Appropriate Restraint or Unreasonable Interference?

“The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.” 

- William Orville Douglas

I've been following the half-dozen or so stories and editorials plus comments, that have appeared in the News-Gazette regarding the retirement and subsequent of denial of emeritus status to University of Illinois-Chicago professor, William Ayers.

Most recently, I read:

The UIC senate voted 52-16 to send a letter to the board of trustees this week that begins that senators are:

"Requesting that the Board of Trustees reconsider its decision to deny emeritus status for Professor William Ayers. We neither claim to speak for all faculty at UIC, nor endorse Mr. Ayers' writings or actions prior to the time he joined the UIC faculty, but our concerns are with potential detrimental implications that this decision may have" on academic freedom.

The senators continue that "by withholding this honor, for reasons other than poor performance in research, teaching and service, and in opposition to the recommendations of university administrators," the board sends a message that "political involvement and public statements made, no matter how long ago and no matter how distant from a faculty member's work, are open to investigation and can and will be used for punishing university faculty and, presumably, graduate students."

The letter adds that there are concerns that faculty and students need to "censor themselves if they hope to succeed in the scholarly community."

It appears that considerable time and attention is being paid to a person, under the auspices of academic freedom, who has arguably produced a legitimate body of work as a university professor, albeit under a cloud of controversy, to put it mildly.

It seems that Mr. Ayers, from what I have read, might have led a far more restricted life had serious charges against him not been dropped due to the FBI improperly handling this and other investigations of American activist groups. For an overview, see this entry. As usual, I apologize for pointing you at a less that scholarly source, but the Wikipedia article is as good of a stepping-off point as any I have found for this topic.

While I will keep my opinions regarding Mr. Ayers' career and causes to myself, it does pose an interesting backdrop to examine to the state of academic freedom in our colleges and universities, given it appears to be of central concern to the UIC faculty senate.

I am reminded of a presentation I was invited to give at a local civic organization on the current activities of our college. Upon finishing and asking for questions, the conversation turned suddenly and with great emotion to that of the controversy surrounding Mr. Ayers presence in Champaign-Urbana, as he was scheduled to give a lecture the following week. I was asked many times over if I thought it was right and proper, even after deferring to the wisdom of those more closely associated with the event.

Would you allow it at Parkland?

Would you ever hire such a person?

I'll confess that I was totally unprepared for this line a questioning and very new in my role as President of the College. I'm sure I mumbled some noncommittal line about free inquiry and discourse, but the truth is that I didn't know how I felt about the matter. More importantly, my feelings aside, what would the proper response be if it were to manifest on our campus?  

Subsequently, I've spent considerable time thinking about the matter and following the news stories with a little different perspective.

For the uninitiated, the term “academic freedom" generally refers to a set of privileges afforded the professoriate with the intent of protecting the ability to teach, study, and pursue knowledge and research without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations, or public pressure. The concept originated with medieval European universities and has evolved into a slightly different interpretation in the United States.

In American colleges and universities, both public and private, academic freedom is derived from the guarantee of free speech under the First Amendment, whereas constitutions of other countries typically grant a separate right to free learning, teaching, and research.

In my read of the history, it seems that there was little organized concern with respect to the Americanized version of academic freedom prior to 1915. At that time, concern about the faculty role in college and university decision-making led to the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which held its first meeting in 1915 and immediately took up the task of considering how this new organization would serve university professors much the same way that the American Medical Association serves doctors and the American Bar Association serves lawyers.

Although  the AAUP addressed many professorial concerns in its early years, the most pressing (and enduring, as it turns out) concern was that of academic freedom. The AAUP issued a report in 1915 that spoke to academic freedom, but it was not until 1925 that a code of principles (the Conference Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure) was issued. 

Shortly thereafter, the AAUP agreed on a re-statement and re-issuance of the principles set out in 1925, aimed at promoting public understanding and support of academic freedom and establishing procedures to govern academic freedom in colleges and universities. It is referred to as the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and along with clarifications made in 1970, remains in place today as foundational doctrine.

