Do something else with your life

From a critique of the GRE, which is the exam one usually has to take when applying to grad school in the U.S.:

Grad-school admissions is a competitive venture; researchers call grad school a “high-status opportunity.” For Fall 2014 admission, 2.15 million students applied to graduate school in the U.S.  Only 22 percent of the doctoral applicants and about 48 percent of the Master’s-degree applicants were accepted, however. Score well on the GRE and your odds of entry to this high-status opportunity look better. Don’t score well, and—at least traditionally—you may have to consider something else to do with your life.

Which might be, regardless of how well (or badly) you do on the GRE, a very, very good idea.

The legacy of Brown

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked its 60th anniversary in May 2014.  A unanimous opinion of the Warren Court, Brown prohibited official (i.e., de jure) segregation in the public schools and rejected the doctrine of 'separate but equal'.  "Separate educational facilities," Chief Justice Warren wrote, "are inherently unequal."  He explained that "[t]o separate them [i.e., African-American students] from others of similar age...solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."  In a follow-up opinion a year later, the Court noted that implementation of its decision would involve a "period of transition"; it ordered states to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with its ruling and directed the lower courts to "enter such orders and decrees...as are necessary...to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."  

While the practical impact of Brown, which took time to be felt fully (see below), was in some respects significant, the "symbolic quality of the decision," as Yale Kamisar observed in 1969, "was immeasurable," or at any rate substantial.  Thurgood Marshall (later, of course, a Supreme Court justice) was the main lawyer for the successful plaintiffs, and the cases consolidated in the Brown decision were the culmination of a long litigation campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.   

Writing in The Atlantic around the time of the 60th anniversary, Ronald Brownstein described Brown's "core mission" as "unfinished" and went on to observe: "...racial and economic isolation remains daunting: One recent study found that three-fourths of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics attend schools where a majority of the students qualify as low-income."  Brownstein also noted that the "increasing diversity and shrinking white share of America's youth population" makes more urgent than ever Brown's "broader goal of ensuring all young people the opportunity to develop their talents."

How much and in what ways did the Brown decision matter and, more broadly, how much did the courts in general contribute to the civil rights movement in the U.S.? On the one hand, the prohibition of de jure segregation in the schools was important both symbolically, as already mentioned, and because it did lead, first in the border states and then eventually in the deep South (after years of 'massive resistance' and other forms of obstruction), to some school integration.  In 1954, 'dual' (i.e. segregated) school systems were mandated by statute in eleven southern states and six other states, as well as the District of Columbia.  The situation in the border states began to change relatively quickly after Brown, but the decision did not have any substantial effect in the deep South until the 1970s, when, as James Patterson (author of a 2001 book about Brown) notes, the decision finally was enforced.  Some cities and localities have been success stories of integration -- Raleigh, N.C., to mention one, as discussed in Gerald Grant's 2009 book Hope and Despair in the American City [link]. 

If that's the glass-half-full side of the story, the glass-half-empty side is that there is overall still a great deal of both economic and racial segregation in U.S. public schools -- there's more segregation now in schools in the North and West than there was 30 years ago.  The Supreme Court had a chance to help reverse this trend in 1974 by allowing court-ordered cross-district (urban/suburban) busing in cases of de facto (residential) segregation, but instead a 5-4 majority of the Burger Court went the other way; the case was Milliken v. Bradley.  Voluntary urban/suburban integration programs -- which typically do not involve an actual merger of urban and suburban systems, as occurred in Raleigh, but instead move relatively small numbers of students across district lines -- are not an adequate substitute for larger-scale court-ordered programs, but Milliken basically precluded those.  Today, according to this piece that aired last month on the PBS NewsHour, there are only eight voluntary urban-suburban 'transfer' programs in the country, involving all together a mere 40,000 students, and almost half of those are in Hartford, Ct.  The same piece noted that the number of 'intensely segregated' (i.e., more than 90 percent minority) schools in Rochester, N.Y., has increased fivefold since 1989, and Rochester has one of the voluntary urban-suburban programs.

There is by now a large literature on Brown and on the broader question of the courts and social change, most of which I haven't read (I've listed a few relevant titles at the end of this post, but this list is only the tip of the iceberg).  With that said, Mark Tushnet's judgment on the impact of Brown, and of civil rights litigation more generally, seems reasonable, though no judgment here will command universal agreement.  In Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law (1988), p.132, Tushnet wrote:

Brown galvanized black communities not so much because schools were desegregated -- except in the border states substantial [de jure] segregation continued for more than a decade after Brown -- but because it showed that one branch of the national government was on their side. Two years later the Montgomery bus boycott was the first episode in the development of the modern civil rights movement, whose sit-ins and marches prodded Congress to enact important civil rights acts in 1964, 1965, and 1968. The [Supreme] Court's response to the movement was hesitant and indirect. It never ruled that sit-ins were protected by the Constitution, but it did allow demonstrators to invoke the powers of the federal courts to limit the worst sort of harassment, and it upheld innovative efforts by the executive branch to convict white terrorists under old statutes.  Overall the courts played a distinctly subordinate role in the post-1960 struggle for civil rights.  It seems fair to wonder whether the pattern of race relations in 1970 or 1980 would have been dramatically different had blacks been forced to use only political methods.

