Conversation Starters

Is Diversity the Opiate of the Masses?

2007-10-09T22:06:00.000-05:00

Walter Benn Michaels can be counted on to provoke us, and his 2006 The Trouble with Diversity is, at the least, provocative.

At America's 146 most selective universities, a meager 3% of the student population hails from the lowest socioeconomic quarter [that figure rises to an unimpressive 7% at the next-most-selective 250 or so, though Benn Michaels doesn't mention this]. Taken with oft-cited stats about increases in income disparity between the richest and poorest workers among us and the declining incomes of those without college degrees, Benn Michaels sees these gaps as more significant and less frequently discussed than our preferred arguments over racial equality and identity politics. To him, complaining that there are too few female physicists places emphasis on the difference between rich physicist men and slightly-less-rich physicist women rather than on the difference between any physicist and any Wal-Mart employee.

So not only are discussions about diversity less important than discussions of class, but they distract us from focusing on class at all. And where diversity discussions invite us to respect (even celebrate) identities as equally valid, we're less comfortable admitting that there's nothing to celebrate about being poor:

"While it may be plausible to think of cultures as different but equal, it cannot be plausible to think of classes in the same way. Defined on a vertical axis--upper, middle, lower--classes are nothing but structures of inequality. Blaming the victim (treating poor people as if they were responsible for their poverty) may be bad, but it's hard to see how congratulating the victim (I love what you've done with your shack!) is better" (107).

That's Walter Benn Michaels for you. He also argues that we seduce ourselves with stories about minor class differences to quash our guilty awareness of major class differences; stories about how hard it is to be poor at Harvard perpetuate the (all but incorrect) belief that there are poor people at Harvard. Stories about the lifestyles of the super-rich in the New York Times reassure the upper-middle-class that they're not really that rich. Class gets recast in terms of attitudes and lifestyles rather than material realities, mirroring the way we talk about diversity:

"Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. . . . As long, in other words, as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality." The left "has suppl[ied] the right with just the kind of left it wants" (109).

The Economics of Happiness

2007-04-16T00:57:00.001-05:00

A late December article from The Economist reports that levels of happiness (according to national surveys) has remained more or less fixed over the last 50 years, even as the "richness" of most relatively affluent nations has shot up. What are some mechanisms that would leave, say, an upper-middle-class white American male in 2007 no happier than an upper-middle-class white American male in 1957, even though our guy today is considerably wealthier than his counterpart in the '50s?

There are two recurring explanations in the article that are worth considering. First, the habit argument: "People grow accustomed to what they have--however much of it there is." Just because the 2007 guy can spend circles around his counterpart from yesteryear, happiness simply isn't measured by gross tonnage of stuff you own. Today's luxuries can become tomorrow's necessities, so having the hot new thing isn't likely to sustain your joy. As mentioned in my previous post, this is a fundamental criticism of commodity culture: if we look to purchases to make us happy, they'll only break our hearts.

Second, and related to the habit issue, there is the problem of "positional goods", an economic term for goods that are valuable when you have them and others don't. It may be that having a fancy car is less important than having a fancier car; if everyone gets the same amount richer (for the moment, forget that we know this isn't the case) and can afford better cars, you might be no happier than you were before, since back then you had a better-than-average car and today your (more expensive and capable) car is still simply better than average. A better example is in schools: if you or your future employer value a Harvard degree, going to a good high school might be less important than going to a top high school. Even if many good schools are better today than they were in the '50s, there are still only a few that can call themselves "top".

What you may see, then, is a type of inflation in the world of wealth. If everyone makes huge sacrifices at work in order to stand out from their colleagues, then the bar is raised and the standout employees much work that much harder to maintain their edge. If many parents push their kids to be dreamy college candidates, the top candidates must look that much better. The overall improvement in worker or student quality (an increase in wealth, really) might not translate into much happiness if happiness is measured through competition with peers, just as the overall improvement in technology or other goods might not translate into much happiness if happiness is measured through the owning of cool new toys.

Cumulative Advantage, Or the Market Makes the Man

2007-04-16T00:24:00.001-05:00

An April 15 New York Times Magazine Article wonders why media publishers are so spectacularly bad at predicting hits in advance. Why do companies know so little of our preferences for music or movies? Much of it may have to do with "cumulative advantage", the tendency for something that is getting popular to get the attention and, ultimately, the love of more fans. Some economists describe this as the "network effect", the tendency for some goods to get more attractive the more people are using it.

Carrying this logic forward, the authors suggest that although "it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow 'better' . . . than their unsuccessful counterparts," in the end what a given person finds "best" can have a lot to do with what other people are calling "best" and what people in the recent past have called "best". In short, then, markets not only reflect our preferences but also shape them. This complicates the work of publishers, marketers and economists who may be tempted to assume that people tend to make choices that reflect stable preferences. In some settings, it seems, they really don't.