In the 1940 Statement, the notion that faculty are appointed to a professorial “office” was incorporated, describing faculty as “educational officers” and “officers of an educational institution.” Furthermore, we are reminded that faculty have ethical responsibilities to both their profession and their institutions, but only the institutional matters are legally binding. In other words, deviation from ethical underpinnings may result in censure by members of the profession, but are likely not actionably from a legal standpoint. The professional autonomy and integrity of the faculty seems to  depend not at all on membership in a professional or discipline-based association, but on the terms and conditions of their institutional appointments. So says the legal profession.

The 1940 Statement provides, for example, “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties.”

Furthermore, “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.”

Lastly, "College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline . . . As scholars and educational officers, . . . they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinion of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution."

As you can clearly read, even these most general statements of the protections afforded by academic freedom are predicated on proper professional conduct.

That's the rhetoric. Somewhere between it and real life, things get far more complicated.

Universities and colleges are unavoidably bureaucratic institutions.  They generally need budgets, policies and procedures, and facilities. Based upon mission and purpose, they are looked upon to organize and coordinate public service, grants and contracts, and most importantly, incorporate and coordinate the activities of highly trained professionals, both academic and technical.

The quality of that work and progress toward college goals depends on the presence of a shared vision, including an environment in which faculty can conduct their work on the basis of appropriate professional standards.  The whole endeavor, as is the case at Parkland College, is led by a group of elected officials that constitute a Board of Trustees.

Nonetheless, we are all, with the exception of the Trustees, considered to be state employees.

Our faculty are selected and contracted based their degrees, qualifications, and expertise, yet are not assumed to speak for the college or even other professors in the same department. And as a significant body of case law suggests, the free speech rights of the faculty are not unlimited and must be balanced with the rights of the institution.

In this context and in contrast to universities, challenges to academic freedom in the community college are usually the result of internal administrative and bureaucratic forces rather than outside pressure or controversy. Generally, there are fewer instances of controversy over publications, public lectures, or overt political positions at issue in the community college, although on occasion, a faculty member will be taken to task over a charged issue.

By and large, the community college pressures on academic freedom come from administrators (occasionally via Trustees), other faculty (with respect to curricular issues), and increasingly from students that may not understand or do not appreciate content, subject-matter, or teaching techniques of a particular professor. Recent events around Kenneth Howell, although at the university setting, illustrate the intractable nature of such matters.

At the community college, our emphasis is on teaching with only minimal to moderate attention paid to research, publication, or, public comment in particular, as was the case with William Ayers and Ward Churchill.

Our teaching-oriented faculty autonomy and integrity remains, not only because of competent instruction but because it is an essential component of competent instruction. Our students are more likely to learn to think critically and independently from faculty who do so themselves.

Secondly, there is the issue of how faculty teach, in terms of format and method. Here, the pressures on academic freedom are less overt but no less powerful. For example, the choice of an emotionally, ethically, or religiously charged topic as a prompt or theme of an introductory writing course may very well incite a student to action, easily spiraling into petitions, letters to Trustees and tactics of similar ilk.

Third, tenure decisions are often based, in part, on willingness to innovate and experiment, especially with respect to the use of technology. There is a certain degree of academic freedom that comes with being able to refine a course as one sees fit or at least to choose freely among the technologies available, yet there may exist perceived or real pressure to embrace online or hybrid methodologies due to institutional goals.

Although much attention is paid to alleged as well as real intrusions on academic freedom from the standpoint of the offended individual, there tends to be little awareness or attention paid to the constraints placed on the administration, and for good reason.

Management requires discretion and confidentiality from a legal as well as professional perspective. The accused (thankfully) have rights and due process considerations. 

Confidentiality and academic freedom co-exist tensely, at best. Most issues involve personnel matters, where confidentiality is not only prudent, but legally necessary. The result is often a claim that "the administration knows, but is covering it up” is often really “the administration knows, but can't reveal the course of action without violating confidentiality.”

As contradictory as it is, the responsibilities of administration carry a burden of prudence when it comes to public opinion as well. It would be naive to think that a university or college's leadership can arbitrarily ignore public opinion without undesirable consequences. 


That balance is the crux of the issue.

(5392)

Paranormal Academics

A Suspension – An illusion where an object or person appears to maintain their position in air without any means of support. Unlike a levitation, an object does not rise or fall on its own. The supports from under the subject are typically pulled away and then placed back at the conclusion of the effect. 

