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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Marty Nemko

June 27, 2008

My Closing Thoughts

This is my final post as guest blogger and I must say that many of the responses demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education.

My first set of posts built on my recent Chronicle article, “America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.” It continued to discuss the dismal results of undergraduate education and the terrible lack of disclosure to prospective students about their prospects of success and growth there, and proposed solutions. Rather than engage on the issues, most of the responses were deflective: for example, blaming the problem on K-12 education, that hermeneutics was more valuable than literature’s universal themes, or most often and most surprising, ad hominem attacks. For example, commenters called me, not just my ideas, for example, “off the deep end.” To bolster such claims, commenters went to my personal Web site and noted, for example, that I am an atheist.

If they treated me this way, I wonder how they treat colleagues or students with whom they disagree. Is that the “free and open marketplace of ideas” that colleges — when recruiting students or begging for money from the government or other donors — claim to provide?

I ascribe some of the commenters’ antipathy to their defensiveness about their teaching — for example, that their undergraduate courses should be based heavily on arcane, often outré research, especially their own.

But some of the antipathy, I believe, derives from those commenters’ repulsion at my grave doubts about a core principle held by most social-science and humanities faculty: redistributive “justice.” I believe that redistributive “justice” is far from just, because it yields a net negative to society and because, in moral-reasoning researcher Lawrence Kohlberg’s terms, it’s immoral in a universe-wide sense; it’s cosmically wrong.

Most of the commenters’ belief in redistributive “justice” is so zealously held that my posts related to that topic mainly engendered even more name-calling-rich deflection. Without any inquiry into my rationale for questioning redistributive “justice,” some commenters immediately jumped to calling me racist or sexist, among the most damaging labels that can be placed on a person today.

Is this the free and open marketplace of ideas that colleges claim to provide?

Side Note: I was struck by how the negative comments, even the ad hominem ones, rather than demotivating me, motivated me to try even harder in my rejoinders and in subsequent posts. That reminded me of all the people who say they were unmotivated until someone said, “You can’t.” or “You’re a loser.” That motivated them to prove those people wrong. In contrast, we all know people who, despite lots of praise and encouragement, remain unmotivated. Perhaps all the praise engendered more complacency than motivation. So, is it possible that that linchpin of educational and psychological theory — that people are motivated primarily through positive reinforcement and self-esteem building — isn’t necessarily true? But I digress.

Dear readers, please remember that not all wisdom resides left-of-center, and that the well-educated person is fairly exposed to the full range of benevolently derived ideas. That seems an obvious truism, yet in the past 40-plus years, higher education has ever-more censored ideas and people that dare veer right of center. Higher-education administrators and faculty in the social sciences and humanities rarely hire such people, and usually prefer to admit students whose admission essays reveal a leftward bias. Courses typically present right-of-center ideas and readings only as strawmen to be knocked down. Faculty tend to demean students’ right-of-center classroom comments and shepherd students into left-leaning term papers and dissertations. Professors almost never choose a right-of-center research agenda.

My closing exhortation is this: Ever more leaders, beyond just the Spellings Commission, are convinced that undergraduate education deserves far more external scrutiny, that you provide frighteningly little benefit for the time, money, and opportunity costs. To avoid major intrusion into what you do, you must look much harder at what you’re giving to students in exchange for the enormous time and money they spend on you. Reread the aforementioned Chronicle article, “America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree,” my posts, and my rejoinders to the comments, and then ask yourself, whether even your own children are likely to derive what they deserve from their undergraduate experience.

In closing, I’d like to thank Chronicle Review Deputy Editor Alex Kafka, whose counsel was most helpful and kind. I should have expected no less, given my equally positive experience with all the other Chronicle editors with whom I’ve worked, most recently Sarah Hardesty Bray and Carolyn Mooney.

And on that note, I wish you all — critics and supporters alike — a reinvigorating summer.

Comment [54]

June 26, 2008

Helping Your Procrastination-Prone Students

When I ask clients, “When did you start procrastinating?,” I often hear responses like this:

“When I was in junior high school, I got this big, hard assignment. I knew I should get started right away but I always found something more fun to do. I waited until the last minute when the adrenaline pushed me to crank it out. I was afraid I’d get a bad grade because I had done it so last-minute but, lo and behold, I got a good one. That gave me the message that by procrastinating, I’d generate the adrenaline to get me to do the task. Before long, I was procrastinating on most unpleasant tasks — I was addicted to adrenaline.”

Of course, procrastination tends to reduce the quality of the work produced, not exactly the sort of lifelong work habits we’re trying to engender in our students. So, you might want to try one or more of these procrastination deterrents:

— Offer a few-minute lesson on overcoming procrastination, perhaps based on my previous post, “Overcoming Procrastination.” Or just distribute a student-oriented adaptation of that post to your class.

