The Wondering Mind

Among the latest articles chronicling the end of the financial world as we know it, there was an article detailing some of the difficulties now faced by state universities in the U.S. 

It’s pretty much run of the mill for this kind of story, and we’ll be hearing more about it again, I am quite sure. What I do think bears more discussion is the content of the following passage.

Mr. Crow’s record for improving quality is impressive, too. He has hired more than 600 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, and last year, for the first time, won a spot on the National Science Foundation’s list of the top 20 research universities without a medical school, along with powerhouses like M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley.

But not every university can be in the top 20. And in a time of shrinking state budgets, undergraduates at public universities will most likely pay the price in higher tuition, larger classes and less interaction with tenured professors. So it is a real question how many public research universities the nation can afford, and what share of resources should go to less expensive forms of education, like community colleges.

The first point to make is that as the article mentions later on, being a cutting-edge research university is not the same thing as being an excellent teaching school for undergraduate students. Most of us know that just because you’re a genius who understands all the ins-and-outs of a particular subject does not make you the best teacher of that subject.

Mr. Crow’s objective of creating an institution which excels both in research and teaching is a fine one and those objectives do not necessarily conflict with each other. Those objectives are not, however, the same. More importantly, in an environment with limited resources, directing resources toward one objective means less resources available for the other objective.

While it may be unpalatable, universities and policy makers should acknowledge that these different objectives are coupled through choice, not because they are inseparable.

Which brings me onto my second point: not everyone can be number one.

In fact, the idea that every state can have a leading research university is simply a non-starter. As the article points out, simple arithmetic dictates that to be a “leading” research university in such a scenario means being in something like the top 20 such institutions. But if every state had such ambitions, then the majority will be bitterly disappointed. And all the states are likely to spend increasing amounts of money chasing their ambitions, most for little to no reward.

This observation extends to teaching as well. With hundreds (I think) of tertiary teaching institutions in this country, only 20 schools can be in the “top 20″ for anything, including teaching. Rankings are only a useful metric in so far as they tell us something about the difference in quality.

First, they should tell us that there is an ordinal difference in quality. That is, there should be a measurable superiority in quality in the school ranked number one versus the second ranked school. As many, many people opine, this is rarely the case, with most rankings being criticised on this very point.

Second, rankings imply a certain degree of cardinality in the difference in quality. For example, as a student, you would much prefer going to a top 20 school than the one ranked 100th, and there is much more prestige associated with the top 20 than the top 100. But a top 20 school may not be significantly better than a top 100 school.

Ultimately, it is probably more important that a school achieve a certain threshold of excellence rather than worry about how it compares in ranking. In a cash-strapped environment, this is especially important since the additional resources necessary to improve in rankings will likely experience severe diminishing of returns.

All things the taxpayers, if not the policians, will care about in the current environment.

The Times Higher Education apparently has an annual ranking of universities around the world. It made news on the BBC because the top 10 are filled with American and British universities. In case you didn’t guess, Harvard is the unworthy (in my opinion) number one.

I am vain enough that I am pleased to have attended two of the universities listed in the top 30, although I have to admit that the ranking, like all rankings, is a little suspect. The position of some of the U.S. and British institutions does seem rather surprising, and I’m not still talking about Harvard. (I don’t know enough about schools in other countries to judge those.)

But what I really wanted to comment on was this reaction piece from heads of some of the schools in the ranking. I am biased, being a graduate of the University of Chicago, but is it just me or do all the comments read like student recruitment brochures except President Zimmer’s from University of Chicago?

All the other comments read like, “We’re wonderful, so you should come here,” whereas the President Zimmer’s comment reads,”Hey, come here or don’t. But this is what we do.”

Anyone who’s been to Chicago will have heard exactly the same thing that Zimmer said, over and over. And over. The uber-geeks at Chicago are so focused, it’s kinda scary…

I first read about a Texas town which would allow teachers to carry concealed firearms into the classroom on the BBC website a while ago. And I had the usual reaction to such news.

“Those crazy Texans. What it’s the water over there?”

But the NY Times had an article which went into more detail on the story. And in all fairness, the lunacy appears to belong primarily to the school superintendent and the school board.

You can read the story for yourself to see all the threadbare arguments backing up the thinking of these individuals, so I won’t take apart the weaknesses of the individual justifications. They’re rather obvious, at least to me, but I doubt I would persuade anyone who thinks this is a good idea.

The thing is, the real issue in this case seems to be that the policy was the result of a paranoid individual who let what little power he had get to his head, and a school board looking for a raison d’être.

As the article points out, it’s not clear what threat this policy is supposed to counter.The sorts of criminal activities which blight some urban schools, such as gang violence, is not an issue in this district. In fact, incidents of criminality appear to be rare in general.

If the fear is of sociopathic incidents, such as Columbine or crazed individuals entering the school, there really is no practical way to counter such threats. More to the point, as horrific as such incidents are, they are rare enough (thankfully) that you really have to have nothing better to do before you would spend any amount of time thinking how to counter such an improbable occurrence.

This is a small school district in rural Texas. I don’t know how good this 2-building school is, but I will assume that they have educational needs for which they could have better spent the money than on this security policy. Unless all 100 students are going onto Ivy League schools or other top universities, they could probably stand to improve their educational achievements. Which is the sort of thing most school superintendents spend their energies on. It’s also the sort of thing most school boards want their superintendent to spend their time on.

Of course, improving the educational achievements of your school is much harder than sending some of your teachers off on a week of weapons training and arming them in the school for a threat you can’t define.

