Thomas Edison’s dumbest invention.

I have heard about this before from a former curator at the Edison National Historic Site, but, of course, I found it online at Boing Boing.

In which I write two nice things about Ronald Reagan.

I still think he was a terrible president, but recent events remind me of two things that Ronald Reagan did right during his eight years in office:

1) He clubbed foreign car companies into building plants in the US. This seems particularly important now that Chrysler is going bankrupt. As the Car Connection wrote shortly after his death (via me at HNN back in 2005):

Reagan also was a free trader and generally turned his bad ear on the demands from unions and Detroit executives such as Iacocca about imposing tough restrictions on Japanese imports. Reagan, however, was also a pragmatic politician and during the heat of the Presidential campaign in 1980, he agreed to support quotas on Japanese autos imports. The quotas were imposed but the end result was that it pushed the Japanese Big Three, Toyota, Honda and Nissan, to expedite the construction of new plants in the United States. Honda already had made plans to open a plant in the U.S. but the plant quickly expanded. The competition ultimately helped make American and foreign cars better.

While I’m at it, I might as well steal my own conclusion to that article:

Lest you think otherwise, I am not suggesting that protectionism is the solution to our problems. Free trade that runs in both directions is beneficial to all countries that participate in it. What I believe is that by taking protectionism completely off the table, this country is being taken advantage of by firms like Toyota that know they can build plants in Canada and still have completely unfettered access to the U.S. market.

My solution is to run trade more like Ronald Reagan did. Love the free market, but remember that a country can’t prosper with a trade policy that is all carrot and no stick.

Can you imagine an America without an auto industry? Those foreign-owned plants may be all we have left soon.

2) The other thing Reagan did right was to sign the international convention outlawing torture. Granted, that’s a pretty low bar, but George W. Bush managed to set the bar practically underground during his eight years in office.

Joseph Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor.”

There’s a “Talk of the Town” note in this week’s New Yorker that mentions that oyster farming was invented in the 1830s.  Who knew?

Reading this reminded me of my very favorite Joseph Mitchell story, “The Bottom of the Harbor,” which is about the end of the oyster catch in the waters surrounding New York City.  You’ll need a subscription to read that link, but just having access to everything Joseph Mitchell ever wrote for the New Yorker is more than worth the price and you’ll still get a new magazine every week.

Who exactly encourages people to enroll in doctoral programs?

Yipee! Marc Bousquet is back, drawn out by the same silly op-ed I wrote about earlier this week. If you’ve read How the University Works (the blog or the book), you can guess his angle:

[T]here are plenty of teaching positions to absorb all of the “excess doctorates” out there. At least 70 percent of the faculty are nontenurable. In many fields, most of the faculty don’t hold a Ph.D. and aren’t studying for one. By changing their hiring patterns over the course of a few years New York or California — either one — alone could absorb most of the “excess” doctorates in many fields.

The problem isn’t an oversupply of qualified labor. It’s a restructuring of “demand” so that work that used to be done by people with doctorates is being done by persons with a master’s or a B.A., or even by undergraduates.

Of course he’s right. Perhaps I’m just more pessimistic than Marc so I tend to put the possibility of making every adjunct in America’s universities tenure track right up there with when pigs have wings on the scale of possibilities, but  he and I recognize the same problem no matter what the solution is.

The funny thing though is that Mark C. Taylor (author of said silly op-ed) also sees the problem. This line from the article is worth posting again with emphasis:

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

[Emphasis added]

What’s with this we stuff?  I never encourage anyone to get a Ph.D. in the humanities unless they’re independently wealthy or they get into one of the very few programs from which you’re practically guaranteed a tenure-track job when done.  I don’t want that much debt with no prospect of paying it back on my conscience.

This view may not be popular, but I know that I am not alone in holding it.

So the solution is to make everybody’s job unstable?

I was saving this long review essay from the New York Review of Books to write about today when I got sick of grading papers. That time came quickly. It’s not that I object to the idea that universities are in trouble or that students in them are not being well-served, but this paragraph stood out:

Still, compared to Americans who work at manufacturing jobs or in the service industries, many people who make their living in academia are reasonably well insulated from financial devastation. For most tenured faculty, the worst they are likely to experience is stagnant pay and deferred retirement. For graduate students and young faculty hoping to start or keep a teaching career, the situation is more alarming, since postponed retirements mean fewer entry-level positions and promotions.

Considering the subject and the thesis, it’s pretty stunning that the discussion of part-time faculty gets relegated to a footnote.

That’s not true with the op-ed piece on higher ed in today’s NYT:

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

What I understand is how the author gets from there to this possible solution:

Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed.

So universities need to change, but we should abolish the protection that faculty need to speak freely without retribution in order to propose and support major changes? Why not give it to adjunct faculty too (like has been proposed at CU-Boulder)? Then everybody would have a stake in changing the system for the better.

Swine flu panic (in 1976).

It scares me that I have to read Gawker for historical perspective on today’s headlines.

We only encroach on the Brooklyn Bridge a little.

