education – Page 3

January 22, 2014

The end of reading . . . books?

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As detailed in a follow-up article in today’s The Atlantic,

“They hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in their car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

“If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrubland full of cat GIFs and reality TV spinoffs, then this news will probably reinforce your worst suspicions. But buried beneath it, I think there’s an optimistic story to tell about American book culture. It’s about the kids.

“Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn’t enjoy today’s abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they’d read more than 50!). Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.

“But here’s why we shouldn’t proclaim the death of the book quite yet (aside from the fact that the vast majority of the country does still read them). First, the number of books an American reads tends to be closely associated with their level of education. Even those with just a little bit of college read far more, on average, than high school grads or less. That may be because people who grow up reading are far more likely to enroll in higher education. But it seems at least somewhat likely that reading books in class conditions people to read books later in life. And the good news (for publishers, at least) is that today’s twenty-somethings, as a rule, go to college. A recent Department of Education study found that 85 percent of the high-school class of 2004 had at least some postsecondary education. Continue reading “The end of reading . . . books?”

January 19, 2014

How grad school could be changed

By Leonard Cassuto “I talk a lot in this column about how graduate programs might be run differently. The graduate enterprise faces a lot of problems, so there’s plenty to talk about. But I don’t run a graduate program, and we don’t hear enough from the people who do.

‘There’s a reason for that. Administrators can’t dissociate themselves from their institutions when they speak. As any administrator will tell you, even the most casual remark can become the object of Kremlinological scrutiny and speculation. With that concern in mind, I recently conducted an email interview with a dean who works with graduate education in the arts and sciences at a well-endowed private institution—let’s call it Very Good University. He’s a full professor who came up through the faculty ranks and was named a dean less than a decade ago. Because I’ve shielded his identity here, he was able to offer some bracing observations and sound prescriptions. Here is our exchange. What sorts of changes would you like to see in American graduate study?

“The biggest one is that our doctoral curricula need to be changed to acknowledge what has been true for a long time, which is that most of our Ph.D. students do not end up in tenure-track (or even full-time faculty) positions—and that many of those who do will be at institutions that are very, very different from the places where these Ph.D.’s are trained. The changes will differ from program to program but might include different kinds of coursework, exams, and even dissertation structures. Right now we train students for the professoriate, and if something else works out, that’s fine. We can serve our students and our society better by realizing their diverse futures and changing the training we offer accordingly. The other necessary change: We need to think seriously about the cost of graduate education. There is a perception that graduate students are simply a cheap labor force for the university, and that universities are interested in graduate students only because they perform work as teachers and laboratory assistants cheaper than any one else. At elite universities—or at least at elite private ones—that is simply not true, and I am glad that it is not. It is absolutely true that graduate students perform labor necessary for the university in a number of ways, but it is not cheap labor, nor should it be. Continue reading “How grad school could be changed”

January 12, 2014

Gender, race, schools and technology

When people talk about how to diversify the tech field, a common solution is, “Start earlier.”

As discussed in a recent essay in The Atlantic, “Rather than focus on getting women and minorities hired at tech startups or encouraging them to major in computer science in college, there should be a push to turn them on to the discipline when they’re still teenagers—or even younger.

“It’s already too late,” Paul Graham, founder of the tech entrepreneur boot camp Y Combinator, said last month in a controversial interview. “What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that.”

“Right now, the “start early” strategy doesn’t seem to be working: The students doing advanced computer science work in high school remain overwhelmingly white and male. According to data from the College Board compiled by Georgia Tech’s Barbara Ericson, only a small percentage of the high-schoolers taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam are women. Black and Latino students make up an even lower percentage of the test-takers.

“Ericson’s analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the exam were women. Eight percent were Hispanic, and four percent were African-American. In contrast, Latinos make up 22 percent of the school-age population in the U.S.; African-Americans make up 14 percent. (I don’t need to tell you that women make up about half.) Continue reading “Gender, race, schools and technology”

January 9, 2014January 9, 2014

Tenure and incompetence

Want your colleagues to remain effective teachers and researchers after tenure?

Then prioritize quality over quantity in publishing during the tenure process, avoid collegiality as a tenure criterion and make sure your administrators aren’t rubber-stamping faculty tenure recommendations.

