Taxmom on MOOCs

Taxmom shines the  life-giving glow of her wisdom on MOOCs:

…  I think the problem with online education is that learning a discpline is, by defnition, hard (hence "discipline"), and 98% of the people need someone to lead them through it.  How many times have we all decided to learn something new, skimmed the surface with ease, and then about 2% of the way in realized that there is something pretty basic that is either a) really hard to comprehend or b) requires skill and practice, and building up stamina, or both.

With guitar, everything is rosy until you have to play an F-chord.

With algebra, everything's peachy until you have to do that (a + b) (a - b) thing.

With a language, everything is great until you realize you have to keep more than 8 words in your brain at one time, and that words don't necessarily look the same in the dictionary as they do on the page.

I'd add:sociality.  People still learn more from each other than they do from the teacher.  Or even if not directly from each other, then from the buzz of learning in the vicinity.    

The Ideal Major?

Overheard in the sauna at the gym: couple of old coots talking about the young athletes they'd met at Palookaville U.  From the sound of things, one had been some sort of athletic director.  I couldn't quite pinpoint the other, but they seemed to have known a number of the same young people--guys who used to play on Palookaville sports teams.

And don't let the "athlete" bit mislead you: Palookaville is not on anybody's sports radar so the jocks here just play games--no talk of major league contracts, or branding, or drug use.  Just games.

Still,  the thing was, the old guys seemed to know a lot about the youngsters, and a lot about their lives, both in school and out.  In short, they seemed to take an interest in their careers and lives.  One of the speakers avowed as how he was off to the city this weekend to preside at the wedding of one of the young men.

They also talked a bit about "character."  In this context, "character" seemed to mean "a desire to win," but also steadiness, self-discipline, good order.  "Helpful in any field," said one of the saunees. "Yep," agreed the other.

And in passing they mentioned their favorite major.  My suspicion is you wouldn't guess it but take a stab.   Go on. Take a stab.   You said "English"?  Heh, dreamer--but you knew that couldn't be right once you said it, not so?   Oh, I know, you say, ROTC!  Shrewd guess, but Palookaville doesn't offer ROTC.  So now you're thinking it must be business administration.

You're getting warm, but still not quite there. Turns out that what these guys really admired was the major in construction management.  The what?  Well yes, it turns out the university does offer a major in "construction management," with a BS degree.   It is not the same as "business," though my surmise is that it is some sort of a spinoff.   

So what is it these guys liked about "construction management"?  I can only guess, but I went back to the catalog and looked at the blurb.  I find they present a faculty "with a beneficial blend of academic preparation, successful teaching experience at the college and/or university level, and most importantly significant experience managing construction operations"  (my italics). They also boast that graduates "historically experience an extraordinarily bright career horizon immediately upon graduation. Virtually all CM students are aggressively recruited by both local and nationally based construction companies of all types."

In short (my words) "we don't get bogged down in all that theory stuff. We teach you what you need to know to get a job."  It's a pitch that surely separates them from the centers of higher learning on the other side of campus. My notion is that it probably separates the construction guys also from the folks in the "real" business program who have crept, I suspect, ever closer to the realms of higher abstraction. Compare: I can't put my finger on it right now but I remember a story from a while back about the students at, I think, the Culinary Institute of America, complaining that their professors (sic?) were ladling out the theory when all the youngsters wanted was the pots and pan.

Oh I know, I know, all of this is to make the folks over in Arts and Sciences roll over and gag. That would include my nearest and dearest (it would include me, insofar as I ever did get an education, which was patchy). But I suppose there is something to be said for teaching in a department where the students (and even the faculty) know why they are there, and what they can expect to get out of it. Who knows, they might even find somebody to preside at their wedding.

Oh. Right.

 

[D]on’t sleep with subordinates, don’t fly into fits of rage, beware of a former president conspiring with a board member to get his job back, and don’t promptly fire a top administrator whose family’s construction company literally built the college town you’ve just moved to.

Advice from the review of a book co-authored by a former university president on (as the reviewer headlines it) "avoiding disastrous presidencies."  Inter alia, the authors tell the story of a University president who "was ousted after he charged the university for a personal chef, vacations in Europe and an engagement party for his son."  For valuable prizes, explain how one gets to be a university president without knowing that you will get fired if you charge the boss for your kid's engagement party.

[But the chutzpah prize probably goes to the guy who sought a whistle-blower award for blowing the whistle on his own financial, ahem, indiscretions.]

