December 31, 2104--Crimean War

We have a friend who has a precocious four-year-old. He spends some time in preschool but, since both parents work, his grandparents also spend a lot of time with him.

This past year, during parent-teacher night at the school, our friends heard from their child's teacher that he is, of course, bright and delightful; but, the teacher also confided she doesn't understand why little Edward spends so much time thinking about war. Especially the wars in Afghanistan and the Crimea.

The parents too were puzzled, but on the way home realized that their son's grandfather, a retired history professor, must spend time talking with his grandchild about his interest in that complicated region of the world.

I said to Rona, half facetious, "He may be only four-years-old but already he has an interesting thing to write about when it comes time to apply to college--How my grandfather, when I was very young, taught me about the Crimean War."

"What a leg up that is. I mean, with all the pressure on young children to think about college even before they're toilet trained, Eddie is off to a running start."

"He's in his own version of Head Start," I said. "But think about all the other children who, even at four, barely know their alphabet or numbers."

"Or, have people in their lives who pay deep attention to them much less expose them to anything beyond play things."

"And these advantages and disadvantage as time goes by. Just a few days ago there was a story in the New York Times about college guidance counselors."

"I saw that," Rona said, "How even at places like Midwood High School in Brooklyn, still one of the best public high schools in the City, where almost all the kids plan to go to college, with nearly 800 seniors applying to college there are only two college counselors."

"And how they have a hard time keeping up with the paperwork much less getting to know any of the seniors well enough to be able to write individualized letters of recommendation for them. Letters that all the selective colleges colleges require."

"And it's even worse at most other high schools where the ratio of students to counselors is more 500-to-one."

"I read that at Midwood where parents are mainly middle class there are volunteers who help with clerical chores like stuffing and mailing thousands of applications."

"In the 21st century where we're trying to be globally competitive and know that to be viable most young people need as much education as possible this is going on."

"Sad," I said.

"Think about how fortunate little Edward is."

"Even though he's too young to know that."

"The advantages nonetheless pile up."

"Let's not think too much about this today. It's New Years Eve."

"I hope we'll be able to stay up late enough to see the ball drop."

August 29, 2104--Best of Behind: Velcro Parents

This first appeared near the end of August 2010. Since then not much has changed--

It is still a few days until Labor Day, the traditional end of summer, but already things are getting quieter here on the coast of Maine where many families have been vacationing. 

Especially noticeable is the thinning out of the wait staffs at restaurants in the area. They depend on college students during the summer and now clearly older crews are struggling to cover more tables.

Schools for students of all ages are starting their fall terms earlier and earlier. To extend the school year for youngsters in an effort to provide more instruction than in the past; and, in the case of colleges, to get the semester's work done by Christmas so that students do not have to return after the holidays to finish their classes and take their exams.

This means that they, frequently with the help of their parents, have to head off to campus in late August with SUVs loaded with the things college kids these days squeeze into their undersized dorm rooms. I am showing my age, but when I went to college there were no computers and printers, microwave ovens, or stuffed animals and all sorts of non-allergic pillows. Just a bag or two of clothing.

But in addition to what undergraduates transport with them these days, they also, in more and more cases, bring their parents along with them. Not just to help with all the stuff but also to share the college-going experience. 

As a result, an increasing number of colleges are concerned about what some refer to as "over-parenting." They are for the most part happy to see an increase in parental involvement--and in response many colleges have opened offices of Parents Affairs to manage and take advantage of this increased interest. But they are also concerned that things for some are getting out of hand. So many parents, they feel, are hovering too close and pressing for more involvement than colleges feel is good for their students that they are instituting practices to help parents and their children go through the adjustment required when a youngster enters college.

After all, they say, college is supposed to be a major step toward young people becoming independent. To help facilitate the letting-go, some colleges have added activities and even ceremonies to wean parents from over-involvement, especially during freshman orientation.

