On the Consequences of Consumer University

Clark Kerr, former University of California President, once famously joked, “three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Over the fifty years since he made that statement, his joke has increasingly become reality. It isn’t funny anymore. It’s the truth.

Universities have become less substantive, especially when it comes to the education of undergraduates. And increasingly, the role of university leaders is to simply make people happy with things that should be peripheral to a school’s mission: a fun-filled social environment for the students; sports to keep alumni emotionally tied to their school; creature comforts for faculty. With so much effort placed on satisfying the social and emotional needs of its constituents, something has been lost along the way: education.

Workloads are down. Twenty percent of all freshmen spend less than five hours a week studying. Grades are up. In the humanities, the average grade at elite colleges is now an A-. It used to be that finding an easy path to graduation required a little preplanning; the paths were there but they were like obscure hiking trails. Now that path is a superhighway.

What is interesting to me is that this trend away from education and toward entertainment and perks – nice dorms, good food, top-notch exercise facilities - has met with resounding approval from both parents and students. Surveys indicate that they are overwhelmingly happy with their college experience. This country isn’t giving them the education that they may need; but it is certainly giving them the experience that they want. Universities evolution from a place of learning to a place that provides a “college experience” has been, from a marketing standpoint, very successful.

College and high school both have changed. Now high school – formerly a low-key experience that provided lots of time for goofing off – is, at least in the upper-middle class suburbs, a 55-hour a week job of homework and extra-curricular activities. High school has become the defining educational experience of a student’s life. In contrast, once a student gets into the college of their choice, they can drink a lot of beer, barely open a book, and easily graduate with a high GPA.

From an educator’s standpoint, this change has measurable consequences. I can remember looking at my lecture notes and homework assignments a few years into my teaching career and discarding a third of them. The academic intensity that I was expecting of my students and what was expected of me as an undergraduate - about six hours a week of work outside of class, use of rudimentary calculus, and an expectation that students participate in discussion – was well outside the bounds of a college class today. I had to get with the program and teach “college-lite.”

When your focus moves from education to keeping the customers happy, completely different demands are placed upon an institution and university leadership. First and foremost, by focusing on customer satisfaction, you essentially cede your power to the consumer. Like a politician whose decisions are governed by opinion polls, parent and student opinion become your main concern. If they’re happy, you’re happy. If they aren’t happy, you change.

For parents, the concerns are chiefly about student safety, happiness, and the prospects of their children prospering in the world. They may state that learning and education are important in and of themselves, but when push comes to shove they don’t, in general, want their children to struggle. And we make sure they don’t. We keep the workload light and easy.

University leaders now have to spend time assuaging parents that their children will have a happy and safe experience. So when a tragedy happens on campus – for instance, a student dies from alcohol poisoning – they'll calm parental fears by stating that the tragedy is an isolated incident. They don’t report to the parents that tens of times every year students are rushed to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped, and that every weekend they worry privately that another student may die.

University leaders don’t criticize student debauchery and demand students behave responsibly because to do so would make students unhappy. Instead they have their cleaning crews dutifully clean up the mess of vomit and stale beer in the pre-dawn hours.

Universities and colleges are now a kind of delightful puff pastry. They look great, but there’s not a lot going on inside. Their customers like the look and taste of the puff pastry as well. The only rub is that by creating Consumer University we have failed the most important “customer” of all: our country. We need a well-educated public. If universities don’t provide this country what it needs, we as a nation ultimately suffer.

Nuclear Waste and Going To The Dentist

Come January, the changing of the guard in Congress will likely mean many positive things. But there will be at least one change that to my eyes won’t be positive. Harry Reid, Nevada Senator and Majority Leader, will undoubtedly kill the prospects for permanent nuclear waste storage in Nevada for the foreseeable future. In doing so, he is certainly acting in the interest of the citizens of Nevada. But he is going against sound science and the needs of the nation to find a reasonable place to store our Nation’s nuclear waste stockpile.

The issue of radioactive waste has been a political football since the 1950s. Unfortunately, that football has yet to end up in the end zone. We can't seem to make any lasting decision. In life, there are decisions you delay, like going to the dentist, because they are so unpleasant. That's what nuclear waste is about. And like delaying going to the dentist, the outcome leads to a lot of problems. You pay for the delay. That is what is likely going to happen with regard to nuclear waste.