- From the Glossary of Magic Terms 

In honor of Halloween… 

I am a fan of James Randi. Spending most of his life as a stage magician, The Amazing Randi retired at age 60 and has subsequently dedicated his life to the art and science of “debunking”, which, simply defined, is the process of discrediting and/or contradicting claims as being false or pretentious. In other words, a debunker is a skeptic with skills.

From Skeptic Magazine

Although it has nothing to do with the content of this week’s thought, my fellow language geeks will appreciate this aside; the American Heritage Dictionary lists the first appearance of the word “bunk” in American English in 1923 as a derivation of "bunkum", of which the first recorded use was in 1828, apparently related to a poorly received "speech for Buncombe" given by North Carolina representative Felix Walker during the 16th United States Congress. I must visit Buncombe someday.

Regardless, the point is the fact that James Randi has a Foundation, an “educational” foundation nonetheless. The James Randi Educational Foundation is the sponsor of the “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge”, a fund set up to provide the first person that could provide objective proof of paranormal activity. The website is silent on protocol around a second occurrence.

Allegedly, over 1,000 applications have been filed but no one has passed the preliminary test, which requires that both parties must agree in advance as to what conditions of the test constitute a success and what constitutes a failure.

With that setup, I found two articles that trouble me this week. Neither was written this week, but I just now got around to reading them.

The first article is a defense of the ongoing and growing criticism around the cost of higher education. The second deals with the how bad colleges and universities are in terms of graduation rates. Half of my audience is now gone. I am sorry. Next week, I’ll try to do something more topical.

Here is an excerpt from the first: 

“Another strand of the dysfunction narrative focuses on the gold plating of the college experience. In this view, colleges spend far too much money on lifestyle amenities. The criticisms fall on things as diverse as career advising centers, psychological counseling, and plush exercise rooms.“ 

“Lax workplace culture at colleges and universities offers yet another fat target. Tenure is a common punching bag. In different tellings of the story, the faculty either does not work hard enough, or alternatively works too hard on the wrong things – research at the expense of teaching. Faculty governance often is fingered as a problem since it supposedly allows the professoriate to dictate the terms of its own employment. These workplace culture arguments often are augmented by politicized attacks on the type of research done by many professors in the humanities and social sciences.” 

“Lastly, statistics indicating that administrators and support staff have grown as a percentage of the higher education workforce supposedly offer even more evidence of rising inefficiency. Over the past 20 years, as enrollment has grown by 40 percent, the number of support-staff members on campuses has doubled. This is often taken as prima facie evidence of bloat and inefficiency.” 

- The Real Cost Equation by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, published October 19, 2010. 

In fairness to the authors, this treatment is geared more toward university structure, but they do mention “colleges” a number of times and that makes it relevant to me.

In keeping with the Amazing Randi’s rules, which require advance agreement on the conditions of the test and what constitutes success and failure, I will begin. Unfortunately, I have no paranormal skills and, therefore, cannot know if you will agree with my evidence or argument ahead of time, but that circumstance didn’t deter better people than me.

I will begin with tuition increases. From the mid-1990s through 2003, tuition increase $2 per credit hour each year. From 2003 to present, the increase has been $5 per credit hour. Small, planned, and incremental increases have been and continue to be our philosophy. Parents with children in 5th grade today can, with relative confidence, estimate their tuition costs at Parkland College. 

As far as exotic services like a career center, psychological counseling, and plush exercise rooms, technically we have all three.

The Career Center at Parkland has three staff members assigned. As I mentioned in a previous post, I hear countless tales from thankful students (and parents) about how Parkland College helped a son or daughter, husband or wife, mom or dad, figure out their academic and career goals. And in the College Center, so many of the students I talk with are undecided about what they want to do and are looking for a little guidance, so much so that I think almost every student would benefit from a visit. Whether you are a student choosing a college major, a dislocated worker, career changer, or retiree, there are resources and services designed to help. No sleight of hand here. 

We have eight counselors at Parkland that are certified to do personal counseling. Each counselor and advisor has their own style and I found it very interesting to see the different techniques in action when I visited. I view it as a good thing that we have such a diversity of approach in the Center as it allows our students to find a compatible soul and a connection with that person. This type of work with students requires exceptional listening skills and the ability to “translate” what a student is attempting to communicate. Some students provide very little information and other times, it’s a flood. As more students with diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions come to college, our staff is asked to do more.

