That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet

Well, hell.

The pro “intelligent design” bill in West Virginia passed the Senate Education Committee.

The bill has now gone to the House Education Committee. The bill’s progress can be tracked on the West Virginia bill tracker. 

This Metro News article has more background on the bill, including the slightly strange fact that the bill was prompted by an idea from a high school student.

Committee chair Amy Grady, R-Mason, is leader sponsor and told the committee that the idea was brought to her by Hayden Hodge from Hurricane High.

Hodge appeared before the committee and said a teacher gave him the idea. The teacher wanted the option to teach ID alongside evolution.

“I am not in favor of getting rid of evolution,” Hodge said. And ID is not ultimately religious. (I hope this is Hodge’s opinion, not the reporter trying to state a fact. - ZF)

“I’m not asking for religion to be taught in classrooms, period,” Hodge said.

This is, of course, untrue. “Intelligent design” is a religious argument. This has been documented many times. We have the receipts. 

Reading the comments from the committee members is depressing. A retired science teacher was arguing in favour of this bill. In favour.

I’m glad the American Civil Liberties Union spoke out against the bill.

The bill made it out of committee with only one vote against it. The report doesn’t say who it was, but my hat is off to you, anonymous West Virginia senator.

External links

Senate education committee approves 4 bills including ‘intelligent design’ measure

‘Intelligent Design’ bill threatens science education in West Virginia

Is using AI to write a paper academic misconduct?

We’ve come a long way from ELIZA. Or the ridiculous duelling chatbots.

Natural language artificial intelligence has recently gotten far better than I think many people realize, and today’s article in Scientific American points that out.

A researcher asked an open source artificial intelligence program, GPT-3, to write an academic paper. It did such a good job that the preprint is out and the paper is now under review at a technical journal.

Publicity stunt? It smells a little like that, but then again, this is an area that needs some publicity.

As natural language program like  GPT-3 get more widely available and more widely known, of course university students are going to do what these researchers did. They are going to get the programs to write their papers.

How is that going to shape up in our thinking about teaching?

It using an artificial intelligence to write a term paper cheating? I suspect a lot of my colleagues would say, “Yes,” for the same reason that asking an actual person to write a paper for you is cheating.

But how would you detect that?

The new article suggests that these papers are not going to be obviously defective. If anything, the clue for a professor might be that the paper is too good.

Every one would be a unique output of the artificial intelligence, so that it might skirt plagiarism detectors. I don’t know enough about how GPT-3 generates text to know if it has a “tell”: predictable quirks in expression that might indicate it was an artificial intelligence rather than a person.

I don’t think many university professors are thinking at all about what this means for student assessment. We professors have traditionally wanted to build towards using writing as the preferred assessment. We ask grad students to write theses, after all. But writing as a form of assessment keeps getting compromised and harder to validate.

For another look at what GPT-3 can do, check out this video of someone who used it to recreate a childhood imaginary friend - which turned evil and tried to kill him.

Disclaimer: The story in the video is so wild that I can’t help but wonder if some of it is staged. 

Update, 2 December 2022: Veteran blogger Chad Orzel has a Substack post on this issue: “Why do we assign writing?”. The take-away is that if your writing assignment can be done by an artificial intelligence chatbot, you’re probably doing it wrong.

External links

We asked GPT-3 to write an academic paper about itself. Then we tried to get it published

Science isn’t the only one fighting recommendation algorithms and bemoaning education

This article about crises in American evangelical churches resonates with crises we see in science communication.

The churches’ problems? People aren’t getting enough education and social media’s recommendation algorithms are too influential.

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness.” ...

“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. ... Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour. ...

(W)hen people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other.(”)

And wow, does that ever sound familiar.

The clergy bemoaning the lack of education in religious instruction puts a twist on the long-running arguments about teaching creationism in public schools. It suggests the reason some fundamentalists fought so hard on those issues because at some level they saw their own catechesis was failing.

Related posts

Recommendation algorithms are the biggest problem in science communication today

External links

The evangelical church is breaking apart

The failure of neuroscience education

In every field of science, there are certain basic facts. These are the facts that if you get them wrong, mark you as naïve at best and foolish at worst.

In chemistry, one of those facts might be that everything is made of atoms.