— Give assignments unlikely to earn a decent grade if done last-minute.

— Have students submit a key part of a large assignment early: for example, a list of the resources the student will use as the basis for a term paper.

— When those assignments get turned in, don’t get soft on the grading. Remember, giving a good grade to work that likely was done last-minute only reinforces procrastination, and, in turn, causes lower-quality work.

— Think twice about having liberal extension policies. For example, on quiz day, a student raises his hand and asks, “Could we have one more week?” A number of students cry out in support. Nice professor that you are, you grant their wish, thereby punishing the students who had taken the time to fully prepare. Of course, that rewards the procrastinators and suggests to them that they can continue to procrastinate with impunity. Similarly, when you grant an extension to a student on the course’s first written assignment, you risk that student telling classmates that you’re a softie, whereupon you’ll find yourself with ever more procrastinators claiming they had to go to their grandma’s funeral.

— Procrastinators often resort to plagiarism: “Oh no! The paper’s due tomorrow. I’ll just buy one on the Internet!” If you suspect that’s likely to occur in your course, and believe that the benefits of trying to deter plagiarism outweigh the liabilities, you might announce that you’ll be comparing their writing on an in-class assignment with the work they do at home, and when you see a large disparity, you’ll use techniques, including software, to detect plagiarism. For example, you might Google a couple of unique-seeming phrases from their essay to see if they came from another source. For other plagiarism-detection strategies, see Iowa State University’s Deterring and Detecting Plagiarism.

Comment [1]

Overcoming Procrastination

Even higher educators, some of society’s highest achievers, are subject to procrastination. In fact, higher educators are particularly tempted to procrastinate because they face challenging tasks that have long-ahead deadlines: a grant proposal, the syllabus for a new course, completing a research project, drafting a committee report, etc.

Of course, procrastination can hurt the quality of your work — something thrown together last-minute is rarely as good as work done deliberately. I’ve often seen procrastination impede people’s careers.

  • Set a big goal. Goethe said, “Dream no small dreams because they have no power to move people’s hearts.” So, what’s an exciting, beneficial-to-society goal that, if you put your mind to it, you could potentially achieve? Even if you’re not sure you could achieve it, might getting partway there be beneficial enough?
  • Perhaps your procrastination is a sign that the task really isn’t worth doing. Consider that. If so, drop it and tackle a more important one.
  • Simply use your force of will: Make yourself sit down and do it. That is such an obvious suggestion, yet it’s the one that has most often worked with my clients.
  • Imagine how good you’ll feel if you get the task done well and on time. Perhaps envision yourself getting praised by others, that your work will have made a difference in people’s lives, or that it will help you get tenure. Or simply think about how good it will feel to cross it off your to-do list.
  • Imagine how embarrassed you’ll be if your procrastination results in a poor product or missing the deadline. How would you feel if the readers of your work would think or say, “I’m disappointed in you.”
  • Remind yourself that once you get started, you’ll probably feel more motivated to get it done.
  • Be aware of the moment of truth: the moment when you decide — usually unconsciously — whether you’ll tackle the task or do something more pleasurable. Of course, there are times you’ll choose the more pleasant task, but if you make that decision consciously, you’ll more often choose to tackle the task.
  • Schedule a time to work on the task. Treat that like a doctor’s appointment: You would not blow that off.
  • If the time to begin your task arrives and you’re overwhelmed by its enormity, follow the time-honored advice to start by breaking it down into manageable bites. One way to do that that avoids the perfectionism that so often stalls procrastinators is to set a timer for three minutes. In that time, write all the steps that need to be taken to complete the project, or as many ideas as you can think of that are related to the project. However long it takes you to develop that to-do list, ask yourself, “What’s my first one-second task toward completing that first sub-task. It could, for example, be typing in a search term in GoogleScholar, opening a book, whatever. Often, that one-second task gets you rolling.
  • If you reach a stumbling block, try using the one-minute struggle. If you can’t make progress on the stumbling block within one minute, the odds are that spending much more time will not bear fruit. So, often it’s wisest to — at the one-minute mark — use the best solution you’ve come up with, ask someone for help, or figure out if there’s a way you can continue without having solved that stumbling block. What too often happens is that when people reach a stumbling block, they keep struggling with it for such a long time that the task becomes so odious that they procrastinate the entire task.
  • Be aware of excuses to procrastinate. Often, to avoid working on the core task, academics do a tangential but more pleasant one: for example, pursue some fun part of the research in greater depth than necessary. I find it helpful to continually ask myself, “Is this the most time-effective approach to getting the task done?”
  • Does your procrastination stem from fear of failure, an unconscious belief that your procrastination allows you to save self-esteem by thinking, “Well, it’s not that I’m incompetent. I just chose not to spend the time on it”? If so, that temporarily propped-up self-esteem usually gets clobbered by the repercussions of procrastination.
  • Does your procrastination derive from fear of success? Are you afraid that if you succeed, expectations will be raised further? If so, it may help to remember that you can set limits on how much you’re willing to tackle. Other people fear success because they don’t want a loved one to feel inferior. It may help to remember that if another person feels worse because you succeed, that’s more likely a problem the other person needs to work on than a sign that you should sabotage yourself.
  • Does your procrastination come from laziness/hedonism? Some people are lazy or choose the short-term hedonism of task-avoidance even if it yields the long-term pain that comes from being a procrastinator. With higher educators, that usually occurs later in life. Few lazy people are able to obtain an advanced degree and land a position in higher education. But after they get tenure and/or feel burned out, it can be tempting to procrastinate difficult tasks such as developing a whole new course or writing a complicated grant proposal. The usual best curative is to come up with a more exciting big project to tackle, in which the prospects of doing it and succeeding at it outweigh the desire for sloth.

