Keeping up with the Times

Just a quick comment on this piece on "The Dwindling Power of a College Degree," which appeared in the NYT Sunday Magazine for November 27:

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

As a result, the people whose jobs remained valuable in that “Mad Men” office were then freed up to do more valuable things. A talented art director could produce more work more quickly with InDesign. A bright accountant could spend more time thinking of new ways to make and save money, rather than spending endless hours punching numbers into an adding machine. Global trade works much the same way. It’s horrible news for a textile factory worker in North Carolina, but it may be great for a fashion designer in New York.

Has it, in fact, been great for that art director and accountant and fashion designer? Or, in addition to producing more work quickly, thinking of new ways to make and save money, and so on, are these workers not also having to take on paperwork, maintain correspondences by voice and e-mail, and schedule meetings and what not via Outlook? The technologies do not do the work on their own - they still require people to run them. Except that those people are no longer dedicated staff that (in my opinion, more efficiently) manages the operations of a workplace.

In the workplace of higher ed, I recently heard from a colleague that how a few of her now-approaching-emeritus faculty member typically handled attendance (until quite recently) was that they circulated a sheet of paper asking students to sign in - then passed along the sheets to their full-time department secretary to keep track of student absences! So that the older faculty members could not understand how and why younger faculty members complained that they could not "count" attendance in their grading. Hint: Because it takes a lot of time to keep track of student attendance. Time that younger faculty members do not necessarily have b/c we have absorbed a lot of workplace operational work ourselves... (Not to mention whether or not it is even appropriate to ask department secretaries to do work like this...)

Here is what I found a bit frightening:

A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries. Money now flows around the world so quickly, and technology changes so fast, that people who thought they were in high demand find themselves uprooted.

I think we tenure-track faculty members cannot take for granted that professors will always be needed. (We know that they are not always wanted...)

It is happening already, believe it or not, in K12 schooling. Read this piece, "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools," from The Nation's November 16 issue.

The new normal sucks.

Why texts, not textbooks

From today's Science Times profile of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins:

“I didn’t have a very starry school career,” he says. “I was medium to above average, nothing special.”

He lighted his own intellectual fire at a university peculiarly suited to his temperament. Oxford relies on the tutorial system, in which students burrow into original texts rather than textbooks.

“I loved it; I become easily temporarily obsessed,” Professor Dawkins says. “I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.”

(From that experience he drew a dislike of the current establishment insistence — bordering on mania — for standardized tests and curriculums. He views this as antithetical to true learning.)

At your "service"

Given that I am applying for tenure this winter, I prob'ly should just keep my trap shut about this, but then StraightMan starts talking about this new book that has him in high dudgeon - Randy Martin’s Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn.

In particular, he reads me this passage, from an interview with Randy Martin that appeared in Inside Higher Ed - on the meaning of academic "service":

Indeed, service has a connotation of voluntary or unpaid work, which associates it with the raced and gendered divisions of labor on many campuses–those who serve the academic mission, from clerical staff to food and maintenance workers. Service as a category of labor is also connected to unpaid domestic work and slavery. Devaluing service not only makes it easier to take for granted all these jobs that allow campuses to operate, but also takes attention away from the increasing administrative work that faculty are asked to do and the growing purview of decision-making claimed by senior administrators — whose own work is becoming more generously compensated. Academic freedom, doubtless a value that cannot be taken for granted, pertains to faculty governance, a domain that is being eclipsed by university governance over which administration holds sway, especially when it comes to priorities in collecting and disbursing funds or investments. Faculty will be well-served to recast service as administrative labor, both to give value to an increasingly consequential aspect of their academic lives, but also to come to recognize the knowledge they possess as to how to run the institutions of which they are a part.

Wow.

Until I started teaching six years ago, I had never even heard the term "service" before - I know that in graduate school, I heard professors grumble about meetings and committee work, but I never heard it discussed as I do now. On my campus, there are faculty members who seem to think one cannot do enough service and that it, along with teaching, should be all that counts toward tenure - and then there are others who think there is already much too much demand for faculty to do service (and that there are clearly individuals flouting their obligations and placing the burdens on their untenured colleagues). Which always has caused me to wonder what exactly everyone means when they talk about "service" in the first place. Do the former just love meetings and committee work that much? Do the latter simply tell their students to piss off?

The distinction that Martin makes between faculty governance and administrative labor helps me make a bit better sense of what I see around me. When the service that you do is the work of faculty governance, it is meritorious and rewarding. However, when it is indeed administrative labor - here, I am thinking particularly about the development of academic program assessment that is phrased as created by and for faculty, but comes clearly as a managerial mandate on campuses across the nation - it is work for which you are uncompensated.

You feel even that your work as a professor is being held hostage by "service."

Yet, the administrative labor being absorbed by faculty as service could and should itself be work that a support staff could perform (even more ably than faculty) for pay. There is plenty of work to be done, and there are workers out there looking for it.

