digital digs

robot graders, new aesthetic, and the end of the close reading industry

This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education.

If you aren't familiar with new aesthetic, the links above provide some starting places, particularly the first one, which takes you to James Bridle's tumblr collection of all things NA. Bridle coined the term and has been collecting these examples ever since. As I understand it, the basic concept of NA is an effort to understand the aesthetic processes of digital technologies: how do digital objects respond to the world they sense? And perhaps more to the point, how does our growing human sensitivity to this aesthetic dimension shape our own design and artistic practices? Given this, one can understand Bogost's interest and also his response that NA "needs to get weirder." However I am also interested in what Bridle says at the end of his SXSW talk.

the network is not a space (notional, cyber or otherwise) and it’s not time (while it is embedded in it at an odd angle) it is some other kind of dimension entirely.

BUT meaning is emergent in the network, it is the apophatic silence at the heart of everything, that-which-can-be-pointed-to. And that is what the New Aesthetic, in part, is an attempt to do, maybe, possibly, contingently, to point at these things and go but what does it mean?

Perhaps it is a "spime." Or perhaps this is Bridle's attempt to express an OOO-like insight into the withdrawn nature of objects. Maybe both. In any case, NA reads to me as another manifestation of a speculative realist sensibility, in this case one that comes out of the design houses of London rather than humanities departments and academic blogs. 

So what does this have to do with grading, digital humanities, and close reading? Bridle offers an answer to the first item here, where he links to this Inside Higher Ed article about robot grading as yet another example of NA. And why not? If facial recognition, satellite imagery and splinter camouflage are NA, why not the responses evoked in machines by reading student papers? Computerized grading systems rely upon the relatively consistency in the way in which essays are scored. The qualities the software identifies may not be the same the qualities humans identify but as long as the score that is produced is satisfactory then it doesn't really matter how the sausage gets made (or at least that's the premise). Here's a bit from that article:

AES software has not yet been able to replicate human intuition when it comes to identifying creativity. But while fostering original, nuanced expression is a good goal for a creative writing instructor, many instructors might settle for an easier way to make sure their students know how to write direct, effective sentences and paragraphs.

“If you go to a business school or an engineering school, they’re not looking for creative writers,” Shermis says. “They’re looking for people who can communicate ideas. And that’s what the technology is best at” evaluating.

Shermis is the dean of education at Akron university and a lead researcher on this project. I think that last line is telling: technology is best at evaluating people who can communicate ideas. It is a classic cybernetic perspective, I would think. Communication can be mathematically described and evaluated. No creativity is require for writing "direct, effective sentences and paragraphs." If this is the case, then why not have the machines also write the papers? If they can crunch the data, why don't computers write their own business analysis reports? Why don't they write their own technical documentation? From my perspective there's no doubt that computers can write, that they can read, and that they can have responses to texts. And while computers may not have the same aesthetic responses as humans that doesn't mean they can't identify creativity.

Shermis' conceptual error is the classic modern one. Of course he doesn't mean to say that business majors or engineering majors don't need to be creative in some fashion. He doesn't mean to suggest that his school is seeking to cultivate dull, unimaginative students. He just separates "creative writers" from creative people so that the students have creative ideas but communicate them in an "uncreative," dull, mechanical, machinelike way where the fact that computers and people have different ideas about creativity doesn't matter. 

Coming at this from a different direction, Cathy Davidson offers an explanation for why this entire approach is wrong-headed. And from an NA/OOO viewpoint, we might say that Davidson explains why an approach like Shermis' recognizes something that is happening but draws the wrong conclusions. She writes

If everything about the Industrial Revolution, Taylorism ("scientific labor management") and mass compulsory education (what I call "scientific learning management") is designed to rejigger humanity's attention to the needs of mass production, there is no question that since 1993 or so we've had a huge spanner thrown into the industrial works.  But to return us to the industrial way of paying attention neither addresses the forms of attention we need to succeed in the digital age nor does it return us to a mindful, meditative state.   It simply reinforces an increasingly irrelevant form of learned attention.

That is, modern education was/is about factory work, about transforming people to meet the demands of interfacing with particular kinds of machines in a particular workflow. The focus on a specific kind of attention results from those demands. 

What we ought to learn from NA is that while this particular aesthetic may be "new" right now, what is not new is the way that objects have always participated in our aesthetics. Industrialized attention, the kind where you watch widgets coming down the conveyor belt, is a trained aesthetic sensibility. In the composition classroom, the widgets on the belt are student papers. If computers can read like people it's because we have trained people to read like computers. The real question we should be asking ourselves is why are we working in this widget factory? And FYC essays are perhaps the best real world instantiation of the widget, the fictional product, produced merely as a generic example of production. They never leave the warehouse, never get shipped to market, and are never used for anything except test runs on the factory floor. 

I'm interested in how machines read, but I'm not interested in their ability to mimic the dullest responses that humans can generate. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that computers (and other objects) participate in the aesthetic experiences of composition in ways that are "creative" rather than explicitly ignoring creativity. Rather than think of writing as a process where students produce widgets that can pass factory inspection (by robots or humans), maybe we can take up Davidson's suggestion, which might be read here as an invitation to develop new aesthetic relationships.

And this brings me finally to DH and Ted Underwood. Underwood suggests that neither the study of digital objects nor the use of digital technologies to conduct analysis will transform the humanities, which will prefer to remain "as is." Here is an extended bit from a reply he makes to comments:

If DH helped the humanities embrace the concept of “practice” wholeheartedly, we could join forces with librarians and start teaching students an active kind of critical literacy that included a bit of hacktivism and a dash of statistics along with history, critical theory, and rhetoric. That’s probably what we need in the 21st century.

