Misdirection and the Fun Theory in College Teaching

As I have been preparing some materials for my class in the fall on the Economics of Organizations and a significant part of our topic coverage will be on various compensation schemes that provide cost-effective ways to provide motivation for employee and/or contractors, it's good for the students to reflect on their own motivation in school.  Partly for that reason and partly because it is also good to begin with familiar examples before jumping into the more general approach, I start the first couple of weeks of the course on two examples that should be readily familiar - the class as an organization and then again the university as an organization. (This approach is also my way of coping with the adds and drops that happen during the first 10 days of the term and encouraging the students to get the textbook, which we will get into during the third week of the semester.)

The very first day of the class, as a I give an overview of the course, I will tell students that the course might help them think like a manager, though it is definitely an Econ course, not an MBA course.  My guess is that this will draw them in, both because they'll have aspirations to become managers themselves and also be curious about how their manager thinks when they're in their first jobs after college.  Then I'll do my little schtick about managing down and managing out.  Most of them, having done some summer job already, will think about management mainly as managing down - supervising other employees.  Managing out, which is more of what upper level management does, was my strength.  At least in the university setting, it is mainly about establishing peer relationships.  I certainly like doing this, with other faculty, with ed tech people, and with other campus administrators, as well as peers on other campuses.  It needs schmoozing that builds a trust relationship, but it also needs some quid pro quo - usually that's just information sharing, sometimes it's a service or a program to initiate or tweak. 

In contrast, I'm mediocre at best when managing down and I will let the students know I should not be their role model in that dimension. My ideal of this sort of management is Jean-Luc Picard communicating with Riker.  When I first started in SCALE, Lynn Ward also started at the same time.  My job was to be an ambassador of sort.  Hers was to manage the office. We came in as peers and remained that way when I took over SCALE, only four months later. This continued when Jolee West replace Lynn.  It was Lynn who found Jolee for the job, not me.  If I have only one person to manage I can probably do that and then I will treat it as a peer relationship.  I got overwhelmed, however, when I had 8 direct reports, when CET formed.  I really wanted the office to run itself and not devote much time to it at all.  This is not the mindset of someone who takes managing down seriously.  That someone was not me.

With this as background, I will try to make a parallel between the manager and the staff, on the one hand, and the teacher and the students, on the other.  If employees want to understand their manager they might get an initial inkling of this by asking whether as students they understand their teacher.  What does the teacher do to motivate students?  Are those attempts successful or are they flawed?  When is it one and when is it the other?  Does that depend on who the students are or is good teaching universal so provides motivation for all students?

Since this is an economics class, when considering popular examples of teaching thoughts immediately turn to Ben Stein boring the students to tears in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  The movie came out more than 30 years ago.  A decade or so later that clip, and the movie in its entirety, became iconic in ed tech circles as exemplifying the difficulties with the old pedagogy and a need for something else to replace it.  Further, while others might not have realized it Ben Stein was exactly the right person to be cast in this role of the economics teacher, because his dad, Herbert Stein, was a very well known economist and was Chairman of the Council of Economics Advisors under Nixon and Ford.  But the students may never have seen the clip from Ferris Bueller, so after polling them on that I might then show it in class, along with this clip from the little rascals about playing hooky from school.  (Will they know Spanky and Alfalfa?  I'm probably as old as their grandparents now.  Do their grandparents talk about the TV they watched as kids?)  And then there is the Pink Floyd song (and movie) Another Brick in the Wall.   Together these clips present a rather dim view of school and of teachers.

On the flip side are movies such as Mr. Holland's Opus and Stand and Deliver; the latter is based on a true story. Both movies are inspirational.  Each features a teacher with such dedication and concern for the students that the teacher is able to elevate them to performances beyond their own expectations.  Other movies in this vein, Dead Poets Society and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, deliver a similar message.  While we should all applaud such instructor dedication, the reality is that in the world of ed tech it is pedagogy that we hope saves the say and we'd like to see excellent results even from ordinary instructors, as long as they practice effective pedagogy.  So one might ask, what does effective pedagogy look like and what does it do to encourage student motivation?

Ten years ago when I was teaching a class for the Campus Honors program, one of the students in the class introduced me to this video about the piano stairs that exemplified The Fun Theory.  (I think the video was on a different site at the time.)  The idea is self explanatory - take a tedious task, one that many people avoid if they can, and redesign it in a way where it is piques one's interest, so people want to engage in it.  Are all tasks subject to such redesign provided that the designer has a good imagination?

In thinking about this I quickly remembered my high school years, particularly math with Mr. Conrad.  He was my favorite teacher and I ended up taking 4 classes from him: 9th grade algebra, analytic geometry and trig in 11th grade, math team workshop, and number theory.  Those last two classes were non-standard and probably are not offered anymore, an example of enrichment classes being crowded out by AP classes. I wrote about my experiences with Mr. Conrad in a post called Math as a gateway to creativity.  Mr. Conrad did many things to make the math fun for me.  Probably the most important was The Problem of the Week.  A nonstandard problem was posted on the bulletin board outside the Math Department Office.  You got no recognition for solving it correctly.  You did it for the challenge only. I enjoyed having to think those problems through.  But then, it's true that I was a math guy, high scorer on the Math Team as a senior, and a math major in college.  Is this sort of fun only for nerds like me?  What other fun might be more broadly encouraging of the learner?

Rather than answer that question directly, I want to note that even with the piano stairs some people continue to ride the escalator up rather than take the stairs.  If my arthritis was giving me a hard time, I'd be one of those who'd take the escalator.   We might ask, can a person do something in the person's own approach to things to make the person more likely to take the stairs when seeing something as unusual and amusing as the piano stairs?  With this question I mean to take some of the burden off the pedagogy and put some burden on the learner.  It stands to reason that more redesigns would encourage learners if the learners were eager for them.  How then might we bring that about?   When I pose this question to my students I will again bring into focus the parallel with the workplace.  The manager may want to do some redesign of tasks to make them more engaging to the employees, but the manager is also hoping for the employees to step up so that even tasks that haven't been redesigned get their full attention. Is that a reasonable quid pro quo?

In my class, I'm going to treat this redesign question just as Mr. Conrad treated the Problem of the Week.  It will be a challenge for the students to come up with their own redesign ideas.  They can either email me with them privately or post them to the class site (the latter would be a way to get some recognition, although that would only be recognition within our class as they post under an alias).  They will not get course credit for it.  And then I will challenge them with something similar about their other classes.  Can they do things to change their own orientation and thereby make other courses more engaging to them, even without those other courses going through their own redesign?  In other words, might a person choose to walk up the stairs even without the innovation of the piano, by just imaging the innovation to exist?

Let me close by talking a bit about misdirection, which until now I've not mentioned.  I'm pretty confident the students will be interested in this stuff from the supervisor-employee angle.  After all, they will soon be entering the world of work and this is an important consideration in that setting.  But in this exercise I'm using that only to keep the students interested.  I'm far more concerned with how they go about learning in my class (and in the other classes they take) and I think most of them take a far too instrumental approach.  I'd like them to reach the same conclusion, but I'm afraid that if we talk about it directly, they'll become defensive and say they have to worry about their GPA.  So rather than go that route, we'll start with the supervisor-employee angle, where I've already told them I'm no expert, and let them invent in that domain by inventing in a more familiar one.  I won't tell them my true intentions even if it works, at least not for a few weeks after that.  Then we'll see.

The Long and the Short of It

I'm reacting to a couple of pieces I've read recently that talk about writing. As part of the message the authors delivered, each piece said to write less.  In my post I want to consider when that is good advice and when the advice should be challenged, perhaps even discarded altogether.  And I want to do this twice, first for more experienced writers, then for student writers.

Of the two pieces, the more recent is this one from the Chronicle of Higher Education called, Why Writing Will Make You a Better Person. (This piece is behind the Chronicle's paywall.  If you don't have access to the Chronicle but want to read the piece, contact me and I''ll send you a copy.)  The authors are two philosophy professors who want to treat writing as an ethical activity - be kind to the reader.  It is a novel approach from which to consider writing, one that made sense to me.  Yet I thought they made a rather serious error that I want to highlight, after which I will consider my alternative.   The other piece is called How to Get Every Email Returned - Or at least how to try.  The author is a former Op-Ed editor of the New York Times.  She talks about psychological factors that readers confront, which influence how they will read a piece, and then she bases her recommendations on these factors.

Now a bit about my writing online experience.  I got started with that in two different communities.  One was on campus done in FirstClass, with faculty who were teaching with ALN (what the Sloan Foundation called online learning at the time) and ed tech types who were supporting those faculty.  This started in late summer or early fall of 1995.  Then there was a discussion group for the various grantees of the Sloan Foundation in their ALN program, with representatives on many different campuses.  I found some comfort and social life in these discussions, as a parent with young children we were pretty much homebodies during the evening.  I also found I had some flair for this.  It was a way to meet interesting people and a way for me to contribute ideas to the community. This writing served as a gateway for my career change, from an academic economist to an ed tech administrator.

