Academia: October 2003 Archive Page

Once adopted, the credit hour became a driving force in higher education. | It presented students with a specific time frame in which they were expected to complete course work, usually one semester.... But Wellman and Ehrlich, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argue in their book that using time to measure 21st century learning is ineffective. --Steve Geigerich --Academics Make Case to End Credit Hour (AP/Newsday)

The butterfly effect has, until now, been cited only as an illustration, but Professor Jim Spanners of the Pennsylvania Institute for Making Stuff Up takes it seriously, and believes that butterflies are directly responsible for most of the world's major problems. --Butterfly (The University of the Bleeding Obvious)

He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors -- and others with a financial stake in atrazine -- would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may be harmful. --Goldie Blumenstyk --The Price of Research (Chronicle)

The author of this article is careful to check with scientists who say they were unable to repeat Hayes's findings. It would be an irresponsible exaggeration to claim that all corporate research is biased, or that research funded by non-profits or governments is free from similar pressure. In my "Practice of Journalism" class, we are learning to be skeptical of the statistics quoted in agenda-driven press releases, but this article shows the opportunities for the misuse of science are much broader.

P.S. Goldie Blumenstyk? Really?

Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature -- old and new, from every culture -- as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? --Thomas H. Benton --College and the Fall (Chronicle)

I can't exactly say I'm basking in the self-satisfied glow this professor projects -- especially now that midterm grades are out and students are worrying about their GPAs. On the other hand, I don't think I ever was really angry in graduate school -- or, if I was, I was angry at the fashionably alienated graduate students who surrounded me.

One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, "Happily?" Another student sneered, "Wow, married ... how retro-hetero-normative." Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my working-class origins, most of my core beliefs. I had to smile and nod in support of "tolerant" people who openly hated the world that produced me -- and who were abetted by the "profession" in doing so. --"Thomas H. Benton" --Leaving the Big City for Small-Town College Life (Chronicle)

"Retro-hetero-normative." That's a good one.

As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I found things were much easier for me when I concealed my American identity. When spelling out my last name, I learned to say "Jay Eee Are Zed," which seemed to associate me with the Queen's English and upperclass culture (which translates as more or less religiously anti-American). One student, pondering why a particular Canadian author would use a particularly offensive racial epithet, noticed that this author had lived in a city near an American military base, and concluded that this author must have picked up the term from American servicemen. That was quite amusing -- and when I chose that moment to identify myself as American, I think at least some of the people in the room were embarassed by their casual anti-American bigotry.

All in all, I think I benefitted from studying American literature in an essentially anti-American culture. One student from Germany all but called me a racist when I told him that, based on the speech patterns of the characters in a particular story, I could tell which characters were white and which were black. The fact that one mother called her son "n----- boy" was a pretty strong clue, if you ask me.

Link found on The Couch, which also has an amusing comment on the lightning which recently struck the actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's much-talked-about religous movie.

It's poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It's failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A's clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives. --Carlin Romano --Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me? (Chronicle)

Another fine suggestion from Jim.

Brewster Kahle wants the world to know that old software is an important part of our cultural history and -- like books, films and other media -- should be preserved. --Daniel Terdiman --Fighting to Preserve Old Programs

Problem? The DMCA prohibits the archiving of software, on the grounds that doing so violates intellectual property rights.

At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation. | "The only difference is that they say `international edition' in little print on the cover," said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified. --Tamar Lewin --Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas (NY Times (Reg; expires))

Via KairosNews.

A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student's experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does he break the confidentiality rule and tell his student what he just learned? --Ethics 101: A Course About the Pitfalls (NYT (Registration; link will expire))

Another good suggestion from Jim.

[A]ttractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. --Gabriela Montell --Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations? (Chronicle)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. I mentioned about this article couple days ago in a comment I added to a post about ' bad genes,' but it's worth repeating as a separate entry.

What does one do when the book is wrong? Should the book's authority outweigh the professor's? In the mind of the student, the book is usually the "law" of the class, in many ways, and the teacher the lawyer. Obviously, I can't hold the student accountable for missing a question when the book mislead her -- and I did later give her full credit for her answer -- but now I see another way in which grading is revision... not of the test, but of the textbook! --Mike Arnzen --When the Book is Wrong (PEDABLOGUE)

Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America's leading satirical newspaper. Brief, informal proposals are welcome at this stage. Submit to Graham Harman at toolbeing@yahoo.com (deadline for initial proposals is October 31, 2003) --Philosophy and The Onion (APA)

ARRGH! I have way too much to do... way, way too much to do. Back away from the keyboard, Dennis! Stop!

Via Crooked Timber, which offers it under a title Mike Arnzen won't want to miss: "God is Undead."

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

Kirshenbaum is publishing excerpts from his forthcoming book, which examines the hard drive as an inscription machine. Here's part of a somewhat rambling comment I posted on his site:

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106427418616569858

I haven't read the specific article referenced, but I wonder if your description of the technology of computers as a physical environment (on the micro level) would place the percieved violence of computer terminology into another context.

