Another angry (former) academic reviews “Ivory Tower”

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A movie titled Ivory Tower is scheduled to be shown at a few cinemas (or theatres, if you prefer) across the country.  It is a documentary about college education, evidently, and William Deresiewicz has reviewed it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the professional forum of college professors.  I’m going to respond to his review without ever having seen the movie.  His article (or piece, if you prefer) stands perfectly well on its own, as a defense of higher education, and a critique of the nationwide condemnation of it, but because he compares the take of the movie with the take of people generally, in particular the take of business leaders, we should really see the movie sooner or later, particularly as Elizabeth Warren’s (college loans-related) legislation will be up for debate in the Senate.

Mr Deresiewicz begins with a very apt observation about higher education (which, unfortunately, applies to a lot of other things as well), namely that the vast majority of those who haven’t been to college —and even some who have— treat college as a ‘black box’:

“18-year-olds were inserted at one end, 22-year-olds came out the other, and as long as the system appeared to be working, no one bothered to inquire what happened in between. Americans, as a result, have very little understanding of what college is about—how it works, what it’s for, what larger social benefits it offers—and those employed in higher education have had very little practice in explaining it to them. The debate has been left to the politicians, the pundits, and increasingly, the hustlers and ideologues. Few who talk about college in public understand it, and few who understand it talk about it.”

College means different things to different people; it’s like the blind people describing the elephant.  Not that we are blind, but different things about College impress different people, and only a few of us have the nerve (or the chutzpah, if you prefer) to claim that we know the whole business.  In addition, of course, College has evolved over the last several decades even while I watched it from the inside, but its essential nature has evolved slowly enough for us to be able to talk about it.

He identifies some of the big questions that the movie deals with: “ballooning tuition and student debt” he says are put in context; they have to be taken against the background of a number of contributing factors, and I’m going to explain these carefully, because Deresiewicz uses professor-speak, which everyone should be able to understand, but in the present intellectual climate, nobody cares to put in the work.

Institutional competition: this is fairly obvious, but colleges compete with each other for students, since they operate within the business model we have.  Normally, when businesses compete, prices go down.  But colleges compete by spending money on things that look good to parents and prospective students: better food, more comfortable rooms, prettier campuses, which drive costs up.

Expansion: Campuses are indeed expanding, but a larger proportion of people are going to college, as Mr. D states later, and campuses must hire more people to deal with kids who really wouldn’t have been in college in years gone by, but many colleges try to make the experience work even for these marginal kids, and quite honestly, some of them are able to extract more out of college, than the spoiled kids of privileged families.

Borrowing: Not sure what he means by this; perhaps some institutions take out loans in order to expand.  Ours has been careful about raising money in more imaginative ways.

Administrative bloat: Colleges and universities—more the latter—are hiring non-teaching staff in order to deal with issues of marketing, student ‘life’, sports, etc; in other words, marketing, because all this stuff boils down to the cut-throat competition, and they no longer hire Presidents, but rather CEOs, Executive Officers, and they often hire them because of their credentials in having successfully headed big corporations.  Many in colleges do not like this trend, but college and university trustees, who tend to be selected according to how well they can steer the financial affairs of the school, tend to have more faith in people like them, who are businessmen.  In other words, the trustees, instead of directly dealing with funding the institution, outsource their job to an efficient Executive President, who has to be paid an enormous salary.  Trustees are idiots.

The rise of the "party track": This is colorful language based on the idea of the so-called “party school,” which is a college which has a reputation on the grapevine as a place for rich kids to have a good time, and earn a degree that isn’t very demanding.  (I know at least one instance of the offspring of the President of a fairly rigorous school who chose a nearby “party school” to attend.)

The long-term withdrawal of public funding—the shift from taxes to student loans—that has been the fundamental factor in creating the entire mess.  This is one big factor that I had not noticed, which is so big that a lot of faculty might have missed it.  As state and Federal legislatures balance their increasingly tight budgets, they withdraw funding for education, and families must take up the slack with student loans, which the government brokers, but which comes with interest.  So instead of the taxpayers paying interest on government deficit spending, kids pay interest on student loans.  At least part of the blame for rising education costs derives from this legislative shell-game, which has worked as long as the state and Federal government could divide the populace into two parts, one of which denied the importance of college education, and refused to pay for it, and could be made to blame government funding of education for some of the budget deficits, and the other of which wanted government to hold up its end in funding education.  This divide does not fall along economic lines, but rather on philosophical lines, which Mr. Deresiewicz tries to explain to some degree.

