Category Archives: academia

bridging the gap between what universities can offer and what students can do

At its best, a college education offers students–regardless of their career plans–opportunities to participate as apprentices in real research that addresses unanswered and pressing questions. That experience is good for the mind and the character. I think people understand the value of such work in a scientific context; they realize that they (or their children) would benefit from a summer’s work in a biology lab. The humanities, the arts, and the social sciences offer comparable benefits.

It is largely in order to create such opportunities that we train college teachers in PhD programs that emphasize research; that we grant them tenure in return for a record of active scholarship; and that we expect them to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

But the fact is that most students never experience actual research. Most do not come to college with the skills and knowledge necessary to take advantage of such opportunities. Many would not willingly choose to participate in research. A majority of American professors are not actually and currently involved in scholarship. And some of the most prolific and talented scientists and scholars are uninterested in teaching of any kind. The combination of those factors reduces the set of students and faculty who work together on real research problems to a very small number.

I’d resist any reforms that would reduce the size of that set or that would limit such experiences to elite institutions. Thus I’d resist efforts to move professors away from scholarship. But I also reject the status quo. We can’t be satisfied if most students miss the intended benefits of higher education–benefits that are supposed to derive from tenure, peer-review, and graduate education. Nor can we simply wring our hands in despair or blame other institutions, such as high schools, if there is a gap between students’ backgrounds and the best opportunities we offer at our institutions. We have to take responsibility for the gap.

Some of the most promising answers, such as the Gemstone Program at my university, pull together teams of students to conduct ambitious collaborative projects over more than one semester. This is a different model from the individual student in the lab or seminar room. The research is student-led, hence not really at the frontier of an academic discipline. In some cases, students pursue questions that have already been answered; they reinvent the wheel. But their projects are challenging, and the professors who coach them can draw on their expertise.

The secret thoughts of a Maryland School of Public Policy prof

No wonk has ever won a vote, yet we’re the ones who rule.
For us, the whole of Washington’s become a kind of school.
The politicos are our students; they show up from the sticks
With shiny smiles, fancy suits, and campaign-finance tricks.
But when we talk cost/benefit, chi-squared, or Freddie Mac,
Their brains feel slow, their spirits, low; their mouths look kinda slack.
“You profs,” they drawl, “it seems y’all know exactly what to do.
You write the bill, just as you will, and tell us when you’re through.”
In College Park, we’ve students, too; they’re the ones who pay us.
But they don’t exactly have the clout to make us into playahs.
That’s why we love the World Bank, C-SPAN, or a think tank,
Anywhere that cameras roll and the offices are swank.
Civic engagement? Sounds like a drag.
Public deliberation? Don’t make me gag.
A populist revolt? Not in our time.
The people only care about celebrities and crime.
Youth are dumb and selfish, but that’s really no surprise.
Their parents can’t detect the most patronizing lies.
Voting’s overrated: I’ve hardly ever done it.
As for the government, who’d really want to run it?
And while I’m getting all of this off my panting chest,
What about the folks who think that Maryland’s the best?
Please, a Terp is a turtle with his head up in his … shell.
Against a Blue Devil, he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell.
The Terps are meek, the ozone’s weak, our troops are up a creek.
Philosophy’s obsolescent and the future’s looking bleak.
Net intelligence is constant, but the population keeps on growing.
We’re out of cash, ideas, and friends, but the mess is still ongoing.
The end is near, I sadly fear, for planet, country, school.
But I get paid for opinions, so my future’s looking cool!

loyalty to place in the age of jet-set academia

I grew up with Jason Stanley, who wrote a thoughtful post on the Leiter Report about changes in academia since our days as fellow faculty-brats. His father, Prof. Manfred Stanley (whom I knew well and miss) was committed to his institution and community, to such a point that the idea of moving “bewildered him.”

He tended to value conferences, reading groups, and the development of links between the university and the community at least as much as his own written work. … His own production clearly suffered from his other activities. For example, he spent years working with a poor town near Syracuse on a project concerning the responsibility of companies to the communities they abandon. A lot emerged from this project; a documentary, several town-meetings, and a civics class for high school students in that town. But very few publications emerged from it. He also viewed his obligations to his community as extending to his family. For example, he sent his children to Syracuse city public schools. As a professor at the local good university, he felt an extra obligation to be a member of the community, rather than a lesser obligation.