Five months ago I was more sanguine about that happening. I’m feeling skeptical now because I have a growing awareness that most humanists may not want the future we’re both envisioning. But I’m not pessimistic about the big picture; I’m just beginning to think that the energy you describe may end up located mostly in disciplinary interstices instead of being located “in” the humanities. Hope I’m wrong, though; I would rather live in your future!

To be fair to my colleagues, I have to add that the real question may be this: What do English majors want? Some of the stuff we’re talking about is hard. If English majors wanted to take informatics, they would. Maybe they prefer to sit in a circle, discussing Heart of Darkness. And the way our system is structured, there are strong incentives to give students what they prefer.

I very much agree with Underwood here, and I think his vision of the 21st century is similar to Davidson's. I also share his skepticism. At this same time, I think the "close reading" model that dominates English and is exemplified here in the example of Conrad is one that is ultimately linked with computerized grading and industrial modes of attention. That is not to suggest that in the future we will not need to pay close attention to things. However it is an error to conflate paying attention with the specific industrial modes of attention that dominated the last century. While the current flavors of DH will change and perhaps disappear (or at least become unrecognizable), I believe they are part of this larger aesthetic and rhetorical shift that will demand a different response to humanistic objects. Think about this way. In the 19th century, literature was mostly read for style, as a way to help students develop their own oratorical techniques. That seems strange and distant, almost impossible. Someday in this century, we will view close reading in an analogous manner. And while I understand Underwood's gesture to be fair to his colleagues, I don't think that's the real question. Maybe English majors want to do close reading of Conrad, but there are far fewer such people each year it seems. 

What we require is a new aesthetic sensibility to drive our study of these objects.

 

Adjuncts, MLA, and Rhetoric

There's been a little back and forth on the issue of non-tenure track faculty and Michael Berube's (MLA President) recent statements. First of all, let me say that I fully support Berube's efforts to improve adjunct working conditions (specifically pay). Who wouldn't? Second, I will also note that as composition director at UB, I employ a number of adjuncts, a couple are on annual salaries (which are ok but not great) but most are on a per course basis ($2500, which is a far cry from the standard Berube states, though adjuncts do get benefits). Many of the adjuncts are graduate students past their 5-year TA-ships, so they are not permanent. However I do have a handful of effectively permanent instructors, most of whom I am sure would prefer to have more permanent, better-paying positions.

The issue that Steve Krause brings up has to do with the relationship between MLA and rhetoricians. This would appear to be a non-sequitur until one realizes that the vast majority of adjunct-taught courses in English are in first-year composition. As such, there is a valid point to be explored here. Berube also makes a valid point in noting that MLA makes no explict statements regarding rhetoricians. In response to Krause he writes:

I know there are snotty literature professors out there, absurdly invested in their place in the pecking order, just as there are rhet/comp people with chips on their shoulders, as you say. I am well aware of the historic tensions between teachers of literature and teachers of rhetoric, and of the fact that at some universities those tensions have resulted in departmental divorce. But the fact that snotty literature professors exist does not demonstrate that the MLA holds rhet/comp in some kind of blanket institutional contempt.

I think there's a fair amount of territory between "snotty literature professors" and "blanket institutional contempt," where the results are the institutional conditions we typically see today. So what are those conditions?

1. Let's ask a "big data" question. Look at every English BA at an accredited four-year US institution. How many of those degrees include required courses in rhetoric? How many even have elective rhetoric courses? I think the answer to that question will tell you generally what role literary studies professors believe rhetoric should play in an English department.
2. Now look at these same institutions and look at the ones that require composition. Here we could look at the percentage of composition courses taught by literary studies faculty and/or the percentage of their courseload that composition represents. I will hypothesize that the percentage is low (<10% of workload nationally) and that it is lower than it was 20 years ago. My hypothesis is strictly based on anecdotal evidence though.
3. Let's also consider graduate programs. How common is a required course in rhetoric at the graduate level? Here, I bet that such courses are fairly common, if one includes the typical composition practicum course that TAs are required to take. So rhetoric is largely associated teaching, and specifically with teaching a course that literary scholars do not commonly teach.

But this is all old news, right? Still it's worth remembering lest we think this is just a matter of "snotty professors." There is a very clear institutional character to these relations.

MLA is just part of that system. While I have zero interest in assigning blame, I do think that recognizing these conditions will be important in MLA's efforts to address adjunct labor in English. I agree that it may be the "snotty professor" who holds rhetoric in contempt, and I would say that can go both ways these days as there is still a fair degree of antipathy that has been intensified in recent years as literature and rhetoric become increasingly specialized (hyper-specialized I would say) with the result of there being less overlap. My personal sense is that the typical literature professor recognizes rhetoric as a valid field of study, generally equivalent with other humanities, but does not view rhetoric as an integral part of English. That is, the typical literature professor views English as equivalent with literary studies: a claim that I am confident would be borne out by the representation of the field in curriculum. 

An English profession that viewed rhetoric and writing as an integral part of its disciplinary work would view composition as foundational. It would have departments with multiple faculty who view writing as central to their scholarly work. This would impact the role of writing instructors in the program who would be less likely to see themselves as doing work that is consider undesirable, non-intellectual, and/or disconnected from the "real" department. IF you had a department like that, maybe it would be more inclined to view NTT faculty as colleagues. Perhaps there wouldn't be a second-class status that implies "you're allowed to teach writing, b/c that requires minimal qualifications, but you aren't permitted to teach the 'real' curriculum."

