Op-Ed Deplores what Higher Education Has Become

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Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory, has written a --scathing, I believe-- op ed in the New York Times entitled: What's the Point of a Professor?

I did not read it.  I'm not the sort of professor who inhabits the concept-world of senior academicians of the 1950's.  A rebuttal appears in a blog here, which still responds to the original article on its own terms, by and large, and how the writer of this rebuttal describes what he does is a little closer to what I do: provide information to students who are looking for it, provide a basic experience for students who just want the accreditation, and occasionally be the role-model which Bauerlein wishes he would be allowed to be.  (I know, I didn't read it, but I read the cheat sheet.)

I've been writing about this for years, and there isn't any point to repeating what I keep saying.  Perhaps I never said it succinctly enough: private higher education does not sit comfortably in the business model we have in the USA.  I don't even think what should ideally take place in on a college campus comes exactly under the heading of mentoring.

One theme does stand out in all these writings about the undergraduate experience: nothing is going to work if an undergraduate is in the classroom unwillingly.  I suspect lots of undergraduates are on campus willingly: they get to stay away from home; they get to play sports; they get to meet members of the opposite sex unsupervised by their parents; they get to eat what they like in the cafeterias, and complain all they want.  They get to be slobs, and piss off their roommates.  But they're in the classrooms unwillingly.

This is quite unsurprising, because the society is becoming more and more exploitative.  Whereas a half-century ago, it may have been a pleasure to work somewhere, and you may have got some credit for whatever achievements you were able to make, today a worker has all his effort and energy sucked out of him at work, and is paid relatively less for equivalent work.  It follows that a youth prepares for employment grudgingly, and college is seen as preparation for employment, and the classroom is seen as a hurdle.

While there may be professors who are in the business for the prestige and the money, the vast majority of professors take up employment in academe because they love their subject, and they love teaching young students.  Teaching undergraduates is like a drug; it is surprisingly enjoyable, if you have halfway decent students.  (It does lose its shine over eight months, at which point you need some time off.)  But I honestly think that education should be absolutely free, and that you should qualify for it by competitive examination.

The open university is a whole different thing; a different sort of professor is needed to teach students who are not qualified, to engage them and seduce them into learning beyond their expectations.  Unfortunately, all of academe is heading in this direction, because often it is the unqualified who have the money.  So, to earn the right to teach bright, poor students, you have to put in some time teaching lazy wealthy kids, who just want to be accredited.  Sick Sad World, as Daria would say.

Arch

Writing in Word -- This time, for reals

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Microsoft Word is available everywhere, and there is hardly anyone who hasn't used it.  It's easy to get into it, and start writing; using it at this level is simply using it as it were an editor, just something into which you type basic text.  Notepad would do just as well.

Most writing programs now support the basic features of boldface, italics, underscore, and sometimes strikeout, including HTML-based editors, such as this one I'm using for the blog.  This is called character level formatting; you switch the boldface or italics on and off as needed.  In addition, it is usually possible to switch the font any any point.  All of this is possible, even in the middle of a word.

For those who write often, additional features are available, and you can get help anywhere.  But when you write large volumes, and read large volumes, you begin to appreciate consistency of style.  This is hard to explain, and I'm not going to try now; it is basically that similar things must look similar, e.g. an excerpt from a letter.  This is done usually by indenting on both sides (making the paragraph narrower, side-to-side, or equivalently, making the margins wider).  Similarly, you want to have the same spacing between paragraphs throughout.  (Or you could indent paragraphs; this is just indenting the first line, to set it off from the previous paragraph.)

The first huge step towards consistency is to use Styles.

In the Home tab of Word (Since 2007, Word has begun to use Tabs, which are an array of boxes at the top, just below the title.  This is so that Word can give you a different Toolbar for each task.  You spend most of the editing time in the Home tab, with the standard toolbar on top, just below the tabs) there is a section in the toolbar called Styles.  This section can be split off by clicking the little spot shown outlined in red, below.

