Woe is us academics

Have you been following Doonesbury for the past few weeks? It’s been all about the progressive destruction of the American university, as the old model is replaced by the for-profit university, a hideous scheme in which state and federal support for higher education gets siphoned off to support lousy schools that grind through massive numbers of students, offering low tuition, flexible hours, and a fast-track to a degree…and with abysmal retention rates, low success, marginally qualified ‘faculty’, and an education that is worth less than you paid for it. These are the colleges you see advertised on cheesy commercials on television, in which some guy proudly testifies about getting his fancy diploma working only a few hours a week at night over two years, and never having to step away from his computer to do it.

The assault is occurring at multiple levels, not just with dumbass MBAs and lawyers in congress shunting off cash towards their Libertarian ideal of a university. Anyone involved in academia has been watching the slow erosion over the last few decades…a period during which university faculty have been blamed and cheapened and discarded, replacing institutions of learning with factories churning out quotas of tuition-paying customers. You want to know How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps? Here’s one of them.

V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.

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I’d like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts – which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but to hire adjuncts, as a “cost saving measure” in an increasingly defunded university. What they don’t say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power. The money wasn’t saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore away from the students’ education itself — and into these administrative and executive salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of “consultants”, PR and marketing firms, law firms. We have to add here, too, that president salaries went from being, in the 1970s, around $25K to 30K, to being in the hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of dollars – salary, delayed compensation, discretionary funds, free homes, or generous housing allowances, cars and drivers, memberships to expensive country clubs.

Yeah, that’s the reward for earning a Ph.D. Most of you won’t get employed in academia, and most of you who do will get the terrifyingly fragile job of adjunct. And if you do manage to get a real tenure-track position, after 4-6 years of graduate school and a post-doc or two, you’ll get paid $40-50K/year, and be damned grateful for it.

A modest proposal

A typical American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with reading and writing. We ought to face reality: most of these students might graduate, but they’ll never crack another book in their life, the bulk of their written communications skills require nothing more than their thumbs and a tiny screen and fleeting comments that require neither punctuation nor even lower case — Y U NO WRT ME? — let alone grammar. If they make it to their version of advanced studies — business school — the epitome of literacy will be the 5 line, six words per line bullet point slide in PowerPoint, and most of the lines will consist of stock phrases.

Meanwhile, the schools invest time, money, and teachers in futile efforts to make students with the attention spans of mosquitos try to read short stories, and even novels…and then, in the inevitable standardized test, they are challenged to extract meaning from at best three paragraph snippets. They then regurgitate trivialities in the stock 5-paragraph essay: I’m going to tell you 3 things, here’s thing 1, here’s thing 2, here’s thing 3, I just told you 3 things.

Why are we wasting time on these antique skills? You know they hate reading, they don’t want to read, and once we stop nagging them about reading, they’ll avoid it altogether for the rest of their lives. Why read a book when you can just wait for the Hollywood version, which will also include breasts and explosions? These are also skills most people won’t need in whatever jobs they end up doing.

So here’s my proposal: let’s stop.

We’ll save money. School can be abbreviated, getting the kids into the workforce faster. We won’t need to train teachers; any babysitter will do. And most importantly, graduation rates will soar right through the roof. And as we all know, graduation rates are the only numbers we need to determine whether our students is learning, and our schools is teaching.

I’m certain this idea will have enthusiastic Republican support, and that the Democrats will follow along.

I know, you don’t believe I’m serious. Then how can we believe Andrew Hacker? He seriously proposes in the NY Times (which will apparently publish anything nowadays) that we should stop teaching algebra. Algebra! The one basic, elementary mathematical principle we should expect our kids to learn, and he considers it superfluous.

His reasoning is bizarre.

The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Shirley Bagwell, a longtime Tennessee teacher, warns that “to expect all students to master algebra will cause more students to drop out.” For those who stay in school, there are often “exit exams,” almost all of which contain an algebra component. In Oklahoma, 33 percent failed to pass last year, as did 35 percent in West Virginia.

Um, yeah? Math is non-trivial, and it’s conceptually difficult for some students to master. But that is true of every single thing worth learning. The purpose of an education is not to get a diploma, but to learn challenging and useful knowledge, and his approach is to redefine education to be something anyone can get with little effort — in essence, he’s making an education achievable by more people by stripping out the difficult learning part. But that’s not an education any more!