And now, would you stop procrastinating by reading The Chronicle and get to work? All right, a few more minutes with The Chronicle.

In my next post, I’ll explain how many instructors inadvertently encourage their students to procrastinate and how they might discourage it.

Comment [3]

June 24, 2008

In Praise of Elitism

Chronicle Review Deputy Editor Alex Kafka invited all of us Brainstormers to respond to a thought-provoking essay in The American Scholar by William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Here are my reactions:

++ Deresiewicz writes, “Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people.” I disagree. The graduates of elite schools, on average, have attributes that make them more likely to cure cancer, develop interventions that reduce poverty, etc. And they’re less likely to commit murder, robbery, or become drug addicts or dealers. That makes them of above-average value to society. Of course, all people have value and should have certain rights simply by virtue of being alive (for example, basic shelter, food, health care, and education), but I find it hard to accept that all people are of equal value.

++ Deresiewicz decries that elite colleges keep reminding the students that they’re elite. I think we should keep reminding them of that. Of course, I don’t mean elite to mean “privileged by virtue of social class or other non-merit-based criterion.” I mean “possessing abilities and skills that give them above-average potential to contribute to society.”

Educators take great pains to build the self-esteem of our lowest achievers hoping that will inspire them to greater achievement. Similarly, there is advantage in reminding our elite students that they are special. What we must do is to better infuse noblesse oblige into their psyches: that their having lucked out to have been born to the right parents, etc., gives them the responsibility to use the fates’ largess to abet society as much as possible.

Interestingly, we say that at orientation and at commencement, but as Deresiewicz says, during the four (or six) years in between, we forgo the noblesse-oblige message as well as the Big Picture questions (the meaning of life, justice, etc.) in favor of professors’ niggling specializations.

Side thought: What misguided professorial narcissism: thinking their arcane if not downright outre research is the wisest vehicle for educating their undergraduates.

++ We say we celebrate diversity yet we insist on one-size-fits-all education. For example, Deresiewicz pointed out that Yale students routinely get extensions on deadlines when Cleveland State students are less likely to. There’s a good reason: Most Yale students have strong self-discipline. If every so often, they need extra time to complete a paper doesn’t suggest they’re at risk of a lifetime of sloth. In contrast, without deadlines with clear consequences, a higher percentage of Cleveland State students will procrastinate unduly, a pattern that often endures through life.

++ Deresiewicz laments that Cleveland State students have few “classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries.” If we allowed students at all colleges (3,500 in the U.S. alone) to have dinners with foreign dignitaries, those dignitaries would have to eat every meal in a sports stadium. It is in society’s best interest (as well as cosmically correct, from my perspective) that the best and brightest be the ones given the extra opportunities, so as to maximize their greater potential for improving society.

++ Deresiewicz argues that grade inflation disproportionately benefits elite students by pointing out that “the average GPA at public universities is 3.0 … while at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4.”

I’d draw the opposite conclusion from those statistics: They suggest that grade inflation has most benefited weak students. After all, most Ivies have much higher admission standards. For such disparate groups to have such similar GPAs implies that Public U students have been the primary beneficiaries of grade inflation.

A related point: Deresiewicz decries that most Yalies who work hard at a course expect at least A-. I’d imagine that, compared with what is expected of an undergraduate, the work of those Yale students is indeed an A-. Should we — in yet another example of redistributive “justice” — lower Yalies’ grades so they don’t have an “unfair” advantage over Cleveland State students?

