Questions of Value: Tuition and Online Education

As I was driving home yesterday morning, a CBC news story addressed what might become a mounting problem for UNB and other universities: tuition increases.  Student leaders at UNB are upset that tuition will rise by approximately 2% this year. Mt A -- the place where I work -- and most universities, to the best of my knowledge, are all looking at tuition increases. To paraphrase the student concerns: they are being charged more for an inferior quality of education. Their argument runs like this: the type of online education UNB (and other institutions) are rapidly trying to develop for this fall is a substitute -- a second best option -- for an institution that normally provides education through other means. In the case of UNB, this other means is largely face-to-face in-class instruction. My best guess is that about half of Canadian universities have announced that their classes will be online this fall and the other half (with notable exceptions) are making provisions to dramatically change their modes of instruction, to dramatically expand online content delivery, and/or establish contingency plans that would allow for a rapid shift to online delivery should there be a Covid-19 "second wave" that occasions a second suspension of in-person teaching.

I mention this not because I actually want to weigh in on the issue of online teaching and how universities are preparing for the Fall 2020 semester. I've been involved in planning at Mount A and it is difficult (and, oddly and interestingly rewarding but that is another story). Instead, I mention this because I want to talk about the question of value. I don't inherently disagree with the UNB student leaders. I'd need to think through their position in considerably more detail before I had an opinion on it. Instead, what I'd like to do is talk about who we assess value and how that is translated into dollar terms because that is, after all, what the student leaders were discussing. I want to talk about this because this seems to me to be a good example of a disjuncture in our culture. In one important way UNB student leaders are wrong. Again, I might agree with them and I might not agree with them, but they are wrong in the sense that in a capitalist society (like we have), dollar value (or, price) is determined differently than they suggest. It is this different that I find interesting and culturally important. 

How do we determine value? How do we determine worth? How do we determine price?  These are not all the same thing. In a capitalist society, price is determined by a series of variables that we call, for shorthand, supply and demand. I buy things at the price that I am willing to pay for them.  Price is a market indication. A particular business offers to sell something -- say, a chair -- at a certain price. The consumer -- say, me -- now decides whether or not they want to pay that price. If I don't but I still want to the chair, I might make a counter offer, In effect I say "I want to buy the chair but I am only willing to pay X (X being less than the asking price) for it." The seller now has to make a decision: do they accept my offer or make their own counter, counter offer or do they let me walk away?  You could think of this kind of negotiation -- a market transaction -- as something akin to a Facebook "buy and sell" group. People put stuff up, ask a price, and potential buyers accept the price or make counter offers. 

Now,  I recognize that outside of Facebook and garage sales, and other like venues this does not seem to happen. Most of the time, I go into a store, see a price and decide whether or not I will, buy the product after some quick calculation about my own needs, desire, and disposable income. Yet, there are echoes of the market negotiation I described even in this. While I might not negotiate with the clerk (who would likely not have the authority to change a price anyway), I do see the price as an offer (I will sell you X for $Y) and I decide whether or not I will pay that price. I know people who will not pay that price. They spend ages shopping for bargains. If enough people don't buy something and there is, then, too much stock, the business will put their items on sale, lowering the price. In effect, there is a bit of a collective negotiation going on. By not buying the product, we are telling the business that the price is too high and they need to lower it if a bunch of us are going to buy their product. Is this good? Is this bad? Capitalism is silent on this question. It simply is the way prices are supposed to function. The value of a product is not fixed. It is determined by what someone is willing to pay. 

What the UNB student leaders showed us was another way of thinking about value. If you were to ask me, I'd suggest that their way of thinking is closer to the way most of us operate.  The students drew a connection between their assessment of a products value (how good is it) and suggested that the price should fall because the quality is not as good the past product (that is, last year's education).  That is, instead of asking "how much is this worth to me?" they are trying to make an assessment of the intrinsic value of the product and suggest that this should vary price. In the first, capitalist, example, price is determined by what a person is willing to pay. In the second, let's say non-capitalist, example, price is determined by the product's inherent value determined against a range of criteria.

Note, too, that that there are ethical overtones to this argument. It is wrong to charge someone more for something that is not as good as the product you delivered last year. Sometimes the language of "deserves" is featured as in "student deserve a break."  

Now, without wading into the debate about this year's tuition, this is, I recognize, a complex situation and I won't throw up smoke and mirrors by pretending to have an easy answer. I will say something about tuition and education in a future blog, but for now I am focusing on the issue of value and price because what we see in this discussion is not just a disagreement over the price of a product. In fact, that happens all the time. It happens every time someone buys a car or a house or waits for a sale or goes online to comparison shop. Capitalism is built around differences of perspective on price.  That is, in part, what we call "the market."  What we have here is two different theories of value. 

What the UNB students are saying is that tuition is not a product like others. Its value needs to be set in a different way (than what the market will bear) and that there are ethical, pedagogical, social justice, etc., consideration that should weigh in on the price of tuition. For reasons I will explain later, I agree with this perspective and I think most people who work in and/or administer universities do too. What it shows us, however, and this is the key point, is that a discussion of tuition is not just a discussion of tuition. It draws together not simply different perspectives but different ways of looking at prices and values. The result is that different stakeholders can end up talking past each other, not because they inherently disagree with each other (or, think alternative perspectives are misguided) but because they look at issues in dramatically different ways built on different preconditions. 

All that sounds very vague but it begs a question:  what are we to do about it? How do we stop talking past each other? How do we develop a meeting of minds on the subject? That is obviously easier said than done. I am sure that there are a fair number of people who actually want to be part of this discussion; I'd suggest that this is precisely what is needed. We need to do our jobs -- to be professors, for instance -- this year coming but we also need to initiate a discussion about the role and place of post-secondary education in our society.  This discussion will be long but a first step, I think, is to begin from a consideration of value. If we want to look at the value of post-secondary education, what is it? How do we calculate it? Is there a price point -- tuition -- on which we can agree? None of these discussions will be easy but starting to think about the value of education outside of its economic value might be a starting point. 

The Crisis of the Humanities (III): Am I a Better Person?

Are the humanities in crisis? And, if so, what can -- or, should -- be done about it? I have to admit that I don't really know the answer to either question. Instead, I've been trying to address some of the internal self-criticism generated by the humanities themselves. In particular, I tried to argue that supposed defenders of the humanities who assert limited "my way or the highway" definitions of the humanities as the practice of pure contemplation and who poo-poo the digital humanities and other skill-based pro-humanities arguments are off track. They are, in fact, making claims based on their own limited and, often, unsupported views about what they happen to think is best, rather than what is actually going on in the humanities. Their view, I have implied, has some measure of irresponsibility to it because: (a) they ignore legitimate merits of a humanities based education, (b) to argue that they should be paid to contemplate with the taxpayers who fund their contemplating having no say at all. Worse, yet, (c) these supposed defenders of the humanities are contributing to the very crisis of the humanities that they decry. They are, to be sure, not the only factor involved but the tendency of the humanities to attack itself does not help its cause.

In this blog I want to begin to address another line of argument raised by Stanley Fish: there is nothing inherent to a humanities based education that makes one a better person. This is part of Fish's general rejection of arguments put forward in support of humanities education. Fish argues that any self improvement that occurs in the humanities not the result of design but incidental to the general process of education itself. Hence, he contends, any arguments that the humanities might make for support based on the idea that they help people develop as people (what we might call self-actualize) is misplaced and non-operative from the get go. Let's begin this discussion by thinking about the overall merits of education and what we might mean by being a "better" person. In the next blog, I'll try to continue this discussion and move to a social level.

I think Fish is wrong but he raises a good point. There are merits to education, regardless of what form and focus that education takes. Here, I am using the word "education" to refer to a series of processes that involve both the accumulation of knowledge, information literacy skills, critical analytic skills, self reflection, and the like. In other words, I am differentiating education from propaganda. I've blogged on this before and so will not repeat arguments I have already made. Just assume the difference.