Advances in pharmaceuticals and better treatment options allow students that once never considered higher education to attend. And our counselor to student ratio is 2,598 students to 1 counselor. If there was ever a need for the “saw the woman in half” trick, here it is.

Our “plush fitness center” is on the way. Today, students, staff, and faculty share a basement hallway that has been walled off to make a “fitness center”. Since 1987, this approximately 1200 square feet has served our community poorly and we are building a new one that will contain over-the-top amenities like open floor space (#6,7,& 8), two offices (#4 & 5), and two classrooms (#3). If that fits your definition of “plush” there you have it. Sound like smoke and mirrors? 

Let’s move on to those dastardly faculty members. 

The claim is that “the faculty either does not work hard enough, or alternatively works too hard on the wrong things”. I smile as I type this next bit.

The full-time faculty at Parkland College teach between 15 and 16 credit hours per semester. Here is the math: Each credit hour taught requires two clock hours per week of in-class time, preparation, grading, assessing, answering questions, et cetera. The faculty is also required to hold five office hours per week, during which they are available to students for questions, assistance, advising, and the like. And additional five hours per week is allocated to departmental or college service. This includes committee work, curriculum development and coordination, recruitment, research, advisory committee organization, or any number of related activities. That looks like a 40 hour work week to me. No illusions here.

Lastly, there are allegedly “statistics indicating that administrators and support staff have grown as a percentage of the higher education workforce”. I suspect this is aimed largely at the proliferating number of administrators hired to manage the bureaucracy the higher education is. You will find no argument from me on the last part of that sentence. Imposed bureaucracy grows faster than the national debt in the form of state and federally mandated reports, audits, surveys, legal requirements, legislation, and grant pursuits, to name just a very few.

In 2000, Parkland College employed 39 people that had administrative contracts. In 2010, that number got a little out of control, growing to an amazing (just like Randi) 40 administrators. 

One might ask what the numbers for support staff look like? I can’t find the number for 2000 at this very moment, but in 2003, there were 258 support staff at Parkland. Today there are 236.

By the way, student enrollment in 2000 was 14,640 per year. Today, we are just over 20,000. No spoon bending here.

The second article, or more accurately, series of articles, has to do with the very popular “completion agenda”.

“Supporters and critics of community colleges alike question the merits of the primary success metric currently produced by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System: the "federal graduation rate," the completion rate for first-time, full-time students who earn credentials within 150 percent (recently changed to 200 percent) of the generally accepted amount of time it takes to complete. (In other words, four years for a two-year degree, and eight years for a four-year degree.) 

Supporters say the current data don't reflect the good work the colleges do, failing to account for the many students who transfer to four-year institutions without degrees, and the many students who come to the institutions for something less than a degree -- a certificate, or even just some retraining -- and get what they wanted. Critics argue that better data would simply provide clearer evidence that community colleges are failing in their mission, reinforcing what are terribly low completion rates at some institutions.” 

- Measuring 2-Year Students' Success October 21, 2010 

Most of the national discussion about community college focuses on completion rates. How long does it take a student to complete a two-year degree? This appears to be a very simple, straight forward question. Colleges should be able to count the total number of students enrolled in a given year as well as the number that graduate and calculate the completion rate. In order for this kind of measure to be valid, we need to accurately define the cohort of students to be tracked and we need to define a reasonable timeframe that reflects reality. Let me tell you now that this is nearly impossible. I’ll explain.

One might assume in perfect world in terms of cohort and timeframe, the completion rate would be 50%. That would be a perfect score, assuming all our students enrolled full-time and in 2-year degree programs of 60 to 65 credit hours.

The inset table, generated by our own Institutional Research Office, reviews both number and percentage of ALL students enrolled in CREDIT course at Parkland in a given year. It takes a very simple look at total number of students enrolled versus and how many “graduate” in the various categories. 

You can see from the chart that in our best year of the three -- 2009, just 8% of all credit students at Parkland graduated with a degree or certificate.
As a taxpayer and a human being, this figure is disconcerting to say the least. I would contend that the table above is not very useful way of measuring a college. Matter of fact, it’s useless.

Why? Four reasons:

The first issue with this measure is that the vast majority of our students are enrolled in two year programs, meaning that only about half of our students are eligible to graduate any given year. A perfect score for that year would have us graduating (16,780 students /2 years = 8390) 8390 students. If you agree with this logic, our completion rate rises to 17.8%.

