Why aren’t we?

… links to my post about the nature and purpose of a serious university education.

University Diaries welcomes readers from MPR.

Oh, just bleed your students for more money. Big deal.

The best universities, writes Paul Johnson

help to instill certain intellectual virtues in young minds, including respect for the indispensable foundation of democracy, the rule of law; the need to back up opinions with clear arguments, empirical evidence and hard work; the varying importance of resolute conviction and friendly compromise, when appropriate; open-mindedness at all times; and the perpetual need for courage in the pursuit of truth.

These are essentially moral qualities, which must form the basis of any university education.

He’s trying, in a short essay in Forbes, to justify the time and expense of a university education, and what I’ve just quoted is his conclusion, his answer to the question of justification.

I think he muddies things a bit when he talks about moral qualities, since what his list of intellectual virtues really has at its heart is dispassion, not any particular form of goodness. “Disinterested intellectual curiosity,” writes Trevelyan, “is the life-blood of real civilisation.”

Indeed I’ve long argued that the weakest universities, the weakest departments at universities, tend to be those that feature the most explicit moral stance, the most overt and self-aggrandizing ethical self-definition. Women’s Studies, that sort of thing. Some Ed schools subject their students to “disposition assessments” — a close personal examination, with an eye toward your having certain correct values. Instead of wanting free autonomous inquiry in their students – Johnson thinks this form of inquiry takes courage, but unless the only schools in your country are fundamentalist religious institutions, it doesn’t really take that much – they want sheep-like conformity. They test for it.

Johnson’s list stresses the cultivation of a very conscious distance from the convictions and opinions you bring with you to campus, an open-minded willingness to hold everything that seems to you obviously true and beautiful in a kind of abeyance.

It’s quite unnatural, this stance. Most people grow up in particular moral communities, internalize the beliefs of those communities, and go on living out their lives from there, without challenging those moral foundations very much, if at all. Truly university-educated people, Johnson suggests, are just the opposite – they have the guts or the obstinacy or whatever to pursue the truth as it gradually, contingently reveals itself through high-level argumentation and well-grounded evidence. (Today is the centennial of William James, and in an appreciation of him in The Daily Beast, his biographer writes that James is “our great prophet of the truth that there can be no one great permanent truth, but only the process of trueing, as a carpenter trues a board with a plane, or as a builder trues an upright with a plumb line.”)

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Note, above all, that Johnson’s description of the instilling of intellectual virtue among university students presumes a flesh and blood professor actively modeling this virtue — a dispassionate figure at the front of the room embodying and articulating and organizing the class as democratic procedure. Discussion is argumentation based on evidence; it features the willingness to take on the hard task of making yourself understood, as well as the willingness to grant views very distant from your own some legitimacy.

So, as Johnson remarks, you need a certain lively verbal dialectic to be put in play in the classroom between what he calls conviction and compromise. The implicit conversation goes something like this:

This point of view seems to me true or persuasive or likely; something very much at odds with this seems to you true or persuasive or likely. I ask you why you believe as you do; you respond by asking me the same question; we go back and forth.

Back and forth, week after week, under the subtle guidance of a professor who has gathered all of us here precisely to put into play these debates, a professor who keeps us from falling into sloppy attitudinizing, who, via her own efforts in the direction of intellectual virtue, keeps us honest and disciplined.

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Almost all of my classes, at the beginning of the term, have some students in them who are emotional and doctrinaire in what they say. “Anything can be art!” “Everything’s subjective!”

I find these students exciting, because — although I’m perfectly okay with their holding these views at the end of their time with me — I know that, with their impatient certainty about things, they will be my inspiration for the semester. They will start my engines every day. I will be directing immense pedagogical energy toward loosening their hold on those emotions, those doctrines.

Yet if they do accomplish this broadening, this loosening, it won’t primarily be because of me. It will be because of the complex and subtle drama of dispassion, conviction, and compromise that I will hope, from the front of the room, to direct. There’s something I want to make happen among my students, and Paul Johnson gets at what it is well enough.

University education takes place in the theater of the classroom. It can’t be put online.

… and more characterize the Marc Hauser misconduct story. The journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science attempts to clarify things.

An interviewer asks architect Charles Renfro about the job market in his field.

Q: What would advice would you give to a student who is thinking of becoming an architect?

A: Go into law.

Q: And if he doesn’t listen?

A: There are many other kinds of outlets that have become available to architects, from making shows to getting into museum and exhibit design to getting into writing online. Hope is not lost. The money is down, however. We were never a well-paid profession, much to a lot of other people’s surprise. Definitely, there’s less money out there to build buidlings. So we all have to be more creative.

UD finds moving the efforts of this recent University of Texas graduate to consider some very basic and at the same time complicated truths.

His writing is rather awkward, but UD doesn’t mind, because the awkwardness reflects a deepening understanding of things. You can see the writer grappling, even as he writes, with changes in his way of regarding the world. Bravo.

… Based on its decisions in the Realignment Madness and its recent paranoia related to football practices (even the two “open” practices), UT is starting to feel less like a college team — and more like a pro team — than any other school in the country. In fact, some actions from pro teams could even be viewed as being more accessible and fan-friendly than some of the recent decrees coming from Belmont. As a whole, these decisions are not necessarily a bad thing, but they take away from what has been traditionally identified as the typical relationship between a college program and its most dedicated fans. And it is these type of bonds that are supposed to transcend the experience of fans of a professional franchise.