About ten years later I started this blog. The immediate cause was an analytic post that I wrote for a discussion that had stalled on the then Sloan-C listserv.  I received several private emails from well situated people on the list, thanking me for that post. But no subsequent discussion ensued on the list.  That bothered me, a lot.  So I thought to expand the audience for my analyses by making the writing public.  After a few months of doing that I got discovered by Scott Leslie, which served as a launch point for entering into the edu blog community.  A year or so later I met Barbara Ganley online, and along with a few others began some very interesting conversations about how to find the right sort of social adaptations to get the technology to truly work in service of learning, and about a lot of other stuff as well that all tied in. Barbara was featured in this piece about the slow blogging movement, which is a useful read now if only to show the tension to shorten online pieces and the push back from some writers who did the opposite existed even then, when Blackberry was still the smartphone market leader.  As for me, I too was a slow blogger and had something of a large following within the edu blog community, as indicated by this post.  Coincident with this I participated in several different professional listservs that stemmed from my administrator job, and I had an enormous amount of one-on-one and small group email as well.

Part of the reason to emphasize this background is to point out that how we write depends on context, in a community setting the mores of the group matter, and when there is an ongoing group discussion that you are reacting to, you need to ask - are you pushing the discussion further, providing a different framing for considering things or otherwise helping members of the group think through the issues?  Or are you mainly echoing what has been said before?  As I said earlier, I have a flair for this sort of thing, at least with respect to certain subject matter about learning and technology, and giving an analysis that takes some substantial writing to explicate may try the patience of some in the group while pleasing others who want that content.  In other words, readers are not a homogeneous group.  I believe that the philosophers who wrote the Chronicle piece linked above tacitly assumed they are.   What then should the writer do about reader heterogeneity if as a writer you want to treat readers ethically?

I'd like to illustrate the issue with some data.  We live at a time where analytics is the new buzzword. Unfortunately, for written documents online, such as this blog post, one can get measures of "hits" but hits don't indicate whether the person read through the entire piece carefully, merely skimmed it all, or didn't even get that far.  And, with tabbed browsing the norm, a person can have the piece open in the browser for quite a while, yet spend very little time on reading it.  Consequently, I want to momentarily looked at such data for video of a micro-lecture, specifically this one I made on the principal-agent model for a course I teach.  YouTube tracks not just hits, a bit more than 3,100 for this video, but it also tracks minutes viewed, with the average viewing time per hit less than 3 and a half minutes, while the video itself is over 12 minutes long.   On average, then, the video doesn't seem to be reaching the audience.  Yet there are a bunch of positive comments, only one negative comment, and a dozen likes with no dislikes.  How does one reconcile all this information and what does it tell me about how I should make other video micro-lectures in the future.  My conjecture is that the audience is bimodal, with the larger mode impatient and not willing to sit through the entire video and a smaller mode of students who watch it all the way through.  If that's right, is it ethically okay for me to focus on the smaller mode and as long as they are happy with the piece then I should feel I'm on the right track?  Or must I make content that the larger mode would watch in its entirety?

Having made that little embrace with data, let's return to talking about writing in the presence of reader heterogeneity and note that the issue has been around for some time.  Consider this essay by Saul Bellow from the New York Times series Writers on Writing, published in October 1999 when the Internet was still in its gestation period. It shows a parallel argument about writing novels in an era where most people were going to the movies (or watching TV) rather than reading books.  It is an eloquent defense that the writer is entitled to concentrate on the smaller mode, consisting of those readers who still appreciate the writing.  Of course, Bellow had won the Nobel Prize for Literature more than 20 years earlier and the audience for his writing, though much smaller than the audience for blockbuster movies, was still sizeable.  What of us writers who are not as skilled as Bellow and have a much smaller audience?  Can we still make a case that it is ethical to appeal to the smaller mode?

I think that's a tough question and I certainly don't have an ideal philosophical answer to it.  I can report what I do, which is to take a mixed mode approach.  Theses days, I definitely have more hits on my Twitter posts than on my posts at Blogger.  I do something novel with Twitter, which is to post short rhymes there (which I re-post to Facebook).  Some of them resonate with the audience and in Facebook I will occasionally get a friend to rhyme back at me - the most sincere form of flattery. But I do this longer writing too.   At this point, the blogging is not that different form an alternative  where I keep a journal only for myself.  I need to process my thinking and the writing helps with that.  Having even a little bit of an audience then encourages the proofreading after the processing and the tracking down of links to insert into the piece.  I also do a fair amount of other writing in the volunteer work I do, editing training documents, putting together grant proposals, and communicating with the others who are also volunteering.  The context determines much about the writing.  I am for clarity, always, but brevity, only some of the time.  I do think that writing supports collegial interaction and I try hard to be a good colleague. I think it is important to develop a sense of taste in these things, more so than simply follow a set of rules.  That sense of taste come from reading and finding other authors whom I enjoy reading.  (When I started the blog I tried to emulate Stephen J. Gould, as he would write in the New York Review of Books.)  Now I always try to please myself with my writing.  I can sign off when I've done that.

* * * * *

I want to switch gears here and talk about student writing.  In the class I teach I have students write weekly blog posts.  I first did this when I was teaching a class for the Campus Honors Program and wrote about the experience here.  This was before I retired so the teaching was done as an overload, work you'd only do if you really enjoy it and/or if you thought it contributed to doing your full time job better. Teaching honors students is always fun and I've learned that my little experiments with pedagogy are much more likely to give good results with honors students.  Those good results then encourage me to try the approach with regular students.

I retired just a few days after that article was published, which was more than a semester after the class had concluded. When I've taught since then it has been for the Economics Department, once intermediate microeconomics, all other times upper level courses in the majors.  From 2012 on that has been a course on the economics of organizations.  Student blogging is a mainstay of the course and what I write here is based on which I've learned from that experience.  Students post weekly, typically in response to a prompt I give them, which relates to subject matter the class will consider, though they have the freedom of writing about something else, as long as they can connect it to course themes.  There is a 600 word minimum requirement for these posts.  I don't enforce this strictly, but I mean to convey by the requirement that the students should put in real and substantial effort in the writing.  I comment on each post students make, provided the posts don't come in too late.  I also require students to comment on my comment.  That much of the mechanism is fixed now. I've also sometimes required students to comment on the posts of other students.  That has been more of a mixed success, though it does make the students aware of how their peers write.  They sometimes get discouraged when comparing their own writing to mine.

I don't think of this as teaching writing.  I think of it as using writing to build connections between the economics we are studying and the experiences the students have already had.  This is not something they do in their other classes and eventually, though definitely not early in the semester, students come to appreciate the value in making those connections for their learning.  The students do grow some as writers during the semester and I would like to mark that trajectory a bit.

I should note first that the students are writing under an alias, but then are writing out in open.  A potential employer won't know who the student is, but the student's classmates might be able to match the alias to the person.  As I assign the aliases to the students, I am not in the dark about which student is writing under an alias.  In spite of this particular form of protection, many of the students are extremely uncomfortable with the blogging early on.  It takes about a month for them to relax about the blogging.  Much of this is about poor self-image as a writer.  Apart from the required rhetoric classes and some dreaded term papers in other general education courses, the students don't do much writing academically, a downside of attending Big Public U.

Even after they relax some, many students still struggle with generating prose.  I talk about pre-writing with them in class and the necessity of that, but I don't think it sinks in, especially not at first.  The benefit from this struggle to generate prose is that the students subsequently become more amenable to suggestions from me.  They may then be ready to embrace pre-writing and come to understand why it is necessary.  Of course, writer's block happens even to experienced writers who have put in substantial time thinking prior to sitting down at the keyboard about what they will say.  I like this page from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue and especially the suggestion to start in the middle, which is very easy to do when writing on a computer, as paragraphs can be moved around via a simple copy and paste.

Eventually, most of my students find that the minimum word requirement doesn't bind (at least during weeks where they don't have exams or term papers due in their other courses).   Yet the students still often only gloss the surface of the subject they are writing about.  My comments are meant to encourage them to explore their topic further.  Sometimes they also have a cognitive issue when describing their own experiences.  They are eye witnesses, but the reader wasn't there and needs background and context to understand the experience.  Providing such context is a particular writing skill that will serve them well later and does make the the student more empathetic for the reader, but it does not lead to the student writing less.  If anything, the student needs to write more.

A very small number of students treat the blogging as if they are opening up a vein and then just let it flow, producing a large volume of prose.  If it is coherent, I will not object.  If it is scattered, I will encourage the student to spend more time on editing and them make sure the various bits connect to one another.  But such students are the exception.  For most students, getting more depth in their pieces remains the goal through the entire semester.