The Non-Profit Web of Life

My friend Michael, who spends part of his life dealing with people who don't pay their student loans, turns a jaundiced eye on the whole matter of higher education bloat. Michael signs on with those who think they see demand push: the government makes funds available to students via various forms of credit, easy and otherwise; the students tank up on the stuff and the colleges and universities get to build bigger, fancier, more palatial building, higher more faculty deans and assorted administrators and do the other things that people do when somebody gives them a bunch of greenbacks to play with. Michael is remembering the great boom in health care spending when we pressed new dollars into the hands of consumers without doing much of anything to increase the supply of medical services. If you come, they will build it, especially if you come bearing a government subsidy or guarantee.   

 

[Second theme in a minor key: except in this case, of course, the students are the ones left standing when the music stops. The shortfall on all this easy credit is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and just try paying your $200k professional school marker with your income as a massage therapy assistant.  True, but I don't think it undercuts the main thrust of the story].

I'm thinking of Michael this week when I'm back in Ashland, Oregon for another shot of Shakespeare. Allow me to explain. I just now did a quick check on the history of the Ashland festival. . Sure enough, when the festival started in the 30s, it hardly deserved the name: just two plays a year in the inaugural 1935 season, then three, then four, then five—and  then leveled off at five through 1969 (with couple of blips along the way). The year 1970 brought the opening of the big new indoor theatre named after the founder Angus Bowmer, and allowed them to kick up the annual count of productions to nine. In 1977 they added the shirt-pocket “third theatre,” although the number of productions didn't increase exponentially: the modal number through most of the time from them up to the present seems to be about 11.

There have been internal changes: the current outdoor theatre is actually the third on site. This current outdoor facility went into service in 1958, although there was a multi-million dollar upgrade in 1992. A new “little theatre” subbed out the original smaller performance space, also in 1992. Staff and administrative facilities have also evolved over the years though not, perhaps, in the way you might think: there's still nothing like the costly palaces that adorn so many college and university campusus.

What you do note if you look around you is the increase in personnel. Wiki reports that there is a fulltime payroll of 300, including about 100 actors: that would mean 200 in the backshop, plus part-timers and volunteers. Is this “too many”? I'm not ready to say so, but just as a guess, I'm betting Angus Bowmer did not have the services of “voice and text director” plus a “head of voice and text,” nor a “director of literary development and dramaturgy,” nor a “resident fight director,” saying nothing of an “associate costume designer,” at least three “composers & sound designers” a “voice & projection designer” a “dance captain” plus individual individual directors, scene designers, light directors, costume designers for particular plays, and suchlike. And a dramaturg; I always wanted to be a dramaturg—in a pinch I'd settle for assistant dramaturg.

I'm sure these are all total cheap shots; I'm sure I've enjoyed every single piece of work that every one of these worthies has carried out. And I don't mean to say they are rolling in the big bucks: Guide Star shows them running a deficit in the range of $2.5 million on revenues of $27 million (there's also a foundation).  But you'll have to concede: there is a certain sense of mission creep here. Outfits like this never get smaller. They may die; they may choke on their own bodily fluids in the section 501(c)(3) equivalent of pulmonary edema.  Otherwise, the pathway is a ratchet and the only trajectory is up.

And what does all this have to do with higher education bloat? Well I admit, the comparison is not 1:1. Ashland doesn't finance the purchase of theatre tickets. And if they did, the liability wouldn't be exempted from discharge in bankruptcy. But look around you: whom do you see in the crowd outside the theatre at Ashland, this balmy autumn afternoon? My guess would be you are looking at upwards of 60 percent public employees, maybe upwards of 70 percent. And of these, I'm betting that more than half are present or retired employees of public educational institutions--i.e., the same universities and colleges who have profited so much from the boom in higher education. If somebody passes out  in an Ashland theatre and you yell “is there a doctor in the house?”  you'll probably get a response, maybe several. But perchance you should ask for a professor of rhetoric, my guess is that there would be a stampede. [I'll bet a good three quarters also own public broadcasting tote bags but that is another story.]

In other words, what we are seeing here is the recycling of the money that went into the education bubble: the great web of non-profit life. Again, I feel no need to deride: I'm one of the proud holders of this lucky ticket and I think I worked hard for my good luck, thankyouvery much. But it's a good life, even if I am not a dramaturg. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to see the show.

No, Really, What Is the Story at HBS?