One of the major points that the author makes is that student loan debt is not as high as reported by some sources, including the movie, but I seriously doubt whether it makes a big difference to public feeling against college education.  Furthermore, he reports that some families take on debt so that their children may not have to take out so much debt; this is especially true for families where both parents are college graduates, and know the value of education.  It is also true for more affluent families, who can afford to take on the debt, though, obviously, not families that are so wealthy that they can simply pay cash for full tuition.

Mr. D also points out that employment prospects are poor for college graduates, but their situation is not as bad as the situation of non-graduates.  Getting a job without a college degree is tough: the unemployment rate was close to 10% at one time, and has now fallen just a tiny bit.  But it was just around 6% for college graduates, and is now down to about 4%.  College definitely does improve one’s chances of getting hired.  He also makes the point that college education is not a bubble; he says of young people today: “They know they have to go to college, and they also know they’re probably going to have to take on debt to do so. But it’s also the reason that higher education is not, in fact, a bubble—that there isn’t going to be a sudden institutional collapse.”

I don’t know about bubbles.  It is very possible that there is going to be some sort of sudden change.  For instance, if someone were to suggest a measure of college value, where schools that forgo what really should be considered extras, such as expensive campuses, expensive athletics programs, expensive administrative staff—there actually is such a thing: academic budget to total budget ratio— and if the Federal government (to begin with) were to offer zero percent student loans only for students who attend high-value schools, we might see a sudden collapse of the academic ‘aftermarket,’ if you will allow me to coin a phrase.

The next target—actually Mr. Deresiewicz’s only major target—is a pair of businessmen called Peter Thiel and Sebastian Thrun, one of whom offers a fellowship for students to drop out of college and follow other paths, and the other of whom heads a firm that develops MOOCs: massive open online courses.  Though Thiel, who offers the fellowship, seems rather an unpleasant character as Mr. Deresiewicz describes him, I don’t see why offering his fellowship for kids to drop out of college should earn him such venom.  But this is a philosophical question.  As long as it is essential for a kid to go to college, the hostility is justified.  As long as high school provides almost zero education, college will be essential.  As long as government interferes with high school education in destructive ways,  high school will provide zero education.  Government interference in education will be destructive as long as the nation at large views education at large as a desperate means of preparing kids for starter jobs.  What Billy D. says of college education is true of education at large.  It is time college professors came off it, and stopped thinking of themselves as the only means for kids to learn about everything.  Some of what Deresiewicz says happens in college, should happen also in high school.  Of course, it is presently fashionable to talk about high school teachers as marginally functional idiots, but, well, so are some professors.  Mark my words: the day will come when the government will insist on the same testing for college students as we have for grade school students.  This is because most legislators should never have graduated from any sort of school, and should know that tests can only deliver so much information and no more, and tests are only as good as how carefully they’re interpreted.  I’m beginning to convince myself that the situation is hopeless, but ... I guess I shouldn’t.

William Deresiewicz asks an interesting question: will these advocates of MOOCs and ‘UnCollege’ advise their own children not to go to a traditional college?  Do they take the view that college should be only for the exalted future leaders of society, and not for the hoi polloi?

This is a much deeper question than most people realize; I personally think it is the central question about how society will evolve, and where society is headed.  Perhaps the stratification that education provides is inevitable, given the social dynamics of education, attitudes, politics and employment.  Taking education as a whole, lumping grade school education and college education all together, for the moment, we have to ask: what does it do for us, as citizens, viewing it as those who enable it to take place, not for ourselves, but for future generations?  I was taught, informally, that education provides Information, Attitudes, and Skills.

Information is pretty clear.  We learn everything from how the seasons work, to how to multiply numbers, and how a court of law works.  We have to know this, if we are to survive as individuals in society.

Skills is also pretty clear.  Some of the information I listed above is also classifiable as skills: writing, reading, arithmetic, computer programming, setting up a website, driving, dealing with foreigners, making a presentation at a meeting, conducting a meeting.

Attitudes is the step-child, here.  It is politically tricky for a teacher to pass on attitudes in modern America, because, on the one hand, parents insist on teachers passing on certain attitudes which the teachers would rather leave to the parents: playing well with others, being civil, being honest; on the other hand, some parents would be all over a teacher who passes on other attitudes, such as concern for the environment, a positive attitude towards reading, immigrants and minorities, and a negative attitude towards guns and wars and drunk driving, and watching TV.

