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stemwedel
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Name: Janet
Country: United States
State: California
Gender: Female
Interests: Reading, writing, trying to get to the bottom of deep questions and enduring mysteries.
Expertise: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, being in school.
Occupation: Education/training
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
7/1/2003
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| Passing thoughts from the grumpiest assistant professor alive.
It's funny how The Spartan Daily can get me riled on such a regular basis. And not just about the blatant misspellings in headlines, or the offenses to standard grammar, or the misquoting of interviewees. Nope, we seem to be getting the real hot-button issues of late. So brace yourself for some ranting...
What's the point of going to lecture?
Today's article to angry up the blood is on students leaving class early, and conspicuously. As with most articles in this fine publication, it stayed at the surface: Boy, this is annoying! It distracts the prof! It distracts the other students! What was missing was a diagnosis of what this phenomenon means, really, about the commitments of the students.
There are a few benign possibilities. Maybe the next class is very far away and the student moves rather slowly. Maybe there is an important meeting at work, or a sick child waiting at home. But in most of these cases, it seems to me a responsible student would explain the situation to the instructor up front and try to exit as discreetly as possible. And frankly, that isn't happening.
My own suspicion is that this is a milder version of the related phenomenon of not coming to lecture at all. And that phenomenon is a big head-scratcher. It seems to be premised on the assumption that lecture doesn't add any value at all to a course -- that it's enough to read the books on one's own and, perhaps, show up for tests. Of course, the empirical evidence I've seen suggests that not coming to lecture is strongly correlated with failing tests, and doing a crappy job on the papers. So maybe that means that, in fact, the people who are blowing off lecture are blowing off the reading too. At which point, I have to ask: what's the point of enrolling? If you are not coming to class or doing the reading, and you are turning in crappy work, in what sense are you really in the class? Isn't this kind of like saying "I'm taking antibiotics" because they were prescribed and they're sitting there in your medicine cabinet, even though you've never ingested any of them?
Sad to say, I think the cult of blowing off lecture may be strengthened by a well-intentioned SJSU policy, namely, that attendance (or lack thereof) cannot be a grading criterion. In other words, you can skip every single lecture and (theoretically) feel no negative impact on your grade. Except that you can't, not really. Learning is interactive. A certain amount of the learning process depends on actually being there. But damned if a certain segment of the student population will believe that.
Naturally, being there is a prerequisite, but is itself insufficient to guarantee learning. But I'm saving my rant about the students who consistently sleep through lecture for another day ...
Tenure, or not.
On Thursday, there was an article on tenure. A big focus was the specter of professors who get tenure and immediately cease to care what students think of their teaching (or of anything else).
A big omission from the article was the horrors of the work load leading up to the tenure decision. Every single choice (which text book? how many assignments? stay up late to grade or sleep a few hours before it's time to wake up? can I get a grant? when will I find time for research? do I need to serve on another committee?) is fraught. It's a decision that might make the difference between having a job and not. And that difference is rather large if one has put down roots, or has a family to support, or has a partner whose career might not be easily transplanted if one had to go on the academic job market again. So, for some of us, the moment when our job will no longer be on the line is the thing that keeps us from losing hope and leaving the business. Indeed, freed from some of this excessive stress, I imagine some of us could become better teachers and scholars. I hope to live long enough to find out.
The other omission, of course, was the rationale for the tenure system: protecting academic freedom of scholars who, after a period of proving their worth, can only be removed for cause. There was a letter today, from an Associate Professor in Political Science, pointing this out. However, the letter included the following unfortunate paragraph:
"Radical theories are often unpopular. Galileo taught that the earth was round rather than flat. He was right, but the Church called him a heretic and forced him to recant. If Galileo had been a faculty member without tenure, he would have been fired for teaching the truth."
Trouble is, this isn't what happened. By Aristotle's time (384-322 BC) it was well known that the earth was a sphere; they were just working out good estimates of its circumference. Galileo (working in the 1600s) and the Church would have had no disagreement about this fact. Rather, Galileo's crime was in arguing that the earth moved around the sun (rather than the other way around), and he didn't even offer a knock-down argument that this view was true, but instead offered an argument that the evidence of our senses could not let us distinguish whether the earth is stationary or in motion.
Of course, not having tenure, I find myself taking special care to get facts like these right ... | | |
| A thought experiment
Let's say you have an important task to complete, but it's one you find completely onerous. You find nothing worthwhile about the task itself, but you need to do it to achieve a goal that is important to you.
