fast as anti-education people can go; under fund it, restrict research areas and support, destroy shared governance, take away academic freedom, and weaken tenure. Apparently many in our country no longer value the ability to think, the ability to understand that bumper sticker slogans are not thoughtful foreign policy nor good education. Never mind that higher education has long been directly and indirectly connected to this country's productivity and prosperity. So let's not challenge students with new ideas or make them think, certainly don't encourage them critically examine anything. The minor non-protest at Duke about freshmen who don't want to read a particular book that might make them uncomfortable, a book they may disagree with, which is OK, but these are the very students who need this type of education the most. TPP isn't even slightly sympathetic to their cause. Twerps.

Voting your professor out of the university

Zounds!  Here's another terrific idea for improving a university education: Let students vote "poor" professors out of the university. In other words, fire professors who get low teaching evaluations from students. What political party does this legislator represent? Anyone?  Anyone? Not having done the homework, the class simply waits for the answer to be given. TPP moves on. A hand is raised, a question posed, "Well, which party?" Ah, yes, well, you were able to get that from the article (see link above) you were assigned to read. Bing, dropped a tenth of a point right there. So many fallacies and misunderstandings are presented in this article TPP checked to see if it came from the Onion, but no, the Chronicle of Higher Education. Close. So where does one begin? Let's just take the most obvious. This hawk-eyed  legislator thinks 18-22 year olds are qualified to make such decisions because they are spending thousands of dollars for this instruction. Who is spending the money?  Mostly parents.  OK, TPP has 40 years of teaching evaluations that argue students really aren't qualified to determine what is and isn't good teaching. They know what they like and what they don't like. High on that list of dislikes is working to learn, studying. Many students end up in your classroom with the attitude that it's your job to educate them no matter what. And even if they make little or no effort their failure to learn is your fault. "I was so turned off by his attitude that students needed to work harder that I didn't learn nothing." And even in a low-stakes contest of determining faculty raises, in which teaching evaluations play some factor, some faculty shamelessly pander, and lots of students just eat it up. The highest teaching evaluations TPP has ever seen were "earned" by a colleague who was very entertaining and very, very easy. When team-teaching with this colleague my own evaluations suffered in comparison, and when teaching the same material without this colleague, my evaluations jumped up more than a whole point on average on a 5 point system. As an undergrad, TPP had one professor who was an arrogant SOB, a difficult and demanding teacher with an insufferable manner, but after a few years, TPP recognized that the man was simply a brilliant teacher who was way ahead of the curve in science education. He'd give you instructions for a lab, which of course we didn't read. There was a problem to solve. He'd walk into the lab, smile, and say, "Any questions?"  Nobody asked anything, so he'd say, "Good, good." And he'd leave, checking on the class at intervals. Some students simply got up and left too. Some of us decided to finally read the assignment. When we finally had decided what to do, discussed how to proceed, and finally had some questions, he was quite helpful. If students had used today's system of evaluations, no telling how low his evaluations might be, but his teaching influenced my own teaching for a whole career.  Now don't get TPP wrong, there are poor teachers and there are discerning students who recognize it and pandering when they see it. But they aren't the majority particularly in those larger lecture courses. You know maybe if 18-22 year olds voted in greater numbers this legislator wouldn't be so eager to put his fate in their hands. And there's much more that could be said about this legislator's misunderstanding of higher education, e.g., his failure to understand the role of research and scholarship in teaching, but TPP just recently touched upon this issue. Oh, yes, another suggestion from the party fixated upon improving higher education, the GnOPe.

How to "improve" university professors and destroy higher education in the process

