Do I Look Younger than Bill Gates?

Nerds of a feather....

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Inside Bill's Brain, which Netflix is heavily promoting. Bill Gates and I are contemporaries.  Indeed, back in 2013 I made a "Slidecast," a streaming PowerPoint presentation with an audio track as accompaniment, called Simple Quiz, which featured a list of famous contemporaries and then me after first posing the question: what do these people have in common?  Alas, Slideshare stopped supporting Slidecasts a few years ago, but you can see the video version and the original slides are also still available. The background music in the video is a Midi version of the song It Was A Very Good Year.

Years earlier, I had become fascinated with the idea of students making presentations that were largely images, with a small amount of text as narration, and then background music to make it all come together.  I tried it out in a CHP class in 2009 (Campus Honors Program students seem receptive to instructor experimentation) as a novel form of writing, since some students took the class to satisfy the Advanced Composition requirement.  I've since used it occasionally in my course on The Economics of Organization, where the students have written a review paper first of some article in an economics journal that is relevant to the course.  I've referred to the presentation as a "virtual elevator speech."  What's interesting in this context is whether the students trust that their image choices are good enough to represent the ideas in their review paper.  For those that did it well (meaning they put in real effort in the image selection) the result was satisfying.  Others, however, had way too much text on the screen, defeating the purpose of exercise.  Also, some students weren't very attentive to production values, though this was probably a failure of my coaching.  Their presentations would end abruptly, before the song reached its end.  The slide timings need to be adjusted so the presentation and the song conclude simultaneously.

Getting back to my Simple Quiz, the music held the clue to answer the question.  The presentation itself was my type of shaggy dog story, including me with the others, all of whom are/were quite famous. Each of us was born in 1955 - it was a very good year.   I'm a bit older than most of the other people listed in Simple Quiz, since my birthday is in January.  Bill Gates was born in October. I had always thought of him as having a boyish appearance.  Watching that episode in Netflix was the first time I can recall his appearance showing his age, noticeably gray and with lots of wrinkles in his face.

I found that I compared myself with Bill Gates in other ways as well.  There is a superficial similarity between us.  I too was a math nerd and in junior high and high school had a reputation as a very smart guy.  And I also had lots of issues with my mother during adolescence.    Then, much later in life, I've also found an interest in doing volunteer work in Africa, albeit via totally online interactions.

Now I want to be a bit critical of the video, which is probably not too shrewd on my part as the organization that I work with likely will be making an application to the Gates Foundation for support sometime in the not too distant future.  On the other hand, I try to be skeptical when I hear stuff and I think other viewers of this Netflix series should be skeptical as well.  Here are the main issues in what I saw.

1.  The Gates Foundation has spent a large sum on what appears to be Bill Gates' pet project, figuring out an environmentally friendly way to dispose of human waste in LDCs, so the spread of disease is thwarted and clean drinking water can be provided.  In the first episode, the focus was on technological solutions to this problem.

My critique here is based on my experience supporting ed tech projects on campus in the mid 1990s and early 2000s.  I came to conclude that you had to end-to-end the solution, and identify all possible points of failure.  Murphy's Law favors these sorts of hopeful projects which show possibility but ignore the pitfalls. They will fail in this case, as the pitfalls will invariably be confronted.  Further, the success of innovators and early adopters can fool us into believing that the success will be generally available to majority adopters, though that may not be true.   Apart from bringing down the cost of the technological solutions, which was mentioned in the video (Bill Gates made a simple math error in discussing this; he said that costs must be reduced by a factor of 10 when they actually must be reduced by a factor of 100) what else is needed for successful diffusion?  Is he expecting foundations like his to underwrite the adoption of the technology or foreign aid budgets to do that?  Foreign aid wasn't mentioned at all in what I saw.  My sense of things is that it has been reduced greatly since the Reagan Revolution began (when Bill Gates got his big break by winning the contract to write the operating system for IBM PCs).   Also,  if there are revenues flowing to an LDC in support of a worthy cause, what is to prevent those funds from being diverted to local warlords and the other powers that be?  This is the unglamorous but necessary part to consider.  It wasn't discussed at all.  In my opinion, making light of the political economy issues and treating this as mainly a technology problem is a mistake.

2.  While the Gates Foundation has a huge budget, how much wealth are Bill and Melinda retaining for themselves and their family?  I don't know the answer to that but I suspect the number is also huge and likely dwarfs the Gates Foundation endowment.  Netflix touts this video as a documentary, but it readily could be interpreted as a Bill Gates promotion, getting unwitting viewers to regard Gates as a philanthropist rather than as a robber baron, with Microsoft in the mid to late 1990s the evil empire.  Since I haven't yet watched the other episodes, I don't know how much of that history will be reviewed in the video.  But even if the history is shown, will the case be made that while Bill Gates may have changed his tune its possible that he's the same guy but now is cagier at marketing his image?  At the least, it seems to me that possibility should be explored.

3.  I can't help but think that a good deal of Gates' wealth is a consequence of tax cuts put in place during Reagan's time and thereafter.  Marginal tax rates on very high incomes came down dramatically.  Whether you now favor Medicare for all or instead expanding the benefits of Obamacare to those in the population who are not currently covered, it will cost a lot of money to do either of these.  I honestly don't know how to consider the trade-off between improved healthcare for low income Americans and making investments to improve the health of those who live in LDCs.  I think there are some thorny ethical questions here in coming up with a good answer.  If it were government doing this, it would be a struggle to work through.  But with a private individual doing this, those thorny issues are avoided. It's almost as if the Gates Foundation has become its own sort of State Department.

Let me conclude on a lighter note.  The TV show The Big Bang Theory made the nerd personality entertaining to others.  Casting Bill Gates in the same light may be good entertainment as well and its certainly closer to the real life story.  Over the rest of this week I'll watch the other episodes and see for myself.  I expect that many of my friends will do likewise.

The Challenges in Teaching the Student Rather than the Subject

I have been struggling with my teaching this semester and have started to lose my patience, which I fear is the death knell for any instructor who is trying a non-standard approach to instruction.  With impatience there is a temptation to scold the students.  The scolding may work for me to expunge the demons from my own system, but I know that it won't work for the students.  Nobody likes to be scolded.  I certainly don't.  There is a tendency to shut down when you're being scolded. What I need is for the students to open their eyes and see things as I'm seeing them.

There seem to be two factors that are distinct but work in conjunction to produce the source of my struggles.  One is student competence (or lack thereof) on prior knowledge, which to me includes the ability to fill in gaps in their knowledge on demand as the need arises.  Part of this is to understand the meaning of terms in a way they can be applied correctly.  I'm actually seeing a lot of mistaken interpretations that might have been reached in haste but then weren't checked to see if they were correct.  Doing it slower to get to the right meaning of the terms is a habit of mind.  That habit seems to be absent in a lot of students.

The other is student responsibility, which includes feeling an obligation to come to class even when attendance is not required, doing a thorough job on the homework rather than rushing through only a partially completed assignment, this includes a thorough checking of one's own work before submitting it, and then getting the work done in a timely manner.  In my class last Tuesday, which was the start of the fourth week of the semester, attendance was around 50%.  This is in an upper level course in the major, one where students should have intrinsic interest in the subject matter.   The question I will pose in class today is who bears the responsibility to catch up the students who missed that session? Does that rest on me, them, or the entire class?  In the process of asking this question I will inquire among those who attend regularly whether they've been asked by any of their classmates to catch them up.  I'm expecting unanimity, or near unanimity, that they haven't received any such requests.   

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the class site that I hope didn't scold, at least not too much, about what the issues are from my point of view.  We will discuss that post in class today. I will repeatedly say that I want students to be making connections between the various ideas they are being exposed to and with that also make connections to their own experiences that illustrate those ideas. I believe many students aren't used to do doing that.  They don't understand this is time consuming.  They also won't see the gain to themselves from going through this sort of effort.  Maybe I can convince the students to try out my way for a while, to see if they can get the hang of things.  That's for the blogging I require.

But then there is the math modeling part of the class.  Some of the students seem to be extremely uncomfortable with high school algebra and basic analytic geometry.  They have no intuition at all here and lack the skills to do some basic manipulations.  How can I teach economics at this level, where we do some math modeling, when the students don't have high school algebra in their set of tools?

On an ethical level, I feel compelled to help those students who struggle through these limitations, but I don't feel responsible for other students, who themselves don't display a sense of responsibility.  I don't believe I can teach them that.  I can make them aware of behavior I perceive to be unprofessional.  But from there on out, the choice in how to react to the information is theirs to make.

This is not the first time teaching the class where these issues have manifest.  But this time my class has more students.  I have tried to preserve an approach that I first used in fall 2012, then to good effect.  But the last few times these issues have been there.  Maybe it's time for me to hang up the spikes and go onto something else.

But if I do that, who else is going to get these students to turn around?

Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech - My Take

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a couple of pieces that caught my attention.   The first was This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost.  The article included an interview with the professor, David Karpf.  He had written a Tweet about the NY Times columnist Bret Stephens that eventually went viral, but only after Stephens responded to it in a way that raised attention. The other piece appeared the next day.  It is by Steven Salaita and is entitled My Life As a Cautionary Tale: Probing the limits of academic freedom.  I will comment a bit on both of these articles below.  Mainly for my own edification before writing this piece, I did a Google search on academic freedom versus freedom of speech.  From that search I found this page at Columbia Law School, which I found helpful.  While I'm no legal scholar, I had two points to take away from this piece.  First, many people confound the two.  Second, academic freedom is about community rights, groups of scholars within a certain field have the right to set the norms for the field and establish those truths that the field embraces.  Freedom of speech is an individual right.  The two may be related but they are different.  Then I want to bring in this piece from the Sunday Review, Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?  This will round out the picture for me.