A couple of my buds have been telling me I have to read the big NYT piece on sexism at the Harvard Business School.  I did read it, and didn't quite know what to make of it.  Then I read it again with the same response, plus an added fillip.  Specifically: I'm not sure the author knew quite what to make of it either.  Had she stumbled on an important story about sex discrimination at HBS?  About administrative overreach?  About the  terminal awfulness of HBS students?  Was she being spun by the marketing folks at one of the world's leading brands?

I don't know and like I say, I think she is not confident she knows either. Apparently the core story is straightforward enough evidently the worthies at Harvard (they have a grrl in the President's office) decided that it was time to reform the culture over at the B school, to stop boys being boys.  o have taken to try to clip the wings of the vulgarians, to level  the playing field (if that is what it is) for women in grading, and also (not least) to  make life a little less unbearable for women trying to run the gauntlet of tenure.
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There are so many open threads here.  Part of me wants to say: sure sounds like Palookaville, where the young barbarians arrive every August with a stinkin' carload full of loutish caterwauling. The booze sounds familiar; the groping, oddly, we seem to hear less about.  I'm not sure whether (a) women here are more complaisant; or (b) men or better behaved or (c) women here despair of ever improving men's behavior. And by the way, ae HBS students supposed to be better?  Are people surprised that they are not better?  Could they be worse?  And by the way again, just exactly why did that promising youngster with a pregnant wife wind up dead in Portland, Maine?

But another part of me wants to say--really?  Women have trouble competing at HBS?  I had thought the problem was that women were running away with university life, capturing all the places, the grades, the awards, while the men lay stunned on the couch watching ESPN.  Is HBS different from everybody else, or am I just getting bad information?

It's probably to her credit that the author seems unable to answer all these questions, or even to frame them: means at least she is not going for the easy fix.  But I am struck by one bottom-line perplexity.  At the end of the day, these folks, men and women alike, are meant to learn; either (a) finance--which means a system designed to reduce the level of overall wellbeing in the world; or (b) marketing--which is about selling. Hey, it's a business school,   Don't take yourself too seriously.



 

The John and Howard Show

Boy, here's a name I haven't thought of much lately: John Silber, paladin of all that is good and great in American academic life; also freelance bully and headline grabber--and in particular, arch-foe of Howard Zinn who played the Questing Beast to Silber's King Pellinore.  I haven't thought that much about Zinn lately either although I guess I was aware that his People's History of the United States, once the cynosure of campus radicalism is apparently still in print and still grinding out a nice piece of change for the the Zinn estate.  Zinn (or his ghost) is also the recipient of a gift--really, a pair of gifts--perhaps rather grander than he deserves.  One is a biography by Martin Duberman, apparently a sympathetic observer even if clear-eyed about at least some of the shortcomings of his subject.  The other is a superb review of the book (and of Zinn) by one  David Greenberg (hitherto unknown to me), willing to approach both Duberman and Zinn with perspective at once clear-eyed and compassionate.

I'm to review the review--go read it yourself, it's great, and not that long.  But I do want to say a word about the conflict between Zinn and Silber which appears to form a center of the book as perhaps it did of Zinn's career.  For those just arriving, Silber was the high-saliency president of Boston University and Zinn represented, to all appearances, just exactly the sort of guy Silber did not want cluttering up his government department.   Clearly Greenberg holds no particular high regard for Silber:.  

Silber’s ostensible concern for academic freedom was belied by his tyrannical style. Heedless of due process, intolerant of dissent, Silber imposed his will on the faculty and students, generating only more unrest.

For such a man, Zinn was a natural target, and however bitter the conflict, you can;t escape the notion that Zinn loved it: to all appearances, it gave him all the street cred a self-proclaimed radical could have wanted.  

But let me turn back to Silver.   Like him or not (I don't know many people who do, or did), still I think you'd have to concede the sincerity of his commitment to the academy, or at any rate to his own vision thereof.  But whatever his virtues, I think you'd also have to concede that he was an unquenchable publicity whore--one of those people, to put it differently, who really doesn't care whether he wins or loses the good fight as long as the spotlight stays on him.

I'm  not quite sure how this plays out in the life of Boston University--not nearly well informed enough to pass judgment.   As a distant observer, my guess is that BU is a more impressive place now than it was before Silber set foot in the place, whether because or in spite of him I wouldn't want to say.  But that won't keep me from speculating that Silber might have done a better job of work on Zinn if he'd been quieter about it.   And that here may be half or dozen or so University leaders who have done far more damage to the cause of progressive politics just by being a bit more reptilian about it.

a

Janet

Turn your back for a moment and they name a new president for the University of California.  Inside Higher Education (and others?) is treating it as a "surprise pick," but is it?   Granted that most university prexies scratch their way up through the chairs, still it seems by now quite a number of figures who have made the leap from Washington into the university front office but it isn't really all that new.  My bud Joel mentions Terry Sanford, Donna Shalala, Mitch Daniels.  I see him and raise him Bob Kerrey and John Brademas. 

