University admissions

Things have really changed. There was no stigma to attending a state college.  And certainly no one was in the business of bribing admissions people, although some wealthy legacies existed, but they were the exception not the rule, and mostly they went to a particular college it was because it was where a parent or older sibling attended.  It didn't seem likely that this connection was going to be influential later in life.  It does explain perhaps why some of the people you meet professionally who graduated from a prestige school don't seem all that exceptional. The people who do the admissions bribery are the type of people who are impressed by the perceived prestige of certain institutions.  Out here in the great Midwest, our huge state universities sort of blunt the prestige of smallish private school, so big damn deal.  TPP has a talented niece whose writing was impressive enough to get admission to Oxford, clearly meritorious.  TPP's undergraduate record was so unimpressive that a department chair actually began to question, what such a record told you about potential success in graduate school.  It only meant that TPP had changed, grew up, transitioned, whatever, to academic life.  Of course TPP was not in Business school, but in botany, and you only decide on something like botany because you love it.  Do MBAs love their subject, or is it just a ticket to make more money?  

Narrow-minded, short-sighted university administrators

One is tempted to ask, "Are there any other kind?"  Actually, yes, for which TPP is most grateful for his. But admini-minds at the Univ. of Louisiana, Monroe, are the worst kind.  Biologists were given 48 hrs to solve an insoluble problem of where to relocate their natural history museum to, and of course no justification for keeping it was going to be accepted.  According to their web page, these admini-minds could "find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university." "The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team." In this case the collections involve 5 million fish specimens, a very major collection, and over 500,000 plant herbarium specimens.  That's pretty close to 10 time the size of TPP's herbarium.  The stoopid arrogance of such admini-minds is astounding. We cannot image a use or find a value to having such collections, so they must be junk, and if not relocated the collections will simply be trashed!!!  Yes, decades of biologists efforts, irreplaceable data and specimens, and out it all goes unless the biologists can find a home for them, elsewhere!  Naturally another use for the land has been found, the very valuable track team. The ignorance of such admini-minds is boundless. And a 48 hrs deadline is just infuriating; clearly no solution was wanted. You think climate change may affect Louisiana and the distribution of fish and plants as a result? No value to historical records at all. Sad! 

A teaching manifesto of merit

The tattooed professor is new to TPP, but TPP likes this guy, and we likes his teaching manifesto as well. For the first 2/3 of his career TPP taught in large introductory biology classes, both majors and nonmajors, and how well he remembers needing summers to recharge until finally it got to the point where that burned out feeling would not go away. Only then did TPP begin a second career teaching botany to people who wanted to learn it. 
As a long-time observer of higher education here in Lincolnland, the cost of higher education is not because of the high salaries paid to lazy faculty, it's not because of having too many administrators, and it's not because of inefficiences and waste, it's because a long time ago, 30 or so years, our legislators decided to shift the responsibility of paying for higher education to the student and their families. They did this by simply gradually withdrawing state support. So tuition had to cover the difference and real cost increases and unfunded mandates as well, as a result tuition has been rising faster than the cost of living.  TPP has seen state support drop from around 60% of the cost to 16% of the cost, to no state support at all this past year.  So higher education is no longer affordable to many people, and this was a choice our state made, but not by coming right out and saying it. Cleverly the very people who made these decisions found it easy to criticize the educational institutions themselves, blaming the educators!  State supported colleges and universities have been great equalizers, and TPP appreciates the opportunities they afforded him; no ivy-league or private schools in TPP's background, just plain blue-collar botany bought and paid for by his own effort.
But at least it was possible. It should be again.

Success week!

Success Week. What a great euphemism! Somebody (Asst. dean of students?) will claim this as a great achievement and get rewarded for it. So what is Success Week? It's the last week of classes before finals. There are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do the last week of classes, however it can all be boiled down to don't further stress out stressed out students. Too many things must be finished this week along with studying for finals.  TPP never did any of the "don'ts" and it was because the big project due was their lab portfolios, and they've known about this from day one (syllabus). And he never gave comprehensive finals, although because ideas and concepts build on each other the 4th exam has the most comprehensiveness. Here's the thing. It wouldn't really make any difference because you can't make up in a week what you should have been doing all semester. "But we need time to study." No, you need time to review, studying was, or should have been, done day by day, week by week as the class went along. This means a lot of students didn't really study at all, and then try to make it all up in one week, and we're not to make matters worse. OK, TPP can buy that, but it should be called "It's too late week."  This is one of those things you learn or you only go so far with your education. But euphemisms like this make you want to gag, or choke a deanlet.

