Sense and Sensibility

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Some more thinking about journalism, the public sphere and policy formation. There was a spirited discussion of breastfeeding last week at a number of blogs, particularly 11d and Crooked Timber.

I said my piece in the 11d thread, basically recounting how my wife and I encountered an extreme advocate of breastfeeding just before our daughter was born and how the intensity of her advocacy wormed its way into our heads even though neither of us cared for it when we heard it. This is one reason why we were slow to move to what turned out to be a totally sensible, pragmatic approach to feeding our child, which was mostly breastmilk (some pumped, some not) combined with a supplemental formula feeding when needed.

Hanna Rosin’s article about breastfeeding, which kicked off the cross-blog discussion, asserts that the positive effects of breastfeeding have been exaggerated. A lot of people reacting to the article (I think in many cases without reading it) leap almost immediately to criticizing Rosin for rejecting breastfeeding (she doesn’t reject it personally; in the article she notes that she breastfed and in the end, is reasonably happy that she did). Those critics also emphasize the expert medical consensus in favor of breastfeeding, asking whether Rosin or any other person who has had doubts has any ground for questioning that consensus.

As a layperson, just looking at the data, I’d say that it is reasonable to say that breastfeeding is better. It’s overwhelmingly better where water supplies are contaminated. It seems to have a range of moderately good effects when that’s not a consideration. On the other hand, as Rosin notes, it’s way harder to do than most first-time parents think. I know we were stunned at how difficult and exhausting it is for both baby and mother to master. It has some costs in terms of scheduling for working women, and bottle-feeding also allows fathers to share the load more equitably from the beginning.

So why is there such an intense commitment from the medical establishment to “breast is best”, a rhetoric that seems to outweigh the modest positives of exclusive breastfeeding? I think this kind of rhetorical overcompensation is typical of a lot of practices that have expert consensus behind them but where their rate of adoption by the general public or their incorporation into policy lags behind that consensus.

When there is such a gap, experts tend to think that the only way to close it is rhetorical overcompensation, to overstate benefits and dangers in order to get attention. Simply saying, “There are modest benefits”, or “All things being equal, it would be better if we did not do this” doesn’t seem to be enough to persuade people to adjust their habits.

Just on this point alone, there’s a risk of blowback: when you oversell a practice or a policy and it doesn’t deliver the overwhelming benefits promised, you often lose the people who tried to change, and foster increased cynicism about all expert authority to boot.

I think this kind of overemphasis also has a corrosive effect on the formation of expert knowledge itself. For one, it underwrites a dangerous sense of inside and outside within an expert community, that you can only talk about proportional benefits and harms when you’re with fellow experts, and when strangers come in the room, you have to switch on the megaphones. For another, this sensibility encourages experts to isolate and amplify the causal force of single variables, which is a basic problem with much social and behavioral science. You get rewarded in various ways for a finding that disaggregates one small aspect of a hugely multivariable outcome because that’s where the feeder streams to public health, policy formation and the like are, it’s what produces findings that can be implemented, encouraged, advocated. You get shunted aside if you firmly insist that the life outcomes for children are a massively complex consequence of income, family stability, physical environment, feeding practices, genetics, influential peers and inspirational models, education, luck, complex-systems interactions between institutions and events, and the mysterious alchemy of the human condition.

And maybe you should be shunted aside if your insistence on that complexity is taken to mean that all more particulate or manageable conclusions are impossible or unwelcome. Breast is best, clearly. Many of the changes to everyday practice which experts argue for are sensible, useful, productive and well-supported by solid evidence.

What I really want is for us to get to a place where modest incremental benefits can be argued for using modest incremental rhetoric, where experts don’t feel the need for overcompensatory alarmism or feel they have to circle the wagons in order to get attention or bludgeon an uncooperative public into change. But the burden of making that change is not all on them. Some of it rests on the mainstream media and the way they report on scientific or expert findings.

Some of it rests on the public themselves. Getting to a place where most of us feel the call to a social politics that rests on modesty, proportionality and pragmatism is really difficult. Partly because there are ethical, social and political questions which shouldn’t be considered in a modest or restrained way, where bipartisan or consensual approaches are the wrong way to go, but also partly because maintaining a measured approach to many questions in a discourse that’s staked out by competing totalizing, will-to-power approaches is a quick road to marginality and irrelevance, a form of unilateral surrender.

I’m not saying that this kind of modest or proportional rhetoric is the be-all and end-all of social and political dispute. I’m sure some of my preference for this kind of rhetoric has as much to do with being a schlumpy mid-life guy who feels increasingly conflict-averse. The one thing that actually still tends to fire me up, really, is overwrought or hackishly partisan argument, when people throw out some messy, ambiguous issue on the table and proceed to lobotomize it down to some one-note slogan, when people seem unwholesomely certain. But I feel pretty certain that life would be better if people (and experts) could learn to playfully knock around a range of ideas about What Is To Be Done with a less fanatical devotion to their own idee fixes, with less fussy tending of their own felt wounds and slights.

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 13 Comments

Cramer and Stewart

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’m very much enthused by the proposition that Jon Stewart and his merry band of TIVO-ing staffers should step up their attacks and go after much of the rest of the media.

The basic drive behind the Daily Show‘s criticism of CNBC is that at the end of the day, truth matters. Getting it right matters. That it’s time to cowboy up and act like adults, to be responsible for what we say in public. To wipe off the clown makeup when we’re performing in roles where what we do is consequential.

One of the off-stage handmaidens of the mess we’re in now is that a lot of the mainstream media, a lot of online writers and a lot of public figures all arrived at the same place over the last two decades, that your schtick was what mattered, your brand name, your spin. That you didn’t have any responsibilities beyond that. That you’re just a performer, an entertainer, that anyone who takes you seriously is a rube. That if you’re wrong about fundamentals or facts, bluster and splutter a bit, throw up some smoke, out-yell the other guy, change the subject, and if that doesn’t work, shrug and say, “Who cares, none of this really matters anyway.”

Stewart didn’t let Cramer or his colleagues off the hook with that excuse. It would have been very easy, much less emotionally excruciating, to just open the door to that alibi, to say, “I understand, you’re just trying to entertain, it’s not meant seriously, your viewers understand it’s all an act, maybe you should just put a more explicit disclaimer in front of your show”. But Stewart didn’t invite that escape, and Cramer wasn’t able to seize it from him.

