Sherman Dorn

Sins die

Sine die* is one of the few Latin expressions known or used in the Florida statehouse, and it marks the end of a session (technically adjourning indefinitely). 6pm EDT was the scheduled close, and when the traditional handkerchief dropped a few minutes afterwards, the legislature had wreaked havoc on the state budget, blown apart the merit-evaluation process for $85 million in start-up funds for large research centers, ... but failed to act on two foolish educational ideas, one the misnamed "academic freedom" bill that would undercut the science standards and the other a constitutional proposal that would strip the state's Board of Governors of all authority to manage the state's universities except what the legislature deigned to give it.

In both cases, there was a broad array of opponents, though the bill to undermine science standards was far closer to passage. In the case of university governance, the state's university faculty were joined by the editorial boards of major daily newspapers, the state's Chamber of Commerce, a business development group called the Council of 100, and a former private-university president who is now a state-house representative. Everyone who opposed the proposal deserves credit for killing it.

* The pronunciation is commonly "sigh-nee die," though purists would probably prefer "sin-ay dee-ay." I still like "sins die," but maybe that's because I'm now completing my 12th year in Florida.

"We can never have too many resources"??

In the Times article on Rockefeller's $100 Million donation to Harvard, Harvard President Drew Faust said,

To outsiders, our bucket may seem full, but at Harvard, we so often see aspirations we hope to fulfill that we can never have too many resources.

That's chutzpah. The question is not whether Harvard can have too many resources but whether other colleges and universities have too few. (For the record, I like the proposal others have made, that such wealth should flow to small underfunded private institutions.)

College graduation

The new Ed Sector report by Kevin Carey, Graduation Rate Watch, summarizes some of the material available from the IPEDS 6-year graduation measures for four-year colleges and universities. The main point is that there are vast differences within different higher-ed sectors not only in 6-year graduation stats but also Black-White differences in graduation. He correctly points out that some institutions such as Florida State have programs that appear at first glance to provide substantial support to first-generation college students, support that increases the likelihood of graduating.

Kudos: the interesting slice of IPEDS rates, with the appropriate hedges/caveats; the nod to Vincent Tinto's work; the acknowledgment of Cliff Adelman's suggestion for improving the IPEDS measures; the observation that U.S. News & World Report rankings largely diss graduation rates as ways to distinguish institutions; the recommendation that financial aid be shifted away from its merit-based emphasis today and back towards means-testing; the observation that funding enrollment does not provide a strong incentive for retention programs.

Kumquats: the continued push for a national unit records database. I think that's the only DOA suggestion in a compact, complex report. I may disagree with some other ideas, but the report on the whole is thoughtful and presents issues in a clear way. I might want a bit more use of the current college-retention literature, but I can't point to specifics because that's outside my area of expertise.

Some broader issues that complicate efforts to increase undergraduate graduation:

• A large proportion of college students are in community colleges, and programs that focus on first-time-in-college students at universities are great... and limited to that sector of higher education.
  
• Part-time students are a serious puzzle in terms of retention and even measurement. In many states, part-time students have a much harder time getting aid (in part because they are often older, and in part because of minimal-credit requirements). They also have competing obligations, are on campus less frequently, etc. I love older students in my classes for very selfish reasons (they are more mature, they help teach their classmates simply by being there and talking about their lives), but I'm not sure who has cracked the practical challenges that part-time students present for themselves and for their colleges.
  
• Health crises can turn a student with marginal success into a student who has dropped out, and young adults are among the least likely Americans to have adequate health insurance.
• Institutional pecking orders are hard to pinpoint, and they can shift rapidly: witness Florida, where reduced funding is pushing most of the state's public universities into being far more selective. My guess is that graduation rates will rise in 4-5 years, but while some institutions (including mine) are figuring out how some concrete steps to increase student success, some part of that will be a selection effect. So making comparisons with "peer institutions" may be a difficult enterprise.
  
• Measures focused on undergraduates make it somewhat more difficult for graduate-focused institutions in any incentive system. States need to be flexible and negotiate the systems with institutions, or they are likely to provide odd advantages to some institutions over others, advantages that will only be discovered after the fact.

And those are the issues that are apparent to me without knowing the higher-ed attrition/retention/graduation literature. There is one faculty colleague at USF who focuses on higher-ed attrition, and there are IR gurus for whom this is an occupational focus, so I do have local resources... now I really need that Time-Turner. But for now, it's 11:30 pm, and I still need to provide feedback on a student thesis...

Think, then blog

I'm occasionally embarrassed when a typo appears in a blog entry, and I'm frequently learning from comments here, but I'm surprised at Mike Petrilli's simplistic argument that "bad ideas flow from academia into our K-12 system ... (... moral relativism, the decline of the core curriulum, dubious pedagogical approaches)" and that "one of public education's worst features" is "its hyper-unionized workforce." I'm not sure when I've seen Petrilli this shrill.

Taking the claims one by one...

