7 Bad Ideas of Higher Education (Only 7?)

By Professor Doom

     A recent article on Inside Higher Education lists, supposedly, 7 seriously bad ideas in higher education today. The article starts off well with an awesome quote from an expert:

"Seriously bad ideas, I’d argue, have a life of their own. And they rule our world.”

Paul Krugman, from Seriously Bad Ideas. Considering this guy’s kooky economic ideas seem to rule the world today, it’s safe to say he knows exactly what he’s doing.

     Past this point, alas, the article misses mark after mark, often missing the point entirely of each bad idea.

    

Seriously Bad Idea #1 - Institutional Sustainability Requires That Faculty Costs Be Minimized

     I’m a little ambivalent about this being a bad idea. Yeah, sure, I’d like more money, but I honestly don’t feel that I should become fabulously wealthy doing my job. 

     The important thing is to consider how this bad idea came into place. The only reason “minimize faculty costs” is prevalent on campuses today is because administration costs have been so heavily maximized. Every penny goes to administration first, with leftovers going to everything else on campus. If you can’t get more money coming in by attracting more students, then the next best thing is cutting down on the money going out that you’re paying to faculty.

     The student loan scam means that you don’t need good faculty to attract students, because everyone can get the money to go to college now—it’s not the students’ money, so they’re not picky about spending it. This led to an era of great growth in higher education. That era is coming to a close, as a large majority of high school graduates eventually go on to college. With no further growth possible, minimizing faculty costs is the next option for administration to take.

      So, yes, this is a bad idea, but whether faculty are forced to work for nothing, or paid fabulous amounts, is irrelevant as it won’t address the real issue in higher education.

Seriously Bad Idea #2 - Quality Education Can Be Scaled:

     Yes, this is a bad idea, but it’s not the actual idea in higher education today. First, minimizing faculty costs motivated trying to scale education, this is just a consequence of the first bad idea. Second, “quality” is irrelevant. Accreditation today is completely bogus (and the endless academic scandals, with no penalty from accreditation, illustrate this well), and accreditation facilitates the student loans.

      Since student loans are not based on quality education, only on “education” as laughably defined by accreditation, the people trying to scale education don’t care in the least about quality. To even assert “quality” is a factor in today’s higher education is naïve, deeply naïve. It’s about saving a few bucks. If administration were presented with research showing that class sizes over 30 were guaranteed in all ways to do absolutely nothing for students…administration would still order class sizes of a thousand students or more, because those classes are immensely profitable.

     The gentle reader should ask himself: if you wanted to learn something, would you like private access to your teacher, or would you like to share your teacher with 500 people simultaneously? For thousands of years, humans have learned best by having teachers with a small class (optimally, a single student). We all know this, so any assertion that some large class offers quality education is a lie on the face of it.

Seriously Bad Idea #3 - Technology Is the Answer to Every Problem in Higher Education:

     This, too, is a bad idea in higher education, but some questions really need to be asked about how it got into place. I remember one department head, an administrative hachet-person, would also stress the word “technology” and really wanted us to use it. It didn’t matter how irrelevant the technology, as long as it was being used, we were doing well in her eyes.

       When I asked for a computer with a CD-ROM drive, she had no idea what such a drive was. When I was building a website for an online course, she sent me an e-mail asking to see it. I sent her a link. She sent me another e-mail asking to see the website. I sent her another link, explaining that she needed to click on the underlined words and she could see the site. Eventually I had to come to her office and show her what I was talking about.

      It’s clear admin has a fixation on technology, but the previous paragraph shows that they don’t really understand what they’re doing. So why the fixation on technology as a solution to everything? I suspect the massive potential for kickbacks, but I must concede I’m not conversant with every form of fraud in higher education today (I do not concede lack of effort on my part in this regard, it’s just that there’s so much fraud…). Technology can solve many problems, but problems are, indeed, not necessarily solved by the use of technology. Most administrators have no capacity to understand exactly what I just said in the previous sentence, and having this type of leadership is the real bad idea.

Seriously Bad Idea #4 - Faculty Are Impediments to Innovation in Higher Education:

      The author of the article proposes this as a bad idea, but again obvious questions present themselves. Who is making the judgement that faculty are the impediment? What are the innovations being advanced that faculty are impeding? How are the incredibly disposable and quickly replaced faculty an impediment? Is turning our universities into boiler rooms really an “innovation”? Is increasing faculty workloads to extreme levels really going to improve higher education? Any investigation into the answers to such questions leads to the real problem in higher education.

      Now we come to a really bizarre claim:

Seriously Bad Idea #5 - Staff Growth Is the Underlying Problem to What Plagues Higher Education:

     The author has yet to mention the ridiculous growth of administration and staff (and their huge pay). I just assumed it was ignorance, but here the author is saying this growth, a cancerous tumor larger than the size of the host, isn’t a problem.

 

      I beg to differ.

      A generation ago, when most campus employees were faculty, students graduated in around 4 years, and these graduates didn’t start life deep in debt.

     Today, faculty are a minority on campuses, due to that staff growth. Even on good campuses, most students don’t ever graduate, graduates typically take 6 years to get their 4 year degree, and these graduates now start life around $35,000 in debt.

     Now, the reason for all the staff is…what, exactly? They’re not educators, and they’re not researchers. They justify their existence by claiming to help students. But the students are less likely to graduate now, and are more likely to graduate with considerable debt. Thus, they’re not helping students, either. They’re not helping anyone but themselves.

      So, yeah, maybe we should look into getting rid of staff, since, empirically, they are hurting our students. Universities got along fine without all the little fiefdoms filled with staff they have today, and not having to pay all those huge salaries would go a long way to reducing tuition, which would help students. Hey, aren’t we supposed to help students?

      I haven’t been quoting the author, but I do want to give one quote to demonstrate the writing style here:

Colleges and universities need more non-faculty educators able to partner with faculty on redesigning large enrollment classes to encourage more active learning, and on partnering with faculty to create new blended and low-residency degree programs. Where the work can be sourced, and it is not a core competency that differentiates the institution, then it probably should be.

    

     Seriously, we need more staff to make it easier to run larger courses? Do note the vocabulary here: partner (as a verb!), blended, sourced, competency, etc. Hmm, who writes with such consistent edu-speak?

     I get the feeling the author is one of those staff, because there’s no way to objectively look at what’s going on in higher education and not suspect the increase in staff is part of the problem.

     No, we don’t need more of these staff. Even if we did, they should be contingency, right? Hire them to redesign the course, then fire them…like we should with most of the non-faculty on campus.

     The next bad idea also has some issues:

Seriously Bad Idea #6 - The Trends Toward Public Disinvestment to Higher Education Is Inevitable:

     It’s rather debatable that there’s public disinvestment in higher education, as I’ve discussed before. While this “bad idea” isn’t even accurate, it’s quite possible that, at some point, it will be valid.

     In fact, I concede it is inevitable. States don’t have access to the money-printing machines, the Federal government does; one only has to look at Greece to see what happens to a printing machine-less state in a fiat system. The primary purpose of fiat money creation is the transfer of wealth away from the people that don’t have the money-printing machines. As Krugman’s hero Keynes pointed out, not one person in a million understands when his wealth is being taken away in this manner.

     So, states are steadily having their wealth extracted, and with the national debt soaring ever higher, at some point states won’t be able to create wealth as quickly as the money printing machines can take it away.

       Saying this is inevitable isn’t so much a bad idea as just acknowledging the mathematics of our exponentially increasing national debt. But…what of it? 

       The author quotes some uncited numbers giving current support levels:

Connecticut spends over $12,000 per full-time equivalent student, Wyoming spends $16,000, and Hawaii spends about $14,000. In comparison, in 2012 Arizona spent on $3,425, New Hampshire $2,795, and Wisconsin $4,439. 

     Even with a “paltry” $3,000 of support per student, this suggests serious fiscal mismanagement of our institutions. Assuming faculty teaches a mere 200 students a semester, the faculty thus brings in $1,200,000 a year. Over a million bucks a year, and the faculty would be quite lucky to get $50,000…most get less than half of that.

      And that’s support from the taxpayer, many students also have to pay tuition on top of that.

      Every single time someone starts looking at the money going into higher education, I have to wonder where does all that money go? If there were only as many adminstrators/staff as faculty, and all were paid about the same, I suspect we could get a huge surplus in higher education, instead of always being told how cash-strapped our universities are.

       Now we come to the last, worst, bad idea:

Seriously Bad Idea #7 - U.S. Higher Education Is In Crisis:

      Wait, what? Saying higher education is in crisis is a bad idea? Higher education is in a crisis, that’s the simple truth. Please, gentle reader, allow me to present some facts:

 Student loan debt is over 1.2 trillion dollars now. If higher education were legitimate, this level of debt would be questionable. But is it legitimate? Let’s take a look:

Whole swaths of coursework across all campuses in the country are openly fraudulent.   Students are indebting themselves for useless coursework.

18 year long frauds take place at our universities…and there are no arrests, no penalties, no firings. This type of fraud goes on at many universities, because the ones committing the fraud know there will be no penalty.

Our community colleges operate in open violation of Federal law. There is nothing to stop this.

About half of our college graduates can demonstrate no measurable improvement in knowledge or skill from high school. How much longer will people indebt themselves for useless education?

 Our college graduates are often useless after graduating college. How much longer will people indebt themselves for entirely useless degrees?

     How can anyone look at the above issues and deny that our higher education system is in crisis? Every single one of the above issues affects thousands, if not millions, of students (well, the UNC fraud only affected a few thousand, but similar frauds go on at many institutions).

      There are some bad ideas governing higher education right now. Things are far simpler than what the author of the article claims, and soon I’ll go over, again, the truly bad ideas that are destroying higher education.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Do Entire Troll Websites Exist?

By Professor Doom

     For the most part, my blog has done pretty good service, and I’ve received much favorable commentary. Only one site has had anything truly negative to say.

     The site? www.degreeinfo.com. Yes, there’s a whole website dedicated to discussing buying various online college degrees. This is a great idea, and apparently a popular site…but I can’t help be a little suspicious that this is a troll site—not exactly on the up-and-up. There aren’t nearly enough warnings about the many pitfalls of online and for-profit education, and overall, everyone is really enthusiastic about all the great degrees for sale.

      Anyway, Confessions of a College Professor came up…there was little vitriol poured on the many questionable schools discussed in the forums, but the posters had plenty for me.

      I tried to log into the site, to help them understand what’s really going on, but couldn’t do it. Even with two different e-mail addresses, I couldn’t get a confirmation e-mail (and yes I checked the ol’ spam folder) so I could post…as though the site didn’t want any dissenting input.

      So, allow me to address some of the criticisms of my blog (and, again, it’s curious, not a single poster there thought to post on my blog or even use my contact form):

As I was reading through his essay I started to pick apart his logical fallacies, then decided it wasn't worth my time.

     Darn, I would have liked to have seen these fallacies; there were certainly plenty from the posters. What’s interesting about this site is the posters consistently list the degrees they’ve bought in their signatures. It’s funny, I’ve been posting to forums for years and have made thousands of posts; it never occurred to me to list my credentials…every…single…post.

     I like the part where he claims that as soon as employers learn that an applicant has an online degree, they immediately throw that applicant's resume into the trash. Every single employer does that. 100%. No exceptions! Amazing!

      I never said 100%, no exceptions. But, the fact still remains that many employers do, and every hiring committee I’ve been on has tossed such applications right in the trash. I fully acknowledge someone, somewhere, takes online degrees seriously, and I’ve even mentioned how you can get an online degree taken seriously (namely, get employed first, let the employer know you, and THEN, maybe, your degree will count for something at your current place of employment). If I could log in, I could clarify that straw man fallacy.

     Of to another bizarre post:

A few truths . . .

