More about controversial speakers

At the moment CSULA is saying that Ben Shapiro can speak at some future event that includes an opposing viewpoint.  This sounds nice and open and pluralistic on the surface.  However, there are two problems.  The first is that it is being applied selectively.  Most speeches are allowed to go forward without a rebuttal.  There's something to be said for the educational value of structuring all formal activities as debates rather than monologues, but if that educational notion is going to be practiced then in order to avoid becoming censorship it has to be practiced consistently, not selectively.  Otherwise, you're saying that certain viewpoints need no rebuttal or moderation, but others are dangerous and need official opposition.

Second, who's to say what constitutes a valid or sufficient degree of opposition?  If a biologist is talking about research that might lead to a vaccine against a particular disease, is it sufficient to bring in another scientist who believes that the evidence more strongly favors targeting a different molecule?  Or do they have to bring in somebody who believes that vaccines cause autism?  Or somebody who believes that the researcher is pursuing a scientifically sound line of inquiry but also believes that vaccines should be a matter of personal choice rather than a public policy mandate?

If somebody wishes to speak in favor of tighter regulation of stock trading, should the opposing speaker be somebody who believes that trading by humans doesn't need further regulation but agrees that electronic high-frequency trading is dangerous?  Somebody who believes that we should have less regulation of trading?  Somebody who believes that the debate over regulation of financial markets distracts from the bigger issue of problems with capitalism itself?  Which of those viewpoints is sufficient rebuttal?

The most painful compromise of my academic career thus far

The Cal State system has done many things that deeply offend me, and the CSU has forced me to make many compromises, but the very worst compromise that the CSU has ever pushed me into is defending a smarmy little shit like Ben Shapiro. He had been invited to give a speech to a student organization at Cal State LA (our sister campus), but the campus president canceled his speech because he's an obnoxious firebrand who says offensive things. If the CSU were properly upholding the value of free expression I wouldn't have to say one damn word in defense of Ben Shapiro. I could simply do what I was planning to do, which is to ignore him. Instead, I now feel a responsibility to say that Ben Shapiro is in the right and academics are in the wrong. WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME DO THIS?????

You think I like defending Ben Shapiro? Believe me, I don't, but we live in a world with academic values, and those values need to be guarded by people with convictions. Who's gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for being offended, and you curse academic traditionalists. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Shapiro's speech, while repugnant, is necessary for free expression to thrive. And my stance, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, makes spaces safer than you'll ever make them. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about in safe spaces, you want me in that committee, you need me in that committee. We use words like academic freedom, debate, and free expression. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a slur. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a scholar who reads and writes under the blanket of the very academic freedom that I am trying to defend, and then questions in the manner in which I defend it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you donate to FIRE. Either way, I don't give a damn what sort of space you think you're entitled to.

You want a free European college? No, you don't. Trust me, you don't. I do, but YOU don't.

This article outlines some of the substantial differences between US and European universities, and they go much deeper than the much-lampooned "climbing walls." (I'm pretty sure that European universities could add a gym for, well, the price of a gym membership.) There are differences in the educational model and the socialization provided. These differences are not just recent things; in the 19th century (and earlier) US academics were noting that our universities and colleges offer undergraduate education at a lower level than their European counterparts.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

If you want giant lecture classes and sink-or-swim academic models, with physics taught at a far more rigorous level than we currently do it, believe me, that can be provided, and it can be provided more cheaply than the current model. I am positively salivating at the thought of offering it. Shit, I'll take a pay cut to offer it. I have a list of students to fail, and they include YOUR favorite students. Yes, I'm talking to YOU.  Your precious little offspring who gets B+ and A- grades in a California k-12 school?  Your poster child for your grant-funded program?  This One Student who is getting mostly B's but is So Nice And Friendly?  I'll give all of them F's.  ALL OF THEM!!!

Anyway, whether you prefer the US model or the European model depends on what you want from a system, but realize that the differences in educational model are directly related to the differences in funding model.

This was the dawning of the text of our lives, of Halliday

I went and got a 1962 printing of the first edition of the classic physics textbook by Halliday and Resnick. I only got the first volume, but the topics in that volume are the ones that I have the most experience teaching. In many ways I actually feel better about the present, because the end-of-chapter problems are actually not so different from today.  They are harder, but only slightly harder, and the amount of calculus used is actually not much greater than in today's books.  All of this has happened before and has happened again.