Because of the way parents and community leaders control the flavor of schools, teachers are strongly discouraged from passing on their values, and we’re lucky that many teachers, at great risk to themselves, do choose to transmit liberal social values to their students, whenever they have the opportunity to do so.  In college, however, professors have felt less constrained about speaking out about their values, and so-called “first generation” parents, that is parents who have not themselves gone through college, and “effectively first generation” parents, that is parents who have gone through college, but cut most of their classes, or were too high to remember any of it, are very unhappy about what they perceive as college professors being too political.  Unfortunately, many philosophical matters that we must talk about: the environment, education, taxes, wars, social welfare, health care, are now considered political.  In other words, leaders, both liberal and conservative, have conveniently formulated opinions on behalf of everybody, and thinking has become sort of a multiple-choice business: you’re supposed to embrace one “slate” or the other, wholesale.  In contrast, most teachers (and professors) are all about thinking for yourself, which many parents are very uncomfortable about.

In addition to information, attitudes and skills, there is a fourth objective of education that William Deresiewicz points out: that of creating an educated citizenry.  The demands of Democracy require an informed and educated voter, something that nations across the globe have been struggling to create (or prevent from being created) for a century.  Some countries have laws that prevent anyone without the prescribed level of education from voting, which is one of the things that kept universal suffrage so long from being the norm in the US.  Today, of course, we allow anyone of the right age to vote, because we feel that the right to vote must precede the right to an education.  But the fact of the matter is that many who have passed through college and university are still only marginally educated, and do not see the point of various items in the national budget because of their sheer ignorance.

Mr. D. touches on a variety of deplorable aspects of US education and educational institutions that I have, in my own scattered way, deplored over the years.  It is good to know that sharper minds than mine are watching the education scene, but it is sad to see that those who understand at least an enormous piece of the puzzle as he does end up preaching essentially to the choir.  What we need is a larger, more influential choir that can make a difference.  Rather than defend tertiary (college) education as it exists today, I believe we should encourage its evolution in different directions.  I wish I had the smarts to do that, or to think of a path that can be taken.

Well, that concludes my review of Mr. D’s review.  I encourage everyone to read the review first, because with movies such as Ivory Tower, it is well to have a guide to it before you see it, because movies are so incredibly persuasive.  It is a definite advantage to know beforehand how much time is given to one aspect in contrast to another, and to be prepared to be only as impressed as the actual case presented warrants it.

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Brace Yourselves. This could take a while

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(Just in case you’re reading this after the Holocaust, I’m reacting to the news that a militia representing a group called ISIS, which stands for some mash-up of Islam, Iraq, Syria and Something Else has begun to move across Iraq from the North, and may or may not have taken the capital, Baghdad.  They also like to make videos of shooting off the heads of captured soldiers.  Meanwhile, another puerile bunch of militants keep kidnapping Nigerian girls, and it appears that the Nigerian government is powerless to keep its population secure.  In the US, of course, it is random civilians who go about on killing sprees, but that never seems to bother anyone outside the US.  Our own killing sprees seldom result in more than about twenty deaths, luckily for everyone.)

Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1995, for reasons not clear to most of us (except that Kuwait and Iraq both sit on top of the same oil field, and Kuwait seemed to be draining it off and selling it faster than Iraq could do it, or wanted to do it), and the US (where George H. W. Bush was president at the time) marched in and liberated Kuwait, in Operation Desert Storm.

In 2001, two US passenger airliners were hijacked by Al Qaeda agents, and rammed into the World Trade Center, killing thousands, and causing millions of dollars of damage, and widespread shock.

At this time, many countries were suspected of hiding weapons of mass destruction (other than the US, Israel, Britain, France and Russia, all of which had given themselves permission to own these weapons).  One of the prime suspects was Iraq, which vehemently denied that they had any such thing, in a tone guaranteed to convince the US that they actually had them.  In 2002, right after the attacks of 2001, the US (where G. W. Bush was president at the time) decided to attack Iraq, ostensibly to search and remove weapons of mass destruction, but in actual fact, as retaliation for 2001.  Al-Qaeda, in fact, had little or no presence in Iraq at this time.  The military operation against Iraq in 2002 was pure theatre.  The only truly substantive objective of the operation was to capture the Iraqi oilfields, or at least to ensure that they did not fall into the hands of anti-US interests.

