The Tenure Trap, Part 4

I've recently read two books on higher ed, Higher Education? and Crisis on Campus, that make the claim that somehow ending tenure will help to create an entirely new kind of university. Of course, letters defending tenure have been sent by the bucketful to any magazine, newspaper or major website that reviews these books and concurs with this assessment. Those letters warn of a mass calamity should tenure be abolished.

I don't think either claim is correct. What do I think would happen if tenure would be abolished? It's true that making predictions about the effect a change will have on any system is almost always a fool's errand. But since there have been so many willing to be fools on this topic, I might as well join them.

First I note that both books bemoan all the old fart professors on campus who are no longer productive. Abolishing tenure will supposedly get rid of them. Huh? The existence of those tired professors, the authors damn well know, isn't the result of tenure. It's the result of the age discrimination legislation created by the late Congressman Claude Pepper. Before those laws, there was mandatory retirement. After those laws, there wasn't. Tenure has little or nothing to do with any of this.

Let's say we abolish tenure. A professor turns 65. The light is barely on in his brain (I'm not trying to condemn all 65 year old professors here, there are plenty that are still vigorous; I'm just using a single example), but he's teaching courses, attending department meetings, and taking part, when required, in faculty governance. Students don't complain about him because he grades easily and his work loads are light. Just how are you going to get rid of this person without ending up with an age discrimination lawsuit?

So getting rid of tenure is not going to eliminate deadwood faculty. It won't save money either. Those same senior faculty members will still be there thanks to the late Claude Pepper. I have no idea why an editor didn't hit the authors of these books over the head when they made their claims concerning abolishing tenure and said, dude get a brain.

Getting rid of tenure will likely have other effects, though. Professors will no longer be de facto part owners of their schools, something that tenure confers to them. Instead, they will be just regular employees that happen to have Ph.D.s. That means that it is possible that they will have less freedom in the classroom; they may be forced to teach in certain ways and on certain topics.

I think that change is more than possible. It's likely. Overall, I'd say that change would be a plus. Professors are often awful instructors and are inclined to teach their own arcane area of research regardless as to whether there is any interest or need for classes on their research area. Having a boss man or boss lady doing a little lording over their teaching might be a good thing.

On the negative side, that same lording over would likely take place with regard to research. Given the financial constraints on institutions, it's likely that professors would be pushed to go where the money is research-wise. To a large extent that's happening already. For example at Duke, a joint college/medical school department in anthropology was put in deep freeze mostly because it wasn't generating as many grant dollars per square foot of lab/office space as other departments in the medical school (yes, some bean counter dean actually had that calculation done for him). Abolishing tenure, would likely make such decisions even more common.

Besides being crass, the push to chase after money - essentially making professors the Ph.D. equivalent of ambulance chasing lawyers - will diminish the intellectual quality of research on a campus. The fact is that granting agencies with a fair amount of easy money tend to want very mundane work done.

My guess is, though, that the influence on both teaching and research will be minor. Deans and even department chairs only have so much time on their hands. Some may micromanage and actively try to alter the teaching and research habits of professors. But most won't. It will be the same old, same old, except professors will be on contract.

I think the most profound change with the loss of tenure would take place with faculty governance and the management of a university. Currently at most colleges and universities, the faculty's role in management is a curious thing. The faculty has committees and a senate body to look at school policy. But most faculty members hate working on these committees or being a member of a faculty senate.

The reasons for this lack of interest in faculty governance are two-fold. One, as noted in an earlier post (part 2, I think) professors are far more interested in impressing their colleagues at outside institutions with their research than they are in influencing their own school. Their promotions are based on research prowess and as a result their loyalties are less with their school than they are with their professional research organizations. Why should they waste their time on something that gets in the way of them being productive researchers?

Second, these faculty bodies hardly have any power. Usually, they are advising bodies only, and usually they are expected to simply rubber stamp changes wanted by leadership. And that's what they almost always do. Why do tenured faculty do this? Why don't they exert some influence? I think it's partly because of the loyalty problem described above. Basically, professors don't give a sh*t.

It can get to be comical, this dance between faculty and leadership. A few years ago, the faculty at Notre Dame wanted to abolish its faculty senate because it was so toothless and a waste of time. The faculty wasn't allowed to do so. Leadership basically admitted that the faculty was powerless, but they insisted that professors go through the motions with their committees and "governing" bodies.