Keeping up with the Times

With the college semester starting this Wednesday, and Beanie starting the 2nd grade in two weeks, I found these two op / ed pieces worth a gander:


"The Hidden Costs of Higher Education" notes that payment plans intended to help middle-class families afford tuition - paying by the month instead of by the semester, and by credit card instead of by check - end up costing them more:

Struggling families often face rough patches during which they don’t have enough cash on hand to make such payments, and so have to go to their credit cards — and pay the fees. Meanwhile, wealthy families that can afford to simply write a check upfront each month avoid both credit card fees and interest payments.

To be fair, monthly payment plans intend to help lower-income families afford college. But they have also had the unintentional consequence of creating bonuses for the wealthy and added impediments to the less well-off.

"The Kids Are not All Right" describes childhood in crisis today. Being the jaundiced parenthropologist that I am, I admit to approaching claims of "crisis" a bit wearily and warily, esp. when the usual suspects of Big Bad Business become paraded. Not that I am an apologist for BBB. What I found most interesting in the piece is this little bit of legal history:

By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.

But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept.

Children and corporations both being ascribed personhood at around the same time, using similar metaphors and images? It seems like not small coincidence - and that, I think, is far more fascinating and frightening.

What is the point of college?

Is it merely that I am sensitized to the topic of higher education b/c I work in it - or is there quite a bit of public discourse, including the publication of books and book reviews?

The latest installment appears in the June 6th issue of The New Yorker, which features a review essay by Louis Menand. In the essay, he features two books - Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa's Academically Adrift, which already has garnered a lot of attention and is based on an analysis of the College Learning Assessment (a kind of standardized test that is being used at a number of colleges and universities in an attempt to measure what a college education might "yield") and Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which is a kind of memoir based on an essay previously published in The Atlantic. I am unfamiliar with Professor X's work, but Menand makes him sound like a real-life William Henry "Lucky Hank" Deveraux.

This is fitting b/c in the public discourse on higher ed, I think we need to hear more (and take more seriously) about the experiences of the "teachers" - that is, the professors (who BTW do more than teach) and the adjunct instructors.

On a related note, I think we also need to hear more from students themselves - not just about the standardized tests that they take, ostensibly to measure what they have learned or been taught. This is where faculty feel frustration: As in the discourse on K-12 public schooling, the talk is all about "whether or not" (yes or no) students and learning and teachers are doing their jobs.

What, in fact, is the point of college for students? This is the point where Menand starts. Students bring diverse expectations (as well as experiences) to college - and this bears directly upon what they learn in college (and how and what professors also teach).

Menand describes three "theories" of what college is for Americans:

1. "College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test" that is used to sort individuals according to "intellectual capacity and productive potential."

I admit that I cringe at the thought, and wish that this were not true.

2. "College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing."

I imagine that a number of my colleagues oh-so-want this to be true: I want to believe. (In fact, I do.)

3. "College is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work."

In fact, this is what I think a lot of students attending the four-year comprehensive public college where I teach believe this - or at least a lot of their parents do. Which is why I sit with students and talk with them about what to do with their major in anthropology - which they tell me they took b/c they "love" it, not b/c they think it is "practical," which I take to mean pre-professional. (In fact, about 60 percent of the majors in our department have anthropology as their second major. Not necessarily paired with a pre-professional major: I wonder whether or not there might be a perception that an anthropology major on its own might be fine, but pairing it with history or psychology or biology adds a bit of heft?)

Menand's conclusion is a bit bleak, as it suggests that the problems of higher ed might be much more difficult than simply testing students in order to assess* the value of collegiate learning and then weeding out the "bad" teachers - that is, those deemed ineffective at student engagement*:

*Buzzwords in higher education today.

Assuming that these new books are right, and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roska believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated - their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected - and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on it really matters, it's hard to transform minds.

I think Menand is right to point out that a problem of higher ed today is that it is trying to be all things to everyone. On the one hand, I appreciate the idea of having college accessible to "everyone": Not that long ago, women and people of color and poor students were excluded from opportunities for higher education. It would have been unthinkable for someone like me to graduate from the privileged little community of the mind that I attended. The mission of higher ed, too, has changed, will change, and ought to continue changing.

On the other hand, I think the problem of "motivation" is not just what happens between between students and professors, in classrooms and on campuses, but the even larger system of the rest of life - or "reality," as my students call it.

When I talk with students, they are as likely to call college as a "break" as to describe it as an opportunity or a rite of passage. In their eyes, college is a last chance to "enjoy" themselves before "reality" - and the reality that they perceive is at best uncertain and at worst uninspiring and apparently unrewarding. They know that love can end in divorce as well as marriage, that women still bear the (unappreciated) burden of care, and that careers can be cut short as even the most loyal and experienced workers become "let go."

What, then, is the point of reading the assignments and writing the papers and acquiring those skills that standardized tests seek to measure? What is the point of college?

