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In Texas, Public Officials Offer More Ideas for Cutting College Costs

February 12, 2011, 4:25 pm

Unwelcome surprises continue to come for public-college professors and administrators in Texas. In his state-of-the-state address this week, Gov. Rick Perry called on colleges to set up undergraduate programs in which students could earn bachelors’ degrees for a total of no more than $10,000, textbooks included. But the state’s higher-education officials said they had “no idea” how such a cheap program could be created. In the meantime, community-college leaders—already in shock after a draft budget in the state Senate proposed shutting down four of the state’s two-year colleges—got their calculators out and started guesstimating how they would deal with another of the draft’s suggestions: that the state cut its support for health benefits for community-college employees from 83 percent to 50 percent.

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  • arminius

    Yep — dun’t go messin with Texhus!

    Yup theme ther deeegrees shud onlee kust $10,000 an tham yungins kin youusee thar hi skool buks ‘cuz Texhus Skool Burd dun aproofed ‘em — an they dunt half enyee bad eye-dee-ahs en ‘em.

    Yahoooooooooooooooo

  • chedie

    Can we let Mexico have Texas back?

  • archman

    Paraphrasing a commenter from the Austin American Statesman, it costs the state $8,000 a year to put a child through public K-12. So over 4 years, that’s what, over $40,000?

    And now the governor thinks that a 4-year college degree can be had for for $10,000. I cannot tell if he is either crazy, incompetent, or merely shifting the burden for Texas budget woes onto education. Probably the last one, as raising taxes won’t help with his presidential campaign…

  • http://twitter.com/adriennemay Adrienne May

    A $10,00 Bachelor’s degree (text books included) is a dream come true… but it will be hard to actually make it come true.

  • riskybiz

    And yet again Rick Perry offers an idea related to education that shows his lack of understanding…tell us Govenor how do we create this $10,000.00 degree? Perhaps spend time helping to solve problems instead of offering ideas that you think make you look good and get real…

  • ramberg_jk15

    How about slashing or just plain eliminating the athletic budgets at all the state institutions and redistributing some of the money back into academics? I’m sure reducing the Longhorns football budget by 1/2 to 3/4 wouldn’t go over well in Austin, for example, but it would reduce the cost of a 4 year degree. However, this wouldn’t make him very popular.

  • katisumas

    Do we have to wait for Texas to secede from the US? Can’t the rest of us do it for them and be ready to accept a lot of refugees?

  • esgphd

    Hey – arminius and chedie – I dont know where you’re from, but I actually LIVE in Texas. The provincial snobbery your posts appear to show doesn’t reflect well on you. Just because Rick Perry is an arrogant, self-serving no-nothing (this distinguishes him from most politicians…how?) doesn’t mean Texas is filled with ignorant hicks. Every state (including yours) has stupid politicians. Texas is no exception. I won’t take the time to point our some of the more egregious examples from other states, but they are there, on every level of government. The persistent snobbery of academics from some areas of our country with respect to other regions reflects an unbecoming self-regard based largely on media-derived stereotypes of others and a boundless willingness to believe in one’s own cultural and intellectual superiority. Don’t we spend a considerable amount of time these days preaching about diversity, cultural sensitivity, etc. to the students? I guess there are just some categories of human beings (those that live in “fly over country”?) that it is still ok to stereotype.In short folks, quit watching so much TV and treat your fellow Americans with a bit more respect.
    Oh, and by the way, I too think Perry’s idea is bizarre.

  • akprof

    Now I understand – The Governor got his degree for $10,000 – clearly we got what he paid for!!

  • _perplexed_

    10k is a stiff price for a sheepskin and a few textbooks. Is anything else included?

  • lcro5205

    Let’s have him ask his alma mater A&M lead the pack and see how far he gets!

  • archman

    As I recall from the original press releases, the chancellor of Texas A&M did in fact respond. I believe he is the one that is quoted above as having “no idea” how a $10,000 bachelor’s degree was possible.

  • http://twitter.com/emeraldcite emeraldcite

    I think this would be a good deal for students. Not only could they get a budget car for that price, but they can get a budget degree as well!

    Would it come with a budget seal and offer budget courses?

    Remember, Texas, you often get what you pay for….

  • 22118130

    Archman, you ask if Governor Perry is “crazy, incompetent, or merely shifting the burden for Texas budget woes onto education?” I would answer, “yes, yes, and yes again.” Now, as a Texan, I would give you fair warning when Perry runs for President not to get fooled again by another Texan snake oil salesman who says he knows what he’s talking about. Remember what that got the country last time. Perry is basically a demagogue. He says things the least educated among us react viscerally to, like “Texas should secede.” He even says the treaty by which Texas came into the union allowed for that, which of course anyone knowledgeable about history knows is not true. Most of what comes out of his mouth, like the drivel about a college education costing $10,000 is just garbage. We’ve learned to ignore him in Texas, to the extent we can. Everyone else should do likewise.

  • studentsuccess10

    Why not just close all the DCCCD colleges and give their money to the other state systems? The smog in Dallas makes it unhealthy to live there anyway!

  • bscmath78

    I know nothing about what is taught in the listed course:
    “Or History 3530 at Auburn, ‘Science Fiction as Intellectual History.’”

    but if I were teaching it, it would consist of the intellectual, political, historical and propaganda analysis of:

    Zamyatin’s “We”  – novel
    Huxley’s “Brave New World” – novel
    Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – novel and animated film (some say the film was partly financed by the CIA)
    Orwell’s “1984″ – novel and film
    Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ – novel and film
    Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)

    These works defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility with far greater vigor, passion and power than a pile of Western Civ courses.  To slight the idea of Science Fiction being of value, is to miss some of the most important works of intellectual history. 

    Though I always liked “With your shield or on it” and “Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”  There is the major problem that the Spartans were the enemies of freedom, liberty, individualism and dignity, as well as the ancestor (along with Plato) of the 20th century totalitarian, mass-murdering state.  Which of course is why the 20th century totalitarian dictator typically loved civilization, loved Greek or Roman art and in turn was loved by teachers and professors who eagerly aided the state (except for the ones who were rounded up or escaped).

  • bscmath78

    Although it would be nice if students knew about Stonehenge or “The History of the Peloponnesian War”, it isn’t important compared to carefully studying the famous fundamental political/legal documents. 

    What could be more “relevant”, useful and necessary for the citizen?  The study of those documents could be the defining core of English, Rhetoric, History, Philosophy and Political Science.

    Isn’t that better than poisoning their minds with the works of the enemies of freedom, liberty, individualism and dignity, who long dominated Western Civilization and civilization in general?

    One might start with:
     
    * The Declaration of Independence
    * The Federalist Papers
    * The Anti-Federalist Papers
    * The Constitution
    * The Bill of Rights
    * The subsequent Amendments to the Constitution

    They could be supplemented with:

    * The works of Thomas Paine like “Common Sense”, “Rights of Man” and “Crisis”
    * The works of John Locke
    * The key arguments before the Supreme Court and the resulting judgments
    * The famous political speeches like “Ich bin ein Berliner”, the Gettysburg Address, “Nothing to fear, but Fear Itself”, “Day of Infamy” and Eisenhower’s farewell address

    They might be further supplemented, specifically for critical thinking purposes, by:

    * Orwell’s “Animal Farm” both animated film and novel
    * Orwell’s “1984″ both novel and 1950′s film
    * Huxley’s “Brave New World”
    * Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” – set in Harvard and its environs, in the future.
    * Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″
    * Zamyatin’s “We”.
    * “The Sorrow and the Pity”
    * “Casablanca”
    * “Alexander Nevsky” – Soviet propaganda film – to inoculate.
    * “Triumph of the Will” – Nazi propaganda film – to inoculate.
    * “The East is Red” – 1965 Maoist propaganda film – to inoculate.

    The English oppressors of the American Colonies were typically quite familiar with the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton and other greats, and it seemed to produce minds geared to crush freedom, liberty, justice, democracy and Natural Rights.  Should we not heed the warning “Ye shall know them by their fruits”? 

    The Founding Founders overcame this noxious intellectual stew (maybe via John Locke’s
    writings and the political writings of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of 1688), but how many can resist being poisoned or weakened, other than through blind rejection of all that “irrelevant DWM” stuff?

    Works that defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility with vigor, passion and power seem like a reasonable basis for the Core.  Far better to read these works than the Iliad (you can do that on your own time).

