The argument I have been trying to make so far is that the equation of "political correctness" with thought policing is misplaced. This can be qualified. There are people on every point on the political spectrum who are not particularly interested in open mindedness. But, that can be taken for granted. What I am interested in is demonstrating that the idea that asking people to think again about something is not wrong. I tried to argue that most of do this all the time. It is a normal part of conversation because we often talk to others about things about which we disagree. There is nothing wrong with saying to someone, you know, I thought X and here is why. Far from being thought policing, it is a normal part of discourse. It is the way we carry on conversations. Likewise with politics. Democracy requires people changing their mind. No mind changing ... no democracy. Suggesting to someone, then, that they can and should look at an issue (the economy, health care, the environment, it does not matter what) in a different way is hardly thought policing. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with suggestion to someone that bigotry or insulting someone is wrong.
Post-secondary education is one ares where people are often accused of being PC. If you follow the logic of my argument, this will not come as a surprise because post-secondary education is about thinking differently. If it was not ... would it be education? I periodically hear this from critics of PC: "Professor So-and-So said that something I fundamentally believe was wrong and wants me to change my mind. That is so PC." If you are one of those people who has said that, can I ask: what were you paying for when you paid your tuition? Imagine a situation where you paid your tuition and spent the entire year being told only things you already knew. How would you feel. At the end of the year, you knew precisely and exactly and only the things you already knew at the start of the year. No one had challenged your thinking. No one presented data that refocused your attention. No one suggested a different methodology that might yield different results. Would you believe that your tuition was money well spent?
Education can and should be about many things. It should be about skill acquisition. It should be about some measure of cultural literacy. It should be about empirical knowledge. There is, in other words, not a single thing that higher education -- or any form of education -- is about. In my view, for instance, it should be about something we've called in the past "habits of mind": how you look at and think about how you will think about issue and interact with others and knowledge. But, if you completed your university degree and your views on anything that is important were never challenged, regardless of your political perspective, would you say that your education was complete?
Post-secondary education places a premium on critical thinking. To be sure, that can be -- and is -- defined in different ways. To be sure, what that means is approached through different research methods. And, to be sure, faculty hold different political perspectives. On my floor (which houses three different academic units), at Mount A, for instance, just about every perspective on the political spectrum (with the exception of the extreme ends) is represented. [BTW: It might surprise people to know what we professors, in fact, spend shockingly little time talking about politics. We talk about it, perhaps more than other people in other jobs (I've never held a job where politics was not a subject of discussion at some point in the working day), but we spend the vast majority of our time talking about other things ... like our jobs (teaching strategies that worked or did not work, attendance issues, students who are struggling, departmental budgets, professional development, research) or .... ordinary life things like kids and household repairs and movies we like.] This is my point: despite these differences, we all get along. No one accuses someone else of being the thought police because we share a commitment to an ideal of post-secondary education that does many things: builds knowledge, conveys facts, promotes skills, and sustains different perspectives on the events or issues in question.
I want to be clear on this point: different faculty take different approaches to challenging student thinking. I had a colleague years ago who played devil's advocate, intentionally adopting the opposite perspective of his students. Most of us don't do that and can't really do that, say if you are lecturing to 100 students. What you can do is explain certain perspectives and challenge conventional thinking as a way to spur thought. In my classes, for instance, I ask students to think about what the mistreatment of First Peoples tells us about Canada or what we should think of contradictory tendencies in foreign policy or why we take wilderness icons for emblems of nationhood but produce so much pollution. Sometimes, I will confess, I don't have answers to these problems. I have my own views -- and this blog is a place where I articulate them -- but I don't have the answer to every issue or every problem that perplexes national public life.
But ... what if I did have answers? Well, it turns out that there are some things on which I do have some things that I think I can contribute to the general discussion. Most faculty are this way. There are issues about which I have been teaching, or which I have been researching, for some time. I'm getting close to twenty years at Mount Allison, which means that some of my current students were not alive when I started here. I've done more reading on some subjects than my students and, in some cases, a great deal more reading. Where one of my students might have spent, say, hours reading about a subject they find interesting, I might now have spent 100 times that. I'm not bragging, just doing math. I've seen the evolution of scholarship over time (where students are often coming in half way through a story; not their fault, this is simply a product of age). I've see policies that have begun with much promise but resulted in failure. In other words, it is possible that I know more about something than one of my students and I might have ways of thinking about some matters that can help them. I do lecture in some of my courses and I lecture because I can use that forum to get students "up to speed" on an issue quicker than sending them away to read the dozen or several dozen books (let alone scholarly papers) that I have read on the same subject.
So, knowing that, what should be my approach as an instructor? As a faculty member, I am paid for many reasons. I am paid to teach classes, to administer an academic program, to provide effective collegial governance, to research, to edit, to advise. But, surely one of the reasons students pay to sit in my class is that they have something that they think they can learn from everything I've just wrote in the previous paragraph.
This is not arrogance. To be sure: some faculty are arrogant but arrogance has no single political home. It is not the sole provenance of the politically correct. And, in my view, the issue is not arrogance. We all agree that it is not a good mix with teaching. There is, though, a difference between arrogance and knowing something or having certain skills. My plumber knows a lot more about plumbing than I do. Is that arrogance on his part? My mechanic knows a great deal more about car engines than I do ... is he arrogant when he fixes my car? You see the point and the oddity of some of the accusations of thought policing or PC. When a faculty member corrects a mistake a student makes ... are they arrogant? Some people -- particularly but not exclusively, I suspect -- those in the anti-PC camp come very close to arguing that this is the case. But, imagine a different situation. What if I spotted a mistake and did not correct it? Would I be doing my job?
These are something more than rhetorical questions. What I am saying is that a reasonable conception of education involves thinking, changing your mind, learning new things and we expect instructors to guide us in that process. We don't expect them to sit on the sidelines while errors are made and ignore those so as to avoid becoming "thought police." The fact that someone who knows more about a subject than I do corrects me is not a horrible thing. It is not an insult to me, or a challenge to my moral worth or identity, as a human being. It is simple that: a correction.
