This book review is by my husband, David Lowry, a plant evolutionary geneticist in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. We recently read Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. I highly recommend this book to readers and hope it’s widely circulated in and out of academia. I decided David should compose the review to offer the perspective of a postdoc currently in the system.
Higher Education? How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids-and what we can do about it by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus is an enthralling report on the state of higher education in the early 21st century. As the title suggests, the main goal of the book is to guide colleges and universities toward a future where education of undergraduate students is once again at the forefront, and not an afterthought of research, athletics, and bloated administrations, as it has become in recent years.
Early in “Higher Education,” Hacker and Dreifus lay out their core beliefs in the approach that should be taken:
Higher education should be open to every young person, and this is an option we can well afford. We confess to being born-again Jeffersonians: we believe everyone has a mind, the capacity to use it, and is entitled to encouragement. Of course, students have to do their share. But the adults who have chosen higher education as their profession have even greater obligations, which we’re not convinced they’re fulfilling.
The professors who have chosen higher education as a career are the subjects of the first chapter. It is here that the reader realizes that the gloves are off and Hacker and Dreifus aren’t going hold back in their critiques of the sacred cows of the ivory tower. To them the contemporary professoriate is composed of a group of tenured six-figure paychecks, who focus far too much time on their questionably meaningful research, while constantly trying to dodge any interactions with undergraduate students (i.e. teaching). Academics are likely to curse under their breath while reading this scathing report, while those who have always questioned the value of the professoriate may find themselves pumping their fists in the air. Regardless, you are not putting the book down now, Hacker and Dreifus have a lot of blame to spread around.
In subsequent chapters, the authors question why college administrations are so large, why colleges cost so much, and the point of college athletics. In each section, they skillfully describe the issues at hand and present possible solutions. Throughout, the reader will feel confident that they have already grappled with the issue only to find Hacker and Dreifus have a fresh perspective for these old debates. There was more than one point where the authors presented data that made me rethink former assumptions. For example, I had always assumed that scientific research departments paid for themselves through external competitive grants. After all, what were universities doing with that 33-50% that they took out of those grants for overhead? Yet, a college president testifying before Congress recently claimed that a big reason for the rise in college tuition is its commitment to research, namely genomics, which happens to be my field of study.
While “Higher Education” spreads the blame around and is fair in its assessment, Hacker and Dreifus do bring personal biases to the discussion. One recurring theme that caught my attention was the lack of clarity on what exactly Hacker and Dreifus believe to be the value of college education. They appear to feel that a well-rounded liberal arts education is best for all students and there are many references to western classics and a yearning for interdisciplinary “consilience” courses. Vocational education is definitely seen as second rate. In the chapter, “The triumph of training,” they express great disdain for “practical” majors, even engineering, which our nation could definitely use more of right now. They end this chapter with the following:
We’ve met former business majors, now nearing middle age who say they regret not having studied philosophy while at college. We have yet to meet a philosophy major who felt he or she should have chosen business.
My father, who has a Masters degree in history and now runs a non-profit, has often told me he wished that he had taken more business courses. I wish I had taken more practical computer programming courses. I also wish that those practical skills had been a requirement for my undergraduate degree. In today’s modern technological world there really has to be a balance between the practical and the academic in higher education.
Hacker and Dreifus argue that it might be better if practical skills are taught elsewhere. The only problem is that this might further isolate the ivory tower from the rest of society. The same would be the case for the elimination of college sports programs, which are watched by a lot of folks who never went to college who reside in the communities around universities. Like it or not, college sports are often the greatest unifying force across socioeconomic classes and polarized political groups in communities across America.
“Higher Education” may be a bitter pill, but it is a pill that the academy sorely needs right now. I would sadly have to say that many of the faculty I know would like nothing better than to avoid teaching undergraduate courses. Administrations and campus bureaucracies can be bloated and inefficient. The cost of college is putting it out of reach of many, while college debt is becoming unsustainable. Few campuses have huge endowments, while many squeak by on much lower budgets. Adjuncts and lecturers are exploited labor. For profit colleges are often a scam. Athletics may cost too much.
