"Hey, you, pay attention! This is important."
Say that today and you won't hear anger or
shame. You'll hear something like: "Wha...? Oh,
sorry sir. My bad. I didn't mean anything."
And they don't. They don't mean anything. They
are not dissing you; they are not even thinking
about you, ...
I wonder what students think they are paying for, and what, indeed, they should be paying for.
With the massive escalation in fees, and the ubiquity of phones, with instant access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more, do you really think things haven't changed?
Y'know, some people read that and think, 'gosh, old folks always complain about kids; kids must not really be getting any worse!' I wonder if kids really have been getting worse for millennia…
Not just any piece of paper, one thats slightly thicker than your average A4 sheet. But don't worry, with new advancements in academic technology, you will undoubtedly see that certificates thinner and lighter than ever before.
In all seriousness though, this is not a liberal problem. Its just that universities just don't provide the cost to benefit ratio that they once did over alternate mediums of learning.
Not just a piece of a paper: a credential. The paper itself is unimportant, they simply need the institution to reliably tell possible employers (the rare few that even bother to check) that the credential was duly earned and appropriately filed.
The lecture part of college in many cases is the least valuable part of the experience. Adding something to your lecture more meaningful that can be gleamed from the book or the completion of home work is nontrivial, and many schools can't afford the rare talent that and provide research and a strong teaching presence. The students are, and have always even in the "good old days", paying for certification, the network, and the time to get a foothold in the world.
this, i think, is what he's addressing. if you don't see value in humanities or the arts, i'm afraid you're completely missing the point of being alive.
a world run completely by engineers is no place i want to live.
The point of being alive is being forced to spend exorbitant sums of money for the privilege of being talked down to by someone whose entire life is spent in an ivory tower about a subject whose value s/he can't articulate without resorting to esoteric vagaries?
who's holding a gun to your head? a guy who's read and studied source materials for decades knows more about authorial intent or historical context than you; i'd bet he has an understanding worth thinking about and considering.
I agree that the humanities and arts are of profound importance. I've found that the problem with these subjects is often simply how they are taught. Philosophy is a great example.
I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecturer would drone on about academicians' opinions on various doctrines, their historical context, and critique each doctrine from a logical perspective without any group discussion or talk of application. Students were then asked to regurgitate the professor's opinions in an essay. It was boring, and eventually I quit.
Imagine if all chemistry classes were just the classroom side of organic chemistry, with people sitting in rooms memorizing syntheses and electron pushing without ever even talking about stepping into a lab. Would anyone be surprised if those students then said they thought chemistry was boring?
>The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life
...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it?
The whole idea of natural science of the important child of Western philosophy.
History of philosophy is a beautiful example how most of the purported "actionable guidelines" turn out quite hokey in a closer inspection.
>...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it?
Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works?
Why should we expect that the world is comprehensible from an armchair in a liberal-arts college?
You seem to be asking whether it is possible to derive truth a priori by logic, or whether truth is dependent upon the physical context in which it's found. Perhaps the answer is a combination of both. Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)
> Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)
You were of course paraphrasing Kant, and the very fact that the question remains, from the point of view of professional academic philosophy, unsettled hundreds of years later speaks very loudly about the inadequacy of armchair speculation as a guide to truth.
> if you don't see value in humanities or the arts
Who said that "humanities or the arts" is, or should be, the exclusive province of academics in the humanities and arts who've never thought about anything else? Self-referential meta-study always seemed a bit... depressingly pointless to me.
Personally, I want the world to be run by engineers, because they're the intersection of actually knowing stuff about reality (hard science) and using knowledge to fix problems (trades). I also want them to be connected to the human side of the world. Which is what naturally happens with smart people, unless you spend their childhood teaching them humanities are bullshit - which is what our schools excel at.
Out of people interested in humanities that I know, the best ones at it are engineers. On the other hand, I also meet people with liberal arts background who are keen to learn more about hard science and building stuff, and they are good at it. What we really need to fix is the perception of humanities, and we can do so by trimming all the accumulated bullshit.
We should do the same with some areas of harder fields, like medicine, while we're at it.
This article is OK overall, but I could do without the "I am so brave for exposing this" trope at the beginning. The author presents some new insights, but complaining about the state universities isn't exactly original.
The author is a non-tenure track faculty member. Expressing his criticism of his university--not to mention a whole class of similar universities--is taking an enormous risk, as he could be fired (aka his contract won't be renewed) for any reason.
He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a colloquium:
I tried to illustrate this old-style understanding for colleagues and
administrators at a colloquium at my university a couple of years ago
by offering a pictorial representation of the university as I thought
it should be. First I drew a very large building named “Students,”
then another of comparable size named “Professors,” then a still
larger one named “Library,” and finally a tiny shed well off to the
side named “Administration.” I wasn’t attempting to insult
anyone by this, but simply to make a serious point in a mildly
amusing way. In the event, my meaning was not lost on one
administrator, who, noting the disparity in proportions and considering
it necessary to match wits with me, suggested that come time for the
renewal of my contract, I would not be found in any one of my
fictitious university buildings. How is that for real university
debate? Suggest a deficiency in university governance and it’s a
pair of cement galoshes for you.
Guess what, when you insist on doing only useless work, people start to think your work is useless.
Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming even objectively false facts. I'd think half the professors at the humanities dept were politically naiver than me at the time, today I think I underestimated it. (Oh, yes, I got some nice lectures about geography at the biology dept - go figure.)
Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.
I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension.
The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be.
Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek, literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them, this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind, network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.
Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners, lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty. It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu. The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness, and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is) a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life, but also somewhat irrelevant.
The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school. They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a computer), he'd think your nuts.
Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps of a role that no longer exists.
IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.
> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.
How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievements of the past"?
I guess you're right, I formulated that too flippantly. I meant, they have no use in the utilitarian sense, in the neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school.
I guess because the wonder of human achievement only matters in so far as it can be turned into the wonder of inflowing dollars. Seriously, the more efficient our economy becomes, the more it sucks the life itself out of everything. Dreaming, big or small, is not profitable.
The side effect of creating highly-paid, highly-educated clergy was that smart people who don't have to worry much about feeding themselves tend to do interesting things. It's something we've lost today, and I think it's a big part of why basic research is in trouble today - because science doesn't usually pay off in short term, and is best done by people who are free to do whatever catches their interest. This is also not compatible with the new "neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school".
You couldn't be more wrong about that. Humanities, liberal arts education are the most useful parts of education (and I say this as an engineer). The reason why, through the ages ruling classes educated themselves in philosophy, history, literature, is that it shows you how this world really works, how politics is done, what separates rulers from ruled, what are the basic human rights. Greek and Latin, which you consider useless as well were key to this, because up to Enlightenment era most important papers were written in those languages (either by Plato and Aristotle or by Cicero, or medieval philosophers)
Lower classes were allowed to educate in some practical matters, like medicine, architecture, geography, etc. but studying liberal arts was forbidden by law (e.g. in ancient Rome), because there is nothing worse, from master's point of view that the slave with sense of entitlement, fighting for hers human and political rights.
Democracy arose about the time when humanities education became common enough - because it became hard for people to settle for less than the freedom.
Now, in 21st century we see opposite trend: people are encouraged to study STEM fields, completely ignoring history, literature and philosophy, which basically makes them highly skilled puppets. Which of course is welcomed by ruling class of our times.
> Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.
The wrong perception of humanities being useless is so embedded into today's culture that it would take a cultural change to fix it. And even changing the culture within a university is prettymuch an impossible task for one person.
In all honesty this writer sounds utterly curmudgeonly. He writes passionately about what "real education" is, dispenses some good ol' Hard Facts About Life, and urges us all to put down those dang computer-devices and just learn! This is classic finger-pointing, angsty whining.
I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another. The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and content.
I don't think young people need to force themselves to regress to the antique stylings of almost all Universities, I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault.