++ Using cherry-picked examples of George Bush, John Kerry, and Enron’s Ken Lay, Deresiewicz argues that graduates of elite colleges continue to get extensions and other favoritism. From where I sit as a career counselor to both the elite and just plain folk, the elite, on average, work at least as hard and are not allowed to slack off. Most of my clients who get jobs at nonprofits work 60 to 80 hours a week for low pay. Those that enter corporate jobs work equally long hours for more pay and sometimes (yes, only sometimes) fewer psychic rewards. Those that enter Ivy graduates’ holy grails — management consulting or investment banking — work 80 to 100(!)-hour workweeks, and, despite that, many of them not only don’t receive dispensations, they get dumped — only the strongest of the elite survive there.

My more-average clients, on average, have an easier time of it: There are many more middle-of-the-pack jobs, so they’re easier to obtain. And those jobs usually are less demanding of time and expertise, and less likely to make demands typical in elite jobs such as having to spend half their weeks flying around to meet clients or to take promotions in far-flung places. (Montgomery, Alabama, anyone?)

++ I agree with Deresiewicz’s decrying that so few kids from middle- or upper-class backgrounds contemplate delaying matriculation at least for a few years. He writes, aptly, “Our rigid educational mentality places that outside the universe of possibility — the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.”

++ I disagree with his contention that being elite-educated makes you incapable of talking with uneducated people. I believe that, more often, it is that elites are unwilling to make the effort. If you make the effort to keep your speech clear and concise, ask about things the person is likely to care about: e.g., family, friends, the Red Sox, and listen carefully, you’ll do fine.

++ A final point of agreement is with his statement, “The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their (the elites’) lives.” Indeed, the elites, in college and out, maybe more than most people, feel pressure to perform within a narrow range of normalcy. In another example of how we say we celebrate diversity but are tolerant only of the “correct” kinds of diversity, if a student expresses perspectives out of sync with our classroom’s or university’s norms, even if they’re thoughtfully derived, we, too often, subtly or not so subtly punish them.

In sum, I believe we should encourage our brightest and most driven to feel elite and to express their gifts in a wider range of ways that we currently do, as long as it is toward pro-social rather than narcissistic ends.

(Image from Photobucket.com)

Comment [21]

June 20, 2008

Looking for a Job Outside of Academe?

You’ve had enough: You’ve tried as hard as you can yet can’t find a good-enough job in higher education. (You mean, you don’t want to continue driving 30 miles to a campus on which you can’t park to teach three classes a week for 15 weeks to a group of underprepared undergraduates, for which you are paid a total of $5,000, with no benefits? Where’s your dedication to The Cause?) ;-)

What the hell do I want to be when I grow up?

It’s often scary. By the time that most aspiring academics have finished their doctorate and spent a year or three trying to land a sustainable position, they’re around 30, when many of their peers outside of academia are in full career flower: six-figure-income, power and influence, and a job title their parents just love to brag about.

And there you are, still fumbling around, toting a copy of What Color is Your Parachute or the results of the Strong Interest Inventory or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Here are some other ways to figure out what the hell you want to be when you grow up, even if you’re already supposed to be a grownup:

— Check the Web sites of your professional organization and that of the doctoral program from which you graduated. They sometimes contain a list of nonacademic careers that people have entered with your degree.

— Attend an alumni event at which people from your doctoral program will be in attendance.

— On an online discussion group in your field, post a query such as, “Outside of academia, what sorts of careers are people entering with a Ph.D. in insert your field?”

— Google terms such as careers philosophy or Ph.D. careers “molecular biology.”

— Visit the exhibit area at professional conferences in your field. Many of the companies, non-profits, and government agencies with booths there employ doctorate holders. Those booths are often staffed by senior people, whom you’d otherwise have a hard time gaining access to, yet at a conference, are available to you in quantity.

One approach to a booth is to scan the written material on the booth’s table, then approach its staffer. Explain the sorts of things you might do for that organization and ask if that might be of interest. Then ask if the person could imagine other ways the organization might use someone like you. If you find a hot prospect, you might invite the person to a meal or a drink. That request might be too forward under normal circumstances, but at a conference, if it feels right, it’s probably an appropriate request.

— Browse annotated lists of careers. For example, there’s the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which comprehensively profiles 250 careers. Or consider (Warning: bias-alert here!) my misleadingly titled, Cool Careers for Dummies, 3rd Edition (Wiley, 2007), which offers brief, more subjective profiles of 500 careers, each with a recommended website or book for more information. The book also contains “The 35 Most Revealing Questions,” which also may help you home in on the right career choice.

Landing the job.

There are four major ways to land a job:

— Answer ads. An easy way to sort through literally millions of job ads is to visit http://www.indeed.com and http://www.simplyhired.com. Also, your professional association and other field-specific Web sites may list non-academic job ads. For a collection of general and field-specific sites see: The Riley Guide’s Job Site Directory.