Kamisar in 1969 emphasized more strongly Brown's "galvanizing" effect, arguing among other things that it contributed to the subsequent enactment of civil rights legislation and that it sped up or "perhaps even precipitated" the Warren Court's "revolution" in criminal procedure ("The School Desegregation Cases in Retrospect," in the Chelsea House volume listed below, p.xxiv).  Probably the only certain statement is that the legacy of Brown will continue to be debated.  
----

References and further reading
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
Gerald Grant, Hope and Despair in the American City
F. Harris and R. Lieberman, "Racial Inequality after Racism," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015)
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed 
James T. Patterson, "The Troubled Legacy of Brown v. Board" (pdf)
Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope
James Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart
Mark Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue 
 
Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55, vol. 1 of the series Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 1970; paperback reprint, 1983), ed. Leon Friedman, with introductions by Kenneth Clark and Yale Kamisar.

[added later] R. Straus and S. Lemieux, "The Two Browns," New Political Science v.38 (2016) 

A system in crisis

It's well known that higher education in the U.S. is facing a number of problems (so is K-12 education of course, but we'll put that aside for now). To mention a few, in no special order: First, the adjunct-ification of the faculty (which can lead to rather horrible stories, see e.g. here). Second, continually rising costs and resulting debt burdens on students. Third, budget constraints facing institutions that are partly or largely dependent on state funding. Fourth, there is the question of how much students are actually learning in U.S. colleges and universities, with some recent studies suggesting that the answer is: on average, not very much (sorry, don't have links for this). J. Quiggin at Crooked Timber also has hammered on the point that there has been relatively little expansion in recent decades in the top rungs of the system, in terms of number of student places. It has also been pointed out that economic inequality contributes to rising tuition, as the wealthy and well-to-do bid up the price of the most prestigious institutions. Universities in turn try to compensate by expanding financial aid, but sometimes, as at UVA recently, such programs themselves come under budget pressure.

Although these issues are systemic, the anger they have generated is often focused on the institutions at the top of the prestige/cost hierarchy. Some may doubt that these institutions are actually much concerned about education, as opposed to the perpetuation of their exalted positions and the passing of the advantages of their "brand" on to their graduates. A commenter at the LGM blog expressed this view recently when he wrote (in a comment thread attached to this post):

Harvard’s chief concern has not been education for a very long time. It’s about producing powerful people. Yale, too.

This remark is confused. To be sure, in an inegalitarian society one of the functions of elite education is, at least to some extent, the reproduction of privilege. But "one of the functions" does not mean "chief concern" or "primary purpose."

It is reasonable to ask whether a handful of institutions should be relatively well off while others scape by. But it is not credible to suppose that Harvard wants to raise 6.5 billion dollars -- the target amount of its just-launched campaign -- simply so that it can more effectively, in the words of the LGM commenter, "produc[e] powerful people." It doesn't take billions of dollars to do that. The number of "powerful" slots is limited: there are only nine Supreme Court justices, only so many CEOs, etc. If Harvard's main or overriding concern were insuring that its graduates continue to have a disproportionate share of such positions, 6.5 billion would seem an excessive requirement. But expensive labs, libraries, other buildings, and personnel costs do mount up and they might well have some connection to education, the thing that the LGM commenter is convinced is not "the chief concern." My interest here is not to defend wealthy, elite universities which sit on multi-billion-dollar endowments but rather simply to observe that heaping all the blame for the system's problems on a few institutions will not solve those problems.

Democracy and individual capacities: a postscript on Knight & Johnson

Before returning Knight & Johnson's The Priority of Democracy to the library, I want to mention something I neglected to mention in my earlier post on the book. It concerns K&J's reference to Rawls in their discussion of "the relevance of individual capacities" in ch.8. They write:

Our pragmatist defense of democracy envisions active participation by citizens in processes of mutual discussion and persuasion. Such participation requires that each citizen be able to advance arguments that others might find persuasive. Thus, equal opportunity of political influence must attend to the conditions under which all citizens would be able to engage in discussion at this level. The depth of the anticipated participation highlights the importance of the effects of individual-level capacities for effective institutional performance. (p.234)

In other words: One of the requirements for democratic institutions to work properly is that individuals must have the capacities (abilities) to participate effectively in deliberation. Presumably that means that most adults must be able to speak and/or write coherently enough to have the possibility of persuading others of their point of view.

Knight & Johnson proceed to criticize Rawls for paying "no explicit attention to issues of equality of capacity" (p.236). Citing Rawls's Political Liberalism [PL] (1993), they note Rawls's statement that everyone must have "a fair opportunity...to influence the outcome of political decisions" (PL, p.327). But, K&J continue, Rawls

limits analysis of [this] fair opportunity to the ownership of the minimum threshold of primary goods and merely assumes that actors possess the capacities needed to effectively use these resources.... On the dimension of moral and intellectual capacities and skills, Rawls concludes that any variations above the minimum threshold [of primary goods] are acceptable and consistent with the principles of justice as fairness. Ultimately, Rawls treats as an assumption what equality of capacity treats as a fundamental feature of political equality. (p.236; footnotes omitted)

Perhaps Rawls would indeed be untroubled by some inequalities in capacities or, to put it differently, perhaps he doesn't focus explicitly enough on ensuring that individuals engaged in democratic deliberation have roughly equal capacities ("roughly" because obviously some inequality in capacities is unavoidable: not everyone has the eloquence of a Martin Luther King).

