I take all surveys with a grain or more of salt, but here’s one worth thinking hard about: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/infographic-adoption-of-m_b_3303789.html

 An educational service company called Enterasys surveyed several hundred educators around the world.  Here is some of what they found:

• Right now  13 percent of the responding institutions offer MOOC;  43 percent plan to offer MOOCs by 2016

·        Biggest value of MOOCs: 44 percent say  keeping up with development in education, 35 percent raising visibility of the school, 16 percent improving quality of  residential teaching

• 44 percent  are planning to offer MOOCs for credit.

·        67 percent believe that MOOCs will never replace traditional, residential classes; 5 percent said yes within 5 years.

To me the most interesting result was  that 84 percent of the respondents thought MOOCs complement residential education. What do they mean by this? Do they think students will continue to pay the high cost of residential education if the college down the road  will let them stay home and get credit for taking MOOCs?  Do they have plans for “hybridizing” MOOC material with existing courses? Have they looked closely at what support services their students will need to succeed in MOOCs or related courses?  Have they talked in depth with faculty members about what will really benefit their students?  I doubt that many institutions have done their homework on these issues.  But I’d like t hear from people on the ground in institutions planning to give credit for MOOCs.

 


What do you think should be at the top of the list of impediments to students choosing a liberal education?” One hears a lot of suggestions:

Poor understanding of the term “liberal”?

Poor understanding of the term “education”?

Inadequate course offerings?

Weak curricular / advising structures?

Over-specialized faculty?

Lousy job market?

Excessive media emphasis on entry level jobs?

Parental pressure?

High debt levels?

After reading Michelle Singletary “Carefully Consider Taking on Student Debt” in yesterday’s Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/business/personal-finance/2013/05/25/lesson-student-loans/7NwlL8V5JAadw9gE7rA0xH/story.html ) I am inclined to check the last item in the list.  She points out there are now more than 38 million student loan borrowers (some many years out of college), and more than $1.1 trillion (yes, “trillion” is right) in outstanding debt.  And while Americans were “de-leveraging” in other ways, that is paying down their debt, student loan balances for households have been rising – almost 15% between 2007 and 2010.  

There are plenty more statistics to show the scale of this debt. But what about its implications?  I don’t know of any good studies of what it means when it comes time to choose a job, but Singletary reflects the thinking of many students when she writes,” Many graduates can’t go in any direction they choose. They have to take any job they can get.”  The pressure doesn’t start at graduation.  Surely it’s already there when course and major selections are being made.

What can individual faculty members do?  First of all, know the facts about one’s own institution.   This can easily  be done by clicking on the map developed by the Project on Student Debt at  http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php.   You can go state by state and institution .  Here are thumbnails of a few institutions in Massachusetts  showing  the percentage of students graduating with debt and the average total of that debt:

Amherst College:           41% , $12,713

Boston University:            57% , $36,408

Harvard University:                    34%, $11760

Northeastern:                  Not reporting

Smith College:                 65%, 22531

U Mass, Amherst:             69%, $26,893

Wellesley College:           52%, $13,579

Williams College:             44%, $9,801

In North Carolina, the other state I checked the variation in the amount of debt was especially wide among historically black institution,  -- 100% of students graduating with an average debt of $46,673 at one, 93% with $12,652 at another.

Second, we all have to think really hard, it seems to me, about ways to  keep student loans from going even higher.  I can’t see how that can be done without more creative efforts to keep total costs down. Tuition drives debt.   That may mean a reversal  in current ways of thinking about quality.  Is bigger really better? Is greater expenditure the only road to greater success?

A relatively affluent, well educated, university-based  community with a fine school system seems to be in the process of cutting back severely on foreign language instruction.  Chapel Hill NC, of all places, is on the verge of deciding to wield the ax.  And, as you might have guessed, Latin is most likely to be the first to get cut back.  If so, othe victims will follow. 

Why the proposed cuts?

Jim O’Hara of the UNC Classics Department explains: “As drastic budget problems caused both by the economy and an unwillingness to raise taxes lately.  They have to cut some things, and naturally noticed that some advanced language courses are very small. “

So why these low enrollments?  It turns out the “a growing state level emphasis on core curriculum subjects has shrunk enrollment levels in languages.”  (Chapel Hill New May 22 2013, 8A). In other words Math, Science, Reading are in the state-wide tests; language learning is not.  It doesn’t matter that the study of foreign languages is known to be a powerful means of developing long-lasting, high-level capacities such as critical thinking.