That the authors put forth recent experimental findings to support this tendency should be satisfying to critical theorists and critics of capitalism, who have articulated complex theories for the ways a market economy manipulates and enslaves us. Those looking for accessible, concrete examples of the effects markets have on people should start with this article.

"The Incredibles"

2007-01-20T10:19:00.000-05:00

A January 7 NYT article shows how educational rigor seems to follow the distribution of wealth in America: relatively more and more for relatively fewer and fewer.

Being a top student in my high school meant taking several AP classes and taking on sports or activities. This resume easily distinguished less than ten percent of the class in an affluent suburb, most of whom went on to attend highly-selective, often "top-ten" colleges. Here, by comparison, is the current state of the nation's most overachieving secondary schools:

"The new reality for high-achieving students: work crazy-hard in high school and cruise in college. In high school, they pile on the college-level Advanced Placement courses, face reading lists that can’t realistically be completed and tackle complex, advanced ideas once reserved for undergraduates. 'The high-end students have greatly expanded their preparation and their exposure to the life of the mind and scholarship,' says John C. Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford. 'This has been a huge change, especially in the last decade.'

"There are currently two national conversations about high school. In September, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a report on how ill-prepared high school graduates are for college, citing statistics like this one: 40 percent of college students take remedial courses. Of 1.2 million seniors in the class of 2006 who took the ACT, only 27 percent reached its college-readiness benchmarks in biology, 42 percent in algebra, 53 percent in social science and 69 percent in English composition. . . . At the other end of the academic spectrum, however, are the stellar students who are doing ever more difficult work at ever younger ages.

"As they stretch to accommodate students at both ends of the preparation spectrum, universities are grappling with that question: How do you challenge and engage undergraduates? One answer is to focus less on the acquisition of knowledge and more on how it can be furthered. Undergraduates are being offered more research opportunities and interdisciplinary programs, which require them to apply related concepts in different fields. Other efforts connect extracurricular and community service to coursework so students can road-test what they have learned.

"Advanced Placement is no longer the zenith of academic challenge. Now there are “post-A.P.” courses, for which a good grade in the A.P. course is the prerequisite. . . . Most telling is that several advanced math courses — for example, “Complex Analysis,” which blends abstract math with practical applications in physics, electrical engineering and fluid modeling — are taught by Robert Sachs, a math professor and former department chairman at George Mason University. Dr. Sachs uses the same text for some high school and college classes, and says “Complex Analysis” covers the same material a college junior or senior would take. “If you ask me, ‘Is it like the honors curriculum at M.I.T.?’ we’re probably real close,” says Dr. Sachs, who notes that he had the most students ever, 35, enrolled this past semester. The number is particularly impressive because students gain entry to the course by completing a full year of advanced math after A.P. calculus. “The courses I teach are actually a second year beyond A.P.,” he says. . . . Some students actually enter ninth grade having taken the A.P. exam in calculus.

"David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is troubled by the trend. He believes that professors can no longer count on high schools to make sure students have fundamentals down cold. 'High schools are trying to imitate college and teach college-type material instead of the high school material they used to teach,' he says. 'They are now learning the advanced stuff, but not the basic stuff.' He continues: 'We are finding students who have learned about s-, p- and d-orbitals — a theoretical concept in chemistry — but they don’t know that chlorine is a gas.'

"Katherine Bergeron, dean of the college at Brown, believes the bigger issue is not about sequencing academic content, but getting students to view college as a time for reflection and exploration. It is part of the liberal arts ideal that pre-med students delve into Proust, but college leaders say many top students want to pursue serious challenges in their fields of interest earlier in their college careers.

"Some colleges have been pushing back against A.P.’s, which students rack up hoping to waive entry-level courses. At Stanford, departments are less willing to let students with top A.P. scores (4 or 5) skip courses. As of this fall, says Laura Selznick, a freshman adviser there for 28 years, 'a 5 on A.P. Econ is no longer an express ticket into the economics department.' Partly this reflects doubt that A.P. classes actually cover college-level material. But also, 'part of it is that students think they know it, but they don’t know it all,' Ms. Selznick says. She insists college academics are different from high school, even if the texts are the same.
Dr. Rhodes, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, concurs. High school-age students are not mature enough to grasp the subtleties of some material, he says.
Many colleges frown on letting students skip entry-level courses, even with placement tests, he says. 'Some say, ‘You start out at the beginning, even if there is repetition; we want you to get what we’re offering the way we’re offering it and have our education,’ ' he says."

How Much Do We Learn Without Being Taught?