And to remove algebra from the curriculum…I can scarcely believe it. We live in a technological society. Not learning algebra in the public school system means those kids will not be prepared, will not be qualified, to do anything in science and engineering. I’m serious: if you don’t know algebra, you can’t do basic quantitative chemistry, and if you can’t do that, you can’t do biology. At all. Not the molecular/biochemical/bench side, not the ecological/evolutionary/field side. You can’t do physics, that’s for sure. Forget math and statistics. If you’re not capable of grasping statistics, forget psychology, too.

You can probably still be a competent English major, I admit. But wouldn’t we be better off if all the English majors had an inkling of the foundations of science, as well as all the science majors having a touch of the humanities and social sciences? Shouldn’t we expect that even those people who choose not to pursue a college degree ought to have a bare minimum of competence in math and history and language and science and art, if we’re actually going to deem them educated?

Setting algebra as a minimum is actually setting a low bar. If a third of the students are failing that minimal expectation, then the solution isn’t to simply disappear the requirement, but to teach it better. Or admit that students who can’t read, who can’t write, who can’t do a simple algebraic manipulation, are not educated. Period. No excuses.

And if you’re going to do that, you might as well write off any delusions about having a well-informed citizenry.

Neither brilliant nor stupid

News is trickling out about the Aurora murderer. The first wave of misinformation was gosh-wow gullible stuff in which reporters were gushing over how he was some super-genius in a top-flight neuroscience program. I have to disillusion everyone right there: getting into graduate school is a minor accomplishment, sure, but it’s not the major mark of distinction they think it is. By all accounts so far, he was an average student early in his academic career. Most revealing is the suggestion that he was also washing out of that career.

Holmes had difficulty with a June 7 preliminary exam, given orally by three university faculty members. It is designed to evaluate students’ knowledge at the end of the first year. Three days later, Holmes dropped out.

Basic fact about grad school, at least in the sciences: you are admitted provisionally. You’re essentially given research tasks at first to test your ability, and then the big event is your preliminary exam. It is extremely stressful, just ask Jen. If you pass it, you advance to candidacy for a Ph.D. and are expected to buckle down and get to work. If you fail it…you’re done. Pack your bags, go home. You probably aren’t going to get accepted into any other grad program, either.

At every school I’ve been at, most students pass their prelims — their importance is highly emphasized, and everyone knows to work their asses off. But there are always some who don’t make the cut. And that sounds like Holmes’ case. I kind of suspected, from the timing, that he was a grad student who’d just failed his prelims.

You can’t blame his shooting rampage on that, though. I suspect that one reason he failed is that he spent the last several months, when he should have been frantically studying, stockpiling Batman paraphernalia in his apartment, instead. He was on a trajectory towards failure long before he stepped into that last examining room.

via Neuroscientists debunk idea Colorado suspect was supersmart – USATODAY.com.

Just like Lenin and Stalin!

The residents of Happy Valley have torn down Joe Paterno’s statue. I’m dismayed, though, at the student in this video whining about how it wasn’t fair. Paterno enabled child rape. The kindest thing was to keep the statue’s removal discreet, rather than having a mob strap cables to it and tear it down with trucks, followed by dragging it through the streets and tossing it in the river.

Also, the NCAA will soon be announcing strict penalties on the Penn State football program. PSU football is dead, and unfortunately, this is going to be a major hit on PSU academic programs, too. Never tie your university’s reputation to athletics, people!

Science: It’s a Girl Thing!

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It’s a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept.

Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women’s preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3″ heels.

How do you get people excited about science and science careers? By talking about science. Ben Goldacre made some excellent comments on twitter about this.

The EU have funded a campaign to make women in science wear shorter skirts. http://bit.ly/KYRkBk #sciencegirlthing

Time and again with these high budget state funded science communication activities, they dumb down, shoot for the mainstream, and miss.

Meanwhile I can’t help noticing that the really nerdy stuff done by ppl like me and @robinince is commercially successful in the marketplace

I realise that sounds cocklike, but it’s true. Dumbed down state funded sci comms is patronising and fails to meet its stated objectives.

People – not just nerds – like nerd stuff. They like the details. They’re not thick.