Even so, I don’t agree with many of the conclusions reached by Hacker and Dreifus especially about the elimination of tenure and the value of research. But that is the point. “Higher Education” is about starting the debate, a discussion that will hopefully lead to an improved and affordable education system for all.
August 25th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Why don’t we teach those practical skills, like computer programming, at the high school level?
Especially if the value of a full liberal arts education is eroding, there’s plenty of room to change up high school curricula to include more technical and practical skills, such as accounting and computer programming. Those are really useful skills for *anyone* to have for their own benefit, and even more so once they’re working at a business of any kind.
August 25th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
While it is entirely correct (as are many other points that seem to be raised by the book, I haven’t read it yet) that there is a serious disconnect between professors and undergraduates, placing the blame for this solely on the shoulders of professors is very misleading.
The main reasons professors don’t have the time and desire to interact with undergraduates are the following:
1. They don’t have time because they are overwhelmed with all the paperwork they have to complete in order to get their research funded (the never ending writing of grants, reports, reviews, animal and human subject safety protocols, etc.). And things are the way they are because general research funding is inadequate across the board, and because creating an environment in which research can progress with as little unnecessary impediments as possible is not a priority, instead the amount of paperwork required only increases as new rules and limitations are constantly being invented (yesterday, hESC, anyone?) and as the gap between money available for research and money needed for research grows bigger and bigger
2. They don’t want to interact with undergraduates because the vast majority of undergraduates doesn’t give a damn about any intellectual activity and all they care about is getting good grades, because they see college as a stepping stone to a well-paid job or med/law/business school, not as a place where intellectual development happens. In that environment there is absolutely nothing productive that can come out of such interaction, the usual outcome is that the professor’s time is completely wasted – I have seen with my eyes countless times how scientists and mathematicians of the absolutely highest caliber get surrounded by undergraduates asking the silliest kinds of questions (usually revolving around how much stuff will be on the test), with those undergraduates not even having any idea who they are talking with and how they are wasting his time. So it is absolutely no surprise that professors grow weary of this kind of stuff and try to avoid interactions with undergraduates. Which has the unfortunate result that the undergraduates who really came to college to develop intellectually and who could really benefit from such interaction while not wasting the professors time (contrary to what the conventional wisdom says, professors do like to share their knowledge to the next generation) suffer from not being able to do so. But that’s not the professors’ fault, it is the fault of society that sends to college tens and hundreds of thousands of people who simply do not belong there
August 25th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Great review. I had a liberal arts education – probably the type that Dreifus and Hacker hold up as the ideal – and I’m happy with it, but I agree that I wish I had more practical courses that would have made me feel better prepared about entering the professional world. Especially now that forms of communication are changing so much, there should be courses on how to correctly use emails, social media, give a talk, etc etc. I feel like I had far too few “Additional skills” at the bottom of my college resume.
August 25th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
You might want to contrast it to Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America, c.1918
http://www.ditext.com/veblen/veblen.html
August 25th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Does the book say anything about small liberal-arts schools, whose missions are explicitly more focused on education than the large research Universities?
Re: a liberal arts education, if done well it’s one of the most valuable things you can have. But, it’s not for everybody. Some people aren’t going to be interested in it, and we shouldn’t necessarily be pushing people into it who don’t really want it. There is a place for pure vocational schools, I believe, and I don’t think it’s good to view that as “lesser” than a liberal arts education in an absolute sense.
August 25th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
interesting review dr. lowry!
two points
1) i don’t think everyone really gets that much out of a “life of the mind.” many people are not intelligent. they are happy people, and full people, but just like some people understand the idea of athletics and are not athletic, there are people who understand that some people are smart and that intelligence has value without being intelligent themselves. we should remove the moral connotations of being intelligent or not, just as we have no moral connotations on being athletic or not.
2) many people with technical educations can be boorish, but a liberal arts education can be attained in part through library fines! in fact, you can find many classics online now, so if you have a computer and an internet connection. granted, that prevents you from having discussions with people, but you have to really discuss things with those who have genuine passion or interest. that’s not always so easy. i have a passion for classical history, particular the roman imperial period, and was very disappointed with a discussion i had with an ivy league graduate with a degree in classics (to be clear, it was immediately obvious that he was parroting the talking points of several specific professors at his institution who had a specific model of the transition between classical antiquity to late antiquity, rather than offering his own original thoughts, if he had them). didn’t machiavelli say that he retired in the evening to have conversation with the ancients? all through books.
