Can you blame me? I mean the whole 140 character thing just smells vapid. However, tools can be used for good or for ill and there are more than enough people out there in various history-related professions using Twitter to share interesting stuff that you are losing valuable information if you aren’t following them. You can see some of them at my feed.* Start with the folks I’m following, then expand out from there.
This mea culpa has been prompted by the news that Delicious has been saved from extinction. I first used that bookmarking service to show good student posts to other students on class blogs, then to mark articles for possible future blogging on this blog itself. When Yahoo announced that it was phasing out Delicious, I switched over to Twitter for that purpose. However, I’ve now seen that Twitter is good for a lot more than just that.
I have now gone back to Delicious for that task on this blog, so that my Twitter Feed can go more free form: messages, snarky comments, etc. Occasionally, I’ll do what so many other people do and Tweet my own posts (but only if I think it deserves extra attention). I still promise to include nothing about my breakfast should you elect to follow me, but from this point forward it will be more than just links.
* Of course, the last thing I followed on Twitter was the Next Great American Restaurant (at least until the finale next Sunday), but really I am following some much more serious and interesting Tweeters.
A few weeks ago, Kati Haycock from the Education Trust in Washington, D.C. came to our campus to give a presentation about student retention. I went because our administration strongly urged everyone who could to go, and because I’ve been trying to become less ignorant about how higher education really works (as I’ve often tried to work that out here on this blog).
They’ve put both a video and the PowerPoint from that presentation online here. While it’s not for the easily overwhelmed, it certainly was an eye-opener. For example, when I first saw slide 90 I thought I was seeing things. Now I know I wasn’t. The average 6-year (6-year!!!) graduation for college students nationwide is 55.9%. And that’s 2008 data, almost before the recession.
It’s hard enough to find a job these days with a completed degree. What happens to your life prospects if you take out thousands of dollars in loans and you don’t even finish? At the very least, it puts the high number of people who simply disappear from my survey course in better perspective.
Along those lines, slide 97 offers up the six-year graduation rate at my institution. For some reason, I thought it was in the 60s. I’ll just say that her number pegs it as much, much lower. Since nobody from the administration jumped up to object, I’m guessing she’s right.
I had to leave early, so I don’t know what her solutions to retention were, but I can tell you that as soon as the semester ends I’m going to watch the part of that speech I missed because I think I have a moral obligation to limit the financial wreckage that not finishing college practically guarantees. Don’t you think you do too?
Brendan Gill is amazed by the fax machine (p. 112):
“In recent years, part of the twenty-second floor, which is the top floor of the building, has been given to a facsimile transmitting system, by means of which a copy hurtles back and forth all but instantaneously between our office and the Donnelly Press, in Chicago, where the magazine is printed. I would like to describe in precise detail the extraordinary process that makes it possible for me to make any number of fiddling little changes in my galleys as late as two o’clock on a Monday afternoon and have the finished magazine in my hands late the following morning, but I am totally incapable of doing so.”
I wonder how much one of those things cost when Gill published those words in 1975.
Go here and scroll down for other episodes in this continuing series.
Since we’re at the end of the semester, I handed out evaluations to the students in my survey class yesterday. No, I’m not talking about their evaluation of my teaching. We switched from paper to online surveys a few years ago, and the response rate dropped through the floor. Those evaluations have become utterly useless to both the university and me. I’m talking about the in-class survey regarding my non-text textbook.*
Besides seeing more student prose about the course than I’ve read in years, I think the most striking thing about them was what wasn’t on most of them. I only read one complaint about having to do their reading on a screen (and trust me, the syllabus was designed to force them into doing their reading so anyone who wanted a good grade had to do a good deal of reading there). Most were happy with the efficiency of an online text since they only had to read what I assigned and nothing else. They also seemed happy with a the $50 price (which surprised me, but, then again, I don’t have to buy new chemistry texts nor have any idea what people are paying for that text which Alan Brinkley stopped writing five editions ago either).
So my pre-evaluation decision to keep going with Milestone Documents seems like a good one. However, there’s one piece of advice to anyone doing this that seems particularly important. Put your syllabus online and lay the links out there for them so that they don’t have to navigate it. I know Milestone Documents will do this for you soon, but that will prevent you from changing assignments on the fly since they won’t necessarily be able to change your page for you in a timely fashion.
