UC Education: Down the Tubes

The New York Times ran an article on the destruction of the UC system.  Significantly, the article directed its analysis almost entirely at the UC’s research mission and what may be lost in that area because of budget cuts.  Only briefly mentioned was the affect of those cuts on students.

I have been a member of the University Council American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT) since its inception.  This union represents lecturers, non-tenured faculty, in the UC system.  We are hired to be teachers; and some estimates hold that 50% of undergraduate classes are taught by lecturers.  They are being cut mercilessly in this crisis and the effect of these cuts upon the quality of undergraduate education are clear and immediate.

I am proud of the Union and its attempt to represent student interests, as well its own.  I am especially proud to know the current President of the UCAFT, Bob Samuels, who appeared recently on “Democracy Now” as follows:’


For more on the crisis see Bob’s blog, Changing Universities.

UC Crisis Continued

I can’t get this off my mind, though I wish I could. That’s hard to do when it’s staring you in the face.

I unfolded this morning’s LA Times to see a picture of students at UCLA protesting fee hikes. One is carrying a sign that says, ” California….#1 in Prison Spending #48 in Education.” I think that’s true; and it’s something to ponder. I don’t know how we got into this situation. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.

ucfees.jpg

               But apparently, the fee hikes will take place. Up 32% by next fall, tripling the cost of UC education since 2000. 32% equals $2,500 dollars, meaning that overall students will pay $10,302 in fees. Then, for many, add in books, room and board; that’s estimated at around $16,000. For a grand total of about $26,000 per year.

That’s nothing, I know, compared to many private schools. But the UC is not supposed to be private institution. It used to be a way for the less affluent to get a quality, affordable education. Obviously it is becoming less affordable, and at the same time the quality is going way, way down.

All of this has palpable affect upon the classroom teaching experience. My students seem distracted this quarter; attendance has been very variable–not up to the usual levels. Part of that is the flu. I have a lot of sick people; one student broke her elbow. Another has bronchitis. And many are now working. I asked one class, are you working, and three quarters of the hands went up. I know of two students in my classes who are working full time and one of these told me she is taking 19 units.

People are being graduated–or so they tell me–$20,000 to $30,000 in debt.

When I was in college–those many, many years ago–I was in college. I read, I wrote, I took the tests. I over did it, I know. But I studied a good 40 hours a week. While I was in college I thought college was my job.

A 2006 study of the UC undergraduate experience found that UC students study on average 12 hours a week.

All of this enters the classroom in the form of students; it alters their relationship to me and my relationship to them

I don’t know what to say about it really, except that it makes me sad. 

The Death of Reading and the First Paragraph of The Ambassadors

Following Nicholas Carr, who argues that the net is changing the way we think, I argued that the net may prove the death of reading, qua reading, or as a particular kind of experience.

Certainly one reads on the web, but one reads for information. In one sense, this is very active reading; one is constantly clicking as one looks for a particular info bit. When I asked my students about how they use the web–whether or not that read entire articles–the whole point of the web, for them, seemed to be to avoid reading the whole article. One student said, I type in key words, I find the article, maybe I read the abstract if there is one, and then I use the “find function,” type in key words again and go straight to what I am looking for.

If this is how the web is teaching people to read, then something significant is also being lost.

I tried to indicate the nature of what might be lost–the experience itself of reading–by quoting the entire first paragraph of Henry James’ The Ambassadors and daring you, dear reader, to read it. The passage from James I felt would stick out like a sore thumb as the kind of writing that does not belong on the web. I wonder if any one read it.

I did several times and as proof, if one can call it that, I include here audio of me reading aloud the passage from James.
And if you want you can read it again:

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh–if not even, for that matter, to himself–there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive–the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

I think there’s a good deal going on in this passage and that it can’t really be put into words other than the words into which it is put.

Strange to think that James hired at one point a Type Writer. I say hired because back then the person who worked the type writer was called the Type Writer. And James, consequently, dictated his later novels. That is amazing. What kind of concentration did it require to speak sentences of the kind found above.

Is the Web the Death of Reading?