Public education in an era of wealth disparity

The whole idea of public higher education, our state-wide systems of community colleges, undergraduate universities, and graduate universities, was to assure a well-educated citizenry and access to educational and professional opportunities for the "working/middle class" and even, via grants and loans, the fiscally disadvantaged, as well as the wealthy.  What made this possible was public assistance that kept tuition costs affordable and opportunities available.  This system has been under duress for some time now as public assistance has been systematically withdrawn (And for what purpose?), and under active attack from legislatures and governors that want to cut costs and perhaps limit opportunities for graduates that have been generally perceived as  hostile voters. Things are bad here in Lincolnland. TPP doubts public institutions will receive any public support at all this fiscal year (no budget since July '15), even though if a budget were to happen, it would still be a 20% cut in support, so tuition increases are being mandated by the state. Opportunities for students in response become more limited at public institutions, while they remain unchanged at private schools affordable to only the wealthy. Take into account that public schools educate at least 10 students for every student at an elite private school. This will accomplish widening the income/wealth disparity that the public schools were instituted to diminish. 
If you want another analysis, consider this comparison of Stanford, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State.  This really is an issue that has no winners except the one percenters. As one of those formerly middle class "blue-collar" people who benefited from access to public education, TPP is extremely annoyed with the people and the political system that wants to dismantle it.  If you have a more just and equal vision for our society and our country, you should be annoyed muchly too. Yes, very GnOPe, but plenty of blame to spread around. Say no to incumbents.

Study guides & student entitlement

This editorial from the U. Minn. Daily student newspaper really shows the state of student entitlement.  Do professors "owe" students a study guide for exams?  This was pretty much a pet peeve when TPP was teaching large lecture, introductory courses. You announce an exam already scheduled on the syllabus, and one of the questions you always got was, "Will you give us a study guide?" Sure.  Then the syllabus' lecture outline was copied, an outline TPP was always followed unless noted otherwise, added in the major topics covered in each heading, and sometimes added reminders of illustrative examples provided. Then one astute fellow notices the similarity to the syllabus, and says, "This study guide just copies the syllabus."  Right!  That's the material that's covered on this exam.  Now any competent student should have been able to do the same with their lecture notes, but the problem is that this was not the "study guide" they wanted. Read the editorial yourself. Maddie actually wants her professors to specifically note the material that will NOT be covered on the exam. Now TPP understands that exams cannot be fully comprehensive, but he tried to make his exams representative of the material covered, in depth and breadth, and never, ever, once has he ever said after covering some topic, "But you won't have to know this." WTF? Why would any teacher ever say that? Out of a universe of material on the subject of biology, your knowledgeable professor has winnowed out a minute amount of material that is both essential and necessary to the content of the course at this level, and now students want that professor to winnow out that subset and provide them with the sub-subset that they don't have to learn!  Amazing. This is what happens when education becomes primarily about about grades & credits, and not about learning. TPP doesn't think very many professors are going to be very sympathetic, but obviously Maddie has gotten study guides from some of us somewhere or she wouldn't be so entitled. Isn't it obvious that if a professor spends 30 mins explaining something it'll be on the exam. If it was 2 mins. maybe not so much. We can only hope life will provide Maddie with a study guide so she can put her valuable time to good use making sure she doesn't learn too much. HT to Angry by Choice.

How not to run a university - like a business

The very latest example of trying to improve a college by running it more like a business is playing out at Mt. St. Mary's college, a nice enough Catholic school, but with many of the same troubles as many small liberal arts colleges. At the very beginning of TPP's academic career he was offered a job at one such college. The Dean made a single low-ball salary offer, which TPP turned down without ever being asked what salary would be acceptable. Then the Dean explained away the failure to hire TPP, the person the other faculty wanted, by telling them the salary negotiations failed, negotiations which never took place. No regrets about that job at all. At Mt. St. Mary's the new president wanted to game the system of counting enrollment by getting at risk students to quit before an official count took place so that the retention rate would look better. That such an action is educationally unethical is obvious, but the new president has a business background so it might not occur to him that their college is obligated to try to educate any student that they accept. Colleges get presidents like this because trustees or their equivalent are appointed with a directive to run the college more like a business. A couple of tenured faculty who either directly or indirectly criticized the president's approach got fired.  Now this tells TPP several things. A business-type president doesn't give a damn about tenure, and when it comes to faculty, they are employees, nothing more, so their disloyalty must be dealt with, no matter that the primary reason for tenure is so that faculty can speak up to power. It further demonstrates that there is no shared governance at this institution, which always undermines the academic enterprise, the all important student-faculty interaction that leads to education. The fired faculty members have been offered reinstatement as an act of mercy! So like a business to try to improve retention without trying to improve the actual education of the students. Hey, Mt. St. Mary's trustees, check your priorities.  Stories like this will not help your college's reputation or your bottom line.

Student consults syllabus; campus in shock.