The jaw-dropping refrain from Cramer throughout the segment was, “Well, I talked to this well-placed source and he lied to me.” You talk to a source and if you trust that source, that’s it, case closed, story finished, judgment rendered. It was delicious to see Stewart constantly circle back to this defense and express unfiltered anger and disgust at its patent inadequacy. This is especially true with financial reporting because there is a public record, there is public information, there was enough out there beyond the sources that could have been consistently used to push back on them. There were observers who saw the over-leveraging, the bad debt, the hubris coming from a long ways off, and they didn’t see all of that by calling up a couple of CEOs and asking them if there was a problem.

I do not think that this description of methodology is limited to Cramer. I think it’s what a tremendous amount of mainstream journalism has become, the pimping of connections, the passing-on of self-interested representations from powerful and influential people who are otherwise safely insulated from skepticism. Judith Miller had the same alibi.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics, Popular Culture | 21 Comments

The Protection of the Uninitiated

Posted on March 12, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I don’t have much to add to various reactions to the Watchmen film. To put it simply, I enjoyed it far more than I expected to, especially after I found 300 impossible to enjoy as simple dumb fun because it’s dumbness went beyond being simple.

The one thing I have noticed in reading a lot of Watchmen-knowledgeable reviews and commentaries, though, is the presence in those reviews of significant others who had not read the graphic novel back then or now. These accompanying viewers are reported in many cases, to the considerable surprise of their escorts, to have liked the film. I’ll add to that: my wife, with minimal comic book knowledge and no prior reading of the graphic novel, was actually way more enthusiastic than I was (and I thought it was a pretty decent film).

This reaction makes me mindful of the way that geeks married to or dating or related to non-geeks tend to deal with their cultural obsessions in the presence of those others. Gently? Carefully? The decision to expose a normal to a geek experience is often done tremulously and uncertainly.

The strangest reaction of all, however, is not, “I don’t get it”. It’s, “That was GREAT”, where the positive reaction doesn’t involve an embrace of the total cultural penumbra around the work or experience but just the work itself. (Bob Rehak has a great description of all the talk and viewing and buzz that precedes the arrival of a pop cultural work, calling it the “cometary halo”.)

The reason that’s the most uncomfortable experience at all is that it raises sharp questions about geekery itself. Is this film or show or book great in and of itself? Do you need any metatextual knowledge to like it? Is the metatextual knowledge actually screwing with my ability to enjoy the experience myself? Immediately after the film, I’m fielding questions about Silk Spectre I and Hollis Mason and Mothman and the missing Squid and so on. This is gleeful on one hand, and on the other, how discomforting to know that you don’t need to know any of it to have a great time seeing the film.

Of course, this goes for all cultural criticism in some measure, not just geek popular culture. What’s missed if you read and love a 19th Century novel or a Shakespeare play and that’s the alpha and omega of your experience? Maybe nothing at all: maybe that’s the sign of the greatest hope that a cultural critic could ever have, that someone can come to that culture without having their hands held and yet have questions afterwards that you can step in to answer. But it worries a bit that you’re the one reserved, holding back, fretting about the problem of transmedial adaptation or about whether the change in the ending matters or whether the film’s literalism is a good thing or a bad thing.

On the other hand: geek and non-geek agreement that Malin Akerman did a pretty crappy acting job as Silk Spectre II, while Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson were damn great as Rorschach and Nite Owl II, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian was also impressive.

Posted in Popular Culture | 7 Comments

Mindful of Money

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Swarthmore, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is presently engaged in serious collective scrutiny of its spending habits. The hope in our case and many others is that small, incremental frugalities will head off any need for more drastic measures to control spending.

There are two big problems with this approach to cost control in a relatively decentralized academic institution.

The first is a lack of information about the importance or impact of any single change to spending. If you go to the often-considerable effort of changing a personal habit, you tend to get fairly immediate feedback in your own life routines or in your body about the positive consequences and whether those results justify the effort of maintaining a new routine.

Institutional budgets by contrast are opaque and they operate at annual or longer time cycles. It’s hard to know whether a change in practice is worth the trouble. It’s always easier to believe that difficult choices can be avoided by squeezing excess and waste out of existing spending, but sometimes that kind of cost-cutting just ends up imposing performative hassles and strictures on everyday business while the tough choices get deferred, and at no real savings. On the other hand, sometimes there are tons of little economies that are easy to achieve that add up to a structural solution to general budgetary woes.

What most people need in order to decide whether changes in habit are worth the trouble is a more transparent account of the savings derived from small changes in behavior in relationship to a total institutional budget and in relationship to the total range of costs and expenditures within that budget.

I’ll give a really trivial example here at Swarthmore to illustrate. I play tennis once or twice a week at Swarthmore’s indoor tennis court. There are three courts. In the past, when there’s only one group on a single court, the building staff have allowed the players to have one bank of lights on the adjacent courts on in addition to the lights over their own court. (This leaves two banks of lights on the adjacent courts dark.) Otherwise, with just the lights over a single court on, the visibility is relatively poor, the court fairly dark. It’s been decided that one austerity measure we can take is to turn off the one row of lights on the adjacent courts, leaving just the lights on over the one court.

This is a trivial sacrifice that I and I think all other tennis players are happy to make. It’s only a slight inconvenience to play with poorer visibility against the context of the luxury of having a court to play on at all. And yet, you can’t help but be curious about the exact savings involved. How much does it cost for those two extra rows of light for the 90-120 minutes of a game, and how often in an average week would the college be paying that cost? If it turned out that the total weekly savings was $25, and thus the annual savings was $1,300 (less a few weeks when the facility is closed or on highly restricted hours), well, is it worth it? How many $1,300 habits need to be given up before the savings start to matter against the current shortfall, and are there anywhere near that many habits of that kind? If the total weekly savings from this change was $100 or $500, that starts to feel psychologically substantive.

Of course, if the lights cost that much or more to operate, then that raises completely different budgetary questions. Are there cheaper lights? Maybe we should shut the indoor courts any time the weather outside is decent enough to play there. Maybe we should charge tennis players a small fee to offset the cost of the lights. Maybe we’d be better off allowing outsiders to play on the courts for a substantial membership fee (but one well short of the local competitors).