Unless the ad gives you reason to do something else, the guts of your cover letter should consist of two columns: On the left side, list the job requirements stated in the ad; on the right side, describe how you meet that requirement.

— Recruiters/headhunters. Two ways to find on-target ones: * Use an online database. An annotated list of them is at: The Riley Guide’s Recruiter Directory..

* Contact the human resources department at your most desired employers and ask, “When you use a headhunter to fill a position such as (insert your target job.”), who do you most often use?

— Direct contact. Make a list of 25 employers you’d like to work for, whether or not they’re advertising an on-target job opening. Identify one or more people at each organization with the power to hire you. Write a brief letter that highlights the elements of your background likely to impress that employer. Sample: “I’m a Ph.D. in psychology, with special expertise in issues faced by people in Generation Y. I am skilled at ethnographic research and in explaining complicated concepts to lay audiences. If you think I might be of help to you or if you’d be kind enough to offer some advice as to where I should turn, I’d really appreciate hearing from you.” Usually, your letter can be relatively generic, but you should include one customized paragraph explaining why you’re choosing to write to that employer.

— Networking. Make a list of the 50 people in your network most likely to introduce you to someone who could hire you for your target job. You say you don’t know 50? Remember that people from your alma mater, your LinkedIn or Facebook contacts, your friends and relatives, even your hairdresser might help — they all know lots of people. Email or phone the 50, asking if they know someone at one of the above 25 employers who you should speak with, or anyone else for that matter, that might help you land your target job.

Then, of course, there’s self-employment. But I’ll leave that for another day.

Comment [6]

June 19, 2008

Frustrated in Trying to Land a Job?


Yeah, it’s tough . . .
But don’t give up just yet.

You decided to spend a lot of money and some of your prime earning years getting a doctorate, assuming it would lead to a position as professor or higher ed administrator.

Yet, despite applying for a number of positions, you’ve landed no more than a part-time temp job that pays less (with no benefits) than you could have earned as a high school teacher.

Before giving up

Before giving up, consider trying one or more of these approaches. Here, I use a tenure-track professorship as the goal, but similar strategies can be used in seeking a position in administration.

Unless you’re a star, a cv is unlikely to make you stand out from the pack. Here are some ways that mere mortals can rise from the crowd:

— On your website, post a video of your teaching. If you’re not currently teaching, ask a friend or colleague who is teaching a class to let you be a guest instructor, and hire someone to video it. Edit it down to the best three minutes of 15- to 60-second snippets.

— Write a one-page case for why you can be expected to have a productive research agenda: the case for your research agenda’s importance, and for how your approach to getting it funded is likely to bear fruit.

— Make superlative presentations at local, regional, or national meetings attended by people in a position to hire you. Toward the end of each presentation, subtly, perhaps with humor, let it be known that you’re looking for a tenure-track position. Not sure your presentations will be superlative? Consider asking a faculty developer to help you.

— (Bold, time-consuming, potentially audacious, but sometimes highly effective … ) Develop an ongoing relationship with some department chairs, deans, or key professors, including those not advertising an on-target job opening. That relationship can give you a significant edge when a position becomes available.

Start by asking your professors and others for referrals to such people, but even without a referral, you might want to write to 10 or 20 on-target department chairs, deans, or professors. Briefly but compellingly request a bit of counsel on how you might best go about landing your target job.

True, most of those people will brush you off or not respond, but if your letter is substantively impressive yet human in tone, at least a few are likely to agree to speak with you. If the person is local, do it in-person rather than by-phone.

Normally, your initial meeting will not sufficiently motivate the person to help you. It’s important to build the relationship. For example, send articles of interest to that person, keep the person apprised of the results of your following his or her suggestions, invite her or him to lunch, attend his or her presentations at conferences and share your reactions (especially the positive ones), offer to help out on one of that person’s projects, for example, a grant proposal, revamping the department’s website, or putting together a symposium.

This approach may, in fact, turn off some recipients of your letter—they don’t want to be bothered, but you only need one yes. And remember that you’ve imposed for only the one minute it takes to read your brief letter. You routinely take up that much of a stranger’s time every time you stop someone on the street asking for directions. Before giving up the career you’ve worked so hard to attain, I believe this strategy if often worth attempting. Of course, be sensitive to a person’s perceiving you as a pest or too aggressive.

In my next post, I’ll offer suggestions on what to do if you decide to look for a career outside of academia.

Comment [24]

Tim Russert, Sudden Heart Attack, and Sexism in Higher Education

Tim Russert’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack reminded me of the dramatic 50+-year-long gender disparity against men in health care research and outreach.