Let me conclude: if you wondered why so much politically correct discourse (pro and con) is on campus, at universities, it is not an accident. It is not some sort of left wing academia. It is a product of the nature of the higher educational enterprise. Challenging people's thinking, correcting mistakes, asking people to look again at an issue, and recognizing that there are people who know more because that is their job, is not horrible. Yet, in hoopla that surrounds PC on campus, I think we have lost sight of those simple facts. The goal of education is *not* to remain the same. That is why we go to school: to develop, to change, to become better. If we assume that anyone who seeks to change us is involved in some sort of nefarious conspiracy or is some agent of the thought police, we are, in fact, condemning the very idea and purpose of education.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Monday, June 16, 2014
Tenure ... or, why don't people like it? Part I: The Life of a Prof
Some people, it appears, don't like tenure. This op ed from respected journalist Richard Gwyn captures the basics:
University Teaching
I will be frank: this is not a particularly good piece of journalism or even a particularly good op-ed. If I were using it in class, it is a model of how to *not* make arguments. For instance: it assumes that tuition increases are driven by faculty salary increases (but does not actually look at the ratio of university spending on faculty salaries versus other elements of university budgets), its evidence provides links to links (for example: "As is little known, Canadian professors are the highest-paid in the world, even, astoundingly, 28 per cent better paid than those at public universities in the U.S., no matter all the Nobel Laureates there" ... if you thought that link would take you to table to demonstrate the point ... you would be wrong, it takes to another link that takes you to another link that requires you to buy a book to get the information), and its makes use of sweeping generalization on the basis of a single case study. In other words, one thing we might learn about the jobs faculty do is that journalists might fail our intro courses if they submitted some of the things they write as term papers because they don't meet the minimum levels of documentation or argumentation.
But, that is snide and catty of me. The critique of tenure is not widespread, but it might be growing. It used to be confined a few voices on the lunatic fringe and faculty could count on their administrators to defend it as a fundamental aspect of the occupations to which they had devoted their lives. The U of S case suggests that tenure and its importance is still recognized but that some administrators (including the outgoing president of U of A) are interested in finding ways to disregard its basic provisions. Their objectives in so doing sound crass when I state them clearly: they were looking to silence or remove potential critics. The crassness, however, is not my restatement but the fact that their objectives were crass and don't have a place in institutions of higher learning.
This said, I do think we should avoid being snide or catty about this issue. Tenure is important and its importance requires that those of us who support it explain what it is and its importance. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with talking about this issue. Questions (even if misinformed) and discussion are a natural part of a democratic society. So, lets talk a bit about tenure, what people think is wrong with it, and what might be done to address their concerns. I'd like to do this in several parts. First, I'd like to talk a bit about who profs are -- I'll use myself as an example and explain why I think this is important to a consideration of tenure below. In future blogs I'll look at the demands of research and its relationship to teaching at the post-secondary level. Finally, I'll look at what tenure is supposed to do and what it actually does do. My overall conclusion is that a bit of education on this issue transforms concerns about tenure into a non-issue. Reading Gwyn's piece one might get the impression that there is much "sound and fury" here. Their should not be. Tenure is not the problem with post-secondary education in Canada and taking its "off the table" will allow us to focus on what is the problem.
Before I get to these, however, let me begin by saying that I am a university prof (if you did not know) and I've been one for about 15 years. I don't know what other people think professors do but you might be surprised by its banality. I go to work like everyone else. My office might look a bit different than others. I have more books, for instance, but these are the tools of my trade. Other than that, however, my office is shockingly ordinary. I pride myself on being at work. I leave for work when my daughter leaves for high school. I get in around 8:15 and say until 4:30, when I stroll home (I live in Sackville) to make supper. I spend my evenings doing other shockingly normal things: I watch my kids play minor sports, take them to music lessons, do the laundry, pay the bills, watch the Jays game. From what I can tell, my day is not unusual.
I get the feeling from reading Gwyn's piece that his image of a professor is that I spend my days trying to avoid teaching so I can do my research. My research is important to me and to my employer (Mount Allison University). They pay me to do it. I like it (most of my research is on different aspects of Canadian cultural history) but it is also my job. If I don't do it, I would not be doing what I am paid to do and my employer would (rightly) have problems with that.
But, during the school year, it is pretty far from all I do. Gwyn does not like lecturing and sees videos as a useful substitute. Perhaps, but lecturing is not all I do. In fact, it is only a small part. I lecture to the large intro class once a week, but most of my colleagues work to make their teaching interactive. I do too. I run small discussion groups for the intro, seminars, meet one-on-one with independent topic or directed reading or thesis students. Moreover, lecturing, or another other form of effective post-secondary teaching, is not just going in to a room and talking off the top of your head. A good lecture communicates important information, it is interactive, logical and responds to student questions. All of this takes time. I teach Canadian Studies and teaching students about Canada requires that I am informed about the things I am teaching. In other words, making up a course takes a long time and requires a lot of work. I like that work, but it takes time because I want to be more than a video.
Outside of teaching, I do other things. My university requires something called "community service" from me. Again, I am paid to do this. It is not a choice, but an obligation. Generally, again, I like it but it also takes time. It can involve university governance but it also involve programme advising, reading materials on which students have appealed grades, meeting with students to work through their problems (whatever these might be). Just one example to illustrate my point: one day this past semester I met with a student for three straight hours. She had problems that needed to be addressed. They were and it took that length of time to address them. She was happy when we were done and so was I but I then had the next student meeting, which last almost two hours. So, five hours of my day were taken up addressing the concerns of two students. I don't want anyone to say "what a great guy" but just notice the pattern. These are extreme cases and I should not be congratulated for doing my job but that is my point. I was doing my job. I also have a range of other routine paperwork that needs to be done. I did not make this paper; it is a university rule that I have to "sign off" on pay forms for interns and student TAs. I don't mind doing it but if I don't ... someone is not paid.
