Attacking community colleges

Robert Reich has been a vocal, informed advocate of community colleges since the early 1990’s. This from his (unsuccessful) primary run in the Democratic gubernatorial campaign in MA in 2002 — he really did make support for community colleges a major element of his campaign (guess who finally did become governor? yep, good old Mitt):
http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Robert_Reich_Education.htm

Business groups and right wing conservative “think tanks” have orchestrated a campaign to undermine public education on every level since the 1980’s, not least here in MA. Should we be surprised that the Kaplan subsidiary, the WaPo, publishes tripe like this?

As a commenter on Krugman’s post about this story repeats several times, “I smell Koch.”

I taught one semester at a cc, for $2k. Got a shitty evaluation from the dean and chair for “not treating the kids enough like high schoolers.” Fuck that shit.

Regardless of how many hours are spent in the classroom, isn’t it strange that 88k in one of the wealthiest counties in America (13th, in fact, in a metro area which includes 10 of the 16 wealthiest) for full professors that generally have PhDs is considered high? Without having access to the data, my very strong hunch is that a policeman or a high school teacher with 10 years experience in Montgomery teacher is making more than 88k. Standard community college salaries in poorer regions are much lower (even in econ, adjuncts I’ve known make something like 2500-4000/course, so 25k-40k for 10 courses over two semesters, which clearly is not a lot of money).

Yet another reason why I think I’m going to try to stick it out in European academia. I know my chances here aren’t great, but getting a faculty position in the States sounds more and more like a Pyrrhic victory. I remember my Dad struggling in vain for tenure in the 80s with a large classload and not enough research and ask myself if it’s worth it.

If Levy represents the direction of higher education policy in the US, I’d rather go back to writing code.

I am informed – rumor mill, but from someone who would know, so the usual disclaimers apply – that German universities are aggressively trying to hire European profs away from the States, and leaning heavily on “we’re not slave-drivers.” I know one well-known figure in my field has been hired away from a relatively high-tier Canadian university that way.

Henry’s observations about journalism (high profile jobs therein) and the ivy league (and other elite schools, public and private) rang true to me — recollection of reading various pieces about this over the last few years. Quick google search came up with:
Dana Goldstein, “Journalism’s Elitism Problem, ” The American Prospect 10/1/2009:
http://prospect.org/article/journalisms-elitism-problem
Very current:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/29/961283/-The-Pack-of-Young-DC-Labor-Journalists-The-Shitkickers
Also, an excerpt from a new book, Viva Journalism! by John C. Merrill and Ralph L. Lowensetein:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wg4_62PgVuEC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=ivy+league+journalists&source=bl&ots=NETfGOwDQy&sig=uwN-GhjF5T8Gtg8MJYhrZpjaYIk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yJ9wT8yuO4Tx0gG7yvn0Bg&ved=0CE8Q6AEwBzgU#v=onepage&q=ivy%20league%20journalists&f=false

Now I must stop procrastinating. A good 40 hours of paper reading to get down to — along with lots of other work — on my “spring break.”

Have to inject the queasy position of the WAPO publishing anything about colleges, seeing as the newspaper is supported by its Kaplan “get students to take out gov loans, then screw em” for-profit colleges. Here’s a nice link to begin with: http://dailycensored.com/2011/10/10/lobbying-insider-trading-censorship-at-the-washington-post-kaplan-u/

My thoughts were exactly what js. (@15) said. 1-1 ratio? Has he *ever* done, even spoken to a teacher??

I certainly agree on the substance of the editorial. What’s really striking is that he didn’t even bother to dig into the statistical evidence on what’s behind the cost increases.

In terms of tuition, this is an interesting resource:

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

Inflation adjusted tuition costs across the 2000 – 2010 range did rise by a lot (37% in one decade, roughly a factor of two since 1976). Administration contributes, but since the average is of order 20% (up from much less in the past, of course) it can’t be everything. The full table is at

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_345.asp

A more detailed summary of statistics is at

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/ch_3.asp

It isn’t having overpaid professors:

“Faculty salaries generally lost purchasing power in the period from 1970–71 to 1980–81, during which average salaries for faculty on 9-month contracts declined by 16 percent after adjustment for inflation (table 267). During the 1980s, average salaries rose and recouped most of the losses. Between 1999–2000 and 2009–10, there was a further increase in average faculty salaries, resulting in an average salary in 2009–10 that was about 8 percent higher than the average salary in 1970–71, after adjustment for inflation.”

Tenure is declining but not vanishing:

“The percentage of faculty with tenure has declined in recent years. Of those faculty at institutions with tenure systems, about 49 percent of full-time instructional faculty had tenure in 2009–10, compared with 56 percent in 1993–94 (table 274). Also, the percentage of institutions with tenure systems in 2009–10 (48 percent) was lower than in 1993–94 (63 percent). Part of this change was due to the expansion in the number of for-profit institutions, relatively few of which have tenure systems (1.5 percent in 2009–10).”

And the student to teacher ratio isn’t changing either. So rising tuition is mostly a combination of reduced state support, higher administration, and expensive capital improvements (including dorms, rec centers, and the like.) The labor cost of professors is only up by 8% over 40 years – and probably less if you include the decreasing tenure rate.

No. 19

Yes, you can teach the same classes more than once and that will reduce prep , but not grading. I have four two hour lectures a week or eight hours of in class room time. But, I only need to prep for two lectures a week since I repeat them. So I put in less than the 24-32 hours of prep and grading a week that four lectures entails for some other people.

I revise the courses from year to year. But, I teach the same classes twice each semester.

I think that honestly, if you are re-teaching the same course for more than a few years and you don’t revise the prep/lectures/content/assignments, you’re doing a shitty job teaching

I don’t see this. The subject (at undergraduate level) doesn’t change all that much even in the sciences. It’s not like new works by Milton are being discovered every year, and there is no real reason (indeed, plenty reasons against) teaching the bleeding edge of academic research. I would guess that someone revising more than 20% of their course every year is either creating needless work for themself, or is doing so in order to correct massive flaws in the original material.

I am far from being a “market fundamentalist” but how does this make any sense:

. But we all should object when they receive these salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers. …

Object to what? This is just whiney nonsense. yes there are “important” things that research universities do but there is certainly an element of “privilege” as well. The privilege to work hard to try to establish oneeself in an academic area where, hopefully, the rewards may follow. But those may not be monetary rewards.

When you’ve taught a course several times before, you needn’t and even shouldn’t, for dsquared’s reasons, spend a lot of time revising it. I look at my old lecture notes and tweak them for an hour or so before each one-hour class. If I did a lot of revising I’d be tempted to add more complex and interesting (to me) material that wouldn’t be suitable for beginning students, even at a good university.

Especially at a community college, though, the grading must be a huge burden, since there presumably aren’t TAs to help. In the sciences, with multiple-guess tests, that may not amount to that much, but in the humanities, with essays, it can be a lot. If Levy’s ignoring that he’s ignoring something very significant.

That said, there’s been no response to the “30 weeks” part of his op-ed. Faculty at research universities do research outside term times — if faculty at community colleges aren’t expected to research, what’s the justification for their having similarly long non-teaching periods? Presumably some prep is done outside term time, but can it fill 22 (or 18) weeks?

The links above work, despite the nonsensical titles — the first is to “Udacity” the second to “Coursera”.
I wish there was a preview function.

@24: In the sciences the material does change. Astronomers can settle on a treatment of Kepler, Galileo, Newton etc. that works for them. But that’s not true for planetary science or cosmology, even at an introductory level. You also have to adjust your materials for demographics. But the biggest costs after the initial effort (which is far more than 3:1) are the fixed costs: office hours, assignment preparation and grading, and course administration. Even with a teaching assistant and familiar course material you will still spend 2-3 x as many hours on these out of the classroom tasks as the number of hours spent in it.

Tom Hurka in no. 28, over the last three years or so I have taken several calculus courses at the local community college. Lots of written assignments and always returned clearly having been read, by people who have about 150 students overall in their classes; I don’t see where they find the time. Ditto for the accounting courses I took; the powers that be are trying to make them online courses but they will simply not be as good as they were when I took them.

Many years ago when I taught intensive Latin in summer school (one five unit course with about ten students) it took me at least forty hours a week to handle it adequately. And that’s a perfect example of a course that simply doesn’t teach what students need to be taught without a classroom teacher and written assignments that are marked in detail.

I live in one of the more populous mountain states. A community college prof here makes about 40-50K teaching 5-6 courses per semester and hasn’t gotten a raise in three years. Most of the full time faculty are PhDs. Profs have a great deal of administrative duties also.
But roughly half the courses offered at community colleges in my state are taught by adjuncts who make about $2k a course.
Notice that the author mentions “full professors” as if the average salary of full professors told us anything about the average salary of all faculty. My grad program had roughly 20 faculty and about 4 full time professors. Its sort of like arguing that minor league baseball players make too much by providing data from the Yankee’s starting line-up.

It’s worth pointing out that his target is not just community colleges, but everyone who isn’t at a fancy R-1 research institution. Many such schools also have publication and research requirements — not to the extent of the R-1s, of course, but enough to make it challenging when dealing with five to ten times the number of students and no assistance with grading. And I can’t speak for everyone, but my contract is for nine months, which means I’m not paid for summers off to do research.

I’m skeptical that doubling the teaching load on someone with a 3/3 at a small liberal arts college would yield lots of educational benefits.

I think more normal teachers would be constantly noticing that some parts of the course work better than others, and trying to figure out how to tune it up.

there’s “trying to figure out how to tune it up”, and then there is a process whereby {12 hours of classwork 30 weeks of the year} turns into {60 hours of work a week 50 weeks of the year}. Given how well other related industries (TEFL, the CFA etc) do with standardised course material, I really think it’s odd that so many college teachers reject the concept of standardisation so completely. I suspect that some of it is precisely because they lack the confidence in their role that you’re calling “uh, very self-assured”, and that this is because they’ve been sold a concept of their job that values research (which they aren’t doing) over teaching.

Really, how long would it take to decide one had English Comp 101 “down” and there was no further need for improvement in one’s teaching?

I would guess that by five years, diminishing returns would certainly have set in to the point where only a fraction of the time would be usefully spent in tweaking. These are undergraduate courses (and often survey courses!) that we’re talking about.

“When you’ve taught a course several times before, you needn’t and even shouldn’t, for dsquared’s reasons, spend a lot of time revising it.”

Strongly disagree. At least in my field, the classroom experience and responses from students mean I have to revise how I teach the material, regardless of whether I’ve taught the course before. Why were students confused or bored with that approach? What assumptions did I make about students’ reception that turned out to be wrong?

And even an interval of 4 or 5 years will change what I can presume about how undergraduates will respond to a given topic.

For me there are 4 different phases of preparation: the spadework performed before the start of the semester; the preparation of the lecture or discussion before each class session; the notes taken after a given session to keep track of what I learned about student response; and (if I am going to teach the course again) a review at the end of the semester to decide what needs to be added, subtracted, or changed to make it a better course.

It’s not about trying to teach anything cutting edge in a basic course; it’s about making pedagogy more empirical, in touch with the learning as it is happening on the ground.

dsquared
quite a lot of people have got sucked into a teaching-only job which was marketed to them as if it included research when it basically didn’t.

I think people who take academic jobs usually know whether they are expected to do research, and if so how much. An institution that cares mostly about teaching really has no incentive to mislead prospective employees on this score. “You may have some time for research” is not the same as “you will of course be expected to publish.”