What the studies we have show us is that education --formal, informal -- at higher levels has a range of benefits: it seems to improve voter turnout, civic activism and volunteering, for instance. Higher education also seems to lower crime rates and improve life-long earning potential. And, it does seem to make people happier. Now this is not perfect. You will notice the word "seem" in this discussion. The interpretation of the data requires more nuance than I can (and will) devote to it hear and, to be sure, there are problems. For instance, gender is an important factor contributing to earning potential as well. But, the point is this: the data that we have points in one direction: more education is better than less education.

This makes sense. If given the choice, would you rather be more educated or less educated? If you were making decisions for someone's life, would you help them get more education or less education? When we think about different countries and societies and places to live around the world, which do we think are better: those with higher levels of education or lower levels of education? In fact, levels of higher educational attainment are now often used as one of the features that differentiate cities. When we study universities to assess whether or not they are doing their job, one of the metrics we use is completion rates: what percent of students are actually getting the education for which they paid. Thus, while I know this issue is complicated, the general point is nonetheless true. Education has its merits and we can empirically demonstrate this.

What of the humanities? Can we demonstrate their merits? Sort of.  The answers are less clear when we start to break down different types of education because the studies don't usually do this. They usually look at educational attainment, rather than History or Philosophy graduates verses, say, Commerce or Psychology or Physics grads. Such data is available in different ways but the general studies -- say, of crime rates and educational attainment -- don't query whether or not a History grad is more likely to become a criminal than a Biology grad but whether or not a grad is more more likely to become a criminal than a non-grad. See what I mean?

But, this does not mean that we have no evidence and we cannot make some arguments. First, there is nothing in the evidence that shows that humanities graduates are dramatically worse off than other grads. There is, as far as I can tell, some earning differences but these don't strike me as too significant (and really merit a discussion of their own). And, there are interesting trends in the anecdotal evidence. It shows that a broad range of employers like humanities graduates and, in fact, find them preferable to grads in other disciplines. This does not make you a better person but it does suggest that there are merits to the humanities. I'm not at all certain that I would agree with Fish -- that these merits are incidental. Instead, I would put it differently: education is beneficial and the humanities provide education.

What about being a better person? This is an even more difficult issue to address because it forces us to venture into a subjective ground: what makes someone better? My intention is not to enter into this discussion but to suggest that we should accept some level of subjective perspective and to argue that self-actualization is one ground on which we might rest claims to "better." Why? Because self-actualization (becoming better at being yourself and meeting your own objectives) does not require me to impose my thinking about what is better on someone else. Said differently, better does not equal, for example, thinking like me or knowing more of what I know or reading the books I read or looking at movies the way I look at movies. Instead, it takes advantage of subjective perspectives to ask "does the humanities help people be better?" and leaves the definition of better up to them.

Why would anyone be concerned about being better? Or, at least someone might ask this. Is not the whole idea elitist? Who are you, Andrew Nurse, someone might ask, to tell me (say, a person reading this blog) that I need to be a better version of myself?

That is a good question. I am sure that there are bunch of people out there who are really just plain old happy with themselves. Good. I am not arguing that you should be unhappy with yourself. Indeed, I would likely resent it if someone came by -- particularly someone I did not know -- and told me that I should do something to improve myself.

And ... yet ... does not the idea of self-improvement haunt our society? Go into any Chapters outlet and you'll find an entire section of self-help books: habits of successful people, how to win friends and influence people, how to lose weight, the secret of happiness, but it does not end there. One can find books of remaking one's space, on succeeding in athletics or business or the best places to travel and nifty things to see. One of the odd things about supposedly elitist suggestions with regard to self improvement is that the suggestions for self improvement (being a better self) rarely come from people like me: academics. Academics talk about all kinds of things all the time. How to fix the democratic deficit (better public policy), policies that will address unemployment (better economy), ways to make molecules do nifty things (better, say, medicine), or how to use a telescope to see a star (better research). But, most of the suggestions for being better come not from academics but from mass media. Daytime TV is populated with shows that focus on this but so is speciality programming (one show I watched the other day showed car wreck of a bar transformed -- in a way that helped a community heal after a hurricane -- into a new and snazzy bar that remade self confidence and community).

Said differently, I am not actually claiming to tell anyone how they can be better. I'll ask some more pointed questions in my next blog, but those people suggesting that we can be better and they know the secret of how to do it are legion. They are just not, by and large, in the academy.

What is more important, however, is that no one seems to object to what these people are doing. Whereas some folks will get hot under the collar of an academic says something about self improvement, no one seems to mind at all that there are quite literally hundreds of books out there on the subject, motivational speakers that charge an arm and a leg to come to your company or school to talk about how we can all be better, tv shows that focus endlessly on the theme.

Why? Well, the issue is not better nor who says it. I'm not particularly interested in the disjuncture between something being bad *if I do it* and good if some guy on TV does it. I am interested in what all this tells us about culture and the thing it tells us is that people are interested in better. They may not be interested in what I have to say, and they don't have to be, but they are interested in finding ways to self-actualize: to meet their own objectives, to live a better and, I dare say, richer life. Our society watches these TV shows, buys these books, goes to the talk and pays a premium for the seminar to find out the secrets of life and the way to lead a better, more full-filling and deeper, more meaningful life.

It is not me, I hasten to add, saying that this is a good thing. It is ordinary people (ordinary Canadians) out there watching these shows, going to the talks, buying the books. For a variety reasons about which I am not going to write, there is a desire for something more. Once we establish that fact, then I think we can start to have a discussion of the role the humanities might play in it. That, at least, is the subject of my next blog.

The Politics of Free Tuition

So ... New Brunswick is going to have free university tuition for some of its less well off citizens. Sort of .... It is not really the "free tuition" that we have heard people bandying about as a name but it could represent a very different approach to university education in NB and one of the more innovative ideas that we've seen in a generation with regard to post-secondary education. There are many reasons to like this idea. There are just as many -- from what I can tell -- to worry about its practise. But, there are some other interesting and potentially important things to note about the debate over "free tuition" as it has already unfolded and it is to those interesting things that I want to devote some attention.

My reason for doing so is not that I want to avoid a discussion of the merits of "free tuition." I don't. Indeed, I think this debate is long, long overdue. I've been arguing it -- not that you folks who happen to be reading this would notice because I don't have a high public profile, or, well ... any public profile -- for some time. Other countries in the world have adopted a "free tuition" model (which is, like the model proposed for NB, not free but the name kind of sticks). And, it seems to me that in more ways than one the secondary educational system of NB -- and perhaps many other jurisdictions in Canada -- is at a bit of an impasse. This impasse is historically conditioned. It is not the product simply of a bunch of individual bad decisions. There are, I think, good and bad ways out of the impasse. Said differently, there are better answers to solve our problems and worse answers.  There are no guarantees that answer X or policy Y will solve problems but there is good reason to presume that some answers will move a greater distance toward solving problems than others.

This is where the free tuition idea/discussion/debate enters into the question. Its politics are multifaceted. One of the things that has struck me about it, however, is the degree to which people are lining up in opposition to it. Indeed, it is a sign of the times, I suppose, that there are people ready willing and able to articulate views against the idea that increasing access to education is good. I cannot, in fact, imagine another time in Canadian history -- and, I am a historian -- where people would have argued such a thing publicly. After WW II, for instance, great efforts were made to expand post-secondary education; again in the 1960s the idea of making education more accessible was seen as a good thing. And, today, the Maple Spring in Quebec was about precisely this (among other things): accessibility. We are, therefore, in an interesting moment in time where for the first time that I am aware of when have come out against free tuition. There seem to be a range of reasons why this is the case but let's take one to start with, that offered by the self-appointed Canadian Taxpayer's Federation. I want to start with this argument because it is (a) one that will likely be repeated over and over again and (b) a pretty darned weak argument against "free tuition." In future blogs I'll look at other arguments against free tuition and what free tuition is all about.