On the other hand, the first edition is actually readable, not being overloaded with side-bars and graphics and other distractions.  It's hard to blame Kids These Days for not reading the books when we've worked so hard to make them unreadable.

A WrongThink Think Piece is still a Think Piece.

I'm 8 chapters into The State of the American Mind, a collection of essays on anti-intellectualism in the modern era.  It's full of things that would be considered WrongThink in my professional setting, so I ought to be primed to like it.  Alas, it's a book of 240 pages and 17 chapters (counting the intro and afterword), so each chapter is approximately 15 pages.  This is the same format that plenty of breezy and unchallenging books take.

Alas, the introduction and the second chapter both amount to "Most people don't know what they ought to know."  I agree with that, but I already know it, and there's nothing really new added.  The third chapter is a too-short and too-broad critique of writing pedagogy, something that has me walking away saying "OK, something is wrong" but as a person who assigns and grades project reports and lab reports I still feel like I need to know more before this chapter would be useful.  Chapter 4 is a synopsis of Academically Adrift, a book that I like, but I already read it.  Chapter 5 is a critique of psychiatry that elides the fact that plenty of psychiatric illnesses are in fact real illnesses.  Chapter 6 is a short rant about how people don't pay enough attention to the news, and its chief saving grace is that they don't try to blame late-night comedians; indeed, the author recognizes that jokes about current events only work for an informed audience.

Chapter 7 is the most abominable of all.  The basic message is fair enough:  Slowing down and observing closely is often better than quick, superficial glances.  Great.  Unfortunately, the chapter spends a lot of time on This One Intervention, where a single afternoon of activities to promote close observation habits led to great outcomes.  I'm sorry, but I don't believe it.  If This One Intervention worked, it worked because somebody cared enough to send students to the program and follow up, not because that one afternoon was so great.  Alas, I could easily see a colleague showing up at lunch and talking about how they read an article about This One Intervention and going on about how We Should Do This Too because it's so easy.

Saving graces:  The first chapter, by Mark Bauerlein, delves into the Flynn Effect, the trend of rising IQ over time.  He looks at how some skills have improved more than others.  I respect that nuance.  Also, Chapter 8, which claims that Kids These Days are different, does more than just repeat the same old complaint; it also critiques the modern zeitgeist that promotes the alleged differences.

Vanity of vanity! All is vanity!

I didn't write this article...but I could have.  The whole thing is worth reading, but a few choice quotes:

The communities where such universities exist, like jars of pickled eggs themselves, tend to be on the margins and therefore poorer and less resourced than their urban counterparts. A common refrain often heard in these communities is that, because their kids are poorer, we shouldn’t expect too much from them. It’s not fair to them because of where they came from.

Though this is always presented as compassion, it’s not. It’s contempt. It amounts to saying, “Because these kids are poor it’s all right if we also let them be illiterate.” That to me simply adds insult to injury. Intelligence is and always has been a great leveler. It roams the world freely, flagrantly disregarding its divisions and classes. But it’ll settle in and make itself at home anywhere it receives an honest welcome.

The ones who want to dumb it down will ALWAYS talk about disadvantage and diversity.  ALWAYS.  Just by typing the previous sentence I am exiling myself from polite company, but I am beyond caring.

Or, regarding what I suspect is a "flipped" class:

If you’d like a sense of how contentless it can get, I have heard of an instructor, one without a PhD, who assigned his students videos of himself talking about this or that subject as their class text. A digital lecture is assigned as preparation for a live lecture that will be about a digital lecture.

God help us.

The anecdotal evidence I’ve been able to gather tells me that students do not read anymore. In one course I co-taught with several other faculty members, the readings were posted online, which allowed us to map access patterns. In that course, readings were accessed — not necessarily read — by between 5 and 15 percent of the students in the class. The same pattern was confirmed by the textbook sales in a course from the previous year. There were roughly 230 students in that class. I was teaching George Orwell’s 1984 and I had ordered 230 copies based on enrollments. At the end of term, the bookstore informed me that it had sold only 18 copies of the book, a hit rate of about 8 percent. It may be that some students already had the book, or had purchased it from another source. But the quality of essays and midterm exams suggested a very different story, as did students’ own explanations of their actions. If you only remove your professor hat for a moment and allow them to speak frankly, they will tell you that they don’t read because they don’t have to. They can get an 80 without ever opening a book.