Now how that would connect to increased pay is a little unclear. However I think the argument would be that if/when English comes to value writing it will insist on attracting the most qualified instructors. In a world of limited resources however, this means putting department resources and institutional clout to work in the name of writing. 

I will say that in the case of my own department, that it has recently put its weight behind writing instruction, including working hard to establish a writing center on our campus. Now I realize one could say that we should have had a writing center 20 years ago, but that's not what matters today. What matters today is that there has been a positive shift in the way writing is viewed. I am hopeful that it is part of a process that will lead toward a sustainable writing curriculum where instructors are well-compensated and all faculty (not just English but across the campus) take up an active investment in student writing.

what does an English phd mean? And how long should it take?

There was extensive discussion at MLA this year (and, following that, quite a thread of posts on the WPA list, and I imagine elsewhere) on the subject of doctoral programs. Inside Higher Ed reports on the MLA business here and here. These are not new debates. However I think they are increasingly propelled by job market prospects and the uncertain future of the humanities. They are also connected to discussions regarding #alt-ac (alternative academic) careers and digital dissertations. That is to say these discussions include the fact that at least some doctoral students are seeking nontraditional careers off the tenure track and others wish to produce nontraditional dissertations. 

For me, the central issue is this statistic from an NSF report that indicates humanities students spend a median of 9 years of registered time to degree, which is "time in graduate school less reported periods of nonenrollment." This has increased slowly but steadily from 1978, when it was 7.5 years. I believe that's a 20% increase over the last 30 years or so. I'm not sure what the cause of this increase has been. Perhaps there are economic pressures that cause students to take longer (however here we are talking about registered time). Maybe it is the "reading problem," that my colleague Derek Mueller discussed in his dissertation: the proliferation of scholarship means one is required to read more before writing.

I don't know. 

Typically, though, I believe doctoral students enter their "ABD" phase after three years. That would mean the median time spent writing a dissertation is six years. To put this in perspective, a 300-page, 90,000 word dissertation, written over 5 years, would require writing about 50 words per day. Obviously it's not possible to write that slowly. I would suggest that, if one is in fact writing, then it is difficult to write less than 2500 words per week, which would suggest you could write this sucker in 36 weeks. That is why I tell graduate students that it isn't writing the dissertation that takes a long time; it's the not-writing the dissertation that is so time-consuming.

So this is what I am confused by. The average graduate student will have spent 3 years (one as a master's student and two as a doctoral student) taking coursework. S/he will then spend another year devoted solely to reading something like 75 books (or the equivalent in articles) in preparation for exams. This, of course, mentions nothing of the time spent getting a BA in English. However, despite having taken over 30 English courses in college and spent a year reading books in narrow preparation for an exam, the now ABD doctoral candidate spends an additional 3 years or more doing research to prepare for writing a dissertation, which then takes another 2-3 years to actually write???

I want to be clear. This is not meant in any way as a criticism of the doctoral students. This is a systemic, disciplinary problem. What it says to me is that everything that a student does enroute to becoming ABD leaves her totally unprepared to write the dissertation. One effectively starts from scratch. I don't actually believe that is the case. Instead, I think the problem is more likely a rhetorical-compositional one. First, I'm not sure that the writing and research done in graduate courses connects clearly enough with the rhetorical challenges of researching and writing dissertation chapters. As such, graduate students find themselves reinventing their writing practices once they hit the ABD level. Second, I think that we need to have a frank discussion as a discipline about the rhetorical purpose of a dissertation in relation to the larger purpose of a doctoral degree.

Let's look at this problem backwards and say that we wanted to move the median to 5 years (at MLA the objective was to cut time to degree in half). So we still have three years of coursework and exam prep. As such, we can start by defining the dissertation as "the text you can reasonably produce in 2 years." What does this mean? Well (and perhaps this is a little ideal) I imagine the following:

• a student enters a program with a general idea of what she wants to study (e.g. 19th cent. Amer. Lit or Digital Rhetoric)
• she takes a dozen classes in two years that are in that area, in adjacent areas, and introduce her to the primary methods and theories of her field
• she writes a dozen seminar papers and hopefully 2 or 3 of them will have the potential to be developed into dissertation chapters
• she then spends a year reading more narrowly in her field, which hopefully provides her with 80% of the research she needs to write her dissertation

Ok, now we're ready to write the dissertation in 24 months. In the first six months, she revises those 2-3 seminar papers into dissertation chapters and gets feedback on them. Then she sits down and figures out whatever chapters have to go around them. Let's say we are going to write an additional five chapters, each about 30 pages. Well, you've been writing 3 seminar papers every semester, right, so we'll write a chapter a month. We're now 11 total months into the dissertation and we have 7-8 chapters and 200+ pages. We've got a year to revise these and write the introduction and conclusion. 

As far as brute force work goes, that's quite manageable. The tough part is the rhetorical challenge of conceiving of a book-length project. It can't just be a bunch of seminar papers juxtaposed to one another. It ain't an essay collection. Conceiving of a book-length project isn't actually hard, unless you've never done it before. The cognitive problem that ABD students face isn't so different from the one FYC students face when they are told they need to write their first 10-page research paper (gasp!) or the one seniors face in writing their capstone essay in an English class or the ones MA students face writing their first seminar paper or their thesis. 

As graduate faculty, we might mitigate this obstacle by helping PHD students to understand the rhetorical challenges of the book/dissertation (and they are different things) as we are going along in coursework. I would imagine there are any number of ways to do this. My inventive strategy has always been to stick things together and see what problems/questions they generate. That's how I wrote my dissertation in six months. I took a couple seminar papers that I liked, stuck them together and then wrote my dissertation in the space they created. In some respects, the less well the papers go together the better the result. So I had a paper that was a Deleuzian analysis of critical pedagogy, another that was on Ulmerian/Derridean invention strategies, and a third that addressed death and simulation using Baudrillard and Blanchot. I tossed in some technology questions along the way, and *poof.* I'm not saying it was the greatest dissertation of all time, but it got the job done. 