I’ve written about this issue before in the SF Chronicle in terms of the nuts and bolts of storing waste. In a nutshell, commercial nuclear waste is accumulating near major metropolitan areas in storage facilities that were never intended to keep the waste for as long as they have. The waste will be a hazard to human life for over 10,000 years, a time period well beyond the life span of any nation or organized political body. We need to find a place to store this hazardous material over the long haul.

The ideal place to store it – and there is no perfect place – is dry and sparsely populated. As a result of a mixture of politics and science, Yucca Mountain, NV was chosen by Congress as the location to store our high-level commercial waste in 1987. That decision has yet to be implemented. Waste continues to accumulate at commercial nuclear reactors. Scientific studies that indicate that Yucca Mountain is a reasonable place to store waste have been for naught.

In a rational world, good ideas rise to the top and are implemented. But the world of politics isn’t rational. And good ideas, even backed by sound science, that don’t have an emotional pull don’t make it in the real world.

When I look at the failure of our ability to deal with our nuclear waste stockpile, I see a number of critical factors at work. First and foremost, there is no perception of an ominous threat to maintaining the status quo. The waste currently sits in cooling ponds. The public never sees it. It’s out of site, out of mind.

Second, the public is scared of all things nuclear; that revulsion causes them to delay doing anything. Nuclear waste is even worse than the dentist.

Third, all politics are local; a strong congressional delegation from any state can mount a strong “not in my backyard” campaign.

Fourth, all solutions are imperfect. Given the revulsion factor noted above, the public simply cannot deal with imperfection.

Fifth, while the scientific consensus is that Yucca Mountain is a good place, scientific opinion is hardly ever unanimous. There will always be a few scientists that dissent and provide ammunition to local politicians.

Given these factors, storage of high level nuclear waste is almost an impossible task. Twenty-five years of science and engineering have gone into the selection and design of Yucca Mountain, but we aren’t going to do anything yet, especially with Harry Reid around.

But I’ll make a prediction. It’s inevitable that we will store waste at Yucca Mountain some day. It won’t be pretty, but we’ll do it because accidents always happen eventually. The day will come when an accident at a nuclear power plant draws national attention. Waste will no longer be out of sight, out of mind. I'm not trying to scare people into thinking the accident will be a doomsday event. The world will not end, but the hazards of our neglect of nuclear waste will come to light. People will die; hopefully the number deaths will be small. Under such conditions, the emotional pull to implement policy will be strong and Congress will move quickly to find a permanent storage solution. My guess is that the storage location, Harry Reid or no Harry Reid, will be Yucca Mountain. We won’t go back to square one.

It's a bit like New Orleans and Katrina. We knew the levees were bad. We did nothing (not because of any revulsion in this case, but because of cost). The levees failed; people died. We put in new levees long after we should have. I note that in response, California, now fearful of a Katrina-like failure in their Delta, has begun the process of fixing levees that should have been fixed 20 years ago. They needed the wake-up call of Katrina to do anything.

I realize that my view that only an accident will cause us to change is a bleak one. My hope is that I’m wrong, and we implement policy before then. I'm guessing Harry Reid, who is someone I admire, has the same hope that I do; in this case, he's just caught up in the need to serve local interests over national ones.

Back and forth

My piece of a couple days ago, Hot Air Versus Hot Air, drew some reasoned, civil criticism at Liestoppers. There is unreasoned, uncivil criticism elsewhere that I'm not going to respond to. But civil discourse deserves civil discourse and I responded to some in the comments section of Hot Air Versus Hot Air. Here is my response to Liestoppers, which you can also find on their site. Whatever comes after, civil or not, I won't respond to. I need to move on.

Response:

I’m going to assume that I get my two cents since I am the subject of this blog. No, I didn't identify any particular blog as having a severe right-wing slant. The author of this blog does mention a few other blogs that have dwelled "at length on the Hoax" but considers it neither "accurate or fair" to identify them as being "about the Lacrosse scandal" (my quotes on the last phrase). This is semantics. I understand why he would want to distance himself from some of those blogs. I would too. Life is all about the company you keep. I'll make a change to my language and say: I've read blogs that have dwelled on the Duke lacrosse scandal that have a severe right-wing slant. Now we should be on the same page.