2007-01-20T09:32:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting concept in language acquisition theory and deaf studies that I have just recently begun to think about, thanks largely to the research interests of two deaf students in my doctoral program.

How much of the learning we do in schools happens as a direct result of teachers' speech and explicit instructions? By contrast, how much of our learning is shaped by more informal interactions as we go about the school day? "Incidental learning" refers to the learning that goes on indirectly or informally, and some researchers have estimated that 80% or more of what we really learn in schools comes from incidental learning.

This is no surprise to many constructivist or student-centered educators, who see student interactions and processes as essential for (meaningful) learning. But an important nuance of "incidental learning" when applied to deaf studies is that much of what makes for rich learning in a classroom is the enormous amount of information students learn from their environment. Think of it this way: If you were a deaf student with an interpreter, you'd have some access to what one person at a time is saying, and you have some ability to communicate with hearing persons (both, of course, require meaning to be mediated by the interpreter, but.) But what about the side conversations that hearing students are privy to? What about when several people speak at once? What about the learning you do with your eyes while also capturing what someone is saying with their ears (I spent quite a bit of my high school hours absently browsing some book or other while 'keeping an ear on' the sanctioned discussion in class).

There are troubling statistics about the development of deaf students in mainstream schools, and incidental learning provides on way to think about why that may be. Not only do we learn much of what we know and do without being explicitly taught, but we learn much of it as we're officially focusing on something else.

On the Failed Racial Integration of Public Schools

2007-01-15T22:53:00.000-05:00

Statistics recorded from "What Happened to Brown?", a review by Kathleen Sullivan in the New York Review of Books:

White students make up two thirds of the American school-age population, but on average they attend schools that are 80 percent white.
Fewer than 10 percent of black students attend schools whose students are mostly white.
Only 10 percent of white students attend schools in which minority students predominate.
The students in some school systems, like the Mott Haven elementary schools in the Bronx, are over 99 percent black or from other minorities.

"Schools Need to Pay More Attention to 'Intelligence in the Wild'"

2007-01-15T22:19:00.000-05:00

This article by David Perkins, published in the Harvard Education Letter in 2000, has been a key text in my thinking about student learning in the last year. The article is a gloss of several articles and books Perkins has published along with his colleagues at Harvard's Project Zero.

In essence, it calls out the kind of learning most kids do in school as limited in its opportunities for the kinds of thinking and problem-solving that carry over into the real world. The kind of intelligence needed for school Perkins calls "laboratory intelligence", the work of "teaching kids how to deal with clearly defined problems. However, life is more confusing and complicated than that. Often the greatest challenge is just discerning whether there is a problem or what the problem is. You have to muck around and puzzle out what you want or need to do and where to invest your efforts. That's intelligence in the wild."

"The principal roadblock to thinking well is usually detecting the problem in the first place and then caring enough to invest effort, not in following through. People tend to be much better at solving problems than detecting them. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them."

Children's proficiency at tasks requiring laboratory intelligence, Perkins has found, is not at all correlated with their proficiency with intelligence in the wild, suggesting that

Schools engaging laboratory intelligence only are not somehow also building students' intelligence in the wild.
Students with "wild" intelligence do not have those talents validated in the typical school.

Indeed, Perkins argues, "Ill-defined problems are better than well-defined problems for helping people get the knack of coping with the murky wild. The murk is good; it is more authentic."

"Must Schools Fail?"

2007-01-15T20:40:00.000-05:00

Richard Rothstein's 2004 article in the New York Review of Books takes on several recent books examining the famous achievement gap between white and black students. Three recurring questions frame these studies:

Where should one lay the blame for these differences (schools, families, and wider society being the usual suspects.)
To what extent is the achievement gap a race-defined gap, and to what extent is it a gap between rich and poor?
Given answers to 1 and 2, what is to be done?

While the essay does put forth several researchers' answers to #3, my interest tonight is more in the first two questions, so it will be data relevant to those that I reproduce below. No firm answers are forthcoming here, and the below is a somewhat rough assemblage of data, to be sure. But taken as a whole, they help to sketch out some of the challenges in the schooling, family life, and careers awaiting quite a few young Americans based on the skins and income levels they are born into.