What needs to be "fixed" in collegiate student learning is not necessarily the teaching: Instead of blaming the professors, how about we take a look also at students? What needs to be "fixed" in higher ed is not necessarily just higher ed itself: What about the rest of the world that colleges and universities ostensibly "prepare" students to face? How about we try to fix that, too?

Our So-Called Education

Living Anthropologically posted this brief item, commenting on two articles in The New York Times:

May 14: On the one hand, "Fast Tracking to Kindergarten." Meanwhile in college it's "Your So-Called Education." As a parent of young children, and a professor, these trends seem intuitively true, and wrong. Are they also related?

I think what we are witnessing now is the further constriction of what counts as education - and parents and everyone else concerned with teaching and learning, from primary school to college and university, ought to join forces to resist it.

Or as William Deresiewicz writes in an essay reviewing a dozen recent books on the state of higher education (published in the May 23rd issue of The Nation):

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren't the same debate.... Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.... Learning isn't about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think.... It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

Deresiewicz cites Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recently published book, Academically Adrift, which found that college students today are not in fact learning all that much in college. At institutions of higher education, the buzzword now is "assesssment," which is supposed to measure "student learning outcomes" - that is, how full are the buckets.

When students apparently fail to learn, the reflexive response of policy makers has been to blame the teachers. Witness the popularity of so-called reformers like former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and the attacks upon public school teachers and their unions.

However, consider the conditions in which public school teachers today work. Austerity demands that they make do with less, teaching more children in their classrooms (not to mention having to manage the complexities of the lives of the children whom they teach), cutting "extras" like field trips or recess, preparing children to perform well on standardized tests that are taken as measures of the teachers themselves. How well can teachers teach - and students learn - under such conditions?

A point that Deresiewicz and Arum and Roksa (in "Your So-Called Education") all make is that there are now fewer full-time tenure-track faculty teaching at American colleges and universities: No more than 35 percent. Deresiewicz suggests:

If we're going to make college an intellectually rigorous experience of the students who already go - still more, for all the ones we want to go if we're going to reach the oft-repeated goal of universal postsecondary education, an objective that would double enrollments - we're going to need a lot more teachers: well paid, institutionally supported, socially valued.

***

Another important reason to resist the narrowing of education is that it reinforces already existing inequalities. Narrowing what counts as worth learning serves the interests of people who know what Kumon is and can afford it. The only hope for democracy is a broad education.

Valuing college

Tina Fey, in her prayer for daughters, beseeched her maker thus: "Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance."

Just read today's Room for Debate at the NYT, which is a follow-up to an article from last week questioning the worth of an undergraduate degree in business.

I think it is a question well worth asking. True, we all know people who worked hard at their business degrees and people who lolled away in the liberal arts. The point is that when students undertake a business degree - and 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the United States are granted in business - what are their expectations, and are they being met?

When I talk to students, they assume (or at least have parents who assume) that a business degree makes them "more" qualified for employment than, say, a philosophy degree. However, note that one of the bloggers at Room for Debate claims, "if I was an employer who had to choose between a business major and a philosophy major, I'd pick the grad who could write well, and I know who that would likely be."

So, I hope that a dialogue on the worth of a business major inspires students and parents to rethink the value of, say, a major in Spanish or Asian studies or, God forbid, anthropology.

More important, a dialogue on the value of higher education ought to inspire colleges and universities to consider where they place (or misplace) their values. For example, UNLV will be cutting faculty in programs like anthropology and philosophy, U Albany eliminating entire programs in classics, languages, and theater.

What worries me is what happens if / when fields of study like theater or philosophy or anthropology become areas accessible only at wealthy and elite college and universities? Will we be creating even greater inequalities?

My advisees in anthropology often describe "educating" their parents, relatives, and friends on how and why they think anthropology is, in fact, "worth" majoring in - however, I am pleased also at how many students also tell me that their parents tell them that it matters less what they study than that they do well at it. This is what I plan to tell Beanie and Bubbie.

Unless they tell me that they plan to major in business. Then I just might have to badger them into comparative literature or art history.

Keeping up with the Times

Apparently, when women start to succeed, this is a problem. Or so MIT has found, as the Times reports:

Among other concerns, many female professors say that M.I.T.’s aggressive push to hire more women has created the sense that they are given an unfair advantage. Those who once bemoaned M.I.T.’s lag in recruiting women now worry about what one called “too much effort to recruit women.”

WTF?!

But with the emphasis on eliminating bias, women now say the assumption when they win important prizes or positions is that they did so because of their gender. Professors say that female undergraduates ask them how to answer male classmates who tell them they got into M.I.T. only because of affirmative action.

Cue anger. Cue frustration:

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

Even the intelligent people at MIT cannot be expected to devise the solution on their own:

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

The problem is not that women have begun to succeed, but that women can only begin to succeed. Still, I find it bold, brave, and even encouraging that an institution like MIT has undertaken this kind of scrutiny of its own policies and practices and their effects. How else can we work for change?