That was my impression as well. I love how, in one anecdote, he talks about how students "don't read" and puts the example that given they know they can get a B without the book, don't bother; some how this is the students' fault. Just the selective blindness to it all, how can anyone be surprised that given no external nor internal motivation any human being is going to be arsed to go out of their way to do things.
He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.
Huh. 18 out of 230 students bought the text they were studying. That sounds like statistics. 'C' grades for what used to be failing exams - more data. And rising test scores? In what universe is that happening? These are 2nd-tier liberal arts colleges at issue, not Stanford.
Tool belt? Its nonsense to imagine googling a subject is as effective as learning it. That's twaddle, and any student who skates over their lack of education by faking papers from online resources is involved in a self-destructive sham. The paper is supposed to demonstrate a mastery of the subject. The paper is not the point. Producing a likely-looking one is not the point. Actually knowing the subject is the point.
18 out of 230 bought bought a book, widely accessible and read by most in the early hs, from the over priced campus book store. FTFY. That's not statistics, that's just a single (unenlightening) data point.
A personal anecdote about the fact the OP now feels his standards have dropped (providing no numbers for this nor writing samples so we the readership can appraise the truth of this claim) is also ~not~ statistics.
As for rising test scores, unfortuantely for you and your "twaddle" most colleges maintain a factbook detailing past admissions data. Lets look at a couple of state schools from the worst part of the US shall we:
It appears you have to go down to at least the 76th ranked southern university[4] before the gains in test scores begin to look more like noise and even at that level there's a non 0 increase in performance. We're clearly not talking Standford here.
Finally, the internet represents a tool because it allows for more mental bandwidth to be used on analysis over memory. No longer must you remember the exact quote to make an allusion, just the fact that it exists. This is then indexed to other supporting works a student can draw upon to further support their argument. Machines are excellent at recalling and storing information, however struggle with analysis (especially in the context of humanities). Students are more free than ever to peruse these lines of thinking, to demonstrate meaningful mastery you might say, now that names, dates, formatting, indexing, etc have been outsourced to the machine. Just for an example, when a blind blow hard comes and makes assertions comfortable his eloquence will make up for the lack of facts, the internet allows for the rapid synthesis of numbers to render the argument hilariously invalid.
[1]http://www.clemson.edu/oirweb1/FB/factbook/minifactbook.cgi
[2]https://oira.auburn.edu/
[3]http://www.fmarion.edu/about/factbook/article12711c7605652.h...
[4]http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
Thanks for the analysis! We can only hope that the SAT is not also inflating.
Oh! They did! SAT was redesigned and rescaled in 2005 to 'reflect today's high school curriculum'. And that whole debacle over the written exam part. So I'm not sure how much we can learn from comparing scores before vs after that watershed year.
But ok accept that scores might be going up. The meat of the OP's rant was, college is no longer a place of learning but instead a place of 'earning'. The degree is what matters, and nobody is expected to actually learn, master, internalize subjects particularly in the liberal arts which are termed 'fluff'.
That is an argument worth examining. Notwithstanding the codgerness of the ranter, and his evident desperation at being ignored and shouted down for a decade.
>> The paper is not the point. Producing a likely-looking one is not the point. Actually knowing the subject is the point.
Tell that to the people handing out the grades/scholarships/acceptance letters. Students today see assignments as hurdles, not opportunities for learning. At school today the first and most relevant question is always "But will this be on the exam?" If no, then the activity is dismissed as a waste of time.
There certainly are more opportunities to learn than ever before, but learning requires effort.
If you want to learn something that _really_ matters you have to give it full attention. That means total focus, not "continuous partial attention", not facebooking on another tab. Whether you use an ipad, a book, or sit across from a table from a professor, learning really does require undivided attention-- when has this ever changed?
What the hell are people majoring in that 80% of the material doesn't matter? I'm sitting here post-MSc wishing I'd done 80% more material in undergrad so I'd be properly qualified for the stuff I want to do!
Computer Science. 80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones). The rest 20% can be learned in a couple of afternoons. If you're American YMMV tho.
>80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones).
Soooo what courses were you taking, in which the non-theoretical material was 80% useless? When I think about applied computer-science subjects, I think of operating systems, embedded programming, circuit design with FPGAs, networking, program optimization, compilers... all eminently useful subjects.
Also a lot of stuff you internalize better when you get your hands dirty in it. That OpenMPI class may not be very practical or relevant on the job market, but it can teach you quite a lot about the problems and approaches in the field of distributed computing.
I had an epiphany about feedback loops one day and since then I wish I paid attention during the 1.5 years of control theory classes I had at university. It also made me finally realize that a lot of this "useless" stuff is actually important, but we may not realize it immediately.
This view is a bit too sanguine --- in general we really have lost the ability to engage deeply with printed matter. Those students who continually monitor facebook while doing their assignments are just phoning it in, and the poor quality of their work shows it. Declining academic standards are real. Students aren't getting an education for their money.
But.
The internet is the new Forum. What the students do there isn't inherently valueless. So while declining academic standards are bad news for the academy, they're also not relevant to whether the students are able to participate in their culture and in civic debate. The problem is that, online courses notwithstanding, the humanities generally fail to take online fora seriously enough.
> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another.
Can you code with one tab open to Facebook chat? Because the overwhelming consensus here on HN is that coding requires concentration and lack of interruptions. So does learning.
Technology doesn't change the basic biological processes of learning, and the fact is that technology has proven itself to be a fantastic failure as applied to education. Remember the "multi-media in every classroom" shit that failed in the 1990's? Same thing with iPads today. Research even shows that taking notes on a computer doesn't help you retain material as well as writing it on paper. Until we invent neural downlinks Matrix-style, educational technology peaked with the invention of the printed book 500 years ago.
I can think of at least one university class where the pace was well below what I could handle. In order to prevent myself from getting bored and falling asleep (both figuratively and literally), I regularly took a newspaper to class and read that. Occasionally, I would look up to make sure I was still following the class. Sometimes, having a distraction can actually improve your attention to otherwise boring material.
Clearly, this is not going to apply in all or even most university classes where the level of the material being presented is quite high, but my point is that different things work for different people or even the same person at different times.
I was too smart for the pace of learning at my public junior and high school (not too smart for college, but that's another story), and regularly either doodled, wrote stories or poetry, or programmed simple text-based games in TI-BASIC on my calculator in order to get through my classes, while looking up periodically to make sure I was still following everything they said. And this was during the 1990's that I was in junior/high school.
I graduated with almost a perfect GPA too, so at least in my case, yeah, I could code and learn at the same time.
I still can for some coding tasks professionally, but not for all. I'll have podcasts or Netflix while programming sometimes. When I really have to concentrate, though, yeah that's when the lyricless music gets put on.
No you didn't do it at the same time. You did learning at a higher pace than the average pace (which is the pace at which the teacher will cover material), and then did not learn for the remainder of the time. That's completely different from doing things simultaneously, i.e. at the same time.
In some cases that was definitely true, perhaps most cases, but there were several times when I was being taught brand new material and was coding while I was listening to the teacher. In math class especially there was almost never a moment when I wasn't doing some form of programming during the class, since I could get away with having my calculator out the whole time.
This was TI-BASIC, though. I mean, it didn't get much more complicated than "PRINT", "INPUT", "IF THEN ELSE", "FOR", and "GOTO LABEL". I wasn't trying to figure out how to integrate a horribly documented third party API or anything.
That's kind of my point. I didn't need to be "at my best" at those times. When I really need to figure something out at work, I do my best to eliminate distractions as much as possible so I can be "at my best" (I work in an open office). But even that's not needed 100% of the time.
Sometimes you're just doing grunt work that needs to get done, sometimes you're doing something you've done thirty times before. But sometimes you're figuring out one of the trickiest interlocking puzzle you've ever come across, and that's when I need to be at my best.