The argument, as reported (cite is below), given by the Atlantic director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation runs like this:

“There’s nothing free in government,” says Kevin Lacey, Atlantic director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “This promise today is paid for with borrowed money. That money that’s borrowed today will mean higher taxes to the very students that are benefiting.”
Lacey says the Tuition Access Bursary (TAB) sounds like a positive step but it’s a bit misguided. (cite) 

I am citing the news story. So far, you might say, so good, pretty reasonable and looking like it might be balanced. But, then it gets silly:

“Investing in education is the right path for the province, it promotes business investment,” Lacey said. “But there’s no evidence to show that investing more money in lowering tuition payments will actually encourage more people to go to university. There’s much larger factors than just cost to why people go to school and why they don’t.”

And, here one might start to wonder about the arguments being made against free tuition. This argument is what is called a "truism." It is, more or less, the philosophical equivalent of saying "pain hurts" or "grass is green." The statement is true but it is also irrelevant because the point being made is so straightforward that it is the beginning of the an argument; not its end point. In this case, the idea that any one person makes a decision -- say, to go to university -- for a variety of reasons is the truism. We all knew that. In fact, no one pretended anything but. I'll rephrase my point just in case my language is preventing anyone from understanding it (and, apologies for that if it is the case): Lacey's position is silly. He states something we already knew and tries to mobilize it  as a reason to argue against free tuition.

But, and this is my point, his argument misses the mark. While we all know that parents, students, etc., make decisions for a range of reasons that does not mean that money is *not* one of those reasons and it does not mean that it is *not* an important one. For example, a student might choose to discontinue their university education and they might do so for a range of reasons. They might not like their major and want to  change it. They might be homesick. They might decide that they need skill upgrading. They might want to shift over to college. In other words, there could be a bunch of reasons but ... if you take a look at these reasons, they are all -- in one way or another -- related to money. The student who decides to drop out rather than change majors is making that decision because they don't have the cash to go back and start again in a new programme. The homesick kid makes that decision because they cannot afford to get home often enough. The student who decides to shift to college does that because they feel that they are more employable. In other words. while there are complicated reasons why student X or student Y makes a decision to go to -- or, to leave -- university, money is in there somewhere.

I work in a university and I hear this all the time. I frequently hear students (who are about to leave university without completing their degree) say "I'd love to keep going and get a good education, to know more about Canada [I work in Canadian Studies] but I can't afford it and so I'm going to get a trade." Said differently, the only way to pretend that money is *not* a key factor in decision making regarding post-secondary education is to not be familiar with the people who are attending post-secondary education and the way they think and look at the world.

Now, I want to hasten to add a couple of other points that I'll put out there in response to potential red herrings (you all know what a red herring is ... an argument that distracts from the discussion at hand). No one is saying that free tuition will ensure that everyone goes to university, at least everyone among those who make below a certain income level. It won't and the policy -- at least from what I can tell -- is not designed to that. The red herring here is that someone says "this policy did not work because some people, or a lot of people, or most people, still don't go to university." We don't have a command economy in Canada. We  can't just order people to go to university. Nor, of course, can the state solve all problems. Whether you, I, or the folks who run the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation like it or not -- and, for the record I do -- after a certain age each individual retains a freedom of choice with regard to their education.  Because people will make different decisions for different reasons, some will elect to go to university and some will not. Some will go to university and decide it is not for them. Others will go and decide that it is.

To say this differently, if this policy is implemented, its success or failure -- in some people's eyes -- will not be assessed on what it actually sets out to do, which is almost complicated and multifaceted. For some it will be  assessed against a standard that it never articulated. What we have, then, is an argument in which a key reason for making decisions is downplayed in favour of some unnamed complexity but little to no analysis actually done on how that complexity might relate to money or how different factors might be inter-related. Moreover, we have little conception of what the goals of the programme actually are. Instead, we are left to make assumptions because those details are not really addressed in the story. The key point here, we need to think about the objectives of "free tuition" before we start saying it will or it will not work.

As this news story goes on we are treated to more truisms that seem to line up in opposition to the idea that "free tuition" -- increased access to postsecondary education -- is a good thing. We are told, for instance, by other advocates of the private sector that the government made a "political decision." Be still my heart. I don't to make fun of this argument but I can't think of what else to do because it is so naively silly. Does anyone not think that governments make political decisions? Pause, for a second, and think about decisions made by other governments. Were those not political? Was, say, the federal Harper govt's energy plan for Canada somehow *not* political? Was Trudeau's support of feminism *not* political? Was the previous NB government's decision to *not* lower tuition somehow *not* political? Was the NS government's pandering to the middle class as it was creating a framework to drastically raise tuition in NS somehow not political? Seriously ... it is as if the person making this statement had not taken Politics 101 ... say, at university.

In the news story others expressed disappointment that government did not consult the private sector, but why should it? Does the private sector have some different privileged access to government than the rest of us? Why should it -- the government -- consult the private sector any more than it should consult educators? Or, say, universities? Or, parents or students or labour unions or churches? Somehow, the story implies (or, at least the person making this statement is implying) that something bad has gone on here: the government of NB tried to increase access to postsecondary education without consulting the business sector. But, as citizens we might ask: why should business get a say in whether or not my kids can or should go to university? Surely, in fact, in a democracy, they shouldn't or at least they should have no more say than any other interest and certainly should not have special access to government (they should have a say, to be sure, but as individuals and no more than you or I).

I've now gone on too long but you see the point I am making. We have here a group of people trying to make an argument that they know is not popular. They know that increased access to postsecondary education will be popular and popular with specific sectors of society. Thus, they resort to other arguments: it is misguided, the government is being "political" (that is, it is not behaving with good intentions but unnamed bad ones) and the issue is "complicated" (as if anyone said it was not). I suspect, as I said above, that conclusions will also be drawn on the basis of objectives that are not part of the actual goals of this policy so that some people can declare it a failure? Why and for what reason?

This is the odd thing, as I said above, access to education is good. Its democratic and it is good for society. Who opposes it? Well, right now it is pro-conservative  lobby groups and business interests and a few journalists, but there are others on social media articulating other views. Why are they opposed? Some are upset because they were not consulted -- that is, they did not get privileged access to government -- others because they think it will raise taxes (but they make this claim without, of course, providing any evidence). But there is also something else there as well. That is what I will address in my next blog ....

Student Evaluations of Teaching .... Why?

I had a long chat with a co-worker the other night and it was a good chat. I'll leave her name out of this since it is not fair to tar her with my thoughts, particularly since she may not share some or even all of them. We were talking about Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs), those course-end evaluations that students at universities complete. Many universities require them; some requirement that they be included in packages submitted for tenure or promotion. Mount Allison does not, although we are required to complete a self-report and be assessed by respective deans every two years and most people include SETs in their reports. There has been remarkable controversy lately over SETs that, in my view, is frankly misplaced. Why? That is what I want to explain in this email, but I'll tip my hand at the outset: mandatory SETs that are assessed by deans will not accomplish their goals. Hence, they become a hoop through which people jump rather than a meaningful part of work in the post-secondary environment. What is more, we have alternatives. People who are looking to meet certain goals can use these alternatives to a better end.  SETs are not a waste of time but if you are looking to (a) improve teaching, (b) provide higher accountability, (c) ensure a student voice in the evaluation/assessment of profs ... SETs will meet none of these objectives. Hence, promoting them is not a good idea when we can more profitably direct our attention to mechanisms that will work.