The GnOPe in particular wants to destroy the one remarkably good thing the USA ever constructed: a public education system. The cynical view is that a party that governs by ideology rather than knowledge doesn’t really want a public capable of “critical thinking”.  And in the case of higher education, the GnOPe so dislikes higher education especially that they are willing to toss the economic baby out with the academic bathwater. Of course a lot of people might get upset if a political party actually came right out and said, “we’re out to destroy public education and those expensive universities in particular”, so the plan is to kill them with a thousand small cuts. North Carolina, one of the academic powerhouses of the “south”, is showing just how this is to be done. Under the guise of “improvement” you demand that professors, all professors, have a high teaching load or 4 courses per semester. You may think that doesn’t sound like too much, but then you haven’t calculated how much time is needed for class preparation and evaluations (grading).  In the case of biology, a single 4 hour class generates six hours of class time, 3 lectures and a 3 hour laboratory. Even with a graduate student assistant to help, it took at least 2 hours to assemble and set up a laboratory class and another hour to put it all away. Fresh materials and other supplies took another 2 hours of shopping every week.  And the lab guide, the instructions, had to come from somewhere especially if you are not teaching labs like a cookbook. At a university lectures are not supposed to be a simple guided tour of a textbook. In TPP’s classes he generally knew more and expected more than was delivered in a textbook, and if you know textbooks, especially science textbooks, the conceptual forest is often totally hidden by the factual trees. Now to fulfill a 4-4 load in the sciences a professor would have to teach 3 such courses (and then each three hour lab counts the same as a 1 hour lecture, a for real accounting!).  It boggles the mind. Now please remember that science is not just a subject, a body of knowledge, science is also a very successful process for learning. You learn to do science by the ancient method of apprenticing, but doing science with a master. Science just eats time for lunch, and there are a limit to how many students you can have working under your supervision. So what can be concluded? One, too many of the current crop of politicians either have no idea what science (or other scholarly endeavors) is, or if they do know, they don’t think it’s very important. Two, these politicians don’t understand education at all, but that isn’t stopping them from meddling in a negative way. Three, this has the potential to be the most ruinous political activity ever, one that actually does put our nation, and its international standing, at risk. Too many of these fools think a nation’s status is determined solely by how many boom-booms it has.  Four, many of these anti-education politicians think many fewer professors are needed doing research if you just cut out all those stupid, useless research programs and focused on real human needs. Oh, TPP could say much more about the type of personalities that think research is all and only about us, but this only shows you how little they understand the basis of doing basic research just to satisfy curiosity, the need to learn new things, because if they did know how research worked, they’d know that with a remarkable frequency, “useless” knowledge becomes important for unforeseen reasons.  In places (corporations) or in countries where research has to be focused on “important” or “needed” outcomes, you often see the most humdrum, unimaginative sorts of research, projects pursued without any intellectual passion or creativity.  So wise up people; this has nothing to do with “improving” education. It has everything to do with destroying higher education. 

Assessing assessment in higher education

In an article entitled “The walking dead in higher Ed” (whatever that means; it never says) Geoff Irvine tees off on what passes for assessment in higher education, and at the institutional level, it is indeed woeful. So what the ever-loving hell does this guy mean when he says “they [colleges and universities] can’t prove that students are learning”? That is what this faculty member has done for the past 35 years! TPP constantly assesses student learning; they learn content, they learn to make connections with other fields of knowledge, a hallmark of a liberal education, they learn to understand concepts in more sophisticated ways, they learn to think, they learn to observe, they learn how to frame questions and test them, they learn how to learn. This all can be demonstrated to just about anybody if they have the time to wade through all the materials collected during a typical semester-long course. However, multiply this by the number of courses, and the mountain of material becomes insurmountable, so the university hired this faculty member to provide a single letter summary, a metric quite limited to be sure, and then they take my word for it that students have learned what the course was intended to teach them. Now of course what administrators really want, and what the non-educators who impose their views on higher education really want is some nice easy metric that says this university is this much better or worse than that university (nothing new here). Oh, there are lots of metrics that don’t have anything to do with learning, e.g., graduation rate. It is important to graduate students at a high rate, and it may mean you are good university, or an average university with very good students, or an easy university; it all can look the same. Teaching and learning are complicated things to assess, and at higher levels, institutional levels they never are assessed because the essential interaction is at the grass roots level between faculty and students. TPP has tried more new things, more new approaches, and more new techniques that you can imagine, some work well and others are quickly discarded. But really, you think students can pretend learning and this faculty member won't notice?

What does this guy means when he says, “the primary source of evidence for a positive impact of instruction has come from tools like course evaluation surveys”? Course evaluation surveys tell you one thing and one thing only; they tell you what students liked and what they didn’t like. As a long time professor, TPP can assure you that students can learn a great deal from things they don’t like, but fortunately as a pretty creative instructor, he has found a lot of interesting, and yes, fun things from which they also learn. And of this learning, he has direct evidence in many forms. Still you must take my word for it because even with all the materials is you won’t know what evidence of learning and what isn’t without my input.  To demonstrate this to an administrator once, TPP wrote three short justifications for a research project and told them one of was a total fabrication, an out-and-out fib, and challenged them to pick it out. Of course, in a distant field, someone could do the same to me. 

Geoff says, “the problem is that faculty and program leaders are indeed content experts, but they are no more versed in effective assessment of student outcomes than anyone else on campus.” Say what? Who else is going to assess whether students learned anything in my class? Who else would know?  You must challenge students with situations, some few of which are called exams, where they must demonstrate learning by first drawing the dots, using correct terminology and examples to label the dots, and then connect the dots in a manner that demonstrates learning when done on blank pieces of paper. 

 What Geoff was trying to accomplish with his article was pretty easy to figure out; he’s an entrepreneur, a huckster for his own company’s assessment product. He’s just one more assessment consultant trying to win the hearts and minds of clueless administrators who believe his assessment critique BS. Yes, that’s right, Geoff Irvine is the CEO of Chalk and Wire,  where you will find “all you need, to achieve your assessment vision”.  TPP envisions people learning the correct use of commas, but here we have evidence that they don’t, an illustrative assessment.