I actually code with one tab open with Facebook...I trained myself to ignore it unless I have a free moment. Sometimes it's necessary for me to be responsive there due to having plans to do something later with friends (i.e. meeting up in the afternoon to run or have dinner at Facebook). However, if I have important tasks to do, I keep a mental reminder to respond later and focus on my current task first.
I agree with the rest of the points made though. Multitasking is generally difficult.
Same here, though at work I keep just the Facebook Messenger on (it's on http://messenger.com), mostly to stay in touch with my SO. I used to keep IRC too, but I find myself either too distracted by it, or too frustrated by being afraid of missing out.
I find that my ability to divide attention is directly related to how much I'm enjoying the task at hand. At work I can barely keep focus, but when I get into the flow while working on a personal project, I can IRC, respond to e-mails, chat with few people on IM and browse HN while still doing solid work on the project, and without losing focus for a second.
(Funnily, I remember that I was turning off my IM for coding when I was a kid, but that was only because my computer wasn't very strong, and the compilation would take 3x as long with the communicator open.)
I think it is actually moving in the opposite direction. With information so easily available, and so much of it out there being false, professors are today more important.
The days where book publishers vetted material are gone. Being in print is no guarantee of anything. The internet is full of every opinion and crackpot theory on the planet. The unguided student will find whatever information is most convenient at the time. Today more than ever students need to pay attention to someone with the experience to separate junk from the real science.
"I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another"
Not really. His point was that the act of learning hasn't really changed, and he's right. Undivided attention is still needed for most learning intensive tasks. I even see many posts here on HN about not being able to concentrate on business task X or Y because a person is surfing the net too often (I'm guilty of it too).
If you spread yourself too thin, you won't really learn much of anything.
"I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault."
Technology should be used to supplement learning and make it more efficient (IE: e-learning, etc). But it's not a complete replacement for it. There still are no shortcuts to success.
If a young person can't handle this, maybe they should go into the trades instead.
> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another. The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and content.
If you paid attention to university research, you'd know you're spouting things well-known to be wrong. Multitasking is detrimental to learning and knowledge.
It's a crappy essay, but it does point at a couple of systemic problems with the modern university. Grades used to be better correlated with actual performance, and they aren't anymore, yet they're still used as metrics. It might be better to have 2 metrics: pass/fail that counts on your transcript, and a letter grade that's private, but maybe available for internal statistical purposes (I believe a handful of teachers do this now, but the "private" grades are really private). Too much teaching is done by underpaid labor. There's not enough focus on teaching, period.
There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to.
Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.
The main point which hit home for me was that the students are running the asylum now and there is no respect for the professors or faculty attempting to teach them.
From the comments:
The key to this article is the explicit statement that administrators are aligned with students against faculty. I work at a major university, and my department head has often sided with students without even contacting me to hear my take on the incident. I get an angry email from him saying that a student complained that I say hello (Really! I didn’t say hello!), or that I must give a student the opportunity to do an assignment after the deadline, because she said it was impossible to do it for technical problems. In fact, though, 21 students had completed it successfully, despite the alleged technical problems. Still, I was ordered to allow the student to complete the assignment late, for full credit. I was never consulted, or I would have mentioned that the student spends most of class on facebook, among other things. Another time, a student sent him an email saying that I “diminished her” in class. The head sent her a passage from the student handbook saying that students are to take it up with the professor. She refused, saying that made her “uncomfortable.” Instead, the department head insisted on visiting my class to observe my teaching. At the time, I said that he was spineless -- that she had told him to jump, and he did. That may or may not have been correct, but I’ve since realized that backbone had nothing to do with it. Instead, the head was actively searching for opportunities to baby students. It explains, for example why I was told to teach a student to use a calculator that I do not even require in my class.
I feel like this professors experience is fairly consistent with what I know. I had six friends who all went into academia and education. Within a year nearly all had exited the profession and only two remained. They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.
You come so close to figuring it out there at the end. The truth, it's always been happening. There were no "good old days". The pecking order has always been: research prof > students > teaching prof.
Seems the main problem here is the high tuition fees, which to some degree give the students the impression that they deserve good service for which they have paid.
Coming from a country where most of university is state funded (minus a nominal fee of about 300€ per semester), I can see that I might have had other expectations of my professors had I paid ten thousands of dollars per year.
Additionally, while I do not know in which country you reside, generally countries who fully subsidize higher education have much more stringent requirements to entry, allowing only those who are completely serious about receiving an education access.
In America, if you are willing to pony up the cash, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot. Combine that with the common idea that you will not be able to find a job without a degree and you end up with a lot of people who aren't really in it for an education, but feel like they have to be there anyway.
The Atlantic article linked at the top of this piece spends more time on this, which I also think is more important.[0] The tension between the professor who thinks he's having a conversation and the student simply demanding compliance was surprising to me.
> They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.
In my experience, they're not doing things to appease the students, they're doing things to appease the students' parents.
I read "Gettin’ bodied by Classics: the joys and challenges of public scholarship" (to whose HN discussion I linked above) and thought, wow, cool, who is Hermes Trismegistus and what's the reference? Hey, those articles on exclusion, inclusion, and the ideas of citizenship from antiquity to today sound really interesting. Wow, a Princeton classicist doing something I can understand! I'm going to look at buying his book, this guy is rad. (Halfway through morning coffee, so excuse the shallowness of the thoughts.)
I read this OP and started rolling my eyes again. Right, right, kids these days, telling kids to think about their Halloween costumes is so PC (telling kids to think! can't have that! wait, next paragraph he wants kids to think, just about something else). As I continued to read, I realized why we have such different experiences in part: I teach math. I can see that my students did learn something this semester. Now most of them can discuss geometric Brownian motion. That's cool. As the author here says,
Many of the engineers who were painted purple during frosh
week are now running the institutions where we teach. And they weren’t kidding when they were pissing on our guitars in the quad. It was a promissory note on the future — a future they could feel in their bones belonged to them, not us.
I'm one of them -- the heathen, uneducated STEM people! If I call his thoughts about Camus "fluff" he no longer has any defense! Needing to be polite in his response renders him... gosh, impotent? in the face of such trenchant criticism. Hm.
Things are different on the STEM side of campus than the classics side. Many on that side say that they're terrified of their students (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) but it seems to me that these folks are terrified of discussion -- and the other thing to note is that every single one of them brings up the fear of losing their job over a discussion. It's curious, in one of the only professions in the world with tenure. Why are all these guys afraid of losing their job for challenging the PC SJW orthodoxy or whatever? For professors with tenure, this is a fear entirely unsupported by statistics. The only case even marginally close is when Salaita had a job offer withdrawn because of his views on Israel and Palestine, and I think he was on what would be stereotyped as the PC side at the moment. So, tenure gives golden handcuffs -- you can't move institutions -- but you'll still have your job even if you're a grump.
Ok, so why are these profs on the liberal arts side scared? Because of the adjunctivization of higher ed -- no tenure for most (including me). One great discussion here: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identi...
Because of the corporatization of higher ed: more discussion here. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/college... Because the STEM and business profs are "winning," as the OP said. Because he can't see his own relevance anymore, unlike Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Because he can't connect with his students anymore.
It's hilarious that these problems are so acutely felt wh...
I can't count the number of things I learned in college on my fingers because I didn't really learn anything. Nor did I learn good study habits, nor did I cultivate my appreciation of knowledge there.
I did all that after I dropped out of college and the ugliness of the work world drove me to cultivate my inner garden. I am exponentially smarter now than I ever was in school. I am a firm believer in the sentiment behind the phrase "Never let your schooling get in the way of your education."
The author believes in a fiction that never existed. Professors have always had to fight to earn the attention of students, iPhones weren't the only competitors. What's happened is that reality has gotten so naked that even the absurdly idealistic professors have had to acknowledge it. They were the only ones who ever really believed it. I feel like even parents, for awhile now, pay lip service to the value of schooling without actually believing in it.