Now let's get back to real matters. The statement of this blog that, "because the ad, in his opinion, does not express a presumption of guilt, it is acceptable," is correct. It is more than acceptable. It is called free speech. You don't like the contents of the ad, fine. Neither do I. But it is not "faculty misconduct" to state an opinion.

The ad makes no presumption of guilt. It just doesn't. And the professors have every right to state their opinion.

There are many villains in this tragedy. The role of the ad in this tragedy is so minor that at best, those that dwell on it and its signatories are simply making a mountain out of a molehill.

For example, it has been stated here concerning Brodhead, “the gang of 88 saw his weakness and emasculated him.” No professors at Duke possess that kind of power, much less the “gang of 88.” The influence of those 88 professors on Brodhead and any of his substantive decisions has been non-existent. Brodhead’s decision making has been motivated by one thing and one thing only: cool, calculated self-interest. In a nutshell his actions have been to: do anything possible to get the story off the front page; cut your ties to anything that might keep it there. Ad or no ad, he was going to shove the lacrosse players under the bus.

Similarly, the ad had no influence with the DA’s office. Ad or no ad, Nifong was going to prosecute.

So what was the impact of this ad? Not much. It was just hot air.

If you fervently believe that the lacrosse players are innocent it's commendable to support their cause. If you want to identify real villains in this tragedy, please make sure they are people that matter that have behaved without integrity, not simply people with whom you don't agree. To its credit, this blog has in my view identified quite a few villains correctly. I don’t usually agree with the back-story as to why they are villains, but I agree with their identities. Its obsession with 88 professors is, however, off the mark.

If you disagree, that's fine. I'll agree to disagree. I've said my peace. I am grateful that at least so far this discussion has been civil.

All That Carbon

A recent report by Sir Nicholas Stern on the economics of global warming suggests that the cost of stabilizing global CO2 emissions to projected 2035 levels will be 1% of world GDP. But such a stabilization in CO2 emissions will result in a dramatic savings in the cost of the damages caused by global warming. In other words, restricting CO2 emissions pays dividends.

There is a great deal of uncertainty in these estimates. What is clear is that the Earth is warming. What is not clear is what this may mean for the frequency of hazards such as flooding and hurricanes. Global warming has the potential to increase the frequency of a number of natural hazards, but the magnitude of the increases is guesswork.

Be that as it may, paying 1% of world GDP to avoid the potential cost of increases in global warming seems like a worthwhile investment. It would seem to be a rational decision for the world to collectively organize to combat global warming and achieve a modest goal in CO2 emission stabilization. However, it won't likely happen.

Carbon drives our economies. While from a rational standpoint there may be long term benefits to curtailing carbon usage, we are not particularly rational in our decision making. Emotionally, we are tied to carbon. It's why the US can't put together a reasonable conservation strategy despite the fact that our current policy not only contributes to global warming, but sends billions of dollars to nations that support or turn a blind eye to anti-US terrorism.

It's not just the US. There are over 2 billion people in China and India and many of them hunger for the same material goods and carbon consuming lifestyle we've adopted. The short term benefits to consuming ever more carbon are tangible. The long term hazards are rather vague.

A collective world-wide effort to curtail carbon emissions would require an unprecedented level of cooperation. It would require a world-wide political response to a hazard predicted by sound science. But science rarely drives decision making. Emotions do. I think that reports like that issued by Sir Harold Stern are very useful. Without them, the chance of any change in the global use of carbon would be nil. With them, the chance of any move from the status quo is still highly remote, but anything that gets the global community to even think about global strategies is valuable.

Hot Air Versus Hot Air

Lately, I’ve read blogs about the Duke lacrosse scandal that have a severe right-wing slant. They tend to focus on a few points. First, they state outright that the charges against the lacrosse players are bogus. If this were their only issue, I’d have no problem. But it doesn’t just stop there. They tend to go on and on. The lacrosse players are great kids and boys will be boys. Those that criticize scholarship athletics are just jealous and envious of those kids. And then there is a need to demonize the “Group of 88,” the 88 faculty members that signed an advertisement in the Duke student newspaper decrying the state of race relations at Duke.

