Has Wall Street Subverted Either the Democrats or Liberals?

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In a recent post in Salon, Bill Curry (a former aide to Bill Clinton) charges that the Democrat party has come under the influence of what he calls "Wall Street Democrats".  While many of the details of his post are difficult for me to follow, not being an insider to the history of the party, he certainly seems to have some good points.

His post takes as a unifying theme the relationship between Ralph Nader and the Democrats.  Initially, when Ralph Nader originally came to national attention in his denunciation of certain Ford cars, he worked with the Democrats to get certain important pieces of legislation passed, despite the enormous influence of the automobile industry lobby.  Since then, however, it has become more convenient for a certain type of Democrat --precisely those Curry terms the Wall Street Democrats-- to cooperate with Big Business than stand up against Big Business, whereas Nader has continued to firmly oppose anything Big, including Big Business, and (surprisingly) Big Government.

These days, the only way I can make sense out of a closely argued political piece is to copy it out, delete all the references I don't understand, and all the advertising, and then give it a try; until them I'm not going to give an opinion on the entire thing.  However, there are some major points that I think I understand.

• Deregulation (of the Media, of Communications, of Banks and Lending and Investing) has caused enormous damage.  I don't get all the details, but it certainly seems as though something has hastened the demise of newspapers, and deregulation seems as good a culprit as any.  The same is true of Banking, though Curry says that Bill Clinton continues to claim to support it.  I don't know why Bill Clinton does this, and even whether he does this, and he usually has good arguments for things he claims to support, even if he secretly doesn't.
• Small businesses, (Curry claims that Nader claims,) hate Big Business.  Big Business is not on the side of small businesses; they want to swallow them up, or destroy them.  Bill Curry (perhaps picking up on something Ralph Nader says) remarks that Small Business has not been completely grabbed by the GOP even now, and if the Democrats can show themselves as supporting Small Business, they could find a staunch ally there.
• Barack Obama has not yet delivered on a large number of election promises, especially those about openness of government.  To Curry, this is evidence that Obama is a populist.  I'm suspicious of these labels, which are political insider terms, and often mean something different to specialists that they do to us amateurs.  It appears, judging from how Curry uses the word, that the word describes politicians who make false election promises (of a particular sort).  I thought it described someone running for office who was for the rank and file against the inner political circle.  I guess I was wrong, and they were right.

[To be expanded]

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A (moderately) Easy Way to Alleviate some of the Peculiar Dynamics of College Teaching

One of the first things that bother new college faculty is that, for the first few weeks of class, things are going swimmingly; the students are eager to learn, and they believe, for the most part, that the teacher is on their side; then, one awful day, it is time to administer a test.  This is where, in many cases, things begin to go downhill.  The teacher --in the view of the students, of course, not in actual fact-- becomes the Enemy, the Giver of Grades, the Dispenser of Red Ink.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to recover from this setback.  But it is a setback that returns intermittently, especially in the sciences, because there is a greater proportion of what might be called mechanics in the sciences: standard skills that must be mastered by the student, and verified by the instructor, which are crucial to progress, even within each course, and certainly for subsequent courses.

People familiar only with US education have lived with this contradiction all their lives --or at least, the portion of their lives that they remember.  The teacher is both the Coach, and the Examiner.  But in grade school, the Examiner aspect is downplayed, and most kids remember their grade school teachers with some degree of fondness.  In recent times, teachers have been confronted with external examinations, which are outside the ability of the teachers to control, so the teachers (who have been able to set their own tests thus far) are completely discombobulated with the fact that the students are no longer able to rely on the benevolence of the teacher to adjust their grades.  But look on the bright side: the teacher is now firmly in the position of the Coach, and not the Examiner.

In College, however, the tension between the teacher's role as Coach and Examiner persists, and results in students regarding the friendly advances of their instructors as being two-faced.  Here is old professor C- trying to schmooze me again.  And it is no surprise.  (The negative stereotype of the slime-ball professor is probably reinforced at home, especially by parents who struggled in college, and are still paying their student loans!)

There are two, entirely different, solutions.  I will describe the easier, more innovative solution first, and the more traditional solution later.

Solution One.  Make it easier for the student to raise his or her grade, by repeating the course.  At present, my school like most schools, charges the full tuition rate for a student who repeats a course, despite the fact that they've already made their money from the poor kid the first time around.  This certainly has the desirable effect of forcing the kid to take the first pass through a course more seriously.  But having to pay anything for a repeated course is deterrent enough, in my humble opinion.  Why not allow any student to repeat a course for a fraction of the cost, or even for free?  Why not allow better students to carry a repeated course as an overload (that is, as extra credits, beyond the usual full credit load)?  And why not completely erase the unsuccessful earlier attempt from the transcript? The only reason for keeping the bad grades on the transcript is to bolster the impression that the school has high academic standards: Look, we give bad grades.  We're awesome.