In astronomy, one of these facts might be that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way round.

In geography, geology, and astronomy, one of those facts might be that the earth is round and not flat.

These basic sorts of facts are often used to assess people’s scientific literacy. We consider it important that people be educated in these.

But neuroscience has failed in conveying its most basic facts. Case in point:

The myth that “We only use ten percent of our brain.”

People believe this. I mean, they really believe it.

I’ve heard multiple people mention it at public scientific lectures. I’ve answered dozens of questions about this on Quora, where some version of it crops up every few days.

And that damn Luc Besson movie didn’t help.

From a neuroscientist’s point of view, saying “We only use ten percent of our brain” is as big an error as saying, “The earth is flat.”

A few moments of thought should show why it can’t be true. We never hear a physician say things like, “Well, the bullet went through your skull, but luckily, it went through the 90% of you brain you never use.” It has no basis in reality.

If you go to the Society for Neuroscience to see what scientists say about this, you might find their  outreach page. There, have to navigate to their “Brain Facts” page (which should be “About Brain Facts”, not the actual landing page for “Brain Facts”), dig down to their “Core concepts” and under “Your complex brain” you can read:

There are around 86 billion neurons in the human brain, all of which are in use.

So the leading professional society for neuroscience counters the 10% brain myth with a sentence fragment that is hard to find and weakly worded.

If I was leading neuroscience education, my goal would be to make, “We use 100% of our brain” the sort of bedrock scientific fact that we expect people should know.

Postscript: The 10% myth probably dates back to 1936, when American writer Lowell Thomas wrote the foreword to one of the best all-time sellers, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Thomas was summarizing an idea of psychologist William James: that people have unmet potential. Most of us could learn Russian, but don’t. We could learn to play a musical instrument, but don’t. We could learn how to repair a 1963 MGB sports car, but don’t.

Thomas added a falsely precise percentage: “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten per cent of his latent mental ability.” Somewhere along the line, “mental ability” became “brain.” This isn’t surprising, since the notion that “Thoughts come from our brain” is a scientific fact that is widely known. That’s our “Sun is at the center of the solar system” fact.

External links

Do we really only use ten percent of our brain?

“Teach the controversy” image from a super cool T-shirt from Amorphia.

The future of education isn’t online

There is a certain class of people who are convinced that higher education as currently taught is a stupid waste of time, and that the future is to move instruction on to the Internet. I see a lot of questions on Quora asking when this will happen.

I think the notion of online learning is appealing for a certain kind of person: technologically savvy and probably rather introverted. I’m one of these people.

But most students are not like that. Most people learn best with face to face interactions instructors.

I am reminded of this by seeing this Twitter thread about Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium, which is basically an online class. Students get a computer lab and no professors.

And students hate it. I think my favourite burn is one studentwho wrote:

I would call this place hell on Earth but I don’t want to insult hell.

Even a MOOC company acknowledged that MOOCs have failed to disrupt education (they called them “dead”) in the way some people were talking.

More data shows MOOCs consistently underperform.

The vast majority of massive open online course (MOOC) learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world's most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs — low completion rates — has not improved over 6 years.

I teach some classes online, and I think you can create a good learning environment for some students. But this vision that the future of education is a bunch of YouTube videos and adaptive algorithms is not a vision that I want to see.

Update, 30 May 2019: A new report on online education adds more evidence saying they aren’t better, although this one is focused more on K-12 than higher education.

Full-time virtual and blended schools consistently fail to perform as well as district public schools.

Not hot: the Rate My Professor chili pepper is done

The website Rate My Professors is getting rid of its “hotness” rating. Which means you won’t see stuff like this any more:

The idea of getting rid of the “chili pepper” has been floating around for a while, but fellow neuroscientist Beth Ann McLaughlin was able to hit a nerve on Twitter this week. Almost 3,000 retweets and many professors chimed in to say, “Get rid of this appearance rating.”

And to their credit, the website owners did.

This is a good thing for people in higher education. The Rate My Professors site is well known to people in higher education, both faculty and students. I’ve encouraged students to use Rate My Professors, because I have a record teaching, and people have a right to hear other students’ experiences. It matters when they tacitly suggest it’s okay to ogle professors.