However, it's worth considering in this connection an implication of Rawls's views as expressed in A Theory of Justice [TJ]. There he says that "the primary social goods, to give them in broad categories, are rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth," and -- importantly -- self-respect, i.e. "a sense of one's own worth" (TJ, 1971 ed., p.92). The sense of one's worth depends on a number of things, and one of them, Rawls suggests, is an ability to participate in the public life of one's society, as the following passage (p.101) indicates:

...the difference principle [i.e. the principle that social and economic inequalities must benefit the least advantaged] would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectation of the least favored.... And...the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his [or her] own worth. (emphasis added)

Thus, given the importance of self-respect in Rawls's view and the effects of the difference principle, the Rawlsian just society, at least as described in A Theory of Justice, would likely be one in which the large majority of adults would have the capacities needed to participate effectively in democratic deliberation and, more broadly, in their society's public affairs.

Romney in Philly

So Romney, according to WaPo, went to a charter school in West Philadelphia, did some listening, but also delivered a little sermony remark about two-parent families and cited a McKinsey study purporting to show that class size is not correlated with student achievement. Wow. I guess, on balance, it's better than not going to West Philadelphia, though he can't possibly expect to get many votes there, I wouldn't think.

How to f*** up grad school (among other things), in a few easy lessons

Some encouragement from Kindred Winecoff over at IPE@UNC has persuaded me to take a shot at a post outlining the mistakes I made during my career (such as it was) as a graduate student. This will not be a now-I-reveal-everything sort of post -- I've chosen to blog under my initials, after all -- but I think I can manage to convey some points without going into too many specifics and details. (Well, having written it, it turns out I have gone into some details. I also realize that I probably don't come off as a paragon of wisdom and scholarly wonderful-ness in this post. So be it.)

***

My situation was unusual from the start, because I was considerably older than most Ph.D. students when I began grad school. I had gone to law school (also a mistake, btw, but never mind that now) almost right after college (I took one year in between them), and then after law school worked for a number of years -- not, for the most part, practicing law, though I did do that briefly, but rather working in fairly conventional go-to-an-office-sit-at-a-computer-edit-and-write-stuff type of employment (it wasn't journalism as usually understood but somewhat more specialized). I eventually got bored with that, decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my working life doing it, and decided to go back to school.

I applied to a couple of M.A. programs (not simultaneously but in succession). The first one was a rather prestigious one that I didn't get into. The second institution not only admitted me to its M.A. program but ended up -- for reasons that largely had to do with some idiosyncratic factors not worth going into -- offering me a place in its Ph.D. program.

Mistake #1: I should never have accepted that offer without (i) thinking longer and harder than I did about whether I really wanted to get a Ph.D. and (ii) if so, whether I wanted to get it at that institution.

The institution in question was not a traditional political science department (my Ph.D. says International Relations, not Political Science), but the majority of faculty members were political scientists. The program was closer to a "big thinking and deep theorizing" (Kindred's words) type of program than to what Dan N. calls an "overprofessionalized" program. I had to take exactly one quant methods course, which was fairly worthless, and that was it. (At the time that was fine with me: I stopped high school math after 11th-grade trigonometry and analytic geometry, or whatever the course was called, and never took calculus, anywhere, though I certainly could have.)

I actually enjoyed aspects of my first couple of years as a PhD student, despite the heavy reading/writing load. Perhaps partly because, as I've already said, this was not a traditional pol sci department, the required first-year seminars were along the lines of Big Books and Big Theory (not exclusively but to a fair extent). So in my first year (this was the mid-'90s, btw, just to give the time frame) I read, for instance, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (much of) Polanyi's The Great Transformation, re-read some of the Marx and Weber that I'd read in college, plus a bit of Kant and Plato and Hobbes and Grotius, plus, of course, standard IR theory stuff: Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis; Oye et al., Cooperation Under Anarchy; Snyder, Myths of Empire, etc. (Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics hadn't been published yet. I read that later, on my own, when I was writing my diss.) Plus I took a course with a respected historian on U.S. diplomacy in WW2 and the Cold War and wrote a paper on Kennan. That was fun. Wrote another paper for which I read some of the lit. on civil society and social movements. Also did an independent reading course (this was the second year, I think) for which, among other things, I plowed through all of Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the space of a few days -- don't recommend doing that unless you have to. One gap in the first year, though, even on its own Big Theory terms, was the modern literature on comparative politics. (Note: The program's curriculum has been modified in various ways in the intervening years.)

Now this was all fine but I really had no idea what I was going to write my dissertation about. At the time that seemed not to matter much, even though the then-Dean of the school had asked all of us entering PhD students for our tentative dissertation topics in the second week we were there. (I told him, in politer language, that I hadn't the slightest f***ing idea what my topic was going to be.) Anyway...

Mistake #2: I did not really think about my training in relation to the job market. I figured if I was finding grad school reasonably interesting and learning something, that was enough.

Mistake #3: When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, I chose one that was not going to help me on the job market. If I had been attending a marquee institution -- a Columbia, Berkeley, Princeton, perhaps (even) Chapel Hill [still with me, Kindred? :-)] -- I could have gotten away with the topic I chose, but the combination of topic and institution was not good. (It was a historically-oriented topic, though of course I had to connect it to the present, since it was an IR diss.) Plus, frankly, my execution of it was ok but not stellar. It passed muster as a dissertation but that's about it. (I'm sure the administration's attitude was: Are you still here? Defend your ******* dissertation and leave, already.) Afterward I thought about trying to get some journal articles out of it, began to write one, but then decided I was really too sick of the whole subject to be able to do that.

