Monthly Archives: September 2011

the chasm between public opinion and scholarly discourse

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Via Kevin Drum, here is a table from the Pew Research Center that shows how much scientific consensus Americans perceive on the subject of climate change:

As Drum notes, there is a correct answer to this question. It is not a question about global warming, but about the proportion of climate scientists who believe that the climate is changing (for whatever reason). In reality, that proportion is very close to 100%. Yet only 14% of American adults chose the 81%-100% category. The median respondent thought that scientists are split about evenly regarding the very existence of climate change. Drum writes, “Hell, if it were really true that 60% of climate scientists believed in global warming and 40% didn’t, I probably wouldn’t believe in it either. But nationally, that’s what a large majority of Americans think. They think that within the scientific community, there’s roughly an even split among believers and deniers.”

To me, this kind of statistic raises a very basic question about how the university functions in the modern world. To be sure, participating in public debates and informing policies are not our only roles. If you are a pure philosopher, for example, then you are engaging in an activity of intrinsic value. But climate science is not about pure knowledge. Like most of the university’s work, climate science is an expensive, labor-intensive enterprise ultimately meant to advise human beings. So if we employ many thousands of highly trained experts, spend many millions of public dollars on this activity, and agree upon at least the fundamental facts, yet only 14% of our own fellow citizens recognize the consensus, there is a problem.

I do not claim that the problem is worse than it used to be, although I think it has novel features and causes. Forty years ago, most people watched Walter Cronkite and/or read the daily newspaper. So the challenge for concerned academics was to persuade the broadcast networks and print reporters to pay attention to and understand scholarship. Now the media landscape is fragmented, and all forms of substantive news reporting reach niche audiences. That is a different problem.

One common proposal is to teach our core findings better in k-12 schools. For instance, in my field, survey results of adults’ civic knowledge look abysmal, and the typical response is to demand civics classes in high schools. But 97% of American high school seniors already report taking American government or civics courses, thanks in part to standards that exist in all the states except Iowa (where most students nevertheless take the courses). Some states require difficult civics tests for graduation. The textbooks, tests, and standards are written or heavily influenced by academics–like me.  We could do a better job, but it’s folly to assume that by teaching a bunch of material to 16-year-olds, we can solve all the communications and knowledge problems for their subsequent seven or eight decades of life.

I don’t have solutions, but I believe the academy most “own” this problem. It is ours. We might start by lamenting the poor performance of the mass media, but we cannot stop with that. We have more than 2,000 institutions distributed across the nation’s communities, three percent of GDP, large endowments, skilled employees, and a generally accepted right to decide who enters the middle class. Those are assets that we must deploy to address the communications problem.

how 9/11 is taught in public schools

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Today, CIRCLE releases new research by Jeremy Stoddard and Diana Hess on how 9/11 is treated in state standards and textbooks. More than 20 states require the event to be discussed, but usually in superficial ways. My quote in the release: “9/11 was an event of enormous significance, but we must get away from putting everything important in state standards until they are unmanageably long lists … If we are going to list specific events that must be covered, the point should be to teach skills, concepts, or ideas rather than just requiring students to identify the event.”

the ideological valence of Sebastian Junger’s War

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I enjoyed War, Sebastian Junger’s vivid report of an American platoon in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan during five months of regular combat. I was a little taken aback to note that the other Amazon customers who had bought War had also bought the memoirs of Dick Cheney and Herman Cain and polemics by the likes of Ann Coulter. On the other hand, some readers of Junger had bought Hadji Murad, by the pacifist Tolstoy, The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility by the philosopher Cheney Ryan, and books about the history of Afghanistan. Probably the Amazon customer database is not the best tool for deciding where to place a book on the ideological spectrum, and it’s good to know that ideologically diverse people still share some common reading. Still, the political implications of War (the book) are interesting to think about.