This portion of the toolbar (it probably has a name, which I forget) will now be on the right side of the window, alongside your document.

Suppose you want to create a rather long document, and you want the main body of the document to be
(1) in Times New Roman font.
(2) line spacing 1.5.
(3) You want each paragraph spaced 6 points from the following paragraph.
(4) You do not want the first line indented at all.

What is most convenient is to modify the "Normal" style to be this way.  To do this, you move your mouse over the word Normal in the styles list.  Don't click!  Just move the mouse pointer to hover over the word.  This makes a little icon appear on the right--what is called a "Drop-down-list."  Click on that, and the choices appear; move down to Modify --and click on that.  You should see a grey window, what is called a "Pop-up box", appear.

This is where you tailor the Normal style to have all the properties you want in your normal text, just for this document.  (If you want all your documents to have this sort of Normal text, we have to do something a little more invasive, which I will try to remember to tell you afterwards.)

Here is an illustration of the Modify Style dialogue pop-up box:

You can clearly do (1) right here, by adjusting the font to Times New Roman.  (You can even set the text size at the drop-down box right next to the font box.)

To do (2), (3) and (4), you have to click on the button shown outlined in red above.  A list of choices appears; select Paragraph.  Yet another dialogue appears.  All three of (2), (3) and (4) are set inside this dialogue.

Click on the side of the box that shows "Multiple" in my illustration (yours may have something different), and select 1.5 lines.  That takes care of (2).
For (3), in the Spacing area, select 0 pt for Before, and 6 pt for After, or 3 pt for each.

For (4), you probably don't need to do anything; Word paragraphs are usually not indented.  If you would like to indent the first line of each paragraph, by say 1/2 an inch, you go up to the Indentation area, to the Special area, click on the drop-down list, select First Line, and then specify By 0.5 inch.

Click on the OK button, and the Paragraph box disappears.  Now if you click OK on the Modify Style box, your setup will be just for this document.  If you want all your future documents to have these settings, you have to select Future documents based on this template.  Click on the little white dot, and it should show a little black dot, to indicate that it has been selected.

There you have it.  This should take you a long way.

Arch

Writing in Word, and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and anyone else who chooses to run

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I just got started learning to use a program called Scrivener, which is a sort of add-on to --apparently-- a number of other word-processors, such as Word.  Most of the features of Scrivener echo what's available in Word, and it struck me that most people really don't know how to use Word with all its features, so I'm writing this little introduction.

Meanwhile, down at the farm, the Presidential "race" is gearing up.  First the Democrats have to have their own private bloodbath, with Republicans sniping from the sidelines, and then the Republicans get to have their bloodbath, while the Democrats laugh themselves silly, or get furious, depending on what goes down.  Fortunately we've already heard a lot of the nonsense spouted by the Republicans, and they will have to come up with a newer and more preposterous lie to get me really angry.  Unfortunately, the Dems have succumbed to pressure, and begun to use the same sort of clever tactics, such as telling the electorate any sort of lie it wants to hear, just until they get elected.

One of the truly original American inventions is, as a great man said several times: advertising.  The concept of advertising has now developed into a finely-tuned plan for propagating as many lies as possible without getting caught, and having a good story ready, just in case you do.  More money seems to pass through the hands of advertising companies and consultants than through any other industry.  For instance: you've heard about college fees skyrocketing.  You know why?  Because private colleges are in a race to make their campuses look as attractive as possible, which means: more buildings, more sports facilities, more athletic teams, more coaches, more team-mascots-related sportswear in the college bookstore.  Why?  Advertising.  Every student, therefore, has to pay more tuition just to attract more students, to pay more fees.