But as a practical matter, if you’re spending exactly the same amount of time and effort on revising the course year after year, isn’t that a good sign that the effort in year N isn’t actually helping with year N+1 …?

In general, I am not trying to argue with professors about their job – I’m sure that you do spend that much time. But I am surprised that, despite the pretty clear empirical evidence that it isn’t working (cf, John’s link above), everyone seems to think that there is literally no room for improvement – that the 4 hours preparation per 1 hour classroom (plus grading?) is simply the way it is. Because it is actually quite weird for someone in what is basically a people facing industry to have a ratio of preparation and back office time to customer contact of nearly 7 to 1 (ie, 12 hrs/wk x 30 weeks = 360, 48hrs/wk x 50 wks = 2400). Any other industry that was using its key employees’ time so inefficiently would be desperately trying to find another way to work. And it’s not as if there aren’t a myriad of other models, as shown in Alex’s link. Does the field of undergraduate education at community colleges in the USA have literally nothing to learn from anything else in the world?

Any other industry that was using its key employees’ time so inefficiently would be desperately trying to find another way to work.

Wait, you are SURPRISED to find that American universities are hideously inefficient at educating students?

… When people say “4 hours per class hour,” I think that’s “prep/grading,” not just prep. Tho depending on the subject, it could be longer.

Too, in some subjects you have to design new problems every semester – you can’t just re-use the same stuff, lest you promote cheating. Frats keep files of math tests, etc.

@43: A significant fraction of the out-of-class time is extra teaching for students who have problems, fielding their email questions, and so on. Given my style I’d have almost as many hour on that sort of work as I do in the classroom. And you’re right that the ratio between class hours and those outside is very large – it would be even worse without undergraduate graders and graduate teaching assistants.

Basically, if you have significant problem sets or writing assignments you have a lot of out-of-the-classroom obligations. If you want to use computer-graded multiple choice tests, no homework, and no writing assignments you can drastically prune the overhead. Unfortunately you also compromise learning. Some subjects also are intrinsically labor intensive; language instructors need unusually low student to teacher ratios for effective learning.

Most of my prep time is spent analyzing student error and developing or researching ways to help them recognize and overcome those errors. If I had the same group of students each semester with new content, I would be sooooooo set.

Well, since you don’t, might it not make sense to stop doing this (as it appears you are constantly spending time working out how to win the last war) and just deal with the problems as and when they arrive, like Marc does?

Some subjects also are intrinsically labor intensive; language instructors need unusually low student to teacher ratios for effective learning.

Whoa whoa whoa. Mega, mega pushback on this one. There is a whole industry, called “TEFL” which is premised on this not being true. Since other countries don’t have massively lower student/teacher ratios than the Anglosphere (often quite the reverse), this argument really does have a problem in accounting for all those people out there speaking English.

I have absolutely no idea what it’s like to teach a 5-5 load at a CC. But I strongly suspect that Henry is right about student needs, which is going to push the ratio up (how much, I don’t know). Also, depending on class size, if you’re teaching English comp at a CC e.g., you’re almost certainly going to spend hell of a lot more time grading than 1-2 hrs per class per week. Add service and administrative responsibilities to that, and yeah, it’s probably significantly worse than the calculation in 48.

…the calculation in 46, even.

If you have students with the same first language, similar age, and reason for learning English then you can pretty much choose a suitable coursebook and follow it.

But isn’t this really quite likely to be the case for a class of American (check) undergraduates (check) learning French?

I get an essay marked in 20 minutes and move on

This would suggest that a lot of the problem is these huge class sizes. There are guys on this thread with 100 students, so that is 30 hours a week just marking essays. Which is crazy of course.

As someone who’s been teaching for more than a decade post-PhD in the humanities, I offer the following formulation: “the more time you devote to student writing, the better teacher–indeed, the better person!–you are.” Never directly stated, very often thought, this is the characteristic form ressentiment takes in the literary academy.

But what makes things tricky is that those professional self-help strategies that suggest ways to spend less time per student while grading just as effectively are fundamentally dishonest. Up to a certain point, the more time one spends with a, say, 5-page freshman composition will be genuinely helpful to the student–and if one routinely reaches that point with all the student writing one has to read, well, the hours add up in just the way person after person in this thread has testified that they do….

Thanks dsquared: this makes sense, and investment banking sounds like the right place for you.

What assumptions generate “12 hours direct client contact equates to a 4/4 course load” ? I would average 12 hours a week for one course, based on the work I describe above.

Whether or not colleges and universities are well-managed is a harder question. One peculiarity at least in the U.S. is a tradition of “faculty governance” which has implications for the overall structure. A large claim on faculty time is personnel work, from hiring committees through the annual merit process and promotion&tenure committees. I could make a long list of admin functions performed by senior faculty, but I think that would get us away from the OP. But I think that a brokerage is a pretty different animal.

nick: well put.

The adminstration operates on the assumption you can grade a paper in n minutes.

The “professional” view is that it takes 2n (or even 3n mintutes to grade a paper properly.

Many “professionals” then grade to this higher standard that no-one will provide the resources for, thus also feeding student expectations and peer pressure within academia.

It is a form of scabbing, basically (or, alternatively, self-exploitation). People taking extra stuff on themselves for reasons of professional ethos means that administrators never have to face hard questions of the resources that are necessary to teach to the standards they lead students to believe are the norm.

(Of course there’s the other side: if people won’t pay for this stuff to be done as it should be done, then maybe it shouldn’t be done …. cue deparmental closures. Since that’s unthinkable, people work themselves into the ground.)

Teaching is always easy (and can easily be made more efficient). To those who don’t do it.

Cranky

D2 @24: It *may* differ from subject to subject? But I know that I just used to get effing bored with the same thing every semester. Plus, you want to prevent cheating: so you need new paper assignments and/or new tests every term. And surely it helps keep students engaged if you occasionally update the examples you offer, so you’re not giving them examples based on outdated news items, pop culture references, etc. And of course as technology changes around, you revamp certain things–add visual stuff to what used to be just straight lectures, maybe, or experiment with using clickers or questions or different teaching methods.

I’m sure there are professors who don’t do this. But as I said, the vast majority of my peers talk about revamping assignments or syllabi or adding new courses pretty frequently.

D2 @46: Honestly, I do not think I spent 4 hours/contact hour for every class, every semester. For courses I’d taught before, I spent less–except when I was marking papers, when I took more. Or during weeks when I was conferencing with students, which was pretty much 20 hours for a class of 40. But on new courses, one can easily spend that, or more, depending on how conscientious one is.

Re. efficiencies, the industry valuing its workers time, etc–really? Academia doesn’t value faculty time. At all. And “efficiency” in academia means cutting tenure and replacing permanent positions with adjuncts, at $2k/semester/class. And since adjuncts are often younger people, and/or teaching new courses, the prep time on that stuff is quite high. Plus, if you don’t have an office, “office hours” are way more inefficient to schedule and keep–you end up sitting in the cafeteria for hours, or spending chunks of the morning and chunks of the afternoon there, schlepping student papers and books back and forth each time. Add in reapplying for your job every semester.

What assumptions generate “12 hours direct client contact equates to a 4/4 course load” ?

My understanding was that “a 4/4 course load” means “four three-hour courses per week”. So I spend as much time in direct, planned, equivalent-to-lectures-and-classes contact with my clients as someone teaching a 4/4 load does with their students. We both have “office hours”, except that mine are defined as “any hours I happen to be in the office”, plus any other hours I happen to look at my blackberry, for good clients. I have to do preparation just like you do, mate.

It is a form of scabbing, basically

As usual, Chris cuts to the heart of the problem – except that of course in most cases, scabs know that they’re doing something wrong, and don’t try to claim that blacklegging is the honourable, moral thing to do. As Tedra says:

Academia doesn’t value faculty time. At all.

Why would it, when there are no consequences at all to not doing so?

I don’t see a link in John’s piece to data that gets at the outcomes difference between lecture-plus-exam and a more individualized, feedback-rich kind of class.

I would be cautious about generalizing across U.S. community colleges. A lot of their classes *are* lecture-plus-exam.

This isn’t about whether college teachers are actually overpaid or work less, it’s part of the continuing assault on any sector (unions, libraries, public servants….) which produces or maintains opinion leaders whose opinions are at variance with those of the right. It’s about de-housing an ideology.

I posted 85 before seeing Henry’s 84. Same pt, obviously.

Peter T @ 86 gets my nomination for vice-president of this thread, with Henry of course the head of the ticket.

Chris B @70: It is a form of scabbing, basically (or, alternatively, self-exploitation). People taking extra stuff on themselves for reasons of professional ethos …

I know this is well-meant, but it also seems … well, cynical or naive, I’m not sure which. Professional ethos (pride of craft, intellectual integrity, conscientiousness, etc.) is not a thing one can turn on and off at will. If the students don’t give a damn, and nothing can induce them to, then all right, the hell with them. But if they’re doing their humble best, and they actually care what they hear back from you, then you simply can’t — I don’t mean shouldn’t, I mean can’t, if you have normal emotions — simply toss their work into the “Done” pile when the timer goes off.

Am I missing something?

with 2 kids, 18 and 16, college costs are very much on my mind.
As a scientist, or simply as an educated member of the polity, I find it astonishing that there is no simple clear website with a simple set of numbers that cover the period , say 1950 – 1960, and have numbers for # teachers, salarys/full time student, admin costs, buildings and grounds, healthcare and retirement, athletics, etc etc

I think this is an astonishing indictment of the lazyness of the professoriate; they have done a terrible job

One argument advanced by Farley (url below) is that admin costs are out of control; he provides a link to a 2008 UC analysis, a poorly formatted, hard to understand paper.
(I mean seriously, the assignment was admin costs in the UC system, would you give this paper more then a B- ?? the formatting and wierd data presentation make it almost worse then useless; by definition, I shouldn’t ahve to think; it should be so clear that it is obvious [the diff between smart people, really smart people like I saw at MIT, and semi smart people, is that the really smart people have enough self confidence to be simple]

Why, oh why can’t we have a better professoriate, where a well known webpage offers authoritive numbers on the cost of college from, say 1950 to now, with numbers for salary, admin, athletics, academics, buildings and grounds, retirement and healthcare, etc – sort of the basic statistics you would expect from FRED

As a parent with an 18 and a 16 year old, I find it astonishing that these numbers are not readily available. It is sort of like buying a car; a huge enormous industry with only one tiny little source of unbiased info (consumers reports)

Levy doesn’t tell us his own salary; and his salary at Corcoran and earlier at The New School don’t seem to be readily available – why hasn’t someone dug up these numbers, which would make clear that Levy is part of hte 0.1%s assault on the rest of us

PS: I did not think PKs piece was very good; it lacked specifics and details; compare to the two URLs below.
I would say this is a generic weakness with PK; he has THE most prominent voice, for a liberal in the country. When he does econ, he changes the debate; when he does this sort of thing, all his fans go rah, all his enemies go, socialist commie, and nothing changes or happens. And the reason is no details, no specifics.
Surely there are oodles of incredibly smart hardworking kids who would dye (devil wears prada) for a chance to intern for PK; they could have added to this, a link on the outsized salarys of admins like Levy, a link to other stuff, and the column might actually have an impact.
PK has, it may sound righteous, a responsibility, and with blog post like this he is failing us.
farley = http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/03/stupid-or-lying-wildly-overpaid-faculty-edition
http://virtualpaperballs.wordpress.com/tag/david-c-levy/
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/do-college-professors-work-enough/

One benefit of all this is that it is a confirmatory data point about the Kaplan Post. The sooner this corrupt rag dies, the better.

