Boundaries Are Always Harder to Define

Among other categories, the campus tracks enrollments by race.  Using those categories, last fall I had a majority non-white class.  It was the first time for me.  I suspect it won't be the last.  Here is the breakdown, though before I provide it I want to note that instructors are not given this information.  The information they are given that comes from Banner (the Student Information System) is the home address.  Based on that and other identifying information, of the 23 students overall who completed the class 8 were international students (7 Chinese and 1 Korean), 3 were Asian-American students, and 1 was Hispanic. 

I suspect that many instructors will never look at the home address in Banner.  Will they be aware of what category each of their students is in, simply by an eyeball test?  In yesterday's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof's column, called Our Biased Brains, argues that very early on we learn about racial identities and most of us (African Americans are the exception) develop a preference for the race we are a member of. No doubt we are conscious about race, but do we make mistakes from time to time in assignment of category?  And might it be that our own mental categories don't coincide with the official categories the campus maintains?

One troublesome aspect in the official categories is that International Student is a designation, which in theory encompasses all the races but in practice has come to imply East Asian, witness the piece from Inside Higher Ed, The University of China at Illinois. In other contexts the expression, "they all look alike to me," is offensive.  Yet to the unwitting instructor (I include myself here) it is quite easy to mistake an Asian-American student for an International student and vice versa.

Another category I struggle with is Hispanic.  There is first the Hispanic-Latino naming dispute.  The campus seems to be hedging its bets on this one, where one of the race categories is Hispanic yet in area studies there is the Department of Latina/Latino Studies.  More to the point for me is not really knowing who counts in this category and how my mental model of who counts is not reliable this way.  To illustrate, I did a Google Image Search on Sephardic Jew.  Below is one of the pictures I found, apparently a well known actor, Hank Azaria, though I was not familiar with him.  Is he Hispanic?  My immediate answer is, maybe.  He was born in Queens, where I grew up.  His grandparents apparently came from Greece.  Is that what's decisive or is it largely immaterial?   In my process of looking via Google I learned that Jerry Seinfeld is a Sephardic Jew.  I do not consider Jerry Seinfeld to be Hispanic. 

Noises off: The curtain rises on April Fool's Day | Stage | The Guardian via kwout

These puzzles for me led to further mental associations.  I thought of the film version of West Side Story.  That movie came out when I was a kid and was something of a big deal, in part because Leonard Bernstein did Young People's Concerts that were on TV in NYC, and the music from West Side Story was sometimes featured in those. Anyway, in the movie George Chakiris (born in Ohio, of Greek ancestry) plays Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, The Sharks.  And Natalie Wood (born in California, of Russian ancestry) plays Maria, Bernardo's sister.  Then I started to think of other films where White actors play characters of other races.  One I came up with immediately, because I saw part of it on TV recently while doing my workout on the elliptical, was Remo Williams, where Joel Grey plays the Korean martial arts master, Chiun.  That movie is an enjoyable farce.  What about in a more serious setting, are there movie examples of that?  I thought of A Passage to India, which has at its core the tensions across race and culture in the presence of colonial rule.  The chameleon-like actor, Alec Guinness, plays an Indian character, Professor Godbole.  I'm sure the reader of this piece can come up with many other such examples.

For me, the effect of these examples is to blur what it means to be of one race or another.  In contrast, the type of bean counting that the campus does on enrollments, perhaps mandated by law, of that I'm unsure, seems to sharpen the distinction between the races.  I then asked myself a question I wasn't able to fully answer.  Which do we want, blurring or sharpening?  My partial answer is this.  Most people identify themselves with some subgroup of all human beings, and that subgroup serves as their primary identifier.  In some cases that subgroup may be racially defined, in which case sharpening the distinction is preferred.  In other cases the subgroup may be defined by other than race, religion for example, in which case the racial distinctions should be blurred.  But then, trying to apply this thinking to myself, I'm not even sure of what my own primary subgroup is.  I feel like something of an outsider to any one category, though my parents were Jewish, as were a majority of the kids I went to public school with, I'm completely non-observant now. Similarly, in some ways I feel strongly that I'm an academic and defined by my professional identity, but I don't try to publish in refereed journals anymore and haven't for some time.  How many people feel like outsiders this way?  I don't know.  I do know that I don't like to be lumped into the single category, White.  I hope with this to convince the reader that I feel uneasy with the entire discussion, but that much of these feelings are useful to keep in mind as we turn to the next part.

* * * * *

When I started at Illinois back in 1980, upwards of 90% of the undergraduate students were from within the state.  Most came from the more affluent suburbs of Chicago.  There was also a sizable population from down state.  The city of Chicago itself was underrepresented.   The only real way I learned how this mattered was via one of my fellow assistant professors in the Economics department, who happened to be the daughter of the Belgian Ambassador to the United States.  She said our students were too provincial.  That is not a word I used regularly in my working vocabulary, which is perhaps why I remember it now.  Also, as someone who grew up in NYC I had substantial fear of people from the Midwest, which my 4 years in graduate school at Northwestern didn't eradicate completely.  So I was accepting of that conclusion without wondering how she reached it.  It occurs to me now that she must have directly experienced some intolerance, a woman teaching economics was uncommon then, and somebody who spoke English with a French accent even rarer here.

Fast forward twenty years.  I am the representative from my campus on the CIC Learning Technology Group.  The CIC is the academic arm of the Big Ten but also includes the University of Chicago, which is not in the Big Ten.  At the time the group was sponsored by the Provosts.  The various representatives in the group were either Associate Provosts for Undergraduate Education or like me the leading Educational Technologist for their campus.   It was quite a collegial group and I became friendly on an individual basis with many of the members.  In a sidebar conversation with my colleague from UIC, our sister campus in Chicago, she tells me that my campus is not hospitable to African-Americans.  I was already somewhat aware of the this via discussions on my campus about "digital divide" that I was engaged in.  But I hadn't realized the issues impacted the entire university, not just my campus.  Regarding selectivity and the prestige of a degree, my campus was ranked much higher than UIC.  But qualified African-American students might nonetheless prefer attending UIC.  That was a real issue.  It probably still is.

The above two anecdotes are there to show that issues with lack of collegiality along racial/cultural lines have been with us on campus at least since when I began here as a faculty member.  Those issues are more prominent now.  There are several reasons why.  One of those is the change in demographics of our undergraduate student population toward a much larger share of international students coupled with a much greater reliance on tuition as a revenue generator for the university.  A second is prominent role that the Internet plays and its enabling of hate speech, even in circumstances where race is not really at issue, such as on whether to cancel classes or not due to cold weather.  A third is the greater attention being given to race at a national level as a consequence of the senseless killing of black men by police that has made the news. 

I am a fairly regular reader of the New York Times Opinion Page.  Among the regular columnists, Charles Blow is the one who writes regularly about race issues, often taking on the Republican attack machine in the process.  It might be expected that an African American columnist will write on race issues, but as a regular diet of columns I find this problematic.  So it occurred to me that Blow should swap columns with somebody else at the Times, Joe Nocera for example.  Nocera has written a spate of columns on the NCAA as evil cartel.  Imagine if for a month or so that Blow would write about the NCAA, race could certainly enter the discussion there but the constraint would be that there was a connection to NCAA issues, and Nocera would write about race relations, preferably entirely outside the world of sports.  The alternative perspective would be helpful to readers. 

In that spirit I am writing about issues that were taken up in a recent campus report on Racial Microaggressions. While I have written on race issues before, it is far from my usual fare and it is not easy for me to do.  This post is taking much longer to write than is typical for me.  It almost certainly would be a good thing if other voices who don't normally talk about race to begin to do so in a thoughtful way and do that publicly.  Perhaps this piece will encourage others to do likewise.

Part of the reason to do this is to show that while commentators are like minded, they do disagree on occasion.  For example, I took issue with some of the recommendations in the report, particularly its call for mandatory diversity training for all on campus.  The campus doesn't do mandatory training well.  It doesn't do such training okay.  It does a poor job.  The Ethics Training that all faculty and staff must do on an annual basis makes people resentful of the training and doesn't make them any more ethical in performance of their jobs.  I believe that newly entering students get Alcohol Awareness training, but that clearly doesn't work.  Even the training that the IRB administers for anyone doing research on human subjects is heavy handed.  One has the feeling taking this training that part of it is there for the campus to avoid liability.  Better educational approaches wouldn't worry about that at all, but instead ask what activities best get the trainees to appreciate the issues at hand.  This calls for the trainee to make some contribution to the product, as a co-author contributes to writing a paper.  Campus training doesn't allow for that.  It is much more heavy handed.

In the process of doing background reading for writing this piece I became aware of the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations.   Among other activities for students, they offer an I-Connect Diversity and Inclusion Workshop for all first-year students on campus.  I could not find on their Web site how long this office has existed nor could I find how many cohorts of students have been through the I-Connect workshops.  It would be good to have some sense of the efficacy of this workshop.  Lacking that here, I will simply move on.  But let me make one point first.  This office is part of Student Affairs.  That may explain, in part, why I was unaware of it.  Faculty tend to be more knowledgeable about the academic affairs side of the house.

In the concluding section I suggest several possible more bottom up approaches that potentially would be better than mandatory training.  These are things that might be tried.  I really don't know what will work.  I'm not sure anybody else knows that either.  But it seems to me there are many possible activities that could energize the community in a good way around race issues.  So I certainly don't want to argue that we should just sit on our hands.  I only want to discourage top down mandates, which tend to be heavy handed and are therefore ineffective.  In the remainder of this section I'd like to recount a few other anecdotes to illustrate other dimensions of the issues.

