The Teagle Liblog

At one university I know the word came down from on high via the Dean - the department should assess its work, course by course, report within a few months on the method to be used, and a few months later on the results, and by September 2005 show how the assessment was leading to better teaching.

No one in the department, of course, had any clue how to do such assessment, and the university provided no help or guidance. The schedule was totally unrealistic. Complaints and appeals did no good. Just get it done.

The chair of the department told the dean he would aim at a C minus on this assignment, like a mediocre student planning just enough to get by. There was no way that he could imagine turning this project into anything useful. Given the schedule he was probably right.

That's a nightmare scenario for assessment; as governing boards, state legislators, accrediting agencies and others insist on assessment, the nightmare will surely recur.

Higher education has to get out ahead of the curve. That means starting now to think about how to do assessment right.

Tom Wolfe Hits a Single

Tom Wolfe's new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar Strauss Giroux 2004) is a shabby, overwritten affair, appealing to older people's prurient interest in the debaucheries, real or imagined, of today's college students. It's not a home run, but at one point, the ever elegant Mr. Wolfe steps up to the plate and hits a single.

Bright, ingenuous Charlotte, a freshman at Dupont University, asks the campus's hot shot athlete, Joseph Johansen, better known as "Go Go Jojo," why he had given a foolish answer in a class in French literature, when he really knew the right answer. Jojo, after he has worked through his annoyance, responds:

Three other players, my teammates, are in the class. It's okay to do the work, because you have to pass the course, and you might even get away with a good grade - although there's this one really bright guy on the team, and he always tries to keep anybody from knowing his grades. But you can't let anybody know you are actually interested in a course - you know like you actually enjoyed the book? - then you are really fucked...(p. 179)

Charlotte then gives him a mini-history of the liberal arts, ending up, with "So the 'liberal' arts are the arts of persuasion, and [the Romans] didn't want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people." (p. 182)

Jojo takes the ball and runs with it: " So that's what we are ...athletes - we're like slaves. They don't even want us to think. All that thinking might distract us from what we were hired for." Charlotte, ever the schoolmarm, sends him off to meet Socrates, but Jojo first has to confront his coach, who confirms all his newly won understanding of the nature of the education he is receiving at Dupont, culminating with his own encapsulation of cultural history:

"See? ... The Greeks knew something we've lost sight of. A good mind doesn't mean much unless it's one and the same thing" - he held up his hands and interlaced his fingers - "with a good body. Mens sana in corpore sano. That's Greek for 'If you want a great university, you damn well better have a great athletic program." (p. 192)

And that, in coach Roth's view, means athletes who are not distracted by ideas, Socratic or other. They in turn are the role models for the rest of the student body: "You're helping teach all this great university the Greek ideal: Mens sana in corpore sano ... You're teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching the Greek ideal: Mens sana in corpore sano, Jojo, mens sana in corpore sano." (p. 192)

Let's not let a little confusion about the ancient languages obscure the fact that the coach is right. The athletes are role models; the pressure they exert never to allow an interest in a course permeates the university, and not just the fictional Dupont. It's a campus culture that will become pervasive if a counter culture doesn't press against it. At Dupont a few faculty members try to do what they can in their individual courses, but there is no concerted, collective effort to create a culture where learning matters.

Dan Medelsohn Hits a Home Run

In the New York Review for 16 December Dan Mendelsohn has a fine review ("like totally awesome" as the characters in the novel might say) of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. He takes the novel seriously, which is more than I was able to do, but also exposes its great deficiency:

Dupont [University] is allegedly elite, but it's hard to see why. In the seven hundred pages of Wolfe's novel, you never encounter a student (apart from Charlotte, at least at the beginning) who betrays intellectual motivation or curiosity: you never see students showing genuine respect to their professors (or to each other): you are never shown students deeply involved in and committed to campus life or religious or social activities or charities or politics ... In other words, you never get to meet typical students at elite universities -- young people who, for all that they are prey to their hormones and insecurities, move their teachers precisely because they have so clearly come to college in the belief that it will be a transforming experience. (p. 42)

Dan may not be quite fair to the fictional and dysfunctional Dupont -- even there Jojo tries his best to meet Socrates. And I don't believe that Dan is saying what some might assume -- that students who believe that college will transform them go only to elite institutions. They are out there in lots of places. If you don't turn cynical yourself, you meet them in your classes at Princeton where Dan teaches, and at places we may never have heard of. Their impulses to understand, to serve, to love their neighbors as themselves, however inchoate or conflicted, need to be affirmed and given a structure that is, perhaps, still to be imagined, let alone realized on our college campuses.

"I Can't Get No Satisfaction"

After reading an article in the New York Times on the differences in pay among college majors I ordered the book on which it was based: Neeta Fogg, Paul Harrington and Thomas Harrington, College Majors Handbook (sic), second edition, JIST Works 2004. The approach is made clear in the chapter titles: "What You Need to Know About The College Investment Decision," "What Pays Off in ... College and Career Choices," etc. Money, money, money.

I thought I might be missing something so I checked the index under "job satisfaction," "fun," "enjoyment," "burn out," "mid life crisis," and, just to be melodramatic, "suicide." Where is "satisfaction"?, I wondered, and found myself humming the old 60s tune" -"I can't get no -satisfaction." At least not between these covers. "Success," however, had three dozen subheadings and "salaries" over 60.