TPP must say that he can only remember one time that a student consulted his syllabus, and then it was to practice for a career in contract law litigation, clearly not understanding that some syllabi are aspirational documents.  At any rate this is pretty funny.

University of Misery

Mizzou has been in the news and most of it isn't good. TPP spent a couple of years at Mizzou in his early career and worked with some real nice people some of whom are still good friends. But having come from upeast, a New England part of NY state, the whole state seemed like the deep south, acted like the deep south, basically a largely, over-whelmingly white campus whose diversity was largely recruited for sports. So none of the racial tension in the news surprises at all. Two years of Misery were all we could stand in those days, so the Phactors left for Lincolnland when the opportunity presented itself. The town and campus were pretty segregated and as poor recently graduated types our residence was in a "bad" part of town and our insurance was really high, of course that was because our lower, middle class neighborhood was red-lined into a "high crime" block by being in the middle between two apartment complexes with a lot of break-ins and other trouble, so those of us inbetween were being soaked and the local insurance company was not happy when this dubious practice was pointed out in the local newspaper. The most appalling part of the racial situation at the university is the student response of denying even local reporters free-speech after having used it to themselves to get a change in administration. Bloody awful, but fortunately non-violent. TPP remembers the racial tensions on the 60s that left cities in flames. So remember folks, it's best just to hang presidents in Effigy, which is a small town about 85 miles south of Springfield.  

How to run a university - Adminspeak

Once you've been around a college or university long enough you learn Adminspeak. For those of you new to this jargon, here's a few pointers.
"Strategic reorganization" - This means "we're going to fire some people and the way we're going to do it is by reorganizing to make a division, department, office, etc. disappear on the organization chart".  Yes, rather than just fire people, terminate jobs, admins like to reorganize such that the desired object for termination ceases to exist.  Poof, no more job, so no more person in that position.
"Performance assessment" - In higher education, everything must be assessed. This is why people in higher education collect and count beans. Never mind that there are no complaints, no problems, no omissions, no excuses, no evidence of anything but a job well done, you must be assessed. The problem is they don't know how to do it. Do you never, sometimes, often miss deadlines? Yes, assessments eat up my time that could be done doing something useful.
"Special Study Group" - Groups like this are formed to reinforce preconceived notions and deliver expected results. Some times 2 or 3 such groups must be formed and dismissed to get the desired result. Then the Admin can announce, "A special study group has recommended ...".  TPP had a chair who constructed a new curriculum this way.
"Shared Governance" - Mostly this means faculty are thrown a few bones, placed on committees and such, where their input can be ignored. While membership on a committee can look quite inclusive, unwanted opinions are frequently, conveniently, left out of reports by the lapdog appointed chair. You can also just be left out of strategic discussions, candidate interviews, etc. And that's only if the organization pays any lip service to shared governance at all.
"Program review" - This is the academic equivalent of strategic reorganization. Tenured faculty are hard to fire, but read the fine print. You can be terminated if your program ceases to exist, i.e., it is deemed out dated, too small, too expensive, too specialized, etc. based upon "assessment", which is really bean counting. The lesson here is simple, only make big, broad programs for majors. Minors are always suspect and liable for cutting, as if this was anything but a bookkeeping problem, so make sequences which can accomplish the same thing for students but are not on admin radar.
This is just too depressing to continue.  But maybe you have some suggestions to submit in the comments?

How to run a university - This is your budget (Right!).

One of the good things, a tiny silver lining to a dark cloud, of having no salary or pension that depends upon the state, or not having any budget for running your herbarium, or not having any staff to support, is that your budget can't really be cut. Sigh. And of course since Lincolnland has a GnOPe governor, the state budget must be cut, especially higher education, that most dangerous of public institutions. More on this later. Let's suppose you are a department chairman, and here any similarities to real people are completely accidental, and your dean tells you you have a budget of say 4.5 million dollars. OK, that sounds like a lot, but mostly that consists of the cumulative salaries of your faculty and staff. However, that total is used to calculate how much you must cut your budget based on some magic percentage figure. Well, suppose professor Z is retiring in December, so you decide to cut the budget by an amount that equals half of his current salary. No, you can't do that because as soon as he retires that salary is no longer part of your budget. Well, can that half salary be deducted from the budget now so that the percentage cut is based on a smaller total? Well, no, you can't. Now this folks is a budget catch-22 where the total only counts against you and never counts for you. Actually, only about $140,000 exists that isn't salary, so your cuts must come out of that amount, and departments with more highly paid faculty will suffer larger cuts from other funds than others. Now TPP has pointed out before that departments never get the tuition dollars that their courses generate either, or the decision about which administrative services to retain might solve the budget cut problem easily.