There’s a sweet spot of “This small change produces meaningful savings” between “This change is a hassle that saves us a handful of pennies” and “The significant budgetary impact of a small change reveals that the entire expenditure on some routine practice is insane and needs immediate review”.

Every single change of habit needs an informational feedback loop if it’s to take hold and make sense. Otherwise, it just disappears into a black box.

The second major issue is a classic game-theoretic problem. You have little motivation to change your own habitual practices if you get a sense that others are not doing (or being made to do) the same. If one unit in an institution gets with the new religion of austerity while another remains profligate and there are no consequences that follow to either, then the people who are careful spenders feel taken advantage of.

This problem is really exaggerated by an inclination in a lot of colleges and universities to take all disciplines and departments as entitled to the same dispensation of resources but also as subject to the same kinds of cost-cutting imperatives, a kind of faux-egalitarian rhetoric. So, for example, when administrations direct libraries to cut journals budgets, libraries often have to turn to departments and ask each of them to volunteer a few titles that they can get rid of, so that the cost-cutting seems to fall evenly on all, to be a collective responsibility. But if you did a relatively dispassionate cost/benefit analysis, you might note that you could cut three hugely expensive journals (usually but not always in the sciences) at the cost of thirty or forty journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Mostly academics avoid having that kind of conversation, where we have to ask what the relative worth of one important but expensive journal in one discipline is over ten such journals in another discipline. Instead we tend to say, “You tend to your knitting, and we’ll tend to ours; we’ll cut one journal and you cut one journal”. We don’t tend to want to talk about which disproportionately expensive projects or commitments are worth it and which aren’t worth it, because then we’d have to try and convert our divergent apples and oranges to some common fruit standard.

If you want people to economize, they have to know and see that everyone else is economizing, and they have to trust that the economizing is happening in a way that is proportional to the expenses involved in other units and divisions of the institution. No one wants to spend a lot of time scrimping and saving only to find that across the quad, the champagne and caviar is still flowing with cheerful abandon. No one wants to be told that they’ve got to cut ten percent of their budget when they’re already a bare-bones operation while another unit or department can get rid of ten percent just by cutting one of a number of luxurious expenditures.

(I’m leaving aside here the very different situation in large universities of divisions or schools that “sit on their own bottom”, that have completely separate streams of revenue that only barely intermingle with the general budget.)

So imposing austerity both equitably and rationally is sometimes not possible, and yet you have to persuade people that both principles are in play.

The way that budgets in most academic institutions work aggravates the problem still further. I’m not the only person who has been struck by the absolute absurdity of what often happens near the end of an annual budgetary cycle. If you’ve got a budget which has some fluctuations in how heavily it’s used from year to year, say a line item for speakers and events, you are often under serious pressure as the end of a budgetary year approaches to spend the whole thing down so that you don’t get an automatic cut on the grounds that you don’t need the budget. But if you used the whole of the budget in the two years previous, and ran out of the budget early in the year in the two years before that, cutting back in the one year you don’t use it is a totally counter-productive practice. The message that gets sent, in fact, is that saving money is not at all rewarded, that being a careful steward is punished. So you often see a big rush of unnecessary spending at the end of a budgetary cycle just to ensure that a line item gets brought to zero in order to avoid a permanent adjustment downward in that line item.

So if you want managers of departmental and divisional budgets to be good stewards of those funds, you have to assure them that everyone is being a good steward (or else) and you have to reward rather than punish units which manage to come in under budget for the year. Otherwise, the first person to cross the finish line in the savings race is just the first-prize chump.

In both cases, the first requirement for encouraging good decentralized management of budgets is information and transparency, down to a fairly fine-grained level of expenditure. It’s worth the squirming that this kind of transparency is likely to produce, at least if an institution is serious about producing distributed rather than centralized budgetary mindfulness, about making everyone feel responsibility for analyzing cost and benefit.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 9 Comments

Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Timothy Burke

As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can’t provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.

As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising that complaining about how people on the Internet are really mean or stupid. It narrows the discussion down to a central function of journalism, the independent investigation of government, industry and society and the delivery of information from such investigation.

I know that many of the journalists talking along these lines don’t really mean to throw overboard all the other writing (and jobs supported by that writing) that appears within most major newspapers. But I’m going to take it that way: as a concession that much of the rest of the content of 20th Century newspapers is served either equivalently or better by online media. We don’t need newspapers to have film criticism or editorial commentary or consumer analysis of automobiles or comic strips or want ads or public records. It might be that existing online provision of those kinds of information could use serious improvement or has issues of its own. It might be that older audiences don’t know where to find some of that information, or have trouble consuming it in its online form. But there’s nothing that makes published newspapers or radio programming inherently superior at providing any of those functions, and arguably many things that make them quite inferior to the potential usefulness of online media. So throw the columnists and the reviewers and the lifestyle reporters off the newspaper liferaft.

So it comes down to independent, sustained investigation of public affairs. The argument that online media cannot provide this function comes down to money, in two respects. First, that doing this kind of work requires an organization that will support the travel and costs necessary to doing this work, that if you want reports from Darfur or Afghanistan or the U.S. Presidential campaign, you’ve got to pay for reporters to travel and live and acquire information, and you’ve got to pay to have an organization that legitimates those reporters so that informational sources will recognize and trust and accredit those reporters. Second, that you’ve got to pay people a living wage for reporters and writers to do this kind of work in a dedicated fashion, that while people might produce short-form criticism of current films or games or TV shows purely out of voluntary interest while making a living at some other job, they are not going to engage in sustained investigatory work for serial or short-form publication without being paid to do so.

I agree, but let me first pick a few nits before moving to a possible answer to the problem of financial support for reportage.

1) The key distinction here is “short-form publication”. Longer reportage, at book length, is at least arguably still supported financially by other publishing economies besides newspapers, that consumers will still pay for serious nonfiction and investigative reportage. Arguably a lot of the work appearing at that length is more satisfying and substantial than newspaper journalism, in fact: it doesn’t require savage editing or oversimplification in order to fit within the format of a daily paper. If you were trying to understand the Iraq War as it unfolded, where would you rather turn? The ten to twenty excellent books produced by reporters or the fairly shabby and inconsistent record of daily reportage in mainstream newspapers? It’s true that newspaper jobs underwrote some of the production of those books, but transferring that support onto the book publishing industry doesn’t strike me as impossible.