Mistake #4: Sticking it out and finishing was probably, under the circumstances, Mistake #4. Obviously I did finish, even though, for reasons not entirely (though mostly) my fault, it took me a long time. I went on the academic job market after doing a bit of adjunct teaching (because I hadn't done a lot of teaching as a grad student; just one semester's worth), but I didn't have to send out a huge number of applications in order to discover that no university or college was much interested in hiring me -- and, all in all, I can't really blame them too much. I'm not sure I would have hired me, given the presumed competition.

***

I'm not wealthy, certainly not in the sense in which most Americans use that word, but, without going into detail, my circumstances are such that I don't need a job to survive, at least for the time being. Which is good, because no one is exactly beating down the doors to hire me. I don't have a narrow, focused policy specialty (e.g., environmental issues, nonproliferation, etc.), truly deep regional knowledge, or tech (statistics etc.) skills. In other words, I'm a generalist, and in a field where the demand for them is not very high. I could probably be a decent teacher but I'm not so desperate to teach that I'm enthusiastic about adjuncting; I don't need to do it to eat and I don't really like teaching the intro course, which is all I've ever taught. So if/when I do need a job I'm probably going to have to pound the proverbial pavement (even if I have to take some stuff off my résumé so I'm not rejected as overqualified for whatever I'm applying for).

I will conclude with an anecdote: last month I gave a guest talk in a friend's intro IR class. I enjoyed doing it, there was a lively discussion, the students asked good questions, etc. At one point I had occasion to remark: "Most of you are not going to become IR theorists," and then I added "I hope." My friend, the class's prof, looked surprised, but grinned. I pretty much meant it: Parents, don't let your children grow up to be IR theorists.

Well, this post has probably not contributed all that much to the sum total of wisdom in the blogosphere but writing it has been more enjoyable, believe it or not, than the post on growth, poverty, and inequality that I'm supposed to be writing. That will appear when I get around to finishing it.

Clarifying addendum (tacked on later): My point in this post is not to argue that all pol sci grad students should load up on quant methods, nor am I defending "over-professionalization" in graduate training. In my own case, going the quant route would have been rather absurd. I'm just saying as a practical matter that grad students have to be conscious of how their choices will affect their future chances of employment etc. In comments at DofM, PTJ has repeatedly made the point that one doesn't need a lot of quant/stats background to get an IR academic job in the U.S., provided one is willing to go outside the urban centers, major research institutions etc., and he cites some of his own students who have gotten jobs as examples. I think PTJ is right on this, but I would point out that many (or some) of his students may have written on interesting or 'hot'-ish topics, which helps; moreover, being acquainted with PTJ, as I am, I would imagine -- I don't know but I'm guessing -- that he really 'goes to bat' for his students (in a way that not all advisors necessarily do), and that's also got to help.

Shouldn't they be, um, studying, or at least asleep?

From a long post by Timothy Burke, Swarthmore professor and eloquent blogger:

At Swarthmore this semester..., some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise).

I'm feeling old, kill-joyish, and stick-in-the-mudish. Students should not be partying on Thursday nights, or on any weekday nights. More to say here, but it will conjure up the image of a middle-aged person harrumphing, so I'll refrain. What really makes me feel old is the fact that one of my contemporaries (actually one of my brother's contemporaries, but same diff) has a daughter now at Swarthmore. (I'd guess she's not partying on Thursday nights. But I don't know.)

P.s. If American English is your native language and you don't know the expression "same diff," you're too young to be reading this blog.

Life paths

If there is such a thing as an American creed and if you had to pick one statement that comes closest to encapsulating it, the most likely candidate would be Jefferson's assertion that all persons ("men" in the original) are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...."

Although the pursuit of happiness is an old notion, its translation into the idea of personal fulfillment is arguably more recent. The material precondition for this is the existence of a group of people whose (relative) affluence allows them enough leisure to worry about being 'fulfilled'. Needless to say, this observation is far from original. It was made, to take only one example, by Andrew Hacker some forty years ago in a book called (rather presciently) The End of the American Era.

In a chapter titled "The Illusion of Individuality," Hacker cast a skeptical eye on the notion that most people have hidden capacities and potentials waiting to be unleashed, if only given the right setting and opportunity. On the contrary, he wrote, "most people are ordinary...regardless of the time or society or setting in which they live." Most people, he continued, lack "any special qualities of talent or creativity" and "prefer the paths of security." They are "not terribly clever or creative or venturesome."

That may sound harsh, but what Hacker went on to say about education is, I think, still apt, more than forty years after it was written. "Middle-class Americans," he observed,

remain persuaded that with just a little more effort and some added insight they may discover their true selves. Thus the growing commitment to education, and the conviction that with schooling can come not only worldly success but also an awareness of one's own potentialities.... Yet, on the whole, the educational process has surprisingly little effect in determining how people will finally shape their lives.... [T]he overwhelming majority of college graduates...despite their exposure to higher education and their heightened awareness of life's options...nevertheless take paths of least resistance when faced with critical decisions throughout their lives.