I want to begin with some history, which will start when I was in grad school (1976-80).  In this world that I was introduced to, scholarly communication happened first via working paper, where the authors produced a document that might have had earlier drafts and might have been previewed by some small circle of colleagues, but then was revised for broader distribution, yet the work had yet to go through the peer review process.  Most of the audience for a paper would read it in working paper form.  During this time period, line space in published journals was scarce, so even a paper that was accepted for publication might be trimmed substantially to fit with the space allotted to it.  The working paper then would survive as the longer form, even after the paper had been published.  This gives some sense of the community for which the working paper was intended.

Sometimes reprints of popular articles would be made and distributed in undergraduate classes, to expose those students to well known research.  However, undergraduates generally didn't have access to the published research in bound periodicals.  When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I only could get into the stacks by having the faculty member I was doing some research for sign a note that my access was on his behalf.  At Illinois, undergraduates don't have access to the stacks in the Main Library.  I can't remember what the situation was at Northwestern this way.   But my general sense is that published research was restricted in its release to faculty and graduate students.  It was not meant for a general audience.

Regarding publication in general interest magazines or op-ed pieces in a newspaper, some luminaries in the field did that, certainly.  So there was an "educating the public about the field" function achieved this way.  But those who authored in this way counted for only a small fraction of the field.  Most scholars didn't do this at the time.

In the late 1970s - the mid 1980s academic freedom was contained to this sort of communication.  At the individual scholar level, the research agenda was determined by that scholar; co-authors, and academic friends who would make friendly suggestions about the work might have some influence, but the ultimate decision was with the individual scholar.  Similarly, while course assignments were made by the academic department, given the course assignment the scholar would control the syllabus and the set of readings chosen.  There were some obligations that were mandatory - the instructor had to specify office hours and a final exam had to be given, except in seminar courses. The instructor did have to operate within these constraints, but had flexibility on other matters as long as the constraints were satisfied.

What about publication of work entirely outside the field, scholarly or otherwise?  Could that impact academic freedom?  My first year of grad school at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering, published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which denied the Holocaust ever happened.  It created quite a maelstrom yet Butz kept his tenure, to the chagrin of many on campus.  If we contrast what happened with Butz to the Salaita case, I believe there are two factors that are important to note here.  The first is that Northwestern is a private university while Illinois is a public university.  Second, Butz had already been at Northwestern for a couple of years before the book came out.  So his tenure had been granted ahead of that event.  In contrast, in the fine print of the offer letter that Salaita received from Illinois it said pending the approval of the Board of Trustees.  Such approval was never granted.  That much I know.  What I don't know is when Salaita resigned from Virginia Tech.  If it was when he initially received the offer letter from Illinois, then in retrospect that was a mistake, since he did have tenure at Virginia Tech.  I can only guess about this.  My conjecture is that any controversial publication of work outside of normally scholarly outlets will severely limit the scholar's market, regardless of the quality of the scholarly publications.  If the scholar has tenure at one institution that is some job security, but it doesn't transfer to other institutions.

Now let's move forward to how the Internet has impacted scholarly communication.  A different form emerged - communities of practice - where members of the community would post or respond to other posts in some discussion forum.  This began with Usenet Newsgroups in the mid 1980s.  I initially did something like this in the bulletin board applications FirstClass (for folks on my campus who were affiliated with SCALE) and in Allaire Forums for those who were part of the Sloan-C community.  Listserv made email an effective way for groups to form and communicate, since members then didn't need other software to participate.   Communities of practice were not restricted to academic fields and could be used for any endeavor where members shared some common interest.  For example, many classes embraced a community of practice approach where members of the class could discuss course topics.  An important distinction to keep in mind is open groups versus closed groups. With an open group, a potential member can self-enroll into the group.  With a closed group, only vetted individuals become members and the criteria for membership would be predetermined.  Class groups, for example were typically restricted to the instructor and the students who were registered in the class.

My experience is that while mostly such groups had discussion where members respected each other and where disagreements might then be negotiated in a friendly fashion, once in a while there would be a jerk in a group, whose flip and off the cuff remarks would bother other members.  This could then cascade into something toxic. I've experienced this both in professional groups and in class groups. Something similar might then happen with individual emails.  We soon learned that while people understood norms of behavior when in face to face discussion, when writing on a computer screen with the message to be sent after the writing was completed, many people would "take the gloves off" and say harsh things, only to regret that they had sent the message after it had been delivered and they had calmed down from the earlier provocation.  It is from this observation that netiquette was born.  Further, many people learned to move away from the  computer when they were agitated.  Alas, these lessons may not have stayed learned and/or the next generation of users never mastered them.

As the technology changed some of the issues also morphed.  I started this blog back in spring 2005.  Within about six months or so I was part of the edu blogging community.  Other people would read my blog regularly and I would read other blogs in the community on a regular basis as well.  Sometimes we would comment on their blogs.  Other times we would respond in our subsequent posts.  I later learned that I was a slow blogger (possibly the slowest).  Indeed Barbara Ganley, who is pictured writing outside at the beginning of the linked piece, was one of the people who became part of the circle I was in.  I enjoyed that community very much.  But it didn't last.  The sort of writing that I'm doing in this post is meant to be read on a computer screen.  As smartphones began to take over, the readership for these longer pieces declined, simply because of the screen size to render the text.  Plus the multiprocessing, moving between many different messages in a short period of time, doesn't favor the lengthy piece that has been composed slowly. The quick hitter wins out here.  And winning has a metric, or a set of metrics, that are undeniable - hits, likes, referrals, etc.  I should also note here that life events also impacted my participation in the edu blogging community.  After I retired (in summer 2010) I didn't feel the need.  I still wrote posts once in a while.  But I no longer felt it necessary to read other edu blogs, let alone comment on them.

The point here, bringing this back to the title of my post, is that a truly academic discussion of a subject, with nuance and counterpoints, is facilitated by a slow blogging approach.  A scholar can make a strong argument this way where others can disagree but see the scholar has attended to the underlying issues and treated others respectfully.  While that is still possible, the market largely made slow blogging dry up.

So, for example, in the Chronicle piece featuring the interview with David Karpf, he argues that Bret Stephens simply didn't get it that Karpf's initial tweet was a joke.  Let us, for a moment, imagine that Stephens read the Chronicle piece before he ever saw the tweet.  Would Stephens have reacted the same way if only then did he see the tweet or would he have shrugged it off as not worthy of a response?  There is an issue for which I can see an argument made both ways as to whether an author bears any responsibility for errors resulting in misinterpretation that someone in the audience might make, especially if the author is someone like David Karpf who is savvy about how social media works.  Karpf talked in the interview about how he felt secure because he has tenure.  So he would not be harmed by Stephens' response (contacting the Provost of George Washington University in the process).  But Karpf did not address whether his institution might be harmed even if he personally remains unscathed.  I can't say in this case, but I'm quite clear that in the Salaita matter the U of I was hurt in this episode, along a variety of fronts.   If the individual faculty member remains unharmed but the institution might be damaged as a result, what is the responsible thing for the faculty member to do?  I will return to this question in a bit.

I have had a couple of incidents in teaching where my students misinterpreted my intentions, in such a way as to render what I planned, which made sense to me for good pedagogic reasons both ex ante and ex post, but which the students thought I was pursuing some far left agenda and indoctrinating them in the process (I wasn't). So the idea that especially conservative students will misinterpret instructor motives seems a very real issue to me.  I don't know how most faculty deal with it, but as for me I opted not to teach behavioral economics, the class where the issue arose, and changed the approach in the next course I did teach, the economics of organizations, so the issue wouldn't arise there.  I wrote about this in a post called On the role or economic rationality in teaching undergraduate economics.  The post makes reference to the book Nudge, by Sunstein and Thaler.

Seeing that a behavioral approach can have real economic consequence in areas where the assumption of rational decision making would predict no consequence whatsoever, there is a temptation to want to teach about behavioral economics.  Indeed I offered a course on that in spring 2011.  Unfortunately I stumbled into a couple of issues, one anticipated, the other not.  The anticipated one concerned senioritis.  Attendance dropped below 50% fairly early into the semester.  Many of the students didn't seem very earnest about what they were supposedly learning.  The unanticipated issue resulted from using the Nudge book as the core reading in the second half of the course.  The underlying philosophy to guide the nudges is called Libertarian Paternalism.  It is libertarian in the sense that choice by the individual is retained.  It is paternalistic in that the nudges are defined to achieve some social good defined by other than the individual.  In preparation for the students in encountering this philosophy, I had the students read this piece by Amy Gutmann on paternalism unmodified, with regard to the State's interest in the education of children, and then I had them read the Supreme Court case Wisconsin versus Yoder.  Among those students who were earnestly participating in the class, several reacted quite negatively to these pieces on the merits.  They wanted as little government interference in the ordinary activities of individuals as possible.  From there, they reacted negatively to much that is in Nudge.

So I opted not to teach that course again.  I didn't want to have to do battle with the students on their politics as we were learning the economics.  Instead, last spring I taught a course on the Economics of Organizations.  This semester I'm teaching on the same topic though in a different format.   The environment that organization members operate under is full of uncertainty.  Different members have different information and they may very well also have different agendas for what the organization should be trying to accomplish.   So it is in this setting where I pose the question - what should the role of economic rationality play in teaching such a course?