Let’s look at the fallout

There is a long history of the US going to war to protect its economic interests.  The country is by no means unified in its support for this; in fact, the numbers of those opposed to military action for economic ends might be a majority.  The numbers opposed to military action for the sole purpose of keeping a particular party in power is an even larger majority.  At any rate, the emotional response to the attacks of 2001 were so great that many in Congress lost their objectivity, and supported the call to war, and the years between 2002 and the present have been some of the most shameful in US history.  President Obama, who was elected in 2008, was unable to withdraw US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan because of the complications surrounding the process of disengagement, and the practical impossibility of constructing an effective withdrawal strategy.  In every war since 1900, the exit strategy has been increasingly more complex, and less satisfactory.  The postwar reconstruction of Germany will probably stand as the last success story; reconstruction of Iraq has been a failure, reconstruction of Afghanistan will be a failure, and every new war the US prosecutes will be a failure in every respect.

The politics of the world today are not open to solution by simple, clean, decisive military action.  Only a military dictator who is completely uninterested in a sane foreign policy can be satisfied with military action today, and unfortunately the number of political enemies of the US abroad which are headed by such people is proliferating.

In Russia, we have Mr. Putin, who appears to be somewhat short of being a statesman.  If Russia stops exporting gas to Europe, and if it cannot enrich its coffers by selling gas to China instead, it will be looking for international customers for its advanced weapons systems, and any enemy of the US could be a customer.  (In fact, arms manufacturers in the US itself are eager to sell arms to its enemies.  Business comes before patriotism, for everyone in the armaments industry, and they would justify themselves by saying that selling arms to our enemies strengthens us economically, and we have better guns anyway.)

The interesting thing is that there is something common between the US, and the Islamic Fundamentalists who are the most militant enemies of the US.  Both parties are easily inflamed by words.  The US is more easily pissed off by rhetoric than most of its present and former allies, such as Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Japan.  It takes a lot more than rudeness to piss off the Japanese.  It’s almost impossible to irritate China.  But Putin can enrage Americans with a mere look.

It is the same with the Islamist Fundamentalists.  Both the US and the Islamist Fundamentalists absolutely pride themselves on being easily enraged.  With our short fuses, we could be at war for more than a century.  This is why I have stocked up on a whole lot of DVDs.

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Originality and Plagiarism

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Oh, what amazing times we live in!

I recently heard that kids as young as second grade were being taught the concept of plagiarism.  The person who was telling me this (my wife and I are blessed with not having access to television, and so live in blissful ignorance of all the disgusting plagiarism that is taking place out there) was indignant, not so much with the rampant plagiarism that is rotting the very tissue of society, but that children of the tender age of, say, seven, were having to puzzle over the demands of originality.  I had to agree.  (The image at right is actually resident at another website; my use of it without providing a reference will be construed to be plagiarism.)

Little kids, of course, are struggling to use words and sentences, and we naturally teach them the skillful and idiomatic use of their (admittedly intractable) mother tongue through the use of models.  We were all taught that way, and some of us were lucky enough to be steeped with brilliant passages from Shakespeare, and Milton and the Bible, as Professor Henry Higgins said.  The more erudite among us can hardly utter a sentence without using phrases, and even entire sentences, that derive from literature (that is, stuff that we have read.  Of course, we were shamelessly reading a lot of stuff, a vice we indulged in in our misguided youth).  I used to quote heavily from P. G. Wodehouse and Leslie Charteris, my favorite authors when I was growing up.  Now, ironically, my friends think that many of these phrases are Archie specials, and I’m too lazy to tell them their origins, because it usually involves such deep questions as “Who the heck are those people?”  These days, as long as you stick to short sentences of words of one syllable, you’re fairly safe; the computer programs that check for originality usually let pass a quotation consisting of a single word.

Grade school teachers, you see, have been provided an operational definition of originality.  You take a sample of writing, which is to be tested for originality.  You feed it into a computer program which compares it with all the samples of text that are contained in its database, and if there are no matches beyond a certain length, JOY!  The sample is certified as original.  So, in the absence of a truly useful definition of what it means for the essay of a student to be original, young teachers (who were themselves students in college when the Great Leap Forward of the Witch-hunt Against Plagiarism exploded into being) have resorted to this procedure to establish originality.