(The following is a series of direct quotes)

Race-Specific Differences in Education and the Workforce

Only a minority of Americans, black or white, are college graduates (18 percent of blacks and 34 percent of whites in their late twenties have college degrees).
Male black workers with only high school educations earn on average 79 percent of what similarly educated whites do. If only high school graduates with similar test scores are compared, then black wages are 87 percent of white wages. These figures, however, understate the difference in annual earnings between white and black high school graduates because black high school graduates work fewer annual hours and annual weeks than do white high school graduates.
In the early 1990s, teams sponsored by the Urban Institute in Chicago and in Washington, D.C., trained applicants for jobs with nearly identical résumés to present themselves in the same way in their interviews. Black males were three times as likely to be rejected as white males. A recent study found that whites' applications were more successful than blacks' even when the whites had criminal records and the otherwise identical blacks did not.
Black median family income is now 62 percent of white income, up a little from 58 percent thirty years ago. But . . . the median net worth of black families is still only 8 percent of whites'. Part of the reason for this difference is that government and private lenders have discouraged or prohibited black families from buying homes in suburban communities where values have appreciated in the decades after World War II. Part of the reason, too, is that black middle-class adults are more likely than whites to be the first generation in their families to have risen to the middle class; many have low-income parents and other close relatives to help support, making it more difficult for them to save money.
Familiar claims about black students [found accurate by the authors under review]: They put pressure on one another not to "act white" by doing well in school. They do not work as hard in school as white students from economically similar families. Black students watch TV and socialize with friends more than whites do. More black students than whites come to class unprepared and are more disruptive. Black students spend much more time at after-school jobs. Many think grades are unimportant because they can go to college on athletic scholarships. When given the opportunity to take more academically challenging courses in high school, they frequently decline. Moreover, black parents supervise homework less frequently than white parents do, while black adolescents are exposed daily to skepticism about white-controlled institutions, such as schools. Black students also accept conventional notions that they have less academic ability and make less effort as a result.
No one can say how much of the gap in academic achievement between blacks and whites is caused by racially neutral class differences, how much is attributable to black culture, and how much of that cultural difference is itself a defensive reaction to continuing discrimination. The Thernstroms write that poverty (defined by current income), parents with little education, and residence in poor neighborhoods explain only about a third of the gap.

Class-Specific Differences in Early Childhood Development
Middle-class children today are encouraged from an early age to negotiate with their parents over what to wear or eat, to question adult statements if they seem implausible, and to interact with adults as equals. Money tends to be less frequently discussed in middle-class families, so it less frequently occurs to middle-class children that their ambitions might be blocked by a shortage of resources.

Working-class children have no such sense of entitlement. Most of them, black and white, speak to adults only when spoken to; they are not expected to express opinions that challenge what adults say. Money or lack of it is a frequent topic of conversation at home, and children become aware early of the limits to their futures.

Middle-class parents were more likely to encourage children to figure out problems for themselves; working-class parents were more likely to tell them what to do. Lareau's middle- and working-class parents both encouraged their children to read, and parents from both classes read aloud to their children when they were young; but middle-class parents were more likely to read themselves, thus showing the importance of reading by their own behavior. Moreover, Lareau's middle-class parents more frequently intervened in schools when they felt it in their children's interest to do so.

Meritocracy & Social Class

2007-01-15T19:52:00.000-05:00

Two articles from The Economist, one a 2004 piece entitled "Ever Higher Society, Ever Harder to Ascend" and the other a 2005 piece called "Middle of the Class", lay out some of the data available on social mobility and education in America. Below are a series of relevant quotes pulled from both articles:

A Gleam of Apparent Good News

Americans' average salaries have risen over the past 30 years, though admittedly not by much. A far smaller share of the population lives in poverty now than in the supposedly golden age of equality in the 1950s (12% compared with 22%). Moreover, a surge of immigrants on minimum wages tends to bring down the average: home-grown Americans are probably better off than the figures suggest. The rich have not got richer at the expense of the poor. The rising tide has lifted dinghies as well as yachts.

On a Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor

Between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%.
The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster.
Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.
In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.

On Social Mobility, or Lack thereof
Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations.

42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth.
On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.
There is also growing evidence that America is less socially mobile than many other rich countries.

Results from other studies/research:

The years from 1880 to 1960 were a period of great corporate behemoths. These produced a new class of Americans—professional managers. They built elaborate internal hierarchies, and also accepted their responsibilities to both their workers and their local communities. But since the 1970s the pressure of competition has forced these behemoths to become much leaner—to reduce their layers, contract out some activities, and shift from full-time to part-time employees. It has became harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. And it has also become harder for managers to keep their jobs in a single company.
If you are among the poorest 5% of the population, your chances
of achieving an average income are only one in six. If you are among the poorest 1%, they become very dim indeed.