Presented with a shortcut, a way to appear to have met the requirements of the task, you jump on it. But, the shortcut is detected, and this results in your having to begin the task all over again, thus delaying your ability to attain the goal that actually matters to you.
So, as you are again grappling with this onerous task, the same shortcut presents itself once again. Knowing that the stakes are just as high and maybe even higher -- if you take the shortcut again this time and are caught, you will not only have to start the task over yet again, but you might be prevented from attaining your actual goal -- do you take the shortcut? How onerous does the task need to be that this strategy for avoiding it seems worth the risk of not attaining the goal that is forcing you into this onerous task in the first place?
Making the abstract problem more specific.
I suppose a lot depends on what your actual goal is, what kind of onerous task stands in your way, and what the tempting shortcut is. So, let's fill in some specifics:
Let's say the actual goal is a college degree. The onerous task is a required course. And the tempting shortcut is plagiarism.
On a practical level, it's hard for me to see the choice here as anything but a no-brainer. You're taking a course you don't care about at all, but need to graduate. You plagiarize. You get caught. As a result, you fail the course and don't graduate. In order to graduate, you end up having to take this course (which you still don't care about) again. To plagiarize again seems like an inordinately big risk. You were caught the first time, so there's not much reason to think your plagiarism won't be detected the next time (especially if you have the same professor, who now has reason to think your academic integrity is not all that it could be). If you get caught, the best you can hope for is that you'll simply fail the course again -- and have to take it again, or else give up on graduation. But, you might be in for much worse, including being booted from school and barred from graduating at all. Sure, not plagiarizing might require some actual work on your part, but on balance it might be less work than defending yourself against administrative sanctions.
On a deeper level, I have trouble understanding how the repeat-plagiarism route is consistent with the goal of earning a college degree. What, precisely, can a college degree mean to you if risking detection again strikes you as an acceptable means to this end? Honestly, if it's just a matter of the increased pay a college degree will get you on the job market (or the increased play it will get you on the singles market), there are a number of fine diploma mills from which one can purchase a degree for much less trouble. Of course, there is always the chance that the employer (or date) will find out that the degree has been purchased, rather than earned, and that this will undercut your real goal (wealth, prestige, companionship, etc.). But this just points to the possibility that what is really important in securing these goals has less to do with a piece of paper and more to do with your own integrity.
Undoubtedly, I'm the most naive assistant professor on the block, or this kind of risk-taking would make sense to me. But, I'm also a person who thinks a real education can have immense value even in a crappy job market -- that the worth it has has less to do with earning power than with the power to look around and make sense of your world, to get to the bottom of issues you care about, and to keep learning new things. As with everything that matters, this power can't just be bought. It must be cultivated. You have to work at it. If this is actually what you want out of a college education, then plagiarism is obviously a bad strategy for getting it. If this is NOT what you want out of a college education, then why on earth would jumping all the hurdles involved in earning a degree seem like a good strategy? Seriously, go for the diploma mill, or go to DeVry, or find some other, easier way to get where you think you want to go. If cultivating your integrity seems like a big waste of time to you, don't put yourself in an environment where people take for granted that integrity matters.
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| California's budget crisis and higher education
I just got back from a town hall meeting about the California higher education budget, moderated by State Senator John Vasconcellos. There is now absolutely no reason to doubt the magnitude of the crisis. From the budget the Governor has proposed, the cuts would include:
- A 10% reduction in new freshmen enrollment in the CSU system. In other words, students who worked hard in high school and meet the admissions standards for the CSU system get turned away. The hope is that the community college system can absorb them, but they are facing budget issues as well and probably can't absorb all these extra students.
- An increase in the student to faculty ratio. In other words, bigger classes. Much bigger classes. This, of course, will mean fewer faculty members, and fewer courses offered. And this will lead to a longer time to degree, because it will be harder to get into the (large but less frequently offered) classes one needs to graduate.
- Making CSU students pay out-of-state tuition for "excess units". Let's say your major requires 120 units to meet all graduation requirements. You would get to take 110% of the number of required units (132) at the regular price. Past that point, every unit you take is at the out-of-state price. It won't matter if you're a double major, have a minor (required by a number of majors), or have changed your major (as a large number of responsible students do). Nor will it matter if you see your education as serving a larger purpose than just fulfilling degree requirements.
- Elimination of student success programs like the Educational Opportunity Program.
- An estimated reduction of $102 million in the CSU budget beyond this, with no plan yet for where to take these cuts.