Moreover, if we lost at least some short-form reporting, that might be a blessing in disguise. Daily newspapers (and yes, daily blogs) are forced to make many mountains out of molehills precisely because they need to report every day on stories whose development is not necessarily a day-to-day affair. So we get microreadings of tracking polls, parsings of speeches, small leaks blown into gigantic kabuki theater for the amusement of Inside-the-Beltway types, none of which really tells us much about how a story is actually developing. Online media, print media, and television all suffer from this, but maybe if we gave way to longer press cycles and more substantive publication forms, we’d be very well-served.

Still, some stories do need daily coverage in a short-form manner. Sometimes we can’t wait six months for a book or three months for an article in the Atlantic.

2) If print journalists want to claim that their saving grace is independent, investigative journalism, they might want to clean house a bit first, because a substantial amount of print journalism doesn’t really live up to that ideal. Getting fed information by a confidential source inside an Administration or inside a business who is using the reporter either to kick a rival in the teeth or as part of a coordinated scheme to float a trial balloon about a hypothetical decision is not independent investigative reporting. It’s a collusive agreement to serve as an unpaid assistant to the public-relations staff of a government or business. Calling a few experts on your Rolodex and plugging them into static paragraphs in an article that otherwise just processes the conventional wisdom of punditry is not independent investigative reporting.

If what we want to support is sustained, independent investigation of issues of public concern, we need some new models about how to do that kind of work. A lot of what passes for investigation now isn’t ultimately that different from what online media can provide, and much of that alleged reporting will be reinvented if newspapers pass from the scene. Government officials are still going to try and manipulate information to their advantage even if they don’t do it by leaking to a major urban daily. Industries are going to try to get favorable coverage from seemingly independent sources even if they don’t have a Washington Post or Los Angeles Times to do it through.

Investigative reporting, wherever it ends up appearing, needs to tighten up its ethics and to systematize and broaden its methodology. And that effort needs to go in tandem with legislative and governmental reforms: better sunshine laws, more requirements for disclosure and transparency from private businesses and institutions, and so on. Investigative reporting should involve a sustained, deep reading and use of publically available materials, the acquisition of independent technical or expert knowledge about the issues in an investigation, and sustained pressure on publically available sources to speak to the investigation. Ethically it requires a lot of attention to remaining independent. This does not mean balanced in that tedious one-hand other-hand way: a good investigative reporter can have a strong view or sensibility about the subject of their investigation. But they can’t be a shill or mouthpiece for some off-stage interest.

=======

This, I agree, can’t be done for free, or in the spare hours after work. Bloggers mostly are not going to do this kind of work. Short-form investigative reporting appearing in a daily or weekly publication requires a full-time job.

If newspapers contract their publication to this alone, can they remain economically viable with more or less the same business model as they have now?

Probably not. I suspect that after you throw overboard the columnists, reviewers etc. and their editors, you haven’t shed that much of your payroll. You can cut your overhead some, too: get out of that prestige building, concentrate your desks. Maybe create more pooled positions for expensive reportage (foreign, for example) or buy more from stringers and wire services.

Now you’ve probably lost at least some of your advertisers, who were there for the cultural coverage or the comics pages or something besides the reportage. Probably some of your older customer base is also gone, because that’s all they read too, along with a few of the bleeder-leads in the local news. Maybe you can make some of the lost print advertising revenue back with more extensive online advertising. That works for the top upper wedge of online content providers, so why not daily reportage providers? (The quality of product has to be high, though.)

Let’s suppose you up your subscriber fees considerably, figuring that your remaining audience of educated readers is willing to pay for high-quality information. Can you make up the difference in lost revenues to make your slimmer, leaner payroll and overhead?

Probably not, but I’ll bet the difference is in sight at this point. So how to cross the gap? I think with some kind of philanthropic or foundation funding–what we maybe need is an umbrella organization that produces pool reportage with heavy foundation support, an independent endowment, etc., from which daily news outlets buy their content, which provides a revenue stream back to the organization that produces the reportage. Rather than an editorial staff who prunes the reportage produced to a single voice or standard, the goal would be to support multiple reporters working on the same issues whose filed stories could be mixed-and-matched by a news portal or end publication–so we might get a front page of a daily newspaper that would have three bylines on the Obama stimulus package, each the product of a different reporter’s investigative work, if the stories were interesting or well-developed enough.

The end of the newspaper model of the last century doesn’t have to be the end of independent investigative reporting. Arguably it might be the beginning of a much better form for it. But I agree that online media as they stand can’t substitute for that vital practice, can’t make up the difference spontaneously, can’t automatically fill in the gap that newspapers will leave as they sink beneath the waves.

Posted in Blogging, Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Miscellany | 18 Comments

Social Production, the Good Life, and the Ways of Desire

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Ever since I studied the history of consumption and commodities, I’ve been uncomfortable with the conventional terms of what James Twitchell has called the “jeremiad against consumerism”. I’m still uncomfortable with the proposition that what we now need to aim for in the resolution of our current crisis is an end state of material austerity, to shed all our worthless possessions, to give up consumer culture.

Part of my unease has to do with the argument of some experts that what’s needed is a short-term return to the consumer spending habits of 2003-2004 in order to boost the economy, then a managed, gradual “slow landing” to a much heavier emphasis on savings over spending to give the economy time to shed excess capacity in a sensible, graduated manner. That’s roughly the equivalent of expecting occupied Iraqis to universally throw flowers and parades to welcome the American military. Desire isn’t so easily managed, nor for that matter is fear. This vision of the way forward is made possible partly by mainstream economics’ lack of interest in culture, in psychology, in history, authorized by a belief that people are collectively easily pushed one way or the other by signals and incentives.

If eventually we settle into a new austerity, that is likely to be partly performative, an identity that we try to communicate to others for some of the same reasons we might have tried to communicate fashionability, luxury, discriminatory taste: because in our local worlds, that identity accumulates some kind of social capital. (Or it protects us from attack.) Some of the material underpinnings of everyday life are likely to remain the same, even if we present them as thrifty or moderate. Many of the staple goods and fundamentals of early 21st Century life will still be there, though middle-class American consumers may buy fewer of them, or buy more austere versions of them, or use them more carefully. Families may replace computers or cars on a much more extended cycle, and use them more parsimoniously, for example, but when those wear out, they’re getting replaced.