Educational credentialism

While grading exams and papers, I have been taking little "breaks" and reading anthropologist Peter Demerath's Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School.

The book is based on longitudinal ethnographic research - that is, Demerath conducted fieldwork over four years, engaging in participant-observation and interviews in order to follow a focal group of students from 9th to 12th grade - at Wilton Burham High School, a "good" public high school in the Midwest.

Much of the public discourse on schooling today is focused (rightly, I think) on disadvantages, so that we might talk about the effects of poverty.

As an anthropologist, however, Demerath also argues that advantages ought not be taken simply for granted - that they, too, should be examined carefully as socially created. He describes "the tight - almost seamless - linkages between class ideology, parenting practices, ideal notions of personhood, and accepted school policies and practices" that result in "1) positioning individuals to successfully compete in school and 2) leveraging community resources to support the schools, build up the confidence of individual students, and frame their efforts as successes" (2).

Exhibits A and B: At WBHS, building up the confidence of individual students and framing their efforts as successes can be seen in the school allowing up to 47 students to graduate as valedictorians, and distributing a special cord and "Medal of Excellence" to every graduate to wear with his or her cap and gown (in response to a parents complaining that their graduates might "feel bad" about not being designated members of the National Honor Society).

What especially concerns me as an anthropologist and a college professor who bears witness to this every day in my work is this passage that Demerath quotes from another book that I might place on my kindle wish-list, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning (1997):

David Labaree pointed out several years ago that market pressures and social exertions give rise to educational credentialism, at the heart of which is a tension between a view of education as a private good that facilitates individual advancement, and as a public good that provides society with collectively shared benefits. Furthermore, he showed how under credentialism, "teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses (1997,2). Labaree concluded that social mobility goals have promoted the commodification of education in the U.S., which threatens to "transform the public educational system into a mechanism for personal advancement" (p.12).

I think Labaree might have been a bit optimistic: Commodification is no threat, it is what already has been happening. Now, I worry that higher ed / academia has sold itself too cheaply as a self-help program. Yet, I also hear how lamely platitudinous it sounds: To claim education as a public good. What does that even mean? I wonder whether or not there is a convincing way to talk about public good that does not on some level speak to the "pecuniary considerations" that sociologists claimed in 1929 (in the classic study of "Middletown") were changing the fabric of American life.

I wish it mattered not only to talk about a public good, but also to talk about the play and excitement that actually accompanies learning - which as a parent is what I wish for my kids to know.

A question

A friend posted this link on Facebook, which immediately caught my attention because I had been asking myself and my students exactly the same question: Why Aren't US Students Rioting Over Crazy Tuition Hikes Like College Kids in Europe?

When I posed this question to students in my field methods seminar, they looked a bit blankly at me. Apparently they missed the coverage on Fox. (Which is usually what I saw on the screens mounted in the waiting areas outside the lecture room where I taught my ANTH 100 courses - not sure who chooses the channel, but I do not think it is necessarily the students.) I described to them the alleged "attack" on Prince Charles and his wife as their Rolls Royce took a wrong turn through the throng.



No response.

So, I found the comments in this alternet piece interesting, including Tom Hayden's observations about what prevents students from being more politically active today:

The challenges they (students) face on their campuses are far different than the past and perhaps more profound. Tuition costs at UM in 1960 were one hundred dollars, and I can’t remember if that was for a semester or an entire year. So I could obtain my degree, edit the paper, go south to the civil rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate school, and never feel I was falling behind in the competitive economic rat-race…A student today falls tens of thousands of dollars in debt, even after holding two part-time jobs, a burden which limits their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings competitive disadvantage.

I think that my students would agree with alternet's observation about what college means today:

Public higher education is no longer seen as serving the broader social good. And if you can afford college—likely through high indebtedness—the four, five, or six years you’re there are spent making yourself more employable. Colleges aren’t enabling greater democratic citizenship anymore, they’re producing wage earners. There is a trend towards privatization and commoditization that’s quite troubling.

Which is not necessarily to say that my students would disagree with alternet. In fact, I think my students see themselves as managing, as best they can, what has been handed to them. Which itself is a stance that at times frustrates me: They see themselves as reacting, and they do not see themselves as participating, much less creating and re-creating. Is this a millennial / post-9/11 thing? B/c I just do not remember feeling so sad and defeated already at age 20: I still do not feel that now at age 40.

The druggiest colleges in America?

The front page of our almost-daily newspaper blared with a headline about the college where I teach being "not among 'druggiest' schools, locals say."

Which I think violates certain rules taught in journalism school about writing headlines and "not" being not news in the first place. In any case.

The article tells us that The Daily Beast posted a list of the "50 druggiest colleges" in the United States. Included in the top 10 were the college where I now teach. (So, technically, it is among the "druggiest" schools, in contradiction to the headline.)

"I think the whole thing is preposterous," the article quotes the mayor of our fair city saying.

