Remake the university? How about we understand its purpose first.

Today's piece is a guest post by Michael Lopez. Michael is a few of my favorite things: an attorney-philosopher-graduate student-educator. He previously guest posted here on our shared alma mater and he also guest posts at Joanne Jacob's blog, Linking and Thinking on Education. His own blog is Highered Intelligence.


"But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution." -CK Chesterton.

Preliminarily, I'd like to thank Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog here once more. I've immense respect for her education writing and am honored to be a part of it. She's asked me to write a "response" to this article  in The New Republic about Rick Perry's "higher education vision." The author of the piece is Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector, a DC think tank. And he apparently thinks that Rick Perry has great ideas for the university. So let's do two things up front (besides reading the article): let's identify Perry's ideas, and identify why Carey thinks they're so great.

The article itself provides a link to Perry's "7 Solutions". Carey also provides this brief summary of the relevant steps:

Taken together, the seven solutions are remarkably student-friendly. Four of them focus on improving the quality of university teaching by developing new methods of evaluating teaching performance, tying tenure to success in the classroom, separating the teaching and research functions within university budgets, and using teaching budgets to reward professors who excel at helping students learn. The fifth solution would give prospective students choosing colleges more information about things like class size, graduation rates, and earnings in the job market after graduation. The sixth would make state higher education subsidies more student-focused, and the seventh would shift university accreditation toward measures of academic outcomes.

So what's so wonderful about these efforts on Carey's account? Well, the long and the short of it is that both Carey and Perry share a vision of the role of the university in our society, a vision that has quite a grip on our collective consciousness these days. That vision has a few assumptions behind it: (1) that the role of the university is primarily economic; (2) that the university is part of the "social assembly line" that our elementary and high schools have become in which institutions produce citizens something in the way a screw machine turns out screws; and, (3) that college benefits (or should benefit) everyone who attends, and, specifically, does so through advancing their career prospects.

We can see these assumptions at play throughout Carey's article. For example:

A landmark study of college student learning published earlier this year by the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa of NYU and the University of Virginia found that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students, and persistent or growing [race- and income-based] inequalities over time.” Fixing this problem ought to be a bipartisan concern.

That Carey assumes that these findings "should" be a universal concern convinces me that he doesn't even entertain two notions: (1) that university might not actually have as its mission teaching everyone equally; and, (2) that the university may not be a suitable a tool for eliminating at least some race- and income-based inequalities. These aren't implausible views, in my estimation, and they deserve at least consideration.

The balance of the article is really more about progressivism than it is about Rick Perry. (Although one might have guessed this by looking at the last sentence of the first paragraph, the traditional location of the "thesis statement."--Carey's doesn't mention Perry at all, despite the title and the picture.) His conclusion is, essentially, that progressives should be seriously committed to their goals of equality-through-social-engineering, that they should treat the university as a tool to accomplish those goals, and that they shouldn't allow party-line loyalty to interfere with their vision. Carey is, in other words, calling for a more consistent progressive idealism that pursues goals over political positioning:

Making college more accessible and affordable is, of course, the foundation of progressive higher education policy. Yet Democrats in Texas have almost uniformly denounced Perry’s plans.

Running through much of this discussion is a common theme: that students aren't getting everything they should from college, that some professors are not great teachers, and that the university is failing in its primary mission to educate the population and prepare them for the workforce. And there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that universities are, indeed, failing to prepare students for the workforce. Carey and I agree about that. 

Where we disagree is that I question whether universities should be in the workforce-preparation business in the first place. That might seem like a bit of heresy these days, when the phrase "get a college degree" is almost ubiquitously followed with the words "in order to get a good job." But the fact of the matter is that while certain portions of the university are geared towards employment preparation--schools of engineering, education, law, medicine, and the like--the undergraduate curriculum is typically a curriculum in the liberal arts. That is, it is a preparation not for employment, but for life as a free, educated member of the civic body. The university has always had this split, since its inception: there was the arts curriculum on the one hand, and then there was advanced study in Theology, Medicine, or Law on the other.