Essentially, these bloggers are trying to use the lacrosse scandal as a way not only to state the innocence of the lacrosse players, but: 1) perpetuate the status quo of a student culture where debauchery trumps academics; 2) make a quixotic attempt to remove left wing faculty at Duke.

As for issue number one, I don’t think they need to make this effort. The culture of debauchery and anti-intellectualism at Duke will not go away. No one in Duke leadership has a sincere interest in changing this culture. The right-wing bloggers don’t have to worry. Duke will be Duke for the foreseeable future. It's one of the reasons why I left.

As for issue number two, this is one where the effort doesn’t make any sense. Those 88 faculty members aren’t going anywhere. The right-wing bloggers may claim that the advertisement signed by the 88 faculty members and several departments assumes the lacrosse players are guilty of rape, but it doesn’t wash. The ad doesn’t presume guilt. Read the ad. The ad decries racism on campus. I don’t agree with the ad; Duke is a place where racism is not pervasive. I think the ad is loopy. But that ad does not presume guilt of any crime.

Why obsess over the signatories to a loopy ad that is a sideshow in a scandal? If you’re a loopy right-winger, you try to use any wedge you can to move universities to the right. It’s not enough to argue for the innocence of three people; you have to use those three people to further your political objective. I note that most people who are supportive of the lacrosse players have been sensible enough to stay focused on the issue of their guilt or innocence. It’s only those on the fringe that are trying to demonize faculty for expressing their opinion. I don’t agree with that opinion. But I think those faculty members have every right to state it.

Now let’s get back to the matter at hand. A group of lacrosse players hold a party. They get drunk. They hire a couple of strippers. Some of the lacrosse players behave atrociously. A broom is used to threaten rape.* Racial slurs are made. Three of the lacrosse players are accused of rape.

If you’re a former faculty member at Duke like me and you read about this incident, a lot of bad images flash through your head of just how nasty Duke student culture can be. You remember walking from your lab to your car on an early Sunday morning after a long night of work and trying to avoid the vomit and occasional used condom on the Duke slate sidewalks. You remember trying to have homework due on Monday and getting back paper after paper of junk because students were too hung over to do a decent job. You remember watching two drunken male students willfully destroy Duke property on a late Thursday night and having a great time of it.

You think of those images and read about a nasty party with drunken students and wonder if these rape charges are true. You think that with enough alcohol, anything is possible, but it isn’t likely. You read more articles over time, and you decide that you are being fed distortions coming from both sides. You read disingenuous statement after disingenuous statement coming from lawyers, politicians, professors, and university administrators. The case is a mess. The press has been irresponsible. This scandal has brought out consistently ugly unethical behavior from every party. It's impossible to find someone who is behaving with anything approaching integrity. The event is a tragedy for all involved.

Flash forward many months, and you read some blogs from right-wingers decrying an ad signed by 88 faculty members. You finally get around to reading the ad. You think this ad paints a picture of a racist campus that just doesn’t bear any relation to reality. There are serious problems with Duke student culture, but this isn’t one of them. The ad does not presume guilt of any crime. It’s just a silly thing. You wonder what the fuss is about. And you realize that just as there is no substance to the ads claims of pervasive racism, there is no substance to the right wing blogs attack on the 88 faculty members. It’s hot air versus hot air.

*Correction. The broom wasn't used to threaten rape. The holder of the broom requested that the stripper use the broom in a public sexual act.

What An Education Can and Can't Do

I used to think that a US president could only do so much damage. There are so many checks on a president's power and this country is so fundamentally sound that over the space of four or eight years how bad could things get even with the most incompetent of presidents? But then George W. Bush came along. And I'm rethinking my sanguine view. It seems like a president can screw up a country in a hurry.

Our last truly incompetent president was Jimmy Carter. I certainly agreed with many more of Carter's ideas than Bush's, but the way he ran the White House was awful. He couldn't get anything done. I was glad to see him go. In contrast to Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush gets things done legislatively; unfortunately, what he is doing in policy after policy is destroying this country. He is easily the worst president we have had over my lifetime.

