Capra Corn

Amazon Prime has It's a Wonderful Life so I watched it over the holiday for what must be the zillionth time. I know it almost by heart, but it's been a few years since I've last seen it.  So, among the puzzles it holds for me is why I still find it compelling to view.  One explanation is that it is a tearjerker and I've got a soft spot for movies like that.  But there are other things in the story that bring about questions, including several I didn't find answered when I surfed the Web to read about the movie.  I'll pose them here.

The first thing to note is that Capra's style in this movie is to bring in a host of issues, touch on them in a gentle way, and then leave them, perhaps for us to reflect on after the movie is over. The one most evident to me in this viewing is prejudice - Northern European whites, as represented by the character, Mr Potter, against Italian immigrants.  Potter refers to them as "garlic eaters." I don't believe I've ever heard the expression used in a different context.  Has anyone else heard the phrase used elsewhere?  Capra was himself of Italian extraction, so surely had a distaste for other slurs, which if used would have added realism to the story, but otherwise would have changed its tone.

The year the movie came out, 1946, Joe DiMaggio was the center fielder for the New York Yankees, probably the most familiar name associated with Major League Baseball, and quite possibly the best player in the game.  Yet in New York City when I was growing up, 20 years later, there was a pecking order among the ethnicities where the Italians perhaps were in the middle, but definitely not at the top. In Jane Leavy's book about Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, which I wrote about here, she recounts a story where on meeting Mantle he introduces himself as Mickey Lipshitz.   She inquires why.  Mickey responds with something he learned very early on as a ballplayer in New York - When you're going good you're Jewish, but when you're going bad you're EYE-talian.   Indeed.

The prejudice as depicted in the movie is linked to the predatory capitalism that Potter emblemizes, owning a slum where many of the townspeople live and pay rent to Potter.  This serves as a backdrop for what the Baily Building and Loan would accomplish, enabling people to leave this slum and to own their own homes in Baily Park, which in the post World War II era was a time of great economic expansion where the many shared in the wealth being created.  These homes would then appreciate in value as a result.  Potter, who prided himself on being an excellent businessman, entirely missed this investment opportunity.  His Bank had turned down mortgage applications that the Building and Loan later approved.  In some sense this shows the great change in the American mindset, from the late 1920s and into the 1930s to the post World War II era.

Pa Baily, who started the Building and Loan along with Uncle Billy, could be taken as prescient, getting ordinary working people into their own homes well before the post-war boom. But a characteristic of the "business model" that was employed by the Building and Loan was to allow the customers to capture the bulk of the gains from trade.  Nobody at the Building and Loan became rich, even after the war, definitely not George Baily.

To be fair to Potter, his prejudice was on class lines as much as it was on ethnic divisions. In the story the two melded together.  So, one question the movie brings up is this.  What happened to prejudice of the sort that Potter embodied?  Did it fade out as racial prejudice took it's place?  Or has it survived, perhaps morphing into other forms of grievance?   WASP was a pretty common designation when I was growing up.  I don't see it used nowadays.  What does that reflect?

Let me use that question to segue into a different but related topic.  Who views It's a Wonderful Life these days?  Does watching it correlate at all with political affiliation?  This is one of those things that we'll never learn, unless the polling organizations find it a worthwhile question to ask.  But let me speculate.  George and Mary, the heroes in the story, are completely accepting of other people in the story.  (Of course, George gets very upset at Zuzu's schoolteacher, and eventually gets socked in the jaw by her husband for having balled out the schoolteacher on the telephone, but that's because he blamed her for Zuzu getting the sniffles, and he was under a huge amount of stress at the time.)   This acceptance of people regardless of ethnicity or class might be touted as embracing the Liberal view, and perhaps can be seen as a forerunner of today's identity politics.  On the other hand, the Bailey's are clearly very family oriented and the movie depicts a very strong sense of community among the people in Bedford Falls who know George and Mary.  Indeed, traditional values are what tie the community together.  Conceivably, this could appeal to Conservative viewers as well.  Does it?

Now another segue as I am intermittently reading Maslow and he writes so extensively about being psychology, an end state of personal development where all challenges have been met and the individual perceives the world as it truly is.  In what I've been reading recently, Maslow seems to use the B-psychology label as much as he uses the expression self-actualization.  Which character in the movie most represents this psychology of being?  Most people probably would say George Baily, as he is the protagonist in the story and performs a variety of selfless acts during his lifetime.  Yet I would argue that Mary Baily is the better candidate here.  George has ambivalence, which he expresses many times in the movie.  He wants to leave Bedford Falls because it is a crummy little town.  As a kid and then again as he is ready to leave for college, he wants to make a lot of money and earn fame from his creations, as if these external validators would show he is an important person.  Of course, the story plays out so he never achieves these things.  Mary, in contrast, has pure motives from an early age.  She is in love with George even as a kid.  She makes a wish that they will live in that drafty old house when they are married and, of course, the wish comes true.  She gives up the money meant for their honeymoon to stop the run on the Building and Loan during the Great Depression. And, she's the one who contacts all the friends when George is in trouble with the bank examiner.   She was living the life she wanted to live.

Let me not talk at all about the fluff part of the movie, Clarence getting his wings and all of that.  It is charming, but I have nothing new to add here.  I want to talk about a few more detail things and then close.

For whatever reason, this is the first time watching It's a Wonderful Life where it occurred to me that Bert the cop and Ernie the cabdriver were used as precursors for the muppet characters with the same names.  On this one, I guess I'm slow on the uptake as it apparently has occurred to many viewers.  This site says it is merely a coinky dink.  Of course, tracing the full causality in our own thinking for when a spark of an idea emerges is virtually impossible to do.  So, who knows?

Then I learned that Capra went through many different screenwriters before he got a script to his liking.  This included some whose names I recognized.  (Capra himself is credited as one of those screenwriters.)  Donna Reed reported this was her hardest movie role, though I didn't find out what made it so difficult for her.  And Jimmy Stewart was apparently very nervous about the role, particularly the kissing scenes (youth is wasted on the wrong people - a truly great line) because he had served in World War II and this was the first movie he made after returning, so he was out of practice.  I'm going to speculate that Capra was something of a perfectionist, which put stress on Donna Reed that she wasn't used to.  Jimmy Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore too, had worked with Capra on earlier movies, so were more used to his style.   I do have some vague recollections of watching Jimmy Stewart talk about the acting style he typified, where the goal was for it all to look effortless and spontaneous, in contrast to the reality of the hard work in making the movie.

One last point is about intellectual property.  I learned that It's a Wonderful Life is in the public domain.  The original copyright holders didn't renew the copyright, because the movie was not a big success after it was released.  One reason that TV stations were so willing to air it around the holidays is that they didn't have to pay royalties to do so.  So the movie took on a second life and has since become an American fixture.  It seems to me this offers an excellent example in which to reconsider our copyright laws.  Such a revival probably can't happen for most movies (or for most recorded music).  But if there a few other hidden gems that would attract attention, yet aren't seen or heard now, because they copyright holder is keeping the property tightly, isn't that a shame and a huge social loss?  Why, then, do we allow this?

The Executive Minds Pretend They're Not Rich

My title, which might seem kind of odd, is taken by combining the titles of two different articles.  The first is a piece called The Executive Mind and Double-Loop Learning by Chris Argyris, which makes for quite interesting reading and is readable even by  non-academics.  (Regarding copyright and getting access to the article for those without a university library to provide access, I found a copy available at SCRIBD, which gives a month's free membership.) The other piece is an Op-Ed in the New York Times from a couple of years ago, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich by Richard V. Reeves. My post was motivated by imagining a hypothetical conversation between Argyris and Reeves about their respective essays.