 Remember Brademas?  Wiki reminds us he was the Democratic party heavyweight who left Congress to become president of NYU (1981-92).  Brademas was on the edge of my radar in my newspaper days and I remember thinking that it was an odd choice.  But then, no.  The job of a University president is to orchestrate an illimitable range of feuding constituencies, and to funnel money; in short. to manage the kind of Roldex you bring with you from Capitol Hill.

Unencumbered by any specific knowledge, I'd guess that Napolitano may have decided that it wasn't worth hanging around Washington waiting for either the Attorney Generalship or the Supreme Court.  My notion is that she is likely to be pretty good at what she was hired to do.  Maybe the really interesting question, at least for University insiders, is: who will be her provost.

Sock it To 'Em, Baby

The gang down at the law school spends a lot of time agonizing over "the Socratic method," or perhaps better "the dreaded Socratic method," whereby the professor attempts to liven up a somnolent classroom by actually asking a question.*  I'm not precisely sure where/when this obsession began; by convention it starts with the (putatively) brilliant and (clearly) half-mad Christopher Columbus Langdell who more or less invented "the case method"--the strategy of studying law via reported opinions of judges--back in the 1860s.  I suspect a more precise inflection point would be September 9, 1978, when the actor John Houseman took the TV screen as Darth Vader Professor Charles Kingsfield, the scowling, beetle-browed holy terror of the law school classroom who (Wiki catches the conventional wisdom here) "inspires both awe and fear in his students in his unremitting determination to prepare them for the practice of law."  It's one of the alltime great pieces of television schtick, and a whole generation of lawyers went through their entire professional careers under the sincere conviction that Professor K represents the truth of their own rite of passage, as distinct from anything that they really underwent.

A trifling sidebar set of questions, surely of no more than entertainment value would be: who was Socrates?  And what, if anything, was his method?  I will trust UB readers to be informed enough to gin up some sort of answer to the first question  As to the second, here's a fascinating little trifle that I just stumbled across in the notes to a schoolbook edition of a Platonic dialogue:**

The technique of [Plato's Symposium] is characteristic of the Platonic Socrates: self-deprecating and self-effacing; disarmingly complimentary; insistent on the need to agree at each step and on the recollection of essential steps;  courteous but firm in the rejection of hesitant answers; patient in making each general question clear by taking individual cases; swift and bold in forcing fallacious inferences and assumptions on the collaborator in the dialogue; motivated by the need to prepare the ground for doctrinal exposition and assisted both by the fallacies which the collaborator has himself committed and by the intellectual paralysis which strikes down the collaborator at any moment of Plato's choosing.

References omitted. So far, I would say this is bang on.  But the commentator continues:

A dialogue in which one speaker agrees at every step with the other, never offering serious resistance or making serious criticisms, differs in form from the type of continuous, authoritative exposition which Socrates decries [elsewhere], and differs (at least on a cursory reading) in the impression which it conveys, but does not differ in substance.

 I'm really not clear what the commentator is trying to tell me here.  I'll grant that at least the best of the dialogues are hypnotic reading: at times funny, magical, breezy seductive, deadly earnest and just about any other rhetorical or literary strategy you can imagine.  The trouble is that for the most part, they aren't really "dialogues."  True that Socrates' "questions" (really, expositions) are cameo masterpieces; still the stark truth is that his poor stooges almost never get a decent line and almost always wind up dumbfounded and empty-handed, like Hamilton Burger losing every trial to Perry Mason, or Ed McMahon responding to every one of Johnny Carson's assertions with a booming chord of "You are correct, sir!"  Socrates says all the stuff you wish you had said to the brute at the party; and the responder says all the things you wish the other guy had answered.   Maybe that is the problem with classroom dialogue, too.

---

*Or maybe they don't.    I may just be dating myself here, and references to "the Socratic method" may now be just as dated as references to "The Simpsons" or "the Presidency of Adlai E. Stevenson."

**Plato, Symposium (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Kenneth Dover ed.).  I see that Dover's edition was first published in 1980. Could it have  been a response to--nah, that is way too simple.