It’s nice to have a little good news. And to be reminded that sometimes, faceless corporate websites – and the people behind them – do listen to reason, and can change.

External links

Why The Chili Pepper Needs To Go: Rape Culture And Rate My Professors (2016)
RateMyProfessors.com Is Dropping The "Hotness" Rating After Professors Called It Sexist
I Killed the Chili Pepper on Rate My Professor
RateMyProfessors.com Retires the Sexist and Uncomfortable “Chili Pepper” Rating After Academics Speak Out
RateMyProfessors Removes Hotness Rating

First in the family

I was the first in my family to go to university. My mom finished high school. My dad didn’t get that far. (People attended university less often then.)

What strikes me now is that I don’t know how that affected me.

In my institution, much is made that most of our students are “first generation” students. There’s a lot of talk about how hard it can be for them to transition to university, how they don’t know how to navigate university systems, and that we should try to provide more support mechanisms for them.

I don’t know if that was even a conversation faculty at my undergraduate university were having at the time. In any case, I never felt like I needed any of that.

Maybe it was because I was graduating high school from a small town with no university that I had no idea which adults had university degrees and which didn’t. It seemed to me that the cohort of students from my high school were all just in the same boat. I never felt like people from families with university experience had any sort of “inside information” coming from their parents.

Maybe it was because I was a white middle class guy. I wasn’t faced with some of the socio-economic hurdles that are often associated with “first generation” students in some places. Particularly here.

Maybe it was because I was academically inclined, and a nerd, and universities were just a good fit for me that I didn’t feel the culture shock that others felt. After all, I liked universities so much that I’ve basically spent my entire adult life in them.

But I think this is something I need to mention to my students more often. It might help some of them see that university degrees are not inherited feudal titles. And maybe it can help my “first in family” students see the possibilities for themselves. “You can’t be it if you can’t see it,” as the saying goes.

Just because you are the first to travel a pathway in your family doesn’t mean you’re the first ever.

Hat tip to TatooedDevil on Twitter for the hashtag, #FollowFirstGenerationAcademics.

Truth and justice at universities, not “or”

A friend whose opinion I trust asked people what they thought of a talk by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt’s summary of the talk is here. His thesis is universities can search for truth or be agents for social justice, but not both. Weirdly, Haidt says that individuals can pursue both truth and justice, but an institution cannot, for reasons that are never explored.

Haidt says there are few conservatives in university positions, citing Higher Education Research Institute data. Haidt then presumes that being on one political side precludes understanding of others. He does this by demonstrating that much reasoning is “motivated,” which is an idea that has lots of empirical support. However, he makes hasty generalization in arguing that because people often engage in motivated reasoning, they always do this. He makes another hasty generalization by arguing that only other people can dissuade researcher from incorrect views, neglecting the possibility that evidence can do so.

And this is about the last portion of Haidt’s talk that is driven by data.

Haidt is concerned that the political homogeneity of universities will trickle down to students. Evidence does not support this. Professors may largely lean to the political left, but their students are not much affected by this. See here and here.

He goes on to make lots of similar assertions about how students and professors are scared. “Professors all over the country are changing their teaching,” he claims. But his assertions are just that: assertions. He presents no data to support these claims. Well, unless you count a screenshot of a Vox article. (One which did not go unchallenged, incidentally.)

Haidt goes on to expound his thesis to say that universities have created a culture of victimhood, and how universities teach that other people are literally “members of good and bad groups.” He does so again through selected anecdotes, not data.

Haidt clearly implies that teaching that people can be “members of good and bad groups” is somehow wrong. He presumes that all political views have prima facie validity. He ignores many cases of political ideas have been shown to be empirically, factually wrong, but that are still bandied about as “common sense” by politicians. I would also like to ask Haidt would be whether he thinks German Nazis of the 1940s were just misunderstood.

At one point, Haidt says, “I’m not denying there’s oppression,” but I can’t help but wonder why this is a throwaway sentence compared to the amount of time he spends attempting to build the case for “victim culture.” He argues that certain statements are inviolable, like, “America has endemic racism / sexism,” but doesn’t address whether or not that is true. Again, Haidt is apparently operating from the point of view that has as as starting point that “America is racist / sexist” and “America is not racist / sexist” are equally plausible.