While this was and remains a considerable overgeneralization (like virtually all such social criticism), it does bring to mind the large numbers of graduates of elite colleges and universities who have gone into investment banking, fancy consulting firms, hedge funds, private equity firms, etc., in recent years. Lately the numbers have started to decline, but for many it is still the preferred option. Of course today the majority of young people, including no doubt the majority of college graduates, face economic uncertainty, high levels of student debt, and a job market in which getting any kind of reasonably remunerative employment is a challenge. In that respect the picture is different from what it was when Hacker wrote the above-quoted passage. But it is interesting that in the late 60s and early 70s, a period one thinks of as full of experimentation and rebellion by the young (especially the 'privileged' young), at least one observer found more evidence of conformity and rationalization. Also interesting is that Hacker's The End of the American Era was published in the same year, 1970, as Charles Reich's The Greening of America, which took a quite different view of the rising generation.

P.s. (anecdotal): Back in December the NYT ran a piece about a 30-year-old American with an MBA who had decided to make a career in the slums of Rio singing hard-edged Brazilian funk. No 'path of least resistance' there.

Diamonds are forever; or, Institutional arrogance, 1970s edition

[title revised on 11/7]

A Crooked Timber thread about a recent student walk-out from Harvard's intro economics course (Ec 10), currently taught by Gregory Mankiw, elicited comments from a number of people who had taken the course in the past, sometimes the quite distant past. I was one of those commenting, having taken Ec 10 sometime in the mid-1970s (no need to get too specific for these purposes).

Late in the CT thread, one commenter suggested that having so many students in one course, albeit with numerous TA-led sections, was evidence of institutional arrogance. My response, which I'm posting here rather than at CT: if you think Harvard officialdom is arrogant today, you should have been there in the late 60s -- which I did not experience but have read a bit about -- or a decade later in the 70s.

Emblematic of the latter period for me, and no doubt for others, is a statement by the then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky. I remember this statement one way; I just discovered that Google (or, more precisely, an article I found via Google) remembers it slightly differently. Thus I'm going to give it in two versions. As I recall it, Rosovsky, probably responding to a question from a probably disgruntled student, intoned: "You are here for four years, I am here for life, and the institution is here forever."

Typing "you are here for four years..." into Google produces, among other things, a Feb. 28, 2005 NYT piece by Adam Cohen about the controversy then raging over Lawrence Summers's remarks about women in science. Here is how the piece opens:

"You are here for four years," Henry Rosovsky, who long served as Harvard's dean of faculty, once told a group of students. "The faculty is here for life. And the institution is here forever." The quote became part of Harvard lore: a campus film society promoted a James Bond movie with the slogan, "You are here for four years; Dean Rosovsky is here for life; and Diamonds Are Forever." But it also came to embody, for my generation of students and alumni, Harvard's imperious view of its place in the world.

It hardly matters whether my version or Cohen's version of the Rosovsky quote is correct. The point is that one would be rather unlikely to find a university administrator making a comparably patronizing, dismissive statement today, not because administrators necessarily have become more benign and enlightened but for reasons of survival in a changed climate in which, among other things, student opinion probably matters more than it used to. Btw, if you read down to the end of Cohen's piece you'll see that he managed to riff neatly on the statement in his last paragraph.

Junk the theories, keep the history

Ok, ok, I'm not really in favor of junking theories. But this post by PM about the syllabus for an introductory International Relations course does prompt me to say that without knowing some history it's impossible to understand "the contemporary condition" (to steal the title of another blog). There is a passage at the beginning of Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes (which I have quoted previously on this blog) in which he notes the date on which François Mitterand chose to visit Sarajevo when it was under siege during the Balkan wars of the 1990s: June 28, 1992. (Google "Mitterand visit to Sarajevo" and you can find the New York Times article by John Burns, published the following day, which indicates that Mitterand's visit to a city under continuous artillery and mortar fire, as Sarajevo then was, entailed some personal risk; he flew 100 miles in a helicopter over mountainous terrain from the Croatian port of Split.)

But to the point: Why did Mitterand choose to deliver his "message of hope" to the inhabitants of Sarajevo on June 28? Because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. However, as Hobsbawm points out, virtually no one caught the reference, apart from professional historians and some elderly people (probably mostly Europeans) with long memories. So here's a proposal for the nonce: no student should leave an introductory International Relations course without knowing a little about WWI, including the date on which Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Ideally, they should learn a few other dates too, such as, for example, the date WW2 in Europe started (Sept. 1, 1939), the date it ended (May 8, 1945), and the date on which the Cold War officially ended with the Charter of Paris (gulp, without looking it up I don't know that precise date myself). And I'm sure one could suggest a number of other dates, but I won't drag this out. Isn't this hopelessly old-fashioned, having students learn dates? Of course, but old-fashioned isn't always bad. I'd much rather that a 19-year-old be able to tell me when Franz Ferdinand was killed and why it mattered than that he or she be able to give a little disquisition on the different versions of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. There's nothing wrong with the "isms" but you have to be able to connect them to something (how else can I say this?) real.

A few somewhat jaundiced thoughts on the 2011 State of the Union

Candidate Obama in 2008 said repeatedly that tax breaks which reward U.S.-based corporations for "shipping jobs overseas" needed to be ended. After his inauguration, however, other, apparently more pressing issues (stimulus, health care, etc.) took precedence, and we heard little in his public addresses about ending such tax breaks. Even if the issue came up in Congress in the first two years of the administration (and it might have -- I don't follow tax policy closely enough to know), I'm reasonably sure those parts of the tax code are still in place. But the State of the Union speech this evening hit a rather different note on tax policy: the emphasis fell on lowering corporate tax rates, with an eye supposedly to creating a climate more conducive to hiring and job-creation. There was a glancing reference to ending loopholes in the corporate tax scheme, another glancing reference to ending tax breaks for oil companies, but the emphasis was clearly on a more 'business-friendly' approach -- one dictated, or perceived to be dictated, by political and economic 'realities'.