These pieces are similar in that both authors write about highly educated people who are two-faced.  In Argyris' piece, he describes executives who, on the one hand, have an espoused theory of behavior, but, on the other hand, their actual theory in action is quite different, so the two theories do not act in concert.  The espoused theory, and now I'm putting words into Argyris' mouth, is to be a good listener and be responsive to the other person. The theory in action, in contrast, is to be proven correct, to win the argument at all costs, and to force the other party into agreeing that the fault was theirs.  Argyris refers to this theory in action as Model 1.  That the two theories can coexist arises from the many tacit beliefs that the executive has, yet the executive is not conscious that these beliefs impact how decisions are made and quite possibly the executive is unaware of holding these beliefs.  They are only revealed by doing a careful post mortem analysis on the executive's decisions.

Similarly, Reeves takes to task members of the professional class (my label for households in the upper quintile of the income distribution, but not in the top 1%).  Members of these households argue, at least implicitly, that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy, hence they deserve the good life that their hard work provides for them.  But the ignore their own gaming of the system, e.g., sending their kids to posh private schools at a very high tuition to increase the likelihood of their getting into an elite college.  The data show that if the household is in the upper quintile then the children, when they reach adulthood and have their own families, are very likely to also be in the upper quintile.  This makes it extremely challenging for those who start in the lower quintiles to make it to the top. Thus, the system seems more rigged than meritocracy. But those at the top seem hell bent on preserving the system, rather than changing it, though they go about that quietly if they can rather than make a big commotion.

The experimental design that Argyris employs to illustrate the issues is very clever.  He has a transcript of a high-level executive, Y, talking with a subordinate, X.  The situation is that X has been under productive on the job for a long time, but X himself believes that this is because the organization has hampered his efforts, not because of his own lack of initiative.  Y, in quite blunt terms, lets X know that he can no longer rely on excuses.  Either his performance improves or that's it for him.  In so doing, Y is utilizing Model 1 to deliver his message.  That message puts X on the defensive.  It does not empower X to improve his work.  Instead, it encourages a passive aggressive response.

The executives who read this transcript are very critical of Y.  They don't like how he acted in this exchange at all. Yet, ironically, in offering up their critique they too employ Model 1.  In other words, while they are dismayed by how Y handled the situation, they see no inherent contradiction in criticizing Y along the same lines.  Therein lies the fundamental problem.

Near the end of the piece Argyris discusses an alternative approach, Model 2, which is about bringing to the surface those implicit assumptions that remain submerged when Model 1 is employed.  It is fundamentally an inquiry approach and it requires questioning those assumptions and replacing them with something else when those assumptions are proved wanting.   Argyris argues that it takes a lot of practice to become proficient at the use of Model 2 and it should not be assumed that a mere embrace of it will bring immediate good results.  Nevertheless, he puts Model 2 forward as the path to use for making real progress that does not produce fracture but instead incorporates the views of all the participants.

I imagined Argyris reading Reeves' Op-Ed piece.  Argyris might begin by noting that members of the professional class are well educated and almost surely exude a competence about the work they do.  In this they are similar to the executives he has studied, if not identical to them.  Reeves likely would agree with that assertion.  Then Argyris would follow up with this observation.  Reeves may be unaware of this, but his piece reads like an exercise in Model 1 thinking.  If Reeves was actually trying to persuade members of the professional class to mend their ways, he likely would be achieving the opposite.  They would dig in their heels.   Argyris would then recommend that Reeves try a sustained effort at Model 2 on this same general topic.  He then says that at present he is unsure what a Model 2 conversation would look like on this matter, but he'd be happy to work with Reeves to design such a campaign.  Reeves contemplates this offer.

* * * * *

Now a disclaimer.  I an nowhere near an expert practitioner at Model 2.  In particular, in my teaching of an upper level undergraduate class in economics intended for econ majors, the students are either children of parents already in the professional class or have high aspirations of entering the professional class once they graduate, get a good job, and find a spouse. Yet these students are remarkably heads down about their own education, meaning they care a great deal about their grades but care much less about learning in a fundamental way and trying to develop habits of mind that will allow such learning to persist after they graduate. I have tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to get these students to see the folly in their endeavor.  And, at least some of my efforts have employed Model 2 methods. 

Further, as I teach my students in the very first class session, whatever human capital is produced by our course is owned by them.  If they are heads down about their own learning, where they themselves are the beneficiaries, imagine how they would be, or their parents would be, when considering a societal redesign where, at least by the normal economic analysis, they would not be the beneficiaries.  In addition, such a redesign would entail enormous complexity.  Most people don't know how to think about complexity in a thoughtful and constructive way.  Further, for those in the professional class the system does work for them. The status quo maintains an appeal for that reason.  Rejecting the status quo in favor of something else will take an awful lot of convincing.  I wrote about this quite a few years ago, during the Obama Presidency, in a post called Gaming The System Versus Designing It.

Alas, during political campaigns soundbites tend to dominate, even when politicians make an effort to produce serious proposals.  And the discussion turns to policy recommendations, too quickly in my view.  Much less discussed are the underlying principles that people should have, which then would guide which policies they prefer and which candidates they will support.

My reading of Reeves essay, put in the context of this election season, is that those in the professional class, at least who vote for Democrats, should not vote their pocketbooks.  Instead, if they recognized that they were indeed rich, they'd be obligated by a 21st century version of noblesse oblige.  They would then support principles that defined what that obligation looks like.  Surely it implies increased taxation (some of which might come from reduction or elimination of preferred deductions, such as the one for mortgage interest) but, to use a little math jargon, the principle should pertain to the integral, not to the derivative.  In other words, it should speak to the right level of taxation, not just that taxes should be raised on the professional class (and on the the 1% as well).

But we don't have this sort of discussion.  Instead, we have an indirect conversation about whether the candidates should be centrists or leftists, where this issue of principle lurks in the background.  This has the consequence of pitting working class voters against professional class voters instead of together forming a united front. 

This is potentially a huge blunder, where under the current circumstances it could lead to Trump being reelected.   I wrote about this in a post called How to Unify the Left and the Center - One Voter's View. There is an immediate tactical agreement that needs to be made to cover the election next year.  There is a long-term agreement that incorporates the principled approach, which if done reasonably well should assure the party dominance for the indefinite future.

But to get there from here those principles need to be unearthed.  How do we do that?

* * * * *

As I said above, I'm not an expert practitioner of Model 2.  But I'm buoyed by the quite recent attention being given to Mr. Rogers, his gentleness and the respect he showed for children.  I'm going to use him as a proxy for what effective Model 2 communication looks like.  This bit from The Mr. Rogers No One Saw says it all.

“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-raising or anything else,” he told me later. “But at the same time I don’t want to be an accuser. Other people may be accusers if they want to; that may be their job. I really want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.” 

In other words, the communication must appeal emotively and not merely be made cognitively.  If you are asking people to rise to the occasion they will do so by being inspired, and that's the only way that will really work.  Further, such inspiration will be found only by tapping into beliefs the people already have.  But we don't really know what these beliefs are.  They should be investigated as part of a Model 2 inquiry.