The first of these is my own experience witnessing something very much like a microaggression, really a series of these, mainly coming from one student in particular.  This happened in a seminar for the Campus Honors Program that I taught in fall 2009.  I wrote about it at the end of the semester in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A".  The thing is, I inadvertently invited it to happen, without realizing I was doing it till too late.   Once the door is open, it is very hard to close it again.  What I didn't understand at the time, but have a better feel for now, is that kids who have a desire to avoid all the drinking that many undergraduates engage in on campus need some alternative that they find compelling and engages them.  For some students, this ends up being a faith-based living arrangement.  In that class several of my students resided in faith-based housing.  It was really only that one student who committed microaggressions.  Since there was another student in the class who lived at the same place, this other student was extremely quiet and spoke but rarely in class, many of his classmates also were very quiet, I take it that there were multiple factors in confluence which caused the microaggressions.  Based on that experience I conjecture that extroverts among the students, the type of kid who can dominate a class discussion, tend to be less sensitive to needs of their classmates and are therefore more prone to commit a microaggression.

Then, as I said, I encouraged this through my prompts for their blog posts, asking the students to bring in their own experiences into the discussion.  I didn't intend that encouragement to enable discussion of religion in our class, but neither did I proscribe such discussion up front.  I have continued to use blogging in my teaching and continue to provide prompts that encourage the students to relate the topic at hand to their personal experience.  And I haven't had another experience like the one in that fall 2009 class.  So I would deem that sort of thing unlikely, though not impossible.  I probably could manage it better were it to happen again.  It was a bit unnerving that first time.  The other issue I want to bring up here is that apart from deterring the microaggression, reasonable instructors might disagree about what the teacher's role should have been in this case.  As I wrote in the linked piece, my prior was that discussion of religion should be cordoned off from the classroom entirely.  I can imagine that in a biology course where evolution is discussed that religion might come up there and the instructor shouldn't entirely deflect the discussion.  Of course, we do have a Department of Religion on campus.  I really don't know whether instructors in those courses encourage students to discuss their own religious beliefs.  And I don't know whether other instructors would agree that discussion of religion should be cordoned off in the courses they teach.  That, in itself, might be an interesting question on which to poll the faculty, though getting at that might also create more enmity than it's worth.

The next anecdote concerns a class I taught in Behavioral Economics in spring 2011, the first time I taught since I retired in summer 2010 and a course that hadn't been offered by the Economics department before then.  It had been my intent in designing this class that I would teach it repeatedly thereafter, but my experience that spring was so bad that I taught the course only that one time.  I now teach a course on the Economics of Organizations instead.  In the behavioral course I had the students read the best selling book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein.  In that prior campus honors seminar several of the readings were popular books and that worked well, so I was prone to try it again.   This time around it created lots of problems.

Let me explain this by beginning with lessons learned and then working back from there.  Many students who study economics (and business too) are conservative/libertarian in their politics, have an instinctive distrust for government, and have a strong belief that people earn what they deserve.  If these people make a lot of money, it's because they worked hard for it.  And if they are poor, therefore, they most be loafers.  These students have views that are different from mine.  I am more liberal.  I think government has a positive role to play, though I do distrust excessive bureaucracy, but I also believe big business can be a threat and needs a counter force to rein it in.  I also believe that income-wise where you end up depends a lot on where you start and, hence, it is not only effort that matters in income.  Further, if you do fabulously well, you were apt to have had more than your fair share of good luck.  In most classes I teach neither the students' views nor mine come out in the open.  I prefer it that way.  In this class these views did come out and they clashed.  There wasn't microaggression.  There was overt hostility and anger.  I lost control of the class as a result.

The underlying philosophy in Nudge is something the authors call Libertarian Paternalism, a seeming oxymoron that the authors claim is really quite sensible.  The Libertarian piece is that people should be free to choose what they want.  The behavioral econ tweak of the neoclassical choice model, one that has substantial bite in practice, is that often people make choices passively rather than actively.  In other words, they come to accept what is first presented to them and then don't consider possible alternatives.  Thus, an agent who set the default that precedes the choice will influence the actual outcome.  The paternalism part comes from setting defaults in a way to achieve socially desirable objectives.

Ahead of time I thought the class needed some intellectual background on paternalism, the old fashioned kind.  So I assigned some readings that we'd discuss in class.  One of those was this piece by Amy Gutmann.  Gutmann is the President of the University of Pennsylvania and a distinguished scholar.  That mattered not to the students.  Some of the students went ballistic about me assigning this piece.  The class went downhill after that.

Let me add some things here that I conjecture about but don't really know.  Let's imagine that the conservative political views I described above are correlated positively with microaggressions, something that I don't think is too hard to believe.  Let's also consider the microaggressions themselves as symptoms rather than root cause, with the cause stemming from the students' underlying beliefs.  Then it will occur to some to want to address the cause directly. And in articulating why, one reason will be to protect students from microagresssions, which is consistent with the Student Code. But another reason will be to benefit the students who are apt to commit the microaggressions, to give them a healthier value system on which to based their judgments and actions.  If my experience in that behavioral econ class is any indication, there would be a lot of pushback from some segment of the student population that this is the worst sort of paternalism, liberals imposing their values on conservatives.  If something like this is to be expected, the issues are whether a treating the symptoms only approach can be effective and, if not, how progress can be made otherwise. 

The last anecdote is aimed at reminding us that a student being uncomfortable in class can at times be a good thing; the discomfort fosters learning and the student feels it should be overcome via the student's own efforts.  The following passage is from a Chinese-American student who took my class last fall, writing in her last post of the semester.  She liked the course but was nonetheless uncomfortable in participating in class discussion.

At first I was worried about the blogging since I feel that I am a horrible writer. I dreaded writing essays ever since middle school. It is usually tough for me to formulate my thoughts and make them flow. I would sometimes spend several hours on these posts, but most of that time, I was thinking about what to write and how to start writing about it. After that obstacle, it was a bit easier. Despite the difficulty, this was actually my favorite part of the course because I was pushed to make connections between my real life experiences and the economics behind it. If a professor were to just teach me topics like transfer pricing and the Shapiro Stiglitz model with definitions and graphs, there is no way I would recall the material several weeks from now, but bringing it to a personal level in these blog posts really helps with absorbing the concepts.Furthermore, I really enjoyed the structure of the class and the fact that it was discussion-oriented. Although I never talked, I felt engaged in the topics discussed and I was able to absorb a lot of information aside from days when I did not get much sleep the night before. You may have seen some "glazed" looks from me those times (I apologize for that). Moreover, the reason why I did not chime in as much as other students is because I either felt that I could not relate or was too shy to contribute. There were multiple times when I had wanted to but remained silent because I have a fear of being wrong in front of people even in the most trivial situations. This is due to a somewhat traumatic experience that happened in the past, but I am getting better! And hopefully I will continue to do so in the midst of searching for full-time jobs.

As my post title is about boundaries, an exploration of the boundary would consider what happens on both sides of it.  If instructors sometimes deliberately make students uncomfortable for good learning reasons, then student discomfort can't itself be taken as sufficient that there is a problem which requires some remedy.  What distinguishes the discomfort caused by microaggressions from the discomfort my student writes about?  Are those easy to parse or not?  We should be concerned with Type I and Type II errors here. 

* * * * *

What might we do to make things better?  Much activity of this sort probably should be about raising awareness.  If possible awareness would be about more than merely alerting people that there is a problem.  It would point them to instances where the problem doesn't manifest or where the problem has been overcome.  Then people might emulate these good examples.  Things will improve on campus if such emulation happens at scale.  But as the good examples might encourage some to deny that there is a problem at all, some documentation of the problem itself is surely necessary as well, just to counter the naysayers.

We live in a world where broad scale communication happens via social media, where online video is the preferred form of communication, and where if a video "goes viral"  it can then influence a very large audience.  I have made many instructional videos related to the courses I've taught.  None of these videos have gone viral.  I do not know "the trick" for making a video that will go viral.  So what I say next should be taken as aspiration only, not a game plan that were it followed is known ahead of time to succeed.

There are two courses on campus that I am aware of that satisfy the Advanced Composition Gen Ed requirement and entail video production.  One of these is Writing with Video.   The other is Writing Across Media.  Students do projects in these classes.  A part of each project is making a video from scratch.  This semester, one of my students from last fall is taking Writing with Video.  As part of one of his projects, he did a video interview with me and a clip from that became part of his project.  Based on this, I suspect many students taking these classes are looking for appropriate subjects for their projects and for people whom they can video interview.

What if the principal investigators of the Racial Microaggressions paper met with the course coordinators of the video production classes, offering to send a solicitation to all the students who were asked to complete the survey that formed the basis of their paper, asking those students whether they'd be willing to appear in a video interview as well as to identify friends they might have of another race who'd be willing to appear along with them?  Part of the solicitation would be to note that the video projects might very well have a half-life beyond the course where the projects are created, so to also request that the students being interviewed give permission to make the videos public.  If such a solicitation produced some positive response this would enable a social experiment aimed at making things better.  (There are a host of logistical issues that would need to be addressed to make this work.  I am not going to get into those here.  My point is that something like this might be tried, not how to orchestrate it if it were tried.)

Beyond this, what of diversity education for faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants that would be of the opt in kind?   There are many potential venues for this.  The various college teaching academies offer one possibility.  CITL has a variety of different workshop series that provide a different possibility.  But who with the appropriate expertise would offer these sessions and wouldn't they end up mainly as preaching to the choir? 

