Will college professors go the way of the milkman?

I have been a Natalie Merchant fan since I first saw 10,000 Maniacs in college. In the old days, when I still went to concerts, I saw them more often than I did any other band (even after their shows were overran by teenage girls in peasant dresses). I pre-ordered the first Natalie Merchant album in seven years before it came out last year (rather than download the tracks) so that I could read the liner notes, and have had it in my car ever since. It’s two discs of the work of mostly obscure poets put to music, so there is actually a lot of interesting stuff to learn there.

This is my favorite track on the album:

The poet is Eleanor Farjeon, well-known in English places, but not in America. As Merchant notes, poetry aside, perhaps the most endearing thing she ever did was to turn down the title Dame of the British Empire with the line, “I do not wish to become different from the milkman.” Words to live by if I’ve ever encountered them.

They seem particularly useful to us academics, as we (myself included, of course) tend to greatly overrate our own usefulness. So many of us assume that whatever we’re interested in will be interesting to others, even if it isn’t. [See here for an important variation on this phenomenon.] I’ve also seen far too many examples of academics who assume that they’re somehow different than other working people just because they have a Ph.D.

We had time, and somehow we found the resources to study something for seven-odd years. This does not make us immune to the same rules of employment that blue collar workers face, like technological unemployment or the inevitable class struggle between employer and employee. This post by Tenured Radical about her computer troubles from over the weekend reminded me of Henry George’s complaint that industrial workers had been reduced to “mere feeders of machines.”

At the same time, there’s one way that I really do hope to be different from the milkman. Unlike milkmen, I hope my chosen profession continues to be practiced beyond a boutique existence long after my career has ended. If anyone has studied the demise of milkmen in America, I’d be interested in reading their work. If I had to guess though, I’d say that milkmen were probably victims of better refrigerated transport. It became cheaper to make milk on vast dairy farms and keep it cold for hundreds of miles than to squeeze it fresh and send it down the street. Yes, I know milk delivery is still a boutique operation in some places, but most people aren’t willing to pay that much more for a better product.

Will the college students of the future be willing to pay more for a better education? Will they even be able to pay more for a better education? Earlier this summer I wrote:

Seriously, the primary reason that I don’t go totally Luddite on this entire profession is that if given the opportunity, I don’t think the average bean counter is going to remake the university very well at all.

I still believe that, but now I’m afraid that the vast majority of both administrators and college students couldn’t care less. If I’m right, that should be enough to make you empathize with working people of all kinds. Especially milkmen.

Perhaps we can all double as psychiatrists, just like this milkman did.

Einstein’s chalkboard or why you don’t need to buy a Kindle.

That photograph comes from Keith Erekson of the University of Texas – El Paso. He took it at a museum in Oxford, UK. Apparently, Einstein was visiting at some point during the Thirties. He worked a bunch of equations out on a chalkboard and they immediately whisked the chalkboard away to a museum, hanging it high enough so that nobody would ever accidentally erase the great man’s handiwork.

Keith uses this to illustrate the importance of ideas relative to the technology by which they are conveyed. After all, if Einstein could convey such complicated ideas on a mere chalkboard, his choice of technology did not stifle his genius. [Did I mention that Keith was serving as the technology specialist during our teacher colloquium last week?]

While I may seem obsessed with online education these days, the first thing that I thought of after seeing Keith’s picture and hearing his interpretation of it was the Kindle. I still think Kindles are for suckers, but besides the reasons I gave in that post I also think they are also a very complex technology where a simple one will do just fine.

I have come to this conclusion despite knowing that the future seems to be entirely against me. This was in the Telegraph under the headline, “The printed book is doomed”:

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a senior executive from a big Silicon Valley company. We talked about digital media and in passing he mentioned digital books. “I doubt that my daughter will ever buy a physical book,” he said. His daughter is nine.

Why exactly is the printed book doomed? Apparently because Silicon Valley executives say so and because Telegraph reporters don’t read very well:

I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly frustrated when reading printed books because they don’t have a search function. With an ebook I can quickly search the text to remind myself who a character is or to re-read a particular passage.

Ever heard of reading slowly or (God forbid) an index? With reading skills like that he’ll never make it in the All-England Summarize Proust Competition? [Come to think of it, reading Remembrance of Things Past on a Kindle might explain why all the participants at the All-England Summarize Proust competition did so badly at it.]

I also hear that Kindles are much better than iPads in direct sunlight. Well I’ll bet good money that neither one of them is better than an actual book (unless, perhaps, the words are written in invisible ink). Seriously, can’t Amazon come up with a better marketing hook than that?