The Role of Schools

Over the past 25 years, globalisation has increased rewards for intellectual skills, pushing up the value of a degree. The income gap between college graduates and those without university degrees doubled between 1979 and 1997.
The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has labelled “soft America”. Soft America is allergic to introducing accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for outstanding pupils.
Three-quarters of the students at the country's top 146 colleges come from the richest socioeconomic fourth, compared with just 3% who come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.
In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, “legacies” make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to be admitted than others. The students in America's places of higher education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial preferences.
The budget squeeze on states in 2001-04 forced them to increase fees at state colleges, traditionally the places where the children of less wealthy parents went. Those children also face increasing competition from richer kids squeezed out of the Ivy League. As a result, a student from the top income quarter is six times more likely to get a BA than someone from the bottom quarter.
College graduates tend to marry college graduates. Both go out to work, so in the households of the most educated the returns to a university education are doubled. College-educated women are also postponing children for the sake of their careers. On average, they have their first child at 30, five years later than in the 1970s and eight years later than their contemporaries who have not been to college. At the bottom of the heap, you see the opposite: women have children younger, often out of wedlock and without a job.

"Colleges: An Endangered Species?"

2007-01-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

Andrew Delbanco's 2-part 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books takes stock of the purpose of higher education.

Delbanco considers it a recent trend that colleges offer unprecedented freedoms to students (social freedoms and freedom from prescribed core curricula) in order to attract them in such a competitive student marketplace. He discusses that trend in light of a historically moral purpose for higher education and, he believes, increased cheating and segregation along class and racial lines on American campuses.

(All text below, save my subject headings, is quoted directly from the essay.)

Historical Trends

College Attendance:

At the turn of the century fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college.
By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million.
In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population.
Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.

Role of Higher Education:

The antebellum college was typically an arm of the local church—an academy for ministers, missionaries, and, more generally, literate Christians—that remained true to the purpose of the oldest American college, Harvard, which had been founded in dread "lest the churches of New England be left with an illiterate ministry...when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."
By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges "where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." Eventually these "land-grant" colleges evolved into the system of state universities.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the professionalized university had absorbed schools of medicine and law that had typically begun independently, and was acquiring teacher-training schools, along with schools of engineering, business, and other professions. It was on its way to becoming the loose network of activities that Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, famously called the "multiversity." When Kerr coined that term in 1963, in The Uses of the University, he remarked on the "cruel paradox" that a "superior faculty results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching," and he called this paradox "one of our most pressing problems."

Increasing Competition & Threats to Universal Availability

In The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads, former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt points out that private universities now enjoy what are, in effect, large public subsidies that, unlike the legislative appropriations on which public universities depend, are dispensed out of sight of the public eye. "When the investment corporations created by many private universities to manage their endowments make profits on a business venture," Duderstadt writes, "that profit is tax-exempt, and, in effect, the forgone tax revenue must be replaced by tax dollars paid by other citizens."
Applicants are stampeding toward early admissions programs that offer, in exchange for a promise to attend if admitted, a better chance of getting in. These programs, which now account for roughly half of all enrolled students in the Ivy League, favor candidates from private or suburban schools who have well-connected counselors (sometimes privately hired) and the financial freedom to pick a college without waiting to compare financial aid offers—and the colleges know it.
In today's educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing.

A Socially-Uniting, Morally-Sound Core Curriculum (in Danger)

The incursion of market values into the putatively pure academic world has been the subject of a host of recent books, all of which point in one way or another to the marginalization of undergraduate teaching.
One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain institutional pusillanimity—a fear that to compel students to read, say, the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the teachers about what should be taught.
Peter Gomes . . . in his essay "Affirmation and Adaptation: Values and the Elite Residential College," he seems to say that universities have refused once and for all any responsibility for the moral education of undergraduates, but that perhaps it is not too late (it may even be timely) for small colleges to do something about it. "
In our "postmodern" moment, we no longer have any consensus about what culture is or should be, yet the need for cultured authority has become more urgent. Perhaps the most remarkable sentence in all of these books—as remarkable for the fact that it appears in a footnote as for the fact that it is patently true—occurs in Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: "Arts and Sciences faculties," Bok tells us, "currently display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education and one urgently needed at this moment in the United States." It is not hard to imagine what other purpose the faculties have in mind. Preparation for well-paying jobs seems high among them even if that goal is not explicitly stated. So does introduction to various academic disciplines as they are conceived by the guilds in charge of them. Any larger sense of purpose seems absent and there are few signs that anyone is concerned about it.
As my former colleague the literary scholar Arnold Rampersad (now at Stanford) remarked a few years ago at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Columbia Core Curriculum, the Core is like the interstate highway system: we are glad we have it, but we could never build it today.
Diversity (to be achieved not by quotas, but by considering race as one factor in admissions decisions) contributes to the purposes of liberal education, which Kronman summarizes as "expansion of the student's powers of sympathetic imagination" through appreciation of "views, moods, dispositions and experiences other than his or her own. The one place where students might be compelled to listen to one another—"to educate ourselves by knowing opposite lives," as Stover put it a long time ago—is the classroom. And yet small group education is expensive and therefore increasingly rare, and universally required courses, where students of different backgrounds cannot avoid each other, are almost unknown. The human proclivity to stick to one's own, especially in our age of diversity, is an argument for a shared general education, not
against it.

