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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Marty Nemko

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.

Posted at 10:48:18 AM on June 27, 2008 | All postings by mnemko

Comments

  1. Which center?

    — S. Taylor · Jun 27, 12:45 PM · #

  2. Commenters on this blog’s postings are “by definition” either “detractors” or “supporters”, eh? No such thing as a “critic of ideas” among the commentators?

    Please indicate where in the comments made on this blog faculty showed “insistence that their undergraduate courses should be based heavily on arcane, often outré research, especially their own”, for example.

    All courses in the disciplines need to be based on research. Period. That goes without saying in a university. Disciplines define themselves by the research that is conducted. The research relied upon in teaching an introductory level course may or may not involve some of the more arcane aspects of the discipline – but in any and all cases, research grounds the disciplines. To attempt to divorce teaching from research in the disciplines is what gets “consultants” in trouble with faculty – always.

    And what is “affirmative action” which ensures that males are accepted into colleges and universities in the same proportions as females – whether or not their performance records merit such admission – if not a form of “redistributive justice” which the blog host has condemned?

    As Tom Stoppard wrote in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “Consistency is all we ask. Immortality is all we seek. Give us this day our daily week.”

    Farewell.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 27, 01:08 PM · #

  3. As was just mentioned above, I see little evidence in the prior comment threads of the ad-hominem attacks Mr. Nemko perceives, but much well-justified contempt for the shallow cliches and dime-store wisdom presented in his blog entries. To give just a single example of such a distortion, no comment here has, actually, called Mr. Nemko “idiotic”; one remark (by me) referred to some of the simplistic things he claimed should be taught about literature as “idiocies.” This was, perhaps, intemperate, but it was nothing like the deflection nor the personal attack that he claims here. They say one of the components of incompetence is the inability to recognize competence in others; Mr. Nemko has consistently posted remarks ranging from insipid to trite to plain false, dressed up in bureaucratic prose that would not be given high marks in a freshman writing class, and then marvelled that (judging only from their writing) many articulate, intelligent, well-read and funny commenters found it less than impressive. Well, marvel no more, Mr. Nemko, and thanks for sparing us any more of your contempt for the life of the mind. I wish you a happy summer as well.

    — Roger · Jun 27, 01:58 PM · #

  4. This would be a good moment for an anti-pomposity advocate to post. Anyone? Admittedly #2 is an easy target. Still, might be fun, yes?

    Period. Always. Goes without saying.

    — T Paine · Jun 27, 02:01 PM · #

  5. Thanks for blogging for us, Marty. It’s been a pleasure working with you.

    — Alex Kafka · Jun 27, 02:52 PM · #

  6. Two questions:

    1) Is this your version of taking your bat and ball and going home since we won’t let you play the position you want? Seems like it to me.

    2) While disparaging others’ ad hominem attacks, do you not recognize your own tendency toward logical fallacies? In this farewell, for instance, you create false dilemmas in your discussion, suggesting that either a reader must agree with you or s/he’s wrong.

    And I still have no idea of what your position is on the Bachelor’s degree. In one article, you pronounce it over-rated. But in your blog, you lament the fact that we bad ol’ professors make it unattainable. If it’s so over-rated, who cares how professors act?

    — JM · Jun 27, 02:54 PM · #

  7. So, who’s replacing Marty? Zig Ziglar? Tony Robbins? Carleton Fredericks? Karl Rove? Antonin Scalia? Bill O’Reilly? David Duke? Ann Coulter? David Horowitz? Phyllis Schlafly? Margaret Thatcher? Alan Keyes? The staff of the Claremont Institute? The interns at the Hoover Insititution? Margaret Spellings? Dick Cheney? Ward Connerly? Michelle Malkin? Charles Krauthammer? The POD people? This is a tough slot to fill.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jun 27, 04:12 PM · #

  8. Another one of those amazing changing CHE blog postings just happened.

    For those who would otherwise not understand or know what was being referred to in Comment 2 above:

    After Comment 2 noted that the last sentence of this thread’s posting defined commentators as “detractors and supporters” — suddenly, POOF! The last sentence in the posting now reads “critics and supporters alike”.

    AHA-Erlebnis

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 27, 06:28 PM · #

  9. At least they didn’t fix the singular/plural disagreement (or the weird capitalization) in the teaser: “Higher Educators, Know Thyself.” It would’ve been sad to scratch a laugh-line like that, ‘cause it takes talent to write a four-word sentence with such an obvious grammatical error.

    — Roger · Jun 27, 06:43 PM · #

  10. As one of Mr. Nemko’s frequent and severe detractors, I am experiencing a slight—and I mean slight—pang of nostalgia-to-be. It’s like (from my experience) when some unpleasantly eccentric old uncle shows up at the family picnic and tries to hold forth with unpleasant (to the family) views on things. People groan, people argue with him, and a dotty cousin or two actually agree with him. But at some point, he realizes this isn’t his crowd and wanders off to his dark green Buick to drive away. Most everybody’s glad he’s gone, but among a few—even those who liked him least—there’s a bit of a “could we done a little more to bring him into the fold if we hadn’t been so argumentative with him?” feeling. And most everybody also has a small sigh knowing that the rest of the picnic won’t be quite so entertaining without him.