The study of the liberal arts-- the preparation to live a civic life--is primarily about maturity, reflectiveness, and grounding in culture and philosophy. It's about the development of reason and the contextualization of experience, all so that one's "wider view" of the world might be brought to bear in the course of one's life. Public universities were established in order to make this sort of personal development more available to the populace, on the theory that an informed citizenry is a better citizenry, not necessarily a wealthier citizenry. (Please note that I am referring only to the more common programs at colleges of Arts and Sciences; there is a difference between the purposes of liberal arts programs on the one hand, and technical colleges such as Texas A&M on the other.)

Now perhaps this is something that we should hope for everyone, and maybe college should be more accessible, and cheaper. But if so, it's not because college is simply the last step in preparation for the workforce. The benefit of college (in the sense I'm talking about) isn't economic and the outcome of a college education should not be judged in terms of either economic outcome or economic parity.

This vision of the university does not see the professor as a content-delivery system. That is the role of the teacher in high school, which really is an institution developed and geared towards the distribution of foundational skills for use in one's economic life. Indeed, the K-12 system was developed after the university system, and can credibly be seen as a way to fill a foundational-skills void that the university system was never designed to address. A college professor is not a high school teacher; a professor is there because he or she ostensibly has a subject-matter expertise that makes him or her a resource for those who would like to learn about those things. The burden of learning, however, is on the student; the college student should be one who can teach him or herself, and who can use the professor as a resource in their own educational development.

The high school, by contrast, is an institution for imparting foundational skills that enable students to pursue their own goals and interests. If we see education as the project of providing students with the ability to lead good, flourishing lives, we can see high school as providing the student with the means, the capacities for action, while the liberal arts curriculum helps refine the student's goals.

Yet somewhere along the line--I suspect it was in the 60's--someone decided that college should become the new high school, that a college degree should be the natural continuation and culmination of the basic-skills acquisition that the K-12 system was designed to impart. Progressives like Kevin Carey see college as a way to level the playing field, to achieve their dream of economic egalitarianism. But I think it's the wrong tool for the job, and by leaving it to colleges to pick up the slack left off by a failing high school system that has substantially abandoned any attempt at hard and fast academic standards, we're asking colleges to deliver something that they are not originally equipped to deliver.

It's hardly a surprise that colleges fail at tasks for which they are, by design, incredibly ill-suited. That failure may be a problem, but by proposing seven-point reforms like those advocated by Perry, we're not "fixing" the university, but rather reshaping it into something else.

Now maybe that's really for the best. So far, I've been merely descriptive, offering an alternative vision of the university. It happens that, historically speaking, my vision is much more accurate than Perry's or Carey's. But that doesn't mean it's the best vision for our future. Nevertheless, I think that it's important that we understand what we are doing, and that we avoid the fallacy of Chesterton's Fence, that is, the reform or changing of institutions without regard to the purposes for which they were initially constructed. (Megan McArdle discusses that fallacy here. Please, especially read the block quote from CK Chesterton.) We have universities that provide a liberal arts curriculum for a reason--presumably because the society which attends to such things is a better society. If we "reform" the university, we do so at the risk of losing the benefit of that original purpose. To overstate the case somewhat, by transforming that which gives us a vision of the good life into that which gives us financial success, we risk pursuing money at the expense of our national soul.

I hope readers will excuse me if I'm not quite as eager as Perry and Carey to sprint down that road.

Research Papers vs Blogs: Defending "Antiquated" Teaching from 21st Century Education Reform

Here is the guest post I mentioned earlier today, from Cedar Riener, a college professor of psychology who normally blogs at Cedar's Digest:



Cathy Davidson is making the rounds again in the education blogosphere. A few years ago, she gave up on grading, structuring her classes around peer review. Each assignment was graded by peers (pass/fail) and the final grade was determined by the number of assignments completed. Now she is promoting her new book Now You See It, which, as I see it, is an effort to apply Dan Simons' and Christopher Chabris' Invisible Gorilla to... well, everything. But the edu-blogsphere is all a-twitter through Virginia Heffernan's post on the NYT about how Davidson shows that education needs a 21st Century upgrade, because 65% of our students are going to have jobs that don't exist yet:

"One of the nation’s great digital minds, she has written an immensely enjoyable omni-manifesto that’s officially about the brain science of attention. But the book also challenges nearly every assumption about American education."