According to the New York Times, Morehouse College in Atlanta now has a formal "Parting Ceremony." After introductory speeches attended by both students and parents at an off-campus chapel, freshman march through the gates of the campus which then are ceremonially closed with parents both literally and symbolically left outside. Emotionally difficult to be sure, but college officials feel it is necessary to help with the complicated transition.

At Grinnell, move-in day for freshmen was last Saturday; and after duffel bags and iPods were dropped off at the dorms, students and parents were invited to the gymnasium where they were placed on opposite sets of bleachers. According to the vice president for student affairs this was designed to be "an aha! moment, an epiphany where parents realize. 'My student is feeling more comfortable sitting with 400 people they just met.'" And then, after that hoped-for epiphany, parents are encouraged to leave campus.

At the University of Minnesota the same goal is being pursued but a bit more subtly and gently. There, when students are finished moving into their dorm rooms, they proceed to orientation activities that are just for them (at many places some parents insist on accompanying their children to these) while parents are invited to a reception held elsewhere.

But in some dramatic instances, after the colleges have done their carefully-orchestrated thing, so-called Velcro Parents manage to find ways to stay deeply involved with their children. Some go so far as to rent or buy apartments near where their kids are enrolled and travel there every weekend. As surprising as it may seem, many children of these parents seem to be happy with this arrangement, even bringing friends along to hang out with their parents and, of course, do their laundry. 

School administrators and sociologists are struggling to figure out what is going on. Some say it's because adolescence is continuing longer than in the past--perhaps extending well into children's 20s. Others are saying that parents are living vicariously through their children and, in effect, going to college as if walking in their footsteps. It is also speculated that this is a class-based phenomenon--that it is only middle-class and affluent parents who can afford to do this and/or feel sufficiently comfortable on college campuses to spend so much time there with their children. 

Whatever is going on, when I went to college I recall being dropped off on Manhattan's Amsterdam Avenue by my double-parking parents. I think they didn't even accompany me to my dorm room. I schlepped the bags up there myself. They were involved and loving parents and certainly had very mixed feelings about my going off to college, realizing how big a step it was for me and them. But they also knew that if I was to get the most from the experience I needed to do more of it on my own than many today appear to feel.

September 17, 2013--The Walmartization of Higher Education

Tenure as we know it is a relatively new thing.

In the 19th century, professors served at the pleasure of trustees and university presidents. And they could be terminated with little cause. Major donors could and at times did pressure university administrators to fire certain individuals or prohibit the hiring of others, mainly those they felt would interfere with the religious principles of the institution.

Courts rarely intervened in dismissals; but, nonetheless, a de facto tenure system existed and professors, if they did not get far out of doctrinal line, could expect to have their jobs for life.

During the early years of the 20th century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a quasi faculty union, began to pressure colleges and universities to adopt practices that provided lifetime employment protection for senior professors.

The AAUP contended that this was necessary to shield faculty from being dismissed for their views--political as well as religious. Though there were relatively few cases of these kinds of firings, it proved to be a potent argument; and so by the 1950s virtually all institutions of higher learning implemented a tenure system that assured continuous employment after, typically, a seven-year probationary period.

During the McCarthy era, when there were indeed witch hunts to root out alleged Marxists and communists, many, under the protection of tenure, were able to claim that their private views--and even those they articulated in class--were an expression of "academic freedom." Though there were situations where colleges caved into pressure, for the most part few tenured professors, even during that dark period, were dismissed. Many felt intimidated, but very few were purged.

In more recent years, in some quarters, tenure has come under attack. For a number of reasons--

First, it can be used to protect incompetents. After receiving tenure, professors are for all intents and purposes free not to keep up with their disciplines, teach from yellowing notes, and spend little time outside the classroom with students. At even prestigious institutions many tenured faculty are rarely on campus--teaching two to three days a week--do little meaningful research, and shun committee assignments and other collegial and campus citizenship responsibilities. Tenure makes them effectively untouchable, even unsupervisable.