Taking a break from reading papers and exchanging emails (exchanges with colleagues about a number of things, among them, very short list: assistant professor/tenure review issues; leave-plan glitches, which screw up a million other things; are we going to try a new intro Latin text as early as next fall, which will mean LOTS of new prep time for several of us in that language that’s been taught to students for a very long time now — by me, for quite a few years, too, but a new text will mean massive reorganizing of supplementary materials, quizzes, tests, whole shape of two semesters — just when each of us has gotten our most recent choice of textbook down to an art! yet that textbook — there are problems; when can you and I meet, before you go off to give that paper at meeting Q?; how much do we have for an honorarium for speaker X in April? can we help sponsor speaker Y in another department?; several high school prospectives want to meet one of us; registrar wants proofreading of next year’s course copy; honors thesis applications must be considered; oh, I forgot this report is due and that office wants to know what hours members of our department will be available for meeting x; and oh, yes, there’s that study abroad set of concerns we were going to take care of two months ago; adm. asst. wants day off for doctor’s tests; and oh, yes, there’s…. All this before the interdisciplinary program and college-wide committee emails.
I know my situation is not unusual. My department’s newest, and most protected-from-it-all, assistant professor is in the throes of organizing a summer study-abroad trek, for instance. (Plus, he’s under lots of pressure, from me, to get that article submitted.) No one escapes. So, that’s life.
Oh, yes, those actual current students. Well, they’re on spring break. But still emailing me about one thing or another. And I still have so many of their papers to read. Plus, I was looking forward to rereading the Odyssey in preparation for their first classes after spring break, a poem that (perhaps more than any other poem) is, by its own design, never the same twice. And I’d hoped to have time to read several books and articles for another course — last time I taught this play: nearly 30 years ago. Yes, I chose to read this play in Greek rather than another, because, gee, silly me, I wanted to go back to it (one of my favorites, and wrote about it once, but I haven’t taught it or devoted myself to it for so long. I don’t teach the same courses year after year — a luxury I read about, or my colleagues in larger departments or at major research universities may enjoy — who are all these people who teach the same courses year after year after year? not me, not my husband, who teaches English at a state college — not even most of my colleagues at major research universities, not in my field). But this Greek play is new to me now! Not the scholarship (I’ve mostly kept up), but the play. Gee, the students have changed but, even more, I have changed! (Tedra and a few others here, like Colin Danby, Gene O’Grady, I feel I can count on getting this.) So, it’s a new play. And then, I have a paper to give in early May: will I have to fall back on my old ideas, or will I find the time to develop the new ones (the main reason I took on this paper)?
I am not complaining. I love this life! I appreciate that I have been fortunate in it.
Just saying, it’s crazy to try to compute (a la dsquared) # of hours in class meetings as any base measure of time a teacher/scholar spends in vital work. Talk about misapplying industrial time-clock models. Lawyers try, with their billable minutes (down to two or three, from five, I understand). Doctors don’t even try (though soon they, too, may be forced to?).
Did I mention? Much time spent in the last ten or twelve hours noting dangling participles and incomplete sentences (like this one) and trying to gauge, on issues more subtle concerning argumentation and diction and register, the level of intervention that might truly be helpful to each student. Sometimes painful duty. Also, pleasure. I have been learning quite a bit about the Iliad. As from the student who was arrested by Hektor’s being “shackled” (Lattimore) when, with Achilles on-coming, the Trojans stalwart found himself outside the walls, impervious to Priam’s and Hekabe’s entreaties. She struggled to connect that word “shackled” to “fate” in the poem (with due, semi-understanding of the notion of “apportionment,” esp. of life-span) and divine intervention — an insightful struggle. I learned much from her. I think she learned from her struggle.
We are not cogs. Our students are not cogs. End of story. Beginning of story.

I also don’t agree with this:

it’s basic lessons for underprepared undergraduates in how to write acceptable academic English, and requires lots of quite intensive feedback if it’s to have any actual benefits.

“Improving one’s written English” is a subject that’s been taught for decades via correspondence courses with a high degree of success. This might not be the best way of teaching it, but it does imply that there are substantial benefits of standardisation available, and that it shouldn’t necessarily be the kind of thing that (as I keep saying, this shouldn’t be treated as normal) blows up 12 hours of face time into the equivalent of 60 hours of total work.

Sorry to have been motivated to comment, in large part, by dsquared. In other blogs, he would be identified as a troll. To be ignored.

Rubbish, Chris. Meredith has it right as usual.

dsquared, do you want to tell all my “English as first language students” to enrol on these vaunted courses in addition to their existing course load?

Well, the alternative is that you do all the work yourself for no extra money, and surely you can see how this isn’t a sustainable solution on an ongoing basis? At present it seems to be the case that the community college system is offering a university education to people, then not providing the resources to give them a university education, and then presuming that its employees will fill the gap for free. And the employees are not only going along with this plan (which seems crazy to me in the first place), but doing so in a comparatively labour-intensive way.

So Phil, what happens to your single parent colleague who has less time at evenings and weekends than you do? Who gets the promotion, you or her?

Well done comrade!

… also, the Baumol effect.

Chris’s #108 is really important here. Obviously, when I am talking about re-engineering and changing the educational experience to fit the needs and resources available, the people who really ought to do this are the administrators. And lassitude, incompetence and overpay on the part of administrators does seem to be a lot of the problem here.

But the trouble is that a lot of the reason why educational administrators (cross-check: also medical administrators) are so bad is that the people they’re managing won’t let them manage. If we expand Chris’s points here, we can see that if you set n as the standard for grading, someone who is trying to deliver 2n thinks that he’s being a good guy. And if Chris says “no, do n, then you can get your research done”, then he is the evil one, who is trying to deprive the students of their 2n grading, while also making unrealistic demands about research.

So the employee goes on delivering 2n, while complaining about it. And then after a while, he gets burned out (or decides that the hours he’s working, he might as well go to Goldman Sachs) at which point the problem lands on Chris’s table. And the administrator is in an invidious position, because the only way that this train keeps rolling is to have a constant supply of idealistic youngsters – you can keep running a factory at 110% if someone keeps giving you new machines, which is not a particularly ethical way to work, but it’s how law firms, investment banks and apparently universities go about it.

This is a particularly sinister managerial pathology, because it implies that even the first-reach solution of throwing resources at the problem won’t work. If you double the workforce, then it’s all too likely that some ambitious or idealistic sprog will now decide that 5n is really the least these kids deserve, and anything less than 4n is shoddy.

Looking back at the thread, it seems to me that there are some underlying philosophical and/or ideological issues that I hope Harry has a moment to comment on. For example, look at this from Seth at #53:

Anybody who thinks they have ENG 101 (First Year Writing) “down,” after 5 years or 20, is very, very wrong. There’s a whole field, Composition and Rhetoric, that’s researching the teaching of writing and learning new things about it all the time. Every class is so different that what worked one time probably will never work again the same way.

This can’t be right taken literally. My first reaction on reading it was that if every class is so different that what worked one time probably will never work again the same way, then there is no point in doing any preparation at all, because how do you know what to prepare for? But it goes deeper than that – if every class is completely different and nothing works the same way, then what is all this research in composition and rhetoric learning about? Surely the existence of the research base implies that there are lots similarities between different classes, and that lots of the same things do work in all sorts of different contexts.

I say “ideology” because I think there’s a very strong commitment to saying that the students are individuals and that the teacher/student relationship is a personal one. But I don’t think that’s necessarily or intrinsically true – it’s a statement about how people wanted to make that relationship work.

_what is all this research in composition and rhetoric learning about? _

As a rough generalization, academics just don’t want to know about pedagogical research. They believe they know it all already, and haven’t got time anyway (for reasons covered upthread). Hence massive scepticism from colleagues towards the research on the effectiveness of lectures. One person (an academic!) literally said to me “You only think that because you read a book about it.”

because the only way to do a job properly is within the constraints that have been imposed

Although I see why you find this unsatisfactory, it’s the only way to have managers at all. I obviously don’t know what your specific situation is and if your actual managers are not setting things realistically that fits into the heading of “managerial laziness, incompetence etc” above, but being able to specify the standard to which the job is done and the time allotted to finish it in is pretty much definitional of what it means to be a manager.

Could you define your terms? What is this “Rolls-Royce approach”, other than “putting in a level of effort that takes more time than management have allocated”?

well on a tu quoque, what’s your definition of “shoddy”, other than a level of effort that takes less time than you personally have decided is appropriate?

dsquared: One problem for managers in HE, is that you can’t actually stop people from killing themselves by working all night and all weekend (and then boasting about what Stakhanovites they are!).

(At least this would be a problem, for any manager set on attacking this issue. Few are, given the apparent appetite of the teaching staff for literal self-sacrifice.)

piglet @31. Thank you. Journalism numbers are in decline, and what this thread is reacting to is opinion, not journalism. We have a saying: ‘Facts are expensive, opinion is cheap’, and that is the model that is currently driving newspapers. I run a lean journalism shop, of expert journalists, and each one of us can do the interviews and research for 3-4 ‘standard’ stories per week. An investigation takes much longer, and you can add the expense of lawyers. We are specialists. The mainstream dailies are asking their beat (specialist) journalists to push out up to 3 stories per day. Which is insane, because there is no time for research and tracking down hard-to-get sources. And more and more specialists (they are expensive) are being sacked and replaced by ‘pool’ journalists, who despite their best intentions are only able to ask the obvious questions, and have no in-depth knowledge of an area to warn them when an answer is a flat-out lie. They also don’t have time to develop sources. Levy is opinion. The average grunt journalist… deserves a bit of pity. He or she would like to do a good job.

_I’m sure I’d be more vulnerable if I didn’t._

And you are not wrong about that.

123: I am pretty sure that none of those implications were intended.

But you can see, surely, that if you have a system where the norm is to work large amounts of unpaid overtime, you effectively have a system where only people willing and able to put in that amount of overtime will get ahead? This is the sort of thing that would be rightly decried in – say – the financial sector, and HE shouldn’t be any different. The whole “professional ethos” argument is a bit of a blind: what would you say about an industry where you could make 20 quality widgets an hour and management expected you to turn out 240 quality widgets a day? And the response of labour was not to say “can’t be done” or even “can do, but they’ll be inferior widgets” but “we will work harder!”

I would also like to question the unspoken assumption that academics are the only people in the world who can work longer and longer hours without the quality of their work product deteriorating. Is spending twenty minutes on grading an essay really worse than spending one hour, when that hour is between 11pm and midnight?

academics can circulate memos and hold long meetings with the best of them, and a collegiate view on workload could easily be arrived at if there were the will.

This is what happens though. Chris (who isn’t a professional administrator) and his colleagues reached a standard of n, and then the colleagues all marched off and started grading to a standard of 3n. Your own situation might be different if n started off as too large a number, but the gold-plating problem definitely exists.

None of this is the case. I do it partly because I think I’d be miserable if I didn’t, but mostly because I’m sure I’d be more vulnerable if I didn’t.

But isn’t a lot of the reason why you’d be more vulnerable if you didn’t that someone else would be more than willing to do so? And (I realise this is a bit teaching-granny-to-suck-eggs trade unionism) isn’t that a bit of a problem? And what happens when some little keener comes along and declares that the minimum standard is weaving four yards instead of three? I think Chris’s point here is that management are not necessarily the ones driving the speed-up (or rather, that, as you say, the management and the workers are the same people). The speed-up is being driven by a running Dutch auction of “professional standards”, which is subject to the same winner’s curse as any other auction.