Therefore, I believe it is a mistake to tell such students to write less at this time in their development.  Ultimately, of course, the skill they need to develop is to be able to write a cogent memo or perhaps to be able to write a tolerably good (1 page) executive summary to accompany a white paper. Eventually, writing less will be an important lesson for them to learn.  But they need to understand that a lot of thought was put in before that cogent memo was produced.  They simply will not understand that until they've done a lot of other writing that demanded substantial pre-writing from them.

I haven't yet talked much at all about proofreading and editing.  Many students don't get why that's necessary, because they have yet to develop empathy for the reader, and feeling the writing in the class is just another hoop to get through.  As I think comments about grammar and spelling are rarely effective (except, for example, when they use a homophone for an economic term, principle-agent model is one common student error) I will not give feedback at all on that front, but will encourage proof-reading, which in the ideal should happen with some time interval after the composition of the piece.

Editing for substance is a different matter, one I don't discuss much in the class because I don't think students are ready for it.  Instead, with some of the better students I've tried a strategy where they split their blog post into pieces.  The first part is a reflection on the blog post they wrote the previous week. The second part addresses the current prompt.  The going back to what they've written earlier is in lieu of editing the earlier piece.  I only do this for the very good students, who are willing to do the extra work.

* * * * *

I want to wrap this up.   As income inequality may be the number one social issue of our time, I'm sensitive to criticism about being elitist.  Indeed with respect to my teaching I've opted to teach regular students rather than honors student partially because with my teaching I think it is right to focus my attention on the larger mode (although I continue to believe that typical students need to raise their game about what they bring to the academic table).  But I may very well be elitist in writing slow blogging posts like this one, though the few readers I still have may not consider themselves elite at all, but rather are hungry for more thoughtful analysis expressed in generalist writing, which is becoming increasingly rare.

I do think we need to be careful about sending messages to students that encourage them to put in less effort in their studies and to imitate the communication strategies they've adopted when they text with their friends.  It is a reality that the students are very busy and they tend to have their heads focused on their electronic devices at all times.  But I believe that reality needs to be combated int their class.  What I see, instead, is acquiescence.  There is no short cut to thinking well. That's a hard lesson to learn and, until it is learned, focus on the limited attention span of some readers is likely to be counterproductive.

The writer who produces long form writing regularly but is cognizant of the reader learns to be able to produce short form writing that is effective, when the need arises for it.  Along the learning curve, it is my belief that should come later.  An effective one pager has its uses, no doubt.  I'm not denying that.  I'm only questioning how people come to develop that skill.   And I want to note that many college educated people never do, which I surmise is because they haven't spent enough time writing.  If students don't have enough practice and the message from the instructor is - write less - what does that say about the amount of practice students will get?

Do undergraduates benefit from campus and department reputation based on research?

I am preparing some content for the class I will teach this fall on The Economics of Organizations.  We begin the semester with some examples that in certain ways will be familiar to students.  I've decided to do that more slowly than in the past and to get a little deeper into the examples, to highlight the richness of the potential economic approaches one might bring to look at some of the questions raised by the examples.  Probably in the third class session we will consider the university as an organization, with some focus on the U of I.  I have a slide in my PowerPoint that says universities are brands, which is definitely true.  With each brand we associate a certain reputation.  For R1 universities, the academic reputation is typically based on well-known research done at the university.  (As everyone knows, the Four Color Map Theorem was proved at the U of I!). The issue in my title is whether undergraduates are able to internalize the benefit from that reputation.

The most obvious way such internalization might happen is by taking a course from the researcher or, if not that, then taking a course from one of the researcher's disciples.  But perhaps this only matters in a course designated as a special topic so the instructor can teach about the research  In other courses, where there is a fairly standard subject matter to cover, does the instructor's research inclinations and accomplishments matter to the student?  It's a good question, but I will defer it for a bit and then get back to it.  Let's also rule out the possibility of an undergraduate student working directly with a faculty member on the faculty member's research outside of the class setting.  That does happen some and the student clearly benefits from that, especially if the student plans on going to grad school.  I want to concentrate, however, on students who will enter the world of work after graduation and not go for an advanced degree.  Do they benefit from the U of I reputation simply by attending the university and having their resume say U of I, in the part of the document where they describe their education?

I am going to frame the question to the students this way.  For those who are from Illinois, I will ask what their next best choice of college was?  If it was a private college or university or a public university in another state, I will then note that because of the rather large tuition differential, their demand for the U of I is rather price inelastic - modest tuition increases wouldn't have changed the choice, unless they were getting a substantial scholarship from the other institution.  If it was another public university in the state, the situation is different as the U of I is the higher tuition school.  If the U of I was chosen then it must be taken to have higher quality (or some other factor is at play such as their friends are going to the U of I).  These other factors are a biggie in practice, but in our analysis we'll rule them out.  I will wave my hands a bit and say that if the students are on average better at the U of I, say as measured by their standardized test scores, then that might improve quality as students learn from other students and we can't sort out the different effects.  But then I'll want to get at the question, what makes the U of I a better school other than this student to student effect?

This much I've talked about in my classes before, but I thought to do something novel and get the class to look at some data that are publicly available.  So I built the Excel workbook linked below that has some interesting information to consider.

Excel Workbook

The are three spreadsheets. The first is from the Campus Profile that the unit which does institutional research, the Division of Management Information, provides for us.  It relates instructional staff to IUs (instructional units).  Each credit hour per student is an IU. The course I will teach gives 3 hours of credit and will have 60 students enrolled.  So I will be generating 180 IUs.  There are three categories of instructor:  Faculty and Visitors, Graduate Assistants (TAs), and Specialized Faculty.  The first category captures those who are tenured or are on the tenure track.  The third category might be referred to as adjuncts or in the Economics Department's euphemism, Teaching Faculty.  Frankly, I don't know how retirees like me are counted, but the campus is now down on using retirees for instruction, so they shouldn't impact the aggregates very much.

The data show an upward trend in undergraduate IUs, which if credit hours taken hasn't trended much at all, a reasonable assumption in my view, then it can be interpreted as an upward trend in enrollments.  There has also been an upward trend in the share of instruction done by Specialized Faculty - in introductory courses, for all undergraduate courses, and overall.  This is matched by a downward trend within each category in the share of instruction done by Graduate Assistants.  For regular faculty, my eyeballing of the overall data show the share pretty much flat until 2017, and then a big drop-off.  Off the top of my head, I can't explain that.  I need more information to understand what happened there.

The second spreadsheet gives some salary data - of Assistant Professors in Economics and of Teaching Faculty, who hold the title either of Lecturer or Clinical Professor.  Those on the tenure track who come to the U of I with their dissertation not yet completed,are also called Lecturers.  But for the Teaching Faculty, the designation means something else, as most if not all of them do have the PhD.  It is the lower peg on the rung of possible appointments for adjunct instructors.  Clinical Professor is the higher peg.  I believe the term used to refer to faculty who previously worked in industry and that their prior experience in industry was relevant for their current teaching.  But the term no longer has that connotation.

I first went to the Economics Department Website to download the names in each category.  Though they are publicly available, I decided to xxxxxx them out here so as not to get anyone bent out of shape.  I don't want to pinpoint particular individuals.  I just want to provide a general picture of what is going on.  If you click through the Assistant Professor names you get to their Web pages, many of which offer a further click through to their CVs (academic resumes).  They include when the person started at the U of I.  Starting date might matter somewhat for salary.  Indeed, the numbers seem to indicate some salary compression issues within rank, meaning newer people are hired at a salary above more experienced people.

After uploading all the names I went to the Daily Illini Salary Database and did a search by department.  Please note that when you do this you get results back for faculty and staff from the departments at all 3 campuses.  My interest here is only with the Urbana campus.  Then I simply copied and pasted the salaries for the names I had already put into the spreadsheet.

For good measure, I also put in my starting salary from back in 1980, both in 1980 dollars and inflation-adjusted to 2018 dollars, using this inflation calculator.  I know such calculations aren't beyond critique, but they are good enough for the exercise I wanted to do.  The upshot is that even adjunct instructors today are paid more in real terms than I was paid in 1980.  When I started, the standard teaching load was 2 courses per semester and I believe every instructor was tenured or on the tenure track.  I got a one course buyout my first semester to help me start my research portfolio, which in my case I used to finish my dissertation.  I also got summer money guaranteed for the first summer.  Now, I believe the standard teaching load is 3 courses a year, Assistant Professors get a course buyout every year in rank and I believe they get guaranteed summer money too, but on that last one I'm not sure.   In any event, it should be clear that Assistant Professors are given every chance to prove themselves as researchers and are well advised to devote their time to their research, if they want to get tenure. But in so doing, they become very expensive as teachers.  Is it any wonder then, that the category of Teaching Faculty emerged as a way to deal with, mainly, undergraduate instruction in a cost-effective manner.