That example is a sample of one course offering. In this case, the conservative students ended beating up on the liberal professor. And the liberal professor wanted out.  In this case out means teaching economics in a way where liberal or conservative shouldn't matter much at all.  I know it is dangerous to generalize from a sample of one. But that single experience has me believing that the hype and the reality are two different things on this issue.  While conservatives lament liberal professors indoctrinating students, perhaps true in the humanities on occasion, how much does it happen in social science and business disciplines, where the conservative students mock liberal professors who then must conform to the prior expectations that students have?  And if this reverse form of indoctrination is actually happening, who is reporting about it?  If it happens more frequently than others care to admit, why isn't that commanding any attention?

I've set the stage for the real issue that I want to talk about, but which I'm afraid doesn't get any attention at all. But before I get to this, here is my university's code of conduct.   The code is fundamentally about preserving the trust between the university and the larger community. At this level of generality, it seems an imperative we must all respect.  But when one drills down a little, it then creates many issues about what preserving the trust means.  These issues are exacerbated by how the university raises funds, with state tax dollars playing less of a role, while tuition and gifts are of increasing importance.

Undergraduate education at the university should be a concern for all faculty, all undergraduate students, and those graduate students who participate as TAs, graders, or in other capacities in undergraduate instruction.  Yet we are a campus where STEM rules and Social Science drools.  (I won't even mention the arts and humanities.)  We market the successes that sometimes occurs in STEM. (For example, see this page about undergraduate research at the university.)  We don't discuss the mediocrity and outright failures that are more obvious when looking in social science.  

I wrote about this in a post called More Thoughts on Campus Strategic Planning - Five Years Later.  Imagine that we will do a SWOT analysis on undergraduate education.  The underlying issue is whether weakness and threats can get a full airing or if they are glossed over because the fundraising arm of the university reports that an open discussion of the issues will damage contributions.  Those who are writing the checks want to feel good about the university, even if that feeling is generated in a glossed over, uncritical way. Further, there is a long run/short run aspect to this consideration.  If eventually all the warts will come out, does the current claim that everything is honky-dory amount to the powers that be saying that if the bad news will eventually come out, let it happen on the next person's watch?

The particular issue that I'd like to see get a broader hearing are student transfers within campus, particularly those from the College of Engineering to some major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Economics in particular. The previous time I taught my course, fall 2017, I had quite a few such students who transferred in this way and many of them, perhaps all of them, were bitter about their experiences while in Engineering.  One of them, based on what she wrote in her blog for my class, went through a rather severe depression as a result of that experience. Yet the strong academic reputation of the university is based largely on the reputation of the College of Engineering.  My sense of things is that new students coming in don't understand the reality on the ground and/or the brutal competition that engineering engenders needs to be softened so the students don't get beaten up by it.  But this is a tough issue to discuss openly.  So one wants to know, will we ever get to such a discussion or not?

I don't know whether this would make sense to either David Karpf or Steven Salaita, but it is my view that episodes like the ones they were engaged in weaken the university in a way which makes it much harder to have the type of discussion I've described in the previous paragraph.  Put a different way, since no news is good news, when the university makes the news that usually ends up tarnishing the university's reputation.  Senior leadership of the university then proceeds by damage control.  Stopping the bleeding becomes job one.  Nothing else can be accomplished until the university's reputation has been restored.

It is my view that Twitter is a terrible forum for discussing university issues, while simultaneously being the best forum if the goal is to attract eyeballs. It invites a blunt and inflamed rhetoric by the author and thereby encourages venting rather than calm and persuasive discourse.  We live in a world where now anyone can self-publish online.  It seems to me that academic freedom, as distinct from freedom of speech, comes with a responsibility to educate, especially when the audience for the communication is largely outside the university. If we know ahead of time that some people will have a visceral and strongly negative reaction to a blunt message, then academics have a responsibility to mitigate against that outcome by changing the nature of how they communicate.  The visceral and negative reaction might still happen.  Yet any thoughtful reader would then have to acknowledge that the author tried to make an even handed argument.  We should work toward that as our social norm.

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks.....

.....What Would It Take to get the Start of the Semester Add-Drop Period Down from 10 Days to 5 Days?

In my next class session we'll spend some time on Paul David's famous paper on QWERTY.  The paper initially goes through the history of the typewriter.  In the nineteenth century the mechanism was slow and clunky.  Having one key depressed before the previous key returned to its original position would cause the keys to jam.  The inventor of the qwerty keyboard designed it as a way to slow the typist down, to reduce the number of key jams.  At the time of the invention, it was an efficiency enhancing development, which is why it took hold. But then the typewriter mechanism improved. This was followed by electric typewriters, some of which no longer had keys at all. Then there were word processors and personal computers.  Eventually there was no reason whatsoever to slow people down with typing.  Yet the qwerty keyboard has persisted, in spite of some efforts to unseat it by keyboards that are more sensible for encouraging rapid and accurate typing.

I think my own situation is typical and explains why we're locked into qwerty.  I learned touch typing in the summer after 10th grade (1970), attending a secretarial school in Flushing for that very purpose.  At the time I learned on a manual typewriter.  But those skills have survived to the present and are evident to me as I compose this blog post. I surely have a preference now for a qwerty keyboard.  I would hate any other system.  That would require me to practice hunt and peck and slow down the flow of the writing substantially.  This is why I don't like to text on my phone, even with a qwerty keyboard.  It's painful to input that way, at least for me.

The qwerty example is the best known example of lock-in to a practice that is no longer efficient, but it is certainly not the only example, not by a long shot.  The university offers several other examples. In class we will consider the lecture and ask whether it remains an efficient form of instruction or if it no longer is yet persists because of lock-in.  My views on this are somewhat eclectic.  I believe that lecture still makes sense as a mean of discourse when researchers are communicating with other researchers in the same field about their recent work.  I also believe lecture makes sense, in other settings that are closer to a general interest presentation when the audience is reasonably large, though then you might say the person is giving a talk. The first case, especially, means that much doctoral education will be in the form of lecture, so the students can prepare both to give talks about their own research, and to understand the obligation of members of the audience.  Reading a professional working paper requires diligence and keeping up with the literature.  It is effortful.  Having gone through this rigor as a doctoral student, is it any wonder that new assistant professors lecture?  It is what they were trained to do.

But for teaching undergraduates, especially when not in a large class setting, is lecture the best way for them to learn?  There are several different angles on this.  One is that making online micro-lectures is now a viable option and further, the videos can be made broadly available, so students elsewhere can view them if they so desire.  As an example, my profarvan channel on YouTube has recently gone over 250,000 views, the vast majority of which is from other than my own students.  Second, the online micro lectures can be coupled with online assessments that encourage the students to pay attention while watching the video.  Third, the research on learning shows "active learning methods" superior to lecture for most students.  Then there is my personal preference, Socratic dialog.  I like it because the sequence of question and response is the closest thing I know to thinking, and what I'm trying for in the classroom is to model thinking for the students. More than a dozen years ago, Barbara Ganley and I debated these issues on our respective blogs.  (Barbara's post that I was responding to can be found here, but it takes a while to load.)  At the time I had yet to experience the-post retirement teaching that I've now been doing for many years, where around then when I did teach it was students in the Campus Honors Program.  My sense of the student has changed as a result of this more recent teaching.  And I'm more in Barbara's camp now then I was then.

Another example of lock-in at the university that is usually given is the academic calendar, which treats the summer in an asymmetric fashion.  Once upon a time students needed to go home to tend to the harvest.   That need is no longer present, but the academic calendar persists as if it still were there. The first 10 days of the semester is the add-drop period.  While I don't know this for a fact, I do remember back to when students had to line up at the Armory to register and the process was all done on paper.  Instructors would eventually get a paper based copy of their course roster.  Adds and drops after that were printed on manila cards.  I'm guessing that the 10 days were needed then. But now course registration is done online, yet we still have these first 10 days.   Is that too an example of lock-in.  Or does it survive now simply out of institutional inertia?

Before trying to answer that, I want to note the example of Google, which has taken the approach to kill applications it had been supporting, even if the applications are popular with current users.  Google does this when the application no longer fits into their overall business plan.  Examples include Google Reader, iGoogle, and most recently Google+.  Even though I was a pretty avid user of the first two of these services, I didn't jump off the Google bandwagon after those services were cancelled.  So the lockin, if it existed in this case, might not be to a particular service or way of doing business.  Alternatively, the company might take some near term hits when it does cancel such a service, users who relied on the service are indeed upset by the cancellation, but the company can endure that and those users eventually do adjust to the new circumstance, perhaps more quickly than they had anticipated.

Now I want to consider the first 10 days of the semester and the add-drop period, where students can add or drop a class without getting permission from an instructor or an advisor.  In theory, students are not  supposed to game the system by registering for more classes than they plan to take.  I informally polled my students on that issue in my class on Tuesday, where I asked, to be cute and so my students didn't feel they needed to lie about themselves, do they know of other students who hoard classes like this, where they plan to drop at least one of them during the semester?  I only eyeballed the results, but it seems that a vast majority present raised their hands, indicating they were aware of such gaming of the system.   Then I explained that the Econ Department also apparently gamed the system.  On August 15, 11 days before the start of the semester, I did a tally of all the 400-level classes in Economics based on the listings in the online Class Schedule. At that time there were no openings whatsoever for undergraduates, while there were 11 cross-listed graduate sections that had some openings.  (I think there was 27 offerings overall.)   A week or so later, there were many openings for undergraduates in 400-level classes.  Apparently the department had held back seats for late arriving students who had yet to register, perhaps sensible under the circumstances.   Then the free-for-all began.