I wrote about such an investigation in the first part of this post.  I envisioned an interviewer doing spot interviews with a person on the street.  Many such interviews would be conducted. Then this would be done again in longer focus groups, with the participants chosen because they fit certain predefined demographic categories.   And it would also be done with certain celebrities. Each of these would be video recorded and made available to the public.  The idea would be to make this an ongoing learning activity.   I envisioned three different topics.  One about being responsible, another about being a good citizen, and a third about paying taxes.  The topics obviously overlap but clearly are not identical.  To illustrate what such an interview would be like, these are the scripted questions I came up with for the first category.

On being a responsible adult:
1) What does it mean to be a responsible adult?
2) Can you give an example where you've behaved as a responsible adult?
3) Does that example typify your behavior or do you often act irresponsibly?  You don't have to give an example of where you've behaved irresponsibly if that helps you answer the question.
4) What about other people?  Is your impression that they mainly act responsibly or not?

In any inquiry, one must make the follow up dependent on what is learned in the first round.   Also, what I have described so far could readily be manipulated by cherry picking the participants in the interviews or screening the results and only showing those that were favorable for the prior maintained view.  The process needs integrity so those things don't happen.  That itself will not be easy.  But if it could be achieved, the results then might be surprising and facilitate the learning that we hope would follow.

A different sort of learning needs to happen as well.  The label "professional class" is very broad strokes and may not be refined enough to identify households that if they were true to themselves would call themselves rich.  Let me give the sort of particulars that I think might matter here.  One pertains to where people are in the life-cycle.   A household that enters the professional class only after the parents have reached their mid 50s, but weren't there until then probably were unable to accumulate a lot of savings until then and might really deserve to keep more of their income than to pay that in taxes.  This example suggests that past income should matter in this consideration, as should the age of the household members.

Another pertains to the income of the parents.   If the parents were already in the professional class, then the children making it there may be considered an accomplishment, but it is far less of an accomplishment than for those whose parents are working class or poor.  Here I will speak about my own situation.  My parents paid for my college, so I carried no tuition loan debt.  After my parents retired, they started to give cash gifts to my brother and me, a way to make some of the bequest well before they passed away.  This enabled me to save a good chunk of my income even in the early years, when living expenses can take a good bite out of income.   I had colleagues who lived more frugally than I did (smaller apartment, older car) because they were cash poor then.  Their parents weren't as well off financially.  None of us were uncomfortable with quality of life stuff.  But I had the added luxury of not worrying about money.  I don't know if that made me rich then, but I was definitely comfortable.  My preference would be for Reeves to have more categories that would together include the entire professional class - comfortable, upscale, and rich.  I'm not sure where the boundaries should be, but my intuition in regard to the added tax burden these people should absorb is that a progressive tax principle needs to be applied.

This third particular I'm finding difficult to write about because, on the one hand, it gets at the sort of gaming of the system practices that Reeves has singled out but, on the other hand, it may be that many are followers in this sort of gaming and only a few are really strident about it.  I am talking about zoning restrictions for housing and whether income or wealth should be defined, at least in part, by the zoning restrictions of the community in which the household is situated.  For example, my parents when they retired moved to a condominium community in Boca Raton called Century Village.  It was a very large development.  While my parents apartment was modestly sized and provisioned, the place was gated with security guards at the gate.  I gather that many communities in Florida are set up this way.  The place may have had a minimum age requirement for ownership of a unit.  (I'm thinking that was 55, but I can't really recall.) Most of the residents were Jewish and there was a Synagogue on the premises.  So there was exclusion of others, which is just what zoning restrictions do.  But in this case, that my parents felt comfortable living there is what mattered to me and I think some of these restrictions facilitated that, especially the age restrictions.  So how do you parse this out?  I'm not sure.  Yet I think something along these lines is needed.

* * * * *

I want to wrap this up.  I wrote this post to encourage Reeves and others of his ilk to engage in a learning exchange with members of the professional class on what their social responsibility should really entail and whether they themselves can embrace their social responsibility.  I believe such a conversation needs to happen now, but it will take quite a long time for it to reach even tentative conclusions.  Surely there is not enough time now for it to conclude by the 2020 elections, even if it were to start today.  Maybe, however, if this conversation did start now it would be done by the next Congressional elections.

The concept of center versus left does a disservice to thinking jointly about economic issues and identity issues.  I tried in this piece to stick with the economic issues only and it is there where I believe that members of the professional class who vote their pocketbooks are in the center or even right of center.  This needs to change for the good of the order.  But that change will only come slowly and then through a concerted education effort.  It's time for that education effort to begin.

Juxtapositions

We take the local newspaper in Champaign-Urbana, The News Gazette. I look at it more for doing the Daily Jumble than for reading the news.  Way back when, I read it for the sports section because it was good about U of I sports.  But that interest has dissipated over the years.  More recently I might read the lead article on the front page, which more often than not is about some campus issue.  I'm not well connected to what's going on about campus any more, so this is a way to get a little information and figure out which way the wind is blowing.

This past week The News Gazette changed its layout.  Previously the Daily Jumble was located with other puzzles - notably the Sudoku, which I would also sometimes do, and then both were on the same page as Dear Abby.  In the new scheme of things, the Daily Jumble is located next to the bridge column by Phillip Adler.  Odd as this may seem, I hadn't read that column for years.  I simply didn't bother to find it in the paper.  But this week after doing the jumble, I would read the bridge column, and found I enjoyed it.  What's more, it really is a sort of puzzle.  The bidding is given and the reader is asked to figure out how to play the cards as the declarer to make the contract, if that's possible.  So far, I've not gotten the right answer this week, but I can say that thinking about this is interesting.

Which makes me wonder, if the bridge column is really a puzzle but Dear Abby is not, why cluster some of these but not the rest?  And how did the News-Gazette figure out to change the arrangement?  While I don't have real answers to these questions, I do have my guesses.  I'm going to say that this is a vintage thing.  The bridge column and the Daily Jumble have been around for a long time, at least since I was in high school.  (I graduated 47 years ago.)  The Sudoku, in contrast, is comparatively new, at least for American readers.  So maybe the News-Gazette is doing some implicit sorting of the readership, based on their age.

The thing is, current adolescents would benefit from learning how to play bridge.  It teaches a kind of situated logic that is valuable in many other contexts.  And it teaches communication skills and how to work together in a partnership.  This piece, now from a while back, argues just these things. Yet I'm guessing that very few teens learn to play bridge anymore.  When I was a teen (maybe even before that) my parents taught me and my brother the rudiments - fourth from the longest, strongest suit, etc. It was a family thing.

* * * * *

I'm going to do something unusual here and publish one of my rhymes within a longer blog post.  I wrote this a few days ago, but then was reluctant to post it to my usual outlets (first Twitter, then Facebook).   I'm doing so here because I want to use it to make a couple of other observations.

https://massmail.illinois.edu/massmail/28709.html
Power and sex
Concave or convex?
The U will have new rules
Let’s hope everyone’s temperature cools.
#ButItAin’tOverTillItsOver

While I never dated a student once at the U of I, I was only 25 when I started.  I wasn't much older than the undergraduates I taught in intermediate microeconomics.  More than once I heard the dreaded question - are you the TA?  (If I heard that now, it would make me delighted for a week.)  So there was a need to establish one's authority in the eyes of the students.  A fellow assistant professor did that by wearing Brooks Brothers suits to class.  Getting dressed up was not my thing.  I established my authority inadvertently, by making the course way over the heads of the students.  Many years later I learned this is a common mistake made by brand new assistant professors.