The third spreadsheet gives a historical look at tuition, both in-state and out-of-state, base tuition and fees, as well as ancillary costs.  Alas the last 5 years are missing, but students probably are well aware of the current numbers, and the time trend from 1980 to 2014 is unmistakable.  Higher Education has experienced hyperinflation in that period.  The numbers show that.  Again I did an inflation adjustment to compare 1980 tuition to the tuition and fees in 2013-14.  There was about a 7-fold increase in real terms.  Note that the State of Illinois, which contributes tax revenue to the U of I, has had its share of the U of I budget decline substantially in this time interval.  So one explanation for the increase in tuition is to make up for that.  A second explanation is to cover the increased costs of instruction shown on the previous spreadsheet.  A third represents expenditure on capital improvements (DKH had no air conditioning back in 1980 and it was not with sufficient electric wiring to manage the needs of Internet usage).  Many business processes experienced large quality improvements (course registration is one prominent example).  There has also been a large expansion of student services.  I don't believe the Counseling Center or the Career Center existed back in 1980.  And the athletic facilities that students have access to now are a cut above what they had back then.

Nevertheless, one might focus more narrowly, just on courses and tuition.  There seems to have been a shift from research faculty to teaching faculty for undergraduates while at the same time tuition has been on the rise.  Can we translate that into saying something about quality of instruction and the tuition paid by students?

Some years ago when I used to watch Illini Football and Basketball on TV, I would make a point to watch the commercials about the university that were featured at halftime.  Invariably those commercials would feature a prominent researcher who was interacting with undergraduate students, with everyone seemingly upbeat and getting a lot out of the experience.  Some of that was obviously hype.  Was any of it reality?  As an old timer, I would like to say that there was some reality in it.  But I have to say there are reason to believe that the teaching faculty are better than the researchers at teaching undergrads.  One obvious reason is enthusiasm for the job.  Many researchers want everything they do to relate to their research in some way, shape, or form.  If they perceive that undergraduate instruction does not so relate, they will give it short shrift. How common this is I don't know, but it is something to consider.  There is also the matter of developing empathy for typical students.  Research Faculty tend to come from the top tier of students and they tend to teach to a conception of students based on their own experience that way.  It might be a wonderful way to engage future professors, but it may be a poor way to engage other students.  Further, such faculty tend to be quite theoretical in their orientation.  Students are far more practical about what they want to see in their classes.  There is a disconnect here.

Yet there are arguments that say Teaching Faculty are also compromised in their teaching.  The biggest of these is that such instructors are dependent on getting good course evaluations in order to keep their jobs.  As students are very grade conscious, the instructors design their courses so that students well understand the approach, view it is fair, and in fact it produces many high grades.  In that circumstance students will give good course ratings.  But to achieve that end there may be a lot of teaching to the test and not a lot of challenging the students to go beyond exam material.  So students may be able to notch up another A, but actually haven't learned much from the course.

If this is going on, should the students themselves be concerned about it?  Overtly, most don't appear to be, treating college as something to get through not as something to experience for itself.  And if they get better job interviews because they went to the U of I instead of Illinois State, maybe that's enough, for them.

It isn't enough for me and my instinct as a social scientist is that the market will catch up to what I perceive as a big imbalance this way.  What has been happening to students who major in the liberal arts, with regard to job opportunities after graduation, might start to happen to Econ majors.  Either the work they had been doing has been automated away or the quality of new grads is perceived as too low as to be worth the investment in developing the talent further.  But if that were to happen, then why pay the tuition in the first place?  I've been worried about this sort of unraveling for some time.  It hasn't happened yet.  And I've got my fingers crossed that it won't happen ever.  But I would like to be more proactive than that, if at all possible.  So I write blog posts, like this one.

Being Forthright Or Keeping Things To Oneself (An Out-Of-The-Box Teacher's Dilemma)

Stylistically, the way I've taught my Economics of Organizations class is quite different from the way other undergraduate economics classes are taught.  The students who end up taking the class become well aware of these differences.  By and large, they have expressed appreciation for the alternative approach.  Many students who register for the class are not aware of the style difference at the time they register.   My approach may end up being more work for them than in their other classes.  Consequently, some of them end up dropping the class, either during the first 10 days of the semester, when they can still add a different course, or somewhat later, when they begin to fall behind in the work and would prefer having fewer credit hours to focus on.

The Economics Department is somewhat aware of my alternative approach.  Each year they ask for a syllabus, which all instructors must provide.  I doubt, however, that anyone reads through it carefully.  And, while this is not surprising, nobody from the department has ever come to my classroom to see how a class session goes.   This is consistent with notions of academic freedom, where the instructor is sovereign in making these decisions about course content and how the course is taught.  When I was an administrator of campus Ed Tech, I did occasionally attend lectures of some faculty, which was mutually agreed upon ahead of time.  After the visit I would send an email where I would pass my observations onto the instructor.  It was intended as a friendly way for the instructor to get some critique of the teaching.  But it was entirely focused on method and issues that some students might confront as a result of that method.  I was not qualified to comment on appropriateness of the subject matter.  As a general matter I think there is interplay between method and subject matter, so such a critique would be better from someone in the same field.  But as I noted, that is not the common practice.

In The Economics of Organizations, my approach is substantially more labor intensive than the approach taken by other economics instructors.  I can afford to spend the extra time this labor intensive approach entails because I'm retired, so am comparatively time abundant.  I've embraced my alternative because it allowed me to learn about issues student have with the traditional way the courses are taught.  Further, I get to see if my alternative can address some of those issues, which is what has been the driver for my experimentation with the teaching.  The particular innovation that seems to have had the best result is getting students to write weekly blog posts (600 words at a minimum) in which they connect their own experiences to course themes.  I would then write extensive comments on each post and the students would write comments in response to what I wrote.  This very much makes instruction like conversation and has the instructor reacting to student formative thinking in a way that is specific to the particular student.  In other words, my comments were not canned and I didn't try to steer the students in some pre-determined direction.  My goal was to get them to see the implications of their own thinking and then push that thinking a little further.  While at the outset of the class students found this process awkward, after a month or so they would have settled down and then come to appreciate it.

Last year I was told I couldn't teach the class.  The campus was frowning on having retirees teach because of the double-dipping it entailed.  (Retired faculty get a pension from the State of Illinois.  Being paid to teach on top of that for teaching, while allowed under the rules, seemed like an extravagance that a campus struggling with its budget could ill afford.)  It wasn't impossible for departments to hire retirees, but procedures were put in place that made it more arduous to do so.  Also, the Economics Department had an abundance of other upper level course offerings, so didn't need my class as a way to increase the variety of what was being offered to juniors and seniors who majored in economics.

This year is different, not on the double-dipping but on the variety of other upper level courses in economics.  Owing to quite a bit of faculty turnover, these upper level courses for the fall have become scarce, with many of them closed now for further registration because they've reached the maximum enrollments allowed, yet with transfer students who will come to campus in August not having registered yet.  So the Economics Department offered me to teach the class again, but this time with maximum enrollments approximately double what they've been in the past.

While I had expressed interest in teaching the class again, this put me in a quandary, particularly about what to do regarding the blogging.  Because my comments were typically written over the weekend, and I had to proceed with reading the posts and writing my comments at a pace that was comfortable for me, I was already close to maxed out at the lower number of enrollments.  If I were to keep the blogging, I needed to alter my mechanism somewhat, either not comment on the posts of every student each week, or have some help from a TA who would write comments in lieu of mine. Having used undergraduate peer-mentors who had previously taken the class in the late 1990s, when I taught a large section of intermediate microeconomics, and with that pretty effective at the time, I glommed onto the idea of using a former student as a TA.

I had a particular student in mind, who was very diligent with her own blogging when she took the class and I was convinced would do a good job with the comments as my TA.   She took the class in fall 2017 and graduated immediately after the course concluded.  Indeed, as my course is an upper level course in the major, with the students juniors or seniors, any student who took my class in fall 2017 should have graduated by next fall.  So if any of them were to be my TA, they'd be alums of the university as well.  (The peer-mentors I had in the 1990s were all current students.)  There is no business model in place that I am aware of where a virtual TA is hired who is not currently enrolled at the university, though we do have the occasional virtual instructor who is a faculty member at some other university or who, perhaps, has a full time job outside of academia.

Because there is no business model for this at present, it is hard to know whether using former students who have already graduated as virtual TAs is just a silly idea (they already have a job so the TA work would be above and beyond that) or if it really might make sense for alums who had a good relationship with a professor and would be happy to have that connection continue and be extended via the virtual TA work, in spite of their other employment.  In the case of my former student, I did have some back and forth with her via email, but as she was possibly moving to a different job it wasn't clear which of these best describes her situation.