    In Mr. Nemko’s case, the thorny reception he got (which just kept getting thornier) stemmed as much from what he is, as revealed in what he said, as from what he said per se. To wit: one leg on which he stood was as a straight-talk-express critic of higher education; the other leg on which he stood was as a career counselor and “faculty developer” who gave people invaluable advice on how to get jobs in the very field he (still) criticizes as “provid[ing] frighteningly little benefit for the time, money, and opportunity costs.” Academe sucks, but ol’ Marty is just the guy to help you get in on it.

    Of course, the second leg rankled much if not most of the academics who participate in this forum. But looming larger than that was the puzzle of “What kind of guy can this contradictory stuff come from?” So some of us went to Mr. Nemko’s own website (it’s a business advertisement, so he hardly hid it), to the POD website, and on to a few related links to try to figure it out. And lo, it became readily apparent that Mr. Nemko has been (according to his “What the Hell is the Meaning of Life?” essay on his own website) veering from pillar to pillar and post to post for a good deal of his life trying to find something to hang onto as guiding principles. He’s ended up with, on the one hand, some rather peppy, happy-talk, motivate-the-sales-force bromides about helping people to go out and get those academic jobs, and, on the other hand, some fairly bitter and paranoid complaints about how the “straight white male” is trod upon not just in academe, but in society in general these days.

    This is the stuff of conflict, and Mr. Nemko is nothing if not conflicted, deeply conflicted, probably in places that we’re better off not knowing about. Commentors on his posts have been, perhaps, only too eager to point out those conflicts, and those comments have served only to drive Mr. Nemko deeper into believing that he was unfairly put upon ad hominem, and into believing that academics who teach/read/research/discuss for a living actually don’t know that “not all wisdom resides left-of-center.”

    Okay, we could have been a little nicer, handed him a second hot dog and encouraged him to drink a few beers, sit down at the picnic table, and forget about trying to “develop” us into being better people. But although I can make myself slightly—and I mean slightly— melancholy thinking about the peculiar little mental universe Mr. Nemko must now go home to, I’m really rather glad to her that old dark green Buick start up.

    — Just Passing Through · Jun 27, 08:04 PM · #

  11. BTW: Bob Zemsky is now a “Brainstorm Alumni” – vanished without a trace!

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 27, 08:34 PM · #

  12. There’s so much I could say in responses to the commenters on this post, but suspect that nothing I could say would assuage them. I’d simply be fanning their flames, which would generate yet more heat without more light on what was the main purpose of guest blogging here: to engender a harder look at why undergraduate education has been so ineffective and what to do about it.

    I close by reiterating my exhortation to take a harder look at yourselves, higher educators. As you can see, the commenters have preferred to make tangential and personal attacks rather than respond to the facts I presented:

    — According to the U.S. Dept. of Education, among the hundreds of thousands of students admitted to four-year colleges from the bottom 40% of their high school class, 2/3 don’t graduate even if given 8 1/2 years.

    — In the latest annual national survey of freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, 44.6 percent said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life.

    Dissatisfaction is one thing, but how much do undergraduates learn?

    — A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below “proficient” levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.

    Unbelievably, according to the Spellings Report, which was released in 2006 by a federal commission that examined the future of American higher education, things are getting even worse: “Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. … According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade.”

    To ameliorate the disgraceful performance of higher education, I recommended that colleges be required to disclose crucial information to prospective students:

    ++ Value added as measured by a test such as the highly regarded Collegiate Learning Assessment administered to students as freshmen and then as seniors. Each college should report its mean value added, broken out by precollege SAT scores, race, and gender. That would strongly encourage students to more wisely select their institutions, for the institutions to improve their undergraduate education and to admit only students likely to derive enough benefit to justify the time, tuition, and opportunity costs.

    ++ The average cash, loan, and work-study financial aid for varying levels of family income and assets, broken out by race and gender. And because some colleges use the drug-dealer scam — give the first dose cheap and then jack up the price — they should be required to provide the average not just for the first year, but for years 2 through 6. (40% of all students admitted as freshmen to so-called four-colleges don’t graduate even if given six years.)

    ++ Retention data: the percentage of students returning for a second year, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

    ++ Safety data: the percentage of an institution’s students who have been robbed or assaulted on or near the campus.

    ++ The four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, broken out by SAT score, race, and gender.

    ++ Employment data for graduates: the percentage of graduates who, within six months of graduation, are in graduate school, unemployed, or employed in a job requiring bachelor’s-level skills, along with salary data.

    ++ Results of the most recent student-satisfaction survey, to be conducted by the institutions themselves.

    ++ The most recent accreditation report. The college could include the executive summary only in its printed recruitment material, but it would have to post the full report on its Web site.

    Being required to conspicuously provide this information to prospective students and parents would exert long-overdue pressure on colleges to improve the quality of undergraduate education.

    Most commenters chose to deflect attention from rather than address these horrific statistics or seriously address my recommendations.