Something strange in the neighborhood

Wut happened? Universities are such nice quiet places all summer, and then bam!  Something happens! It's noisy, it's crowded, it's a longer line at the coffee shop, it's hard to find parking (if you drive to campus).  Oh, yes, the students have returned for the fall semester, an event TPP avoided last year by taking a  sabbatical in Tuscany from life as usual. It hasn't changed. Students can be seen wandering around looking lost. iZombies wander the sidewalks. TPP is still concerned about the preparedness of today's students, what has been called the infantization of college students, the idea that students should be protected from discomforting and disturbing ideas or concepts. Nothing whatever should challenge their carefully crafted parochial world views. It never dawns on people that this severely limits learning.  Memos from deans suggest how to include "trigger warnings" in your syllabus as a precaution. Yes, probably a good thing TPP has retired with his record to having been accused of being a sexist, a racist, and a religious proselytizer all in the same semester while teaching botany. Some records you just have to be proud of and TPP wasn't even trying to slay any sacred cows or even advocate any cultural changes. It was however a non-majors class, and that semester prompted the move to change the class to an upper division majors class.  The thing about this is that some of these new students will not just do fine, they will do great, prosper, and take advantage of all the neat things you can do at university, like research, but it's impossible to tell ahead which ones. Finding those who wanted to learn was one of the great things about being a university professor. So from the sidelines, TPP wishes his colleagues and all the new students well. The formula for success is pretty easy: go to class, take time to think, and make an honest effort. As for the students, well, the same advice applies to you too.

Retirement update

Quite a few people have been asking TPP how his retirement is going.  In answer: It's going well. You see everyone's big worries are money and boredom, having nothing to do and having nothing to do it with. Neither of these is a problem at all. Disciplined saving, investment, and Mrs. Phactor's watchful fiscal eye have paid off. Saw today that 29% of people in the USA have no savings at all, and this is actually impossible for TPP to imagine. Scary. Even as grad students the Phactors had some money socked away. Boredom just isn't an issue. Fortunately a big dividing line between what TPP did for his salary and what he did because he liked doing it never existed. So this was a retirement from being a professor, but not retirement from being a botanist. Why would you retire from botany? The young fellow in the next door office just turned 85 and he now has been an active retired biologist for longer than he was an active professor, a very difficult feat. Without the distractions of teaching, faculty meetings, and the like, he has published more research articles in the retirement portion of his career. So, yes, TPP still has some active research projects. He is helping master naturalists organize some "citizen science" projects. He is an emeritus curator of the university's herbarium. And of course his historic house and expansive gardens all scream for his attentions. Finding things to do is not the problem. TPP doesn't miss the stress of dealing with deadlines and fixed schedules. Going with the flow and not feeling like you're always rushing towards a deadline is quite relaxing.  As Douglas Adams once said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as the rush by."  So, on the whole, the retirement thing is going quite well. Thank you for asking.

An eerie quiet spread across the land

It was an exceptionally quiet Monday morning. TPP did not see a single other person while walking to the coffee shoppe. It had been raining for hours, and it was still a light drizzle. Things were wet, very green, fresh, and lots of new things had popped into bloom. However the strange quiet was because finals were last week and graduation took place on Saturday, so this college town had emptied and everyone went home for Mother's Day. Aside from all the new things in flower, other observations contributed to eerie nature of the morning. A lot of couches died over the weekend; fourteen were piled on the curb, four at a single address. At least they weren't hauled into the street and burned as was the fashion (very much frowned upon!) a decade or so ago.  A dismembered foosball table sat in an avenue's median. It looked sad. A dozen feet away sat a whole pineapple. One wonders if they possibly could have had any connection?  One apartment building was cordoned off by yellow caution tape.  It seemed very appropriate; TPP has no desire to investigate. The expected confluent litter of beer cups and associated drinking paraphernalia were strangely lacking except for one place where the empties were artfully stacked on a porch railing; it was all too neat. Maybe the pending arrival of parents triggered some primal survival instinct to pick things up. In contrast the coffee shoppe was bustling; a lot of faculty were getting caffeinated for a last bout of grading. Students were totally lacking. It felt really good knowing this was the first Monday after finals when grading did not ominously loom for TPP in over 4 decades! 