Now let me turn to the title of my post.  Being forthright in this case meant asking the Economics Department to pay me a bit more, so I could use the increment to pay the virtual TA, and letting them know that was why I was asking for more money.  Keeping things to myself, I could have simply made a side deal with my former student and never informed the department about doing that at all.

Now some things about the money, from my point of view.  The last few years in retirement, I have treated what I earn teaching as "mad money" so I can allocate it to expenditure as I see fit, unlike other household spending that my wife and I agree upon (at least in principle).  In fact, much of the earnings from teaching would go to the organization I support in my volunteer work, as a charitable contribution to the Foundation in the U.S. that supports this organization.  Last year when I didn't teach, I took an early distribution from my IRA for this purpose (plus I had substantial medical expenses that needed to be covered). This year, if I did pay my former student out of my pocket and yet earned what I had been paid for teaching the class in the past, there would be less left over for me to use as donation.

Considering money on the teaching side of things, there are two different models to consider.  In a large lecture class, where the homework is done via the online quiz tool in the LMS, exams are given on Scantron forms that are machine scored, and there is a head TA who does a good bit of the course administration, instructor time and effort are largely independent of enrollments in the class.  In this case, instructor pay and class size need not correlate very strongly, if at all.  In the opposite extreme is the seminar offering, where there is substantial interaction between the students and the instructor, and where the students will do substantial writing that is evaluated by the instructor - term papers rather than blogs in most cases. (I did have term papers in my class, but to make the evaluation of that manageable I put students into teams of three, with one term paper per team, and in weeks where drafts were due, there were no blog posts.)  In the seminar much of the instructor effort is proportional to the number of students.  Consequently, the appropriate thing to do in the case when you double the enrollments for a seminar that was previously at capacity is to offer it in two sections and pay the instructor for that. Because of the large number of students who major in economics and the size of the classrooms in DKH available for these course offerings, upper level economics classes are a bit too large to be taught as a pure seminar.  But I viewed them as closer to that extreme than to the large lecture alternative.  So I was a bit irked when the department said they'd pay the same as before in spite of the greater enrollments, implicitly sending a message to me that I should teach the class as if it is a large lecture.

Further, in the back of my head I have in mind the new budgeting rules on campus, which reward IUs taught at a much greater rate than previously.  (The IUs for a class are the number of students enrolled times the credit hours the course offers.)  While I've not been privy to campus discussions about the purpose of the new budget model, it's not rocket science to conclude that it should drive expenditure on instructors per student upwards and in that way it should improve teaching.  Yet it is not that simple.  First, instructor hours/IU spent in teaching are typically not measured and is highly idiosyncratic.  Instructors who spend more time on a class (and thus less time on something else) presumably improve the quality of instruction without it costing more (paying for the quality improvement by lowering the quality of that something else, whatever it is). Further, teaching decisions are made at the departmental level.  Budget allocations based on IUs generated are made at the college level.  Economics is but one of many departments in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.  It is unclear, at least to me, whether the budget that LAS sets for the Economics department is also IU based or not, nor whether there are substantial lags in how IUs translate into budget revenue, meaning additional IUs taught this year impact budget revenues only next year.   

Applying this to my particular situation, as the Department of Economics contacted me fairly late with regard to teaching this class, it may be that they have few funds with which to pay me, yet a sizeable hole to fill in staffing courses so that transfer students can have at upper level classes.  So I kind of understand their situation without knowing the details.  They did offer me a doctoral student as a TA, who would be paid hourly (by the Department not by me).   This is safer for the Department, as there is a business model already in place to use graduate students in this capacity.  I've not yet learned who this student will be, so I remain hopeful that I can use the TA in a productive way.  However, in the past when the department did assign me a graduate student as a grader, invariably the student would be a foreign national whose spoken English was mediocre.  Those graduate students who had high TOEFL scores would become TAs in one of the large intro courses.  Only those who didn't get assigned to the intro courses would be available as graders for other courses.  So I'm wary that whomever I do get will be able to write good comments on student blogs, no matter how competent the person is with the economics.

Let me make one more point and close.  The situation that I've described actually is an example of the alignment problem we consider in The Economics of Organizations course.   If we can assume that courses taught in seminar mode are higher quality than courses taught in large lecture mode, and courses in mixed mode have quality somewhere in between, then the issue is what quality coupled with a suitable rate of expenditure per IU does the campus want for my course, what quality does the Economics Department want again paired with an expenditure per IU number, and what quality do I want.  (And should that depend on how much I get paid or not?)  Does the transfer pricing scheme put into place achieve alignment or not?  The campus budget model, as I suggested above, seems to indicate at least a mixture of modes.  The Economics Department apparently would prefer me to offer the class as a large lecture.  Personally, I would prefer to do otherwise, but I need this to be manageable for me and not to become overwhelming.  So I'm still trying to think through how I will conduct the class and what to do about the blogging feature.

I ended up being forthright on the matter with the Economics Department and was told that it was not possible to do as I intended by using my former student as a virtual TA.  I'm now feeling some regret and wonder if I played my cards right or not.  Even if it ultimately produced the same outcome, with my former student telling me she had too much other stuff on her plate to do this, had I kept this to myself instead I would have at least had a go at my preferred alternative, so likely would not feel the same sense of regret as I'm feeling now.  On the other hand, now I will have a few more bucks to donate to the organization I support.

What if I were mentoring somebody else who was in this situation.  What advice would I give to that person.  We learn the proverb, "Honesty is the best policy" early in life.  Is it true or not?  I'm wondering about that now.

Reading Fiction on the Computer with the Kindle App

I'm going to try an imperfectly controlled experiment.  Yesterday I finished reading the novella Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.   I had started reading it on my Kindle Fire Tablet, but I've been having difficulties with that keeping its charge, and if I use it to play music while I read then it drains the electricity way too fast, plus the volume on the sound is too low even at the max setting. So for a while I used the Tablet as a reader, but then used my phone as the audio player.  It's a clunky solution, but do-able. (I may eventually get an iPad mini, but it is pricey so I'm going to hold off for a while.)  So I thought to try reading on my computer.  For a while I tried that on my laptop, setting it up in Tablet mode (so the keyboard is unavailable), which is a possible solution for me but I need a good chair and the screen at the right height for that to work.  My regular computer, an iMac, has that.  The laptop is in the basement, sitting on a table where the screen is too low,  and a cheapie chair is what I use when I access it (after doing the treadmill, to cool down for a few minutes).  The thought that getting both the technology and the physical environs to work in concert in support of my reading is why I'm experimenting with reading on the computer.  In the past, the Kindle app has itself been unstable, which made this impossible.  But the current version works reasonable well.

Over the past several years I've taken to listen to music, mainly Chopin, as I would do book reading.  I'm much less likely to do that if I'm reading pieces from the New York Times or some magazine, perhaps because doing the latter has a stopping point in the near future (when the article fully is read) as distinct from a book, especially one with rather long chapters. The music is there to block out audible distractions, particularly other people in the house talking (or if I'm out having a coffee other people having a conversation at an adjacent table).  For this purpose, I really like this "album" for which there is so much music that once you start it the music plays for as long as you will read, with only momentary pauses when one piece ends and another begins.   The music itself, however, sometimes is a source of distraction in that if a piece catches my attention then I want to know its form - waltz, nocturne, or ballade for example and I want to know the key that it is written in.  So I'm apt to depart the reading momentarily to find out this information.  This sort of distraction pervades reading with an electronic device connected to the Internet.  There is a compulsion to check email, Facebook, and for me also to check how much my most recent blog post has been accessed, and likewise for my most recent Tweet.  A different part of the experiment, which I will begin later today with some paper based reading, a short story and the latest issue of the New Yorker, is whether I can get into it sufficiently that this compulsion vanishes.   Part of the experiment is to determine, when my attention is more squarely on the reading than on these various distractions, is it the medium that matters or is it the nature of what I'm reading.  I know I find fewer things that I read absorbing these days.  But I'm much less sure why that is.