"What's Wrong with Cinderella?"

2007-01-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

Peggy Orenstein's recent New York Times Magazine piece wonders where the latest trend in princess merchandising for girls stands in contemporary feminist understandings of growing up female. Is the princess persona an appropriation of feminine power for girls (a la third wave feminism), or a clear undermining of girls' rights to be socialized into something other than rich, graceful ladies? "I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?"

Orenstein's thinking speaks best for itself, so here are some long quotations that sketch out her arguments:

"To call princesses a 'trend' among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. 'Princess,' as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet."

"There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine."

"According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers."

" 'Playing princess is not the issue,' argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes. 'The issue is 25,000 Princess products,' says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. 'When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.' "

"When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey
held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)"

"The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs. I mulled that over while flipping through The Paper Bag Princess, a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is 'dressed like a real princess.' She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone. There you have it, Thelma and Louise all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom."

"Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. 'Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,' observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original Little Princess was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. 'The original folk tales themselves,' Forman-Brunell says, 'spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval — famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.' That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders."

According to Sharon Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College: “There are other ways to express ‘innocence’ — girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you’re really talking about is sexual purity. And there’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink — exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

2007-01-15T13:04:00.000-05:00

This essay by Peggy McIntosh is a favorite among students of education and cultural studies.

McIntosh came to realize "I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had not been taught to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. . . . I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious."

It follows, then, that addressing power imbalances cannot include simply empowering oppressed or marginalized people, but must include a relinquishing of power as well. Whether or not this is truly a zero-sum game, it is crucial for white children to cease learning that their lives and identities are morally neutral and/or ideal and that the goal for other groups is to come up to their level, so to speak. In other words, white people must give up the "myth of meritocracy" by which they rationalize their social standings and the superficial understanding of racism that sees whites as raceless and racism as enacted only through hate crimes and racial slurs.

Here are some of the daily priviliges McIntosh feels she enjoys, though has not earned, as a white person:

I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people mof my race most of the time.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization", I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
I can go into a music shop and count on fining the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who will cut my hair.
I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.

These privileges, McIntosh argues, vary between positive advantages which we would want for all people and privileges that reinforce hierarchies and operate necessarily at the expense of others. It is important to distinguish such privileges as we assess whether our goal at a given moment is to share a paritcular privilege equitably or eliminate it.

"What Should a Billionaire Give - and What Should You?"

2007-01-15T12:22:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the intriguing turns of Peter Singer's argument in his December 17 New York Times Magazine piece on philanthropy.

Reasons to Give
According to UNICEF, 30,000 children on average die each day from avpoidable, poverty-related causes worldwide.

According to the Global Forum for Health Research, less than 10% of the world's health research budget is spent combatting conditions that account for 90% of the global burden of disease.

"The Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, include:

Reducing by half the proportion of the world's people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).
Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.
Ending sex disparity in education.
Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.
Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.
Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist JeffreySachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006,rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aidpromises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billionfor 2006 and $74 billion for 2015."

Warren Buffett has acknowledged that society is responsible for much of his wealth. ''If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,'' he said, ''you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil."

"The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that 'social capital' is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. 'On moral grounds,' Simon added, 'we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.''"

The Moral Question
"Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. Gates compares very well with most of the other people on the Forbes 400 list, including his former colleague and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. Allen, who left the company in 1983, has given, over his lifetime, more than $800 million to philanthropic causes. That is far more than nearly any of us will ever be able to give. But Forbes lists Allen as the fifth-richest American, with a net worth of $16 billion. Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls between the 5 percent that Allen has given away and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has donated?"

A Possible Answer

The 14,400 people who make up the richest .01% of taxpayers earn an average of $12,775,000 (totaling $184 billion), with a minimum income of $5,000,000. If each gave away a third of his annual income, the contributions from this group would total $61 billion.
The 129,000 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest .1% average $2,000,000 and make at least $1,100,000. If they gave 25% of their income yearly, they'd contribute $65 billion.
The 575,900 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest .5% average $623,000 per year and make at least $407,000. Giving one fifth of their income would total $72 billion.
The 719,900 taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest 1% average $327,000 per year and make at least $276,000. Giving away 15% of their yearly income would yield $35 billion.
The 13 million taxpayers who make up the rest of the richest 10% average $132,000 and make at least $92,000. Giving 10% of their income would yield $171 billion yearly.

