During the debt ceiling battle the Republicans have shown once again how much better they are than Democrats at the rhetorical aspect of politics. When Republicans talk about government debt, they never fail to claim that reckless spending is costing jobs, whereas the Democrats' proposals for "job-killing tax hikes" on "families" and "job creators" will just make matters worse. Democrats weakly counter that cutting spending during a recession will slow down the recovery, but their words lack the force that comes from endlessly repeating phrases like "job-killing tax hikes", "failed economic stimulus", and so on. I recommend that from now on, no Democrat ever mentions spending cuts without attaching the modifier "job-killing".
To bring the matter home: this spring President Obama, caving into pressure from Republicans for spending cuts, slashed funding for community action programs. These federal budget cuts and similar cuts at the state level have forced the South Central Community Action Program, which provides social services in Adams County, to terminate some important programs. Most crucially, Wee Care, my kids' day care center which also serves a lot of low income people in Gettysburg, is closing at the end of the summer. They need something like $100,000 a year to operate, and they're no longer going to get it from the state and federal government. So they close - and with their closing, a dozen or so hard-working, patriotic Americans who have devoted their lives to educating our children, will lose their jobs. Jobs killed by our politicians' obsession with cutting spending and unwillingness to raise taxes even a little bit to preserve essential programs. To quote Charlton Heston: "Damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!"
This episode is really a microcosm of what's happening all over this country. The recession is grinding the life out of low income communities while the well-healed protect themselves from the pain. Over the next few years I suspect that the class divide in this country is going to be more and more obvious, and eventually too toxic to ignore. Let's put this in perspective: Gettysburg College is gearing up for another fund-raising campaign with a goal of raising something over $100 million dollars. I wish us luck. That kind of money will allow us to continue to (start to?) pay competitive salaries for faculty, offer new programs for our students, and overall sustain the quality of our college. But an endowment of just $2 million or so - the kind of generous donation Gettysburg gets every year or so - would save the SCCAP programs permanently and, I'd argue, do much more good at the margin than anything Gettysburg College is going to do with this money. Will anyone step up? Will anyone even think of asking? No, I'm afraid Gettysburg College and society's upper crust in general will continue to get along just fine while the bedrock beneath us crumbles away.
In a previous post I suggested using a strengthened faculty evaluation process as a tool to reward good teaching and punish bad teaching. But how do we know which faculty and departments are doing a lousy job teaching? Well here's an idea, something that I would imagine is being done at other colleges and universities but not, as far as I am aware, here.
Suppose the Provost's office were to collect evaluations from every course every semester in digital form. (This would require all of us to have students do course evaluations on line, or use Scantron sheets for in-class evaluation.) Data on course grades are compiled every semester as well. Staff in the Provost's office - preferably people with an NSA background - sift through the data looking for outliers: courses, faculty members or departments with an unusually high concentration of A's and A+'s; with an unusually high number of students giving overall instructor evaluations of "poor"; with low scores on a "degree of difficulty" question; etc.. A message goes out to the chair of the department concerned: look into this course or instructor to see if there's something wrong and report back to the Provost. Faculty are given an opportunity to address whatever problems are found; if they are not addressed in future semesters, the wrath of God is called down upon them as I suggested earlier.
One concern with this plan would be catching too many faculty in the dragnet. Student evaluations are notoriously unreliable indicators of quality of teaching. I would not want the Provost to be calling chairs every time an instructor got a few below-average course evaluations. So the process would have to be focused on rather extreme outliers. If half the class rates the professor "poor", my guess is there's a real problem that needs to be addressed.
Data-gathering in this way could help deliver a more positive message as well. The Provost's office could post summary statistics on course evaluations so that individual faculty could see how they match up to college averages. How many hours a week do students say they spend on my class relative to the college average? How difficult do they find my class? How good an instructor do they think I am? What are the cross-correlations between "difficulty" and "overall evaluation" scores? Obviously one would need to take this information with a grain of salt, but I for one would find it interesting and potentially useful, and it might help establish norms for what qualifies as effective teaching.