Because I use a class Website that is not on a campus supported application, I email the students ahead of time with the url for the site and some other information specific to each student.  (Thank you, mail merge.)  As my class is Tues and Thurs, I always make this mailing on Sunday.  I downloaded the roster for my class the day before.  At the time I had 37 students registered for my class.  Since then, I've had 14 students drop and 18 students add the class, and in one case a student dropped but then added it again later. This amount of churn is unbelievable. Is it really necessary?

From my perspective, instructors are definitely not locked into the current 10-day arrangement.  I don't speak for other instructors but I imagine that most of them would echo the sentiments in this rhyme, written back in 2011. You don't want students adding your class who have missed the opening session(s).  Catch up is hard and it places an added burden on the instructor.

This point makes it necessary to distinguish switching discussion sections for the same large lecture class, either because the new section is at a preferred time or because the student wants a different TA, from what I was describing with the 400-level classes.  In the case of switching discussion sections in a large lecture class there isn't the catching up I mentioned in the previous paragraph and the section switching probably should be accommodated, even after the 10 days are over.  Indeed, at the U of I students can add a class after the 10 days with the permission of the instructor.  So there maybe be enough flex in the system as is to handle this case.

Missing the first two weeks of class in an entirely new course is a different matter. Such adds do happen and I'm fearful now that I will experience some of them this time around.  It is a downer to consider the possibility.

A real study of late student add-drop behavior would entail interviewing many of the students who make such course changes to understand their situation and their motives.  Did they find some other course they were registered for too difficult or the instructor too rigid?  Do they have a friend taking the course they add late who gives them the skinny on the new course, something they couldn't get from the available information to all students (course syllabi)?  Did they make some bad mistake in their previous class and would prefer not to be accountable for that so want to switch classes to start with a new slate?  Or was it just sloth and they couldn't figure out the right courses to register for the previous semester under the normal scheme where students register for classes?  Who knows?  Some data gathering might shed some light on this.

Maybe an efficiency argument can be made for enabling adds through day 10.  (The last day students can drop a class is much later than that.) But I doubt it.  Further,  there clearly are a lot of bad things that result from the churn.  Number one of these is that instructors have to adjust their teaching during the first two weeks of the semester so that late adding students can catch up.  Students who are in the class on day one are done a disservice by this practice.

Once the appropriate study has been done, the issue of shortening the duration of the add-drop period becomes a matter of campus politics.  I wouldn't want to speculate on whether it's possible to do something in this dimension or not.  But I suspect that if another peer institution were to do this, that would make it much easier for us to do it here.  The arguments I've been making are not specific to my campus.  Somebody should have a crack at this, please.

The Lack of Usability in Campus/University Supported Applications That Undergird Instruction

I'm on a Maslow kick as of late.  In this post I'm going to talk mainly about applications that learning technologists on campus tend to ignore, because they are outside the scope of their direct responsibility.  But instructors get waylaid by these applications, for pretty obvious reasons.  If you believe in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this means that instructors get stuck on lower rungs of the hierarchy and as a result don't self-actualize, which in this context means they don't use the instructional technology in a creative way that might enhance learning.  They are too busy coping with other accommodations with the technology to do that.

Here I will take on the Student Information System, University email for students, and if I've got any energy left over then I'll consider the hosting of files so they are publicly available as well.  My complaints are not new.  And that's a big part of the point.  Why hasn't there been innovation so what was perceived as a problem 10 years ago isn't a problem now?

Let's get at it.  My university uses Banner as their SIS.  It has the unfortunate feature of treating the section as the unit of measurement rather than the course as unit of measurement.  If you teach a class where there is only one section, this is no biggie.  But if you teach a class that has multiple sections which are cross listed, as I do, then there are several problems.  The biggest one right now for me is the way quotas are set.  The room I teach in has 50 seats for students.  That is an obvious quota.  The software should not have more than 50 students registered for the class.  But I have one undergrad section and one grad section cross listed, as do several other upper level undergraduate classes offered in Economics.  Though the classes are primarily intended for undergraduates, Masters students are welcome to take the classes as a way to round out their degrees.  Banner forces one quota for the undergrad section and another quota for the grad section.  The two add up to 50.  If the undergrad fills while the grad section has openings, then more undergraduate students can't register for the class, unless the quota is manually reset. In fact, this is happening for many of the upper level courses being offered.  I did a tally of this last Thursday for 400-level courses in Economics using data from the Course Explorer. At the time there were no empty seats for undergrads, while there were 11 grad sections with openings across the various offerings.

This situation created an ethical conundrum for me.  I'd rather teach a smaller class and, in fact, my course has never had more than about 30 students in the past.  But there are more students now taking such classes and possibly fewer offerings overall (of that I'm less sure).  Do I have some responsibility to those undergraduate students who want to add a 400-level class in Economics by increasing the quota on my undergraduate section?  If there were a quota on the room only, not on the individual sections which are cross listed, that decision would be taken out of my hands.  As it is now, it looks like the Economics Department is giving preferential treatment to the grad students, as empty seats are being held for them while the undergrads don't have any options.   Even if in fact there is some preference for the grad students, is this the sort of message that the department wants to broadcast?  The software forces this.   It would be much better if the software allowed students to add as long as the room wasn't full, regardless of which section the students joined.  It's amazing that this simple function is not supported.

Coupled with this, alas, I can't view both sections pooled in one view, nor can I readily download data from Banner for import into Excel.  These are obvious deficiencies of the software.  The campus provides work arounds for these limitations.   The LMS can be viewed as an alternative roster service.  And DMI also offers such a service.  But the services are imperfect substitutes.  For example, while DMI does list a second major for the students, it doesn't list a minor.  Also, the home address isn't provided.  This is particularly useful to identify international students and out-of-state domestic students.  So, while it would be nice to go to just once source for the roster information, I end up using all three sources.  Before the semester starts I rely mainly on Banner, as the information is most current there.  DMI does color code recent adds and drops, which is useful for the first 10 days of the semester.  After that I use the LMS for it's electronic grade book function. I've been doing this for so long that I'm used to it.  But that doesn't make it right.  A newbie instructor is likely to be frustrated by this environment.

Let me turn to email/student identity.  While I've not done a careful sampling, my general impression is that about 50% of my students use non-university email as their primary form of communication.  There are two obvious reasons why.  One is continuity from before being a students on campus and after they graduate.  If they've already been using their email for external to the university functions (and I will note that a quick check of my current roster has students with other external sites - LinkedIn mainly, some other sites too) then it makes sense from their perspective to continue with that.  The other use is so they can change their screen name to a preferred name that is different from what is on their university record. This is particularly important for international students who want to use an Americanized name will studying in the U.S.  Our business practice at the university, however, doesn't accommodate either of these uses.  Instead it is up to each instructor to adjust or not.

I will note that ATLAS has a photo roster service that is potentially quite nice.  I gather that it is pulling data from Banner and the I-Card (student ID) databases.  So in addition to name and photo it also offers the student's UIN (University ID Number).  If students were allowed to enter a preferred name into one of of these databases, then that information could be pulled as well.  In my class UIN has no function.  Addressing students by their preferred names would have real value.

Now let me briefly talk about my use of Box.com for my course files, rather than use the LMS.  This allows the files to be made publicly available, so my course site becomes a mini OER.  When these files are associated with a YouTube video, they do get external access.  I would like to better identify external access from access by students in my class, but at present I can only tell that by when access occurs.  I do wish the Campus would consider the OER function more seriously, rather than only be concerned about Coursera, but I suppose I'm a voice in the wilderness on this.  C'est la vie.

Wearing Out

Dualism in all things is the rule, not the exception.  Why I need a frequent reminder of that, I don't know.  But it seems surprising every time I tell myself that.  In this case my recent fascination with early childhood development as a template for how the college student goes about school, including much reminiscing about my own time in nursery school and elementary school, a foreshadowing of The Professor Mind, has its own dual in my current self-perceived decline, of which I will detail a few separate incidents.  Then I will wave my hands and make some not so sweeping conclusions about whether the cause is mainly fear of the inevitable or if it is the inevitable itself.

First let me tell a personal joke that I first used on my then optometrist (he too has retired now) but subsequently have used on several other doctors I visit.  It's clear that some parts of me are slowly wearing out.  For my eyes, in particular, I'm managing that by taking eye vitamins twice daily and by putting drops in during the evening. What I told the optometrist is that my goal would be for all my parts to wear down, more or less, at the same time.  He chuckled at that one.  Be careful what you wish for.

Then, yesterday, I had a little episode with the dishwasher.  I thought I had started it, but four hours later it was still not done, so I opened it up.  The control panel was flashing.  Apparently, I had never pushed the start button.  This very simple thing bothered me because not all that long ago I was a campus administrator with learning technology my domain.  Such a person is supposed to like technology and be comfortable with it.  But more recently I'm vexed by such things, especially our hand control for the big TV in the family room.  There are many different pieces of hardware connected to it and a variety of packages play on it.  So manipulating the hand control is a challenge.  But the real biggie is when a message comes on the screen that says the firmware needs updating and wants to know whether that should happen now or not.  I push the button but there is no response.  Evidently I'm not on the right screen.  I haven't a clue what the right screen is or how to navigate to it.  There's some irony here, given my prior job.