• The arguments about moral relativism and the decline of civilization appeared ... let's see: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." That's Cicero. Today, everyone's writing blogs (PDF), including Petrilli. In any case, I don't think Cicero could blame either TV or higher education.
  
• If one wants to blame higher ed for the decline of the core curriculum, when should we pinpoint it? Harvard with its elective system in the late 19th century, or when institutions stopped requiring Latin and Greek for Ph.D.'s? Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
• To claim that higher education is at fault for standard pedagogy, one would have to accumulate evidence that it was substantially better at some point. And that evidence is...?
• Public education's worst features... unionization? So Mississippi and Alabama schools are perfect, because they don't provide collective bargaining rights for public employees?
  

Incidentally, is there any evidence that graduate-student unions are horrors visited upon public universities that have them?

Open-source textbooks

This morning, Inside Higher Ed has a good article on faculty who write open-source texts. In the end, it'll be faculty decisions that determine whether this is a viable alternative to expensive texts.

In memoriam

It's been one year after the shootings at Virginia Tech. No great thoughts here, just thoughts.

The difference between being wrong and being fired

Aaron Barlow has it on the nose when he discusses Academic Freedom and Yoo. Fundamentally, once UC Berkeley's law school hired John Yoo as a tenured faculty member, it owed him due process in any disciplinary proceeding, both substantive and procedural due process. The fact that his actions as a government lawyer are obnoxious and antidemocratic does not change that obligation.

One of the arguments against torture is that the United States needs to operate even a war on higher moral grounds, and torturing prisoners injures that national interest. So how would violating John Yoo's academic due process be gaining the higher moral ground by those of us who think he was wrong?

Funding in higher ed

Kevin Carey's column on unequal funding of higher education makes the obvious but important point that states' public higher education systems are often skewed in favor of spending more in institutions with better-prepared students. Carey uses per-student (FTE) instructional expenses calculated using the Governmental Accounting Standards Board numbers (i.e., numbers that institutions reported using GASB definitions), and because I don't know the details on the relevant definitions, I can't comment on the methods in terms of his back-of-the-spreadsheet estimates that California institutions spend more than $10K per student when students' entering SAT scores are higher. I suspect somewhat different measures would come up with different numbers.

But the larger point is still true: community colleges spend less on instruction per student, in large part because they receive less per FTE than universities and because their tuition is lower. In turn, they pay full-time faculty less than in universities, and they rely far more on contingent faculty. At the same time, community college students are far more likely to be told to take developmental (remedial) courses.

The historian in me wants to know how this inequality in spending (however calculated) has changed over the past three decades, as states have disinvested in higher education. And also what the relationship is between general higher-ed revenue structures in a state and the inequality within the state. The easiest way to equalize spending in higher ed is to cut revenues back for every public institution, and that inevitably reduces the range in instructional spending. We're trying that here in Florida, but I don't think anyone is going to like the outcome.

(A note to Carey and to the editors of Inside Higher Ed: the word is methods, not methodology. Methodology is the study of methods. A little later: That word probably caught my eye because I'm in the midst of journal-editing stuff today, and I regularly have to change "methodology" to "methods" in that role.)

Turnitin.com, students' intellectual property, and fair use

Eric Goldman has the latest news and commentary on the high school students' lawsuit (and the suit's dismissal) against having to submit papers to Turnitin.com (hat tip). It's a fascinating and complicated issue, and Goldman's discussion explains at least some of the tangles involved (though I wouldn't be surprised if there were more).

Who ever expected Florida legislators to be enmeshed in ...

Following a few weeks after revelations that a small university up the road from me hired a state legislator as a lecturer for close to six figures, there's a story in IHE with the title A State Senator's Sweet Deal, about one of the universities in our state capitol.

This type of news item appears occasionally in almost any state, but my concern is that if a proposal to gut the powers of our state governing board goes forward, we'll see a lot more of it.

Complex object creation tools: review needed

With the recent release of new versions for both Omeka and Sophie, I'd love to see some comparative review from both institutional users (e.g., the perspective of someone in charge of a project team) and also individual users (e.g., teachers trying to create content for specific courses or modules).

I'm not saying I'm going to (no time!), but I'd love to see the reviews from both perspectives.  Oh, yes, and while we're at it, how about a review of Inform 7?

Defending Effective Accountability and Assessment Practices

Saturday, March 29, 2008
10:45-12:15
Hilton Washington

Defending Effective Accountability and Assessment Practices is the title of the session I'm a participant in at the NEA/AFT Higher Education Joint Conference.

• AFT web page on conference
• NEA web page on conference

From what I understand, the tentatively-slated participants include staff members of two institutional associations as well as us faculty. As soon as I have permission to post those names, I'll do that.

Essayist as Puck?