In Politics, the game has become advertising, all advertising, all the time, and nothing but advertising.  All these conservative antics, and the complete circus to which they have reduced the electoral process, are, broadly viewed, an advertising game aimed simply at the next election, to denigrate their opponents, and persuade the public to vote for their candidate.  So, okay, I'm lumping all sorts of propaganda under the general heading of Advertising, but the word advertising gets across how cheap the whole thing is, in a way that the sophisticated word propaganda fails to do.  Propaganda seems, in its tone, something subtle, subversive, intelligent, sophisticated, and worthy of indulging in, to defeat a clever enemy.  But what we have here is a cheap, expensive effort to confuse the fact, and put someone in place in the White House and in Congress so that Business can continue to run roughshod over the poorer members of Society.

There is an element of fear in politics, from the point of view of the most wealthy members of society, the so-called One Percent.  No one ever got into the One Percent by working.  The only way into that select few is to be born with money.  If you're born with money, or you can steal it, or talk a lot of people out of it, this society has ways to enable you to steal more of it from poor folks.  This is the so-called American Dream: to get on the thieving side of society, rather than to keep working so that you can be stolen from.  Remember that.  If you're already rich, you can stop reading now.  All you can possibly be interested in is to steal more money from the poor by overvaluing your services to mankind, and to prevent the government from returning it to the poor, via taxes.

If you're not rich, you have two choices.  Work hard, and subsidize Big Business: Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Media, Big Automobiles, and Big Military; or organize together to change the system to be more friendly towards workers.  Don't let the One Percent, and it's media slaves, and your idiot poverty-stricken friends who imagine themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" persuade you that being a worker is stupid.  Being a worker makes sense, provided the affluent end of the spectrum pulls its weight, and pays its fair share of keeping the country running.

The One Percent should pay at least 90% of the cost of rebuilding roads.  Why?  Because they own the trucks, which bring goodies to them in their enormous homes hidden away in Connecticut (or Texas, or wherever).  The same goes for practically everything.  If the One Percent gave 1% of their wealth to fix the roads, that would give the working poor a living wage for a year, which would boost the economy like you would not believe, and bring WalMart so much income they could probably start a shuttle service to the Moon.  Excuse me, while I go try to find out how much the One Percent owns ... roughly 2 million a year per person.  That's obviously an income, not wealth.

Let's suppose that the population of the US is 300 million.  That means there are 3 million members of the One Percent.  Suppose they donated 10% of their annual income.  That's 10% of $2 million per person, multiplied by 3 million people: $600 billion.  Divide that up among the 15% unemployed or underemployed people out of the 300 million population: that's

$600 billion / (15% of 300 million) = $600 billion / 45 million = about $13000.

$13 thousand a year would not get a large family very far, but the poorer, single members of my family could sure as heck use $250 a week, no kidding.  Right now, some of the younger members of my family have no income at all, and they would dearly like to contribute at least a little bit towards their room and board.

"Why I want to be President."
One of the harder things a presidential candidate --who is for real-- will have to do this year is to persuade the public that they have good reasons why they want to be President, because the more thoughtful among us knows that the job can bring nothing but misery to anyone whom we trust.

1.  I want to push legislation through that reduces business influence in politics.
This is going to be almost impossible to accomplish, because Congress, by and large, is in the pocket of Big Business.  I want to restrain and restrict lobbying practices in Congress.  Lobbying is a type of corruption.

2.  I want to get people employed repairing the US infrastructure: roads, bridges, schools, water systems, and parks and preserves that have been destroyed by energy companies, electric cables, airports, waterways, and the coastline.

3.  I want to force streamlining of the automobile industry energy standards.  At present, car companies can get away with not improving gas mileage for some of their vehicles by promoting the model line to a larger-sized one.  Larger cars are allowed lower economy, so car companies simply make the car larger, without making the engines more economical.

4.  I want to liberate schools from tying their financial support to student performance on tests, or at least make the rules a little more reasonable.  (Don't get me started.)

5.  I want to alleviate the tax burden on lower-income people.

6.  I want to continue to withdraw troops deployed abroad.

7.  I want to remove the tax subsidies to Big Energy.

8.  I want to regulate Banks and consumer credit.

Word

Man, I'm pooped.  This will have to wait.