Something that really, really aggravates me is people in academia acting like idiots. Today, I have another example.

“Oxford targets poorest postcodes”

The title of this article in the Guardian caught my eye by being a little cryptic. (A postcode is the equivalent of a zip code in the U.S.)

Basically the article tells us that Oxford University will take into factors other than purely grades in deciding which applicants to interview for possible acceptance. This is an effort to try to take in more students who come from less privileged backgrounds, who one would expect to have overcome greater obstacles in reaching college.

As well as widening the demographic profile of the students, this makes sense if the university is interested in, among other things, the student’s potential for future achievement, both academic and professional. All other things being equal, you would expect students from less privileged backgrounds to have achieved more just to get the same academic scores as more privileged students. Such students may well have potential for greater achievement than their peers.

It’s the sort of thing that infuriates Republicans in the U.S., so I was interested to see what kind of criticism you might find in the U.K. Well, maybe because it’s the Guardian, they didn’t find any credible opposition.

But the move has infuriated critics who say it puts middle-class applicants at an unfair disadvantage. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said ‘the emphasis on social factors’ worried him. ‘Alex Ferguson needs to make judgments based on football ability and Oxford needs to make judgment on intellectual ability,’ said Smithers. ‘The only issue should be the talent of the person. The government is keen on social engineering and [Oxford] university seems to be bowing to that.’

This is a poorly argued criticism. While Alan Smithers makes the argument that students should be judged on talent, he completely fails to demonstrate that that is not happening here. Oxford is simply stating that they will use other measures as well as test scores to judge an applicant’s talents. The “emphasis on social factors”, as Smithers puts it, helps Oxford put the test scores in better perspective as a measure of talent.

For Alan Smithers to make his case, he has to demonstrate how test scores on their own give a better measure of a student’s talents than you would get by also taking into account other factors, such as social factors. You hardly have to be an expert in education to surmise that proposition is highly unlikely to be correct.

All this is not that hard to figure out, which is why it’s disappointing to hear from someone who is a “director” of a “Centre for Education and Employment Research”. Or it would be if you weren’t from the U.K.

Because if you are, you may know that Buckingham University is a “private university”. Unlike the U.S., all respectable universities in the U.K. are publicly funded. Places like Buckingham are where rich parents send children not smart enough to get into a real university.

So despite the semi-respectable looking bio on Buckingham’s website,  I wasn’t expecting too much from someone on the faculty of this school. But what really took the cake was the following information Alan Smithers offered up to the Guardian.

Smithers compared the move with his own experience when he claimed a university decided that it was ‘desirable’ to promote black professors for social reasons. ‘As a result, I was not fairly treated,’ said Smithers.

Clearly, this guy has an axe to grind and is carrying such a chip on his shoulder that he is blind to how silly that makes him sound.

Such a complete lack of objectivity is to break the first rule of good academic inquiry. That he so blithely displays his total disregard for any objectivity is a measure of his talent, or the lack of it.

I stumbled across this article on Reuters about an “academic” in England who is arguing that universities should simply accommodate the most common spelling mistakes among its students. This statement coming from someone who teaches at a university seemed so ludicrous, I was beside myself. I didn’t know where to begin to lay into this cretin and his idiocy.

But then I thought, maybe I’m not being fair to the guy. He may have been misreported. So I read another article, this time by the BBC, and it said pretty much the same thing.

Just to be sure, I found the original piece Ken Smith wrote in the Times Higher Education, where incidentally, he identifies himself as a “senior lecturer in criminology, Bucks New University”. (Bucks is short for Buckinghamshire.) Reading the entire piece, I found that the news article had not misrepresented Ken Smith.

What a shame.

You can read the reader comments at the end of the Times Higher Education piece for all the ways Smith makes an ass of himself with the factual inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies of his arguments. That someone who claims to be a senior lecturer in criminology is silly enough to present such shoddy writing for publication is disappointing enough.

(If nothing else, you would think professional pride would prevent him from holding himself up to such unnecessary and very public ridicule.)

You can also make some very unkind observations about the institution he teaches at. You can hardly be overwhelmed by the academic credentials of an institution which has a link on its homepage to a website which claims to promote interest in tertiary education among 11 to 16 year old school children, by using bad spelling. In its own name no less.

“Be Coz U Can“

Way to drum up interest in education by lowering standards!

If you think I’m just being elitist, I would like to point out that this “university” offers a “degree” in “the management of selling beds”. I’m not even kidding. You can’t make this stuff up. See for yourself.

So things are not looking that impressive for Ken Smith. He seems to be a silly man working at an institution that appears mediocre at best. Even knowing this, it is distressing to hear such tripe coming from a supposed educator.

But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.

Why must you “suffer”? How about the fact that you are drawing a salary to educate these young people? If you are suffering from having to teach these kids spelling, perhaps you should speak with your university’s administration about entrance standards and accepting students who cannot even spell. Instead, Ken Smith would have other educators and institutions lower their standards to the level he has set for himself and his institution.

Ken Smith himself acknowledges that these “variant spellings” are actually mistakes. They aren’t “variant spellings”. That implies knowledge on the part of the student of the correct spelling of words, and an intentional use of a different variation of spelling for those words. There is no such intent here.

Students who misspell words do so because they are poorly educated and don’t know any better. No doubt they were ill served by other educators as equally dedicated to low standards as Ken Smith.

The op-ed in the Times Higher Education is not just the muddled thinking of a silly man. It is the work of a clearly mediocre and lazy educator, and the solution to poor student standards is not to lower standards, but to rid the education system of “academics” like Ken Smith.