I’d still argue that a sense that the material world around us is dense in objects and spectacle, that we have a sense of what I’ve called fecundity, is important to middle-class well-being. A lot of professionals of my generation were already trying to make their peace with some kind of downward mobility before the crash of the last year, but that was not an adjustment from wealth to poverty, just a redrawing and relearning of limits within which comfort and material well-being were still very much available. So much cultural creation in the 20th Century has come from a sense that the world around us is materially and socially crackling with possibility, even from a sense of its excess and superabundance, and of course also the starkness of the absence of abundance and wealth from so much of the global life of humanity in the same time.

I struggled during a talk last December to explain that middle-class consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere can find that sense of abundance and possibility in the intangible. I partly meant this as a rejoinder to the argument that consumer culture is inevitably environmentally destructive, that it inevitably consumes material resources at a rate beyond replenishment. I also meant to give some of the manufacturers in the audience a sense that hope for them lies in hermeneutics as much as it does in economics, that a single commodity can carry enormous weight and meaning to people and that they will continue to prioritize acquiring and displaying and using that good if that happens, even when budgets are very tight. Desire works from intangibles and meaning far more than some fixed material utility.

If I had been clearer about my argument, I would have used the concept of “social production” that has cropped up recently at Matthew Yglesias and Crooked Timber. Middle-class well-being in the United States in the last ten years has been increased far more by social production than it has the addition of new material goods. Wikipedia, for all its faults, makes life better and easier. It’s true that Wikipedia happens to displace a material commodity, the encylopedia, and it does so without replacing the jobs that the publication of the Encyclopedia Brittanica provided. Not all social production is directly rivalrous with productivity in this way, but the key is that as social production rises, it supplements that sense that the world is fecund, full of wealth and possibility, it provides some of the well-being that material commodities also provide, and adds new kinds of well-being at the same time. In Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want”, it matters that the table is well-provided with silverware, that the home is safe and clean, and that there’s a big turkey on the platter, but at least some of the comfort and well-being in that scene is social and relational. Not everything that makes us feel wealthy and happy needs to involve the conversion of material resources into material objects.

At the same time, let’s not go skipping down the kumbaya path too far. It’s one thing to think along the lines that John Quiggan does in his Crooked Timber post, and point out that “there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job allocating resources to supporting innovation”, and to look forward to an economy that aligns social production, creativity, knowledge creation, innovation and a leaner, more coherent vision of productivity. It’s another thing to think that this gets us to a mash-up Sunday-school/countercultural version of the thrifty good life where we all live in 9-foot square houses, wear burlap bags, eat Soylent Green supplemented by the modest vegetable garden on the roof of our huts, live in communitarian happiness with our neighbors while flitting about the virtual global village on our netbooks, while producing homebrewed mash-up music videos of our cats for posting to YouTube. At least some of the material culture that both attracts and vexes us is also a part of the Good Life and needs to remain so. It will and should continue to produce difference as well as connection, be haunted by inequality and attended by pleasure.

The Good Life also needs good booze and good food. It needs extravagance and flights of fancy in architecture or the design of everyday objects. The Good Life can’t be bounded everywhere by a mean kind of utility, by a cool external judgement of need and want. Desire can’t just be penned up into an interior reserve: it sometimes must leap out into the material world, to hold and to act. The prophets of thrift throughout the 20th Century were also always preachers on behalf of the intense disciplining of human subjectivity, to the management of time and the control of sensation and the rationalization of beauty, to a Taylorism of the soul. That we’ve given those thrifty, controlled disciplinarians up for their opposite numbers, a crazed frenzy of Dionysian racketeers who pretended to rationality while they engorged themselves, is a good sign that it’s time to rethink how and when we desire, to recognize the ways that social production enabled by innovative technologies have enriched us far more than SUVs or 4-bathroom suburban mansions. But it’s not a reason to stop wanting.

Posted in Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities | 1 Comment

I Do Believe in Fairies! I Do!

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I hadn’t heard of Paul Krsek before this NPR segment and a few other NPR pieces about his view of the market and the economy, but I’ll be looking for his name more often from here on out.

Krsek struck me as one of those rare characters who is willing to talk honestly about the nature of his profession. Yes, of course his way of talking is self-interested, since his own investment strategy has been contrarian, and he’s trying to talk up his own approach. Nevertheless, he’s one of the few investment professionals I’ve heard in the media who is willing to admit that the emperor is stark naked, that the perennial repetition of the advice to “buy and hold” or “stay in the market” or “don’t look at your 401k” is bad advice from professionals who have no experience with an economic climate other than that which prevailed from 1981-2004.

Krsek observes in the segment that for people who are already retired or on the cusp of retirement, “staying in” on the premise that it isn’t until you sell or move your holdings that you’ve actually lost money is likely going to lead to further losses. He’s pretty gentle about it but I understand him to be saying that for investors in that position, they need to count that money as gone, lost, and adjust to the new normal, whatever that might be. that the only positive thing they can do now is stop the bleeding.

I also understood him to be arguing that we may be in a market where the bottom is very far away as yet, and that under those circumstances, even staying “in” for the long run may not be a smart thing to do. If you cashed out now and lost 30% from your peak value in your investment portfolio, even if you’re only 35 or 40, and moved that into a safe haven earning 4 or 5%, you might be better off than someone who just holds fast while stocks continue to lose more and more value. Even if we find the bottom in a year or two or three, and things then slowly start to turn around, it might be a decade or more before a stock-heavy portfolio gets anywhere close to its 2005-2006 value. Maybe quite a bit more than a decade.

Most financial advisors who appear in the media advise otherwise not just because of a limited ability to imagine different economic environments than that of the last two decades but because they know that the only hope for their own jobs and their own investments is to continue to entice investors to stay invested, to continue the Ponzi logic that has kept the thing afloat for so long. In this respect, Bernie Madoff isn’t a monstrous aberration of the investment management world, but instead its concentrated essence.

When you look at the long history of economic cycles and speculative bubbles, it starts to become apparent that there are really only three ways to successfully time a market and make more money than everyone else. 1) Create the speculative boom in the first place through price manipulation, cultural persuasion, cartel throttling of supply–and cash out early, as your control over speculators wanes. 2) Have information that other people do not and keep that information concealed for as long as possible. Again, to end up a winner, you have to cash out whenever that privileged access starts to erode (and it inevitably will). 3) Be genuinely smarter in the way you read public trends and information and make prudential, often contrarian, judgments in advance of everyone else. Count me a skeptic about the third category: I think there are people who pull that trick off once or twice, but almost no one in history has pulled it off consistently.