First, bloggers are people who can’t be published elsewhere or who have lived out their usefulness in the writer’s marketplace. No one gives a crap about what they have to say except for others who don’t have a life. No exception.

     Neat! It’s good to know there are no exceptions, according to this expert.

     Of course, I’ve been published under my real name many times so…not much of a truth, and Drudge Report has done ok, I think, despite starting as a blog. The fallacy here is “appeal to authority,” as the poster is claiming he’s speaking from the authority of truth. The expert here continues:

Second, people who write or post anonymously have zero credibility. Zero.

      Interesting point of view. I’ve certainly demonstrated that publishing anonymously is about the only recourse a professor has now if he wants to say anything about higher education and keep his job. This is the fallacy of ad hominem—what I have to say is invalid because I’m saying it. That’s why I cite studies and articles. Are these studies still invalid because an anonymous person cites them?

     The expert continues:

There are a few exceptions to the above principle

    It’s tough to be taken seriously when you contradict your “truth” within a paragraph of stating your truth. Oh well.

     Off to another laughable post:

I have taught online for 11 years, on ground for 12. Roughly 50 courses in each format. I have studied the pedagogy and effectiveness of both, I've read some of the research into it, I've published in a journal that focuses exclusively on online pedagogy. I bet I know a great deal more about this than Professor Doom.

Professor Doom tries to make meaningful extrapolations from online high schools to online universities. That is a patently absurd position to take. Professor Doom should know this.

      Interesting. The poster here is referencing my Obvious Question About Online Education, wherein I ask why do high schoolers, when taking online courses in controlled environments, fail online courses, while 3 months after graduating high school, these very same students can do great in online courses…provided they get to take them at home with no supervision and access to ways to hire someone else to take the course for them. I think it’s fair to ask if maybe, possibly, they’re cheating.

     Scholars, when asked questions, respond with answers. Trolls respond with insults. This person has taken pains to claim he’s an expert and a scholar in online teaching, so how does this self-proclaimed scholar respond to the question?

It is one thing to be ignorant. I am ignorant of many things. It is another thing to be stupid. Stupid is when you are ignorant, yet think you can strive forward and make definitive statements about things of which you are ignorant.

Ergo, Professor Doom is stupid.

     The expert above doesn’t indicate his precise field, though it’s clear it’s a discipline where neither reading comprehension nor logic is particularly relevant. A question isn’t a definitive statement, after all.

      Another expert, again listing all the degrees he’s purchased, chimes in with another train wreck post: 

The anonymity really causes me to question the guy)

      Again with the ad hominem. I, and others, have written of the culture of fear in higher education which causes so many faculty to write anonymously now. This is such a weird fixation they have, considering they are on a forum where most every poster uses a pseudonym. Hmm, which class of people in higher education is notable for hypocrisy?

. So this guy (or gal?) is a) full of crap and isn't a professor at all b) is an adjunct who is angry about being an adjunct c) is a complete coward or possibly some combination of the three.

     Goodness, again with the ad hominem. Please note, while I’m attacked pretty heavily here, what I actually say in my blog isn’t.

…, it's also a ludicrous statement that CCs are worthless and no self respecting university accepts their credits (Doom's words)…..

     I’ve never said this. In fact, one my most popular and accessible posts details the optimal way to get your community college (CC) credits accepted at a university (see The Community College Secret, right on the front page). I do, however, cite studies that show many students have difficulty transferring their credits and that many community colleges practice fraud and that most community colleges violate Federal law regularly by offering sub-9^th grade level coursework…should all this research by others be discounted just because I anonymously point it out? If only I could log in and correct the lies being told at this troll site.

     The train wreck continues:

…. Lobbing insults from behind a computer screen anonymously isn't intellectual discourse ….

     What, pray tell, does this anonymous poster think he’s doing in his post? He says he’s using his real name but…it’s a forum, I’ll never know. He could easily post on my blog if he was truly interested in a discussion.

      The train wreck somehow manages to continue:

and if Professor Doom IS simply angry about not getting tenure I'd say it likely has more to do with a pissy attitude and poor judgment than the state of higher ed in the US.