This is what happens though

Where Chris teaches, maybe. It’s a bit more top-down where I work. Perhaps Chris is thinking “look, guys, we agreed to this”, but what I’m hearing is “look, this is just the way it is”.

isn’t a lot of the reason why you’d be more vulnerable if you didn’t that someone else would be more than willing to do so?

Not really. I’d be vulnerable in and of myself, so to speak, because my results and/or student satisfaction figures would be likely to fall. The (unlikely) fact that all my other colleagues were equally vulnerable, because their ratings had also fallen, would be no consolation to anyone.

If there is an element of competition it’s with senior colleagues who genuinely don’t need to take so much time over the job, because (as Chris said of himself) they’ve done it so long that they know it inside out. When I’m rearranging my notes on a topic I know, a new lecture isn’t that big a deal; unfortunately the range of topics I know isn’t broad enough to cover every area where I might be called on to give a new lecture. And things change; my brilliant lectures on New Labour’s criminal justice policy are starting to look a bit whiskery.

One important element of job satisfaction is control. Whatever the intention, Chris et al. are really advocating a style of work where the professors don’t get to make decisions about how to educate their students.

More to the point, a lot of us have seen this game before. At the K-12 level, for example, education theory fads are notorious. The powers that be dictate that things be done this way, then that way, that teachers do things in precisely this manner. And yet the magic method of today becomes junked tomorrow – a lot of effort for almost no gain.

There is also a real lack of respect for teaching as a lifelong experience. A good teacher will notice things that worked better or worse, and adjust their approach accordingly. They may make a connection that they didn’t the last time. This is, again, *the fun part* of teaching; the part where you’re not doing tedious chores like grading. And the industrial approach takes this away – most likely to be replaced with yet more rote tasks.

Again there’s a clear and increasing pressure to go the extra mile for fear of student dissatisfaction, and there is no empirical basis for asserting that n is sufficient time to mark an essay ‘properly’, because there’s no way of establishing an objective standard of proper marking.

Well, there must be some standard. It’s manifestly not the case that academics mark essays until they are physically unable to continue, so each one must make her own decision that n or 2n or 4n or whatever is the ‘right’ amount for them; based on what? What do they take into consideration when they look at a pile of essays and think “that’s going to take me the rest of the morning to do properly” rather than “that’s going to take me the next two days”? What makes you think that (say) 20 minutes is too short a time and one hour is adequate, but that you wouldn’t do a ‘better’ job by spending two hours on it?

Likewise essay marking: it’s not just that I feel I can do a decent job in n whereas a colleague insists that only 2n is sufficient time, it may be that this is actually true for each of us.

But surely in this case, it’s worth asking if your colleague needs some training or something? I suppose the generally poor state of industrial relations make it impossible to do this without getting immediately into constructive dismissal territory, but really if someone takes twice as long as anyone else to do something that’s a big part of the job, that’s a problem.

I also think that academics have a structural tendency to underestimate the benefits of standardisation, overestimate the benefits of customisation and (weirdly, for a profession that is all about qualifications and testing) overestimate the difficulty of measurement. I think a lot of this is ideological.

(Parenthetically, AIUI Chris’s move away from lectures isn’t based on personal idiosyncracy or style – it’s research-based because they don’t work and technology has made other approaches possible. Your colleagues may think that their more prepared lectures work just as well and are just as popular, but it’s quite likely that they’re wrong; it could be that you’re just better at teaching than they are, and they need training to improve their methods rather than the brute force approach. This is the sort of thing that ought to be the role of education administration).

03.26.12 at 10:18 pm

Another: ” I get an essay marked in 20 minutes and move on”

dsquared: ” This would suggest that a lot of the problem is these huge class sizes. There are guys on this thread with 100 students, so that is 30 hours a week just marking essays. Which is crazy of course.”

I’d say that 20 minutes/essay is none too long. Remember that you’re trying to communicate with somebody about what and *why* they’re doing right and wrong,
and how to do better.

@dsquared #136: entirely agree about resistance to standardisation, obsession with customisation etc. – but I would feel very reluctant to set myself as a standard for anything, and would probably get lynched if I did. Equally, I know the research on the problems of lectures as a mode of teaching; but the student satisfaction data, here at least, which plays a far more significant role than pedagogical research in determining what actually happens in the classroom, *does* support the idea that traditional lectures can be at least as popular with students as more flexible approaches (in some cases more so, because they feel they’re getting value-for-money facts from the authority figure rather than a lot of debate and student input). The fact that they ought to be less satisfied because they’re getting an inferior lesson doesn’t adequately counterbalance their belief that this is what lessons should be like.

dsquared @ 100: ““Improving one’s written English” is a subject that’s been taught for decades via correspondence courses with a high degree of success. ”

Right. And those Kaplan schools do a real good job at anything other than extracting money.

Dsquared, you keep saying things, about something you know nothing about, while those who know disagree with you. Now, that’s not necessarily bad (see ‘economics, corruption thereof’), but you’re pretty much just bringing ‘well, I still think……’ to the table.

dsquared @ 109: “But, you can’t postpone maintenance forever. ”

Your whole analysis here is rather bad. The point is from upper management’s view, they can. Units can be discarded; many will self-discard.

And, since this is the US, “productivity savings” simply go into increasing workloads. If we adopted a model where professors spent fewer out of class hours we would end up with more classes being taught (worse) and no fewer hours actually spent working

No, not “(worse)”, because the point about increasing productivity is that it takes less time to achieve the same results. This is not a nitpick; it is the whole point of this discussion!

143: OK, fair enough. Sounds like it’s still the sort of thing that doesn’t need a highly educated and (relatively) highly paid faculty member to do. Unless he’s willing to do it in his own time for free, of course. But I bet that a non-academic institution with a similar task would give that job to some sort of junior clerical staff rather than the subject matter expert.

@146: If you think that education lends itself well to mass standardization, and that teacher morale is irrelevant, then yes – a universe where I process 300 widgets a term is better than one where I process 200 widgets. However, if many of the teachers are not well suited to the methods they’re forced to use, they are actively discouraged from giving students extra help (detailed comments on essays), and their autonomy is removed…yes, this outcome will be worse.

If we adopted a model where professors spent fewer out of class hours we would end up with more classes being taught (worse)

?? I thought that teaching the classes was the fun part, while grading papers and going over course notes was the grind?

US community colleges really don’t aspire to be Oxbridge colleges. Many of their instructors – especially the adjuncts – are terminal MAs. […] It’s teaching basic literacy skills – there are different approaches as to how best to do this, but instructors are using standard textbooks and methods.

Also ?? Have community colleges changed completely since the 1980s? My dad was a “terminal MSc”, but he wasn’t teaching in an environment where remedial literacy and adult education was a big part of what was going on – OKCCC was roughly equivalent to an FE college in the UK, but which did award undergraduate degrees. Teaching there was (unlike my mum’s job teaching in the Federal prison system, where there was a substantial pastoral element) just a matter of keeping bums on seats, and imparting enough knowledge of physics to get the buggers onto an engineering course, whence they would hopefully graduate with enough understanding to drill for oil without killing anyone. Is this a state-level variance or something?

And on Henry’s main, quasi-Hayekian point:

There is a lot of apparent slack in academia – people studying topics without much obvious use. But some of this slack is potentially useful redundant capacities (I’m prepared to argue e.g. that there are lots of useful things that you can learn from how Athens and other cities organized politics), and it’s very hard to tell what those capacities are going to be in advance.

Up to a point, Lord Copper … agreed that it’s hard to tell what those capacities are going to be in advance, but it seems unlikely to me that the missing cure for cancer is hidden in an annual revision of someone’s course notes or in Googling to try and pick up plagiarism. It’s precisely in order to free up some time for this sort of serendipity that I’m trying to work out where some of the entropy can be engineered out of the more routine tasks.

150: my own education was methodologically outdated and inefficient, Marc, but it was efficient enough to teach me the meaning of “false dichotomy”. Thanks for playing.

Lurker @129

” One of the things I don’t understand here is the ununiformity of the student body. Why on earth are the community colleges taking everyone in, and teaching rather (within-college) standardised course structure to all? Why can’t they differentiate, giving simply remedial classes to those who are unable to follow the usual 1st year material? Or barring that, why do they accept students who are unprepared? And barring the exclusion of unprepared students, why cannot they fail the students who can’t follow the usual run of the course, even if they are from unprivileged backgrounds?”

They are. Please consult the course catalog of your nearest community college. in any academic field, you’ll find course from 200-level down to high-school dropout level.

Couldn’t this be done at the college level to free up time?

What makes you think it isn’t?

It seems like there are a lot of people talking past each other who pretty much agree. Two things strike me. 1) the pride that many college professors take in their work comes from in no small part a feeling that what they do is noble and good in exactly the way that investment banking isn’t. 2) Dsquared is more or less exactly right about where that feeling leads in terms of efficiency and work conditions (in his typically sharp but a little discomforting way). Working in the California State University system, I of course have it worse than all of you. The words of a colleague (sadly passed away) have stuck with me on this subject- to paraphrase, if you continue to do more with less you will continue to get less and be asked to do more.

Yes, we use TurnItIn. Yes, it’s handy. Yes, it saves time – there are some false positives and false negatives, but mostly a low TurnItIn score is a paper without any major misuse of sources. But no (Ajay), I don’t trust anyone who’s not capable of teaching the course to interpret what it says.

I think 20 minutes to mark a short essay & write feedback is pretty reasonable, to be honest. Put it another way, anything over 20 in a day is good going.

Paul O – I’ve always believed that I wanted to do something good with my working life. The belief made me miserable all the time I was working in IT, and when I finally made it into academia it made me miserable all over again. I’m starting to suspect it’s not a very adaptive belief. (Looking back, I think what I really want to do with my working life is work hard, with complete autonomy and a lot of variety, and have people regularly give me money and periodically tell me I’m doing a great job. Academia only ticks some of these boxes – and the work isn’t there in freelance journalism any more.)

On reflection, make that “ticks most of”.

Could still be a lot worse. (Could still get a lot worse.)

Creating common curricula would surely allow universities to achieve economies of scale, but also create a point of entry for all sorts of dubious political organizations

Engineering courses for mass consumption –which achieves economies of scale– can be done without imposing standard curricula across an entire country.

What would be the downside to giving disadvantaged students from community colleges access to world class teachers (via standard lectures, standard feedback, standard grading) while assigning only the indispensable individual feedback to local tutors or local teachers (who could easily point people who struggle to more basic mass consumption classes)?

It’s perfectly true that good, up to date lectures take a lot of time to craft — but isn’t it likely that a group of people whose only job is to craft lectures for tens of thousands of students will do a better job than an overworked college professor?

The problem is that the radical thinking of the academic world is reserved for fields other than its operation.

Shared context fail – that paper tells me everything except what an honour code actually is.

Paul Orwin @160: the pride that many college professors take in their work comes from in no small part a feeling that what they do is noble and good in exactly the way that investment banking isn’t.