It seems unnecessary to emphasize the dollars and cents aspect of this idea, but for the sake of the cash-hungry administrators: it is probably more likely that a student will stay in school and complete a degree if repeating courses was made easier, than if a student was thrown out of school for getting below the required course point average to stay in school.  Classes will be larger, if more students repeat courses.  But if students are encouraged to lose weight, more of them can be squeezed into the classrooms.  Lots of things to think about.

Remember, also, that if students are encouraged financially to repeat courses and raise their GPA, the average GPA of the student body will rise, which is always a good thing.  And it is done honestly.  And don't forget the advantage to this system in recruiting.  We need not advertise this program to stronger students, but for students with parents fearful about the success of their offspring, an honest way to improve their chances of success will be very encouraging indeed.  In any case, this simply codifies a discretionary course of action that deans and other administrators could have followed in any case, but codifying it makes it possible to administer the policy more uniformly.

Solution Two.  Have every course final set by an external examiner.  This is an idea used extensively in Europe and many other foreign countries, at least in the past.  This puts the instructor firmly in the role of Coach, which makes it much easier to develop a rapport with the students, and establish a friendly relationship with them.

There's no need to get sentimental about student-faculty relationships, but every teacher knows that some of the most enduring relationships are between faculty and their best students.  The question is: are the relationships strong because the students were strong, or were the students strong because the relationships were?  Why not try to extend your relationship to all your students?  Many's the time I thought a student and I were friends, only to find that the relationship was completely soured by a bad grade.  The easiest thing in the world is not to give any bad grades, and that path of least resistance is the slippery slope that leads to intrusive Assessment, and ultimately government interference in academic standards.  All a student needs, sometimes, is a second chance to ace a course, without it costing an arm and a leg.

Finally, one of the advantages of distance learning is that a student can, in most cases, take a dry run of the course first, and then take the course "for real."  This is a parallel plan to the one I suggest in Solution One: some students just take longer to pick up certain sorts of material.  Unfortunately, administrators are more happy to go whole hog into distance learning than to try more innovative approaches to raising academic achievement, simply because administrators are more focused on marketing than on the services they have been hired to deliver.  But this is America; everything is at the service of the marketers.

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A Totally Scattered Post

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This is a scattered post; it has no theme whatever, and I’m simply shooting off my mouth about the stuff that has been in the news lately.

The Supremes, the Hobby Lobby, and Birth Control
My stance on health care is that in the form it currently takes in the US today—July 2014—health care is only a little less broken than it used to be before 2012.  It is unconscionable that the Supreme Court (by a very narrow majority) has decided that businesses smaller than a certain size have the right not to provide (via the insurance plans that they offer) birth control for women (or any medical services at all) that are contrary to their religious views.  It is even more unconscionable, in my opinion, that businesses have to provide health insurance at all.  Why?  Because [1] businesses should not have to negotiate deals with health insurance companies at all.  Doing so puts them at a huge disadvantage, because they have to take administrative and planning expertise away from what they should be doing —running an efficient company— towards comparing health plans, and gambling on what sort of health plans will appeal to new hires.  Let’s face it: the existing employees will have to eat any sort of heath plan garbage that is imposed on them.  American citizens have lived with this twisted situation for a century.  As long as health services are paid for by insurance companies, there will be inequity, discrimination, and logical inconsistencies in the delivery of health care.

[2] Health care should be social obligation, paid for by taxes, not an employment benefit.  It is fashionable today to blame unemployment on the actual individuals who happen to be unemployed, rather than economic conditions, or the US tradition of not allowing government to create employment through public works, or developing the infrastructure, which is the most crying need we have at present.  It is even worse, next to being unemployed, that the health of unemployed persons and their families should suffer, so that if an opportunity for new employment does offer itself, the person concerned is too sick to take it.  Health care should be paid for by the government, and ideally the Federal Government.  If there are objections to it from the point of cost, compromises can be made.  Objections made on religious grounds must be ignored.  This “Life begins at conception” principle is sheer hogwash, and cannot be allowed to influence government policy.  The principle that all life is equally sacred makes better sense than human life begins at conception, but all other life is negotiable, which is what lots of orthodox Christians claim to believe.  Basic Health Care should be paid for with taxes, and I’m willing to discuss what sorts of health care should be considered elective, and so not covered.  If there should be a death panel, so be it.  Even a death panel cannot prevent a patient from paying for treatment that the death panel has denied.  (Denial is only denial of insurance coverage.  All these millionaires who pretend to be deathly afraid of death panels can easily afford any care that an Insurance "Death Panel" denies coverage for.  Anyone would think that a (so-called) Death Panel has the right to send someone to the Guillotine!  No.  In case you were wondering; a so-called death panel can only say that such-and-such a procedure is sufficiently exotic, or unnecessary, and expensive that the patient must pay for it him- or herself.)