It is common to ascribe George W. Bush's failures to his lack of intelligence. I'm not sure that this is right. Jimmy Carter is a very intelligent man; despite his smarts, he was incapable of leading this country. But it is undoubtedly true that it is more likely to find incompetence associated with low intelligence than with high intelligence. By electing Bush not once, but twice, this country was playing with dice preferentially loaded to yield snake-eyes.

George W. Bush is not a smart man. You can hear the gears grind when you watch him think on his feet. It's painful to watch. When pressed to think in response to questions from the press, he looks like a C student in a high school debate class.

It is worth noting that George W. Bush was educated in some of the finest schools in the land: a supposedly rigorous prep school; a world renowned college; and the best business school anywhere. At first blush, George W. Bush's lack of intelligence and lack of interest in complex thought would seem wildly out of step with his education. But the apparent contrast between Bush's educational resume and his intellectual shortcomings isn't a contrast at all. Institutions of learning, even the best in the land, can only do so much. As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

I've never been to Exeter, Bush's prep school. I have been to Yale and Harvard. All of these institutions have reputations for rigor and standards. But the fact is that for as long as these institutions have been around, they have had a rigor optional track. If you want, you can take demanding classes and get a great education. Or if you'd rather not, there are ample classes that even a corpse could pass. In the time of Bush's education, the corpse would get a C. Now that corpse would, as a result of grade inflation, get a B+.

It is likely that Bush took the easy road to get all of his degrees. He has diplomas, but they are largely meaningless. One rule to take from the lesson of George W. Bush is that a diploma, in and of itself, from Harvard, Yale or Exeter means virtually nothing. It's just a piece of paper. If you need to hire someone, you better look beyond the piece of paper and find out if your prospective employee actually possesses a working brain.

It is also likely that Bush was forced to take a handful of classes along the way that required him to think. Even at Harvard, Yale and Exeter - schools that make a conscious effort to make sure that the wealthy but mentally lame have a path to graduation - you can't dodge bullets forever. And those classes stretched Bush mightily. They improved his writing skills and his analytical thinking skills. As hard as it may seem to believe, without those classes we'd have a president with even less intellectual horsepower.

I've taught students like George W. Bush; it was as painful to teach them as it was for them to take my classes. In the end, I gave them passing grades because they tried to do the work. Effort counted for something in my eyes. In the beginning of my teaching I'd give them a D or C for their efforts; by the time I retired, the grade rose to a B-. Call it social promotion.

Rule number 2 is that an education does not make you smart. It does not make you curious. You come into a school with a certain personality and skill set. If you are refractory to education - as George Bush clearly is - the best teachers and the best resources can only make marginal improvements. You can only do so much with a hardened lump of clay.

Four blades good, two blades about the same

I’d rather not shave, but I have a significant other that I love dearly and she dislikes beards. So shave I do, about 340 days a year in fact. A typical blade lasts me about 8 or 9 shaves, which means that I go through about 100 blades every couple of years.

My history with shaving is about 37 years old. My first blade was the Gillette Blue-Blade, a cousin of the first safety razor. I imagine it was indeed safer than a bare blade to the skin, but the fact was that the thing routinely tore my face up. Perhaps that was because for the first three years that I shaved, I didn’t really need to. My skin was baby smooth until I turned 16. Be that as it may, I happily followed the razor industry's technological march to an aerodynamically sleek blade imbedded in a plastic cartridge. Bandages on my face were largely a thing of the past.

In 1971, Gillette introduced the first double razor. I tried it and was hooked. It was a better shave. The only down side was that when I cut myself, I now had two cuts instead of one.

For the next 15 years, I became a blade junky, moving up the ladder of more complicated designs, heartlessly throwing out my old handles when the latest blade design came along. I was never much for disposable blades: too much plastic for landfills and the blades didn’t last as long. I was always a cartridge man.

But then I stopped being trendy. Once Gillette introduced the Atra Plus, a flexible double bladed cartridge with a lubricating strip in 1985, I saw no need to change. It was a great shave. My face nary received cuts. Nothing could be better. Plus clone cartridges could be bought for cheap that were just as good as the ones made by Gillette. I was in blade heaven.

