Minnesota mooks don’t like MOOCs

Every once in a while, some news comes down from on high that reveals that the people we’re trusting to lead don’t have a clue about what they’re doing. Now Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education has banned online courses, specifically the excellent suite of free online courses from Coursera.

We do have a law on the books that has the goal of shutting down diploma mills — you shouldn’t get to browse a website and be awarded a Ph.D. in quantum neuroscience. But Coursera doesn’t do that: they don’t issue degrees or even credits, they just provide massive open online courses for free. So you can learn stuff. For free. You don’t go there so you can pretend to learn and get a fancy diploma to hang on your wall, it’s just free information.

This ban is utterly unenforceable and absolutely ludicrous. All you Minnesotans should take your laptop or iPad into the bedroom or bathroom or someplace private, turn off the lights, and browse Coursera — I recommend the biology section, obviously. Oh, look: Rosie Redfield has a course on practical genetics. That should be good. Sign up for something.

Now feel the thrill of being an outlaw. Go commit crimes: learn something.

Hey, maybe the Minnesota OHE is trying reverse psychology on us?

Crown Clade of Creation

I’ve been writing at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for nearly a decade, and in the decade’s worth of archives there are a handful of posts that really seem like they ought to live here. So every month or two I’ll dust one of them off, if it’s not too horribly outdated, and put it here for your delectation or dissection.

This one is a 2006 review of the abysmal “biology” “textbook” Biology: God’s Living Creation, published by the creationists at A Beka Books.

[Read more…]

A triumph for Black Atheists of America!

Good news: they’ve been given $10,000 by the Stiefel Freethought Foundation to improve science education for kids in low-income neighborhoods.

Ayanna Watson, President of BAAm, says she’s excited to get started in the fall. “We’re in the process of selecting nearly a dozen schools to donate equipment. We were able to give squid dissection kits, DVDs, and other materials to the students, allowing them to learn about their own waterways and wildlife. We want to do this kind of thing for other students around the country.”

Notice: Atheism + science → squid. It’s inevitable.

Academic realities

Oh, great, another depressing article about the state of American academia.

My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages – data which universities have long kept under wraps – her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.

By the way, five course per year — the standard 3/2 load — is what I teach. It represents about 20 contact hours per week, and doesn’t include all the preparation time. Or in the case of adjuncts, the commute time: I knew of adjuncts in the Philadelphia area who taught 5 or 6 or more courses, each one at a different university.

And as the article points out, there are additional costs to being in the professoriat. I’m at a small university, and we get several hundred dollars per year for travel (although we’d be in trouble if every faculty member tapped into that fund), but adjuncts typically get nothing, and are entirely on their own. A lot of journals also have page costs if you want to publish…that has to come out of your pocket if you’re an adjunct.

This is a telling quote from the article:

The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.

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.

…

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!