I think the decision the Supreme Court (initially) handed down is the only good one it could have (except for some last-minute —evidently post-decision— finagling by the conservative justices, which expanded the rights of fanatically religious employers beyond the extent to which the Court had managed to compromise to arrive at the initial Hobby Lobby decision).

Intervention in the Middle East
I haven’t kept up with what is happening with these ISIS people; it appears that what they want most of all is attention, after which they want to make sure that Islamic women are not permitted the same rights as Islamic men.  The Christian religion, in my humble opinion, is a rational reformation of Judaism, in addition, of course, to some claims that Jesus was the Messiah, and so forth.  In all that has been reported in the first century writings about what Jesus said that we have been permitted to see, by the censoring arm of the Early Church and the Emperor Constantine, Jesus keeps up an unremitting assault on the inconsistencies of the Jewish observation of their religion.  In later centuries, successive reformations kept making the rules of the church more rational in small increments, until the inequities between the sexes were eroded systematically, in keeping with the social philosophies of each succeeding age.  In more conservative branches of Judaism and Islam, of course, the rights and privileges of the two sexes are quite asymmetric.

Until we take the logs out of our own eyes, of course, we cannot keep exclaiming about the motes in the eyes of the Islamic peoples of the world.  We can support Islamic women, we can provide sanctuary for them, we can give them a platform.  But if we were to make a raid on an Islamic country simply to liberate their women, it would be viewed as a mere excuse for aggression.  We must simply wait, until Islam comes of age.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Iraq.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Algeria.  It will never work.

Let us by all means take each call for “liberation” on its own merits.  But I for one am convinced that the liabilities of a move to liberate any foreign nation vastly outweighs the benefits.

Leaving the CIA to extend covert US support to foreign countries is just as idiotic an idea.  The CIA is managed by fools, and when, with the current US popular distaste for secrecy, the operation is brought to light, the US looks more foolish than ever.  We simply have to stop pretending to be the conscience of the world.

Lawsuits, and Obama Executive Actions
Recently we learned that the Speaker of the House, Mr. John Behner, has announced his intention of bringing a lawsuit against President Obama because of the number of Executive Action he has taken.  (For the information of those who are not aware of this fact: because Congress has failed to act on an enormous variety of issues, the President has gone ahead and given orders.)

Supporters of the President across the nation are incensed, because the Behner lawsuit will be expensive.  But this is a common thing: Congressional games involve appointing Special Investigators and Grand Juries and lawsuits to discredit various branches of the Government, be it Watergate, Oliver North, the Whitewater Scandal, the Monica Lewinski Scandal, or now the Too Many Executive Orders Scandal.  It is all part of the Hollywoodization of Congress.  Sarah Palin, a one-time GOP glamorous character, has come out in favor of impeaching the President.  The tragedy of the GOP is that its true leaders are a few cynical intellectuals, and a few oligarchs, such as the pair of brothers of the name Koch.  In contrast, the idols of the rank-and-file GOP are loose cannons and lightweights who are a general embarrassment to the party, such as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and this Senator from the south, whose name I forget [Ted Cruz. See here for more idiocy from this numskull].  It is a crazy circus, watching the cynical intellectual leadership trying to keep the goofballs under control.

All we can do is to keep careful track of how much money is spent on this lawsuit, and use it in the 2014 campaign, and the 2016 campaign, and keep using it as long as John Behner is in the running for absolutely anything.  One of the most fearsome prospects is that of having a total idiot running for President, such as, for instance, John Behner.  But there are worse idiots in the GOP stable, and the GOP knows it.  It also knows that the GOP rank and file likes these idiots.

Chaotic Weather, Global non-warming, rising sea levels, and Carbon Emissions
It seems clear that Human-Induced-Global-Warming is resulting in increasingly chaotic weather.  Even if you believed that the global warming is entirely natural, you have to believe that cutting down on energy use can help slow down the rate of warming.  But the neigh-sayers are in firm control, despite Neil deGrasse Tyson’s valiant efforts on the Fox channel.  At least one of President Obama’s executive orders, so troublesome to the Coal Industry, has had to do with limiting emissions from Coal Plants.