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
-Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i

In trying to explain Why I Write These Columns, Stanley Fish argues that his goal as an essayist is to probe the logic of an issue, and that he can remain agnostic on the larger issue while probing that logic. Thus, he says he could be atheist while criticizing Richard Dawkins et al., against identity politics while grasping one possible rationale, against the Iraq war while seeing advantages for John McCain in a McCain-Obama matchup, etc.:

[W]ere I to address myself to those matters, I would be entering the realm of moral and political (as opposed to analytical) judgment.

Fish has a point here: One can talk about aspects of an issue without taking a position on other aspects. On the other hand, I am surprised with how he did so. Fish's tone came across as whiny, or that's how I read it. The indirection of the first few sentences nailed it for me, with my comments in brackets:

Every once in a while [honestly, Fish, I don't care how often you do this] I feel that [glad to know you have feelings, but could you get to the point?]it might be helpful to readers if I explained [does anyone else think this phrase talks down to the reader?] what it is I am trying to do in these columns [Ah: we finally get to the point, which is that you're going to tell, not show]. It is easier to state the negative [you know that you should be stating the positive instead]: For the most part, it is not my purpose in this space to urge positions, or come down on one side or the other of a controversial question ["I'm not going to carry any reader's water"].

This is the worst argument for academicizing a subject I've ever read from Stanley Fish. Instead of pointing out how removing oneself from the instant issue can give one a broader perspective, he's being remarkably self-indulgent, focusing on how people have responded to prior columns. Who cares that comments on his prior columns misunderstood his point? Or, rather who cares about those specific misunderstandings?

I'd be slaughtered on end-of-semester surveys if I tried this approach with students: You're misunderstanding everything I say. That may be true, but maybe it's my fault, or maybe I could try explaining it in a different way. Implying that your immediate audience is stupid isn't endearing, even in the Gray Lady's blogs.

Eating okra at the carnivore's table

I'm in Tallahassee this evening, giving up a day and a half to convince legislators that a proposal for a diminished university Board of Governors would be a bad idea. This evening, I asked the hotel clerk for a restaurant. The one she directed me to had one car in the parking lot: not a sign of confidence for me in the restaurant's popularity in town. Instead, I went to a good ol' Southern restaurant, full of ham and other meats. A buffet, so I figured I could get something, though I'm a vegetarian. This is the South, so even vegetables like green beans have ham in them. One has to be careful.

Fried okra. That was the solution. When we moved to Nashville in 1993, I discovered that I loved okra. I figured out how to make baked and breaded okra (with cayenne pepper!), and while most of my okra in Florida is now in soups, I still like the crispy kind. I didn't ask what else went into the fry bin, but I figure that's not my ethical problem. Everyone around me was eating meat, while I was eating okra. We got along. We each got what we needed. I suspect my fellow diners were as sated as I was when each of us left.

So I'm going to try to eat some okra tomorrow, of the conversational sort. Legislators have their interests, and I'm fine with that as long as my interests are met. We talk, we see where our common interests lie, and we try to eat at the same table.

Embarrassments and education politics

Does anyone else think that Florida state senators waited to criticize the university system's chancellor's bonus until they wanted to decapitate the Board of Governors? I am no fan of huge bonuses for academic administrators, but surely the legislators knew of this for several years, as they've known about large bonuses for university presidents (which they are not criticizing). For what it's worth, Mark Rosenberg is head and shoulders above every other SUS chancellor we've had in Florida. That doesn't mean bonuses of this size are a good idea, but his salary is still less than the salary of several major-sports coaches in Florida, and on principle academic administrators should be paid more than football coaches.

This is the second time this week when senators I normally think of as temperate have clearly lashed out at Rosenberg in personal ways.

Is the blind spot on higher-ed accountability that big?

In all the kerfluffle over the senior theses of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, I hope I am not the only person asking the other question that I think is obvious and to the point: What do the theses tell us about the state of undergraduate education for Princeton and Wellesley students at the time?

Similarly, all those who huff and puff about higher-ed accountability are ignoring a huge source of information on the quality of graduate education: dissertations. Want to know what the expectations of students are really like? Go read what students create, when they know it's going in the library, going to be microfilmed, or going to be available electronically to the world.

Wrong incentive structure for community colleges/technical training

George R. Boggs and Marlene B. Seltzer describe Washington State's incentive structure designed to encourage community colleges to push completion:

Washington's community and technical colleges will receive extra money for students who earn their first 15 and first 30 college credits, earn their first 5 credits of college-level math, pass a pre-college writing or math course, make significant gains in certain basic skills tests, earn a degree or complete a certificate. Colleges also will be rewarded for students who earn a GED through their programs.

On the one hand, focusing on proximate measures on the way to degrees makes enormous sense, at least if we trust Cliff Adelman's work. On the other hand, I worry that such an incentives structure will affect standards in institutions with weak faculty governance and protection of academic freedom: "We need these students to pass these credits, or we lose money."

