Apt. 11D

College Criticism Continues

I've been getting e-mails from family and friends to tell me to stop the anti-academic diatribes. I can't help it! The fodder keeps on coming. I really want to change the subject, but I can't.

Wendy just sent me a link to a blog post about Andrew Hacker's new book, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz writes:

Andrew Hacker, who is professor emeritus at Queens College in New York, recalls the day a young political scientist walked into his department to interview for a job. Everything about the man's resume made him an ideal candidate. He was finishing his dissertation at a top university. His mentors had written effusive recommendations. But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible. He was not invited back for a second interview. 

She follows up with a great interview with Hacker.

The Liberal Arts Strikes Back

Everybody is talking about this video.

Thinking about Tenure

I've been thinking about tenure this morning. I have fifteen minutes until my chiropractor appointment, which isn't enough time to write a careful post. Let the bombs explode.

What would happen if we got rid of academic tenure?

Academic Tenure: Time's Up?

Does academic tenure really protect radical thought? Does it create barriers for employment? There are two good blog posts about the downsides of giving professors a job for life.

Megan McArdle writes,

Most scholars in their sixties are not producing path-breaking new research, but they are precisely the people that tenure protects.  Scholars in their twenties and thirties, on the other hand, have no academic freedom at all.  Indeed, because tenure raises the stakes so high, the vetting of future employees is much more careful--and the candidates, who know this, are almost certainly more careful than they would be if they were on more ordinary employment contracts.  As a result, the process of getting a degree, getting a job, and getting tenure has stretched out to cover one's whole youth. So tenure makes young scholars--the kind most likely to attack a dominant paradigm--probably more careful than they would be under more normal employment process.

Dean Dad questions the usefulness of tenure from an administrator's point of view. He talks about the enormous costs of supporting tenured faculty.

The cost of tenure goes far beyond the salary of the tenured. It includes the opportunity cost of more productive uses that had to be skipped to pay for a decision made decades earlier in a different context. (We actually have people for whom staff jobs were created when their tenured speciality went away. That’s a direct cost of tenure.) It also includes the cost of the various bribes that have to be paid to the tenured to get them to step up to acknowledge institutional needs: course releases (a direct cause of adjunct hiring), preferential scheduling (whether it makes sense for students or not), and even cash stipends (which have to be paid for somehow). 

It's liberating to be done with academia (well, I'm 90 percent sure that I'm done). I'm going to APSA this year, but it's mostly as a tourist. The word on the street is that academia's employment woes should continue for the next few years. I'm moving on. So, I can freely say that these guys speak the truth.

The only positive aspect of the tenure system is the relief on my friends' faces once they get tenure. Grad school and the tenure process is grueling and unstable. People put off buying homes and starting families. Tenure marks an end of torture and the beginning of a normal life that other people enjoy in their 20's. I worry that without tenure, the hazing from peers would continue forever.

Affirmative Action for Snookie and "The Situation"

In today's New York Times, Ross Douthat writes about recent studies of admission practices at elite colleges. These studies show that lower-class whites aren't getting the fat envelope that promises a spot an elite school at the same rate as wealthy white kids.

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

While affirmative action programs have helped lower income minority students, there aren't the same practices set in place to help lower income whites. In fact, wealthy white kids have an advantage over less wealthy white kids. Why? Legacies?

David Brooks and The Big Shaggy

A couple of days ago, David Brooks wrote a passionate column about the importance of a liberal arts education. As students face a horrendous job market, they are increasingly majoring in practical majors -- business, economics, and technology -- and staying away from majors that don't seem to lead directly to a career plan. What does one do with a history or a philosophy major? God knows that we don't want them going on for a PhD.

Brooks writes, "There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries."

However, history majors have certain advantages over the practical majors. Brooks explains that you learn how to write effective business documents and to use language to build a brand. A knowledge of history also gives you a certain perspective on life. It gives us perspective on the irrational, on word-less beauty, and on human frailties.

