David Broder, in an opinion piece in today's Washington Post, quotes Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, who says that to bring education costs down. "We have to look at productivity measures for college faculties," he said. "The course load may have to increase for some professors" (Hunt, quoted by Broder).
There are lots of reasons why simply increasing the course load won't solve the problem. See the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here, here, and here. (Sorry, these are by subscription.)
But I want to address the unspoken implication in David Broder's column: That faculty aren't working very hard and that we have lots of free time so that we can, without much inconvenience, simply take on more students. If I could reply to Mr. Broder, I would say . . .
Good evening, Mr. Broder,
Well, if you have your way and I end up teaching more students while still keeping up with my obligations of scholarship (not to mention those other obligations of "service" that are expected of faculty), perhaps you could help.
You could start now. It's 11:20 pm. I still have 9 more papers to grade by tomorrow so that the students will have feedback before they start working on the take-home final. (I have spent my weekend grading the first 20. A good paper can take 10 minutes. A bad paper can take an hour or more.) I'll give you the reading list and the paper requirements. I'm sure that you could help me by grading. (Throwing the papers down the stairs to see where they land is NOT an approved method.) Just remember that it is not OK just to put the grade on the paper. You must write comments on them, showing them where they have made conceptual errors, grammatical errors, and stylistic errors. Also, it is really empowering to tell them where they have made excellent points. Final comments should always be constructive, never cutting. Use this as a guide:
"Suzie, I see that you read some of the scholarly literature on the global political economy of basket weaving. Unfortunately, you have confused Adam Smith with Karl Marx. Instead of conducting a literature review, you have simply summarized some articles. Misunderstanding what those articles said was a definite negative. Also, you need to work on proofreading skills. Perhaps you should go to the Writing Center and ask for help on commas, as well. Grade: D."
OK? Should I send you the papers? Surely you don't have anything better to do tonight! When you're done with these, we can go over the grading of the doctoral students' seminar papers. They are more interesting, but still take a lot of time to go through.
The bloat in universities is not at the level of the professor. Our salaries do not go up as quickly as student tuition -- not nearly as quickly. I don't know enough about university finances to say where the money is going, but I suspect it's in health care costs, beautiful dormitories and gym facilities, and other non-teaching, non-research areas.
I think, though, that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that teaching two courses a semester is a breeze. That's two courses a semester plus preparation time plus grading time plus keeping up with the field time plus advising students, writing letters of recommendation, serving on University committees, and -- oh, yeah! -- fitting in time for our own research. (And a few million other tasks, as well.)
If you want faculty at major research universities to teach more, research will suffer. If the purpose of a research university is the production of "knowledge for the world," as my University's fund raising campaign claimed, then your plan will further exacerbate the weakening of American intellectual capital. Shouldn't our engineers and scientists be taught by people who know the cutting edge research because they are doing the cutting edge research?
But what about other fields that are less directly tied to practical things like R&D? At least the profs on the softer side of the university, you might suggest, should teach more. Perhaps you don't think that research into literature, ethnomusicology, or my own field of global political economy is particularly important. That these areas of study are fundamentally important to how we are an educated people, how we see ourselves in the world, and how we preserve and enhance our culture is, I'm afraid, something of an article of faith for me.
I'll say one thing for my own area of study, though. For the past 22 years, all students in my global political economy course should have learned one thing that Alan Greenspan didn't: Markets work efficiently and fairly only when government provides an appropriate regulatory structure that governs the market. Extreme deregulation and governments' abdication of their responsibility to govern markets brought us to what Susan Strange referred to in 1986 as "Casino Capitalism" -- with disastrous results.
Scholarship is worth producing, whether the result is something practical like a better software algorithm; possibly useful, like a more nuanced way of looking at world events; or just enriching, like the life lessons we learn from great literature. That's what research universities are supposed to do.
Dumbing the university down by making it a glorified high school will, in the end, have a negative effect on our collective store of knowledge.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Susan Strange was right
Susan Strange had a crusty personality, and she liked to tell truth to, well, if not power, then at least to the self-satisfied. And with her gravelly voice, she did it oh-so-well. And I liked her very, very much. Even though Susan passed away in 1998 -- 10 years ago -- she is much on my mind nowadays.
I have been rereading some of her work, Casino Capitalism (1986) and Mad Money (1998). She warned that we were heading for financial collapse for the very reasons that the financial system did collapse: "a monetary system cannot work efficiently unless there is political authority to say what money must be used or may be used; to enforce the execution of agreed monetary transactions; and to license, and if necessary support, major operators in the system" (1986, p. 25). She argued that through a series of decisions and non-decisions, the leading states of the international monetary system (particularly the US) have failed to govern the system.
The result is madness: wild volatility that makes everyone, even those people who never wanted to engage in risky behavior, gamblers in a global casino. Here, again, Susan speaks in 1986:
"For the great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay way from, and the global casino of high finance, is that we are all involuntarily engaged in the day's play. A currency change can halve the value of a farmer's crop before he harvests it, or drive an exporter out of buisnes. A rise in interest rates can fatally inflate the costs of holding stocks for the shop-keeper. A takeover dictated by financial considerations can rob the factory worker of his job. From school-leavers to pensioners, what goes on in the casino in the office blocks of the big financial centres is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives. The financial casino has everyone playing the game of Snakes and Ladders" (p. 2).