Exam Time

Professors like to complain about grading.  I can sympathize: it is a hard part of the job.  The scandalous secret is that it is the only hard part  of the job.  Other than grading, you can spend your life in following your bliss, and if your trifling classroom obligations aren't what you want them to be, why then you just haven't engineered them right, so you have no one to blame but yourself.  

The trouble with grading is that it is a constant and unforgiving reminder of how little you've accomplished: I blow it in so straight and it comes out so crooked   I told them and I told them.   You really know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Which isn't to say the papers are awful.  Often, by any independent standard, they are pretty good, okay, good enough (once in a while they slip in a ringer but that doesn't change the generalization). The thing is, you want them to be brilliant, just like y--  

Oh wait a minute, maybe they are just as brilliant as you are, and maybe that is precisely the problem. As I think I've said before, my two great nightmares are, one, that I haven't lived to my potential; and two, maybe I have.  As Nietzsche said, you gaze too long into the bluebook and you will find the bluebook looking back. Welcome, professor, this is your life!

But grading time is a good time to put your mind on something, anything, rather than the task at hand.  I wouldn't be surprised that this (grading) week is the week when a whole lot of first drafts get done on the syllabus for next semester, when, of course this time at last I will finally get it right. As for me, I haven't actually retooled the syllabus (though maybe I should)--but have you any idea how many really great full-length operas there are available for free on Youtube?

This might also be a good time to reformulate your entire research agenda.  And for this I can offer a suggestion from the late C. Wright Mills.  It's stated in pre-digital terms, but you can recodify:

[T]he rearranging of the file ... is one way to invite imagination.  You simply dump out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing up their contents, and then re-sort them.  You try to do it in a more or less relaxed way  ... Of course, you will have in mind the several problems on which you are actively working, but you will also try to be passively receptive to unforeseen and unplanned linkages.

 --So Mills in "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," reprinted as an appendix to The Sociological Imagintion (OUP 1959).  And now back to the blueb--oh look, there's a kitty!

Hoisted from the Comments:Eb on What they Teach in School

The other day I wrote a bit about what they do and do not teach in econ 1A. The Sapient Eb* offers an insight which itself invites a comment.  Eb:

It's amusing to compare Econ 101 to Physics 101. Both are largely false, based on simple ideas that have been discredited. Both are pedagogically sound beginnings. But the difference, I think, is that a person who takes Physics 101 and stops there has learned something useful. A person who does the same with Economics 101 has a lot to unlearn before s/he reattains their previous level of sophistication.

I think that law school is comparable to Econ 101.

  Further thoughts: one, I had a law student a while ago with a pretty good engineering background.  He explained the  teaching of the second law of thermodynamics.  First year, they tell you, you write it down and spit it back on the exam.  Second year, they teach it, you say this can't possibly work.  Third year, they teach it, you say, unh hnh, with the right assumptions and the right luck, this just might be true.

Now, as to law school.  Eb, you touch a nerve.  For years my job in the canonical curriculum was the course in "contracts."  And boy to I mean canonical.  So far as I know, every beginning law student at every Anglo-American law school in the known universe takes "contracts."  

But here's the catch: no one practices contract law.  Don't misunderstand; people practice adjectival contract law:  labor contracts, or entertainment contracts, or construction contracts, whatever.  But the law school course in contracts--it was invented in the 19th and early 20th Century by a madman and a pious fool who believed that there was a single unifying set of principles that underlay all contracts and that they could be usefully stated and taught; more, that they were the right place to begin a legal education.

Next point: nobody believes this any more.  Haven't for a long time, if ever.  It was dying, if not dead when I began teaching 45 years ago.  And as they say about Elvis, it's getting deader.  [Side issue: people will object that there is a realm of contract theory that remains alive and well, articulated by, e.g., Randy Barnett and Charles Fried.  True enough, but the relation between contract theory and a unified contract law is at best haphazard or incidental.]

Yet we keep doing it.  Why?   Well I suppose, we can make some plausible  retrospective justifications: it is at least somewhat possible to teach contracts as a course in "legal method" (if we know what that means).  And it's useful, even worthwhile, to explain what you might call a meta-theory of contract: explaining why it came to be some important, why it isn;t really important, what is important in its stead.  But all this is post hoc.  The real reason, I lies somewhere in the realm of inertia or existential angst: if we didn't have a course in contracts, how would we know we are a law school.