I agree. Although not necessarily for the same reason as hizzoner.

The piece is clearly a bit of snark - I mean, this is the Web site that Tina Brown founded and edited - responding to "Operation Ivy League" that snared students dealing drugs at Columbia University.

Its "methodology" is. Well. Creative. (I can snark, too.)

The grown-ups see a list like this as discrediting the work that they do to protect and promote the health, well-being, and safety of the students here. Not to mention to teach them.

It is also demeaning to the students who take seriously that "the college has raised its standards, and the quality of the students has improved," as one student told the almost-daily. However, Operation Ivy League itself seems to belie the assumption that the selectivity of the college and the SAT scores of the students can be taken as signs of Moral Character and / or Intelligent Decision Making.

Interestingly, the elite college that StraightMan and I attended as undergraduates - Williams - is also included in the top 10, even with a drug use grade of A- from a student review database called College Prowler: "A high grade, i.e. an A+, indicates that drugs and alcohol are not noticeable on campus and there is no pressure to use drugs."

I wonder what college kids - and a lot of them see themselves as kids - think about this. With higher education resembling a marketplace of branded names that offer more or less the same kinds of bells and whistles, to what extent might the notoriety of being ranked among the druggiest colleges in America actually distinguish one brand from another? With the result of making a school better known and more attractive?

Keeping up with The Times

Exams and papers have been graded, and the fall semester has a great big fork stuck in it. Then along comes this article, "Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges," which I think is worth a gander for anyone teaching undergraduate students:

A recent survey by the American College Counseling Association found that a majority of students seek help for normal post-adolescent trouble like romantic heartbreak and identity crises. But 44 percent in counseling have severe psychological disorders, up from 16 percent in 2000, and 24 percent are on psychiatric medication, up from 17 percent a decade ago.

The most common disorders today: depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, alcohol abuse, attention disorders, self-injury and eating disorders.

Every semester, it seems, I have at least one or two students who come to talk to me about their concerns about their performance in my courses - in connection with the side effects of the medications that they take for depression and / or anxiety and / or attention disorders.

What got to me especially was the effects that students' problems have on the people who work with them: "The need to help this troubled population has forced campus mental health centers — whose staffs, on average, have not grown in proportion to student enrollment in 15 years — to take extraordinary measures to make do."

This is not to mention the professors, like me, who frankly are unequipped to do much more than make referrals to the counseling center. However, each referral results from my taking the time and care to sit and listen - and absorb - the worries of a student who approaches me as his or her teacher.

“By this point in the semester to not lose hope or get jaded about the work, it can be a challenge,” Dr. Hwang [a clinical psychology at SUNY Stony Brook] said. “By the end of the day, I go home so adrenalized that even though I’m exhausted it will take me hours to fall asleep.”

For relief, she plays with her 2-year-old daughter, and she has taken up the guitar again.

Hmm. I need a hobby.

Benefit of the doubt

This is to follow up on my post from the other day on college degree or pedigree.

A friend commented on Facebook that one of the social assets that is gained through attending an elite college or university is benefit of the doubt:

Sure, graduate schools may matter more, but going to an elite college makes it easier to get into a top graduate school. Having worked at two Ivies now, I've seen up close how this benefit of the doubt works in an almost talismanic way for those who graduate from these schools. Most interesting to me in the debate was the point that this benefit of the doubt can be especially beneficial to minority students.

This reminded me that as a child, my parents taught me, explicitly and implicitly, that in order to be considered "as good" as "other people" in the United States, I needed to perform "even better," as they perceived inequalities in the social order: Arriving as "guest workers," they felt keenly that they had a "place" that they were given in American society, but to this day, even as naturalized citizens, I think they lack of real sense of belonging. They still talk about "American people" as somebody else.

Performing "even better" to my parents signified speaking "good English" and academics. So, they stopped speaking Korean at home with me, and fairly aggressively encouraged my reading and writing with weekly visits to the public library. Some families take day trips and vacations to look at mountains and lakes: My parents took us to look at Columbia and Harvard.

So, I think the comment on benefit of the doubt raises points that I hope are being examined further: The experience of attending an elite college, and the "fact" of receiving a pedigree from one certainly benefit individuals, but they also benefits individuals differently. For students who become identified as "minority," it might represent simply gaining a foot in the door, which seems rather a modest aspiration.

Also, among "minority" students, there will be differences: The rates at which Asian-American students enter and graduate from college and university look staggeringly different from the rates for African-American and Latino/a students. In addition, "Asian-American" students can refer to the upper-middle-class children of professional parents who immigrated from Taiwan and then moved to Alpine, New Jersey - and to the children of refugees.

College degree - or pedigree?

Today's Room for Debate in the NYT is worth reading - the discussion is on "Does It Matter Where You Go to College?"

Personally, I go back and forth on this issue - I think b/c the question itself is not that straightforward.