As InsideHigherEd puts it, “That’s according to a new study out in this month’s PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association.

“When Tenure Protects the Incompetent: Results from a Survey of Department Chairs” (an abstract of which is available here), is based on results of a survey of 361 responding political science chairs at doctoral, master’s and baccalaureate institutions regarding faculty incompetence and tenure. The author, John Rothgeb, a professor of political science at Miami University, in Ohio, said in an interview he was inspired to explore the topic in light of recent state-level debates, including in Ohio, about the value of tenure and whether or not it made faculty members less effective as researchers and educators. And most of those debates happen without empirical data to support arguments on either side, he said – partly because data are hard to come by.

“I was concerned about tenure because of the many claims you read about all the time [that] tenure is destroying higher education, and blah blah blah,” Rothgeb said in an interview. “And if you serve on tenure committees, as I do at Miami University, we’re always talking about what tenure means, but I wondered, do you really know what you’re talking about what you say all these kinds of things?” Continue reading “Tenure and incompetence”

December 23, 2013

Rise of the administrative class

In the two decades from 1985 to 2005, student enrollment in the US rose by 56 per cent, faculty numbers increased by 50 per cent, degree-granting institutions expanded by 50 per cent, degrees granted grew by 47 per cent, administrators rocketed by 85 per cent and their attendant staff by a whopping 240 per cent, reports the Times Education Supplement.

“The obvious question is – why? Have students become so needy that a university needs not only a “dean of student life” but several associate deans, assistant deans and a plethora of deanlets – Ginsberg’s coinage of the term “deanlet” is wonderfully offensive – to cater to their whims and shield them from the temptations of booze, drugs and illicit sex? Have we become so trapped by information technology that we need an IT officer apiece in order to function?

“A common explanation of the growth in administrative numbers, both in the US and the UK, is that government demands for information and an increasingly complicated regulatory environment make it impossible to manage with fewer administrative staff than institutions actually employ. Ginsberg doesn’t deny that some growth in numbers could be accounted for in this way, but he argues, I think rightly, that most cannot.

“Because the US has a genuinely private and a genuinely public higher education sphere, it’s possible to compare administrative growth across the sectors; and because public universities and colleges are vastly more tightly regulated than private universities and colleges, it ought to be the case that they have added far more administrators. In the 30 years from 1975 to 2005, the reverse was true. Administrative and managerial staff grew by 66 per cent in the state sector against 135 per cent in the private sector. Continue reading “Rise of the administrative class”

December 4, 2013December 4, 2013

Adjuncts are organizing

A movement catching on across American campuses where adjunct faculty members, the working poor of academia, are turning to collective action.

Only a quarter of the academic work force is tenured, or on track for tenure, down from more than a third in 1995, reports today’s New York

Times. ” The majority hold contingent jobs — mostly part-time adjuncts but also graduate assistants and full-time lecturers. And the Service Employees International Union, with members in health care, maintenance and public service, is moving hard and fast to add the adjuncts to their roster, organizing at private colleges in several urban areas.

“In Washington, it has unionized American University, Georgetown, George Washington and Montgomery College. In the Los Angeles area, adjuncts at Whittier College and the University of La Verne just filed with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. In Boston, Tufts University’s part-time faculty voted to join the service employees’ union in September, and an October vote at Bentley University failed by two votes. Campaigns are underway at Northeastern and Lesley.

“The S.E.I.U. strategy has the momentum right now,” said Adrianna Kezar, director of the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success. “And we know that unionizing leads to pay increases and at least the beginnings of benefits.” Continue reading “Adjuncts are organizing”

December 2, 2013December 2, 2013

Gender diversity growing at colleges

The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way, reports a story in today’s Sacramento Bee.

“Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else.

“It’s an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the “shes” and “hers” that dominate the introductions are keeping third-person company with “they,” “ze” and other neutral alternatives meant to convey a more generous notion of gender.

“Because I go to an all-women’s college, a lot of people are like, ‘If you don’t identify as a woman, how did you get in?'” said sophomore Skylar Crownover, 19, who is president of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be mentioned as a singular they, but also answers to he. “I just tell them the application asks you to mark your sex and I did. It didn’t ask me for my gender.”