August 25th, 2010 at 8:03 pm
The problem is the manic-depressive paradigm of the research professor who teaches. Separate those things and keep them separate.
Colleges and universities systematically de-value the profession of “teacher”. That is a discipline all by itself but you wouldn’t know it based upon the people that the universities hire. They think that everyone can teach. No, no they can’t. And many of those that can are mediocre and want mainly to get back to their research.
Hire research profs if you want and turn them loose on research. Hire teaching profs and let them teach. The hybrid thing is a crock and cheats the students out of a decent education, not to mention an inspiring career and life model.
August 25th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
\begin{rant}
I confess I’m getting a little tired of these guys, especially since they keep popping up in NYT, NPR, US News, etc. Like they have a special insight. This week you can read Hacker in US News. They speak ex cathedra as if their characterizations of a handful of tiny private and not so tiny private schools are the norm. Hacker in US News: Kenyon, Reed, Bowdoin, Occidental, Swarthmore. Driefus in NYT…include, naturally, Williams. Yup, that’s a cross section.
I’m a physicist of 30 years tenure at a large public institution. Department chair for nearly a decade. NSF-supported research professor for all that time – _and_ a devoted teacher of non-major, general education, undergraduate students. Am I different? No. All of my colleagues, including Nobel Laureates with whom I have worked all teach undergraduates. Hours in offices helping students. The Physics culture is that way. The Astronomy culture is even more that way. I suspect that others in the sciences are as well.
Now. If there are research/scholarly cultures who disdain and avoid undergraduate teaching, that should be brought out. But, the criticisms that I hear from these authors are aimed at a minority of the research institutions, but they make it sound like we’re all above the soil of undergraduate education.
Don’t you all perk up your ears when someone starts to slam his/her own profession? In my experience, when this happens at a university, it’s the result of a professor who was unsuccessful in research and scholarship, suffered in salary and review as a result, and then discovers students. After that, their fully-employed colleagues become their targets….because, _they_ don’t care about students as much as the mediocre faculty person does. Hence, “whistle-blowers” who now sing to that vast media crowd who loves to find fault with the professoriate.
Look. Tenure is a privilege. Teaching and research are a privilege. They mandate a lifetime of active involvement. Doing it well is NOT as unusual as the bleating unhappy faculty would like you to believe. And, doing it well is indeed worth “6 figures.” This glass is decidedly more than half-full and it’s ridiculous to smear the entire profession from such narrow perspectives.
By the way, about college athletics. At public institutions, it’s unusual for this to not be a self-suffiicent enterprise. Again, their criticism of athletics as draining from the general funds may be appropriate for the tiny, private college…but not for the large, majority public schools. Yet, the authors don’t make that distinction, at least they haven’t in their public splashes.
We are not all Queens College. In fact, most of us are Illinois, Michigan State, Penn State, Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, UTexas Austin, Florida State, Stony Brook, Purdue, Colorado, Oklahoma, Old Miss, Arizona State, Washington, Oregon, Pitt, Indiana, Oklahoma State, Arizona, Georgia, UNC, Tennessee, New Mexico, WashU, Iowa State, UMass, Berkeley, Riverside, Iowa, Kansas State, Maryland, etc. That’s thousands of faculty and hundreds of thousands of students. That’s where the professoriate lives. These are much different places than what I’ve heard and read Hacker and Dreifus use as exemplars.
Sorry. I’m proud of my institution, my colleagues, and my career.
\end{rant}
August 25th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
GM:
You raise two important points. I’ll address them individually. This does not trivialize the majority of professors. Most absolutely love their research. A large number continue in their research even after they retire without any compensation whatsoever. Most love working with students. They are usually more upset when their classes get cut because of low enrollment or budget cuts.