Tenure also makes it difficult for institutions to flexibly deploy resources into new fields and disciplines and makes it almost impossible to phase out departments where enrollments, because of market forces, have shrunk dramatically.

To invest in more programs in computer science, it may be necessary to phase out courses in classical languages; to build capacity in molecular biology, it may be necessary to scale back offerings in biochemistry. With tenured classicists and traditionally-trained biologists, institutions are locked into rigid academic structures which, if they cannot be reformed, place severe limits on an institution's ability to keep up with the times or break new intellectual ground.

And the AAUP and faculty unions claim that without tenure colleges would dangerously reduce the number of expensive full-timers and replace them with much-lower-cost part-time adjuncts. As a result, it is asserted, teaching quality will decline.

This is half true--

Many places in fact have dramatically shifted teaching responsibilities to adjuncts. It is not unusual for at least half of all freshman and sophomore courses to be taught by graduate assistants and part-timers. Cost savings are indeed considerable. But, and this is significant, there is growing evidence that adjunct faculty are more effective in the classroom than tenured faculty.

For example, the New York Times recently cited a study which showed that part-time faculty are more effective in the classroom than full-timers.

The study was based on data from more than 15,000 students at Northwestern University. The results revealed that there was "strong and consistent evidence that Northwestern faculty outside the tenure system outperform tenure track/tenured professors in introductory undergraduate classrooms."

This appeared to be true in almost all subject areas and was especially evident for "average and less-qualified students." These conclusion were based primarily on how likely students were to take additional courses in the discipline and comparisons about the grades students received in subsequent courses. Again, in most instances, students taught by adjuncts reported that they had richer experiences and performed better than those taught by tenured faculty.

Rather than face the challenges this and similar studies have exposed, the AAUP attempted to change the subject. Anita Levy, a senior program officer at the association, said:

My worry is that a study like this can be used to justify hiring more contingent faculty who won't have due-process protection or job security and might not even have offices. It's part of the just-in-time, Walmartization of higher education.

A few points--

Adjunct faculty do have due-process. If they feel they have been dealt with illegally they in fact have recourse to legal remedies. In addition, why should they or any ineffective faculty member have "job security"? And just having private offices does not guarantee that faculty members will set aside more than two hours a week for office hours or use them appropriately.

September 6, 2013--Magic

For some reason probably related to the passage of time we just now know three or four young people who are high school seniors and are in the throes of applying to college.

They are all excellent students, by Wobegon standards well above average, and it has been our great pleasure in recent years to have had numerous conversations with them about their thinking and have attempted to help them select just the right half dozen places to which to apply.

Our favorite part of the process is to hear their ideas about the personal essays they will be required to write as a key part of the application process.

We know enough about how the admissions business at elite colleges works to urge them not to turn too much of this over to advisors and coaches who charge lots of money to help the children of the affluent prepare their applications, especially encouraging them to write something to distinguish themselves from the also-well-prepared "competition." Admissions professionals can spot over-doctored essays and are inclined to quickly place them in the reject pile.

The young folks we are engaged with this year have not spent the past 10 years building resumes out of volunteerism, travel, and arts and science projects but have pursued deep interests that they would have otherwise followed even if they weren't college-bound.

One friend's granddaughter wants to find a college where she can continue her ballet training. She isn't thinking about dance as her eventual profession and doesn't even care if there would be ballet classes on campus.

"It's just that it's so important to me, has been since I was little, that I need to have access to a studio, on campus or off, where I can take classes."

"Are you thinking about writing about ballet in your application? It might be a good . . ."

With an apologetic smile she cut Rona off, "I am already drafting something. And maybe not about what you might think." It was Rona's time to smile. "For me," she continued, "it's all about balance, the balance that ballet requires and trains you to perfect."

"That sounds interesting," I said. "How about . . ."

With an even broader smile this time she interrupted me. It was clear she wanted us to hear her out, unfiltered, and not be unduly influenced about what "adults" might preemptively say or suggest.