Does it matter? No, in the sense that it matters more "what you do," both in your time in school and afterward. Also, no in that graduate school might "matter" more. Not to mention that students will find good teachers almost anywhere.

However. Yes, in the sense that where you go to college can put you into contact with professors and probably even more significantly peers who will affect your own performance or "what you do" at school. Also, where you go to college and as a result, who you know, become important and meaningful forms of cultural and social capital.

Yes, in the sense also that, as one of the bloggers at Room for Debate also notes:

If you attend a highly selective college, the per pupil expenditure is $92,000, compared with just $12,000 at the least selective colleges. The richest colleges require students on average to pay just 20 percent of the total cost of college, compared with 78 percent at the least wealthy colleges.

I think another reason why I go back and forth on this issue is that I personally feel that I have gained, both materially and immaterially, from attending an elite institution - but that cannot justify the unfairness and inequity of the structure as it stands. Or as another blogger at Room for Debate succinctly states the problem:

Elite colleges are economically and personally productive for individuals lucky enough to attend them. The real issue is what this means for those who do not attend, and for the promise of upward mobility in our society as a whole.

It is not that the elite colleges don’t work. It is that they work too well as passive agents for the intergenerational reproduction of elites.

In these times, I think there is a serious problem of misapprehending the conditions that produce an individual's access and ability to attend an elite institution as that individual's merit. "Lucky enough" glosses over the so-called accident of birth intersecting with contrived particularities: I happened to be born in the United States as a result of my parents meeting during the medical residencies in New York City, following changes in American immigration law that themselves resulted from a "shortage" of doctors and nurses. I was raised in a so-called upper-middle-class suburb with "good" public schools where teachers and guidance counselors were familiar with the college application process, and took an interest in me - and so on.

When I think about what hopes I have for Beanie and Bubbie - I hope they will be as "lucky" as I have been. Which means not necessarily that I wish for them to attend elite institutions themselves, but that the promise of living lives of significance will remain in reach. For everyone.

Curtains for anthropology?

Colleagues in my department circulated two articles reporting on the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In particular, the reports focused on the bleakness of the present and future state of anthropology – which made me wonder whether or not StraightMan and I had attended the AAA in an alternative reality. Tis true that the job market has reached the depths of suckitude. Yet, the amount of engagement seems as high as ever. At the same time, anthropologists seem to be taking to heart the notion that they ought to demonstrating and communicating the relevance of what we do.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported primarily on that old chestnut in American anthropology: The four fields of anthropology (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) are so divided that it is threatening the discipline. Presented as Exhibit A of the embattled and embittering state of anthropology: A session featuring graduate students (which no doubt contributes to the sense of embattlement and embitterment…) commenting on the intensity of specialization within the subfields, i.e., how and why archaeologists and linguistic anthropologists cannot understand each other’s jargon.

Inside Higher Ed reported:

It is no secret that these are hard times for anthropology. The discipline claims little more than one-half of 1 percent of undergraduate degrees conferred, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Anthropology departments across the country have been rebranded or threatened with being merged or scrapped; jobs have been targeted.

Hard times for anthropology? As far as I know, the number of undergraduate degrees in anthropology is itself not in decline. Combined departments of anthropology and sociology have been more the rule than the exception at colleges and universities. Unfortunately, it is not only anthropology programs and positions being scrapped or targeted, but to cite the particular example of the University at Albany, classics, foreign languages, and theater. It is not only hard times for anthropology, but in fact, hard times for the liberal arts and for anything that smacks of any intellectual life.

Back from outer space

Or more precisely from the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association.

Beanie and Bubbie spent the last few days with my parents! So, it was just StraightMan and me in New Orleans. With thousands of other anthropologists. Not to mention Saints fans. Who are even dat much more annoying than anthropologists.

***

Is it not a truth in life that the time when you are busiest at work is right before a break or a vacation?

It is also a truth that in the higher education-industrial complex in which I work, a break is never a break: Thanksgiving week and summer included.

Blurgh.

***

Finally, here is more evidence that "sucks" might be the new normal. Or is it just evidence of the kind of company I keep?

Friends on Facebook have been sharing the following two links that appear to be making the rounds among faculty: "So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities" and "One professor's fantasy".

I take the popularity of the links as a sign that morale among the professoriate is rather low at this time. When I started teaching, just five years ago, I actually talked about graduate school as an option that motivated majors ought to consider! Not any more.

I am conscious of the fact that I directly have benefited from the expansion of academia / higher education in terms of both my education (having had the privilege of attending an elite liberal arts college and a premier public research university), and my employment (as a tenure-track professor at a four-year public college).

However, I also think it is important and necessary to examine the effects of that expansion critically. We need to ask both whether or not colleges and universities really are prepared for the students that they are admitting, and whether or not the students really are prepared for college or university.

Simply expanding higher education is not the same as democratizing it.