And that's another point. The diss isn't an end so much as it is a beginning. To me it's more about creating velocity into a future career than it is about working some subject (and somebody) to scholarly death. But regardless of how one wants to define it or go about it, it just doesn't make sense to me that it should take six years.

the philosophical technologist; the technological philosopher

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, by Damon Horowitz, Google's in-house philosopher, has been making the rounds. I find Horowitz makes his key point here:

The technology issues facing us today—issues of identity, communication, privacy, regulation—require a humanistic perspective if we are to deal with them adequately. If you actually care about one of those topics—if you want to do something more serious about it than swap idle opinions over dinner—you can. And, I would venture, you must. Who else is going to take responsibility for getting it right?

I see a humanities degree as nothing less than a rite of passage to intellectual adulthood. A way of evolving from a sophomoric wonderer and critic into a rounded, open, and engaged intellectual citizen. When you are no longer engaged only in optimizing your products—and you let go of the technotopian view—your world becomes larger, richer, more mysterious, more inviting. More human.

Horowitz tracks his own journey from being a successful technologist to someone who became dissatisfied with his ability to address the challenges he had set for himself. His humanities graduate education, he argues, became invaluable in exploring these deeper philosophical questions in a way his previous education could not. Perhaps Horowitz presents an overly romantic vision of the humanities. He acknowledges this to some degree, though I believe he is sincere in his accounting of the value his education has been to him. And no doubt, his personal, idiosyncratic journey from technology to philosophy may not be a blueprint for others to follow. I don't think he's asking anyone to take his life as a model.

What is most interesting (and sadly telling) are the comments that follow the article in which various humanists take all manner of offense to Horowitz's suggestion that the humanities was actually useful for him as a technologist and might be valuable to other technologists as well. I'll just offer the first response as indicative of what generally follows in the 71 comments (at this moment) that follow:

While I appreciate a well-written defense of the value of the humanities, I resent that it takes someone who has a degree in a "more valuable" discipline to help/allow us to be taken seriously. Please don't take this personally, but it's frustrating that people in tech or business are taken more seriously when they talk about the value of the humanities than those of us who are "just" humanists.

Yes, heaven forbid that someone not in the humanities might find our work valuable. Certainly no humanists would ever be so rude as to find value in the sciences or in business or among technologists. The comments range from refuting Horowitz's suggestion that the humanities could be of any use to claiming injury from the suggestion that someone with a humanities phd might do something other than become an academic. Keep in mind that most of these comments appear to come from academics in the humanities. 

Admitedly, it is an unfortunately surprising notion to most humanists that the humanities might serve as an intellectual means to address the challenges, problems, and opportunities that humans encounter in their lived experience. If, as the last century has suggested, humanists wish to be viewed like the sciences, conducting "pure research," then maybe we need "applied humanities." While I would be happy to nominate rhetoric as applied humanities, I'm not sure if or how rhetoric would make any use of "pure" humanities research, because in the humanities not only is research done without regard to how or if it might be applied, it is often done with a resolute insistence that it has and can have no application or value. 

hmmm....

In any case, the sad little comment stream on this article tells you all you need to know about what is wrong with the humanities. In my view, of all the arenas of academic thought, the humanities most of all needs to be in/of the world. Maybe using the humanities to address technological problems isn't for everyone. Obviously not everyone is going to be an in-house philosopher at Google. But why should we be angry or even skeptical about the notion that the humanities might be of value to such people?

rhetoricians in the space-time of war

My colleague and friend, Mike Edwards, a faculty member at West Point, is now blogging from Kabul, where he is beginning a six-month stint helping to develop language and literacy education there. First and foremost, I wish him a safe journey and look forward to the opportunity to buy him a drink the next time our paths cross. In his most recent post, he describes getting the project underway:

the project our American mentor team has taken on feels enormous and a little bit diffuse, with undefined boundaries or limits beyond that of the departure of the American mentor presence from this extraordinarily young institution of higher education in less than three years, and a philosophy that can mostly be summed up as an orientation toward helping the Afghans draw together and perform all these administrative and curricular and pedagogical tasks, literally inventing the university in its entirety as their own, on their own. I still struggle to get my head around how big a project this is and how many moving parts it has and how swiftly and carefully we have to move. 

Put bluntly, I don't envy the challenge before him. When I think about inventing the university, the first thing is that the modern university as we know it is a Western development, specifically from 19th century Germany. The university was part of the modern nation building of Germany and, importantly, it was developed in response to the cultural impact of losing to Napoleon. Arguably, Afghanistan faces a similar cultural and national crisis. It is important to add that there are Muslim institutions of higher learning that date to the 10th century as well as Persian and Indian traditions. So the university does not necessarily mean "Western." That said, one imagines this particular university as participating in the democratic, nation-building enterprise that is part of the larger US mission there.