You probably realize that, at least in certain parts of the country, consumers have taken to buying Hybrid cars in droves, and sales of heavy SUV's are slowing down.  One of these days, Coal Plant owners will find themselves out on a limb, despite the agonizingly long-drawn out employment crunch.

The employment crunch
This is something that is not so much in the news, as affecting our family directly.  The rhetoric coming out of the Right is that it is Health Reform that is causing it.  That may be so, but it is more that the Right is aggravating the effects of health reform on the impact on the hiring practices of small businesses.

If only the US was friendlier to cooperative enterprises!  It would not be too difficult to organize unemployed young people together to create communal farms, cooperative stores, and to help themselves enjoy a moderately comfortable lifestyle.  But it is not easy.  If ever the time was ripe for a network of cooperative enterprises to be organized, it is now.  The culture is wonderful at proclaiming the value of the worker, while at the same time denying any real opportunities for workers, and working all the time to make things easier for the largest businesses.  The sheer power of the media is deployed to make it appear as though Big Business is the underdog, and anyone helping the worker is the oppressor.  It defies reason.

Well, keep calm, dear readers, and try not to get too many ulcers reading the news, or worse, watching the news, or even going on Facebook.  Political frustration is spreading among both liberals and conservatives, because nothing good ever happens in Congress, or anywhere in the world, except for an occasional tennis or football game.

Our Animals / Terry Pratchett

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My wife and I belong to a couple of animals: a Dog, whom we shall call Fuzzy (not her real name), and a Cat, Buzzy (not her real name either).

Fuzz came to live with us two years ago, when the Reelect Obama campaign was getting underway in the Fall of 2012.  I noticed, when she first arrived, that she was a mixed breed of great dignity and intelligence.  She was about 12 years old then, or at least my wife’s family had had her for that long.  She had walked into their store in a town some sixty miles away from here, and taken over the place with her wit and charm.  Or at any rate, her seductive puppy ways.

When my wife and I were still dating (we’re sort of newlyweds; we’ve only been married a few years), Fuzz would regard me with a certain reserve, more a sort of tolerance than real warmth.  After we got married, Fuzz went to live with my wife’s son, who acquired another puppy, Hank, who soon grew huge.  Fuzzy had great trouble coping, and so she moved in with us.

Once she got to my home, she became a lot more friendly, and was very unhappy with having to live downstairs, because my wife and I were convinced that her constant shedding was giving us problems, especially in our bedroom (though we all know lots of other folks who often slept with their animals, sometimes even in their beds).

We quickly settled into a sort of routine, where Kate (ouch; there, I’ve gone and mentioned her name.  I wonder whether it is common to place a semicolon right after an ‘ouch’?  Wait; should I put the question mark inside the quotes?  This is getting crazy...) would zip downstairs early morning to get the coffee started, and stare balefully at the weather reports on her little tablet, and then come upstairs with the Fuzz and the coffee.  (Fuzz was allowed upstairs briefly, but not overnight.)

Pretty soon, Kate would announced that I had a visitor, and Fuzz would march up to me and demand a scratch while I was still in bed, and I would give her a pretty thorough scratch, after which she would walk round to Kate, and demand some sort of acknowledgement, and get a little chitchat, but not very much of a scratch, but she seemed happy with the little she got.

Then we would all head downstairs for breakfast, and feed the Fuzz, and let her out, and then Kate would head off into the wilds of where she worked, in the County office, and Fuzz would mope until she got back.

Over the next year, I learned that Fuzz’s intelligence was the usual one of being able to tell to an almost uncanny degree what Kate (and often I, myself,) were thinking.  We would exchange a few coded remarks about the mere possibility of going out for a brief excursion, and Fuzz would caper about like a maniac.  But to the question, “Well, where’s your leash?”, she would just grin and wag her tail.  She would never fetch anything, not even a toy with which to play.  I cannot figure out, to this day, whether it is because she doesn’t know what the words mean, or whether she regards all that as our department, and not hers.  It is as if she were saying, “You guys get all the equipment, and I’ll help with the walking.”

Fuzzy, giving the camera the Evil Eye

She is a very pretty dog.  I can never get a good photo of her, mostly because she keeps fooling around, or showing the camera her hindquarters.  I have a photo or two that Kate took, which are the best ones we have.  She is at least half Beagle, but opinion is divided as to what the other half is: Pit Bull (Staffordshire Terrier) or Labrador.  I lean toward the latter.

Lately, she has trouble with her hindquarters; she finds it almost impossible to climb our rather narrow stairs, and Kate comes behind her, to help in case Fuzzy slips off a step, which she has done often.  We have a lot of smooth floor in our house—not my idea; I got the house that way—which sometimes results in Fuzzy doing an unintended split, which simply has to be very uncomfortable or even painful.