If there’s anything good about all this e-book stuff, it would have to be that it’s focused attention on the fact that books are really the physical manifestations of ideas rather than objects for people to simply buy and covet. Unfortunately, if you let one company gather a monopoly on distributing all those ideas, it’s not exactly going to serve the cause of universal enlightenment. This is from the Guardian:

It’s still early days in the ebook story, and no doubt there’ll be many disputes and disruptions along these lines in the future. But here’s a final thought for now. Was it wise to allow a situation in which a single company – Amazon – became market leader in terms of both a digital product (the ebook) and the hardware through which it’s delivered?

Luckily, we can still turn to physical books to read the same content that Amazon wants to monopolize. While it may difficult to impress your friends with a paperback in your lap, an awful lot of ingenius ideas have been conveyed that way over the last five or six hundred years. I’m guessing, against all odds, the book will survive five or six hundred more. Despite competition from those dry-erase monstrosities, I bet even the chalkboard has a few more decades in it.

After all, aren’t the simplest solutions to complex problems often the best?

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).

Another Analogy for Tenure.

Tenured Radical compares tenure to scene from Through the Looking Glass. While I would have thought the Caucus Race from the original book would have been a more obvious analogy, I’ve been thinking of an entirely different one based on my favorite movie of all time:

My point here is not that if you fail to answer the questions you get cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril (although unlike Tenured Radical, I’ve never known anyone who’s been denied tenure that ended up with a job at anywhere near the same pay grade, let alone prestige). The point is that the questions get harder as you go along.* So you’re not a Python weenie like me? The newly tenured Laurie Essig at Brainstorm offers a good explanation of my argument in plain English:

The increasing scarcity of tenure means that the standards for getting it are getting more and more difficult to meet. At Middlebury, it is not unusual for older faculty to have received tenure without a single book, while those of us undergoing review now often have two books at the point of tenure.

I’ve seen the same thing myself even long before I got tenure or promotion to Full Professor. Just yesterday I heard from a friend in a different discipline at a different school that his promotion to Full Professor got rejected solely because he hasn’t been the PI for enough grants (and he’s not in the hard sciences!). It’s like first you have to hit the lottery and then run a triathlon after that just to stay in place.

What I wonder though is whether Essig’s explanation of why standards are harder than they used to be is entirely correct. An increase in supply certainly makes it possible for administrations to make earning tenure harder if they want to, but I don’t think they’d do it just to torture people. My guess is that their motivation is money. Deny an Associate Professor promotion and you save the cost of their raise. Deny an Assistant Professor tenure and you can hire a new one for less or, even more likely these days, cut the line and replace them at fire sale prices.

I realize that people like me have it much better than all the contingent faculty of the world, but we are still all in this together to a great degree. Every rank from contingent to Full Professor does essentially the same thing in he classroom. [I know that ranked faculty should in theory be able to teach better, but come on! There's a lot of awfully good contingent faculty out there these days and when's the last time you met an administrator who could even tell the difference?] Therefore, we all suffer when there is a huge excess labor supply, because even Full Professors can be replaced by someone (or perhaps several someones) for much less money. They can treat us all badly with full knowledge there are plenty of readily available replacements if we whine too loudly.

So what can we do to solve this problem? I say limit access to graduate school to cut down the supply of excess labor. Organize everyone. And most importantly (at least for this topic), make sure your department and your university has clear and reasonable standards for tenure and promotion because being cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril isn’t really all that funny.

* Except for Sir Galahad, but cut me some slack here, OK? This analogy is a work in progress.

“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

Stephen Colbert channels “Life of Brian.” Watch the whole clip.

You want students to take the Michael Palin position.

As the author of an article on teaching history with YouTube, I naturally liked Randall Stephens’ post on videos to use in historiography classes. But I also like it for two more reasons:

1. It reminded me that I wanted to see Howard Zinn’s “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” again all the way through.

2. It gives me an excuse to post the only YouTube clip I’ve ever used teaching that class:

I made a vow a long while back not to talk Python with students, but I make an exception here because an argument really is “a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition.”

There are no more Americans in Python.

I hadn’t realized that Terry Gilliam had renounced his American citizenship. He always basically seemed British anyways. There’s also a nice reference to this sketch:

In the interview, which I hadn’t seen in ages. Thanks Terry!

Déjà Vu.

The funny thing about this story is that this isn’t exactly the best known Python skit ever:

While I love it, I don’t live in New Jersey anymore and the voters Chris Christie is targeting aren’t going to get the reference.

“The magic age seems to be eleven.”

That’s about the first time I encountered Monty Python.

“She turned me into a newt!”