Yes to everything he said.

When it became distressingly obvious that Steve's history PhD wasn't going to land him a job, he applied for a job with a temp agency in Manhattan. His first assignment was at an investment bank. He was an administrative assistant assigned to answering phones and filling out basic paperwork. He was hired permanently a few months later, and he's been promoted many times over the years. He's a vice-president now, and will hopefully move up another level in the next year or so.

Steve works in the documents division. He negotiates the contracts and makes sure that stock brokers fill out the proper paperwork in order to trade properly. His clients are the state of New Mexico and major corporations, not Grandma who wants to buy a couple of bonds. It's a very intense job with quite a bit of responsibility. Most of his colleagues have law or business degrees.

While Steve had to learn about the stock market and money stuff on the job, he already had quite a few skills that have served him well in the past ten years. He knew how to write. He knew how to research information. He was able to work independently. He did have to unlearn "professorial speak;" he had to stop pontificating in business meetings and he had to stop using words like "the petite bourgeoisie" on the trading floor.

Aside from the practical benefits, Steve's history background gives him a lot of joy. He reads history tomes on the bus ride into the city and he tells Jonah about how the rifle helped transform American history.

I used to teach Introduction to Political Theory every semester, in addition to other political science classes. The students and I would go through Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx and all the dead dudes (and a few dead chicks). It was always a packed class. Thirty kids in a stuffy room. Most of the students were there, because it was a requirement for the political science major. They hadn't read any of that material before.

They loved it. They ate it up on toast.

After we read Pericles funeral oration, I had them imagine how a modern leader could rework the structure and the themes of his speech. Then we talked about Socrates. They loved that cantankerous old dude who walked up to strangers and asked them, “... aren’t you ashamed to be only concerned with making money and give no thought about truth and perfecting your soul?" I asked them what they would think if a stranger went up to them while they were waiting in line in Starbucks and told them to think about truth and philosophy and not money. Lots of laughter and discussion.

I understand that students today have to be practical. We've certainly had to go the practical route ourselves in order to provide for the kids. However, I hope that in the rush to do the practical thing that we still make time to do do the fun thing -- read history books on the bus and to take the class that lets us imagine a crazy old dude in Starbucks.

How Do You Explain Adjunct Exploitation?

Megan McArdle also read that article in Insider Higher Ed about the exploitation of adjuncts and part time employees in academia. Some highlights from the Higher Ed article:

[Adjuncts and contingent faculty] now make up an amazing 73 percent of the nearly 1.6 million-employee instructional workforce in higher education and teach over half of all undergraduate classes at public institutions of higher education. Their number has now swollen to more than a million teachers and growing.

Those one million workers are making less than workers in McDonald's. They enjoy no benefits, no security, and they are working sixty hour weeks doing the same work as tenured faculty.

Megan wants to know how this exploitation can occur in a profession that is dominated by liberals, who should be the champions of the exploited.

This is a good question. Is it hypocrisy to be champions of the  underdog, while letting some guy down the hall from you survive on ramen noodes? 

YES, IT IS! Well, somewhat, sort of.

So, why are senior tenured and tenure-track faculty turning a blind eye to exploitation in their own midst? Lots of reasons.

First of all, people are allowing themselves to be exploited. Actually, lots and lots of people take these adjunct jobs with the vague hope that they'll someday win the lottery and get that smoking jacket and a tenured job. These people have been twisted to believe that an academic lifestyle is the only acceptable route to happiness and that working for the man means dull, meaningless work. It's hard to get the energy to fight exploitation, when there's a long line of people waiting to take a beating.

Secondly, the tenured and tenure track are in separate worlds from the adjunct faculty. They aren't chatting in the hallway about last night's American Idol. The adjuncts aren't invited to the Christmas party or the faculty meetings. The adjuncts are the invisible house elves who teach those icky intro classes. So, the tenured and tenure track are really in the dark about the conditions of adjunct life. Or they convince themselves that the adjuncts will find a good job in the next job cycle. Or they get Darwinian and believe that the adjuncts aren't as smart as they are; they are the Neanderthals of the academic world. Really, they just don't think about it at all. 