Better incentive structure: if public funding plus current tuition is sufficient for an institution's operating expenses (a rather big if, as I'm aware in Florida), keep the hands off the potentially perverse incentives inside the curriculum and give students an incentive to do well by keeping tuition stable for students as long as they make steady progress towards degrees. In other words, tuition stability (or a cap on rising tuition) is guaranteed if students are doing well.

The institutional incentives then can be geared towards summary graduation measures, to some extent. Florida's universities are having their first bite of outcome incentives this year, but the budget cut is swamping the effects of it. (Here's the motivational undermining: You don't starve people and then tell them they can earn a little bit of pin money if they work harder. At this point, at least for the universities, it's a matter of looking to the future and probably a system negotiation about formulae.)

There's a lot more to be said about higher-ed accountability, including Gerald Graff's commentary on assessment and Erin O'Connor's response, but I have to chair a proposal defense in 10 minutes...

Update (2/27): Kevin Carey responds:

I'd like to propose that people be more judicious and precise in their use of the term "perverse incentives" by not applying it to any incentive that could theoretically cause someone to act in bad faith.

I'm not going to split hairs by pointing out the adverb potentially up in the original entry (okay, originally potential and then changed to potentially); if I understand it correctly, Carey's argument is that we should not say something is a perverse incentive unless we can really point to the evidence of strong corrupting influences. In this case, my argument is about the pressures on instructors, not students (something different from what Carey inferred). Are colleges susceptible to such corruption when institutional stakes are tied to individual course grades? The scandals each year tied to athletics (e.g, FSU and tutors who helped athletes cheat) tell me the answer is yes.

Did Stanley Fish really have to bring the truth into it?

Ouch:

The truth is that there are no perfectly straightforward senior administrative searches. They are all a bit cooked, and often they serve more as window dressing than as genuinely deliberative processes.

The larger point he made in the column makes sense: institutional leaders are as important for reaching out as for directing what happens within. And the point he made at the end is also true: maybe institutions could be led by people with solid academic credentials, management acumen, and political skills. The fact that I love reading books, researching, writing, and teaching shouldn't excuse mismanagement.

Stocks for the plagiarist?

Margaret Soltan argues for public punishment of plagiarists, most recently in the case of Madonna Constantine of Teachers College (Columbia University):

UD sees no reason to keep the nature of the sanction private, and many good reasons to make sanctions public. These people should serve as examples to other professors tempted to plagiarize.

I'm not sure Constantine is avoiding public scrutiny, especially with the New York Times article yesterday on the case. Nor do I think her public comments are doing anything other than undermining whatever case could be made. I suppose one could say that anyone disciplined on any job for serious misconduct should have the details spread on the table like a crime blotter, but there's a reason why we term one a criminal arrest and the other a civil matter.

There are a few problems in making all disciplinary matters public. First, doing so would raise the stakes tremendously inside an institution and eliminate all incentive for faculty who have screwed up from either owning up to mistakes or going away without a fight. Second, making all sanctions public would penalize the first institution that does so by making all their faculty misdeeds an open book; who would go first? Third, it would reinforce the double standard that already exists with K-12 teachers, who are often assumed to be more moral than the general population instead of held to a reasonable standard of competence and decent behavior.

Besides, didn't we do away with putting criminals in stocks a long time ago? So why we should do it with plagiarists and not convicted criminals seems an odd proposition to me.

Bright Futures: an out-of-control entitlement program that conservative Republicans created

For probably the first time in my life, I had perfect timing: My column on Florida's lottery-funded scholarship program (Bright Futures) appeared in the Jacksonville Times-Union newspaper today, the same day the St. Petersburg Times reported on a poll about university tuition, a day after the Tampa Tribune reported on problems with the Bright Futures program and two days after a Palm Beach Post editorial on the subject and the state's Board of Governors discussed the isssue.

It's a tough argument to make, especially with students creating Facebook groups to defend the current structure of Bright Futures, but it's an important point: when Florida tied a merit-based scholarship program to lottery funding in the last decade and promised full funding of college in the program, without any caps to the students involved, ... and then has failed to fund all of the students universities have admitted in the past ten years ... something had to give. The lottery hasn't paid for all of the program costs, and so the legislature has had a huge incentive to cap tuition and to fight the Board of Governors when the Board wants to set tuition. The result is that universities cannot admit all the students they would like to. In essence, Bright Futures is no promise if not all students eligible can be admitted to universities, and if it pits the interests of students in getting the cheapest possible degree against the interests of universities in running institutions that are solvent.

In addition, Bright Futures is the vast majority of financial-aid funding in the state, and it goes disproportionately to families who can afford the rock-bottom tuition we have in Florida. The students who really need the help with tuition have a much smaller pool of funds available to them because of Bright Futures. The irony (noted in the title): here's an entitlement program created by a Republican former governor (Jeb Bush) and conservative leaders of the state legislature, when most of them have probably criticized other entitlement programs. There's nothing wrong with Republicans (my oldest sister is a Republican officeholder in California), but here's a case where the political dynamics have led to a clear philosophical inconsistency.

