You almost certainly have no interest in this…

…but I need it as a placeholder. It’s for the chapter on cold storage in my ice and refrigeration book and the source is Louis M. Schmidt, Principles and Practice of Artificial Ice-Making and Refrigeration, 3rd Edition, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Book Company, 1908:

The online higher education emperor has no clothes.

This review of the book DIY University (which I still refuse to read and won’t link to either) is absolute genius. Go read the whole thing, but I’m going to quote from it backwards here in order to make my own point:

The adjuncting wave of the early 1990s was supposed to make education cheaper. It didn’t. Now online courses are supposed to be making education cheaper (price being conflated with accessibility in this line of argument). Despite spreading like wildfire in the last decade – from dedicated online schools like University of Phoenix to the best (and worst) brick-and-mortar schools – the price of higher education only increases. So who benefits from replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts if not the students? If students aren’t getting cheaper or better education from online courses, why are colleges so eager to establish them?

The answer, as anyone on this side of the looking glass knows, is that it’s cheaper – for the university. Adjuncts are cheap, desperate temp labor who don’t complain. Online courses have essentially no overhead and are taught in the vast majority of cases by – you guessed it – adjuncts or graduate students who, if they finish the long trek toward a Ph.D., can look forward to taking a paycut to hop on the adjunct treadmill. These changes are not in the interest of students. Nobody sincerely believes that. They do not make education cheaper or better because that is not their intent. The goal is simply to make education more profitable. Universities like that. State legislatures (when the schools in question are public) like it even more.

The reason schools get away with this is that most students can’t tell the difference between an adjunct and a tenure-track faculty member. Sometimes that’s because the students are clueless, but oftentimes an adjunct can teach you a lot, especially the poor and unfortunate over-educated people who have been left behind in the struggle for living wage jobs teaching in the humanities.

Is this the same for online classes? Not so much:

Online courses are, for lack of a better term, shit. No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. When the author of DIY U describes a model of students “cobbling” together a self-guided degree consisting of “course materials readily available online,” I cannot convince myself that the Yale-educated author believes that even as she is paid handsomely to type it. Perhaps 1/10 of a percent of undergraduates are mature and motivated enough to effectively direct their own course of study. What Kamenetz describes feels more like replacing the 12-course tasting menu at El Bulli with a trip to Old Country Buffet and calling it a wash. The idea that anything meeting her description would qualify as an education is prima facie ridiculous and requires no further discussion.

All students who care about actually learning something know this instantly. Therefore, while the problem of learning from an overworked adjunct is not so obvious, the problems with online education are. As a result, charging sky-high tuition for an inferior education isn’t going to look like a bargain to most people. In fact, I’m guessing that if the recession drags on much longer and their placement rates get worse, the student population at most online schools will drop like a stone.

Oddly enough, this is the happiest thought I’ve had about the future of Academia for a long time. Don’t try to talk me out of it, OK?

“[T]he Walmartization of higher education.”

This is the sort of thing I expect to find at RYS, not the pages of Academe. Nevertheless, here it is:

At a community college in Maryland, many faculty members have ignored an administrative initiative that one professor says puts him in a position similar to that of a sales clerk in a department store.

Over the past year, Prince George’s Community College has issued name badges to every college employee that ask, “Have you been served well?” President Charlene Dukes says the badges are part of a campuswide campaign for “quality service” that focuses on providing students with the information and support they need to reach their academic goals.

For faculty, she says, that might include helping students find referrals for services outside the classroom or assistance with financial aid. “We expect our faculty to get to know their students by name and the types of academic need they have,” says Dukes. “We don’t mandate that faculty wear them, but we encourage them to do it, and some do.”

Faculty members have been cool to the badge campaign. Associate professor Earl Yarington says very few wear the badges. The badges put faculty in the position of delivering a product, preferably with a smile; the student is buying the course and the prized higher education credits.

“The problem is—I’m not selling them shoes,” says Yarington. “It’s the Walmartization of higher education and it’s a disturbing trend.”

I guess I could just chuckle and let this one slide. After all, most of the faculty is ignoring the initiative. Nevertheless, I think this is indicative of something more.

Students are the LAST people who understand whether they’ve been “served well.” Or, perhaps, you only figure out whether you’ve been served well long after you leave college.

The problem is all these administrators who seem to think that education is a commodity like toilet paper or cheap plastic crap from China. It’s not. Paying tuition does not guarantee that you get it. If students don’t put everything they can into the process, learning will not come out the end. That badge is an invitation to blame the professor for whatever shortcomings you have, when perhaps students would be better served if we encouraged them to look inward instead.

Hacking the research paper assignment.

I’ve had this idea kicking around my head for a while now. Thanks to Dan Cohen for giving me the incentive to actually write this up and get feedback before I give it a try myself.