He says certain patterns that might be correlated with racism or sexism are “invitations to get to work” to find out if they are true or not. I like that Haidt is advocates empiricism, but what is missing is at what point hypotheses should be abandoned. We have seen the “Doubt is our product” strategy used many times to bring faux respectibility to discredited ideas.

Haidt also takes the liberty of defining “social justice” as he has experienced it. I suggest it is at least plausible that other people might disagree with his definition.

Haidt claims he is not on the left or the right. My impression is that Haidt, in trying to understand the origins of political disagreement, has attempted to be fair in understanding the basis for political viewpoints. Unfortunately, I think that objectivity in seeking the basis for people’s views has made him unwilling to critique them unevenly, leaving him to proclaim, “Everyone does it.” But as David Frum wrote:

“They all lie” is a sentiment that most benefits the most egregious liars.

I agree with many of the individual cases Haidt presents. But this is not surprising when you build your case on the best supporting anecdotes.

Weirdly, at the very end, Haidt unravels his own thesis, saying you can only effect change if you commit to truth. But again, this is a throwaway line that runs counter to his headline (which is 90% of communication effort). Haidt’s headline argument would make academia irrelevant. We can only tell the truth as long as it doesn’t matter. If we try to effect change, we’re spin doctors.

External links

Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice
The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Student preparation and the industrial-education complex

Last week, we had a visit from Kati Haycock from The Education Trust (video of her talk above; I have a cameo at the end when I ask a question). She says lots of smart and useful things, but one thing that got me thinking was she talked about whether students are “adequately prepared for university.” It’s not Haycock alone who talks about this: I hear the phrase all the time.

As an instructor, when I’m working with a student individually, I don’t care how prepared a student is. If I can teach a student at an advanced stage, then surely I can back up and teach them the beginner stuff if that person does not know it. I don’t (or shouldn’t) get upset by a student’s ignorance. I should view them as one of today’s lucky ten thousand.

Of course, the problem is that I rarely have the luxury of working with students individually.

The phrase “prepared for university” is an excellent example of how education is an industrial process. Ken Robinson (video here) often talks about this:

Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism — they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labour. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.

― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Every time you hear the phrase, “prepared for university,” replace it with “meets factory standards.” If student age is comparable to their date of manufacture, university preparation is comparable to quality control. I suppose I should be grateful that students aren’t sent to university with tags like this in their wallets:

Once I realized that, I thought about how much of the language about improving university education mirrors industrial concerns. “Student success” is measured in the same ways that factory production in measured, by efficiency: time to degree, percentage of students who graduate with a degree, and so on.

From a certain point of view, my job as a university instructor is not to teach, but implement processes that minimize loss of product.

Using textbooks you wrote in your own class

I have a little e-book that you can buy on Amazon called Presentation Tips. (If you get it through this link, you’ll support my friends at the Science... Sort Of podcast.)

I also teach a class about presentations from time to time: BIOL 4100 Biology Seminar. There’s a lot of demand for it, because it’s a required course for all our majors.

There is nothing to stop me from assigning my own book as a textbook in that seminar class, and requiring all the students buy it. I am willing to bet that this happens routinely, because faculty are given a lot of freedom in choice of learning materials.

That is a conflict of interest. I have a financial gain that I can make by selling my own book as a textbook.

That might not sound so bad. After all, students are expected to buy textbooks. You could make a good case that if a faculty member has written a book on the subject, she wrote it because she thought it would be the best book on the subject out there.

This post started because I received a report that sounded like a professor at another institution was doing something like this. As I understand it, the professor is asking students to pay for a manuscript of a book that is supposed to be published by a small publisher later. The publisher is so small, it’s nowhere to be found through a Google search. The students were instructed to use a PayPal account.

This seemed to me to be very strange and suspicious.

Textbook pricing is notoriously opaque to begin with. And as distribution moves to the digital realm, more and more sorts of shenanigans are possible.

Let’s consider my book for a second. Because it’s an e-book, I could set the price to whatever I wanted. I could gouge each student for $30 instead of $3. (When I talk about it, I say, “The version on Amazon is for people who want something that looks good on their Kindle, but the ideas in are free. You can find them on my blog or a PDF on my website.” But nothing obliges me to do that.)