Team players need not apply

For both the subjects and writers of recommendation letters in academia / higher ed, this piece (and the comments) in today's Inside Higher Ed is worth a gander:

You are reading a letter of recommendation that praises a candidate for a faculty job as being "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a "supportive colleague." Whom do you picture?

New research suggests that to faculty search committees, such words probably conjure up a woman -- and probably a candidate who doesn't get the job. The scholars who conducted the research believe they may have pinpointed one reason for the "leaky pipeline" that frustrates so many academics, who see that the percentage of women in senior faculty jobs continues to lag the percentage of those in junior positions and that the share in junior positions continues to lag those earning doctorates.

The research is based on a content analysis of 624 letters of recommendation submitted on behalf of 194 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at an unidentified research university. The study found patterns in which different kinds of words were more likely to be used to describe women, while other words were more often used to describe men.

Sadly, while the results are not surprising - the caring, sensitive, compassionate, and supportive candidate is the one who does not become your colleague - the study has me thinking about how I characterize my colleagues and my students, particularly as I find myself writing recommendation letters for jobs and graduate schools.

I suppose that I might rephrase "collegiality" and "consensus building" as "professionalism" and "leadership." However. I hate that the advice is to "stay away from communal words, whether writing on behalf of men or women."

Cue Elvis Costello: "What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?"

A comment on the comments on Inside Higher Ed:

Predictably, there are comments that this is not really "about" gender, as in women and men, because men now have as equally hard a time being hired.

To which I must retort: How about entertaining the idea that "gender" is not really only about women and men? That it might be about arrangements of social relationships - significantly, inequalities - that both reflect and inflect ideas and practices of "women" and "men" in the first place?

One of the comments called attention to the fact that the so-called communal words refer to ideas that academia has celebrated as its values - and the so-called agentive words refer to ideas that "private enterprise" celebrates.

Unfortunately, I think there is a relationship between the devaluing of academic values and the privileging of corporate values in academia / higher ed - and the gendering of academia as communal / female and private enterprise as agentive / male.

***

On the bright side: Tina Fey was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor - only the third woman to receive it, and at 40, the youngest ever recipient. Hooray for funny, smart, female, and 40! That is for all my gal pals :)

On why I have not worked on my book revision in about a month

StraightMan and I share the responsibilities of Beanie's and Bubbie's drop-off's and pick-up's at their respective schools. I think it is important to talk with their teachers and the other kiddos and their parents. Also, I just like holding their little hands and walking with them, hearing their little thoughts. Beanie asks questions like why "tissue" can be something you blow your nose with or what your body is made of - I have no answer. Bubbie seems to notice every crack, twig, and drop of water on the pavement.

This morning, I dropped off Bubbie at nursery school, where he seems to be thriving.

When I say "dropped off," I mean that I walked him there, leaving the house about 20 minutes before 9am, after feeding him a "second" breakfast as he hardly ate his first, which StraightMan served around 6:45am, then bundling his reluctant little body in boots, sweatshirt, winter jacket, mittens, and hat after locating his favorite Matchbox car and packing it into his backpack. At nursery school, unbundling Bubbie, accompanying him into the classroom where we have a routine where I bumble at locating his name tag, then sit down and read a story book before I walk him to the table where a teacher is helping other children use scissors and glue sticks to create a craft that fits with the day's lesson, which was, most fittingly, adaptation. (Good luck with that, I think.)

When I arrived home after a micro-run - my almost-daily exercise, which I fit into my day because it requires dropping off a child at school, then returning home to eat breakfast and ready myself for the rest of the day - it was about 9:20am.

In other words, "dropping off" Bubbie is a multi-step process from door-to-door-to-door that requires at least 40 minutes.

I mention this because when I arrived at home, about eight hours later, I found on my desk, a photocopy of the first page of the Acknowledgements to Kay Anderson's 2008 book, Race and the Crisis of Humanism.

No, I have not read the book. StraightMan, aka LuckyHank, is on sabbatical: He has read it. He left me the page, noting that it reminded him of me: This is what counts as romance between two anthropologists married almost 14 years.

I doubt I am alone in sensing over the past 10 years the loss of a profession that once moved to a rhythm that fostered creative surges and pauses. This was a profession that felt alive to its own distinctive disposition - that winged immersion in ideas reigned in by the labour of composition. The challenges in producing this book have had less to do with the pressure of multiple relocations..., plus the arrival at an advanced age of a much-wanted but unexpected child. Mostly the experience has been an interior wrestle with an intensifying regime of academic production that seems increasingly hostile to sustained projects of the kind this one, in intellectual terms, has necessarily been. To be sure, the privileges of a writing profession remain (tenuously) intact. I am thinking of those riveting moments in the creative process when the parts appear to converge in a plot that drives and exceeds them. But, still, there is cause to highlight wherever possible the blindspots in an academic culture that increasingly measures 'output' as if it actually hails, machine-like, from the buried chambers of a mind divorced from all its embodied and circumstantial conditionings.

I might add that what can be said of scholarly writing can be said also of scholarly teaching.