1. Paperwork and time. Bleed me a river. I work in a university and I hear the same whining garbage. The kind of workload in a university that you mention is a joke compared to the rest of the work world. Most faculty have not had a real job out in the world to compare to. I would like to see them in a public school or private industry. Even a high work load of 4 classes a semester is a grand total of 12 hours of classroom teaching a week and 5 hours of office hours. That is a total of 17 or 18 hours a week for their teaching responsibilities. Then we have the remaining half of their work week to attend to these other research and non-teaching activities. Of course we have all the time between semesters and summer to work on other activities full time and we factor in release times for research and other activities. I routinely see professors who teach a grand total of 2 classes a semester creating a grand total of 11 hours a week for teaching and office hours. They still whine about their “heavy workload”. I am not impressed.
2. Oh, poor babies. They want to work in an educational institution but they are much too important to waste their time with students. They are so icky, and young and stupid, and everything. Oh, how tragic. A student might ask a stupid question. The horror!!! The students are not there to satisfy the faculty’s needs for intellectual stimulation. The faculty are getting paid to create intellectually stimulating environment for the students.
If they don’t like teaching, there are many non-teaching jobs that they can do. Go take a post-doc research position. Work in private research. Work in government research. Start their own business. An educational institution does not exist to be a Disneyland for academics.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:31 am
It seems to me that many of the solutions to the problems of higher Ed already exist in the US community college system.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Why isn’t all of academia liberal arts colleges? Hmm. It’s the same as saying that no music conservatory should have composition faculty.
If you want faculty who teach full-time you can find that type of faculty. If you want faculty who push the envelope, do innovative research and spend time writing things yet unwritten, you can find that too.
Why Hacker and Dreifus are particularly fit to define what is fruitful research is not clear to me at all. Clearly if we look at the nobel price distribution world-wide the US system is not failing. And if we look at the schools that raise those, the educational system isn’t failing either. And if we look at access to broad education from community colleges to selective vocational, liberal arts, large public schools or selective private schools with research emphasis, there isn’t a lack either.
But it is kind of hip to say that higher education is failing and that the fault is with higher educators, and it works if one paints a simplified picture of it all, that people who do not look at the broader picture will nod their heads to.
If you want less open innovation, all you have to do is kill research in academia. It will work. We will see if that really was the outcome that was a good idea, also for advancing education.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:06 am
Anyone who thinks that 2 classes a semester only represents 11 hours a week of work is at best deluded. I teach 2 classes (only one of which I typically have taught recently) and my week is full. I work in my lab for hours 40-60. And maybe when I make tenure I’ll get six figures, and I’ll f’ing deserve it.
I’m getting really tired of the last few months of professor-bashing. People really have no clue.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:28 am
Rufus in Rochester:
No, I realize that most professors work much more than the minimum requirement going far beyond a typical 40 hour workweek. But as far as the required student contact hours, that is it. The rest of the time is divided between research and non-academic responsibilities.
I just think that the people that whine about taking time out to apply for grants and making reports on the spending are just out of line. That is part of the job. They knew about what the institution expected when they signed up. All jobs have good and bad about them. It is just dishonest to take a job that you know exactly what they expect and then complain that they want you to fulfill what you agreed to do.
August 26th, 2010 at 11:38 am
I am not talking about teaching, the majority of the paperwork doesn’t have anything to do with teaching, as I pointed out. At least at major research universities, which is what I am talking about, I have no experience at any other places.
The paperwork and all other commitments involved really takes a massive amount of time to complete – professors who have large and active research groups often get less sleep than your average MIT undergraduate, and that says a lot. It is not an easy job
Again, you are referring to something completely different from what I was talking about. It is not the stupid questions themselves, it is the attitude towards learning. If the majority of your students are in class for no other reason than getting their degree and going on to earn big paychecks, the whole process becomes completely compromised, and it is not the professors fault. I don’t think you got that point at all, or if you did, you chose to ignore it, but it was the major thing I focused on in my post
August 26th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
GM:
“I am not talking about teaching, the majority of the paperwork doesn’t have anything to do with teaching, as I pointed out.”