In the context of all of this, I was thinking about the important role of rhetoric (and ethics). One might argue that Western-style rhetoric is a foundation of a Western-style democracy (and indeed that the failures of our own democracy are at least partly a reflection of the failure of 20th-century rhetorical education). Admittedly, it is difficult to know if the relationship is necessary or not, but certainly the long tradition of rhetoric is present in the founding documents of American government. We might say that our government struggles to be the democracy it imagined itself to be because 1) many citizens (and politicians) have abandoned a civic, democratic rhetoric in favor of a fundamentalist, biblically-inspired hermeneutic (which, ironically, is what our founding fathers were trying to avoid) and 2) a related failure of ethics in favor of a magical faith in capitalism. It's not hard to imagine that Afghanistan will face similar challenges in relation to religion and global economics. We've seen these two forces pitted against each other at least since Benjamin Barber wrote "Jihad vs. McWorld" in 1992. In this light, it may be that a rhetorical education will be a factor in the fate of democracy in Afghanistan. 

In any case, I've been thinking about this in the context of last night's State of the Union. Once again, Obama made the case for the importance of education.... in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I don't disagree. We need to improve in STEM education. And these fields will be important in improving our economy and addressing many of the problems we face as a planet. At the same time, I can't help but think that many of the problems we have created have been the result of a failure of rhetoric and ethics and that our continuing disregard for that fact means that we can expect future problems of the same kinds.

The meltdown of our economy wasn't caused by a technoscientific deficit, nor was it a result of a mathematical error. It was fundamentally an ethical problem. And by that I do not simply mean that people on Wall St were greedy, though that's part of it. There was a failure to govern, both on the part of the government and on our part as citizens. If we want to prevent future failures of this kind, it isn't enough to educate a generation of scientifically literate students. Similarly, the crippling stagnation of American politics won't be solved by streamlining technologies or by electing politicians with a stronger background in science. In my view, a central element of rhetoric is the art of communicating and working with people with whom you disagree. In Washington, we can agree that the government's responsibility is to govern. Maybe that's all we agree on and obviously we disagree about the form that governing should take. Nevertheless, we need to work together to do that governing. Rhetoric is the mechanism by which that is accomplished.  

Unfortunately, few Americans, even few, well-educated Americans, have much of an understanding of rhetoric. In America, changing one's mind is considered... what? Weak? Inappropriate? Unmanly? UnAmerican? We aren't allowed to be persuaded. In fact, in political discourse it even seems to be inappropriate to listen to a disenting opinion. It's not hard to extrapolate the kinds of problems that might result. Of course, money talks. Maybe an education in rhetoric and ethics, along with one in math and science, might help Americans realize why our current situation is untenable. So if we can figure out how to create a democracy in Afghanistan then maybe we can learn from that lesson how to create one here as well.

critical thinking and the mythologies of higher education

I promise to get back to the issues of object-oriented ethics in my next post, when I am home and have books nearby. Today I am back playing my administrative role and find myself thinking along those lines in reading this recent report from the Social Science Research Council that once again raises the alarm of crisis in higher education. Namely, according to their longitudinal study, students do not develop as critical thinkers in the way that they should, and when it comes down to it, the primary culprit is a lack of "rigor." Undergrads need to be asked to write more and read more.

In my view, there are oh so many curious things about this report and its kin.

The report is based on the results of test called the College Learning Assessment (CLA). As the report describes:

The CLA aims to measure general skills-based competencies such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning,and written communication.  Measures used to assess student learning consist of three sets of open-ended prompts that have been carefully constructed in consultation with experts on student assessment and elaborately pre-tested and piloted in prior work. The three components include: performance task, make an argument, and break an argument. We focus on the performance task because that component of the CLA was administered most uniformly across institutions, had the largest completion rate, and is the state-of-the-art component of the assessment instrument. The performance task allows students 90 minutes to respond to a writing prompt that represents a “real-world” scenario in which they need to use a range of background documents (from memos and newspaper articles to reports, journal articles, and graphic representations) to solve a task or a dilemma.

In short, it's a timed, essay examination. Now maybe you believe that performance on a timed essay exam tells you something important about human beings, and maybe you don't. Clearly the act in itself is not especially valuable. Perhaps performance here though is predictive of performance elsewhere on tasks that we might indeed value. In my view, the measuring tool is itself flawed. 

The report goes on to state that students who read more, wrote more, and studied alone more tended to perform better on the test. OK, so what you're telling me is that students who spent more time reading and writing independently did better on a test that essentially measures one's ability to read and write independently. 

How much did this study cost again?

What's implicit, of course, is that the true measure of "critical thinking" (aka intelligence) is the ability to sit alone and read and write. And how do I know that? Well, I know that because that's what I do and I'm smart, right? Ahh, the mini-me pedagogy never ceases to amaze.

Shall we press on? The central problem the report identifies is that over the four years of college, students on the whole make little improvement. They say, for example "Students who scored at the 50th percentile of students in their entering freshman cohort would have moved up only to the 68th percentile after four years of  college (if, when graduating college, the students retook the test with a new cohort of  entering freshmen)." Gee, I guess that sounds not too good. I wonder what the results would have been like in 1950 or 1980. Too bad we don't know. It sounds bad because we have a mythology about learning which assumes that improvement should be more dramatic. We have an expectation that the results should be different, but maybe our expectation, rather than our methods, is wrong.

One thing the report certainly gets right is that, on the whole, college students don't spend a lot of time doing the kinds of activities that they are asked to perform on the CLA. Given that they don't spend a lot of time reading and writing, it's not terribly surprising that their improvement on this general test is not that great. Of course, the absurd error here, performed over and over and over, is that writing is a generalizable skill. Let's imagine a different test. shall we? Let's imagine we take first-year students with declared majors and give them a test that asks them to read material from their field, analyze it, and produce a text that reflects an appropriate disciplinary genre. Then give them the same test when they are seniors. Do you think the improvement from first-year to senior would be more dramatic than what was found with the CLA? I'm betting it would. By the same token, I'm probably no better at writing a chemistry lab report today than I was when I was 20. I guess my education failed me, huh? 