Scratching my head about this for a while it occurred to me to trying something like a particular training session for learning technologists that I was involved in for the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Program back in 2007.  We made a video vignette of a "how not to" kind, deliberately campy in style so that when it was shown to the group in attendance it elicited quite a bit of laughter.  After the showing of the video was completed, the group was instructed to find all the errors that were made during the video.  It worked remarkably well in that setting.  So my question is might something similar work for diversity education?  I should note here that though we didn't plan it at the time that video was used again in later institutes, after the people who were involved in the video were no longer in attendance. 

At issue here is whether the real felt pain from actual microaggressions gets diminished this way, so as to disregard the problem that the training is trying to address.  If that happened, of course, then this sort of approach would fail in a fundamental way.  So there would be a risk in trying this, no doubt.  But there seems to me an upside potential as well.  If the videos were sufficiently illustrative of what is at issue then the campy humor would help to make the audience larger and the message better understood.  For that reason it seems to me worth trying, though I will admit here I'm entirely uncertain as to who would get the ball rolling. 

Let me wrap up.  Gandhi said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."  To this I'd add that up front most of us don't know what it is we want.  We need to think it through, try out some tentative possibilities, and then go from there. So let's talk about this some more, let's try some things while we're doing that, and in so doing let's make things better by practicing the art of the possible. 

The virtues in making it up as you go along

When you come to the fork in the road....
A good background on Yogi Berra quotes in general and this one, in particular.

I don't like scripts that I have to follow.  I don't even like them when cooking, where I probably should follow a recipe.  I definitely don't like them in teaching.  I don't really like having a GPS, or that voice in Google Maps, at least most of the time.  I want to do what I want to do.  I don't want to be told what to do by somebody else, definitely not by by some machine.  If there is a chance that I might screw up (there always is) and I'm aware of it ahead of time (not nearly as often) then I might want some help right before the fateful moment.  Making a plan in advance that I will adhere to so as to avoid the screw ups, however, is overkill.  Getting a general idea, sure.  You don't want to do anything totally blind.  Filling that in with detail?  Absolutely not!

Until a few days ago I knew this about me, but I didn't understand why.  Now I have a better idea.  That came from reading this paper by Bruffee (1984), Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Let me explain how that came about in a bit. First let me note that Bruffee was a teacher of writing and his piece was meant at the time for others who taught English.  The rest of us, who teach whatever it is that we teach, could learn a thing or two about how to teach our courses better if we first asked, how would a teacher of Writing go about the teaching task in my class?  Only after chewing on that one for a while and coming up with some spark on something new to try should you then ask, now what do I have to do to modify the approach to fit my subject matter?

Bruffee's paper is about that triad: conversation, thinking, and writing.  And his key point, I'm not sure it is original to him (Vygotsky is mentioned somewhere in the paper but I haven't read Vygotsky) is that these are really all the same thing, conversation, a social concept that requires more than one participant.  Thinking is internalized conversation between the thinker and imagined others.  So thinking, often envisioned as a solitary act, is really a social activity and it proceeds according to conventions defined by social discourse.  Writing is then externalizing the thinking, bringing the conversation of the mind out to where others can participate in it.

I so liked this framing.  It definitely captures what I do.  Indeed, it is why I like the slow blogging approach to writing - it is conversational at root.  It may explain why I struggle with digest forms of email, such as from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle, where each blurb is not conversation but instead more like an ad for some conversation to follow. It's also why I struggle with micro forms like Twitter.  If you have all these different and disjoint blurbs running around in your head, is there a unifying conversation in which to embed them all?  Most of the time to me it just sees like a lot of noise.  Perhaps there is visceral appeal in an individual item.  Lead us not into temptation.  There's already too much of that with the sidebar in Facebook.

I've now reached the fork in the road in this essay. Are we human beings hard wired for conversation, with each of us thrilled to be in a discussion where all of the participants can hold up their end and seem to be doing just that but they are also sympathetic to the others so will help if one stumbles?  Or is it that some people have a predilection for conversation, Bruffee for one, me for another, while other people get their jollies in some other way?  My story is better if conversation is fundamental to the human condition.  But if that is true it remains a puzzle why more people don't engage in conversation more often. My best explanation for that is people often act out of fear first and foremost.  In this case they are fearful that they can't hold up their end of the discussion.  This make sense to me for shy people.  For the gregarious types, it must be something else, though I suspect many of them don't venture beyond very familiar terrain, so that most of their conversations don't go anywhere.

The high point for me in having actual conversation was in college at 509 Wyckoff Road, during my junior and senior years at Cornell.  It's not that I didn't have conversations in high school.  But I had fewer friends to have real talks with so there was less variety in what we talked about, and I don't remember any conversations outside of school in a group setting, while in the kitchen/eating area at Wyckoff Road that was the norm.  It may be that a few close friends is all you need to have a really good talk, though I like to explore different things and I need others to help me get there.  With one close friend you can go deep, but it's less likely that you go wide as well. 

My first few years as an administrator, running SCALE and then CET, I was able to spend a good chunk of the time in conversation.  The Espresso Royale on Sixth and Daniel was my unofficial other office.  I got to talk with a wide variety of people there - faculty, other administrators, teaching with technology types, and once in a while pure technology types too, though many of those discussions happened someplace north of Green Street.  It was either good fortune or me shaping the job to do what I liked.  Over time, there was less of that and more of the dreaded time suck ---- committee meetings.  My calendar became more crowded.  My enjoyment at work started to wane.  One real reason for starting this blog was to get back that sense of joy.  If I couldn't have the type of conversations I'd like to have with others very often, then I'd have them with myself.

There is a question for me whether I would have stuck with the activity had I kept the blog private, in essence a journal or a diary.  Bruffee helped me to understand that one too.  Most of the stuff in this blog is potentially interesting to people I know, or people I know of, or people where I've read what they've written and I'm commenting on that.  This doesn't mean they'll want to read my stuff or like it if they do read it.  But there is that possibility.  So in that way the blogging is holding up my end of a larger conversation.  A private journal is something else entirely.

Now let me get back to making it up as you go along, which I do quite regularly in writing.  So the blogging I do is different that way than how I would write up an economics paper aimed for publication in a refereed journal.  For that sort of thing the thinking would precede the writing.  I would spend an inordinate amount of time working through a model, perhaps 3 months or more.  During that time the model became my universe and I'd try to understand everything that was in it, intuit what my main results would be and how to prove them.  Only as I neared completion of this modeling part would I begin on the writing.  So the writing was other than learning.  It was communicating what I had already learned in a way that might be intelligible to others.

It is quite different with the blogging and with some of my other mental sojourns that I end up not writing about at all.  There it is just exploration via conversation and if the exploration seems promising, I'll start writing then still with a lot to discover ahead of me.  I hope it's now obvious why you have to make it up as you go along this way.  If you do that, there is something to still talk about.  The mystery isn't yet solved.  The verdict hasn't yet been rendered.  The outcome is not known.  (I'm sure there are yet more metaphors here for describing the uncertainty in the process, but I hope the reader gets the idea.)  This is not the skillful writer holding back information till the last possible moment to build suspense.  This is the writer himself not knowing where things will end up other than some vague idea that he will not insist on if he misses that mark.  Keeping the internal conversation going is a way to find out how things will turn out.

This allows the discussion to cover familiar themes, make only a mild departure from prior conversations, and still be absorbed with the discussion because it has a freshness to it that is captivating.  I could not produce a blog post by first making a detailed outline of what I want to cover and then writing paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, adhering to that outline.  And individual sentence or two might be better that way since my full attention could be brought to how to shape what it is that I'm going to say.  But my commitment to the activity would wane well before I'd finish.  That approach with outlines would end up killing my interest in writing.

There's one other thing that making it up as you go along does for you.  If you produce something tolerable that way, it builds some confidence in you to try it again.  Being able to improvise in the moment, I suspect, whether a jazz musician in a band, or a comedic actor doing a sketch with fellow actors, a painter trying a new technique on a canvas, or a slow blogger like me writing on a different theme, is an act of confidence.  If you try it, a spark will come.  Logically, it's not necessarily true.  There are those excruciating times where you fall flat on your face. As an empirical regularity, however, for me with the writing it seems true most of the time, especially if it is open ended when the writing will stop, meaning where there is no day job or other regular obligation that takes precedence.

I do throw out pieces that I've started but that don't seem to have enough oomph in them to make it worthwhile to finish them.  But most of the time I do finish. And when I come back later to reread the piece, I frequently like what I'm reading.  Maybe that's narcissism, though I tend to be quite critical of my own performance when I find it below par.  It's hard to argue for objectivity on this score.  But I'd wager that any one who practiced making it up as they go along and did it for quite some time, they'd start to like the results of what they produced.  And the reason, in case it isn't clear, is that when you have a good conversation it comes to a good conclusion. 

But you also better watch out.  I'm cooking tonight!

On Social Issues Is There Ever A "Right Answer"....

....or is there only "different points of view?"

In his column last Friday Paul Krugman writes:

The 2016 campaign should be almost entirely about issues. The parties are far apart on everything from the environment to fiscal policy to health care, and history tells us that what politicians say during a campaign is a good guide to how they will govern.