At Duke when I was there, the faculty senate related to undergraduate affairs completely fell apart for a few years. There were no senators. There were no meetings. University leadership forced it to be resurrected. I know what these senate meetings were like. The head of the senate talked. Virtually no one listened and instead read research articles, student papers or worked on their lecture notes, raising their hands yes when asked.

This I know sounds completely cynical. But I'm just reporting what I observed. It was a farce.

Despite all this lack of real power, for some strange reason leadership remains fearful of faculty opinion. Getting the faculty to agree on policy takes time. The faculty will almost always say yes, but you still have to go through a lengthy process of getting professors to meet in committees and then getting a vote in a faculty senate. It can take months.

There may also be one loose canon faculty member who decides not to go along and suddenly energizes the other faculty to delay leadership's desires for at least for one or two meetings or maybe even a year (I did that once or twice).

The presence of tenure gives the faculty the kind of power - even though they barely exercise that power - that makes leadership slow down. It's a check on the system. Remove that check, and leadership can swiftly move.

This sounds like a potentially good thing. But look at the quality of leadership on American campuses. It's not a pretty sight. We've have had decades of poor leadership across the country. For example, I served under three presidents at Duke. They were all bad. They all had serious lapses in character and integrity. They were all incredibly thin skinned. They didn't do their homework and understand what was really happening at their university (basically, they were too distracted with raising money to effectively manage anything).

Serving under them were deans that were rather pathetic as well. They all aspired to be future college presidents. In all my years, I admired one provost. He left to go back to teaching after one year on the job. I admired one dean. She left after a few years to be a provost elsewhere and now works in the Obama administration. That's two out of maybe 20 people in positions of leadership with whom I had to interact that I felt deserved any respect. That's not a good track record.

Given the general absence of competence and integrity in university leadership, those checks that tenured faculty put on the system are actually a good thing. They limit the damage that leadership can do.

This little discussion has gone on for far, far, far too long I know! It needs an editor. But if you've gotten this far, you might be wondering why I haven't mentioned the reason tenure is defended time and time again, free speech. I peripherally mentioned it with regard to research. Pushing faculty to chase money instead of good ideas is in a way, restricting free speech. Should tenure be abolished, would faculty be more circumspect in what they say? No doubt.

I'll end with a pre-tenure story about a university in about 1900, Vanderbilt. The school wanted to beef up its science and had some idea about developing a nationally recognized geology department. They hired a Harvard educated Ph.D. to head up this effort. After a few years, it was clear there was a conflict. The professor believed in evolution. He taught evolution in his classes as any geologist would. In Nashville at the turn of the 20th century, teaching evolution was not at all acceptable. The professor was canned. The department was essentially eliminated. Vanderbilt never developed any research prowess in geology.

Now I doubt in today's environment that a professor or department would run into trouble teaching evolution (except at places like Liberty and Oral Roberts). But it's likely that the elimination of tenure would occasionally inhibit the teaching of controversial ideas.

What would the abolition of tenure do to colleges and universities? It would be a mixed bag. Given the awful quality of university leadership over the last few decades, the overall influence would likely be negative. Should the quality of university leadership dramatically improve nationwide, I might give tenure abolition a thumbs up. But I don't see that happening anytime in the near future.

The Tenure Trap, Part 3

When critics bemoan tenure, the attack is usually about the fact that no one deserves a job for life. There needs to be some accountability - a job needs to have some risk associated with it - otherwise people will eventually become irresponsible. I'll get to that argument in a bit. But first I'd like to assume tenure has value and ask, under that assumption, are we granting tenure for reasons that truly enhance a campus?*

I think that the answer is at best mixed. As I noted in Part 2, the preponderance of professors are not good at research, but we pretend they are. We create a fiction that universities are all inhabited by top notch scholars. Universities are certainly not alone in creating delusions like this. Many heart patients across the country swear that their heart surgeons were the absolute best in the business. It gives us comfort.

Tenure currently encourages excellent research and that is a wonderful thing. But there is far more need for professors to teach than there is a need for professors to do research. The money just isn't there to support them. In most fields of which I'm aware, grants available for potential ground breaking research have a 90 percent or more rejection rate. You can up your percentage significantly by applying for "directed research" money, but there's usually not much scholarship in that kind of work at all.