Add to this hikes in student fees, a reduction in the income ceiling for CalGrant (which means financial aid goes down while fees go up), and the spillover of qualified students who have been (and will continue to be) turned away from the UC system, and you've got yourself a disaster in the making.
As a newish professor, I'm already stretched pretty far. My classes are not "jumbos", but they are pretty big for the educational tasks that must be accomplished. GE courses stress active learning, lots of writing and feedback (and revision) -- this becomes impressively difficult in a class of 40 or more. And, I'm told, next term the classes will need to get bigger to accommodate the 12% reduction in department budget each department in the College of Humanities and Arts needs to take. (Notice that this is a cut we have to take regardless of what happens with the additional cuts proposed by the Governor.) I'm on committees that deal with curricular issues and GE course offerings, and the effects of the cuts that have already been taken are pretty clear across the university. In theory, if I'm to keep my job by getting tenure in another few years, I should be finding some grant money to find "release time" that would let me teach one less class and spend more time on my research ... but the magnitude of the teaching is so great that it's really hard to find the time to apply for a grant to find more time. And many of my colleagues will not be around next fall because, in tough budgetary times, the part-time faculty, who are master teachers (and who, on this campus, teach the majority of the GE classes), are the first ones cut.
I love this place. I really do. I find the students smart, engaged, and highly motivated. My colleagues are top-notch, in addition to being challenging and fun and good people. The administrators in my college are doing everything they can to preserve the educational mission of this place despite the bleak situation. But I am truly scared that if the people of California don't get it together and figure out an alternative to balancing the budget on the back of higher education, this place -- and the well-being of the state itself -- will suffer permanent damage!
So, what to do about this mess?
Send a letter. The California Faculty Association has sample letters to Governor Schwarzenegger and Assembly member John Laird, newly named head of the Budget committee. It is imperative that Sacramento recognize that the short term savings they may find in further cuts to the CSU will have a long term impact in the state -- a less educated work force (and electorate), which will hamper business (especially in the high tech sector), health care, and K-12 education. In the long run, this will hurt the state economy rather than helping it.
Stay in touch with your representatives in Sacramento. Let them know how you feel about the importance of funding for higher education in California. I plan to tell my representatives that we should be paying more taxes to help fix this -- this is a societal investment that we ought to make. (Given that every dollar spent on higher ed in California puts five dollas back into the economy, I expect that business leaders who rely on the educated workforce here will be willing to step up to pay their share as well.)
Vote! Seriously, this is the only way to be sure the state budget reflects our societal commitments. No excuses.
Senator Vasconcellos was optimistic that the Governor could be brought around. We need to educate him about just how crucial public higher education is to the health of California. If we don't make this happen now, I'm not sure we'll make it through what happens next. | | |
| Why the search for meaning?
An interesting question came up in seminar yesterday. What is it about humans that makes them feel like they need their lives to have some grand (or even modest) purpose? Why can't we just take life at face value and be satified with that? Is Schopenhauer right that we're just really badly designed critters?
Some possibilities on the purpose side of things:
- We have a purpose that comes from God. That introduces real incentives for fulfilling your purpose rather than wasting your life. Maybe it even makes the suffering worthwhile. But, there is the problem of establishing with certainty just what that purpose is. (God may know, but most of the time She ain't saying.)
- We have a purpose, but it's purely biological. We're gene-spreading machines and that's it. Maybe we get some fun along the way, but there's a whole lot of nasty stuff in there too. As Freud put it (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), my life is just a detour on the way to its destination, death. Can we really accept this? Even if it's true, can you really swallow the idea that everything you do, you do because its good for your genes? (This seems to me just as unpleasant as admitting that Schopenhauer's Will to Live is the boss of me.)
- We have a purpose -- any purpose we want. It's up to us to choose it. Fine, but doesn't it seem like some things I might pursue would be good purposes for a life and others would be evil or downright silly. (We don't really want to say Jeffrey Dahmer's life had as much of a purpose as Mahatma Gandhi's, do we? Or that a life devoted to curing cancer is on a par with a life devoted to learning all of Britney Spears' lyrics and dance moves? Do we?) Even if there's more than one worthy purpose I might pursue, there are a whole lot I reject as unworthy. Is it just a matter of personal preference? Or are there certain characteristics that are necessary for us to find a goal important enough to be my purpose?
But the big question remains: why do I feel like I need to figure out my purpose? Is it because if I don't have a goal my efforts point in too many scattered directions and don't add up to anything? Or is it that I'm too damned lazy to think out each individual decision in my life and I need a Purpose to simplify things and be the thing all my efforts will point toward?