Education is not, and never was, what academia seems to think it is.
This essay is absolutely correct in all things. I didn't finish college and, even though I've been highly successful, it was later in life that I noticed things that were missing. Things that would have made other things easier and, especially now, made life a little easier.
Those "things" are probably different for everyone but, for me, I wish I had them from the beginning.
Those who become professors tend to spend their college years around those of similar inclinations. Once they become professors they have to deal with the general population, and I think this can be a shock. Very little that I have read about the universities of other years (going far back) suggests to me that there was ever an age in which a large majority of the students were in it for the learning.
It is perhaps the case that students read less and so write worse than they did once. But having worked as a copy editor long ago, I can tell you that a lot of Ph.D.s wrote pretty damn badly before most of HN was born. (OK, Ph.D.s in the social sciences and E.D.s are mostly what I'm thinking of.)
And "Finally, the very act of employing, empowering, and often elevating such people [term employees] denigrates real scholars and scholarship by definition." I haven't heard of a lot of empowered adjuncts. And if that adjunct happens to have what it takes to teach freshman composition or an introductory survey course, I don't see the denigration. As for real scholarship, well, not everything published in a refereed journal is more than formally scholarship. One could, for example, compile an entertaining anthology of things that writers and highly qualified critics have said about Proceedings of the Modern Language Association.
Finally, what does a parent expect who sends a child off to school unable to write well and disinclined to read? It does seem to be a premise of US education that if you keep people in a classroom setting long enough then something will happen. But why should parents believe that?
As someone who has taught college for over a decade, I can say that while there are a lot of problems in higher education students are not high on my list.
while there are a lot of problems in higher education students are not high on my list.
I've not taught quite as long as you, but I'll add that I like to tell students that life is going to be their ultimate punishment or reward: If they don't learn how to read and write (I teach English), they'll be the ones who suffer. Not me.
Some people of course don't learn anything and are fine. Many however don't learn anything and aren't fine.
If this is news to you, dear HN reader, then you really haven't been paying attention to the discourse surrounding education in the last 30 years of the United States. I believe the big work to hit the popular mind initially was Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, which essentially says the same thing, but the disease was slightly less advanced then.
As an interesting linguistic note: the liberal arts were conceived of as the arts for free men; rather then the techincal things - technicalities - which were to be done by slaves. A careful reading of michaelochurch's polemics should suggest to you that this has not changed in substance in the general case.
No computer science will save you from someone who can out-rhetoric you.
Finished reading. The text is cut short on this page, but even after reading what is there, I am left amazed. A few points (mind you, I haven't read anything from the classic besides what they managed to force me to ingest in school, which as you can imagine is not much):
- Though I found the discussion overtly long (yay my non-existent attention span), it's surprisingly easy to read; I expected ancient Greek texts to be much more difficult in terms of language and style.
- All the whining I see and do about manipulators, liars, salesmen and contemporary advertising industry, Plato has described thousands of years ago. It's like, fuck, why do I bother rediscovering and repeating what ancient philosophers knew all along, and why the society doesn't seem to be learning from those lessons?
- I should have learned this already, but I'm still amazed every time I read an old text describing exactly the same problems we have in the contemporary world. Here's me thinking they are unique to our age, but apparently King Solomon is right, and there truly is nothing new under the Sun, at least in human relations - we keep repeating the same patterns, generation after generation.
- I guess I'm starting to appreciate the stated reasons for classic education.
Yes, but the US is widely regarded as a, if not the?, leader in higher education. So if you're keen on understanding the intellectual currents of education in your piece of the world, it's wise to keep abreast of the currents in the US: they will show up in your fine part of the world in time. I'd guess in these days, the time between 'major American idea' and 'hits the rest of the world' is under a year, if not under a month.
I am not sure how distant the third and fourth tier Canadian schools are from the US paradigm, or how independent they feel. I'd guess they follow the lead of American universities pretty closely.
I am super comfortable saying that many UK academics have been lamenting the same thing for the past decade and more; I used to belong to an online academic community with many UK members (also in the Classics) in the 2004-2008 timeframe where the song was being sung with a different verse (but same chorus). If the UK and the US are singing a song; Canada, Australia, and the rest of the English speaking world aren't going to be far behind.
Particularly in the Anglophone world (I can't speak to the others, I am sorry), ideas are shared very fast, and often the US is granted leadership, whether it should be or not. Having been deeply involved in the US university system, I would regard a great deal of the modern innovations in the universities to be a tremendous waste of non-intellectual effort, in many cases for the purposes of boosting the support staff (Gotta embiggen the headcount kingdom) or for comforting the tender feelings of immature children.
I don't mean to lay all the blame on the universities; and none of the blame should lay on the student's shoulders; those who are older and have the reins of power have driven the cart to the ditch. That the load of the cart fell in is not the fault of the load, but the driver. A great deal of blame sits squarely on the United States electorate's shoulders; a non-trivial portion sits on the k-12 policymaker's shoulders; and the rest of it can be shuffled off to the flow of history, parents, the media, and the usual human condition.
Bloom's dread was of the Rolling Stones; now elder statesmen - Sir Mick Jagger, once arrested for soft drugs.
This reeks of his attempting to separate culture into low and high, and no, he shouldn't have to explain himself. Oh really?
Computer science has a long border with linguistics. Somewhere on the other side of that border is rhetoric - the Liberal Art - so computer science is a roundabout way there.
This completely ignores the two most significant intellectual innovations - that of Claude Shannon, which revolutionized physics itself and of Godel, who diagonalized logic itself ( at least the Peano calculus ). These represent towering intellectual achievements unlike any other in history.
Trying to map classical society onto modern society is an exercise in futility. Classicals were bloody, venal, voracious and cruel. Our engineers, whether they're called that or not, made the difference. We live after the Scots Enlightenment, in which Man was freed from a destiny as a draft animal with thumbs.
As an exposition of the phenomenon in the article, I much prefer "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
I have mixed feeling about this article. On one hand I agree with heavy commercialization of education. I feel same about my life where all my education was one step closer to better life in term of money and comforts that money brings. Now after working for more than a decade and having reasonably successful career I feel more and more empty. On other hand I slightly disagree or more accurately, feel sad and scared that online education is not something that will bring any intellectual fulfillment to life. I use to think a few online courses here and there will bring in some content to me.
I was expecting the worst judging from the comments here, but it's actually an excellent essay (or article, or whatever you want to call it).
I personally agree. University should be more about learning and becoming better thinkers than simply learning a few facts and getting a piece of paper.
Pretty much none of the students I interact with care about 'learning', or any form of critical thinking. They want the profs to teach them a few facts, then base the test on those few facts. They optimize for this so they can get their A, then get the hell out.
IMO, the internet has changed who speaks for the masses. It used to take real effort to speak out. So, you generally only hear from people who do stuff. Now days speaking is easy, it's getting people to pay attention that's hard. And what most speaks to people are simple messages about simple problems. Sadly, this means it's simple messages from whiners that drones out everyone else.
There are still plenty of builders, protesters, and politicians, but it's just the drone of first world problems silences them.
PS: As to learners, you don't need to speak to your professors if you want to learn something. So, professors are going to hear more from people about there grades than the actual subject.
A lot of students don't care about critical thinking, but I think that really underestimates these students. What do we offer them, after all?
All I had to do was advertise some research opportunities and 10+ students were interested in doing work for no pay and no credit outside of class. Sure, they have no idea what they're doing -- but they know they want to be doing something interesting, and they took the initiative to follow up with me. What is so special about my students? They're pretty career focused, and not in a "learning-for-learning's-sake" kind of field. And yet they want to use what they learn in class to do meaningful analysis on extracurricular topics.