Because the money is limited and the number of applications is so high, the pie for research is often cut into skinny little slices that impair a researcher from doing the work necessary to truly do high impact research. Take away two thirds of the applicants, and the situation would be healthier and would still instill competition.

Creating a tenure system focused on research alone essentially forces professors to do something for which most aren't particularly skilled and for which there are far too few dollars available, anyway. Of course, those professors may think they are skilled. Their accomplishments say otherwise. Worse yet, they produce Ph.D.s who can't find jobs (this is particularly true in the humanities). It's a waste of resources across the board.

You can see where this is leading. You probably, if you've been reading this thing from the beginning (you must not have a job!), could see where it was heading at about paragraph 2 of Part 1. If a university is going to have tenure, it should de-emphasize research in tenure considerations. It should go partly back to the good citizen model, a model still used by many liberal arts colleges today.

Such a transformation would have many benefits. It would allow professors to work from their strengths. If they are great researchers, more power to them. They can continue to follow the model of today, publish and get grant money. If they are great teachers, they can give up the pretense of trying to be researchers, and focus on inspiring undergraduates. If they are wonderful at interacting with colleagues, they can use most of their time moving the college or university forward programatically by running committees and faculty councils.

One end result would be that the quality of teaching would likely improve. Also, I would hope that such a change would, because professors would no longer be obligated to do research, help ease the glut of papers and books that never get cited. It would likely ease the glut of Ph.D. students as well, since in the current climate the number of Ph.D. students you graduate are like notches on your research bedpost.

Finally, this change would move a significant number of professors away from focusing on trying to satisfy outside scholars to actually being of direct benefit to their schools. We'd likely have fewer obnoxious jerks. Professors would have to work harder at getting along with others in their own institutions. The environment would be saner.

I can't think of a single downside to allowing professors to achieve tenure through strength in one or two aspects of their work instead of strength in only one, research. The only barrier I can see to making such a change would be that the academy would have to admit that the current model doesn't work. No one likes to admit mistakes, I know. It's probably true that the research-focused model for the professorate we use today worked fine in 19th century Germany. It probably worked in 1920, too. But scaling up that model 100 or more fold in an ad hoc way, which is what we have done, doesn't make any sense at all.

All of this assumes tenure has value, and I started out part one with a tease about the attack on tenure. Should we have tenure at all? Crap. I've used up my alloted hour of typing. That discussion will have to wait until part four. And then I absolutely have to finish!

*As I side note, I've been typing in Yiddish and Hebrew all day, and this left to right writing that I'm doing right now looks very strange to me. I'll probably lapse into Yiddish sentence construction even more than I usually do.

The Tenure Trap, Part 2

Tenure wasn't always based on research prowess. That change was mostly a 1960s phenomenon. The US government began to invest in basic research after WWII and universities decided to go after a large share of that research pie. In the process, they transformed themselves into institutions where teaching was number two on the list of priorities. By the 1960s, the rise of research was fully established, and it was then apparently that tenure committees began to look primarily at research prowess - books and articles published, grants obtained, etc. - to determine tenure.

Before that time, a professor simply had to be a member in good standing in the university. Basically you had to play the role and...look professorial. Teaching, committee work, not pissing people off, and being a good citizen were the important things. Those criteria still hold at many liberal arts colleges today.

But at the big schools, both public and private, the criteria moved away from being a good citizen. Instead it was all about how you were viewed by other scholars outside your university or college. This created a profound shift in a professor's loyalties. It was increasingly becoming possible to be a bad citizen - you could teach poorly, avoid committee work, and just focus on your research - and still get tenure. Professor X could in fact be an asshole and as long as he was an extremely productive researcher and outside scholars viewed him as a star, he'd be awarded a job for life.

In fact, that's what started to happen at universities and colleges in the 1970s. Real jerks whose only abilities were to crunch papers, write books and get funding started to dominate faculty rolls. They were obnoxious. They was nasty. They were unhappy and miserable. I know. I was surrounded by people like this. The older faculty members - who had been granted tenure under the old be a good citizen rules - tended to be perfectly fine people to be around. The newer ones - who came along in the 1980s and beyond - were, with some wonderful exceptions - horrible, obnoxious people. I did my best to avoid them.