Buzzy, smiling for the camera

KT has, over the years, lived with numerous cats and dogs, and one day she declared that she was going to look up on the Internet to see whether there was a cat of a specific description available in any animal shelters within a radius of about 50 miles, and presently we were bringing home a little lady, whom KT named something fancy, but I called Buzz, because of her purring.  I, too, had grown up with cats, but except for a sort of absent-minded benevolence towards them, can remember little of the specific individuals our family had adopted over the years.  They were often fond of me, and would climb up onto my lap, and generally mess up my homework during my high school years, or when I was home from college.  But this one seemed smaller than the majority of cats I could remember, and certainly half the size of KT’s own cat, who is enormous, and lives with her daughter, and is a sort of feline version of the character Wimpy in the Popeye cartoon series.  Well, no; he is quite adorable, but not a very active cat.  The young lady also has a Chihuahua, and a young python.

Going through the fotos, I discovered a variety of critters whom we encountered over the last several years.  From left to right:
* we have Hank, still in his puppyhood; he is now a couple of inches larger, and a few tons heavier;
* Channing, a little foal born earlier this year, to a former neighbor of Katie’s;
* A nameless possum, who turned up on the roof of our shed last winter;
* Katie’s enormous cat, who now lives with Pam;
* Another daughter’s puppy, Bibsey, taken a few years ago.

We’re still missing photos of the python, and Pam’s doggie Jack, of whom I don’t have suitably flattering photos yet.

Some names have not been mentioned for various reasons!

Anyway, Fuzz is slowing down.  She still manages a great deal of enthusiasm when the prospect of a perambulation arises, but otherwise drags herself around the house with her head hanging.  She could last a couple more years, but they will not be happy ones.  I adore that dog, and I’m awaiting her passing almost with fear.  She still raids the garbage, when it contains something suitably odoriferous which we have forgotten to take out.  When we return home after such an event has taken place in our absence, Fuzz is walking around with a broad grin on her face.  Remorse, she says, is for the birds (though none of us has ever seen a remorseful bird).

Buzzy, meanwhile, is just the most charming, elegant, graceful cat.  She was very cautious with the dog when she first got here, but now she walks right up to her and licks her, and plays with her tail, and generally considers Fuzz her property.  She even lies down on Fuzz’s bed, and Fuzz simply lies down on the rug somewhere.  This seems a constant of cat/dog interaction all over the world.  Unlike Fuzz, who is game to eat absolutely anything (except strawberries), Buzzy doesn’t eat anything except dry cat kibble, and occasionally a few grams of the canned cat food Katie so lovingly puts in her bowl.  The cat also walks on tables and shelves and furniture, only coming down to floor level occasionally; you get a really good idea of why they call those things catwalks.  These are things I had never noticed in all my years of not noticing things!  Junior (my daughter) owned a ferret one time, called Jefferey, who also liked to walk about on the tops of shelves, and of course, push things over, onto the floor, something Buzzy likes to do.  She plays furiously for a while, then sits and stares out the window for a while, then goes to sleep, and then wakes up and does a poop, and then starts all over again, watched with apparent disapproval by the dog Fuzz.

I have been tempted to put yet more cat videos on the Web, but it seems a superfluous thing to do.  So I will be content to just blog on the little andamuls, as I call them, and leave it there.

Terry Pratchett
We have gotten news that Terry Pratchett, the well-known British author whose humorous novels of mythical Discworld have earned him a Knighthood, and worldwide recognition, has just cancelled appearing at an annual gathering in Britain to celebrate Discworld.  It appears that he has never skipped this event in the past, but the depredations of Alzheimer's Disease, which began several years ago, has left Pratchett unable to travel.  The implications are difficult to assess, because patients can survive for years.  But it is almost certain that Terry Pratchett will be contributing very much less to the intellectual discourse of various topics that he was interested in.  He was an environmentalist, and a rationalist (which meant that he was an atheist).  Though religious folks are fond of regarding atheists as devoid of any moral or ethical values, Terry Pratchett is clearly a man of what I would call great spirituality, because his books simply radiate values that go far beyond those that one would attribute to a mere rationalist.

I urge my readers to read his book Small Gods.  It is not only screamingly funny, but it also brings out how forgiving a man he is.  His criticism is relentless, but his chides are gentle, and to that extent I hope that I have been influenced by him.

This is by no means intended to be an obituary, but the news of Pratchett’s being indisposed has reminded me that I have been remiss in blogging about what a great author and all-round neat person he is.

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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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