Yes, I understood you. I itemized the overall small part of the time that is related to teaching to present that the REST of the time is there to handle the other component of their job which is research. The paperwork is part of the job. They knew that when they signed up for the job. It is not all just fun research stuff. Sorry.
“If the majority of your students are in class for no other reason than getting their degree….”
The hope that all the students come in with a thirst for learning for it’s own sake is a pipe dream. Hopefully they pick up that part at the university. They come in as a bunch of uneducated kids. In what bizarre parallel universe do the students come to school already mature and educated?
August 26th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
[...] Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About… [...]
August 26th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
David, tenure-track faculty do exactly what is expected of them. Else they don’t get tenure.
Also teaching evaluation, improvement and innovation to teaching, undergraduate research opportunity etc etc are all part of contemporary comprehensive universities. Teaching is constantly innovated, evaluated and improved.
Granted after class ends there may be just 1-2 office hours, but there are countless hours spend with undergrads in the lab!
And that faculty don’t care for undergraduates is at best a stereotype. Indeed people who do not want to teach should not be in academia. And most don’t go there! They rather go into an industrial research lab or industry proper, because (a) they will make much more money (b) they indeed do not “have” to teach.
Sadly most academics love to teach, so this negative image that is being perpetuated hurts double.
I know some academics who purely want to teach. They go to liberal arts schools. I know some who want the mix. They go to a research university. I know some who want to do research in an academic setting. They become research scientists. And so forth.
And granted not all academics are Carl Sagan. And some academics do not like to teach.
But some students don’t like to learn and rather complain about how poor a professor was explaining it to them, when really they just didn’t read the textbook as assigned, and didn’t spend the time doing the problem sets.
The reality is that I have seen students who demand lots of attention. They sit in every office hours, send lots of email and so forth. If a professor allocates all his attention to that student, what happens is that (a) other students get less attention, (b) graduate education and research suffers and so forth.
And if they are tenure track they will not get tenure, because they waste their time on a student who doesn’t do what it takes to learn.
So to tell such students at some point that they have to do their assignments and read up on the material is not a cop-out. It is calling the students to the responsibility to do their part (after all we are all grownups at this point) to make their education a success.
I for one always took more courses than I was required, and I would never blame the system for not having picked what I needed. Nothing really ever got in the way of my grabbing courses I found helpful. But students have responsibility for their education. If you do not take your responsibility in it, don’t go blame the professor.
But this is why it is easy to get cheers for saying that professors don’t like to teach. Because giving good grading gets equated with good teaching. And being tough but torough and making students engage with the material is equated with bad teaching. Not by all, also perhaps not by many, but to place what happens at “professors” feet is really not serious, and keep up the stereotype that they don’t want to teach is not particularly fair or accurate.
Also I don’t see people whining. People explain that time is limited and obligations are many. Most academics I know live their job. They work long hours and never complain. To point all that out is mostly to oppose the charge that they are lazy and negligent. I think we have to take a much harder and closer look, and be much more honest what is going on, and look at fair measures of outcome, before making charges of this sort, and we should look at all wheels in the system, not just one.
August 26th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I am a tenured English professor, and I teach 3/3 at a public state university. I doubt I’ll see six figures ever. Media people think a little, but they know the people they write for don’t think much at all, so they constantly over-simplify issues. Teaching and Research are not independent activities. As some have intimated here, if you don’t do research, you start teaching stale ideas, lecturing off yellowed notes, etc. The best teachers prepare their undergraduates to do good research themselves and to join critical dialogues. Hacker and Dreifus may have done some research, but they seem to have wanted to sell their book more effectively by not mentioning what they found and sticking to the typical scandal of the prof out there at 2pm mowing the grass.
There is one response above that sounded pretty elitist–complaining about the intellectual seriousness of today’s undergraduates. With friends like these, etc., but the answer is not (as some others have repeated) to send fewer kids to college. The answer is to prepare them better for college: not only to fund up our primary and secondary education systems, but to coordinate what gets taught at the lower levels with what is expected in college. To do that, many of us at the university level (yes, even those taxed with all that paperwork) have to take some time, every once in a while, to participate in local, regional, and statewide conferences that bring all levels of the education community together. Enough complaining and fingerpointing, and that goes double for the Tea Party sympathizers writing books about it.