With the limited scope of a blog post, Heffernan starts blindfolding and lining up these poor assumptions on the wall. The first is... the antiquated 19th century research paper. Which, is always a reliable old scarecrow to shoot to shreds as you are speculating on the wonders of the 21st century jobs and skills.

Once the stage is set, Davidson points out that students are prolific publishers, only they blog. When they are forced to write a solitary, industrial age research paper, their hearts aren't in it, and they are awful:

“Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

Some aren't buying what Heffernan is selling.

Kathleen Porter-Magee from the reformy Fordham Institute, points out that if we can't predict the future, we might as well prepare students for rigorous, evidence-based reasoning:

"Regardless of what is the hip new medium, we do our students a grave disservice by pretending that pithy diatribes or observational blog posts are on the same level as more thoughtful, well-developed arguments, grounded in evidence derived from texts, with clear theses that come from something other than their personal feelings."

Robert Pondiscio adds a delightfully snarky reply, beginning by pointing out that "65% of future jobs" is a silly Potemkin number and continuing on about the ridiculousness of the 21st Century skills movement that Davidson seems to be a part of. He highlights the inconvenient fact that no one assigns research papers any more, and reiterates his point that rich factual knowledge is necessary for reasoning of any sort:

"We talk about rigor and academic achievement while dismissing the legitimate products of scholarship as inauthentic and anachronistic."

As a college professor who assigns and supervises both real research papers (I make students write them in industrial age chairs with broken typewriters, naturally) as well as short responses that might as well be blog entries.

First, the distinction between research papers and blogs is largely meaningless. Do we mean brief? Then say "short form writing." Do we mean talky, informal? Then say, "informal writing." Do we mean collaborative? Then say "collaborative." I often feel that people use "blog" as a shorthand for "everything that is good about the internet" while opponents use it as a shorthand for "everything that is bad about the internet." The vague distinction as Heffernan uses it, and as adopted by Porter-Magee and Pondiscio does not help. Research papers, in my field at least, are most often incredibly collaborative, and sometimes brief. Blogs can be solitary affairs, as well as informed by a rich scholarly knowledge of the field, even if that field happens to be side-scrolling video games made in the 1980s for left-handed suburban thirteen-year-olds.

With that caveat, let me just lay out why I think both "research papers" (by which I mean: long-form, formal, describing a consensus of scholarly literature, organized around the author's own thesis) and "blogs" (short, informal, current, multimedia, collaborative) are important for a complete education, at any level. I will give examples from college, but I have no doubt many K-12 teachers could describe their experiences with using both.

Any conception of the goals of education must include both breadth and depth. Students should learn a bit of everything, even those subjects they are not naturally drawn to. Students should also have the freedom to follow their interests, and experience mastery through sustained practice and background knowledge. What does this have to do with blogs and research papers? I think it might help if I gave a few examples from my own teaching.

A "Blog" Assignment

Short-form, collaborative writing is suitable for a quick dip into many different subjects. In my General Psychology class, I assign three very short papers (1-2 pages), as well as more frequent short responses to the class material. The first short paper is a summary and response to a TED talk video. This might as well be a blog post (perhaps Davidson thinks that peer-review and collaboration are the key ingredients, but I'll get to that later). I give students a fair amount of choice about which video they write on, and the TED talks are, as everyone knows, fun, interesting, and only fifteen minutes long.

Why is this assignment awesome? Students are given choice, but also must choose, demonstrating some interest in one of the videos. They learn interesting psychology content, their curiosity is aroused, and they get the practice of putting some of their thoughts on paper. They get some practice at the struggle of writers everywhere (bloggers and scholars alike) to put themselves in the minds of their reader, and organize their thoughts to be understood by someone else.

Why does this assignment suck? Students do not do well on these assignments. Why not? The first reason is that they don't know enough: their vocabularies are often limited and they have limited scientific knowledge, and even more limited psychology knowledge. As accessible as the TED talks are, they suppose some broad liberal-artsy knowledge, and some of my students don't have enough (yet). The second reason is that they have not had much practice writing (really in any format) yet, and they are understandably bad at it. There are several structural changes in K-12 that discourage practice writing. High stakes standardized testing pushes teachers to teach "testing skills" and large class sizes increase the already high time commitment necessary to give feedback to all students.