The chancellor of Florida's university system has the right idea: cap current costs, don't affect the students who are currently in the universities on Bright Futures, but in future raise eligibility requirements and shift spending over to needs-based financial aid. I don't know if that'll fly this year, but something has to bend, or the university system's integrity will break.

On eprints at Harvard and Full Monty open-access

I'm still trying to figure out the consequences of Harvard's Arts and Science faculty voting last week to push open-access publication of faculty work. This is fundamentally different from the occasional individual boycott of subscription-based journals. Harvard's faculty move is closer to Congress's push for a mandate that all grant-funded articles etc. be accessible to the public within a year of original publication. It is from these institutional moves that the publishing world will change. There is a simple, digestible explanation for the open-access moves related to grants (the public pays, so the public should be able to read) and the Harvard A&S faculty (we're established enough not to have to worry about the reputational economy of subscription journals). What flows from that is not necessarily clear, but we can reasonably assume that something will flow.

Reputational economies and the refereeing process

There are two broader issues here that need to be untangled. One is the reputational economy of academe, which is partly tied to the referee process and partly to post-publication reputational measures, such as citations. As physics has shown with arXiv, a discipline can survive quite nicely with a much fuzzier boundary between working paper and publication. But maybe that's because of the established reputation of physics. Similarly, I think history, classics, math, and other disciplines that have relatively high intellectual status (if not in resources) have nothing to fear from loosening up the refereeing process.

But what about other disciplines, including education? Education research already has a number of unrefereed publications that receive a lot of attention, largely because of differential access to publicity. Unlike medicine, where the top-reputed journals have publicists that distribute press releases (and you will see those regularly reported in the press), education has a different distribution of publicity. If you look at the indispensable Fritzwire, you'll see oodles of announcements for think-tank-based research symposia, and the ability to hire publicity folks does have an impact on what gets reported. As one colleague in another institution explained, when I asked why his work received far less attention in his area than the think-tank-based work of X and Y, which I thought was of lower quality, "Sociology departments don't usually hire publicists."

This is not to say that all think-tank-funded research is of poor quality, or that articles in refereed journals is of high quality: you don't know until you read the stuff. Nor am I suggesting that think tanks fire their publicists or stop doing the legwork to get attention. My point is rather that given the existing visibility of nonrefereed work in education, in addition to the status issues in education already, I suspect that faculty in education will be far more reluctant to let go of a peer-refereed model. Even though the notion of peer refereeing is historically and geographically bounded (see Einstein versus the Physical Review for one example), it is wrapped up in status issues. For Harvard's A&S faculty to vote for an open-access preference is one thing. For even Harvard's education faculty to go the same route? We'll see.

Economic models for open access

Since EPAA is described by John Willinsky as a "zero-budget journal," I'm living the tensions involved in open-access.  We don't charge either readers or authors for anything, though I have no compunction about asking authors to review other manuscripts as part of a reviewing ecology, and I've shifted the submission checkoff to alert authors that very long manuscripts or manuscripts with a number of tables may involve some paid preparation of an article post-acceptance. (I haven't yet asked authors to pay for such preparation, but it's a recent move.) Apart from the administrative issues involved, I am not philosophically inclined towards allowing advertising on EPAA. Maybe I should, but I and many editorial board members would be uncomfortable with that. But as a result, the burden of making the journal work is largely on volunteer labor, or labor borrowed from other tasks. Even if I were to accept advertising into EPAA, I suspect that we would not receive much revenue from it, and it may not be worth the headaches involved.

The most visible open-access journal system, the Public Library of Science, relies on publication fees charged to authors, starting right now at $1250. Here is the PLoS explanation of publication fees:

It costs money to produce a peer-reviewed, edited, and formatted article that is ready for online publication, and to host it on a server that is accessible around the clock. Prior to that, a public or private funding agency has already paid a great deal more money for the research to be undertaken in the interest of the public. This real cost of "producing" a paper can be calculated by dividing your laboratory's annual budget by the number of papers published. We ask that-as a small part of the cost of doing the research-the author, institution, or funding agency pays a fee, to help cover the actual cost of the essential final step, the publication. (As it stands, authors now often pay for publication in the form of page or color charges.) Many funding agencies now support this view.

For largely grant-funded disciplines, that's doable. For others? Not possible, either because an institution will not pay publication fees or because an author may be an independent scholar.

Here's the bottom-line concern: For journals in non-grant fields that are currently subscription-based and where there is paid staff who work on the journal, the transition to subscription-free work is fraught with risk, and I suspect that forcing all currently-operating journals to go subscription-free would result in the closure of hundreds of journals. I don't think anyone wants that to happen, but there is no secure economic model for open-access journals right now. We'll see the development of hybrids for some time (such as the Teachers College Record in education research), and that will work to some extent. And my guess is that a number of journals would have no problem with open-access for a substantial number of country-specific domains, to help scholars in countries that do not generally have institutional subscriptions to expensive journals. But that's different from the "Full Monty" open-access journal.