Even that may not be the whole story.   In a hollowing-out economy, in a state with a high unemployment rate parents are understandably worried about  courses that do not  demonstrably lead to job opportunities.  How much are they steering their kids away from what might  in fact be the best educational course for them?

The good news is that students are leading the charge against the proposed change. If you want to join them send a message to all  the School Board Members and the Superintendent's Office, at:allboardmembers@chccs.k12.nc.us."

There’s an ongoing argument about how well (or badly) American students are doing in developing their critical thinking capacities. (“Less Academically Adrift”: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/20/studies-challenge-findings-academically-adrift).   A lot of the argument is statistical, but there are political implications as well.  Many on the political right would like nothing better than to show that American higher education is doing a miserable job.  They saw in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift  (Chicago, 2011) http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo10327226.html  a chance to bash colleges and universities.  That’s a distortion of the book since its goal, I believe, was to point out ways to improve student learning, not to trash colleges and universities.

Inevitably, there has been push back, some of it with a political agenda of its own. . 

The evidence comes largely from the Collegiate Learning Assessment  (CLA), not a perfect assessment instrument but, I believe, the best measure available of student achievement in a cluster  of capacities  (not just critical thinking, but analytical and post-formal reasoning, and writing skills) that liberal education has often claimed to help students develop.  So how well do students in institutions that use the CLA do in improving those capacities during their undergraduate years?

That’s where the numbers start to roll.  The CLA data show that the overall gain (“effect size”) over four years is 0.73 of a Standard Deviation (SD), as reported by Roger Benjamin in “Three Principal Questions about Critical Thinking Tests” (http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/Three_Principal_Questions_About_Critical_Thinking_Tests.pdf ). Unless you are a right wing ideologue, that number doesn’t mean much all by itself. You ask what the highest performing institutions achieve (and how badly the poor performers do).  In the most recent year the top among the CLA schools was a gain of 2.30 SD and the bottom a negative, -0.76 SD.  That is a spread of over three standard deviations, a lot when you consider that the mean gain is 0.73 SD.   Those numbers come from the extremes, of course,  so what about  the 25th percentile compared to the 75th?  The spread there is about 1.5 SDs. That seems to me still a huge variation.  It suggests that at many institutions there is a lot of room for improvement.  No institution should be content with the median of 0.73 SD, when others are achieving twice that.

A more sophisticated approach to the data looks at “Value Added,” that is, results compared to predictions based on entering SAT scores, etc.  Those figures contain a real  shocker: The  25th percentile is a negative (-0.56 SD).  That is, in a quarter of institutions students actually slip back from the course they were on when entering college.

So who does well and who badly? Is the top all schools with high snob value? Big endowments? Top US News rankings?  The scuttlebutt I hear alleges that the high performing institutions are not always the most prestigious ones.  And among the bottom performers there may be some well-known names.  Since  CLA keeps the individual institutional reports confidential, there is no way to be sure – except for faculty to insist on seeing  their institutional report, and  take a hard look at it with one crucial question in mind – How can my institution do a better job for its students?   That may involve making comparisons with peer institutions, all quiet and confidential, of course, but focused on the crucial question What works and what doesn’t, and for whom? You’ll have to drill down and find what is happening in the various majors, and among groups of students – men, women, minorities, athletes etc.   My hunch is that at most institutions there will be success stories and problem areas.

But one thing is  already clear, and agreed upon by both sides in the debate: “ .. students who majored in  … the arts and sciences, including the humanities, foreign languages, physical and natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering did better than academic majors in applied professional fields such as health, education, and business.“ (Roger Benjamin, cited above). 

It’s important not to stop there.  Why do students in the liberal arts and sciences outperform those in other fields? What works and what doesn’t?  Roger Benjamin writes, “One hypothesis is that there is more writing and analysis required of students in those fields.“ That’s what we humanists do (most of us, most of the time).  But in the current climate, academic and political, humanists need not just to assert that but to do the numbers, with CLA or with other methods of assessing these and other capacities. That’s why this debate is important for everyone who cares about the classics, the humanities, and liberal education.

 
 I used to take the campus metaphor seriously.  I took colleges and universities at their word.  Each was indeed situated on a campus, an open field where people could move about freely, and ideas and knowledge could easily be exchanged. You could wander around or  settle down in the shade of the great plane tree, talk, argue, love.  Even in the most crowded, urban setting a campus was a locus amoenus, a pleasant, pastoral setting, a good place for all three of those activities.

No, that’s not a fantasy;  we experienced it first-hand. Don’t you remember?