Inside Higher Ed should provide a disclaimer before they let a guy with a vested monetary interest in criticizing assessment use their publication as a bully pulpit. In case it isn't obvious, faculty generally dislike guys like Geoff because they seem to lack a basic understanding of the educational process, and a general contempt for what faculty think of as assessment, and how faculty assess learning.  At the very end of the article, Geoff says that institutions of higher education need “one essential unified goal: to make certain students are really learning”.  Always thought that was our single reason for existing, and to say we need such a goal rather indicates Geoff's disconnect with what he wishes to assess.

Academic bureaucracy

One of the first things to get the Rauner-round^TM here in Lincolnland are its universities.  Our new GnOPe governor says he'd like to give universities more money, but first they have to "cut their bureaucratic waste".  Now TPP is not a big fan of the administration, but he does know a few things after so many years as an academic. And TPP knows a few things about his university after having been around so many years. The state has been slowly but surely cutting its support for higher education which means the cost is shifted to the student in the form of tuition and fees. Here in Lincolnland the state support has shifted from around 68% of the cost and now some 30 odd years later state support is around 16-18%. Yet if you figure in inflation, and the actual real cost of doing business, our university is spending less of its budget to run itself than ever before. In other words to minimize the burden on students, our university has gotten more efficient. Another thing that is known by this academic is that our salaries are below the median of our peers at comparable institutions. Sigh. One wonders how us over-paid faculty escaped our governor's criticism? The majority of the administration operates to do things for students many of which the state mandates the university to do, and a lot of unfunded mandates have come our way; the state still wants things, but doesn't want to pay for them. Now the university could probably do with a few less deanlets, but seriously where is all this bureaucratic waste our governor wants cut? Well, he doesn't know, but it's his business acumen  and GnOPe belief that higher education is wasteful. Do not hold your breath for him to show you data, nor will he look at yours especially if it doesn't support his beliefs. What all of this means is that higher education is going to get its budget cut in name of curtailing wasteful spending whether there is any or not. It didn't take long did it? That's how it is. You do a great job, you do it more efficiently, and then you get budget cuts because of your non-existent wastefulness. Could have been worse. The governor of another Midwestern state wanted to know why university faculty couldn't teach 5 courses a term like high school teachers?  No need to try and explain that our job is to teach students to learn for themselves, and that means doing history, art, and science, and to be a scholar, someone who can apprentice young scholars, takes time outside the classroom. But then again one of our missions is to "train people for the work force of Lincolnland".  Yes, train, not educate.  Sit, speak, roll-over, heel, beg, that's training. And our politicians of all flavors don't seem to appreciate the difference between education and training. This is a good time to be retired. 

How to run a university - value of the blanket C

Back in the good old days when you enrolled in a common curriculum course at university, you stood about a 60% chance of getting a C more or less for just showing up and sort of trying. About 10% of the class would be grade gunners and receive As; and the 15% who didn't quite make As but out-distanced the Cs would get Bs. The real screw offs and the academically unfortunate would get the Ds (10%) and Fs (5%).  This was called the "blanket C" and it only required faculty to distinguish those students in the upper and lower groups; everyone else just got a C.  You expected it. Grade expectations of parents, employers, and graduate schools were adjusted to the blanket C and anything on the sunny side of 2.0 was looked upon favorably. TPP will not mention his own undergrad GPA which was sort of embarrassing even in the blanket C era. Let's just say he lived up to the low expectations. Now the point here is that jocks were still jocks, but not one objected when the hulking brute sitting behind you in English passed forward a page torn from a spiral notebook with a couple of paragraphs printed on it in pencil, signed Hulkowski- Football in big, bold letters at the top, which you could not help notice as you covered it with your own page and a half typed essay that you slaved over for at least 2 hours.  When the papers were handed back, your own essay would be covered with red marks and emblazoned with a C, as expected, and as expected, Hulko's paper would also have a C at the top, but it had remained pristine and unmarked. Why should either party bother, because you see, it was OK for jocks to get Cs. Well, grade inflation has just shot the hell out of the blanket C, a grade now reserved for the no-shows, or maybe not used at all. As explained by a dean to a colleague who had the audacity to give no-shows Cs at a Carolina university (Luke, Puke, something like that), "We are a selective school; there just aren't any "average" students here."  Even jocks had to get As, and they had to take more courses than just "Coaching winning fill-in-the-sport 101".  This is the reason for the huge uproar at another university also in the Carolinas, which one doesn't really matter because this could have happened at more than two of them because this is just how things are, and it isn't even limited to those states, but if you want a list, check the national rankings in football. When it was just a blanket C, no one got upset, because the jock-student was actually there to turn in and receive the assignment back, but with grade inflation and rising expectations for better preparation of jocks for the major leagues, jocks could no longer bother any more with even the pretense of being a student. You got an A in certain courses just for existing and playing your sport. Those graduates and students who are actually at university to get their 3.8 GPA even though it has now been greatly devalued because everyone else also has a similar GPA get upset when their GPA isn't higher than that of the non-attending athlete, or anyone else for that matter. Alumni from years before who had a 3.8 in the era of blanket Cs (TPP will not mention Mrs. Phactor here, but he could.) are really upset because this practice just tears the lid off of the higher education, except for sports, problem. It means their prestigious institution of higher education has laxer standards and much higher tuition than the local community college. People are upset at finding out the whole system is broke because some careless people got caught, but it opens the door for the next step in this evolution by just making learning optional for big sports "undergrads" who want to play in the minor leagues hoping to grab the brass ring of a major league contract for millions of dollars paid for the 4.2 years of the average pro career and the physical disabilities there after. Then if they don't make it in the pros, and after they blow their life's earnings in 5.3 years, they can reapply to university with a different attitude about learning.   