Second, as you are aware, the student population enrolling at a community college is far more diverse in terms of age, background, and socio-economic status than a university. The vast majority of undergraduate university students attend full-time, taking 12 or more credit hours each semester. At Parkland, less than half of our students attend full-time. Actually, only 43% of our students attend full-time and the other 56% attend part-time. We also know from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement that 80% of our students work 20 hours a week or more.

For discussion purposes, let’s assume that students that attend college part-time will take 4 years to complete a two year degree. Some take more and some less, but this is as good of a starting point as any.

In 2009, we had 16,780 students enrolled in credit courses. We know 56.3% of that number are attending part-time. That comes to 9,447 part-time students.

If we were to adjust the original table to account for part-time students, how would it affect the “perfect score”? The number is now 6027 and our completion rate becomes 24.8%.

The third difference lies in student intent. Nearly 70% of our students at Parkland consider themselves to be degree-seeking. By the way, even though a student may have declared themselves to be degree-seeking population, some incalculable percentage has no intention of finishing a degree or certificate. There are several reasons why this is the case. First, in order to qualify for financial aid, a student must pursue a degree. For many students, this leads to an arbitrary and meaningless decision.

Regardless, we know that only 70% of our students in a given year are actually pursuing a degree, at best. How does this knowledge affect the “perfect score”? The number is now 4228 and the completion rate becomes 35.3%.

As an aside, the 30% of our students that intend to transfer to a university to finish a 4-year degree, there is little incentive to complete the requirements for an associate degree. Students are most likely to transfer after having completed just 38 credit hours of transferable general education course work. In addition, we enroll approximately 5000 University of Illinois concurrent students each year. By serving these students, by some completion measures, it actual hurts our completion/graduation rate.

Fourth, approximately 9% of the students at Parkland are enrolled in developmental coursework. The “extra” classes that a student may need to complete before enrolling in college-level classes can range from as little as 3 to as much as 30 credit hours for students entering at the lowest levels. I do not have the data on hand to accurately calculate the effect that developmental courses have on completion rates without going into student-level data, but the point is still valid.

Depending on your preference and your faith in the assumptions I made in the calculations, you may or may not agree that 35.3% is a more accurate representation of the graduation rate for Parkland College. With a little bit of discussion, we could probably agree that this (or a reasonable variation) scenario is accurate. My point is that one of the most significant issues in the completion agenda discussion is in defining the cohort of students to be tracked.

To complicate the picture further, we shift focus to the reporting we already perform.

Currently, we report our graduation/completion rates in two ways. The first method is for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the second is for the Illinois Community College Board/Board of Higher Education.

With respect to IPEDS, there are two measures of significance. The first are data are for full-time, first-time, degree/certificate-seeking student graduation rates within 150% of normal time to program completion. Our latest published rate is 23%. For comparison purposes, IPEDS assigns us to a comparison group of other, similar colleges. The comparison group rate, which included 7 other Illinois community colleges, was 15%.

In comparison to all community colleges in Illinois, which is not an apples to apples comparison, Parkland ranks 28th of 48 campuses, with the highest rate at 46% (Frontier CC) and lowest at 3% (Olive Harvey CC).

The second significant IPEDS measure has to do with graduation rates of full-time, first-time, degree-seeking students at three different points: 100%, 150%, and 200% of normal time to completion. Using this measure, Parkland College consistently outperforms its 26 peer colleges.

Our numbers for 2009 with comparison group rates in parenthesis:

100% of normal time: 10% (7%) 

150% of normal time: 23% (16%) 

200% of normal time: 30% (22%) 

With respect to the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s Data Book on Illinois Higher Education, the measure of graduation/completion rates is slightly different. Community Colleges are judged on the proportion of first-time, full-time freshmen who complete their degree with 150% of catalog time, transfer, or are still enrolled at the college. Obviously, this is a much broader measure. Using the most recent data, Parkland College shows 75.2%. When using this measure, Parkland ranks 2nd in the state, after Rend Lake Community College.

In summary, Parkland College appears to be in the middle of the pack with respect to some measures (that don’t take into account significant difference between colleges) to nearly the top performer when other measures (IBHE) are applied.