So, to recap: to be better writers, students need knowledge and practice. That knowledge has to start somewhere, and writing is a good way to learn something. I try to encourage students to accumulate a bit of knowledge as they gain practice writing. I try to make the knowledge gathering interesting and the writing practice as painless as possible, but painful enough to make it clear that they need more practice. That means low grades on writing assignments, more drafts, that means meeting them where they are, and helping them to the next stop. If that means helping them realize that they need topic sentences for each of their paragraphs, then I help them with that. If that means their sentences are too long, overly wordy and the passive voice is adopted too often in their well-meaning efforts to sound formal and scientific then I point that out to them.
If they need help writing brief and direct sentences, I patiently urge them to make their sentences active.

I suppose I could make this assignment peer-reviewed, on a collaborative blog, but I resist for the same reason my father refuses to display his high school students' English papers on the walls in his classroom. Real feedback on their writing means someone telling them some hard truths:

You are a conscientious student, and you have tried your best, but you don't know how to do this yet. I know you are not satisfied with your evaluation, but let's look to the future, you can turn this back in, and here are the next steps you need to take to improve. I feel confident that you can do this, but you will need to work hard.

If you can imagine an eighteen-year-old college freshman saying that to another 18-year-old, you have a livelier imagination than I do. This simply will not happen on a collaborative blog. Further, although they may collaborate to reach a deeper truth, as James Surowiecki points out in his Wisdom of Crowds, and others have pointed out more recently, crowds are only wise when there is a diversity of knowledge and of perspectives. Despite some racial, ethnic and class diversity, most everyone in my classes are eighteen to twenty years old, and know very little about psychology. They are only going to be but of so much help to one other.

A Research Paper

After students have had General Psychology, Research Methods in Psychology (which I do not currently teach) as well as my Sensation and Perception, I find a select few still interested enough to take a class called Sensation and Perception Research and Theoretical Systems, or S&P RATS. Psychology majors at Randolph-Macon are required to take two of these "RATS" classes, in which they conduct a research project and write it up. The research paper is a formal, APA-style research paper, with the requisite sections of a scientific journal article: introduction, method, results, discussion. How 19th century of us!

Why is this assignment awesome? By now students (juniors and seniors) have some knowledge, and some practice writing. They know some psychology, they have been taught some statistical tests, and they even have some limited background in sensation and perception. They get to apply that knowledge, design a scientific experiment, and see it through over the course of the semester. They will learn first hand what science really is through actually doing it. They will learn how scientists communicate, by struggling to express their methods so that someone might reproduce them, and their results so that they can be interpreted. Through writing a report on an experiment they conducted, on a topic of their choosing (okay, with a few nudges) students experience the second side of our university system, not the transfer of knowledge through teaching and learning, but the creation of new knowledge through scholarly research. They must explore what other people have written on this topic (and realize how much research has been done already). They may not exactly create any new knowledge themselves, but they see what sorts of long, painful efforts are necessary to add another grain of sand to our castle of knowledge. Perhaps in the future scientists may communicate through blog posts (some do in the present, see Rosie Redfield on arsenic life). But the assignment's value is the same: this is how scientists communicate, these are the critical elements of an experiment, this is how we separate the experimental methods and the data from the interpretation.

Why does this assignment suck? Most of these students will not become scientists, but through this assignment they learn first-hand what science really is: repeated, soul-sucking failure punctuated by brief moments of relief. They will learn how scientists communicate, in rigid, impersonal format, like an OCD's desktop, everything in its place. NO! You cannot say why you wanted that to happen in the results section! Nein! The participants section does not include your experimental groups! I think this is valuable, and I know they will eventually find useful the habits of mind demanded by my field. But some (not all) don't find it all that interesting or valuable in the moment. Further, even though they do have more knowledge than they did as entering students, they still do not have enough knowledge to fully understand a scientific journal article. In short, some students struggle.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 reform?

First, these are exactly the conversations that K-12 teachers should be able to have about their assignments and courses, and are actively discouraged from having by the current reform scheme. Unfortunately, the "thoughtful, well-developed arguments, grounded in evidence derived from texts, with clear theses" that Porter-Magee and Pondiscio value fall by the wayside when everyone has to teach basic math and reading skills to be accountable to standardized tests. The ability to do a research paper in high school depends on knowledge and interest gained throughout a students schooling. When curriculum is driven by test-based accountability, it undermines teachers efforts to develop practical wisdom.

