Quote of the Day
The most important thing I have learned over the years
is the difference between taking one's work seriously
and taking one's self seriously.
The first is imperative,
and the second disastrous.
Margaret Fontey
Texas College Transparency Law: Thumbs DOWN!
Given the fact I've often discussed transparency, it may sound that I, as an ex-professor, would oppose a unanimously-passed Texas higher education transparency bill (in May 2009, effective this fall) ostensibly to provide better consumer information to students and their parents, sounds self-contradictory or hypocritical, but there are specific contextual areas where I disagree with state representative Lois Kolkhorst (R). I don't disagree with the idea of transparency but with its implementation in this bill.
I'll present a more detailed analysis shortly, but I am disturbed with the current kerfuffle between legislators and faculty groups on the law. I disagree with both of them. As to the legislators: anytime a legislature passes something unanimously, it should be considered with caution: for example, a law has been watered down so much that it's meaningless or perhaps there is a level of political correctness where it is risky to oppose it.
-- Comments on the Kerfuffle
I want to point out that there is an elephant in the room nobody is discussing--like how progressive faculties have decided to create academic disciplines out of political ideology like minority and feminist studies and force students to take such courses. In some colleges, Western civilization course requirements or classic literature courses have been supplanted by progressive reading lists of nominal minority authors. [On the other hand, that's how I was forced to attend this lecture being delivered on campus by Alex Haley, then an obscure author, before the famous TV series Roots. I was spellbound as he discussed his Eureka moment in Africa, having traced his lineage and hearing the tribal historian utter the name of his ancestor.]
There is a question of the public right to know professors' salaries, the rights of a student or parent to know what the courses are on the detail, and the qualifications of the professors to teach the students, etc. How could anyone object to Mom and apple pie? It sounds like common sense, right?
Wrong. First of all, a student applies to a university based on any combination of a number of factors--maybe it's reputation (e.g., Ivy League), cost, proximity, available slots for a chosen major or professional degree, etc. For example, one of my nieces attended a private college in South Dakota because she found waiting lists for nursing programs in her home state of Colorado were oversubscribed. There are relevant facts you can get about schools from sources like US News & World Report. A lot depends on one's post-graduate plans; for example, there may be statistics on job offers and salary ranges for a particular program, acceptance rates at graduate degree programs, etc.
A professor who only teaches a few students (most likely a research professor)? What you might not get is the number of grants he or she is pulling in, other quality professors or students he or she is attracting to the program, the professor's connections to top corporations or venture capitalists, the number of dissertation committees he or she is sitting on, the contribution he or she is making to the program's reputation, etc. For example, I don't think you could argue that the best use of Albert Einstein's time would have been teaching college freshmen analytic geometry. Keep in mind I'm not defending all professors teaching 6 hours a semester. But it is a lot easier to query how many courses and/or students a professor is teaching than understanding the big picture.
Second, in many cases there are independent accreditation programs (e.g., AACSB for business schools), where college programs are scrutinized for some of the very things that Rep. Kolkhorst is suggesting, e.g., the curricula, faculty qualifications, etc. Does the typical parent or student have the competence to evaluate faculty, courses and programs? Let's be honest: not really. We have to depend on assessments by others whom are more familiar with the discipline and can independently and expertly analyze that faculty member's scholarship. Yes, I may be interested in my doctor's bedside manner from patients via the web, but when it comes to trusting him with my life, I'm looking at his graduation from an accredited medical school, his board certifications and any relevant actions by medical review boards, e.g., license revocation.
Third, I am concerned by privacy and due process rights. Yeah, right: government employees have no right to privacy: but public disclosure of salaries can result in friction among co-workers: that's why private-sector companies usually don't do it. I understand that the public doesn't want to discover that faculty are making Bell, CA city manager type money-- $800K a year (I always wondered why my CPA baby sister at one point aspired to be a city manager....) It would be more useful to discuss the department median or mean and maybe identify those individuals making above a certain compensation band.
[I'll never forget that the ardent feminist professor working in the next office at UWM was absolutely obsessed by how much I was making, obviously worried that UWM offered me more money than she was making. I refused to discuss it--hey, I was making over $650/month, my graduate student stipend for teaching 2 courses a semester. She vowed that I couldn't stonewall her investigation, because it was available through the state of Wisconsin. She later returned, with a smirk on her face, telling me my salary; she was obviously pleased to learn she was making more than me. And when the senior faculty met to divvy up the overall 2% increase, I got rewarded for 3 major article acceptances and decent teaching evaluations with something like a 1.5% increase. Those are the kind of perverted results which occur when progressive educators run a business school.]