From his essay, "My Early Beliefs," 1938. It's especially poignant in light of Brad DeLong's series "liveblogging" from May 1940.
I can visualise very clearly the scene of my meeting with D. H. Lawrence in 1914…My memory is that he was morose from the outset and said very little, apart from indefinite expressions of irritable dissent, all the morning… We sat round the fireplace with the sofa drawn across. Lawrence sat on the right-hand side in rather a crouching position with his head down. Bertie stood up by the fireplace, as I think I did, too, from time to time. I came away feeling that the party had been a failure and that we had failed to establish contact, but with no other particular impression. You know the sort of situation when two familiar friends talk at a visitor. I had never seen him before, and I never saw him again. Many years later he recorded in a letter, which is printed in his published correspondence, that I was the only member of Bloomsbury who had supported him by subscribing for Lady Chatterley…
Bertie gave him what must have been, I think, his first glimpse of Cambridge. It overwhelmed, attracted and repulsed him – which was the other emotional disturbance. It was obviously a civilisation, and not less obviously uncomfortable and unattainable for him – very repulsive and very attractive. Now Bunny had come into his life quite independently, neither through Ottoline nor from Cambridge and Bloomsbury; he was evidently very fond of Bunny; and when he saw him being seduced by Cambridge, he was yet more jealous, just as he was jealous of Ottoline's new leanings that way. And jealousy apart, it is impossible to imagine moods more antagonistic than those of Lawrence and of pre-war Cambridge.
But when all that has been said, was there something true and right in what Lawrence felt? There generally was. His reactions were incomplete and unfair, but they were not usually baseless… So Bunny's memoir has thrown my mind back to reflections about our mental history in the dozen years before the war; and if it will not shock the club too much, I should like in this contribution to its proceedings to introduce for once, mental or spiritual, instead of sexual, adventures, to try and recall the principal impacts on one's virgin mind and to wonder how it has all turned out, and whether one still holds by that youthful religion.
I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore's Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year. I have never heard of the present generation having read it. But, of course, its effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still dominate, everything else. We were at an age when our beliefs influenced our behaviour, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for the mIddle-aged to forget, and the habits of feeling formed then still persist in a recognisable degree…
It was only for us, those who were active in 1903, that Moore completely ousted McTaggart, Dickinson, Russell. The influence was not only overwhelming; but it was the extreme opposite of what Strachey used to call funeste; it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything…
Now what we got from Moore was by no means entirely what he offered us. He had one foot on the threshold of the new heaven, but the other foot in Sidgwick and the Benthamite calculus and the general rules of correct behaviour. There was one chapter in the Principia of which we took not the slightest notice. We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary – meaning by 'religion' one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by 'morals' one's attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate. To the consequences of having a religion and no morals I return later…
Even if the new members of the Club know what the religion was (do they?), it will not do any of us any harm to try and recall the crude outlines. Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after’. Their value dependend, in accordance with the principle of organic unity, on the state of affairs as a whole which could not be usefully analysed into parts… The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.
How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalysable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue… In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method – greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity – Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. Strachey's methods were different: grim silence as if such a dreadful observation was beyond comment and the less said about it the better, but almost as effective for disposing of what he called death-packets. Woolf was fairly good at indicating a negative, but he was better at producing the effect that was useless to argue with him than at crushing you. Dickinson knew how to shrug his shoulders and retreat unconvinced, but it was retreat all the same. As for Sheppard and me we could only turn like worms, but worms who could eventually be goaded into voluble claims that worms have at least the right to turn…
I have called this faith a religion, and some sort of relation of neo-platonism it surely was. But we should have been very angry at the time with such a suggestion. We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character. Like any other branch of science, it was nothing more than the application of logic and rational analysis to the material presented as sense-data. Our apprehension of good was exactly the same as our apprehension of green, and we purported to handle it with the same logical and analytIcal technique which was appropriate to the latter. Indeed we combined a dogmatic treatment as to the nature of experience with a method of handling it which was extravagantly scholastic…
Thus we were brought up – with Plato's absorption in the good in itself, with a scholasticism which outdid St. Thomas, in calvinistic withdrawal from the pleasures and successes of Vanity Fair, and oppressed with all the sorrows of Werther. It did not prevent us from laughing most of the tIme and we enjoyed supreme self-confidence, superiority and contempt towards all the rest of the unconverted world. But it was hardly a state of mind which a grown-up person in his senses could sustain literally. When MacCarthy came down for a week-end, he would smile affectionately, persuade moore to sing his German Lieder at the piano, to hear which we all agreed was a very good state of mind indeed, or incite Bob Trevy to deliver a broken oration which was a frantic travesty of the whole method, the charm of it lying in the impossibility of deciding whether Bob himself meant it, half at least, seriously or not.