But then signs began to go up: “Private Property.” The campus was no longer one field; it was a cluster of fields, with carefully surveyed disciplinary boundaries.   That was, I guess, the way it had to be.  If you’re serious about knowledge, you have to be willing to specialize, dig down at one place or another, find friends and maybe your vocation there.

After a while, though, the signs changed: “No Trespassing.” “No Hunting.”  “Keep Out.” OK. I understand that. This is my field. That’s yours. Good fences make good neighbors.  Keep away from my field and I’ll keep away from yours.  Cut the barbed wire and what was once a locus  amoenus becomes a minefield.

Well, not really.   Nobody gets blown up.  Those signs are  just the “Trespassers W” sign in Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood.  But they left me dissatisfied,  looking for something more,  “hungry”, you could say. And D.H. Lawrence knew what that meant: “They poach because they’re hungry.”  Think of the signs  as essential to the joy of poaching.  You can’t poach without them.  It’s delicious, sneaking in and out by the back gate, trying not to get caught, savoring the catch that night by the fire.

In Classics poaching is a special joy, not just because the field has been so subdivided, but because now so much has been outsourced.   Ancient history has goes over to the History silo; Plato and Aristotle to Philosophy.  Things are crowded in Art these days but maybe they’d take upGreek and Roman art and ancient material culture for that matter.  Political theory? Sent off to Political Science.  Don’t worry the Quants won’t even notice.  Interested in the development of literary genres? Comp. Lit owns the silo for that.  And so on.

That’s why three of us renegade classicists decided to start poaching.   We were hungry, sick of hearing the old Tom Lehrer song:

“Once the missiles go up

Who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department,”

Says Werner von Braun.”

We couldn’t claim expertise in any of the outsourced fields.  Others knew the specialized scholarship, but as classicists we thought we knew something, too: How to interrogate a Greek text. So we picked a short out-sourced one, the Gospel of Mark, and tried reading it together as if it were a newly discovered text from the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the Roman empire.  Verse by verse, chapter by chapter, we read it as Greek, and emailed each other about what we saw in it.  We argued, agreed, disagreed, and along the way kept experiencing a kind of discourse for which we had been trained (partially at least) but hadn't encountered very often in academia.  I hope that we three renegade classicists might have modeled that discourse by  our efforts to be true to the Greek, by our frankness and honesty with one another, and by our play-filled tussling with the text and the issues it raises.  

You can judge the results at www.Gospelrenegades.com.

For the sheer joy of it, there’s nothing like poaching --  well, nothing quite like it. Give it a try.

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the salaries of public university presidents.  Obscenely high in some cases.   But the real story seems to me that the pay of other university officials is even higher . Take a look at this map, called to my attention by Alex Schiler:

A lot of what we do in liberal education is building communities of learning   We encourage frank but supportive  discussion among students in a class. We  chat with them  after class and on campus walkways.  We drink coffee, and sometimes wine,  bring donuts to class ( A Facebook exchange among some classicists I know worried  about a class that didn’t eat them all up right away.)  We invite students into  our homes.  This isn’t entertainment. It’s building  a community of learning.

Surely MOOCs can’t do anything like that .  Or can they?  Claudia Filos tells me they can build   communities in their own way:, or at least that's part of the goal in Greg Nagy's course on the hero. “When I'm wearing my HarvardX hat, I help to moderate the posts on the discussion forum for [Greg Nagy’s] HeroesX course. One of our goals is to create a community--not just a course.  For that reason, I have read every single thread so far and I've been incredibly moved by the universal hunger and excitement for learning that I've seen. People from all over the world really have an opportunity (and a need) to connect with others around these texts which for thousands of years have helped us to think about what means to be human. “

Every few months I produce a Newsletter on developments affecting  liberal education etc.   The new one is just out and can be read at  http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/1109165/285f7bd1b5/520044277/d89d95e725/

I hope you like it. 




 

I was in D.C. yesterday and found that there’s now a proposal under discussion in Congress to make every applicant for an NSF grant show how it would directly benefit the American People. War making, cancer fighting, job creating claims are all fine, but basic research? Forget it. Don’t bother to apply Mr. Einstein. 

And research in the humanities? Are you kidding?

The really exquisite feature of the proposal , however, is  its name “ The High Quality Research Act.“ (Text of the draft bill: http://www.scribd.com/doc/138488029/The-High-Quality-Research-Act-of-2013  ) So the Q word is being taught to stand in its head.  It is going to have to learn to mean the reverse of what it used to mean.

Oh, brave new world to have such quality in it.

For how this proposal fits in to the grand strategy of the grand old part see Norman Ornstein http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/the-slash-and-burn-house-republican-yahoo-caucus-rampages-on/275502/