Reflecting on Nicholas Carr’s claim that the net has altered the way he thinks, I offered a contrast between the net as largely information passage and the experience of reading, qua that.

I tried to offer an example of what I meant. A rather poor one I think, and then I remembered, dimly, that I had written my master’s thesis on Henry James, a readerly writer if there ever was one.

I finished that dissertation in 1973 I think, and then in 1974, Peter Bagdonovich came out with the film version of James’ “Daisy Miller,” featuring Cybill Shepard. Boy, that was a long time ago, but I remember leaving the movie house disgusted. The rather horsy Cybill simply was not my Daisy. And that film–whatever else it might be–simply was not Henry James. Sure the guy had stolen the plot; innocent bullheaded young American women goes to Europe, doesn’t heed advice about how Europe is different, catches the flu and dies. That’s about it, plus some sort of moral. Awful flimsy stuff on which to hang a film. I have not consequently watched any of the other many films that have come out over the decades using James’ work.

You simply can’t watch a film of a work by James. James’ works are not watchable, only readable….if that.

Take the following. Try to read it (I dare you!). The first paragraph of James’ greatest novel, The Ambassadors:

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh–if not even, for that matter, to himself–there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive–the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

A first paragraph like that does not belong on the web. No information at all is passed. Just the experience of Strether’s subjectivity, which to be experienced, must be read. Of course, while this might be true, the question remains: is this experience worth the time it takes to do it.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

That’s the title to an article by Nicholas Carr that appeared in the July/August, 2009, Atlantic.

A student in my research paper writing class turned it up, and I read it.

Carr doesn’t conclude that Google makes us stupid. But in the course of making his argument, Carr recounts how his own reading habits have changed the more, over the years, he has used the internet. Sadly–or not–his experience parallels my own. He can speak for both of us:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I have read perhaps three or four books from start to finish over the last five years. The last time I did I was on vacation and away from my computer. It was on the Middle Ages and I rather enjoyed it, especially the part about Magellan and his sad end.

But mostly now if the argument is complicated or requires “de-coding” or is more than four or five pages long I start getting irritated and frustrated; and this from a guy who once read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind from beginning to end, and almost enjoyed it. Looking now at that or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, I wonder how I ever did it, and doubt very much that I could do it now.

The way I would put it–and I think Carr puts it this way too–is that the net has turned everything into information. Sure you could read the Phenomenology of Mind, but why on earth would you want to do, when one can’t find all sorts of Cliff Notes summaries of the thing, and, heck, many of them are pretty accurate (as summary) but not of course the experience itself. The experience itself is pretty amazing. Hegel lays down a line of reasoning, follows it out completely, pulls you completely in, then pulls the rug out from under you as he makes a dialectical leap of some kind, and you are forced to re-assess all the assumptions that got you to that point of departure. This sort of experience simply does not show up in Cliff Notes info bits.

What though–if one wants to know what Hegel said–would be point of this experience. It doesn’t show up as something can be turned into an info bit. The point of this kind of experience of reading is the experience itself and that’s about it.

So what’s being lost exactly. I don’t know. But I think the net may have a good deal to do with the way students write these days. They have been immersed in the net for years. Information is just a click away. The experience of reading is not. That may go part way at least as an explanation for the constant teacher complaint: students cannot follow or write themselves a sustained argument.

The Dumbest Generation

Trying to get my head around the affect of the digital age upon young people, I picked up The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future by Mark Bauerlein, a Professor of English at Emory. Based on my calculations the students I am teaching at this moment–born in1989, 90, or 91–are on the cutting edge–if that’s the right phrase–of Bauerlein’s dumbest. For every one kid you might read about in the Ivy League who studies him or herself into a stupor or constant panic attacks, Bauerlein argues, there are thousands who don’t study at all and don’t know diddly.

