A (somewhat trivial) PowerPoint issue.

Despite the fact that its so easy to misuse, I still lecture with PowerPoint in my survey classes. I’ve defended that practice elsewhere, so I don’t feel like I need to do it now. I will say this again though: The illustrative power of pictures in a history class is so great that to me not using PowerPoint is a form of educational malpractice.

There is also great value to using PowerPoint for primary source quotes. In my pre-Power Point days, I remember reading out relatively long primary source quotes from my notes as if I was the narrator from a Ken Burns documentary. Now this strikes me as rather inefficient since I can now talk about the quote rather than read what students can read for themselves.

But thanks to a couple of conversations I’ve had lately, I’m beginning to wonder if that much multi-tasking is too much to ask from students. So professorial readers, the questions of the day are:

Do you ever read text (particularly quotations) from a PowerPoint lecture? If so, why? If not, why not?

Yes, I know this whole line of questioning is somewhat trivial, but I still think there’s some interesting teaching philosophy issues under-girding this seemingly insignificant argument.

Petty tyrants are everywhere.

My interest in the Wisconsin struggle is not just a result of being an ex-cheesehead or of my being interested in labor issues. It’s academic. My original subdiscipline was American labor history, and I was always interested in employee voice in an historical setting. <

Now employee voice has hit the big time. This article, which offers up Indiana (where collective bargaining by state workers ended in 2005) as an example of what Wisconsin might look like if Governor Walker gets his way, touches directly upon the willingness of employees to tell it like it is:

Jim Mills, a longtime welfare worker and union activist in New Castle, Ind., said a big problem with ending collective bargaining was that workers who had ideas to improve government agencies or services became scared to stick their neck out and make suggestions to their bosses.

“If we saw there was a bottleneck and something didn’t work and told them, it was ‘Get lost, you’ve got to do it the way we told you or you can leave,’ ” Mr. Mills said….

Mike Huggins, the city manager of Eau Claire, Wis., said Mr. Walker’s push to curb bargaining could make management more difficult at the city level because it would hurt municipal employees’ morale and end the labor-management cooperation that he said had yielded excellent ideas to improve services to the public.

Insert “shared governance” where it says “labor-management cooperation” and you’ll get an idea why this principle translates smoothly to a university situation. In the same way that teachers unions keep class sizes down because they look out for the interests of education besides the interests of their members, professors can look out for the interests of education in the university setting if they are empowered to do so.

Not that many of us professors are actually union members, but a lot of us are tenured. Tenure, while hardly the bulletproof vest that its critics think it is, does presumably offer enough protection so that reasonable people can feel free to speak their minds. No wonder our new Tea Party overlords (at least in Utah) are going after it too.

It’s not a conspiracy to destroy education at all levels, but sometimes it sure does feel like one.

Is it possible to teach an online history course that isn’t evil?

At some point in the recent past, our last department chairman (now retired) and our last provost (now also retired) signed our department up for a program that allows active duty military personnel to get history degrees from our school entirely through distance education. The program has the potential to make a lot of money for both the department and the university, and I’m certain that they simply decided that there was no way they were going to leave that money on the table.

While this program is being presented as something that the department can choose to participate in, it is abundantly clear to me now that it is going to go on whether tenure track faculty decide to participate in it or not. All of us in the department, me included, have serious qualms about how any online or distance ed history course would stack up on an educational level against anything offered on campus, but I’m starting to think that it might be better if we went into this with our eyes open to get a share of the money and to mitigate the difference between online and on campus classes.

It’s clear though that if I go through this, I need a serious attitude adjustment. That’s where I could use some help from you, dear readers. Is it possible to teach an online history course that isn’t inferior to a face-to-face offering? If so, what do you have to do to make it that way? Also, while I’m at it, if I’m going to sell my soul to the online Devil (so to speak), what should my price be?

All advice, by comments or via e-mail, would be very much appreciated.

Update: If you’d like to see a good summary of the always evil position, UD has one of the best I’ve ever seen up today. It’s going to be hard to make me feel better about what’s going to be done around here after reading that, but I’d still like to try.