It seems to me looking back, that this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under. It remains nearer the truth than any other that I know… It was a purer, sweeter air by far than Freud cum Marx. It is still my religion under the surface. I read again last week Moore's famous chapter on 'The Ideal'. Itis remarkable how wholly oblivious he managed to be of the qualities of the life of action and also of the pattern of life as a whole. He was existing in a timeless ecstasy. His way of translating his own particular emotions of the moment into the language of generalised abstraction is a charming and beautiful comedy… The New Testament is a handbook for politicians compared with the unworldliness of Moore’s chapter on ‘The Ideal’…
I am still a long way off from D. H. Lawrence and what he might have been justified in meaning when he said that we were 'done for'. And even now I am not quite ready to approach that theme. First of all I must explain the other facet of our faith. So far it has been a question of our attitude to ourselves and one another. What was our understanding of the outside world and our relation to it?
It was an important object of Moore's book to distinguish between goodness as an attribute of states of mind and rightness as an attribute of actions… We were living in the specious present, nor had begun to play the game of consequences. We existed in the world of Plato's Dialogues; we had not reached the Republic, let alone the Laws.
This brought us one big advantage. As we had thrown hedonism out of the window and, discarding Moore's so highly problematical calculus, lived entirely in present experience, since social action as an end in itself and not merely as a lugubrious duty had dropped out of our Ideal, and not only social action but the life of action generally, power, politics, success, wealth, ambition, with the economic motive and the economic criterion }ess prominent in our philosophy than With St Francis of Assisi, who at least made collections for the birds, it follows that we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition. In practice, of course, at least so far as I was concerned, the outside world was not forgotten or forsworn. But I am recalling what our Ideal was in those early days when the life of passionate contemplation and communion was supposed to oust all other purposes whatever. It can be no part of this memoir for me to try to explain why it was such a big advantage for us to have escaped from the Benthamite tradition. But I do now regard that as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamlte calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal.
Moreover, it was this escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism of our philosophy, which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism. We have completely failed, indeed, to provide a substitute for these economic bogus-faiths capable of protecting or satisfying our successors. But we ourselves have remained – am I not right in saying all of us? – altogether immune from the virus, as safe in the citadel of our ultimate faith as the Pope of Rome in his.
This is what we gained. But we set on one side, not only that part of Moore's fifth chapter on 'Ethics in relation to Conduct' which dealt with the obligation so to act as to produce by causal connection the most probable maximum of eventual good through the whole procession of future ages (a discussion which was indeed riddled with fallacies), but also the part which discussed the duty of the individual to obey general rules. We entirely repudiated a personal liabiljty on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wIsdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditionaI wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case…
I am not now concerned, however, with the fact that this aspect of our code was shocking. It would have been not less so, even if we had been perfectly right. What matters a great deal more is the fact that it was flimsily based, as I now think, on an a priori view of what human nature is like, both other people's and our own, which was disastrously mistaken.
I have said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthamism. But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders. We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who belIeve in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. The view that human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it. It underlay the ethics of self-interest – rational self-interest as it was called – just as much as the universal ethics of Kant or Bentham which aimed at the general good; and it was because self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.