Have you ever seen Iron Chef America? It’s a kind-of game show on the Food Network based on a similar Japanese show where two chefs duel it out inside a two-kitchen “stadium” making different dishes based on the same “secret ingredient.” Suppose we turn the chefs into historians and the ingredient into a research topic and maybe turn the competitive element into collaboration…

For those of us who teach at universities with small libraries, Google Books has been a Godsend. Instead of waiting weeks for books to arrive, our students can have access to a practically limitless supply of primary sources from the best libraries around the world at their fingertips. Those primary sources are even searchable (yet perhaps still advisable) to teach them how to skim.

Granted, due to copyright restrictions, the vast majority of sources that Google makes available in full view mode are from before 1923. However, as most of American history pre-dates 1923, that shouldn’t bother most of us. Indeed, the problem I face if I turn students loose on Google Books or Gale’s database of nineteenth century newspapers or the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site of newspapers around the nation is that they have too much information rather than too little.

In an age where so many fantastic primary sources are available on the computer, it is the height of stupidity to privilege written secondary sources over the stuff that historians have been using to write history forever. Nevertheless, to me, information overload is the biggest problem with research paper assignments in the digital age. And despite the ready availability of excellent books, time is always a problem with today’s college students.

So suppose we guide students through the information that’s out there and see what they make of it. The contestants on Iron Chef America submit shopping lists based on potential mystery ingredients. Suppose we do the students’ shopping for them. What would that look like?

The mystery ingredient – oh, sorry – the mystery topic is:

The Progressive Movement.

What principles united the most important strands of the Progressive Movement at the turn of the twentieth century? Which one was most important and why?

Rather than just set students loose on the library or even their computers, here are the only sources that they’re allowed to use:

1. Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company.

2. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House.

3. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities. [Interestingly enough, this one isn't on Google Books in full view format and I wonder why. Luckily, it's elsewhere.]

4. W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk.

5. Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography.

As much as I like primary sources, it strikes me that there should be at least one historiographic piece thrown into a question like this for general guidance. Luckily, Reviews in American History is on J-Store. So here’s a classic:

6. Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 113-32.

[Obviously this one is subscription only.]

7. 8. and 9. Might be particular newspaper articles coming from Chronicling America.

While still recognizably a research paper, the fact that students have equal access to each source at the same time allows for interesting twists on the traditional research paper assignment. For example, you could assign everyone to discuss the reading in teams. You can compare and contrast the uses of particular sources in each paper once they’re done, thereby illustrating how historians interpret the same sources differently. And since the only time they’d need is the time to read the books (as opposed to waiting for them to arrive) , I can imagine doing this research exercise more than once during the semester.

Now I just have to wait for a class where I can try this. Which sources might you use for this assignment in a course on American Slavery? That’s what I’m teaching this fall. I guess if I had any sense I would have used that for my example here, but the sources for Progressivism just came to me faster.

Maybe you can’t eat prestige…

…but you can eat with the salary the job it can get you provides. Rob Weir offers advice to prospective graduate students at Inside Higher Ed:

First — and I hear the scream of the Ivy Leaguers as I type this — go to a grad school that will pay you to come. It may be true (though I’m dubious of their placement statistics) that a degree from high-prestige private university offers some job placement advantages. But if a good state school waives your tuition and offers you a fellowship, and the fancy school doesn’t, take the money! In fact, if no one offers you a financial package, you’re probably not top grad school material and youneed to rethink your career plans altogether. Pannapecker notes that nearly a quarter of grad students rack up around $30,000 of debt and 14 percent more than $50,000. That’s a ridiculous amount of debt to carry as you begin your career, even if you are lucky enough — and few are — to secure a dream job. As Harvard strikers once chanted, “You can’t eat prestige.” Amen to that.

Personally, I’d rather work with someone who’s happy at my campus rather than an Ivy League grad who wants a better job from the moment they arrive. However, I fear my opinion is rare. If search committees have 100+ applicants, filtering out the grad programs you never heard of is the easiest way to get them down to a manageable number. I’m not saying I approve of that tactic, I just strongly suspect that it gets used often by committees with overworked professors who would rather do something else than read cover letters. Therefore, if you follow Weir’s advice you may get through graduate school debt free, but you have to remember the opportunity cost. You still lose seven odd years of your life from a career standpoint if you can’t get hired when it’s over.

In this job environment, I think the only way I’d recommend going for a Ph.D. in the humanities is if you can get into a top twenty program AND get money for going there. Anything else is gambling with your life and your sanity.

Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The pre-review.

After reading the NYT‘s review of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent on Saturday, I went straight to Barnes and Noble to pick it up.