So most investors in most historical cases really fall into a fourth category: desperate scramblers for the last open chair before the music stops. Financial advisors try to keep that chair open by diverting the attention of other scramblers, by delaying the impulse of others to sit down and get out of the game. The tail end of a pyramid scheme is where the knives all come out and the bullshit flies fast and furious, where swindlers desperately try to stave off their losses by convincing their marks that all is well, stay the course, don’t listen to the naysayers, you gotta believe.

Posted in Miscellany, Politics | 5 Comments

Suggestions for the Campus Activist

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There’s an old idea in historical research that the material we find in archives often make their authors into “witnesses in spite of themselves”, that what people meant to record or note is often quite at odds with what they end up revealing.

This video from the end of the recent student protests at New York University is a pretty good example of that same idea. Some of the negative reaction to it at various sites is cruel or excessive, but the video doesn’t exactly put the protesters in a very good light, with their bad mix of naivety and grandiosity. (The person holding the camera and speaking most prominently is apparently not an NYU student, however.)

I’ve written about this question before, but I never know what my teaching responsibility is when I see student activists blundering strategically or making what seem to me to be weakly documented or poorly thought-out claims. This applies whether I’m thinking about conservative groups, leftist groups, or single-issue groups that aren’t particularly ideological. There’s a very good pedagogical case to be made that one just ought to let students learn through experience about what doesn’t work, or about the need to think carefully before acting, let them make mistakes and blunders.

I remember one broad protest at Wesleyan when I was an undergraduate that was directed at the faculty’s pedagogy and curriculum, called “Free University”. I went into the tents that the organizers pitched on the front lawn feeling loosely supportive of the event and left it reeling with the intensity of my distaste for the most strident voices and for the conception of the whole event. It wasn’t about thinking through the choices being made in the curriculum, but about an absolutist, thoughtless rejection of almost everything the university had to offer, without taking the next responsible step of advocating that we all just leave the university. I don’t think that it would have helped at all to have a professor come there and tell the conveners that, or to push back on the uncritical mood that prevailed under the tent. I’m not sure you can ever tell people about the lessons you’ve learned in your own life in a way that isn’t patronizing. Making mistakes is important, too. I suspect that even the organizers back in the 1980s may have gotten it out of their system, realizing after saying all that aloud to thirty or forty listeners, it sounded pretty weak. Maybe the NYU students will realize, if they watch that footage, that the camera does more to indict them than it does to insure against “brutality”.

There’s also a more cynical managerial case to be made for a hands-off strategy, because student activists are often hoping and waiting for faculty or administration to criticize them or discourage them. There’s some reason to think that the professors or administrators (or fellow students) who actually engage activists critically (again, whatever the ideology) are likely to end up in the crosshairs. At least in some cases, activists are hoping to engage some very distant, difficult or amorphous problem and using the campus as a proxy target, a stand-in for some remote enemy. Stepping in as a critical interlocutor is like volunteering to play the part of Snidley Whiplash.

There’s an argument that when you just leave student activists to say and do whatever they want, and maybe throw them a mock concession or two if they get to be too much of a hassle, you’re being far more contemptuous and condescending to them than you would be if you disagreed with them, that the really respectful (and professorial) thing to do is to share some criticisms, set some challenges, give some advice, to treat student activists as responsible adults who are culpable and creditable for their action. Conversely, if you’re an activist, that kind of critical response should be what you’re craving in the best way. Not just because it means that it’s a sign of respect, but because that’s what will make you better at critically engaging political and social issues in the future. Too many students with activist concerns (again, across the political spectrum) leave campuses completely unprepared for participation in the wider public sphere or to deal with legal and institutional systems which are not predisposed to treat them relatively gently.

Without getting too attached to any specific case, here’s a few general bits of advice derived from my own experience as an undergraduate and that I’ve seen as a faculty member, as well as observations of doings on other campuses. I honestly think these apply to some conservative as well as left-wing campaigns of action I’ve observed on campuses.

1) Do your homework. If it’s worth taking the time of other people in your community, it’s worth taking your time to seriously and independently understand the issues you’re focused on. This includes understanding some of the lines of possible opposition or criticism, and I mean really understanding them and engaging them. You need to have some degree of confident ownership over an issue before you catalyze activism around it. If you’re still exploring the issue, stick to exploration first. Ask questions. Be curious.

2) Keep your rhetoric under control. Don’t self-aggrandize. Recognize the seriousness of questioning the personal or institutional integrity of your opponents. Be very careful not to misrepresent a meeting or a process you’ve participated in. I’ve seen student activists make unbelievably harsh accusations about perceived or real opponents and then be stunned or surprised when that produces an intensely negative reaction. If you’re going to accuse someone of being dishonest or lying or concealing facts or behaving unethically, be damned sure you’ve got some serious evidence to that effect.

3) Think through what you’re asking people or institutions to do, and try to be plausible in your demands in terms of what an institution can actually accomplish, the time frame it can accomplish it in, and how it might accomplish it. This is especially important if what you’re asking for involves some shift in resource allocation. It’s not up to other people to tell you how to afford what you’re asking for: that’s your job. If you don’t want the institution to give up anything it’s already doing, talk about how to raise new revenues. If you can’t do that, talk about what the institution needs to give up. Know something about the comparability of costs within institutions: don’t argue that a $10 million obligation can be paid for with $50,000 in trivial savings. If you’re at a point where you’re arguing that the institution must become something completely different from what it presently is, understand the magnitude of that demand. Don’t whistle past the graveyard: when you’re asking for a hard choice, own up to it.

3a) Be willing at some point to accept that it’s not the institution that has the problem, it’s you, that your convictions necessitate that you go somewhere else, that you reject what’s on offer where you are and find something that fits your principles elsewhere. If you really can’t stand the liberal, godless professoriate at your current institution, there are places better suited to your values. If you reject the hegemony of science and the military-industrial complex, there are other institutions closer to your philosophy. At some point you have to ask, “Why does this place urgently need to be what I want it to be? Why do I still believe in it, if I reject almost the totality of what it now is and has been?”