There is also distraction with the book itself.  I don't recall other fiction I've read that has extensive footnotes.  In the Kindle version, these appear as hyperlinks.  In the first chapter, if you click on a link it brings up a different screen with some explanation of the recent jargon/terminology used in the text.  I started by ignoring them, but after skipping perhaps a dozen then dutifully clicked and read each of them.  The background information was useful.  There is also the technique used in the writing of the story itself, which is told from the perspective of Marlow, the character who is sent to find Kurtz deep within Africa.  Marlow is the narrator.  But I found it difficult to understand, especially when transitioning from one scene to the next, what was going on, and was this actually happening or only something in Marlow's mind.  Indeed, at the start of the book, Marlow seems to be a passenger in a boat on the Thames, and the story is what he relates to the other passengers as their way to pass time together.  But once he gets into traveling up river to find Kurtz, he never returns to those passengers who were listening to the story.  It's as if now he is living the story in the present tense.  Further, while the expression "heart of darkness" is used multiple times in the story, it is still unclear to me whether it is only meant as describing a location, the part of the river and the immediate surrounding area where eventually they did find Kurtz, or if it is meant as a double entendre, to also describe Kurtz as an emotional being, one so wrapped up in the amassing of ivory that he disregarded his fellow human beings and was capable of doing atrocities to some of them.

I have not yet read any interpretations of the book, other than the chapters that proceed the novella written by somebody else, meant as an aid in understanding how Conrad came to write this book and his own trip to the Congo, traveling up river. There is Conrad's diary of that trip, which is included in the Kindle edition of the book after the novella, and I've not yet read it.  Perhaps it will illuminate further.

But I'm going to leave that for a while.  The next Kindle book I plan to read is Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, several years after it was the book that everyone else was talking about.  It may be that reading non-fiction, particularly economics, is sufficiently unlike reading fiction, because you need a pencil and paper in available to work through equations so they are understood.  That's definitely the way it was for me in graduate school.  But I will start out reading as if the experience is novel-like.  And we'll see where that goes.

The managing of the compulsion for updates of information may not have an ideal solution.  And maybe I can train myself away from it (though signs point to the opposite conclusion).  But I think we should experiment with possible solutions, imperfect as they may be.  That's what I intend to do. 

Does Real Life Imitate TV? If So, When?

It seems that once in a while I really get hooked on a TV show.  For a long time that was The West Wing, which I watched repeatedly.  It was a show that derived from the movie The American President (both written by Aaron Sorkin) with several of the actors in the movie appearing in different roles on the show.  For the most part, I watched The West Wing as reruns (I believe on the AMC channel, but I'm less sure of that).  Later I got a boxed set of DVDs with the entire series.  I've learned that when doing the treadmill, watching something already familiar is better than watching something new.  For quite a while The West Wing was my exercise companion.

After that it was 24, which seemed to capture the attention of many, as I recalled reading about Jack Bauer in Maureen Dowd's Op-Ed columns. The show offered a way for viewers to fantasize about how we combated terrorism.  We needed some such relief in the aftermath of 9/11.  Evidently the show capitalized on ethos after that event, plus in the first season, which in some ways was remarkably low-tech, the show dramatized the possibilities of invasive surveillance via security cameras connected to the Internet.  It was eerie in this way, both for then and as a foreboding of things to come.  While I'm representing these shows as being viewed sequentially, I must have watched some of the West Wing in the same time period as I watched 24, as for the latter I eventually watched the shows live, though I also got DVDs of the series and watched them repeatedly as well. Not surprisingly, some of the actors in 24 had also appeared in the West Wing.  I suppose the talent pool from which one casts such shows is limited and viewers of both forgive such overlap, though I think actors we haven't seen before are more effective than those we are familiar with, because then we don't project what we think we know about the person from prior roles the person has played. For a short period of time I watched a few episodes of Designated Survivor, which featured Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role.  Apart from some other aspects of the show that I found unappealing, it was very difficult to consider Jack Bauer as a character expressing such reticence and ambivalence.  I can understand why Sutherland would want to play such a character, but as a fan I still wanted him to be Jack Bauer.

The next show I'll mention is The Hour, perhaps more obscure to American viewers because it was a BBC production.  My friend Deanna recommended it - the closest thing to The West Wing, she claimed.  So I took her up on the suggestion.  It was an intriguing show, taking the issues out of the present by going back to the 1950s for its setting, and then looking at the perspective of the press and their adversarial relationship to the powers that be.  This time I started with the DVDs, as it wasn't yet being aired online and had already been shown, so no chance to view it on the air.  It readily can be viewed now via Amazon Prime, but I seem to recall a while back it being free while now there is a charge per episode.  Also, there were only two seasons and only six episodes per season.  Yet the story is quite compelling as there is a narrative that runs longitudinally throughout each season and that builds to a a dramatic climax.

The last show I'll mention and the one I've viewed most recently is Homeland.  During the first and second seasons the show seemed to have two leads - Brody, the former POW who returns home to a hero's welcome, while he actually has been turned into an agent of the terrorists who held him in captivity, and Carrie, the CIA officer whose skepticism at the outset lets her discover Brody's true colors yet also falls in love with him so the two have an affair. In the third season Brody is killed off and by then it was clear that Carrie was the sole star of the show.  She is something of a genius for doing spy work, her bipolar disease part and parcel of the intensity and instinct she demonstrates for the work.  In this respect she is like other genius characters, Vincent Van Gogh who clearly suffered many manic episodes, the cause of which have been widely speculated upon, and John Nash, who had schizophrenia, are probably the best known among them. As a consequence, Carrie is able to see things clearly that others in the CIA miss or gloss over.  Yet her mania and her intensity sometimes get her too far in front of the evidence, so she too makes errors by jumping to conclusions that can't be sustained.

Each of these shows share some common elements.  Carrie's intensity is paralleled in the Josh Lyman character in the West Wing, the Jack Bauer character in 24 who has already been mentioned, and the Freddie Lyon character in The Hour.  Apart from the intensity they share an ethical rightness about their work, yet are willing to take quite unorthodox means to achieve their ends.  You might describe the style as "all in," borrowing a term from Texas Hold'em poker.  Other people would be more measured and circumspect, but not these characters.  The shows also share that a happy ending doesn't always occur and that sometimes the main character does seem to win, but the personal costs are so high as to be disastrous.

In what follows I'm going to focus on Homeland Season 7 the last season that's been fully aired.  (Season 8, which will be the last season of the show is due to air this fall.) At this point Carrie is former CIA and doesn't have an obvious employer, but she suspects nefarious activity from within the White House and with good reason.  With the help of her usual teammates, she begins an illegal but important surveillance effort targeted at the President's Chief of Staff.  She then encounters a disaffected FBI agent, seemingly by chance, and after a rough start they begin a partnership.  In the previous season she also had a relationship with an FBI agent that started badly, but then proved productive.  So this seemed to be following the same script, though it wasn't, because this time around the FBI agent was a plant, working for a foreign government.

Indeed, the nefarious work inside the White House turns out to be an illusion, and what is really going on is information warfare provoked by the Russians.  This includes fake news of the most provocative kind, homicide that is made to look like a heart attack, and the planting of an agent as the Chief of Staff's girlfriend with the aim that she could ultimately betray him while under oath.  In the last episode, the National Security Director and former mentor to Carrie, Saul Berenson, arranges for a team to travel to Russia, to negotiate with their counterparts there about the recent course of events.  This is a cover for an attempted extraction plan of the female agent who had been pretending to be the Chief of Staff's girlfriend, who had been under sequester before giving testimony to a Senate committee, but was rescued by her Russian comrades, allowing her to escape back to the home country.  Unfortunately for the Americans, the Senator who had ordered the sequester leaked the information of the extraction plan to the Russians, so the plan failed.

The last episode of the season is a plan B, figured from scratch by Carrie on the fly, but something that seemed to come to her without too much effort.  They enlist a partner from among their Russian counterparts whom they had been negotiating with, an old time General who had an extraordinary amount of wealth, hundreds of millions of dollars, located in U.S. controlled financial institutions.  They are able to freeze these assets and tell the general he will only get them back if the help them get the female agent.  The General pursues this with a vigor by enlisting a seeming army of those who report to him to find this woman.  It looks like an inquisition and the American team is able to capture it live on camera and stream it on the Internet.  In effect, the American team was giving the Russians a big dose of their own medicine, even while this itself was a cover for a second extraction plan, which worked, though Carrie paid a huge price as a consequence as she was captured by the Russians.

* * * * *

Let's take a break from TV and look at some history that all of us know about, then try to connect the two, and ultimately bring that back to the present. It is a peculiar aspect of intelligence operations that the most successful ones mainly remain hidden from view.  It is the failures that get exposed and then become part of history.  For example, what do we know about CIA involvement (if any) in the Ukraine prior to it expressing interest in joining NATO and the European Union.  Consider this paragraph from a Tom Friedman column published in December 2014.  Writing about Putin, Friedman says:

He bet almost his whole economy on oil and gas that only can be exploited long-term at the risk of disruptive climate change; he underestimated the degree to which technological innovation has enabled America to produce more oil, gas, renewable energy and greater efficiency, all at the same time, helping to undermine crude prices; he talked himself into believing that Ukrainians toppled their corrupt leaders only because the C.I.A. told them to — not because of the enduring human quest to realize a better future for their kids; and he underestimated how integrated and interdependent Russia is with the global markets and how deeply sanctions, over time, would bite him.