    I hope that, moving forward, those commenters and other Chronicle readers will redirect their energies to a thoughtful consideration about what to do about those shameful statistics, and whether the aforementioned recommendations would be helpful.

    — Marty Nemko · Jun 28, 11:39 AM · #

  13. 1. So, you don’t want to give people in the bottom half of their high school classes the opportunity to even try college? Or what?

    2. UCLA is doing quite well in the marketplace, turning away more applicants than it admits.

    — Josephine · Jun 28, 03:00 PM · #

  14. On Comment 12 by the blog host:

    Actually, this commentator has also pointed to most of the very statistics the blog host cites in this reply. The difference is that, rather than attack the male or minority student as unprepared, some of us have more faith in their ability to learn than such attacks assume/presume.

    Instead, rather than defend the status quo as the blog host assumes we do, on the contrary, many of us believe that “consultants”, when they are engaged, should, for example, spend their energies looking at the draconian cost-saving measures in higher education which disproportionately affect the first two years of college and the “lesser-prepared” student.

    In short, rather than suggesting that “active learning strategies” like “turn to your neighbor and see if you can repeat what was just declared from the podium” (I’m paraphrasing, of course) can help justify such policies as the “large lecture class” which dominates general education, “consultants” would do better to attack such structures as seriously problematic for student learning and attempt to find ways of convincing administrations that students’ variety of learning styles and backgrounds would profit better from a variety of learning strategies and options for them to pursue – made easier by the information age and its manifold opportunities for “just in time” learning, for example.

    And some of us have repeatedly noted that the over-worked and under-paid contingent faculty members are also found disproportionately at these lower levels of instruction – which coincide as well with the difficult years of adjustment to college life in all of its complexity for the incoming student.

    No, I do not believe that most of the commentators are simply engaging in “the rhetoric of refusal”. It is the tried and true teacher-student relationship which the commentators, by and large, are trying to foster, and not the increase in the coffers of the administrations which engage “consultants” in order to justify what they are already doing – to the detriment of the life and heritage of the university as we have known it for a millenium.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 28, 04:04 PM · #

  15. I appreciate Anti-Hypocrisy Advocate’s comment #14. It matters not that he disagrees with me, nor that he thinks I make my suggestions because they’ll generate consulting assignments. (Hah!)

    In that comment, he is addressing the core question of my blogging for the CHE: how to improve undergraduate education, which is producing ever worse results despite tuitions continuing to exceed the inflation rate. (Yes, if one digs within previous comments, such proposals are embedded, but not as clearly or effectively as in comment 14.)

    It was the kicking-around of various higher educators’ ideas such as AHA’s comment 14 for improving undergraduate education that was my hope for this blog.

    For what it’s worth, here’s my reaction to the specific suggestion in Comment 14:

    Because as s/he states, employing full-time benefited faculty is more expensive than the grossly underpaid adjuncts and TAs, advocates need to present good studies that find that replacing contingent part-time/minimal-benefits instructors with full-time permanent fully-benefited faculty will generate sufficient student growth and other benefits to justify the additional cost. Otherwise, that additional cost (which likely would be be passed on in the form of higher tuition) will unjustifiably further strap students and families.

    Apriori, I’m agnostic on whether such studies would yield sufficient cost-benefit. On one hand, full-time permanent faculty are more involved in the institution’s overall improvement and are, on average, more available to students. (Of course, we all know permanent faculty members who make themselves as unavailable as possible to students, especially undergraduates.) And it’s simply the right thing to do—college administrators, when they teach classes or give campuswide addresses often stress the importance of treating labor fairly, yet pay so many of the people who have spent the most time in their institutions—the doctorate-holders—McWages, with no benefits and absolutely no security of employment. That’s not only hypocritical, but cosmically wrong.

    On the other hand, adjuncts often have a more diverse set of experiences to bring to their classes. In addition, departments can hire and fire adjuncts much more quickly, enabling them to to accommodate to changing instructional needs and to changes within their discipline.

    With regard to the other point in comment 14, (echoing comment 13), I do believe we must take into account the opportunity costs to students when we allow them to “try college.” The preponderance of the evidence, over quite a long time, suggests that greater good would accrue by encouraging students who graduated in the bottom half of their high school class to pursue an option other than a four-year university. It may feel virtuous to give them a shot at a four-year institution, but ultimately, I believe the data suggests it does more harm than good to them, to the qualified students, and to faculty.

    Even though my stint as Guest Blogger here is over, I hope that readers will continue to debate the best approaches to improving undergraduate education.

    — Marty Nemko · Jun 28, 05:38 PM · #

  16. In the meantime, academics, rest assured that uncle Marty is out there, helping his clients (many of whom have to be in the bottom 40% of their job-application class, so to speak, otherwise they wouldn’t need him) flood chairs’ and deans’ offices with mass-mailing job application letters, insinuating themselves into lecture (“presentation” in consultant lingo) dates that are really opportunities for job-application informercials, developing patently opportunistic “relationships” with chairs and deans in the event there might eventually be a job on offer, pestering their old professors for the contacts the professors wouldn’t volunteer before, filling useful faculty members’ mailboxes (snail or e-) with clips of their articles, showing up noticeably at useful faculty members’ lectures, inviting them out to lunch, and almost anything else that will putatively help the client get a job on the basis of the sound of the sizzle and not the substance of the steak.