“On high school and college campuses and in certain political and social media circles, the growing visibility of a small, but semantically committed cadre of young people who, like Crownover, self-identify as “genderqueer” — neither male nor female but an androgynous hybrid or rejection of both — is challenging anew the limits of Western comprehension and the English language. Continue reading “Gender diversity growing at colleges”

November 12, 2013November 12, 2013

School dress codes and gender policing

Last month, the fifth grade parent group at my daughter’s school had the first of many conversations about how to mark our children’s transition to junior high, writes Marianne Mollman on HuffPost Gay voices:

“Unfortunately, the issue we discussed — whether the kids would be wearing caps and gowns at the end-of-year celebration — sidelined a much more important issue: what the kids would be wearing under these gowns. (My daughter’s school had sent out a notice to parents that boys must wear one thing and girls another.)

“For many children, a gendered dress code may be just another imposition by adults, and to some it may seem small compared with decisions related to bedtime, computer usage, and the precise meaning of the phrase “clean up your room.” But to others it is a big deal. Indeed, clothing is such an essential expression of who we are that international law recognizes it as a human right to wear what we want, barring reasonable restrictions for the purposes of safety or to protect the rights of others.

“And it is precisely because clothing can project our identity so concisely that the clothing associated with particularly stigmatized populations is vigorously policed around the world. For example, several European countries and some North American jurisdictions place restrictions on head coverings. These restrictions are closely linked to discomfort with Islam and are based on the negative and erroneous stereotype that Muslim women are “oppressed” and “submissive.” In fact, even where headscarves are not explicitly prohibited by law, women can be fired for wearing them, and many are discriminated against even before landing a job.

“Likewise, many jurisdictions enforce strictly gendered dress codes in public by either requiring specific attire or criminalizing cross dressing. These restrictions are tied to stereotypes about sexuality and sex. Continue reading “School dress codes and gender policing”

November 11, 2013November 11, 2013

On instructional autonomy

Individual professors largely retain the right to choose what they teach and how, even when they’re teaching sections of the same course as other professors. That’s the American Association of University Professors’ take on individual vs. collective responsibility for course design, as laid out in its new statement on the matter, reports InsidehigherEd.

“The freedom to teach includes the right of the faculty to select the materials, determine the approach to the subject, make the assignments, and assess student academic performance in teaching activities for which faculty members are individually responsible, without having their decisions subject to the veto of a department chair, dean, or other administrative officer,” reads AAUP’s “The Freedom to Teach.”

“It continues: “In a multisection course taught by several faculty members, responsibility is often shared among the instructors for identifying the texts to be assigned to students. Common course syllabi and examinations are also typical but should not be imposed by departmental or administrative fiat.” Essentially, beyond the shared choice of textbook among professors teaching the same course, which may make logistical sense, other pedagogical freedoms remain “undiluted,” AAUP says. Greg Scholtz, director of academic freedom, tenure and governance for AAUP, said no particular incident or institution prompted the statement. Rather, who decides who teaches what was something the organization had been meaning to address, in the same statement, for some time. Previously, different parts had appeared in various AAUP documents — but there is one notable change. The new statement includes entirely new language saying such principles “apply equally” to all faculty — including adjunct faculty, who often feel that course materials are “imposed” on them, Scholtz said.

“The statement comes at a time that technology makes it possible for multisection courses to get quite large, and when an increasing number of instructors may not be teaching such courses in structures that designate someone as the lead professor. Don Eron, a full-time, non-tenure-track professor writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is part of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which drafted the statement. In his opinion, he said via email, individual vs. collective responsibility for course design is the “probably the central academic freedom issue” confronting adjuncts — particularly for those teaching core courses, which are more likely to be subject to administrative calls for standardization across sections.”

November 1, 2013

Interdisciplinary losers

Everyone, it seems, loves the idea of scholars interdisciplinary work. But does academe reward those — particular young scholars — who actually do it?

