Tag: "academia"

Fish on Churchill

This seems like a very sensible take. As far as I can tell the charges of academic misconduct against Churchill are very, very thin gruel — as Fish says, mostly run-of-the-mill academic debates about whether the evidence is sufficiently strong rather than more serious or unequivocal charges — and it’s inconceivable that he would have been fired had he not written his stupid 9/11 essay. And however offensive the essay was, if academic freedom means anything it’s not a firing offense.

Why I Study What I Study…

Mr. Trend has a thoughtful post about why he studies military dictatorships in Latin America:

But studying dictatorships has a particular oppression looming over it. Environmental destruction, strike-breaking, and war all have really ugly components. Yet, at least to my way of thinking (and I think a lot of people’s more generally), dealing with issues like methodical torture, disappearances, and murders in lop-sided “battles” is really, really hard to deal with. I’m pretty sure every Latin Americanist who studies dictatorships (not just Southern Cone) passes through a phase somewhere in their professional path where they seriously worry, “is there something WRONG with me for wanting to study this?” At least for me, it wasn’t just some passing question I waived off – it ended up involving some pretty heavy moral and philosophical reflection in my second year of my Master’s. And I’ve known many people who started off wanting to study dictatorships, but once they really got into how awful those governments could be, they opted out, choosing to focus on some other issue either topically or temporally (or both).

Trend’s musings spurred a couple of thoughts. First, I’m quite interested in how academics come to study what they study; my recollection from graduate school is that student’s dissertation topics rarely matched up very tightly with what they had intended to study when they arrived. Figuring out how academics ended up specializing in particular topics and subfields is sort of interesting in and of itself.

This inevitably leads to the second question, which is “how did I end up specializing in security and military doctrine.” This has a relatively straightforward answer; I never really outgrew an adolescent fascination with weapons of war. The fascination slept for a while during undergrad, but awoke when I reached graduate school. Consequently, I focused on security studies, and eventually found enough space in the literature to write about how military organizations interact with one another. I credit Group Captain Lionel Mandrake for providing the proximate inspiration for my dissertation.

Anyone have an interesting story about how you came to study what you study?

"As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado"

I have little to add to what Rob, Dana, or Erik have offered on the subject, but I’d like to grit my teeth audibly for a moment and urge Ezra Klein and others to stop conflating “academics” with “the relatively small number of professors employed at one of the 946 doctorate- and master’s-granting universities in the United States.”

Kids whose parents work at community colleges also “grew up around academics,” as did kids whose parents work at four-year institutions where scholarship is regarded by administrators as a quaint hobby — like collecting equine figurines or roaming the beach with a metal detector — that professors indulge in because they’re never quite abandoned the habits they acquired in graduate school. Dana’s certainly right that for professors employed at schools formerly known as Research-I institutions, teaching likely “won’t matter a hill of beans when it comes time for tenure evaluations.” Applied to the profession as a whole, though, that statement makes little sense. At most schools, teaching and university/community service provide the sole basis for tenure and promotion decisions.

All that aside, the gimmick at Texas A&M — offering $10G as a reward for good evaluations — is a terribly misguided allocation of resources. In immediate terms, it’s little more than an invitations for professors to debase themselves in front of their students. If the administration at A&M were serious about improving classroom performance, they’d invest quite a bit more money in pedagogical training for their graduate students; hiring more professors and reducing class sizes; offering release-time for professors to design new courses; and so on and so forth. But since they’re clearly not serious, this is what they’re offering instead.

To that degree, Klein has the problem entirely backwards. To substitute one sloppy generalization for another, it would nevertheless be more correct to say that it’s not “academics” who hate teaching, but administrators. By their works ye shall know them.

Ezra Klein: Wrong About the Academy, Wrong for America

Ezra:

I grew up among academics. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of teaching. You’d think they were being asked to chew mud.