Let us rewind to an earlier time, when teachers had to puzzle over the problem of plagiarism (spelled without capitals, here, or 'Caps', as they are fondly called these days) in the essays students turned in.  Teachers need to teach their pupils to write, and so they assign students to write what are called essays (yes, I know you’re intimately acquainted with these things) about some topic, which is usually a compromise between a topic of interest to the teacher, and a topic of interest to the students.  We all know what a chore it is to write such a thing.  But, fast forward to the present day.  On any given day, close to a million idiots out there are putting out a BLOG POST; including my humble self.  What is a blog post?  An essay.

So teachers assign their students to write a blog post on some topic, which, once they arrive on the teacher’s desk, must be taken home, and read.  The teacher has to reluctantly read the essays (or blog posts) which between twenty and thirty students have reluctantly written.  Usually, students write pure pap; sometimes the students write something substantial with the help of their parents.  Sometimes the parents write the essays for their kids.  Sometimes, especially older kids, steal the material from the Internet.

Since standards of writing have declined over the years, teachers, in desperation, require an ever greater volume of writing from their students, who turn to the systematic theft of writing from other sources.  If we were to actually find out to what extent students submit material that did not originate with themselves, we would lose faith in all that we hold dear.

Plagiarism, is, in its essence, the submission of the work of someone else as your own.  In contrast, today, plagiarism is defined indirectly as presenting a plagiarized piece of work, and a plagiarized piece of work is defined, in turn, as something which contains a significant portion which matches up with something already in a database.

To make things perfectly clear, if one were to submit work that essentially matches up with something in the database, I suppose that an argument could be made that one is handing in the work of someone else as one’s own, but there’s always the chance that it was not intended to be deceitful.  Plagiarism that happens unwittingly cannot be considered a culpable offense; it deserves the term plagiarism only if there is intent to deceive.

I have many problems with this whole business.

First of all, I’m not at all sure that assigning writing on topics that do not inspire the student is helpful.  For instance, if I were forced to make a blog post about something completely outside my interests, such as the voting habits of Buddhists in Montana (and bless them, anyway) I would end up stealing most of it from the Internet.

Secondly, there are relatively easy ways of ensuring that essays are original.  One way is to ask the students to write a brief paragraph right in the classroom.  Then you ask the students to expand it into three paragraphs at home.  You can then check the two versions to see if extraneous material from possibly Internet sources (if that is what you’re worried about) have crept in.  It is my belief that, if the student gets help from older relatives on the essay, and if there is an aspect of plagiarism involved, we could safely overlook it, because it is sure to have been a learning experience anyway.  Sometimes older relatives are worse writers than the students themselves, and I suspect that the student will soon arrive at this conclusion him- or herself.)

Thirdly, the problem of being unoriginal at the phrase or sentence level is not problematic, and should not be confused with truly large-scale plagiarism.  (However, when a kid uses uncharacteristic phrases in an essay, it is taken as a clue that plagiarism has crept in.  But is a teacher clever enough to know how characteristic a particular phrase is for a given student?  Kids pick up phrases like cats pick up fleas.)  My own writing, for instance, will most certainly contain numerous phrases and sentences that might be found in literature of one sort or another, especially if I were to be writing on Bach or Mozart.  Nothing I have ever written has been so original as to have escaped earlier writers, some of whom I may have read at one time or another.  Computers are wonderful things, but it seems a mistake to rely on mechanical aids to ensure that learning is taking place.  This is one reason why I just don’t believe in distance-learning for younger students, who are still at the stage where they’re being made to learn material reluctantly.  (When I was in college, I looked forward to every lesson; this is not the case with kids in college today.  They learn everything reluctantly, and this has a bearing on the entire plagiarism debate.)  Today’s computer just might be smarter than today’s teachers.  It’s okay for me, as a private individual, to suspect that, but it is deplorable for administrators and legislators to take that point of view.

Some of this preoccupation with originality is a cultural thing, of the same mindset as that which wants to enforce copyrights and patents, and digital rights management (DRM).  When the benefits of originality are measured in dollars and cents, in a certain perverse sense it seems reasonable to inculcate in the very young the means of making a living from their originality.  But unfortunately, it seems to be taking the route of teaching kids not to get caught infringing the plagiarism rules.  Research today is often misconstrued to mean: read up about the subject, and report on what you have read in such a way that a plagiarism detector will not accuse you of copying the article.  The assignment is ambiguous: find out what others have done, but make it your own.  Some geniuses are perfectly content to work with this paradoxical instruction.  I sincerely doubt whether it can be done honestly.

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