"But I am not writing about ballet techniques and the classes I've taken, or even the performances I've been a part of."

"But that's what colleges are looking . . ."

"Maybe they are, but I want to write about the ways in which ballet has been and continues to be essential to me."

"For example?" Rona wisely thought to ask questions rather than make comments or prematurely offer suggestions.

"For example, what I have taken from my involvement with ballet is not just about the physical balance it emphasizes, as important as that is, but how it contributes to my inner, non-physical sense of stability and centeredness. I'm not sure this will work in an essay--but it's what I am attempting to express. I know my dance limitations and therefore prefer to attempt to write about ballet in a personally metaphoric way."

She paused to see what we thought. Neither one of us said anything. "I hope this won't come across as sounding sophomoric and manufactured in a personal-essay-writing tutorial. I know I have to stay on the safe side of the line, making this sound insightful, authentic, and written in my own words and voice."

Again she waited to see what we might have to say.

I jumped in--"I love how you're thinking about this. Especially the 'personally metaphoric' part. That seems appropriate, not sophomoric at all, though I can see the danger, in the wrong hands, of it becoming smarmy. But," I added quickly with Rona nodding vigorously, "in your hands there is minimal danger of that."

And just yesterday we had lunch with the son of a close friend who was up in Maine checking out the state's troika of top-notch liberal arts colleges--Colby; Bates; and my favorite, Bowdoin.

"You know about my interest in magic?"

In fact we did. For years he has literally been playing tricks on us, often over Sunday morning breakfasts. At first, he perfected simple card tricks which we could see though since his technique was primitive. He was, after all, at that point, only eight years old. But then, over time, his tricks metamorphosed into magic. They became more complex and his technique, even at close range over the breakfast table, flawless and truly mysterious.

"Well, as everyone has been telling me, if I write my personal statement about magic it had better be about more than the tricks themselves. And to be competitive I need also to talk more than about the meaning of magic to my life. Even to me that's boring."

He shrugged as if he was still struggling with how to approach the subject. "I'm thinking of coming at it from a perceptual and neurological perspective. You know," and neither Rona nor I in fact did know, "the brain's ability to fill in perceptual voids. Film is a good example. Twenty-four images a second are projected, but because of the brain's capacity to make things whole when they are in reality are made up of parts, we 'see' [he made air quotes] the projected images as seamless, not herky-jerky."

"I get it," I sort of did, "This sounds like a promising tack. Blending your interest in magic and science is . . ."

"Is not what I want to do. I'm actually more interested in philosophy than science and am looking for a way to connect it with my magic. The kinds of tricks I am now working on, I think, have 'philosophical' [air quotes again] implications."

"Tell me more," Rona said.

"Well, isn't one of philosophy's historic concerns the struggle to determine how much free will we have as opposed to how much is predetermined?"

"Wow," Rona said, duly impressed, "You really have tricks that deal with this?"

"There is this one that I do that involves a sealed envelope on which something is written. I then show someone from the audience a stack of cards that have all sorts of different things printed on them. After going through a lot of process and shuffling, I ask them to pick a card at random from the pile. To use their 'free will.'" He winked at us.

"After that I have them open the envelope and, low-and-behold, the card in the envelope--as if predetermined--has the same thing on it. Amazing, right?"

We were impressed.

"At the moment of working on this but haven't got it fully figured out. I know what I'm thinking about is a stretch and I don't want to come off as too cute or clever. To make it work, I have to hit the philosophy part just right."

"And all in 500 words," his father added.

"I agree," I said. "And while you're being philosophical, you know from Aristotle, don't you . . ."

"Can you believe it," Rona interjected, "we're sitting here by the water eating oysters and he's talking about Aristotle?"

I knew she was fooling with me and so continued, "You could consider citing Aristotle, who I think in his Poetics, wrote about the 'suspension of disbelief.' How in drama, as an example, even though we know there are actors pretending to be kings, rather than dismiss that as make-believe, we suspend our disbelief so we can be drawn into 'believing,'" my chance to make quotation marks, "they're kings rather than mere mortals."