If the US used this calculation, and it were applied worldwide such that even half the global giving came from outside the US, the world would still raise $808 billion annually, more than 16 times what the Sachs task force estimated was needed to fill the gap in funding the Millenium Development goals.

Precocious Kids and Successful Adults

2007-01-15T09:06:00.000-05:00

Another offering from Malcolm Gladwell, this time his talk at the 2006 New Yorker Festival. Gladwell works from the assumption that parents and citizens are interested in kids who display early aptitude for a given skill -- who are, in short, precocious. We are not only interested in identifying and nurturing and praising such talents, but we expend resources on them on the assumption that they are more likely to innovate and excel in these fields later in life than their non-precocious peers. Examples of this include child prodigy musicians, young track stars, or early readers.

But does early excellence really predict future success? Not according to Gladwell, who summons a diverse host of studies suggesting that precocious kids tend to fall off the proverbial map later in life, and similarly, highly successful adults (not just physicists but Nobel Prize-winning physicists) did not tend to be precocious kids. There are always exceptions to this, but the complexity of real life and growing up remove any real correlation between precociousness as a kid and pathbreaking as an adult. (He suggests, at one point, that young kids who excel are gifted learners or gifted consumers of knowledge; stellar adults are gifted doers or gifted producers of knowledge.)

Gladwell suggests two factors that, in combination, are much better predictors of excellence than precociousness per se:

1) Your attitude about your own intelligence (known, apparently, as your "explanatory style"). People who are optimistic about thenselves AND who see their intelligence as malleable are likely to actively pursue knowledge and address challenges constructively, as opposed to those who are always told they are brilliant and thus crumble under the first challenge.

2) Your capacity for hard, focused work at something. Though not all diligent workers are tomorrow's Nobel prize winners, Mozart's capacity on the violin likely had a lot to do with the unprecedented practice regimine he is thought to have undertaken from such a young age, whether or not native ability is still a prerequisite of excellence.

Malpractice! Thank You, God!

2007-01-15T09:04:00.000-05:00

Economists who calculate the economic damages due a malpractice victim have to compare what that person would have earned without injury to what he will earn once injured...lost earnings. If the victim is young, one also has to consider what kind of education that perosn will receive, as education leads to different job prospects and different pay. If you go to college, you can generally expect better job security and higher salary than those who don't go to college.

So what affects a person's decision to go to college? The clearest economic factor is the opportunity cost of going: the amount you pay to go to college, plus the amount you could have earned if you didn't go. That can be a high number for most people, but the long-term benefits make it worth it to us. Still, college is an expensive choice.

Now consider a malpractice victim whose arm was crushed by doctors during a botched delivery. One of his arms is less-than-functional, so his family is suing the doctor who permanently injured him at birth. An economist's question: what effect has this injury had on his financial prospects?

If you grant that most manual labor is done by people who do not need a college degree to compete, and most non-manual labor jobs (jobs that are, say, mentally or verbally intensive) require a college education, something strange emerges. A malpractice victim with a crippled arm will need a college degree to compete for jobs in which his injury won't be a liability. Those jobs also, by and large, pay better. His opportunity cost of going to college is lower than it is for the rest of us because his job prospects if he DIDN'T go to college are relatively grim as a disable person. He likely wouldn't make as much as the rest of us if he tried to work without a college degree...

...so his injury has made college less costly. It has made a lucrative decision easier, without significantly harming his chances of success in many college-grads' jobs. In this case, it could be argued, his injury has yielded him economic benefits. How, then, can we quantify the damages the doctor owes this boy? That is, if we're not comfortable arguing that the doctor has done him a favor...

"Million-Dollar Murray"

2007-01-15T09:02:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's 2/06 New Yorker article opens with the story of Murray, a homeless man in Reno who rotates fairly regularly among the street, the hospital, and shelters. His medical bills may be the highest for any individual in Nevada. He costs the state an enormous sum of money.

Policies toward the homeless tend to be constructed as though all homeless required the same available services; there need to be shelters, emergency care, and food for all of them. Such blanket policies necessarily imply that how much each homeless person "costs" is distributed normally, that is, on a bell curve, with a large majority accounting for most of the costs and a few that are very or very-not costly.

Recent research on homelessness, though, says different. The costs of aiding homeless men and women shows a "power-law" relationship: a graph that looks like a hockey stick, with a few people accounting for the majority of the costs, and most people costing very little. Most homeless individuals, it turns out, are homeless for a very short time, and only once. Only a very few are "chronically" homeless and riddled with costly addictions, etc. From the standpoint of efficiency, it would be most cost-effective to house, feed, employ, and treat those few chronically homeless "for free" rather than pump money into less-comprehensive services for everyone. This may not be politically popular, of course.