One of the things about SETs that surprises me is how the debate -- at Mount A at least -- has become frozen in time. It has, in short, not kept up with the scholarship of teaching and learning as it pertains to SETs. Once, when I first started out in this gig (let's say 15-20 years ago), there was a vigorous debate about the accuracy of SETs. Do the scores students accord to profs accurately reflect teaching ability; that is a competence and so can be used as a tool of evaluation. This debate is old and settled. Anyone who keeps debating it is, frankly, missing out on a lot of scholarship. The scholarship on SETs falls into three camps. There are ardent defenders of their accuracy. There are ardent rejectors of their accuracy. Both are small groups. In other words, just about no one takes one side or the other in an extreme form. Instead, most people fall into a third camp that we could call "yes ... but ...." The basic premise of this perspective -- which represents the mainstream of SETs assessment the following:

• SETs are valuable tools that cannot be taken in isolation. They must be combined with other forms of assessment. In other words, to use them by themselves as your sole or even dominant teaching assessment tool would be wrong and would create inaccuracies. It would be like using a year-end poll instead of having an on-going democracy. 
• SETs cannot be assessed outside of a chronological framework; that is: one needs a time span, ideally several years, for SETs to make sense. In other words, the trend is more important than any single individual number.  This point should not surprise us because it is a standard point of statistical analysis. Ask Michael Adams if you don't believe me. It is the pattern into which the numbers fit that is important.
• SETs require interpretation. You cannot just look down a range of numbers, see that one prof has 4.1/5 on average in their evaluation (we use a standard 5 point scale at Mount A)  and determine that that person is better than someone who had a 3.9/5. Why? We have no longitudinal data, we don't know how many students each of these profs taught, we don't know their stage of careers, we don't know the courses, we don't know how they provided extra help, we don't know whether or not the students in their courses has prerequisites. In other words, all we have is a number outside of context. What if the first person had six students and taught only one class of advanced, motivated students who happened to collectively be a really nice and deferential bunch who assumed that the prof knew what they were doing? What if the other prof laboured for hours with hundreds of students in core courses that students hated taking but were required for their degrees, providing endless hours of extra help, marking, say, hundreds of papers (I'm not exaggerating. I mark hundreds -- seriously -- of papers each year.) Would we think that a situation where the first prof's numbers could have changed dramatically if one student had changed their SETs as fair and accurate? Don't believe me ... take some time and do the math yourself.  What is more, however, we believe that everything requires interpretation. Geographers interpret space; biologists interpret living things, historians interpret the past, sociologists ... society. After we teach this to our students ... why would we suddenly believe that it would not apply to our jobs? After we spend hours teaching students statistical analysis, political inquiry, quantitative methods .... why would we ditch it as if everything that we taught were unimportant? 

Put together, no one who has serious studied this issue says "yeah, go ahead, look at one number and that will tell you whether person X is good or bad at their job." My point is this: in having a debate about whether or not we should have SETs and whether or not deans should look at numbers to assess faculty, we are missing an opportunity to leave an old debate in the past and have a new conversation that serves all of us (students, faculty, administrators, the institution) better. To get to this conversation we need to ask this question: why have SETs? 

I've encountered two answers to this question, one of which I accept and one I reject. The one I reject is this: we assess everything so why not use this tool to assess teaching. I reject that argument for the following reasons:

•  We don't actually assess everything. Most professions are certified, go through probation and then are approved to work in that profession. We do this with faculty; it is called tenure. After certification, though, we don't assess most professions regularly. We don't assess the ice cream we eat; the plumber who  comes to our door; the mechanic to which we take our car. The idea that we assess everything is, therefore, wrong.
• Why would we use a method of assessment that might be inaccurate? Even if we agree that assessment is good and useful, we want that assessment to be accurate. Simply implementing a SETs-based assessment policy will, therefore, do nothing but say we have a policy implemented, the accuracy of which we cannot guarantee. Does that inspire your confidence? Imagine using that line for a different profession. We have imposed a method of assessment on our fire department but we cannot guarantee that it is actually accurate and so we actually tell you whether or not they'll put out the fire if you call. Does that instil faith in the fire department? What about a medical professional? Yes, we've assessed your doctor and they passed but we can't actually say whether or not this assessment is accurate so if you are sick you might or might not get the right advise. Hmmm ...

Sometimes I hear people say "we  have to do something." Yes, we do, but let's do something that meets our goals; not something that we do just to do because that is a waste of time and resources. 

The correct answer to that question is that we need to assess teaching to improve teaching. There is absolutely no other reason to do so. (Pause and think about that if you disagree with me and you'll actually see that that statement is accurate. If we are not assessing teaching to improve it, what other possible end could we have in mind?) Now I am on the same wavelength. And, now you can see why accuracy, change over time, and context are so important. Without these things, we run the risk of drawing wrong conclusions and making changes that would actually hamper good teaching as opposed to enhance it. For instance, a person who is getting better at teaching every year might be someone who is worthy of commendation even if their numbers are not quite as good as someone else's who has basically flatlined. A person who innovates -- say, with regard to technology in the classroom, experiential learning, mentoring -- might run the risk of a horrible failure but we might all be glad that she ran that risk because it helps us. Should we condemn her for that? 

What I would suggest is that as part of this new conversation that we consider our objectives and think about the range of ways we can meet them. We approach our own developments on an opt-in basis, knowing that there will be people who will not opt-in right away, potentially never. I never mind it if someone says to me "you know, Andrew, I'm going to see if this works before I sign on." So, if someone is skeptical and wants to wait until we have evidence of success ... well, heck, that strikes me as just plain good sense. 

We could begin by looking at what SETs are used for in the scholarship of teaching and learning as one first step. We might discover that there is a whole field of research and we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We might encourage team assessments, student open fora on teaching, open fora on conceptions of what constitutes good teaching, or even what constitutes a class, experiential learning (done right), different forms of extra help, encouraging faculty involvement in the scholarship of teaching and learning, encouraging faculty involvement in teaching conferences, developing new and flexible forms of teaching that meet student needs. In other words, there is a whole bunch of stuff that we can and we should do to improve teaching ... why not start doing it. SETs and some mode of thinking about those might be useful but there is so much more that we can do to encourage student voices, provide fora for them so they can be heard, and get encourage improvements in the quality of education. Yet, if we spend all our time discussing SETs and their accuracy and whether or not a dean should look at them ... well, none of the rest of this stuff -- from student voices to something else -- gets done. 

I might blog more on this in the future but one last thing ... there is a role for deans in this and I honestly don't understand why it is not being done right now. Why not encourage good teaching? Why not go to workshops and teaching conferences? Why not check in with faculty as the term goes along? One of the big problems with using SETs to evaluate teaching is this. Imagine, for instance, and for the sake of argument, that it works and it does help us separate a good teacher from a bad one. If that were true ... it does that only after the fact. In other words, and assuming the accuracy of SETs, we discover that Professor X (who got a bad evaluation) was not educating his students only after the course was done. By this time, the prof -- allowing a bad prof -- might have cost students their scholarship, or forced them to have to repeat courses, or even driven them from the subject because he was so bad. SETs, in other words, have a built in flaw: they are re-active. We need to be pro-active in developing good teaching. And, I might say, I am on board for anyone who wants to find ways of doing that. 

Tenured Blues: Last Thoughts

I have been slow in writing this last post. Apologies. I will start off a new subject in the next one which might also be a bit out of the ordinary. What I'd like to do here is quickly summarize the arguments I have been making to date and to suggest an overall perspective that allows us to move the conversation forward on the problems of post-secondary education.