Re the rest of the law school curriculum I suspect the story is more complicated, but I note two points. One, my law students spend more and more of their time in "clinicals," or "externships," which may mean "paying us $50k a year so they can work for someone else for free."  Students tend to love clinicals--often better than their regular courses, as they will be quick to tell you.  And they may be right.  But there lingers the embarrassing question: if we are just an apprenticeship mill, why not rip off the mask and show our true identity?

And two, as to classroom work.  Beyond the "required" or "semi-required" core ("the bar courses"), an awful lot of "advanced" legal education tends to look more and more like polisci.  Translated: stuff the professor thinks will be career-advancing for her, and which s/he can persuade students to think of as fun.

And?  And I don't know. I'm painfully aware that I am sounding like the old geezer.  I remember the geezers from my own youth who complained that "the boys" didn't take code pleading or equity any more --"and where will they learn how to replevy a dog?"    I find myself feeling the same way when I see a student taking a course in tenant's rights when he doesn't know how to record a mortgage.

But I recognize that there's an underlying issue here far deeper than I (or, let's be fair, anyone else) can fathom: exactly what does go on inside a University and in particular, is it worth those insanely high prices when so much of the pure content seems to be online for pennies (or even for free)?  We have only the dimmest shadow of an answer though the word "socialization" appears visible through the void.  More crudely, maybe "contracts" and "polisci" and yes, "externships"  are all just artifacts of a system barriers designed to maintain a hierarchy and, specifically, a core of elites whose main role in life is to be In while others are Out.  Oh dear, vulgar Marxism.  Sorry 'bout that.  Really, I am.
 ---
*He goes by the name of Ebenezer Scrooge although I suspect he does not run a London counting house.

And Here's to Good Old (Uh, Let Me Check My Notes ...)

I see that the good folks at  Coursera as their breakthrough in online education offering, a couple of courses from Antioch University in LA.  Is it worth remembering that Antioch LA is itself the product of an earlier experiment in educational brand management--the initiative of Antioch College in Ohio to franchise itself, on the order of "Colonel Sanders, Muncie branch"--?  There may or may not be a moral to be drawn from the fact that in the earlier case, it was the mother ship that foundered while some of the satellites (including LA?) seem to have done okay.

Ah, an I see that the Antioch courses will be offered by professors from Penn--further proof, if any there need be that the entity isn't the entity any more: it's just a locus in a network of IP rights.  I note also that Coursera is a subsidiary of Amazon.  If you'd rather skip the education and go straight to the brand, go here.

East Stroudsburg?

Link.  

A Wrinkle on Education Pricing

You probably know this one already, but I just glommed onto a wrinkle in the college pricing game.  

We all know (don't we?) that pricy schools share the wealth: they charge rack rate to the eager and solvent. Then they transfer some of the wealth as "scholarships" top the ones they really want.

Do the numbers.   Suppose the rack rate is $100.  The effective cost is $80.  You have two eager applicants;  #1 is willing and able to pay $100, #2 would love to enroll but he can't scrape together more than $60.  How do you get them both?  Answer, you charge the one $100, and you transfer $20 to the account of the other.

So far, old news. What I just noticed is this: you tell #2, "good news, I am giving you a scholarship...."  A scholarship of what?  Well, you are cutting his price from $100 to $60, so you tell him  "I am giving you a scholarship of $40."  But you're not.  In the strict sense, I suppose you could say you aren't giving him any scholarship at all; you are just making a semi-voluntary wealth transfer from #1.  But set that aside: the point is that in any event, the amount in play is not $40, but only $20.   Generosity on the cheap.

[Afterthought: I suppose it works the same for any transfer pricing scheme, but right now, education may be one place where transfer pricing really thrives.]

True Facts Being Taught in Louisiana

[Pardon the crude formatting, Blogger just isn't doing anything right this morning.]

 Much blog chatter over the "Wacky 'Facts' Kids will learn in Louisiana's voucher schools."  I can roll my eyes with the best of them (dinosaurs palled around with humans, oh yeah!).  But there are a few that may deserve special scrutiny.  In the spirit of the Public Editor, then, consider:

• "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ."   God has not yet returned out phone calls to confirm that it was his intention, but the tragic fact is that (many? some?) Indians probably did convert to Christianity.  I'd file that under "T" for "tragic," along with the truth that American blacks regularly embrace the names given them by the Christians who bought them, or failing that, by the Muslims who sold them. 
• "Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath…"  I'll drink to that.  Sentimental drivel. Raise your kid to be a bank robber or a gangbanger if you like but never, never, instill him with bad taste.  If you must have a Steinbeck novel, send him to the far darker and less forgiving In Dubious Battle.