Perhaps my bigger issue with technology is a perception that I'm making more typos than I used to.  Some of these flip letters in a word.  Others put in wrong letters altogether.  I teach in my class on the economics of organizations that there is an issue of alignment between management and the staff.  Apparently my mind and my fingers are having a similar issue.  Proofreading, of course, would negate this problem, or so one would think.  (Homophones survive even a serious proofreading, but the reader may be more tolerant of that sort of error.)  The reality is that the energy to proofread is less than what it used to be, because the generating prose is itself getting harder.  To paraphrase a well-known maxim, all dissipative play and no engaging work makes Lanny a dull boy.  Also, in the type of online chat I do, using Facebook Messenger a fair amount and texting some, the environment itself is not that conducive for proofreading.  (Composing a post in Blogger is better.  The editing window is ample and the normal sentence-paragraph structure is evident.)

I'm also finding that my ability to deal with even minor stress has declined a great deal.  It used to be that minor sources of annoyance would just bounce off and become part of the background noise.  If necessary, they would be dealt with as they came up.  But now I seem to fixate on them and am unable to let go, which I almost certainly should do.  Here's a case in point.  Earlier in the week, I got an email from the Econ Department's HR person about the course I'm supposed to teach this fall.  Apparently, since I didn't teach last year, they have to file an I-9 form for me.  (Though I only had been teaching in the fall and not in the spring, so I don't understand why they have to do that now but didn't each time they did rehired me in the past.)  The email said this had to be done no later than the date my appointment starts, August 16, which is a week from tomorrow.  I will be out of town the first part of next week, so wanted to get this done before I left and responded with that information. Then nada from the person who sent the email.  I also noted, though just to myself, that the offer letter was contingent on doing a background check (which was a non-issue in my case) but didn't mention an I-9 form.  I submitted a signed offer letter, so in my mind, though I'm not a lawyer, that should be a binding contract as the background check was completed in under an hour. Yet it now seems possible that the I-9 will not get done in time.  What then?

My bigger stress with regard to this class is what the ultimate enrollment will be.  When the Department Head asked me to teach the class, where the year before he did not, he told me the class would "border on 60 students" because the department didn't have enough upper level offerings for majors.  So I started to plan for that.  I asked for a classroom in Wohlers Hall, rather than in DKH where the Econ Department is located, because Wohlers has amphitheater classrooms, which are better when the class size is 60.  And I looked to hire a former student as a TA, because I have students do weekly blogging, where I do try to write interesting comments in response on each student post, but 60 is just too many for that. So I was hoping to divide up the commenting work with the TA.  This former student graduated right after my class in 2017, lives elsewhere, and has a full time job. I envisioned the commenting as taking 5-10 hours a week for her and getting her some additional spending money for the effort.  But the department didn't go for it.  They promised me a grad student hourly instead.

So far, I haven't been assigned anyone, and it is unclear to me whether they will follow through on that.  The actual classroom I am in has a capacity of 50 students, which is in Wohlers Hall, and is flat.  (The class is from 9:30 to 10:50 a fairly popular time on campus and I'm guessing the amphitheater classrooms had been previously scheduled at that time.)   Further, the class is cross listed - one section for undergrads, a different section for grads in Econ.  (The department has a big bucks professional masters program and uses the upper level undergraduate offerings to amplify the variety of courses available to those masters students).  In Banner they set the capacities of the undergrad section at 30 and the grad section at 20.  Yesterday, the undergrad section reached capacity.  The grad section has no students registered.  Managing this is the department's issue, not mine, but for planning how to conduct the class I would like to know how many students I will ultimately have.  I would really prefer not to have more than 35 students and in my mind an upper level class should be taught like a seminar, so no more than the mid 20s in enrollment.  But I also try to be a good citizen and accommodate the Department's wishes.  If they need the classroom to be full, I'll figure out some way to conduct the class.  Yet while knowing that, I'm still stressing out about it.  I need to chill out, till the students are back on campus.  I wish I could do that, but it seems outside my control.

Then there is the matter that my mental quickness seems to be on the downs.  This is a simple test of that proposition.  I do the Daily Jumble, which appears in the local paper.  I used to be able to unscramble the words in a snap and then most of the time I could get the theme pretty quickly as well.  I don't know where that skill comes from, it's just one of those things that came easily to me.  But this past week it's been a struggle.  I sit there and ask myself, why am I not getting this?  Eventually I do, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.  Is this a foreboding of all sorts of thinking that requires some insight?    Last week I had a terrible senior moment (that went on for about a half hour) seeing somebody while grocery shopping whose voice was familiar, but I couldn't place him.  It was very disturbing.  (It turned out to be my old optometrist.)  And for quite a while I have been having the issue that I know the famous person, but can't come up with the name.   My memory was once truly great (witness those report cards from nursery school).  It now is beginning to betray me.

I could go on and talk about aches and pains as well as various ailments.  But I think that's enough.  The real issue here is whether this is normal aging combined with perhaps too much time where I'm at home at the computer rather than interacting in some social context or if this is marking an acceleration in my personal decline. The jury is still out on this.   I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been in this situation.  I wonder how others manage it.

Let me close with this point.  The past few years I've noticed an ageism that discriminates against retired people, where if I were still working full time I wouldn't experience this nearly as much.  My ideas are ignored now much more readily than they otherwise would be.  (The low number of hits on this blog is one indicator of that.)  Yet if I am experiencing an acceleration in my own decline, my desire to accomplish something of substance while I still can is all the greater.  The question is how to do that.  My dad read us an abbreviated form of Don Quixote when we were young kids.  Maybe it's time now to read the real thing.

Maslow and the Creative Attitude

Last week I started to read The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, a book of Maslow's essays which I believe were written later in his career.  Some years ago I read Toward a Psychology of Being.  Actually, I read it twice.  The first time was in the 1990s as I was trying to catch up on theory about learning, while doing my campus job as an ed tech administrator, where I thought that background was necessary.  Educational technology was about learning as much as it was about the technology, maybe even more so.  The next time I read it was perhaps a dozen years later, when I was near retirement, where it was more pleasure reading and to gain some further self-understanding. In both instances I found that much of what I read in Maslow spoke to me directly, as if he was explaining my behavior, especially when I was writing or concentrating while making some Excel learning object.

I am somewhat reluctant to call myself a self-actualizer, because Maslow thought that those who are in this category represent only a small fraction of the population, and I am loathe to self-diagnose in a way that makes me part of an elite group.  Doing so seems egotistical.  But some realizations as of late make me more willing.  For one, periods of complete absorption into some task happen less frequently for me now.  Indeed, I'm finding that much more often I can't read straight through to the end an Op-Ed in the New York Times.   In the last few years, where I've spent quite a lot of time sitting in front of my computer, I've acquired a kind of ADHD.  I will speculate on why that is and what I should be doing to reduce its incidence, though much of this will come as no surprise, for it seems that everyone who is in front of a screen may be experiencing something similar. The other part is that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs should be reconsidered to allow being on several different rungs of the hierarchy, more or less simultaneously.  Most people these days are exposed to stress, from a variety of different sources.  Coping with those, sometimes by caving in, other times by an inelegant approach so definitely not self-actualization in that domain, does not preclude that periods of intense concentration may accompany a writing activity or some other project I happen to be engaged in at the time.  In Maslow's terms, health and sickness co-exist in me.  It is not all of one and none of the other.

I suspect this is true of most people, but in varying proportions.  And what I want to know, which is why I'm writing this piece, is for college students, such as the ones who will take my class this fall, having made their deal with the devil where they've opted for a non-creative path through school, is it worthwhile to encourage them to reconsider that choice, as a way to make them more effective at lifelong learning, or will there be a pernicious effect as a consequence from having pointed out their inadequacies without giving them sufficient training on how to remedy those?  At present I'm opting for making the point rather forcefully, but then not belaboring it.  I do believe the choice is ultimately for the students to make.  My job then is only to make them aware of the decision, not to foist it upon them.  But I will criticize that the "good students" in the crowd over program themselves and are constantly juggling the various activities that they've committed to.  This juggling is inconsistent with deep concentration on one activity only.  It may be that they've become addicted to keeping all those balls in the air and consider it something of an accomplishment just to be able to do that.  Yet they are shortchanging themselves on depth of experience that way.

Let's turn to child development and what in it might encourage the creative attitude as the kid matures.  It occurred to me to go back to my "report cards" from nursery school, which gave written evaluations only, no letter grades.  There are two of these, one from January 1960, reporting on my progress from the previous fall, when I was 4, the other from June 1960, reporting on my progress that spring, when I was 5.  The first area of the report is on physical development, where I struggled because my fine motor skills were lagging behind the other kids and because being a larger kid I may have been grouped with kids who were a bit older, even then, so this limitation may have felt even more extreme to me.   The other two areas are on intellectual development and social development.  There it seems my performance was much better - eager to try new things, a strong sense of completed work, a good memory, a high level of concentration, and a pleasing sense of humor. Without seeing the reports on other children, so to learn how much of this was fluff and how much was an accurate representation of the kid, this does seem quite a good foreshadowing of my adult self - at least on my good days.