Systematic fiscal abuse of public universities

Higher education especially the USA's systems of public state universities has been one area where our country truly excelled, and now this educational success story is being denigrated and gradually being killed by a thousand little cuts.
Those of us who have worked in higher education over the past 40 years know this so very well. A recent essay expresses TPP's understanding of the situation quite well.  "Emerging evidence from the Delta Cost Project (as well as other studies) has shown that the exploding costs of higher education are not primarily caused by a heavily tenured faculty and their “big” salaries. Indeed, over the past decade or two, as the faculty had been reconfigured, total institutional expenditures for instruction have declined — offset by increased expenditures for administration, student support, and auxiliary enterprises. American higher education has not put itself on a diet. Rather it is being starved by state governments."
Over TPP's entire academic career his salary has increased just a tad over 400%, which sounds pretty good until you realize how low his salary was way back then and that inflation went up 254% over the same period.  In particular raises have been little or none over the past 12 years. Of course, this is not by way of complaint, but just to illustrate that increases in costs have not been to support the lavish life styles of us faculty.  When TPP started his career here in Lincolnland some 40 years ago, the state was paying something over 60% of the cost of higher education, and it was quite a bargain. Now state support is about 17% of the cost of higher education, a decrease put into effect by simply gradually withholding support, year by year, and no legislative action was needed to do it either in the sense of having to pass an "increasing the cost of higher education" bill. (And the most brilliant part of this politically, is that then these very politicians put the blame for rising costs on the universities!) Lately science is being denigrated as just one more "opinion" or "bought and paid for results" because otherwise politicians might actually have to pay attention to science in forming policy. A lot of the products of higher education are being appreciated a lot less. And now, having priced higher education out of the reach of many, having transferred the cost to the students, those very politicians are arguing that well maybe higher education just isn't worth the cost and you're better off without it any who. How's that as a way of dealing with rising costs of higher education? Convince people they just don't need it!  None of this bodes well for our future and people had better begin to get pissed at such blatant disregard for education.  

Does "convergent intersectionality" bridge the gulf between science and the humanities?

“When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree…, I will never have taken a physics class..., I won’t have studied organic chemistry or … biology.”  “My excuse for my lack of background knowledge is that I am a humanities person. ….It’s actually the design of the intellectual environment of contemporary higher education that makes it difficult for a humanities major to take physics”[.., chemistry, or biology].  Or “vice versa”.

So writes Leslie Niro, a humanties major at Duke, in a column published in the CHE. Ah gee, another humanities major who laments never having had to take a science course (so perhaps her self-designed curriculum, of which she seems proud, leaves something to be desired) but basically what Leslie is really saying is that she isn’t taking science because it’s sounds like science, it's taught like science, and ideally you should learn at least some of it by doing science. It rather sounds like she wants to understand science, if only it weren't science.

Ms. Niro says, “The compartmentalized humanities and sciences have become divorced from each other.”

And when were they married? Not recently, and the divorce occurred because as science developed its methodology for learning it became quite impossible for science to remain in any way similar to the humanities. So unlike Ms. Niro’s contention, compartmentalization did not force a separation between the sciences and the humanities, but the very success of science is because of the difference in its way of learning. First, understand the differences in emphasis. While discussing something with a friend in the classics, TPP dismissed a story about something botanical as “that's only anecdotal”. And he said, what’s wrong with anecdotal? Well, it isn’t very good evidence. And he replied, “It’s the best evidence I have.”  A historian of some note sagely counseled TPP early in his career to come up with a new "theory" and then go find the data to support it, not realizing that doesn't work so well in biology. The sciences and the humanities also are separated because of the scope of study. The humanities study human artifacts, the art, literature, thoughts, and history of ourselves.  The sciences study life, the universe and everything else. And yet the humanities dominate the core curricula of universities.

Ms. Niro says, they are “compartmentalized because the nature of the undergraduate major means that most students in either division of the university don’t often delve into upper-level courses outside their majors.”

Yes, so very true.  It takes a considerable effort to learn enough of the basics to “delve into” the more sophisticated, upper-level courses. And we have pre-requisites to keep unprepared students out of such courses least they drag the courses back down to an intro level.