A few years after I started I learned that the U of I had a somewhat difficult time recruiting assistant professors who were single.  The issue of social life (is an assistant professor entitled to that?) seemingly the driver causally, though in discussion it would often manifest by talking about the quality of the restaurants in town.  I'm totally out of the loop now regarding this situation.  But if the situation is more of less the same as when I started, I can imagine that recruiting single assistant professors will become even more of a challenge, and unintended consequence of the new policy.

A different issue that seems to me at root here, is that even when the age of the person indicates the person is an adult, if there were some sophistication metric that could be applied, would many of the students we have, whether over 18 or even over 21,  nonetheless score high on a naiveté metric? If so, does the university have an in loco parentis responsibility, even for students above the age of consent?  Back in 2015 I had a brief exchange with Laura Kipnis of Northwestern, after her piece in the Chronicle made quite a splash, Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.   I'm going to put words in her mouth here.  In my interpretation of what she wrote the kids are naive because they are overprotected.  So stop protecting them.

Somewhat later, I wrote a piece that was intended partly as a refutation to this argument.  It's called Shyness and Kindness.  The upshot is that some fraction of our students are shy.  They are entitled to be that way as students and we must offer them protection, let them mature on their own timetable, not one we specify.  I also related some rather horrifying experiences from my first year in graduate school about the torment some of my classmates went through - this was academic torment, not sexual at all.  But it had telling consequences on these people.  Even if these are not the star performers in the classroom, the university should care about their welfare, as human beings.  More recently (about a year ago) I wrote this piece called, Why are we so screwed up about sex and authority?  It was an awkward piece to write, as I discussed my own naiveté in the romance department during adolescence.   Near the end of the piece it asks about what type of interventions might help in this area.   Fundamentally, the question is whether there is a type of education that can help the person overcome their own shyness.  Experience is a good teacher, if the stumbles are mild, but not otherwise.  So maybe some prohibitions are necessary as means of protection, but my sense is that it can't be the entire story.

* * * * *

This semester in my class I've had a couple of very clear examples of students being intellectually naive, in a way that I can't recall happening before.  Back in September students were given this prompt, to focus what they would blog about that week.  It turns out that many students didn't realize that opportunism has an ethical dimension to it.  So they wrote an inappropriate post (meaning it didn't address the topic at hand) thinking that opportunism simply meant taking advantage of opportunities.  Further, as we discussed this in a subsequent class session, they didn't question their own thinking on the matter, say by looking up the word in the dictionary.  (Given that they were already online to write the blog post, this is remarkably easy to do, yet they didn't do it.)  And some of the students didn't think it was their job to discover the true meaning of the word.  Instead, they felt the obligation was on me, to make my prompts clearer so this sort of error wouldn't happen.

The second example happened quite recently.  On Tuesday we will be discussing Bolman and Deal's Chapter 8, on conflict in organizations.  The prompt for their blog posts asked students to relate some real or fictitious experience they've been involved with where there was conflict, and then to Monday morning quarterback the situation.  One conscientious student had read through the PowerPoint for that session, and made note of what I have on slide 12, Newton's Third Law of Human Interaction.  But she took it literally, which was not what I intended it.  I was being a little cutesy, thinking that most students would already know Newton's Third Law from their science classes, and then using the label as a metaphor, which would get the students to ask the question - what is an equal and opposite reaction when one person acts aggressively?   But this student didn't take it metaphorically.  She took it literally.

* * * * *

In the case of the first error above, about the meaning of opportunism, you might imagine it was made only by mediocre students.  In the second example, however, the mistake was made by quite a diligent student who prides herself on getting good grades.  Yet, I learned recently, that in her pleasure time she enjoys watching TV, but doesn't ever read a novel for fun.

One should not generalize from a sample of one.  Yet over the years, this has been the same conclusion and I dare say the sample in this time period, stretching back to 1990 or so, is in the thousands.  Many students can't make good meaning of what they read, my example 20 years ago was an article from the NY Times, because they don't read enough.  So they don't see it as their job to supply the needed context in understanding what the author is trying to say.  Instead, it's the authors job to send a simple message.

The current culture values performance on standardized tests and I'm afraid that test prep has replaced doing a lot of outside reading as the means for how students prepare themselves.  The inadequacy of test prep as an educational approach is quite evident, if you care to look.  But who is doing that?

So we're producing graduates with high GPAs who are opportunistic in their focus of learning to the test but not learning otherwise.   And we too at the university are opportunistic, because these students pay the tuition that is our meal ticket.  So let's not make a fuss about this, please.

If anyone has read my prior post, where I expressed a lot of frustration, let me observe that the frustration is still there.  I wish I could see a way through this based on my own efforts.  But at present, I don't.  So I probably won't teach again, at least not at the undergraduate level.   I need to get some satisfaction from the teaching, which is lacking now.

Capitulation

The course I'm teaching this semester hasn't gone as I've wanted it to go.  I wrote about this in a post yesterday addressed to my students.  I have not required attendance.  I tried to encourage it, but perhaps inadvertently did the opposite.  At this point a majority treat the class as if it is totally online, while there are other students who take the class as if it is blended (hybrid), mixing times where they do attend with other times where they skip class.  There remains a small group of students who attend regularly, the exception to what some years ago was the rule. Among these students, most are quiet by nature, at least as I perceive them in the classroom.  They are each diligent students, getting their coursework done in a timely manner.  Many of the other students are not so diligent.

I had been trying to engage the handful that still do show up in Socratic dialog, but it feels as if they are reluctant participants.  In the past I've always had one or two glib students who evidently would want to respond to my queries, which gave me the sense that my methods were effective.  Not this time.  So I've been wondering why persist in what now seems a fool's errand.  This morning I broke the logjam.

While it goes against my own inclinations, I made a PowerPoint presentation, animated it for on screen viewing, and then made a voice over screen capture video of the slideshow.  This PowerPoint was all text (though sentences, not bullets) and meant to be something like lecture notes for the follow up to the homework that is due tonight.   As some of the students have already completed that homework, I wanted them to have access to the video immediately.  If coming to class is too arduous for most of the students, this is a quicker way to get some of the take aways I'd like students to have.  The video is under 14 minutes, perhaps on the longish side for an on screen presentation, but much shorter than a full class session.

This is more about satisfying my guilty conscience than about anything else.  From a purely utilitarian point of view, I should cater to the students who don't come to class, as they are now the majority.  I do want students to make connections between the homework and other ideas, about how to apply the model to various real-world circumstances as perceived from an economics view.

Indeed, I designed the class with the idea that the homework would be preliminary to class discussion.  Some of (maybe most of) the poor attendance can be attributed to an instrumental mindset.  Since the class discussion is itself is not graded and it is not aimed as preparation for the homework (or the next quiz) why bother coming?  I have no way of measuring how widespread such instrumentalism is outside my course, but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say that it is endemic to the undergraduate economics major and perhaps to many other majors on campus.

So the design, which might make sense if students either feel obligated to come to class no matter what or feel some desire to learn deeply even if it puts their course grade somewhat at risk, has been defeated by the attitudes of the students I do have, who are used to presentation coming first and assessment following that, to test their comprehension of the presentation.  That's the traditional method.  It is ingrained in these students, as near as I can tell.

It remains to be seen whether any of the students will look at this follow up PowerPoint and video.  I can track hits data on the PowerPoint and hits plus minutes viewed on the video.   But I'm now doing this little experiment at a time in the semester where many students are just trying to keep their heads above water. So it is far from a perfect test, and low access doesn't mean this wouldn't have been preferred by students earlier in the semester. 