Taking that as a starting point, I want to consider further developments that in retrospect seemed to matter for the creative attitude.  When I grew up kids didn't get pacifiers and, as a result, thumb sucking was pretty common.  I'm quite sure I did it a lot, till about age 7.  I also had my favorite security blanket, so held that in my left hand while I was sucking the thumb on my right hand.  That's the way I went to sleep.  To give up such an ingrained habit it probably helps a good deal if whatever else comes along next satisfies the same needs in the kid.  Somewhere around that time I read my first real book, Charlotte's Web, and did so sitting in an overstuffed chair in the basement with nobody else around, which provided quite a comforting environment for me.  So I was able to associate this sense of security with the joy of reading.  This joy was accompanied by some sense of control as to what would be read, as my school had a program of Individualized Reading, and my dad made sure I had ample reading materials, either from books we had at home or by taking me to the local library.  I wrote about this in a post called Read The Book and Find Out, the invariable closing line to the book reports students did in class then.

I want to be clear here.  I certainly got recommendations of what to read from adults, teachers and librarians.  From that I developed a pattern.  If I liked the suggestion, as I usually did, I would then read several other books by the same author and of the same genre.  Eventually I'd want to move on.  When I was early in this pattern, at that time I would elicit another recommendation for a different author and perhaps on a different topic.  Eventually I made those choices for myself as well.  Random House had a series of books for kids, biographies of famous Americans and sometimes histories of famous events.   I believe these had various authors, but were written according to a style the publisher specified.  I stuck with that series for quite a while and became excellent in social studies as a consequence.

While most of this reading was done outside of school I also want to note that especially in sixth grade, but perhaps in fifth grade as well, I spent a significant chunk of time doing school stuff on my own.  One thing, and lets remember that in the 1960s there was no such thing as a personal computer, I had a book to teach grammar that was designed to be interactive like a learning system, such as the Plato system developed at Illinois.  A little lesson was in a text box that took up part of a page.   Below that was a question to test the understanding of the lesson.  The answer, with an explanation, was below that.  Of the two or three kids who got this sort of instruction, we were told to cover up the answer and then see if our selection was correct.  If so, we could proceed.  If not, we were to go back to the lesson and see if we could figure out what we didn't understand the first time.   Only a few kids in the class got this programmed instruction and now, as an adult, I would love to know why I was selected to participate in it.  What I want to note here is simply that at this early age, I was 10 or 11 then, the teacher encouraged me to teach myself, given the programmed learning book.  I believe it reinforced the reading I was doing as another source of self-teaching.

The next step up on the path to creativity happened in 8th grade, when my math teacher asked me to join the Math Team, something that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own then.  I am extremely grateful to her now for making that suggestion. As I've written about this some time ago in a post called Math as a gateway to creativity, let me only note that as a prelude to addressing open ended issues which have no known solution, working on a hard math problem while knowing in advance that there is a solution, though it's not obvious what that solution is, offers an excellent way for the mind to explore possibilities and not give up too early.  I found I had some aptitude for this, a definite plus.  And I found it engaged me, in the same way that many people become engaged by a puzzle that doesn't admit an immediate solution.  Somewhere along the way I also developed a sense of either - I should be able to get this or this is beyond my capability.  That intuition matters a good deal.  It can't be perfect ahead of time.  As an adult working on something much more complex than a math team problem, I still had this same intuition about whether I should be able to get a pleasing answer.  Even now, I become bothered when I have that feeling, but have yet to produce something that cuts the mustard.  In my class, where I do want to bring Maslow's essay to the attention of students, I will make some mention of Grit and associate it with this notion of being bothered.  I persist because I can't let go when in that state of mind.  Then I'm operating under a certain tension.  I want release of that, but release can only come if the issue is resolved.  I'm incapable of saying, let's move on and perhaps return to it later.  This type of persistence as response is learned, in the sense of a habit that has formed, one which I choose not to break.  While it is happening it is vexing.  After the fact, the stick-to-itiveness proves remarkably productive.

Now I want to take on what is something of a puzzle, why I didn't write more in those years, particularly in high school, beyond what was required in the classes I took.   I did write some, contributing an article here and there to a school publication.  But I didn't feel a need to produce piece after piece, as I seem to feel now.  Here are some of the reasons why.  Probably most importantly, I had friends with whom I could talk about my formative ideas and learn about theirs.  Having such conversations, the urge for writing was less for me.  Then there was the mechanical aspect.  My handwriting was atrocious.   I had to slow down a lot to write out something that eventually would be typed up for publication. That made the writing activity itself more of a chore.  I did learn to touch type  in the summer after 10th grade, but the electric typewriter we had was in the den, the same room where my mother did her foreign language tutoring and where my parents played bridge when they had friends over to the house.  So it was only available to me at certain times.  Then, I pigeon-holed myself some.  My older sister had friends who could quote Shakespeare, in the context of the current discussion.  I definitely could not do that.  Plus, in English class I often couldn't make headway with the symbolism in the poetry we read.  So I didn't consider myself artsy.  For that reason, I never followed through on the encouragement I got from my ninth grade English teacher to try writing for the school's literary magazine.  For me, that was the road not taken.

I want to fast forward some and talk about productive habits I developed when doing research as an assistant professor, which morphed into something far less so after I retired.  It would take two or three months of serious thinking to work through a model, fully digest its implications, and then write that up in a paper.  I learned that between papers there needed to be a time interval for the mind to be fallow, a period of rejuvenation.  Some of that would happen during the work day while I was doing my research.  Doing the Times crossword, usually in the morning, and playing bridge at lunchtime provided such relief.  And then I would jog or play golf, to get some exercise and have a different sort of diversion.  Beyond that, however, between projects I would veg out even more - junk TV a source of downtime then. The pressure put on by publish or perish then, and later when I was an administrator to the more or less constant demands on my time, would serve as a discipline device so that the fallow time was limited.  Unfortunately, many of the activities in it had their addictive aspects, so when the discipline device was eliminated, I began to indulge more than was really healthy for me.  This is the underlying reality for me on which the new addictions from Facebook, Twitter, etc. have worked their evil magic.

The obvious answer is that when I'm not writing or researching a new topic to write about, I should step away from the computer.   I would like to think I have the resolve when reading online to stick with that piece of reading.  But the reality is that too often I bounce from one thing to another when at the computer.  I may go back to reading books on paper for this reason.  

Yet even in retirement there is work to do - for the class I will teach in the fall, for the volunteer organization I help to support, and once in a while trying to touch base with the ed tech universe that was my stomping grounds a decade ago.  And some of this work entails its own creative activity.  So I continue to delude myself that the periods intense concentration will return on their own.

Maslow is right to glorify those episodes.  They are precious indeed.  One may not realize that when partaking in them.  After the fact, it's a different story.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Why Not Up And Down Along With Left And Right?

When I was a graduate student at Northwestern I learned about a short book called Flatland, which served as a brief diversion for me from the intense study of economics.  I have a memory fragment of sitting outside of Norris Center on "the rocks" that were on the boundary of the landfill and Lake Michigan, reading the book on a reasonably sunny day. At one level the book is about math, what it is like living in an n-dimensional world and then being visited by an (n+1)-dimensional object.  In Flatland n = 2.  The story is told from the perspective of a Square who is visited by a Sphere, but who only sees one cross-section at a time.  Each cross-section appears as a circle.  To the Square, the Sphere seemingly has the ability to change its radius, but the Square is unable to comprehend that the Sphere resides in a higher dimensional space, which gives the complete explanation for this capability. By analogy, one might imagine that we who are 3-dimensional are visited by some 4-dimensional entity.  If the forth dimension were time, we would see the entity getting older or younger, seemingly at will. Thus, Flatland is a precursor for many other books that consider time travel.  (Flatland was first published in 1884.  The Time Machine was first published in 1895.)  Flatland is also a political satire about Victorian England and its closed mindedness about social class.  I will leave it to those of you who are interested enough to read Flatland to learn about the particulars of that critique.  Here it is enough to note that the math view of the story already has some closed mindedness built into it by the characters being unable to envision higher dimensions.

I am writing this piece in response to Thomas Edsall's column from yesterday, The Democratic Party Is Actually Three Parties.   The upshot from that piece is that because each of these sub parties has a different ideal point with regard to the policies that they'd like to see pursued, Edsall claims it will be difficult for the Democratic Party to find a winning platform that energizes all of these voters.  With all due respect to Anthony Downs, I believe the political scientists whom Edsall cites are trapped in a left-right (one-dimensional) universe, which while giving the lovely theoretical result about the median voter does make politics seem very much like a zero-sum game; if I win then you lose and vice versa.   In that universe, of course, that's the rational way to behave.  Then the entire debate becomes not about the policies themselves, but rather about the underlying distribution of voters along the left-right spectrum.  People justify pursuing their own preferred policy menu by arguing that is where there is a concentration of voters.

An alternative would be to envision a bargain between the various coalitions.  The thing is, for a bargain to take place there must be two or more dimensions; you get something but give up something else in return.  The dimensionality enables the bargaining.  Adding a second dimension, then, is needed.  Of course, there can be three or more dimensions, so we can have in and out along with up and down and left and right.  Sticking to two dimensions keeps it simple to explicate.  I teach this stuff in my economics class.  But in higher dimensions it is easier to find gains from trade.

Now a couple of more points and then I'll close.  I've written a post about a year ago that envisions just such a bargain.   The description of that starts in about the middle of the post.  We need language to talk about the thing you give up in the bargain and we need politicians who can speak to multiple constituencies with a straight face, who can describe the full bargain, not just the gains part.  In my way of thinking about this, the preferred language is to talk about responsibility and invoke JFK, ask what you can do for your country.  The part you give up in the bargain you then do for the good of the order. I don't hear rhetoric of that sort now.  I believe we need it, quite badly.