Second, it affects what students can do once they get to college. Faculty at my institution have noticed a decrease in students' proficiency in writing since the advent of the Standards of Learning in Virginia. These high stakes tests push teachers away from writing, and towards test prep, and we college teachers notice. The worst part about it is that while accountability falls hardest on teachers in urban high-poverty settings, intended to decrease the achievement gap, what I see in college is a widening of the gap. Those who went to private schools or who had teachers who were able to bypass the SOLs are more equipped to write at the college level than those who didn't, and the testing and accountability craze is widening this gap.

Finally, education is a long game. This is true for a teacher like myself, having an internal dialogue as above, trying to gradually improve my craft, fitting it better for my students, but it is also true for the students. Some of the things I do in general psychology for enjoyment in the moment (like candy) but other things are for payoff down the road, like brushing and flossing. The same is true for research papers. The capability to write with depth and rigor in a field must be cultivated over years and years, by content-rich curriculum to give students background knowledge, and by practice in writing that is nearly impossible to assess cheaply with bubble tests, or by underpaid graduate students.

Accountability through high-stakes, standardized, multiple choice tests narrows administrators and teachers attention on those aspects of student learning that can be easily measured in a single year. Emphasis on practicing writing or developing a broad base of knowledge may not be reflected at the end of the year, just as my efforts in General Psychology may not bear fruit until four years later. Education is incremental, but it is not always measurably so.

Gentle reader, are you still here? Thanks for bearing with me for a blog post the length of a research paper (if not the focus). I have two take-home messages:

First, college professors like myself should realize that their teaching is being changed for the worse by standardized testing. The brains in our classrooms are shaped by the SOLs just as much as they are shaped by Google, and we have to clean up the mess. Many more students come in unprepared for writing at a college level, but also unprepared to focus and apply their own interests to a topic. Naturally, I believe the best place to realize their interests and gain that preparation is a small liberal arts college, where people like me have a passion for teaching as well as the time and support to focus on a lower number of students, and follow them for 3-4 years.

Second, I would remind those educational "conservatives" like those at the Fordham Institute who championed Core Knowledge when E.D. Hirsch was derided for his traditionalism, and now rise to the defense of the research paper that I appreciate that your right hand is fighting hard to preserve valuable aspects of the "industrial model" of education: broad factual knowledge and rigorous arguments based on legitimate, scholarly authorities. Unfortunately, you don't realize that the true enemy of these cherished elements of education is ... your left hand, which is pursuing awful test-based accountability. The research paper was in hiding and on life support long before Cathy Davidson came along, and it was not driven mortally wounded from K-12 education by blog cheerleaders like Heffernan and Davidson, but by the very Reformy Idols that you celebrate.

Diversity University: University First, Diversity Second

I was "introduced" to Michael Lopez when he was guest blogging over at Joanne Jacob's place. Among others, he wrote a post in response to this piece in the New York Times about admissions policies at Amherst College (and at other elite colleges). (This is a bit off topic, but after you read the NYT piece, read these letters to the editor in response.) Since he mentioned he had gone to Wesleyan, I shared my posts in reference to admissions policies there (here's the first and the second one). We chatted a bit and one thing led to another and next thing you know I asked him to write a guest post in response to mine. Michael's blog is "Highered Intelligence." I will soon respond to his post, but in the meantime, here's Michael:


This post is an outgrowth of a comment I left on Rachel's "Diversity University, No Longer" post. It covers much of the same ground, but also includes a few important ideas that I had neglected before. I will assume that the reader of this post has read her post in its entirety; there's quite a bit there, and it's not all obvious, but I think it boils down in the end to this paragraph:

"No matter how diverse racially and geographically the student body seems to be, in order to be truly committed to diversity, equality, and social justice, Wesleyan must change their admissions policies and must get out of the US News and World Report ratings game. Otherwise, no matter how much they're marketing themselves as part of the meritocracy, Wesleyan is still the same elitist animal."