Sign of the times

Huh. Not sure what to make of this photograph taken at the Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert rally and posted on Inside Higher Ed. Am I supposed to laugh because I also am supposed agree - or because (to be honest) I find it rather ludicrous?

I think there is a lot more to say about "evidence-based" discourse. Certainly there ought to be more careful and considered study of, say, teaching and prenatal care, to mention two arenas where a need for more "evidence-based" practice is being claimed. However, "evidence-based" discourse seems to be grounded in narrow functionalism, with little interest in, say, ritual.

Yet, rituals accomplish important, meaningful, and necessary work for us as members of communities. I mean, we all engage in any number of apparently unimportant, meaningless, and unnecessary - and unevidenced - practices whose effects might be missed when they become eliminated.

There is a lot more to say. Alas, I am not the parenthropologist to do it at this moment.

College-for-all?

When last I blogged, I had been reflecting upon the observation that clearly not all students seem entirely prepared for college - and that both the kind and range of the challenges that students face (and a result, the challenges that students themselves then pose to faculty, staff, and administrators in academia and higher ed) leave me, as an anthropology professor, feeling rather unprepared to manage.

Exactly how am I supposed to "teach" students who are in no psychological, social, and / or even academic condition to "learn"?

Also, I confess, it is not only that I feel unprepared: I admit also that I feel somewhat unwilling to break what I understand as the "rules" of college b/c to do so then empties it all of meaning. Not just the class the student is taking, but also the student's purpose in college, his or her degree, and not insignificantly, the career to which I have committed myself as an anthropologist, who teaches... I mean if I had wished to be a psychiatrist / social worker / life coach / guru - not to mention a high school teacher - then that is what I would have become.

(BTW, there is a larger discussion that could be had here about rules making meaning, but that is too lofty for me... At least right at this moment, when I am procrastinating from grading exams while StraightMan and Beanie and Bubbie nap upstairs.)

As a cultural anthropologist, I think attending to meaning matters a lot - and should matter more to a lot more people - in the current discourse on college, esp. in this era of encouraging college-for-all. This is a point made in an article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of American Educator (which the American Federation of Teachers publishes): "Beyond One-Size-Fits-All College Dreams: Alternative Pathways to Desirable Careers."

The issue had lain forgotten in a stack of to-be-read magazines that I reached for in a fit of despair last night - a Friday night spent reading exams - and I think the cover story is well worth reading. It opens with the observation that while the majority of high school seniors today plan to go to college, the truth is that less than half will graduate from college - a rate that drops to less than 20 percent for low-achieving students, who often must start their college careers with remedial courses for which they receive no college credit. "Meanwhile, they have wasted precious time and money that could have been spent on career-focused certificates or associate's degrees that have better outcomes than are generally recognized," note the article's authors, James Rosenbaum, Jennifer Stephan, and Janet Rosenbaum.

The outcomes include AAs in radiography earning salaries in the $80K range. Which I might add seems unfathomably high: It is considerably higher than what I earn with a PhD from an institution that the National Research Council recently ranked as one of the top programs in anthropology.

Here is where the question of meaning become critical in academia / higher education:

In everyday language and in formal policy discussions, the word "college" is used as a synonym for "bachelor's degree." Colleges have much more to offer than just four-year degrees - and recognizing that fact would go a long way toward rescuing the college-for-all-movement.

A friend commented to me on Facebook that "college will never be for everyone": I think what we both mean is that the pursuit of the four-year / bachelor's degree is not for everyone. Not to mention an education in the liberal arts, which I think traditionally has defined the four-year / bachelor's degree.

Another point about meaning: "Students are understandably surprised to learn that 'high school competency" does not indicate 'college readiness.'" Huh. In my experience, I have learned that this is true in fact, but I am surprised to learn that this is true in intent, too.

An especially interesting observation in the article is their comment that too many students in high school tend not to be especially well informed "about" college: They know they "ought" to go, but they do not know that fewer than half will graduate. The authors suggest that students enter college with unrealistic expectations - which themselves make it even less likely that they will succeed - because adults are withholding information and as result misleading them. In part, this might be because some adults, like parents, might or might not have attended college and have the experience to share with their children. Or at a time when the ratio of high school guidance counselors to students is 1 to 284+, the advice is fairly general, with not much detail shared, let alone individual counseling.

Even more significant, I think, is that the rah-rah routine to cheer students into college appears to be part of a larger cultural or social value placed on, well, rah rah routines in general - especially when as they concern adults promoting and / or protecting children's well being.

We are mystified by what we are increasingly seeing as idealism that prevent optimal outcomes across youth-related fields. We think our society's tendency to advocate BAs for all is a good example of this problem. Somehow, across fields, we must find a way of being honest with our youth without crushing their dreams. Short term, the truth about college might be disheartening. Long term, knowing the truth is the only way to accomplish one's goals.

For another time: How to talk to talented undergraduate students about (sigh) graduate school.