Does Friedman actually have inside information about the CIA here as he is writing his piece, or is he shooting from the hip and speculating about it.  Who knows?  (I hope his editors know, but that doesn't help the rest of us.) There are, of course, Web sites that assert the CIA did actually produce the coup in Ukraine.  But I, for one, have no way to determine whether those sites are trustworthy or are Fake News. I can't find such information from among sources I already am aware of and might rely upon.

The one intelligence operation that we're all aware of and are confident in it happening is the Watergate break-in. Here is an early article by Bernstein and Woodward (perhaps their first on Watergate) that ties the break-in to a vast conspiracy aimed at sabotaging Democratic candidates.  The date of publication is October 10, 1972, not quite a month before the election.  It had minimal impact on that as Nixon "won" in a landslide.  But it did set the stage for the investigations that followed in the spring.  I want to make note of this particular paragraph

“Intelligence work” is normal during a campaign and is said to be carried out by both political parties. But federal investigators said what they uncovered being done by the Nixon forces is unprecedented in scope and intensity.

I wish they had elaborated on the normal intelligence work and what that is about.  Would any of this normal activity make ordinary voters queasy if they learned about it happening?  And would this work be done by typical campaign staff members?  Or would the campaigns hire former FBI, CIA, and NSA operatives to complete this work.  That would be useful to know.

Regarding the break-in itself, there was one former CIA operative involved among the 5 who were arrested, James W. McCord Jr.  (I found this site helpful simply to recall the names of those involved in Watergate.  Forty years ago, many of them were household names, but some of that familiarity fades with time.)  Two other, more familiar, names were soon connected to the burglars.  They were E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who later worked as a consultant for Charles Colson, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent and then Finance Counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President.  So here is an example of former CIA and FBI agents working hand in hand on an illegal intelligence operation, making Homeland Season 7 seem like deja vu, which in some sense it is.

Viewed from now, I would like to know during the aftermath of the Watergate episode what it would have taken to rule the Presidential election in 1972 null and void.  Here's a piece by Robert Reich that argues this should happen for the election of 2016.   I don't believe the matter ever came up at the time of Watergate, so I will speculate here about why that was.   First there was the Agnew resignation, on matters unrelated to Watergate.  That lessened the legacy after Nixon's resignation. Then, the parties were less far apart then.  It is instructive to observe that Roe v. Wade was decided early in 2003 while Chief Justice Burger presided.  Burger was a Nixon appointment.  So, if remedies are taken in sequence and ruling the election null and void is the last step in the sequence, with impeachment an earlier step, then it seems that Nixon's resignation brought a halt to all of that.

Getting back to Reich's argument, if he is making more than a mere rhetorical case, one wonders how it would happen.  Would the Supreme Court decide the matter?   If so, would Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh weigh in on the matter, or would they be required to recuse themselves, as they were appointed after the 2016 election?  (Reich argues they would need to recuse themselves, but would they agree?)  Indeed, if such recusal were required and the other Justices found that the election should be annulled (likely by a 4-3 vote) what would that say about all the judicial appointments made?  Sensing the various dilemmas that arise here, one wonders what previous steps would have to be taken to bring the matter to the Supreme Court.  The Constitution doesn't speak to this directly.

Now I'd like to talk about one other event that was near contemporaneous with Watergate.  This is the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.  While the U.S. clearly preferred Pinochet to Allende, the role of the CIA in deposing Allende is unclear, though I will say that I believe the CIA was the driver of the coup, basing that belief more on what I heard about at that time, when I was in college, and a few years later, when I was in graduate school, than on any look at more direct evidence. My sense of things is that then the CIA was quite good at exercising political upheaval, where it suited U.S. foreign policy.  The Watergate break-in, then, was a consequence of that expertise taken too far and applied to domestic politics.  Unfortunately, the lesson we exported to the rest of the world is that exercising political upheaval is an effective way to undermine one's adversaries.  The Russian interference in our domestic politics is our chickens coming home to roost.  Homeland Season 7 makes that case very well.

* * * * *

Now I want to take a different angle and imagine that I'm a Democratic Party strategist.  Looking at the pace at which things are going, regarding impeachment, regarding the various Southern states passing their repressive anti-abortion laws, even assuming a big Democratic victory in 2020, what should be made of all those judicial appointments that have occurred since Trump became President?  Should they be viewed as collateral damage - it's a shame they happened but there's nothing that can be done about them now?  Or should they be viewed as intolerable, because Reich is correct and the 2016 election should be annulled?  If the latter, but if it is recognized that going through proper channels is very unlikely to deliver the desired results in a reasonable timeframe, would more unorthodox approaches then be entertained?  Would any of those unorthodox approaches look like something that came out of Homeland Season 7?

As I've watched this TV series, these questions have been in the back of my head. Sometimes, they move to the front of my head as I think about matters while away from the TV.  I can't be the only one thinking this way.  But resorting to such a solution, if it exists, requires a hardball mentality that I associate with the Republicans, not with the Democrats.  Democrats really want to trust the system and believe that things will work themselves out for the best if that trust is there.  Yet it's getting harder and harder to maintain that belief.   I'd rather believe there are some hardball types among Democratic Party strategists who are working on this.  If so, I hope evidence of this work becomes visible to the rest of us, and soon.

The Value of College Then and Now - A Personal Perspective

With a focus on the high rate of tuition, there is a renewed interest in asking about the value of college from a financial perspective - is it still a worthwhile investment?  In a perfect capital markets world, college being worthwhile would mean the expected return in increased earnings exceeds the expected costs.  In the liquidity constrained alternative, meaning there are limits to how much debt the student can acquire as well how much of the future earnings risk can be well diversified, we tend to look at the debt burden after graduation and how it impairs the working life of a young graduate.  This is an additional burden not captured in the perfect capital markets analysis. How much additional burden depends, in large part, on how tight the liquidity constraint actually is.   In any event, in the rest of this piece I'm not going to concern myself with the financial issues regarding college education.  I am after a different sort of question, which goes as follows.

Self-education by reading, attending public performances, watching movies, having conversations with interesting people, and many other activities as well, stands as an alternative to formal schooling. Formal schooling comes with certification (the diploma) that self-education can't provide.  Does self-education have other shortcomings that formal schooling avoids?  For example, if self-education comes from the person following his own interests, might the person be too narrow minded to broadly educate that way or too myopic to struggle through something difficult but which would produce good results if mastered?  Conversely, does formal education have its own shortcomings, particularly that it relies too much on extrinsic motivation (getting good grades) so blocks curiosity the student would otherwise develop?

Now a little disclaimer about me, before I produce my views on these matters.  I went on to graduate school immediately after college and after that became a professor.  In retrospect, this path was obvious for me, though in prospect it actually was far from certain.  One aspect of that for me is having a strong desire for self-education from pretty early on.  I attributed this to a variety of factors where the environment encouraged me in this direction. Individualized reading, which started in elementary school coupled with regular trips to the public library was a big part of it.  Then there were piano lessons, more for fun than to produce expertise, but also playing sports with my neighborhood friends.  This was when producing a renaissance man was still in vogue.  I wrote about this some time ago in a post called PLAs Please.  A kid with this type of orientation will find formal education a complement to self-education, mainly because there will be other kids at school who are similarly situated and friendships can develop this way, which is the source of many of those interesting conversations.  Such kids typically like school, even if not all of the classes make a strong impression on the kid.

Then there is the additional factor for me, I don't know how common it was among my cohort, it seems more frequent now, where I went through a rather serious depression in tenth grade, with the upshot that I could ignore the extrinsic motivation after that (or delude myself that I was ignoring it) whereas other students were more taken up with the grades they were getting.  For me, the issue was getting ego rewards from academic high performance.  I came to understand that was a path for the depression to return.  And I really didn't need grades as a motivator.   I could learn and perform well in school simply as a matter of self-expression.

I did have a cohort of friends who were similarly inclined to me in an intellectual way, both in high school and in college, so I'm sure I was not unique this way.  But I've not got a sense of how widespread this strong sense of self-education was among among others whom I didn't know as well.  I do recall there was a certain stereotype about students who were pre-med and who were not otherwise extremely gifted as students.  They tended to be much more mercenary about school, caring quite a bit about grades, and in that sense may have been a portent of the more general trends that would manifest a generation or two later.  For such students school was a passport, nothing more, which represents a different extreme from me and my cohort.  Now a bit of hand waving, which I'm prone to do when I don't have the data.  I imagine that student orientation back when I was in high school, at least among the students in Arista (National Honor Society), all of whom would be college bound, lies somewhere along the continuum between these two extremes.  This seems a pretty safe assumption.  But, in addition, since I'm now well aware of the availability heuristic, I can compensate some for it and say that the group of students for whom self-education served as the driver for their learning was a smaller fraction of the overall population than I would otherwise have surmised.  Nonetheless, when I refer to the value of college then, in the title of my post, I'm referring to students for whom self-education was a big deal.