I say "problems" because I don't want anyone to get me wrong. I am not defending the status quo. There are problems with universities and with university education; there are changes that need to be made. What we need to do, however, is to think concerted about what those changes should be with an end goal in mind. But, the changes that we need to engineer need to be considered with end goals in mind. Minor, piecemeal, economize, etc. changes will not necessarily do anything, in my view, but mild out the rough edges. I hasten to add that there are a lot of things I think universities are doing right. The data we have for Mount A suggests (whatever this means, and I confess that I am not 100% sure) that our students are, overall, quite happy with their experiences here.

I make this point -- in part by way of summary -- but also because we are, I think, at a bit of a crossroad in education at the post-secondary level. The strikes we have seen at Mount A, UNB, St FX, the near strike at CBU are, I think, signs of this crossroads. In what direction should we be moving? The strikes are about answering precisely this question. They have occurred for more than one reason, to be sure, but if you look at the issues involved in the strikes, you can see that pay levels is not a particularly important issue. The strikes are about other things -- staffing levels, modes of assessment, the arbitrary assignment of penalties to faculty by administrators, etc. The issues are complicated and, of course, there is more than one side (because, if there were not ... well ... there would not have been the strikes).

I think that what these strikes show us is that the system with which we have been working to organize, innovative, and develop post-secondary education is creating conflicts. These conflicts are not, in themselves, bad. Don't get me wrong: no one likes strikes (I was on strike and I did not like it). But, we need to find ways of addressing our concerns before they come to such a point. How can this be done? I'll offer one suggestion and then get back to the point at hand because it feeds in to what I have to say. It really does.

One of the problems we encountered at Mount A was communication. I credit our VP Student Affairs for this observation. It was not a problem of communication in this sense: the faculty did not understand what the administrators were saying (which leads to the belief that if administrators just communicated better, there would be no conflict). Indeed, having been on strike, I can say that the faculty fully understood what the administration was saying. They just disagreed with it and, it turns out, fundamentally. Communication is a two way street. As administrations have developed, they are less connected to faculty than they were in the past. To try to be objective: both sides view each other as not cut from the same clothe. In the past, there were many reasons why there were not strikes but one reason was that administrators and faculty tended to see things the same way because administrators were faculty (more or less).

There were a lot of problems with the way universities used to be run in Canada. This system of common views between administrators and faculty was sexist, racist, and carried with it elements of Christian religious conformity. We should not mythologize it. It was changed for the right reasons. The problem we have now, however, is that the shared community has given way to competing or different perspectives. Conflicts between these perspective can be vibrant and viewed as a sign of commitment. That is not a bad thing. A dialogue of competing perspectives can be a good thing. It is certainly democratic. But, what is clear is that faculty feel that this is not a dialogue. That they are being told things. Their views are not fully considered, rejected out of hand, minimized, or discarded. Left with no other way to make their voices heard and to resist policies that they feel will harm the university and its mandate, faculty elect to go on strike. For me and for my colleagues, this strike really was a last alternative.

What does this have to do with research? It has a great deal to do with it in the case of Mount A because one of the issues that has been causing conflict here is the balance between teaching and research. I have argued repeatedly that Mount Allison is not UoT writ small. It is a teaching institution. Research is necessary; it can and should be encouraged and supported, but we also need to bear in mind that teaching is of vital importance. It is the reason the vast majority of students come here. And, we need to bear this in mind. If we make changes to the university - say, make tenure dependent on winning major research grants, make promotion dependent on number of publications -- we need to consider, I have tried to argue, the outcome of this change. The natural outcomes is that the balance of teaching and research at Mount A will change. If tenure is more dependent on winning big grants than on  teaching ... faculty will change their own balance. They will devote less time to teaching and more time to writing grants. If publications are the mark of promotion, then faculty will devote more time to writing and less to teaching.

Time, economists tell us, is a scarce resource. This does not mean that is available in limited quantities. It means that if you use your time for one thing, you cannot use it for another. Earlier, I tried to explain how I spent my time and how most of it -- during the school year -- was devoted to the various elements of teaching (which included marking and preparation). It is not all I do, but the largest chunk of my time goes to this. I do this in the expectation that my superiors understand that this is the mission of the university -- to provide effective teaching -- and that I am, therefore, doing my job. In the summer, I can  turn to research and writing in a more concerted way. If, however, this balance changes, I need to change my balance. One simple example: we have small internal research grants at Mount A. I don't apply often, but you could get a few thousand dollars to help with research. Because my research in the recent past was local, this was all I needed. Now, however, internal grants might be tied not to one's research but to whether or not one were going to apply for a big grant, say, from the federal government. The result is that my research is either (a) harmed because I cannot get one of these internal grants if I chose not to apply for a big grant or (b) I have to devote more time to getting the big grant. Big grant applications can take just about forever to fill out. It is a very time consuming process. My point is that the drain on my time now becomes greater. Instead of researching in the summer and teaching in the winter, I now have to take part of my summer to apply for a research grant. This lives me in a deficit with regard to actual research (filling out the grant form, of course, is not research). And, imagine in this scenario, that the standards of promotion are increased so as to require more publications. Time being scarce ... where is the time for publication (of which I have to do more) going to come from?

You know the answer. It comes from the only place it can come from: teaching time. Everyone -- everyone I know of, anyway -- proclaims their commitment to teaching but proclaiming something and actually supporting it is not necessarily the same thing. I know a soccer coach who proclaims his love the game and yet discourages people from actually playing the game. It make it difficult to believe his proclamations of his love of the game if he is not interested in encouraging actually existing people to play it. Teaching is the same way. Simply asserting that we are committed to teaching is not evidence that we are actually committed to teaching if everything else we do contradicts that statement. These are the kinds of discussion that we need to have. If we are committed to teaching, we need to create a situation that does not detract from research and supports it but which also maintains the important balance between teaching and research.

Here is the point I want to make as a summary point. I originally began this series of blogs as reply to Richard Gwyn's critique of faculty at universities. I've tried to show that much of Gwyn's critique is empirically inaccurate. Faculty cannot be easily faulted for the cost of post-secondary education if they have no control over it and Gwyn would find that most faculty agree with his perspective: expenses are too high. Faculty are not monks living in cells doing arcane research to the exclusion of everything. Many faculty are remarkably active in the public sphere. Simply taking a look at what faculty actually do will illustrate this. Most faculty prize the balance between research and teaching and they are not the ones who are trying to change it. Indeed, they are in the case of Mount A trying to maintain that balance or at least force a wider discussion before it is changed. There are problems with the university system, but simply saying 'bad profs' will not address the problems. Those who think that it will, are misinformed. At least, that is the contention I have tried to sustain.

Faculty are not just altruistic. Don't get me wrong. Like other people, we want to paid for the job we do. If you have problems with that ... ask yourself whether or not you want to be paid for the job you do. Some faculty are not doing their jobs. But, the evidence we have at Mount indicates remarkable satisfaction from students, suggesting that most faculty are doing their jobs. We need a balance of teaching and research; changing that balance will have implications and will push faculty into doing more research. The result, however, because time is scarce, is that this means less time devoted to teaching.

Ultimately, these are choices that we make. What we need to know are the implications of those choices and not pretend that they do not exist.

Tenured Blues or ... Lecturing

Over a series of blogs, I've tried to ask a series of questions for which there are not ready answers. In this blog I want to begin to address lecturing ... one of the concerns that people seem to have with faculty is their supposed reliance on lecturing which is viewed as an outdated, low energy, boring way of teaching. I'll do that but in order to keep this blog reasonable in length, I'll cut off and write a part II another day. I'd like to begin, however, before I get to lecturing, by recapping what this series of blogs is about.