A new study, based on data from all people who earned Ph.D.s in 2010, suggests the opposite, reports InsideHigherEd

“In the year after earning their doctorates, those in the cohort who did interdisciplinary dissertations earned, on average, $1,700 less than those who completed dissertations in a single field. The study was conducted by Kevin M. Kniffin and Andrew S. Hanks, two postdoctoral fellows at Cornell University, and has been released by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

“Kniffin and Hanks used data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, and focused on the more than 26,000 people who earned doctorates that year who are U.S. citizens. The income of new Ph.D.s, of course, varies by such factors as discipline, whether postdoctoral employment is within academe or outside it, and whether the first job after the Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellowship. Kniffin and Hanks came up with their $1,700 gap by controlling for discipline, age, gender and ethnicity. They reasoned that because some disciplines are more likely than others to produce new doctorates who seek employment outside academe, they could address various differences in post-graduation patterns of various new doctorate holders.

“The Survey of Earned Doctorates specifically asks if new Ph.D.s did a multidisciplinary dissertation, so that information was readily available for the study. Continue reading “Interdisciplinary losers”

October 29, 2013October 29, 2013

TransActive Education and Advocacy

“Transgender first-graders aren’t the problem. Uninformed adult are,” writes Leela Ginelle of TransActive Education and Advocacy (http://www.transactiveonline.org/index.php) in today’s Advocate.

As California prepares for a fight over AB 1266, which affords rights to transgender students, issues of gender identity are likely to land in the national spotlight in coming months. As Ginelle continues:

“Our culture doesn’t wait for newborns to tell us what gender they are — we decide for them and then put it in writing. As soon as transgender children can speak, however, they correct us, and, increasingly, their parents listen to and affirm them. As we’ve seen recently, this can lead to confusion and even conflict among less-informed adults.

“When Colorado 6-year-old Coy Mathis tried to use the girls’ restroom at her school, the district attempted to block her, leading to a case that drew national attention. The district thought a transgender girl wanting to use the girls’ bathroom was a little weird or that other people might or that someday it might be.

Transgender people have long been stigmatized as mentally disordered. But an outside observer of this case, in which a public school legally fought to prevent a grade schooler from using a bathroom, might draw different conclusions as to who needs help. And they might have a point. TransActive Education and Advocacy is a first-of-its-kind nonprofit that offers counseling and services to transgender children and their families, and trainings to schools, corporations, and other groups. When families contact us, their children are often displaying depression, and that’s common. Eighty-three percent of trans children and youth report ideating taking their own life, and 32 percent report at least one suicide attempt. Suicide is the number 1 cause of death among transgender youth. While every case is different, the cause of these children’s distress is not their transgender identity. Commonly, rejection by their families and the wider community is at the root of their issues. This rejection, a product of blind antitrans prejudice, founded on generations of unquestioned beliefs regarding gender roles, deviance, and “normalcy” and bolstered by a relentlessly negative media, is as pervasive as it is baseless. Continue reading “TransActive Education and Advocacy”

October 28, 2013October 28, 2013

Ranking colleges by value

President Obama began promoting a plan in August to rate colleges on their value and affordability and to tie those ratings to the $150 billion in financial aid that the federal government supplies each year.

Should Mr. Obama’s plan come to pass, value would not just be a selling point for colleges, it would be a matter of life and death. But there is no agreement on how to measure the value of a college, and there is no agreement, or anything even close, on what value is in the first place, opines The New York Times:

“It’s a quest for the holy grail,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “It sounds good, it sounds like something we’d love to know, to be able to rank the value of these institutions, but when it comes down to practicalities, it’s very, very difficult.”

“U.S. News and World Report, whose academic rankings have long been derided — and obsessively followed — by college presidents, now publishes “best value” lists as well. Princeton Review, which has advised decades of prospective students on the best party schools, more recently began listing the best value schools, too. Forbes Magazine got in the is-it-worth-the-money game too, as did, among others, The Wall Street Journal, The Alumni Factor, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Payscale, a company that gathers data about the job market.

“Some of these analyses approach value as largely a function of cost: How much is tuition? What subsidies are available? Others define it as return on investment: How much do graduates earn? Some factor in student satisfaction or academic ranking or graduation rates or economic diversity, all in varying quantities. These widely divergent definitions produce wildly divergent results. Continue reading “Ranking colleges by value”

October 27, 2013

Early arts help with … business skills?

Good news for parents: Those pricey piano lessons or random toy parts littering your floors may one day lead to the next scientific breakthrough.