Many more men than women die of sudden heart attack and at an earlier age than do women of breast cancer. Indeed, sudden heart attack is the #1 cause of premature death among men over 40. Yet, more money per capita is spent on breast cancer research. And regarding outreach, there are a trivial number of prostate cancer ribbons compared with the number of pink ribbons against breast cancer. And have you ever seen even one ribbon against sudden heart attack?

More broadly, men die 5.3 years younger than women, and spend their last decade in worse health. There are more than four widows for every widower. Yet when I searched PubMed, which indexes 3,000 medical journals over the past 58 years, I found 22,304 articles with the keywords “women’s health,” but only 586
with “men’s health.” That’s 39 articles related to women’s health for every one on men’s.

A search of Guidestar, a comprehensive database of nonprofits on “men’s health” yielded 35 hits. “Women’s health:” 1088.

If women suffer a deficit, for example, the “underrepresentation” of women in engineering, we typically see significant efforts at redress. Yet, when men have the deficit—even the ultimate deficit: they die younger—not only is there not redress, but the opposite occurs: disproportionate amounts of research and outreach are directed at women’s health.

I’ve heard these explanations to justify the double standard:
1. “It wouldn’t happen if, like women, men organized to protest.”
My response: Would you deny redress to women who are “underrepresented” if they hadn’t organized to protest?
2. “Men’s dying younger is their fault—if they’d only take better care of themselves.”
My response: The three major controllable causes of mortality and morbidity are obesity, smoking, and excessive drinking. Men have lower incidences of the first two. In any event, if women are “underrepresented” in engineering, would you deny them the redress by chastising them, “It’s your own fault. Do better in science and math.”?
3. “In the past, most health research was done on men. This only levels the playing field.”
My response: First, as cited, over the past 58 years—the period during which the greatest medical advances have been made—the opposite is true. And with regard to research that’s more than 58 years old, an underreported reason why women were often excluded from many experimental treatments was not lack of interest in women’s health but a concern that an experimental drug or treatment might damage a woman’s fetus.

And en toto, any deleterious effect that came from a smaller percentage of women being subjects in 58+-year-old medical research apparently was small: In, fact, the
life-expectancy gap in favor of women grew during every decade but one from 1900 through 1980.

The big question is why:
— Why do you think that, for the past 50+ years, the overwhelming majority of health care research has been on women’s health, despite men living shorter and in poorer last-decade health?
And consider these other male-death-related questions:
— Why do 92% of workplace deaths occur to men yet we rarely hear that statistic, while we frequently hear statistics such as, “Women earn 79 cents on the dollar compared with men?” (By the way, that statistic is misleading: Most current evidence suggests that for the same work, pay is, on average, roughly equal.)
— Why, still, must only men register with the U.S. military’s Selective Service?
— Why, still, are only men allowed to serve in direct combat? (resulting in the little-publicized fact that 99% of the Iraq War deaths were men.)
— Why do the media emphasize when deaths occur to “women and children?”

I agree with men’s advocate Warren Farrell, who is the author of nine books including The Myth of Male Power and who has taught at Georgetown and the School of Medicine at U.C. San Diego. He believes the main reason is sexism: “Men are the disposable sex.”

Higher educators have many opportunities to be gender-neutral or biased toward or against men, for example:
— Which students to admit to your program
— Which readings to assign
— What content to present in class
— What research agenda to pursue
— Who to select as your research assistant
— What student thesis and dissertation topics to encourage
— Who to hire as a faculty member or administrator
— To whom to grant tenure
— Which studies to fund. (For example, should sudden heart attack studies be given higher priority?)

At this point in time, what do you think is the wisest stance for you, personally, to take?

Comment [20]

June 14, 2008

Do We Need Less Pluribus and More Unum?

Recently, I attended my assistant’s master’s-degree commencement ceremony at San Francisco State University.

We entered the auditorium to Jamaican percussion. Then, the African-American emcee introduced the retiring chair, a white man who said that his vision for the counseling department is to create a program in counseling the incarcerated, disproportionately minority. He introduced the keynote speaker, an African-American woman who spoke of the need to continue fighting for the underrepresented while an audience member waved a large Latino-Power flag. Next, a Latina professor praised an African-American student who had died. Then that professor handed out four student awards: three to Latinos and one to a white male who had been transgendered and did his thesis on transgender counseling. Finally, the graduates walked across the stage. Some added African-American or Latino shawls to their cap and gown. One pasted a Mexican flag on top of her mortarboard.

I wondered how the straight white male graduates must have felt. I’d imagine that many of them felt OK about it. After all, their education likely has included much rhetoric explaining why one should celebrate all forms of diversity except that of the straight white male. But I wondered how many, in their heart of hearts, felt sadness or anger at being excluded.