Modern tenure assessment - focused on research prowess only - has created a faculty loaded with jerks. Also, as I noted in Part 1, even at top notch universities most faculty aren't doing much research that's either worthwhile intellectually or practically. The majority of research papers published never even get cited. Yet, as the criteria for tenure increasingly shifted toward research prowess, the number of academic journals exploded to accommodate more and more obscure research.

One would think that the community of scholars that were, through their external evaluations, the de facto judges of tenure nationwide, would do serious policing to separate the good from the bad. But a strange thing happened over time. Honest external evaluations became difficult to find. Instead a buddy system developed in an ad hoc way. After all, who wants to be responsible for getting some young bright eyed person fired when you see him at conferences every year and know he has a couple of young kids? I speak from experience in writing external tenure letters for such people. I sure as hell didn't want anyone canned.

Instead, in this buddy system we created the fiction that most research was of value.

In the end, a tenure process based on research evolved into a system where people were promoted for churning out minutiae. Not everyone does this. A significant number of people at top notch universities do in fact produce research of significant worth. But nationwide, I'm guessing that the percentage of young professors doing worthwhile research in the sciences and engineering is on the order of 20 percent. In the social sciences and humanities - which hung onto the coat tails of science funding in academe to create, by and large, artificial research communities of their own - the percentage is lower.

Add the fact that as noted in Part 1, even productive researchers usually cease to be productive after they reach fifty or so, and the percentage of all professors on a campus doing worthwhile research at any university - even the best ones - is alarmingly small. Yet research is what defines these institutions' prestige.

We have created a strange system where the end all and be all in universities - research - is not something many professors are good at. The community of scholars at a university consists of a tiny percentage of people actively doing something worthwhile, another small percentage that because of the inevitability of aging is resting on its laurels, and a huge percentage of pretenders. We don't challenge these pretenders. In fact, we pretend right along with them. It makes them happy. It also feeds the ego of the university and its community if everyone suspends disbelief and gives into the idea that everyone is a top-notch scholar.

I'll finish this up with my next post.

The Tenure Trap, Part 1

Lately, I've been running into writings that bemoan tenure in universities. Here's one. And here's another. These articles (and chapters in books) that call for the abolition of tenure make arguments that tenured faculty are too expensive and tenure promotes faculty irresponsibility and laziness.

I should first note that the article in the LA Times I linked to above has a big error that the authors have admitted to me via email. Senior professors use up nowhere near the percentage of salary dollars claimed in their article. They also don't dispute that their salary data, culled from the annual AAUP surveys, might be off.

All that aside, the arguments against tenure sound an awful lot like the diatribes against union labor. Salaries for full professors are supposedly too high. Yet, salaries even for established full professors at decent universities are in the 80K-90K a year range (higher for big name and elite schools, but nowhere near the average salaries that are given in the AAUP annual faculty salary surveys). This is nothing to write home to mom about. I know that for a fact. My mom would, in a nice way, frequently tease me about what was, in her opinion, my very meager professor's salary.

No, tenured professors aren't overpaid. And the argument that somehow universities will save money by eliminating tenure partly implies that senior professors will end up being paid less in a tenure-less university. Great. We'll put downward salary pressure on people with already modest salaries relative to their level of education.

I actually doubt that senior professors would see significant salary cuts or increases if tenure was eliminated. I actually doubt that the elimination of tenure would have that much substantial financial impact at all. It would however, significantly change the culture of a college campus, and probably not for the better.

Before I discuss how campus culture would change, it's worth examining the life cycle of a tenure track faculty member. Let's call this person Professor X. Let's also call Professor X a male because if I call my model professor a female, the description below might be twisted into a sign that I'm female bashing. I'm just professor bashing here. Let's get that straight.

My model professor gets his job at the age of about 30 give or take a few years.

Professor X is likely very, very fortunate to get any kind of tenure track job. He had to somehow beat out 80-400 other applicants for his position. Every one of them had a Ph.D. Twenty percent of them had stellar applications with recommendations that said the applicant virtually walked on water intellectually (recommendation inflation is as common as grade inflation).

It's likely that Professor X is energetic and brimming with new ideas. Most of the time, unfortunately, those ideas are arcane and will result in little impact in the intellectual world. But no one has told Professor X that. He truly believes he's a world beater. And about ten percent of the time he is. By that I mean, he has the kinds of ideas that, if he successfully works on them during his career, will be cited at least hundreds of times by other scholars.