I'll be going to an academic setting in order to become a game programmer. What's interesting is that just as there are film degrees (one of which I currently own) that combine the fields of literature and art with a variety of other disciplines, including physics among others, there are degrees in game creation. Places that do not seek to be known as giving out "degrees in playing games" as my aunt and uncle sometimes derisively refer to it call their degrees things like "Human-Computer Interaction" which, to be fair, can cover more than just games. Things like biofeedback for medical purposes are also examined. While gaming in education has yet to pan out, these people are doing some amazing things. As a part of the curricula, students also examine the historical place that gaming holds. In addition, they also examine how to integrate filmic and literary concepts into interactive computing. --Dade --Gaming in Education (Switchbox)

Order and Respect in the ClassroomLitreracy Weblog)

[Note: I've changed the title of this entry and edited it slightly -- mostly by changing which words I used to link to Mike Arnzen's blog. The previous version the previous version implied an association that I didn't mean to create.]

On his PEDABLOGUE, Mike Arnzen confesses he raised his voice at his students today, because they were rustling papers and preparing a portfolio to be collected at the end of the period, rather than paying attention to his lecture. I also had a lot of students submitting work today, but I specifically asked them not to use binders -- just a staple or a clip was fine. I admire my colleague for trying to get some serious teaching in the day before a vacation -- I just used the day to preview some upcoming assignments and grade part of a quiz in-class, and let them go about 5 minutes early.

Due to the power differential in a classroom, I try to be very careful about raising my voice or getting mad. I try to smile almost all the time; I've felt since high school that, when I listen to recordings of my own voice, I often sound annoyed or angry. [And sometimes, I let students get away with behavior that would offend me if I were a fellow student. I was already pondering this issue when I learned that...] According to Stuart Twemlow, there's a problem in schools -- teachers are bullying their students. See the article responding to Twemlow, on "Irascible Professor."

Twemlow (with his associates) has a few academic articles on his website, www.backoffbully.com, but as you can guess from the name that website markets videos and a curriculum to school systems. Of the articles posted on his site, one -- "Feeling Safe in School (PDF)" is identified as having been published elsewhere in a shorter form; when it was peer-reviewed, apparently parts of it were cut. The bibliography for that paper mentions at least four articles by the same researchers (in varying combinations of names) that hadn't yet been published.

So... researcher makes claims about a problem. Researcher also happens to sell videos and other materials to solve that problem.

I trust that the academic peer-review process will do its job and ensure the accuracy of Tremlow's published works and the validity of his research methods. There's nothing wrong with making an honest buck, but this is a potential conflict of interest. A good journalist should notice and be skeptical. There's a difference between cynics and skeptics, of course -- I don't want to exaggerate the issue. Nevertheless... keep an open mind, but double-check publicity information coming from somebody with a product to sell (something the TV reporter duped by the "Hunting for Bambi" hoax didn't do).

It must be that time of the semester (no, no, Michelle, not that time): people are talking about grading student papers. --Ron Vitia --Grading Papers (Vitia)

I don't understand the in-joke referring to Michelle, but the conversation that ensues is good. Via Clancy on KairosNews.

A note from C.M. Worth reminds me to blog that Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death died this weekend. --Neil Postman, Mass Media Critic, Dies (NY Times)

A very outgoing young man in my class ("Troy") keeps a blog (Internet diary) about his schoolwork, partying, and politics. As I read his entries, including his grousing about my class, I tell myself that I am not eavesdropping, and that he is entitled to write whatever he likes in a public forum. Yet his field is public-school teaching, for which I think his openness about his life might hamper his chances of getting a job. Should I advise him or let it go? -- Letter posted to "Ms. Mentor" advice column --Keeping a Lid on Your Blog (Chronicle)

I can't help thinking of the middle-school teacher fired over a website he created when he was 19. When does the online confessional become too public?

[T]he recipients of higher education (along with the parents whose experience is 30 years out-of-date if they had one) do not know in advance what they need. If they did, they wouldn't need it, and what they often want, at least at the outset, is an education that will tax their energies as little as possible. | Should we give it to them? Absolutely not. Should we settle curricular matters -- questions of what subjects should be studied, what courses should be required, how large classes should be -- by surveying student preferences or polling their parents or asking Representatives Boehner and McKeon? --Stanley Fish --Grading Congress (Chronicle)

Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette.

"These are not frills," said Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont. "They are absolute necessities."

The University of Vermont plans to spend up to $70 million on a new student center, a colossal complex with a pub, a ballroom, a theater, an artificial pond for wintertime skating and views of the mountains and Lake Champlain. --Greg Winter (registration; will expire) --Jacuzzi U.? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students  (NY Times)

And people wonder 1) why students can't find time to do their homework and 2) why college tuition is skyrocketing. Note that no single college has every one of the extravagant luxuries mentioned in this article -- the overall feeling of pandering to the whims of potential students is exaggerated because the author has chosen to focus on the most extravagant luxuries he found. Still, it is amazing. Via Arnzen's PEDABLOGUE, where I posted a relevant quote from Malcolm X.

Lower standards and grade inflation make campuses safe for students who have little hunger for knowledge, little love of learning, and almost no appetite for hard work. Although students have many reasons for going to college, a very large number--71.3 percent of the entering class of 1995--do so not to enrich their minds but their pocketbooks. "The only reason most of us are going to school is society says, 'this is your meal ticket'" (Sacks 139). --Paul Trout --Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University (The Montana Professor)

Found via Arnzen's PEDABLOGUE.

I teach a wide range of students, including some that fit the description above. In my first year of full-time teaching, I made a passing reference to "when you used to do homework in high school," and the class burst out into laughter. I had to ask them why, and at least half of them said that they never did any homework in high school at all.

If you happen to be one of my students, and you're offended by what Trout wrote, then chances are you aren't one of the students he's complaining about. Besides, I doubt an anti-intellectual student would bother reading my weblog -- after all, it won't be on the test.