When in the course of making blanket statements based on what amount to personal anecdotes, Ezra should probably pause to consider whether he knows any academics who value teaching. Like, say, me, or Scott. It’s true that some academics are contemptuous of teaching, and that undergraduate education isn’t well supported institutionally in either the production or employment of most academics. However, many (in fact, most) others enjoy teaching, and make every effort to do it well; it’s shocking that people actually try to do well at aspects of their jobs that don’t lead directly to promotion. Moreover, the academics that Ezra grew up among may not have been representative of the profession as a whole; many academics have to worry quite a lot about their evaluations, because they work at institutions that value teaching over research, or because they’ve been forced into a succession of teaching oriented adjunct positions.

As for the substance of the proposal (paying $10000 to some lucky professor on the strength of evaluations), I can say that evaluations (and I get fantastic evaluations) have almost nothing to do with teaching skill or effectiveness. They’re a useful metric for evaluating student satisfaction, but this isn’t the same thing as teaching. Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen ways to pump evaluations, none of which have a positive impact on student learning. As an academic, I’d be happy to have $10000 floating around the system (maybe the winner would feel generous enough to buy me a beer), but it’s absurd to expect anything useful in terms of teaching outcomes to result from such a prize. Given his wide experience with the academy, I’m rather surprised that Ezra would believe that such a stunt could actually improve outcomes. Measures to improve the training of academics in graduate school would help, as would stronger institutional support for innovative undergraduate education. Indeed, if I had $10000 and was tasked with improving professorial teaching effectiveness, I’m not sure I could come up with a less helpful way of spending it than instituting such a prize.

Also see Erik.

Cross-posted to Tapped.

Ezra responds:

Nor does Rob Farley, who notes that he gets “fantastic” student evaluations, but believes they “have almost nothing to do with teaching skill or effectiveness.” He goes on to say that he “can think of half a dozen ways to pump evaluations, none of which have a positive impact on student learning.”

I’m sure he could also think of a half dozen ways to pump evaluations such that students would enjoy going to class more, and would learn more. A clear class outline put on the projector, for instance, so students could follow the verbal presentation and understand the structure of the argument. An animated lecture style. If these incentives compel some efforts that make teaching better and some that simply make class more enjoyable, I’d consider that a policy success.

Ezra continues to miss the point, on a couple of levels. Sure, better teaching can lead to better evals, but it doesn’t necessarily do so. In fact, (and as several commenters have noted), objectively bad teaching can produce good evals. Most importantly, gaming the eval system is easier than teaching well, which is why an prize based incentive is quite like to produce the former, rather than the latter.

Second, Ezra notes correctly that physical characteristics and personal mannerisms have a large impact on evals. This is quite clearly true; reams have been written on how women have more difficulty getting high evaluations that men, for example. Any construction under which high evaluations receive a prize will inevitably be out of reach for teachers who don’t have these specific characteristics. I may or may not be a fine teacher, but I am 6’1″ and have a beard, which means that I have what amounts to a high evaluation floor. If I were 5’3″, the story would be much different.

Unfortunately, Ezra doesn’t really engage with the critique that student evaluations don’t measure learning outcomes, and as such don’t measure teaching effectiveness. “Give it a try and see what happens” is the last bastion of desperation for the policy wonk who’s been given lots of reasons why giving it a try would be useless at best.

"Critical thinking? Not really my area"

This is a pretty awesome sort-of-job-market story for aspiring academics.

Having sat on more hiring committees than I’d care to think about, I’m still amazed by the capacity of some candidates to duplicate this sort of witless reaction in actual interview scenarios. During one of my own interviews, for example, I was informed that at some point in the near future, the person hired for the job would be expected to serve as program chair. I’d known about this possibility for several hours before the official department grilling. At which point, asked to provide a brief account of my “leadership style,” the best I could come up with was a distracted, noodling monologue that ended — no kidding — with the blunt declaration that “I’m not a tyrant.”

About a month later, I received a very nice phone call from one of the committee members who — when I asked about it — confirmed my suspicion that yes, indeed, that particular moment had probably cost me the job. Of course, she didn’t put it quite so directly, but instead explained that the tipping point had been my lack of leadership “experience.” But I’m reasonably certain that if I’d managed a more capable, articulate response to the question, I’d be living in wine country right now.