You put this all together and what do you get? Well, you get a pretty ordinary job that takes a lot of time. When we talk about hours teaching, we don't talk about how long it takes to prepare to teach, to meet with students afterward, doing the routine paperwork that needs to be done. And ... you will notice that I have not even gotten to marking. Marking is an amazingly time consuming thing if you want to do it right. Ask yourself this: how would you want your work to be evaluated? Bubble sheets and fill-in-the-blank? That would save a tonne of time, but would it provide a meaningful post-secondary education in the humanities? Would you want commentary? Would you want to know how to improve your work?
What about the sciences? Well, in addition to everything I do, my colleagues in the sciences run their labs, which is fundamental to both their research and the education of their students. That, too, takes time. My colleagues in music spend evening after evening going to recitals and working with their students. My colleagues in drama devote countless evenings to working with student actors and stage managers.
My point is this: none of this stuff shows up on the "time cards". The meetings I had with the five students who took directed readings classes from me last semester never showed up as work I did because they are not officially counted toward my contact hours. Thus, someone might say "Nurse was only in class 200 hours last academic year" (I don't know, I have not counted) but that would not touch the surface of how much time I spent with students or preparing to spend with students (for instance, if you are taking a directed readings course ... do you think the prof should have done the readings you are discussing? If you said "not needed" ... how meaningful would you think his or her commentary on your work might be?) or marking student work. In the summers, I work forty hours per week, give or take. During the school year, this figure naturally goes up because there is more work to do.
Am I well paid? Well ... come look at how I live. I am wary of generalized stats because they don't account for variations and are prone to be thrown off by outliers. For instance, imagine a situation where we have four salaries: #1 is paid $1000.00; #2, #3, and #4 are paid $100. What is the average salary? $325, but 3/4ths of our same made considerably less than the average making the average meaningless from a statistical perspective. (There is also an ethical problem with the "X is paid too much" argument that I will get into another blog.) The better test, for those who want one, is to look at how I live. I have a nice house, a car that is almost paid off, my son has a car but he's 21 and works in the next town. I have a flat screen TV that I bought at Walmart for $325; an iMac in my basement, and a two dogs. I have a nice yard on which my wife has worked tireless for the last 12 years because gardening is one of her passions. But, like others I have a mortgage and my house is pretty ordinary, even if I like it. I'd describe my lifestyle as comfortable and middle class. I don't want for anything but, like a great many other people, I have to think before I make a purchase or go on vacation (this summer we are thinking about whether or not we can afford a brief trip and pay for some needed repairs on the house). There is nothing wrong with that and that is my point. My lifestyle is roughly the same as my brothers (neither of whom is a prof) or my parents (who were not profs).
I'll end this Part I here and reiterate my point. Before we demonize profs ... we might want to think about who they are and what they do. The ordinariness of our lives, the regularity of our work, the way in which we try to respond to others needs might strike people as ... well ... ordinary. Knowing this helps up, I think, to proceed to an assessment of the merits of tenure with a clear head. Perhaps I have too stereotyped a view of what others think of profs. The vast majority of us are just trying to do the job for which we are paid and live -- however banal -- a middle class life.
University Teaching
I will be frank: this is not a particularly good piece of journalism or even a particularly good op-ed. If I were using it in class, it is a model of how to *not* make arguments. For instance: it assumes that tuition increases are driven by faculty salary increases (but does not actually look at the ratio of university spending on faculty salaries versus other elements of university budgets), its evidence provides links to links (for example: "As is little known, Canadian professors are the highest-paid in the world, even, astoundingly, 28 per cent better paid than those at public universities in the U.S., no matter all the Nobel Laureates there" ... if you thought that link would take you to table to demonstrate the point ... you would be wrong, it takes to another link that takes you to another link that requires you to buy a book to get the information), and its makes use of sweeping generalization on the basis of a single case study. In other words, one thing we might learn about the jobs faculty do is that journalists might fail our intro courses if they submitted some of the things they write as term papers because they don't meet the minimum levels of documentation or argumentation.
But, that is snide and catty of me. The critique of tenure is not widespread, but it might be growing. It used to be confined a few voices on the lunatic fringe and faculty could count on their administrators to defend it as a fundamental aspect of the occupations to which they had devoted their lives. The U of S case suggests that tenure and its importance is still recognized but that some administrators (including the outgoing president of U of A) are interested in finding ways to disregard its basic provisions. Their objectives in so doing sound crass when I state them clearly: they were looking to silence or remove potential critics. The crassness, however, is not my restatement but the fact that their objectives were crass and don't have a place in institutions of higher learning.
This said, I do think we should avoid being snide or catty about this issue. Tenure is important and its importance requires that those of us who support it explain what it is and its importance. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with talking about this issue. Questions (even if misinformed) and discussion are a natural part of a democratic society. So, lets talk a bit about tenure, what people think is wrong with it, and what might be done to address their concerns. I'd like to do this in several parts. First, I'd like to talk a bit about who profs are -- I'll use myself as an example and explain why I think this is important to a consideration of tenure below. In future blogs I'll look at the demands of research and its relationship to teaching at the post-secondary level. Finally, I'll look at what tenure is supposed to do and what it actually does do. My overall conclusion is that a bit of education on this issue transforms concerns about tenure into a non-issue. Reading Gwyn's piece one might get the impression that there is much "sound and fury" here. Their should not be. Tenure is not the problem with post-secondary education in Canada and taking its "off the table" will allow us to focus on what is the problem.
Before I get to these, however, let me begin by saying that I am a university prof (if you did not know) and I've been one for about 15 years. I don't know what other people think professors do but you might be surprised by its banality. I go to work like everyone else. My office might look a bit different than others. I have more books, for instance, but these are the tools of my trade. Other than that, however, my office is shockingly ordinary. I pride myself on being at work. I leave for work when my daughter leaves for high school. I get in around 8:15 and say until 4:30, when I stroll home (I live in Sackville) to make supper. I spend my evenings doing other shockingly normal things: I watch my kids play minor sports, take them to music lessons, do the laundry, pay the bills, watch the Jays game. From what I can tell, my day is not unusual.