Ms. Niro says it “feels like I’m missing out on an entirely different perspective. The science [scientific] one.

But here’s the rub, her solution seems to be if only science more like the humanities she wouldn't miss out on this perspective. Ms. Niro doesn’t seem to appreciate that science is hierarchical; certain knowledge is needed to learn the next level. And science is operationally different from the humanities for the most part.  

 “What a college environment should offer is an increased emphasis on convergent intersectionality.”  [Emphasis mine]

Ah, TPP misunderstood her solution.Oh, boy! Convergent intersectionality. Now such things are done between disciplines in biology, and thus are called "interdisciplinary", as she herself illustrates in one of the -ologies, and many biological studies display a convergence between, say, systematics, evolution, and genetics. And some of my colleagues do this with colleagues in math and computer sciences, and even with colleagues in geography. But those are all the kind of sciency stuff avoided by most humanities majors. 

"Imagine an environment where the arts, humanities, and sciences converged. Perhaps an entirely different species of learning would rise." 

Do you think? No. Actually science and the humanities do converge, culturally, historically, philosophically. Generally this hasn’t turned out well for the scientists of those times as the predominate convergence seems to be one of castigating scientists and suppressing scientific study, even though the science was accurate for the time. This is because science attempts to discover the truths of life and the universe without regard for the prevailing cultural view. This still drives some humanities people crazy, and they, knowledge denialists, wish to diminish science to just one more narrative. But the entirely different species of learning that did arise is called science. Melding humanities and science into some sort of hybrid may well yield sterility, as it sometimes does in nature, the inability to do either properly.   

Mr. Niro observes that, "Taking two classes carrying a “natural sciences” code doesn’t mean that by the end of those two classes, I’ll have a deep understanding of anything related to those topics. It’s like being an academic butterfly, fluttering in and out of cognitive psychology or environmental science. ….Breadth does not equate with depth."

Ms. Niro is quite right. Two courses won’t provide a deep understanding of anything particularly in science. But if you think an “intersectional convergence” will provide a deeper understanding, then you really don’t understand what a deep understanding is.  TPP has socialized and worked with smart people his whole life, and most of them, smart as they are, have only a very superficial and mostly wrongish concept of evolution. She is also correct that “breadth does not equate with depth”, and here TPP is quite critical of the modern approach to core curricula that provides only the former and almost never the latter. It took considerable effort and wrangling for TPP to minor in the fine arts while majoring in the sciences. TPP will further contend that MOOCs are not the way to develop any depth either.  In the sciences, that depth only comes from actually getting into the lab or out into the field and doing biology because science isn't just a body of knowledge, it's a process. This seems to be at the crux of what Ms. Niro fails to understand. Without the process it isn't science, and that process, while working well with the natural world, doesn't seem to work at all for the humanities unless you wish to count the use of certain words in Paradise Lost and use the data to challenge Milton's authorship of this poem. 

TPP must disagree with Ms. Niro on another point. In spite of the differences, in spite of the methodological gulf, the sciences and humanities are not pitted against each other except as competitors for limited resources often in a zero-sum game. They are just different intellectual endeavors.  TPP spends some time discussing the humanities component of their education with our biology majors in a senior seminar. Their most common reaction is one of not really caring all that much about the humanities although they often had a particular favorite course – philosophy is the most common. Most of them feel that the humanities wasted their time and they wanted more control over how much or how little of a subject to take [like Ms. Niro], many opting for more depth, less breadth. Most certainly the non-majors taking biology feel much the same way; they simply don’t care very much about the subject. Some part of this is the language of science, the jargon, poses a learning barrier, as do concepts for the 70% of beginning college students who remain concrete thinkers, memorizers rather than conceptualizers. 

Ms. Niro contends that she and her cohorts “are coaxing intersectionality into our compartmentalized intellectual environment.”

Now of course this takes place within the sciences, and between the disciplines within a broad field such as biology. The interfaces with chemistry, geology, and physics are many and sharp boundaries don’t exist, but between biology and history, or biology and literature, or whatever not so much except what you learn by studying the history of science. And yes, they each know different things, and they learn from each other.  Hey, that's being educated! 

Ms. Niro suggests “we must create more opportunities for students from the humanities and the sciences to work together.”

OK, in general TPP agrees with Ms. Niro, but here TPP observes, and this is a massive generalization with notable exceptions, but people in the sciences generally know way more about the humanities and the arts than the humanities or arts people know about science. This is probably because people can and do pursue their interests in history, or art, or literature, on their own. This can be done with science, but not as easily. In science's early days, "amateurs" made many important contributions to various fields, but that hardly happens at all any more. TPP loves art and was good enough at it to minor in art, and the Phactors collect art and support artists, but nothing in all of that has improved my science or taught me a “new way” to do or approach biology, although well-versed biologists do coin concepts using ideas from the humanities, like the "red queen" [reference to Alice in Wonderland] hypothesis in evolution, and the like.