This seems to me an entirely reasonable feeling. Teaching is to some extent a gift economy, in which one is motivated by mysterious and spontaneous generosity to pass on the inspiring experiences that have made one’s own life worth living. Very few teachers, and no effective ones, rationally calculate their aptitudes and appetites versus demand schedules and pay rates and, as a result, decide to become teachers rather than real estate brokers or investment bankers. Obviously this is only true to some extent, and obviously, as Paul goes on to point out, it leads to many teachers (like most generous people in a capitalist society) being exploited. Obviously they should do what they can to minimize that exploitation, and obviously the rest of the society should be concerned to help, even more than it should be concerned to help prevent the exploitation of non-gift workers (or even of real estate brokers and investment bankers, if they need help). But the idea that the labor problems of teachers should be discussed in exactly equivalent terms with those of workers in more purely commercial activities is somewhat amiss, as many people seem to be trying to point out.

Teaching is to some extent a gift economy, in which one is motivated by mysterious and spontaneous generosity to pass on the inspiring experiences that have made one’s own life worth living.

All too true — but wouldn’t it be more consistent with this spontaneous generosity to share those experiences with twenty thousand people rather than twenty people at a time?

All too true—but wouldn’t it be more consistent with this spontaneous generosity to share those experiences with twenty thousand people rather than twenty people at a time?

Nothing that is really valuable about teaching can be shared on a video screen. Hell, lectures are a pretty sucky instructional method even in a live classroom. Which was discussed above, you know.

@172: Except that it tends not to work. Some professors in our department get unusually good evaluations, for example, and their students do well. But other professors who use their course materials as templates just don’t replicate this. That’s because the personality of the instructor has a lot to do with how well it works. One professor might be a bit shy, but able to work well with students one on one; others might be outgoing and good storytellers. Some will have an approach that works well for bright students, others for struggling students.

that paper tells me everything except what an honour code actually is

I think an “honor code” differs from a “university policy on plagiarism /etc.” mostly in that the former is something with a lot more institution-wide buy in. An honor code is an integral part of the culture/’DNA’ of both the institution and the way students identify as members of it. Not just a rule on a page in the orientation material.

I believe they also tend to involve a high level of active student participation in rule setting, enforcement, adjudication, etc. (Which is probably important for achieving the high level of buy in.) As well, at some places they may (or used to) cover more than just academics (like cheating at cards or using bad language in front of ladies).

Such cultures probably do help reduce cheating, so far as it goes, but I would think it might be somewhat more difficult to muster an effective level of institutional identification at, e.g., Suburb Community College X than at Elite Ivy League College Y or Elite Military Officer Academy Z.

There’s the Open University…

From what little I understand, and taking their own website at face value, it certainly doesn’t function merely by making lectures available. A prior I would doubt that the lectures are the most important part of the experience.

And I very much do mean to include large elite universities, as I can attest from my own experience as a Harvard undergrad.

“And low-level STEM teaching at large universities is renowned for sucking, and for turning off a lot of potential students.”

As opposed to low-level STEM teaching at community colleges, which is well known to turn people into overachieving citizens.

When your argument rests on claiming that “some [community colleges] to my personal knowledge” do a better job than elite universities in intro and mid-level STEM classes then I can leave my argument as it is.

And note that no one is suggesting video lectures as the only teaching material. Both tutors and various ways of providing feedback are possible.

Steve, the people experimenting with the educational models that I linked to in an earlier post seem well aware of the advantages of interaction with the course material. I took a few classes from one such course, and I spent either the same or more time answering interactive quizzes as listening to the lecture. These are not the passive lectures that are used as control in some of the learning experiments.

For a physical college student interaction should also not be a problem.

Listening to you I would get the impression that there is in fact no problem of privilege perpetuating itself via education, that a community college STEM education is as good as any, only employers are not sufficiently attuned to their own self-interest to hire more CC graduates with good GPAs.

Of course there is a tradeoff between the greater complexity of the material you have to present in external client meetings / seminars…but I think it can be easier for an expert to present complex material for a motivated audience that shares assumptions than laboriously unpack the assumptions of the field for an unmotivated audience.

None of this is to say that post-secondary teaching is done efficiently (it probably isn’t for reasons discussed above) just that teaching is a pretty distinct skill and it is hard to compare it to non-teaching work , even when that work involves presentations.

Congratulations! You have just discovered graduate students.

That is precisely a description of what TAs (teaching assistants) do and are. Community college faculty, as noted, don’t get this help, and neither do faculty for most regional comprehensive universities.

Your reinvention of the wheel is not enhancing your credibility in this discussion.

The 4 year liberal arts v. big state U is complicated by the fact that most SLACs are much more expensive (and therefore out of reach for many students) making the populations difficult to compare. You may have data on this that is good, though, and I would generally agree that the education at those types of schools is superior – I might add, that there is a good reason for that: they invest money in paying for strong faculty and giving them resources to work with. They also (usually) have small class sizes and lots of money/time/equipment for students to use. Finally, they often have research as a component of student work and faculty work (at least in STEM).

I have a comment that I think is probably a separate blog post or discussion, but seems entwined with all of this – what is a college education for? Is it the same for all students at all institutions? Should faculty at all institutions approach their job the same way.

On the one hand, I think the answers have to be “to give students an opportunity to succeed in life by preparing them with advanced knowledge/thinking skills” to the first, “no” to the second, and “obviously not” to the third. At least these are the answers that pop into my head when I ask myself what I am doing.

On the other hand, I worry that while the answer to the first is generally true, it is different for people from different socioeconomic backgrounds (uh oh…). A privileged kid at a SLAC who went to a private high school and has parents with advanced degrees is obviously different from a kid at a CC or a state university who went to an underperforming inner city high school and whose parents never graduated HS. So they have different goals, different starting points, and deserve to have their needs met. However, if we start treating CC and 4yr state universities as vocational schools we risk abetting the economic stratification we think we are trying to ameliorate. The kid at the SLAC (or the Ivy, or Oxbridge for the UKers) is probably not worried about vocational learning (i.e. job prep) exactly, and can luxuriate in the life of the mind (or more likely the bottom of a bottle for most of the time), secure in the notion that they have the tools already to succeed (ie they come from a high enough socioeconomic stratum that someone will step in and help them before they sink too far).

On the gripping hand, I worry that if I focus on vocational stuff (here’s what you need to know to get a good job/get into med school or whatever) and don’t give them the thinking skills I think are necessary for life in a complicated world, perhaps we end up with a lot of somewhat prosperous “sheeple” who can perform a complex task at work but can’t apply that thinking to the real world, and thus vote for Mitt Romney or worse.

To make matters worse, and to get back to the point, it seems to me that college administrators are largely in favor of the “sheeple” model, since it is efficient in moving students through. Don’t worry about if they can think, just give them skills they need to survive/thrive in the job market. This has the benefit of getting them high marks from politicians who see efficiency and marketability as the prime virtues of education, and the ancillary benefit of producing consumers/customers who don’t think too much about the big picture of what’s happening in the world, because they haven’t been taught how to do that.

So, I think Dsquared has a point about how we use our time poorly in some ways, but I think we also have to recognize that the institutional goals are substantially different. Which is why the initial op-ed was so aggravating, of course.

we need to think about how we can get the job done without burning people out. That may indeed involve an examination of such mundane matters as how much time people spend doing stuff, and the asking of critical questions about whether what they’re doing is really such a good idea.

This sounds positive and constructive, benevolent even. And yet what I’m hearing isn’t “you haven’t got time to get the work done – how can we lighten your load?”, it’s “you haven’t got time to get the work done – here, have even less”.

The 4 year liberal arts v. big state U is complicated by the fact that most SLACs are much more expensive (and therefore out of reach for many students) making the populations difficult to compare.

You can make an apples-to-apples comparison of elite liberal arts colleges and elite universities and you’ll still find that science majors at the former are significantly more likely to go on to graduate-level study in science. (This is a fact that was drummed into me as a LAC professor!) I believe they also do better at retention of students who enter college intending to go to med school, though I’m less sure about that. It’s hard to get around the disadvantages of big lecture courses (only partially mitigated by hit-or-miss experience with TAs) and the importance of personal contact.

It’s certainly true that teaching of freshman comp has changed significantly, if (as I’ve read in the alumni magazine, as well) it’s now geared toward dealing with the writing needs of undergraduate coursework. In the mid-1980s at an Ivy, the non-remedial version of the course was called “expository writing” and IIRC focused largely on the personal essay, though I remember one assignment was to critique the argument of a recent newspaper op-ed of our choice.

Some people are talking about teaching assistants. Is their point that TAs are more expensive than professors? Is it that the time a teacher saves by relying on mass consumption lectures doesn’t exist? Or is it another type of argument that I am missing?

taking resources as a given, I’m in favour of working out how we can get you to do your job without killing yourself in the process

I’m afraid this has been a dialogue of the deaf for some time now, but here is the way this has played out in practice at an institution familiar to me.

OMNES: “We’re busy! Insanely busy! We’re so busy we’re all doing unpaid overtime, it’s the only way we can get the job done!”
MANAGEMENT: “What nonsense. Just look at this table – it clearly shows that you can get all your work done with time to spare. Enough time to take on even more work, as it happens.”
OMNES: “Excuse us, but the underlying assumptions of this spreadsheet bear no relation to reality.”
MANAGEMENT: “Don’t they? Sorry about that. Let me… there. Fixed that for you. Now it’s all realistic, and look – you can still get all your work done with time to spare. Lucky you to have all that spare time in your working week! Better not tell management – sorry, our little joke!”
OMNES: “That spreadsheet looks almost exactly the same as it did before.”
MANAGEMENT: “Sorry, can’t talk about it now, we’ve got to move on and draw a line and forge ahead. Coping with change is very important, you know. There are courses you can go on. Hey, you’ll be able to do that in all the spare time you’ve got now!”

If people are taking 10 hours to do something that officially takes 7, telling them that henceforth it officially takes 4 doesn’t strike me as the most helpful thing you can do.

How bored the professors are is relevant to (1) how engaged they are with the course material and the students; hence (2) how effective they are as teachers.

Alex K. 03.27.12 at 9:08 pm

” Some people are talking about teaching assistants. Is their point that TAs are more expensive than professors? Is it that the time a teacher saves by relying on mass consumption lectures doesn’t exist? Or is it another type of argument that I am missing?”

I thought that my point was obvious – a professor may be ‘teaching’ a large class by lecture, which is not much better than a video, but there’ll be TA’s providing the personalization and feedback.

Are we really reduced to arguing under the basic assumption that education is just another commodity? I hope not.

@207: You’d also end up driving the best people out of the field – the ones who have choices.

Backing up Alex in #199, possibly a bit of a disservice was done by those who approved of the label “scabs” for teachers that are putting in uncompensated time attempting to improve their job performance. It’s a bit like calling minimum wage workers “scabs” for putting any more effort into their job than is required to stave off getting fired or penalized, because it means everyone else needs to ‘step up’ that much too.

Except, in this case, it doesn’t mean that. Seriously. Nobody has ever clapped me on the back and congratulated me for spending some evenings working to improve my teaching. I could have left at 3pm free and clear every day, and literally no one would be the wiser. The difference in benefit to the students, even if substantial and positive, would never be seen or noticed by an administrator or even a colleague. They’re too far away from what happens to be aware of that kind of thing. And they make no effort to obtain better awareness of how much time or effort we spend on these revisions. There’s no one looking around seeing if my colleagues are investing this kind of time. There’s no professor or administrator stopping by to see what improvements have been made on the previous semester’s syllabus or lecture notes. Nobody who would be in a position to make decisions based on this uncompensated work is aware of that work (or the lack thereof).

