NAS Blog

The Regents of the University of California just voted to embrace a pilot program testing the efficacy of an online undergraduate degree.  Until now, like most research universities, UC has been leery of the online environment because of the thorny problems it poses:  questionable security, dubious academic integrity, loss of “voices around the table,” substantial and perpetual costs.

Conversely, online education does seem inevitable given our technological dependence, a Beltway “college-for-all” mindset, corporate customer service business models, and ruthless competition.  ”It’s the future,” gushed Regent Bonnie Reiss.

Despite teaching online for years and running an online program, I remain ambivalent about the marriage of technology and education.  Showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up “Young Goodman Brown” used to be stimulating; now it’s just disruptive.  Why jerk students back to the terrain they already inhabit, filled with insistent, continuous, cognitive shifts whose interruptions prevent learning?  Handling electronic information, Nicholas Carr says,

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

As one online student just posted, “During the time it took me to read for this assignment, I received 1 phone call, 6 emails, 4 text messages and 1 Skype message.”

At the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in June, the most instructive point about online education was made by Porsche, a young African-American college student, who said, “I don’t want to study organic chemistry on my computer.  My computer is where I go to have fun.”

The UC Regents would do well to heed her words because Porsche really is the future.

One of the most depressing articles I’ve ever read in my entire life describes the problem American students face when pondering a career in science. For years, the conventional wisdom was that our education system was failing to properly educate our children in STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, and math). However, this article in Miller-McCune directly challenges this assumption.

The authors contend that the real problem facing American students is a lack of careers in science. The case they make is compelling: Although the number of graduates receiving Ph.D.’s has increased, the number of job opportunities has not kept pace. This trend is particularly noticeable in academia, where young Ph.D.’s spend years as post-docs, with only a small chance of ever landing a permanent position as a professor. Indeed, the average age of a scientist who earns his first independent NIH grant– a huge milestone in the medical science field– has risen from a researcher’s late 20s/early 30s to the ripe old age of 42.

One of the biggest causes indicated in this article is the flood of foreigners who are willing to take post-doc positions. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that a massive increase in labor supply will both eat up opportunities and drive down salaries. Post-doc positions, which were once viewed as prestigious, are now treated as temporary, cheap labor. With such a dismal prospect for career advancement and compensation, it’s no wonder that American students would rather get an MBA or MD… or to forgo higher education altogether.

If you follow the comment threads in places where anything concerning science is being discussed, you’ve probably noticed how little it takes to get some posters really apoplectic about the dangers to scientific inquiry posed by “fundamentalists,” “creationists” or other assorted religious cranks and yahoos. Interestingly enough, virtually all of the science reportage I’m referring to isn’t even remotely connected to the religion/science controversy. Nevertheless, the discussion doesn’t get very far before someone weighs in with dark warnings about the fate of Galileo, the Scopes trial and McCarthyism [not scientific, I know but it gets in there anyway], along with much less decorous references to “bigots,” “Christofascists,” or “witch burners.” Such dangerous people do exist, but it’s pretty hard to find any of them on most college campuses. So why is it necessary to do battle with them when they don’t even show up? More than that: even if no one says anything about religious belief at all in these venues, it’s not the least unusual to encounter unprovoked, stern admonitions about the incompatibility of science and faith. Curious, to say the least.

In this light, I’m hoping that something productive will come from a new initiative sponsored by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, a Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER), the subject of this piece today at Inside Higher Ed. One purpose will be to “facilitate communication” between science and religious belief, since the two are so often seen as mutually exclusive, and some commenters have already jumped in to insist that it must ever be so. Hopefully though, the tone of the “dialogue” can at least become a bit more civil, particularly on the part of those who so often mount a stiff defense when no one attacks.

Today’s New York Times features John Tierney’s followup to his piece last week about attempts to legislate “gender equity,” which he concludes will never work: a mixture of innate biological factors and individual career choices, rather than a “glass ceiling” or deliberate discrminination account for the statistical disparities between men and women in fields such as physics or mechanical engineering. Tierney cites a solid body of research to bolster his conclusion – including the stellar work of our friend Christina Sommers – but the comments thread indicates that, where this subject is concerned, ideology still reigns supreme for many others. The gap can be explained by “gender bias,” case closed. Unfortunately, Congress seems to be listening to the ideologues at the moment.