I get the feeling from reading Gwyn's piece that his image of a professor is that I spend my days trying to avoid teaching so I can do my research. My research is important to me and to my employer (Mount Allison University). They pay me to do it. I like it (most of my research is on different aspects of Canadian cultural history) but it is also my job. If I don't do it, I would not be doing what I am paid to do and my employer would (rightly) have problems with that.
But, during the school year, it is pretty far from all I do. Gwyn does not like lecturing and sees videos as a useful substitute. Perhaps, but lecturing is not all I do. In fact, it is only a small part. I lecture to the large intro class once a week, but most of my colleagues work to make their teaching interactive. I do too. I run small discussion groups for the intro, seminars, meet one-on-one with independent topic or directed reading or thesis students. Moreover, lecturing, or another other form of effective post-secondary teaching, is not just going in to a room and talking off the top of your head. A good lecture communicates important information, it is interactive, logical and responds to student questions. All of this takes time. I teach Canadian Studies and teaching students about Canada requires that I am informed about the things I am teaching. In other words, making up a course takes a long time and requires a lot of work. I like that work, but it takes time because I want to be more than a video.
Outside of teaching, I do other things. My university requires something called "community service" from me. Again, I am paid to do this. It is not a choice, but an obligation. Generally, again, I like it but it also takes time. It can involve university governance but it also involve programme advising, reading materials on which students have appealed grades, meeting with students to work through their problems (whatever these might be). Just one example to illustrate my point: one day this past semester I met with a student for three straight hours. She had problems that needed to be addressed. They were and it took that length of time to address them. She was happy when we were done and so was I but I then had the next student meeting, which last almost two hours. So, five hours of my day were taken up addressing the concerns of two students. I don't want anyone to say "what a great guy" but just notice the pattern. These are extreme cases and I should not be congratulated for doing my job but that is my point. I was doing my job. I also have a range of other routine paperwork that needs to be done. I did not make this paper; it is a university rule that I have to "sign off" on pay forms for interns and student TAs. I don't mind doing it but if I don't ... someone is not paid.
You put this all together and what do you get? Well, you get a pretty ordinary job that takes a lot of time. When we talk about hours teaching, we don't talk about how long it takes to prepare to teach, to meet with students afterward, doing the routine paperwork that needs to be done. And ... you will notice that I have not even gotten to marking. Marking is an amazingly time consuming thing if you want to do it right. Ask yourself this: how would you want your work to be evaluated? Bubble sheets and fill-in-the-blank? That would save a tonne of time, but would it provide a meaningful post-secondary education in the humanities? Would you want commentary? Would you want to know how to improve your work?
What about the sciences? Well, in addition to everything I do, my colleagues in the sciences run their labs, which is fundamental to both their research and the education of their students. That, too, takes time. My colleagues in music spend evening after evening going to recitals and working with their students. My colleagues in drama devote countless evenings to working with student actors and stage managers.
My point is this: none of this stuff shows up on the "time cards". The meetings I had with the five students who took directed readings classes from me last semester never showed up as work I did because they are not officially counted toward my contact hours. Thus, someone might say "Nurse was only in class 200 hours last academic year" (I don't know, I have not counted) but that would not touch the surface of how much time I spent with students or preparing to spend with students (for instance, if you are taking a directed readings course ... do you think the prof should have done the readings you are discussing? If you said "not needed" ... how meaningful would you think his or her commentary on your work might be?) or marking student work. In the summers, I work forty hours per week, give or take. During the school year, this figure naturally goes up because there is more work to do.
Am I well paid? Well ... come look at how I live. I am wary of generalized stats because they don't account for variations and are prone to be thrown off by outliers. For instance, imagine a situation where we have four salaries: #1 is paid $1000.00; #2, #3, and #4 are paid $100. What is the average salary? $325, but 3/4ths of our same made considerably less than the average making the average meaningless from a statistical perspective. (There is also an ethical problem with the "X is paid too much" argument that I will get into another blog.) The better test, for those who want one, is to look at how I live. I have a nice house, a car that is almost paid off, my son has a car but he's 21 and works in the next town. I have a flat screen TV that I bought at Walmart for $325; an iMac in my basement, and a two dogs. I have a nice yard on which my wife has worked tireless for the last 12 years because gardening is one of her passions. But, like others I have a mortgage and my house is pretty ordinary, even if I like it. I'd describe my lifestyle as comfortable and middle class. I don't want for anything but, like a great many other people, I have to think before I make a purchase or go on vacation (this summer we are thinking about whether or not we can afford a brief trip and pay for some needed repairs on the house). There is nothing wrong with that and that is my point. My lifestyle is roughly the same as my brothers (neither of whom is a prof) or my parents (who were not profs).
I'll end this Part I here and reiterate my point. Before we demonize profs ... we might want to think about who they are and what they do. The ordinariness of our lives, the regularity of our work, the way in which we try to respond to others needs might strike people as ... well ... ordinary. Knowing this helps up, I think, to proceed to an assessment of the merits of tenure with a clear head. Perhaps I have too stereotyped a view of what others think of profs. The vast majority of us are just trying to do the job for which we are paid and live -- however banal -- a middle class life.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Immersion and Bilingualism
Opposition to bilingualism is silly. There have been various efforts to explain it away -- fear, concerns about job security, etc. -- but none of these really hold too much water. Opposition to bilingualism is about as backwards as it comes and the reasons for this have been so thoroughly discussed that I won't even bother to go into them here because anyone who reads can look them up for themselves.
So ... why mention this? If opposition to bilingualism is so backwards as to not merit comment, why even raise the issue. Because I want to talk about something else: immersion education in NB. Recently, French-language immersion is under consideration yet again in New Brunswick and it is possible that early immersion programmes may be eliminated. Apparently, there are concerns that there is a need to have a solid handle on one's mother tongue before one learns another language. I actually doubt the merits of this argument, but I recognize that it is legitimate scholarly argument that has been made by sincere individuals who have studied the matter in some detail. I don't debate, therefore, the seriousness and sincerity of those who would put forward an argument against early immersion on this grounds. I think they are wrong, but that is a matter of debate.