Clearly, there is lack of agreement among those we are accountable to with respect to what the cohort of students should be as well as the timeframe that makes sense. The completion agenda, as it sits today, is a mess. There are several competing models, funding sources, and interests with no clear picture as to which model, if any, will be the winner. 

The community college equivalent of the James Randi Foundation exists several times over as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina, and others offer financial incentives to create the mutually agreed upon test.

It appears to me that Parkland College is performing well in general, but when our data is disaggregated, we know we have work to do. Examples are minority student completion and retention rates and certificate completion rates, due in large part to a small number of certificate programs available at Parkland. 

Yes, we have work to do and readily embrace that challenge every day. You expect it of us.

In order to do this job, some tools are required. We need well-trained and dedicated staff, faculty, and yes, administrators. The endeavor requires a physical campus (somewhere between spartan and plush) that isn’t embarrassingly on consignment from the 1970’s in terms of décor and technology. And finally, we should be held accountable for our performance using measures that make sense. 

(4924)

Bigfoot and Sugar Pills

Be very wary of people who go to college to "get an education". I mean, what are you doing the rest of the time? Un-getting an education? - Unknown

Sugar pills. You can buy 500 doses here for $49. For the more discriminating shopper, you can go here and get roughly the same thing for $24. Both will work fine for treating depression.

Apparently, the fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills in controlled, scientific studies has thrown the industry into crisis. But really, we have known for quite a while that there is lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine and that people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.

Allegedly, the mere proximity an ultrasound machine to someone's face is effective for post-operative dental pain, regardless of whether the machine is even switched on.

During the 1950s, doctors were somewhat taken with the notion of “ligating the internal mammary artery” to treat angina. Unfortunately, when someone did a placebo-controlled trial, complete with a mock-operating room and an incision, but only pretended to “ligate the internal mammary”, the theatrical procedure was just as effective as the real one. Ouch.

So we did the intelligent thing. We just stopped doing the procedure because it was useless, not to mention the consternation it likely caused for the billing/complaint department.

We know that red sugar pills are more effective stimulants than blue sugar pills.

We know, of course, that two sugar pills have a bigger effect than one, and that an intramuscular sugar pill injection is far more effective than sugar tablet form.

We know that brand-name aspirin, with brand-name packaging and the wealth of advertising and cultural background material that supports it, is more effective at managing our aches and pains that that no-name generic, knock-off stuff, no matter that they've both got the same active ingredient. Four hyphens appear in that sentence. That makes it better.

We’ve known for quite a while that placebos can affect lots of things, but especially the stuff that has some level of subjectivity attached and that a big part of effectiveness comes from the ceremony and the cultural context of the treatment. But, I have only recently learned that there are some that believe higher education isn’t much more than a sugar pill, albeit a highly invasive one.

I read (part of) a book by Tyler Cowen called “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”.  In it, he makes the statement that, “…placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?”

Is that what we do? Is that all “education” is? Is it the social function of bringing people together, and letting positive peer pressure do its magic? Is it that educators and administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group called the learned? Is it that only once students finish 2 or 4 years of higher education they will have drunk a sufficient amount of (k)cool-aid (but the kind made with real sugar) to believe? 
Maybe a little. I should explain:

School in general works to some degree because it makes people feel they've been transformed. College graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates. The College Board reports that, “…the data showed that median annual earnings for workers 25 and over also increased with more education. In 2008, high school graduates earned an average of $33,800; people with some college education but no degree earned $39,700; people with an associate degree earned $42,000; bachelor's degree holders earned $55,700; master's degree holders earned $67,300; doctoral degree holders earned $91,900; and those with a professional degree earned $100,000.”

Our own results confirm. But why?

Saying that you studied modern American literature by itself rarely gets people a job. But by saying that you are adept at critical-thinking (and producing the skills to back it up) just might.

The problem is that critical thinking is not a definable skill set, in and of itself.  Unless something was published recently that I missed, all the known world's collected wisdom of several thousand years has failed to accurately describe an effective and replicable way of teaching critical thinking.

It is sort of like Bigfoot. We can describe generally what it looks like, but very few people have seen it, and there is some doubt about whether it actually exists.

Critical thinking deals with some sort of problem solving, say the application of the principles of mechanics to living organisms. It has to do with how good a decision is or how well a problem has been solved. It focuses on specific outcomes.