John Tierney has an interesting piece in today’s New York Times about the ongoing controversy over what an “equitable” proportion of female faculty in scientific fields such as physics, aeronautics or engineering might be. His title – “Daring to Discuss Women in Science” – indicates how politically radioactive that subject continues to be, although perhaps we can take heart from the fact that it’s appearing in the Times. Given the ubiquitous presumption that male/female statistical disparities are attributable to entrenched “bias,” Tierney asks whether the “gender equity” legislation just passed by the House of Representatives would be amenable to at least considering some pretty solid evidence that other factors may be at work as well. Echoing the seminal work of Christina Sommers which we noted here last week, he observes that in any case, we’re talking about a relatively small number of people, since most of us, male or female, aren’t especially talented in the hard sciences, and tend to fall in the middle of most statistical measurements. A small number of men, however, score both much lower AND much higher than the comparable number of women in mathematically oriented scientific fields such as those noted above. If this is true, then perhaps we cannot continue to assume that social factors alone account for differences in the ratios between men and women. In any case, it’s striking that male/female disparities are much more pronounced in a number of other fields, such as English Literature, psychology, veterinary science and special education, but aren’t attracting the solicitude of Congress or “gender equity” activists on campus. Go figure. Be that as it may, it’s fine with us if you want to discuss “women in science” at this page, so feel free to let us know what you think. We won’t try to prevent you from getting tenure or seek to have you sacked from your job as a college president.

Jessica Custer of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW) has an article at NAS.org with six considerations/questions that our expanded use of technology in the classroom raises:

1. Online searching may provide an immediate answer but students are missing out on a key part of the classroom—teacher-student interaction.
2. Does access to Google in the classroom really help students learn?
3. Does technology-based education teach anything beyond how to use the technology itself?
4. Is banning laptops in class a good solution?
5. All technology is not created equal.
6. In this hyperlinked world, how do we know what’s true and what’s false?

Here’s NeW’s blog post on the article.

Last week I published “Bias, Barriers, or Biology” in response to the AAUW’s March report Why So Few? on why fewer women than men pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). I argued that while social norms and parent/teacher encouragement play a role in leading women to pursue such careers, attempts to achieve some sort of gender balance are misguided and ignore the fact that men and women are inherently different and their interests aren’t always the same.

This week Minding the Campus features two additional articles responding to the AAUW report. Susan Pinker, author of The Sexual Paradox, writes that “there’s good evidence that on average, women choose different disciplines than men do–or in different proportions–and they do so with their eyes and options open.” John Rosenburg of the blog Discriminations places Why So Few? in context with a mountain of similar research by feminists puzzled by women’s “underrepresentation.”

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Diane Auer Jones warns, “the inherent bias in this report should caution everyone against taking the results too seriously” (the report had no male authors). Jones acknowledges a “gender gap” in STEM fields but says women need to stop blaming this on men and take responsibility for their own career success.

To read more about this debate, see the AQ article “Feminizing Science: The Alchemy of Title IX” by Patricia Hausman and the book The Science on Women and Science, compiled by NAS board member Christina Hoff Sommers.

Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are working together to create a national identification card with biometric technology. The purpose of the card will be to curb illegal immigration. Because all citizens will be required to carry one, employers will have no excuse to hire illegal immigrants.

Predictably, privacy advocates are already up in arms over the proposal. According to the article (see link above), one of the major objections is that the government will be able to track citizens. However, this concern makes little sense in today’s digitized world. If you use a credit card, debit card, or cell phone, the government can already track you wherever you go.

The biometric data, undoubtedly, will also cause a stir. Early indications about the bill (which is still being developed in the Senate) seem to show that the biometric data will either be a fingerprint or a scan of the veins on the back of one’s hand. I assume that if DNA was the biometric of choice, this issue would go from controversial to downright explosive. Fortunately, that probably won’t be the case.

In an age of globalization and terrorism, it may be time for the United States to implement a national ID card. At the very least, it’s time to have this discussion. Hopefully it goes better than the health care discussion.

Dr. Derek Bruff takes issue with my satire on the use of clickers (“The Data-Driven Classroom,” March 3, 2010).  His comments, professional and sincere, are also provocative at a time when many colleges are in existential crisis about their raison d’etre.  Dr. Bruff’s promotion of clickers as meaningful to student learning prompted me to re-examine what I think college is for, what a teacher is, what a student is, and what teaching is.  I am mindful that Dr. Bruff is a mathematician, Assistant Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, and has published a book on clickers.  I, on the other hand, teach literature, publish about teaching, and coordinate a Great Books Program.  One cannot help but feel a sepulchral draft from the ghosts of C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, and the 50 year old “two cultures” debate which Roy Fuller described this way:

the essential question that divided Lord Snow and Dr. Leavis was this:  are there, as Snow maintained, two cultures, the literary and the scientific, which need to be brought together; or is the vital thing, as Leavis said, the prior cultural achievement – ‘the creation of the human world, including language?’