Chained to a sinking ship.

Somebody on Twitter declared this national solidarity with Wisconsin government workers day. As an ex-Cheesehead, I not only had my red and white handy – I’m wearing my Bucky Badger t-shirt. Despite my concerns, I’m feel strangely optimistic about the fight going on in Madison. Governor Walker is completely tone death. As many other people have already pointed out elsewhere, he’s the best union organizer the labor movement has seen in years.

Suppose the worse happens and the Koch Brothers get the bill through. I just read on H-Labor that the Madison area AFL-CIO has started planning for a general strike. That’ll certainly be interesting. More importantly, if that happens Walker will get recalled in January as soon as it’s legal. Madison is the kind of place where people take the idea of voting for the Socialist Labor Party seriously. That is an idea born out privilege, and now that the effect of doing that (or more inexcusably, sitting out the election because Obama hasn’t brought about the millennium yet) is painfully obvious, I don’t think the people of Wisconsin will ever let that happen again. Russ Feingold for Governor, anyone?

What worries me the most though is not Wisconsin, but Nevada. This article, for instance, is much more depressing than its premise suggests:

Professor Michael Young began to think last year that he should look for a job outside of Nevada.

It was not the craziest thought; the recession was in full swing and legislators were slashing the higher education budget.

Young was a departmental director at the Desert Research Institute. Now he’s an associate director at the University of Texas, Austin.

During the recession, Nevada has had a difficult time keeping research professors like Young.

The best students already seem to be leaving for out-of-state colleges. The same thing seems to be happening with faculty.

Good for Michael Young, but he’s a scientist. What’s happening to all the humanities professors in Nevada who work at state schools? You know, the ones who can’t get million dollar grants and who aren’t paid well enough to take the huge loss they’d have to take to sell their underwater houses in this market. And where are all those humanities professors going to go, when the job market is saturated with new Ph.D.s and state representatives everywhere are talking like this?:

“You’re really good at coming and asking for money,” said Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas, to Dan Klaich, NSHE chancellor, at a higher education hearing this week. “But what we need now is help and places where we can make reform. Drastic reform.”

Reform, of course, is code for sinking the ship to which most faculty are chained.

I actually feel lucky compared to these other academics. There are obviously brutal cuts coming our way in Colorado, but state aid has been down so far for so long that a huge percentage cut of very little makes a much smaller difference than it does in places like Wisconsin or Nevada. We are all headed towards public universities being tuition driven, which means they will essentially be privatized. We’ve been testing that model in Colorado since the 1990s here, and it seems as if that ship can float.

The problem with this model, however, should be obvious: the ability to keep your doors open is not the best way to offer quality higher education. Neither is a corporate university where the only departments that matter are the ones that get patents. [Apparently, this is the way that Nevada wants to head.] Higher education is an investment by society for society that may not pay off immediately and may not pay off in dollars and cents, but it does pay off in the long run.

And if our Tea Party overlords don’t believe me, there is always another way to go…

Have you ever noticed…

…that something is getting in between you and your students (via the Lisa Simpson Book Club)?

“Eat your veggies!,” says the professor.

Have you ever seen that book by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife where she teaches moms how to hide vegetables in junk food? I’ve had a hard time figuring out whether it’s good or evil because I’m for kids eating vegetables, but I think that they ought to do so willingly with their eyes open. I have a six-year old who’ll eat salad for dinner. Still, I don’t want to spend this whole post bragging about Everett. I want to make an analogy.

I do not think my students are six-year olds. I don’t even think they are like six-year olds, but it can still be difficult to get them to eat their veggies in the academic sense.

We all struggle with the question of how to get students to read who don’t want to read. But what happens if they don’t want to enroll in your course in the first place? Thomas H. Benton explains the ramifications of this well in a long review of Academically Adrift:

Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education. Some students may rise to a challenge; many won’t. They’ll drop, withdraw, or even leave a college that they find too difficult. If you are untenured and your courses do not attract enough students, then you can become low-hanging fruit for nonrenewal. If you are tenured, then it means being “demoted” to teach service courses. In such contexts, the curriculum—populated by electives and required courses competing for the lowest expectations—is driven increasingly by student demand rather than by what a community of scholars believes undergraduates should know.