4) Don’t claim to represent the will of the community or the people or real Americans or whatever the common construction is in your ideological neck-of-the-woods unless you’ve got rock-solid evidence that you do, which means not just polls or guesses or overheard conversations. Maybe not even a conventional plebiscite. If you think you’ve got a good argument about something that should be done, then that’s good enough: stand on the argument. If you think it’s important that what you’re asking for represent the consensus values or majoritarian sentiment of your community then find an independent, serious way to verify that. In any event, however, understand the seriousness of asking for something that may have an enormous impact on your community or institution, and the responsibility you’re taking on by doing so. If there are going to be long-term consequences, keep in mind if you’re a student that you likely won’t be around when those unfold (good or bad). It’s too easy to talk yourself into believing that you’re crusading on behalf of everyone, and that leads to rhetorical problems, as noted previously. If you’ve got a principled case, make the case, and worry later about how strong your base of support is. (If it’s weak, you’ll find out.)

5) When you make a mistake or errors of judgment, don’t blame other people. Learn from mistakes by owning them. Blaming other people is something that students sometimes do fairly blithely at times, again without seeming to understand why this can really piss people off.

6) Don’t answer to concrete objections about your program of action with metaconcerns about discourse or frameworks or processes. If process models are your issue, start with process models. Substituting a concern for process only after you’ve come up against substantial opposition to a concrete program of action is bait-and-switch. If you become convinced after a fight over some concrete problem that process really is the issue, then back up some and start over. Don’t use process as a Trojan horse to get what you were really after in the first place. If you’re serious about changing the way an institution deliberates or decides, you can’t be sure in advance that those changes will produce a particular decision or course of action that you favor. (Unless your proposed change is to make you and your compatriots the final and absolute dictators of the community.) Plus, honestly, when you change suddenly into talk about discourse or metaknowledge or frameworks after having been quite concrete, it usually looks like you’re evading the issues that are on the table.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

Oh the Humanities

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Patricia Cohen has an odd article in the Arts section of the New York Times today titled, “In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. It seems odd to me because in substantial measure, you could have published a similar article any time in the last five years. The economic collapse is putting enormous pressure on universities, so I agree this gives the “crisis of the humanities” a new urgency. If the fiscal problems of higher education and the larger economic needs of American society are really combining to push for a change in the character of the academic humanities, that might shift the long-stalemated debate about their future and push us towards some new consensus. It’s equally likely that well-ground axes will continue to be whittled down to the nub and nothing much will happen. Or maybe, if the pressure of crisis forces leaders to make poorly considered short-term decisions, the humanities will be cut with little rhyme or reason.

Grant for argument’s sake that the humanities must make a more focused, philosophically coherent case that they deserve some substantial proportion of the resources of higher education. (Not forgetting, in the meantime, that in terms of overhead beyond salaries, the humanities are generally a good bargain.) Similarly, let’s concede that this new view will accept that the humanities must justify that budgeting in terms of the delivery of unique or precious value to society as a whole.

I think if this is true, it sidelines two consistent positions in the existing struggle over the humanities.

First, the argument that the humanities must return to a narrowly composed canon of classic literary, artistic and philosophical works because their job is to preserve and reinforce cultural and intellectual traditions which are necessary to preserve national or civilizational coherence. The conservative argument for this perspective is often made against a vision of ongoing, constant moral and social decay, or in the context of a “clash of civilizations” in which unity is seen as a precondition of victory over an external enemy. If you’re coming from that perspective, I doubt new circumstances are likely to change your view of things. Still, it seems to me that the economic and social crisis of the moment is pretty difficult to portray as moral decay (unless you’re willing to focus that image on either a narrow class of plutocratic elites or on the financial choices of ordinary people, either one of which is a pretty tough place for cultural conservatives to find themselves in) or as a civilizational struggle for supremacy. In this respect, arguing that lavishing resources on the humanities in order to preserve and strengthen a patriotic dedication to a highly circumscribed core of classic cultural and philosophical works sounds as decadent and economically superfluous as doling out millions of dollars to commission a follow-up to “Piss Christ”.

Equally, however, if you concede that economic circumstances force the humanities to explain anew why they’re valuable to universities and to the wider society, I think the default reliance on disciplinary justifications for continued support are just as dead. Many humanistic disciplines have long privileged tautological arguments about the value of research and teaching: what they do is important because the discipline deems it important. A good project is a project which advances the work of the discipline. In particular, if you concede some new resource limitations or imperatives, I think the humanities mostly have to give up the disciplinary proposition that what we do is primarily discovery, that we research subjects and information which are unknown and turn them into knowledge. I don’t think that aping of science has ever served the humanities well, but it serves us especially poorly if we really do have to justify ourselves in some new fashion.

I’m not saying that in scholarly history (for one example) that everything is known. There are so many archives that haven’t been read in whole or in part, so many documents open for new interpretation, so many interviews to collect. Just as there are new literary works created all the time, new expressive work to be seen and critiqued, there are also old works to be read in fresh ways. Mostly, however, the mission of the humanities is not to discover the unknown, but to explain and explore the meaning of history, of culture, of human life within the universe, to students and the wider society. The mission of the humanities in this perspective would be not to know new things, but to explain why what we know matters, to think about what we should do with what we know. That doesn’t require constantly moving towards the unknown: most of that project comes out of what we already know.

The main point here being that if we accept a new urgency to our circumstances, it’s no longer good enough to say that a project or a faculty position need to be supported because they advance the needs of history or philosophy or literary criticism as disciplines.

So what does work? Basically, I think you can take your pick between the two teachers of the play The History Boys, or work out some hybrid compromise between them.

One teacher, Hector, would answer is that the purpose of the humanities is to make better humans, to teach wisdom, to explore deep truths, to cultivate wonder and possibility. A society that could not afford the humanities, in this view, would be spiritually impoverished, emotionally stunted, bereft of any hope of genuine progress, whatever its material condition. In the play, Hector is open to any work or idea that accomplishes this end, though I think it’s fair to say that this general view would turn first to work and ideas that form the core of traditional canons, accepting that there is some kind of quality or greatness in some work that makes it most suited for exploring truth and beauty.