     Again, I’ve posted about tenure, and I’m pretty ambivalent on it, because there are some inherent problems with “job for life”—it’s really an irrelevant issue, because tenure is basically dead anyway. The fallacy here is simple ignorance, he thoroughly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

     The train wreck continues:

Oh, and "Professor Doom?" That's too hokey to even be a good Bond Villain name. All signs point to "living in parents basement teaching English Comp 1 on a per semester basis." 

     Again, more ignorance. I don’t live in a basement (and, again, where I live in no way relates to the validity of what I say), and any reader that’s spent some time on my site would know I don’t teach English Comp. It would take, what, four posts to figure out my discipline? That’s closing in on willful ignorance on this expert’s part.

       It is funny that this person chooses to disrespect writing teachers in this way; I’ve written before that these are perhaps the most abused faculty in higher education right now…and that writing is probably the most important skill of human civilization.

      Why does this poster have such disdain for such important teachers? I conjecture this “expert” is an education administrator or something similar (note: I present this as a guess, rather than ignorantly state authoritatively, as the poster does).

      The previous poster is only too happy to boast of his graduate degree from the “University of Management and Technology,” which is on the list of scam schools for Consumer Fraud Reporting. There are reports of paid trolls that go online to post in support of various agendas, but the gentle reader needs to consider the possibility that entire websites can also be trolls.

      I could continue with the things being said in this forum, but why bother? If it is a legitimate forum, someone would have pointed out the wild lies and blatant factual errors of the posters there; it would only take a few minutes’ reading on my blog to figure it out. I would make the corrections, myself, but registration seems to be pretty restricted…which leads me to believe this is a troll site, set up to mislead and trick people into various bogus institutions.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

“Microaggression” Foolishness Debasing Campuses (Further)

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written before of the fear that now pervades the job of a college professor. Say something that can be remotely be considered criticism, and you’re fired. Say something that students find offensive, and you risk complaints that could lead to termination. They’re simple rules, but it’s hard to claim there’s academic freedom or freedom of speech when you must watch what you say.

     I grant that, in times past, professors (and other people) said some outright offensive things, but nowadays, the only offensive racists I’ve seen and heard on campus were multiculturalists and diversity professors.

     With all the overt racism removed, we’ve now moved on to the concept of “microaggression,” where students take offense at the most ridiculous thing, cry “racism,” and spineless administration supports the student, even when the aggression is literally so small that it can’t be seen (hence the name). That’s ok, because that’s the point of microaggression.

     Ridiculous? Absolutely. An example that didn’t quite make the mainstream news really highlights just how miniscule these so-called aggressions are:

In November 2013, two dozen graduate students at the University of California at Los Angeles marched into an education class and announced a protest against its “hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been victimized, they claimed, by racial “microaggression”…

      Now, these are graduate students, and I’ve covered graduate student protests before. Absolutely, when this many students protest, you have to consider their claim, particularly when the class generating complaints is dissertation level: these students are very close to officially establishing themselves as scholars.

      So, what, pray tell, was the micro-insult being delivered so grievously that students felt the need to complain?

     [The professor, Rust] had changed a student’s capitalization of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view. Tensions arose over Rust’s insistence that students use the more academic Chicago Manual of Style for citation format…

     That’s right, folks, we’re now at the point that professors need to fear student protests over issues of capitalization and citation style. I totally respect the students’ right to protest, but this is pretty micro, eh? 

     The fear doesn’t come from the student protests, it comes from administration’s response to this level of lunacy.

UCLA’s response to the sit-in was a travesty of justice. The education school sacrificed the reputation of a beloved and respected professor in order to placate a group of ignorant students making a specious charge of racism.

      What did they do to this highly regarded professor with decades of experience?

The administration announced that Rust would not teach the remainder of the class by himself but would be joined by three other professors, one of whom, Daniel Solórzano, was the school’s leading proponent of microaggression theory and critical race theory. This reorganization implicitly confirmed the charge that Rust was unfit to supervise “graduate students of color.”