This is a matter of institutional culture. You'll find it in schools that are country clubs or low-cost mass-appeal credential factories. You won't find it so much in private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty.
private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty
Which schools are those? As a homeschooling parent, who emphasizes to my children that they should THINK, I would definitely encourage my children to apply to schools (public or private) that are genuinely nerdy and difficult. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions of good colleges and universities like that.
Harvey Mudd, CalTech, Rose Hulman, Carnegie Mellon, from what I've heard and experienced. But I expect you have heard of these institutions, and they are all on the technical side.
MIT, UChicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, WashU, Middlebury, Berkeley, etc.
Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's left at schools like these are the masochists who actually want to be challenged academically and surrounded by peers at or above their intellectual level.
I'd say Chicago is the paradigm case, but I'm biased :). One of its best features is an extraordinarily large and rigorous general ed requirement ("the Core") which means even a computer science student gets a substantial liberal arts education. There are paths through the Core with a higher tolerance for bullshit, but they're frowned upon. I took the more philosophy-leaning sequences and loved them. Lots of emphasis on close reading, lucid discussion, critical analysis, and clear argumentative writing. It has also been my experience that students merely looking to check the "college" box with minimal effort are not mainstream and don't tend to succeed.
I think there's a valuable role for such an institution in the world, but I'm not sure why it should be the university.
The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't: they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only secondarily where undergraduates learn things.
The change to make universities, as a system, be about people who specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better thinkers can go to a different sort of institution.
Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a lot for people who care about learning.
It should be university because it originally was. It evolved towards being a very elaborate vocational school. The actual vocational schools are uncool now, so you get basically the same thing from Ivy League, only less efficiently and for more money.
I think both approaches are fine; what messes things up is the dissociative identity disorder the university suffers from. On one hand, it is expected to carry great traditions of scholarship. On the other, economic incentives create strong pressure to do vocational training instead. If we could split it (back) into two separate institutions, things would be much better.
When I was a professor I tried an experiment a few times of offering extra classes during the lunch break. These covered interesting and important areas that we just didn't have time to get to in class. The topics covered weren't on the final exam and were totally voluntary. Out of a class of 100 I would get around 10 or so students come to these classes which were more tutorial than lecture. It was great experience teaching students just interested in learning.
The most interesting aspect of the exercise was the students were drawn pretty evenly from across the performance spectrum. There were students who got A's in everything, but there were also a number who we're just scraping through the degree. I was quite surprised at which students came.
I'd probably be in the middle of the perfomance spectrum of your group. I learned in my own pace, followed things that interested me, which meant that I could have bad grades (mostly from ignoring assignments) but still have a keen interest in the subject.
That is, if anyone would tell me this is a thing. I always thought that office hours are mostly for a) helping people who didn't understand some part of a lecture, and b) dealing with formal stuff - grades, extensions, absences, etc. It was pointed out to me just around the time I was finishing my education that I could have just come to talk about the subject matter, and a lot of the staff would be more than happy to tell me about it. This is one of my two biggest regrets from the university - that I didn't come to professors and asked them, only limiting myself to occasional after-lecture chat.
(The other one being that I completely ignored party life and thus didn't take the chance to meet and befriend many smart people studying various sciences and arts.)
I used to have the occasional student that would "drop in to chat”, but I think most were too scared to do so. In the natural sciences you have labs which are smaller and more informal where students were more comfortable chatting about science. I had lots of interesting conversations in labs and even occasionally about the subject.
I had always wished that we could have a more informal learning process where the professor’s job is to guide the student through the subject, but this is not really compatible with the industrial-scale higher education system we have today. In the end you feel you have accomplished something if at least a few students have learned something.
On a bit of a rant at no stage in your performance evaluation as a professor are you ever judged on what your students learned. No effort is made by the university to measure how effective your teaching is or if your students have gaining anything from the course. Entertain the students and hand out A’s like confetti and the university is happy.
If I may give an unsolicited hint (with standard disclaimer of n=1 anecdote-neq-data) for the sake of other students who are like I was: make sure your students know they can drop in to chat about science, and that's totally fine and you'd be happy to talk to them.
The experience of primary and secondary education I had has taught me that teachers generally are not that accessible, and only few of them know stuff outside curriculum. It's not that they don't want students to come to them, but it was never encouraged. Managing their opinion of you, on the other hand, was paramount to getting by, especially if you're not their favourite pupil who gets straight As on all tests. You also didn't want to be seen in your class as lickspittle (yay the dysfunctional world of schoos). I carried that attitude with me to the university, and didn't realize until it was too late that situation is different now - that those (still intimidating) professors and PhDs are really willing to share their knowledge, and they're often national, or even world-class experts in their particular domains.
Sometimes what a young person needs is an explicit permission and reassurance - that yes, they can stop by to chat about things. Like the article said - the means and opportunities are there. People are just not using them, and don't even think they should.
EDIT: A side note - the other big thing I learned only after getting close to befriending several faculty members (I'm generally likeable person, I find it easy to establish good relationships with people even above my status level). Initially I used to believe that a lot of our professors, like high school teachers, didn't know shit about what they're teaching, and that they totally sucked at doing it. But then one day I was chatting with a lecturer about her plans for next years of the course, and she got emotional and told me something important - that she doesn't like this subject, doesn't know much about it in the first place; it's not her domain of study and she simply was told to teach the class. This was an eye-opener, later confirmed - quite often that professor or PhD that comes across at stupid, miserable or annoying is simply forced to teach things he doesn't know or care about, and if you come and ask him about his research field instead, then he turns out to be quite a different person - smart, excited, and suddenly capable of teaching effectively. It's a big failure of university management that members of faculty have to teach things they have zero interest in.
My students all knew they could drop in whenever they wanted - it was the standard within our department so it was nothing unusual for our students. Even given this the vast majority never took advantage of this and I would usually only be visited by less than 5% of all students in a semester.
Edit. In response to you edit this is very common. I had to teach all sorts of subjects at very short notice (the worst I was only given 3 days notice). I taught many subjects where the last contact I had had with the area was when I was an undergraduate. Makes for very stressful teaching.
The author and I are in very different fields, but this article echoes a lot of the reasons why I left my tenure track position and ultimately ended up in industry.
The final nail in the coffin was an email sent out by some middle-administrator schmuck to all of the faculty, encouraging us to think over the winter break about how to "provide excellent customer service" to our students (or some such horse shit...this was several years ago, so I don't remember the exact words).
On an unrelated topic. Anyone else experience the inability to scroll properly on that page? I am on mobile but even requesting desktop version didn't fix. There are a few seconds of full scroll then it locks into a range. It's not even necessarily the beginning. One time it locked in some middle portion. Is this the fault of poor web design or is something wrong on my phone? Thanks!
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Curmudgeonism for over 2500 years and counting.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children...
Maybe if we had all had better humanities classes, we'd know that :)
In all seriousness though, this is not a liberal problem. Its just that universities just don't provide the cost to benefit ratio that they once did over alternate mediums of learning.
The classes that had valuable lectures were few and far between. Were I less motivated, I am sure I would have missed them.
a world run completely by engineers is no place i want to live.
i haven't decried any problem. the professor who wrote this piece is a bloviating whiner, but he also happens to be mostly right.
I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecturer would drone on about academicians' opinions on various doctrines, their historical context, and critique each doctrine from a logical perspective without any group discussion or talk of application. Students were then asked to regurgitate the professor's opinions in an essay. It was boring, and eventually I quit.
Imagine if all chemistry classes were just the classroom side of organic chemistry, with people sitting in rooms memorizing syntheses and electron pushing without ever even talking about stepping into a lab. Would anyone be surprised if those students then said they thought chemistry was boring?
...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it?
The whole idea of natural science of the important child of Western philosophy.
History of philosophy is a beautiful example how most of the purported "actionable guidelines" turn out quite hokey in a closer inspection.
Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works?