It seems to me that this paragraph is uncontroversial.  The parties are far apart.  Would anyone question that?  One might imagine on going down the list of issues, noting the current positions, and then asking, can the parties reconcile on this one?  What would it take to achieve such reconciliation?  If there were a right answer on a particular issue and if one of the two held positions were the right answer, one might expect that over time there'd be convergence to it, as evidence accumulated to support that position.  But there are reasons to believe this won't happen and as Krugman writes people seem free to deny the evidence or to deny their articulation of what they previously believed.  Further, because the focus here is social issues, there really can't be controlled experiments to test hypotheses and disprove the false ones.

But there are other reasons why there might not be convergence.  The most obvious of these is that neither position is the answer, perhaps because each position is articulated in a straightforward way but the right answer is complicated.  Or it might be that the right answer is not that complex but it is other than the two positions as articulated.  In this case the evidence will never point to either of the positions convincingly.

I tend to think there is still a different reason that explains the lack of convergence most of the time.  It is that we don't know what it is we want because we can't imagine it in the absence of seeing it.  So we are not rational in the way the previous reasons imply.  And this lack of rationality keeps us from learning about a right answer, because in the absence of rationality there isn't one, as a right answer depends fundamentally on what it is that we want.

An alternative that recognizes this dilemma would be to view our beliefs as evolving based on what we learn from experience and that everything we hold true at present is contingent on current beliefs.  Alas, most people seem to find this approach quite unsettling.  They want things to be more certain.

I wrote about this issue some years ago as I tried to write a book on the  precepts that should underlie undergraduate education, which I called Guessing Games, because developing good intuition is at the heart of critical thinking.  I ultimately gave up on the book writing because I became aware that I was lecturing in many of the essays and readers don't like to be lectured at.  I then didn't know how to reconcile the points I wanted to make without lecturing.  I still don't know how to do that.  Indeed, this post might very well seem like lecturing, though I'm less concerned about doing it in individual blog posts.

The passage below is from the chapter Just The Facts and Guessing.  It sets up my concluding section.

* * * * *

There are many who are not well versed in the scientific method, who nonetheless invoke the mantra that is the title of this chapter – just the facts. They too are aiming for objectivity though sometimes I fear they have an additional agenda, to close off further argument. Anecdotes are evidence. They may not be the best sort of evidence, especially when more systematic evidence is available, in which case relying on anecdotes exclusively is silly. But throwing them out is bias. When the systematic evidence points one way and the anecdote another, there is learning in carefully reconciling the two. Likewise, the expressed opinion of a friend, colleague, or opponent is evidence too. The vast majority of people are rational and thoughtful. When they express an opinion that appears contrary, they are apt to have access to information that you don’t have or to have related experiences that are unknown to you. Ignoring the opinion then is inconsistent with weighing all the evidence. Of course, we are awash in polemical argument in the political arena, where often the goal is to seek political advantage rather than to illuminate the truth. So there is a tendency to discount if not entirely ignore opinions of the other side. To the extent that politics is like sports and we voters are like fans, perhaps that’s ok. Outside of sports and politics, however, it’s a problem.

The best articulation of the principle I’ve seen is by Steven Sample in his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. The first chapter is on Thinking Gray, which means several things all at once. First, don’t make a decision before you have to and don’t tip your hand as to how the decision will eventually come out to encourage others to provide you with evidence that you will weigh fairly. Second, actively encourage argument and debate about the decision so different points of view can be well articulated. Third, while the first two are really external behaviors this one is truly internal to yourself. It’s not that you have a quickly formed opinion that you are not sharing because of the first two reasons. It’s that you maintain neutrality on the issues until when judgment is needed. You do this so you can make the best and therefore unbiased judgment when it’s time for that. As Sample says, this is contrary to the way most of us behave because we’ve been taught to make snap judgments.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function.

Thinking gray is contrary to what I was taught in formal economic theory/statistics, Bayesian Decision Theory. This theory admits an element of subjectivity captured in the decision maker’s beliefs represented by the prior distribution over the unknown parameter. The theory then explains how beliefs get updated based on experience, generating a posterior distribution. That part is pure statistics. The economics comes in when experience is driven by choice, call it a consumption choice, and when different consumption choices have varying degrees of informativeness. For example, in consuming a drug, a low dose will have little effect simply because it is low, while a higher dose may have substantial effect if the drug actually works. So taking a high dose is more informative than taking a low dose. The economic theory prediction is that early on part of the drive of choice is experimental consumption, to encourage learning. Ultimately the choice settles down to what is optimal given beliefs. (In some cases beliefs reach the truth with certainty, but there can be instances where beliefs are stable with residual uncertainty.) This approach can rationalize the binge drinking of teenagers.

Really, the two approaches are distinct. Sample is contemplating a large decision that once made remains fixed for quite a while. The theory of experimental consumption focuses on repeated decisions of a smaller nature. The information gathering that Sample has in mind is also different from the statistical approach in Bayesian Theory. One metaphor that might help in understanding the Sample view is to imagine having to understand a three dimensional object from getting to view a finite number of two dimensional snapshots of the object, each taken from a different perspective. Another snapshot from essentially the same perspective doesn’t really help. One from a new perspective helps a lot. Sample doesn’t argue that we get to choose the perspectives from which we get to take the snapshots. He just argues that we have a better understanding with more perspectives.

Much as I like Sample, however, he is an engineer by training and he leaves you with the impression that after all the information is in the situation and high intelligence he brings applied to the situation more or less dictates the solution he comes up with. Mostly, I don’t think it works that way. Prior disposition and point of view matter for these decisions. Consider this episode from the West Wing called The Supremes, with Glenn Close as Judge Evelyn Baker Lang (very left of center) and William Fichtner as Judge Christopher Mulready (just as far right of center). Mulready exemplifies the F. Scott Fitzgerald conception of a first-rate mind; he is able to articulate the Liberal view better than the staffers at the White House while he comes at his opinions from an opposing vantage. We care about the politics of our Supreme Court Justices because in the way they decide on cases their politics matters. In the context of judicial opinion, that is an unremarkable assertion. In broader contexts prior disposition plays the role politics plays in the judicial case, hence there is an inherent subjectivity to the decisions. Sample conveys the idea of an optimal (and unique) solution to his decisions as the afterward of thinking gray. Optimal is the engineer’s credo. Though as an economist I was trained to think that way as well, my experience as an administrator suggests there are multiple possible approaches, none a priori optimal, with preference over a particular alternative determined by prior disposition. So I’m inherently subjective in my approach and my interest is in understanding the interplay of that subjectivity with the facts.

* * * * *

In the Op-Ed page from Friday there was an essay by N.D.B. Connolly entitled Black Culture Is Not the Problem, which argues that the problems we've seen in West Baltimore stem from the extant power structure and the predatory business practices which create a breeding ground for disaffection and ultimately destructive violence.  In the same paper there was a column by David Brooks, The Nature of Poverty, which I read as a blame the victim piece, even if the title conveys the idea that the victims can't help themselves.  This is the way opinion pieces are written - to argue for one position on the matter.  The Times doesn't always present two pieces in the same day with competing views, but clearly they believe that competing views need to be presented, which is why they have Conservative and Liberal Columnists and why they will have guest columns from people whom the Editorial Board clearly disagrees with.

Indeed go back to the 1970s and consider 60 Minutes, a highly respected and well viewed program at the time.   Their Point/Counterpoint segment celebrated this form of debate.  We don't seem to have innovated on how news shows present argument since then.

What we don't have, in other words, are examples for newspaper readers and TV viewers of a first rate mind in practice thinking gray on the matter.  One wonders why not.  Would the audience be turned off by that because the complexity would dumbfound them?  Or is it that such first rate minds are too scarce?  Or might it be that media outlets don't view it their job to teach the audience on how to analyze and synthesize news and opinion.  Leave the analysis and synthesis for the audience to perform; the media's job is simply to present the raw ingredients so the audience can get at it.

I do want to single out Thomas Edsall here, the exception that proves the rule.  Not only does he seek out even handed treatment on whatever topic he discusses, but he always consults a variety of experts yet weaves his own compelling narrative that does help to educate the reader about how to think through the issues.  I wish Edsall were the norm.  But he is not.  The norm is that if you care about an issue you take one side of it or another, but not both.  If you don't take sides it means you don't care.

I'm afraid the same is true at universities across the country, with the Salaita Case an exemplar from my campus. I wish our rhetoric could embrace a thinking gray approach.  For the most part, however, my experience is that it doesn't.

Courses and Inquiry, Grades and Inquiry, Semesters and Inquiry

This morning I want to pose the question whether the various administrative structures we place around formal learning actually impede inquiry.  Let me do this only in the context of supervising an undergraduate thesis meant to give honors credit to the student.  I am supervising one such student now and had a different student I supervised last year.  Each of them had taken my Econ of Organizations class and done well in it and presumably they liked the structure of that class.  After conversing with an Econ Department adviser and learning what was required to graduate with honors, they asked me if I would supervise their project.  I agreed to do so.  So I am posing this question with that experience in mind.

Let me also note that perhaps my situation is unique in that while I still engage in inquiry in some way, much of which is express on this blog where the big question is how can we do better with undergraduate education?, I don't see that investigation as being economics for the most part.  So I can't simply make these students research assistants in my ongoing project.  If I could, perhaps the answers to this question would be easier to come up with.  A big deal issue with students doing a research project is what question should they be trying to answer and who comes up with that?