    In short: although there are problems great and small in American undergraduate education, Marty Nemko and the POD people aren’t the answer. They’re a new problem: attaching a parasitical consultant corps to the already bloated administrations of our colleges and universities. The problems he cites that could nominally be laid at the feet of the faculty (dissatisfaction with instruction, insufficient literacy) are rather majorly the fault of, respectively, the administrations (large, cost-effective lectures, overworked and underpaid adjuncts, little or no support for the time and space needed for faculty actually to teach to their real abilities), and factors in play long before the students get to college (bad families, bad K-12 schooling, etc.) Everything else is more directly attributable to all vice-presidents and assistant provosts who hire Marty and the POD people to tell them how to get their asses out of the ringer. And things aren’t going to get any better with more faculty (adjuncts mostly) hires coming from the ranks of Marty’s clients who, if they get jobs by following the advice synopsized above, probably simply wear people down.

    — LuckyJim · Jun 28, 07:32 PM · #

  17. On Comment 15:

    While the detailed reply of the blog host is appreciated, I fear that the characterization of my suggestion as being “full-time faculty only”-oriented and “much more costly” is unfortunately over-simplifying what I actually wrote:

    “[A]ttempt to find ways of convincing administrations that students’ variety of learning styles and backgrounds would profit better from a variety of learning strategies and options for them to pursue – made easier by the information age and its manifold opportunities for “just in time” learning, for example”.

    Of course, there will always be a role for adjuncts, but the etymology of the word itself indicates that it is wrong-headed for adjuncts to be the core of the general education faculty (and indeed, even upper-division undergraduate programs) in major disciplines, as they are in many, if not, most of the nation’s colleges and universities.

    Why would it not be equally cost-effective and far more learning-effective to have the “full-time faculty” Power-point lectures for a class of 100 available for viewing via the campus Internet server ‘just in time’ – and have the faculty member meet with the students once weekly with each of three groups of 33 (or 34 ;-)) instead of once in a large lecture hall? The students would have the real benefit of a class with that professor, rather than a “discussion section” with a contingent worker.

    In short, technology has not yet begun to change the way the university thinks about itself and its interactions with students. The fact that the Sloan Foundation (which was helping to fund the SUNY sytem’s distance learning program) discovered at one point that the majority of the courses were taken by students enrolled at the campuses in place of on-campus (presumably less convenient and more “alienating” courses – large lecture classes, perhaps?) speaks volumes about the real distance between the “culture” of administrations – and their “consultants” – and that of the students.

    No, I never said that the blog host makes his suggestions in order to generate more consulting assignments – although it is a possibility, is it not? Instead, I and several other commentators have been struck by how incomplete, how (dare I say?) simplistic, and/or generally adminstration-self-serving the suggestions have been.

    “Learning” has rarely seemed to be at the heart of the blog postings’ preoccupations. The “bottom line” always seemed to be driving the suggestions, first and foremost – and not just anybody’s “bottom line”, of course: the priorities of the bottom line of administrations rather than of students.

    Yes, a priority for the student is also cost-effectiveness – but never at the expense of learning. I sincerely believe that an open session with a group of freshmen about what they find alienating and what they find helpful about their classroom experiences – and what they wish were their course experiences – would likely bear out the faculty-student relationship commentators more than the administration-“consultant” cadre.

    In any case, that has been my own experience. Students know that they are being short-changed the minute they step into that amphitheater for the tenth time in a week. They know and they don’t know what to do to overcome that fact. It’s sink or swim – and those who have graduated from Choate, etc. arrive with a life-jacket already in place. All others, well, apparently need not apply.

    This higher education administration “pyramid scheme” needs to be “stood on its head” – but it’s not the “consultants” who will do it. The underscoring of that unfortunate fact is what we readers take away from this blog’s postings.

    Deja vu, all over again.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 28, 08:05 PM · #

  18. FYI: A University of Illinois survey, released this week, found that of 1,143 people surveyed, only 11 percent felt that four-year colleges were doing an excellent job. Only 7.8% strongly agreed that college students get their money’s worth. Here’s the link to the Chronicle’s reporting of it: http://chronicle.com/news/article/4725/illinoisans-value-local-community-colleges-over-4-year-institutions-survey-finds

    — Marty Nemko · Jun 29, 02:20 AM · #

  19. Re comment #18: A sample size of 1,143 is roughly .00009% of Illinois’ population of about 13 million residents. I would call those findings weak at best, without having seen the actual study. Either way, it it certainly not strong enough support for the industry-wide arguments you have made on this forum.

    — Tessier-Ashpool · Jun 29, 01:32 PM · #

  20. Please don’t let Mr. Nemko upset you. As one poster suggested previously, just take a look at his personal web page. He has some pretty scary ideas. What bothers me is that he does have direct influence in our local school district. He’s married to the superintendent. Just thank your higher power that he’s no longer a guest blogger on this site

    — JustAverage · Jun 29, 03:31 PM · #

  21. Marty, Marty, Marty…What WE have been trying to make you understand is that YOU need to take a good hard look at yourself.