Neither Snow nor Leavis, however, imagined that science and technology would effortlessly become the context for all our thinking . . . with especially dehumanizing consequences in education.  For example, education professor David Steiner asked a group of teachers whether they would prefer the play Romeo and Juliet, a YouTube video of Franco Zeffirelli’s gauzy film of the play, or a Cliff Notes pamphlet on the play.  He expected YouTube and was shocked when 16 of the 18 teachers chose the Cliff Notes, citing “economy, simplicity, directness, and accessibility.”  I would note that those are machine values while we humans are notoriously profligate, complex, oblique, and inaccessible.

Still, college curriculum ought to produce educated humans but as Neil Postman famously noted, at most schools “The curriculum is not, in fact, a `course of study’ at all, but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses `skills.’ In other words, a technocrat’s ideal…”

Clickers, PowerPoints, and SLOs are also a technocrat’s dream but they do not improve learning.  Administrators of my acquaintance describe themselves as “data-driven” and as seeking a “culture of evidence.”  My questions are:  how is the data interpreted and evidence of what?  It looks scientific, all those tables, rubrics, decimal points, and bar graphs, but what does an instant feedback loop have to do with reflection?

Humans, and how they learn, are what Monica Anderson calls “bizarre,” meaning they are at once chaotic (or unpredictable), irreducible, ambiguous, and emergent.  The importance of “like a patient etherised upon a table” is not whether students recognize it as a simile.  That’s junior high school level.  The significance is that Eliot devises creative, arresting, and suggestive images to which individual students react in different and surprising ways.  My own classes are most effective when they proceed as conversations, and I learn how best to teach them from the questions the students themselves ask me.

Yet conversations are increasingly rare.  Today, teachers are pressed to become designers, archivists, presenters, and programmers.  Is that teaching?  Richard Paul once propounded five stages of teaching and learning.  Paul estimated that 80% of teaching is at the Didactic level, 14% at the Tactical level (engagement without intellectual skill development), 4% at the Analytic level, 0.9% at the Holistic level, and 0.1% at the Exemplary level.  He said, “Teaching for intellectual skills that enable students to grasp content deeply is rare in education today.  The overwhelming majority of teaching is didactic.  Most of the rest is merely `tactical’, engagement as an end in itself or as a tool for lower order learning.”  At the exemplary level, the teacher is a “`model’ or `living example’ of the mode of reasoned learning she teaches (e.g., historical reasoning, or sociological reasoning, or mathematical reasoning, or chemical reasoning).  The teacher is good at thinking aloud, slowly and carefully, in front of the students…”

I remain leery of instructional technologies and tools.  As Marshall McLuhan put it, “We create our tools and thereafter our tools create us.”  The only documented factor that improves student learning is smaller class size.  For me, clickers, SLOs, and PowerPoints develop conformity, what Jaron Lanier calls “the hive mind.”  If you have read my blog posts here you may find that they in some ways form a call for a New Humanism in higher education.  Students urgently need unmediated classrooms and Exemplary-level teachers who through Socratic dialogue and shared inquiry develop independent, informed, and original minds.

Check out this week’s articles at NAS.org:

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Debating Diversity at Smith College…No Comment, Glenn Ricketts, Mar. 1
Two contrasting student views of the “main topic” at Smith College.

Chivalry Lives: An Interview with Blayne Bennett, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 3
Gentlemanliness is not dead; it’s just dormant, says the Network of enlightened Women.

Unimaginable Calamity, Peter Wood, Mar. 4
How does global warming doctrine’s foothold in higher education fit with the integrity of science?

Articles of Interest This Week, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
A roundup of must-reads in higher education news.

Sustainability Links, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
Articles of note on campus sustainability – of special note is UF’s “40 days of change” leading up to Earth Day. Is Earth Day the new Easter?

March Forth, Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne, Mar. 4
On March 4 thousands of students at universities around the country and especially on California campuses are rallying to protest tuition hikes in public higher education. College costs have indeed become exorbitant, but is this the right way to confront the excess?

Suitable for Framing: Revisiting Virginia Tech’s Diversity Litmus Test, Ashley Thorne, Mar. 5
This month last year, NAS showed Virginia Tech had made “diversity” service a requirement for faculty promotion and tenure.