In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personaly and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed and as Ludwig with justice also used to say – for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order… As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own…
It seems to me that Moore’s chapter on ‘The Ideal’ left out altogether some whole categories of valuable emotion. The attribution of rationality to human nature, instead of enriching it, now seems to me to have impoverished it. It ignored certain powerful and valuable springs of feeling. Some of the spontaneous, irrational outbursts of human nature can have a sort of value from which our schematism was cut off. Even some of the feelings associated with wickedness can have value. And in addition to the values arising out of spontaneous, volcanic and even wicked impulses, there are many objects of valuable contemplation and communion beyond those we knew of – those concerned with the order and pattern of life amongst communities and the emotions which they can inspire…
And as the years wore on towards 1914the thinness and superficiality, as we as the falsity, of our view of man's heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious; and there was, too, some falling away from the purity of the original doctrine… I fancy we used in old days to get round the rich variety of experience by expanding illegitimately the field of aesthetic appreciation… classifying as aesthetic experience what is really human experience and somehow sterilising it by this mis-classification.
If, therefore, I altogether ignore our merits – our charm, our intelligence, our unworldliness, our affection I can see us as water-spiders gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath. And if Iimagine us as coming under the observation of Lawrence's ignorant, jealous, irritable, hostile eyes, what a combination of qualities we offered to arouse his passionate distaste; this thin rationalism skipping on the crust of the lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to libertinism and comprehensive irreverence, too clever by half for such an earthy character as Bunny, seducing with its intellectual chic such a portent as Ottoline, a regular skin-poison. All this was very unfair to poor, silly, well-meaning us. But that is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said in 1914 that we were 'done for'.
I got an email linking to a Youtube clip of David Horowitz speaking to students at UC-San Diego, in which a Muslim woman apparently reveals that she is a genocidal anti-semite. The email touched off a discussion of what is wrong with higher education that we let such views go unchallenged while enforcing a strict code of political correctness in other realms of political discourse. I thought my response was (uncharacteristically) cogent, so I've decided to blog it. This may also serve as a fitting send-off to our graduating seniors. Since I'll never be asked to give a commencement address, this will have to do.
My experience in higher education is apparently different from yours; certainly I never saw anything like what happened in that video (though it's not clear that the student's "yes" meant what everyone thinks it meant; I'd need to see more tape to be sure). I went to Georgetown, a fairly conservative Jesuit institution, from ‘81-85. There the main political controversies were poverty vs. Reaganomics, Central America, and apartheid. The radicals on campus were working at homeless shelters and with groups like Sojourners, protesting US support for the Contras, blockading the South African embassy, and also trying to get student health services to provide birth control (I wonder if the University ever relented on that one). I then went to U. Wisconsin from 1987-93 (not the hotbed of radicalism that say UC-Berkeley is, but close). "Political correctness" was starting to be a buzzword then. When a fraternity had a party where everyone came in black face, they were put down pretty hard. But most of the radicalism I saw was inward-directed. Feminists marched bare-breasted to "take back the night" and banned "scents" at clubs and concerts in solidarity with people with "environmental sensitivities". There was a lot of activism around AIDS awareness. Tommy Thompson as a new governor vowed to crack down on pot, and thousands of people gathered around the state capitol for a smoke-in (but they were too chicken to smoke the real stuff because he promised to arrest people who did). Young parents would push strollers through the streets during the Willie St. festival commemorating student riots in 1968, munching on hash brownies while the police looked the other way. One of the biggest controversies was Indian hunting and fishing rights in northern Wisconsin - a federal court ruled that the Ojibwe Indians had the right to fish for walleye during spawning season because of treaties dating from the 1830s. Non-Indian fishmermen and people who made their living on tourism were upset about this because they thought this would deplete the population of the prized walleye on Wisconsin lakes. The racists came out of the woodwork, gathering at boat landings all over northern Wisconsin to harrass the Indians while they gathered spawning walleye. Hence leftists at UW gathered there as well as silent witnesses, standing between the Indians and protesters to ensure they could exercise their rights in peace. The Gulf War was also big, but protesters always made sure to distinguish between their opposition to the war and their support for soldiers as people. Then I went to the College of William and Mary, then Gettysburg College, two very placid, socially conservative institutions with very little going on by way of political controversy (though after I left W&M seems to have loosened up a bit: students recently put on a sex workers art show). Which is all to say that in my almost 30 years at institutions of higher education, I have never (that I can recall anyway) seen anything like a Muslim student advocating genocide, much less any comment like that being condoned. I have, however, seen a lot of racism and anti-gay bigotry from students, and Georgetown allowed Roberto D'Aubuisson (founder of El Salvador's death squads) to speak at an event sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom.