• "[Mark] Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel."  True enough for government work.  The older he got, the bleaker and more nihilistic.  The sad consequence of his failed attempt at respectable Christian living.
• "Several of [Emily Dickinson's] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life." What's to quarrel with there?  "Presumptuous attitude concerncing her eternal destiny," check.  "Salvation as a gamble, not a certainty," check.  And bless here li'l rebel heart, that is just what we love in her.
•  
  And as to the literary literacy rate in Africa being about 10 percent--I wonder what it is in Louisiana, just askin'?

Annals of Academic Marketing (New Antioch Division)

Antioch College in my day was famous as a den of free love and communism.  Or that was the public image; if there was any truth to it, nobody ever told me.  Anyway, as Antioch continues to claw its way back from its near death experience, they seem to be putting some money into some glitzy PR.

But help me on this one, people.  I take it their target audience is loving (and solvent) parents who might be persuaded to disencumber themselves of $35,750 a year to  give their beloved a start in life.  And that is their audience, do you think this little creation conveys they message they want to convey?  Opportunities and possibilities, oh boy.

It's Still a Mystery

You want the real story?  Okay, here goes: Helen Dragas and her sidekick the ingenious Passepartout were hunkered down over a beer in the smoky back room of a Charlottesville pleasure palace one night when Helen said "you know what would be cool?  Let's fire her sorry Texas ass, and the donors will go ballistic and we'll back down and then they give us lots more money than they ever planned on."

You find it far-fetched?  Well yes, but have you got a better story?  Has anybody yet come up with any even remotely plausible account of why a bunch of supposedly worldly adults (came up with, conspired in, signed  off on) such a crack-brained, ham-handed, wrong-footed, bowlegged, knock-kneed scheme in the first place?   Fire the President? Sure, let's do it. Oh wait, sorry, let's not.

The firing of Terry Sullivan at UVA remains, in short, entirely incomprehensible.   I guess you'd have to grant that she "didn't communicate with the board" in the sense that she apparently didn't see it coming (where's Judas when you need him?).  Maybe it is also true that she was having trouble with fund-rising, but I'd be interested  to know how she stacks up on the standard measure we are supposed to use for money managers--not how well she did intrinsically, but how well she did as measured against the market as a whole. These have not been, after all, great years for fund-raising anywhere.  

The fact that she didn't please the board as a is, of course, just about entirely irrelevant to the question of her intrinsic skills as a manager--from the look of things, you'd get better management advice from a gang of Charlottesville kindergarteners.  If the core issue was the taint of "consultative management"--that in running a great University, you've got to play the roll of border collie, with a growl here and a nip there to cajole all the sheep (ahem) in the right direction--then I'd say she is onto something.  Woodrow Wilson, who had his own presidential disappointments, said that trying to run Princeton was like trying to move a cemetery.  You go too fast and--well, look what happens.  Whether she can actually wind up transforming the University--well, now that she is back in the job, maybe we will get an answer to that one.

Exactly what caused the board to back down so abjectly and so fast--ah, on that one I suspect we can look forward to some leakage over the next few days.  But in trying to identify causes, I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the visible public uproar.  I don't think the uproar is the kind of thing that would drive the governor into his shrill threat to fire the whole board (which, as it happens, it appears he can't do anyway).  I'd look rather to some deep pockets, maybe former board members who let him know with  a full soundtrack that his school would never see another penny of their money, not one penny until the deed was undone. 

 Ironically, this probably does mean that she'll find fund-raising actually a bit easier, rather than harder, at least for the moment (as Joel points out for the duration of her 15 minutes, she'll probably also be a welcome guest in foundation board rooms).  Which brings back to square one, supra.  No, of course I don't believe it, but do you have a better?

VA Again: Hey Gang, Let's Do a Show!

Once again, what were they thinking at UVA, when they called up the President and said "oh by the way, you're fired"?  So far,  I think the most plausible account comes from  David Karpf over at Huffpost, who makes it all sound like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland shouting, "hey gang, let's do a show!" Somebody told them that on-line education is the new, new thing. They slapped together a few news clips and a large dose of self-reassurance. Recall the syllogism--major, something must be done; minor, this is something; conclusion, let's do it.  Teresa Sullivan is left as the fuddy-duddy typing teacher who asks where they are going to get a cast, a hall, a band, a roll of tickets, and by the way has anybody given any thought to their homework yet.  In a word, nothing: they were thinking nothing, and firing a president was pretty much part of the adrenaline rush.