    Believe it or not, although we have the nerve to disagree with you, it’s not because of a lack of introspection, as you so quickly assume (and without a single piece of evidence to back your assumption).

    I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with colleagues about teaching during the last semester. Truth be told, we talk more about teaching than our research—which is what we would all prefer to do.

    But it is telling that your first assumption is that WE lack introspection in what we do. Perhaps, you are assuming that we suffer from the same affliction as you do…because it is you who has consistently offered a patchwork of mis-shapen and distored ideas that your readers cannot piece together into a coherent whole.

    But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? What really bugs you is that higher education has been getting along just fine without people like you all along. So, you try to work your own way into the system by suggesting that there’s a problem. And to do that, you align yourself with all of the disgruntled groups who have a beef with the system (those who fail to be admitted, those who fail their classes and drop out, those who fail to get jobs within the system’s ranks—in short, all the failures).

    In particular, you side with the students who don’t see the value of a higher education but who have grown up in a world that does. So, you transform them from “students” into “customers,” and you pull out that old saw about the “customer being always right.” And because they pay money, too many administrators have blindly accepted your cute little analogy. Which would be fine, except that it’s all wrong. In this little analogy, students are raw materials, graduates are products, and the people who employ our graduates are the customers.

    And, yes, the process that transforms these raw materials is a messy one. In tougher moments, it resembles the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. But it’s necessarily tough, because the people who look to college graduates as employees or as prospective graduate students have high expectations.

    Of course, I doubt seriously if you’d have the nerve to ask our real customers about how we’re doing…because they’d probably have a lot of suggestions about how lax our products have become in the recent years since people like you have come on the scene. Truth be told, our real customers would probably start hollering for tougher standards for students, less sympathy for their excuses, and more accountability from students for their own work.

    In fact, I have read numerous reports where they offer these exact criticisms of our newly-minted graduates. But that’s not something you’d ever dare touch.

    So, yes, Marty, take your bat and your ball and storm off to your mommy’s house. When you tell her what happened, she won’t understand your gibberish anymore than we do, but she’ll take your side because she’s your mother and that’s her job. It’s a nice feeling to know she’s there, isn’t it? Just don’t confuse her unconditional love with the way the real world works.

    — JM · Jun 29, 07:00 PM · #

  22. Though it would probably be best just to let Nemko go gently into that good night, here are a few things that he (deliberately?) left out of his reporting on that Illinois survey. (You have to click on the link he gives in his riposte, then click on getting the full results of the report of which the survey was a part, then click on the .pdf document that is the complete results of the survey. Either Nemko didn’t do due diligence or he wanted to mislead. What a consultant! What a guy!)

    90.1 percent of those surveyed agreed (44 percent “strongly” and 46.1 percent “somewhat”) that though a college education may be expensive, it is worth the price.

    Although only 7.8 percent “strongly” agreed that college students are getting their money’s worth, 55.8 percent agreed “somewhat,” meaning that 63 percent generally agreed that college students are getting their money’s worth.

    As to the increase in tuition and fees in recent years, 40.1 percent thought the most important cause was general inflation, 30.1 percent thought it to be cutbacks in state support, and only 25.4 percent thought it to be waste and mismanagement by campuses.

    While it’s true that only about 11 percent felt that, overall, Illinois’s [public] four-year colleges and universities are doing an “excellent” job, 67.5 percent felt that they were doing a “good” job. The other two choices were “fair” (20.6 percent) and “poor” (1.4 percent). This means that over three quarters of those surveyed felt that the colleges were doing, at the least, a good job. And, if you take “fair” to mean “average” or “OK,” it means that less that two percent thought that the colleges were doing an unsatisfactory job.

    Either Nemko is deliberately disingenuous in cherry-picking the particular survey results that supposedly support his incorrect assertion that the results are generally negative, or he’s a total incompetent who simply can’t read the results of a survey. Since he astonishingly supplies the link that enables any interested reader to see that the survey blows up in his face, I’m going with the latter, probably more charitable, interpretation.

    — Just Passing Through · Jun 29, 07:31 PM · #

  23. I changed the excerpt style you reference in your Comment 9, Roger.

    — Alex at Brainstorm · Jun 29, 09:57 PM · #

  24. Nenko and Baby Bush are distinct in so many ways, yet identical in both being disasters for their respective jobs/responsibilities. One can agree with Nemko on the abysmal quality output from US colleges, however, his suggestions of copying the Ancient Chinese National Learning-Acquired Exam system from 1000 years ago, falls short of correcting the ills he gets ill over. We all wax eloquent over defining “the problem” and we all become wimps and bigots when suggesting solutions. The technical name for this is politics—negotiating agreements and creating shared visions of what is essential and possible among people having diverse viewpoints. One can suppose that the ugliness of the people in the US that one has to engage in order to get political work done with them, has increased to the point that Americans generally are becoming politically unwilling or incapable—and their civilization will as a result collapse through a sequence of disasters into mediocrity, much like British shrinkage from WWI to Thatcherism. The best and the brightest have apparently not given birth to the best and the brightest but to the average and the so-so (people like ME). I am sorry not to have kept up America’s historic levels of political capability but I must confess of late the people in the US one must engage in order to get political work done HAVE disgusted me to the point of maybe letting the whole US project in history slide and giving the main ground away to some dictatorship of the proletariat or some upperclass snobbism-maintenance project in Europe. Nemko’s unprofessional thinking about solutions is dangerous, in part, because of the bad-minded people that use “spokespersons” like him to justify hidden and inimicable agendas—think Baby Bush paying back the Saudis now with high oil prices for their funds for his family business ventures. Nemko is not the evil, he is the door that evil uses to wend its way into destroying anti-conservative things like non-conservative views, or truths, or alternatives ways of seeing the world.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Jun 30, 05:45 AM · #