For example, you can give a student an assignment to consider reasonable alternative explanations for an historical event, but they can't do it unless they know what's reasonable in that context. Similarly, you can tell a student to look at an issue from multiple perspectives, but if they don't know much about the issue they can't think about it from multiple perspectives.

Our academic assessment woes aside, universities (and to some degree, colleges) are very concerned with prestige, status, and pretense. This translates into thick syllabi, famous professors, research dollars, and impressive graduation ceremonies. It sounds like a speech (my own included) that you may have heard. You know, the one admonishing students to persist, to invest in their education both financially and in time and effort?

One of the reasons we spend so much on college is to convince ourselves of our own commitment; similarly, in medicine, experiments show that aspirin relieves more of our pain if we know that we spent more money on the pills.

When I went through basic training in the Army, the culminating event was a week-long hazing called “The Crucible”. I learned quickly that it had absolutely nothing to do with Arthur Miller.

To sum it up, it involved very little sleep, lots of yelling and screaming, marching long distances, and practical examination of routine skills we learned the prior eight weeks. The “crucible” exists so that the soldiers feel they suffered/invested to get there and it remains an extraordinarily effective technique. It has to do with perceived value -- our opinion of a product's value. It may have little or nothing to do with a product's market price, and everything to do with the product's ability to satisfy our needs or requirements.

Correspondingly, effective higher education probably won't ever be cheap or easy. What you get in college is the opportunity to demonstrate that you can manage your own schedule, complete projects and papers on schedule without someone standing over you every minute, autonomy, and resources. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity. It really does cost a lot to bundle together a bit of learning, some good theater, and some missionary zeal, replete with the socially required props. And to some degree, it is about the ability to deal with a bureaucracy, and that’s, my friends, is a valuable life skill. It also demonstrates the ability to come up to speed on some topic, and be able to engage in some logical discourse. In total, I think this is why employers value a college degree.

To keep on with the medical analogy, a college or university is a delivery system (think the syringe) that imparts the "medicine" of knowledge. The “knowledge” is an independent entity; it isn't the "cure" itself. A delivery system is incredibly important to a medical outcome, but it's not the drug, so (at least in my understanding) it can't be a placebo.

The drug, on our case, is the information, knowledge, skills, and techniques, sequenced and presented in a way that engages the student.

And here it comes, the big reveal…the critical element that separates higher education from medicine is the professor.

In medicine (or at least pharmaceuticals), the treatment is independent of the doctor. The effect of swallowing two little pills has nothing to do with the skills and talents of the person handing them over. It’s all about the "treatment" regardless of who administers it. But in education, the professor is supposed to be a major cause of learning. And it is true.

In nearly all “teacher effects” studies where one of the variables was the faculty, the effect of different teachers was always bigger than the effect of different treatments (what was meant to be studied). Read that again. I’ll wait.

In my last posting, Nanothoughts, I talked about a study that showed that 10 seconds of video (without sound) of a teacher allows students to predict the ratings they teacher will receive. Similarly, hearing the sound without the visual (rhythm and tone of voice only) were enough as well. This is powerful evidence that teachers differ in ways that cannot easily or normally controlled, but which are very quickly perceptible. Somehow and with lightning speed, students' minds are able to determine value of a teacher.

Basically, teachers have a huge effect but one that we don't understand at all from a social science standpoint.

The most fundamental lesson that comes to my mind is that our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound. Despite confidently asserted empirical analysis, persuasive rhetoric, and claims to expertise, very few social-program interventions can be shown, in controlled experiments, to create real improvement.

We continue to consider socio-economic factors influencing learning and cognition, learning styles, multiple intelligences, student preferences, faculty teaching style, active-learning techniques, constructivism v. behaviorism, air temperature, room size, time of day, and daily caloric intake. Every one of these variables has been studied to some extent and when assessed individually, some generalizations can be made, but always with exception and never with absolute certainty. 

There is as much difference between two teachers doing, purportedly, the same thing in conventional classes as there is between two teachers doing different things.

As long as we keep on thinking that it works, it probably does.

(4377)

Nanothoughts

Split second decisions. Nanothoughts....           