  • cwm4c

    Glad to see you mention the The History of the Peloponnesian War.  Since its publication, there has not been a conflict, or war, in human history that cannot be explained by Thucydides lucid explanations!  

  • bscmath78

    cwm4c, sadly, I have only read snippets in secondary sources, though what I have read suggests he is too subtle/complex for a Core-type curriculum. ;-) Maybe for advanced students? I see its value as a case study of a democracy making mistakes, but that might simply be biased by the secondary sources that I have read. But Athens was a very different type of democracy.

    “. . . any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man . . .”

    This suggests he isn’t suitable for many ;-) (since I read him as being critical of what he is describing).

    Which reminds me that I never finished James Boyd White’s “When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community.” Here is a review http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381075 which explains the title’s allusion.  It might be an excellent addition to my earlier list.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    And yet, try convincing an employer that reading Thucydides (and Herodotus & Xenophon & all the rest) is just is valuable as that accounting/business course you DIDN’T take instead.  Look, I love the classics, and I’ve had time to read nearly all of them – Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Persian, Celtic, Saxon, or otherwise, because I was a history major from a top 20 college and I’ve only ever had underemployment, law school, and more unemployment to show for it.  When college costs as much as it does, EVERY course should be considered with an eye towards the future.  Does GE care if I know Latin or Anglo-Saxon?  Will BCG be impressed by my knowledge of Sun Tzu?  No.

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, actually, I am a bit surprised that BCG wouldn’t be interested in your knowledge of Sun Tzu (“The Art of War”), there was a time (the 80s?) when there was a bit of a fad in management education for “The Art of War”. 

    I think the key problem is that you went to Northeastern and the top places don’t recruit or want students from places that are not on their list which is basically HYPS.  Please see
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565 

    The comments for that thread are quite interesting and you might find some comfort in the last comment about the difficulties of a Harvard Law School graduate (apparently a B+ isn’t good enough for most).

    Backtracking on my earlier statement, the above referenced CHE article and the paper it is based on suggest that the top places actually don’t care what you learned in university (or on your own) and are really looking for the kind, who in the old days were called “clubable” (as in “Skull and Bones”).

    “The portrait that emerges is of a culture that’s insanely obsessed with pedigree.”

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, another possibility is that they were worried you were another Alcibiades, the serial traitor/betrayer.  Xenophon was another traitor working for the Persians. Socrates had such great students ;-) Or was it their classmate Plato? ;-)

    My list was geared towards being “relevant”, useful and necessary for the citizen as citizen. My list is concerned with the education of better citizens and not better corporate employees.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Northeastern was my law school. I went to a NESCAC liberal arts college for undergrad. However, I did not go to Williams or Amherst (or Wellesley, though it is not a NESCAC), which is about all that the BCG’s of the world will tolerate of liberal arts colleges.

    I am well aware of the elitism that infests consulting outfits and law firms. Actually, Harvard Law School doesn’t have grades aymore – just Pass/Fail, with the occasional Honors or Low Pass for exceptionally good or bad work (by which I mean performance on one exam, which is the sole measure of grading at every law school in the land).

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, so was jaysocrates (note the Socrates in the name) misleading us when he claimed to have gotten a B+?

    “. . . I graduated from Harvard Law School a year or so before the economy tanked. I was in the middle of my class. I thought getting B+’s at Harvard would be as good as getting A’s at some lower-ranked schools. Wrong! . . .”
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565

    I am curious when and how you learned what the right schools were to be recruited by the top (especially beyond HYPS which many suspected).

    BTW, I have found your previous posts quite informative about law school, thanks for providing the information and the context.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    @jaysocrates:disqus 

    Harvard Law School only moved away from grades a few years ago.  I believe Yale Law has not had grades in a great long while, and because Yale is a much smaller law school than Harvard, and is always USNWR’s #1 to Harvard’s #2, it has never been an issue for them.  I don’t believe either of them has class rank now.  I believe Stanford (#3, but a very small law school like Yale) is also switching or has already switched to a Honors/Pass/Fail system of some manner.

    There are unemployed Harvard Law grads out there, but that is just symptomatic of how utterly destroyed legal hiring is in light of both the economy and the complete irrelevance of a legal education in the practice of law (which is an entirely different conversation).

  • peterwwood

    Dear UN: Your short account exemplifies so many of the difficulties that we face.  The liberal arts in general and knowledge of classics in particular never guaranteed satisfying employment to a graduate.  Colleges and universities were more honest about this a century or so ago, when only those not in need of employment would pursue a liberal arts education.  But that kind of elitism didn’t sit well with either the professoriate or the general public and America embarked on the plan to make liberal arts education a general purpose preparation for a wide range of “professional” pursuits:  medicine, law, business, etc.  This worked during some historical moments when the economy needed skilled workers and a liberal arts college degree reliably served as a proxy for high-level cognitive ability.  It worked less well during periods of high unemployment, and it really began to unravel when, via America’s pursuit of mass higher education, the liberal arts bachelor’s degree lost most of its utility as a marker of higher ability. At that point, the job market began to shift strongly in favor of those whose educational credentials offered evidence of particular vocational skills.  

    You are, like many others, a century too late to be able to translate knowledge of Thucydides into an appeal to employers looking for someone with cultural breadth and depth.  Yes, if a student’s goal is to prepare for employment, that student should probably pay close attention to the programs of study that have a definite destination.  But that is to weigh only one side of the problem.  We need people like you too, UN, and we have to think carefully about why you and people like you end up stranded with sophisticated knowledge but low appeal to employers.  

    We also have to think about the problem of how to educate all those other students who are attracted at the outset to vocational goals.  They need to encounter Thucydides (or at least a few writers of his standing) along the way as well.  Mass higher education hasn’t worked very well on either end:  for those who seek to understand civilization or those who seek to fit themselves to ever-changing market needs.  What do we try next?

    Peter Wood

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, are you referring to the fact that law schools do not teach you to pass the bar exam and that you have to take special outside courses geared to the bar exam?

    Or are you referring to the fact that most law professors have not actually acted as lawyers, instead they have been law clerks for judges and then go directly to law school?  Which often means they are interested in the theory and history of theory, but not what a lawyer actually has to do? I may have read that in one of your earlier posts.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    For undergrad, I knew the score beforehand. I had applied to the tippity-top of schools, and likely had a better shot than most at getting into one of them save for one semester’s blip in academic performance stemming from having an immediate family member have a major health emergency five days before finals. I knew senior year of high school that my backup choices and eventual alma mater (all liberal arts colleges ranked btw #10-25) did not offer anything like the career possibilities of a Williams or Yale, say. What I did not know, and dearly wished I did, is that your average business/finance major from much less selective universities than my liberal arts college are in far more demand for Corporate America. I have had recruiters from most of Boston’s big financial players (think Fidelity/Putnam/State Street/Liberty Mutual) tell me that they would rather have a business major from an essentially open-enrollment university than a English/History/Poly Sci/etc major from the likes of a Colby or Tufts or Wesleyan. I really wish I knew that back in high school so I could have just skated through a BU-type institution and gotten a job.

    For law school, Northeastern has always advertised that 40% of its graduates get an offer from a co-op employer. This has never remotely been true, but since no one audits the numbers, they keep saying it. 93% employment at nearly a six-figure salary – it’s the same nonsense that every law school puts out, but since we are brought up in America to think that college is THE ANSWER for everything, we tend to buy into it. I’ve heard from recent grads that maybe 20% have jobs, but the school keeps saying 90% (as they raise next year’s tuition + living expenses north of $70,000).

    The main difference, to me anyways, is that my UG liberal arts college at least tries, somewhat, to help its grads. Networking events, internal job postings, etc. Northeastern Law drops its grads like a bad habit, save for those fortunate few with the BigLaw jobs, who get harassed incessantly for donations.

  • peterwwood

    Dear bscmath78:  It might make for an interesting course, but it is important to weigh college courses with two sometimes overlooked considerations in mind:  Is this material that the student would otherwise miss?  And:  What other courses will this course displace?  (An undergraduate curriculum has space for a finite number of courses.)  