Alan Bennett obviously prefers Hector’s sensibility to that of his rival, Irwin. So I’ll build a more favorable idea from Irwin’s preference for teaching his students how to beat the system, how to use education to work games of status and aspiration. Less cynically, you could argue on behalf of the utility of the humanities, that the humanities are where we learn how to reason and persuade, how to speak many languages and rhetorics, how and why culture and the world has meaning to human beings, how past experience determines our present lives and offers lessons about our future. A student of the humanities should know what stories and pictures and performances are powerful or evocative and why they are, will know how to weave that knowledge into their own speech and action. Even in a world wracked by recession, there will be many professions where those competencies and skills are as necessary as scientific or technical skill in other jobs, and that even in more technical fields, a strong command of humanistic skills might distinguish an adaptable leader from a person only capable of performing a single task.

————

I don’t think those justifications for humanistic knowledge and teaching are incompatible with each other. I think either or both make long-running arguments about high and low art, classic canons and popular culture largely irrelevant, but that both views require a continuing investment in ideas about quality or integrity in expressive and philosophical expression. (e.g., in either view, Shakespeare is still more important to study than Gilligan’s Island, at the very least because Shakespeare’s work is a denser target of opportunity, a richer ‘teaching case’ whose quality either lends itself to human wisdom or to better skills development.)

If we accept the premise that in these times, some new justification for humanistic knowledge is required (and that premise itself can certainly be questioned), and that either or both of these approaches offer that justification, then much of the scholarly output of humanistic academics and at least some of their course offerings need some redirection. That’s a subject for a future post.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture, Production of History | 7 Comments

Grades as Information

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Timothy Burke

A bit more on grading. One of the responses to the conversation about grading over at Megan McArdle’s blog was from David Walser, who was frustrated with the idea of flexible or situational grading because he claims that he uses grades as a tool in hiring graduates, or that he would like to do so but can’t because too many professors grade flexibly or situationally. (As an aside: a lot of the commenters there pretty much just look at a post title and then start chewing up the scenery based on whatever prior disposition they have about a given topic. Relax and read, people.)

I want to engage that complaint a bit further. First off, surely any employer is going to recognize that higher education in the United States presents a massive problem when it comes to comparability of standards or information about graduates which a consistent approach to grading across a given institution would not in and of itself resolve. Walser would have to know how to compare grades from Harvard, Swarthmore, Bates, the University of Michigan, Bob Jones University and DuPage Community College and a thousand other institutions for grades to serve as the rigorous instruments that he wants them to be.

This is much harder than it seems, and not merely because of endless debates about how (or whether) to measure quality and excellence across institutions. You’d also have to know the precise comparability of individual curricular programs. Is history as it’s studied at Swarthmore the same thing as history as it’s studied at the University of New Mexico? It’s not: the class size and composition is different, the range of subjects is different, the structure of the majors is different. The classes are different: you can’t actually take a class centrally focused on African history at UNM, but there are many courses you can take there that you can’t take at Swarthmore.

Thus the question arises: why does Walser want to know precisely how to compare two history majors from two different institutions, to feel assured that the A in my course is the same as the A given to a history major at UNM? If he wants a fixed standard that would hold between the two institutions, there is really only one possibility, that we each offer a test that measures concrete knowledge in a specific area of competency (let’s say world history or comparative history or Atlantic history, which I occasionally teach and which is taught at UNM). Unless he is looking to hire into a field where that specific competency is a requirement, what’s the relevance of a highly comparable, objective standard to him as an employer? If he is looking for that competency, then I suggest he has other ways to measure it besides the grade in a course.

What am I grading, most of the time? Most of the time, I’m grading writing first and class participation or contribution second. On exams, I’m also grading basic knowledge of the subject matter (usually through identification questions) where skill in writing doesn’t matter as long as I can understand the answer and it contains the information I am looking for. When I’m grading writing, I’m assessing skill in persuasion, sometimes skill in research, skill in expression, skill in the ability to use information from the course. (Not merely whether the student knows that information, but whether they can do something with it.) It could be that Walser wants to know what I’m claiming about a student’s excellence or adequacy when it comes to written and verbal expression, and wants to be able to compare that claim to every other grade that every other candidate has.

There cannot possibly be that kind of objective standard for evaluating writing in the humanities or the social sciences. There is a good deal of consensus between a lot of professors about the general attributes of excellent, adequate and inadequate writing, consensus not just within a given institution like Swarthmore, but across institutions. That said, there are necessary limits to that consistency. Excellent expository writing in one context may be weak in another context. In a single semester, I cannot teach students to write well on research papers, short response essays, letter-writing to friends and family, memos to bosses or team members, short journal entries and so on: each a kind of writing that has its own kind of excellence (and failure). I cannot evaluate how students write in what I do assign to them against a single benchmark of absolute success or failure, either. I have benchmarks, rough standards, goals, but these move and adjust. They have to.

And here again, I’m asking: what do you need to know about a potential applicant that you’re looking for the grade to tell you? That the student is a competent writer, or an exceptional one? Presumably different kinds of employment have different requirements in that regard. In some jobs, I think competence is all you need; in others, much more. If Megan’s commentator is an editor at a newspaper, then skill at expository writing is obviously crucial. If he’s looking for a sales manager, there are other skills he needs to know about, some of which are measured very poorly by studying world history. Whatever his needs as an employer, he’s asking too much of one grade or even many grades if he thinks a single letter will contain all that information, stamped and guaranteed in a final, graven form.

If you’re looking at a transcript, and you know a bit about the quality of the institution from which it comes, you’ll have a ballpark sense of a student’s quality of mind. If you look at what they studied, you may have an approximate sense of what they might know and what skills they might have. If you have more specific requirements, however, you’ll need more information than grades and course titles could ever conceivably provide, no matter how consistent educators tried to be. That’s why you ask for letters of reference. That’s why you ask for writing samples. That why you look for the things a candidate has done above and beyond their courses. That’s why you interview candidates.

If an employer really felt that higher education should provide more information about the quality of graduates, don’t demand that we enforce absolute and rigid standards for grades. Instead you should be asking us to go in the opposite direction, closer to what Hampshire College does, and provide a written assessment of a student’s performance in a course, and a written description of the specific competencies which measured a student’s performance. Now I doubt that personnel directors for large organizations are going to want to read forty or so evaluations of this kind for each and every candidate who applies for a job, but if high-value information is what you crave, that’s really what you should be asking for from professors.

Posted in Academia | 13 Comments