I wondered how many of the graduates of color felt about the ceremony?

I wondered how the audience of friends and family felt?

I wondered whether the ceremony and awards would, net, increase feelings of cross-group amity or enmity?

In light of all the wars and other enmity, worldwide, throughout the ages, that have been caused by various forms of tribalism — I left the auditorium wondering whether society wouldn’t be better off if we focused less on pluribus and more on unum.

Comment [22]

June 13, 2008

Should Lecture Sections Be Replaced by DiversiSections?


A more-engaged, better-served student? In many cases, could be . . .


Ralph Wolff, Executive Director of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges likes to convene “blue sky” meetings. That’s a loftier (pardon the pun) way to describe a brainstorming session. He urges, “Sky’s the limit. Think big. Think breakthrough. Think unconventional.”

Here’s an unconventional alternative to the traditional lecture course that could be called, DiversiSections. It’s a very specific type of online course that would be disseminated nationwide.

It dovetails with MIT’s making all its syllabi available nationwide, the recommendations in a new book, Disrupting Class, by Harvard professor Clayton Christenson, and with Carol Twigg’s work at the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT). Their research and a priori arguments suggest that DiversiSections would be particularly beneficial for diverse student bodies and for students who don’t do well in lecture-centric courses.

What is a DiversiSection and how might one be developed?

Let’s take for example, the course, Introduction to Biology.

The Association of College & University Biology Educators would select 15 outstanding educators who teach Introduction to Biology. The 15 would divide “Introduction to Biology” into 15 modules, with each educator choosing to create and deliver the lecture section of two modules, so there would be two versions of each module. Instead of having just one lecturer, the student would be exposed to 15, hence the moniker, DiversiSection.

Each professor, for his or her two modules, would develop:
— mini-lectures punctuated by demonstrations
— student-immersive simulations
— remedial and enrichment supplementation
— quizzes
— sample reading list, assignments, and exams. Each institution’s academic department or an individual professor could use those or develop their own to better align the course with the professor’s or department’s preferences.

Experts in online education and in the technology of its implementation would be available for the professors to call on in developing their modules.

During DiversiSection classes, a person would be available online to answer questions in real-time.

N.B.: Discussion/seminar sections of those courses would remain in-person, as in a traditional course.

The development of DiversiSections could be funded by government, higher education consortia, the private sector, or public-private partnerships.

Advantages of DiversiSections

DiversiSections would enable every student at any college — from the best- to the worst-funded — to receive, in a single course:
— exposure to 15 of the nation’s finest instructors.
— to see demonstrations that are too expensive or too dangerous to create on each campus
— to participate in immersive simulations that also are too complicated or expensive to develop by an individual campus
— true individualization: students could proceed through the modules at their own pace, replaying material, consulting remedial or enrichment material, and/or “attending” the second professor’s version of the module

NCAT’s model isn’t as specific as DiversiSections but is much more similar to it than to traditional lecture sections. Research on it, reported on the NCAT website, found that:


• Of the 30 institutions that participated, 25 measured significant increases in student learning in the “redesigned” course when compared to the traditional course while the other five showed learning equivalent to traditional formats.
• Of the 24 institutions that measured student retention, 18 showed significant increases in course completion.
• All 30 institutions were able to reduce instructional costs, on average by 37 percent, with a range of 20 percent to 77 percent. [This is for a course developed by and for one institution only, so it is much more expensive than the national one proposed in this post.]
• The redesign strategies, while effective for all students, have a positive impact on traditionally underserved students (minority students, low-income students, and adult students).

DiversiSections thus would seem to provide a more effective and less expensive approach than the status quo: a nationful of live sages on the stage (ranging from terrific to terrible) lecturing to auditoria of students or to students watching the lecture on TV.

Disadvantages of DiversiSections

If widely adopted, DiversiSections, contrary to its name, would bring considerable uniformity of instruction across the nation. After all, while the course was taught by 15 professors, each module would be taught by just two instructors, and most students would “attend” just one module. Such uniformity brings benefits, for example, that professors of advanced biology courses, would have a good idea of what students who had taken Intro to Biology had learned , even if a student had taken it at another institution. But uniformity, of course, also brings disadvantages, especially with topics on which there are multiple defensible perspectives. The problem could be somewhat mitigated by creating multiple versions of a DiversiSection, using different teams of 15 instructors.

Some students might learn better from one average live instructor than even from 15 top professors online. Then again, many students don’t learn much from live lecturers … even if the student does show up for class. And the data I’ve presented above suggests that, on average, students learn more from DiversiSection-like classes. Too, my earlier blog posts all too clearly document that, with traditional instruction, average students and especially those with poor high-school records grow frighteningly little for all the years and money they’re spending on college. One option is, where possible, to offer both a traditional and a DiversiSection version of a course.