    I like science fiction and reading it does shine some light on intellectual history, but (1) people are going to read science fiction anyway without having a college course to prompt them, and (2) if its intellectual history you want, there are much more direct avenues.  Peter Wood

  • bscmath78

    Professor Wood, how can one defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility with vigor, passion and power through a tradition of typically mandatory, dry, insipid courses that glorified the enemies of freedom, their courtiers and their apologists?  Or through jargon, “theory” filled courses that seem geared to confuse, mystify and distort?

    A mandatory course is by definition an abridgment of freedom and liberty.  Making even my earlier list mandatory would contradict the spirit of the works.  To learn to be free one must practice what one preaches.  I prefer the Founding Fathers to Thucydides, but one should be free to read “When Words Lose Their Meaning”, “On Tyranny” and other books.  Libraries should be well stocked so that students are free to read what is out of fashion (or at least what is out of fashion in the Academy).

    Most of what I have written in this thread also applies to K-12.   The reading of my list should start in K-12, with the great caution that they need to be taught by the willing and those with talent.  Too much is badly taught in K-12 so that what is read is then hated.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Very briefly:

    Law schools almost always follow the model of Harvard Law School, which was founded in the Gilded Age as a sort of intellectual finishing school for gentlemen.  Run by a fellow named Christopher Columbus Langdell, it envisioned law as a science (in that late 19th century pseudo-scientific haze that would later give us phrenology and eugenics), wherein observations would be made by observing and deriving the law via the reading of appellate cases.*  This is, at best, an oblique and inefficient method of instruction, and at worst, a complete waste of time.  130 some-odd years later, it is still de riguer everywhere.  This is just a down-and-dirty hash, but in a nutshell, what should be a vocational education is in fact the most obtuse part of the Ivory Tower.  Google C.C. Langdell, the Socratic method (a sickly perversion of Socrates and all he represents), law schools in general.  There is a blog written by a renegade law prof of sorts called Inside the Law School Scam that is worth a glance, although it is very depressing.

    And yes, many law profs have never practiced law.  To be a law prof, one *needs* to be top of their class at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Columbia, maybe have a federal clerkship or two, and then start teaching.  That’s it.  At least half of my tenured profs had never practiced law in a firm, company, or government organization.  There is a growing trend of hiring non-attorney superstar PhD’s to teach what one can call the “Law and XYZ” courses,** so if anything, the pedagogy is getting even less relevant. Not that the bar exam is much more relevant. One can become a licensed attorney without knowing how to appear in court, draft a motion, will, contract, appeal, etc, talk to a client, find a client, or communicate with opposing counsel. Law school as a pedagogy considers such things to be trivialities, easily picked up on the job. Again, this goes right back to having career students run the schools – most law professors couldn’t practice any more effectively than their students.

    *Translation: you can take a course called Trusts and Estates and never once SEE a will or trust, much less learn how to draft them.  No big deal, except comma placement and/or absence can completely change the interpretation of a will.  Many Contracts courses are devoid of seeing/drafting contracts.  It’s just a bunch of case law.  Pretty much every course is like this.

    **Law and Economics if you are lucky (not intended as a political statement), but more often things like Law and Spirituality, Law and the Diaspora of Human Emotion, Law and The Professor’s Hobbies and Interests, etc.

  • bscmath78

    Professor Wood, thanks for your response.  You wrote, “Is this material that the student would otherwise miss?”  Increasingly, I get the impression that most children do not read novels and especially not novels that don’t have some current TV or media tie in.   Even if some are taught in K-12 I doubt they were taught well.

    In addition, reading several of these novels as a child. I didn’t know many things and I didn’t recognize many things.  I didn’t know about Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Eichmann at the time.   I read the novels and watched the films as naive entertainment.  Doing intellectual, political, historical and propaganda analysis on a second or third reading adds to the depth of understanding.  The march of time adds to understanding.  Reading the analysis of others adds to understanding.  Wrestling with competing interpretations adds to understanding.  There is much to miss.

    You wrote, “What other courses will this course displace?” well I say it would best displace what displaced Western Civ or that all 3 be provided as alternatives for freshmen.  It could be the default and recommended with the others available as alternatives.

    You wrote, “if its intellectual history you want, there are much more direct avenues” but many have found that reading and thinking about novels provides the best education for most people.  Orwell and the others have done more than a host of colleges combined to enlighten citizens and to help defend human freedom, liberty, individualism, dignity and responsibility.  Direct avenues are not often the best for most people.  The totalitarians of the 20th century claimed to have “much more direct avenues” to a wonderful future, but only created mass pain, misery, suffering and death.

    “War is Peace
    Freedom is Slavery
    Ignorance is Strength”

    Are all very direct, and very wrong.

  • peterwwood

    Dear bscmath78, fair enough.  I favor the flourishing of many curricula, so long as they are grounded in serious intellectual purpose and thoughtful respect for previous human achievement.  I certainly have no objection to people reading serious novels, and it is clear that most students arriving at college today have read few such.  

    Peter Wood

  • peterwwood

    To bscmath78,You ask,”how can one defend the ideas of human freedom, liberty…though a a tradition of typically mandatory, dry, insipid courses…?”  The question as you phrase it is stacked.  How can one start a fire with wet matches?  By getting some dry ones. 

    I don’t see any need to defend poorly conceived or poorly taught core curricula, but that doesn’t mean that core curricula as such are a bad idea.  A core curriculum simply means that a body of faculty members has put on offer its best judgment of what students should study in a more or less coherent program.  Those who aren’t attracted to such a curriculum have myriad other options.  

    Mandatory course abridge freedom in at most a trivial sense.  Students who don’t like the requirements at one college have some 3,900 other colleges to consider–and that’s only in the United States.  To be free means to have meaningful choices.  A choice among thousands of colleges and universities all teaching a cafeteria-style curriculum is freedom only in the most superficial sense.  

    “One should be free to read” whatever one wants.  But it is silly to extend that principle to the curriculum.  I don’t lose the freedom to read whatever I want when I pursue a core curriculum at some college.  I just agree that for a limited time I will subscribe to someone else’s judgments about what i should study.  I can read whatever else I want on the side or when I have time. 

    Peter Wood

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, thank you for your explanation and pointers.

    In an earlier post you wrote the very surprising, “they would rather have a business major from an essentially open-enrollment university than a English/History/Poly Sci/etc major from the likes of a Colby or Tufts or Wesleyan.”  

    Professor Vedder starts off his New York Times article with “It is clear that business majors typically study and learn little, but party a lot.” 

    http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/04/17/why-look-down-on-a-business-degree/employers-are-catching-on

    Did the recruiters indicate the reasons for their preference?  Are party and drinking skills what they are looking for (it might be if you are peddling financial instruments)?  Or maybe the key thing is to appear “greedy”. ;-)

    What did the rest of your college classmates end up doing?  Especially the ones who couldn’t get jobs via family connections?

    The WSJ rankings http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703376504575491704156387646.html
    and the related series seem to suggest corporations like to recruit where there are lots of students who won’t have inflated egos (and thus quickly go somewhere else), so they seem to like big schools, but in your case you came to them. But it also looked as if there was generally less interest in Liberal Arts grads as only Georgetown, Duke and NYU are ranked, while 25 are ranked for Business/Economics.  Any observations about the WSJ article?

  • bscmath78

    Professor Wood, good. You wrote, “. . .it is clear that most students arriving at college today have read few such,” that is my impression (based on anecdotal information).

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    The connected kids from undergrad got jobs, of course. A few summa cum laude types struggled valiantly to get in the type of consulting firms that athletics-admits from Williams and Stanford casually walk into with their sub 3.0 GPA’s. A few other bright kids got into medical school. The vast majority became underemployed or went to grad school, mostly to not-quite-elite enough law schools or humanities programs. The school, in fact, likes to say that >70% of its grads from the last ten years have gotten an advanced degree, as though it is a badge of honor and not a subtle hint that the conferred degrees lack much worth. The trouble with going to a school in the Northeast ranked 15 or 20 or 25 is that almost 2/3 of the colleges and universities ranked higher are also in the Northeast, and will be competing against you for the same very finite pool of jobs in Boston/NYC.

    Corporations want business/finance majors because those majors that the students probably won’t need as much training as others. How do you know that History major can use Excel, or that the Poly Sci grad can use a calculator? Do you really want to interview a bunch more people to find out? I think similarly to how the BCG’s of the world consider HYSP as shorthand for the “best” candidates, other companies hire biz/finance/human resources majors (yes, there is such a thing) as shorthand for the most suitable candidates. Why spend time and money training new hires to do something when you can have a university do it for you? I really don’t think it is much more complicated than that. Recruiters aren’t reading “Academically Adrift.”

    I don’t think I have enough of a grasp of the hiring market at large to comment intelligently on all aspects of the WSJ lists, but the notion that NYU – notorious for large classes and TA’s handling the teaching/grading – is one of the best liberal arts colleges is risible. There seems to be a lot of missing info, too. Who are the recruiters? What were they asked, exactly? Statistics and surveys are always manipulable. Does anyone believe that an econ major from #2 OSU is more prized than #4 Harvard or #5 Penn/Wharton? DOes anyone think that Goldman Sachs will start hiring OSU grads because this survey says they are better?

  • bscmath78

    Professor Wood, there are today colleges that offer “Great Books” based programs, so parents/students who want that kind of education can send them there.   Even if the issue is restricted to “elite private and top public colleges and universities”  there is at least Columbia’s Core (which at least a few years ago was still teaching the “Iliad”) in the US.  So there would appear to be no problem. 

    The value of my list being used widely is that even the person who can only go to their local state college can have the choice to learn about freedom and liberty.

    Regarding “dry matches”, history suggests that one should have little confidence in the activities of a committee of academics. One could just look at what they did in previous eras to lose confidence.

    In your article you referred to an ISI test:

    “. . . multiple choice exam about civic literacy to 14,000 freshmen and
    graduating seniors. . . .  had resulted in a net loss of historical knowledge”

    A while back I took what was portrayed as a similar test at the ISI website (I got over 90%) and the key point was that it was an American civics literacy test, NOT a history test and especially not a “deep history” test.  It did ask about American historical events of importance to American civic life.  It did not ask about Marathon, Xerxes or Pericles. 

    It did ask questions about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and at least one important court case.  My list of documents would have been much better prep. If students don’t know about the 3 branches of the federal government as set out in the Constitution and know less after 4 years it is because they don’t care!  What the ISI test seemed to show was that students remembered something from K-12, but if it wasn’t repeated in college they tended to forget, probably because they not only don’t care but they don’t read about politics so there is no reinforcement.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    @chronicle-f17e28704bf2b4702992842989431d24:disqus 

    From Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw:

    UNDERSHAFT. Good. Now, as to money! I propose to treat you
    handsomely from the beginning. You shall start at a thousand a
    year.

    CUSINS. [with sudden heat, his spectacles twinkling with
    mischief] A thousand! You dare offer a miserable thousand to
    the son-in-law of a millionaire! No, by Heavens, Machiavelli! you
    shall not cheat me. You cannot do without me; and I can do
    without you. I must have two thousand five hundred a year for two
    years. At the end of that time, if I am a failure, I go. But if I
    am a success, and stay on, you must give me the other five
    thousand.

    UNDERSHAFT. What other five thousand?

    CUSINS. To make the two years up to five thousand a year. The two
    thousand five hundred is only half pay in case I should turn out
    a failure. The third year I must have ten per cent on the
    profits.

    UNDERSHAFT [taken aback] Ten per cent! Why, man, do you know what
    my profits are?

    CUSINS. Enormous, I hope: otherwise I shall require twenty-five
    per cent.

    UNDERSHAFT. But, Mr Cusins, this is a serious matter of business.
    You are not bringing any capital into the concern.

    CUSINS. What! no capital! Is my mastery of Greek no capital? Is
    my access to the subtlest thought, the loftiest poetry yet
    attained by humanity, no capital? my character! my intellect! my
    life! my career! what Barbara calls my soul! are these no
    capital? Say another word; and I double my salary.

    ———————————————————————-

    A century later, and still as relevant as ever.

  • bscmath78

    This relates to “A few years ago, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute administered a 60-question multiple choice exam about civic literacy to 14,000 freshmen and graduating seniors.”

    Back in 2010, in my 13th post in a Professor Vedder thread, I wrote about the ISI civics quiz:
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Modest-Proposal-Searchin/26949/

    “It might be worth considering the impact of the findings of the ISI’s report “Failing our Students, Failing America”:

    http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/summary_summary.html

    Finding 3, names 4 universities that were in the top 12, in one set of ratings. These 4 universities had seniors who did worse than the freshmen on a simple civics quiz. It suggests that the university experience resulted in worse outcomes. It calls it “negative learning”.

    Finding 1, includes the interesting tidbit that the best average was among Harvard seniors who got a D+!

    It is interesting that there does not seem to have been a rush away from the 4 top-rated universities that were named as having freshmen who did better than seniors. There also doesn’t seem to have been a rush away from the additional 4 colleges and universities listed with a negative “value added” (total of 8 with a negative value) at:

    http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/major_findings_finding1.html

    which has a chart of 50 colleges and universities with the scores and the “value added”.

    Unfortunately, there was no testing of 8th or 5th graders. It would have been fun to see which elementary schools did better than Harvard seniors.”

  • bscmath78

    The ISI report and subsequent the lack of shift in applications suggests that many (most?) students, parents and colleges (or at least the elite ones) don’t care!

  • bscmath78

    You can take the 2007 ISI civics test (or at least a version of it) at:

    http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2007/summary_summary.html

    click on the little box on the left side column under the list of headings.
     
    FYI, a while back, I got over 90% which shows it is an easy test on the web. The quiz on the website is multiple choice only. FYI, the debates were about slavery (if you need to go to college to know that then you have real problems). About the battle, if the real question is what battle forced the British to start to negotiate peace (which is subtly different than actually ending it), then it is Yorktown.

    Sadly, the list of 50 colleges did not include Columbia so we don’t get to see the impact of the Columbia Core.

  • bscmath78

    Yes, marry the boss’ daughter. It is the only thing that really counts.  That’s the real “capital”. Even the Stalin praising socialist GBS knew this. 

  • bscmath78

    I wonder what fraction of CHE readers know “Major Barbara”?  I only know the 1941 film, which is great. Since it was made in 1941, in Britain, during the Blitz, needless to say Undershaft the tycoon weapons-maker is a hero (note the shots of industrial production towards the end as part of the industrial might propaganda tour) at the end of the film.

    Undershaft is specifically looking for a foundling as heir and Cusins fits the bill in addition to being the future son-in-law.  The daughter is a major in the Salvation Army.

    “Wot prawce selvytion nah?” or in standard English: “What price salvation now?”

  • bscmath78

    Unemployed_Northeastern, thanks for the comments about your classmates.

    The WSJ rankings methodology is described here:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358904575478074223658024.html?mod=WSJ_PathToProfessions_TopLEADNewsCollection#articleTabs%3Darticle

    “The Journal focused on the nation’s largest public and private firms, nonprofit organizations and government agencies. The list included all companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500; NASDAQ-100; Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA); the 100 largest private companies according to published reports; and the 50 largest nonprofit organizations ranked by revenue, according to the latest figures in the Nov. 1, 2009 issue of the trade magazine, The NonProfit Times.”

    So it is of no interest to Goldman Sachs or other elite organizations that stick to recruiting only the “clubable” at HYPS and a few other colleges.

    The WSJ wasn’t interested in the best from an academic standpoint but only from a corporate recruiting get a job out of college standpoint.
    “. . .whose bachelor degree graduates were the best-trained and educated, and best able to succeed once hired.” from the viewpoint of the corporate recruiters (who probably haven’t heard of Sun Tzu).

    Elite LAC graduates probably don’t fit in, probably aren’t interested in these type of jobs and probably quickly go on to bigger and better things like grad or professional school, so are probably a poor risk for a regular corporate recruiter.

  • bscmath78

    David Denby’s 1996 “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World” seemed to show that the Columbia Core is wasted on the young.  When Denby returns after 30 years to take the Columbia Core yet again, his new learning seems a result of 30 years of life experienced outside of Columbia. As described, his instructors and classmates seem underwhelming (in some cases they are painful to listen to). 

    It appears he gets out mainly what he puts into the books with the advantages of Stanford graduate school, 30 years of experience and being a “New Yorker” film critic.   The Columbia Core seems in this book to be a waste of time and money. You would be better off going to the library to read the books and the books about the books yourself.  If you have enough motivation to go back to Columbia after 30 years, you should have enough to read the books for yourself or with a reading group (reading groups was one of the Great Books ideas).

    And if you have the motivation, why not read the Founding Fathers instead?

    If you don’t have the motivation then why should anyone hire you?

  • bscmath78

    So many can’t even be bothered to vote.

  • bscmath78

    Way back in 1968, when there was a shortage of new academics (apparently all male, but then Columbia and most of the elite colleges were men only), Columbia’s Jacques Barzun wrote “The American university: how it runs, where it is going”:
     
    “. . . the whole rigmarole is as wasteful and ineffectual as when James first deplored it” referring to William James’ 1903 critique in the “The Ph.D. Octopus”

    “. . . there is really very little the young serfs can do.”

    “. . . to a level of quasi neglect close to the undergraduate’s”

    He doesn’t make exceptions for Columbia and the last quote seems suggestive of what the Columbia Core and others of its ilk might have been like “back in the good old days”.

    He also writes regarding Ph.D. supervisors:

    “. . . for whom the supervising and examining of dissertations is all the more distasteful that [sic] most are exercises in fact-gathering rather than contributions to knowledge.”

    He also says he has nothing to change in his book as a result of events at Columbia in 1968.
    He is probably alluding to the occupations and protests.

  • bscmath78

    Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus wrote “Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting  Our Money and Failing Our Kids.”
     
    In their article http://chronicle.com/article/The-Self-Exam-That-Higher/128543/ they have nothing to say about Columbia or the Columbia Core. They mention other places but not Columbia, even though Claudia Dreifus is listed as teaching there.

    To elicit some more information I wrote in part, with reference to my 1968 Barzun quotations, at:
    http://chronicle.com/article/The-Self-Exam-That-Higher/128543/#comment-283507673

    “Has it changed much at Columbia? The article doesn’t say, even though one of the authors is at Columbia. Has it changed elsewhere? The article doesn’t say, doesn’t ask and doesn’t seem to care.

    More generally, the article provides some examples, but does not compare those examples to either Columbia or Queens College, their institutional homes. Apparently no “Physician heal thyself” admonitions or “Mea Culpas” for themselves, their departments, their faculties, their administrations or their top management.

    Does no one at Columbia or Queens College (past or present) read the CHE? I have yet to see in this thread a post claiming to be from someone at either institution. Are they afraid even with tenure and anonymity? Or do they know something that we don’t? Well, at least we have Barzun’s 1968 viewpoint.”

    Even in their book they have little to say about the Columbia Core other than a brief mention via “Contemporary Civilization” on page 97 with the main concern seemingly being, “However, what’s changed is that far fewer senior professors deign to take part, so the bulk of the teaching is given over to adjuncts and graduate assistants.”   No mention is made of any measure of effectiveness before or after this change.  Simple existence seems to make them somewhat mollified, “To the credit of Columbia, this class is still on the books.”  But one gets no sense that anything useful or lasting happens in the class.

    http://books.google.ca/books?id=RHdjkV-XqcQC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=%22what%27s+changed+is+that+far+fewer+senior+professors+deign+%22&source=bl&ots=PgmMPtT8e2&sig=veEmB45c9afcqLu63XXwZm0Qi5w&hl=en&ei=qAWFTuKSC6vH0AGy0M3ZDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22what%27s%20changed%20is%20that%20far%20fewer%20senior%20professors%20deign%20%22&f=false

    No mention of David Denby or his book.

  • bscmath78

    The interesting 1995 book “An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College” by Timothy Cross does not discuss the effectiveness of the curriculum in terms of even medium or long term results from the viewpoint of students who didn’t become Columbia staff.   Mention is made of various changes to reduce costs, but no impact on the students is really considered.  The focus is mainly on what Columbia faculty, administrators and staff thought.

    http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/oasis/history6.php

    “Finding full-time faculty willing to teach in the core was proving increasingly difficult in the 1960s, and the burden of teaching both courses fell more and more upon preceptors . . .”

  • bscmath78

    And what is a “preceptor”?  Here is Cross’ description of the 60s situation.
     
    “A preceptor is an advanced graduate student who teaches part time while completing a dissertation. Preceptors were the creation of fiscal imperatives, not academic ones:
    They were the low-cost alternative to the older position of instructor. ‘Columbia College used to spend immense sums for full-time instructors who often remained graduate students for many years. Henceforth, two or three graduate students would subsist as preceptor on the salary of a single instructor.’ ”

    Yet this seems to be similar to the situation that Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus seem to deplore on page 97 of “Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting  Our Money and Failing Our Kids” with “However, what’s changed is that far fewer senior professors deign to take part, so the bulk of the teaching is given over to adjuncts and graduate assistants.”

    Yet this seems to have been the situation for close to 50 years as can be seen in Chapter 6 of “An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College”.  Except it would appear that things were worse in the 60s since preceptors didn’t even have a Ph.D. unlike the adjuncts of today (and students paid far less back then).

    And remember what Barzun wrote in 1968, “. . . for whom the supervising and examining of dissertations is all the more distasteful that [sic] most are exercises in fact-gathering rather than contributions to knowledge.” which suggests that preceptors were picked from a unimpressive pool of graduate students.

    All of this seems to suggest that there is a serious problem with even American university history of the last 60 years.  Academics seem to have serious problems with their own history, so why should anyone trust them to teach Western Civ or any other form of history until they have clearly demonstrated their abilities outside of whatever arcane, obscure, narrow specialty they have? ;-)

    “An Oasis of Order” is well worth reading in its entirety (recognizing its basic pro-Core intent) because it illustrates several problems with the Core as it evolved over the decades. The problems, issues and challenges remain important today and just think of what students not under the sway of Columbia staff would have said. Notice how little interest there is in the actual as opposed to theoretical impact on students. Notice also the lack of measurement, metrics and accountability.

    Caveat lector
    Caveat auditor
    Caveat emptor

  • bscmath78

    Those interested in encouraging freedom and liberty might be interested in the discussion of an earlier version of my list and the resulting discussion in the Mark Bauerlein “Against Relevance” thread, starting here:
     
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/against-relevance/38096#comment-284724578

    For those who feel a need for poetry, the thread includes my suggestion of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other patriotic songs as interesting poetry for historical/political analysis.

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/against-relevance/38096#comment-284732249

  • bscmath78

    For some of the issues with “Academically Adrift” and its supporting material you can start reading here:
     
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/who-should-educate-the-educators/30362#comment-317536912

  • bscmath78

    For those unfamiliar with the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” here are a few verses:
     
    Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
    He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
    His truth is marching on.

    I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
    They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
    I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
    His day is marching on.

    I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
    “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
    Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
    Since God is marching on.”

    He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
    He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
    Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
    Our God is marching on.

  • porterszucs

    As the person who teaches “Poland in the 20th and 21st Century” at the University of Michigan, I would invite Professor Wood to sit in on my class someday.  If he actually took the time to investigate the content of the courses he dismisses as frivolous, he might see that many of them are quite serious, intellectually rigorous, demanding, and relevant to the students. First of all, I would maintain that a country of 40 million people is important in its own right, and I would point out that here in the Upper Midwest we have a lot of students of Polish heritage who appreciate the opportunity to learn about their ancestors.  But most of my students do not have ethnic ties to the region. They take the class because it provides a window onto the major themes of 20th century history: nationalism, modern warfare, the Holocaust, communism, capitalism, and much more. Poland was at the center of the storm for most of the past century’s calamities, and it provides an outstanding window onto these important matters. A historian ought to appreciate the importance of context, complexity, and specificity, and recognize that to study (for example) socialism, it is best to do so by seeing how it actually functioned in the lives of real people. Obviously I would never argue that a knowledge of the details of Poland’s past are essential for an education in history, but I would insist that someone with a history degree should learn that the best way to grasp large-scale phenomena is through the study of how those phenomena instantiate themselves in the world.   

    By the way, as a freshman at the University of Tulsa almost three decades ago, I took a first-year seminar called “Futures Past: Reading History through Science Fiction.”  In that course we read works of historical methodology and theory alongside fictional works that addressed the same themes. Not only did I learn to become a more critical and sophisticated consumer of popular culture, but my eyes were opened to the ways in which historians argued over important and fascinating theories about humanity’s relationship to time itself. I decided to become a history major because of that experience. If that course was frivolous, then my entire career since then as been equally so.

  • http://twitter.com/sugar_bird Laura Mitchell

    I’m surprised no-one has picked up on Chuckkle’s comment about skills and field work. We live in huge, very old (in human terms), and now highly connected world. There’s a lot of merit in debating the ideal content of an UG curriculum–history specifically, or liberal arts generally–but we know going in we’ll never arrive at consensus; Peter Woods points out that 4 years of coursework isn’t enough time to get it all in.

    For a global education, why are the Lincoln-Douglas debates more important to know than the tensions around change and continuity in the Boxer Rebellion? Or the ideologies of Apartheid?
    In an era where a few keystrokes on a hand-held device can replace factual recall, our students need skills to make sense of a bewildering onslaught of new information. How do you formulate useful/meaningful questions? How do you gauge the reliability of data? How do you build context to make sense of unfamiliar information? How do you keep track of large amounts of information and extract what’s necessary to answer your questions, without discarding relevant data that might change your answer?

    I see great utility and intellectual merit in the river-based assignment that Prof Woods dismissed. (If badly executed, it could be frivolous–but so could a great books course.) And I can’t imagine how a course on the construction and circulation of identity in our global age would not be relevant. Is it just the reference to Africa that makes it easy to dismiss?

    No matter how much a good student learns at a “top” college or university, s/he will leave college knowing only a small subset of the world’s available knowledge. I’m not at all advocating that we abandon a focus on “content” for our students. But I do assert that a wide range of “contents” can effectively teach the skills our students will need to navigate the fast-paced changes of the 21st century. Of course, none of this guarantees them jobs (but limited knowledge and skills probably precludes employment–or at least long-term employment in a changing economy).

    As our global political economy changes, maybe more knowledge about the Boxer Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Long March, and Tiananmen Square will serve students better than command of the details of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

  • bscmath78

    porterszucs, thank you for points, I especially liked your Science Fiction observations.
     
    Just as a reminder for those interested in freedom and liberty and unfamiliar with Poland in the 20th century:
     
    * In 1939, Poland was the first country to fight Hitler and end appeasement.
     
    * In 1939, Poland fought Hitler and Stalin on two fronts, while its neighbors waited to scavenge the corpse, while the rest of the world watched.

    * In 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saw the Nazi SS fought block by block to the bitter end, while the rest of the world watched.
     
    * In 1944, the Warsaw Uprising saw the Nazi SS fought block by block while the rest of the world watched.

    * In 1945, Poland was betrayed at Yalta by FDR and Churchill.
     
    * In the 80s, Solidarity struggled against Communism and help end the Soviet empire.

    * WW II saw neighbor betray neighbor, terrible atrocities, the Soviet NKVD Katyn Forest Massacre and most of the infamous Nazi death camps.

    * Exiled Polish soldiers fought the Nazis with zeal at Monte Cassino in Italy, in Normandy, in the streets of Berlin and elsewhere.  They also flew escort for Allied bombers aggressively attacking any Nazi attackers they saw.

  • jamesebryan

    I will confess, as a working academic I haven’t the time to read through all of bscmath78 and Unemployed_Northeastern’s back-and-forth, and can’t imagine a working academic would have the time to post them (how UN finds the time is self-evident).  Therefore, I hope the two points I would like to make have not already been addressed, but from skimming their entries I think not.

    First, regarding Peter Wood’s critique of what he views as overly specialized history offerings: I presume they have no prerequisites of the sort of broad introductory courses that would familiarize a student with the general outlines of history before proceeding to a more detailed examination of a particular topic within it.  If they do have such prerequisites, what’s the problem?  I know that in my department students don’t get into advanced specialized courses until after they have passed introductory surveys, and that the latter that are designated requirements but many of the former are electives.  I also presume that he takes amusing course titles to reflect flippant course content, rather than catchy names meant to generate interest among the students for classes that in fact have  intellectual rigor.  If the courses do have intellectual rigor, what does it matter if the students come to a better understanding of the human condition through a close examination of popular culture instead of through a better understanding of the human condition through a close examination of high culture or public policy making?

    Second, regarding bscmath78′s repeated slight of Greco-Roman civilization as the inspiration for totalitarianism based on readings of Plato and his colleagues, it should be considered that a love of the classics has long inspired liberals as well as reactionaries, and maybe bscmath78 should become familiar with more of classical culture than just its literature.  Classical civilization is like the Bible – big enough, diverse enough, and prestigious enough that almost anyone can pick and choose from it to promote almost any goal they wish.  Dictators aren’t the only ones to admire Greek and Roman art.  For instance, while Napoleon Bonaparte was building a Neoclassical Paris Thomas Jefferson was building a Neoclassical Washington, D.C.  Bonaparte admired the Roman Empire and Jefferson admired Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic.  (We can split hairs about how Bonaparte was an authoritarian liberal and Jefferson was more liberal in his theory than his practice, but the contrast remains.)

  • bscmath78

    The Lincoln-Douglas debates are more important to know about because the Civil War is still an open, running, unresolved sore in the body politic.  The Civil War was the most costly, deadly and bitter conflict (at least proportionally) in the nation’s history. Most do not need to know the details of the hours of debate.  One lecture should be sufficient for most, with the focus on why there used to be substantive political/policy debate in public.

    Your alternative list is perfect for Chinese Communists (except for Tiananmen Square). 

    As a child, I thought “55 Days at Peking” with Charlton Heston and the Marines defending the embassies against the murderous Boxer fanatics was great.  Needless to say, I am now aware of other opinions. Your list is too susceptible to the desire to please certain interests. 

    A better Chinese list for Americans might be:

    * The Rape of Nanking
    * The fall of Hong Kong
    * The strike across the Yalu and its repercussions
    * The Great Leap Forward
    * The trickery of the Hundred Flowers Campaign
    * The Cultural Revolution
    * The First Emperor’s burying alive the scholars and burning their writings (except for the practical/vocational ones like science, medicine and agriculture).

  • bscmath78

    You have only to read the works I listed previously to know the dangers of relying on the hand-held device:

    Zamyatin’s “We”  – novel
    Huxley’s “Brave New World” – novel
    Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – novel and animated film (some say the film was partly financed by the CIA)
    Orwell’s “1984″ – novel and film
    Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ – novel and film
    Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired
    by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)

    They also provide the motivation to act on the questions that have been raised.

  • bscmath78

    I confess, I am disappointed that jamesebryan didn’t write:  I can’t imagine a working academic would have such knowledge, intelligence, spirit, historical sense or ability to provide supporting sources ;-)

    In general, I don’t really disagree with jamesebryan’s second point, except Napoleon really was a dictator.  As I wrote near the beginning of this thread:

    “The Founding Founders overcame this noxious intellectual stew (maybe via John Locke’s writings and the political writings of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of 1688), but how many can resist being poisoned or weakened, other than through blind rejection of all that ‘irrelevant DWM’ stuff?”

    One can admire the Parthenon, as architecture, while remembering that it held the treasury looted from the Delian League, the alliance against Persia that Athens oppressed and butchered.  It mimics in stone the attributes of a wooden temple.  The Athenians would have been horrified by today’s white stone since the temple, including the carvings, was originally gaudily painted in bright colors.  The mathematics of the temple and the resulting visual effects are very interesting.  It is being eaten by air pollution. But what is really important for students to know is its history of trust betrayed, oppression and slaughter. But the writings of the Founding Fathers are more important.

    But now I have some other stuff to attend to.

  • http://twitter.com/sugar_bird Laura Mitchell

    Smart phones and I-pads and laptops aren’t dangerous; my point is that uninformed or uncritical use of the information they provide access to doesn’t serve us or our students very well–which I think is the point you make with a proposed reading list. It think we agree, here.

    My second point is that a wide range of reading/art/music/material culture/film can be used to help students develop the critical skills to embrace or avoid an Orwellian future–or other version to substitute for Orwell. We needn’t all share a political agenda or set of cultural inclinations to teach critical reasoning. In fact, a diversity of reading/sources lists is a very good thing.

    The question here is whether we need our students to reason with the same political purpose we do, to absorb a set of political and cultural values that matter to us as instructors, or whether we’re willing to risk having our students see the world as a Chinese communist might.

  • emwhitephd

    A side note on your inclusion of Atwell’s A Handmaid’s Tale in your list. I asked Atwell, at a social occasion some time ago, if she intended the book to be a feminist document, as it is often now used. She replied that she was surprised to hear this, that her major concern was the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US and its political implications. (Neither of us mentioned Harvard, an odd interpretation.) Her prescience about the importance of her subject is remarkable and certainly justifies inclusion of the book in a sound history course.

  • jamesebryan

    I am impressed with the erudition you have demonstrated in your many postings here, my point was that I was astonished at the sheer volume of them and unfortunately cannot possibly read them all and attend to my duties at work during the day.  I am glad to learn that my assumption that your notions of classical civilization are entirely literary is mistaken, and as an art historian I regularly teach all that you have mentioned about the Parthenon, and finish by teaching that the Athenians lost the ensuing Peloponnesian War that they brought upon themselves as a result.

    However, I will add that I find many of your statements vaguely pessimistic and disheartening.  I do not agree that regarding the Parthenon the fact that the Athenians committed atrocities whose origin was directly linked to their turning the Delian League into an extortion racket is “what is really important for students to know,” which I take to imply that such is what is MOST important for students to know and all the rest is merely incidental.  Everything the Parthenon can demonstrate about Greek ideals is worth knowing as an insight into the thinking of our fellow human beings and thus an increased understanding of ourselves by comparison, and while I’m no Pollyanna and certainly don’t believe in celebratory, jingoistic, filial-pious history, neither do I think students are well served by prioritizing all that has been worst in history as “what is really important to know.”  In this I hope I am misreading your intent.

    As a point of clarification, I too regard Napoleon as a dictator, but wanted to acknowledge that some might find some of his policies “liberal,” such as his being the first leader of a major modern nation-state to remove sodomy laws from the books, regarding such conduct as a private matter of no legitimate concern to the state.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Get yourself a collection of Shaw’s plays. While he does not have the transcendent genius of Shakespeare or Geothe’s Faust (and who can match them, really?), Shaw is one of the wittiest playwrights I have ever come across. A worthy foil for the Oscar Wildes of the world. I enjoyed Shaw considerably more than Ibsen or (most of) Chekhov, for example.

  • bscmath78

    jamesebryan, I commend you as an art historian for providing the context that I referred to.  But I suspect that the Western Civ survey courses of yore neglected this.

    Your approach sounds appropriate for those interested in art history.  My comment on importance was in the context of a political/historical education in Liberty for the general US citizen student. It was based on my assumption that coming into class, general US citizen students will most likely only know the “celebratory” aspects of the Parthenon (and probably other things) and therefore need an antidote. I have no objection to them taking your course or other courses on Antiquity that also provide the context and human cost.

    My posts in this thread sought to counter some of the elements of Professor Wood’s article. I sought to identify a more useful, more effective and more generally palatable alternative to the Western Civ survey courses of old — for general US citizen students.

    Thank you for your perspectives.

  • bscmath78

    jamesebryan, WRT silencing blog posters, please read my posts starting:

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/what-else-might-one-do-with-an-english-ph-d/30387#comment-316841743

    One of my later posts in that thread refers to Matthew Arnold who is identified with “‘the best which has been thought and said”. But I referred to a famous downbeat work. The “best” is rarely cheer-leading.

  • bscmath78

    jamesebryan, in “Fahrenheit 451″, Montag pulls the plug on the giant TV screens to get his wife’s attention.  He then reads “Dover Beach” to his wife and her friends in an attempt to break through. He fails.
     
    Pessimistic? Disheartening? Melancholy? “No certitude”? “No help for pain”?

    Maybe.

    Yet still I struggle in these threads since “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

    I also hope:
     
    “Every time we really pay attention we destroy some of the evil within”
     
     - Simone Weil (1909-1943 (tragically))

  • bscmath78

    Laura Mitchell, I fear the popularity of ubiquitous digital soma and Feelies among children.  Will there remain even a Mond or questioning Alpha?  Maybe Proles are the answer? Mind you, “Sic transit gloria mundi” is an old line.

    I agree with your first two points. I had a longer list at:
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-university-of-stonehenge-part-2-of-3/30451#comment-323080313

    I thought it would appeal across a wide-spectrum of US political and US cultural values as well as US agendas. I thought it would provide common ground, thinking it represented a diversity of opinion among US citizens (excluding Communist Party of China and People’s Liberation Army members).  It provides examples of propaganda to inoculate.  But students might end up agreeing with Mond, O’Brian or Beatty, I hope not, but such are the risks of freedom.  I think each work in my list has its own “political purpose” which is part of its beauty to me.

    Thank you for your perspectives.

    My posts in this thread sought to counter some of the elements of Professor Wood’s article.  I sought to identify a more useful, more effective and more generally palatable alternative to the Western Civ survey courses of old — for general US citizen students.

  • bscmath78

    emwhite, Atwood is quoted on page 87 of “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (edited by Harold Bloom) as saying, “The Wall is the wall around Harvard yard”.  You can read the whole quotation and related material at:
     
    http://books.google.ca/books?id=u9dlKNJh_rAC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=%22the+wall+is+the+wall+around+harvard+yard%22&source=bl&ots=yym18uBJms&sig=hSpXokaYuFldiUiafBTauR0GlPM&hl=en&ei=8juHTuLUOOLj0gHgsdXWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20wall%20is%20the%20wall%20around%20harvard%20yard%22&f=false

    Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale, Roman Protéen: Conférence de Margaret Atwood”
    tells us more about the buildings and quotes a friend asking, “Hasn’t anybody figured out that this book is about the Harvard English department?”

    http://books.google.ca/books?id=LOjxddA5gVsC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=%22hasn%27t+anybody+figured%22+harvard&source=bl&ots=i7B4tninmp&sig=lD44QsIrVAmviquBI8Jj5pcNJCo&hl=en&ei=aESHTtC7FInW0QGS9ez3Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hasn%27t%20anybody%20figured%22%20harvard&f=false

    The Harvard University Gazette reported on her receiving the Radcliffe medal.

    “Atwood said her Cambridge days provided fodder for her prize-winning novels. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” altered the architecture of her Harvard Square haunts, including the Brattle Theatre and Widener Library.”

    http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/06.12/03-radcliffe.html

    Harvard Magazine quotes her whole talk including, “All of these buildings appear in altered form in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

    http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/democracy-use-it-or-lose.html

    In 1990, the LA Times wrote:

    “In a hotel lobby interview in Berlin, Atwood gladly filled in the Cambridge, Mass., references in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ starting with the grim, monastic clothes store, Lilies of the Field, placed in what had been, in pre-revolutionary times, Cambridge’s beloved repertoire movie house, the Brattle Theatre.

    Atwood said, ‘The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library is where they have public hangings.’ ”

    http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-04/entertainment/ca-2834_1_atwood-tale-handmaid

  • smac5

    Hear, hear, with one caveat.  I teach classics, and my department teaches “niche” courses in classics. (Gender in Antiquity, Racism in Antiquity, Sex and War in the ancient world, etc.)  We do this precisely because by doing so, we can in fact cover the dark side of the “light in the darkness,” as Edith Hamilton calls it, that was created by Athens.  These courses inevitably inspire discussions of modern racism, sexism, imperialism, etc – and I say, good for us.  The students learn to read historical authors, which is rather like reading a newspaper – what’s the point of view, and how does that affect what the text says?  How do we know what is the point of view?  Where does it arise?  And they learn to ask what ideas might be opposed to their prejudices, and even to evaluate them.  Along the way, we can talk about the difference between the Greeks and Romans, or between the Spartans and Athenians (and how they are portrayed now). To me, these are the things that a history student needs to know more than when Pericles died.  On the other hand, my students will always know more about what Hercules was really like, or what Plato said, or who won the Peloponnesian War.  (I know this because they send me notes on Facebook when they see a bad documentary.)  There doesn’t need to be a exclusive chasm between real history and niche courses, nor between old and new periods of study.

  • bscmath78

    If anyone has any doubts about my earlier Harvard claims in “Atwood’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ – novel, film, opera (some say the novel was inspired by the Harvard English department and it definitely occurs in and around Harvard)”, they can read the following sources:

    Atwood is quoted on page 87 of “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (edited by Harold Bloom) as saying, “The Wall is the wall around Harvard yard”.  You can read the whole quotation and related material at:
     
    http://books.google.ca/books?id=u9dlKNJh_rAC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=%22the+wall+is+the+wall+around+harvard+yard%22&source=bl&ots=yym18uBJms&sig=hSpXokaYuFldiUiafBTauR0GlPM&hl=en&ei=8juHTuLUOOLj0gHgsdXWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20wall%20is%20the%20wall%20around%20harvard%20yard%22&f=false

    Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale, Roman Protéen: Conférence de Margaret Atwood”
    tells us more about the buildings and quotes a friend asking, “Hasn’t anybody figured out that this book is about the Harvard English department?”

    http://books.google.ca/books?id=LOjxddA5gVsC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=%22hasn%27t+anybody+figured%22+harvard&source=bl&ots=i7B4tninmp&sig=lD44QsIrVAmviquBI8Jj5pcNJCo&hl=en&ei=aESHTtC7FInW0QGS9ez3Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hasn%27t%20anybody%20figured%22%20harvard&f=false

    The Harvard University Gazette reported on her receiving the Radcliffe medal.

    “Atwood said her Cambridge days provided fodder for her prize-winning novels. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” altered the architecture of her Harvard Square haunts, including the Brattle Theatre and Widener Library.”

    http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/06.12/03-radcliffe.html

    Harvard Magazine quotes her whole talk including, “All of these buildings appear in altered form in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

    http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/democracy-use-it-or-lose.html

    In 1990, the LA Times wrote:

    “In a hotel lobby interview in Berlin, Atwood gladly filled in the Cambridge, Mass., references in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ starting with the grim, monastic clothes store, Lilies of the Field, placed in what had been, in pre-revolutionary times, Cambridge’s beloved repertoire movie house, the Brattle Theatre.

    Atwood said, ‘The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library is where they have public hangings.’”

    http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-04/entertainment/ca-2834_1_atwood-tale-handmaid

  • bscmath78

    smac5, what do they think of Michael Wood’s “In Search of the Trojan War”?  Do they really think Hercules was real?  Do they think Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell appear in documentaries on Antiquity? Do they distinguish between Greek Myth, history as improved by Herodotus, Xenophon et al., Hollywood entertainments and the archeological record?

    What documentaries on Classical Antiquity do you classify as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly? 

    Do they recognize the problem with Patton’s sales pitch for Syracuse in “Patton” (1970)? George C. Scott as Patton.

  • bscmath78

    Sadly, I am too lazy.

    I did enjoy the film adaptions: “Pygmalion”, “Major Barbara”, “Androcles and the Lion”, “Caesar and Cleopatra” and indirectly “My Fair Lady”.

  • bscmath78

    Do they learn that the real intellectual progress happened out in the colonies with scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and inventors? Archimedes, Zeno, Pythagoras, Euclid, Hero et al. came from neither Athens nor Sparta.  The creator of the Antikythera mechanism probably came from the colonies, some say Rhodes.

    http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/

  • smac5

    Oh woe, or in Greek, talas ego! So many things wrong!  Frankly, I rarely watch documentaries about the ancient world – they just make me furious – so driven to come up with some gotcha, but there are few gotchas in history in the sense that there is no single answer.  In short, I did not watch “In Search of the Trojan War,” especially since my research interests are heroes in the Iliad and Greek tragedy, so I know I would have hated it.  Most classicists these days figure myths are as real as pottery, just in a different way.  And as you can guess, I recommend none of them.  Not sure who “they” is in your first paragraph – classicists certainly differentiate these various types of “history.”  There are many basic books on Greek and Roman history – I would recommend Ian Morris on “The Greeks.”
    Didn’t see Patton – oddly enough, I don’t like war movies.  I only liked “Troy” for Brat Pitt.
    On Hercules – again, this is something I have thought about.  If there was such a person, he would have no bearing on the myths.  After all, are any stories about King Arthur true? Even George Washington (I mean stories we were told as children, not well-researched history)?  Yet we know they did live at some point.  Or did you mean did the Greeks believe he was real?  Probably the way English children believe in King Arthur – that is, it doesn’t really matter.  only post-Descartes thinkers worry so much about what is “fact.”
    On intellectual history:  that is what I am going to teach in the spring as “Racism (or not) in the ancient world.”  My premis mostly is that modern racism has kept the modern world from acknowledging everything that the Greeks got from abroad, but that the Greeks were not racist in our sense.  (I am using Eric Gruen’s “Rethinking the Other in Antiquity,” although I have some reservations about that too.)  However, I would not say “real intellectual progress” did not occur in Athens.  Parmenides and Democritus would never have had the impact they had if Plato had not filled out their arguments.  In fact, I object to notions that the “real” progress happened in a single place and everyone else was “stealing” from them.  Ideas do not work that way.  There was a PBS series that showed how one idea morphed into something we would never have imagined being related, nor would those scientists have been bothered by the borrowing – ideas were worth spreading for their own sake, they didn’t own them.
    There is a good documentary ( the only “good” one I know, but it’s not about history) called “Black Athena” that explains the controversy about modern racism, although it’s a bit dated.  There’s probably something about Black Athena on Wikipedia.
    And for sure, the Greek and Roman political systems surely inspire both liberals and conservatives (especially clear after the Black Athena controversy).  However, it is clear that their political systems were conceived so differently and aimed at such different goals (forestalling class warfare, for one), but from very different angles, that they really have pretty much entirely imposed modern ideas on ancient ones without understanding them.
    Thanks for the interesting questions.

  • bscmath78

    smac5, thank you for your response.  The “they” I was referring to in my questions were your students since you had written, “. . . my students will always know more about what Hercules was really like . . .”

    This surprised me since as child I thought Hercules, the Minotaur and Pandora were myths, while Knossos, Troy, Mycenae, Linear A and Linear B were real. 

    Also as I child, I read that in 1952, Michael Ventris had deciphered Linear B as a form of Ancient Greek and discussed his theory on a BBC radio program.
     
    Here is a description of a BBC documentary about Ventris:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/linear-b.shtml

    It turned out that Linear B was used to record financial/economic activity of interest to the ancient accountants and bureaucrats (or at least those records were the only ones that survived the destruction of the palaces).

    So I do not preclude the possibility of interesting new things in a popular treatment.
     
    A recurrent theme in the “In Search of the Trojan War” series and book is that each new set of archeologists interpreted or reinterpreted artifacts to fit their own worldview and preconceptions.

  • bscmath78

    Isn’t great when the author is still alive to tell her readers what she did?  But despite Atwood’s repeated explanations it is surprising how many working academics are oblivious to the Harvard references, including some who were students there, read the book — and even give lectures on it. 

    It makes you wonder how you can trust working academics with anything that cannot be independently and directly verified with the source . ;-)  Though sources and authors can lie. ;-)

  • bscmath78

    The struggle continues against “Ignorance is Strength.”

  • big_giant_head

    Huh.  OK.  And yet I’m going to do a classic English professor move here and say that I don’t CARE what Atwood says her book is about.  The subject is clearly a whole lot larger and more comprehensive than (who the heck cares about) the Harvard English department.  The novel has had its effect as a feminist novel and as a warning about Christian fundamentalism–and who can really separate those two issues, anyway?

  • peterwwood

    Laura Mitchell:  (1) Those “few keystrokes” that replace factual recall don’t accomplish very much for the individual who lacks a basic framework within which particular facts hold significance.  When it comes to historical understanding, that framework includes names and dates.  “Includes” doesn’t mean “limited to.”  The chronological frameworks are necessary, not sufficient. (2) A undergraduate student residing in the United States would surely be better served by understanding the Lincoln-Douglas debates in depth than by acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of the Boxer Rebellion.  This is not to say one would wish the student to remain ignorant of the Boxer Rebellion.  The question is one of priorities.  The rubric “global education” that you use is mischievous to the extent that it obscures the choices.  Everything is potentially “global education.” (3) Of course students need to learn analytical skills as well as information.  You pose a false dichotomy.  (4) My name is Wood, not Woods.  You got the theory right, just not the details.

    Peter Wood

  • jamesebryan

    That sounds like exactly the sort of curriculum I would want out of a classics department.  I wouldn’t want a rapturous appreciation of the accomplishments of classical high culture to be all we teach about it, nor would I want nothing but a relentless demonstration of instances of brutality in the classical world to be all we teach about it.  As bscmath78 explained, neither does he or she in general, but has here emphasized the pessimistic as a rhetorical technique in challenging Peter Wood.

    Oddly enough, as far as I can tell neither he nor anyone else has commented upon my query about giving broad overviews in required introductory courses and saving esoteric foci for electives later, which I think addresses one of the central complaints of his column.