Listening to the State of the Union this evening, you'd think that lots of Americans are just chomping at the bit to start small businesses and become entrepreneurs, and all they need is a few encouraging words and more government investment in certain kinds of research-and-development to propel them off their butts and to the drawing boards. Of course there are creative people who start businesses in their garages and succeed brilliantly, but most small businesses, I believe, actually fail rather than succeed, and the commanding heights of the U.S. economy continue to be ruled by huge multinational corporations like, oh, General Electric, a company that has closed many U.S. plants and laid off many U.S. workers in the past 25 or so years (as have many others) and whose chairman was just appointed by the President to be head of a new 'jobs council'. (Bit of a through-the-looking-glass effect here?)

Another prominent theme in the speech tonight was education. The emphasis here was, as one might have expected, almost entirely instrumental. We need a more educated population because the jobs of the future will increasingly require post-secondary education, so the message went. But of course this is post-secondary education of a particular kind -- technical, scientific, narrowly vocational. If you're a young person not interested in science, applied math, and technology, the President's message had very little for you: no mention that I recall of the arts, literature, history, the social sciences, philosophy. Of course not: these things have no immediate, direct vocational value, and the President didn't even bother with the usual comforting cliché about the benefits of a liberal arts education in encouraging transferable skills, critical thinking, etcetera, etcetera. Such honesty is perhaps on one level brutally refreshing, though it does leave one wondering, as I say, about the fate of those whose talents lie in other areas than science and math. I guess some observers who are in a cruel mood might say, well, it's just their own bad luck for having been born with the wrong set of dispositions; and yet one can't help noting that most of the people who were loudly cheering the President's words in the House chamber are themselves not scientists, not applied mathematicians, not entrepreneurs (except for a few select invited guests), and the President's own education, of course, was not in math or the sciences.

If one has lived long enough and heard enough State of the Union addresses, it is possible to find them depressingly similar in certain respects: how many times have presidents called for improvements in education and in international competitiveness? For a simplification of the income tax system? Not even a president with Barack Obama's formidable rhetorical and expository skills can completely avoid the impression that much of these occasions consists simply in going through certain specified motions, much like a dancer or actor following a script, and that if the right keywords are struck -- competitiveness, entrepreneurial spirit, clean energy, high-speed rail, meeting the challenges of the digital world -- people will applaud and all will be well. And then of course you end with a reminder that "none of this will be easy," lest anyone actually dare to suppose that some concrete achievements might be quickly forthcoming. This is not, I hasten to add, a criticism of Obama so much as a criticism of the form: the State of the Union has increasingly become a set of quasi-mandatory figures of speech, much as have, say, the public statements of nominees in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The last part of the speech, on foreign policy, had the air of an afterthought. The obligatory references to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where the President said that safe havens of terrorist/extremist elements were shrinking as never before, conveniently avoiding any specific mention of the difficult, precarious position the government of Pakistan is in vis-a-vis, e.g., Baluchistan and areas in the northwest like North Waziristan. No mention of drone strikes, of course, since the U.S. does not officially acknowledge that they exist. No mention of grand strategy or anything approximating it. No mention of continuing violence and political gridlock in Iraq. And South Korea, our competitor in jobs and education and exports in the first part of the speech (though this was tempered somewhat by the call for ratification of the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement), is magically transmogrified into our brave ally in the last part of the speech, standing up to potential aggression by the North. I think the whole foreign policy section could have been dispensed with: the performance had already been given, the prescribed moves made, the applause lines spoken, the new spirit of bipartisanship affirmed, and everyone was eager to leave.

Another step forward (?) for commodified, homogenized education

According to a front-page story in today's Wash Post by Michael Birnbaum (link here), the Montgomery County, Maryland public school system is selling the rights to an elementary school curriculum-in-development to Pearson, a huge, for-profit publisher of textbooks and other educational materials. The superintendent says the school system is broke and needs the money. That may be, but public school systems should not be striking these kinds of deals with for-profit companies, certainly not with enormous conglomerates like Pearson. Such a deal carries the potential for conflicts of interest and, more importantly, it doesn't seem right. In return for a two-and-a-quarter million dollar advance and a smallish percentage of royalties, school officials "will open their classrooms to prospective customers [of Pearson] and speak on behalf of the program at Pearson's request."

And who's going to buy the product? The article's second paragraph says the curriculum will be sold "around the world," but is that likely? Most countries want to control their own curricula, I would think. Why should a school district in country X buy a pre-packaged curriculum designed in the United States? More likely is that the Montgomery County curriculum will be sold to other U.S. school systems. But which ones? Surely states like New York and Massachusetts, for example, which have their own elaborate educational bureaucracies, standards, and system-wide tests, could not possibly have any interest in this, or so I would guess. But Pearson obviously thinks it can sell it, otherwise it wouldn't be shelling out the 2 million bucks. A clue may be that, as the article reports, the curriculum, although geared to give more time to social studies and art by "integrating them" with reading, writing, and math, also "will be aligned with new common core standards for math and reading that are quickly being adopted across the country, including Maryland and the District."