  25. I hold no brief for Marty Nemko or his views, but it seems to me that hell would consist of eternity listening to the self-satisfied, complacent, radical-in-their-own-minds guardians of what is, surprise of surprises, the status quo.

    The general public has really begun to understand what a shameless scam “higher” education has become. The mills of God (or whoever) grind slowly, all right, but they get the job done. Believe it or not, the four-decade-long metastasizing of the academia cannot go on forever, nor should it.

    Marty Nemko and I might not agree on much, but this crop of comments seems to be typical, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a reason to offer any of these clowns even the simplest of jobs in the real world, you know, the one without tenure.

    — dan · Jun 30, 08:02 AM · #

  26. In all the verbal sparring, I still never got to read more information on “bored” underprepared students—a reference to a blog many days or even weeks back. I’m ok with looking into this question on my own, but I just wanted to toss that in. Perhaps the blogger had nothing more to add after the sprinkling of statistics and tips, or engaging in the battles that ensued. And they were doozies, so I can understand that to some extent.

    — NotBored · Jun 30, 10:12 AM · #

  27. “….it’s immoral in a universe-wide sense; it’s cosmically wrong.” Now, that’s intellectual chutzpah on a whole new level.

    — Jack "Razorboy" Drugallion · Jun 30, 10:36 AM · #

  28. I can’t believe this. Comment #27 drops in a quotation and, in lieu of answering the assertion, simply calls it “intellectual chutzpah on a whole new level.” Among the items of intellectual chutzpah that come to mind would be Einstein’s “effrontery” and “nerve” at suggesting that Newton might need a bit of fine-tuning. Name-calling doesn’t dispose of the problem. What’s going on here isn’t chutzpah; it’s laziness, dishonesty, and cowardice. No point in taking the trouble to think when a handy slur will eliminate the annoyance.

    And for heaven’s sake, can’t anyone do simple math? Comment #19 on comment #18 says, “A sample size of 1,143 is roughly .00009% of Illinois’ population of about 13 million residents.” No, math major, 1143 is roughly .009% of 13 million. But what the hey? You’re only off by a factor of a hundred; why would anyone question your wisdom?

    Marty Nemko, congratulations: your critics or detractors or whatever they are appear to be largely if not entirely innumerate, ad hominem-addicted candidates for a lynch mob.

    — dan · Jun 30, 11:00 AM · #

  29. Dan – yeah, sorry about the math typo there. That’s what happens when I try to think on a Sunday morning. Thank you for pointing that out in such a polite fashion.

    So, since .009% is such a massive improvement, I stand corrected – Nemko’s assertions are now beyond reproach.

    — Tessier-Ashpool · Jun 30, 11:36 AM · #

  30. You’re welcome, Tessier-Ashpool—as if validity depended only upon relative size of sample to population. I’d say my standard of politeness comes up to the average on this blog, and then some. Not to get personal, but was this really a “typo,” or rather just a garden-variety math error?

    And personally, I’d just as soon not have my work, much less myself, “evaluated” by what seem to me people far more interested in rallying around the status quo than in seriously considering whether there’s a valid criticism in there somewhere.

    Frankly, to me at least, superannuated “bad rads” of my generation defending their status and privileges, without a great deal of thought about whether students are learning anything, much less being prepared for the real world, are rather more embarrassing than the students themselves. How can they help being ill-educated? Look who educated them.

    — dan · Jun 30, 01:28 PM · #

  31. Christ, I am tired. I thought these discussions/arguments were interesting (and, from my perspective, fun) in the beginning. Now they are tedious and boring at best. Many of us were actively interested in these issues, regardless of our hostility to Nemko, and are truly passionate about what we do.

    Dan – I copped to screwing up, what more do you want. Should I reject and repudiate my former math error (it is in vogue now to do both you know). Either way, it was a comment upon Nemko’s weak offering of evidence. I didn’t feel like getting into a methodological pissing contest over a study that was referenced, and I certainly did not want to dicuss the pros and cons of various statistical sampling techniques (primarily because that would not be fun and it I want to go outside and play). However, it is a weak sample of Illinois and if Nemko wants to make general statements about the nation as a whole, it is totally insufficient.