The first time around I had a project in mind that was a bit off the beaten path. It was about (lack of) preservation of our cultural heritage via the folk music our parents listened to on vinyl.  There was an economic policy question here.  Most of this music was still under copyright.  A good chunk of it hadn't yet been digitized.  Should copyright be suspended in this case so people who had these records could make digital versions and place those in the public domain?  Music companies, which own the copyright in most of these cases, might balk at this even though they wouldn't lose a dime on sales of these albums because those albums are not sold anymore.  The issue for them is whether allowing public copying in this case would somehow impact making copies available of more recently released music.  So there was a real question here that the student could nibble on and see what headway might be made. 

The next time around in my preliminary conversation with the student he indicated interest in doing something with data.  I am not a data guy.  I am a theorist.  But I didn't try to steer him away from his interest.  Rather, I simply posed the question - what data could he get with which to do a project?  So I suggested he do something on graduation rates, because I thought that sort of data would be readily available.  He agreed, though the specific question he would address was left unspecified and was up to him to determine.  He took quite a while doing that - reading what he could about graduation rates and seeing what the education researchers said about the matter.  Ultimately he glommed onto a project on transfer students from community colleges, a specific look at what I would term the educational production function.

In both cases (the second one is still ongoing) I've had the feeling of being end gamed on the projects.  The students would be graduating at the end of the semester, so the project would finish then, regardless of whether it had really run its course or not.  The paper that got produced the first time (this time the paper has not yet been written, even as a first draft) was a rushed job.  So it very much feels like the process produces half a loaf only.

At the outset we had to determine how many credit hours this project should count for.  Neither of the students needed the credits to graduate.  In both cases I suggested 2 credit hours and told them individually that this translated into about 6 hours per week of time commitment on their part.  Perhaps that was an error.  Maybe it should have been 3 or even 4 credit hours to generate a greater time commitment from the students.  I really don't know whether my conclusion from the previous paragraph would have been altered had the projects been for greater credit.  On the flip side, if the student spends a lot of time spinning his or her wheels, not uncommon when doing research, and as a consequence the project produces meager results, it seems wrong to award a lot of credit for doing it. 

I never published anything out of my dissertation for the doctorate.  I did produce working papers from it, submitted those for review, got a revise and resubmit from R.E.Stud on one of them, but ultimately it didn't get accepted.  I had to change my research agenda to get stuff published.  I did have some non-thesis work published early, stuff I co-wrote with Leon Moses, so it wasn't a fatal blow that the thesis wasn't published, but it was quite distressing.  I put a huge amount of time into the thesis work.  I mention it here only to point out that the half a loaf outcome seems quite likely to me for undergraduate inquiry, especially if the undergraduate is the principal investigator rather than the research assistant. 

A few weeks ago I was contacted by the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Econ, as were the other instructors supervising undergraduate theses (there are 12 of these projects and I would guess somewhere between 200 and 300 students graduating with a degree in economics), about whether the student's project was deserving of a departmental award.  So doing such a project is already a plum, but we then seem to want to add another plum on top of that.

Anticipating that the project might not turn out to be a world beater, last year I told the student I'd prefer the grade be credit/no credit only.  She agreed, but this proved to be a huge hassle and ultimately I believe I had to assign a letter grade. This time around the student queried the department about this in advance and was told that to receive honors credit, he needed to get a letter grade for the course.  So I will enter one at the end of the semester, though I haven't graded any of the intermediate work.  It doesn't seem to me appropriate to do that.  We're less than three weeks from graduation.  Grades really don't matter now.  Graduating matters now.

If the student ends up doing other economics research in the future, the half a loaf aspect of the current project might actually provide durable benefit as it will help the student to not make the same mistakes again and provide fodder for asking what needs to be done to get a full loaf the next time around.  As the second student is going into a PhD program starting in the fall, I'm hopeful that the project will have this effect.  But let's face it, this is not the maintained reason for having students write an undergraduate thesis.  

If we want such projects to have more direct benefit to the students, the issues sketched here need to be ironed out.  I am not going to try to suggest what improvements should be made, other than to observe that the institution appears rigid to me and there needs to be some flexibility to try alternatives that might have a chance of doing better. 

I've written this piece because it may have seemed from my prior two posts on The Boyer Commission Report that I was idealizing the benefits from moving to an inquiry based approach.  I'm not nearly so idealistic on the prospect of all students engaging in inquiry that produces new knowledge, even when this is done as a research assistant.  As an alternative, I do think there would be substantial learning for most students were they to engage in inquiry on subject matter that was already known, but not yet to the students.  This would still contrast sharply with a knowledge dissemination approach and help the students mature as thinkers.  Whether it would also work from the instructor's perspective remains an open question, one we should spend some time trying to answer.  The question of whether administrative structures impede inquiry goes for that as well. 

'Splainin'

I finished reading the Boyer Commission Report this morning.  In this post I want to address only the recommendations for student writing.  But before I do that, let me observe that I had read the report many years ago.  I did a search  on my computer to find out when it was that I first read it.  The earliest thing I found was a presentation from back in 2002 - my job talk as it turns out.  The operative slide is below.  (Too much text for my taste now.  But in defense of this there was no paper to give out ahead of time, only the talk.)

By the time I was past the halfway point in reading this time around, I had the feeling I had appropriated many of the ideas in the report for my own.  Indeed, there is quite a bit of similarity in intent between the recent series of posts I wrote, Everybody Teaches, and the teaching part of the report. However, it is hard for me now to identify the sources of my own thinking on these matters.  For example, another influence was knowing Chip Bruce and supporting his work on The Inquiry Page.  Another influence was the NY Times site, Writers on Writing.  And then there were books on learning by several authors, Donald Schon, Jerome Bruner, and John Dewey himself among others.  All of these blended into a whole for me.  Yet as I haven't read any of this stuff recently other than the report, I started to attribute more of my thinking to having read the report than to other sources. 

The teaching message in the report is straightforward.  Abandon knowledge transmission as the primary approach.  Some knowledge transmission might still occur en passant but should be nothing more than that.  Instead, embrace an inquiry approach from the get go. In so doing, undergraduates can be brought into the core function of the research university, which is inquiry and the production of new knowledge that follows successful investigations.  

In my short post on the report from Tuesday I raised the issue of whether students are ready for the type of education the Boyer Commission envisions for them.  Here I want to focus on what readiness means for this particular recommendation on writing.

3. Writing courses need to emphasize writing "down" to an
audience who needs information, to prepare students directly
for professional work.

I don't like the expression writing down, as I will indicate in what follows. What it refers to here is somebody with a specialist's knowledge writing for a non-specialist.  It sounds too much like dumbing down and that is not really the essence of this sort of writing.  The reader should not be treated as stupid, but rather as quite intelligent.  Smart people who are non-specialists in a field deserve to have their intelligence respected yet need to be educated on points where they are ignorant.

My main contribution in this piece is the following point.  The only way you can write this way with any proficiency whatsoever it to read a lot of this type of writing and come to view it as a way to become broadly educated, an activity that is ongoing and lifelong.  Absent this prior reading experience, there is no way to get a good mental picture of the audience.  Armed with this experience, the reader develops a sense of taste for what good writing of this sort looks like.  Then as a writer style-wise this can be done by imitation of the writing the reader likes with himself or herself as in "generalist mode" as the audience. Indeed, it is my view that all students need to learn to communicate as generalists as well as insider in their given field of study. 

When I was in high school I would read at least some of the New York Times, which my dad would bring home from work.  I confess that first I turned to Red Smith or Arthur Daley.  But I also soon developed a fondness for Russell Baker and then the full Op-Ed page.  I also had subscriptions to magazines - first Sports Illustrated, then The New Republic, and Scientific American as well.  With the latter two, sometimes the pieces were over my head.  But I immediately liked the TRB column and learned to like the film review of Stanley Kauffman.  I should add here that this sort of reading was not in lieu of reading books, but in addition to it.

Today I really couldn't say what would make for a good diet of generalist readings.  I know what I like, but I don't want to prescriptive that way, other than that there should be multiple genres and a variety of writers to sample their style.  My sense is that many kids whom we admit to our research universities don't do this sort of thing.  But, as old fashioned as it may sound, I believe it is still the ticket now.  This is preparation that is really needed for college, more than the AP courses, more than the zillions of extracurricular activities. 

And in the spirit of promoting this idea, I would change General Education to Generalist Education and indicate that we should all be generalists, so we can communicate with one another, and each of us should be a specialist too.  This sort of rebranding would help on two fronts.  It would give more purpose to Gen Ed and instead of viewing those courses as one from column A and two from column B, make them all part of a whole.  It would also help to communicate expectations to would be college students about how they should prepare for college.  And, in my heart of hearts, maybe it would help to get students to like school, instead of where we are now where so many kids seem alienated by it in one way or another.

Re-reading the Boyer Commission Report

The passage below is from page 17 of the pdf, found at the ERIC site.

It is obvious that not every student should, or would wish to, attend a research university. Without attempting to characterize students at other kinds of institutions, it might be said that the undergraduate who flourishes at a research university is the individual who enjoys diverse experiences, is not dismayed by complexity or size, has a degree of independence and self-reliance, and seeks stimulation more than security. A research university is in many important ways a city; it offers almost unlimited opportunities and attractions in terms of associations, activities, and enterprises. But as in a city, the requirements of daily living may be taxing, and sorting out the opportunities and finding like- minded individuals may be difficult. The rewards of the ultimate experience, however, can be immeasurable.