While a professor might not get rich doing this, a hundreds or maybe even thousands of extra bucks in the pocket is nothing to sneeze at, either. And the amount of money raised isn’t the issue; it’s about the ethics of charging a captive audience.

If a student felt an instructor was abusing her power to choose textbooks, who would provide the checks and balances on textbook selection?

Additional, 26 August 2013: Some people seem to think I am suggesting that no professor should use her own textbook, ever, even if it’s the best or only one available. No, that is not what I am saying.

When a professor makes a decision about textbook use, if she stands to profit if she decides to use her own, that is a conflict of interest, plain and simple. But there are plenty of good ways to manage conflicts of interest. For example:

• Transparency: Does the professor explain why she adopted this book over all others? Can she demonstrate that the price is in line with the rest of the books on the market? Does the professor recognize that there is a conflict of interest, and invite colleagues to review the decision to ensure that it is fair?
• Oversight: Does anyone else review the textbook decision? Do students have any mechanism to say, “I don’t like this book, there are ones out there that are better.”

Update, 22 November 2017: This story is the first time I have seen a university take action against instructors for requiring students buy their book. The instructors wrote their own $50 ebook, and the only way students could take many of their exams was through the book.

Requiring students to buy stuff to do assessments is common, but having that book be from the instructors themselves, and not through a publisher? Looks mighty dodgy.

Chemistry and curricula

Making the rounds on the science blogosphere this week is a Washington Post op-ed from a father who is wondering why his 15 year old son has to take chemistry. Cue reaction from professional scientists and allies that chemistry is important and that it’s hard to predict what a 15 year old will do as an adult (see external links).

There may be a bigger, more subtle issue here: the standardization of a curriculum. There are a couple of issues that arise from standard curricula.

First is a lack of flexibility. Why should a student take a chemistry class at the age of 15? Why can’t he take it at 16? 18? In university? It is not as though there is a sensitive period of one school year where if you do not learn a topic, your brain shuts off and becomes unable to absorb that information.

Sir Ken Robinson has noted repeatedly that we lump students together by their age, as though the most important feature about people was their “date of manufacture.”

Second is the difficulty in justifying decisions to those not in the immediate loop. For instance, when I teach general biology, I teach the Krebs cycle. This is a notoriously hard subject to teach. I know it comes into play in other classes, but one reason why I teach it is because “everyone else does.” There is a standard set of topics in introductory biology across North American universities, and the Krebs cycle in it. But I could not tell you why it’s taught in first year biology instead of second or third year biology (say). Presumably there is a reason, but it is obscure to me. If I were to try to explain how that bit of information became part of the standard curriculum versus something else, I would probably give an unsatisfactory account.

Now imagine the frustration, not of a kid, but of a parent who is trying to understand the curriculum her child is doing asking why it’s taught, and not being able to get a clear answer from an instructor. The instructor doesn’t necessarily set the curriculum, and may not be able to give a clear answer. That has to be unsatisfactory to someone trying to understand.

Let’s be honest about the degree to which “We’ve always done it that way” guides the behaviour of institutions, including educational ones. Latin was taught in schools for a long time.

External links

Educational #Chemophobia by See Ar Oh at Just Like Cooking

Why make students take chemistry? by Scicurious at Neurotic Phsyiology

On the apparent horrors of requiring high school students to take chemistry by Janet Stemwedel at Doing Good Science

Chemistry to replace corporal punishment, say school district at The JAYFK

Photo by Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Helping the most people

“I want to help people.”

Many pre-med students usually say or write some variation of that when asked why they want to go to medical school. Indeed, the most popular university major across the United States, I am told, is pre-med biology.

For those of you American pre-meds, if you want to help people, go into health and insurance policy.

I'm a reasonably healthy guy (I’ve never cancelled a class due to illness). I’ve got full-time employment that is more stable than most jobs. And the thought of an extended encounter with the American medical system scares the hell out of me. I am constantly aware of how charges start to rack up, even if insurance is picking up most of the tab. And there’s always the prospect that insurance won’t pick up the tab.

We have plenty of prospective physicians and health care providers. Real help will come from changing policies so more people can get to the health care providers.