OK, Bad Book. But what's the counter weight? Where do kids whose eager parents give them this book, find the vantage point to look beyond its confines?

How to Waste $3.1 Billion

Two recent items in the New York Times, when juxtaposed, annoyed me and triggered a somewhat acerbic exchange with a businessman friend. That exchange, in turn, leads me to a modest proposal. The first item came in the Job Market section on December 5th and reports on a book by three economists at Northeastern University called College Majors Handbook With Real Career Paths and Payoffs. They show that in 2002 graduates in Accounting were earning over $63,000 a year while Philosophy graduates got just under $43,000. (And those were the ones who found jobs!)

The second was a front page article in the Times on December 7th 2004 reporting that US businesses spend an estimated $3.1 billion a year on remedying the deficient writing skills of their workers.

A corporation's CEO could turn this problem around with a simple call from the CEO to the Human Relations office, insisting that they start hiring applicants who have had a rigorous liberal education. You can hire a lot of philosophy majors for $3.1 billion, and have enough for an extra divided for share holders.

My outrage at this shortsightedness was vented in an email to several friends, one of whom, a humanities Ph.D., author of an excellent scholarly book, who then worked for a consulting firm and is now heading a major organization, replied with perfunctory agreement that swiftly turned into advice to turn to

... the flip side ... The imperative for the humanities departments and liberal arts institutions ... is that many of today's liberal arts graduates are so jargon-laden in their thinking ... that their prose style and communication ability [pose a] different kind of problem ...

The need is not just about educating CEOs and HR departments... it's also about getting liberal arts institutions to stop chasing fads and get serious again about teaching ... for the real world....

The message ended with a few observations about Jacques Derrida's effects on English prose style.

My friend is not some right-wing fanatic who loves to bash higher education. He's intelligent, well educated, widely read, and scholarly. I wanted to find common ground with him, but my first reactions were defensive. Most humanistic scholars write pretty well, sometimes dazzlingly so. I know that because for thirteen years as Director of the National Humanities Center I read hundreds of applications for fellowships and no small number of the books and articles these scholars produced. In all but a small minority of cases the writing was clear and craftsman-like. What's more, when an application slipped into jargon, "theory-speak," or obscurantism, the scholars who served on our selection committees jumped on the writing, and denied a fellowship on that basis.

It's important, then, not to be misled by the annual newspaper stories about the titles of talks given at the meetings of the MLA and other professional associations. Sure, some of them are hard to make out and some may indicate that the talk itself is silly froth or just plain error. But, let's be careful: scholars need their technical terminology just as craftsmen need their tools. The terminology, like the tools, may look strange to the outsider, but try to get the work done without it!

All this is true, but I found I couldn't write back to my friend along these lines. That was in part because I didn't want to be defensive. However, a bigger problem was that this line of response was open to the objection: "If all is so hunky-dory among the faculty, why do so many college graduates write so poorly?" That takes a different answer. The main reason, surely, is that despite all the efforts to introduce "writing across the curriculum" and similar programs many college students don't write enough and don't get sufficiently sustained and detailed critiques when they do write.

Why not? Part of the answer, I believe, is that faculty in some fields don't see improving writing as their responsibility. They have few incentives to change. Why should faculty members in Accounting, for example, make student writing a high priority in their courses? Their students know that accounting skills, not their writing ability, will win them those $62,000 salaries. In the humanities and related social sciences the problem is different but the results are often the same. Many faculty in these fields want to take student writing seriously, but find it hard to do so. As any teacher knows, it takes a lot of time to read student papers, especially if one comments in detail on writing style as well as on content. The problem can be overwhelming in popular courses. Just do the numbers: at an hour per paper, three papers per semester, a class of two hundred students would take a forty hour week for an entire fifteen week semester without leaving a minute for course preparation, class meetings, lecturing, setting and grading exams, or for the rest of one's teaching, advising, research and administrative responsibilities. It's an impossible situation unless class size is kept low and faculty take the time to critique student writing. College administrators have few incentives to allocate the resources needed for such labor-intensive work. The problem is time, not Jacques Derrida.

So what is to be done? My friend's business acumen may hold the solution. I will write to him along the following lines: "You are trained, when you see a problem and identify its roots, to develop an effective response. Let's develop a business plan, raise some capital, and establish an independent, for profit, corporation to administer the Effective Writing Achievement Test. Any student, for a fee, will be able to take this exam, much as they now pay to take the LSAT, SAT, or MCAT tests. The EWATs, however, will not be a multiple-choice aptitude test but an assessment of a student's writing. Those who take it will be given a selection of material concerning a problem of considerable complexity, one drawn not from any specialized field, but from a real world situation. Under time pressure students taking the exam will have to analyze the problem, propose a way of dealing with it, and defend their position with compelling arguments in a clearly written statement. The scores will be available for potential employers to consider, and a national tabulation will show from which institutions and which disciplines the best student writing comes. Talk about 'incentives'; those results should create the incentives that are needed. Oh, and while we're at it, let's have a little side bet. I'm willing to bet that the $43,000 philosophers do better on the EWATs than the $62,000 accountants. How much do you want to put down?"

Let's see what he says.