August 26th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Thanks for the interesting comments.
August 26th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Just to clarify: when I said that the majority of students should not be in college I didn’t mean that we should have fewer people in college, I wanted to point out that we need to do a better job at preparing kids for college. And this requires a complete redesign and fundamental rethinking of the whole educational system, but this is too big of a topic to start now. And this is a general them – while many of the issues discussed in books like the one in question are real, they are mere symptoms of much bigger problems that, however, nobody likes to talk about
August 26th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
They knew what they signed up, that’s correct. This doesn’t mean that the paperwork should be as much as it is, a lot of it is completely unnecessary .
Do not attack strawmen. Nobody said that students should come already mature and educated. We do not expect that. The problem is with the type of people that should not come to college and which currently comprises that majority of undergraduates, people who only see college as a means for them to get a job, not as the time and place where they develop and mature intellectually, with the end results being that pretty much the only thing they care about is what grade they get, not how much they learn. As a result the whole teaching process becomes one big farcical exercise of “We pretend we’re learning something, they pretend they’re not giving degrees to ignoramuses”.
August 26th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
GM:
The clarification you made in #20 is a hugely different than the explanation that you gave in #2.
I am curious. You say they should not be in college. If college is not the place for them to “develop and mature intellectually”, where should they be? Are we going to just leave them as an uneducated class of people? Are we going to set up a separate educational system for “those people” that you don’t think are properly motivated?
Exactly how do you define “the type of people that should not come to college”? Bluntly, who cares what their intrinsic motivation is as long as they meet the entry requirements and maintain the passing criteria of the classes. What additional selection criteria should we add? Blood tests? Height and weight? Maybe we should revive phrenology? They passed the requirements that the college put forth.
Also, if they are “giving degrees to ignoramuses”, who set the graduation requirements? Who gave them a passing GPA? Who signed down there on the bottom of the diploma saying that they fulfilled all the requirements for a degree? Should we have two degree systems? One for people that love education and another for those that “just passed the courses”?
August 26th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
It is too late to educate such people at the point when they enter college. Anti-intellectualism is a very difficult disease to cure. A disease that universities themselves are suffering from as evident by their advertising campaigns, class offering, etc. It is not a solvable problem at the level of colleges, it is only solvable at the most fundamental level at which the problem exists, and that level is the whole of society. We do not see knowledge and learning as good on their own, we do not see understanding of the world around us as good because it allows us to take wiser and better informed decisions, we see education as a means for elevating one’s societal status and technical knowledge as a producer of cool gadgets. This has to change. Of course, it isn’t going to change, but the practical impossibility of solving the problem does not mean we should not state it.
Everyone should care what people’s intrinsic motivation is because those are the same people who will run the government, the banks, the corporations, will be lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. And if the majority of those people approach their studies from the perspective of “This is something I need to do so that I can get my degree, but deep understanding of the subject isn’t at all necessary for me, so I will only do enough to pass the test”, then you end up with the majority of people in positions that require high levels of competence being incompetent, and a society that’s dysfunctional in general as result. Which describes very well the current situation
GPA doesn’t measure actual learning. In fact, if you look at a highly intensive undergraduate program at a major research university, a good way to sort out the people who haven’t learned anything at all during the four years they spent their is to start with the ones with a 4.0 GPA as those are typically the students who paid a lot of attention to getting a good grade, while completely neglecting actual learning. An university education is a lot more than passing the courses and getting good grades
August 26th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
GM,
A university is not some great psychic entity that can look into a persons mind and know the reason you did or didn’t do anything. All they can say is that the student has performed to a specified level of proficiency regurgitating whatever the curriculum agreed to by the educational system organization. We can’t go around telling people, “Well, you had a passing grade in this course but I am not going to pass you because you didn’t seem to cherish the knowledge.” I am sorry but that doesn’t make any sense.
The goals of education that you think people should aspire to are laudable. I am with you all the way. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to quantify and certify that someone has attained that level of intrinsic motivation. What you end up with instead is some arbitrary jerk saying you don’t pass because I don’t like you. I have had a couple professors like that and can speak from experience. Both were required courses.