Related links

Trying to catch his breath with a hole-ridden safety net

HESTEC Science Symposium 2011

This is the tenth anniversary of HESTEC. HESTEC is a campus and community event, and the name is an acronym for “Hispanic Engineering, Science, and Technology.” I was involved again this year in organizing the Science Symposium on day 1, where we were fortunate to have the biggest “name” speaker we’ve ever had.

Steve Niemeyer (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) talked about his particular path into a scientific career. His three big pieces of advice: Work hard. Learn how to communicate. And don't quit (it took him 7½ years to complete his bachelor’s degree). Niemeyer gave his talk without slides, incidentally.

Jose Bravo, a lead scientist at Shell Oil, was the second speaker, talking about efforts to develop new energy sources. There were two one liners that I appreciated.

“There is a misconception that innovation is an instant,” he said, citing the common “lightbulb” image that is used to signify a flash of inspiration. Bravo stressed the long time needed to develop ideas alll the way through to the final working industrial-level product.

Bravo also talked about how, as he moved through his career, his job transitioned from providing answers to asking questions. He said that at Shell, “People with answers always work for people with questions.” I think that is a great line, and very true for all sorts of organizations, including academia. Grad students and post-docs have the answers. They work for people who ask the questions. (Dr. Karl is very fond of saying, “It’s not the answer that gets you the Nobel prize; it’s asking the right question.”

I was disappointed – though perhaps not surprised – that in answering one question, he washed his hands on whether climate change was happening or not. He said that Shell saw reducing its carbon output as simply good business. But for any scientist to be speaking in a prominent public forum and to pussyfoot around the reality of human climate change, and the effects of continued unrelenting burning of fossil fuels is irresponsible.

I thought about pressing hm on that, but decided against it, to give students the opportunity to ask questions.

The room continued filling up through the symposium...

One student seemed to have wandered out of ComicCon.

Bill Nye arrived to lots of cheers and applause, and palpable excitement.

Nye gave a talk laced with his trademark humour, touching on many topics, such as the changes in society and science that had happened through the lifetimes of his immediate family. Similar to Jose Bravo, energy was very much on the mind of Nye. “I want one of you to go into the solar hot water business! Will one of you do that?!” In response to a student’s question, he later talked about how he cut his electric bill to $10 for two months in summertime.

During the questions, Nye also talked about his new role as executive director of the Planetary Society. He asked people to estimate how many people have now flow in space, and most underestimated the number: it’s now over 500! He noted that space exploration is no longer the Star Trek ideal of boldly going where no one has gone before.

“Now it’s, ‘To timidly go where 538 have gone before.’”

He challenged students to develop materials that would make lighter rockets and space travel more feasible, because, “I want to go someplace new and cool.” Nye was also quite bullish on the prospects of finding fossil microbes on Mars, which he proposed be called “Marscrobes” (if they exist!).

A student also asked if Nye still got to do original research, or if he was just doing television and education. Nye replied that he continued to use his engineering skills every day in his job in the Planetary Society, saying, “Scientific skills allow you to evaluate if someone’s crazy.”

Nye said much more besides, and we could have gone another hour. But it was great to see the enthusiasm people had for him. You cannot underestimate the impact that people on television, like Nye, have on the imaginations of people.

In the afternoon, I moderated a career roundtable with my colleague, Robin Fuchs-Young and Heather Reddick. It went quite well, and was again better attended than it had been in previous years.

After that, I walked back into the lobby and watched some of the posters fall from their frames. Some frames had corkboard mounted on metal, and I guess the adhesive on the cork was getting old... I could see several of them sagging before they gave up and snapped.

Do your students act entitled?

Last week, The Current had a segment called, “Entitled University Students.” It was a feature related to a new book on Canadian universities, but generally, large social trends in the Canada are often very similar to those in the United States. But the overarching student attitude described by the panel participants – entitled, pampered, immature, unprepared, unwilling to take criticism – is not at all what I see in my students.

I get two dominant vibes off my students.

The first is fear.

Fear of speaking out, fear of the professor, fear of getting a bad grade, fear of not getting a job after they finish their degree. Students rarely dispute marks, for instance, except in very obvious errors.

The second is fatigue. What others have described as laziness to me just feels like the weariness of being into year fourteen of being given more seemingly arbitrary homework. An attitude of, “Here we go again...” That does, I think, translate into what other professors see as “laziness” or “minimalism.”