I suspect that well less than half of the undergraduates at Illinois fit this set of desiderata.   My guess is that the population we're talking about is no more than 20% of the student body, quite possibly less.  In the preceding paragraph of the report, they write:

A New Model
WHAT IS NEEDED NOW IS A NEW MODEL OF UNDERGRADUATE education at research universities that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole. Universities need to take advantage of the immense resources of their graduate and research programs to strengthen the quality of undergraduate education, rather than striving to replicate the special environment of the liberal arts colleges. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between all the participants in university learning that will provide a new kind of undergraduate experience available only at research institutions. Moreover, productive research faculties might find new stimulation and new creativity in contact with bright, imaginative, and eager baccalaureate students, and graduate students would benefit from integrating their research and teaching experiences. Research universities are distinctly different from small colleges, and they need to offer an experience that is a clear alternative to the college experience.

If I'm in the ballpark on how many students fit the desiderata and if the New Model mentioned above is predicated on the assumption that near 100% of the students fit the desiderata, then there seems an obvious big issue with the argument before it has really started.  So I've momentarily interrupted my reading of the rest of the report to pose the following questions.

Is there an alternative model that would be more functional for the majority of students and yet remains consistent with the research character of the place?  Or are we stuck with the characterization of the old model provided in the report, where the education of most undergraduates is given short shrift? 

Let me add here some factoids about the business side of undergraduate education, regarding what has changed since the report was published 17 years ago.  We, and really here I mean all public R1s, are much more dependent on tuition revenue now.   Thus a strategy that said reduce the size of the student body to get much closer to that 100% numbers is likely not feasible.  Then there is the much greater reliance on non-tenure-track instructors now, many of whom do no research.  And, finally, the small liberal arts college alternative, which might be more suitable for many students on purely learning grounds, has become so pricey tuition-wise that the in-state public R1 has become the first choice of many students for what economists would refer to as liquidity reasons. 

My inclination is that the necessary change that might enable some progress here has to be found at the promotion and tenure level, not on a campus by campus basis but systematically across all R1s.  These changes must lower the bar on the research side of things and raise the bar on undergraduate teaching, which all tenured and tenure track faculty must do in a significant way.  People need to recognize the Prisoner's Dilemma aspect of what is at play here.  That will block any possible alternative model in favor of preserving the status quo.  The only way to stop the Prisoner's Dilemma is by some systematic change that promotes teaching at the expense of research.  I fear that we will not get there and that the current model will break.

Now back to reading the report. 

Names for the study of numbers

Here's another plug for my blog, The Daily Rhyme, showing a kwout of a kwout.  I wonder if American kids would have scored higher had the length of the wood been 40 inches instead of 40 centimeters, since most don't know the metric system.

The Daily Rhyme: Numerous Examples of Numeracy via kwout

If I were an undegraduate student now, would I try for a PhD?

Timing is everything. Forty years ago, when I first started to consider going to graduate school, in a field I didn't study much as an undergraduate, I didn't think the decision that odd.  I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.  So trying something that was a gamble, certainly, but seemed a possible good fit was about as much as I could hope for.  I was a math guy but didn't think I could hack graduate school in math.  I had a social science interest but never considered going to grad school in political science, which was my unofficial minor.  Economics seemed a reasonable mixture of those two interests.  I didn't think at all about what would happen end of pipe, what sort of job I'd get, whether I'd be happy in that, whether I could support myself let alone a family.  All I asked was whether I could get into being a graduate student.  And the story I told myself, once I got into Northwestern and accepted their offer, was not to make any decision on that until after the first quarter concluded.  Since I got a fellowship, if I dropped out after that to try something else, which many of my classmates ultimately did, I wouldn't have out of pocket expenses to recoup.  That was the full extent of the thinking --- then.

How would such decision making go today for me, if I were the same sort of student now.  I ask this, in part, to try to make sense of the article linked below.  By doing so I also hope to make overt other considerations that should matter in doing studies such as the one at Berkeley.  The other part that motivates the question is how the rise in reliance of adjuncts for instruction would impact this decision.  It is probably impossible to now be as naive about career prospects as I was back then.  Would having more information about career prospects block the PhD path, because it would seem too dismal up front?

I was only 21 when starting graduate school, single and with no dependents.  Many of my cohort were older.  Some were already married.  One already had a kid.  Several were international students, studying in the U.S. for the first time.   For this part, I'm going to assume age-wise that I'd be in the same situation.  Also, I want to note that the world looks quite different as a first-year grad student than it does in the third or fourth year.   Here's how this matters.

While I did look for apartments in Evanston where I'd have one or more roommates, I ultimately opted for a one bedroom in Rogers Park that I'd have to myself.  While this was a no frills place, it was a step up in the quality of housing that I had in undergrad school.  The best part of life at 509 Wykcoff in Ithaca as an undergrad were the people who lived there.  I had a great time with many of them.  What I had in common with them was where we lived, not what we studied.  I lost that when going to grad school, but I was going to lose that no matter what else I did as long as I left Ithaca.  In terms of the physical quality of the place, particularly the sharing of bathroom facilities, it really was no great shakes.  I didn't have more lofty expectations at the time.  I bought crappy furniture.  That was okay.  After a couple of years I started to wake up with my back hurting.  I regretted having such a poor mattress.  That got to me after a while.  By the time I was writing my dissertation, I was kind of fed up with living like a pauper.  A reasonable argument might have been made at the time that I spend an extra year at NU to write a bang up thesis and have an even better job market.  But I didn't consider that because of the low income path as a grad student.  By then I wanted a real job.

So where in the trajectory are these student surveys being delivered?   First year doctoral students are apt to answer quite differently from more advanced doctoral students.  Then, as I recast myself into the present, I wonder if my expectations for housing/quality of life outside of school would be different now and if being driven by more materialistic concerns if that would steer me to finding a job rather than go to grad school.

Next, let me talk about the intellectual quality of life, both the schoolwork itself and the social life.  Graduate school was much more intense than undergraduate and required a much greater personal commitment, or so was my experience back then.  It turns out that I was ready for that; it was something that fit me pretty well.  What I missed, however, was having friends who were not studying what I was studying.  I didn't really want to narrow in the non-school part of life, which there was little of during the first year, especially the first quarter, but which grew more important over time.  Living by myself may have been a mistake in this regard.  Who knows?  What I wonder now is whether one can get more diversity in social life if outside academia, or if somebody who is on the shy side as I was, would tend to find friends at work, but not elsewhere.  In any event, this narrowness can contribute to a depression.

The last bit I want to consider is whether the subject matter itself might seem a betrayal from one's expectations or if it fully captivates the mind.  At the time I went to graduate school, and perhaps for the next ten years thereafter, economic theory was in its heyday and as I was trained as a theorist I found it quite captivating.  Twenty years after I started graduate school I began to become disillusioned with the theory - it really didn't say much unless you made some arbitrary assumptions up front to get more specific conclusions.  That plus the rise of computing has made empirical economics much more valued.  But even there, economists are pretty much stuck with the data they can get.  The can't perform experiments in situ.  There is a branch of economics that does perform experiments, frequently with college students as subjects, but these are classroom as laboratory type of experiments only.  If I had more skepticism about the discipline itself in advance of attending grad school, would that have encouraged me to not go for a PhD?

These sort of hypothetical questions don't have right answers.  I should add here that I don't see some alternative path that is obviously better.  I can envision a public service project in lieu of a stint in the Peace Corps as a possible alternative, the one I have in mind now is to author online interactive content for K-12 to be made freely available to schools and students, and that might engage me and help me mature some so I could better answer the question of what to do next.  Maybe watching The Graduate a couple of times would help or just the bit that produced the answer, "plastics."  In retrospect, we didn't have such good answers back then.  Why is it that we assumed otherwise? 

Berkeley study finds high levels of depression among graduate students | InsideHigherEd via kwout

An American Export - Pablum TV

In the early 1980s I made my first trip to Europe.  The main purpose was to attend a conference in Umeå, Sweden.  There I learned that many of the locals had perfected their English speaking and listening by watching American TV.  Particularly popular at the time was the question, Who shot J.R.?   It was interesting to see Swedes infer that American culture was fully reflected in the TV show Dallas.  At that time I had not yet been to Texas and, having grown up in New York City, viewed it as much alien to me as Europe was.  I hoped that the people at the conference didn't see me as just another character from that that TV show, but really it was hard to know.

Now let's fast forward to the present.  In my discussion group where we are trying to find ways for the students to be more creative in their learning we've reached the point in the conversation to consider pathways into creativity.  Last week we talked about daydreaming.  This week and probably next week too we will talk about humor.  It's useful here to know what the students bring to the table before the discussion even starts.  From this I've learned that the TV shows, The Big Bang Theory and Friends are quite popular in China.  It made me ask, does watching sitcoms helps to develop our own sense of humor?

Who knows what indirect influence watching TV has on our behavior?  That said, I don't think my sense of humor has TV as its origin.  Rather, it seems to me that some internal need for spontaneity was cultivated when I was growing up, quite possibly by non-humorous activities.  Being quick at the draw was its own reward.  Then that got channeled into humor, not telling jokes that are in the can, though we did that as kids too, but rather as a kind of mental counter punching, where you develop some intuition both about what little bit that has emerged should be emphasized and how to express that in a way that gets a laugh.  It must be a learned behavior, but it feels so intuitive to me now I don't really understand my own process.

What is not intuitive to me at all, indeed what I'm taken aback by, is that the students' first association with humor is American sitcoms.  As I've posted earlier, they do like to laugh, very much.  Does seeing something that makes you laugh help you to get others to laugh, by your own emoting?  If not, do we actively need to repress sitcom humor in order to make progress with the type of humor that emerges between students at school or between co-workers on the job?