How to "improve" university professors and destroy higher education in the process

The GnOPe in particular wants to destroy the one remarkably good thing the USA ever constructed: a public education system. The cynical view is that a party that governs by ideology rather than knowledge doesn’t really want a public capable of “critical thinking”.  And in the case of higher education, the GnOPe so dislikes higher education especially that they are willing to toss the economic baby out with the academic bathwater. Of course a lot of people might get upset if a political party actually came right out and said, “we’re out to destroy public education and those expensive universities in particular”, so the plan is to kill them with a thousand small cuts. North Carolina, one of the academic powerhouses of the “south”, is showing just how this is to be done. Under the guise of “improvement” you demand that professors, all professors, have a high teaching load or 4 courses per semester. You may think that doesn’t sound like too much, but then you haven’t calculated how much time is needed for class preparation and evaluations (grading).  In the case of biology, a single 4 hour class generates six hours of class time, 3 lectures and a 3 hour laboratory. Even with a graduate student assistant to help, it took at least 2 hours to assemble and set up a laboratory class and another hour to put it all away. Fresh materials and other supplies took another 2 hours of shopping every week.  And the lab guide, the instructions, had to come from somewhere especially if you are not teaching labs like a cookbook. At a university lectures are not supposed to be a simple guided tour of a textbook. In TPP’s classes he generally knew more and expected more than was delivered in a textbook, and if you know textbooks, especially science textbooks, the conceptual forest is often totally hidden by the factual trees. Now to fulfill a 4-4 load in the sciences a professor would have to teach 3 such courses (and then each three hour lab counts the same as a 1 hour lecture, a for real accounting!).  It boggles the mind. Now please remember that science is not just a subject, a body of knowledge, science is also a very successful process for learning. You learn to do science by the ancient method of apprenticing, but doing science with a master. Science just eats time for lunch, and there are a limit to how many students you can have working under your supervision. So what can be concluded? One, too many of the current crop of politicians either have no idea what science (or other scholarly endeavors) is, or if they do know, they don’t think it’s very important. Two, these politicians don’t understand education at all, but that isn’t stopping them from meddling in a negative way. Three, this has the potential to be the most ruinous political activity ever, one that actually does put our nation, and its international standing, at risk. Too many of these fools think a nation’s status is determined solely by how many boom-booms it has.  Four, many of these anti-education politicians think many fewer professors are needed doing research if you just cut out all those stupid, useless research programs and focused on real human needs. Oh, TPP could say much more about the type of personalities that think research is all and only about us, but this only shows you how little they understand the basis of doing basic research just to satisfy curiosity, the need to learn new things, because if they did know how research worked, they’d know that with a remarkable frequency, “useless” knowledge becomes important for unforeseen reasons.  In places (corporations) or in countries where research has to be focused on “important” or “needed” outcomes, you often see the most humdrum, unimaginative sorts of research, projects pursued without any intellectual passion or creativity.  So wise up people; this has nothing to do with “improving” education. It has everything to do with destroying higher education. 

How to run a university - who are the low cost employees?

A cheerful memo arrived just the other day.  It informed faculty that the Building Service Workers (aka custodians) would no longer empty broken glass containers in labs and classrooms. The memo then went on to inform us where the containers should be placed when full, and that new containers could be purchased at the stock room for some lordly sum (about the same as a good latte).  Now there are two things about this.  First, there is the assumption that yours truly will be emptying broken glass containers. This suggests that the administration thinks it too expensive to have BSWs doing this, so let's let faculty do it.  Well, that never was in my job description, although the rule is that if you break it, you clean it up. And if the administration thinks TPP is going to buy containers for classrooms, well, let's just wait and see if it ever happens. My budget line for broken glass containers is zero. Now of course this is aimed at people who have grants and even they will not spend their grant money on classrooms.  Isn't that what tuition is supposed to pay for?  Second, why do we have broken glass containers anyways?  Why it was too dangerous for BSWs to empty the trash bins if they contained broken glass, and if it did they wouldn't empty it. Will that be the next task dumped onto faculty? Now this is the rather ludicrous part of this whole thing. To save a little money, or make BSWs a little bit more happy, they take a task and transfer it to faculty.  And how is this a savings? Who gets paid the most for 20 minutes of labor? A time study a few years back showed that faculty active in scholarship spent over 50 hours a week with teaching, scholarship, and service, and faculty don't get overtime pay for those 12.5 hours worked above the official 37.5 hour week. TPP doubts the philosophy or English or history faculty have this problem. But rather than have BSWs who accommodate the crap that actually happens when people do science, the science faculty get more custodial duties. Yeah, that's how to run a university.

New look at September

September has always been a hectically busy month, so much so that it was never much fun, and yet it's a nice month, one that starts with some leftover summer and ends with the beginning of fall.  In academia everything, everybody wants to get things going after the summer: classes, students, reports, groups, activities, so many demands upon your time that you simply lurched from one to the next. For the first time in many decades this is not the case, so September gets a chance. The estate is in pretty good shape having been baby-sat for the month of August there having been adequate rain and only a limited amount of beastly hot weather. Yesterday was 90 F and muggy, and a front moved through last night bringing rain, and this morning dawned with a temperature of 59 F being enjoyed by a couple of suddenly energetic kitty-girls. The kitchen garden pretty well collapsed, but TPP already got some fall greens crops into containers for October salads and such. Somehow the weeds have done extremely well so a lot of garden cleanup awaits. Remember, weeds do grow faster. The last hostas and fall anemones are providing some garden color. As remarkable as this seems, today was the Phactors first visit to the big Saturday morning farmers' market! The produce looked great; summer produce at its most diverse so we stocked up except for that greedy lady who bought all the basil in sight. "Sorry", she said, "pesto". Having just returned from Italy we totally understood. BTW the grocery store pesto in Italy was just so good, and so much better than even our home-made pesto that we must re-evaluate our approach. Any tip-top pesto makers have suggestions? Early Jonathon apples were available, so Mrs. Phactor will convert them into pie as only she can. 
September is also a month for birthdays it being 9 months after new years parties. TPP is supposed to have a birthday, but he hasn't celebrated that many, many years. An long time friend is turning 80 and he'll get a nice birthday surprise from his friends. Most of all TPP loves all the September deadlines. As Doug Adams used to say, "I love deadlines especially the whooshing sound they make as the rush by". TPP is truly enjoying being able to ignore all the deadline rushes. This part of retirement is great, but September is still feeling pretty weird, still trying to find his balance, getting into a new groove.

Does "convergent intersectionality" bridge the gulf between science and the humanities?

“When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree…, I will never have taken a physics class..., I won’t have studied organic chemistry or … biology.”  “My excuse for my lack of background knowledge is that I am a humanities person. ….It’s actually the design of the intellectual environment of contemporary higher education that makes it difficult for a humanities major to take physics”[.., chemistry, or biology].  Or “vice versa”.

So writes Leslie Niro, a humanties major at Duke, in a column published in the CHE. Ah gee, another humanities major who laments never having had to take a science course (so perhaps her self-designed curriculum, of which she seems proud, leaves something to be desired) but basically what Leslie is really saying is that she isn’t taking science because it’s sounds like science, it's taught like science, and ideally you should learn at least some of it by doing science. It rather sounds like she wants to understand science, if only it weren't science.

Ms. Niro says, “The compartmentalized humanities and sciences have become divorced from each other.”

And when were they married? Not recently, and the divorce occurred because as science developed its methodology for learning it became quite impossible for science to remain in any way similar to the humanities. So unlike Ms. Niro’s contention, compartmentalization did not force a separation between the sciences and the humanities, but the very success of science is because of the difference in its way of learning. First, understand the differences in emphasis. While discussing something with a friend in the classics, TPP dismissed a story about something botanical as “that's only anecdotal”. And he said, what’s wrong with anecdotal? Well, it isn’t very good evidence. And he replied, “It’s the best evidence I have.”  A historian of some note sagely counseled TPP early in his career to come up with a new "theory" and then go find the data to support it, not realizing that doesn't work so well in biology. The sciences and the humanities also are separated because of the scope of study. The humanities study human artifacts, the art, literature, thoughts, and history of ourselves.  The sciences study life, the universe and everything else. And yet the humanities dominate the core curricula of universities.

Ms. Niro says, they are “compartmentalized because the nature of the undergraduate major means that most students in either division of the university don’t often delve into upper-level courses outside their majors.”

Yes, so very true.  It takes a considerable effort to learn enough of the basics to “delve into” the more sophisticated, upper-level courses. And we have pre-requisites to keep unprepared students out of such courses least they drag the courses back down to an intro level.

Ms. Niro says it “feels like I’m missing out on an entirely different perspective. The science [scientific] one.

But here’s the rub, her solution seems to be if only science more like the humanities she wouldn't miss out on this perspective. Ms. Niro doesn’t seem to appreciate that science is hierarchical; certain knowledge is needed to learn the next level. And science is operationally different from the humanities for the most part.  

 “What a college environment should offer is an increased emphasis on convergent intersectionality.”  [Emphasis mine]

Ah, TPP misunderstood her solution.Oh, boy! Convergent intersectionality. Now such things are done between disciplines in biology, and thus are called "interdisciplinary", as she herself illustrates in one of the -ologies, and many biological studies display a convergence between, say, systematics, evolution, and genetics. And some of my colleagues do this with colleagues in math and computer sciences, and even with colleagues in geography. But those are all the kind of sciency stuff avoided by most humanities majors. 

"Imagine an environment where the arts, humanities, and sciences converged. Perhaps an entirely different species of learning would rise." 

Do you think? No. Actually science and the humanities do converge, culturally, historically, philosophically. Generally this hasn’t turned out well for the scientists of those times as the predominate convergence seems to be one of castigating scientists and suppressing scientific study, even though the science was accurate for the time. This is because science attempts to discover the truths of life and the universe without regard for the prevailing cultural view. This still drives some humanities people crazy, and they, knowledge denialists, wish to diminish science to just one more narrative. But the entirely different species of learning that did arise is called science. Melding humanities and science into some sort of hybrid may well yield sterility, as it sometimes does in nature, the inability to do either properly.   

Mr. Niro observes that, "Taking two classes carrying a “natural sciences” code doesn’t mean that by the end of those two classes, I’ll have a deep understanding of anything related to those topics. It’s like being an academic butterfly, fluttering in and out of cognitive psychology or environmental science. ….Breadth does not equate with depth."

Ms. Niro is quite right. Two courses won’t provide a deep understanding of anything particularly in science. But if you think an “intersectional convergence” will provide a deeper understanding, then you really don’t understand what a deep understanding is.  TPP has socialized and worked with smart people his whole life, and most of them, smart as they are, have only a very superficial and mostly wrongish concept of evolution. She is also correct that “breadth does not equate with depth”, and here TPP is quite critical of the modern approach to core curricula that provides only the former and almost never the latter. It took considerable effort and wrangling for TPP to minor in the fine arts while majoring in the sciences. TPP will further contend that MOOCs are not the way to develop any depth either.  In the sciences, that depth only comes from actually getting into the lab or out into the field and doing biology because science isn't just a body of knowledge, it's a process. This seems to be at the crux of what Ms. Niro fails to understand. Without the process it isn't science, and that process, while working well with the natural world, doesn't seem to work at all for the humanities unless you wish to count the use of certain words in Paradise Lost and use the data to challenge Milton's authorship of this poem. 

TPP must disagree with Ms. Niro on another point. In spite of the differences, in spite of the methodological gulf, the sciences and humanities are not pitted against each other except as competitors for limited resources often in a zero-sum game. They are just different intellectual endeavors.  TPP spends some time discussing the humanities component of their education with our biology majors in a senior seminar. Their most common reaction is one of not really caring all that much about the humanities although they often had a particular favorite course – philosophy is the most common. Most of them feel that the humanities wasted their time and they wanted more control over how much or how little of a subject to take [like Ms. Niro], many opting for more depth, less breadth. Most certainly the non-majors taking biology feel much the same way; they simply don’t care very much about the subject. Some part of this is the language of science, the jargon, poses a learning barrier, as do concepts for the 70% of beginning college students who remain concrete thinkers, memorizers rather than conceptualizers. 

Ms. Niro contends that she and her cohorts “are coaxing intersectionality into our compartmentalized intellectual environment.”

Now of course this takes place within the sciences, and between the disciplines within a broad field such as biology. The interfaces with chemistry, geology, and physics are many and sharp boundaries don’t exist, but between biology and history, or biology and literature, or whatever not so much except what you learn by studying the history of science. And yes, they each know different things, and they learn from each other.  Hey, that's being educated! 

Ms. Niro suggests “we must create more opportunities for students from the humanities and the sciences to work together.”

OK, in general TPP agrees with Ms. Niro, but here TPP observes, and this is a massive generalization with notable exceptions, but people in the sciences generally know way more about the humanities and the arts than the humanities or arts people know about science. This is probably because people can and do pursue their interests in history, or art, or literature, on their own. This can be done with science, but not as easily. In science's early days, "amateurs" made many important contributions to various fields, but that hardly happens at all any more. TPP loves art and was good enough at it to minor in art, and the Phactors collect art and support artists, but nothing in all of that has improved my science or taught me a “new way” to do or approach biology, although well-versed biologists do coin concepts using ideas from the humanities, like the "red queen" [reference to Alice in Wonderland] hypothesis in evolution, and the like.

 Here’s Ms. Niro’s thought of the day. “Intersectionality … is the place where English and physics intimately tango and constructively duel simultaneously. “

Well, it is hard to express many concepts in science in spoken language, and sometimes ideas are presented by using analogies, but really Ms. Niro? Seriously?  Mutualistic? Good thing you’re in the humanities where such notions can get your blog published.  Notice what’s missing? Examples!  Your data! You did not provide one single example of where some creative people in the humanities and sciences produced an inclusive, collaborative intellectual intersectionality of value.  Conclusion: TPP thinks Ms. Niro knows not enough to envision the reality other than it’s a good sounding bit of jargon. TPP has a colleague who delved deeply enough into poetry to earn a master’s degree in literature.  And then she became a biologist. And when asked why, the thoughtful reply was that compared to studying biology, studying literature, while enjoyable, was really quite a trivial pursuit.  Teasing ideas out of poetry was not as intellectually challenging as finding out how nature works.  And mostly Ms. Niro’s quest for convergent intersectionality is not much of an intellectual pursuit either.

Student debt. Are universities responsible?

Student Debt Isn’t the Problem. Colleges Are.

We need to make universities responsible for their students’ outcomes. It is egregious that students, parents, and taxpayers are the ones who suffer when colleges don’t do their jobs while the colleges in question are left untouched. We simply can’t let them get away with it anymore.