    But, from Marty and Dan and numerous other one-off supporters, this is what I have learned from this blog: AHA, LuckyJim, Richard Tabor Greene, Just Passing Through, Roger, A Tired Rambler, and especially Tessier-Ashpool are status-quo loving, ad hominem-addicted, lazy, ivory tower-living, malcontents who love their easy, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives existences and only comment on here while waiting to pick up their paychecks from unsuspecting undergrads. Boy, we suck.

    — Tessier-Ashpool · Jun 30, 02:00 PM · #

  32. Having studied at a community college, a 4-year state college, and two research-led universities, I can honestly say that everything Dr. Nemko has posted on Brainstorm is true. Sadly, the Tessier Ashpools, the AHAs, the Rogers, and the LuckyJims of higher education will continue to shortchange undergraduate students for generations to come. These people are not only ill-suited for higher education, they are a disgrace to the profession.

    — Dave · Jun 30, 04:13 PM · #

  33. Mr. Nemko plays the injured party quite well and doubtless there is some justification for his hurt feelings and his condescending wrist slapping.

    Nevertheless, his response to #14 (#15) speaks volumes. Those who would increase the percentage of full-time faculty must bear the burden of proof that these faculty do a better job (i.e. are more “productive” of “adding value” to the student “ product” ) than do the diversely-rich underpaid but admittedly exploited adjuncts. Notice that in this response: there is no suggestion that gobs of dough might be saved by slicing up college Presidencies and other administrative positions into part-time status and no requirement that any arguments for having full time people in these positions “prove” that full-timers could be more “productive.”

    I must admit that the rhetorical game is won by those who argue that a contingent workforce, growing in numbers in academe, “helps” students because “it keeps costs down.” This is the same argument that says it’s OK to have questionable labor practices both here and abroad so “the American standard of living” (i.e. increased acquisition of what the late George Carlin called “stuff”) can be maintained. There are so many assumptions built into this justification, the most obvious being inadequate accounting for large amount of time and energy consumed in hiring, supervising and evaluating migrant scholar-teachers.

    And then there is the other “cost” to institutions, the one I see as most important: the failure to create and develop faculty whose membership remains consistent and steady enough to build a campus culture and secure the knowledgeable collective experience of a particular student body, to make their campus a real learning community, not just a factory or shopping mall where you park your car to either work or consume goods and services. Let’s call this ignored cost “the continuity cost” insofar as it dismisses the virtues of continuity and the sharing of what Paul Goodman called the expertise and knowledge of “veterans,” replacing it with a fragmented labor force which often, through no fault of its own, hasn’t the time to enter the business of community/culture building or sharing because it’s never sure of its status from one term to another.

    Finally, needless to say, anyone who finds #31’s odious final paragraph the height of wisdom will view the prospect of creating such a community or any such culture as a silly, idealistic and hopelessly naive dream. If it is merely that, then the whole idea of a college, especially a liberal arts college, defended so admirably by the late Michael Oakshott (see his THE VOICE OF LIBERAL LEARNING), is merely quixotic.

    — George T. Karnezis · Jun 30, 04:29 PM · #

  34. Having studied at a large private university, taught at a teaching-intense state college, a flagship state university, an elite liberal arts college, and an Ivy, I can honestly say that nearly everything that Dr. Nemko has posted on “Brainstorm” is false. What? I’m only one person, offering anecdotal “evidence” with no specifics? So is Dave.

    More to the point, neither Dave or dan has mentioned (my feelings are hurt) the Nemko’s idiotic misinterpretation of the Illinois survey results. Can they refute it? Can they defend it? Is Marty (“I Can’t Tell When People Are for Something or Against It”) Nemko their kind of leader in the battle to reform higher ed?

    — Just Passing Through · Jun 30, 07:34 PM · #

  35. The fact is commenters such as the ones mentioned in comment #31 come across as mentally ill with the following DSM IV disorders: obsessive-compulsive, paranoid schizophrenic, narcissism, and anti social personality disorders. Responses from these commenters have the same format: blah blah blah….Nazi…..blah blah blah [insert longwinded nonsensical statements]. If you feel so strongly about what you are writing, then write an article for The Chronicle so that people can critique your article. It just seems these commenters do not have a social life (or work) to be constantly and obsessively posting on this site. These types of commenters always have to be right and have the last word. If you’re going to act like children, you will be treated as children. So all I have to say to your comments is “Whatever to infinity……” Please seek mental health counseling.

    — R.N · Jun 30, 08:23 PM · #

  36. As the author of #31 I should make a confesion; it was sarcasm. I simply made a list of most of the criticisms of some of the posters here to try to illustrate the level of name-calling against those who did not happen to agree with Nemko. I thought by including myself on that list everyone would get it and go “oh, TA’s being a sarcastic jerk, how mature” and then move on. Apparently I was wrong.

    I plan on getting some mental health counseling tomorrow, right after math tutoring. In the future I will also avoid all attempts at humor.

    — Tessier-Ashpool · Jun 30, 08:44 PM · #

  37. Are we to take it then, that R.N. stands not for Reformed Nazi, but rather Registered Nurse, of the psychiatric variety?

    — Mr. Wiki · Jun 30, 10:57 PM · #

  38. The actual ad-hominems finally showed up here. At the same time, so did a crowd of know-nothings in support of Nemko’s derision for academia. Funny coincidence, that.