It is about questions I have relating to what we might think of as some individuals' perceptions of what I do in my job. My questions are inspired by critiques of the professoriate that have been circulating in the popular press, largely in editorials. There critiques are not large in number and some of them can be dismissed out of hand and simply ill-informed and hence inaccurate. That is what I have done in the past. Why bother to write about -- or argue or discuss with -- someone who represents a tiny informed minority view? I elected to write a response to comments made by Richard Gwyn, a man I met years ago and for whom I have a lot of respect in large measure because I have a lot of respect for him.  In an op ed he wrote (linked in an earlier blog), Gwyn offered a series of harsh critiques of the work of professors. These don't amount to a logically coherent or consistent argument, unfortunately, but rather seemed more to recycle complaints that float about from time to time. In short order, some of his criticism included:

• Professors don't engage public issues
• Professors spend too much time researching and devote no time to their teaching 
• Student costs are too high and students have too much debt
• Lectures are a bad way of teaching and students get more out of videos

What I tried to show in my previous posts were that professors were, in fact, pretty ordinary people doing an ordinary job that took most of their work week. In other words, rather than shirking responsibilities to students, most of the faculty I know spend the majority of their time on educational matters (preparing for class, evaluating student work, meeting with students to offer supervision). It is not high profile work, but is is necessary. Papers don't mark themselves. I also tried to show that professors are not shrinking violets. A great number do engage public issues (weather with regard to literacy issues, immigrant settlement, tax matters, public history, environmental policy, etc.). Exactly how Gwyn missed all this engagement is a bit confusing to me and does not, in fact, bode well for his research, but ... the fact is that faculty are all over the place doing all kinds of things. Again, many of them might not be limelight things ... but so what? Moreover, engaging the public sphere takes time. The very research that Gwyn condemns, in fact, is precisely what makes for effective public engagement. I don't know about your or about Gwyn but I when I listen to someone ... I prefer to listen to an informed view; not an off the top or even passably "I watched the news last night" view. Informed views based on solid research don't necessarily make for good TV, but they also are what public policy needs. 

The other thing I intimated that we need to recognize is that faculty respect democratic processes. They are not looking to set themselves up as the font of all wisdom. They prefer to provide options and let the democratic processes of the country work. This amounts to a form of engagement that is based around providing information. My colleagues do it all the time. The fact that Gwyn or other commentators don't bother to read their views, however, does not mean that they are not doing it. 

I also suggested that the debt issue was a red herring. Most faculty think that student debt is too high.  In other words, they agree with Gwyn so exactly why he should fault them for agreeing with him ... is another matter that I find a bit  confusing. 

But, let's address another point: videos are more useful then lectures. I don't want to go overboard on this. Lectures are one method and one method only of teaching. Some faculty are quite good at it -- a colleague of mine who  teaches here in the Classics Department draws "rave reviews" and students contend that his lectures really are wonderfully educational. But, this does not mean that videos are not important to education; or that education is an either/or type of thing. I personally ask my students to watch videos (usually feature films but occasionally short documentaries). My students use them in presentations. But, no one that I know sees the options as watch a video or attend a class. And, this is my key point: the problem with Gwyn's argument on this point is that he has set up a false opposition. No one that I know of sees lectures as some sort of ordinary, boring, guy stands in front of the room and talks in monotone all year and students parrot back what they heard-type of thing. 

Let me lay my cards on the table and tell you what I tell the students in my intro class each year: lectures are useful but they are not the end of education. An effective approach to education combines a variety of instructional techniques that is aimed to move students above and beyond simply being passive recipients of messages that come from a central location (be it a lecture of a video). In my academic unit, we work together to design a range of assignment, to make use of a range of media, to organize discussion exercises, and find ways to have students contributing to their own and their colleagues education. We lecture. But, we don't stop there and to suggest --or, rather imply -- that we do is only to demonstrate a lack of knowledge of what actually goes on in the classroom. In my intro class -- where there is a bit of lecturing -- we devote about 50% (give or take depending on the year) of our time to student-led discussion. I'm not looking for a prize ... virtually all of my colleagues do the same thing. Some can't get to the 50% mark to which we in Canadian Studies are close but that is not because they *prefer* to lecture. It is a question of resources and time. Virtually everyone I know who is lecturing extensively would prefer a different combination of educational approaches, but need to work within the available resources. 

The first key point I want to make them with regard to lecturing is that the image of the professor as lecturer and that is it is out-dated. It is a sign of someone who actually has had little experience with post-secondary education today and has not bothered to ask either students or faculty about what actually goes on in the classroom. 

The second key point I want to make is that lectures are time consuming to create. They are not -- or, should not be -- a person standing at the front of the room using worn notes from a decade ago to repeat the same thing that they said last year and the year before and the year before. That does happen. Most of the people I know who lectured that way (particularly in History and Political Science, the disciplines that Gwyn, ironically, likes) retired some time ago. That was one of the ways I was taught when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s. I found it boring. I think the guy at the front of the room lecturing found it boring. It was what happened them. It is not -- by and large -- any more. 

Again, I can use myself as an example but any of my colleagues will support what I am saying. Lectures are some of the craft. They often involve multi-media (I use maps, stats, cartoons and artwork as well as occasional video clips).  They don't just begin, but rather begin with objectives: "here is what we are going to talk about." They include periodic breaks for brainstorming or discussion (I do try to limit this to one time per lecture because I don't want it to get old). They might also include key words or concepts, alternative perspectives on issues under discussion (so that students don't have to copy what I am saying), extra readings so that students can follow up issues in which they are interested, and conclusions that hit the highlights and key points for students so they can review notes to know if they have "got it." 

A good lecture can take a long time to put together.  My intro lectures take a few hours because they are subjects about which I have been teaching for a long time and because I know my subject. The time is usually taken up review my notes, thinking through communicative problems I might have had last year, and looking for current examples from the news with which students might be familiar (for instance, if I am talking about environmental policy, I might talk about ... say, the tar sands where I used to use the cod crisis).  You can, however, do the math. Imagine that I need to give, say three lectures per week during the school year. I have now already used up nine hours time just getting these three lectures (on subjects I know well) and I have not even gone in the classroom. 

Occasionally, however, a lecture can take a very long time to put together. Every once in a while -- usually once or twice a semester -- one needs to teach a subject with which one is less than familiar. How could this happen? Well ... that is a good question. I teach at Mount Allison University and the truth of the matter (as I noted above) is that there is only so much money that can be put into education. I don't make the decisions about staffing. They are made by someone else who is at a higher pay grade than me and I live with me. What this means is that those of us who run academic units don't always have the instructors we would like to have -- the expert who would be Grade A in the class on that particular subject. There is nothing horrible about this. It happens (sometimes people are on sabbatical, for instance or ill.) And, the general subject might be one with which I (or, some other faculty member) am familiar. The problem is the details. And, there are other obligations. Sometime a course needs to be taught because it is important to what students are learning in their major. A couple of years ago, I had to teach a course that I had never taught before: Regionalism. Clearly an important course in Canadian Studies. It needed to be taught; there was no one else to teach it ... I taught it. 

The result was that the lecture took longer to put together than they do for, say, my intro course. That is fair enough, too. Instead of three hours, I might have been spending six, checking facts, looking over scholarship that I had read but not thought of in terms of a course, reading over census data, or looking up information on regional cultural traditions that I knew existed but now needed to be able to explain to others. One lecture, however, was, for me, a real show-stopped. It was on a subject that was important to regionalism and involved some scholarship I'd read in passing over the years but my reading was enough to know that it was important and I needed to teach it so that the course addressed an important subject. It took my 19 hours to put that lecture together. And, to be honest, I was quite proud of it. You can, I am sure, see my point. Even if one is lecturing ... lectures are not just standing up and talking off the top of your head. They are serious modes of educational engagement that use diverse media and, when taken seriously, are remarkably time consuming. The students who go this lecture got a 1.5 hour lecture; disguised in that were the 19 hours that I had put in to get ready for it.

