I’m shocked, really. What is there to say? Students are apparently knocking down the door at Montana State University-Billings to become history majors. Someone find out what’s in the water in the dorms and send some of it my way – we could use it!
Tenure is a funny thing, and not always easy to justify to people outside of academe. Heck, it can be hard to justify to people inside, too – I certainly have encountered individuals who should not have it. One reason people have trouble with it is they don’t understand it – many non-academics are unaware, for example, that those who fail to get tenure are fired as a result – or, more precisely, their contracts are not renewed. On the other had, at my own school, we do not have a system of merit raises, so there’s a real question as to why anyone should make any extra effort once they get tenure – pride, I suppose. Any system of tenure that does not include real accountability is prone to produce at least a few disasters.
As I come up for tenure for the second time (I gave it up once before to leave an institution I was very unhappy at), I am however reminded of why we have tenure in the first place. Out of Iran, we hear that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is calling for liberal and secular professors to be purged from Iran’s universities. Already many have been forced out – now Ahmadinejad wants conservative students to agitate for further purges. Tenure, whatever its flaws, is designed to prevent just this. Tenure does not protect me from budget-based layoffs. It does not protect me if I’m caught sleeping with students, or if I shoot someone on the campus lawn. It does not protect me if I am manifestly not doing my job. But if the voters in the great state of Tennessee decide to elect a whole host of wingnuts to the legislature and the Governor’s Mansion, I can’t be fired for my politics or my religion. For that matter, I can’t be fired because the Governor decides that postmodernism is the only way while I remain wedded to a fuddy-duddy form of empiricism. I whistle past the graveyard reading a story like this. Tenure could be abolished at any time, and I doubt there would be much public outcry. But some form of tenure must continue into the future to prevent scenes like the one in Iran from happening here.
I’m a bit late posting on this, but there was very interesting article in The New York Times yesterday concerning the number of students at junior colleges who required remedial work. This isn’t just a problem for two-year schools, as this problem also appears in four-year schools. Many students who graduate from high school are shocked to find that their skills in writing, reading, and math are not sufficient for college work. The article points out that some of the students who need remedial work are people who got good grades, even honors, in grade school. What’s going on here?
There are some obvious possible answers. Grade inflation, coupled with a lack of rigor, would be obvious suspects, and undoubtedly these play a factor. But there are some other factors I think are at work here. One is the increased emphasis in our education system on standardized testing. Teachers and school systems increasingly find that their livelihoods and their funding depend on how students perform on these tests. Let me tell you – if you told me my paycheck depended on how well students were doing on a particular test, I’m going to teach that test, probably to the exclusion of everything else. Students whose education revolves around learning these tests do not get the kind of well-rounded education required to develop the critical thinking skills that are needed for college work, which is probably one of the things that is hurting them.
The other thing I think that is happening here is that it is my experience that students do not read enough. Even good students are not reading much for pleasure now, and they read newspapers less and less. Yes, they’re on-line and are “txt msgng” each other like mad, but not enough to enable them to develop strong vocabularies, good critical thinking skills, or a broad cultural knowledge. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but in the short run at least, colleges need to put ever more emphasis on reading and writing. This may seem obvious, but I think we’re up against something critical.
If I were the curriculum god, I would put every student in a reading and writing seminar every semester, with a reading list for the whole institution that every student would be expected to finish before graduation. This is not a call to teach all the Dead White Males – I’m less concerned about the precise works that are being read, more concerned that the process of reading and analysis is taking place, and that students and professors can rely on a common set of cultural references from which to do analysis. If I were the curriculum god.
We know what students really care about - party on! Must be loads of fun to teach early morning classes at UT-Austin.
Talk about a mixed blessing. The University of Texas spokesman Don Hale did the usual sniffing about how UT is really known for its academics, and then tried to dismiss the whole thing:
“It's good water cooler conversation, but is there a basis in fact? Debatable," said spokesman Don Hale. "I think we're known as one of the nation's leading public research universities, and that's really our reputation."Besides, he said, there might have been extenuating circumstances this year: "The students who filled out this survey might have remembered the parties we had after we won the national football championship, and maybe that's what got us to No. 1."Did I say "academics? Note the language - "leading public research universities." That's actually jargon - being classified as a research university means in essence that they have a lot of PhD programs. Still I have a feeling that the spokespeople at my school would also say something about teaching.
The Detroit Free Press had a story yesterday on the problem of high priced textbooks and some of the ways students are trying to deal with it. There are some retailers, notably online ones, that are trying to capitalize on this crisis, but the root problem remains. And a crisis it most certainly is. When I was an undergrad, back in the late 80s, my most expensive textbooks were those big fat books for chemistry and calculus (I may be an historian now, but my first undergrad major was electrical engineering). At that point, those books ranged from $50 to $70, and I only had to buy one or two of those - most books were half that much. My most expensive book bills were $120-$150 a quarter, and once I got past those big auditorium classes, my book bill dropped below $100/quarter. The textbook I assigned in my World Civ I class (Stone Age to Counterreformation) this fall, a paperback half volume (containing the first 23 chapters of the 44-chapter hardback version) is $87 from Amazon. I'm sure our book store charges a few dollars more. At those prices, a student can easily have a $400 or $500 textbook bill each semester. There's a reason some of my students don't buy their books. What happened?
To try to entice professors to order them and students to read them, publishers have filled books with huge amounts of color, images, and all kinds of features. They've also invested heavily in online materials, and textbooks increasingly come with CDs or passwords for online access. Some of the online stuff is useful - I find using the Internet is an easy and cheap way to give my students access to primary documents, though I don't need an expensive publisher’s site to do that. Many things are online already. The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a good place to look for them. All those bells and whistles are distracting, too. Try reading one of these textbooks - all the inserts, images and maps have become too much, making it hard for the eye to follow the text, for the reader to know what they are supposed to be reading. Some of this kind of thing is good, but there is a limit. They are no longer books that you read. They've become more a hybrid cross between a book and an online newspaper - vaguely narrative, yet jumpy and episodic, easily leading you in ten different directions at once and thus leading you nowhere. I'm sorely tempted to get out of the game altogether and just assign some cheap classics, the kind of things you can get for a few bucks - maybe Sun Tzu's Art of War for China, and The Iliad for the West. Or I could take Jonathan Reynolds’s experiment to its obvious conclusion and have students bring whatever old World Civ book the could find cheap somewhere. Could make for interesting class discussions.