The other point, and it is related, is that the pollsters have made the game about appealing to voters who have fixed preferences.  I think in many cases that's wrong.  Voters need some education about what they want.  Regarding immigration, for example, the situation at the border is horrible and, of course, everyone wants that to end. But beyond that what is the right solution - I don't really know and I'm guessing most voters also don't know.  The proposal to end ICE, whether it is ultimately a good or bad idea, is based, I believe, on that those who become border agents now have a belligerence about them that is really undesirable.   These border agents take delight in treating brown-skin migrants with cruelty.  This is a real problem.  Our politics, unfortunately in my view, goes to solutions too quickly, and doesn't spend enough time talking about the problems themselves.  Perhaps there is fear that the problem won't be addressed at all if the current proposed solution doesn't win out.  I can understand that fear, but there might very well be alternative ways to address the problem that can work and are better overall.  The little I know about immigration issues comes mostly from the news, and then occasionally from some situation on campus, but I surely don't live and die with that issue. If the pollsters don't measure the intensity of the preference, along with the preference itself, they really don't have enough information to shape the bargain.  The politicians themselves should do some of this shaping, by educating the voters in the process.

Let me close with this snippet from Paul Begala, which is in the Edsall piece.  I thought it was pretty funny, also quite revelatory.

Democratic Twitter is dominated by overeducated, over-caffeinated, over-opinionated pain-in-the-ass white liberals. Every candidate, and every staffer, checks Twitter and other social media scores of times a day.

Whatever virtues Twitter has, it is not a good medium for education.  That requires something slower, and more thoughtful.  One might not get the readership that way, but it's the place to start.  If the party is to come together, that will require some serious thinking, and quite a bit of negotiation. 

Changing The Narrative About What Happened In The 2016 Election....

....Or Pouring Spilled Milk Back Into The Bottle.

We tend to forget the recent past too easily and too quickly.  We need to keep it in mind, to get a better understanding of the present.

I wonder how many Democratic voters see the history as I do.  I continue to maintain that the Presidential election was stolen - not by votes being miscounted, but by illegal acts that preceded the voting. There were several of those.  Russian interference - fake news and trolling, continues to get some press.  The Republican attack machine going after Hillary Clinton about Benghazi and the emails; this has now been supplanted by attack on the Squad of Four.  But it is the same McCarthyite bs, pure vitriol aimed to enrage the base and to cast doubt among swing voters.  If there's smoke there must be fire, right?  In this case, it's entirely wrong.  Yet the attacks are made plausible by prior prejudice the voters have.  For Hillary Clinton, this was in good part fueled by antipathy to Bill Clinton, itself fueled by the Republican attack machine, but also by the Monica Lewinsky affair.  With the Squad of Four, the prior prejudice is obvious and requires no amplification here. 

Yet the biggest of these prior acts, now seemingly forgotten, was Mitch McConnell not taking up the nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, a violation of his Constitutional imperative.  Logically, there is only one reason why McConnell did this.  Had Garland been considered through the normal Advice and Consent process, he would have gotten through, even with the Republicans in the majority, just as Clarence Thomas got through when the Democrats were in control.   Had that happened, as it should have, then there would have been no vacant seat to fill on the Supreme Court during the 2016 election.  In this case Evangelical voters would have stayed home, rather than hold their nose and vote for Trump, so they could get a Conservative on the Supreme Court.  Hillary Clinton would have won in the Electoral College, as well as in the popular vote.   That's how the election should have played out, if everyone played the game According to Hoyle.

While I don't read the news nearly as intensively as I used to, it's just too depressing to do otherwise, I believe that no Democratic candidate for President in 2020 has taken on this history at all.  Instead the campaigns are about economic issues, identity issues, and bringing the country together. Of these three, the first two are persistent Democratic themes.  I don't want to minimize them. They are very important. But on the third, we need a reality check.  If my premise is correct - the Republicans did steal the 2016 election - how can we possibly bring the country together until that crime has been punished?  As long as the Republicans act like they are fighting a war by other means, and especially if they feel they can keep getting away with it from here on out, there will be no reconciliation.

What follows is how I imagine a candidate who did take on this history, the policies this candidate would advocate for in taking on that history, and the tone that would be needed to make the message effective.

First, while history can't be completely undone, some of it can be reversed.  There would be repeated accusations that the election was stolen.  Given that the Republicans already had a majority in the Senate, this enabled a judicial appointments strategy that was pure tyranny. Sunshine would be placed on that consequence during the election season. While many voters at present may not care as much about judicial appointments as they care about the bread and butter issues, this would be an example of how an effective candidate cand educate the voters, rather than simply appeal to an already fixed voter preference.  Voters should care about this.  With enough education, they will.

Second, this would be coupled with the assertion that every judicial nomination made since Trump took office is illegitimate. The argument is simple enough.  Given that the election was stolen, these appointments constitute ill gotten gains.  This point would be emphasized so as to set up the remedy.  The remedy needs to be drastic, yet be seen as balancing out these gains and not otherwise advancing a Democratic alternative.  The idea is to restore true fairness to the system, not to win a game that has been cooked ahead of time.

Third, the candidate would announce during the campaign (now or in the not too distant future) that as President the powers of Commander in Chief would be exercised to combat domestic threats.  This would entail the detaining of Senator McConnell, possibly other Senators as well who were involved with shelving the nomination of Merrick Garland, and detaining all the judicial appointments who attained their positions under Trump.  These people would either remain detained till the President left office or they would be released immediately if they resigned from their positions.

Fourth, so as not to make political capital out of this act of detaining appointments, the candidate would commit to serving only one four-year term in office. Let us have good and fair elections in 2024 and not have this history remain a burden for the indefinite future.  It seems many candidates now treat running for the President as a perq and likewise for serving in the job.  We need to return to the idea that serving as President is an obligation.  Here the greater obligation is in restoring some trust into the process.  Pre-announcing that the candidate will serve just one term will help to do that.

Fifth, if vacancies in judicial appointments do arise because detained members of the judiciary resigned, there needs to be a way for replacements to be selected that doesn't appear overly partisan.  I have no bulletproof suggestion about how to do this.  But in this context I am reminded of an episode from The West Wing TV series called The Supremes.  In that episode, the President ultimately nominated one very left candidate for the Supreme Court and one very right candidate for the Supreme Court, to restore the previous balance.  And the candidates were viewed as excellent jurists by each other, rather than as merely party hacks.  I don't know how much of this is possible in actuality, but something like this should be an aspiration for this step, and perhaps considering multiple nominations simultaneously is the way to achieve this.

The above constitutes the direct steps that the candidate would take.  There are also indirect steps that need to be taken.  For example, it seems obvious that the hyper partisan political environment that we now find ourselves in has been fueled by yellow journalism which, it is sad to say, does attract eyeballs, coupled with current technology that seemingly requires the news to be entertainment as well.  A more detached and objective presentation of events is desirable, but that's not what is happening. The market is failing here.  There needs to be a remedy to this market failure.  What that remedy looks like can be argued.  One possibility to be floated seems evident - re-instituting The Fairness Doctrine.   Another example, there is too much big money in our politics now.  This is true both with regard to campaign financing and to lobbying.  Presumably, Democrats might take these on without dealing with the history of the 2016 election.  Bringing that history front and center should help amplify the case for solutions.

Let me close with the following observation, in case it is not obvious from what's been said until now.  Talking about how the election was stolen, particularly emphasizing the Merrick Garland nomination, is a way to place the focus on the enablers within the Republican party and move it off of Trump. So, apart from it being the right thing to do in terms a remedying a wrong, it is the right thing to do regarding our politics now.  And it makes sense even among those who want to bring the country together, once it is acknowledged that this can't happen as long as the Republicans want to win regardless of whether it is a fair fight or not.  In particular, calling for an alternative to gerrymandering, that the election in 2016 was stolen should be brought to bear.  While in the one case we are talking about Congressional Districts while in the other we are talking about the Electoral College, the unifying theme should be that the process must be fair.  This rigging of the the political game needs to stop.

Now all we need is for one of the candidates to take up this strategy.

Free College and the Quality of College Education

As I've been at Illinois since 1980 (now as a retired faculty member and administrator) when I think of publicly provided education I tend to think of it as state provision, since with the examples I'm familiar with, mainly the other Big Ten schools (except for Northwestern) are all very large research universities with state provision, I'm unclear on what a national free college program would look like and how it would be administered.  Also, I should note here that the expression, state provision, is more than a bit of a euphemism.  We've always operated under a mixed model which includes, state tax dollars, tuition, gifts to the university, and grants.  The shares of these have not been stable over time, with the tuition share rising and the state tax dollars share declining. And with that the composition of the student body has changed as well. The fraction of out-of-state and international students has risen.   This has happened by growing the overall undergraduate student population.  The number of in-state enrollments has pretty much remained flat.

The university does have its own free college program called Illinois Promise.  It is pretty stern in its income requirements of the student's family.  In a nutshell, the student must come from a family with income below the Poverty Line. And the student must otherwise meet the ordinary requirements for admission to the university.  The program, which started in 2005, has been growing, according to data from the most recent I-Promise Newsletter.  Based on that information and information from the Campus Profile, Illinois promise students comprise between 3.5% and 4% of the undergraduate population at Illinois.  As median family income of all students at Illinois is $109,000, roughly four times larger than the Poverty Line, I-Promise students are different income-wise from typical students and many I-Promise students find the adjustment to campus life a challenge.  For this reason there is a mentoring program targeted at Illinois Promise students (the mentoring is opt in) and students who do choose to have mentors graduate at a somewhat higher rate (though be wary about the difference between causality and correlation).  I have mentored a handful of such students.  My main conclusions from the experience are:  (1) it would be easier if first the student took a class from me so we were more intellectually on the same page, (2) the mentoring training teaches that the mentees tend to value the experience more than the mentors, but in my latest experience with the mentoring the mentee did it only because he thought he had to, and (3) such mentoring should be available far more broadly, because many students find the campus alienating in some way and/or need some coaching about how to best proceed in their classes. Further, especially first generation students, need a friend who has been through it all before and can dispense lessons from the experience.