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| The Will to Live is just using you
OK, let's set aside the worry that Schopehauer's metaphysical picture of a human being strikes the modern 18 year old as implausible. (Most metaphysical pictures of anything are pretty implausible. The metaphysicians don't have all that many people trying to horn in on their turf. They're the mimes of the philosophy world.) There's still something interesting going on here.
Schopenhauer maintains that my essence as a human being -- what defines me -- is the will to live. My whole life is ordered by the tasks of maintaining my life and warding off boredom. Strive, strive, strive. If I'm not pursuing some goal, I'll get bored; if I actually achieve the goal, I'll get bored. If I get bored, I might be driven to suicide; can't have that, not on the will to live's watch! Besides, of course, "boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence." ("On the Vanity of Existence," p. 53)
Schopenhauer is arguing that all the goals I pursue ultimately track back to the will to live. All of them somehow serve my need to stay alive and to make my continued survival more bearable. I am driven by the will to live.
So what? Why think that it's a bad thing to be driven by the will to live? Surely while I'm satifying its desire, I also get to satisfy some of my own (since if I weren't alive, there would be no goals I could pursue or pleasure I could achieve).
Not so fast, says Schopenhauer. You don't get equal benefit from this relationship you have with the will to live. "...what do I get from existence? If it is full, I have only distress, if empty only boredom. How can you offer me so poor a reward for so much labour and so much suffering?" ("On Affirmation and Denial of the Will to Live," p. 65) A.S. is telling me to catch the clue-train: I'm the will to live's b*tch.
Yet, he seems also to be telling me that, once I recognize what kind of abusive relationship I'm in with the will to live, I can decide not to go along with it. This seems to be different than having desires other than the will to live, since all my desires are supposed to lead back to the will to live. I still feel the will to live; I just say "no" to it. According to Schopenhauer, this is really the only way to be my own person (rather than the will to live's stooge). And paradoxically, this requires freeing myself from my own conception of myself as an individual.
My Life, or Life, period?
Schopenhauer asks us to consider Philalethes' bargain:
instead of facing a death which is the permanent end of your existence, you get to keep your individuality. The catch is that first you have to endure a death-sleep of 3 months. So, you're out of the world completely for 3 months, but then you get to resume your life. Sounds OK so far...
Well, what if the death-sleep were longer than 3 months. What if it turned out to be 10,000 years. But, it's still you -- your individual personality, your life resuming -- after the death-sleep is over. Since during the death-sleep you're not at all conscious of time, it's not like you'd be able to experience the difference between 3 months and 10,000 years anyway. Still better than death extinguishing you completely, right?
OK, what if you have the 10,000 year death-sleep, and we, um, forgot to wake you up from it? At this point, your period of non-being (in the death-sleep) is much longer than your period of being (your life). And, more to the point, there's no way you'd be aware that we haven't woken you up. (Think Lucretius: if something doesn't bring me awareness of pain, it can't hurt me.)
The final reason you shouldn't be too bothered by this unending death-sleep may be the hardest to swallow:
"...you would be completely content with the whole thing if you knew that the mysterious mechanism which moves your present phenomenal form had not ceased for one moment throughout those ten thousand years to produce and move other phenomena of the same sort." ("On the Indestructability of Our Essential Being by Death," p.75) In other words: all the stuff you think would be missing because you're still in the death-sleep goes on as usual. The will to live is still alive and well. What makes you you is still out and about. So don't fret.
The obvious response to this is that I want to exist. I want my life!
Schopenhauer's mouthpiece replies, "That which cries 'I, I, I want to exist' is not you alone; it is everything, absolutely everything that has the slightest trace of consciousness. So that this desire in you is precisely that which is not individual but common to everything without exception: it arises not from the individuality but from existence as such, is intrinsic to everything that exists and indeed the reason why it exists, and it is consequently satisfied by existence as such: it is this alone to which this desire applies, and not exclusively to some particular individual existence." ("On the Indestructability of Our Essential Being by Death," pp.75-76)
So, I think what I want is my life; everyone thinks what s/he wants is his or her own life. But the universality of this desire is a clue to the fact that it's not really my desire here, but the will to live's desire. And even though the will to live makes me think what's important is preserving my existence, as far as the will to live is concerned any old existence will do (although more might be better). If each of us does whatever is necessary to preserve our own existence, the net result is more warm bodies to satisfy the will to live's desires.
Echoes of Ivan Ilyich here! (And foreshadowing for Tibetan Buddhism...) | | |
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