What I worry about is that opposition to bilingualism and bilingual education is being smuggled in under the cover of something else: concern for children. I live in a part of New Brunswick where immersion programmes had to be wrung out of a local schoolboard who opposed them (against the wishes of parents) and where there have been campaigns to end immersion. Recently, a group of parents in my town argued that immersion is unfair to kids whose parents have them in a unilingual English-language educational programme. Let's put this matter to rest. These arguments hold no weight.
First, to oppose immersion education one needs to demonstrate that learning other languages is somehow bad for kids. I teach at Mount Allison University and we see all kinds of students. Over the last ten years, I've taught thousands of students, some good and some bad; some bilingual (French/English) and some not. The ability to speak other languages was never the defining feature of what made for a good or bad student. What made for a good or bad student was that student's ability to commit to the work they needed to put into their programme to succeed. In other words, individual effort has been the defining feature of a good student; not linguistic ability.
Second, if bilingualism in education is so bad ... why are so many countries in the world doing it? Language education is fundamental to the educational programmes of a number of European countries. If the argument that immersion were somehow bad for students held weight countries like Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands and Denmark would be filled with a bunch of people who never succeeded. Yet ... they ain't. Most of the rest of the world is busy trying to learn other language and get their kids to learn them. Why would we, in Canada, believe that they are wrong?
Third, I simply fail to see how knowing other languages is bad for kids. It opens up other literatures and other musics, other poetries and other cultures. How can this be bad. Think of a parent making the converse argument: I have improved my child's life by confining the limits of their knowledge and impeding their ability to understand different thing. Would any parent who was committed to the welfare of their child actually say this: that they intentionally limited their child's knowledge of the world?
Fourth, I can't see how children are helped by limiting their ability to compete in the labour market. Again, can you imagine a parent saying this: I have decided to improve my child's life by reducing the number of jobs for which they will be qualified. What would we think of a parent who did this.
Finally, it is important to note that in NB, immersion is a choice. If you don't like it -- if there are parents who decide it is in their children's best interest to not know French -- then so be it. That is there choice and they have a democratic right to make that choice for their children. I would never argue against that (even if I disagree with it). Unless a parent is mistreating a child, I don't think I (or, anyone else) should be so arrogant as to tell them how they should raise their kids. We might offer advise to friends, ask advise of other friends, but that is something different than urging the state to exercise its authority over parents to limit their choices with regard to the education of their children. And ... that's my point: its a choice. Why would anyone want to eliminate my choices. If I choose to send my kids to immersion, that is a choice my wife and I have made. It has nothing to do with anyone else's child. They are free to make their own choices. Yet, this is precisely what the opponents of immersion want to do. They want to eliminate my ability to make choices in the best interest of my children. They are the one's urging the state to take away choice and to exercise authority over me in ways that limit my children's educational options. In effect, the opponents of immersion are arguing saying "not only will I choose to keep my child out of bilngual educaiton but I claim the right to make that choice for your child as well and I want the state to come in and enforce it with the power of law."
This is what I mean when I say opposition to bilingualism is silly. I don't mean the reasoned and evidence based arguments among educators. I urge them to look at evidence from a range of different locations where there is a strong commitment to language education and talk to those of us who work in higher education to see if there are problems with bilingual education. But, I trust they are acting out of a commitment to evidence and reason. I can work with that and I respect that. Those people who have tried to eliminate immersion for other reasons, however, cause me great pause. They seek to eliminate a form of education that has been used and works in other countries. As countries around the world strive to increase linguistic competence, those who oppose immersion seek to limit that competence here at home. They seek to limit the degree to which our children can access and enjoy other literatures and other cultures, in other words to impede their education. And, they promote a form of education that would make it more difficult for our kids to compete in the labour market. Finally, they ignore democracy and seek to use the state to impose their views on parents who would make other choices.
There will always be debates about the best way to education kids and about the best pedagogical tactics. I actually think its good to have an open and on-going debate about the best way to educate kids. We can all learn from it. Opposition to immersion is not about a constructive debate. Its about something else. Its about one group of people attempting to impose a form of education that limits children's education, making it less then it could have been. Should we let others impose limits on our kids? Should we let others impede our kids ability to learn? I hope not.
So ... why mention this? If opposition to bilingualism is so backwards as to not merit comment, why even raise the issue. Because I want to talk about something else: immersion education in NB. Recently, French-language immersion is under consideration yet again in New Brunswick and it is possible that early immersion programmes may be eliminated. Apparently, there are concerns that there is a need to have a solid handle on one's mother tongue before one learns another language. I actually doubt the merits of this argument, but I recognize that it is legitimate scholarly argument that has been made by sincere individuals who have studied the matter in some detail. I don't debate, therefore, the seriousness and sincerity of those who would put forward an argument against early immersion on this grounds. I think they are wrong, but that is a matter of debate.
What I worry about is that opposition to bilingualism and bilingual education is being smuggled in under the cover of something else: concern for children. I live in a part of New Brunswick where immersion programmes had to be wrung out of a local schoolboard who opposed them (against the wishes of parents) and where there have been campaigns to end immersion. Recently, a group of parents in my town argued that immersion is unfair to kids whose parents have them in a unilingual English-language educational programme. Let's put this matter to rest. These arguments hold no weight.
First, to oppose immersion education one needs to demonstrate that learning other languages is somehow bad for kids. I teach at Mount Allison University and we see all kinds of students. Over the last ten years, I've taught thousands of students, some good and some bad; some bilingual (French/English) and some not. The ability to speak other languages was never the defining feature of what made for a good or bad student. What made for a good or bad student was that student's ability to commit to the work they needed to put into their programme to succeed. In other words, individual effort has been the defining feature of a good student; not linguistic ability.