Where to go from here

Of the two issues, my guess is that the reputational-economy question is easier to answer. I suspect citation harvesting will be the basis of future reputation economies in academic publication. Google Scholar is incomplete and inaccurate, but so is ISI's Web of Science, and as long as academics don't treat bibliometrics as carved in stone, things should work out (or at least the problems are of a much lower magnitude than other problems we face). Unlike David Rothman, I do not see online comment forums and rating algorithms working, in part because few researchers can afford the time to invest in such forums or devices. For institutions that care about research, they will still use external reviews at promotion gates, and that will supplement other information.

The economic model of "full Monty open-access" is going to be harder to achieve. Maybe I should state what I would love, as an editor: for someone to figure out how to provide me great copyediting and compositing. Make it so I don't have the headaches of economic administration and post-acceptance detail work, and I'll probably swing towards accepting advertising or a sliding-scale manuscript-processing fee. That's going to be a bit of a challenge, since I have very particular ideas about how an article should look. But a clearinghouse that manages advertising, moderate manuscript-processing and publication fees, copyeditors and compositors, and has a quality-control mechanism for the copyeditors and compositors would do me a huge favor. And if this finicky editor will accept it, and if you can make it work economically, you just might make open-access work on a sustainable basis.

Just awful

7 Killed in Northern Illinois Shooting (IHE coverage).

I have no pithy comments today.

AP participation and passing data

For a good summary of the College Board data just released on the AP program, with some journalistic follow-up, see Scott Jaschik's story at Inside Higher Ed. Odd factoid alert: highly skewed AP subjects by gender include computer science (not a surprise) and French literature (more of a surprise).

How to ask questions of faculty

Once again Cal Newport has solid advice for college students:

Don't be afraid to ask questions when confused in class. Use the following format: <this is my interpretation> + <this is what confused me> + <this is what I want to be clarified>

Yes, yes, yes: don't ask a vague question such as Can you tell me again <topic>? Instead, explain your best understanding, which will help me or my colleagues figure out if you've nailed it, if you're in the ballpark but need some guidance, or if you're out of the ballpark.

A warning to college teachers

Ouch:

I'd like to thank you all for doing away with the education of the past that encouraged thinking, and for signing on to a new style that's more formulated for today. My future boss will really appreciate the robot qualities you have instilled in me. After all, it's a cubicle world, and we're going to need lots of cubicle boys and girls to fill it.

Hat tip.

Notes on a college visit, day 2

My teenaged daughter and I visited a College of Potential Choice yesterday, and it was fascinating watching the process from another angle (as parent, not faculty member and not student). There were four families at the basic orientation, two from the college's region and two from outside the region. One of the families left a few minutes before the campus tour, and I think my daughter was the only one who visited a class in the afternoon. The basic orientation was by an admissions officer who had just graduated, and the tour by a senior. I kept having thoroughly faculty-ish thoughts, while trying to stay at least a little in the background.

---

• With this student-centered description of the academic program, what does that require of faculty? (a few calculations in the head) So that's the likely tradeoff here...
• Yes, that's a very parent-like question,... and there's the grand-slam response. And that's the inevitable follow-up... with the solo home run. The other parents are sold, or at least they've decided not to call the bullpen.
  
• The tone of her answer to my question was in the style of, "Oh, I forgot to say that. Thanks for asking!" The admissions officer's casual style hides a lot of preparation/rehearsal.That next question stumped her, not that I was trying to, in part because it was a request for personal perspective on how she answered the first question. She regularly talks about some parts of her academic experience, but not about this. Maybe it's not as central as she suggests, or maybe prospectives or their parents don't regularly ask.
• Ah, so the senior is not a math or science person, but we're headed to the part of campus with labs because of the weather and because it's a great show-and-tell.
  
• With that poster, they must have a large plotter somewhere in the building.
  
• With that description of the equipment and with the flyer on the lab door to my left indicating the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar grant, my guess is this place has its share of NSF REU  (research experience for undergraduates) awards. The student tour guide is probably not aware that REU grants would be more impressive than access to the equipment she described. My daughter or I can probably search on the NSF website to check, if it seems important.
• And as we pass through this exit door, here's a campus police department flyer on a recent sexual assault (both an alert and a request for assistance). Later in the tour, another parent asked about campus security, and the student describes the regular security walk-throughs at night on each floor of each dorm. I don't remember if the incident reported on the alert happened on campus or near campus; not everyone lives where security walks through the dorms.
  
• My gosh, this studio is cold! I know you have to alert parents that a college might have drawings of nudes in a drawing class, but that's not the question I have. Why is every drawing studio in a temperate climate under-heated: do they want the students to learn how to draw goose-pimples, or is freezing student models the secret plan to fight weight gain?
  
• This lecture room is definitely built for a wired generation. I suspect I'd like it as a faculty member; much more theater-in-the-round style than the rooms I usually get, and that fits with how I like to run class.
  