I used to think too much TV rots your brain.  Now I think it simply gives the wrong impression.  In this case the wrong impression is that humor is easy to generate.  It isn't, especially at first.  Let me close with this quote, which seems apt:

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

Vernon Law

Alliteration in a Limerick

Here's a little promo for my other blog, The Daily Rhyme.  It is going strong after one full week. 

The Daily Rhyme: Teaching and Preaching via kwout

Freedom of Speech - When and Where?

The piece excerpted and linked below from today's Inside Higher Ed challenged me because I didn't agree with its premise.  In this post I will try to work through my thinking about it.   I am not a lawyer and not claiming to be one.  Neither is Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches History and Education at NYU.

Essay criticizes colleges for expelling students for racist comments | InsideHigherEd.com via kwout

Let's begin with what the First Amendment actually says and how that is interpreted by the Supreme Court.  After doing a quick Google search on First Amendment, I found this site at Cornell which I found helpful, especially the discussion at the Learn more link. 

First Amendment | Constitution | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute via kwout

Where the Amendment itself begins with a restriction on Congress, the discussion says that has been extended to all of the Federal Government and to State Government as well.  Fine.  So issue one is whether a university such as the University of South Carolina is part of State Government.  If it is not, it would seem the First Amendment doesn't apply.

It seems clear that private universities are not part of State Government.  So if the incident that Zimmerman leads with had happened at NYU, where he works, then it seems clear there would be no First Amendment issue at all and the school could suspend the student as the University of South Carolina did.

If that is right, an interpretation that treated private universities differently from public universities for application of the First Amendment seems possible, but also would be awkward, at best.  Under an interpretation that treated both types of universities uniformly, the conclusion must be that the First Amendment prohibitions are simply not applicable.

The second issue seems to be whether the Carolinian Creed is a law, one that might abridge a student's freedom of speech.  As I am more familiar with the University of Illinois than the University of South Carolina, I will focus on the Student Code from my campus.  Below is the operative sentence from Part B of the Preamble.

These values include the freedom to learn, free and open expression within limits that do not interfere with the rights of others, free and disinterested inquiry, intellectual honesty, sustained and independent search for truth, the exercise of critical judgment, respect for the dignity of others, and personal and institutional openness to constructive change. 

At issue here are the highlighted phrases, which do constitute some limits on speech put into place for the good of the campus community.  If the University is part of State Government and the Student Code is law, then there is a First Amendment violation.  If the Student Code is not law, the First Amendment prohibitions don't apply.  Here, each interpretation seems possible to me.  The university cannot fine or imprison a student for violating the Student Code, but it can suspend the student or dismiss the student outright.  One thing that matters a lot, in my view, but is not in the language explicitly is on the issue of intent when the rights or dignity of others are violated.  Malicious intent requires a different treatment from a clueless trespass.  The latter demands education rather than punishment and that is the way it is typically handled on campus.  Most law doesn't accommodate the violator that way, which is perhaps one reason to think Student Codes are not law.

The last issue for me is place.  In reading the Inside Higher Ed piece I immediately thought of my own classroom.  Students do not have Freedom of Speech there.  The norm for behavior is that a student can talk up if she first raises her hand and then is called on by me.  If the student says something off point, I might very well interrupt.  I want to note this rarely happens.  Much more common is the issue that no student raises a hand when I would like some student response.  Nonetheless, the point is that the instructor is armed with the usual tools to thwart disrespectful speech in the classroom.

A student speaking out on the Quad is an entirely different matter.  That is a public place and the First Amendment is probably applicable there.  But once you differentiate space where the First Amendment does or does not apply, there is then the issue of which sort of space is a Campus study room. Would the answer depend on whether the room was only accessible to people with campus ID cards?   Our Library and our academic buildings have no such access restriction during normal hours, but our gym facilities do.

Much of the rest of Zimmerman's essay is a lament that infringement on the respect for others seems to matter on grounds of race but not on grounds of religion.  In other words, the codes are enforced selectively.  This is not a First Amendment matter, but it is a serious concern.  However, given that the Salaita case is still pending, it would seem that if we think of these codes as applying to the entire Campus community rather than just to students then grounds of religion do in fact matter.  If so, the real issue is what constitutes breach and what counts for acceptable criticism within civilized discourse.  Drawing that line is undoubtedly difficult, which is why everyone seems to be struggling here.  But that is not sufficient reason, in my view, for an argument that no line should exist whatsoever, which is what Zimmerman argues.

The Teach-to-the-Test Society

Different philosophies of education prevail. They all might be reduced to this one core question.  What is the true nature of the learner?  One popular view is that first and foremost kids want to play; school often serves as an impediment to that end.  Anyone who watched The Little Rascals when they were kids couldn't escape this message.  The job of the teacher in this view is to discipline the students enough and not leave them to their own devices.  A different view is that the learner will drive real learning, provided the learner is not too stressed by the environment.  This alternative can be associated with many names; perhaps Montessori and Maslow are the most prominent.  The job of the teacher in this alternative view is to remove as many potential sources of bad stress as possible, model some for the student to help the student shape the direction of inquiry, and then let the student take it from there.

There may be still other views of the learner that can better account for when extrinsic reward (carrots instead of sticks) is most useful in promoting learning.  But for my purposes here it suffices to focus only on the above two approaches and treat them as polar opposites.  It would be interesting to poll the population of which view of education they subscribe to.  Without any data on this, I conjecture that the bulk of the population subscribes to the Little Rascals view of school, as many of them may have struggled in school, found it boring or alienating, or never had that one inspirational teacher who helped them get over the hump.  In contrast, the bulk of the the people who became university professors must have liked school, a lot.  They are apt then to hold the Montessori and Maslow view. I count myself in this camp.

This spring I've been involved with a discussion group comprised of a few students from my class last fall.  We meet on Friday afternoons with a session going somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours.  It's the first time I've done something like this.  Each of the students happens to be Asian, which has encouraged the discussion to take certain directions.  I believe the group has been quite successful insofar as we are capable of frank and open conversation.  However, it has been pretty much a failure when judged from my original purpose in forming the group.  This was to ask how students might become more creative in their own learning.  Mainly these students don't see themselves doing that though they are extremely diligent about doing their schoolwork.

One of the three, the only female and a double major in psychology and economics, also the youngest and still a sophomore, has talked about how she expands her horizons by doing research on the Internet, getting at topics that are new to her and somewhat beyond her grasp at first.  She enjoys the challenge of mastering these ideas.  This is the closest to a description of creativity, but even here the exploration proceeds according to a preconceived plan.  There is little or no room for serendipity and discovery that wasn't anticipated ahead of time.  There is diligence and competence, but nothing that I would call play.

This is surprising to me as in our conversations I joke a lot and gently tease them fairly often.  They are quick to laugh and seem to enjoy the banter.  Sometimes they even respond in kind.  Yet for whatever reason it doesn't occur to them to bring this sort of play into their learning outside our group discussions, which seems a much more solemn matter.  In large part this is because their primary goal is to get an A grade in each class.  It has been drilled into them over the years.  As I posed it quite a few years ago, Does Pavlov's Dog Evolve?  In other words, can students get past all this conditioning and come to drive their own learning?  Based on how my discussion group has gone, the answer is either no or that if yes it will be extremely difficult to cause such a change.

Last Friday we had a different sort of discussion, focusing mainly on their high school experiences.  This was trying to get at the source of the conditioning.  What I learned appalled me.  It started this way.  Our routine is for one of the students in the group to write a blog post in advance of the discussion.  The others, including me, then comment on the post.  This is meant to ready us for the discussion.  In the post this week a student from China who is graduating after this semester wrote that he used to like reading stuff outside of school and discussing those readings with his friends.  But then when he went to high school his teacher in high school said to stop doing that and only read the textbooks they were assigned.  This would be the best way to prepare for the national exams.  Eventually, he came to agree with his teacher about this.  School was hard work.  There should be no fun in it. 

A Korean student, who though only a junior is a bit older than the others since his college education was interrupted by serving in the army, echoed these sentiments though his story was a little bit different.  He said the students spend all day at high school, from early in the morning till late at night.  Much of this was like an extended study hall.  The students were monitored to keep at it.  If they started to goof off they'd be disciplined for it.  Corporal punishment was part of it.  Not knowing about that from my own experience at school, I thought of this quite vivid scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where young Stephen Dedalus away from home at the boarding school Clongowes gets rapped across his knuckles for some indiscretion in class and is writhing in pain thereafter.  In spite of this episode, which one surmises had its basis in an actual experience, Joyce remained defiant, one reason why he left Ireland.  Most people in these circumstances would capitulate.  That seems to be the hidden lesson of the academic high school in China and Korea.  Capitulation entails seeing success from the perspective of the school masters.  Doing well on the exams becomes the entire focus.  Personal self-expression gets drummed out of these kids. 

In today's NY Times there is a piece by Frank Bruni about the high suicide rate among teens who live in academic pressure cookers; Palo Alto is one such place, though they exist within certain major cities in gentrified zones and in the suburbs that house the well to do.  Wanting their kids to be so smart, the adults are so stupid in how they go about things.  A few years ago I wrote a post called Retards, which though it had different bits to it had main focus on the movie Charly.  The scientists performing the experiment were so intent on raising the intelligence of their subject that they ignored the ego beating he was taking from having to compete with the mouse, Algernon.  That bothered me a great deal at the time.