The blade technological parade moved along. There were spring loaded blades, triple blades and even quadruple blades. I wasn’t interested. I tried a triple blade when Gillette sent me a sample. The shave was marginally better. The blades didn’t even last half as long and were expensive. I went back to my Atra Plus.

A few years ago, Atra Plus blades became very hard to find. However, you could still find clone blades on eBay so I bought a pack of 100 and kept shaving just like I always did.

But nothing lasts forever, and one day the inevitable happened. My handle locked. I tried to fix it, but the thing was never designed to be repaired. Gillette hasn’t made Atra Plus handles in forever. Plus they successfully sued to make it impossible for anyone to make clone blades. I didn’t have a working handle. My blade supply was down to 10 blades. I was at a turning point in my life.

I threatened to grow a beard, but my wife would hear none of that. So I went to the store to look at the latest generation of blades. Gillette calls their new blade the Fusion. Each cartridge costs two bucks and contains five spring-loaded blades. Fusion. I want a shave not a nuclear reaction. My last purchase of 20 bucks on clone Atra Plus blades had lasted me two years. The Fusion would eat up 20 bucks in a month.

What to do? Ebay of course. New Atra Plus handles that have been sitting in a warehouse for I don’t know how many years can be easily found. No clone blades exist, but I found 100 Genuine Atra Plus blades for 50 bucks. I forestalled the inevitable by another two years by clicking the “Buy Now” button.

By the time my next handle breaks (eem has vi haleelah) or I run out of my latest batch of cartridges, the shaving industry will no doubt go beyond Fusion. I only wish that the energy industry could move half as fast as the shaving industry. In a couple of years they may promise me an unbelievable shave with a 187 blade cartridge. But I like my two blades just fine thank you very much. I hope that come next time, there are still Atra Plus blades dated 1993 in some warehouse somewhere.

Racism for Laughs

I consider myself a humorist. Many of my songs and a lot of my fiction and non-fiction are created to make people laugh. I don't just like to make comedy; I also love to read and watch it. If you ask me on a Saturday night what kind of movie I want to go to, I’ll always say “give me a comedy.” My favorite movie is Fargo. After that it’s The In-Laws (the original version). After that it’s Sleeper. I love shtick. You’d have to go down the list of my favorite movies a long ways to find anything serious.

That said, for me good comedy is hard to find. Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t do it for me. He’s too crude. We’ll get back to him in a little bit. Will Farrell is too dumb. Jon Stewart is as subtle and artful as a freight train running into a cow. Most popular comedy is to my eyes and ears dreadful.

Sacha Baron Cohen has drawn raves for his new movie Borat. I haven’t seen it and am not interested. I have seen clips of the movie and Borat comedy sketches on HBO while staying in hotels (I don’t get cable at home). Sometimes the character is amusing. But mostly the act is painfully bad and predictable. You’re supposed to laugh at Borat because he’s such a buffoon. You’re supposed to find a nasty caricature of a Kazakh funny. Borat’s sister is the fourth most popular prostitute in Kazakhstan, a place where according to Borat incest is common. Ha. Ha. Ha. It’s crude. It’s racist. Yet the Borat movie is drawing rave reviews for its “shock comedy.”

A couple of days ago, Michael Richards - a mainstay on the old show Seinfeld, which was about the only TV show from the last 20 years that I thought was funny - tried the Borat trick at a comedy club: use racism for laughs. He didn’t get rave reviews. Instead Richards was called a racist and people walked out. I watched the clip from Michael Richards‘ comedy routine. He has said that he was simply angry and went postal. That isn’t so. He clearly was trying to draw laughs.

The difference between Sacha Cohen’s racist act and Michael Richards’ racist act is simple. Cohen is trying to make us laugh at the other, but it’s someone from thousands of miles away. We don’t have even have a dog in Kazakh culture. But Michael Richards is trying to make us laugh at something that is very close to home, something we are very guilty about: our mistreatment of blacks for hundreds of years. Be that as it may, in essence it’s the same act to my eyes and ears. Both Cohen and Richards deserve condemnation. Racism isn’t funny.

Comedy can be dangerous. Yesterday Iraq’s comic equivalent of Jon Stewart was gunned down. I may not think Cohen or Richards or Stewart are funny, but at least in this country the chance that their awful jokes will result in their murder is slim. Thank god for small favors.