UVA: What the Hell were they Thinking?

One of my bankruptcy buds ventures that maybe he knows the motive behind the firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan: she's a co-author with the notorious Elizabeth Warren, bankruptcy scholar, scourge of the mighty and Massachusetts Senate candidate.

Okay, true about the co-author part, but otherwise, the theory seems to me to border on the tinfoil hat, a bit like saying that the culprits were mad because they found out Thomas Jefferson fathered slave child. I hesitate for one reason only. That is: up to now, I haven't been able to think of any better explanation for for such a clunky, ham-handed (yet by all appearances, not remotely accidental) mishandling of the public's business.

Now my friend Michael points me to another, scarcely less conspiratorial but apparently better documented, from a blogger (one Anne-Marie Angelo) I'd not hitherto heard of:

The theory I have is that Goldman Sachs’s Education Management Corporation, a for-profit education provider, wanted to make or made a bid to offer online education through UVA. From this endeavor, EMC would invest profits back into the University, helping to heal some of the University’s fiscal woes. When Sullivan was reluctant or refused to agree to the venture, key members of the Board threatened litigation related to her performance as a fundraiser for the University.

There's a lot of detail here, some fascinating, some not so plausibly relevant. EMC (it says here, quoting) “recently took a major ownership position in a group of online universities.” A commenter at Angelo's blog point observes:

It's also worth noting that one thing that ECM lacks is a prestigious, high-profile University partner--its current partner schools are smaller and far less well known than UVa. A deal with UVa would immediately boost the company's credibility and public profile.

Angelo connects other dots, maybe interesting, maybe off the mark. I particularly liked the stuff about Peter Kiernan, the chair of the Trustees at the Darden Foundation, the Board of UVA’s Graduate Business School (since resigned)--especially the suggestion that Kiernan knew about the "project" to oust Sullivan weeks ago, while Sullivan got the word only last Friday.

Afterthought: I can see as I write that there are two intertwined issues here--one, why did they do it, and to why (in the Sam Hill) did they try to carry it off in such a bush-league manner?  This is one of the world's flagship universities we are talking about here, and somebody is trying to trade it off like they're selling a flat of marijuana seedlings behind the billboard at the Durham Road expressway ramp. 

Followup:  I'm still reading stuff about how this fight is about "cutting Classics and German"--whereas it turns out that German is doing nicely, thank you, at UVA. amd classics (or at least, Latin) is by some measures flourishing.  Observed in context, I'd say this dustup was never about German and Classics to begin with.  My guess is that the person who first leveled the charge never bothered check the numbers; s/he figured it was an argument that would sell, and would distract attention from something more urgent.

John Locke, Proto-Montessorian

§ 152. I have seen little girls exercise whole hours together and take abundance of pains to be expert at dibstones as they call it. Whilst I have been looking on, I have thought it wanted only some good contrivance to make them employ all that industry about something that might be more useful to them; and methinks ’tis only the fault and negligence of elder people that it is not so. Children are much less apt to be idle than men; and men are to be blamed if some part of that busy humour be not turned to useful things; which might be made usually as delightful to them as those they are employed in, if men would be but half so forward to lead the way, as these little apes would be to follow. I imagine some wise Portuguese heretofore began this fashion amongst the children of his country, where I have been told, as I said, it is impossible to hinder the children from learning to read and write: and in some parts of France they teach one another to sing and dance from the cradle.

--John Lock, Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Pedagogy as Theatre

Pick of the day for me is the piece I find at The Atlantic's website on what the folks at the University of Phoenix do when they wants to film a roomful of attractive and engaged students--they hire models.  Wouldn't want to distract the viewers with the likes of, say, Walden College, and don't even think of  Animal House (told you...).   Though personally, I'm always saddened that I didn't enjoy the ministrations of Quincy Adams Wagstaff, as in "Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?"

But I'm not at all sure Phoenix has gone far enough.  My friend John says his students have dinged him on his evaluations for imperfect use of PowerPoints.  Couldn't we raise the general level of beatitude if we hired an apprentice Vanna White to highlight the bullet paragraphs as John proceeds through what he calls his "Socratic monologue?"  And why stop at one?  How about twins?  And in spray-on bikinis?

He could even position one outside the classroom door during open enrollment.  As in, "hello, student, going my way?"  Who knows, a few of his aspirants might wake up in a rustbucket en route to Macao.  Now, that is education.