The other point involves due process and an improper, unethical inclusion of comments: why should a professor have his professional reputation stained by an anonymous slanderous remark from a bitter student with an ax to grind? There is no independent validation of or accountability for spurious allegations. True, you can't stop someone from trying to ruin your reputation, but there are slander and libel laws.
The Other Side. Mr. Keener talks about two principal objections raised by certain faculty groups: that it was demeaning to have to present their credentials and other course related information to the little people, and the real intention is to identify red meat for culturally conservative groups, presenting a potential threat to academic freedom.
I disagree with both counts. I think the public has a right to know. I wouldn't have a problem putting my curriculum vita on a website, but I would point out that when it comes to articles published by faculty it's fairly easy to identify articles and book chapters. (I'm particularly proud of a couple of annual national conference papers I wrote for Decision Sciences Institute that Google doesn't seem to pull up.) I don't think it's helpful to try to block access to that information because it has the appearance of trying to hide something.
I think a better point to make is that the information isn't really that useful to people, and they could make some unwarranted inferences about, say, one teacher having more students in the same course than another teacher. They also may not know about the relative prestige of a peer-reviewed journal.
I'm a little more sympathetic to the academic freedom argument (although I don't regard the Ward Churchill incident to be a case of academic freedom). A university should be a place to freely debate controversial ideas in one's discipline without fear of reprisals. For example, I once wrote an unpublished article criticizing a widely-used measure for computer user satisfaction in the MIS literature; the peer reviews took the nature of nasty personal attacks, and the article was rejected. I understand the fact that several academics had a vested interest in the use of the measure (e.g., previously published research).
My own mother doesn't quite understand why Fr. Lonergan in my social philosophy course included, among readings, writings of Karl Marx. There's a difference between researching a point of view and advocating that point of view. Most professors know where to draw the line and usually want to distance themselves from public advocacy because it undermines their credibility as an academic researcher.
I think, for instance, cultural conservatives who try to stage a boycott of a professor's classes simply because he or she presents controversial ideas would be doing something both unethical and futile. You cannot censor ideas you disagree with.
There is no doubt that a progressive professor, whom abuses his grade authority by punishing economic libertarians and other conservatives simply for the fact that they disagree with him or provides a hostile, intimidating environment to prevent expression of viewpoints contradicting his own, has breached professional ethics.
-- Personal Comments
First, I have an issue with student evaluations and/or comments; I've had mixed results from my own past evaluations, but many people may not be aware that the universities where I taught principally rated courses on subjective versus more specific/objective criteria (including, but not restricted to, the quality and amount of information learned in the course, their confidence about this course as serving as a prerequisite for higher-level courses, the quantity and quality of relevant course assignments, the competence of the professor teaching the course, the fitness of the course to career objectives, the fairness of classroom tests relative to the information presented during class, or the topical nature of information presented in the course (particularly in my discipline, MIS and related rapidly changing high technology disciplines). Instead, the anonymous ratings, applicable in my experience, were cursory and subjective in nature on less than a handful of questions, such as the overall evaluation of the course and the professor and a comparative assessment. I'm convinced performance criteria of these type are not useful from standard methodological criteria (i.e., reliability and validity) and may not serve much more than a surrogate measure of a professor's personal popularity and/or reputation.
Now I suspect that my fellow conservatives may be surprised, even astonished at a free-market libertarian suggesting caution over the release of consumer information. After all, in the real world, you can't control what other people say behind your back. I'm well-aware of the fact that there are websites like ratemyprofessors.com. But, for instance, anecdotal comments are not statistically valid and can reflect personal animosity towards a professor. It was embarrassing to have my colleagues and deans read an outlier comment, say, referencing my personal hygiene. I've had students whom have concocted conspiracy theories over my tougher course standards; others whom have complained that they were A and B students, barely confident they were passing my course (involving the development of new skills, like computer programming), and suggesting I had unrealistic standards compared to their prior teachers; and (Newt Gingrich will like this) they were making an A in their history class with a fraction of the workload--if I was such a great teacher, it would be a lot easier for them. I've cited before in blog posts I had one student whom argued he had learned more in my class that in any other course, but I didn't deserve any of the credit because he did it on his own. (Imagine, parents: you raise your kids so they can function independently, but they argue you deserve none of the credit because they did it all by themselves. In my view, the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the tyrannical professor somehow got more out of him than all his other professors, so OF COURSE the student is going to rate him a below-average professor...)