The whole thing, in short, seems to further the tide of commodification and homogenization that appears to be engulfing public education in this country.

If I'd been writing the letter

Harvard College recently sent admissions notices to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants to its Class of 2014 -- an admissions rate of 6.9 percent. The linked article notes that applications have doubled since 1994, with half of that doubling coming since the university introduced a series of financial aid initiatives, aimed at students from middle- and lower-income families, in 2004.

If I'm not mistaken, an applicant to Harvard 30 or 35 years ago had roughly a 1-in-5 chance of getting in. Now the odds are roughly 1-in-15 (or 1-in-14). This year, as has no doubt been the case for a while, far more students than the total admitted had perfect SAT scores and ranked first in their high school classes.

Some of the 28,000-plus applicants who got the "we regret" letter from the Harvard admissions office at the beginning of this month are probably mature and self-confident enough to have shrugged it off; but others of these kids, maybe especially the ones with amazing records, were perhaps quite disappointed (and at least a few, eighteen-year-olds being what they are, were probably crushed). Now, I don't know what the Harvard "we regret" letter says, but I'm willing to bet a fair amount of money that it doesn't say what, IMHO, it should.

If I'd been writing that letter, I'd have said something like this:

"Dear Sally/Tom/Peter/Julia/Jason/Alberto/whoever:
We regret [etc.]. We know this is not the letter you wanted to receive from us. We had an enormous number of exceptional applicants and could only admit one in fourteen. We have to consider all kinds of things in making our decisions, and although we could have admitted, for example, a class comprised entirely of high-school valedictorians, that would not have resulted in the diversity that Harvard, like every other institution, aims to have in its student body. So while we considered each applicant very carefully, in the end you should take our decision not mainly as a reflection on you, but rather mainly as a reflection of the constraints under which we were operating.

"Since we work here, the undersigned obviously think that Harvard is a good university. But we also know that, as the country's oldest university, it is shrouded by a mystique which obscures the reality that Harvard is not better than many other institutions whose faculties, students, and programs are just as good and just as distinctive. In any case, the quality of your college education and experience will depend principally on you, not on the particular institution you attend. There are no automatic or guaranteed tickets to success (however one might define success), and you will come to realize sooner or later that the institutional name on your diploma is less important than what you did in the course of earning it. Even in a status-conscious society such as ours, reputation goes only so far, and in the end it cannot substitute for individual efforts (or, for that matter, cover up our own shortcomings). We hope that these observations will help you put our decision in proper perspective.

With all best wishes for your future [etc.]
Sincerely,

Haiti, Pakistan, and education

Now here's a bit of a twist: reading a piece of online writing in a hard-copy newspaper. In the Wash. Post for April 1, which happens to be in front of me at the moment, there's an excerpt on the op-ed page from Lee Hockstader's entry for that day on Post Partisan, the paper's opinion blog. He writes about last month's UN conference on Haiti called to receive pledges of support and to discuss reconstruction. $5.3 billion was pledged for the initial two-year recovery program.

Hockstader notes among other things that Haitian president Préval's speech at the conference called for help for Haiti's educational system, "which even before the earthquake had produced an illiteracy rate of almost 40 percent for adults and a quarter of all children with no experience of school whatsoever." In January I had written a brief note about a W.Post article on Pakistan's public schools; the article referred to half of all adults in the country not being able to sign their name. Since it's too late to look up the exact figure, I'll interpret this as meaning that Pakistan's illiteracy rate is (roughly) 50 percent, higher than Haiti's. Pakistan is of course less poor than Haiti, so this is further evidence if any were needed that you can't infer facts about 'human development' just from GDP per person.

Pakistan's public schools: condition critical

Griff Witte has an interesting if depressing Wash Post article on the grim state of Pakistan's public education system and the obstacles to reform. USAID will spend $200 million in Kerry-Lugar funds on education in Pakistan this year; the money will not be channeled through NGOs but will be given directly to the government, Witte observes. (This, if I'm not mistaken, might have been a condition for Pakistan's acceptance of the Kerry-Lugar package.) Lack of adequate monitoring of how the money is spent risks that much of it "will go to waste," the article notes.

The vast majority of Pakistani children who are in school attend the public schools, not madrassas. But the public school system is in terrible shape, according to this article; government spending on it is paltry, the curriculum is skewed toward reinforcing half-truths and outright untruths that constitute what one interviewee calls the security establishment's ideology, and "about a third of students drop out by the fifth grade." Read the whole thing, as they say.

Pedagogy of the not-so-oppressed

I just ran across, more or less by accident, this piece by Henry Giroux on Paulo Freire, best known as the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While reading quickly through some of the piece, I was struck by this passage:

"Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a 'dead zone,' where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate [sic; this should read migrates -- LFC] to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards. Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live."

The last sentence of this passage (the italics are mine) led me to wonder what Giroux would think of Michael Sandel's "Justice" course (which I've had occasion to refer to before, albeit briefly). After watching an hour or two of "Justice" online a while ago, it seems to me difficult to deny that Sandel's aim -- and probably, to some extent, his effect -- is precisely to help students become more informed, reflective citizens. But Sandel's politics are not radical, while Giroux's are, and I somehow doubt that Sandel is practicing the pedagogy of the oppressed as Giroux might construe it -- although Giroux does point out that Freire refused to identify his outlook with a particular method. I don't follow debates about education much, so I don't know what if anything Giroux has written about Sandel's course (yes, I could have done a search but I didn't). It does strike me as an interesting question, however.