And to be honest, looking at the past year in particular, I can easily be counted among the teachers who don’t put in the time. There are quite a lot of times and days when I’m just not able to do a whole lot (blah blah medical conditions blah blah) and so I have been teaching in an entirely standardized way, patterning on the course’s textbook, this past year. Also I’ve cut back rather severely on my reading of pedagogical materials and my engagement with communities developing math education (sadly). This choice, to spend time elsewhere that I could in theory be spending improving my teaching, goes completely unnoticed. Nobody really knows, or makes any effort to know, that many of my hours are spent doing or not doing that kind of uncompensated extra work.

Frankly, even if the department or admin desired this information, I don’t know how they would readily obtain it — many of the improvements that come from that process are too subtle to be noticed by people other than the students directly helped by those improvements. When you adjust your presentation in a way you feel confident will be helpful to some students, nobody else watching knows what your presentation would have looked like without the adjustment, except possibly those students themselves, and sometimes those students don’t consciously notice even as their performance improves. And even if the department somehow did obtain this information, I think they’d push in the opposite direction; honestly, I bet if anything I would have been criticized in previous years for spending too much of my time on reading pedagogy and education-related materials, and not enough time on conducting research that’s directly relevant to my degree.

I feel confident asserting that nobody (except in ‘corner cases’) is losing out on a university teaching position because they’re not able or willing to put in all this uncompensated ‘extra’ work. No evaluator really knows if you spend 5pm-10pm at home revising your lecture notes or watching TV. The extra work we do is not known, and can’t be known, to those making hiring-type administrative decisions, and the lack of that work would not be at all apparent to them.

So, an accusation that we’re costing others the opportunity to get a job alongside us feels unfair to me. It only seems worth mentioning this because on some level (build the union!) we’re in complete agreement; it just stings a little to be hailed with a sarcastic “Well done comrade!” I guess when folks are unable to obtain jobs, the idea is, those who have the jobs deserve this kind of spiteful derision? Seriously, is it reasonable to direct any amount of viciousness about this at us?

—

But let’s be honest, though. The extra uncompensated work is not even entirely for the students’ benefit. It’s not wholly self-sacrificial altruism. I enjoy reflecting on my own understanding of what I present. As I review and reflect, my own understanding of the material develops, and the fact that this enriches my teaching (by making it possible for me to highlight connections better) is only part of the justification for doing the prep work.

There’s this Elvis Costello lyric, Every day I write the book. That’s lecture in a nutshell; it’s basically an interactive audiobook I write whose new edition comes out every semester: how can I improve upon the previous edition? (The pleasure of this is mitigated somewhat by the department always assigning me different classes to teach, but some of the presentation, and having a stronger sense of the more advanced material does help one better emphasize what’s important in the less advanced material.) Every class I write the book; I come away with a stronger understanding of the materials, and a stronger set of presentation tools. That’s pretty awesome. I like it. And I would like it even if it was my last semester teaching and nobody in future semesters would get to benefit from it. It’s nice to develop one’s skills. Maybe the knife doesn’t need any additional sharpening in order to fulfill its required function of cutting bread, but sharpness is itself a pleasant state.

Now, ehh, is it really part of the job requirements of a professor or lecturer or PTI to improve upon their own holistic understanding of fundamental material, even that which does not inform their research? Probably not, not really. There’s not really a reliable way to quantify that or even measure it qualitatively. But presumably a lot of people choose the job of professor or lecturer or PTI in part because it provides them with the opportunity to polish and refine their own understanding of the material they teach. It’s not just autonomy, it’s engaging with material you love and appreciate and find interesting, over and over and over again. That’s basically the main thing (other than improved student understanding and performance, obviously) that makes the otherwise grinding process of preparing lectures enjoyable.

And, contra SamChevre’s rather biting remark, non-financial benefits matter. (I suppose it’s fair to presume that SamChevre also does. not. care. about whether or not I receive decent health insurance. If we’re arguing on the grounds that it’s not “the purpose of the university” to provide its professors with autonomy, well then, it’s sure as hell not “the purpose of the university” to provide professors with health care, is it?)

If we set aside any benefit students receive from it, it’s easy enough to say that the extra uncompensated and unnoticed and unrewarded hours spent engaging with material are, for many of us, a rewarding experience — and those who do not feel rewarded by this process (or who do not have time for this process) and therefore do not spend much time engaging in it, are rather unlikely to have that choice held against them or even noted by their employers or colleagues. (I guess it means they’re basically missing out on a potential benefit, but so are professors who don’t need to claim their parking pass because they bike to work. Not really a problem.)

So in some meaningful and vital sense, what you’re actually doing is arguing for a reduced benefits package for those instructors who enjoy reflecting upon and improving their own understanding of fundamental material and enjoy improving their own presentation and pedagogical skills. Is this what you mean to be doing?

MG 03.27.12 at 3:18 pm

What does the research suggest is the best way to review papers?

I don’t know there is any global answer to this in the form of “x minutes per y pages”, but this has certainly been an active question in rhetoric & composition research. A number of annotated bibliographies on responding to / assessing student writing and how to address errors are on the web–one such bib. is here:

http://www.indiana.edu/~cwp/lib/evalbib.shtml

The somewhat short answer to MG’s question, though, is that while there is some consensus (that feedback is preferable to its absence, that focus on higher-order concerns about argumentation, clarity, use of evidence, etc. are more appropriate than responding to surface errors of grammar, spelling, etc. on first drafts), the question of how best to respond isn’t once-size-fits-all but rather complex, as it varies by genre, purpose, audience, etc., as well as whether the assignment is designed for formal or informal assessment, the goals of the assignment in the context of course goals, etc. It gets worse, too, due to differences between what students (think they) want and what instructors want for them; a brief excerpt from Richard Haswell’s treatment of just how complicated this question gets may be helpful:

[A]lthough students, especially second-language students, may pay more attention to comments on drafts than on final papers (Ferris, 1995), overall they don’t consume teacher response very well. Research into student perceptions have demonstrated this again and again. Students are avid for commentary (though they may first look at the grade), but when forced to explain their teachers’ comments, they misinterpret a shocking portion of it. When forced to revise, they assiduously follow the teacher’s surface emendations and disregard the deeper suggestions regarding content and argumentation. They prefer global, non-directive, and positive comments but make changes mainly to surface, directive, and negative ones. In sum, they want lots and certain kinds of response, but have trouble doing much with what they ask for (Hayes & Daiker, 1984; Ziv, 1984; Straub, 1997; Winter, Neal, & Waner, 1996; Underwood & Tregidgo, 2006). Of course, some of the blame rests on teachers, who often think they are positively emphasizing central qualities such as reasoning, genre form, and reader awareness while in fact the bulk of their commentary dwells negatively on surface mistakes and infelicities of syntax and word choice (Kline, Jr., 1976; Harris, 1977; Connors & Lunsford, 1988).

To make matters worse, the problems lie not so much with students or with teachers but with the interaction between them. Some of the most disturbing investigation into response seems to show that students and teachers operate under very different evaluative sets. Whether it is due to age, gender, experience, expertise, social position (Evans, 1997), or classroom dynamics (O’Neill & Fife, 1999), students and teachers tend to consume writing quite differently. They have trouble speaking the same language of response because their responses to the writing itself are so far apart. [….]

If students and teachers conflict so much in preference for style and attitude toward the author’s task, then we may have a partial reason for another discouraging set of research findings. Little consistent association between writing improvement and volume or kind of response has been documented. It seems that the time-honored effort of inscribing commentary on student papers is sometimes honored with a proven pay-off and sometimes not, at least within the time span of the course. In a characteristic pre-post study, Marzano & Arthur (1977) compared the effect of three kinds of commentary, one that only marks error, one that only suggests revision, and one that only fosters critical-thinking. They found minimal effect on the students’ writing with all three types (for somewhat dated reviews of such studies, see Knoblauch & Brannon, 1981; Fearing, 1980). The type of response that holds the best record seems to be praise, as opposed to commentary that finds only things to correct (e.g., Denman, 1975), but even that record is inconsistent, and students rightfully are leery of praise when it is general and gives little direction. All this is no reason to return to the practice, universally condemned by most teachers, of restricting response to a grade, or worse of hoping that sheer volume of writing without any teacher feedback will improve student skills and not merely ingrain bad habits (the negative research findings on that hope are reviewed by Sherwin, 1969, pp. 156-167).

Oh, and about plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin: it’s actually not all that great and has a few inherent negative pedagogical consequences. It’s therefore widely discouraged among rhet/comp professors for a number of reasons succinctly laid out here:

http://louisville.edu/english/composition/policy-against-the-use-of-plagiarism-detection-software.html

How to cut down on plagiarism, other than resorting to panopticonic, for-profit software or typing sketchy-looking phrases ad nauseam in teh Google? Well, understanding why students plagiarize and designing better writing assignments is a good start.

If academia were 100% rote work, I’d be looking for other work (perhaps equally boring but more remunerative) myself, and I think I’d have a decent chance of finding it. Nor would I be the only one, on either front.

This might be the right thing to happen. I don’t think it should be taken as given that undergraduate teaching has such massive synergies with academic research that the same people should do both. Some people (like my parents) enjoy teaching as an activity in itself and aren’t particularly interested in using it as a creative outlet, and maybe it would be better if undergraduate education was staffed with people like that. I’ve characterised this view in the past as “it’s ridiculous that we’re doing so much form-filling and photocopying – we ought to be concentrating on our core competence in web design and underwater welding!”

Phil – re your dialogue of the deaf above ….

I’m very familiar with those conversations too. But there’s a big difference between saying that your management have got their figures wrong or have failed to take account of some vital and time consuming aspects of the job and resisting all and any calculation on principle.

How is anyone supposed to deal with someone who says “I’m terribly overworked” but then resists any rational inquiry into how much time their tasks do and should take?

Management have to allocate (limited) resources. They also have to beg additional resources from the people that give resources to them. They need a basis for that job and that conversation.

I take it that as someone with some kind of familiarity with Marx, you know of the concept of “socially necessary labour time” – yes?

Well that’s the operative concept here.

I’m overworked because the tasks you’ve allocated to me require more hours than there are hours is one conversation.

I’m overworked because it takes me three times as long as the average person takes to do these tasks is a different one.

I’ve had both of them.

@DD Speaking as someone who has gone for (usually untenured) full-time research positions rather than teaching/research positions, but has done a fair bit of teaching, my observations on teaching/research synergies is that they are substantial but not, for me, as substantial as the synergies between research and more research.

That said, research-only works for me because I have the attention span of a goldfish, and like to work on at least 10 different projects on any given day. If you are the more normal kind of person who likes to focus on one project at a time, it seems to be impossible to spend more than a few hours a day on productive research, so the rest of your time will inevitably be taken up by something else – teaching seems to be more complementary than any of the usual alternatives.

So we’ve got an interesting job which is mostly done by free spirits. D^2’s reform project seems to consist of making it less interesting and driving the free spirits away.

fly my little birds, be free!

Seriously, I would not be having opinions about this if it seemed to be the case that the academic labour market was working very well and that all the people in it were happy. But it isn’t and they aren’t (apparently – I suppose I have to at least consider the possibility that academics are amazing whiners but for the time being I’m taking it at face value).