Why tell this story ... in part so that people know what a lecture is all about. If the lectures you have received seem more like the old-fashioned ones I got in the 1980s ... I am sorry about that. In my classes and among my colleagues, however, I can assure you that we work to set a high bar. We  strive to be accurate and current (both in terms of information and scholarship) to provide data to students, and to raise important issues even if we need to devote considerable time to them. Lecturing, in other words, is about much more than what happens in front of the classroom for an hour or an hour and a half. 

Tenure Blues ... of, Life of a Prof Part III: "Students are the losers"

This is part three of a series of blogs I'm writing that were animated by Richard Gwyn's critique of tenure and research-oriented profs. The argument I think he is making is that students are suffering because faculty are more interested in research than  teaching. Hence, students are accumulating significant debts in the form of student loans without deriving any benefit from their education. In my previous blogs, I tried to ask what I took to be a simple question about assertions such as this: is this true? Is the education of students suffering at the hands of recalcitrant profs who are not interested in teaching?

This is a good question that needs to be addressed because if it were true, there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. The problem with Gwyn's assertion is that he does not, in fact, demonstrate that it is true. Instead, he uses what we might call a "fake" argument. How is it fake? His argument is that post-secondary education is failing students because students have a large debt. Yet, if we look at this equation, we can see that the one has nothing to do with the other. Most faculty I know, in fact, think that tuition is too high, but faculty do not set tuition rates. At our budget meeting at Mount Allison this past Winter, faculty complained again and again about tuition rates and various fees charged to students. Thus, the idea that faculty are somehow to blame for high tuition is at the very least so simplistic as to be meaningless in the sense that it does not tell us why tuition is high. The key reason that tuition is high is cut backs in state funding for universities. What does this have to do with research? I honestly don't know. There might be a connection but that connection is not self evident. Someone can draw it out for me if they want. Hence, Gwyn's argument runs into a problem: his proof that post-secondary education is failing because faculty do too much research and not enough teaching fails because he has not demonstrated that this is actually the case. Everyone agrees that there is an accessibility problem, but that problem seems to be related to state policy; not research. Or, to make my point in a different and hopefully clearer way: if faculty did less research ... would tuition drop? The logic of Gwyn's argument is that it will. Do we believe him?

Before we reach a final determination on that question, however, let's address two other issues. First, what is the connection between research and teaching? Second, do we have any evidence that teaching is declining in quality as more research is being done?  I'll address these questions in this order.

First, there is a connection between teaching and research. Ask your students or students ask yourselves or parents ask yourselves. Do you want higher level education conducted by individuals who are not active in their research? Does anyone want to history courses from a professor who never goes the archives? Does anyone want to take Chemistry from a scientist who is not in the lab? Does anyone want to painting from an individual who never creates art? We could go on down the line but I assume my point is made. One of the things that differentiates higher level education from lower level education is that it is conducted by practitioners in their fields. Their experiences in practicing their disciplines enriches education; it does not hamper it. The scientist who is in the lab and conducting research knows more about how to teach students who to conduct research and practice, say, chemistry than the one who does not. I asked my students precisely this question: did they want to take courses in, say, literature from a person who does not read novels? They thought the question was odd but when I pressed them, they conceded that it was, in fact, important to them that their faculty were active, were doing their job, we up on the latest developments (we call this research!), and contributed to their fields. The anthropologist who conducts fieldwork knows more about the "other" culture than one who does not, as another example. Far from seeing research and teaching as in opposition, my students tended to see them as connected.

And, I will confess, I do.  Consider my discipline: history. After we get past the introductory narratives, one of the things that students learn in history is how to assess completing narratives about the past on the basis of primary documents. They learn about the biases that infuse primary documents, the necessity of empirical evidence, how different historians produce different narratives by asking different questions of the past. In other words, they don't just watch a video; they learn how to conduct research and how this conduct affects how we view the past. I am a bit surprised the Gwyn completely neglects this element of post-secondary education since he, in fact, claims history is important and has written history himself. Does he believe that students can be properly educated in history without knowing how history is actually done? Does he believe he can write history without research? Does he believe students should be instructed to write history without research?

Second, do we have any evidence that post-secondary education is failing students? This is a tough question because it involves  consideration of a range of variables. What do we mean by failing? Are students learning less than they used to? Are they not learning what they need to learn? And, how do we determine what students need to learn?

I am not being rhetorical here, but rather trying to get us asking the right questions. I've been teaching full time for fifteen years. I'd like to believe that I am a better teacher now than when I first started and I think that is a pretty normal belief. One gets better over time. But, the important point is that Gwyn is contended precisely the opposite: I've gotten worse over time because I am devoting too much time (not *me* per se but faculty in general) to my research. That might be a fair enough assessment, but what evidence does Gwyn have for this?

I keep asking this question -- what evidence does he have? -- because I don't see the evidence? We can't use things like post-graduation unemployment rates because that a product of factors external to teaching (think of the US financial crisis, which caused serious economic problems. It was caused by serious problems with US capital markets and their regulation; not by teaching). Moreover, those rates don't tell us a great deal because they are variations on a theme (unemployment is, in fact, lower than when I was a student ... does that mean that I am a better teaching than my profs?).

The truth of the matter is that Gwyn is asking an important question. The fact that he goes about answering it the wrong way, should not stop us from asking it. I'd argue -- and this will be a theme of a future blog -- that research and teaching (among other things, including service and engaging national issues) is a matter of finding the right balance and finding ways to improve teaching. Neither of which, I will argue, can be done by attacking tenure. Instead, we need to seriously address these issues by establishing a baseline that allows us to think about whether or not our teaching and research are meeting our goals, for students, for faculty, universities, and society. Without evidence, we are left with conjecture and conjecture that claims to be a public statement ... isn't. It is propaganda.

Life of a Prof, or Tenured Blues ... Part II

In a previous blog, I began what will be a series that addresses issues relating to tenure an academics working on post-secondary institutions. The impetus to this discussion is a column by Richard Gwyn that decries tenure as part of a more general critique of academics. In my last blog, I tried to suggest that Gwyn's critique is important not because everyone believes it but because it might be a growing position: tenure is a problem that stands at the root of a broader series of problems with post-secondary education. His argument is that academics are no longer participating in national debates, focused too much on their research, are paid too much, and are devoting too much time to arcane research as opposed to teaching (and participating in national debates). In my last blog, I tried to suggest that part of Gwyn's problem is that he simply does not understand that work day of the average prof. Most of us, I argued using myself as an example, are pretty ordinary people doing an ordinary job to the best of our abilities. I have a middle-class lifestyle and spend most of my time on matters that are directly related to my job. Most of these -- to hammer a point likely into the ground -- are shockingly ordinary but that is what we are paid to do. Most of what we do doesn't show up on a cost/benefit analysis conducted on a macro level of universities. It involves things like providing feedback on student work, preparing for class, and meeting with students.  But, I also think Gwyn's comments are valuable (even while I disagree with them) because they allow us to have a more open discussion of the merits of tenure and what profs do for a living. This blog, the last one, and others in this series are intended as offerings in that discussion. What I'd like to do is go through Gwyn's argument and look at different parts of it to suggest where he "got things wrong" but also open an avenue of discussion for how things might be improved.

This is easier said that done because there are some conflicting claims in Gwyn's piece. For instance, he faults professors for being too involved in their research but then chides the same profs for not participating in national debates to which their research might be applicable. How can, one might ask, someone participate seriously and effectively in the public forum is one does not do good research? Do we want people participating in public debates who are uninformed, particular if they are profs? In other words, good research, I'd argue, is a prerequisite for participating in public debates yet it seems to be one of the things Gwyn does not like.