Nevertheless, it is something.   And if I do get some indication from students that they actually prefer this sort of thing to what I had been doing, will I then consider redesigning the entire class that way?  Hmmm.

Dire Education

The professor's joy is when he can see a light bulb turn on inside the mind of a student, who then shows recognition and understanding in this new found perception.  Of course, it is the student who ultimately determines whether the Aha! moment will happen.  The professor should not take credit for it when it does occur, especially since quite frequently the same environment that the professor creates evinces no such reaction in other students, even those who dutifully go about their studies.  They remain unaware that generating a spark of insight about the subject matter should be their quest.  They are quite content with getting the right answers on the homework assignment, without knowing why those answers are right; hence without being able to transfer the lesson they supposedly learned in the context of the homework to some other situation.

This type of professor's joy has eluded me this semester.  I may be too old to tap into student's intrinsic motivation, possessing no sense whatsoever what buttons to push. Where five or six years ago it was otherwise, the last few times teaching this has been the result.  But until this semester, I would always have at least a couple of outspoken students I could pretty much count on to chime in when I'd do my schtick as Socrates, so we could generate a little back and forth in class.  Now trying that feels like pulling teeth. To the extent that I've performed any social service with my teaching, the value lies elsewhere.

For the first time I can remember, I wrote a note to a Dean (first in the LAS office, then in the Dean of Student's Office) about a student I thought might be going over the rails emotionally.  I'm not sure whether she had already been getting assistance before I wrote that note or if my writing triggered that assistance would be forthcoming.  That's not something I need clarity on.  However, I do want to observe that doing this is probably outside of what most instructors perceive as their job description.  In my case, while I'm unlike my students in many ways, I did go through a rather serious depression in 10th grade and then again during my sophomore year in college. So while I'm no expert, I do have some sense of what is going on and some empathy for the students who are struggling this way.

The thing is, this student is by no means the only student in my class who is struggling emotionally.  Indeed, such struggles may be the new normal. There is discord between (a) very high tuition, (b) pressure to get a good job after graduation, and (c) the students don't know what they want for themselves.   To this I'd add the following.  Many of the students I see in my course don't appear competent at a cognitive level in the course prerequisites.  They've had years and years of school as credentialing, without it producing a foundation for further learning later in life.

If it is not these kids as rotten students, but the system as rotten in what it seems to be producing all too often, you have to ask: when will we wake up. Frankly, it seems nobody gives a ____ about these students.  At the U, we focus on the successes.  They are the targets for alumni contributions.  While these others we admitted, once their performance seems substandard we seem ready to discard them.  We let them graduate in some major that the campus doesn't get bragging rights from, such as economics.  But we're essentially sweeping them under the rug.  Of course, they get that.

The new thing on campus is trying to address inequality of income of the families of students, so we will admit those whose parents have below $60,000 in household income (approximately the median nationally) and fully fund their tuition. But we are not yet doing anything to address inequality as measured by SAT/ACT scores and, for example, the disadvantage that a student who is first in the family to attend college faces, as compared, for example, where both parents have advanced degrees. There is substantial intellectual inequality on campus and it is ripping us apart.  But we don't know how to address the issue, so we ignore it. And even if we attended to it, we would be divided by those who advocate for survival of the fittest approach versus those who would prefer a nurturing approach.

I used to think, circa 2012 and 2013, that with my insight from years in educational technology I could cut through all of this and produce something that was reasonably good for the bulk of the students I taught.  But now the circumstances are burying me.  I'm no longer up to the challenge. Yet the need to rise to the challenge is, if anything, greater now than it was then.  So what do we do about it?

As I've written elsewhere, I'm afraid people are too willing to offer up answers before they've done a complete diagnosis of the problem.  And in this case, I'm afraid that the biggest problem is that we're not willing to admit there is any problem.

You can't score a run if you don't reach first base.

I never could be a campus CIO but....

On Tuesday after class I had a friendly chat with Tracy, who ran the back end of Illinois Compass after the debacle in fall 2005, when it was off-line for well over a week.  I probably hadn't seen Tracy for 10 years, maybe more.  We had a good talk, some of which was about the present, she now runs Library IT, but also a look back, a pretty blunt one.  I was curious about her perspective of what happened soon after I left the campus IT organization, at the end of July 2006, when I did become a CIO, in title only, for the College of Business. The discussion was about the people involved with campus IT who, unfortunately, didn't all get along.  There were quite divergent views about how things should be done.  That discord is an indicator of what I want to discuss in this post.

Around that time, maybe a little earlier, I was part of an Educause committee called 2020, whose job was to project to the future (now only 2+ months away) and think back to the present about what Educause needed to do to be well prepared.  I don't recall our core recommendations, but I do remember that I brought to the attention of the group the lack of communication between the campus CIO and the Provost's Office, which had been my experience up to that time (and I believe may have gotten worse on my campus subsequently).  The issue is what could be done about this communication blockage.  I don't believe our Educause group solved that puzzle.  I hope to see some of these people, my friends and colleagues in the profession, at the Educause national conference next week.  While I have no longing for the work we did back then, I do miss them very much.  Maybe some of the themes in my post will become part of the conversation we have.

Let me get to the reasons for why I couldn't be a campus CIO.

Strength is not my weakness.
"Danimal" Dan Hampton

I like this line, a lot.  Dan Hampton was a defensive end for the Bears in their glory years.  He had a physically imposing presence. This line shows he had an element of wit as well.  I'm going to take advantage of the line to segue into some of the more obvious weaknesses I had then (which I probably still have, though they aren't tested nearly as much now).

(1) I didn't know how to deal with stress, which I felt almost constantly.  Eventually, writing this blog became one release point.  But though I enjoy writing it wasn't sufficient.  I put on a huge amount of weight during my time in campus IT.  And after I stopped jogging because my knees were no longer up to it, I didn't do nearly enough physical activity, only taking up walking several years later. I also drank like a fish, not a good thing to do on a recurrent basis.  And now I'm talking about when I was the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, where I was competent to do the job.  I could only see things getting worse on this score, if I were the campus CIO.  (I'm writing this with an Illinois-centric perspective, where the stress was palpable.  I don't know how it would be on a smaller campus, one that didn't have such a rich history with IT.  In this piece I'm going to keep the Illinois focus, because it's where I have concrete memories.)

(2)  My personal history with Ed Tech was first as an instructor who did ALN under the SCALE project (One semester before that I used PacerForum in my Econ class on a server hosted by the CHP program.)  Even after I took over running SCALE, a year later, my mindset was from the perspective of a user of technology.  The part that interested me was clever adaptations, made in an attempt to improve the teaching.  Some years later John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid came out with a book, The Social Life of Information.  The themes of that book captivated me.  I viewed the back end stuff as an enabler only, not as an object of attention in itself.  This was fine for a director of an ed tech unit, but might be a fatal flaw in itself for a campus CIO.   Further, when I was in the campus IT organization as Assistant CIO, I was viewed as a strategic thinker, not as an operations guy. It would be very difficult to segue from that to a position where operational concerns were of top importance and where the people who did operational work, much of the IT organization, felt I had their back.   I think the CIO position needs the support of the IT organization and it needs the support of the campus too.  Conversely the IT organization needs to feel the CIO is for them while also feeling that what they are doing is in support of the campus mission.  I likely would have been blocked in at least part of this from the get go.