Most of my students don’t act entitled. They act beaten. They act cowed. They act like a big boot is going to come down and squish them like a little ant at any second.

I suspect some of this might be because of the particular institution that I am working at, and the particular majors I am usually working with. Maybe I am just terrifying. Faculty elsewhere, your thoughts?

Taking roll, and then what?

Ray Paredes, the Commissioner of Higher Education for Texas, thinks that making universities more like high school will help more students graduate with their bachelor’s degree. In this article (also San Antonio Express-News), he is quoted as saying:

Paredes said institutions must find cheap ways to improve student retention, such as taking roll and requiring students to visit professors during office hours.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that we take roll and say, “Come to office hours!”

Then what?

What are we supposed to do if half the class never comes to “mandatory” office hours? Fail them? Somehow, I don’t think that’s the outcome Paredes is looking for.

I can tell the commissioner that at my institution, we require third- and fourth-year students to come to us professors to get advisement before registering. We see only a small fraction of the students we are supposed to advise.

Similarly, it is not at all clear what tracking attendance is supposed to accomplish. Again, I do this all the time for my classes using clickers, and it does not perceptibly dent attendance rates. I haven’t run statistics or done a trial, yet, though. Students have told me that they think they are more likely to come to class if I track attendance, but there is a well-known difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do.

Students in universities are adult human beings, there of their own free will. (Maybe with some persuasion from relatives.) University education is not compulsory. People are still allowed to stop going to university, right? There are a lot of reasons that people stop going to universities, and many – I daresay most – are not something that the institution, or the state, has a lot of control over.

I bet a lot of the reasons why students drop out are financial. One of the best things the state could do to increase completion rates is just to keep higher education affordable. Texas has a mixed record in affordability.

Moving along, Paredes also noted:

Soon, a portion of state funding will be linked to graduation and retention rates.

Well, at least it’s only a portion of funding. The College Guide blog has been examining the many states looking to link funding with graduation rates across the U.S. Their conclusion: No evidence that it works.

The effectiveness of the performance-based funding for state universities shouldn’t be a total mystery, however. According to the article, “at least seven states - Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Washington - use performance-based goals in their funding formulas for higher education. Some of the plans, such as Tennessee’s, date back three decades.”

Three decades? Interesting. Well how well is that working out in Tennessee? Did performance-based funding satisfy tax critics and increase the percentage of adults with college degrees? Only 24 percent of Tennesseans have college degrees, that’s below the national average.

American science without Americans?

Physicist Michio Kaku may miss the mark here (edited down; full quote here):

The United States has the worst educational system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. So how come the scientific establishment of the United States doesn’t collapse? ...

How come the scientific establishment of the United States doesn’t collapse? ... America has a secret weapon.

That secret weapon is the H1B.

Without the H1B, the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. ... The United States is a magnet sucking up all the brains of the world, but now the brains are going back. ... And people are saying, “Oh, my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in India now!” “Oh, my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in China!” Duh! Where did it come from? It came from the United States. So don’t tell me that science isn’t the engine of prosperity.

I part company with Kaku when he asserts that American students can’t do science (or that there aren’t enough of them – I’m not sure which he’s arguing). I work with plenty of smart American students. They can perform science at the highest levels. Mike The Mad Biologist has often noted that American students perform well in science – if you account for the bad effects of poverty.

It might be that many Americans don’t go into science not because they are incapable (or lazy or damaged by their education), but because they’re smart. Americans might not pursue scientific careers for the same reason that they don’t pursue careers as migrant crop pickers or maids: there are better ways of making a living out there than being a researcher.

Shorten the path to a doctorate and a career, increase the number of positions requiring doctorates in education and industry, may consider a slight pay raise, and then we’ll talk.

More for those that have the most?

A little more evidence that institutions are not interested in a level playing field.

Larry Faulkner, the former president of UT-Austin... wants more funding for the great universities.

Not all universities. The great ones.

That’s from a report on a panel discussion about research universities in Texas in The Texas Tribune.

Not only are people saying that the institutions with the most money should get even more money, they also want the most promising talent pool funneled into them too:

Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil... argued that there was a need to “differentiate” in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally.

... He added: “If we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education.”