• I suspect that equipment is available on a lot of campuses. But you don't have the comparative experience to know, and it's clear you love your college. That's probably more important to know.
• That didn't surprise me, but it feels like an afterthought, as if you have the answer prepared for students who ask, but few ask. Most who come for campus tours probably expect the answer and don't even think about asking.
• Ah... that answers the question I had when walking on campus. It makes sense, but it sure defines the character of the place in a unique way, far more than the "stop the war" posters I see in a handful of office windows.
  
• Why are frosh all housed in concrete? I think that's universal, and I'm sure anthropologists would have a field day with it.
• Well, I'm very surprised you didn't mention that without the question. It strikes me as something that would be a selling point. As a senior, you've probably been socialized so thoroughly into the culture that you forgot how the structure supports it.
• No walk-through in the dining hall? Ah, the food may be better, but the environment isn't the restaurant-like atmosphere of some large-university dining halls. I'm surprised the tour doesn't show that off explicitly as a reflection of the college's values; you'd be surprised how many parents and students would be relieved.
• Not even a quick peek into the bookstore? I wonder why.
• Not a research library, but since so much is available electronically or via interlibrary loan, that's not too much of a handicap.
• This computer center isn't very crowded. I bet today it's more popular for printing than for using computers... ah, and apparently that's true enough, according to the tour guide's experience. I wonder how many of those experiences were last-minute printouts right before class.
  

When my daughter was in a class visit, I went back to the dining hall, to sample the food, and as expected, it was better than in most college dining halls, if with ugly 70s-ish decor. (It's probably really early 90s-ish decor, but the point is that decor is less important than decent food, and that's a priority I appreciate.) I then headed to the bookstore to browse the shelves for classes. One of the faculty members wrote stuff that my colleagues or I have assigned over the years, and I found a class the faculty member is teaching this term; the books are pretty much what I expected, or in one case a book I want to read. (No, I didn't e-mail the faculty member in advance to meet. The college visit is for my daughter, not me.)

Browsing through the texts section of a bookstore is telling; what's the typical number of books a student would be expected to purchase per semester, and what proportion are textbooks, monographs, or classic books? While the reading load here is a bit lighter than places like Swarthmore or Wellesley, the books are still intellectually weighty: the majority are from the accessible end of monographs or interesting syntheses, not $200 textbooks. I'm quite surprised that the tour doesn't end right in the classes section of the bookstore, leaving parents and students to browse through a slice of the assigned readings. It's reasonably impressive, by itself.

Notes on a college visit, day 1

Signs on a trip to a place 1000+ miles from home with teenaged offspring:

• Teen offspring says she loves the weather
• Wearing a long-sleeved turtleneck and a sweater (if an L.L. Bean sweater), teen offspring doesn't appear to be cold in the weather you need a parka for
  
• Teen offspring repeatedly thanks you for the trip
• Teen offspring explains why the city is much better than the city where you currently live
• Teen offspring lauds the architecture of Huge University She Won't Consider, saying "I want the buildings, but not the university."
• Teen offspring says at least a few times, "My friends will kill me when I get back" with a huge grin.

We arrived last night. This morning, we woke up, walked around downtown, took a bus to Huge University She Won't Consider so I could have lunch with a friend, and then tootled around a bit on our way to nearby small-town where we'll visit College of Potential Choice tomorrow.

The college visit gig

This week, I'm going to be on the other side of the fence, as the parent of a high school student visiting a college. Wednesday, my daughter tags along with me as I have lunch with a colleague on a campus she's not interested in, but when we're at the college she is interested in, it is most definitely Not My Show.

As happened when my daughter entered elementary school, this will probably make me a better observer and critic of higher education. Or so I'd like to believe.

Evaluating college teaching

Since my energy is now sapped, I'll address Eduwonkette's four questions from yesterday:

1) How should learning be evaluated in college?

There are two separate questions (what did individual students learn? and what did groups of students learn?), though I think Eduwonkette is asking more about personnel evaluation. The first two can be evaluated using similar questions and data (including student work!), as long as you acknowledge that classroom dynamics can change things quite a bit. Usually, the first question is tied to students' individual grades, and the second is water-cooler (or coffee-urn) talk among colleagues: how was your class in HVN 101 this semester: better than HLL 666 last semester? Faculty rarely get to ask the second question in more systematic ways.

2) Are course evaluations a fair and comprehensive measure of college teaching?

Eduwonkette is either asking a trick question or conflating the end-of-course surveys that students take with either course evaluation or personnel evaluation. Students are evaluating their own experiences throughout a term, so the survey is more a chance for them to express the conclusions they have already reached, in some fashion, at least if the survey items are at least tangentially related to their concerns. Evaluating a course should involve student feedback but also something about what students learned, not just what they felt or expressed. And evaluating faculty as employees involves additional layers involving their contributions to a course, other information and context often unknown to students, let alone research or service assignments.

