The history of Halloween.

My daughter asked me about this earlier today and I was ashamed I couldn’t answer her. But not anymore…

Or perhaps we can try a new way to limit the production of Ph.Ds.

Louis Menand, writing in Harvard Magazine, certainly gets to the root of the “Ph.D. Problem”:

What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive.

His solution, on the other hand, is absolutely mystifying to me:

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo.

If Ph.Ds are of little value in the job market now, why should we should we expand their numbers? After all, if we are producing all these disillusioned graduate students they should be pouring into all these other jobs if employers actually valued their skills. But, of course, they don’t.

A graduate degree in the humanities teaches a very specific set of skills that are useful for a very specific set of circumstances. Those skills matter in people’s lives, but only as long as you have the opportunity to utilize them once you’ve acquired them.

Convincing people to pay for a degree that is unnecessary for most positions and won’t pay for itself in the end is no different than selling someone an investment property they don’t need and can’t afford. Expanding the supply of labor where there’s no demand is the last thing that universities should be doing.

Obligatory Phillies post.

After all, it’s not like my team is in the World Series every year.

Because people really hate higher wages and better jobs.

“[W]e shouldn’t be talking about “sending” anyone to college. That phrasing smacks of central planning, as if government officials know the right percentage of the citizenry who need to go to college. Instead, higher education must be an individual choice. Fewer young people are making that choice, for whatever reason. The fact that college costs a lot and doesn’t seem to do much for many of the marginal kids who give it a try (and lots of those who do, drop out) is a logical reason to decide not to try college.”

- George Leef, “Re: Send More People to College?,” Phi Beta Cons, National Review Online, 10/22/09.

“Almost 40 percent of the nation’s 18- to 24-year-olds in 2008 were enrolled in college, a record number, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Thursday. The rise was driven almost entirely by a surge in students attending community colleges.”

- “College Enrollment Set Record in 2008,” New York Times, 10/29/09.

There goes several more hours of my life that I won’t get back.

Classic Cinema Online. The only problem is that the videos I want to see most, “Freaks” and “Meet John Doe,” don’t seem to be available anymore. Heaven knows I’ll find something though.

Update: It appears both those movies are elsewhere.

The most depressing thing you’ll read all day.

Those appalling surveys you always read about how students don’t know basic historical facts are always bad, but this one is on a whole different order of magnitude. William O’Neill at the History News Network:

In 1992 40 percent of all graduates were found to be proficient in prose and 37 percent demonstrated proficiency in document literacy. In 2003 the percentages were 31 percent and 25 percent respectively. Over a period of eleven years the proficiency of all approximately 37 million college graduates had declined sharply, in prose by nearly a quarter and in document literacy by almost a third. (The performance of high school graduates declined as well, from 5 to 4 percent in prose and 6 to 5 percent in document proficiency.) Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much.

When you think about it, one result explains the other. If you can’t read at a college level in college, of course you’ll know more about Bart Simpson than the Civil War because the Civil War isn’t on TV every Sunday. While I have many problems with those fact-based multiple choice tests, this one should be more reliable because it’s testing a skill rather than specific factual knowledge.

Then there’s the part that just makes me mad:

Not surprisingly students seem content with a system that fails to prepare them for life in the work force but offers them four or five years of enjoyable irresponsibility. Murray Sperber, whose Beer and Circus (2000) is must reading on this subject, calls this arrangement the faculty/student nonaggression pact, according to which instructors pretend to teach and students pretend to learn. Everyone gets good grades or evaluations and presumably goes home happy.

Sure, that’s not news, but it just reminds me that when I actually expect my students to read even slightly sophisticated books and understand them very few other professors out there are helping me reinforce the skill I’m trying to teach. In fact, I probably look like an ogre for doing so. Nevertheless, I have a sense of responsibility for America’s future and there are only so many sacrifices I’m willing to make.

Does anybody out there have a sliver of good news with which to counter this? Writing this post has made me seriously depressed.

Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” (1943).

I’m growing increasingly fond of Theodore Roosevelt.

Maybe it’s the biography I had as a kid that spent so much time on how he conquered asthma. Maybe it’s his wife and his mother dying on the same day, which David McCullough describes so beautifully in Mornings on Horseback (the only biography I’ve ever read where I didn’t think the early years were the obligatory dull stuff that you have to wade through to get to the good part). Maybe it’s lines like this:

“A paid police department or paid fire department is in itself a manifestation of state socialism. The fact that such departments are absolutely necessary is sufficient to show that we need not be frightened from further experiments by any fear of the danger of collectivism in the abstract.”

That’s from p. 740 of Douglas Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior, which I just finished. Although poorly edited, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s prime virtue is that it explains TR well enough that I know longer think he was a complete lunatic, which is probably why his stock is going up in my book.

I just ordered another Roosevelt book today, The River of Doubt. We’ll see how I feel when I’m done with that.

John Wilke Booth was not a liberal.

Working in a coal mine…

…is still a terrible job.

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