Besides, the time for online syllabi has certainly come. This kind of online text is simply an extension of that, and a more efficient one at that. I’m not sure I’d want students to gaze at hundreds of pages of neutral prose that way. [The notion that people are writing out their lectures and simply posting them for their online courses scares me to death. If you can't get them to pay attention in class...]. However, when you break it up into pieces by assigning documents, it seems to be a popular compromise.
Pedagogically, I’m delighted by the ability to line up my lectures with the reading better. While there’s less reading overall this way, I can definitely live with that since I can tell from their surveys that they were definitely doing the reading that they had.
* And yes, Neil, I’ll drop them in a Fed Ex envelope for you later this afternoon.
I’ve decided to read Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker in order to avoid grading. I got it as a gift from someone who got it from a pile at an antique store for almost nothing, and have been letting it sit for at least five years. I realized that was a mistake when I hit this quote on page four:
“In my youth, having gained a little fame by publishing some short stories in the New Yorker, I was invited to give a talk about the magazine at Indiana University, and it turned out to be a nightmare, because the audience was academic. I didn’t know then what I know now – that college professors like a talk to last at least an hour, with everything being said at least three times. The third time they hear a thing, they feel that famous shock of recognition, and a please smile begins to play over their faces. Well, in my ignorance on that occasion, I simply got up and talked, and having told them everything I knew about my assigned topic, I found that I had only consumed ten minutes. I then went nattering on, in greater and greater panic, about metalinguistics, pendentive arches, and the decline of materialism in third-century Greece. Oh God! That took ten minutes more. All I could think of was to sit down, and I did.”
Sounds like my first college lecture, but I think I made it to half an hour..
There’s so much to talk about in this article on the University of Denver’s plan to move most of the books out of its library as part of a renovation of that facility. Certainly, I’m a big fan of books, and think they’re going to stick around for a long time. I’m also a big fan of renovating libraries, as they just did that to ours last week and it looks absolutely wonderful. No books were moved to storage in that process because, frankly, we never had all that many books here in the first place. That’s why I’m also a big fan of digital humanities projects that let me see more tomes from the privacy of my office.
What I want to focus on is the governance issue:
While many faculty members agree that the library needs to be renovated, they say administrators left them out of the process and that the provost presented the decision to them last week as a “done deal.”
“We should have been presented with the plan, asked to have a discussion and weigh in on our feelings about it before anything was finalized,” said Dean Saitta, chairman of the anthropology department and president of Denver’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Denver’s spokeswoman said the university’s administration consulted with the faculty in formal and informal ways throughout the process.
I know Dean really well and I can guarantee you that if he says the administration didn’t consult with faculty, then the administration didn’t consult with faculty. Perhaps they thought they were consulting with the faculty, telling a few people in the Faculty Senate or something like that. But when you’re making a decision as vital as this to the academic mission of an institution as to the purpose of its library, you have to go above and beyond the call of duty.
The University of Denver is small enough that they could have gone all Greek city state, and really gotten feedback from everyone whose life depends upon that building. Even if they didn’t take faculty suggestions, faculty would have appreciated having input on something that important. I know plenty of faculty input went into the remodeling of our library. Instead, they sprung on most faculty members and now they’re going to be really, really surly for a long time.
You be the judge: Which is better for the institution, more space inside the library or a hostile workforce? Shared governance, as Dean lays it out above, would have been the best strategy for everyone involved. Too bad the University of Denver prefers the Banana Republic model.
“If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.”
When my friend Richard Facebooked “Salt of the Earth (1954)” over the weekend, I almost lost it. For one thing, here was one of the best labor movies ever made entirely online. For another thing, the ENTIRE thing was on YouTube. I had never seen that before.
Then I went to the channel where the movie was posted, and lost it again. Cinevault’s Openflix is an absolute treasure trove of old movies in their entirety. Sure, some of them probably stink, but I’ve seen enough excellent ones there to know there’s a lot of gems too like the best Frank Capra film ever made, “Meet John Doe (1942). Then there’s this piece of great timing, “Royal Wedding (1951).” and more Charlie Chaplin films than I’ve ever seen for free in one place. Mostly it’s shorts, but they also have “The Kid (1921).”
Lord, I’m going to have to stop sleeping now in order to get anything done.