Junger’s focus is tight. He is interested in a platoon of US combat industry in a particular valley in Afghanistan. Although he knows something of the country’s history and culture, he ignores it here because the American soldiers understand little of it. He has almost nothing to say about the overall purpose or strategy of the war. Other parts of the military effort in Afghanistan, such as air support and intelligence, are off stage. Junger describes individual soldiers, but none emerges as a particularly vivid character. The New York Times critic Dexter Filkins sees that as a weakness, but I thought it was a defensible choice. Junger’s thesis is the importance of the group, the bonds that make the platoon hang together even in the direst situations and that submerge individual differences.

(By the way, Filkins generally seems biased against Junger’s book. He complains that Junger digresses into the “unusual physics of fighting in the Korangal: you can see a gunshot but not have enough time to move before it hits you.” But this is true of all modern gunshots and has nothing special to do with the Korangal.)

I’m not sure that conservatives should especially like Junger’s portrait of this platoon. Its soldiers are bad at “free enterprise” and have chosen to be government employees instead. They hold counter-cultural personal values, as reflected by their troubled experiences back home and disciplinary infractions on bases. They put the group well ahead of the individual.

One aspect of the portrait that might appeal to conservatives is its celebration of masculinity. The men of Battle Company have vices as well as virtues, but their virtues are real and at least stereotypically male. They are not so much courageous as determined not to let down the group, in a particularly male way. Of course, the stakes are life and death, and their willingness to sacrifice for the group is what keeps most of them alive.

The book also hints at an idea that Junger captures with an epigraph: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. — Winston Churchill (or George Orwell).” The uncertain, double attribution suggests some irony on Junger’s part, Churchill and Orwell being rather different types of people. But he at least wants us to consider the possibility that we sleep safely because of “rough” nineteen-year-olds like the ones he lived with in Korengal.

Is it true? On the one hand, I think that every society probably does need people who are willing and able to use violence on its behalf. A more rapid and deadly reaction force would have saved lives recently in peaceful Norway. On the other hand, we could clearly rely less on violence if we chose not to extend ourselves aggressively overseas. Further, even if it’s true that we sleep soundly because we have rough men on our side, we also rely on computer nerds, emergency room nurses, and logistics specialists for basic needs. (So the quote proves more than it intended.) Finally, the men themselves realize their own dispensability.  A Black Hawk helicopter costs lot of money and is a scarce resource. Combat infantry are, or at least they feel they are, “the most replaceable part of the whole deadly show.” Junger’s achievement is to show that their skills and commitment are in fact rare and valuable.

 

resistance to evaluating academia

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(West Tisbury, MA) We at CIRCLE are in the business of measuring educational outcomes, including those in colleges and universities. I have fairly complex and nuanced opinions about the role of measurement, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative. Measurement is helpful when it supports making wise value-judgments, and harmful when it obscures the value-judgments that one must make.

Of all the professional groups we encounter–including philanthropists and grantmakers, government officials, k-12 educators, and corporate executives–I’d say that professors are the most resistant to measuring the impact of their work. K-12 teachers have reasonable objections to crude measures of “value added,” but they are resigned to (or even supportive of) the idea that someone should assess what their students have learned. Not so with professors, many of whom reject the whole conversation. Their response may be a little surprising, considering that most of the available tools and methods for measurement originate in academia. I suspect several factors are in play:

  • Some professors are sophisticated about measurement and evaluation, and they reasonably fear that efforts to evaluate their work will be crude.
  • Other professors are very far removed from social science research, and they see evaluation as an incursion into their fields by unqualified outsiders.
  • Especially in the liberal arts, many professors recognize intrinsic value in their disciplines and courses and believe that most of the public cannot understand that. So if someone asks whether a college education is really worth $200,000, their implicit, private response is: “An hour discussing Plato is priceless, and if you ask its value, you’re a Philistine.”
  • Professors do not want to be the Person in the Gray Flannel Suit. They do not want to be employees or cogs in a bureaucracy. They are intellectuals, and the intellectual vanguard is defined by its autonomy and intrinsic motivations.

In my opinion, higher education (which is funded by the rest of society) has a legitimacy crisis and does owe outsiders accounts of what it accomplishes for them. The problem of crude and inappropriate measurement is serious, but it is unacceptable to avoid evaluation completely.