That said, here are things in the report that I agree with:

1. IF we want to make the goal of higher education the ability to perform tasks such as the one represented in the CLA then we absolutely need spend more time teaching reading and writing. Not just assigning more reading and writing by the way, but actually teaching people how to do it. And I would contend that few if any universities have a faculty capable of meeting that goal, so we would be talking about a fundamental restructuring of not only undergraduate education but the graduate education that would prepare future faculty in all disciplines. (Good luck with that, btw.)
2. I don't find it surprising that liberal arts majors performed better than students in other areas. Maybe it's because they read and write more, though I'm not sure if that is the case with science and math students, who actually performed the best on the CLA. I would suggest that students who major in the liberal arts are more likely have come to college out of a desire to learn rather than the necessity of a degree for a job. When it comes down to it, if you don't want to learn, you probably won't. And it won't matter how much I ask you to read or write. 
3. We do need a greater emphasis on undergraduate education. We could start by reducing the number of courses taught by adjuncts. That's not to say that adjuncts as a group are better or worse teachers than professors (who are generally not hired or tenured for their teaching ability, especially at universities). But professors are better positioned to participate in the larger shaping of curriculum and students over time than adjuncts are. 

However, I don't think that our reformation of higher education should be imagined as trying to build some kind of time portal to the 19th century or even 20th century. My measure of success for higher education would be something along the lines of "Can students work together over an extended period of time (i.e. weeks) to investigate, research, and experiment and produce some creative, insightful, compelling solution, analysis, or response to an object, an issue, an experience, etc?" If that seems overly general, it's my attempt to account for disciplinary differences. Let me try it more succinctly: can a group of students make something that works?

You tell me if that is a higher, lower, more or less rigorous standard than what is proposed in that report. 

shadow scholar prostitution

A popular article in the Chronicle detailing a "shadow scholar" who writes original essays and other academic material for students for pay is making the typical academic rounds, including this one, I guess. 

A couple things pop out for me. First, who knows if we can fully believe everything "Mr. Dante" says in the article, but setting that aside I would accept that this general practice is out there and growing. Second, it's a little sad that people who are clearly accomplished writers (to be able to produce quickly good academic material across the disciplines) are willing to work for such little pay. But I suppose the service being offered is viewed as a basic commodity and quality beyond a basic service rendered is of little concern. Third, though this article focusing on cheating at writing, I would imagine that a student who is willing to pay $1000s for papers will also cheat in other ways as well. 

I don't know how one prevents this from happening as a professor. I don't have the investigative resources or powers to track down such activity. We try to prevent or discourage academic dishonesty by having students write multiple drafts, participate in online discussions, and so on. But if the student is willing and able to pay someone to do all this writing for him/her, then I'm not sure how I can stop it. Of course, one can build in-class essay exams into a course as part of the evaluation. But if part of the purpose of education is to teach students to write more formal texts, including revising, and to conduct independent research, then these are activities that will be done beyond the teacher's purview.

If academic dishonesty of this sort where criminalized then these activities would probably be federal crimes (since I assume the often take place across state lines) and authorities could track down the companies and individuals who advertise these services. But maybe in the larger scheme of things, such a move would be over the top.

Or maybe that is missing the point.

Probably we could argue that the Internet makes this kind of cheating easier, but students have been writing papers for each other for a long time. Ghost-writing has been around for a long time. The Chronicle article makes clear that this writing for hire is not just about composition classes. In fact, FYC would seem to be a minor area of concern. It's really about courses in majors, MA thesis, and dissertations. So we can't say that this is the way students respond to courses they don't think matter. This is the way students respond to the courses that are presumably preparing them for their professions... and not just in humanities but in business, nursing, education and so on. 

So what does this mean? That students don't feel like they need to learn anything? That they don't feel like they learn by writing? That the stakes of failure are too high to risk it? That they are just lazy and don't even think through the implications? Perhaps it is mostly laziness and immaturity. "Mr. Dante" suggests that students are "hopelessly deficient." If so, what is the cause of this deficiency? Is it a systematic failure of education? Maybe. But I look at Dante's story and think of my own. Sure, schooling was a part of my education from age 15-22 (when I entered grad school). But most of the learning, reading, and writing I did during that time was self-sponsored.  

If one imagines that all one requires is a degree, then that's something you pay an institution for, and that maybe you get in the most economic way possible, just as you would purchase any product. However if one imagines one requires an education, then that is something that an institution can support, not "provide." In the light of stories such as this one, it is understandable that one might be cynical about the numbers of students who are actually interested in an education. In some respects it's unfortunate that people who do not wish to be educated feel they are compelled to attend a university to make a living. 

And maybe here is the strange lesson to take away. If higher education is becoming de facto compulsory education for many students, then we might need to change the way we think about it. 

 

putting an object-orientation to work in the new humanities

I'm following along the lines of some recent posts here and a clearly broader conversation. Here's Dave Parry quoting Jean-Luc Nancy on the SUNY Albany business. Here's Jeff Rice. Here's Richard Miller. Here's Rosemary Feal in the Chronicle. The MLA has produced a report on rebuilding foreign language programs. Here are UK students protesting changes in higher education (a large part of those changes impact humanities and social sciences, i.e. non-STEM, education).