Let me start out by saying that it's pretty clear that there's an uneasy social compact about what constitutes "academic merit". It's some ill-defined composite of test scores, grades, writing ability, accomplishments, school activities, and various types of service projects. The unifying theme of these constituents is that they are all things that the student does, not things that the student is. Whenever a school wanders outside these factors, it is engaging in what I think can fairly be called "affirmative action," insofar as the admissions office is taking an affirmative step to increase the likelihood that a candidate will be admitted on some other basis.

Now many of these semi-agreed-upon factors are the sorts of things that are tracked by US News and World Report. If there wasn't some degree of widespread agreement, the magazine wouldn't use these figures, because they wouldn't matter to the audience. I thus take it that Rachel is explicitly calling for "affirmative action" on the basis of a student's inferior position in our "increasingly stratified American class system". (I use "inferior" here in its technical, not qualitative sense.)

I've got no objection to this, as such. But I do think that I've got a different view than Rachel does, and that it's informed by a different perspective that I have on our shared alma mater, Wesleyan. See, I was one of the "low income" students that supposedly contributed to whatever diversity Wesleyan had back in the early/mid 1990's. I was also part of their ostensible racial diversity, but I'm not going to talk about race in this post other than to say that I'm not going to talk about race.

Now, from a certain perspective, Wesleyan was a tremendously diverse place. My closest circle of friends included students of five different races from four different parts of the country. Inter alia, we had 1.5 Mexicans, a West Virginian, a black guy from Brooklyn, a Caribbean/African American fellow from the Bronx, two white guys from the South, some half-Asian kids, and two Jews for good measure. Some were rich, some poor, and a few were in between. You might be asking what this group actually had in common, as any group of friends must have SOMETHING in common to stay together. The answer is simple: we were smart and we played D&D.

But I said "from a certain perspective" Wesleyan was diverse. Diversity really is a matter of perspective. If you've lived your entire life in the New York City or Boston upper middle class, or lower upper class, Wesleyan probably seems like it's a cornucopia of human variegation, even though a plurality of the students are actually pretty much just like you. If, on the other hand, you're a poor kid from California, it seems a little less diverse. How is that possible? Well, for the person in the former situation, there's all these new people who are so very different running around. For the person in the latter position--for me, that is--pretty much the entire school seems like rich folks from the East Coast. (And all y'all seemed rich to me, even those who protested about how you were thoroughly "middle class," but that's the perspective thing coming up again.)

While I had no expectations about the make-up of the student body coming in my freshman year, I pretty quickly figured out that despite being "Diversity University," Wesleyan was nonetheless primarily a bastion of a certain type of exercised, cultivated social privilege, and that I was a bit of a guest, free to take advantage of the facilities and treated like any other member of the society, but it was definitely not "my world." This was brought into graphic relief when I would go home. My father and my paternal grandparents, may they rest in peace, used to actually refer to it as "Mike's finishing school".

Now that's not to say I wasn't prepared to do the work--I was just as prepared or even more prepared than many of my classmates. (At least in this respect, I was a typical college student: it was motivation that caused me all my problems.) And while I don't want to go into boring detail, my application was what could probably best be called "inconstant." I had some very strong indicators (test scores and recs) and some very weak ones (GPA and certain curricular choices I made in high school). In short, it wasn't obvious that I was a shining candidate for admission.

I am thus exceedingly grateful to Wesleyan for taking a risk on me, and not least because it was the only school that accepted me. (And not the lowest ranked, either. My bona fides really were inconstant.) I know I was a risk--they could have just as easily taken one of their 4.2/1490 community service Manhattan-based demigods, the ones that they reject every year. That would have been a safer bet for them. They saw something they liked in my application, though, and off I went.

So I don't feel quite the same sense of outrage if the university decides to take fewer risks, if, as I heard some members of Rachel's class once remark, Wesleyan in the late 90's became "L.L. Bean-i-fied." If there are a few less borderline cases, a few less rolls of the admissions dice from an administration concerned with their national reputation, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. From my vantage, extending their assistance and considerable financial generosity was something that they didn't have to do in the first place.