 Here’s Ms. Niro’s thought of the day. “Intersectionality … is the place where English and physics intimately tango and constructively duel simultaneously. “

Well, it is hard to express many concepts in science in spoken language, and sometimes ideas are presented by using analogies, but really Ms. Niro? Seriously?  Mutualistic? Good thing you’re in the humanities where such notions can get your blog published.  Notice what’s missing? Examples!  Your data! You did not provide one single example of where some creative people in the humanities and sciences produced an inclusive, collaborative intellectual intersectionality of value.  Conclusion: TPP thinks Ms. Niro knows not enough to envision the reality other than it’s a good sounding bit of jargon. TPP has a colleague who delved deeply enough into poetry to earn a master’s degree in literature.  And then she became a biologist. And when asked why, the thoughtful reply was that compared to studying biology, studying literature, while enjoyable, was really quite a trivial pursuit.  Teasing ideas out of poetry was not as intellectually challenging as finding out how nature works.  And mostly Ms. Niro’s quest for convergent intersectionality is not much of an intellectual pursuit either.

Watch out! This material may cause you to think!

For some time now, since the news of this first appeared, TPP has been going to write about students requesting "trigger warnings" on books, articles, and indeed, course syllabi. Fortunately this hasn't happened at our university as yet.  There are so many things wrong with this TPP hardly knows where to begin. In biology it's often religiously conservative students who wish to avoid evolution.  Hey, memorize the bones of a vertebrate skeleton.  OK!  Homology, not OK!  But how the bloody hell is TPP supposed to know what topics, -isms, or subjects will offend the delicate sensibilities of students?  And where is it written anyways that when you decide to study at the university level you need to be warned about something that might make you uncomfortable, uneasy, uncertain?  Now before you try to climb TPP's tree about this, be aware that while teaching economic botany, he was accused of being a sexist, a racist, and a religious proselytizer, all in the same semester.  Our undergraduate dean says its still some sort of record obviously set by an equal opportunity offensive instructor, and his response, "Keep up the good work."  Would it have mattered if the syllabus contained trigger warnings?  "Be aware that gatherer-hunter societies have a sexual division of labor presented as an observation about who knew plant resources and not some sort of advocacy for women's roles in a perfect society."  "Geographic origins of plants and plant products are based upon actual facts and not presented to denigrate any particular cultures or peoples, so no, African-Americans (G. W. Carver, in particular) did not invent peanut butter (Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a Canadian, patented the product in 1884 before Carver was even in college.)."  "Biblical botanical scholarship about every mention, in Hebrew, of a plant tells you about what plants were used and important in the Middle East, and this should not be construed as criticism or confirmation of the Bible's veracity (it actually goes both ways - it wasn't an apple; John the Baptist did eat locusts in the wilderness, but he wasn't eating grasshopper like insects, but carob pods.)." At any rate, such complaints come from unimaginative, uninformed, and perhaps, uneducable students, and probably the best response is to suggest that perhaps university study is beyond their intellectual or emotional maturity at the present time.  Kathleen Parker is not one of my favorite opinionators, but in this case she clearly nails it, particularly for the blame any administrator deserves for falling for this.  Requiring trigger warnings ..."is the busy work of smallish minds --yet another numbing example of political correctness run amok and the infantilizing of education in the service of overreaching sensitivity."  Gee, wish TPP could write like that.  Wow, just noticed that our local rag's title for this column was "Warning: Literature happening."  The real title was: "Fair warning, provoking a thought is literature’s job." Now possibly, they just wanted a much shorter, albeit less punchy title, or they thought the full title might hurt someone's feelings! Ha! 

Everything as usual

Let's see.  TPP is too much of a mother hen; TPP doesn't give enough instructions.  One week into a two week lesson, and two out of 24 people have uploaded material.  A mother hen warning was delivered.  People in the empty seats didn't get it.  The best of my students can keep pace with anyone anywhere; the worst of my students still belong in high school.  That's public education for you.  We provide opportunities, but a great many students fail to take advantage of what we provide, and then they wonder why they haven't learned much since high school.  On one hand my undergrad students are showing that they can operate at a graduate level; at the other extreme they are totally lost.  Well, it makes it easy to separate the sheep from the goats. 

The value of higher education

A few months back the Phactors had to hire help to move some heavy bedroom furniture, so the local moving company sent over a team of gorillas.  Typically enough they were relatively young and big guys.   But one of them says, “You’ve got some really nice art, abstracts, and so nicely hung.”  And in particular he was taken by one of the more sophisticated.  Then the other one asks, “Wow, those are great bonsai trees you’ve got.”  And then he begins discussing the why and wherefore of getting them started and the zen aesthetic.  The zen aesthetic?  From a couple of furniture movers?  Well, why not? 