Second, if bilingualism in education is so bad ... why are so many countries in the world doing it? Language education is fundamental to the educational programmes of a number of European countries. If the argument that immersion were somehow bad for students held weight countries like Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands and Denmark would be filled with a bunch of people who never succeeded. Yet ... they ain't. Most of the rest of the world is busy trying to learn other language and get their kids to learn them. Why would we, in Canada, believe that they are wrong?
Third, I simply fail to see how knowing other languages is bad for kids. It opens up other literatures and other musics, other poetries and other cultures. How can this be bad. Think of a parent making the converse argument: I have improved my child's life by confining the limits of their knowledge and impeding their ability to understand different thing. Would any parent who was committed to the welfare of their child actually say this: that they intentionally limited their child's knowledge of the world?
Fourth, I can't see how children are helped by limiting their ability to compete in the labour market. Again, can you imagine a parent saying this: I have decided to improve my child's life by reducing the number of jobs for which they will be qualified. What would we think of a parent who did this.
Finally, it is important to note that in NB, immersion is a choice. If you don't like it -- if there are parents who decide it is in their children's best interest to not know French -- then so be it. That is there choice and they have a democratic right to make that choice for their children. I would never argue against that (even if I disagree with it). Unless a parent is mistreating a child, I don't think I (or, anyone else) should be so arrogant as to tell them how they should raise their kids. We might offer advise to friends, ask advise of other friends, but that is something different than urging the state to exercise its authority over parents to limit their choices with regard to the education of their children. And ... that's my point: its a choice. Why would anyone want to eliminate my choices. If I choose to send my kids to immersion, that is a choice my wife and I have made. It has nothing to do with anyone else's child. They are free to make their own choices. Yet, this is precisely what the opponents of immersion want to do. They want to eliminate my ability to make choices in the best interest of my children. They are the one's urging the state to take away choice and to exercise authority over me in ways that limit my children's educational options. In effect, the opponents of immersion are arguing saying "not only will I choose to keep my child out of bilngual educaiton but I claim the right to make that choice for your child as well and I want the state to come in and enforce it with the power of law."
This is what I mean when I say opposition to bilingualism is silly. I don't mean the reasoned and evidence based arguments among educators. I urge them to look at evidence from a range of different locations where there is a strong commitment to language education and talk to those of us who work in higher education to see if there are problems with bilingual education. But, I trust they are acting out of a commitment to evidence and reason. I can work with that and I respect that. Those people who have tried to eliminate immersion for other reasons, however, cause me great pause. They seek to eliminate a form of education that has been used and works in other countries. As countries around the world strive to increase linguistic competence, those who oppose immersion seek to limit that competence here at home. They seek to limit the degree to which our children can access and enjoy other literatures and other cultures, in other words to impede their education. And, they promote a form of education that would make it more difficult for our kids to compete in the labour market. Finally, they ignore democracy and seek to use the state to impose their views on parents who would make other choices.
There will always be debates about the best way to education kids and about the best pedagogical tactics. I actually think its good to have an open and on-going debate about the best way to educate kids. We can all learn from it. Opposition to immersion is not about a constructive debate. Its about something else. Its about one group of people attempting to impose a form of education that limits children's education, making it less then it could have been. Should we let others impose limits on our kids? Should we let others impede our kids ability to learn? I hope not.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Privatization
There has been a bit of talk lately about privatization: health care, aspects of post-secondary education. It is worth considering what privatization means, who promotes it, why, and what will likely happen before any decisions are made in this regard. I don't think the issue "privatization" is at all an academic debate. Nor do I think it is about "the best way to deliver services" or "saving money" or "efficiency." I think the whole privatization debate is about the type of country we have. Does that sound a little to grandiose? Does it sound like I am upping the stakes? Many of the proponents of privatization would, in fact, say so. They would say that they are talking about modes of delivery and saving money and not fundamental values. I think they are deluded (in a literal sense of the word). Privatlization ultimately is about values and that is what I want to demonstrate in this blog. In other words, it is not a small issue but a big issue, a issue about our values as society and how we want to organize that society. It is on this ground that I think the little bit of talk, of late, about privatization in health care and education merits attention.
You will notice, btw, that I have not yet said whether I am for or against privatization. In my view, this is, in fact, the first problem with public discourse on privatization. People stake out their ground in advance and then don't move from it. In place of discussion and analysis that might lead to policy conclusions, we get ideology in which the specifics of any given situation are lost amidst a haze of generalization. In other words, when the discussion turns to privatization of education or health, we rarely end up with a discussion of the specific institution or situation: "how will this work in Sackville NB?" Instead, we get odes to the wonders of private enterprise or aspersions cast at the American health-care system. Whatever merit such generalizations may have in terms of argument, they actually don't help us make a decision about the specific situation at hand. In this regard, I think it is at best premature to come out for or against privatization before one has worked through the arguments. Moreover, precisely because this issue is important -- because it will affect Canada and will affect real people's lives -- I think we need to be guided by evidence, not general views. In other words, decisions about privatization need to be made in the cold light of logic with a consideration of evidence; not in the head of ideological conflict.
With this in mind, I can't really talk about health care. I don't know that industry and can't bring anything dramatically new to the discussion, at least until I have done my homework. With this in mind, then, I'll turn to my industry: education. Periodically we hear people talking about the need for a private university in Canada. The implication here is that the university would surrender its government grant and turn to the market to make a go of it. The proponents of privatization suggest that there is nothing to fear in this and much to gain. It would be a more efficient allocation of resources; it will unlease an entrepreneurial spirit on campus; students will pay for what they get; the university will not be held back by the state, and on down the line. In other words, privatization will bring many benefits and few drawbacks. With the dramatic curtailing of government support for post-secondary education over the last fifteen years, these arguments come more and more to the fore. As the government pays less of the tab of public education, state support for education seems less relevant. Is this so? There are a number of points to consider.