    — Roger · Jun 30, 10:59 PM · #

  39. Nemkoists: Still no defense of Marty’s grossly misleading summary of the Illinois survey results? We’re w-a-i-t-i-n-g….

    — Just Passing Through · Jun 30, 11:02 PM · #

  40. Dr. Nemko is that most fortunate of men: all of his enemies are beneath contempt.

    — T Paine · Jul 1, 12:45 AM · #

  41. The results of the poll are more complex: 1.4 percent of T Paine believes Nemkoo’s enemies are beneath contempt based on actually reading their comments; 26.7 percent believes it on the basis of believing the pseudonym of “T Paine” carries with it the authority of “Common Sense”; 53.5 percent believes it on the basis of having nothing else to offer but a simple declarative sentence; and 19.4 doesn’t really believe it at all but doesn’t want to see his POD membership go down the drain.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 1, 08:10 AM · #

  42. Nemko got us talking. Now let’s start teaching.

    — Tnachtrab · Jul 1, 08:32 AM · #

  43. “Are we to take it then, that R.N. stands not for Reformed Nazi, but rather Registered Nurse, of the psychiatric variety?”

    I have read your puerile postings, Mr. Wiki: you make my case. “Nazi” is, like pedophile, say, a term not to used against a stranger in an attempt at light humor. Poor taste.

    Those who disagree with you are not evil. They just disagree. You may be wrong. When was the last time a discussion actually changed your mind?

    Beneath contempt. Nothing to get exercised about, certainly.

    T. Paine

    — T Paine · Jul 1, 02:43 PM · #

  44. Operative term: reformed. Can’t anybody accept a compliment?

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 1, 06:19 PM · #

  45. Mr. Nemko, A.M. talk radio is calling to you, although you will not be able to claim atheism.

    Distortion of stats / facts /figures – it’s interesting that someone besides Nemko actually read the cited survey, and, not surprisingly, Nemko climbed into his cherry-picker and got a couple of malcontents to his table. And then there is…
    Simple minded approaches to complex problems…
    An us-vs-the-liberals mentality…
    Angry cohorts who believe the world is being manipulated by elitists…
    A sense of personal outrage and that you are being attacked personally for your anti-establishment viewpoints…
    An assumption of authority…

    It’s so too bad…

    — Rusty · Jul 2, 12:42 AM · #

  46. Just noticed: “Nazi” was introduced into the forum in comment #35 by T Paine, who then accuses M. Wiki of “poor taste” in repeating it in a question. Is this how Nemkoism works?

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 2, 08:27 AM · #

  47. This thread could be evaluated as SO much human energy so profligately ejected into a sock that will require washing tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever.

    — Tnachtrab · Jul 9, 12:09 AM · #

  48. OK, the first law of Nemkoism is to introduce an unsavory term (e.g., “Nazi”) into the discussion and then criticize anybody who repeats it. Now I think I’ve got the second: criticize the whole discussion thread as “SO much human energy so profligately ejected into a sock” by—mais oui—adding to the thread itself.

    As to Tnachtrab’s “energy…ejected into a sock” metaphor, well, that’s between him and his therapist. I just hope that mom isn’t still doing his laundry. Ewww!

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 9, 02:00 PM · #

  49. I agree with comment #32. Those negative commenters seem to be delulsional psychopaths (posing as educators) who happened to be surfing the web and stumbled upon the Chronicle blog. All they can do is talk amongst themselves. Their comments are neither humourous nor informative (only amongst themselves).

    — Reader · Jul 9, 02:14 PM · #

  50. And as Marty Nemko sinks slowly in the west…not one peep in defense of his mangling of the Illinois poll results (#18), nor one peep in substantive rebuttal of my exposure of it (#22).

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 9, 02:17 PM · #

  51. Ignore the following psychotic forum trolls: Mr. Diki, Hypocrisy, Just Pissing Through, CRusty, and Tessier Ass****.

    — Commenter · Jul 9, 02:51 PM · #

  52. “Commenter” [sic] is one clever dude.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 9, 05:39 PM · #

  53. I am unsure how disagreeing is equivalent to “psychotic”. I do like how Commenter turned my name into a dirty word; very clever.

    — Tessier-Ashpool · Jul 9, 06:23 PM · #

  54. “Commenter” (who must go to a church where the minister is a “paster”) plays a simple game. Marty Nemko and supporters could just as easily be referred to as T. Pain, Marty Numbnuts, Din, Dive, R(eactionary). N(obody)., Crabnacht, and Non-Reader. But we psychotics (crazy, probably, for waiting for a Nemkoist to come up with a justification for their leader’s playing fast and loose with poll results) are above that, aren’t we.

    Sudden thought: Do you think that Nemko’s defenders are his clients, who don’t want doors slammed in their faces when they call on those department chairs, whom they’ve been bombarding with unsolicited letters, photocopies of articles they’ve written, pleadings for lecture dates, invitations to lunch, etc.? The thought that any of those chairs, or deans, read the comments on Nemko’s “Brainstorm” posts must be truly terrifying for them.

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 9, 07:53 PM · #

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