Jason believes that our “generation of academics is quite different.” We change institutions regularly, or hope to do so. We think of ourselves as “free agents,” willing to obtain better salaries, working conditions, and status by moving or threatening to move. Our communities are not composed of colleagues, let alone neighbors and fellow citizens, but specialists in our field whom we “see at conferences and talks, and chat with on e-mail and on the phone.”

I think at the deepest level what has happened is a form of Weberian rationization. (That seems a fitting theory to apply in a post that invokes Manny Stanley.) Increasingly, the whole population of college-bound students and faculty have in mind the same criteria of excellence. They rank all institutions on one great Chain of Being that has Harvard and MIT at (or near) the top, and the local community college near the bottom. Lew Friedland and Shauna Morimoto find (pdf) that all high school students in one midwestern town– including those who are struggling in school–envision the same status hierarchy and believe that their life-prospects will be determined by how high they can rise on it.

When everyone is trying to move up a single scale, certain practical consequences result. Actual, published rankings circulate and are influential. Rising in the rankings makes an institution more competitive, thus allowing it to admit better qualified students who are easier and more fun to teach. In turn, the rankings are affected by institutions’ international reputation for research. As in any Weberian system, quantifiable and generalizable criteria begin to count: e.g., the number of publications, or the rate of publication in the most competitive journals. Professors are highly aware of their institutions’ reputations and are very tempted to try to move up when possible. Hence there’s a lot of moving around. Building a local reputation (on or off campus) doesn’t increase one’s market value, so we put our energy into national publications for the people who might write us recommendation letters.

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scholarship & teaching

(Pasadena) Sometimes I find it strange that we pay scholars to teach young people. Scholarship and teaching are often such different affairs. A society could employ scholars to conduct research and teach apprentice scholars but never expect them to come into contact with regular undergraduates.

However, last weekend, I found myself at an academic conference session that reminded me why it’s important for researchers also to teach. It was a very strong panel of pyschologists who study adolescents’ engagement in school (not their civic engagement; their commitment to academic work). That’s an important subject, because kids who are disengaged tend to drop out of school and then pay a very serious price for the rest of their lives. The presentations described rigorous and relevant research. I had a somewhat detached perspective on the whole business, because I’ve never even taken a psychology course; I had few preconceptions or opinions about “scree charts,” “eigenvalues,” and “confirmatory factor analysis”–the topics of the discussion. It occurred to me that when social science works well, matters of great public importance are divided up into chunks that can be addressed through rigorous, cumulative research. Scholars build on previous work and use the most advanced available tools on manageable questions. Everyday presentations and discussions within the discipline tend to be narrow and technical. All of that is fine–as long as the whole enterprise moves toward important general conclusions. Thus it’s valuable for specialists to have to present their whole subject to novices who want to know why it matters. I watched last weekend’s presenters talk about factor-analysis with their colleagues from around the country and imagined them also lecturing to undergraduates about American education. It seemed to be just the right combination.

a market failure in higher ed (the Summers case)

In the highly competitive global market for college students and faculty, Harvard is the leader. A major consulting firm that was hired to advise Oxford (I think it was McKinsey & Co.) found that Oxford could potentially compete with any institution in the world except Harvard. In a business obsessed with rankings, Harvard sits on top, and everyone else emulates it.

President Larry Summers was popular with students (Harvard’s “customers”), but unpopular with faculty (the employees). He was forced out by the Trustees, who have a fiduciary duty to protect the institution. Although we know that students never have much clout, it’s a bit of a puzzle that the faculty should prevail in an organization that is so successful at attracting student-applicants.

Of course, it’s possible that Summers was forced to resign because he was wrong on the merits, and the Trustees saw that. I suspect, however, that the issue was not his comments about women scientists or his confrontation with Cornel West (on which the Trustees might have thought he was wrong). The issue was a set of curricular and budgetary reforms that promised to enhance Harvard’s actual education while eroding the power of tenured professors in the Arts and Sciences. On those matters, Summers was very likely correct.

I want to emphasize that I don’t see students as customers. Nevertheless, an economic analysis is useful for revealing how institutions actually work (as opposed to how they should work). Here are two contrasting views of the economics of the situation: