Modern Language Association Adds Office of Scholarly Communication

Will libraries see an increase in their MLA Bibliographic Database subscriptions next renewal to pay for this new position?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is a brilliant choice for this position! Great news.

I’m curious as to how the digital revolution will affect college library design, especially considering that it costs six dollars a years to keep a book on a shelf in an average academic library: http://www.gensleron.com/cities/2011/6/6/designing-libraries-in-a-digital-world.html

I have short work-week students in my classes. They’re called C-, D, or F.

This is a bit of apples and oranges comparison, some schools may have different standards on curriculum “rigor” and certainly majors play a huge role in dictating amount of time invested in studies. My name is not Naomi Riley and I am not discrediting any particular major or grad program, but of course engineering students are studying way more than Ethnic Studies majors. Those AES majors may be doing all sorts of other community service  (or is that included in academics time) or useful self-development outside of school. But overall, the NSSE report does show a lessening of effort needed to move through higher education. Every student needs to be looked at individually to say what they are getting out of their college studies or, more importantly, we should  look at what they are doing 5-10 years out of college to guage the worth of their investment. But the short answer is, yes, there is a bit of a shell game going on here in the liberal arts. If only learning to “think critically” didn’t just sound good, it actually produced marketable skills. The anti-vocational tone of liberal arts curriculums always confuses me. At least have truth in advertising, “At Walla Walla State University, 53% of our politcal science major alumni are currently baristas, 10% deferred further and are in unmarketable PhD programs, and the rest left the country.”  Higher education is not going to get away with acting like the Wizard of OZ for long because people are already peeling back the curtain. The only levearge universities have is a monopoly on accredidation, once that charade is finished, there is going to be a whole bunch of sturm and drang in the ivory towers. A traditional 4 year education for education’s sake is not a bad thing at all, just don’t sell it as what it isn’t for most students, a clear path to career and personal development. 

Dear Prof Vedder –

I have followed your work for years and continue to watch you miss the forest for the trees.  While all you cite is indeed true and has been, but for only for a certain segment of the student population — remember the gentlemenly Cs in pre-WW II American universities?  The biggest problem in academe is student jobs.  In the vast majority of state colleges and universities, including NIU, most of my students WORK at low-paying jobs for 20 to 40 hours (or more) a week to support their tuition and room-and-board habits. 

Why?  Because since Ronnie Reagan’s day, most states have dramatically retreated from supporting higher education.  At my own university, state support in Illinois has dropped, since 1971, from approx 65% of budget to under 26%.  Why?  Blame Grover Norquist and acolytes and their short-sighted mania for low to no taxes.  Illinois is in the hole some 80+ Billion (with a B) because for three decades, state income tax — a regressive flat tax BTW –  was kept artifically low to abt 3+%, whereas neighboring Wisconsin’s state income tax was (still is, in spite of a crazy Governor) more than double that at 7%. And what does every university Board of Regents do to make up lost state support?  Raise the costs of tuition and room & board, of course !   

So, when you speak of student study time, subtract just working to make the rent and tuition and books and (of all things) food, and you’ll find many many (if not most) students ARE working very hard — as they juggle study time and work time.  If you want to improve study time for most students, cut their tuition bills by 1/2 to 2/3s and you’;ll see a very different university — one comparable to the kind when we attended university in the 1960s.  I keep waiting for you to make the most obvious causal connections – but so far, you have not.

JVK

There is some truth to your argument, but I think it has to be coupled with the fact that we are steadily losing the attitude that for students, school is their job, an attitude that is getting lost a lot sooner than college.  How many teenagers do you know who “have” to work, typically to sustain that vehicle they can’t live without?  Study time gets sacrificed in favor of flipping burgers or bagging groceries.  Obviously, the current cost of college is pushing ever more students into the workforce prematurely, making it hard for even those relatively better off to manage the kind of student loads that those of us from earlier times remember.  On the other hand, I don’t see a lot of sacrifice going on to hold costs down from any of the various parties (students, parents, government, faculty, and most assuredly, academic administration).  It’s only when it comes time to pay the piper that people begin to squawk.

I will note that for as far back as I can remember, the STEM disciplines have demanded, and gotten, a lot more study time from their respective student bodies that the liberal arts disciplines.  They’ve also worked hard to establish relationships with business interests to enable many of their students, even quite early in their studies, to obtain part-time employment that pays relatively well, is discipline related, and not insignificantly may include tuition support.  The students just have to come up to the mark to qualify. 

We all know of students who skate by, typically by locating the easiest major on campus (just find out where the jocks are warehoused).  Also, we all are quite aware of the factors (not the least of which is using student evaluations for determining raises) that have led to grade inflation, particularly in disciplines where grading is more subjective than analytical.  Majors which are smorgasbords of rather loosely related coursework tend to make a mockery of what a college degree represents.  There are some obvious advantages the STEM disciplines have in keeping students’ eyes on the prize, but are they really so much different?  Perhaps some real effort should be undertaken to incorporate more of what they are doing to sustain student interest than seems to be the case in other disciplines.  I  would start with having meaningful prerequisite requirements (you simply cannot succeed in the next course without doing reasonably well in its prerequisites).  I would also seek to have faculty who might be termed polymaths, rather than ones so specialized they are only effective when teaching very narrowly defined coursework.

_perplexed_, I tend to agree for non-physical sciences/engineering students. 35 years ago when I was an undergrad it seemed as if non-physical sciences/engineering students spent the weekend having fun or recovering from hangovers. But there was the time when maintaining the all important draft deferment kept some at the books, especially during the 60′s. 

Louis Menand’s “The Marketplace of Ideas” credits the college draft deferment and the Vietnam War with driving male college enrollment to heights it has never regained. I would think the same forces drove much higher retention, graduation and studying, as well as post-college work in jobs, like defense industry jobs, that provided draft deferments.  

Response to cwinton –

Ok, so imagine the typical middle-class student whose parents have been laid off, downsized, RIFfed, and other popular corporate-led attempt to maximize profits while caring less about the people they “let go.”  Just ask Mittens how it’s done.  Then, these 18 to 23 yr olds try to better themselves and not fall victim as their parents have done to the malaise of the ages by attending the least-expensive college in which they can enroll.  Now, the ONLY way to survive is to work part-time and to take loans, or work full-time and try to avoid the never-never trap of school loans.  As they struggle to make enough to pay ever-rising tuition costs, and begin their majors, they are faced with impossible choices: to work to make $, to study, or to sleep.  Guess which one gets cut the most?

Then to add insult to injury, along comes a so-called expert who tells them, as did Trireme whip-handlers in Homer’s day: work harder, slap, slap!  Work faster, slap slap.  I’d invite you to attend some of my classes and shadow some of my students.  Would you see some slackers?  Of course. Would you see most students on the corporate-driven cycle of higher tuition, lower wages, and at the end, few jobs?  Yes.  You should be embarrassed at your pontificating until you’ve walked a mile (or ten) in their shoes and do it now, not based on your memory of 40 years ago.

JVK 

I’m weary of all this talk about the rigor of STEM discpilines, unaccompanied by any evidence that STEM students are learning anything useful, that STEM students are getting STEM jobs, that STEM students are prepared adequately for those jobs, and so on. Agricultural stoop labor is also rigorous and demanding. A lot of time on task.

I’m pushing 70. As an 18 year old high school honors graduate, I went to a really good small liberal arts college, and my parents paid. I did not have to work at a part time job. I did not have a family to take care of. I lived in a dorm and had to spend no time on commuting and hunting for a parking place. Meals were served in the dining hall. I was too young to go to bars. My job was college, and, as a responsible fellow, I put in a lot of time studying. I didn’t cut classes. But, in spite of this ideal situation, I really doubt that I learned much in at least the first two years, even though I got good grades and did all the work. I played the game, but I wasn’t really ready to learn. I didn’t have enough foundational knowledge  in my head at age 18 to build new learning on. I memorized stuff that I didn’t understand. Most of the courses I took in those first two years did not take into account where I was starting from, and I ws toward the head of the pack. My math and science courses were the easiest ones since they were closed systems that did not require hooks into reality.  It wasn’t until I was into my junior year that I had gained some maturity, that things started to come together, and I genuinely began to learn–in the sense that I had acquired some critical control of coherent knowledge of the content and methods of a discipline. And even that was pretty rudimentary, as I discovered as I proceeded with my post baccalureate education.

So take away some or all of the advantages I had. What can we reasonably expect of the most well intentioned student we see nowadays among our freshmen?  Yet how many of us have said, with reference to our college years, “Damn, If I had known then what I know now, I would have gotten a lot more out of those first couple of years!.”  Our expectations of our students, however, often assume that they know now what we didn’t.

11274135, G.B. Shaw said it well: “Youth is wasted on the young.”

That is no reason to waste further resources.  You wrote that you are “pushing 70″ so your experience is very different, especially since you attended a “really good” SLAC.  From your description it seems as if you would have been better off first spending 5 years as a Marine guarding the DMZ against the North Koreans, to mature you. 

But your story fits with the standardized CAOS introductory Statistics test results that I commented on upthread. You wrote, “I really doubt that I learned much,” and I certainly believe you. The CAOS and CLA evidence (for all its many faults) indicates that is true today, so why waste money.  Your parents were free to waste their money on you, but why should anyone else?

You wrote, “. . . unaccompanied by any evidence  . . .that STEM students are getting STEM jobs . . . ”

You have not been paying attention to various previous articles in the CHE and the studies referenced.

The beauty of the Physical Sciences, Computer Science, Math and Engineering is their reputation for being hard, which discourages many from taking STEM subjects or encourages them to switch to other majors, which is WONDERFUL!  You have to be lucky to pick the right area that will actually be hiring at the time you graduate.  So they require a lot of work and a lot of risk.  That risk is increasing with Globalization, Moore’s Law and all the visas increasing competition.

So here is some evidence (in process I have to find them):
 
A Georgetown study

The first Arum and Roksa study
 
The 2nd Arum and Roksa study

johnvknapp, it would seem in your view that this would all seem a restoration of the ancient Classical model (which is not a justification).

Doctors, teachers, tutors and librarians; all slaves, were a major
Roman import from their Greek conquests. The Romans appreciated a good
liberal arts education among those they were enslaving. The educated
slave joined the multitude of slaves doing the work at the household or
enterprise that purchased them.

The Roman typically had little
concern about being catered hand and foot by slaves or having their
children catered hand, foot and mind by slaves. Well, maybe a bit of
anxiety about another Spartacus, but then that was what the legions
were for.

* The pedagogue was typically a slave in classical Greece.
* Children were taken care of by slaves or servants.
* Wealthy Romans had slaves to wet nurse their babies (see the scene on the wet nurse option in the 1960 “Spartacus”).

Nietzsche
staged this photograph, inspired by how Alexander the Great reputedly
used his tutor Aristotle (Aristotle harnessed to a cart, Alexander in
the cart, whip in hand):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-
salome188.jpg

So maybe all you are doing is preparing the young not to be “wage slaves” like their parents, but “debt slaves”?

rpm13, it should be remembered that back in the early 20th century the elite universities (excluding places like the University of Chicago) were country clubs and were largely inhabited by students who had much better things to do than study.

Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton” describes the extensive efforts to keep out certain groups of students. It discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “This Side of Paradise” which stated Princeton’s “reputation as the pleasantest country club in a America” (p74). Page
66 quotes Woodrow Wilson’s wife as saying Wilson (then the new President of Princeton, later President of the United States) had “ruined…the most agreeable and aristocratic country club in America”.

But we learn that Wilson was defeated in his attempt to shift the emphasis to learning.On page 10 and elsewhere you can read about Harvard’s attempts to cap the number of “intellectuals” at 10%. “Intellectuals” being the term to describe students who were interested in working hard at academic subjects (“grade grinds”).

Page 77 of Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature: An Institutional History” has E.H.
Magill giving 5% as a optimistic figure of students getting value from their professor’s studies (this in talking to the MLA (Modern Language Association) in 1892).

It should be remembered this was the state of affairs when these elite universities admitted no women (or a girl who at 12 passed the Yale entrance exams in 1783) and worked hard to ensure that most students were the sons of elite society, the products of
elite Protestant private prep schools, with no interest in academics and the willingness to pay full price.

So it may be that things are slowly returning to the normal state of affairs, given that the intense part of the Cold War ended with Nixon doing his deal with Mao in 1972 (if not earlier), so that there is less perceived need for good, hard-working, academic students.

The article states, “Mark Bauerlein has pointed out to me, they are not lazy (or at least
not many of them), but they are doing trivial, selfish things too often.”

Yet if you look a the Brainstorm articles it appears that Professor Bauerlein is talking about Humanities faculty and English profs in particular.

The article states, “A large portion of research is seldom cited or read, designed mainly to get faculty tenure or enhance their prestige within a very small subset of the population.”  Well, actually, a large portion, outside the Humanities, is paid for by NIH, NSF, the military and other agencies who pay overhead charges that subsidize the rest of the university along with paying for grad students and postdocs. 

The research may be “trivial,” to some, but it was carefully selected for funding by the funders and if they don’t like what was done, they stop providing the money.  For top research, one would expect it to be seldom read, especially the secret or proprietary research. This is the kind of research that won WW II, the Cold War, the Space Race etc.  As for “seldom cited” think of poor Gregor Mendel (an abbot doing his work in a monastery) who was ignored for years, yet it is work was the basis for genetics and the biotech industry.

“Among students in our study who took the CAOS test at both the
beginning and end of the semester, the average score increase was 5
percentage points”

This tiny improvement in the Ithaka S+R study may best be explained by the average simply improving due to:

* Students dropping out or not taking the test
* Increased focus on the posttest and minimal focus on the pretest
* Increased multiple-choice test experience from other courses
* Increased practice in strategic guessing from other courses
 
So there may have been no learning of statistics at all.
 
I have excluded the Placebo Effect and the Hawthorne Effect since I would have expected much greater improvements with completely useless treatments.  This leaves open the possibility that the hybrid course does do harm, but the harm is hidden by the Placebo and Hawthorne Effects.  A frightening thought.

As an anecdotal example of how few students have traditionally been interested in learning academic subjects (on top of Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen” and Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature”), instead of having a good time and getting a prestigious credential, we have, Kenrick S. Thompson’s add on response to a comment on his CHE Letter to the Editor “Students’ Sense of Entitlement Drives Away a Faculty Member”:

“My father, a distinguished professor of psychology, now deceased, always told me, ‘Son…..if you feel that you have reached 5-10% of your students, then consider yourself a success as an educator.’  Initially, I always thought his observation rather pessimistic…..surely the odds are better than that.  My father was wise, however, and I later found his estimate to be most accurate.” 

http://chronicle.com/article/Students-Sense-of-Entitlement/131879/#comment-531195297 

“5-10%” fits nicely with Karabel and Graff.

Even STEM certificates/degrees are highly suspect as illustrated by the general misuse of statistics in many fields and the abysmal results obtained by a group of  Statistics TAs, even when many have previously marked the final exam, they were only slightly better (72 vs. 65) on average than their own students when they take the same exam later!  Even with “the blind leading the blind,” the undergrads did remarkable well compared to their TAs, probably because they were 1976 Berkeley undergrads.  But how much did they remember a month or 6 months after the exam? This was long before the CAOS test. 

For more details and the source, please see:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/everyone-should-learn-statistics/46353#comment-516819032

For some comments on the issue of credentials:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/stanfords-credential-problem/46851#comment-529524438

chuckkle, you have taught at 2 or more universities, yet still you asked in your first comment:

“Do these studies of how many hours students are studying account for the other hours?”

Didn’t your universities participate in  the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)? Or were you never interested in what your students were doing?

The article even includes a link to NSSE. With a little work I get to
http://nsse.iub.edu/2011_Institutional_Report/pdf/freqs/FY%20Freq%20by%20Carn.pdf

Which as has questions 9a-9g which ask a number of questions including 9f “Providing care for dependents living with you (parents, children, spouse, etc.)”

Yet you seem to be unaware of all this easily obtained information.

A while back in http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations/28804 Professor Vedder references a study http://ftp.iza.org/dp4666.pdf
that he uses to make negative claims about college students.  Except the study is about High School students NOT college students.
 
The study is entitled “Time to Work or Time to Play: The Effect of
Student Employment on Homework, Sleep, and Screen Time” and the
abstract tells us it is a study about high school students and how they
spend their time. Table 2 seems to show on school days, high school students spend
more time on paid work than on homework, if they worked that day (which
was 1/6th of the observations). More time on Screen than working.  Partying does
not appear as a category, though maybe it is part of Extracurricular.
Looking at the Total column it appears that Homework averages about 52
minutes, Extracurricular 8 minutes, Sports 40 minutes, Screen Time 122
minutes, Games 22 minutes, Paid Work 32 minutes and Sleep 515 minutes.
 
I made a number of comments critiquing aspects of Professor Vedder’s article.