I will leave this level of analysis for another day. In this blog, my objective is not address the issue of participating in national debates. Gwyn's argument, as he present it, runs as follows: "In the fields of history and politics, where I can claim some knowledge, academics willing and able to take part in national debates have just about dwindled down to two retired historians, Michael Bliss and Jack Granatstein, and to political scientists such as Tom Flanagan and Donald Savoie. Most of the rest act like medieval monks secure in their cells."

Its a pithy argument, replete with colourful imagery. But, is it accurate? There is no doubt that Bliss and Granatstein, Flanagan and Savoir are "out there." It is would be difficult to watch CBC TV and not see them. But, are they it? Is there no one else? And, more importantly, I am not at all sure what "willing and able to take part in national debates" means. I'm not trying to play semantic games here. I am honestly confused because participating in "national debates" is actually not part of my job and, as I pause to think about it, I am not sure how I might actually go about doing it. In seriousness, what am I supposed to do: call up CBC and "put my on the air," and say  "I'm a prof and I want to comment on X." How would you, if you were a journalist, respond to that kind of invocation? The odd thing is that as a regular columnist Gwyn has more control over whether I become involved in that kind of national venue than I do. He could interview me, for instance, or convince the folks at the Toronto Star to run my blog as a regular column. 

I don't want to use myself as an example for everything and so I'll refer to the work some of my colleagues do below but I will use some of the things I've done over the years as examples. It seems to me that Gwyn's contention can be subjected to several levels of argument. First, do only four profs in Canada actually participate in national debates? Second, what does "able" mean? Third, what role should profs play in national public policy issues? I'll suggest that on each of these levels, Gwyn's argument is inaccurate. Moreover, this inaccuracy is odd because it highlights not the problems of profs but the failure of Gwyn's own research. More on this below because I don't want to make this a just a critique of Gwyn. Instead, I want to use it to illustrate a broader issue I have with the "profs are bad" argument he is making. 

First, do only four profs (an exaggeration to prove a point, to be sure so we obviously would not hold Gwyn to precisely that number) participate in national debates? Well, I'm not one of those people that CBC calls for an interview on a regular basis. I will be honest. I don't like being on the news. I don't think I'm good at it and the type of slow moving, "perhaps we should think about issue X, here are some other ways to look at this matter, we live in a democratic society and so the finale result debates on what Canadians might actually want," responses I give make for good media. I participate but my participation is often to correct (in a professor-like way) misconceptions or misreporting, raise other avenues for people to consider in a democratic society, suggest (as I am doing here) that we subject statements to  analysis to see if they hold water. Is that participation? 

I have been "on the news" a number of times. I've done a few interviews for radio and print journalism (in areas about which I can speak with some knowledge), spoken to a provincial Green Party AGM, I've tried to keep up this blog over the years and now send out tweets on what strike me as important public issues. I've written a few pieces over the years for non-academic audiences. But, I've also done a few other things. For instance, myself and my colleagues organized a conference (supported by Enterprise NB and ACOA) on regional development in Atlantic Canada; Gwyn actually spoke at a conference I helped organize a fair number of years ago now (and, he did a great job) on citizenship and national identity. This past year, my colleagues and I organized a conference on place and culture and, again, a number of years ago, I was part of a multi-university team that organized a conference on rural economic development. I've also done some work for the Treaty and Aboriginal Rights Research Centre in Nova Scotia, organized a workshop on Specific Land Claims, and participated in an Atlantic Policy Congress focus group session on treaty education. Over the years, at Mount A, we've brought in a range of speakers to talk to our students (usually to a packed auditorium) including a former Canadian ambassador to the UN, a Commission of Official Languages, and high ups in the PCO, former minister, among others. 

In short, when I sat down to look at this list, it did not seem to me to be so bad. Sure, I was not on TV regularly, but since I'm not good at that ... why would I do it? It would be a waste of time for the audience, and for journalists, and detract from national debates. Instead, I've done what I could and worked to engage national issues of importance. I've just not done so in a very public way. Instead, I've tried to bring different communities together (civil servants, business people, labour activists, and academics, in the case of regional development). Is this a failure on my part? When I looked at it, I ended up deciding that it wasn't. 

OK, someone might say, Nurse, you're not Bliss or Foucault but I can concede that you've done some things. They might not be high profile but they are time consuming and publicly oriented, addressing a range of issues from treaty rights to the character of democracy to economic development. Fair enough. You, our rhetorical "someone" might continue to say, are not usual. In fact, a university administrator said precisely this to me two weeks ago as he was articulating concerns similar to those offered by Gwyn. The fact that you do things, he said, does not let those people who are not doing them "off the hook."

And, that is a fair statement but the question of its accuracy is still not demonstrated. Indeed, the way in which Gwyn -- and this administrator (whose a good guy) -- put this issue assumed that faculty were not participating in the public sphere. Why should we make that assumption? In fact, making that assumption might say more about those who make it than it does about professors. One of my colleagues spoke on the radio once per week over the last year, usually on historical issues (I might note an area where Gwyn thinks profs could make a contribution). He had, as it were, a regular gig with a regional radio station. Another colleague who works in the economics department has written a fair amount in local media on tax issues. He's also been invited -- and accepted -- to conduct work for a provincial royal commission and a federation of municipalities. I can concede -- and I think my colleague would -- that tax policy might not be the most exciting issue, but that is beside the point here. He is engaging the public forum in the ways he can. A former colleagues of mine -- who unfortunately moved on to another institution for reasons that I won't get into here -- has produced a number of acclaimed and internationally screened documentary films on climate change, among other things. Does his work count? A final example, a good friend with whom I work regularly here at Mount A has been extensively involved in public education curricular reform and the use of technology in the classroom.

This is not intended to be a definitive list but it is designed to illustrate my point. None of these people (I've left their names off because I did not want to draw attention to them) showed up on Gwyn's list and all are intensely involved in public issues and trying to make a difference by using their expertise. In short, on the basis of my sample, I'd say Gwyn's argument -- that faculty are not willing or able -- to participate in public policy issues is not correct. They might not be on The National every night but they are doing things on a regular basis. If we were to conduct a more extensive search -- say for professors who have been on CBC radio in the last year -- my bet is that we'd get a very long list. 

The question, then, actually much different from how it was phrased by Gwyn and my friend in administration. The issue is not "why are faculty not involved?" But, why do people assume that faculty are not involved? Why does someone like Gwyn -- an intelligent, respected and generally good journalist -- assume that faculty are holed away in monastic cells? 

I honestly don't have an answer to this question. It is, to be sure, a failure of research. After all, I am not all that difficult to find, nor are my colleagues. If someone wants to know what I do in the way of public engagement, all they need to do is ask. So, why didn't Gwyn ask (I obviously don't mean precisely me here since there is no particular reason he would ask me)? I'd actually like to hear what other people think on this question. Why assume that faculty are behaving a more than a bit like a-social recluses who ignore the "real world" when it does not appear to be true? 

Part of the problem, and likely only part, is that most people don't know what profs do. They make assumptions and those assumptions are there confirmed by the people in their circles. We all do this. I complain about the Jays management all the time to my friends who share my views; hence we end up confirming our own views. But my complaining about the Jays is not a public issue or debate or even in the least important. Making a public statement about the failure of post-secondary education if one has a platform and is a respected public commentator is. Some level of accuracy and some level of research might be expected. It seems to me that this is, partly, the real problem. Those complaining about what profs do -- or, don't do -- are so certain they are right that they don't bother to check their facts. 

Which ... brings me back to research, its importance, and why we should not castigate research too quickly. If we actually do the research ... we might find out that our views need to be modified. We might find that profs are making contributions all the time in different but often little-seen ways as befit their skills and abilities. And, if we did the research, we might find a way to avoid a fruitless debate (that is, one that begins from an error in assumption) and have a more productive one. I think Gwyn wants to have a productive debate. In future blogs ... I'll try to intuit what that is.  

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.