While I think Bauerlein is aiming for something deeper than a mere information deficit model of dumbness, he starts with that exactly: look at all the stupid things these kids don’t know. Like, as aired on the Jay Leno show, “Where does the Pope live?” And the young person doesn’t know. Or what was the last book you read, and the young person doesn’t know and seems even confused about what a book might is. I have taken these sorts of how-dumb-are-you-quizzes myself and I always miss a couple of them even though I do have a Ph.D. and am pretty well educated. I can’t remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics to save my ass, and I assume it’s a pretty important law. Though not as important as the First, which I also don’t know.

OK, so this is a defense of my own lousy education, but I don’t think knowing the “facts” is all that important. What does it take to know the facts–well, first you have to be around people who know the facts, or in a situation where facts appear, and usually you have to repeat a fact a couple of times to remember it, and that gets to the core of it. Information dumbness or smartness involves the old gray matter only at the level of memory. A very, very important thing–no doubt–but not the stuff of intellect (one might say). I grew up with guys who knew the name of every damn part of a car engine (because they lived for cars) and who could give a damn who John Adams was.

And this gets to another point. Who the heck gets to decide which facts are important (as an indication that one is educated). The educated? I don’t know but this seems sort of like a circular reasoning or a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s pretty easy for the educated to dream up a raft of questions that the uneducated don’t know the answers to. And really who is to say that what the “uneducated” do know is not as important as what the educated know. This is simple “classism, and let’s face it education–and whether one gets some of it–has a lot to do with which class a person is in.

Once I taught a writing class that tied to a political science class. The Professor on the first day quizzed the students about what countries belonged to the EU. After, a student came up to me, with alarm written all over her face who said she thought she should drop the class because she thought Europe was a country. OK, so how does one get to be 19 years old and not know that Europe isn’t a country. But what the heck. No big deal, I said. Don’t drop the class. Now that you know Europe is not a country, tell me the names, I said, of some of the countries in Europe. And then she named off a whole pack of them.

Facts are easy. I am not about to conclude on the basis of those that my students belong to the dumbest generation.

The New Communications

I was born in 1945 and spent my first decade in the rural south. We did not have an indoor toilet much less a TV set. I now teach and have taught writing at a California Research University for 30 years. The young people I teach right now were born in 1989 or 90; they grew up in a world vastly removed from the world of my childhood. Some of them have not seen a live chicken. I cannot and probably will never learn to text-message.

I don’t understand my students and their lives in fundamental way. I try to use the distance between us as a teaching point. Look, I say, we are different, and I would like to learn in class conversation and through what you write how you look at the your lives and experience the things around you. I really would like to know because the fact is, given my age, students are my eyes into a future I will not live to see. Although I don’t put it to my students in this way. It sounds a bit morose.

So I asked them to read a chapter from Suzuki’s book “The Big Picture.” There he writes, for example:

Without perspective, being constantly online and plugged in (a phrase meant to evoke the modern computer era, but already outdated) becomes the normal state of being. But being connected electronically is not the same as being connected physically. In fact, paradoxically, being electronically connected all the time has actually made us less social and less community oriented.

This is what Suzuki says. I am having a hard time finding decent articles on the digital communications and their deep down affect on human relationships. I would be happy to be turned on to something better. But at least he writes clearly, which cannot be said for a lot of writing on digital communication. Of course, he is saying nothing new or that hasn’t appeared or been echoed in a thousand places.

But is it true? I don’t know partly because I don’t have any experience to draw on. I have barely adapted to the cell phone; and I don’t have a hand held, like an iPhone.

I brought up these issues in one class and they just took off–and discussed the matter for an hour and fifteen minutes straight. I had other things planned, but as I said, they took off and I let it go.

I don’t know that I came away the wiser. Mostly they could not imagine living in a world without cell phones and hand helds and iPods. OK, I could have guessed that. They did talk about their feelings about the new technologies and these appeared to be a little mixed, though more positive than not. The more temperate advocated “moderation” when it came to the use of these technologies. OK, but I have read my Aristotle on moderation, so that didn’t help much.