@flypie @robinince we fill out rock venues, my book sold 400,000 copies, i dont know what more metrics you want. Nerd detail sells.

@edyong209 @robinince we make, a fucking, profit. we sell nerd details, and people buy it, while state £ sci comms patronises tiny audiences

The real tragedy is that somewhere, a marketing cock is celebrating that their “controversial” campaign is being discussed #sciencegirlthing

Also, to my vast surprise, for once the youtube comments are actually intelligent.

Oh wow, I can’t remember when I last felt this patronised. I’m pretty sure the message “scientists think that women are giggly, superficial and obsessed with fashion” isn’t going to get more of us doing science. Just eww. I have a physics degree. I managed to get it without strutting around a lab in a minidress and stupid shoes and doing ‘sexy’ pouts.

Rachael Borek

Please tell me that this is a sad joke. Being female and working in a laboratory I find it patronising in the extreme. I can’t believe that any intelligent woman watching this would not want to punch the advert-makers in the face. Is this REALLY what you think women interested in science want?? Go look at clips of Kari Byron hosting Mythbusters and then come back and apologise to everyone.

Catherine Du-Rose

Oh my god. I haven’t been this revolted by something since I heard about the human caterpillar. This is so insulting! I can’t find the words to properly articulate how irritated I am by this. Please tell me this isn’t a trailer – I mean, there’s not going to be more like this? I cannot imagine anything that would turn an intelligent girl off a subject faster than being patronised.

littlelixie

I’m a girl and I’m a scientist. I definitely do not go prancing around making make up. I work on a computer and do processing. Science is not a girl thing, it’s an everyone thing, everyone who is passionate enough about doing what they love. This is a terrible, terrible video, and I feel very offended, and I know my male colleagues do not see me like this. I feel rather disgusted.

chandratap

Hey, next time an organization tries to do the right thing and encourage more diverse people to participate in science, how about if you actually talk to scientists and try to understand what motivates them, rather than dragging some refugee from the fashion and music video world to tell women how to be scientists?

A quick peek at the future Louisiana science curriculum

Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal’s new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?

Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution

No Transitional Fossils Exist

Humans and Dinosaurs Co
Existed

Evolution Has Been Disproved

A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur

Solar Fusion is a Myth

It’s not just science! Look what else they’ll learn:

Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.

“the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”

“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”

It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man
made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”

“God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”

the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.

“Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free
enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”

Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.

“The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”

Watch the video. It’ll show you that I’m not just making this all up.

Fortunately, the student body at my university is largely from the upper Midwest, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry too much about an influx of miseducated kids here — but other universities may have to look at Louisiana enrollments. How much remedial teaching do you want to do?

Oh. So that’s the truck full of stupid that hit Joycelyn Elders

What is it with these prudish, stupid Americans? They want T&A on their TVs, they want crude humor and nekkidness in their movies, and they rent porn to watch when the kids are staying at grandma’s place, but just the thought of sex education makes them freak out.

The latest hysteria: a teacher in Washington state explained how STDs can be transmitted orally and anally.

According to KCPQ, the principal of Onalaska Elementary School was talking to 11- and 12-year-old students about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases when she was asked about oral and anal sex.

The principal’s answer allegedly included verbal descriptions of those sex acts.

Parent Jean Pannkuk recalled to Fox News Radio what her daughter said she was taught: “You take a man’s penis and you put it in your mouth – that’s what the girls do to the boys. … The boys spread the girls legs apart and put their mouths down on the vaginas.”

“Basically, how I feel and others that I’ve talked to, it’s just the same as raping somebody, but you’re raping their innocence instead of their physical being,” parent James Gilliand explained to KCPQ. “When you hit those levels and the sexual acts, you might as well hand them a Kama Sutra book or something, you know?”

“Just the same as raping somebody”…yeah, James, you’re an amoral asshole. Probably a Christian, too, but I wouldn’t want to get too insulting.

And sure, what’s wrong with handing them the Kama Sutra? Well, it’s a little bit opaque and full of euphemisms, and you’d have to define “yoni” and “lingam” for them…how about just giving them a copy of The Joy of Sex instead? We should have absolutely no problem explaining to children how sex works — why are these slackwitted freaks getting so upset over a dry, mechanical description of how oral sex works, especially when it’s in the context of explaining how scary sexual diseases are transmitted?