So says Reihan Salam, a columnist at Slate.

Dear Reihan, respectfully, what a tool you are!  Do you think students are purchasing a degree? What do you think our university is an online degree mill?  At real universities you purchase the opportunity to learn, and while we can lead students to opportunities, we cannot learn it for them. 

You see this is the funny thing; when students do what you ask of them, they get good grades, they learn, and when they do this enough they get a degree.  BUT (notice how big the but is) they don’t always do that.  The list of reasons, some delivered with teary eyes, would fill a book. 

In Salam’s opinion, the college “simply can’t get away with this anymore”, students paying money, going into debt, and then not getting their degree.  This is something colleges "get away with"? You know the students who do accomplish a degree actually don't want us handing them out to just anyone who has paid their money.  Does Salam think the university is mugging students, taking their money, and then locking them out of classrooms?  Not providing them with opportunities?  We have students who think like this, and it’s never their fault.  One guy over the course of two semesters gave me the greatest gamut of excuses ever for a single student, and it turns out he was doing this with other faculty, and when we started checking stories he was caught out, and then summarily thrown out, and Salam thinks it’s the university’s fault he didn't get a degree. Now student debt, the result in public institutions of the withdrawal of public support, sometimes over 2-3 decades, sometimes rather abruptly, is a policy decision done with budgets to shift the fiscal responsibility to the student (and their family).  And politicians can do this without passing a bill saying that they're going to do this, and this even allows the politicians to dun the university for raising costs too. And how is it that taxpayers are suffering since the portion of their taxes going to public education has been reduced from 62% to 18% of the costs over TPP's 35 years in the business here in Lincolnland. So Reihan, our university isn't getting away with anything, if fact when you factor in the loss of state support, and the unfunded mandates the university gets handed, the real costs have risen less than the cost of living, and our salaries are proof of this.  Too bad Reihan doesn't understand how universities work, and he should be responsible for knowing because he chose to write about us.  Hope Slate doesn't let him get away with this anymore.  It's irresponsible.   

Addendum - OK, TPP will cut Salam a bit of slack when it comes to student advisement.  Some of it is poor, admittedly, but even good advice is often ignored, and Salam seems to think students arrive at university knowing what they want, what they are interested in, and what they need. 

Watch out! This material may cause you to think!

For some time now, since the news of this first appeared, TPP has been going to write about students requesting "trigger warnings" on books, articles, and indeed, course syllabi. Fortunately this hasn't happened at our university as yet.  There are so many things wrong with this TPP hardly knows where to begin. In biology it's often religiously conservative students who wish to avoid evolution.  Hey, memorize the bones of a vertebrate skeleton.  OK!  Homology, not OK!  But how the bloody hell is TPP supposed to know what topics, -isms, or subjects will offend the delicate sensibilities of students?  And where is it written anyways that when you decide to study at the university level you need to be warned about something that might make you uncomfortable, uneasy, uncertain?  Now before you try to climb TPP's tree about this, be aware that while teaching economic botany, he was accused of being a sexist, a racist, and a religious proselytizer, all in the same semester.  Our undergraduate dean says its still some sort of record obviously set by an equal opportunity offensive instructor, and his response, "Keep up the good work."  Would it have mattered if the syllabus contained trigger warnings?  "Be aware that gatherer-hunter societies have a sexual division of labor presented as an observation about who knew plant resources and not some sort of advocacy for women's roles in a perfect society."  "Geographic origins of plants and plant products are based upon actual facts and not presented to denigrate any particular cultures or peoples, so no, African-Americans (G. W. Carver, in particular) did not invent peanut butter (Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a Canadian, patented the product in 1884 before Carver was even in college.)."  "Biblical botanical scholarship about every mention, in Hebrew, of a plant tells you about what plants were used and important in the Middle East, and this should not be construed as criticism or confirmation of the Bible's veracity (it actually goes both ways - it wasn't an apple; John the Baptist did eat locusts in the wilderness, but he wasn't eating grasshopper like insects, but carob pods.)." At any rate, such complaints come from unimaginative, uninformed, and perhaps, uneducable students, and probably the best response is to suggest that perhaps university study is beyond their intellectual or emotional maturity at the present time.  Kathleen Parker is not one of my favorite opinionators, but in this case she clearly nails it, particularly for the blame any administrator deserves for falling for this.  Requiring trigger warnings ..."is the busy work of smallish minds --yet another numbing example of political correctness run amok and the infantilizing of education in the service of overreaching sensitivity."  Gee, wish TPP could write like that.  Wow, just noticed that our local rag's title for this column was "Warning: Literature happening."  The real title was: "Fair warning, provoking a thought is literature’s job." Now possibly, they just wanted a much shorter, albeit less punchy title, or they thought the full title might hurt someone's feelings! Ha!