(3)  The reality when I took over SCALE is that I was largely ignorant on a host of issues, particularly on how people learn, but at that time I felt a very strong need to self-educate and that became something of a passion.  Because of my prior views of big IT as an enabler only, I'm not sure I could develop the same sort of passion to self-educate.  (Here self-education includes talking with people who are knowledgeable about the issues, including those who report to the CIO, directly or indirectly.) Around this time Nicholas Carr came out with a widely discussed paper, IT Doesn't Matter.  In other words, IT was the 21st century equivalent to plumbing.  For me to be a campus CIO I would need a refutation to Carr's argument, one I could deeply believe in.  I'm not sure I could come up with that.

(4)  From the time I started running SCALE to the time I left the position as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, I had good connections around campus and in the Provost's Office (though not with the Provost himself after Larry Faulkner left).  Once there was turnover in the Provost's Office, that relational asset was lost.  I'm not sure whether it could be rebuilt or not.

(5) I never wanted to be campus CIO.  Climbing the hierarchy didn't get my motor going.  I was all about self-expression in the name of supporting what I cared about.  I didn't see the CIO position as enabling that.  This wasn't a Peter Principle thing, though that might be part of it. I simply couldn't see how becoming a campus CIO would count as personal growth for me.

(6)  There was a lot of political infighting within the campus IT organization when I was part of it.  It would have been necessary to put a stop to all the divisiveness.  Making that a focal point clearly was necessary, but it wasn't where my head was.  I never liked to manage down - even with the old Center for Educational Technologies.  I was all about managing out - being an ambassador to the rest of the Campus. I liked to doing that. 

I could make this list longer, but I think it sufficient to explain my title. Now, in spite of all of that, I want to consider what I brought to the table which might have been helpful in the CIO's role, and in so doing bring out some issues that might be generally relevant, not just at Illinois.

With that I want to cut to the chase.  I believe there is a kind of prejudice on campus that exists at upper administrative levels that is not often discussed.   The focus of this prejudice is on the person's background.  In your prior life before becoming a big-time administrator, were you a faculty member or not?  Being a faculty member was a big plus.   I wouldn't say it was absolutely necessary, but it was extremely helpful.  Conversely, if you were not a faculty member you already had two-strikes against you.  Further, if you were a CIO who could only talk about IT issues in tech gobbledygook or in Gartner-speak, you were doomed to the outreaches of the Provost's Office and you would never be invited to participate in the Council of Deans.  In contrast, if you could make IT issues available to other campus leaders in a language they could understand, then you might have a fighting chance to be an insider in these high level discussions.  The clincher is whether you could also participate in conversation that weren't about IT at all, be a good listener and make reasonable contributions then, so when it came to discussing the overlap between campus issues and IT, you would have the trust of the other decision makers, which would enable strategic conversations about the use of IT to proceed apace.  In this dimension I believe I would be reasonably good.

A core question about IT on campus is how much the central IT organization should be budgeted and about how much of IT function should be distributed around campus.  During the aftermath of the burst of the housing bubble, when campus budgets overall went south, there was some consensus built for greater central provision of IT services.  Ultimately, it seems to me as an observer now, much of that was on outsourcing with large commercial providers - Microsoft, Google, and Box.com come to mind.  There may also have been important conversations about services that need to be retained with campus hosting, though I was retired by the time those discussions were happening.  In any event, we tend not to make the budgeting part of such conversations public and it's been my experience that people tend to think about these things on a service by service basis, rather than consider the overall picture.   An overall picture is needed.  A realistic discussion that brings to convergence the expectations for IT funding, on the one hand, and the reality of the likely funding available, on the other is needed.  Given my economics background, I suspect I'd be as good at doing that as anyone else who might have the job.

There is then the issue about what happens once the CIO gets his or her wings clipped, being given the cold shoulder from the Council of Deans and/or from the Provost.  The experience I've seen is to retrench with IT peers around the country, and with folks with IT on campus.  The conversation, unfortunately, gets very insular. It's a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma.  It's not a good outcome, but it seems inevitable.  One might ask how to cut through this or if that is possible.

When I was doing the campus job as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, I was also the campus representative to the CIC Learning Technologies Group.  (The CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance.)  It was one of my favorite spots for interactions, with peers from campuses similar to Illinois.  The dinners the night before our meetings were better than the meetings itself.  There was no agenda then and people were quite open with one another.   The membership at the time was split between those who were faculty members in their previous life and those who were academic professionals doing the work.  We got along quite well across those lines.  But, the group when I first joined it also had people from the Provost's Office who were responsible for undergraduate education.  So there was the cross pollination I talked about above.  Yet the arrangement was not stable.  Those folks in the Provost's Office all eventually left the group.  They wanted to pass the baton to the full time ed tech people.  I gather that issue is still with us, as evidenced by this recent piece in Educause Review.

With that background as the canary in the coal mine, one wants to know whether the campus CIO truly integrated into the campus leadership is a pipe-dream only.  I don't know.  I will ask a different question instead.  Are the strengths I brought to the table replicable to some degree?  If they are and a candidate for the CIO position clearly showcased those talents, would the person be given a fair chance to become integrated into the campus leadership?

In my teaching I show students the theoretical ways that the Prisoner's Dilemma logic can be overcome.  It requires forward thinking and patience.  At my core, I'm a theory guy. It's how I was trained in grad school.  On a practical level, I'm much less sure on how to go about it.  In spite of that, I believe that schmooze skills have to be a big part of the answer.

Maybe, just maybe, the full answer can be found.

Tiding the STEM

This post will give a brief analysis and then delve into a proposed solution.  A much more thorough analysis of the general issues was given in a post I wrote back in 2013 called, The business and ethical dilemmas of undergraduate education at public R1s.  This is the most salient paragraph from that piece for what I want to argue here:

Yet I've also become distraught with the regular classes - too many students don't have enough on the ball.  Then there are a few students who do, but some are so alienated by what I gather has been their prior experience, anti-nurture if you will, that they've tuned out.  My little corner of the world may be just that and the rest of the world may be quite different.  But if not, somebody in the know should be screaming about this.  That's what I'm trying to do with this post.

In that post I talked about two possible models of undergraduate education.  The old model employed the grab-the-brass ring approach, in which elite students commanded a lot of attention and got a very good education, while the remaining students did not.  The new model I called the nurturing approach, where even average students have access to a good education and the instructors they interact with treat them as serious students.  The reason for moving from the old model to the new model was a consequence of how undergraduate tuition counts in the overall picture of university revenues.  Undergraduate tuition now is a big deal where when I started it wasn't.  While it is true that in-state tuition is much less than at a ritzy private university now, it is actually more, even after inflation adjustment, than what tuition at such a private university was when I started.  So it takes a big bite out of a middle-class family's income.   If the university is going to rely on undergraduate tuition for revenue it must deliver a decent education in return, for the typical student, not just for the top performers.

Now I'd like to mention several facts that have come to my attention since writing that post in 2013.  Many students I'm currently teaching seem quite stressed out.  This is partly due to their being on the job market and going through the process of interviewing with recruiters and/or their making preparation for graduate/professional school.  (And it may partly be due to their sensing in themselves a certain lack of competence for the new world they will be entering after they graduate.)  I wrote about this, along with one possible solution for alleviating some of this stress, in my prior post called Should We Offer On-Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?  What I didn't mention in that post, though it should be evident, is that any mitigation taken to lessen student stress, whether this one or something else, will come with a price tag.  So one wants to know how those resources might be obtained.