A similar situation inheres in car emissions. Emissions checkpoints and stickers assume that all cars need inspection, and administering such tests is extremely costly. In reality, car pollution falls in a power-law relationship; most cars emit very little. The better solution, then, would be for police to use an infra-red detector (which exists) to check the emissions of cars exiting highways, say. Drivers of cars above approved levels could be pulled over and ticketed (or whatever). The point is, addressing the few rather than regulating the many. That's the way to handle power-law relationships. We don't yet think of homelessness as one of those.

"Getting In"

2007-01-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's 10/05 New Yorker article discusses the advent of non-quantitative measures of merit in college admissions, specifically Harvard's groundbreaking use of interviews, letters of reference, and personal essays in the 1930s. According to Karabel's The Chosen, this practice was instituted to stem the influx of Jews onto campus. The measure was successful; with Harvard able to analyze the personal qualities and background of its candidates, it wasn't long before the number of Jews on campus dropped.

Despite its sordid purpose, these aspects of an applicant's file have obviously been institutionalized widely since then. And as it turns out, such a multifaceted application has been found to correlate with a much higher incidence of success later in life. (however that's measured!)

But speaking of success, Gladwell takes up the question of what exactly Harvard does to a person. Does the school make mere mortals great, or does it merely attract already-great people? The former is known as a "treatment effect", the effect that the marine corps has on its students, say. The latter is a "selection effect", as seen in modeling agencies (the agencies don't make you look 'good'; they select people who already do).

Until recently, Harvard was found to have a treatment effect on its students because, after college, those who were accepted outperformed those who were accepted to other top schools.The recent correction that Gladwell discusses is interesting: what those studies should have been comparing is the students accepted to Harvard who went to Harvard and those who were accepted but did not go. Controlling for the talent to be accepted, those students fare about the same in the real world. Harvard, then, is a school with a selection effect. Those who get in know how to succeed wherever they choose to end up.

"A Star Is Made"

2007-01-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

A May 7 New York Times article by the authors of Freakonomics considers what's behind the great performances of great performers, whether in sports, arts, or any other field. They pivot off the observation that a significant proportion of top soccer stars have birthdays early in the year. Why?

Anders Ericsson, a psych professor at FSU, is studying human performance and has concluded that our ability to develop skills is much more nurture than nature. What is important is "deliberate practice": setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating on technique as much as outcome. This kind of practice characterizes the work of, say, surgeons, whose performance generally improves with time. Mammographers, by contrast, see the success of their analyses long after they make a breast cancer assessment (feedback is far from immediate) and their work worsens over time. Training in medicine and all other fields should incorporate the aspects of "deliberate practice". With it, people young and old have potential they typically write off to lack of talent or potential.

And the soccer players? If youth soccer leagues have an age requirement, young soccer players who are months older than their teammates (born in the earliest months of that year) are more likely to get the attention from coaches and deliberate practice that develop them ahead of their peers. Given years of this trend and a sample size of hundreds of players, the trend appears.

"The Moral Hazard Myth"

2007-01-15T08:55:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's 8/05 New Yorker article tees off on America's privatized health care system, asserting that:

The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in America is unpaid medical bills.
Americans spend 2.5 times the industrialized world's median on per capita health care, $5267/person.
All the while, infant mortality is in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized countries, and the US wildly outspends Canada in expenses for medical paperwork (we're neither more effective nor more efficient).
The death rate for someone without health insurance is 25% higher than for someone who has it.

Gladwell describes the political mess that has stymied the six historical attempts to universalize health coverage in the US (who exactly should be added to the roster of the insured that includes the wealthy and those in powerful unions? And who should pay for those who are added?) But beyond the political mess, the major impediment to expanded health insurance in America is the "moral-hazard" idea: that those with insurance will engage in more risky behavior because they know they're insured. Data supports this effect for car insurance, but Gladwell argues that health insurance is a different beast entirely. Economists underestimate how big a hassle it is to deal with waiting rooms, rounds of testing, dental procedures, etc. People have serious incentive to take care of their own health, and will not act more dangerously just because they have expanded affordable medical coverage.

It is true, Gladwell says, that putting the cost on the consumer cuts down on how much health care he consumes. The problem is that studies show he will cut down on basic, essential health services along with those that might be called "frivolous" by some standard.

And as people continue to propose treating health care like car insurance (in that you pay more or less given your medical history and risks of illness, like paying more insurance for having a sports car or being a young driver), do we want to support the idea that those in poor health or with tragic predispositions should shoulder more of the financial burden than those of us who are lucky (and isn't much of it luck?) enough to be healthy? Don't we as a society benefit from our individuals being healthy?