If all academics had really great jobs like Henry’s then there would be no problem (or at least, a different set of issues). But the profession isn’t set up to do that. At present, it appears to be set up on the basis of holding up a few dream jobs like Henry’s as a glittering prize in order to attract a load of clever and idealistic free spirits into the industry. Then it sets up a tournament reward structure in order to encourage the youngsters to massively overwork themselves. Half of them burn out or leave and a few lucky winners are selected from the remaining half in order to attract the next generation, on slightly worse conditions. The people who don’t burn out and don’t get the dream jobs are left to settle down to barely survivable levels of work on a more-or-less middle class salary.

I am not exactly unfamiliar with this kind of system of personnel management (my industry pretty much invented it), but I don’t think it’s a very ethical way to run a railroad – ironically, universities have pretty strict rules on how much access banking recruiters have to the sprogs. So yes, I think a fundamental rethink might be in order, based on unbundling the really good free-spirit bits of the job from the marking-four-dozen-essays bits.

@Phil #204: “If people are taking 10 hours to do something that officially takes 7, telling them that henceforth it officially takes 4 doesn’t strike me as the most helpful thing you can do.”

From my perspective – as previously noted, having spent eight years trying (and largely failing) to nudge my faculty in a more rational direction on UG teaching – either your management team really is unspeakably evil, or you’re missing something important. The message is not simply “do this in half the time without compromising the quality”, which in most instances would be ridiculous, but “do this differently so that it takes half the time”, or in some cases “stop doing that time-wasting thing so you have more time for more important stuff”.

I’m not denying that there may be serious concerns about whether Method B (quicker) is actually as good as traditional Method A, and that it’s entirely legitimate for academic colleagues to resist change for change’s sake; a significant part of my job was gathering together the evidence to test whether B was indeed good enough to be an adequate replacement for A, and then talking colleagues through the arguments. Where it got frustrating was dealing with people – not everyone was like this, but there were (are) entire departments of them – who would accept that B was both quicker and just as good, and nevertheless insist on sticking with A anyway, or would formally agree to adopt B but carry on doing A in secret (and then of course complain about workloads).

My initial reaction to dsquared’s characterisation of the academic profession (#224) is that it’s mostly, depressingly, correct, esp. as regards the tournament reward structure. Obviously the rewards for all but a tiny minority of the high fliers are less monetary than personal satisfaction – and if you actually enjoy teaching as well as research, rather than using your success as a means of escaping the more mundane aspects of the job, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of self-exploitation and nagging anxiety.

do you really need to spend so much time and effort on changing the course every year?

Again, I think this question shows a lack of awareness of why people are doing what they’re doing. I taught three units this year; on every one of them there will be some negative feedback (there’s always some), and on at least one of them the ‘average’ feedback may be more negative than the target that’s been set at upper management level. Everyone will be asked, routinely, what they’re going to do to address negative feedback; people whose ‘score’ is below the ‘target’ may be asked this question more personally. We redevelop units because they didn’t deliver the goods in terms of student satisfaction and/or results (as measured in numbers, which can’t lie) and occasionally – at the level of individual lectures and seminars – because we weren’t satisfied ourselves with the way they went. At the moment we’re redeveloping the entire curriculum because we’ve been told the entire curriculum needs to be redeveloped. Very rarely do we do this kind of thing on a free-spirited academic whim.

The message is not simply “do this in half the time without compromising the quality”, which in most instances would be ridiculous, but “do this differently so that it takes half the time”

The message we’re getting is “we’ve never had metrics before, so we’re going to have some, and these are the ones we’re starting with”. If anyone has done any thinking about how things can be done in less time, I haven’t been made party to it. Maybe that’s coming later.

One final note – I really am not resisting all and any calculation on principle. What I’m questioning is who does the calculation, how it’s done and how it’s agreed and/or imposed. Tyler on distributive vs procedural justice is relevant here.

I think you’ve identified a key problem there Phil. Because university management is, very often, shit management, there is (understandably) no trust. I doubt there’s any way to make your management and their pathologies go away any time soon. Unfortunately, the problems of workload and resources still need solutions though.

Again, I think this question shows a lack of awareness of why people are doing what they’re doing.

Phil, triangulating between your comments and Chris/Neville/Andrew’s it really looks like you’re in a quite pathological situation (and the near-constant state of war in industrial relations sort of confirms this). I don’t think your experience necessarily generalises either. And there certainly are people commenting on this thread who have said that they regard it as close to a dereliction of duty to not revise your course every year because they bring out a new Iliad or something.

also, unrelatedly, statements like:

Nothing that is really valuable about teaching can be shared on a video screen

really look like the kind of technological hostage to fortune that always ends up sounding ridiculous. Children in the Australian outback go to the “School Of The Air”.

a pedant would note that having the entire months of July and August off scot free is actually already pretty good

ENTIRE ACADEMIC PROFESSION: Don’t get us started.
REST OF WORLD: No, what? Seriously, what? I get five weeks, don’t always take all of that.
ENTIRE ACADEMIC PROFESSION: You wouldn’t like us when we get started.
REST OF WORLD: OK, never mind.

what? what? the person in 235 isn’t part of “the academic profession” as it is currently understood – he/she is a professional essay marker (and plagiarism checker, I’ve started pushing the targets already!). And so he/she doesn’t have any work when there are no essays to mark – no course preparation, no research, nuttn. Phil has already factored in the time for training on the syllabus etc, and so this person is “busy from September to June”, which can be redescribed as “Busy from January to June, then on holiday from July to August, then busy from September to December”. It’s a great job for, say, a competitive surfer.

I have a family member who works in an essay marking factory for the on-line schools division of a US state board of education, and I can assure you that all the Industrial Age horrors that have been put forth as possible consequences of letting education management (and the for-profit K-12 education sector, which has a hand in the situation as well) implement such an “optimized process” occur and more. It is a very ugly work environment and does actual harm to the children it is supposed to serve.

Cranky

It’s not a bad job if it’s what you want to do (my parents loved it). It’s a terrible job if you end up in it, having been drawn into a profession that promised you a job like John or Henry’s, then saddled you with a massive volume of debt.

Plus (ajay) nobody mentioned teaching classes – which is just as well, because you couldn’t do that and be a full-time surfin’ essay-marker.

The “teaching some classes and marking some essays” career path already exists, of course; it’s called things like “Teaching Fellow” and “Lecturer (Teaching-Focused)”. (Or there are institutions like mine, which take the view that all lecturers are teaching-only lecturers unless they can prove otherwise.) There are routes out of it, which people in it are usually keen to take, but for anyone who actually doesn’t want to research or write (or, more usually, doesn’t want to research or write any more) it’s an OK job. It can get a bit demanding, though.

Y’know, there are blogs where I would expect to find an investment banker telling college professors what ignorant fools they are about teaching, but before this thread, I wouldn’t have expected CT to be one of them.

247: FAIL. The claim was “Nothing that is really valuable about teaching can be shared on a video screen”. Not “you can’t teach anything through video teaching alone”.

Y’know, there are blogs where I would expect to find an investment banker telling college professors what ignorant fools they are about teaching, but before this thread, I wouldn’t have expected CT to be one of them.

Contrariwise, Anderson, there are lots of bores and fools who think that a fairly tedious ad hominem argument based on the job someone does is a really clever and even witty point, and I would (and did) expect that you were one of them. Rimshot-cymbal, well done.

Especially worth considering is his point that increased corporatization in Medicine and the corresponding loss of autonomy for doctors has decidedly not resulted in more affordable health care. The opposite, in fact.

However it decidedly has resulted in very large income gains for medical doctors. If you’re talking about structural change over the last twenty years, you’re going to have a very, very hard time convincing anyone that humanities academics have done better than physicians.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a university that had a way students identify as members of it (and I did my first degree at Cambridge).

Well, OK, but… 1. How can anyone NOT identify somehow or other as part of the university? Even if that relationship is just “I commute to this place that sucks, but I’m gonna get my degree and move on”?

And, 2. I might be confused, having never actually attended anyplace that had an honor code (to my knowledge) but a key component is apparently the elevated level of both self-enforcement and student-on-student pressure/reporting/enforcement. The first might well involve, at least in part, reinforcing thinking along the lines of, e.g., “I’m a Cambridge man, Cambridge men don’t cheat.” And the latter at least partly depends on changing your reactions if you notice, say, your roommate is bending the rules a bit, from “it’s none of my business,” to something more like, “cheating not only reflects badly on him, it also reflects badly on the institution, and therefore on me.” All of that sounds a lot like identification to me.

Steve, you really appear to be making claims that look much stronger than what you really mean. If the point is just about lecturing then fair enough, but “Nothing of value can be transmitted through a video screen” and “What is really valuable about teaching is not the mere transmittal of information” are a bit absurd on the face of them.

D^2 (229.): As Cranky mentions in 240., the profession of “essay marker” (or standardized test evaluator – much of the standardized tests nowadays is not multiple choice and has to be evaluated by a person) already exists. and how is it done you ask? As piece work. After a big test is administered (nationally or in a state) the test evaluators sit down at home in front of their computer and get paid some amount of cents per question they evaluate. Once all questions are evaluated they are done – out of work – which forces them to be as fast as possible so they can evaluate more than their colleagues they never meet.

Another area of completely commodified education in the US are for-profit colleges, run according to sound management principles. Of course they result in indebted students who didn’t learn a thing, but hey, best practices were implemented I’m sure.

What you are arguing might be a good idea in a perfect world. It is a horrible idea in the real world where such methods will result in worse labour conditions AND higher costs for the students.

Steve, what’s most valuable (in science/math classes) is doing the pset. Good psets are worth their weight in gold, and should be copied and reused. Does anyone think that not sharing the effort of making good problems is a good idea? What about conducting research into teaching methods? MIT recently remade the introductory physics class to have small groups interacting and solving problems during class: that’s only possible by forcing those who don’t want the change out of the way and increasing the number of instructors, who all have to coordinate the curriculum.

, take the example of the untenured teaching professor that takes 3X the time to grade than her peers. D2, what is the appropriate thing to do with that professor?

Advice from management? Training? Administrative support? Maybe even move her into another job where she can spend more time doing stuff she’s good at? I mean, that’s what I would try to do in the non-academic world.

Watson, where did you get the idea that I wouldn’t be all in favor of initiatives like MITs (which are really just late adoptions of ideas some LACs have been implementing for years)? But as your description implies, they’re far from cheap, which is what fails to endear them to the “efficiency” “experts”.

stp: the person’s immediate manager is probably another academic, so is qualified to give help/advice. Lot of early-career people have difficulty with various parts of the job and need (and get) help. The real problem here is the person 20 years in, who insists, as a point of principle, that grading _properly_ takes however long they claim it takes. Going from X does part of the job poorly to X should be fired (as an attribution to dsquared) looks totally unwarranted.

Just to give a strong “second” to the recommendation made by Academic Lurker @245:

“Folks in this thread should go read Timothy Burke’s post on this:

http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2012/03/27/the-last-enclosures/

Especially worth considering is his point that increased corporatization in Medicine and the corresponding loss of autonomy for doctors has decidedly not resulted in more affordable health care. The opposite, in fact.”

The comments, too, which include responses/further insights from Timothy Burke.

Among other things, there seems to be a big divide in this thread between those who see “more management” as likely to contribute to the solution and those who see it as likely to contribute to the problem.

belle le triste @231: But the nub of “HE for all” is that HE becomes a factory-system; the crafts approach becomes a luxury niche. So the issue is, how to design a factory system that retains quality and delivers value.