Here we are at fallacy number one in academe, the fallacy of the importance of research. Tenure or no tenure, almost all professors are engaging in research of little value to anyone, intellectuals or otherwise. Even at a top notch world class university, most professors are churning out meaningless drivel. We shouldn't have so many professors dedicating themselves to research, tenure or no.

But let's say Professor X is truly a quality researcher. He's produced a wonderful dissertation that will be cited by others for years to come once it has been published in book or article form (it it hasn't already been published). He has lots of good ideas. He gets money and support for his future research despite long odds. For the next ten years he's a whirlwind of productivity research-wise and publishes many interesting and provocative papers or books. He gets tenure along the way, sometimes early because of all he has done. It's a happy story, yes? I agree! Except for one thing.

Let's advance this happy story ahead in time. Sometime in his forties, those ideas just don't come as frequently anymore. And they aren't as good as the ones he thought of in his thirties. That laser-like focus he once had for minutiae isn't there anymore either. He has, oh my god, aged! The fact is that academic research is best for the young. I've rarely seen anyone over the age of fifty doing interesting research. I've never seen anyone over the age of sixty doing it. Your best ideas come in your twenties and thirties.

And it isn't just Professor X that has become a bit lame intellectually. It's also his field. Over a period of twenty years, an area of research that was once brimming with new discoveries can, as a result of those new discoveries, essentially dry up. Everything that will be found of note, has for the next several decades at least, been found.

For those that think I'm writing a quick and dirty autobiography - that Professor X is me - you're wrong. There are parallels sure, but there are also significant differences. Back to the subject matter.

Professor X could, in theory, pick up and go to an entirely new field. But in fact, that's a very, very hard thing to do. First, Professor X must be intellectually agile in his 40s, something that's not very likely. He needs to go back to the library, study and learn everything anew. Second, the people already established in the new field must accept Professor X into their fold even though his fame comes from another field entirely; that's not likely going to happen either.

Now that doesn't mean that Professor X should bow down to the effects of father time on his brain and field of study and quit his job (or jump off a cliff for the more dramatic Professor X's in this world). I'll continue this thing next time.

Three Chords And a Version of the Truth, Part 2

I was listening the other week to some archived interviews with country music musicians and songwriters on NPR's Fresh Air. The host of that show does best when she talks with musicians. You can tell by the warm tone in her voice that she's in her comfort zone.

So it was with her conservations with Willie Nelson et al. Probably the best line in the interviews I heard was at the end of her interview with the late Waylon Jennings, when Jennings said something to the effect, "You asked some pretty good questions there little lady."

I can't say I particularly like the music of Jennings. It's too simple and the lyrics don't do much for me. The same can be said for most country music written before about 1975. The songs were, in general, long on heart, but short on craft. I find most of that music unlistenable.

But sometime in the late 1970s country music began to change. The lyrics became much sharper. The melodies started to occasionally have something vaguely interesting going on. What happened was that a lot of East Coast and West Coast songwriters migrated to Nashville because pop and rock performers were increasingly writing their own material. Songwriting gigs on the coasts completely dried up. That wasn't so true in country music. Singers and record labels still depended on songwriters. Nashville was the last place in America where songwriters could work their trade.

From the 1970s through the 1990s there was a tremendous amount of cross pollination between the pure country writing set and those who came in from the world of pop and rock. Nashville music publishers started the practice of arranging for co-writing sessions between songwriters to foster that cross-pollination. The music got better. A lot better.

Country music was still sentimental, of course. It's a tenant of modern intellectualism that sentimentality is bad in art and entertainment. I've never understood that. Families and family life are often overloaded with schmaltz and sentimentality. If you choose to ignore what's sentimental, then you are in fact creating art and entertainment divorced from reality. For example, here is what is widely acknowledged as one of the best songs ever written in country music (written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam):



Musically this song is as dull as anything. It's also as schmaltzy as anything. But there's that twist at about the two minute mark and if you think that twist is hokey, I'd have to disagree. I'd have to say you don't really understand what enduring love is about and you don't understand what the South is about. A case in point. I worked with a kid from Mississippi one year in the 1970s. This kid, when he wasn't working with me, was going door to door spreading the gospel. He said to me once, "You know my momma loves my daddy so much that when he dies - and he's a lot older than she is - she wants to have his head stuffed so she can put it on the fireplace mantel."