My sense of things now is that among those who become academics, the vast majority had this inclination, so their college experience reflected that.  Some years back, when I thought I might lead a campus project about student peer mentoring, I interviewed a couple of faculty members who had interesting relevant experience.  One of those was Ann Abbott,  who teaches Spanish and does so in a service-learning course designed where students assist members of the community.  The following is from the linked piece:

The other part, this specific to Ann, is the immediate sense I had of finding a kindred spirit. Her personal philosophy about the purpose of undergraduate education, something we covered in the preliminary part of the discussion, is essentially identical to mine. She started right in talking about how over programmed the students are, something I agree with 100%. She also said that when she was an undergrad she went to the movies on campus a lot, mainly for foreign films. She also went to a lot of lectures. I did the same when I was an undergrad. In other words, much of the education was informal and happened outside of regular courses. By being so over programmed, the students block this informal sort of learning. They also miss out on the inquiry into themselves, which is what college should be about, at least in part, even while the students are readying themselves for a life of work that they will enter after graduation.

Now I want to posit something that only an economist would do.  In economics, we think that producers have "production capabilities" and that formal education is largely an investment in human capital creation, that enhances the student's subsequent production capabilities after graduation (which is how it increases earnings). But we also teach that consumers have preferences.  In the typical approach, where consumers purchase goods and services, we treat preferences as exogenous and say - there is no accounting for taste.  But might it be that education also serves to develop tastes in the student, as to what is interesting and important to know and think about?  Indeed, might much of education be developing a sense of what is important to the student and then in helping the student work through how the student's time and energy can be focused on pursuit of these important ends? And, then, might it be that the informal education is important precisely because it is better at educating the preferences of students in this way?  If so, are we apt to mis-measure the value of education, by focusing only on the human capital side of the equation?  And, might students who haven't done much in the way of self-education through college, themselves regard their education only for the passport function?

 Now a different focus, which is on adult learning on the job.  We call it learning by doing and many people today will acknowledge that it is both critical for the work and necessary for the individual.  A person who is fully engaged this way grows in the job, whether there is a promotion accompanied with that growth or not. A person who plateaus and doesn't see further personal growth in the offing is well on the way to becoming "dead wood."  So we should ask, what in college education helps prepare the person for learning by doing in the world of work?  My contention, and I don't think this is much of a stretch, is that the learning by doing is easier for the person who did a lot of self-education while a student. Then it is just a continuation of what the person had already been doing, albeit applied to new and different circumstances.  For the students who was more instrumental about school, however, real learning to learn will be a novel experience, perhaps frightening and difficult to master. This person may hit the ceiling too quickly, finding the challenge overwhelming.

Of course, I never experienced the counterfactual, where I worked in a non-academic job on a full time basis, to find out if my background in school would be a help or a hindrance in that setting.  In the previous paragraph I'm speculating only.  I don't have the experience to match the speculation.  The closest that I've got to this is a change in careers, still within a university setting, from economist to learning technology administrator, where the prior career was a useful credential for the second one.  There was definitely a lot of learning by doing in that second career and in that setting what I argued in the previous paragraph was correct.  Outside that context, however, what I said is merely an educated guess.

Let me make one more observation and then close.  In the small sample of people I know who are recent college grads who did not go on to graduate school but instead entered the world of work, there is a fair amount of job churn.  After a year or two, they find something else.  It may be that in this situation the college degree remains an important credential, not just for getting the initial job, but for getting the subsequent one as well.  I'm not trying say there is no passport value to the degree.  But I would conjecture that the person's track record thereafter begins to matter more as a credential and the degree itself fades in importance.  Learning to learn skills therefore are critical and really should be cultivated in college.  Those students who focus on the passport value of the degree, however, don't seem to see it this way. They are the vast majority of the students I see when I teach my course on the economics of organizations.

I do believe school has the ability to encourage students to be more active regarding their own self-education.  But school as it is currently constituted is not structured for that to be an important goal.  My recent post A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn was meant as a think aloud about how we might go about things differently to make students more aware of their own self-education capabilities.  As you might guess from the title of that piece, I think reading intensively is a key part of the puzzle.  It won't be an easy sell on this generation of students.  But, in my view, it is the right area for us to be focused on now.  I would like to see more discussion on this topic from a variety of educators and others concerned as well - students, parents, and employers.

Being Reasonable In The Presence Of Bullies

This piece is mainly a reaction to Maureen Dowd's most recent column, Fair Play Is No Match for Foul.  It bothered me, a lot.  One the one hand, her indictments seemed right.  In key instances, mainly Democrats, but Comey too, seemed to capitulate, with that apparently precipitating disaster.

On the examples, I think Biden won't get past the Clarence Thomas hearings and as a result it will doom his campaign.  Viewed from the current lens of recent judicial appointments, and that the Democrats were the majority party in the Senate then, it looks like the old boys network and inside baseball simply blocked the truth from coming out then.   There is a different angle that isn't getting reported now, that Poppy Bush was playing the race card with the Clarence Thomas nomination, as his campaign had done with the Willie Horton ads, and since Thomas would succeed Thurgood Marshall, there was some pressure (I really don't know how much) to keep an African-American seat on the court, and at the time no way to know that Poppy would not be reelected the following year.  This is not to excuse Biden for how he played his cards, but simply to note that had he played them differently, the way the critics now would have wanted, then he surely would have had other critics that potentially could have doomed him now as well.  From this perspective, it was a no-win situation for him. Wins, it seems, only happen when the Democrats control both the White House and the Senate.  Divided government used to produce compromise, which is very messy, and now seems to produce only gridlock.

President Obama also gets his comeuppance from Dowd, and on this one we all know the history so there isn't another narrative playing in the background.  The American public needed to know about Russian interference in the election in 2016, in the summer leading up to the vote.  It was a big deal then as it is now.  The knowledge would have influenced the election, no doubt.  So it would have made the Obama administration seem partisan in the incoming election.  My reaction, so what?  I understand wanting to be above the fray after the 2008 election and that Obama campaigned on that theme. But there was quite a lot of experience since to suggest that the President was incapable of getting them to play nice in the Senate, most recently that the Merrick Garland nomination wasn't even considered by the Republicans.  Under those circumstances - stick 'em!  There would have been backlash, no doubt.  But viewed in its entirety, the situation would have been much better.  For one, Hillary Clinton would have been President.

I confess that the feelings of frustration about the events sometimes lead me to think dark thoughts, which usually come in one of two forms.  Either the top Democrats have a "Luca Brasi unit" comprised of former Secret Service agents and Special Ops soldiers, whose job it is to go after leading Republican Senators and all those Judges who have been appointed since Trump took office, and make each of them an offer they can't refuse. Or, in this alternative, such a "Justice League" emerges on its own, unaffiliated with the Democratic leadership, but with much the same agenda as before.

I understand tit-for-tat, from a game theory perspective, and that famous Dr. Martin Luther King quote:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

But what then to do about the bullying behavior?  I do not have an answer to that question.

Instead, I start to self-critique my time as an ed tech administrator.  For the most part I tried to be reasonable and I believe I was perceived as such by people on campus and elsewhere in the profession.  And in a few cases I was able to clean up messes that were caused by bullies and make the situation whole again.  But in my four years as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, after the little Center for Educational Technologies that I ran merged with the big IT organization, a merger that I opposed but did so ineffectually, I felt that bullying was part of the organization culture.  The network people were particularly known for that style and soon the information security folks also embraced the style.  There was rivalry between the divisions of the old IT organization, and that persisted.  My direct reports got beaten up by the structure that was imposed on them, and I didn't have a means to protect them.

No too long ago I read this piece about the current state of Academic Technology.  It seems that what I experienced was not unique and is still common today. Is being reasonable the answer there?

I still have some idealism left in me, as reflected by my previous very long post. When I get on an idealistic jag and write about it, I feel compelled to explain how I came to the idea, then give a fairly detailed statement about problem definition, and only then talk about programmatic reform aimed to address the problem. In this sense, being reasonable admits being zealous for an ideal, one that is not yet embraced broadly.  Yet translating the idealistic thinking into an action plan that does get implemented, is something I struggled with in my administrator career.   I've written elsewhere that I was better as a pinch hitter, so expressing a limited amount of creativity towards advancing somebody else's vision.

I do feel our campuses mimic our national politics, particularly at big R1s like Illinois, in ignoring the little guy and in focusing on innovation quite narrowly.  Is this the inevitable consequence of well meaning and reasonable people letting it happen?   We really need to think this through.