The logical solution to this problem would be to coordinate minimum standards across your department or across your university. But what if your university (or even your department) is big and faceless? As Benton explains elsewhere:

Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.

There’s one more reason that you should be able to pick your adjunct faculty members out of a line-up. If they degrade academic standards (and I realize that’s a gigantic if, with plenty of class-related baggage that comes with it), everyone else look bad by comparison.

Worse yet, what if your department chairman or your dean goes over to the dark side and gets addicted to junk food? You can try to slip your students their vegetables disguised in macaroni and cheese, but if they don’t eat it whose side are your administrators going to take?

That’s why tenure is more important than ever in these troubled times. Tenure gives faculty the protection they need to see this as low as we’ll go, and no lower. Like Jessica Seinfeld, you should be willing to do what it takes to get your students to eat their veggies, but eat their veggies they must! The real evil would be to turn your university into a giant educational McDonald’s full of empty calories and cheap labor.

Two Monty Python jokes.

That’s the best part of my post for this President’s Day, which is not located at this blog. It’s at the Historical Society blog – a far, far better blog than this one (and without the snarky angry attitude you get from my labor posts).

Teaching the history survey without a textbook: Episode 3.

Go here for other episodes in this series.

The midterm is coming up in my survey class without a textbook, and this has given me two thought about this experiment. Both are good.

1) A lovely thing about assigning documents rather than a textbook is that each individual document can conceivably show up in a student’s essay to prove their arguments. Textbooks have lots of facts, of course. If anything though, they give rise to a forest through the trees problem there are so many. I literally can’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen any discreet fact from a textbook that I haven’t mentioned in lecture show up in a test essay. Documents, besides their value as primary sources, are discreet pieces of information all by themselves. I’ve become optimistic that I might read about the reading I’ve assigned while grading for the first time for a long time. I’m hoping less reading will actually come through better since they might actually read it and remember it better.

2) I’ve seen offers from the big textbook companies to create your own textbook. Since Milestone Documents has opened the whole site to subscribers, I can actually tell students that they’re free to read anything from the years we’re covering whether I assigned it or not. It’s a nice way to offer some of the encyclopedic qualities of a giant textbook without wasting all that paper.

PS to Neil: Since I know you’re reading this, put me down for another semester. I can’t tell how well the students like this, but I know that I’m certainly happier doing things this way and shouldn’t that count for more since I’m the one who’s supposed to decide whether they’re learning anything?

Tell that to Ward Churchill.

Mark Bauerlein found the same Las Vegas Sun article that I did a couple of days ago. His response was a query:

As you know, the only way to remove tenured professors is by shutting down departments. There are hints in the story that plans are underway. Any guesses as to which departments will be the first to go?

[emphasis added]

Not so fast, explains commenter “jffoster:”

Wrote Prof. Bauerlein: “As you know, the only way to remove tenured professors is by shutting down departments.”

Not quite, at least not in many places. A declaration general of financial exigency typically, and with particular local variation in detail, allows for the layoff of tenured faculty irrespective of whether an entire department is closed. It sound like this is the provision under which the University of Nevada at Lost Wages is going to operate under.

I’m hardly an expert on financial exigency, but that still sounds about right to me. How it will play out depends upon a clash of forces that most people prefer not to test.

The thing is, Bauerlein’s rather sweeping statement has a much bigger caveat: gross misconduct. Think what you want about Ward Churchill, but he is the most obvious example of the fact that tenured professors are far from unaccountable in today’s higher education environment.

Yes, tenure makes us more secure in our positions than most workers, but most of us pay heavily in lifetime earnings in order to achieve that security. The notion that it is practically impossible to fire a tenured professor is a smokescreen designed to distract the public from other issues that have a much greater effect upon their day-to-day lives.

Eric Foner calls Abe Lincoln a liar.

Or was that a flip-flopper? Don’t make me explain. Just watch it.