There are comments that do provide valid feedback, but they don't fall in the typical university's evaluation schemes. When I was a visiting professor at Illinois State, my colleagues were jealous of my publication record and used to defensively assert that they could have publications, too, but unlike research-oriented professors, they put their students first in terms of time and effort. What self-serving hubris and presumptuousness! I was teaching a software design course at the time, talking about object-oriented programming and other current topics in IT arena. One of my students wrote in his evaluation something to the effect, "I'm a graduating senior and how is it this is the first course I've had where the professor is actually talking about things I see in trade publications?"
I also reported in a prior post a rare encounter of meeting one of my former students (while I was a teaching fellow at UH). I was shopping for a new suit and this young salesman came up to me, addressing me by name. (I sometimes have trouble recognizing clean-shaved former students in suits.) He introduced himself, telling me he had in fact raised my name in conversation at lunch that day. I cringed; he was in the first class I taught, and the perfectionist I am, I started reflecting on my mistakes and how I would redo the class today. He laughed and said, "You know, I hated your guts while I was taking the class. But I wouldn't change a thing. I learned more in your class than any other class I've had at UH, and I can honestly say I never had a real college exam until I took one of yours." (I suspect the feedback was genuine, because he didn't have to admit he once hated my guts...)
But, of course, there has always been word of mouth by students. I quickly befriended a pre-med student at the University of Texas; I remember how we went out to see the Tower lit orange when the baseball team won the College World Series. Joe was exceptionally bright, but he left nothing to chance when it came to grades: he would routinely check the grade distribution of professors for upcoming courses and choose the "easiest" professors. I never really did; I always liked pushing myself. I remember taking this speech course at OLL on a pass-fail basis; I loved performing these soliloquies, e.g., from George Bernard Shaw. The professor pulled me aside, expressing frustration that I had registered pass-fail, because she wanted to give me an A for the course. I took an undergraduate upper-division philosophy class at UT over the summer (I didn't have other choices I could apply towards my minor). The professor called me out after class one day; I didn't know what it was about, but he quickly told me that the paper I had submitted was graduate school quality and didn't understand why I was taking that class...
On the other hand, I've had some professors whom have won teaching awards; in particular, I recall one starting off the graduate seminar I was taking by saying he was still in the process of learning the class material himself, that we would be learning the subject together. If anything, that seemed to endear him with other class members. (Don't get me wrong; sometimes professors teach new courses and material. I don't think that a professor needs to be an authority on each and every thing. I do believe that a professor has to be honest about his or her limitations and not try to bluff students. But I'm personally concerned by a class structure which implies seat-of-the-pants presentation.)
Going back to the GIGO (garbage-in, garbage-out) of teaching evaluations as I've experienced, I don't mind for properly measured teaching outcomes, including more useful criteria (say, a standardized test reflecting course objectives, success in follow-up courses, etc.)
Second, I would caution students and parents syllabi, like curriculum vitae, can be hyped beyond context, and sometimes a professor has to deal with unexpected issues. For example, I have mentioned in past posts how I discovered that some 90% of the students entering my UTEP database management course did not have a fundamental understanding of data structures, covered in a prerequisite course. Effectively, I had to teach two courses for the price of one; many students felt that they were being overloaded. It was not in my pay grade to evaluate whether the lecturer whom taught them was abiding by course requirements and objectives. What I often found was that I had a wide cross-section of students--some could do my assignments in a half hour, others couldn't do them in over 13 hours. You have to strike a realistic balance between those groups. I wouldn't want to be interrogated over why I was teaching data structures if it wasn't in my published syllabus. What you can do is sometimes influenced by factors beyond your control. For example, in one of the first database courses I took, everybody in the course had to take an incomplete, because the relevant college database kept crashing with limited uptime, leaving us inadequate time to complete our projects.
What the parent or student in particular needs to know is if there are relevant cross-university curricula standards and how consistent their program of study is relative to those standards. It's also useful to note about recency of course materials, particularly when you are dealing with emerging sciences and technologies.
Third, I'm concerned about the relevance of criteria in certain contexts. For example, class counts can be misleading if we are talking about a necessary doctoral seminar for a small number of eligible students. In research-oriented courses, we may discuss important recently-published journal articles. I found I was constantly changing textbooks in my rapidly evolving MIS discipline, and the workload of preparing new lectures and computer assignments can be staggering. It's not like Shakespeare scholars suddenly uncover a new batch of plays each semester. You can attempt to provide a broad framework of objectives, but I often found myself late in my office typing up my lecture notes for the next day or devising some test data for assignments. The last thing I need is my time taken up with lawyers questioning my level of detail, the timing of deliverables, etc.
Fourth, I do not deny the fact that there is cost inflation. I remember reading recently where this junior professor in the business college at Texas A&M was making $130K. That was probably triple what I had been making as a professor; I know inflation has increased, but.. (Not to mention a number of professors have outside consulting opportunities, unlike my experience.) But each year or two, the state legislature passes a budget; what's the argument? We need to give the people the knowledge they need to force us to put state universities on a tight budget? The answer is for state legislatures to play bad cop with out-of-control university budgets.