Why should we expect that the world is comprehensible from an armchair in a liberal-arts college?
You were of course paraphrasing Kant, and the very fact that the question remains, from the point of view of professional academic philosophy, unsettled hundreds of years later speaks very loudly about the inadequacy of armchair speculation as a guide to truth.
Who said that "humanities or the arts" is, or should be, the exclusive province of academics in the humanities and arts who've never thought about anything else? Self-referential meta-study always seemed a bit... depressingly pointless to me.
Personally, I want the world to be run by engineers, because they're the intersection of actually knowing stuff about reality (hard science) and using knowledge to fix problems (trades). I also want them to be connected to the human side of the world. Which is what naturally happens with smart people, unless you spend their childhood teaching them humanities are bullshit - which is what our schools excel at.
Out of people interested in humanities that I know, the best ones at it are engineers. On the other hand, I also meet people with liberal arts background who are keen to learn more about hard science and building stuff, and they are good at it. What we really need to fix is the perception of humanities, and we can do so by trimming all the accumulated bullshit.
We should do the same with some areas of harder fields, like medicine, while we're at it.
He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a colloquium:
You missed a good, interesting and thoughtful piece.
Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming even objectively false facts. I'd think half the professors at the humanities dept were politically naiver than me at the time, today I think I underestimated it. (Oh, yes, I got some nice lectures about geography at the biology dept - go figure.)
Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.
The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be.
Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek, literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them, this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind, network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.
Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners, lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty. It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu. The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness, and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is) a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life, but also somewhat irrelevant.
The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school. They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a computer), he'd think your nuts.
Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps of a role that no longer exists.
IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.
How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievements of the past"?
Lower classes were allowed to educate in some practical matters, like medicine, architecture, geography, etc. but studying liberal arts was forbidden by law (e.g. in ancient Rome), because there is nothing worse, from master's point of view that the slave with sense of entitlement, fighting for hers human and political rights.
Democracy arose about the time when humanities education became common enough - because it became hard for people to settle for less than the freedom.
Now, in 21st century we see opposite trend: people are encouraged to study STEM fields, completely ignoring history, literature and philosophy, which basically makes them highly skilled puppets. Which of course is welcomed by ruling class of our times.
I took a fiction writing class, public speaking and American government. Did you not have any electives like that?
The wrong perception of humanities being useless is so embedded into today's culture that it would take a cultural change to fix it. And even changing the culture within a university is prettymuch an impossible task for one person.
I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another. The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and content.
I don't think young people need to force themselves to regress to the antique stylings of almost all Universities, I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault.
He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.
Tool belt? Its nonsense to imagine googling a subject is as effective as learning it. That's twaddle, and any student who skates over their lack of education by faking papers from online resources is involved in a self-destructive sham. The paper is supposed to demonstrate a mastery of the subject. The paper is not the point. Producing a likely-looking one is not the point. Actually knowing the subject is the point.
A personal anecdote about the fact the OP now feels his standards have dropped (providing no numbers for this nor writing samples so we the readership can appraise the truth of this claim) is also ~not~ statistics.
As for rising test scores, unfortuantely for you and your "twaddle" most colleges maintain a factbook detailing past admissions data. Lets look at a couple of state schools from the worst part of the US shall we:
Clemson University: [1]
Engineering school 2014: ACT = 29 SAT_M = 674 SAT_V = 622
LiberalArts School 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 610 SAT_V = 604 Auburn University:[2]Entire university 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 591 SAT_V = 577
Francis Marion University[3]Entire Universtiy 2011: ACT = NaN SAT_M = 481 SAT_V 472
It appears you have to go down to at least the 76th ranked southern university[4] before the gains in test scores begin to look more like noise and even at that level there's a non 0 increase in performance. We're clearly not talking Standford here.Finally, the internet represents a tool because it allows for more mental bandwidth to be used on analysis over memory. No longer must you remember the exact quote to make an allusion, just the fact that it exists. This is then indexed to other supporting works a student can draw upon to further support their argument. Machines are excellent at recalling and storing information, however struggle with analysis (especially in the context of humanities). Students are more free than ever to peruse these lines of thinking, to demonstrate meaningful mastery you might say, now that names, dates, formatting, indexing, etc have been outsourced to the machine. Just for an example, when a blind blow hard comes and makes assertions comfortable his eloquence will make up for the lack of facts, the internet allows for the rapid synthesis of numbers to render the argument hilariously invalid. [1]http://www.clemson.edu/oirweb1/FB/factbook/minifactbook.cgi [2]https://oira.auburn.edu/ [3]http://www.fmarion.edu/about/factbook/article12711c7605652.h... [4]http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
EDIT: number formatting
Oh! They did! SAT was redesigned and rescaled in 2005 to 'reflect today's high school curriculum'. And that whole debacle over the written exam part. So I'm not sure how much we can learn from comparing scores before vs after that watershed year.
But ok accept that scores might be going up. The meat of the OP's rant was, college is no longer a place of learning but instead a place of 'earning'. The degree is what matters, and nobody is expected to actually learn, master, internalize subjects particularly in the liberal arts which are termed 'fluff'.
That is an argument worth examining. Notwithstanding the codgerness of the ranter, and his evident desperation at being ignored and shouted down for a decade.
Tell that to the people handing out the grades/scholarships/acceptance letters. Students today see assignments as hurdles, not opportunities for learning. At school today the first and most relevant question is always "But will this be on the exam?" If no, then the activity is dismissed as a waste of time.
If you want to learn something that _really_ matters you have to give it full attention. That means total focus, not "continuous partial attention", not facebooking on another tab. Whether you use an ipad, a book, or sit across from a table from a professor, learning really does require undivided attention-- when has this ever changed?
Soooo what courses were you taking, in which the non-theoretical material was 80% useless? When I think about applied computer-science subjects, I think of operating systems, embedded programming, circuit design with FPGAs, networking, program optimization, compilers... all eminently useful subjects.
But.
The internet is the new Forum. What the students do there isn't inherently valueless. So while declining academic standards are bad news for the academy, they're also not relevant to whether the students are able to participate in their culture and in civic debate. The problem is that, online courses notwithstanding, the humanities generally fail to take online fora seriously enough.
Can you code with one tab open to Facebook chat? Because the overwhelming consensus here on HN is that coding requires concentration and lack of interruptions. So does learning.
Technology doesn't change the basic biological processes of learning, and the fact is that technology has proven itself to be a fantastic failure as applied to education. Remember the "multi-media in every classroom" shit that failed in the 1990's? Same thing with iPads today. Research even shows that taking notes on a computer doesn't help you retain material as well as writing it on paper. Until we invent neural downlinks Matrix-style, educational technology peaked with the invention of the printed book 500 years ago.
Clearly, this is not going to apply in all or even most university classes where the level of the material being presented is quite high, but my point is that different things work for different people or even the same person at different times.
I graduated with almost a perfect GPA too, so at least in my case, yeah, I could code and learn at the same time.
I still can for some coding tasks professionally, but not for all. I'll have podcasts or Netflix while programming sometimes. When I really have to concentrate, though, yeah that's when the lyricless music gets put on.
This was TI-BASIC, though. I mean, it didn't get much more complicated than "PRINT", "INPUT", "IF THEN ELSE", "FOR", and "GOTO LABEL". I wasn't trying to figure out how to integrate a horribly documented third party API or anything.
Sometimes you're just doing grunt work that needs to get done, sometimes you're doing something you've done thirty times before. But sometimes you're figuring out one of the trickiest interlocking puzzle you've ever come across, and that's when I need to be at my best.
I agree with the rest of the points made though. Multitasking is generally difficult.
I find that my ability to divide attention is directly related to how much I'm enjoying the task at hand. At work I can barely keep focus, but when I get into the flow while working on a personal project, I can IRC, respond to e-mails, chat with few people on IM and browse HN while still doing solid work on the project, and without losing focus for a second.