Now this one episode illustrates a point that seems to have gone missing from recent commentary regarding the value of higher education.   The popular meme is that higher education just isn’t worth it in terms of getting a dollars and cents payback since the cost is so high and higher paying jobs remain quite limited.  No question higher education has been good to the Phactor; he did manage to pay and work his way through and graduate with three degrees and no debt, and got a decent paying job as a result.   But anyone who thinks higher education is just about how much money you’ll make, and a degree a ticket to a more lucrative job, is actually going to university for the wrong reason.  You go to get educated.  You go to learn a more sophisticated way to read, to write, to speak, and to think.   And yes, this frequently leads to higher paying jobs and professions.   But doesn’t higher education lead to an appreciation of many things you never ever would encounter if you had not had higher education?  Art, music, literature, plays; none of them have had much impact on my professional career, but my appreciation of such culture has greatly enriched my life, and indeed, our art collection has grown to an impressive size although simple acquisitive accumulation was not at all our goal.  One wonders if these critics of higher education’s value resented or lacked a basic “liberal arts” component to their education?  Who could argue that a plumber would earn more money by having taken a philosophy course?   But it may well make the plumber a more interesting member of our society.   Maybe one who sees issues in more nuanced shades of gray and in less stark black and white terms?   Given the simplistic, simple ideological thinking that abounds these days, two ideas strike me.  One, maybe higher education hasn’t been doing such a good job.  And two, maybe it’s in the best interests of ideologues to promote a less sophisticated, less intellectual citizenry who won’t see the logical problems and the insufficiencies of many arguments so easily.   My two movers much improved my feeling about how things are going, but the news is so filled with examples of weak intellectual tea, one wonders what this means about our society as a whole.  But with so many people denying what is known, with so many people relying on the inability of people to think critically, with so many people enamored with simple ideas and explanation, one wonders if a more intellectual public is what such people want at all?  And in that case it serves the promoters of ignorance to argue that a higher education just isn’t worth it.  How very unfortunate for all of us.  

Monday education blues

Mondays tend to be a depressing day, and to make it worse today is gray, rainy (a good thing), and an exam is scheduled this morning in one of my classes. Why should a professor be depressed about giving an exam? Think about what are the students feeling? Ah, yes. It is depressing because after so many years of the same pattern, you know exactly what to expect, you just don't know who will do well and who will demonstrate that they are just not yet ready for advanced classes. Actually most of the class will do well enough, and those a bit disappointed will adjust their approach and perform better from now on with the result that 70-80% of the class will probably get Bs and As, which is not unexpected from upper class majors. However in recent years my class has attracted a 5 to 10 transfer students who having just completed junior college have transferred to the university level. Half of these will do fine, but the other half will prove they are not ready having not progressed much beyond the high school level in terms of study skills, work ethic, and educational expectations. They are the ones who aren't taking notes during a discussion because they have been trained to disregard any material that does not easily conform to multiple choice examination questions. Sadly for them, such questions are not on my exams, and when confronted with blank paper, even when a soothing pastel colored blankness, upon which they are to relate their understanding of a discussion that they failed to take any notes about, they are at a loss. "It's not in the textbook." Ah, an insight, finally! Yes, correct, you have an instructor who does not need a textbook to teach and who does not teach the textbook. Although not an issue as yet in Lincolnland, the dismantling of public education continues apace especially under the guidance of GnOPe governors, like the ones in Florida and Texas, and like the educational amateurs they are, their reforms are recipes for pandering. The reason some students arrive at university from junior colleges unready is that too much attention is paid to student satisfaction in evaluating faculty performance, part of the "education should be run as a business" attitude. But learning isn't always easy, or fun, and doesn't always yield top grades. The Phactor learned more from one SOB than almost any other professor he encountered, but it took me 10 years and a lot more sophistication to realize that and any evaluations of his teaching effectiveness back then would have generated outrage and scorn. He didn't care actuallyabout whether you liked him or not, part of his charm, or whether you liked what he was doing, but only if you learned. And it wasn't easy, or fun, although having a real-life blond cheerleader in your study group had its moments, but we did learn, and this guy was so far ahead of the educational curve most science teachers have yet to catch up to him. And when finally the Phactor figured this out, it was awe-inspiring. So, having amateurs decide how you do your job is not good business practice, but there we go. And as the papers are being turned in, you know how disappointing some of them will be, so you have to remind yourself that no amount of your effort can help them all achieve, but at some future time, some of them may credit you for a job well done, even if you didn't teach the textbook.