I was just going to link to this David McCullough Newsweek article just because I so much enjoyed reading this byline:

“The Great Bridge,” McCullough’s history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, first published in 1972, has never been out of print.

I should have been more direct the last time I covered this subject. Buy the book.  While you wouldn’t imagine it from the title or even the subject matter, it’s absolutely thrilling.

After I found McCullough’s article online, I noticed the response of the architect who designed the building proposed for the ground near the bridge that McCullough is opposing:

As the architects of a proposed building that is the subject of an opinion piece by author David McCullough (“A Masterpiece in Jeopardy, April 27), we were dismayed to discover that the article was accompanied by a rendering of the building that is inaccurate and significantly exaggerates the size and potential impacts of the building.

So their response is they only encroach on the Brooklyn Bridge a little. I still can’t see a compelling reason why ANY building has to go there. Why can’t there be some open space in Brooklyn?

Democratic Socialist Party?

This is a proposed Republican National Committee resolution as excerpted at Think Progress:

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

I officially resolve that the Republican Party rename itself the Know-Things.  For one thing, when exactly has Obama nationalized anything? I think we’d be a lot better off if he would, but I don’t exactly represent most Democrats.

Howard Zinn on “The Good War.”

Sam Wineburg v. the Teaching American History program

As somebody who’s been involved in the Teaching American History Grant program for a long time now, I had heard about Sam Wineburg’s speech before the TAH conference at the OAH Meeting in Seattle last month but I didn’t realize precisely what he was proposing until I read Rick Shenkman summarize it on HNN this morning.

I certainly agree with this critique of the program:

And how do we generally measure the effect of the TAH programs on teachers? By having them take multiple choice questions found in an AP history exam. Wineburg was incredulous about this. “In other words, we are paying millions of federal dollars per fiscal year to assure that school teachers possess the level of factual knowledge that we expect of bright seventeen year olds.”

It’s actually worse than that. Many programs only give the same multiple-choice questions twice; once at the beginning of the course of study and another at the end. Assuming the questions match the course of study (which may be a big assumption if they’re using AP questions) even a ten-year old should be able to do better the second time simply if they’re paying attention.

Wineburg is generally right that assessing the success of TAH programs is a huge problem. Anyone involved in the program for any length of time already knows that. However, suggesting that existing assessment mechanisms stink does not necessarily mean that the program itself has failed to teach teachers (or even students) anything.

Looking at Wineburg’s proposed solutions, it strikes me that he wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

1. “Set aside 20 percent of TAH fiscal year funds for competitive grants … to independent researchers … to assess and evaluate projects in experimental and quasi-experimental ways.” This is needed because one of the gravest threats to the integrity of the evaluation process is the cozy relationship that often grows up between teachers and evaluators, he said.

There goes 20 percent of the money that might have gone to teachers to something other than teaching teachers history. Since huge percentages of grant money already go to evaluators, why not make them do it with that existing pot?

2. “For every $20 million in awards, [we should] set aside $1 million for new research and the development and testing of new measures to assess historical understanding and knowledge.”

Again, why can’t this be done within the cost structure of the existing program?

3. “We need to stop testing teachers with multiple choice items.”

Agreed, but since school districts will have to come up with new assessment tools anyway, why not make them do so with their existing grant money?

4. While communities love to invite marquee historians to do their summer workshops these are often not the right historians to be involved in TAH. “We need to engage those historians who are working on the scholarship of teaching and learning … those people who are trying to create college classrooms where our students are thinking and working beyond the use of historical facts. These are the historians we must keenly engage in our projects so we can begin to articulate the problems between elementary and secondary and tertiary education.”

The purpose of TAH program is to improve teacher content knowledge. While some historians certainly do a better job at this than others, what makes Wineburg think that people who think the same way he does will do this job any better than the ones who are doing so now? If he wants money to improve schools of education he should find someone in Congress who agrees with him and try to start a new grant program. I would certainly support that effort.

5. “I dare anyone in this audience to dispute the following claim: We will not change history teaching by continuing to ignore how new teachers are trained. It’s that simple. We need innovative approaches for combining the strengths of university history departments and schools of education to create the kinds of courses and practice teaching assignments that put new teachers into the classroom already possessing deep knowledge and appropriate skill. We need new ways of thinking about alternative certification for history teachers and ways to deliver teacher training on-line. By ignoring how we socialize new teachers into the profession, we delude ourselves. More than any other issue, this one is the elephant in the TAH living room.”

My problem with how history and social studies teachers are trained is that they spend too much time in education classes and too little time learning the content that they’ll teach. Robert Byrd created the TAH program precisely in order to fix that situation. Sure, we cover how to teach the new material as well as what to teach, but just because program participants have not proven learning effectiveness to Wineburg’s satisfaction does not necessarily mean that the entire focus of the program should be changed.

In our grants, we’ve moved towards new models of assessment involving document-based questions for both teachers in the program and for their students. Other higher-order assessment models exist like this one which might be adapted into a TAH context.

Using the word “boondoggle” at this juncture to describe a program that has already done so much non-quantifiable good just doesn’t strike me as particularly helpful.