I'm not kidding. He really said that. And he really meant it. Using the relationship between my old work buddy's parents as a barometer, the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is about as sincere and truthful as anything in this world.

Even if you think that George Jones singing about enduring love is pure trash, I hope that you admit that this song, written by Lucinda Williams, is about as honest and heartfelt as they come:



Again, musically there isn't much here, although it's far better than He Stopped Loving Her Today. But those lyrics are damn solid and the idea of a woman demanding what is "my right" is just damn wonderful.

By the 2000s, the spark in country music had pretty much died out. The lyrics got dull again. The music emphasized beat and volume. And those songwriters from the coasts who came to Nashville lost the last gig for songwriters in America because Nashville producers and record labels decided performers should write their own material.

But for over two decades, there were some fine songs written in Nashville by people who truly understood how to write music. Here's one written by Beth Chapman, Down On My Knees. The production is crappy - that's typical of Nashville - but Trish Yearwood couldn't sing off pitch if you put a gun to her head and this song is as good as any r&b tune written for Motown:



If you had put a hard three on the beat and had Luther V. sing Down My Knees, it would have been on the r&b charts for half a year. Instead the tune was a minor hit for Yearwood. Schmaltzy? I don't think so. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to lose the love of your life. Damn, I'd be down on my knees, too Plus craft-wise this tune is as solid as granite.

Long ago, the dean of Nashville songwriting Harlan Howard described country music as three chords and the truth. I'd say it's three chords and a version of the truth, one that comes from a life where family and love are first and foremost, where people are frail, and where hard luck and poverty are often pervasive.

I don't think, in the end, I'm a very good country music songwriter. Mostly I'm imitating the music. A discerning country ear knows that's exactly what I'm doing. But every once in a while, I come close to "three chords and the truth." The song here is one of those times. It has four chords not three. It's a little story song, a fictionalized version of a day in my own life when I had to deal with the demons inside my own brother. We were living in Wisconsin, which is about as far from the South as you can get. But Harlan Howard grew up in Detroit. Country music isn't about where you're from. It's about, and this is corny as hell but also true, what's in your heart.

Three Chords and a Version of the Truth

One way of thinking of songwriting is that there is an optimal amount of information content in any song. On one end of the spectrum is a song where one note is repeated with an even rhythm and a one word lyric. For example, love, love, love, love, love and so on. That wouldn't be a hit. Too dull. It's a high entropy message. On the other end of the spectrum is a song where rhythm signatures and dynamics vary starkly, there are key changes and odd intervals tossed around, and the lyrics talk about some esoteric subject like how to properly build a chicken coop. That wouldn't be hit either. Too complicated. It's a low entropy message and is called contemporary jazz.

A songwriter intuitively or analytically knows that there has to be something mostly old and predictable (mostly high entropy) in a song and that the trick is to add something new and interesting onto that boring base that excites the public. So the idea is to somehow balance all aspects of a song when writing and make them all just a little interesting: rhythm, dynamics, melody, and lyric. I don't mean that the balance needs to be or should be equal. Usually one element sticks out more than any other. Very few writers have the ability or interest to have a mix of strong elements. People like Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell come to mind; they think of the whole song.

But most songwriters are specialists. The fact is that if you do one thing extremely well, the other aspects of the song don't really matter or just might get in the way. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are essentially lyricists who happen to add melodies and rhythms (dynamics in pop music disappeared with modern mastering about 40 years ago). For Dylan and Cohen, that emphasis on lyric (with a drone-like background) likely comes from where they heard music first, the synagogue. Every time I hear a song from those two, I have an image of an old guy in robes reading the Torah on a Saturday morning.

Most pop music is not lyric focused. The lyrics in fact are almost always complete cliches. From Frankie Avalon in the 1960s to Beyonce today, no one is saying anything particularly important, clever or interesting lyrically. The emphasis increasingly has moved from melody to rhythm. The idea is to simply shake your hips.

There's one exception to the lyric as a silly accessory rule in popular music today, country music. The melodies, chord progressions, and rhythms in country music are almost always predictable. But the lyrics often aren't. Or at least they didn't used to be.