The issues surrounding accountability in education have been with us upwards of 40 years.  The damage done since to the so-called high academic achievers seems enormous to me.  Isn't it time to go back to square one and come up with some alternative, one that both engages the students so they don't want to play hooky from school and one that promotes their good mental health?  Human beings intrinsically are curious.  They want to satisfy that curiosity, which is the prime impetus for learning.  Why have we allowed school to so stray from helping the kids learn on their own?

The Daily Rhyme

I've started a new blog, with link below. This to sustain my latest indulgence without torturing readers of my main blog who don't want the nonsense stuff. I will not repost the rhymes in Lanny on Learning or in Facebook. Instead, there is an email subscription option. Note that if you choose that you will get a confirmation email message where you must click on the link to activate the subscription.

There is a semi-serious reason for my doing this. Even before the Internet, papers had abstracts that would often suffice for readers. Now so much information is delivered in digest form. An issue is whether digests can be made more entertaining and thereby make it easier for people to keep up. Rhymes might prove one way of doing this. If so, this effort might help to identify a few kindred souls who also author rhymes of this sort and collectively amass a readership that wants the stuff.

The Daily Rhyme via kwout

One and done, Spoils the fun.

The Final Four is a very small sample on which to rank the teams who play in it.  Just to make that point, below are the Sagarin rankings for the top twenty teams based on the entire season.  Sticking with just the top three, the Final Four ranking would be 1. Duke, 2. Wisconsin, and 3. Kentucky.

USA Today | Sports | NCAAB via kwout

The Final Four had added interest because two of the teams, Kentucky most famously but Duke as well, featured the new one-and-done model, with the teams featuring freshman stars who are likely to declare for the NBA draft, while the other two teams, both from the Big Ten, employed the more traditional model where seniors and juniors form the bulwark for the clubs.  Each game played in the Final Four was new model versus old.  The results gave the new model 2 victories and 1 defeat.

Invariably, given this conclusion, the new model is taken to be triumphant and Coach K is looked at as a genius for having embraced it.

Duke won its fifth national championship with four freshmen combining for 60 of the Blue Devils' 68 points and a rookie accounting for every single Duke point in the second half. Tyus Jones finished with 23 points, and Grayson Allen, who had 18 in five combined NCAA tournament games prior, finished with 16.

It is anathema to what Duke had long been, a team built on wily seniors who stuck around and eventually won a championship. The last time the Blue Devils won a title, in 2010, Krzyzewski had mostly avoided one-and-done players. By the end of June he might be saying goodbye to three who remained in Durham, North Carolina, for only one season.

Yet what's maybe even more astounding is that Krzyzewski has not only made the change.

He has loved it.

There isn't enough data to support these conclusions, though that won't stop the sports pundits from making them.  But here I'm more interested in what the coaches actually think rather than what the pundits tell us about them.  Are the coaches of one mind on this?  Or are there some in both camps?

It seems pretty clear that the new model can work only at a few elite programs at most - there isn't enough talent to go around for it to become the norm for most programs.  What is less clear is whether among other programs that go the traditional route if at least a few will emerge that give these elite teams a run for their money.  To me, the most interesting game in the tournament was Wichita State beating Kansas.  Yet Wichita State seemed outgunned when playing Notre Dame.  A few years ago Butler was a compelling story.  NCAA basketball needs that type of story to keep up fan interest.  Wisconsin provided that type of story this year, even though they play in a so-called bit-time conference.

If those stories begin to dry up, college basketball will start to seem like it is replicating the income inequality in society as a whole.   Coaches are under a lot of pressure from their fan base, who want to win now.  I wonder whether some coaches at elite programs who actually prefer the traditional model will nonetheless make the switch to the new model because the fans demand it.

One potentially offsetting factor is the Moneyball effect.  By this I mean that for players in high school who are better than their competition it is unclear how they will perform once they face a higher caliber competition. So the becoming a McDonald's All American and the various rankings of players at the time they are being recruited out of high school should be thought of as noisy (in a statistical sense).  The more the noise, the less good should the new model perform over time.   But the talent pool should be thought of as a pyramid.  Is there as much noise near the top as there is at the base?  Even if there is not, is it still noisy at the top?

Lebron is Lebron and Kobe is Kobe.  There wasn't much noise in their case.  (Lebron was drafted number 1 so you might say there was no noise in his case.  Kobe was drafted 13th.  Given that Michael Jordon wasn't drafted number 1, I prefer to think there always is some noise.)   But players like that aren't in every draft.  Last year Michael Carter-Williams was the NBA Rookie of the Year.  He was drafted 11th.

The other factor that could eventually offset the new model is evidence that players' growth in basketball skills and general maturity happens more in college (at least at some programs) than it happens in the NBA.  This would give talented players at such programs some incentive to not declare for the NBA draft that is other than that they simply are having a great time in college.  I have a sample of one in mind in thinking about this.  Deron Williams left Illinois after his junior year and a season where the team made it to the NCAA Championship game.   He might have gone out after his sophomore year, but I believe he timed it right doing things as he did.  There would need to be many other such examples to convince kids it is good for them to stay.  Some of the Kentucky players are sophomores, but it is unclear whether for them that was the reason or if  they felt their talent wasn't up to par.

Division 1 men's college basketball serves multiple functions.  One, clearly, is as a minor league for the NBA.  Another is as entertainment unto itself, with a fan base some of whom care more about the college than the pro game.  The old model respects the multiple functions.  The new model, not so much.  That's the issue.  

If it says so on the Internet it must be true

At one point in my life I may have understood phonetic spellings of words.  But no longer.  So I may get this bit wrong, but I hope it is not too far off.

Perhaps my favorite Limerick, it was not written by Edward Lear, has the first line starting as follows:

There was a young lady from Niger.  

The last line is:

And a smile on the face of the tiger.  

How many sins have been committed in the name of rhyme?  In this case the problem is that the country's name is of French origin and therefore should be pronounced, knee-jair.  A little knowledge is a troublesome thing.  Undoubtedly, kids learn the wrong pronunciation first, as Limericks precede geography in the education sequence.  If only I could figure out why I mispronounce Qatar.  I don't recall any rhyme with Qatar in it.

As of late I have not trusted my own glib response to a friend's birthday announcement in Facebook.  So I've taken to do a Google search or two in the hope of finding something off the beaten path that I might post.  Today one of my classmates from junior high and high school turned sixty.  What search would I do?  Since I've been on a rhyming kick as of late I did a search on rhymes with sixty.  The first hit brings up a page at RhymeZone.  From the list there one should conclude that a word which ends in itty rhymes with sixty.  Yet I'm saying to myself, no it doesn't.

A few moments latter, I do a different sort of search.  Last week I wasn't sleeping well at all and felt exhausted.  I'd get up around 2 AM but then have a lot of trouble getting back to sleep, often not succeeding at all.  I attributed it to drinking too much, so this week I decided to be a teetotaler.  It is harder to first go to sleep that way and there is still some getting up in the night, but I feel the sleep has been more restorative and I'm almost caught up with it.  So I searched for drinking alcohol and sleeping.  The third hit is to a page at WebMD.  It tells you that alcohol interferes with REM sleep and the more you drink the more pronounced the effect.

Some years ago I recall having a discussion with my brother, he is an MD and a PhD,  where paraphrasing what he said - in the even numbered years eating eggs for breakfast turns out to be bad for you but in the odd numbered years it is good for you.  This was a commentary on clinical trials and that individual trials are not conclusive.  Further, in human subject research, identifying causal link while controlling for other factors is no mean feat.  So I'm at least a little clued in to be skeptical when reading about medical research.

Nevertheless, I completely trust what is on the WebMD page.  It jives entirely with my experience.  That is proof enough for me.  On the rhyming, however, while I concede that both witty and sixty end in ty, I don't think that is enough to make the two words rhyme, so I don't trust the RhymeZone page.  I've been scratching my head about why the one but not the other.  This is what I've come up with.

I have some sense of what it means to be an expert.  Though I'm not now current in either area, I believe it fair that I can still claim expertise in economics and in learning technology.  I write rhymes as a hobby.  My proficiency there is not as great and my formal training in doing do is none whatsoever.  But even a hobbyist develops some sense of taste about what makes for a good product.  When I get information from the Internet that comes into conflict with that sense of taste, I will first rely on the sense of taste and reject the information from the Internet.  I will need a lot more convincing to change my mind on that.

In contrast, while I think I'm reasonably well informed about my health as a patient, I recognize that I'm coming at it from a patient's perspective only.  I willingly concede that I don't have a doctor's perspective.  The lack of expertise there makes me more willing to trust what is on the WebMD site, especially when what it says coincides with my experience as a patient. 

There is a perhaps surprising derivative way to consider this, from the perspective of our students.  The more of what they do as students that has an authoring function, the more they will develop their own sense of taste and come at information they find online armed with that.  The more that they merely take as given what is presented in class, the more they are like a patient who knows he is not a doctor.  Acceptance of the information will then be the norm, and the norm will be adhered to unless it contradicts experience in a strong way. 

So, if we want our students to be skeptics, let's encourage them to write.

Capitalists Kill Capitalism

In the search for loot and looking to plunder
Powerful firms rip the economy asunder.

The use of the lobby by these would be harriers
Produce government made entry barriers.

This is the real reason lobbyists do petition
For it has the effect to reduce competition.

Thus while the economy is on the brink
These so-called capitalists cause GDP to shrink.

Has American Business Lost Its Mojo? - NYTimes.com via kwout