It used to be believed that tyrants would ban books that threaten them, but they did us one better:  They trained the public to not want to read the books.  You don't have to ban the book if nobody will read it.  So now nobody reads 1984.

Of course, I have a colleague who has gone on the public record as saying that he does not assign ANY reading in his upper-division "GE Synthesis" course, i.e. an advanced course that is supposed to include substantial reading and writing.  Nonetheless, he has published an article in an education journal in which he BRAGS that students do not need to read to pass his (100% multiple-choice) tests, and his publicly-available syllabi back this up. He's a veritable Frito Pendejo. It is only the thinnest pretext of civility that keeps me from naming names, but maybe one of these days...

Oh, and our masters are sorely lacking in the critical thinking that we all claim to inculcate in our students:

I recall a meeting in which an administrator asserted enthusiastically that the university’s online teaching platform demonstrably improves student performance because one of his tech staff had discovered a correlation between more frequent usage of the platform and higher grades. Never mind that course materials are delivered through the platform and that better students tend to pay more attention to (I don’t say read) such materials; in flagrant disregard of such obvious considerations, this administrator credited a rather pedestrian technical device with the ability to make students significantly smarter and thereby to justify the pressure the institution wished to exert on faculty to deliver ever greater portions of their courses electronically. The fact that such things can be said in public without those who say them being laughed out the room is an indication of how desperate the situation has become.

Indeed.

The trouble with 200 page books

I'm already close to finishing The Trouble With Diversity.  The problem with this book is that the author decided to write in the breezy genre of 200 page books with contrarian ideas.  It's a Slate column expanded to 200 pages but with a viewpoint that would rattle most Slate readers.  I basically agree with him when he critiques our fetishization of identity, and our conflation of identity with culture.  When you have a roomful of students wearing similar clothes, listening to similar pop music, majoring in the same subject (especially if that subject tends to attract or instill a certain point of view), eating at the same food trucks after class, and apparently following the same opaque mating rituals as everyone else in their generation*, I question how much diversity of culture there is in that room.  There may very well be cultural differences between their parents, but the kids resemble each other more than they resemble their parents (which is a fine thing).

So I'm with the author when he questions both the existence and the value of diversity of identity, or the conflation of ancestry and culture.  I'm definitely not on his side when he questions the value of cultural diversity.  I like living in a world with opera and rap and rock and Broadway show tunes and Mariachi music and Gospel and pop crap and everything else.  However, I suspect that if he had another 100 pages he would have conceded that point.

Where I'm definitely not with him is his last chapter, in which he argues that bias against religions is different from cultural/racial bias.  He says (correctly) that all cultures and races are equal, so bias against them is wrong, but since religions make truth claims it follows that taking issue with them is simply disagreement, not irrational prejudice.  He has a point, but he's pushing too hard on it.  The American truce over religion is one of our greatest social achievements, right up there with (and directly connected with) the way that we made English and Irish and Italian and Norwegian and Hungarian and Serbian and Croatian and (to a certain extent) Ashkenazi Jewish people into the same undifferentiated "White" people.  OK, we didn't work out all of the kinks with accepting the Jews, and somehow Spaniards got partially excluded from our giant paella of identity, but still.**

Anyway, when he says on page 179 that religious beliefs should be fair game in Supreme Court nomination hearings I have to disagree.  As long as a judge's rulings are articulated in a framework that can be delineated and critiqued separate from religion, we are all better off respecting the truce.  We Americans have only had one Civil War (hence we capitalize it), which is way better than Europe's track record, and a lot of Europe's internal conflicts coincided with religious lines.

Anyway, this reads to me like a book that went contrarian in too few pages.

*This grumpy old man still doesn't quite get how the youth have apparently done away with the formal concept of a date, a ritual that was dying even in my day, despite my adherence to it.
**We have A LOT of other things to answer for when it comes to race, but the fact that Serbs and Croats, and Irishmen and Englishmen, and Germans and Frenchmen, and Russians and Ukrainians, can all live peaceably in the US is something to be damn proud of.  If you don't believe me, take a vacation in Crimea.