Next, regarding the leadership on campus, it seems more heavily STEM concentrated now than I can remember previously.  Of course, STEM will always be quite important on campus.  But there used to be more balance among the leadership than there is now.  When I started with SCALE about 25 years ago, the Provost at the time was Larry Faulkner (Chemistry).  And a soon to be Associate Provost who would have ed tech in his portfolio was Dave Liu (Computer Science).   But the Associate Provost for undergraduate education was Susan Gonzo (English as an International Language) and that gave the overall approach some balance.  Susan was also on the SCALE advisory committee and Dave Liu had a few folks who had accomplished quite a lot with ed tech tour some universities in Taiwan with him to showcase what we were doing.  I was one of those who went on the trip.  So I became reasonably closely connected to this leadership.  Now the Provost is from Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education is a physicist, and I heard only last week that a new person has been hired for what might be considered the sequel to the Dave Liu position.  She is a mathematician.  In addition, the Director of CITL (the campus learning center) is a biologist.   I don't know these people so don't want to comment on their individual talents, but I sense less connection with folks on campus outside of STEM.

Third, regarding the flow of funds, I am aware that there is a new budgeting model on campus for how tuition dollars track the students that pay this tuition.   The payment per IU (what we at Illinois call a credit hour; it stands for instructional unit) is much greater under the new model than it was under the old.   The new budgeting model applies to payments from the Provost's Office to the Dean's Office in the various colleges.  In any such scheme, one should expect some funds to be retained by the level that is higher in the organization chart.  So I've been told that the Provost's Office keeps the differential in tuition that international students pay.  But for the in-state tuition, my understanding is that more of it now flows to the colleges than before, though I don't know the precise formula.  We should also know, however, how the flow works from the Dean's Office to the Department Head's Office.  Has the new model changed that flow as well?  I heard last week that in LAS it has not, or to be more precise for LAS Social Science departments it has not.  (In addition to Economics, Statistics should be lumped into Social Science for this purpose.)

Fourth, regarding enrollments, for the campus as a whole undergraduate IUs have grown about 10% over the last 10 years while undergraduate students have grown about 8% in that same period.   But specifically within the Economics Department, when I wrote that piece on the business and ethical dilemmas back in 2013 the number of majors was somewhere in the range of 800-850.   I learned last week that there are now 1100 majors.  And that's in only a 6 year period.   So the rate of growth in Economics majors is close to three times the rate of growth of students overall.

Last, the New York Times produced tables of family income distribution for students and how these students fared after college income-wise.  This is the page for Illinois.  (There is some weird programming at the top of the page, which makes it a little harder to access the rest of the content that is there.)  The upshot is that Illinois, like many major public research universities, seems an engine for income redistribution - upward.  In colloquial terms, it is welfare for families that live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  In an idealistic conception of public universities, they provide opportunities for all and thus serve as great levelers of the income distribution.  The data shows otherwise.  One then wonders whether this perpetuates down onto the Campus and whether one should look at the STEM versus Social Science divide as a mirror of the divide in income distribution.

* * * * *

I was tempted to write a bunch of recommendations about how the Campus should change, based on the above, but it occurred to me that not enough is known, on a drill-down level, to have an interesting and intelligent conversation about these matters.  So the suggestions below are all about transparency - provide information that is publicly available with this drill down look.  What follows are a bunch of suggestions in this regard. 

Replicate the kind of information one can find in the Campus Profile, but do it on a department by department basis.

On Majors in the Department

• Report the 25th percentile and 75th percentile on standardized test scores.
• Redo the the New York Times table on family income distribution for each major.
• Report how many IUs are taught by tenure track faculty, specialized (teaching) faculty, and graduate students.
• Do this disaggregated for 100-level class, 200-level, classes, 300-level classes, and 400-level classes.
• Report how the IUs are distributed among these various levels for a student who graduates with that major. 
• To get a handle on required classes that get closed out, report on day 10 enrollment numbers (the 10th day is the last day students can add a course without permission from the instructor) versus room size.  If there is wait list information, report that as well.  There needs to be a time series of this.  Temporary (lasting for one semester) close outs are to be expected when demand for a particular major increases.  Ongoing close outs are a different matter and deserve closer attention. 
• Report on section size, for classes with only one section.  Report on pooled section size for cross listed courses.  For large lectures with discussion sections, report on both lecture size and discussion section size.  Again do this disaggregated by course number.

On Faculty in the Department

• We need a time series on the faculty/majors ratio.  
• We need a separate time series of this ratio for tenure track faculty and specialized faculty.
• Likewise we need a time series on the size of the doctoral student program and the tenure-track -faculty/doctoral students ratio.
• If there is a Professional Masters program in the department, we need similar information for it.

Part of the issue here is whether the undergraduate tuition is subsidizing doctoral education, which would be the case if tuition revenue outside of what is generated from the Professional Masters program ends up paying some of the tenure track faculty salaries, yet those faculty teach PhD students and perhaps Masters students, but not undergraduates.

On Instructional Personnel Spending Per IU

This is the heart of the matter, but it will take some work in getting the necessary information and then putting it together correctly.  One needs: instructor salaries, teaching loads, and percentage of appointment devoted to instruction.  From this one can determine spending per course.  One then divides that by credit hours times number of students enrolled.  We would expect this number to rise by course number, with 100-level courses having the lowest spending per IU and 400-level courses having the highest spending per IU.   Holding course level fixed, how does the number vary by major? Is it relatively flat or is there a significant gradient?  My worst fear is that for 300-level and 400-level courses it is lower for Social Science majors than it is for STEM majors.  But I don't know that; it's only a hunch.  That's why it would be good to do such a study.


* * * * *

We live in a world where data driven decision making is the new mantra.   The university provides a lot of institutional data already, but it is too aggregated for the purposes of this piece.  Further, while faculty salary information can be obtained, as far as I know it is never put together with faculty teaching information.  If we wanted to tell students and their families how their tuition dollars are spent, we'd need to do this.  So a case can be made for performing the above exercise as a way to educate the public on these matters.

I want to give a different argument here as well.  Above I quoted my post from 2013 to say - too many of my students don't have enough on the ball.  If that's not just my class but is actually happening broadly, what should be done about it?

In Engineering they have an attrition strategy (a weed out process).  A good fraction of students who start as Engineering majors transfer out of the College of Engineering.  Recently, I've become aware that Economics is one of those majors they transfer into.  What should happen to these students then?  Overall the campus doesn't want to follow an attrition strategy, especially if that means the student dropping out of the university entirely.   Thus, there seem to me to be two possibilities on how to proceed.  One would be letting the students slide through in spite of not having enough on the ball.  The other would be to follow a nurturing approach and try very hard to get these students up to speed.

The Economics major is particularly odd in that most of the students really want to be in the College of Business, but lack the credentials to get in there.  So Economics might be called the Business Lite degree.  If it comes with reasonably well paying jobs at the other end of the tunnel, everyone can take a heads down approach and continue as we've been doing.   But when fundamentals don't match up to the market price, there is a possibility of a bubble in the making.   Bubbles tend to burst and at the most inconvenient times.   This is why I think these matters are worthy of a closer look and why the campus, already in possession of much of the necessary data, should make substantial further effort to get the disaggregated view of how tuition pays for instruction at the undergraduate level.

This would be a project where lots of people would like to see the results.

Should We Offer On Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?

This post falls in the category - you can't fight city hall.