I will now say something that will make all professors, President Obama, students and parents hate me with a passion: I think higher education is in its own bubble, not everyone attending college should be there, and part of the cost bubble has to do with generous financial aid packages, not unlike all those mortgage bankers putting money in the hands of risky applicants, allowing them to bid up the prices of homes to an unsustainable level.
--Concluding Remarks
In theory, I agree there should be improved transparency to ALL government operations; universities should not be singled out. We need to ensure safeguards are in place to protect due process rights of professors and potential threats to a university's function as a free market of ideas. We should be careful that release of certain private data (e.g., compensation) is done in such as way as not to create morale issues in university departments. We have to have realistic expectations about level of detail in a course syllabis, particularly for new or revised courses for a professor or courses in rapidly changing disciplines. Citizens should understand the underlying data (e.g., student evaluations) may be intrinsically flawed because of poor methodology. Other factors, such as class size, may reflect a variety of factors: limited enrollment because of the nature of the class (e.g., the pipeline of eligible doctoral students may be smaller this year), a new professor is just establishing himself or herself and there may not be enough information, etc.
I don't believe the Texas law addresses my concerns, and it raises more questions than it answers; I want faculty members focusing on their teaching, research, and service, without having to devote significant amounts of time in response to the transparency process. As a student, I never really needed the level of course detail this legislation requires. On many faculties, for a particular course, there might be only one faculty member teaching that semester. (For example, I never got a chance to teach the core MBA MIS course because my colleague Bob "owned" the course.) The issue isn't quantity of data but quality and usability of data. I think the public would be better served by strengthening independent/internal audit functionality and relevant accreditation processes and improving intra-state and cross-state comparative statistics. I also think that the people of Texas would be better served by consolidating centers of excellence and improved, more usable comparative information on intrastate academic programs and costs.
Yet Another Reason For America To Fire
Pelosi As House Speaker
Obama and his fellow progressive leadership make it very difficult for me to agree with them: among other things, I have supported Obama on Haiti relief, I have disagreed with Arizona's immigration law, and from the jump I was supportive of allowing Muslims the right to worship in the proximity of Ground Zero, one of the infamous sites associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (On the other hand, when has Obama addressed local union vows to prevent any construction of the mosque?)
Speaker Pelosi's unconscionable attempt to intimidate dissidents' constitutional right to express their opposition to the mosque by threatening an investigation is morally unacceptable and an abuse of power. I disagree with the dissidents and have publicly criticized the Republicans of playing with fire on the issue, noting it contradicted Bush's honorable post-9/11 pleas not to engage in guilt by association by reprisals against Muslim Americans, not involved in the tragic events.
Sunday Talk Soup
Mitch McConnell did a great job talking to David Gregory's hair, as Gregory tried to do the same thing as he did with John Boehner recently, by replaying former Fed Chair Greenspan's reluctant concession (which I think was a mistake and played to progressive talking points) that the Bush tax cuts don't pay for themselves. (Note, which of course the liberal host will never acknowledge, that Greenspan was not asked whether the Bush tax cuts should be continued in the short term, i.e., past the end of the year.) Mitch McConnell correctly noted that we don't raise taxes in the middle of a soft economy and raising taxes on job creators--which is what the Bush tax cut end would mean in practical terms--is counterproductive when you are trying to stimulate job growth.
Let me further point out to David Gregory's hair two critical points: First, it is rather hypocritical, don't you think?, for the Democrats to raise the issue with respect to the less than 25% of the Bush tax cuts which go to the people that pay the lion's share of income taxes, but not to the more than 75% which go to middle-class taxpayers. You can't have it both ways, David Gregory's hair. Either you raise taxes across the board or you extend tax cuts across the board.
Second, you fail to point out that current Fed Chairman Bernanke over a month ago at a House committee meeting (I guess Gregory's fellow news correspondents failed to tell him...) that he favored extension of the tax cuts, at least given the context of the current soft economy.
Political Humor
A poll says the number of Americans who drink alcohol is at an all time high at 67 percent. It's good to see the majority of Americans finally agree on something. - Jim Barach
[I haven't confirmed the rumor I started just now: there's a new college drinking game, patterned after the "Hi, Bob" game of the eighties: it's called the "Bush Bash". Basically, you down a beer or shot every time you hear Obama bash Bush until the mid-term elections. Most college students are totally wasted by noontime...]
Musical Interlude: The American Songbook Series
Perry Como, "More Than You Know"