Reason 55 of 100 Reasons Not to Go to Grad School is a particularly important one*:
There are simply too many PhDs produced every year for the higher education establishment to absorb them all, despite the absurd degree to which it has absorbed them into jobs that have nothing to do with traditional research and teaching. Today, universities hire doctors of philosophy to be in charge of their dormitories, alumni associations, and police departments.
Colleges benefit from this situation, because there are so many well-credentialed people desperate for teaching positions that they will work for very little money. This would not be such a problem if the world outside of academe had more use for people with PhDs (see Reason 29). The fact that it does not is why there are so many people with doctorates who now find themselves working in part-time temporary teaching positions with no benefits (see Reason 14).
I have a particular interest in this one because I went back and forth with Marc Bousquet about a year and a half ago on precisely this subject. His position (which I don’t disagree with) is that it’s not so much a numbers thing; it’s a structure of the profession thing. Mine is:
Every tenured professor in America could get radicalized tomorrow, but if history graduate departments keep churning out more Ph.D.s there’s still going to be a lot of pain before the ensuing revolution ever takes effect.
In other words, restrict entry AND restructure. Don’t just depend upon one or the other.
If you watch Marc’s video above, you’ll see that the surplus of Ph.Ds (and dearth of jobs) was a surprise to his interviewee. If you’re reading this, it’s no longer a surprise to you. When you think about it, this really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Therefore, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to tell the truth about academia whenever you have the opportunity. People who go to grad school (particularly in the humanities) need to go in with their eyes open, not with their eyes closed. You don’t want them waking up one day when they’re 31 and blaming you for ruining their life by not warning them just so that you can have an extra teaching assistant.
That doesn’t mean nobody should go to grad school. You might hit the lottery (even though it’s not like you’ll never have to work again if you do). Or perhaps you just want to live off of student loans for a few years. That’s not exactly a smart career move, but at least if you do this with no expectation of future employment you do understand the system. It’s the people who don’t understand the system that worry me.
One of my former undergraduates just got a tenure track position at our local community college. It’s not a lottery ticket, but it is a safe spot in the (lower) middle class. I told that story the last time I had the “So you want to go to grad school….” discussion, but I also explained everything else I know about our broken academic employment system. I will never say “Don’t go,” but I will forever resolve to tell it like it is. As the profile page for 100 Reasons explains:
Many of you will choose to go to graduate school despite these admonitions, but it would be good for you to bear them in mind so that the things that can make graduate school difficult and frustrating do not come as a surprise to you.
After all, we’re talking about people’s lives here.
* This may be the first time I’ve included all the links when I’m quoting someone else’s post. It’s worth it. Indeed, anyone who’s considering grad school really should read ALL of 100 Reasons.
Longtime readers know that I am a gigantic fan of the ex-historian, current Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank. Knowing my proclivities, one of my grad students tipped me off to a recent appearance he made talking about the Obama budget proposals on Democracy Now!. Here’s the part I liked best:
[T]he reason we’re having this budget crisis is because we were deliberately driven into budget crisis by the last administration. You remember, these are people that started two wars and cut taxes at the same time, set up, you know, a brand new prescription drug benefit and didn’t come up with any way of paying for it. They were just heaping up expenses, meanwhile outsourcing the entire government in this very expensive manner, you know, and cutting taxes on the wealthy, deliberately defunding the liberal state, deliberately bringing on the train wreck. These guys have spent—the conservative movement, that is, have spent—you know, basically have spent decades trying to run the government into the wall. And they have succeeded. And now they come out and tell us that we have to—you know, we have to cut the programs that they’ve been against all this time. He should expose this sort of card game to the public for what it is.
’tis a good political argument, of course, but let us not forget that universities operate the same way these days. I’ll take one prominent example: The University of California Berkeley is borrowing seven million dollars in order to fund its own online education system despite the fact that the faculty is getting furloughed a few days a year and they can’t afford phones in professors’ offices.
Who’s going to pay when this arrangement inevitably fails? The faculty and the students, of course. How come in academia, heads almost never roll? Nobody retires in order to spend more time with their family. We can’t even kick them out after four years.
This is not to suggest that faculty members are powerless to affect the course such matters. I think the lesson here is simply to point out loudly, wherever possible that there are many other factors that affect a university’s finances besides faculty salaries.
RT @DianeRavitch: Having demoralized K-12 teachers, the Obama administration now plans to inflict higher education with Race to Top (of ... 12 hours ago
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