NAS Blog

In Community Collegeland, it’s transfer time as students nervously polish their apps and recs, teetering on the brink of the future.  My student, Youjin, was shocked at this line from her University of California Transfer Admission Guarantee, “As a transfer student, your goal should be to complete your degree and graduate within two years” [my emphasis].  Of all the goals a college student might have (structured study of important texts, discussions of different philosophies about what makes a good life, an enhanced sensitivity to music, art, and literature), U.C. thinks what she should feel is desperate to be done with it.  Yet Youjin demurs:

It is strange to find myself wanting to take just one class for a year (‘taking a year off’), considering how acceleration in education always has been the trend in my (not yet long) life . . . .  It seems only natural for a real student to desire the luxury of time to really think about a topic . . . .  If even educational institutions . . . follow the suit of acceleration as if students were online articles to skim through, and decide to take time away from students by rushing them, even fewer people will take time to do outside reading, spend hours creating a perception of one’s [own] painting, and will cease to ponder.”

Ponder?  No time!  No metric!  No chance with today’s accelerating, hyperlinked, clickerfied, competency-shortened, pragmatic, outcomes-obsessed academic urgency.

However, students whose entire lives have been on track for academic success can yearn to get off the train.  The anime classic Ghost in the Shell includes a curious wordless sequence during which an unidentified pov just wanders slowly through the streets of a futuristic Hong Kong, exploring a previously un-comprehended, unnoticed world.  Students rarely enjoy seeing with such eyes of discovery rather than with the “weary eyes” of Conrad’s Marlow,

looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone . . . .”

What is college (or life) without time to see, time to feel, time to “really think?”

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I discuss the recent study done by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity on higher ed accreditation. The authors conclude that college accreditation served some useful purposes back in the day when it was voluntary, but now that federal policy has made it almost mandatory (schools aren’t able to accept federal student aid money unless they have been given the stamp of approval by a “recognized” accrediting body), its value is questionable. I think they’re correct. Accreditation does virtually nothing to ensure educational quality, but it does impose substantial costs, more implicit than explicit. It also raises a significant barrier to entry into higher education by new and innovative providers.

Until we cut the Gordian Knot and get the feds out of financing education, we ought to find a better means of keeping people from using Pell Grants to purchase bogus degrees from colleges that only offer a pretense of education. Accreditation is a poor tool for accomplishing that.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting opinion piece by Seth Godin called “The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as Seen by a Marketer)” [subscription required]. Godin suggests alternatives to the four-year college, such as “gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school,” and believes that “There are tons of ways to get a cheap liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter, and teaches you to make a difference (see DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz)” without going to a mainstream college.

Godin argues that from a marketer’s point of view, the typical American college is headed for obscurity for these reasons:

• Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students. [See "Seven Imaginary Curricula"]
• College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
• The definition of “best” [college] is under siege.
• The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
• Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

Video: Peter Wood Talks About Anger on MSNBC, Peter Wood

Anger, Sedition, and Freedom of Speech, Ashley Thorne

Fighting City Hall: Is It Worth It? Richard J. Bishirjian

Why Texas Should Revive Western Civ Study, Steve Balch

Shimer Unmanned, Peter Wood

I am still jazzed by the techno-pitchman’s hype last week about clickers, assessment, and SLOs, and I know clickers are the future of edubiz!  Clickers generate tsunamis of admin’s holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable.

I went right to work, making a PowerPoint of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” embedding slides to measure student learning of the concepts.  This way I can build a data bridge from my students’ clicker responses to bar graphs and data reservoirs.   Crunching the data even shows the accreditation Cylons just how effective (but perpetually improving!) my methodologies and pedagogies are in producing the feedback loop of capability enhancement and desirable outcome consequentialities.  God, I love being a teacher!

Now to ze text:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

I ripped “P-Frock” off the Net (whoops, no epigraph on this one but I’ll add a link to Dante).  WTF?  An entire stanza is missing!  Data entry malfunction—and there are formatting problems and mis-transcriptions.  Better hyperlink “etherised” to Wikipedia so students can learn about anaesthics, their development and use in care facilities; ditto British spelling.  And link to “simile.”

Time for an assessment slide to see if students are getting the concepts.

QUESTION:  Eliot employs figures of speech.  Name two.

1. Miscegenation
2. Tropospheric hegemony
3. Simile
4. Smiley
5. Jane Smiley
6. Anthropomorphism
7. Anthropogenic global warming
8. a and d
9. c and e
10. e and e

I’ll have them click, then discuss with their peeps, then click again.  Then I’ll have data and I can grok if my students are getting the concept!

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Yikes!  Better link “women” to the Women’s Studies Program.  Add another hyperlink to “Michelangelo”  and Google images of David, the Sistine Chapel, The Thinker (wait, is that Michelangelo?  The Thinker).

Dang, only 18 stanzas to go!  I am so teaching now!

We just received a press release from our friends at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) with some good news:

Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has just been appointed to the newly-reconstituted National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. NACIQI makes recommendations to the U.S. Secretary of Education regarding the fitness of higher education accrediting bodies, without whose seal of approval colleges and universities cannot receive federal funds.

Congratulations, Anne. We know you’ll use your appointment to help uphold integrity in higher education.

I have long thought that accreditation is just about useless as a guarantee of quality and integrity in higher education and the article the Pope Center has just released gives additional support to my skeptical view. In it, Professor Tony Fels of the University of San Francisco writes about the indifference with which the Western Association of Schools and Colleges treated his complaint that a dean had set his department up for a bad review of its “diversity” efforts by stacking the review team with people known to be diversity zealots. That would appear to violate WASC standards, but WASC couldn’t be bothered even to investigate Professor Fels’ charges.

Is accreditation more about political correctness than anything else?

I have fought Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for seven years.  Although the “accountability movement” has done much good, in my judgment, SLOs constitute a misguided and reductive Skinnerian behaviorism (for example, SLOs are silent on the student’s effect on student learning).  Unfortunately, SLOs are also mandated by most accrediting agencies.  I have watched this Trojan Horse being maneuvered inside the walls by hucksters using “it’s just” deception, as in “it’s just dialogue” and “it’s just formalizing what we already do.”  Not really; faculty-written SLOs are temporary and simply provide the “buy-in” and framework for easy replacement by state and national standards.

The huckster plan really was to drown criticism and opposition producing a faux unanimity.  That scheme failed on my campus because SLO apostates composed a disclaimer modeled on one a Quaker professor was allowed to attach to her state-mandated loyalty oath.

Our disclaimer reads, in part:

As a credentialed teacher, I want to state my belief that Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) violate both the spirit and the tenets of academic freedom.  I further affirm that my participation in SLO formulation and assessment has been under duress and coerced by threats of institutional probation and/or loss of accreditation.  I believe SLO assessment represents an un-negotiated increase in workload, and in my professional judgment, SLOs have no demonstrable positive effect on learning.

I publish the disclaimer in every course syllabus and even bought a red ink stamp to print it onto every SLO document I handle.  This lets me obey orders and still register dissent.

As our text spread around the state, one vice president called it “the infamous disclaimer.”  Achieving fame is pleasing, but, in this case, achieving infamy is the true mark of success.

Should a college lose accreditation just over a shaky financial situation? Should we use accreditation as the touchstone for eligibility for federal student aid funds? In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I take a look at a battle in North Carolina involving St. Andrews Presbyterian College. The school is in serious financial trouble, and the threatened loss of accreditation would probably kill it.

I answer both questions in the negative.