     This is really, really, insulting to the professor. He’s been teaching for decades, but now needs the help of three in-class commissars supervisors?

     Now, I grant that the students are in a field (racial and gender issues) notorious for complaining about the most ridiculous things…but every once in a while this field does have something relevant to say (a stopped clock is correct twice a day, after all). Complaints, especially mass complaints, should be heard, and considered. In the past, such complaints were heard by actual faculty, people that cared about scholarship and education. Today, such complaints are handled by a questionably highly paid and unquestionably incompetent cadre of professional administrators, who simply don’t care about education or scholarship.

      I’ve pointed out before that higher education administration seems to thrive on hypocrisy and double standards, and, again, we see a double standard here. Consider the abuse, the real abuse, that was inflicted on the Roski students, motivating faculty to resign as well as the entire graduate class. Admin doesn’t give one whit about that (no surprise, since the abuse is coming from admin).

     Student complaints about being forced not to capitalize “indigenous” are taken very seriously, on the other hand.  The proper response would be to crack a few heads together  acknowledge that the highly respected professor knows better about capitalization and citation than the students, and support the guy they hired to train scholars. 

      Looking at some of the writing of these students, it really seems like they could use some help with their skills in this regard, especially in writing understandable prose. I’ll include one line as an example:

“It is, at its most benign, disingenuous to the next generations of Scholars of Color to not seek material and systematic changes in this department. It is a toxic, unsafe and intellectually stifling environment at its current worse.”

     I concede I was at one community college where several faculty really aspired to write at this level of clarity and correctness, but trying to improve this writing is what education is supposed to do. Anyway, at UCLA, it’s not a good idea to try to teach students to write well, apparently:

“Asking for better grammar is inflammatory in the school,” says an occasional T.A. “You have to give an A or you’re a racist.

     Administration should support the production of scholars that can write clearly and correctly, and support faculty that work towards that goal. Admin, of course, did the absolute worst thing, support the students, with predictable results:

The pattern would repeat itself twice more at UCLA that fall: students would allege that they were victimized by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students’ misapprehension, penitently acceded to it.

     And thus the culture of fear gets even worse. Now, across the country, people are terrified of saying something insulting, with the threshold of insult being lowered to literally microscopic levels. How on Earth did acts that explicitly cannot be seen as insulting nevertheless be considered insults?

     Even comedians, usually fearless in what they say in the pursuit of humor, are now too afraid to perform on campuses. In days of yore, comedians used to make pretty good money and further their careers performing on college campuses, and now they know doing so is a major risk to their career. “Opening your mouth on campus” is now dangerous.

      The American higher educational system used to be the envy of the world, and, to some extent, would-be scholars from other countries still come here for higher education. What do these people think of the environment created by administration?

Foreign students are particularly shell-shocked by the school’s climate. “The Asians are just terrified,” says a recent graduate. “They walk into this hyper-racialized environment and have no idea what’s going on. Their attitude in class is: ‘I don’t want to talk. Please don’t make me talk!’ ”

    Please, the gentle reader needs to understand that the creation of this environment will have long lasting repercussions across American campuses. If we had leaders interested in fostering scholarship and education instead of feathering their own nests for short term gain, we could easily stop this.

       This whole matter should have been resolved with some restrained laughter and administration telling students to get back to work. Instead, it just gets escalated and escalated:

“…Rust’s employers presented him with a choice: if he agreed to stay off the education-school premises for the remainder of the academic year, they would not pursue disciplinary charges against him. The administration then sent around a letter to students, alerting them that the school would be less dangerous—for a while, at least—with Rust out of the picture.”

--by the way, Rust is 79 years old, with many awards and commendations for his work in this field. And, apparently, he’s a threat and a racist because of his citation style preferences…

     The article I’m quoting from goes into much more extensive detail on how vile microaggression theory is, and I encourage the interested reader (with plenty of time) to peruse it further.  

      Simply asking students to use a long established citation style can lead to a professor getting kicked off campus. Is this not yet another sign that something has gone horribly, horribly, wrong in higher education?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com