It's important to note that political controversy is and ought to be a central part of the college experience. The idea of a liberal arts education (whether you get it at a "liberal arts college" or a big university) is for students to look at questions from a lot of different angles. Question the frame of reference that you come with (as a Christian, Muslim, Jew, son of dock worker, daughter of financial analyst, whatever), ask how the way you look at the world is formed by that frame of reference, try out different frames for size. Get exposed to a lot of different ideas, some of which you might find offensive. Hopefully get so engaged that you become an advocate for one or more causes. Be free to make stupid mistakes and get slapped down for them in the court of public opinion. Years later, be able to look back at that experience and say wow, did I really believe that crap? but be happy you did because now you have a better understanding of how different people look at the world in different ways.
Most faculty stand on the sidelines and watch this happen rather than participate in it. We toss some kindling on the fire and see what students make of it (such as our Management department which has students read the Communist Manifesto in between accounting courses). Some faculty get right in there and advocate for their beliefs. People like David Horowitz criticize this as "indoctrination," and sometimes I'm sure it goes too far (at Boston College Mary Daly used to forbid men from enrolling in her advanced classes in feminist theory), but by and large I think it enhances students' education to listen to and engage in debate with an informed, impassioned advocate of one cause or another. My best experiences as an undergraduate were in this kind of situation: arguing with my Marxist macroeconomics teacher over the lessons learned from Chinese development under Mao, watching my Russian history teacher, a Polish exile, come near to tears explaining to us what it was like living in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (it's like walking in the wind, he said, you can spend your life going with the wind or fighting against it, but you can't avoid having your life defined by it), arguing with my conservative constitutional law professor who obsessed about the ludicrous ways that the commerce clause had been stretched to facilitate government activism. I don't hear a lot of students complaining about indoctrination at Gettysburg, but when I do I tell them that the appropriate response is to challenge their professor right there in the classroom - stand up for your beliefs while admitting to yourself the possibility that you're wrong and the professor is right.
There's a lot of silliness in higher education. In many cases, silliness is exactly the point. Sometimes offensive opinions are aired, and sometimes, unfortunately, they are tolerated. But it's part of a process of intellectual discovery that is ultimately for the good. For all the controversy it engenders, little harm is done by a 20 year old college student saying something stupid in public. At least we're not dumping millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico or robbing widows and orphans on our way to a quick score in the financial markets.
Brad DeLong has gathered some fascinating documents re Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's proclamation that April is Confederate history month. Originally McDonnell neglected to mention that slavery was one feature of the Confederate experience, arguing that he thought it appropriate to mention only the aspects of the Confederacy that "were most significant for Viriginia" (apparently he did not consult any of the 1.5 million black Virginians as to what they thought the significant aspects of the Confederacy were). As to the idea that the Confederacy was not really much about slavery, here's the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens:
The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us.... This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.... The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.
A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don't really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.
That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.
This is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession,even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.
And Gail Collins from the New York Times can always be counted on for the mots justes:
April is the cruelest month. Or, if you live in Virginia, Confederate History Month... People, what’s our bottom line here. The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?
Meanwhile here at Gettysburg we're celebrating National Thursday is a Monday Day. Happy TIM Day everyone - gotta go teach my Monday classes.