I am sympathetic to Rice's argument:

Ours is an unoriginal profession interested in the originality of texts. For years, we’ve seen this point played out in pedagogies devoted to the study of creative works, creative minds and creative writers but that ask students to produce banal and bland writing in response. Now we see further evidence in an uninspiring, unimaginative, unproductive argument that falls back on cliches and commonplaces in order to make a point. Not one appeal is creative in design. Not one appeal offers or suggests a new mode of thinking. Not one appeal recognizes that a new situation exists, a new exigence to respond to, a new problem that must be contextualized and understood as a 21st century problem.

Indeed in some ways the humanities remind one of the stereotypical ugly American tourist (you know, the one that language/cultural education tries to mitigate), where one someone appears to not understand you, you just repeat yourself but louder and slower.

Who knows what exactly motivates decisions like the one at Albany? We can only guess, interpret, critique. However, I would imagine that the people in the room are familiar with the arguments we make about the value of the humanities. They just don't believe those arguments. Or so it would seem. And it would appear that the discourse in mainstream American culture is divided at best on the topic. I would imagine that anyone who has been through high school and certainly anyone with a college degree is familiar with the basic argument about why studying literature or history or another language is valuable. As Jeff suggests, I'm not sure what repeating the argument is meant to accomplish.

Richard Miller offers a related position:

For the only meaningful constant in human experience is neither death nor taxes, but the condition of unknowing. The humanities curate the record of all previous human efforts to engage this condition and they could also house contemporary efforts to do so as well. Blowing the dust off previous defenses of the humanities comes just from moving through the stacks; engaging in the creative act of inventing sustainable responses to the current situation is the very essence of the humanistic enterprise. It's time we got on with the work of begin building a better world.

While it doesn't get us out of our habit of navel-gazing, the primary project for the humanities right now would seem to be figuring out how to survive. We begin by recognizing that the traditional arguments for the humanities are not timeless but the products of historical and material conditions. They have to be able to change along with those conditions. In the end, adaptability is necessary for any assemblage's continuing operation. 

My response to such challenges is generally to be experimental rather than comprehensive. That is, rather than beginning with a grand theory of the new humanities and then figuring out how to get there, one begins experimentally with changing behaviors and see where the changes lead. Balance and sustainability are, I would say, emergent qualities of assemblages.

So this is my "object-oriented" approach... in really basic terms. Change the objects in the room. Change what you are studying, the activities the students engage in, the social network the curriculum establishes, and the products the students produce. Forget the old goals or objectives. Discover what is achieved, what in fact does happen in the classroom under these new conditions. Rather than operating from some grand narrative about ideology or humanism to explain what is happening and/or what should happen, pursue, in ANT-like fashion, the real associations. Not that curriculum should be 100% student-driven, but maybe listen to the students and their own explanations for why they do what they do. What is sustained in these spaces? What questions are asked? What is produced and what do the products do? What assemblages do they form?

Composition has been the dumping ground of the humanities for decades. Few wish to take the course, fewer wish to teach it, and virtually no one wants to pay for it. It's also the place where the humanities tends to dump its pure ideological drives (b/c composition has no content of its own, right?). So whether its liberatory pedagogy or critical-theoretical thinking or an abstract mastery of grammar, composition becomes the place where the goal is to produce students who freely express in Marxist/feminist/whatever terms, their appreciation for the humanities... all without comma splices. 

So foreign language departments seem to be in trouble. Other humanities disciplines may be in risk. Composition has been the discipline that not even other humanities disciplines would bother to rise to defend. But my argument would be that if you want to imagine a new humanities or just save the humanities, perhaps it begins by saving composition, by recognizing composition's overlooked content. And maybe you could begin with Latour's Compositionist Manifesto, even if he doesn't manage to mention writing. At least you could see a broader picture of composition. Ultimately though, composition is about making things in the world that have effects; composition is about taking student work seriously; composition demands us to engage with the world productively (we don't just look at things; we need to look with an eye toward fueling our own productivity or invention); composition is about making things that work (not that they always do) and delivering them to the world. 

humanities: bottom line or end of the line?

Perhaps you have seen this recent Wall Street Journal report revealing the bottom line production of various departments at Texas A&M. Or the latest xtranormal video titled "So You Want to Get a PhD in Humanities," which has been circulating Twitter and Facebook (if not the video is below the fold). They are two of the latest missives in this ongoing debate about the fate of the humanities.

The WSJ piece is curious in that it wants to target the "Milton scholar" teaching five students in an upper division course, but when one looks at the chart in the article. English and History are in the black, while other departments like Aerospace Engineering and Physics lose money, despite the promise of grants. Beyond that, regardless of the size of a Milton class, I'm sure English and History serve significantly more students than Engineering or Physics both in general education and as majors. And though the report does seem biased against the humanities, it also notes

And among those with diplomas, just 31% could pass the most recent national prose literacy test, given in 2003; that's down from 40% a decade earlier, the [US Dept of Education] says.

So there seems to be a fundamental disconnect here. On the one hand, the humanities get targeted as expensive and superfluous. On the other hand, they actually make money and it would appear that their services are desperately needed by college students. So where does this disconnect lie? Perhaps it is really several disconnects.

One such disconnection is dramatized in the video. The undergrad asking her prof for a recommendation letter to go to grad school imagines a life of the mind that is ultimately solipsistic. She says she wants to study death and Emerson or whatever. And what is her motivation? She's good at it (i.e. she got an A on her paper)? She enjoys it?

A common explanation for the impending death of humanities is to blame theory, which makes us esoteric, or to blame Marxists or other political types or to blame conservatives who think we are all Marxists (which I suppose is to blame Marxists indirectly). But I would say humanities problem is well-dramatized in that video. Our research is disconnected from any but the most narrow of interests, and this is really quite strange when you think about it. Our time is replete with cultural challenges begging for humanistic intervention: living in a globalizing culture, understanding people who are different from us, communicating in all the myriad ways available to us, sifting through all the media and information we receive, addressing the ethical dilemmas of technoscience, establishing an effective civic rhetoric, etc. etc. etc.