(Funnily, I remember that I was turning off my IM for coding when I was a kid, but that was only because my computer wasn't very strong, and the compilation would take 3x as long with the communicator open.)
The days where book publishers vetted material are gone. Being in print is no guarantee of anything. The internet is full of every opinion and crackpot theory on the planet. The unguided student will find whatever information is most convenient at the time. Today more than ever students need to pay attention to someone with the experience to separate junk from the real science.
Not really. His point was that the act of learning hasn't really changed, and he's right. Undivided attention is still needed for most learning intensive tasks. I even see many posts here on HN about not being able to concentrate on business task X or Y because a person is surfing the net too often (I'm guilty of it too).
If you spread yourself too thin, you won't really learn much of anything.
"I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault."
Technology should be used to supplement learning and make it more efficient (IE: e-learning, etc). But it's not a complete replacement for it. There still are no shortcuts to success.
If a young person can't handle this, maybe they should go into the trades instead.
If you paid attention to university research, you'd know you're spouting things well-known to be wrong. Multitasking is detrimental to learning and knowledge.
There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to.
Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.
Multitasking is a myth, just check current literature (only book I remember now is http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Brain-Neuroscientists-Adol... but there are others)
From the comments:
The key to this article is the explicit statement that administrators are aligned with students against faculty. I work at a major university, and my department head has often sided with students without even contacting me to hear my take on the incident. I get an angry email from him saying that a student complained that I say hello (Really! I didn’t say hello!), or that I must give a student the opportunity to do an assignment after the deadline, because she said it was impossible to do it for technical problems. In fact, though, 21 students had completed it successfully, despite the alleged technical problems. Still, I was ordered to allow the student to complete the assignment late, for full credit. I was never consulted, or I would have mentioned that the student spends most of class on facebook, among other things. Another time, a student sent him an email saying that I “diminished her” in class. The head sent her a passage from the student handbook saying that students are to take it up with the professor. She refused, saying that made her “uncomfortable.” Instead, the department head insisted on visiting my class to observe my teaching. At the time, I said that he was spineless -- that she had told him to jump, and he did. That may or may not have been correct, but I’ve since realized that backbone had nothing to do with it. Instead, the head was actively searching for opportunities to baby students. It explains, for example why I was told to teach a student to use a calculator that I do not even require in my class.
I feel like this professors experience is fairly consistent with what I know. I had six friends who all went into academia and education. Within a year nearly all had exited the profession and only two remained. They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.
In America, if you are willing to pony up the cash, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot. Combine that with the common idea that you will not be able to find a job without a degree and you end up with a lot of people who aren't really in it for an education, but feel like they have to be there anyway.
[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-...
In my experience, they're not doing things to appease the students, they're doing things to appease the students' parents.
I read "Gettin’ bodied by Classics: the joys and challenges of public scholarship" (to whose HN discussion I linked above) and thought, wow, cool, who is Hermes Trismegistus and what's the reference? Hey, those articles on exclusion, inclusion, and the ideas of citizenship from antiquity to today sound really interesting. Wow, a Princeton classicist doing something I can understand! I'm going to look at buying his book, this guy is rad. (Halfway through morning coffee, so excuse the shallowness of the thoughts.)
I read this OP and started rolling my eyes again. Right, right, kids these days, telling kids to think about their Halloween costumes is so PC (telling kids to think! can't have that! wait, next paragraph he wants kids to think, just about something else). As I continued to read, I realized why we have such different experiences in part: I teach math. I can see that my students did learn something this semester. Now most of them can discuss geometric Brownian motion. That's cool. As the author here says,
Many of the engineers who were painted purple during frosh week are now running the institutions where we teach. And they weren’t kidding when they were pissing on our guitars in the quad. It was a promissory note on the future — a future they could feel in their bones belonged to them, not us.
I'm one of them -- the heathen, uneducated STEM people! If I call his thoughts about Camus "fluff" he no longer has any defense! Needing to be polite in his response renders him... gosh, impotent? in the face of such trenchant criticism. Hm.
Things are different on the STEM side of campus than the classics side. Many on that side say that they're terrified of their students (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) but it seems to me that these folks are terrified of discussion -- and the other thing to note is that every single one of them brings up the fear of losing their job over a discussion. It's curious, in one of the only professions in the world with tenure. Why are all these guys afraid of losing their job for challenging the PC SJW orthodoxy or whatever? For professors with tenure, this is a fear entirely unsupported by statistics. The only case even marginally close is when Salaita had a job offer withdrawn because of his views on Israel and Palestine, and I think he was on what would be stereotyped as the PC side at the moment. So, tenure gives golden handcuffs -- you can't move institutions -- but you'll still have your job even if you're a grump.
Ok, so why are these profs on the liberal arts side scared? Because of the adjunctivization of higher ed -- no tenure for most (including me). One great discussion here: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identi... Because of the corporatization of higher ed: more discussion here. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/college... Because the STEM and business profs are "winning," as the OP said. Because he can't see his own relevance anymore, unlike Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Because he can't connect with his students anymore.
It's hilarious that these problems are so acutely felt wh...
I did all that after I dropped out of college and the ugliness of the work world drove me to cultivate my inner garden. I am exponentially smarter now than I ever was in school. I am a firm believer in the sentiment behind the phrase "Never let your schooling get in the way of your education."
The author believes in a fiction that never existed. Professors have always had to fight to earn the attention of students, iPhones weren't the only competitors. What's happened is that reality has gotten so naked that even the absurdly idealistic professors have had to acknowledge it. They were the only ones who ever really believed it. I feel like even parents, for awhile now, pay lip service to the value of schooling without actually believing in it.
Education is not, and never was, what academia seems to think it is.
Those "things" are probably different for everyone but, for me, I wish I had them from the beginning.
It is perhaps the case that students read less and so write worse than they did once. But having worked as a copy editor long ago, I can tell you that a lot of Ph.D.s wrote pretty damn badly before most of HN was born. (OK, Ph.D.s in the social sciences and E.D.s are mostly what I'm thinking of.)
And "Finally, the very act of employing, empowering, and often elevating such people [term employees] denigrates real scholars and scholarship by definition." I haven't heard of a lot of empowered adjuncts. And if that adjunct happens to have what it takes to teach freshman composition or an introductory survey course, I don't see the denigration. As for real scholarship, well, not everything published in a refereed journal is more than formally scholarship. One could, for example, compile an entertaining anthology of things that writers and highly qualified critics have said about Proceedings of the Modern Language Association.
Finally, what does a parent expect who sends a child off to school unable to write well and disinclined to read? It does seem to be a premise of US education that if you keep people in a classroom setting long enough then something will happen. But why should parents believe that?
I've not taught quite as long as you, but I'll add that I like to tell students that life is going to be their ultimate punishment or reward: If they don't learn how to read and write (I teach English), they'll be the ones who suffer. Not me.
Some people of course don't learn anything and are fine. Many however don't learn anything and aren't fine.
As an interesting linguistic note: the liberal arts were conceived of as the arts for free men; rather then the techincal things - technicalities - which were to be done by slaves. A careful reading of michaelochurch's polemics should suggest to you that this has not changed in substance in the general case.
No computer science will save you from someone who can out-rhetoric you.
Rhetoric isn't the path to truth, but it can sure help with power.
Here it is online: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html
Edit: added link to 'Gorgias'.
- Though I found the discussion overtly long (yay my non-existent attention span), it's surprisingly easy to read; I expected ancient Greek texts to be much more difficult in terms of language and style.
- All the whining I see and do about manipulators, liars, salesmen and contemporary advertising industry, Plato has described thousands of years ago. It's like, fuck, why do I bother rediscovering and repeating what ancient philosophers knew all along, and why the society doesn't seem to be learning from those lessons?