Students doing good - Real Assessment

Administrators and politicians always want to know how we know if we've taught our students anything. And of course they want it reduced to a simple little standardized exam. The Phactor has ranted about this issue in the past (here, here, and here), but it's too nice of a day to really rant. But you see, a former student who graduated a bit over a decade sent me an email to tell me that even though she miss IDed a columbine on a final plant ID exam, she hasn't missed IDed one since. One important thing to notice is that even though an exam indicated a failure of learning, learning took place, so something important was taught. This is something the dim bulbs that run many universities just don't get. Real learning is a complicated thing, and that's why you must rely on faculty to tell you when it has occurred. Students get to assess our teaching and courses even before they've finished a course, and the Phactor has gotten his share of brickbats and kudos, but the point here is simple. Most students don't know how much they learned, and sometimes a course just starts them on a trajectory of continued learning, and isn't that the point of higher education, developing interests and learning to learn. And when we do that, well, that's a real assessment of educational effectiveness. We've taught somebody something really important, and our students may not know or fully realize this until years after they graduate. The same SOB (He'd laugh out loud if he reads this.) taught me the first and last biology course the Phactor ever took as an undergraduate, and it took me years to realize that even though he wasn't a kind, likable, warm and fuzzy type of faculty member, he was an exceedingly influential and effective instructor who was years ahead of the curve on science education, and important lessons were learned that had an impact on my successful career as an educator. So real assessment of real learning, and therefore effective teaching, takes years. My role was simple, not just to teach some botany, but to instill an interest in plants and learning, and as a result in some small part, my student has done real well for herself and the Phactor is very proud of her active role in Seattle Tilth, spreading a legacy that plants are fun, important, and interesting. But many of our fearless leaders aren't very interested in such data points probably because if they admitted these were important, they'd also have to admit that we faculty know what we're doing. So it will be interesting to see how the new mandate for more assessment of our teaching effectiveness will deal with this. Prediction: it won't.

Assessment versus teaching - again

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a commentary that chides teaching faculty for not embracing assessment. And if we don’t embrace assessment, how do we know our students are learning? Do “we rely on evidence that is dubious (teaching evaluations) or circular (grades)”, they ask?
Well, girls, why are you so interested in this issue? Oh, yes, their commentary is actually flogging their soon to be published book on assessment, so you know of their deep commitment to learning. Once again the Phactor will pull on his boots and wade into this issue because he continues to wonder why to these women presume faculty don’t know when students are learning? You think we read about it in student evaluations? Hardly. Why would you think grades circular when those grades reflect levels of learning in evidence after extensive assessment? Basically it means they don’t trust faculty to do their jobs. Or maybe things are way more subjective in their disciplines? Granted the ABCs are not a nuanced reflection of my extensive assessments, but graduate schools and employers don’t want to read my essays discussing those nuances about various students in various courses; they want a quick short-hand of relative learning, grades. When asked for recommendations, the long version is provided. No, what these twits want is what many administrators want; some sort of broad assessment "instrument" (their word, not mine) that can be used across disciplines, colleges, and universities, although they admit that neither the National Survey of Student Engagement nor any other standardized assessment instruments, blunt as they are, can capture disciplinary knowledge and approaches to critical thought. That ladies is why they bloody well need disciplinary experts like me! My basis for reaching a conclusion that students have learned something is based upon their relative abilities to meet learning measures of several sorts including their answers to exam questions.
Here’s an example from just one of my disciplinary exams for an undergraduate course in plant diversity in its entirety less the more objective portions (definitions, factoids, etc.).
1. Chloroplasts and mitochondria are two of the cellular hallmarks of eukaryotic organisms. Evaluate the hypotheses that account for these organelles based upon observations and testable predictions.
2. Complex metabolisms appear to be constructed of smaller, simpler, ancestral components, some of which adopt new functions. Use photosynthesis and phylogenetic hypotheses to illustrate this concept.
3. Relative to the chemistry of the Universe how usual are the elemental components of life?
4. Ribosomal RNA sequence data provided biologists with a new phylogenetic understanding of all living organisms and had a major effect on our definition of Kingdom Monera. Explain.
5. Chlorophyll is composed of what type of building block molecule? What does phylogeny suggest about the hypothetical origin of chlorophyll? How does it differ in function from its presumed predecessor?
6. What are extremophile organisms, and why might our perspective of what is extreme be somewhat skewed? Why is the biology of extremophiles important to our understanding of early life on Earth?
7. What is the carbon biochemical fingerprint of life and what does it tell us?
8. Why is actin and actin binding protein so important in the early evolution of eukaryotic organisms?
9. For the longest time no fossil evidence of life was known prior to the Cambrian when fossils of large conspicuous organisms suddenly appear. How was fossil evidence of ancient life found? How old and what kinds of fossils were found? Then evaluate the sudden appearance of fossils.
Now having read those do you think students who can answer such questions have failed to demonstrate any learning? Think you could pull the answers for an exam like that out of the air and BS me without having done adequate reading and study, and learned something? Do you think the instructor incapable of discriminating objectively among excellent, good, poor, and terrible answers? Oh yes, and then later concepts are built upon these concepts, so cramming and purging won't do the trick. Do you still think you can capture disciplinary knowledge and critical thought on some sort of assessment instrument that doesn't simplify it to the banal? Sorry ladies, you sound clueless about the depth, detail, and sophistication of disciplines and that is the only gap that exists between teaching and assessment, so best leave assessment to us, the real professionals.