3) What should universities do with student course evaluations?

See above on my desire to ban evaluation as the term used for student surveys. But to answer the substantive question: they should be written with input from faculty, include an item on how much effort the student expended on the course (for a few reasons), be available to students (except for graduate students, who are students as well as employees and thus should have some privacy protections), and be part of program and personnel evaluations.

4) What are the potential risks/benefits to students and profs of making them public?

When I was a student, I found the comments far more telling than the numbers. But I suspect that this doesn't have to be theoretical or based on anecdote: there have to be institutions where the survey responses are public, and where one could study the consequences. See above on the graduate-student privacy concerns I have.

Higher education and the wrong battle

At Education Sector, Kevin Carey (a 4 out of 5 in my book) has an institutionalist lens that is sometimes incisive (4.5 out of 5) , sometimes frustrating (2 of 5), and occasionally both. Such as his complaint yesterday about the "Higher Ed Lobby" (my quotation marks, which are probably 1 out of 5 on style). Here's the gist in his complaint about accreditation agency politics:

But accreditation does a terrible job of creating or providing any kind of public, comparable information about institution-level academic quality.

I'd rate that comment as a 3 out of 5, and the post in general a 2.5 (in comparison with Eduwonkette, whose posts are averaging about 4.87 in the last few months). There are multiple arguments layered into that one statement, but let me focus on two:

• Lax accreditation has played a significant role in letting the quality of (undergraduate) instruction be lower than it could be.
• What we need to improve undergraduate instruction is predigested comparisons of quality between institutions.

Thus, yesterday's statement of principles by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation is unlikely to satisfy Carey's concerns because it resists the notion that creating quantitative comparisons of student outcomes is a necessary part of the accreditation process. Delving into the broader issue at length requires more energy and time than I have this morning, but I'll put out a few counterclaims:

• As long as millions of parents and students perceive that they are buying a degree from a college, there will be an inevitable tension between credentialism and the "use value" of a college education. In this environment, accreditation has to answer the face-value "does this college provide an opportunity to learn, and is the degree legitimate?" question.
• The most savvy students and parents want more than U.S. News rankings, but they're not going to give a hoot about what irks Carey and me about the rankings. Instead, savvy students and parents want to know what happens in the classroom, the lab, the studio, and the field. A case in point: last year, one teen acquaintance of mine was looking for colleges with performing arts programs. In the end, she was accepted to two schools with outstanding reputations, one with local connections that are unbeatable in this subfield, and the other that's in another region, perfectly reputable, but without those networking opportunities. She had the opportunity for one last visit to each place, and what made the difference was watching students rehearse and perform. There was no faux objectivity. My young friend watched students work and decided that the less-networked place had the better education because there was a pop to the work in one place that just didn't exist in the other.

My friend and her parents (whom I've known for years) cared about comparisons, but not predigested ones. They made their own ranking. Kevin Carey, Charles Miller, and others may want to see predigested measures, but they'll be swimming upstream against credentialism, against the needs of students and families who really do want information about educational quality, and against the professional judgment of faculty. Framing the issue as one of the White Hats against the Higher Ed Lobby does everyone a disservice.

One more thing: Last week I tried an experiment and allowed readers to rate my posts on a 1-5 scale. I tried priming the pump by rating a few of them (no, not all 5's), but no one else participated, and I pulled that option. I guess maybe some people are interested in ratings, but not my blog's readers.

Bad signs in Kenya

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Kenyan Universities Remain Closed as Fighting Worsens. Universities had already delayed the opening of the current term, and when schools are closed in civil conflict, lots of other things are inevitably shut down as well. Coverage by PRI's The World provides more information about the conflict in Kenya generally, and on that site, there's an interesting story about cell-phone credit and the current conflict.

Florida budget environment degrades significantly

This story today from the Tallahassee Democrat makes clear how dire the Florida budget situation is, and the consequences for higher education in the state.

I have to head to a meeting in a few minutes, but I'll say the obvious very briefly: This is horrendous, both for people currently at universities (faculty, staff, and students) and also for the future of the state.

Ranking creates perverse incentives; ranking of lunchtime and liberal-arts colleges, doubly so

Inside Higher Ed has a  great article today, Potemkin Rankings, on how Washington and Jefferson College did everything you'd normally think is right to improve how they look to outsiders and still sank in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. The short story: W&J recruited like crazy to increase the applicant pool and managed to increase selectivity while starting to increase enrollment, hold down the full-price tuition, and still maintain a good faculty-student ratio. Because other liberal-arts colleges increased their endowments and tuition faster, W&J sank in the resources area and thus in the U.S. News ranking.

The problem here is not just with U.S. News. You can find that with almost any system that reduces a complex set of data to a simple ranking. Because the quality of any complex service is never going to be monotonic, there will be inconsistencies in any reductive ranking depending on the relative importance of different factors in the final (reduced) rating. This year, Education Week's Quality Co