I get a lot of grief for liking country music. No, I don't listen much to what is on the radio today as I'll get to later. But the stuff from about 1970 to 1995 can be damn good. I also know I'm not the only Jewish middlebrow intellectual who gets grief for liking country music.

I've written a lot of country music and I've gotten a lot of grief for that, too. None of my songs have been recorded by major country musicians. But they have been good enough to get me access to all but one major record company in Nashville. Before the music industry collapsed, record company execs would invite me into their offices, listen to my tunes, and take a song every now and then for potential use. Here's a link to one. I'll continue this discussion next time.

On College Science and Engineering Bashing

I was reading a new book, Higher Education? by Hacker and Dreifus. It had its good points, but not infrequently I would shake my head and think, no that isn't right. One of my head shakes related to their discussion of engineering education. They lamented the high drop out rates in engineering and put the blame on the professorate. According to them, engineering professors must not be doing their jobs right. Then came the kicker. They suggested that engineering be thrown out of undergraduate education altogether and be made into a discipline for graduate study only.

Hah, hah, hah. Earth to Hacker and Dreifus. This country needs engineers to keep our economy humming. Engineering students already spend four or more years (because of extensive requirements, it sometimes takes more than four years even with a full course load) learning the things they need to practice their profession. That's already a lot of time and expense. Do you really expect them to get an undergraduate liberal arts degree as well?

Hacker and Dreifus seem to be of the opinion that if students don't like a class it means that the class isn't very good. They also espouse the idea that everyone has the ability to go to college. Neither are true.

I'm not going to make the claim that every engineering class is taught by a wonderful and dedicated instructor. They aren't. But the reason most students dislike engineering classes is simple. They're damn hard and the work loads tend to be heavy. Students don't like doing all that work, especially when they know their dorm-mates are majoring in things like sociology, and as a result can party all night long and still end up with B+ averages. I'm not making this up. I've talked to lots of engineering students. I had voting rights in Duke's engineering school, and taught and advised many engineering students. That's what they've told me.

And no not every student is capable of doing college level engineering work. Hacker and Dreifus are engaging in wishful thinking when they say every student is capable of doing well in college. Let's talk about just engineering and the sciences first. I'm going to make an ad hoc guess that about 20 percent of all college students today have the intellectual horsepower and work ethic to major in engineering. That's the same percentage of college students today that likely could major in the sciences. The rest just can't cut it. They can't do the math or they can't stand the work load. It's just too damn hard for them.

Don't believe me? Here's a new paper that has its quirks, but is interesting. The author, an Oregon physics prof, looks at test scores in an introductory astronomy course popular with non-science majors. We aren't talking hard science here. Most of the math is thrown out to keep it easy. The syllabus calls it "checkbook" math.

Over a period of four years, less than 30 percent of the class scored a 60 percent or better on tests. Fourteen percent withdrew from the class before completing it. Fifteen percent scored less 45 percent on tests. University of Oregon is a flagship school. It gets pretty good students relative to the national pool. The subset of their students taking what's designed as a science class for those without much science aptitude is struggling to score 50 percent of better on multiple choice tests. Perhaps the professor is an ogre who just creates impossible tests; I supremely doubt it.

What about students who don't take science and engineering courses? How many first year students in college today are capable of truly doing college level work? Based on drop out rates and the typically low GPA's of those that drop out, I'd say about sixty percent can cut it. The other forty percent simply should not be in college. They lack the intellect or discipline necessary to even perform modestly well.

The engineering bashing of Hacker and Dreifus I believe has its roots in science and technology phobia. I've heard the same type of bashing from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's former head, Lee Shulman, who says that the worst of higher education is science instruction. These people are confusing student kvetching about work with substantive criticism. Science and engineering are hard. You have to think. You can't just b.s. and get a B+. You have to do homework assignments to hone your skills. To do science and engineering well requires brains and discipline.

Instead of bashing science and engineering education, I wish those doing the bashing would simply look themselves in the mirror. Are you expecting your students to really work? Are you expecting them to stretch themselves intellectually? When I look at the social sciences, the education schools, and the humanities, the answer to these questions is no. Students aren't being pushed. They coast and earn high grades. I would argue that the worst of higher education involves non-science and engineering instruction. If students ever start kvetching about the workloads outside the sciences and engineering, I know that higher education will be on the right track.