A reason that teaching is seen as a “burden” is because there are not enough professors. Open up tenure-track positions. Many hands make light work. (I understand this is not a popular option for universities right now, because there is a push to cut instead of invest.)

Ray Bowen, the chairman of the National Science Board and the former president of Texas A&M, said that Texas faced a “unique problem,” because many of our brightest students go out of state as a result of the state’s lack of research universities.

I’d be interested to see the data supporting that statement. I doubt the vast majority of high school students are looking around going, “I dunno, that department didn’t have enough Nature papers over the last five years...”

It is always interesting to watch those with power and money argue that they need even more power and more money.

Related posts
Inclining the playing field
Balkanizing small universities
To have and have not. Mostly not.

Want us to teach more?

Ronald Trowbridge, writing in the Texas Tribune, thinks public universities in Texas should be teaching more and doing less research.

Our universities have shifted priorities to research first, students second. “The ultimate source of this cultural shift,” writes Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard University, “is the replacement of education by research as the university’s principal function.”

But Trowbridge doesn’t examine the reason for that shift. I suggest that this shift may have occurred because there is money to be had through research. Successful research programs are a revenue source. If Texas politicians and taxpayers want more teaching, they should be willing to pony up the cash that will replace the money that will be lost as less research is done.

Trowbridge also bemoans the number of adjuncts and graduate students teaching introductory classes. I agree; I’d love to see more tenured and tenure-track faculty teaching such classes. Again, who’s willing to pony up the cash for those more permanent positions?

Trowbridge argues that professors teaching two classes a semester is normal, when this is only true at the two major institutions in the state. He also apparently doesn’t consider working with research students “teaching,” when it is arguably some of the most important teaching at a university.

I’m for transparency and accountability, but “accountability” is not a license to allow you to demand the outcomes you’d like.

Education can set people free, in more ways than one

I’m a bit behind on my podcasts, but I had to point to this one from All in the Mind about a week and a half ago, about why people kill.

I found this piece from guest James Gilligan completely fascinating:

When I was directing the mental health services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States we did a study to find out what program in the prisons had been most effective in preventing re-offending or recidivism after prisoners left the prison. And we found one program that had been 100% successful over a 25-year period with not one of these individuals returning to prison because of a new crime.

And that program was the prisoners getting a college degree while in prison.

You know, when you’re an educator, it’s easy to be so bogged down in the day to day routine of marking and managing students and preparing assignments that the idea that education can be transformative is something that you just give lip service too.

It takes something like that to make you realize that education truly can transform people for the better.

Hundreds of Harvards

Peter Thiel is still promoting his notion that higher education is a bubble waiting to burst. I wrote a slightly paranoid response to this before, but he said something interesting in his new piece:

“If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?”

The first answer is that we do have hundred of Harvards across the country, just without the name. They’re the many public and private universities. They have the same mission as Harvard: deliver higher education.

The second answer is that sensible people realize that the difference in education between Harvard and other universities is nowhere near as great as the differences in price and exclusivity of those universities.

Seth Godin notes that a lot of what is dictating university choices – certainly for people trying to get into what are seen as “elite” universities – has a lot to do with people trying to create their own personal brands, not the education they get.

Like Thiel, Godin rightfully raise questions about the cost of an “elite” education.

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

That people in this country get so hung up on a small number of schools is part of a larger social issue: the American class system.

Malcolm Gladwell points out that the importance of going to the “right” school is a particular indication of the inequalities of American society (which are getting deeper, by all accounts). In Canada, the University of Toronto or McGill could reasonably claim the title of being the Canadian equivalent of Harvard. But in Canada, few would think a University of Toronto bachelor’s degree is somehow so much better that a University of Lethbridge bachelor’s degree.

While some elements of Thiel’s analysis are correct, I think he’s wrong about a coming “pop!” in higher education. Too many employers want employees the bachelor’s degree. I can’t quite envision all the Fortune 500 companies suddenly saying, “We are no longer going to require our entry level positions to need bachelor’s degrees.”

I can see higher education shrinking and stratifying – that is, proportionately more kids from rich families. I don’t think that would be a good outcome, as education has traditionally been a means of creating social mobility.

The Scholarly Kitchen makes similar comments, totally independent of mine!