Going even deeper, I’m still trying to fully understand why athletics even matters. … [I]t’s hard for me to grasp how winning or losing football games really affects the academic stature of the University of Texas, yet those games are something I spend hours upon hours obsessing about…

… [T]he current hyper-monetization and professionalization of college athletics has made rooting for the Texas Longhorns feel more like rooting for a professional franchise than it ever has in the past. And that undercuts the nature of the warm and fuzzy feelings over school and state pride. It’s different (and easier) to root for the University of Texas than to root for Texas, Inc.

The University of Texas represents the dream come true of all big time university sports programs. It’s a staggeringly superior champ, ultra buffed and studly.

This fan registers the irony of his disengagement from the team just at its greatest moment of dominance. He notes that along with annihilating the competition, it has annihilated the university.

Mike Williams, in Bioworld, on the popping of the genome bubble.

[The idea was that once] the new targets associated with a disease… were identified, it would be relatively easy to find active compounds and turn them into drugs … And voila – the pharma and biotech industries would be ever more productive… [But] it appears likely that much of the complexity of the human species is… in cellular events that lie beyond the genome, in the more complex epigenetic world… [T]he genome is now widely viewed as the ‘preloaded software’ of the cell…

[S]ome of the root causes of [pharma’s] productivity problems are being increasingly well-understood by industry outsiders, resulting in a perception that some of the sound bites from the Emperors running biopharma R&D reflect an absence of clothing. Optimistic declarations that a ‘golden age’ of drug discovery is with us have little basis in reality as the industry continues to consolidate and only contribute further to the ‘toxic mix of science of economics’ currently reflective of ‘an industry ripe for disruption.’

… for the Vermont Senate for Windham County, with one of the candidates, our old friend, Peter Galbraith. Peter is happy. He’s doing very well.

… wonders why he was lied to.

When the University was considering adding NCAA football in fall 2007, the administration promised this new program would not take any money from the general University budget. But the administration has brushed this pledge aside.

The original football budget, which was proposed to the Board of Trustees in its December 2007 meeting, required no money from the general budget (though it does use $150 per student per semester of student fees).

Further, USA President Gordon Moulton told the Press-Register that football would “break even” and not use University funds.

But football has taken more than half a million dollars from the general budget since its inception.

In fiscal year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007 to Sept. 30, 2008), the football team received $215,034 under “direct institutional support” — which means money from the general University budget…

The next year, which ended Sept. 30, 2009, football used $320,959 from the University budget…

… law school, established by a man being sued by his neglected children.

And when does Bill Lerach join the faculty?

… in the Wall Street Journal today about the wee problem of ethically challenged MBA graduates. Scathing Online Schoolmarm has rarely seen deader writing, and she’s seen a lot of writing.

We need to better prepare our students for leadership. This requires creating a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions they will face, often under enormous pressure. We must make them aware that these decisions will challenge their values, and that, consequently, they need to clarify the values they stand for. We need to make sure they engage in a continuing dialogue with classmates, faculty and alumni, and learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable for the commitments they make.

This writing has You Can Safely Ignore Me written all over it. It’s empty. Vapid. Void. It’s written in response to a real problem, not an empty one: People with fancy MBA’s go out and Ponzi the country to death. But this writing, which pretends to be a real response to it, is entirely unreal, a cloudy succession of clichés: deeper understanding, difficult decision, challenge their values, clarify the values, engage in a continuing dialogue, hold themselves accountable… It’s ALL clichés.  All of it.

The writers don’t even say what they’re going to do, how they’re going to teach MBA students to avoid Ponziing us. Something about “small group structures” and “generating a deeper dialogue”…

Lazy, cynical, bullshit.

The Oregon Lineman.

Glen Campbell sings.

I am a lineman for the Beavers
And I drive the offense
Lookin’ in the bar for another overload

I hear you singing in your office
I hear you singing out to me
And the Oregon Lineman
Must now take a pee

I know you called the p’lice department
I know I should have worn pants
But I want you to watch me
Do my naked three-point stance

And I need you more than want you
And I see you in my dreams
And the Oregon Lineman
Got thrown off the team

… article on the front page of the New York Times about the slow but steady acceptance of a far better model of disseminating and evaluating scholarly work than antediluvian peer review.

Excerpts:

… [T]he prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly … [has embarked] on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it …the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised versions were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

… Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress, compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects.

… In some respects scientists and economists who have created online repositories for unpublished working paper like repec.org have more quickly adapted to digital life. Just this month, mathematicians used blogs and wikis to evaluate a supposed mathematical proof in the space of a week — the scholarly equivalent of warp speed.

In the humanities, in which the monograph has been king, there is more inertia. “We have never done it that way before,” should be academia’s motto, said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College.

… [T]he debates happening on the site Sociologica.mulino.it “are defined as being frontier knowledge even though they are not peer reviewed,” [commented one scholar.] …

Exciting, cutting-edge stuff.