Of course any research project requires a more narrow focus than those topics, but the rhetorical duty is to connect our research with the problems we all encounter. Doing this in the classroom is just as important. The humanities is fundamentally an educational project, and I think we've lost that to some degree. I'm not saying humanities can save the world but maybe an improved education in rhetoric/communication and ethics reduces the likelihood of oil spills, financial meltdowns, and government graft. 

Anyone who is in the humanities can tell you that it is an intellectually demanding job. It's hard brain work to do this stuff. But in the end, the fact that one works hard isn't enough. Spending seven years studying and working hard to write a dissertation on Emerson and death, as the character in the video proposes to do, is not enough (not to pick on Emerson btw, that's just the video's example). We are surrounded by problems to which we can bring humanistic knowledge, research, and teaching. We just have to get at it and reconnect with a public that recognizes these issues of cultural literacy, rhetoric, and ethics but has forgotten that this is what the humanities is about. 

You can't blame the general public though; I think we've forgotten as well in our high-speed chase down the rabbit hole of hyperspecialization.

I've been thinking a lot about these issues in relation to my own work. Certainly I have my specializations... in digital media, in particular theories/methods. But I have to remember how these connect with more generally recognizable issues, such as the challenges of communicating, research, working, and socializing through networks, which in turn are part of my general questions about how education, civic rhetoric, and workplace communication will operate. I need to be able to move up and down this rhetorical spectrum of audiences and purposes in relation to the work I do.

higher education's two futures

I've been writing and unwriting this post for most of this week in response to this NY Times article. It's an ongoing story about the "end of tenure." Personally I think this particular article is not all that well written. It has a sensationalized opening paragraph and really scapegoats tenure as the cause for the problems with higher education, when that doesn't make much sense in my view. Tenure seems to rub people the wrong way because it is perceived as allowing professors to do little or no work and protecting them from losing their jobs. Technically, I don't think that's the case. I'm sure there are lazy professors as there are lazy people at any workplace. Maybe it is a little more difficult to fire a tenured professor for cause than it is to fire someone of a similar status for cause in a corporate setting. And maybe some institutions need to revisit the legal definitions of tenure. But having been doing this work for more than 10 years now, I'm fairly certain that overall tenured faculty do their jobs. Tenure isn't the problem.

One can find many different defenses of tenure (e.g. protecting academic freedom), but I will suggest that one might view tenure as a job perk. As an academic, if I offered you the choice between a $60K/yr job with a 3-yr renewable contract and a $50K/yr on the tenure-track, which would you take? How much sweeter would the salary of the non-tenure track job have to be for you to jump? That's what I mean by suggesting it's a perk.

If the SUNY system, for example, decided to do away with tenure, all the other R1 universities would swoop down to hire away our most desirable faculty. Graduate students would disappear, grants would dry up, programs would have accreditation problems, and the overall reputation of the institutions would drop like a stone. Obviously SUNY would do the same thing to others. In fact, institutions are always sniffing for blood in the water to see where star faculty can be lured away.

What about for the rank and file faculty? If you were to look at the AAUP salary survey, you'd see UB pays it's associate profs about $15K more on average than it does it's assistant profs. Obviously we pay our assistant profs some reflection of the market. Even though it's a buyer's market for English Phds, we still want to hire our #1 choice. We don't want to take #5 or #10 just because they will work for $10K less. That's not how one builds a good department; that's not how one builds a good staff at any business. By that same logic, why would you give up your associate professor, whom you've thoroughly vetted over several years, to hire a new assistant prof just to save $15k?

Or more to the point, why would you not hire an assistant professor and instead hire an instructor or adjuncts in order to save $40K?

Because you're headed into an entirely different business model. This is where Christopher Shea, author of the NY Times piece, gets interesting. Sadly it's at the very end:

[Mark] Taylor’s eyes also seem to have been opened to the world beyond Williams and Columbia. After his Op-Ed article appeared, a colleague from a cash-short California State University campus wrote to say that the “mind-pulping” teaching load left no room for research of any kind, even if it fell short of the five-courses-a-semester load at some community colleges. “This is an extremely unfortunate situation,” Taylor writes, “because the escalating cost of higher education is driving more students to these institutions.”

Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality.

Here's the thing. It is NOT news that colleges are engines of inequality. They have ALWAYS been engines of inequality. That's why everyone today wants their kids to get college degrees: because getting a degree means having a better chance to be on the more pleasant side of the pointy stick that is the American economy. The problem is that not everyone can have above-average incomes. It doesn't matter how much education Americans as a population get, only a certain percentage of those people are going to end up in the kinds of careers those educations promised (if you don't believe me, check out the MLA convention this year).

So I think what we will end up with are two types of tertiary education. In practice we already have this and have had it for a long time. However, where in the past there was more gradation, the future may offer a stark contrast. Who knows, maybe this isn't a bad thing.

For example, one kid is a straight A student and wants to be an astrophysicist. Another kid might be a low B student and wants a local job in sales or customer service with the chance of maybe rising to management some day. These days both kids would need to get four-year degrees enroute to those goals, but do they really need anything at all like the same kind of education? Do we need to send these kids to the same kind of institution that is accredited in the same way?

Maybe we do. Maybe we want to view college as that kind of egalitarian experience. But if we do, then we have to recognize that we are viewing college as a social good not a private one. We have to recognize that the second student may not have any interest in getting the kind of education that the first student wants and needs.