First, revenue: the government does not pay as much of the university tab as it used to but it still pays a lot. At my institution, by a conservative estimate, government grants count for something like 35% of the budget, or somewhere around $17.5 million. Now, we need to think about what privatization might mean. One thing it would mean is that my institution would need to find another $17.5 million each year. Tuition would have to increase, to be sure. One could argue that it should because that is the way the mrket works. The taxpayer should not subsidize someone else's education. But, we are talking about a big increase here. Again, I want to be conservative (in other words, my aim is to present a reasonable scenario; not a worst case scenario). The average jump in tuition if we divided the revenue shortfall by total current student body would amount to something like $8 500, but let's round down just to be reasonable and allow for some cost savings. Let's say $8 000. What this means is that tuition at Mount Allison (where I would would go up by $8 000/year would would make it somewhere between $14 000 and $15 000 total, excluding residence, meal service, books, other fees, etc.
What we need to bear in mind with this is product substitution. The problem Mount A would encounter is that other institutions would not privatize. In fact, if Mount A withdrew from state support, there would in fact be more money for other institutions in NB. They'd get our chunk of government support. The likely result would be tuition stability at other institutions. Our product is not all that different from other institutions. We're good. I think we are rightly proud of the job we do, but exact how different is on History, English, Biology, etc., degree from another at the undergraduate level. I have friend who teach at other universities and they are good, too. They are rightly proud of the job they do. One question we need to ask before we privatize is this: is our product that much better than other institutions that students (or, their parents) would be willing to pay over twice the tuition of other institutions to attend Mount A. Some would. How many? And, what students? Would really good students be willing to pay over twice as much to attend Mount A? Or, would we get the student who could gain admission no where else and had to pay our tuition out of a lack of other alternatives? What would that do to our standing as an institution?
Second, one could argue that privatizing would unleash some sort of entrepreneurial spirit and allow the University to work in a more efficient way. How? I work at Mount A and I can tell you how hard people work, how inventive they are. What I can say is that there are some bad apples. No one doubts this. But, most people, by and large, are working as hard as they can. Is the university inefficient? Well, I don't know. You'd need to ask the registrar and the VP administration about that. I don't think they would say that they are inefficient. I think the registrar and the VP admin would, in fact, say that their people are working as hard as they can. But, for the sake of argument, let's say they aren't. Let's say the administrative branch is amazingly inefficient. Why do we need to privatize to gain this efficiency? We pay these people a lot of money to do their job. Why should the structure of the company affect whether or not they do their job right? If they aren't doing it right, they should be fired. It is not state support that keeps them in their jobs. From what I can tell the same bureaucracy will be needed regardless of the funding model. Any post-secondary institution will still need secretaries, mail staff, registrars. comptrollers, etc. If there are cost savings to be had, we need to know where those are and how privatization would realize them and whether or not we need to privatize to attain them.
Third, will privatization allow the university to raise more money from the private sector? I don't know but again we need to look at this in a way that is not ideological. Large companies in Canada already donate a lot of money to universities. Will they donate more to a private institution? What will their incentive to do so be? To believe that privatization will bring in more money from corporate donors, one needs to believe that the people who raise money for a university are not doing as good a job as they could be doing. They are missing sources of revenue. Will privatizing suddenly make them better at this? And, what sources of revenue are they missing?
Finally, there are ethical arguments to think about. I've gone on too long already so I'll keep this short. Will raising tuition via privatization ensure that the taxpayer does not pay for someone else's education. Education is a tax deduction so ... it is likely that the taxpayer will pay just by another means. In other words, to ensure that the taxpayer does not pay for someone else, one would need to change the tax system; not the way universities are financed. If the tax system is not changed, increased tuition could be passed along to taxpayers via tax deductions. If one cares about this -- and I think there are good reasons to discuss it -- privatizing the university is the wrong target. Are there other benefits that would foregone if tuition increased? Asked differently, the question is: are there benefits to a better educated society that are difficult to specify in economic terms? There is no easy answer to this but we need to think about education as a form of training for which there are spin-off benefits to industry. What are those benefits? Would industry end up having to pay more for training and up-grading and how would that affect profits? What about equality of opportunity? How would it be affected? What about political knowledge and the ability of people to be thinking citizens? Political scientists tell us that there is a strong correlation between formal education and political involvement. In a day when we are concerned about declining voter rates, is it in society's best interest to price education higher? What about crime rates? How does higher levels of formal education affect crime?
And, we could go on. I've not really spent most of this blog talking about the issue I raised at the start: the values that privatization would signify for Canada. I've raised these only at the end because I think that skill development, equality of opportunity, safety, are values Canadians hold dear. How would privatization affect the realization of our values? Instead, I've focused on the economic issues involved because that is where the debate is most cloudy. I don't provide answer. I am, however, trying to suggest that the issue is more complex. We need to think about things like the efficiency of existing bureaucracies and ways to make them more efficient. We need to think about product substitution and what that could do to enrolment. We need to think about the possibility of being a "last chance u" for people who have no other alternatives. And, we need evidence. I don't believe in change for the sake of change and ideology is misleading. It substitutes what someone happens to believe for analysis. Before we move toward privatization, we need to do that analysis.
You will notice, btw, that I have not yet said whether I am for or against privatization. In my view, this is, in fact, the first problem with public discourse on privatization. People stake out their ground in advance and then don't move from it. In place of discussion and analysis that might lead to policy conclusions, we get ideology in which the specifics of any given situation are lost amidst a haze of generalization. In other words, when the discussion turns to privatization of education or health, we rarely end up with a discussion of the specific institution or situation: "how will this work in Sackville NB?" Instead, we get odes to the wonders of private enterprise or aspersions cast at the American health-care system. Whatever merit such generalizations may have in terms of argument, they actually don't help us make a decision about the specific situation at hand. In this regard, I think it is at best premature to come out for or against privatization before one has worked through the arguments. Moreover, precisely because this issue is important -- because it will affect Canada and will affect real people's lives -- I think we need to be guided by evidence, not general views. In other words, decisions about privatization need to be made in the cold light of logic with a consideration of evidence; not in the head of ideological conflict.