That’s according to new Michigan State University research linking childhood participation in arts and crafts activities to patents generated and businesses launched as adults, as reported in MedicalNews today.

“In the study, which is published in the most recent edition of the journal Economic Development Quarterly, the researchers defined “childhood” as up to 14 years old.

“The team of multidisciplinary researchers studied a group of MSU Honors College graduates from 1990 to 1995 who majored in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or STEM. They found of that group, those who own businesses or patents received up to eight times more exposure to the arts as children than the general public.

“The most interesting finding was the importance of sustained participation in those activities,” said Rex LaMore, director of MSU’s Center for Community and Economic Development. “If you started as a young child and continued in your adult years, you’re more likely to be an inventor as measured by the number of patents generated, businesses formed or articles published. And that was something we were surprised to discover.”

“Musical training seems to be important. The researchers found 93 percent of the STEM graduates reported musical training at some point in their lives, as compared to only 34 percent of average adults, as reported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The STEM graduates also reported higher-than-average involvement in the visual arts, acting, dance and creative writing.

“In addition, those who had been exposed to metal work and electronics during childhood were 42 percent more likely to own a patent than those without exposure, while those involved in architecture were 87.5 percent more likely to form a company. And children with a photography background were 30 percent more likely to have a patent. Continue reading “Early arts help with … business skills?”

October 23, 2013

How much do students text in class?

If you are leading a class and imagine that students seem more distracted than ever by their digital devices, it’s not your imagination. And they aren’t just checking their e-mail a single time.

A new study has found that more than 90 percent of students admit to using their devices for non-class activities during class times. Less than 8 percent said that they never do so, reports InsideHigherEd..

“The study is based on a survey of 777 students at six colleges and universities. Barney McCoy, associate professor of broadcasting at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, conducted the study and The Journal of Media Education has just published the results. Most of the students were undergraduates, and graduate students were less likely to use their devices for non-class purposes. Undergraduates reporting using their devices for non-class purposes 11 times a day, on average, compared to 4 times a day for graduate students.

“Asked why they were using their devices in class, the top answer was texting (86 percent), followed by checking the time (79 percent). e-mail (68 percent), social networking (66 percent), web surfing (38 percent) and games (8 percent).While students admitted to being somewhat distracted by their own devices and those of others, they reported advantages to using the devices in class. The top advantages they cited were staying connected (70 percent), avoiding boredom (55 percent) and doing related classwork (49 percent).Texting in class is a source of constant frustration to professors, but about 30 percent of students reported that their instructors did not have a policy on the subject. (Of course there is a chance some of those students didn’t read the syllabus.)

Continue reading “How much do students text in class?”

September 29, 2013September 30, 2013

Not ready for college

The average SAT scores for the high school class of 2013 remained stagnant from the previous year and fewer than half of the students who graduated were prepared for the rigors of college, officials said.

Average SAT scores for high school seniors nationwide stayed steady in reading, math and writing, according to a report released last week by the College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that administers the SAT and Advanced Placement program.

imgres-3 The combined average SAT score of 1498 was the same as last year; a perfect score on the three-section test is 2400. In California, the combined average score of 1505 dropped two points from last year and 12 points from 2010. Perhaps more telling, only 48% of test takers reached the “SAT Benchmark” — a score of 1550 that indicates a 65% likelihood that students will obtain a first-year college grade-point average of B- or higher, according to the College Board. Students who reach that threshold are more likely to enroll in a four-year school and complete their degree, the College Board said. There was, however, the highest representation of minorities among test takers in history.

“In 2013, 46% of those who took the test were minorities, up from 40% in 2009. African American, American Indian and Latino students made up 30% of test takers, up from 27% in 2009. In California, 57% of graduating seniors — 234,767 students — took the exam, the highest number ever for the state. Nationwide, participation has dipped slightly since 2011 for the SAT. Meanwhile, a rival college entrance exam, the ACT, has seen a steady rise in participation since 2003. About 54% of graduating seniors nationwide took the ACT, up from about 40% in 2003. In California, 26% of graduates took the exam, up from 15% in 2003, according to ACT officials.”

More at: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-sat-scores-20130929,0,2158987.story?track=rss

September 27, 2013

Minecraft and angry birds go to school

From Angry Birds to Minecraft, computer games are invading the classroom.