I am overwhelmed in teaching the one undergraduate class I have.  Part of that is me, where in the last year or two I've become a complete alte kaker, so am kvetchy much of the time.  Yet before the course started, I still had some idealism in me. I thought I could open the eyes of some of the students to change the ways they go about things and encourage them to think more deeply about what they are being taught, making introspection part and parcel of their regular process.  For the most part, that now appears to be a pipe-dream.  There are several factors I'm encountering with the students that are blocking this outcome.  The blocking is what I mean when I say you can't fight city hall.  If you take those factors as givens, and largely unchangeable, then you might ask a different question.  What can you do to make the lives students lead easier as they go about their coursework?  It's not as noble a goal as getting them to learn more deeply.  But it may be more realistic under the circumstances.  Let me give some background.

The class I teach is an upper level undergraduate course intended primarily for economics majors.  It's called The Economics of Organizations.  I do not require attendance in class.  And I allow students to submit their homework past the deadline and still get credit for it.  As one former student has said, I try to treat the students as adults.  It's their responsibility to perform that way. Many are seniors who are interviewing for jobs.  They expect/hope to get a position where they are treated as a working professional.  Yet the performance of many in my class is anything but professional.

The class has 38 students on the roster.  I would guess that no more than 10 of the students regularly come to class and get their work done on time.  With one notable exception, these students tend not to speak up in class.  Last week I polled those present on whether they'd register for this class if it were offered totally online.  In response, one of the quiet students who sits near the front responded that he would not take it.  For him, coming to class was important.  In behavioral economics terms, it is a nudge.  Coming to class gets him to take the schoolwork seriously.  Several of the other quiet students agreed with that.

There are 10 to 15 students who mostly come, but not always.  They try to keep up with the homework but sometimes get behind on it.  And then most of the rest of the students do not attend much at all.  Truthfully, I can't tell whether they are slower to do the homework.   Then there are two or three students who are still on the roster, but otherwise don't seem to be part of the class at all.

If the student learning was evident, the lack of attendance and being tardy with the homework wouldn't be that big a deal.  The thing is, however, students don't seem to be getting what I'm intending them to learn.  There's a variety of evidence to support this proposition.  The most recent one happened yesterday in class when we did a bargaining experiment to test what our textbook calls The Efficiency Principle - parties to a bargain will achieve an efficient outcome.  For about half the class, the experimental results supported what the textbook claimed.  But the other half either were irrational or didn't understand what they should have been doing in the experiment. My thesis is that there is a significant group of students where not understanding what is being taught is ongoing for them.  They go about their homework to get through it, but do not wrestle with the ideas at all in a way to internalize the ideas.

This is not a new thing for me.  Looking for the Excel workbooks I used to produce the experiment, I stumbled upon this video, which I made for the class back in 2016.  The first half of the video talks about the issue described in the previous paragraph, though the evidence it uses on which to base the conclusion is somewhat different.

If I set the bar in the class so that only students who did get it would pass, there would be a lot of flunks or a very high dropout rate.  That would be inconsistent with the other economics courses these students are taking. Given that, my idealistic aspiration is to encourage students on their own to try to clear the bar, but then not punish them grade-wise if they do not.  However, my course is but one of many that these students take.  Their patterns in doing homework and attending class are shaped by the overall environment they encounter.  So my encouragement has a very limited impact.

There is one more factor that bothers me.  I surveyed the students on this.  Among those who responded, the bulk said that if they miss class they use the class Website as a way to catch up (as distinct from asking a classmate about what happened in class).  But the intent in the course design now is for the class Website to supplement the in-class activity, not to replicate it.  So those who don't attend miss things.  As long as they can get through the homework, missing these things doesn't seem to bother them.  Just yesterday, a student who missed class unabashedly emailed me about the homework that is due tonight.  He was stuck on a particular problem.  Earlier in class, I gave students a tip so they wouldn't be stuck on that problem. Should I have to repeat that tip online?

Actually, each week I have a post about the homework and students are supposed to ask their questions about the homework there.  Indeed, there is quite a thread about doing this.  The thread demonstrates that many students don't have competence to work through the algebra and/or they don't understand the tutorial I had them do earlier in the semester about how to enter answers into the Excel so it will say they have the right answer if their formula is correct.   It is hard to teach economics on this level when students seem so uncomfortable with doing the math.   Getting back to that thread, students have to know it is there and they have to read through my responses, not just the panicky queries by the other students.  For students who aren't coming to class frequently, they probably missed these instructions about how to get help on the homework.

So, the title of this post is asking whether we should accommodate those students who aren't attending regularly nor getting their work in before the deadlines by making the class entirely online and self-paced for them.

My background with self-paced classes is limited.  Back in fall 1972, as a college freshman, I took multivariable calculus in self-paced mode.  The textbook was Thomas' Calculus and Analytic Geometry.  You could attend lectures given by George Brinton Thomas himself.  (I still remember his humorous explanation - it takes two hands to multiply matrices.)  Then you could go to a testing center at any time to take competency tests on the subject matter, six in all.  This space was staffed by upperclassmen, who would grade the test on the spot.  One of those I had to take a second time around.  Nevertheless, I recall finishing the last test about a month before the end of the semester, which allowed me to concentrate on other courses then.

The only other experience I have is in supporting Jerry Uhl, one of the founders of the Calculus and Mathematica approach on campus.  At the time they had already started to teach an online version of C&M , which was called NetMath.  Jerry's idea was to do a Netmath version of differential equations,  offer it only to students who had already dropped the on ground version, do this in the spring semester only, and if necessary give the students an incomplete grade, letting them finish up the course in the summer.  Jerry did this as one of the projects among The SCALE Efficiency Projects.  It seemed quite effective except for one serious caveat.  Most of the students taking differential equations were in Engineering.  When some of the administration in Engineering heard about this offering, they got upset.  They thought it was an unfair advantage for students to be able to get an incomplete.

That was 20 years ago.  I have no idea where current thinking on campus is on this matter of granting undergraduate students incompletes.  But I can report it now somewhat common for students to tell me they have to miss my class because they have a midterm in another class that day.  This makes sense because....?  If we acknowledged that students are over programmed, in general, and then episodically the stress levels amp up even more, as high stakes tests in courses take their toll, we need to find some way to release the pressure.  In that way of looking at things, granting incompletes makes sense.

There is still a different issue to confront.  I like to use Socratic Dialog in class, partly as a way to get students involved in the session, and partly because it models how people (should) think and I want to give students a method they should aspire to in their own thinking.  But economics students are mainly getting straight lecture in their other courses.  So that is what they are used to.   Micro-lectures can readily be delivered online.  I am reasonably proficient in producing them.  I already have micro-lecture content for some parts of the course.   Would students who aren't coming to class now watch online micro-lectures?

My guess is that if they could do the homework without watching, most would go that route.  That would parallel the current behavior that I'm seeing with those who skip class.  On the other hand, online viewing when and where the students wants to do that is clearly more convenient than going to class at a pre-scheduled time.  So on the fundamentals of this admittedly theoretical analysis, it could go either way.  Further, if we really considered the current reality on the ground, then we shouldn't be such purists in considering the student behavior we'd find acceptable.

In other words, online self-paced offerings for on ground students as an option should definitely be thought of as a second best solution. A first best solution would address the idealistic concerns I sketched at the beginning of this piece.  I do have some other posts with suggestions in the more idealistic vein, which of necessity would have to be implemented much earlier in the students' trajectory through their school years.  In the spring I wrote, A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn.   A few years earlier I wrote, The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution.  Each of these offers a fairly drastic solution for addressing the underlying issues. Yet these solutions seem so speculative and unrealistic that one should ask what can we do now that is do-able?  That's how my the idea in this post should be considered.

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?