I would have, of course, but for my natural shyness. I understand that we may be forced to extend the semester by a week and add an hour of instruction for each course. So let's do the math: we teach 2 14-week semesters per year, 2.5 hours per week per class, 5 classes. That's 350 hours of instruction per year. If we go to 15 week semesters, 3.5 hours per class, that's 525 hours per year, a 50 percent increase. I assume the powers that be, in figuring out how we're going to make this transition, have factored in the extra compensation that faculty are going to want in exchange for the heavier workload. Here's a proposal: as we transition to the heavier workload, let's transition to a 2-2 teaching load. That reduces hours of instruction to 420, leaving a 20 percent increase in hours; you can compensate me for that in cash, thank you very much. Or, I suppose I could just do a 20% (or 50%) crappier job in each class.
I just got this email about a state program to subsidize employment from the College's Office of Financial Aid: ----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XXX
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 11:53 AM
To: WSCOOR@gettysburg.edu
Subject: PHEAA State Work-Study Program for the Summer
PLEASE SHARE WITH ALL SUPERVISORS IN YOUR AREA
As you make plans for student employment this summer, please keep in mind that the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) helps to subsidize wages for qualified employers in order to encourage them to hire college students.
Gettysburg College (and any office or department within the College) is an approved job location, and as such PHEAA will reimburse 40% of each eligible student's summer wages. Each department must have the funds to pay student wages during the summer. The 40% PHEAA share comes after the summer as a reimbursement.
The limitations are that the "eligible" students must be Pennsylvania residents who are receiving PA State Grants. Gettysburg College enrollment is not necessary as long as the students meet the requirements.
NOTE: Federal regulations prohibit the collection of information that is not required to determine an applicant's ability to perform the duties of a position. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to ask if a student is from PA or is eligible for a PA State Grant.
Eligible students should have received a bulletin from PHEAA which included the application form. Forms are also available from the Office of Financial Aid. Contact Sally Miller at samiller@gettysburg.edu or call x6614 if you need a form. SWSP Student Application/Placement Forms are due in the Office of Financial Aid by Friday, May 14. If you are unsure about a student's eligibility, contact the Office of Financial Aid at extension 6611 or via email reply.
Summer positions within your department/office should be designed with the expectation that your departmental budget will fund these positions. If your chosen candidate qualifies for the PHEAA Summer Program, reimbursement would be a wonderful benefit.
Um, if the purpose of the program is to get me to hire more students this summer, wouldn't it help if I knew whether employing additional students would in fact earn me the subsidy?
Highlight of the semester: a student begs me to grade his second midterm right away because today is the last day to drop the course. I say sure, and come back a few hours later with the result: 36 (out of 100; that would be an F). The student responds, ok, I think I'll stay in the course.
The University of Hawaii at Hilo has told a philosophy lecturer who swore in the classroom that his services won’t be needed next semester, according to an article in The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. The lecturer, Daniel Petersen, said he had told students that “stuff happens”—though he used a more emphatic word than “stuff”—to illustrate concepts like free will and determinism. Parents complained, and Mr. Petersen was suspended without pay. Then he was informed that he wouldn’t be returning to teach next semester. Mr. Petersen told the newspaper that he planned to sue the university.
Well, mine is Economic Thought and his was Political Thought, but there's a lot of overlap. Mark Thoma posts some class notes from a lecture Rawls gave on Marx's theory of economic justice (or lack thereof) at Harvard in 1973.
Summing up. (1) Marx views the notion of justice as a virtue of legal forms and institutions, and thus perhaps it is a notion which belongs to prehistory. The state depends upon the mode of production. (2) Marx doesn't deny that the various conceptions of justice have formal features in common -- exchange of equivalents for equivalents -- but the notion of what is equivalent is determined in different ways. Marx would be prepared to admit that capitalism in its high period is just. One reason he rejects the utopian's argument is that it is misleading. It rests on a misapprehension of where the essential problem lies: not in the superstructure, but in the mode of production. He felt that the key enterprise is to give a scientific theory of the mode of production.
Worth reading in its entirety, especially if you're taking my History of Thought class.