But this is not going on behind the teacher’s back anymore: it is part of the lesson plan, reports the BBC:

“The average young person will have spent 10,000 hours gaming by the time they are 21 years old, research suggests.This has been mainly for entertainment, providing light relief from the maths textbooks and science experiments taking place in classrooms. But gaming is taking up more time of a child’s life.

“For a child in the US with perfect attendance, 10,080 hours will be spent in school from fifth grade (age 10) to high school graduation, according to game designer Jane McGonigal. Minecraft is just one game that has found its way into the classroom, actually being used in lessons In the UK, computer games offering “stealth learning” have been used by many schools. But the big developers have generally, so far at least, not been keen to get involved.

“Angry Birds creator Rovio has brought Angry Birds Playground, a schools initiative devised with the University of Helsinki in Finland, into the kindergarten classroom of children, aimed at six-year-olds. With the initiative already in use in Finland, Rovio has now entered into an agreement with schools in China. “With small children, the Finnish approach to education is very much play-orientated,” says Sanna Lukander, vice president of book publishing at Rovio Entertainment. “These characters and their world seemed to inspire children. You can’t not think about how you might motivate children to do more than play.” Finland is rated as having the best education system in the developed world. And it is not just the same edition of Angry Birds re-packaged: it is using the now-famous characters in new education-based games and a “full 360-degree approach to learning” involving books, teachers and digital devices.”

More at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24228473

September 10, 2013September 10, 2013

Let us now praise the non-tenured

While many higher education experts — and parents — bemoan the fact that tenured professors are a shrinking presence,now making up less than a quarter of the academic work force, a study released Monday found, surprisingly, that students in introductory classes learned more from outside instructors than from tenured or tenure-track professors, reports today’s New York Times

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“Students taught by untenured faculty were more likely to take a second course in the discipline and more likely to earn a better grade in the next course than those whose first course was taught by a tenured or tenure-track instructor, the report said.

“The study, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is based on data from more than 15,000 students who arrived at Northwestern University from 2001 to 2008.

“According to the authors — David N. Figlio, director of Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research; Morton O. Schapiro, the university’s president; and Kevin B. Soter, a consultant — there was “strong and consistent evidence that Northwestern faculty outside of the tenure system outperform tenure track/tenured professors in introductory undergraduate classrooms.” The differences were present across a wide variety of subject areas, the study found, and were especially pronounced for average and less-qualified students.

“Our results provide evidence that the rise of full-time designated teachers at U.S. colleges and universities may be less of a cause for alarm than some people think, and indeed, may actually be educationally beneficial,” the report said. The fact that the study included only one university — and a selective, private research university at that — left its general applicability open to question. And, skeptics point out, there are many reasons a student might take a second class in a discipline apart from the teaching skills of the previous instructor. “I’m kind of dubious,” said Anita Levy, a senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors. “I’m not surprised that introductory classes might be better taught by contingent faculty members simply because most tenured faculty more often teach advanced courses. Continue reading “Let us now praise the non-tenured”

September 3, 2013September 3, 2013

Who makes political scientists

A handful of top universities crank out most of the nations’ political science faculty … Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Michigan, to be precise.

Last year, a study in Georgetown Public Policy Review exposed the extent to which a relatively small number of graduate programs in political science dominate placement in Ph.D.-granting departments., reports InsideHigher Ed.

“The study looked at the 116 universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report for political science graduate programs, and examined where all of the tenure-track or tenured faculty members earned their doctorates. The top four institutions in the magazine’s rankings of departments — Harvard, Princeton and Stanford Universities and the University of Michigan — were the Ph.D. alma maters of 616 of the political scientists at the 116 universities (roughly 20 percent of the total). The top 11 institutions were collectively responsible for the doctoral education of about half of those in tenured or tenure-track positions at the 116 universities.