DiversiSections could cost many faculty members their jobs. An institution, however, could elect to redirect the instructors’ efforts. For example, according to NCAT, the institutions that participated in its Program in Course Redesign have:
• Left the savings in the department that achieved them for continuous improvement projects or for additional course redesigns.
• Provided a greater range of offerings at the second-year, upper-division or graduate levels.
• Left the savings in the departments to reduce teaching load and/or provide greater time for research.
• Improve training of part-time faculty.

Developing DiversiSections would be costly, but that cost would be amortized across all institutions that used it, so that, if the courses were widely adopted, the per-student cost would end up much lower than of traditional lecture classes.

So what do you think? Do you think that DiversiCourses offers that rare combination of better learning at lower cost without overriding disadvantages? Or do you believe its disadvantages outweigh? Or do you see it being of value only in particular situations. If so, which? Or do you have a suggestion for improving DiversiCourses so their advantages would outweigh their disdvantages?

(Image from Photobucket.com)

Comment [17]

June 11, 2008

Summer Reading That May Improve Your Fall Teaching

Sometimes, we need a summer’s break from things academic, but if you might enjoy a book on improving teaching and learning, here’s a good list.

Pat Cross forwarded it to me. It was created this year by a number of members of the POD Network, the national association of faculty developers. At the end of this list, I suggest four other books that may also be of interest.

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bain, K. (2004). What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cooper, J. L., Robinson, P., & Ball, D. (Eds). (2003). Small Group Instruction in Higher Education: Lessons From the Past, Visions of the Future. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.

Bean, J. (1996). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd ed.) Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Feldman, K., & Paulsen, M. (Eds.) (1998). Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Fink, D. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Forsyth, D. R. (2002). The Professor’s Guide to Teaching: Psychological Principles and Practices. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. & Marshall, S. (Eds.). (2003). A handbook for teaching and learning in higher education, (2nd ed.). London: Kogan Page Publishers.

Gardiner, L. F. (1994). Redesigning higher education: Producing dramatic gains in student learning. Washington, DC: ASHE Higher Education Report.

Hativa, N. (2001). Teaching for effective learning in higher education. New York: Springer.

King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kalman, C. (2008). Successful science and engineering teaching: Theoretical and learning perspectives. New York: Springer.

Kalman, C. (2006). Successful science and engineering teaching in colleges and universities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Leamnson, R. (1999). Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits of learning with first year college and university students. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Loacker, G. (Ed.) (2000). Self assessment at Alverno College. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College.

McIntosh, M., & Kysilka, M. (2002). Teaching college in an age of accountability. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Nilson, L. B. (2003). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Nuhfer, E. B., & Others, (2006). A handbook for student management teams. Camarillo, CA: California State University of the Channel Islands.

Pratt, D., & Associates. (1998). Five teaching perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education. Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Ramsden, P. (2003). Learning to teach in higher education (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Richlin, L. (2006). Blueprint for learning: Constructing college courses to facilitate, assess, and document learning. Sterling, VA:Stylus.

Rotenberg, R. (2006). The art and craft of college teaching: A guide for new professors and graduate students. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Stevens, Dannelle D., & Antonia J. Levi. 2004. Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback and promote student learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Walvoord, B. E. F., & Anderson, V. J. (1998). Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Weimer, M. (2002).Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2001). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Zander, R. S., & Zander, B., (2000). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Zull, J. E. (2002). The art of changing the brain. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Here are three brand new editions of books I’ve loved. I’ve ordered the first two, but haven’t received, let alone read, them yet. The third won’t even be out until the fall, but I thought I’d mention it:

Bob Diamond’s just published 3rd edition of Designing and Assessing Courses and Curricula: A Practical Handbook. The first edition is one of my most dog-eared books, and I can’t wait to see what this respected faculty developer has come up with in the new edition.

E-learning & the Science of Instruction, by Ruth Colvin Clark. She is one of that field’s leaders, and the first edition did a great job of compactly synthesizing the research and its practical implications. Since its publication in 2002, of course, the technology has advanced and we have much more empirical experience with and research on e-learning, so I’m hopeful the new edition will be well worth purchasing.

The forthcoming 2nd edition of Barbara Gross Davis’ Tools for Teaching. I am a sucker for compendia of practical tips and tricks, and, in my opinion, this is the best one for college instructors. It won’t, alas, be published until the fall.

In closing, I can’t resist mentioning one of my books: The All-in-One College Guide. It offers my thoughts on how to choose, get into, find the money for, and importantly, make the most of college — all in 200 accessible pages.

Comment [5]

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