It’s good. Seriously, it’s far more fun than any historian of 1877-1945 America should be allowed to have. I’m only about 65 pages in so far, but those pages are about prohibitionists before Prohibition (such as the slightly insane woman depicted above) and the analysis is both extremely sophisticated and VERY interesting.

I’m thinking this may turn out to be one of the best history books I’ve ever read (and as you might imagine I read a lot of them).

The timeless appeal of Pac-Man.

While we we were on the way to the Playhouse Disney site, my son Everett (age 5) saw the Pac-Man 30th Anniversary logo on the Google home page. “That looks like a game,” he says. “Can I play it?” So I Google Pac-Man and find this.

We haven’t been back to Playhouse Disney since.

And while we’re on the subject of computer history, definitely look at this TIME Magazine cover. I’m still giggling about it 48 hours after I first saw it.

What does Rand Paul think about the government restricting child labor?

I watched that Rachel Maddow interview with Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul last night, and was duly shocked by the guy’s extremist views. I was outside digging up grass most of the day, so I’ve only just been reading the reactions of others who share my opinion. The thing is, I wasn’t really shocked by his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. I expect that from libertarians. I was shocked by this:

Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?

If forced integration is akin to a government take over of a private business, I finally understand why Republicans throw the word “socialism” around like rice at a wedding. Too bad, they don’t understand what the word means. They’re all rights and no responsibilities.

This leads me to wonder if Rand Paul supports any government regulation at all? Ezra Klein (via Andrew Sullivan) has some excellent questions along these lines designed to get an answer out of him:

Can the federal government set the private sector’s minimum wage? Can it tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants? Can it tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform? Can it tell toy companies to test for lead? Can it tell liquor stores not to sell to minors?

As a historian, I’d be interested in learning whether Paul supports the ban on child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. He mumbled something about a Commerce Clause debate last night which, like the Civil Rights Act, is the Constitutional provision which that ban hangs upon. Certainly, it is a far-reaching use of government power that interferes with the operation of private businesses, just like the Civil Rights Act. The justification for using that power is to protect the rights of children, even if their parents could use the money that the little tykes could earn.

So which is it Mr. Paul, the rights of businesses or the health and welfare of children? Alas, I suspect I already know the answer.

Marc Bousquet’s uber-post.

Marc Bousquet has written what must be his uber-post about academic labor. It’s been a while since I read his book, How the University Works, but I think all the key themes of it are in there. I’d quote the good parts, but really you should just go read Marc now and come back. I’ll add a few additional observations when you return.

1. As I hope you saw, Marc is reacting to a post by Megan McArdle that quotes an Inside Higher Ed article that includes the fact that 73 percent of employees in higher education are contingent or off the tenure track. Follow the link back to its source and you’ll see that’s a figure from the American Federation of Teachers. But notice that’s a percentage of total employees in Academia. Since non-tenure track faculty always teach more classes than people like me the percentage of the total classes they teach (if such a number is even discernible) is going to be significantly higher.

Try telling that to the typical parent who’s about to shell out thousands to send their kid to college and watch all that high-priced marketing go up in smoke.

2. Check this out from the New York Times:

The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof: superintendents, education professors and job-seekers say that teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which used to hire thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help wanted signs.

Yes, they’re doing it the restructuring thing to secondary school teachers as well.

3. McCardle wonders why a bunch of leftist academics let such horrible labor conditions occur? Why have a bunch of more-leftist-than-the-general-population secondary school teachers let such a horrible labor conditions occur DESPITE BEING UNIONIZED? It’s easy: Because they don’t control the terms and conditions of their employment and neither do professors.

To quote Marc:

Regular readers know that structured demand means that work formerly done by persons with doctorates is now done by persons with an m.a. or less. This revolutionary shift was accomplished intentionally, by university management, all without much opposition by the guild of tenured faculty.

Of course that’s right, but for those of us at state schools massive budget cuts in recent years have only increased the pressure to move in the direct of contingent faculty. Here in Colorado, it’s cuts in state funding that go back fifteen years now that have led to an increasing reliance on contingent faculty. I may be naive, but I believe that my administrators would actually prefer to hire tenure-track faculty if they felt they had the money to do so yet from their perspective they feel they have no choice.

I think they’re wrong, but budgetary shared governance would have to be the topic of a whole ‘nother post.

4. I agree that we faculty know next to nothing about labor law. To me, that’s a much better explanation for why they have acquiesced in the emergence of an evil two-tiered employment system than the notion that we’re all a bunch of fatuous hypocrites.

Business ephemera at the New York Historical Society.

In anticipation of my trip to NYC in a couple of weeks, I was skulking around at the New York Historical Society’s web site, and found that they have a huge portion of the gigantic Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera online.

Good times. Good times.