“On Saturday, the author of that study — Robert L. Oprisko of Butler University — presented expanded findings here at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. The paper argues not only that some departments may have more historical dominance but that others may be on the rise right now (judging from the number of assistant professors they have placed). While Oprisko is critical of a system that seems to place so much emphasis on Ph.D. pedigree, he also argues that this information needs wider circulation to help would-be graduate students make informed choices. (Oprisko earned his Ph.D. at Purdue University, not one of the dominant institutions). The paper — also by Kirstie L. Dobbs of Loyola University Chicago and Joseph DiGrazia of Indiana University — may be found at the website of the Social Science Research Network. Continue reading “Who makes political scientists”

August 30, 2013August 30, 2013

Who wants English, anyway?

Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is in every mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly in columns and reviews and Op-Ed pieces.”The English major is vanishing from our colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it, we’re told, a dying choice bound to a dead subject,” writes Adam Gopnik in today’s New Yorker.

“The estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times that “At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools, other, similar numbers.

“In response, a number of defenses have been mounted, none of them, so far, terribly persuasive even to one rooting for them to persuade. As the bromides roll by and the platitudes chase each other round the page, those in favor of ever more and better English majors feel a bit the way we Jets fans feel, every fall, when our offense trots out on the field: I’m cheering as loud as I can, but let’s be honest—this is not working well.

“The defenses and apologias come in two kinds: one insisting that English majors make better people, the other that English majors (or at least humanities majors) make for better societies; that, as Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, just put it in The New Republic, “ there are real, tangible benefits to the humanistic disciplines—to the study of history, literature, art, theater, music, and languages.” Paxson’s piece is essentially the kind of Letter To A Crazy Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write. We need the humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end up giving us other stuff we actually like: “We do not always know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than others.”

“Well, a humanities major may make an obvious contribution to everyone’s welfare. But the truth is that for every broadly humane, technological-minded guy who contributed one new gadget to our prosperity there are six narrow, on-the-spectrum techno-obsessives who contributed twenty. Even Paxson’s insistence that, after 9/11, it was valuable to have experts on Islam around is sadly dubious; it was Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar on the subject, who consulted closely with Dick Cheney before the Iraq War, with the results we know. Continue reading “Who wants English, anyway?”

August 29, 2013

Fighting textbook costs

The fall semester is upon us, and that means one thing: It’s pilot (project) season for textbooks and their e-alternatives.

Most students are stepping into their first class either this week or the next, and many of them will find themselves participating in their institution’s latest cost-saving experiment, reports InsideHigher Ed. “In the name of student savings, institutions are testing everything from all-tablet learning to textbook rentals to open educational resources (OER) — though similar projects delivered mixed results last year.

This year’s experiments are not markedly different than those of previous years, but institutions are launching new pilot projects with “tremendous forward momentum,” said Nicole Allen, OER director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which promotes open-source alternatives in scholarly research.

“Semester after semester, students are facing higher and higher prices of textbooks,” Allen said. “There’s frustration with the fact that the current system for publishing textbooks puts up legal barriers, which is counter to what the Internet has to offer. The idea of a framework like open educational resources that makes that information available free is really appealing and in many ways common sense.”

“Put on notice by the president and pressured by cost-conscious families to make higher education more affordable, many institutions spy an opportunity to respond to the charge by curbing the cost of textbooks and other educational materials, although not necessarily with open resources. Common strategies include allowing students rent textbooks for a semester or pushing bookbag-friendly e-textbooks. Yet other institutions are launching more ambitious projects, like Lynn University’s investment in hundreds of iPad minis for its incoming freshmen, which shifts part of the cost from the student to the university.

“Lynn hosted the third and final presidential debate last October, and has taken advantage of a massive upgrade to its wireless infrastructure that was required to accommodate the campaign media circus. Faculty members have for months tinkered with laptops and tablets to familiarize themselves with the iOS platform, and this fall, the university will offer nine introductory courses through Apple’s digital course manager, iTunes U.

“Essentially, our goal is to get rid of all textbooks in our core curriculum,” said Chris Boniforti, the university’s chief information officer. “Without getting myself in too much trouble, I’d like for that to happen next year.”

“Given Apple’s tendency to update its tablets about once a year, Boniforti said students will be able to upgrade to the newest model once their iPad has turned two years old. Upperclassmen interested in the courses can also rent an iPad for $100 — less than the cost of the textbook. If a student breaks the iPad, whether by accident or not, the university will repair it and issue a rental in the meantime. That’s a lot of iPads, Boniforti acknowledged.”