Frankly, I didn't go to Wesleyan to experience diversity. I didn't go to meet poor and rich students, Jewish and Episcopal students, or brown, black and yellow students. I went to meet really smart, engaging students who would push me, and with whom I could form an intellectual community. I don't know how many of you actually remember high school, but in many cases (not all, but many) it was a place where ideas and originality went to die. I wanted something different from Wesleyan, in fact, I recall writing in my hurried, last-minute application, the following sentence in response to the prompt, "How do you want to be remembered by your college community: "If college is anything like high school, I don't want to be remembered at all because I'd rather not have been there." I paraphrase only slightly and claim the pass of years as an excuse. Please don't think I hated high school completely--the good teachers I had were excellent, and thankfully, I had them often; the classes I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. But the classes I didn't enjoy were the worst sort of soul-crushing tedium, and the environment as a whole could fairly be called anti-intellectual.

I sometimes think that the "diversity" of a student body, in terms of race or money or accents or whatever, is the sort of luxury that you have to be middle- or upper-class to care about in the first place. And not being part of that club, I didn't care about diversity. In fact, what attracted me was the homogeneity of the student body: they were all wicked smart! My purpose was to get a first-class education, and a better future for myself. (To be fair, I didn't realize that "better future" included an extremely painful, emotionally taxing four-year crash-course on middle-class mores, but there it is.) And I believe that the prospect of a better future and a first rate education has to be the first and primary mission of the university.

That's not to say that a certain amount of risk-taking in admissions isn't a good thing. I'm a fan. As I've said elsewhere, I support SES-based affirmative action, up to a point. And I think that most of Rachel's suggestions--outreach, summer programs, etc.--are well-taken and, funds permitting, would be capital ideas. "Rolling the dice" on a student means taking a gamble, but the gamble I want Wesleyan taking is the gamble that the student they are admitting really are the sort of wicked smart, well-prepared student who will help grow the discourse of learning.

So I'm wary of pushing the thumb too hard against the scale. Rachel talks about students who are "capable" of doing the work (her emphasis). Based on the rest of her essay, she seems to be indicating that there's a certain amount of potential that should be recognized in college admissions; that a student might be good raw material, but just not quite as developed. And that's probably a good idea, to some extent. Nevertheless, as I wrote recently at Joanne Jacob's blog in response to the argument that a lower SAT score from the Bronx was "as impressive" as a higher score from a richer area:

"That, too, is a lovely sentiment. And it’s probably true if the 'merit' that you’re trying to measure is some sort of absolute potential. But the counterargument is a strong one, and runs thusly: college is a bit late to be relying on your potential. College, particularly college at any of the schools on the list above, is going to draw upon your actual preparation as a foundation for more advanced studies. If you don’t have that foundation, you’re going to fall behind because for all your magnificent potential, you just don’t read as well, or just don’t add as well, as the more prepared students with the higher test scores."

And if as admissions officers you degrade the average abilities of your student body too much, you'll also start to change the discourse of learning that goes on in your school. You'll start chipping away at the very reason that kids--especially the kids from the lower classes you ostensibly crave--want to be in your school in the first place, assuming it's not merely rank careerism.

So, just by way of bringing this back to Rachel's post, I'm not so sure about more radical steps like lifting the four-year cap that Wesleyan has; I think that's a good thing: a firm floor to ability. If you don't have the ability to graduate in four years, given the lax graduation requirements and how ridiculously easy it is to get classes at Wes, then I can't imagine that you have any business attending a school like that. There's stretching the standards and then there's simply abandoning them.

Perhaps NOT Diversity University, No Longer: Wesleyan Responds!

Although I have other posts for my series on teacher, I mean, teaching quality in the queue, I'm going to take a little break (okay, it's been a long break, but my kids have been sick and there's been lots of "snow" days) to post the letter I got from my alma mater, Wesleyan University, in response to this post and open letter I wrote to them back in December. 