We, the willing and the unwilling gamblers alike, have been living in a world in which the speed of "innovation" in financial instruments has outpaced the ability of governments to regulate, the ability of firms to realize what, exactly they are buying and selling, and the ability of anybody to figure how risky a transaction is. Moreover, Alan Greenspan's "incorrect ideology," Milton Friedman's one-dimensional thinking, and the seductiveness of the libertarian myth of perfect markets resulted in governments, particularly the US government, abdicating responsibility for governing. It wasn't just Reagan and Bush who failed to regulated. Clinton was quite guilty of this, too.
Now I do believe that overregulation is a bad thing. It decreases efficiency and leads to suboptimal outcomes. But under-regualtion or -- worse! -- failure to regulate at all leads to the mess we have right now.
So, what's the answer? Do we bail out Detroit or let them go bankrupt and try to restructure? What do we do with mortgages? What do we do with retirement, pensions, etc.? I teach my students that the economy functions on liquidity, stability, and confidence. Government has a role in each of these. The Fed, in particular, can help with monetary stability and liquidity. Liquidity can also be helped by infusions of cash by Congress to cash-strapped industries, but only if that cash ends up being used correctly. Overly high compensation for executives is a big negative. Confidence, though, is a psychological state. Confidence might come back if people believe that the government really is taking on the responsibility of governance. Leaders help change psychological states, and that's the promise of an Obama administration. I hope it works.
I really hope it works.
One more word about Susan Strange. (This is, after all, my blog.) Years ago, as a fairly junior scholar, I was sitting in a business meeting of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association. The section chair was asking for volunteers for various section offices (executive board or whatever). Susan was sitting behind me. She certainly didn't know me well. But she leaned for and shoved me in the shoulder and said, "You should volunteer." And I did. And that mattered in my career. Thank you, Susan.
I have been rereading some of her work, Casino Capitalism (1986) and Mad Money (1998). She warned that we were heading for financial collapse for the very reasons that the financial system did collapse: "a monetary system cannot work efficiently unless there is political authority to say what money must be used or may be used; to enforce the execution of agreed monetary transactions; and to license, and if necessary support, major operators in the system" (1986, p. 25). She argued that through a series of decisions and non-decisions, the leading states of the international monetary system (particularly the US) have failed to govern the system.
The result is madness: wild volatility that makes everyone, even those people who never wanted to engage in risky behavior, gamblers in a global casino. Here, again, Susan speaks in 1986:
"For the great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay way from, and the global casino of high finance, is that we are all involuntarily engaged in the day's play. A currency change can halve the value of a farmer's crop before he harvests it, or drive an exporter out of buisnes. A rise in interest rates can fatally inflate the costs of holding stocks for the shop-keeper. A takeover dictated by financial considerations can rob the factory worker of his job. From school-leavers to pensioners, what goes on in the casino in the office blocks of the big financial centres is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives. The financial casino has everyone playing the game of Snakes and Ladders" (p. 2).
We, the willing and the unwilling gamblers alike, have been living in a world in which the speed of "innovation" in financial instruments has outpaced the ability of governments to regulate, the ability of firms to realize what, exactly they are buying and selling, and the ability of anybody to figure how risky a transaction is. Moreover, Alan Greenspan's "incorrect ideology," Milton Friedman's one-dimensional thinking, and the seductiveness of the libertarian myth of perfect markets resulted in governments, particularly the US government, abdicating responsibility for governing. It wasn't just Reagan and Bush who failed to regulated. Clinton was quite guilty of this, too.
Now I do believe that overregulation is a bad thing. It decreases efficiency and leads to suboptimal outcomes. But under-regualtion or -- worse! -- failure to regulate at all leads to the mess we have right now.
So, what's the answer? Do we bail out Detroit or let them go bankrupt and try to restructure? What do we do with mortgages? What do we do with retirement, pensions, etc.? I teach my students that the economy functions on liquidity, stability, and confidence. Government has a role in each of these. The Fed, in particular, can help with monetary stability and liquidity. Liquidity can also be helped by infusions of cash by Congress to cash-strapped industries, but only if that cash ends up being used correctly. Overly high compensation for executives is a big negative. Confidence, though, is a psychological state. Confidence might come back if people believe that the government really is taking on the responsibility of governance. Leaders help change psychological states, and that's the promise of an Obama administration. I hope it works.
I really hope it works.
One more word about Susan Strange. (This is, after all, my blog.) Years ago, as a fairly junior scholar, I was sitting in a business meeting of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association. The section chair was asking for volunteers for various section offices (executive board or whatever). Susan was sitting behind me. She certainly didn't know me well. But she leaned for and shoved me in the shoulder and said, "You should volunteer." And I did. And that mattered in my career. Thank you, Susan.
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