One thing did pop up that seemed to me more concrete, something to try to get my head around. They said life with the cell was more “spontaneous.” One student said he did not like the idea of saying you would meet somebody say next week or tomorrow, and in the old days (without text messaging) one would actually have to be where one said one would be. But today with the cell, one could text and say, I won’t be there, and can we meet at another time or place. But then one student said, yea, this was true, but as it worked out in practice, what with people changing plans all the time, nobody ever seemed to meet up with anybody else, as if they were all sort of moving from one potential meeting place to another all the time. I didn’t quite understand what he meant.

This is something I need to think about–though I don’t know how to exactly–since it would seem to have concrete material implications for the way people behave (and even something to do with a different sense of time) in the era of new communications. 

Got to Have It

In his The Big Picture, David Suzuki starts his chapter on the effects of consumer society on the environment, “The True Cost of Gadgets,” with:

Imagine if you decided to throw away your cell phone, close down your Facebook account, disconnect your high speed internet modem, unplug your satellite television receiver, put away your Blackberry, shut down your iPod, turn off your DVD player and abandon your HDTV. Friends might think you’ve lost it. Family members might suggest counseling. “What’s wrong?” they would want to know.

And you could tell them you’re leading a completely modern life, circa 1995.

Boy, does time fly. I was alive in 1995 and can almost remember it. Was I still using dial-up, and wasn’t the big telephone thing what sort of clever or unclever message one put on one’s answering machine. And I would get those big old VHS things at the local video store (there were lots of those and not just one Blockbuster) and stick them in my machine. I thought at the time that was pretty cool, and didn’t feel, since I didn’t know what was coming, that I was missing anything.

Were those the good old days or what?

I had my students–most of them born in 1989 or 90–write about this passage.

A few of them waxed nostalgic, saying it might have been nice to live in simpler times.

Why is the past always a simpler time?

I don’t remember 1995 as having been any simpler than now.

I got my first “Personal Computer” or “PC,” as it came to be known, in 1984. We had a friend who worked with IBM, and they had a family plan where an IBMer could sell a PC to a family member for half price. Our friend claimed we were family and so we got an IBM for half price. It was just a little box that sat on you desk, you put your monitor on top of that tin box, and the screen was green with a little drop down menu. I used word perfect and I don’t think I knew anything about Windows or Microsoft at that time.

At half price the damn thing cost 3500 dollars (in 1984 dollars). Hard to believe I would pay that much for anything back then. Hard to believe I had that much money to spare. I just had to have it.

As my students claim, a cell phone is not something you want or desire as opposed to something you need. No, you absolutely need it. 

Response to Yoda Yudof interview

Being who I am I was inclined to write off my response to the Yoda Yudof interview as the result of my unresolved Oedipal Complex.

But I do believe it touched a nerve also with others less unresolved.

One colleague reported that reading the interview made her feel as if she were falling into the abyss.

Another friend turned me on to some URLs out of Berkeley that also indicate considerable dissatisfaction with the interview. See especially the attempt of 19 people to provide YY with better responses to the questions.

And another colleague was moved to share a quotation:

To bring an area of life into accord with “rational choice” is to force life into the mold of a specific complex of metaphors for better or worse, all too often for the worse. An example is the trend to conceptualize education metaphorically as a business, or through privatization to make education a business run by considerations of “rational choice.” In this metaphor, students are consumers, their education is a product , and teachers are labor resources. Knowledge then becomes a commodity, a thing with market value that can be passed from teacher to student. Test scores measure the quality of the product. Better schools are the ones with higher overall test scores. Productivity is the measure of test scores per dollar spent. Rational-choice theory imposes a cost-benefit analysis in which productivity is to be maximized. Consumers should be getting the “best education” for their dollar.

This metaphor stresses efficiency and product quality above all else. In doing so, it hides the realities of education. Education is not a thing; it’s an activity. Knowledge is not literally transmitted from teacher to student, and education is not merely the acquisition of particular bits of knowledge. Through education, students who work at it become something different. It is what they become that is important. This metaphor ignores the student’s role, as well as the role of the role of the student’s upbringing and the culture at large. It ignores the nurturing role of educators, which often can be very labor-intensive. And it ignores the overall social necessity for an ongoing, maintained class of education professionals who are appropriately reimbursed for the immense amount they contribute to society.”

–George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), p. 532