I must say I was heartened and stand very much corrected both by the comments made by a fellow alum on the original post and by the information in this letter. That being said, the last paragraph really disappointed and discouraged me and lends credence to my criticisms in the original post of how Wesleyan brands itself (to me, gratingly so) in self-righteousness. I'm sure that Ms. Vasiliou was just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear. But, alas:

a) it is not Wesleyan that gave me my zeal for social justice and public education--it is my family and upbringing--and I found it rather presumptuous to assume otherwise.

b) I am more troubled by than proud of the high number of Wesleyan graduates who go into Teach For America. I myself applied to be a corps member in the organization when I was a senior (and was rightly rejected), but recently I have come to see TFA as highly problematic on a number of levels--as a mechanism to improve teacher quality, ideologically, economically, ethically. I explore all of this in a commentary  I recently finished and am currently shopping around to larger publications (any takers?!?!), which is to say you'll see it on my blog in a few weeks when it, too, is roundly rejected :)

Here's the letter:

Dear Rachel,

As the current director of the Wesleyan Fund, I’d like to provide some information about two concerns you discuss in your 12/1 blog entry: Does Wesleyan help or hinder educational diversity and access? and Why does the University ask alumni for financial support?

Wesleyan’s commitment to racial and economic diversity and access is alive and well, backed up by our longstanding policy of need-blind admission with full aid support. In the current first-year class, for instance, 34% of admittees are students of color and 14% are the first generation in their family to attend a four-year college.  Of all students now on campus, 18% are federal Pell Grant recipients.  Not only do we admit applicants without regard to their financial means, we actively recruit low-income students through their schools and in collaboration with programs such as Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, and most recently QuestBridge.  (Adjusted for size of school, Wesleyan has enrolled more Prep for Prep graduates than any other college.) You may remember that Wesleyan offers scholarships to talented graduates of the local community college, and we also have dedicated scholarships for veterans in need of aid.  The Admission Office doesn’t admit students unprepared to be successful with the level of work required here; instead, they suggest to low-income students with apparent high potential that they take advantage of post-high-school “bridge” programs with financial aid that several secondary schools offer, after which they can reapply to Wesleyan. 

Acting on these principles entails high costs. About 18% of our total annual operating budget goes for financial aid. This year we will spend $41.3 million on scholarships. Wesleyan does not give merit scholarships; all of our scholarship funds are reserved for students from families requiring assistance to afford college. The university meets the full demonstrated need of every enrolled student, through a combination of grants, loans, and work-study jobs.  Under policy announced by President Roth three years ago, grants were increased, so that no student now graduates with more than $19,000 in loan debt.  Loans have been totally eliminated for Wesleyan students with family incomes of $40,000 or less (the Pell grant criterion): these students receive scholarship grants covering their full need.  Even students paying “full” tuition and board are partially subsidized by the University, because the fees charged cover approximately 71% of yearly educational cost. 

Where does alumni support come in? We make up the costs not covered by tuition mainly through contributions to the annual fund and to the endowment.  Far from being wealthy, Wesleyan operates with an endowment one-third to one-fifth the size of those at other leading colleges. Surprisingly to some alumni, third-party surveys have shown that Wesleyan graduates essentially have the same spread in income as our peer colleges.  But, while our higher-income alumni give at comparable rates to alumni from those other schools, Wesleyan is behind when it comes to mid- and lower-level income alumni giving.  Our top priority is financial aid, and we have to mobilize more of the community to make sure we have the funds that need-blind admission requires. 

It’s great that you are idealistic about education. Many other Wes alumni share your dedication.  In recent years Teach for America has been the number 1 first employer of our new graduates.  We’re proud of educators like Kira Orange Jones ’00, the regional director of Teach for America in New Orleans, and Jessica Posner ’09 and Kennedy Odede ’12, who built and are running the first free school for girls in the largest slum in Africa-- Kibera, Kenya.  Alumni like these tell us that their Wesleyan education played a large role in inspiring them and preparing them with the skills to make significant changes in society.  I hope that observation rings true with you, too.

Sincerely,

Pam Vasiliou


UPDATE I: I forgot to mention that while I was a student at Wesleyan, they phased out their teacher certification/education program. I remember my fabulous RA was one of its last participants. Anyone have more information on this? I would much rather see Wesleyan re-institute some kind of teacher training or education program or just do something on a bigger scale to get their students to think about being teachers rather than outsource that to TFA. But, then again, perhaps they do. I've been uninformed before. . .


UPDATE II: A reader just pointed out that Wesleyan University professor Claire Potter, a.k.a. the Tenured Radical, did a terrific post on TFA on her blog. I read her blog, but somehow missed this post. Hmmm, she makes many of the same points I did in my piece. Only better. Maybe I can't get mine published because it's already been said.