More or less at the same time as the Illinois Promise program, though I believe there is no causality between the two, the campus has come to increasingly rely on "Specialized Faculty" who are not on the tenure track and are hired only to teach, with no expectation that they will do any research in their field.  The data on this depicted in the table below come from the Campus Profile.  It is not immediately evident what the effect is on quality of instruction when shifting from Regular Faculty to Specialized Faculty.  I've seen arguments both ways. But it is something to keep in mind regarding quality of the college experience for students.  I believe in this respect Illinois is typical of many public universities (and possibly private universities as well).  When comparing teaching loads across the types of faculty, regular faculty have much lower teaching loads and a substantial research obligation.  So the move to Specialized Faculty can bee seen as a way to deliver undergraduate education in a cost effective manner.

The impact of the Illinois Promise program stems from the access to college the program provides. Clearly, one aspect of making college free is giving access to those students who otherwise couldn't afford it.  Even with access, however, there are different ways to understand it.  As many of the I-Promise students are from the Chicagoland area, there are other public education alternatives available to them where they could live at home and attend college at the same time.  Indeed, a couple of my mentees in I-Promise were transfer students who had previously attended community college. This is a different dimension of the quality issue - which college to attend.  While there is a tendency to think of quality along a vertical axis, with selectivity of the institution an index of quality, sometimes it is better to consider what makes for a good fit between the student and the institution. Students may learn more by starting off at a community college, because they feel comfortable in that environment and being relaxed facilitates learning.  While keeping that thought in mind, to the extent that free college is about access, I believe that those who advocate for free college want to see more low-income students at elite universities.  Indeed, a reasonable case can be made that at present the elite colleges promote income inequality rather than upward mobility.  I can't but feel looking at that page, that the presentation of the data is meant to guilt out those who attend elite colleges, as well as those who have some responsibility for admissions there.  This follows from two bits of information, in particular.  One is that many very qualified low income students don't attend elite colleges.  The other is that the income gaps of the parents are largely made up in the children who do attend elite colleges.

Free college is not just about access, however.  Consider the Excelsior Scholarship Program in New York.  The language on that Website refers to middle class students rather than low income students, and the eligibility requirements include family income below $125,000.  This would put the upper end of those students eligible in the top 20% of the household income distribution nationally.  Many such students would attend college, with or without the scholarship, quite possibly at the same institution of learning.   To the extent that free college is about relieving such students of a large debt burden post graduation, that is a different focus than access.  In some sense, the Excelsior Scholarship Program is about shifting debt burden from recent alumni of the public colleges in New York to taxpayers in New York.   Before considering the merits of such wealth redistribution, let's note that possibility of a different effect.  Some of those who would have gone to private colleges or to public universities out of state and paid high tuition in either case, may now find it attractive to get an Excelsior Scholarship instead and go to one of the research universities in New York - Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, or Stony Brook, with the tuition reduction making those alternatives increasingly attractive.   I haven't seen reporting on this, but surely I would be interested to learn how it is actually playing out.

My own reaction to the Excelsior Scholarship program is to redesign it.  In my Shangri-La, college should be free for households at or below the median income, which in New York is about $65,000.  Above that, but below a higher threshold, say $100,000, there should be tuition discounts, with the discounts declining with household income, so that at the upper threshold the student pays full tuition. So my intuition is to be less generous than that actual program is.  But let's face it, this program is partly a political animal.  Governor Cuomo embraced it after Bernie Sanders championed free college in the 2016 election. The program is meant to appeal to voters.  Voter participation tends to rise with income.  Given that, a less generous program wasn't in the cards, even if it were more fiscally responsible.  The real fiscal issue with the Excelsior Scholarship program is that it represents wealth redistribution from taxpayers in general to households with college age kids, but after the kids have graduated college and the parents are ready to retire, the parents are prone to move south, to a no-income-tax state, and thus grab the benefit without reciprocating later with further tax payments. The kids have to stay in state for a while under the program, but the parents do not.   Given those stipulations, one advantage I can see for a national program is to eliminate this sort of tax avoidance. (The parents could change their citizenship, but that seems less likely to me for the time being.)

Still a different model of free college existed when I was in high school (I graduated from Benjamin Cardozo HS in Queens in 1972) when CUNY didn't charge any tuition at all. And, at least a few decades earlier, CUNY had a reputation for providing a high caliber education.  David Leonhardt refers to City College as the Harvard of the proletariat. This was at a time when there was antisemitism in admissions at Ivy League colleges.  A notable example, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Kenneth Arrow, attended City College.  I believe the entire CUNY system retained a good reputation when I was in high school.  But I want to point out that the private universities were much more accessible (financially) than they are today.  My dad's family was very poor, yet he was able to attend NYU (class of 1933) and then Columbia Law School (class of 1936).  My mother, who was an immigrant from Palestine after World War II, got an undergraduate degree from Columbia's School of General Studies.   Much later, in the mid 1960s, my mother got a Masters from Queens College, to buttress her formal teaching credentials.

Things changed with CUNY starting when I was in high school and then more so after I graduated.  Open admissions began in 1970.  But it was cut short by the fiscal crisis that New York City faced in the middle of the decade. There were no funds to supplant tuition, so tuition charges were imposed.  And at the senior colleges in the system, admission standards were notably increased.   Fast forward 40+ years and today CUNY has a far more mixed reputation.  Leonhardt writes:

More recently, these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates. To some New Yorkers, “City College” is now mostly a byword for nostalgia.

He goes on to say that there is actually good news, that about three quarters of the students who enroll at City College (and at institutions like City College around the country) experience upward mobility gains in income that are significant.  I wish he had unpacked that information more.  Do students who drop out still experience those income gains?  If so, how does that happen?  Alas, there isn't enough in the Leonhardt piece to answer those questions.

Here I want to make a few other points. If students are under prepared for college one might assign responsibility either to the students themselves or to the schools they attended in K-12.  It seems plausible that in most cases the real culprit is under funding of the K-12 education.  If so, does it make sense to argue that free college is the solution?  Wouldn't it be better to redirect some of the funds aimed at free college and instead allocate them to K-12 education for this particular population?  Here is a place where I'm confused about jurisdiction, state (or local) or federal.  I know that Head Start is a federal program, but I'm under the impression that most funding for public schools comes from the municipality or the state.  One would hope that the entire system, K-16 and beyond, would work well for students and that the jurisdictional issues would be incidental only.

Next, let me note that, for better or worse, graduation rates are used as a measure of how well the particular university is performing.  Yet graduation rates are largely determined by demographic factors pertaining to the students - parental income, standardized test scores, prior family members who have attended college, and other related variables.  If in considering graduation rates there isn't control for these demographic variables, and frequently it's just the raw graduation rates that seem to matter, then schools will bias their admissions to those students who are high predictors to graduate. Doing so indicates nothing about the quality of education the university provides these students. My own casual empiricism, mainly based on the one class a year I've been teaching since I've retired, is that many students get the sheepskin but are largely unchanged as thinkers while in college.  My indictment on this score can be found in this very long blog post, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?

Third, this one is again about politics.  And the reality is that middle class voters are rather insular.  This means they will look at free college through the lens of how they and their families benefit (or not).  A voter with no children might be against free college, assuming it implies a higher tax burden on the voter's family.  Voters with kids, who are likely to attend public universities in any event, will love it. Younger voters who are paying their own way through college obviously will love it as well.  So politically, it might very well be a winner.  But it also means there will be a bias, as in the Excelsior Scholarship program, toward debt relief for the families of those students who would have attended with or without the program, and away from the access issue for those students who wouldn't be able to afford college otherwise.  Put a different way, community college quality will be lower than the four-year college quality and that will be a feature of the system, not a bug.  The evident reason is politics.

I want to make one other point and then close.  This is about the dynamics of educational quality at free colleges.  I fear that quality will trend downwards.  There are two different ways to think about this.  The cost of college education has been hyper inflationary for the past 40 years, maybe longer.  This is certainly true at the elite universities and it is easy to understand why.  There is chronic excess demand for admission into such universities.  Indeed, a different way to look at why elite institutions focus so much on the 1% in admissions is that such students won't be liquidity constrained, regardless of the tuition that is charged, which gives the universities complete flexibility to set tuition rates for their own benefit, even though this has the effect of making an elite college education very pricey for the merely well off.  This then gets translated into faculty salaries and other perqs that enhance the faculty as researchers.  And that casts a huge shadow on universities that are the next rung down, which have some high performers among their faculty who might enter the elite ranks in the future.  Indeed the hyper inflationary costs of education will impact the free colleges as well.  Will their budgets be hyper inflationary to match these costs increases?  If not, how will they make ends meet?  One should anticipate various cost savings measures, done in the name of enhancing efficiency, but which will lower the quality of the education provided.

Advocates of free college should think these things through.  Maybe I'm wrong in my analysis.  But if I'm not, there is a reason to express concern here.  And I'm afraid there won't be much rethinking this idea, as the case for free college seems self-evident to the advocates.