- I should have learned this already, but I'm still amazed every time I read an old text describing exactly the same problems we have in the contemporary world. Here's me thinking they are unique to our age, but apparently King Solomon is right, and there truly is nothing new under the Sun, at least in human relations - we keep repeating the same patterns, generation after generation.
- I guess I'm starting to appreciate the stated reasons for classic education.
Thank you for linking to the text.
Not that you're wrong, but TFA is talking about Canada:
> I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions.
which I find interesting.
I am not sure how distant the third and fourth tier Canadian schools are from the US paradigm, or how independent they feel. I'd guess they follow the lead of American universities pretty closely.
I am super comfortable saying that many UK academics have been lamenting the same thing for the past decade and more; I used to belong to an online academic community with many UK members (also in the Classics) in the 2004-2008 timeframe where the song was being sung with a different verse (but same chorus). If the UK and the US are singing a song; Canada, Australia, and the rest of the English speaking world aren't going to be far behind.
Particularly in the Anglophone world (I can't speak to the others, I am sorry), ideas are shared very fast, and often the US is granted leadership, whether it should be or not. Having been deeply involved in the US university system, I would regard a great deal of the modern innovations in the universities to be a tremendous waste of non-intellectual effort, in many cases for the purposes of boosting the support staff (Gotta embiggen the headcount kingdom) or for comforting the tender feelings of immature children.
I don't mean to lay all the blame on the universities; and none of the blame should lay on the student's shoulders; those who are older and have the reins of power have driven the cart to the ditch. That the load of the cart fell in is not the fault of the load, but the driver. A great deal of blame sits squarely on the United States electorate's shoulders; a non-trivial portion sits on the k-12 policymaker's shoulders; and the rest of it can be shuffled off to the flow of history, parents, the media, and the usual human condition.
This reeks of his attempting to separate culture into low and high, and no, he shouldn't have to explain himself. Oh really?
Computer science has a long border with linguistics. Somewhere on the other side of that border is rhetoric - the Liberal Art - so computer science is a roundabout way there.
This completely ignores the two most significant intellectual innovations - that of Claude Shannon, which revolutionized physics itself and of Godel, who diagonalized logic itself ( at least the Peano calculus ). These represent towering intellectual achievements unlike any other in history.
Trying to map classical society onto modern society is an exercise in futility. Classicals were bloody, venal, voracious and cruel. Our engineers, whether they're called that or not, made the difference. We live after the Scots Enlightenment, in which Man was freed from a destiny as a draft animal with thumbs.
As an exposition of the phenomenon in the article, I much prefer "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
I personally agree. University should be more about learning and becoming better thinkers than simply learning a few facts and getting a piece of paper.
Pretty much none of the students I interact with care about 'learning', or any form of critical thinking. They want the profs to teach them a few facts, then base the test on those few facts. They optimize for this so they can get their A, then get the hell out.
There are still plenty of builders, protesters, and politicians, but it's just the drone of first world problems silences them.
PS: As to learners, you don't need to speak to your professors if you want to learn something. So, professors are going to hear more from people about there grades than the actual subject.
All I had to do was advertise some research opportunities and 10+ students were interested in doing work for no pay and no credit outside of class. Sure, they have no idea what they're doing -- but they know they want to be doing something interesting, and they took the initiative to follow up with me. What is so special about my students? They're pretty career focused, and not in a "learning-for-learning's-sake" kind of field. And yet they want to use what they learn in class to do meaningful analysis on extracurricular topics.
Which schools are those? As a homeschooling parent, who emphasizes to my children that they should THINK, I would definitely encourage my children to apply to schools (public or private) that are genuinely nerdy and difficult. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions of good colleges and universities like that.
Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's left at schools like these are the masochists who actually want to be challenged academically and surrounded by peers at or above their intellectual level.
I'd say Chicago is the paradigm case, but I'm biased :). One of its best features is an extraordinarily large and rigorous general ed requirement ("the Core") which means even a computer science student gets a substantial liberal arts education. There are paths through the Core with a higher tolerance for bullshit, but they're frowned upon. I took the more philosophy-leaning sequences and loved them. Lots of emphasis on close reading, lucid discussion, critical analysis, and clear argumentative writing. It has also been my experience that students merely looking to check the "college" box with minimal effort are not mainstream and don't tend to succeed.
The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't: they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only secondarily where undergraduates learn things.
The change to make universities, as a system, be about people who specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better thinkers can go to a different sort of institution.
Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a lot for people who care about learning.
I think both approaches are fine; what messes things up is the dissociative identity disorder the university suffers from. On one hand, it is expected to carry great traditions of scholarship. On the other, economic incentives create strong pressure to do vocational training instead. If we could split it (back) into two separate institutions, things would be much better.
The most interesting aspect of the exercise was the students were drawn pretty evenly from across the performance spectrum. There were students who got A's in everything, but there were also a number who we're just scraping through the degree. I was quite surprised at which students came.
That is, if anyone would tell me this is a thing. I always thought that office hours are mostly for a) helping people who didn't understand some part of a lecture, and b) dealing with formal stuff - grades, extensions, absences, etc. It was pointed out to me just around the time I was finishing my education that I could have just come to talk about the subject matter, and a lot of the staff would be more than happy to tell me about it. This is one of my two biggest regrets from the university - that I didn't come to professors and asked them, only limiting myself to occasional after-lecture chat.
(The other one being that I completely ignored party life and thus didn't take the chance to meet and befriend many smart people studying various sciences and arts.)
I had always wished that we could have a more informal learning process where the professor’s job is to guide the student through the subject, but this is not really compatible with the industrial-scale higher education system we have today. In the end you feel you have accomplished something if at least a few students have learned something.
On a bit of a rant at no stage in your performance evaluation as a professor are you ever judged on what your students learned. No effort is made by the university to measure how effective your teaching is or if your students have gaining anything from the course. Entertain the students and hand out A’s like confetti and the university is happy.
The experience of primary and secondary education I had has taught me that teachers generally are not that accessible, and only few of them know stuff outside curriculum. It's not that they don't want students to come to them, but it was never encouraged. Managing their opinion of you, on the other hand, was paramount to getting by, especially if you're not their favourite pupil who gets straight As on all tests. You also didn't want to be seen in your class as lickspittle (yay the dysfunctional world of schoos). I carried that attitude with me to the university, and didn't realize until it was too late that situation is different now - that those (still intimidating) professors and PhDs are really willing to share their knowledge, and they're often national, or even world-class experts in their particular domains.
Sometimes what a young person needs is an explicit permission and reassurance - that yes, they can stop by to chat about things. Like the article said - the means and opportunities are there. People are just not using them, and don't even think they should.
EDIT: A side note - the other big thing I learned only after getting close to befriending several faculty members (I'm generally likeable person, I find it easy to establish good relationships with people even above my status level). Initially I used to believe that a lot of our professors, like high school teachers, didn't know shit about what they're teaching, and that they totally sucked at doing it. But then one day I was chatting with a lecturer about her plans for next years of the course, and she got emotional and told me something important - that she doesn't like this subject, doesn't know much about it in the first place; it's not her domain of study and she simply was told to teach the class. This was an eye-opener, later confirmed - quite often that professor or PhD that comes across at stupid, miserable or annoying is simply forced to teach things he doesn't know or care about, and if you come and ask him about his research field instead, then he turns out to be quite a different person - smart, excited, and suddenly capable of teaching effectively. It's a big failure of university management that members of faculty have to teach things they have zero interest in.
Edit. In response to you edit this is very common. I had to teach all sorts of subjects at very short notice (the worst I was only given 3 days notice). I taught many subjects where the last contact I had had with the area was when I was an undergraduate. Makes for very stressful teaching.
The final nail in the coffin was an email sent out by some middle-administrator schmuck to all of the faculty, encouraging us to think over the winter break about how to "provide excellent customer service" to our students (or some such horse shit...this was several years ago, so I don't remember the exact words).