I presented the alternative curriculum proposal to the Student Senate tonight. Interesting reactions. One student wanted to know the name of this shadowy cabal that is causing so much trouble. People are calling it the Char Weise Group, which would be great if I played sax but otherwise not so much. Twenty Tenured Professors doesn't have much of a ring to it (again, that would make a great name for a swing band). Since the final details were hammered out over Guinesses at Garyowen's, I'm going to propose "The Coalition of the Swilling."
The Washington Post reports that the Virginia state attorney general has ordered public colleges and universities in Virginia to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation:
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has asked the state's public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school Thursday that their boards of visitors have no legal authority to adopt such statements.
In the letter, Cuccinelli (R) wrote that only the General Assembly can extend legal protections to gay state employees -- a move the legislature has repeatedly declined to take, including as recently as this week.
"It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' 'gender expression,' or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly," he wrote.
Colleges that have included such language in their policies -- which include all of Virginia's leading schools -- have done so "without proper authority" and should "take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia," Cuccinelli wrote.
I suggest that Gettysburg College start recruiting good faculty and students at public colleges and universities in Virginia who don't wish to be treated like second class citizens.
I'm not disingenuous or anti-liberal arts. I don't poison my students' brains about the curriculum. I may be a tad old fashioned. I'm very much anti-bullshit. And apparently that puts me in the minority.
I found your name on the college website and you seemed to be the right person to contact. Your students posted a video about The Daily Show on youtube, and we wanted to let you all know how much we loved it. Jon (yes that Jon) and I just watched it and were extremely impressed. Both the comedic content and the level of professionalism used to create the piece were extraordinary. We genuinely laughed all the way through it. Clearly Gettysburg has great programs and a very talented student body.
Please pass on this email as well as our sincerest thanks to all the students for their effort in making the video, and tell them to keep up the good work. We'll do our best not to refer to your school as a "shithole" in the future, but I can't make any promises.
All the best, Rory
Rory Albanese Executive Producer The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 604 W. 52nd St. NY NY 10019 (212) 468-1750
The least they could do is show the video in tonight's show!
Our curriculum discussions have focused on what some of us want to take away from the current curriculum. I thought it would be a good idea to work from the other direction: if the "alternative motions" are adopted, what kind of curriculum would we have?
Turn to page 29 of your Course Catalogue 2009-10. There you will find a description of the Gettysburg College curriculum (warning: Stanley Fish would not approve!). When I and my ilk have pushed our changes through, the description will look like this (italicized passages are changed from the Catalogue version):
The Gettysburg Curriculum
The overarching goal of the Gettysburg College Curriculum is the development of lifelong learners who
• Have a broad base of knowledge in a number of different disciplines
• Are integrative thinkers
• Are skilled in communication
• Are prepared for the responsibilities of local and global citizenship
Students demonstrate their progress toward achieving these goals through their performance in a range of courses or comparable faculty-sponsored experiences, their completion of a major field of study, and their ability to demonstrate connections across the curriculum.
Multiple Inquiries GoalFamiliarity with a broad range of subject matter and an understanding of the assumptions and methods of different disciplines. The divisional requirements are designed to begin this process of development. Students must take
• One course in the division of the arts
• One course in the division of the humanities
• One course in the division of the social sciences
• Two courses in the division of natural sciences, at least one of which must have a laboratory component (B.Mus. and B.S.M.E. degree students complete one science course with lab)
Through these courses, students encounter the perspectives and modes of inquiry and analysis that characterize academic disciplines, an encounter that continues in greater depth in the major field of study.
Integrative Thinking Goal The development of a critical and open mind that seeks to adopt well-argued points of view through the active consideration and integration of alternative methodologies, perspectives, and foundational presuppositions. This process of development receives special emphasis in the curriculum in three different ways.
• Students have the opportunity to take a wide range of courses in and outside of their majors that emphasize interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches to a common theme. Students may also choose from a number of interdisciplinary majors and minors. Through these experiences, students gain an understanding of the connections and tensions among approaches to common issues, texts, and phenomena.