August 26th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
But I never said that we should be separating people based on some arbitrary criteria. What I said is that that kind of people being the majority of students is what compromises the whole teaching-learning process and that until that kind of people becomes the minority, or better, disappears completely, things will not improve
For which to happen, very fundamental changes in the way education is viewed and the whole educational system is set up are needed.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Man, has this discussion has gone off track. I think the point from my perspective is that marginal faculty who make a name for themselves bashing university faculty need to be countered by the vast majority of us who work 70 hours a week for a whole career passionately pursuing our research and scholarship and energetically teaching undergraduate students both the pedagogy and the newest things that excite us. Because we love it. And, yes. If we’re good enough and lucky enough to be at institutions that value both…we’re compensated for this effort.
That’s most of us by far and I have to presume that at best Hacker and Hacker and Driefus are limited in their experience. Because, if I don’t presume that, then I have to presume something far worse.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
GM:
I am not really being obtuse, I do know what you mean but the problem is that what you suggest is not workable. Yes, society in general has screwed up. Now, all students are supposed to go to college regardless of their interests or aptitude. We have pretty much removed the option of learning a trade for people so inclined or suited (and sadly lost respect for the trades along the way). We have mainstreamed people with severe learning disabilities into the regular classroom where neither they nor the rest of the students get the attention that they need. We have gone to mindless multiple choice tests that they screw around with the scores and you don’t even have any quantitative measure to suggest the student’s chances of success within a program.
The issue I have with your side of this discussion is that we cannot make some subjective distinction to single out who we feel is able or not. We need to have clear and objective criteria to let the students achieve. Some will thrive, some will go through the motions enough to get through and some will fail. Until we have some real metric to give us some insight into the student’s abilities and interests, we have to continue this blind crap shoot. Otherwise, we will end up with some stagnant monoculture. Remember the best example of this: Einstein was labeled as incapable of learning mathematics and considered developmentally challenged. How many others are you willing to let society miss because some professor doesn’t recognize their abilities and might be too busy or self important to be bothered? It is a more expensive approach than just dealing with the “best students” but it is actually pretty effective. People from all over the world come to the U.S. for college. In most places in the world, universities are the playground for the children of the idle rich. Graduate programs are much worse. People succeed or fail based on their connections rather than ability. The inefficient, democratic nature of our universities here are actually one of their strengths. That is why there has historically been so much more innovation coming from the U.S. university system. Some other places have improved their systems and made great advances to weed out their old corrupt systems and are now putting out good students as well.
One other thing to remember. As it stands now, a really good student will get enough financing to attend the university of their choice regardless of ability to pay. These mediocre and worse students are actually funding the good students. The parents of some of these lousy students are paying large amounts of money to make sure that their little darlings have the best education that money can buy. This funds a great number of good students.
August 29th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
“I have seen with my eyes countless times how scientists and mathematicians of the absolutely highest caliber get surrounded by undergraduates asking the silliest kinds of questions (usually revolving around how much stuff will be on the test), with those undergraduates not even having any idea who they are talking with and how they are wasting his time.”
Oh my goodness! you mean the students aren’t fully aware of the greatness and majesty of the professor who deigns to grace them with a minute of his time? How many times would you like the little brats to lick the floor as they approach The Holy Throne, oh reverend master?
Come on. Let’s get a grip. If you work at a university, your salary is paid by a) taxpayers and b) students. Many taxpayers work longer hours than you do, and at least you have a job you enjoy and find intellectually stimulating. The students are your customers. The whole reason they are at university is to learn, so that means they will ask questions, and not all of those questions will be smart questions. I don’t see why it’s unreasonable to expect that professors actually spend some time working with undergraduates.
September 8th, 2010 at 4:27 am
I think at the authors on target after reading the book. I graduated from a small community college in 1974 after time in the army. I attended classes that were taught by professors. A couple of years later I attended a highly regarded university to obtain my undergraduate degree. At the university many of the classes were taught by graduate students or professors that focused on research. In general both were poor teachers and not interested in the students. It was frustrating because of the investment of my time and money.