Thirdly, tenure track are under a lot of pressure themselves. They have to get tenure, which is hard work and stressful. They have to appease the right people, and it would be stupid to critique the system. The older faculty just doesn't get it.

Fourthly, the adjuncts aren't organized. They aren't part of the union that represents the other faculty. There is no organization to form a rally and make demands. If they were better organized, the tenured faculty would certainly support their demands, but it would be unreasonable for the tenured faculty to take up the cause of a decentralized, mobile, disorganized, demoralized group of people who aren't even aware that they're being exploited.

RELATED: Check out Harry B's post about whether teaching matters at American universities.

Alternatives to College

Over the weekend, one of the most read articles in the New York Times was about proposals to create more alternatives to college. Proponents say that college is not needed for many jobs.

Among those calling for such alternatives are the economists Richard K. Vedder of Ohio University and Robert I. Lerman of American University, the political scientist Charles Murray, and James E. Rosenbaum, an education professor at Northwestern. They would steer some students toward intensive, short-term vocational and career training, through expanded high school programs and corporate apprenticeships.

“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”

Instead of a B.A., students could be getting Associate degrees in community colleges and vocational schools. 

I am a huge fan of community colleges. One of my old high school classmates is making more as EKG technician with her AA from Bergen Community College than most of my friends with PhDs in philosophy. Students know this, and are signing up for community colleges in record numbers. Our local community college is splitting at the seams. This is the one area of higher education that has seen growth in recent years.

The one downside of pushing people out of four-year colleges is that they quickly hit career roadblocks without a BA in hand. Another friend is fabulous at her retail store. She's clearly management material, but without a BA, her corporate office won't consider for those higher level jobs.

How Do You Explain the Girl Scouts?

In a fascinating paper in the March issue of Perspectives, Barbara Arneil examines membership numbers in the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.

There was a major drop in membership in both the Boy and the Girl Scouts in the 1970s. Robert Putnam explains that the drop in membership was a result of the rise of time in front of TV and later video games, the increase in dual family employment, the increase of suburban sprawl, and a decline in civic spirit. 

Arneil says that the decline occurred in the 1970s, which was a critical period for in American history. "For the 1970s ushered in a “civil rights” generation with a new post-materialist set of values  that sought to rectify the injustices associated with war, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability." The Girl Scouts adjusted to the new mentality, while the Boy Scouts didn't. Therefore, the Girl Scouts saw a jump in membership after 1985, while membership in the Boy Scouts did not.

It was a very interesting, well-written paper. It was fascinating to see the differences in membership between the scouts. However, I think that other factors have to explain why the girl scouts have thrived and the boy scouts haven't. Some ideas:

• It's all about the cookies and the tiny drops of meth mixed into those Thin Mints.
• Fear of perverted scout leaders getting in a tent with little Johnny.
• Competition with organized sports. I bet that time in little League and soccer game has increased.

Anxiety and Transitions

For the past few weeks, there has been an undercurrent in the comment section that we are entering a period of transition in the economy and society. The economy is moving in a new direction. Professions that were long considered secured and respected may not exist much longer. This anxiety is playing out in many ways. Parents are more worried than ever that their children won't have the requisite skills to find work. They question the education that they're getting in high schools and colleges. Also, adults are struggling to redefine their professional lives.

I was struck by a statistic in a recent article about colleges and the humanities. It said that the University of Phoenix, the online college, has the largest enrollment of any American university: over 400,000 undergrads and 78,000 grad student. The author concluded with deep pessimism about the employment prospects of newly minted PhDs. I suspect the move to online education and the decline of traditional liberal arts colleges has larger implications. 

Tim Burke writes about that a new style of parenting is arising out of our insecurities.