The November Fifth Coalition–an assemblage of organizations and individuals devoted to civic renewal in America–has a new statement on its website. The statement will become a petition that people can sign and thereby join an email list for the Coalition. At this stage, it’s not quite ready for electronic signatures, but comments are welcome.
We also have a Facebook page.
On plane rides last week, I very much enjoyed reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Chabon imagines that in 1941, a temporary refuge was created for European Jews around Sitka, Alaska. The piny islands filled with millions of Yiddish-speaking, urban “Yids” who created a kind of shtetl or Brooklyn of the North. Unfortunately, their lease ends around the present time, which is the time of the narration. Thus the whole district is threatened with “reversion”–which means a new diaspora for the population. In this context, a Raymond Chandleresque detective story unfolds.
Nostalgia and imagination are two keynotes of the Jewish experience. The religious are nostalgic for the ancient Kingdom; they imagine the Messiah. The secular are nostalgic for Poland ca. 1920 or Brooklyn ca. 1950. They are prone to imagine Marxist or Libertarian utopias; fictional narratives built out of nostalgia; or successful assimilation. At the personal level, nostalgia for youth and flights of imagination seem especially common among Jews, although maybe I’m just thinking about myself.
Michael Chabon imagines–with phantasmagoric clarity–a whole world of Sitka Jews. He threatens this world with closure, thereby making his main characters and his readers nostalgic for a completely imaginary past. The Sitka world itself is built on nostalgia and imagination: as in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the rabbi’s house is an exact replica of his old home in Eastern Europe, but the inhabitants dream of Zion. Chabon is nostalgic, too, for hard-boiled detectives who live in flop-house hotels and walk noir streets. Out of that material, he imagines something completely original.
If nostalgia and imagination are two thematic centers in the book, a third is redemption. Chabon sets up a powerful contrast between religious redemption and the redemption that involves two human beings who forgive one another and decide to move forward together. Achieving that requires imagination and some suspension of nostalgia.
(On an airplane between Denver and Charlotte): I’m sure people learn something in college, but the evidence is not strong that, on average, they learn very much. Students perform better on assessments of knowledge and critical thinking at the end of college than at the beginning. But the gains are fairly consistent regardless of the type, size, and mission of the institution.* This finding suggests to me that students aren’t much affected by the educational opportunities that colleges offer. And that doesn’t surprise me, because their main opportunity is the chance to sit in a large lecture-hall listening to a distant figure who might as well be on TV.
If students don’t learn all that much in college, why do they (or their families) pay tuition? And why do students struggle away on schoolwork for four years? One answer is: sorting. Students with good grades from fancy institutions get better jobs than students with poor grades from easy-to-enter colleges, who get better jobs than people with no degrees at all. This is because employers use admission, graduation, and grades as measures of how desirable students are. The fanciest colleges, being the hardest to get into, can pick the applicants who are on course to being the most desirable employees. Merely by admitting a kid, they raise his lifelong income, especially if he performs as well or better than his peers.
In order to attain a privileged position in the market, colleges need not actually educate students. Instead, they need need a reputation for being difficult to get into. To attract applicants, it also helps to provide very comfortable facilities and lots of services outside the classroom; and to appear in the newspaper often for excellent research or athletics. Harvard, for example, employs 5,102 “administrative and professional” staff (excluding clerical and technical workers and those in “service and trades”). Harvard has 112 full-time professional and administrative workers in its athletics department alone. This compares to 911 tenured faculty (or 2,163 total faculty).
I exaggerate this picture, of course. But I fear there is truth in it.
If you wanted to start completely over, you could imagine a college like this:
No frills. Minimal student services, no intercollegiate athletics, but virtually all the tuition money goes to faculty, who are required to teach. The admissions office looks for students who are likely to benefit from the education, not for students who have beaten the competition in high school. Those most likely to benefit will be motivated and will have baseline skills; but they will not all be at the top of their classes in prep schools and suburban megaschools. All courses are seminars or labs, with lots of assignments that require collaboration on lengthy projects. Working with others is a crucial skill that should be learned in college. Besides, such collaboration would compensate for a lack of extramural sports and other expensive extracurriculars Residences for students, classrooms, professors’ offices, and apartments for some of the faculty are combined in the same buildings. All these buildings are constructed simply and cheaply, with techniques to reduce energy use, and are designed to be decorated over time by the students. All arts, architecture, design, and landscape architecture courses are devoted to beautifying the campus. The faculty is selected for excellence of teaching and research, but with no attention to their fame either within their own disciplines or in the media. Criteria for excellence are set by the institution itself; external offers, peer-reviews, and other measures of market value are proudly ignored. A system of assessment or evaluation involves graded group projects at the beginning and end of each academic year. The college discloses changes in the students’ scores on these projects over time and claims any positive changes as evidence of its actual impact. When the impact is weak or negative, the college changes its curriculum.
*Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students: Vol. 2, A Third Decade of Research (Jossey-Bass, 2005).
(Clinton, TN) I spent yesterday in the office of a Washington, DC law firm, which Streetlaw was borrowing for a board retreat. We sat around a marble table in suits and ate delicious catered food for lunch. Today, I’m at Alex Haley’s former farm in Clinton, Tennessee, now owned by the Children’s Defense Fund and used as a meeting site. I’m here for another retreat: this one convenes community activists, mostly people of color, and mostly young. There are rocking-chairs on the porch and pictures of people like Maya Angelou on their visits here. And tomorrow I’ll be in Denver for a conference of the American Association of Colleges & Universities. The setting will be a big Marriott, and most of the attendees will be professors or college administrators.
There are some consistent themes–education; seeing young people as citizens–and some commonalities in the formats of these meetings. For example, we take turns talking; we don’t sing or shout. But you could write a book about the differences.
It’s very common in psychology (and in all the disciplines influenced by psychology) to construct scales that measure mental constructs. We can’t directly observe confidence, responsibility, spatial awareness, or any type of intelligence. But such mental constructs can exist even if they can’t be observed–unless the behaviorists were right, but they seem mostly to have disappeared.
The standard psychological method is to generate a list of survey questions (or checklists to be used by observers) that seem to measure some aspect or component of the mental construct that’s being studied. These items are said to have “face validity”–on their face, they are relevant to the mental construct of interest. These questions are then asked of a sample of people. The questions that cluster together statistically are kept; the outliers are discarded. The list is reduced to a small set of questions that can explain most of the variance in the results. Often, items can be separated into different categories that do not correlate with each other. Then one concludes that the mental construct actually includes several underlying “factors.”
I see the value of doing this, in part because I do believe in empirically identifiable mental constructs that aren’t directly observable. However, as a philosopher, my instinct is to see decisions about “face validity” as basically value judgments. For example, if we listed the behaviors and attitudes that make someone an “engaged citizen,” the reason to include each item would be our belief that the particular attitude or behavior was good. Voting is on CIRCLE’s list of civic indicators, and to defend that choice, we owe an argument about why people should vote. Whether voting correlates with volunteering or protesting may be interesting, but it isn’t necessarily the point. Either voting is part of civic engagement, or it isn’t; the reasons have to do with our sense of how a society should function.
My concern, in short, is that psychological research may look more scientific than it is, and the really important questions may be value-judgments buried at an early stage of the empirical method.