• The Quantitative, Inductive, and Deductive Reasoning Requirement in which students take a course focusing on formal reasoning or mathematical problem-solving and the interpretation of quantitative or qualitative information.
• The Capstone Requirement, a course or faculty-sponsored experience in which students bring together what they have learned in their major curriculum and demonstrate mastery over the chosen area of concentration.
Effective Communication Goal The development of proficiency in writing, reading, and the use of electronic media. Central to these skills is the ability to articulate questions clearly, identify and gain access to appropriate kinds of information, construct cogent arguments, and engage in intellectual and artistic expression. Emphasis on this goal begins in the first year of study and continues in the major.
• First-Year Writing Requirement, a course that introduces students to the essentials of collegelevel writing. The course may be Introduction to College Writing (ENG 101), a specially designated First-Year Seminar, or an introductory course in a particular discipline.
• Major Field Communication Requirement, a course or series of courses or experiences through which students demonstrate they have learned the communication conventions of their chosen field of study. The means through which students will learn these conventions and demonstrate their mastery are determined by the individual departments.
Writing Policy: Since the ability to express oneself clearly, correctly, and responsibly is essential for an educated person, the College cannot graduate a student whose writing abilities are deficient. Instructors may reduce grades on poorly written papers, regardless of the course, and, in extreme cases, may assign a failing grade for this reason.
Local and Global Citizenship Goal The development of the skills, understandings, appreciations, and moral dispositions enabling students to be committed members of and meaningful contributors to their local, national, and global communities. Two requirements have been developed to assist students in achieving this curricular goal.
• Second Language Requirement, satisfied by successful study through the intermediate level (equivalent of 202).* (B.Mus. degree vocal performance students complete four courses in language, gaining a proficiency in German and in French or Italian at the first-year level or higher depending upon placement.)
• Cultural Diversity Requirement, two courses designed to help students achieve a fuller appreciation of human diversity through exposure to alternative historical and cultural traditions and modes of analysis. Students must take one non-Western course that has a principal focus on peoples whose practices and beliefs have been shaped in significant ways by a historical tradition separate from that of Western Europe. Students must also take one Domestic or Conceptual Diversity course that has a principal focus on dimensions of diversity within the United States or on the study of the varied dimensions of diversity in a conceptual or comparative context (whether in the United States or elsewhere). A course listed as both non-Western and Domestic/Conceptual may be used to fulfill the requirement in only one area. In all cases, two cultural diversity courses must be taken.
Now suppose a group of earnest faculty members proposed changes to this curriculum:
1. Under "The Gettysburg Curriculum," change "Have a broad base of knowledge in a number of different disciplines" to "Are able to acquire and process information and ideas in multiple ways."
2. Under "Multiple Inquiries Goal," change "Familiarity with a broad range of subject matter and an understanding of the assumptions and methods of different disciplines"to "The development of an understanding of multiple frameworks of analysis and of proficiency in reading texts that span the breadth of human expression."
3. Under "Integrative Thinking Goal," change "Students have the opportunity to take a wide range of courses in and outside of their majors that emphasize interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches to a common theme. Students may also choose from a number of interdisciplinary majors and minors" to "The Interdisciplinary/Course Cluster Requirement, normally completed by the end of the sophomore year, in which students take two designated interdisciplinary courses or a two course cluster that emphasizes interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches to a common theme. Through these experiences, students gain an understanding of the connections and tensions among approaches to common issues, texts, and phenomena." **
4. Under "Local and Global Citizenship," add another requirement:
• "Science, Technology, and Society Requirement, one course with a focus on the methodological analysis, historical context, or discussion of the social ramifications of some aspect of natural science or technology." ***
* We've since changed this requirement to two semesters of a second language.
** The APPC proposes eliminating the interdisciplinary course option, requiring students only to complete a cluster.
*** The APPC proposes allowing students to substitute STS courses for cultural diversity courses or vice versa.
Question: would the four proposed changes strengthen or weaken the curriculum?
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