I guess this is why I never got beyond Ec 10

For a university to lay off 250 staff members because its endowment has fallen to $26 billion -- that's billion with a "b" -- seems, somehow, rather insane. Yes, I know about imbalanced budgets and all that, but it still seems a bit nuts. Glancing through this NYT article (hat tip for it to L. Sigelman at The Monkey Cage) leaves a bad taste. Not because of the hot breakfast stuff -- that's trivial nonsense -- but because of the way the NYT writes about these things. Breathlessly and, dare I suggest it, not overly intelligently. As for the stuff about the supposed horror of "being quadded" -- that was being said more than 30 years ago and it was way overblown then. Why don't they yank their reporter out of Cambridge, Mass. and tell her to go cover some interesting stories somewhere else? Perhaps that wouldn't be as much fun as hanging around Mass. Ave. and recycling decades-old clichés, but it would be better for the NYT and its remaining readers.

The birth-order thing

I just caught about ten minutes of Michael Sandel on the Diane Rehm show. (As an irrelevant aside, I'm not a particular fan of Diane Rehm. As another irrelevant aside, I'm also not one of those people who would walk across a blazing desert or stand for three hours in the rain to hear Sandel, although he's obviously both smart and a gifted teacher.)

A caller asked Sandel what message he leaves his students with at the end of his "Justice" course, and Sandel replied that, in order to get students to question the extent to which they are personally responsible for their success, he asks all the first-borns to raise their hands. About 75 to 80 percent of the hands go up, Sandel said, illustrating his point about the random (or morally arbitrary) components of 'desert' and confirming the prevailing wisdom that first-borns are more striving (at least partly because they are more conformist, presumably, though Sandel didn't mention that).

I am skeptical about the whole birth-order thing. But since I haven't read Born to Rebel and know next to nothing about the scientific debate on the subject, I suppose I should exercise a heroic degree of self-restraint and refrain from further comment.

P.s. A long article appeared last month on Sandel and his course
in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The "Detroit of higher learning"?

A recent NYT op-ed by Mark Taylor, which opens by declaring graduate education to be "the Detroit of higher learning," has been generating lots of comment in the blogosphere (see here, just for starters). Taylor suggests, among other things, abolishing permanent departments (even at the undergrad level) and replacing them with "problem-focused programs." These two measures, however, need not be connected: you can create problem-focused programs without getting rid of departments. Indeed, I suspect many universities are doing just that.

It is well to remember that, as a group of social scientists wrote more than a decade ago, "the U.S. has had a long history of structural experimentation in [its] university systems" (I. Wallerstein et al., Open the Social Sciences [1996], p.99). Perhaps it is time for a new round of such experimentation, given economic pressures, dwindling resources, overproduction of doctorates in many fields, and increasing (and increasingly exploitative) use of adjunct and other temporary instructors. What form such experimentation should take is the key question, one to which yours truly has neither the time nor expertise to propose an answer at the moment.

Globalization of healthcare-for-the-rich

"There is a revolution afoot in international healthcare." So begins a piece in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, which notes that changes in U.S. visa policy since 9/11, making trips to the U.S. for certain purposes more difficult, have prompted wealthy non-Americans to seek "world-class" healthcare outside the U.S. Hospitals for the wealthy (or relatively wealthy) have been springing up around the world, and various U.S. universities have sought to capitalize on this.

Something called Harvard Medical International (HMI), which was set up in 1994 to make money for Harvard Medical School (HMS) and which has projects in 20 countries and an operating budget (for '07) of $21 million, is being transferred by the university to Partners Healthcare, "the parent organization for two of the largest Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals." The rationale for the transfer is that HMI is a consulting company that should never have been a formal part of the university in the first place. But the new organization will be allowed to use the Harvard name, when entering into new contracts, for the next five years, and the university will continue to be involved in some aspects of HMI-connected projects. HMS will continue to operate, for example, its Dubai Center (for postgraduate and continuing medical education), which is linked to the projected 4-million-square-foot Dubai Healthcare City.

A pertinent issue, broached but not really tackled by the article, is whether this whole trend benefits anyone other than the wealthy. If so, very indirectly, would be my admittedly ignorant guess. On the other hand, an interesting coda to the article, which may relate to this issue, questions "the model that says medical advances develop in the United States and ripple out to the rest of the world." It relates the story of an HMS student, Eric Twerdahl, who spent a summer researching "the impact of HMI projects in Dubai and India on healthcare in their respective regions." It goes on:

Twerdahl met a vascular surgeon in Bangalore who has revised operating room practice -- for example, sterilizing and reusing equipment, instead of using disposable items -- to cut the cost per procedure. He met a cardiac surgeon in Mumbai who has pioneered open-heart surgery without general anaesthesia, using instead an epidural administered above the level of the heart. These innovations sharply increase access to care, but were unlikely to develop in the United States, where the healthcare system is much less responsive to cost. In this sense, says Twerdahl, "the days of U.S. medicine thinking that it's at the top of the pile are numbered."

But at the same time, of course, that organizations like HMI are engaged in projects that may encourage such innovations, it is safe to assume that a number of health systems in various parts of the world are not at all in good shape: see, for instance, this report on the situation in what used to be Soviet central Asia.