With this in mind, I can't really talk about health care. I don't know that industry and can't bring anything dramatically new to the discussion, at least until I have done my homework. With this in mind, then, I'll turn to my industry: education. Periodically we hear people talking about the need for a private university in Canada. The implication here is that the university would surrender its government grant and turn to the market to make a go of it. The proponents of privatization suggest that there is nothing to fear in this and much to gain. It would be a more efficient allocation of resources; it will unlease an entrepreneurial spirit on campus; students will pay for what they get; the university will not be held back by the state, and on down the line. In other words, privatization will bring many benefits and few drawbacks. With the dramatic curtailing of government support for post-secondary education over the last fifteen years, these arguments come more and more to the fore. As the government pays less of the tab of public education, state support for education seems less relevant. Is this so? There are a number of points to consider.
First, revenue: the government does not pay as much of the university tab as it used to but it still pays a lot. At my institution, by a conservative estimate, government grants count for something like 35% of the budget, or somewhere around $17.5 million. Now, we need to think about what privatization might mean. One thing it would mean is that my institution would need to find another $17.5 million each year. Tuition would have to increase, to be sure. One could argue that it should because that is the way the mrket works. The taxpayer should not subsidize someone else's education. But, we are talking about a big increase here. Again, I want to be conservative (in other words, my aim is to present a reasonable scenario; not a worst case scenario). The average jump in tuition if we divided the revenue shortfall by total current student body would amount to something like $8 500, but let's round down just to be reasonable and allow for some cost savings. Let's say $8 000. What this means is that tuition at Mount Allison (where I would would go up by $8 000/year would would make it somewhere between $14 000 and $15 000 total, excluding residence, meal service, books, other fees, etc.
What we need to bear in mind with this is product substitution. The problem Mount A would encounter is that other institutions would not privatize. In fact, if Mount A withdrew from state support, there would in fact be more money for other institutions in NB. They'd get our chunk of government support. The likely result would be tuition stability at other institutions. Our product is not all that different from other institutions. We're good. I think we are rightly proud of the job we do, but exact how different is on History, English, Biology, etc., degree from another at the undergraduate level. I have friend who teach at other universities and they are good, too. They are rightly proud of the job they do. One question we need to ask before we privatize is this: is our product that much better than other institutions that students (or, their parents) would be willing to pay over twice the tuition of other institutions to attend Mount A. Some would. How many? And, what students? Would really good students be willing to pay over twice as much to attend Mount A? Or, would we get the student who could gain admission no where else and had to pay our tuition out of a lack of other alternatives? What would that do to our standing as an institution?
Second, one could argue that privatizing would unleash some sort of entrepreneurial spirit and allow the University to work in a more efficient way. How? I work at Mount A and I can tell you how hard people work, how inventive they are. What I can say is that there are some bad apples. No one doubts this. But, most people, by and large, are working as hard as they can. Is the university inefficient? Well, I don't know. You'd need to ask the registrar and the VP administration about that. I don't think they would say that they are inefficient. I think the registrar and the VP admin would, in fact, say that their people are working as hard as they can. But, for the sake of argument, let's say they aren't. Let's say the administrative branch is amazingly inefficient. Why do we need to privatize to gain this efficiency? We pay these people a lot of money to do their job. Why should the structure of the company affect whether or not they do their job right? If they aren't doing it right, they should be fired. It is not state support that keeps them in their jobs. From what I can tell the same bureaucracy will be needed regardless of the funding model. Any post-secondary institution will still need secretaries, mail staff, registrars. comptrollers, etc. If there are cost savings to be had, we need to know where those are and how privatization would realize them and whether or not we need to privatize to attain them.
Third, will privatization allow the university to raise more money from the private sector? I don't know but again we need to look at this in a way that is not ideological. Large companies in Canada already donate a lot of money to universities. Will they donate more to a private institution? What will their incentive to do so be? To believe that privatization will bring in more money from corporate donors, one needs to believe that the people who raise money for a university are not doing as good a job as they could be doing. They are missing sources of revenue. Will privatizing suddenly make them better at this? And, what sources of revenue are they missing?
Finally, there are ethical arguments to think about. I've gone on too long already so I'll keep this short. Will raising tuition via privatization ensure that the taxpayer does not pay for someone else's education. Education is a tax deduction so ... it is likely that the taxpayer will pay just by another means. In other words, to ensure that the taxpayer does not pay for someone else, one would need to change the tax system; not the way universities are financed. If the tax system is not changed, increased tuition could be passed along to taxpayers via tax deductions. If one cares about this -- and I think there are good reasons to discuss it -- privatizing the university is the wrong target. Are there other benefits that would foregone if tuition increased? Asked differently, the question is: are there benefits to a better educated society that are difficult to specify in economic terms? There is no easy answer to this but we need to think about education as a form of training for which there are spin-off benefits to industry. What are those benefits? Would industry end up having to pay more for training and up-grading and how would that affect profits? What about equality of opportunity? How would it be affected? What about political knowledge and the ability of people to be thinking citizens? Political scientists tell us that there is a strong correlation between formal education and political involvement. In a day when we are concerned about declining voter rates, is it in society's best interest to price education higher? What about crime rates? How does higher levels of formal education affect crime?
And, we could go on. I've not really spent most of this blog talking about the issue I raised at the start: the values that privatization would signify for Canada. I've raised these only at the end because I think that skill development, equality of opportunity, safety, are values Canadians hold dear. How would privatization affect the realization of our values? Instead, I've focused on the economic issues involved because that is where the debate is most cloudy. I don't provide answer. I am, however, trying to suggest that the issue is more complex. We need to think about things like the efficiency of existing bureaucracies and ways to make them more efficient. We need to think about product substitution and what that could do to enrolment. We need to think about the possibility of being a "last chance u" for people who have no other alternatives. And, we need evidence. I don't believe in change for the sake of change and ideology is misleading. It substitutes what someone happens to believe for analysis. Before we move toward privatization, we need to do that analysis.
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