Telstar Logistics

The trouble with split-second decisions is that they often feel as though they made themselves. It is not necessarily the case that simply that snap decisions are less accurate than other kinds of decisions, but it is easy to understand that there is just as much, if not more potential for error when making quick decisions.

If you only have 12 seconds, it is probably a bad idea to begin balancing your checkbook or making jam.

The other issue with quick decisions has to do with consequence. If you are an airline pilot steering a jet into a river because the engines failed, we care a lot about and, hopefully celebrate your ability to make quick, decisive and accurate decisions. Same thing does for the neurosurgeon and the bomb disposal technicians, and search committees.

Wait. What?

“[A research project] conducted by Frank Bernieri at the University of Toledo in Ohio, dealt with job-interview impressions. This researcher selected two participants to act as interviewers and had them professionally trained for 6 weeks on interview techniques. These two later interviewed nearly 100 people of various backgrounds and filled out an extensive six-page interview questionnaire on each. Bernieri’s goal was to determine whether there are particular mannerisms that could ingratiate some people with interviewers.

He found that wasn’t the case. There don’t seem to be any particular tricks one can use to win at an interview.

But then one of Bernieri’s students asked if the videotapes of these encounters could be used for another purpose. She had heard that “the handshake is everything” and wanted to test that old adage. Using a 15-second piece of video showing the candidate knocking on the door, shaking hands, and being greeted by the interviewer, she asked a group of new participants to rate these applicants on the same criteria that the two trained interviewers had been using.

“On nine out of the 11 traits that the applicants were being judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the interview,” Bernieri told The New Yorker. “In fact, the strength of the correlation was extraordinary.”

This is a disturbing conclusion. Here were well-trained interviewers, knowing just what to look for and how to get the information they sought, filling out a detailed, five-part form ensuring a complete and unbiased interview. Yet total strangers, who viewed only 15 seconds of video, arrived at similar conclusions.”

Wow. What they are saying is that the most qualified person doesn't always get the offer? Instead, the qualified candidate who makes the right first impression gets the offer? Yes, well, it gets worse.

Way back in 1993, a couple of experimental psychologists at Harvard University analyzed the nonverbal aspects of good teaching.  Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal enlisted the help of some Harvard teaching fellows who agreed to have their teaching videotaped.

A 10-second silent piece of that video was shown to outside observers, who were asked to rate the teachers on a 15-item checklist of personality traits. Trends emerged.

By athena.

Even when Ambady cut the video back even to just 2 seconds, the ratings remained the same. Apparently, all the important stuff happens in the first 2 seconds.

Now for the kicker: Ambady and Rosenthal discovered that a person's conclusions after watching that 2-second video clip of a teacher he has never met are very similar to the conclusions reached by classroom participants after an entire semester's exposure. The moral of the story is that impressions matter, sometimes more that they should. Of course, there is also the possibility – and some would argue, probability – of this impression being biased.

The ability to make sound decisions instantly over short spans of time is discussed in detail in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink", which I highly recommend. Another of his works that I read last spring break entitled “What the Dog Saw”, is outstanding as well. Malcolm is been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996 and has written four books. 

According to Gladwell, making split second decisions, based on what initially may appear to be a limited amount of information, occurs in a part of the brain called the adaptive unconscious.  This part of your brain is "a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

"There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.” Gladwell explains how this process works, how to develop and control this skill, and when to trust these decisions as opposed to a different decision process.

But neither search committees nor teaching are generally considered high-pressure or high-stress environments, at least most days, right?

Right. So what are we to do, if anything? I mean, what’s the point? Two seconds…?

There really is only one piece of advice. It was given to me by several of my mentors a long time ago and it was to “be true to myself”. In other words, be yourself and be at your best.

Perhaps the best way to influence that split second decision is to not worry about them. There's something liberating about the idea that you don't really have to perform, to pretend to be something you're not.  It appears, based on the studies, that it is really hard to "fake it" in both the classroom and an interview. Since there's nothing you can do about it anyway, you might as well be yourself.

It is, however, a reminder to pay attention to the smallest components of our everyday lives. Every day, whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress, pay attention to those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that you can’t help but form.

If we paid more attention to those fleeting moments, I think it just might change the way we interact with one another, our notions of civility, the way job interviews are conducted, how classes are taught, and on and on.

Isn’t that what we are all about?


(4001)