"I do know about that," he said, "It's actually of great interest to me and it is very much a part of what allows magic to work. But," he winked again, "it wasn't Aristotle who wrote about suspending disbelief. It was Coleridge. You know him, Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

I hate being wrong about these kinds of things but to be corrected by him felt both deserved and wonderful.

All excited, Rona said to him "Hurray up and finish growing up, will you, so we can turn the world over to your generation. It's time for us, who made such a mess of the world, to step out of the way."

July 2, 2103--The Big Boys & the Little Guy

We have a friend in Delray who for years has worked seven days a week cheffing at a local restaurant. As he puts it, "The first five days are for me and the other two for my family. Especially for my mother who lives in Honduras and for my children so they can go to college and not have to work on their feet all day like their father."

When we saw him in April just before heading north, he told us he was looking for a house or condo to buy. That the market was still soft and he had saved up enough for a downpayment. I asked him the other day what had happened with his search.

He made a face and said, "It's my luck that just when I had enough to make a downpayment, the big boys, sensing that the market was picking up, moved in with cash and began to buy up all the places I had been looking at. So, if you were a bank holding property, who would you rather sell to--me, who needs a mortgage, or those who are paying with cash?"

This hardly required an answer. "So what should I tell my children who are in high school? One is in her second year, the other will be a senior in August. What should I tell them about college? That they need a degree so they can have a career rather than, like me, a job? But with all the young college graduates without jobs what real difference will it make for them? Is it worth it to borrow thousands of dollars to get a degree that no longer guarantees that there'll be jobs waiting for graduates?"

I couldn't think of what to say to offer any assurance.

"You know," he continued, if you graduate with $75,000 of debt, it's almost the same thing as having a mortgage."

"I hadn't thought of it that way," I said, "But that's a good way to think about it. And then, if a young person with so much debt thinks about getting married and buying a house, that debt burden affects his credit rating and makes it hard to get a mortgage, forgetting for the moment, how realistic is it for a young couple to be able to pay off maybe two student loans plus an actual mortgage."

"Now you know my problem," our friend said, drifting back to the kitchen.

When we got home, reading the New York Times, Rona said there was an article about how interest rates on student loans on July 1st doubled from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. Nearly twice as much as the average rate on mortgages.

"This is," I said, "because Republicans in Congress want these rates to be set by market conditions, not governmental action."

"In fact, refusing to deal with the problem," Rona chimed in, "they took off for yet another week of vacation at taxpayer expense."

"I remember back in 1965 when guaranteed student loans became available. The idea was to offer low-interest loans to college students that they wouldn't have to begin to repay until after graduation."

"To make things affordable at the time meant that if tuition was $15,000 a year, with, say, a $5,000 loan, the out-of-pocket cost would be only $10,000."

"Yeah," I said, "that was the idea; but what happened? While we were working at NYU, what did they do?"

"Instead of keeping tuition at about the same level as it was when loans became more available, they raised tuition by at least as much as the maximum possible loan. If NYU at the time cost $25,000 a year and students could borrow $5,000, they raised tuition to $30,000 and students and their families still had to come up with the same $25,000."

"What a scam," I said. "And what did they do with the extra money?"

"It made it possible to raise faculty salaries, cut back on the number of classes they were required to teach, and made it possible to expand the number of sabbaticals so that professors could every few years get a semester or two off at full pay."

"What a scandal," Rona said. "A scandal no one talks about."

"And all the while J___ is working seven days a week just to make ends meet and maybe to be able to put aside some money to help pay for his children's college."

"As he put it the other day, it's another example of the big guys taking advantage of the little guy."

"Including the banks," I said, "which for years made the loans, were paid by the government to do so. And the interest was guaranteed, also by the government. So, in effect, there were billions of dollars of automatic, guaranteed profit for the banks."

"No wonder J___ is fed up."

"As am I."