Yes and no. The nub of “cars for all” or “dishwashers for all” or “beef for all” is that transportation or domestic appliances or meat must be mass-produced. OK, those things can be mass-produced, though in some cases (eg, meat) with a drastic and inevitable deterioration in quality. Of course meat certainly could and obviously should be produced less factory-fashion and more craft-fashion, but that would mean large changes in our political economy (serious regulation of the meat industry, large increases in income for those who now consume mass-produced meat) that are, alas, impossible in our current irrational and degraded political environment.

Education obviously can be and is mass-produced, but with even more drastic and inevitable negative consequences. It’s surely sensible and humane of Chris and dsquared to try to mitigate these negative consequences. And of course, as belle points out, more individualized, craft-like education for all would be a great luxury. But what is the promise of capitalism if not luxury for all? We were, after all, promised a pony; that’s why we agree to put up with the insecurity, regimentation, uglification, environmental degradation, and political powerlessness that capitalism entails, isn’t it? I wish we could be clearer when discussing the above educational management reforms that we’re grudgingly making the best of a bad, deceptive bargain rather than, as belle’s formulation seems to imply, maturely accepting the necessary conditions of any imaginable modernity.

Silently sent to moderation?

@D2 #252: Especially worth considering is his point that increased corporatization in Medicine and the corresponding loss of autonomy for doctors has decidedly not resulted in more affordable health care. The opposite, in fact.

However it decidedly has resulted in very large income gains for medical doctors. If you’re talking about structural change over the last twenty years, you’re going to have a very, very hard time convincing anyone that humanities academics have done better than physicians.

Not for family practitioners, it hasn’t–and they’re the closest analogue to undergrad teachers, I think. Specialists are the ones who get rich; the docs who actually work with individual patients over time and get to know their histories, do the day-to-day preventative care and checkups, and counsel them about treatment plans when problems come up are a vanishing breed. I’ve lost four doctors over five years because they keep moving to less expensive states, being unable to afford a living here (seriously, I was told by one guy’s replacement that the guy he replaced had been living, with his wife, in a converted garage. They moved to Texas because they wanted to have children and live in an actual house or apartment.) The family practitioner problem is specifically one of the main issues in health care reform. My understanding is that that kind of “old-fashioned” care actually *saves money* overall.

I’ve been staring at this thread with the fascination of someone watching a train wreck, and have been wondering why it looked like that to me. That is, beyond desquared’s borderline trolling, which is tolerated mostly because he is who he is and has proven his good will in the past. Still, it’s something in the neighbourhood of the concept of education-as-commodity being accepted without examination by the community of this eminently academic blog — indeed, to me the very best of academic blogs — that leaves me slightly nauseous.

As train crashs go, a single comment has little hope of making a difference, unfortunately. So more to settle my own mind, some points that don’t seem to have been addressed too much.

a1) Example of excellence in commodified education as per d2: TEFL. As a person who has learnt two foreign languages from scratch to near-native level of skill, my reaction is “huh?” Sure, up to a certain degree, you can train and drill people up in grammar and vocab, but to achieve proficiency, at least in production, you need all the accoutrements of moderately individualized (eg small-group) teaching, or a really good grasp of self-teaching (which you also typically learn from someone). To me, the offerings of mass language teaching have been useful mostly for certification purposes. The people I’ve seen come out of such a factory farming language bootcamp have been a good measure away from being able to function in the English environment. Worse, I’ve often thought it would be interesting to do research into the frequency of fossilization errors in this population, that is, errors that have become part of the speaker’s idiolect and are extremely hard to undo.
a2) Example of excellence in commodified education as per d2: “the French system”. He doesn’t make it clear which part of the French education system he’s referring to — the massified universities for the mid-tier postsecondary student? the extremely selective grands écoles for the upper tier? the secondary system? Having worked in the latter for some years and studied in the former two a little bit, the least I can say is that the main points of relevance I see are centralized curricula and instructors who enjoy a high level of autonomy, not a very high class load, relatively good job security, relatively mediocre pay, and an expectation of being at the intellectual cutting edge of their field. Not really an example of commodification as discussed here.
a3) Example 1 of commodified education as it occurs to me: IT training and certification. That’s an area I’m familiar with. In particular in the systems administration and information security sectors as well as in project management and similar disciplins, certification classes & exams by vendors and sometimes professional organizations have become commonplace. The outcome are people who know (one way of) how to carry out certain tasks by typing commands at a prompt and tend to think of themselves as experts, but frequently lack understanding of the field in question and, worse, the intellectual agility to discern where they’re wrong. So maybe we don’t need as highly skilled sysadmins as in the early days, but I’m surely not the only one to see a system as at minimum off-kilter and at worst dangerous whose main purpose is to generate cash for proprietary corporations while at the same time producing highly specialized morons.

b) What problem are we trying to solve? This thread looks like a piñata to me where everyone finds themselves a stick and hits whichever end they favour.
b1) The failure of US community colleges as described in the article linked by John Q? Does this failure have anything whatsoever to do with instructors requiring 2h to prepare 1h of class? Or rather
b2) The 2-3h of prep for 1h of class? Is this *really* something that needs fixing? It is understood, to me, that there’s a high level of variation in this, both between fields, from one end of one’s career to the other, from one type of class to the other. Sometimes, instructors will eat the variation — one tough semester followed by an easy one, for example — and sometimes it needs to be, or can be, addressed systematically. The latter cuts both ways: some things just *are* labour-intensive (anatomy lessons, remedial writing, whatever) and some things can be industialized with no loss in quality of outcome. In particular, following standard curricula does help. No re-inventing of wheels, fine. No skin off my nose.
b3) The quality of the *spit* “product”. That’s where it gets a lot more controversial. Teaching, education isn’t reducible to skills transfer. Some, in particular some on the managerial side, seem to think it is: a big oven that spits out little bread rolls with at least X units of algebra to at least level 4b and at least Y grams of literacy to at least level c. Measurable by absolutely objective standardized test. I contend this is a fiction. Not only because it doesn’t seem to work all that well where it’s being attempted, but also, and more importantly, because short-changing today’s and tomorrow’s students by failing to put them through the old-fashioned enlightenment-style intellect-forming experience of education would be quite a mistake.
b4) The quality of management in institutions of higher education. Well, let’s just say, I moved into a staff position at a US university (small and somewhat marginal state U) after 6 years in mostly mediocre software companies, and I’m somewhat aghast.

Now Chris B is worried about self-exploitation in the light of lofty goals, and that’s to his honor. College instructors can be just as infuriating as any employee, I’m sure. But he also seems to think that people should be less dedicated to quality and just obey orders on this matter, and that’s probably not going to work very well, especially when the current zeitgeist seems to consider a model akin to the University of Phoenix as at least potentially desirable.

Steve, the MIT approach entails a massive reduction in the autonomy of the teacher: they now have to do what is proven to work to teach a fairly fixed set of material in cooperation with others.

Centralized curricula are to my mind commoditization: The professor becomes tasked with transferring a very specific set of knowledge and skills, and can employ any means to do so. Tim argues in favor of a sort of bildung approach, which I agree is the purpose of education. But the bildung approach fails to take into account that for many kinds of knowledge and fields (even some humanities) there are things that have to be known in very particular ways. Forming an intellect means acquiring certain kinds of knowledge, and in principle we can say “this how well this method of education teaches this”.

If the teacher has to have some degree of freedom to do that, why does the Core at Chicago work given that the professors are essentially controlled in what they are teaching?

This thread may have outlived its usefulness, but I did want to proffer some thoughts about course preparation time and the revising of courses (as addressed by Tom Hurka, Nancy, at alia).

I am not aware of any disicpline that has been frozen in time. In philosophy, I find I have to revist – in more than a ‘tweaking’ way – not just the assignments/structure but also the content.

Even in ancient Greco-Roman philsopophy, new translations, new discoveries, and new analyses need to be considered by a responsible teacher. One might not decide to bring in all the newest materials and analyses, but one ought to know what they are.
In normative fields, keeping up with the current literature and/or new cases is crucial to good instruction.

If we think teaching is important, even at those ‘lower levels,’ then we must recognize our obligation to revisit and, if needed, revise all of our courses at least every two years. I’m rather shocked that academics would think otherwise.

ChrisTS:

Even in ancient Greco-Roman philsopophy, new translations, new discoveries, and new analyses need to be considered by a responsible teacher. One might not decide to bring in all the newest materials and analyses, but one ought to know what they are.
In normative fields, keeping up with the current literature and/or new cases is crucial to good instruction.

I don’t think you understood Tom Hurka’s point. His view (and he is an experienced teacher of philosophy) is that trying to introduce bleeding-edge new research into an undergraduate curriculum, while it’s interesting for the instructor, is inimical to good instruction. He was quite specific about this. He doesn’t keep his undergraduate lectures static out of laziness or resource constraints – he does it because it’s the right thing to do. If professors are creating large amounts of work, the effect of which is to confuse their students by dragging them too quickly into current research disputes that they don’t have the grounding to understand, this is definitely the sort of thing that senior faculty members should be stopping.

[Tom Hurka’s ] view (and he is an experienced teacher of philosophy) is that trying to introduce bleeding-edge new research into an undergraduate curriculum, while it’s interesting for the instructor, is inimical to good instruction.

To which the answer is, it depends on what subject you’re teaching. My first degree was in mathematics, where the vast majority of what we learned had been known for the last 100 years. We were recommended to read an introductory textbook on mechanics that was fifty years old, because it was so clear.

On the other hand, if you’re teaching a first-year history course in the UK (as I have done) and you don’t tell them about research from the last five years or so, you’re letting your students down, and in some cases seriously misleading them. Some subjects are far more pyramidal than others: you have to learn a, b and c before you can understand d, and then a standardised, unchanging approach may well make a lot more sense. Whereas if what you want is to engage your students with medieval history or American literature, etc, one of the obvious ways of doing this is tying it into things that are currently interesting them, which means references that are often ephemeral. As a specific example, there are a lot more students interested in learning about the early history of Islam or religious conflicts after 2001 than before, and if your history course doesn’t take advantage of that, it’s missing a key component.

dsquared: “I don’t think you understood Tom Hurka’s point. His view (and he is an experienced teacher of philosophy) is that trying to introduce bleeding-edge new research into an undergraduate curriculum, while it’s interesting for the instructor, is inimical to good instruction.”

PZ Myers (of the blog Pharyngula) made a comparison between teaching economics and biology; he said that he was regularly using current research articles in the 300- and 400-level classes. [The comparison was caused by him reading some study of economics instruction which showed that it took (IIRC) 30-40 years for economics research to make it into Econ 101]

Steve, the MIT approach entails a massive reduction in the autonomy of the teacher: they now have to do what is proven to work to teach a fairly fixed set of material in cooperation with others.

Nothing new; that’s always been the case for undergrad science (first two years, at any rate) vs. humanities and social science curricula. For most lower-division courses there is a pretty broad consensus as to what beginners need to learn, and a fairly narrow range of textbook choices which all live within that consensus. As a consequence, procedurally the content of at least the lower-level courses tends to be set by the department as a whole rather than by individual instructors, and so it does not (as it should not) change much when a different instructor takes over a course. Which is why I’ve avoided commenting on the “autonomy” issues in this thread, since they’re less germane to science, and teaching science is what I know about.

If schools are giving away money to the lazy teachers, and you know about it, and you don’t get some of that free money, yer stoopid.

“If biology classes were really popular and crowded while undergraduate economics withered on the vine I would be more convinced by this; the simple fact that he’s doing something different doesn’t mean he’s right.”

Of course not. The point is that different fields will probably have different needs in terms of changing things.