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Category: academia

Published on Leave a comment on Let Me Not Rephrase That

From the preface to the second (1996) edition of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, with my highlighting:

Authors naturally hope that their books will have lasting rather than ephemeral impact. But any advocate, in addition to putting the timeless part of his case, must also respond to contemporary advocates of opposing, or apparently opposing, points of view. There is a risk that some of these arguments, however hotly they may rage today, will seem terribly dated in decades to come. The paradox has often been noted that the first edition of The Origin of Species makes a better case than the sixth. This is because Darwin felt obliged, in his later editions, to respond to contemporary criticisms of his first edition, criticisms which now seem so dated that the replies to them merely get in the way, and in places even mislead. Nevertheless, the temptation to ignore fashionable contemporary criticisms that one suspects of being nine days' wonders is a temptation that should not be indulged, for reasons of courtesy not just to the critics but to their otherwise confused readers. Though I have my own private ideas on which chapters of my book will eventually prove ephemeral for this reason, the reader--and time--must judge.

Sometimes, your first argument is your best argument, and rephrasing it in response to a confused question, comment, or critique only weakens it.

Published on Leave a comment on The Wisconsin Naming Partnership

This is a brilliant idea:

Alumni Give $85 Million to Name Wisconsin School of Business
The Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received an unprecedented gift totaling $85 million from a small group of alumni who have formed the “Wisconsin Naming Partnership” to support the school’s mission.

This innovative partnership provides a naming gift that will preserve the Wisconsin name for at least 20 years. During that time, the school will not be named for a single donor or entity. This unprecedented naming partnership will uphold tradition and greatly enhance the value of the school to students, the campus and the state.

The Wisconsin naming gift is the first of its kind received by a U.S. business school. Conventional business school naming gifts adopt the name of a single donor in perpetuity. By preserving the Wisconsin name for 20 years, this gift leaves open the option of future naming gifts.

UW-Madison Chancellor John D. Wiley calls the gift “a creative act of philanthropy and a major milestone for our university.”

Why would a school want to keep open the opportunity to name itself? The answer seems to be that the price tags for naming business schools are going up faster than just about anything, including the returns to university-managed endowments. Perhaps this is because naming schools is the province of the ultra-rich, who get where they are because they can build wealth faster than conventionally managed funds. So if the school sells the name today and invests the money, it gives up the opportunity to sell the name for a higher current value later on. Wisconsin's solution is to rent the name for 20 years. It allows the school to use a large gift today, without foreclosing the possibility of a much larger naming gift in the future. To really determine how much value it adds, we would have to make assumptions about what the giving behavior of the members of the partnership would have been over that period in the absence of this gift (with or without a conventional naming gift).

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on it here, including a list of other large gifts to business schools in past years.

Published on Leave a comment on Conservatives in Academia

Some recent remarks by Larry Summers (reported here) about the dearth of ideological diversity on university campuses have prompted a number of posts at my usual blog reads, George Borjas and Greg Mankiw among them.

Here's what was reported about Summers:

Noting that he had served in the Clinton administration, Summers said he identified strongly as a liberal and a Democrat, but that while in Washington he viewed himself as being on “the right half of the left,” in Cambridge, he landed “on the right half of the right.”

In advance of the symposium, Summers ran some numbers from the study. He focused on elite graduate universities and on what he defined as core disciplines for undergraduate education (excluding health professions, for example). When conducting such an analysis, Summers said, he found “even less ideological diversity” than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are “the third group,” after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties.

Considering his own treatment by the ideological Left at Harvard, "even less ideological diversity" than he was expecting must be pretty low.

In a post written 30 months ago, which began, "I should have my head examined for getting into this discussion," I wrote, in response to an op-ed by Paul Krugman:

I agree with the general terms that Krugman uses to frame his explanation:

The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

But I do not buy into the remainder of his argument, which can be loosely paraphrased as not enough conservatives believe in the virtue of scholarship to get enough of them to be interested in the academy. Rather, I think the explanation for why liberals outnumber conservatives is that they actively like the way the academy is organized.

I then went on to liken an elite university to a "kibbutz hooked up to an ATM." I commend the whole post to your attention, so that you can see my explanation for the simile.

Taking all of that as background, I would add now that, at present, we are in a low point for conservatives or Republicans self-identifying as such among academics. The reason, I believe, is that my paraphrase of Krugman's argument regarding the virtue of scholarship--while it is not true for most of the conservative- or Republican-leaning people whom I know--seems to be a pretty good characterization of the top Republican in the White House. (And this is coming from someone who spent a year working at the CEA for this Administration and, despite the ample misgivings I have aired on this blog, would do so again.)

Here's a small prediction. When there is a new person in the White House, particularly if it is a Democrat who now has to take on the responsibilities and potential failures of governing rather than merely criticizing the job that others are doing, we will see a bit less self-identification as Democrats or liberals and a bit more as Republicans or conservatives. It won't be anything close to parity in the academy, by virtue of the organization of the academy that I discussed in the earlier post, but it won't be quite so shocking to observers and analysts.

Published on Leave a comment on Harvard Yard, September 1986

In the comments to that last post, and over at OTB, there has been wondering about the kernel of truth in the "Dim White Kids" op-ed I referenced in the last post.

Let's go back in time 21 years (man, am I old) to my arrival as a freshman at Harvard. I get to world famous Harvard Yard. I say good-bye to my parents. I start to meet my classmates, many of whom become lifelong friends. As I attend my first semester or so of classes, I come to the realization that I've long misunderstood what Harvard was supposed to be about. There were many people in these classes I was taking who did not seem to have the intellectual firepower to be at the nation's most selective institution. There were several high school classmates of mine who seemed to be more qualified to be there but who weren't. I had no particular desire to stay at Harvard for the intellectual experience. I finished up in three years and went off to get my Ph.D. at MIT. That group of economics students remains the smartest bunch of people I have ever had the pleasure of associating with.

So who were these kids who failed to impress me? The kernel of truth in the Boston Globe piece is that they were not disproportionately members of any identifiable group that might be given special preference in the admissions process, by race or geographic location. The part of the op-ed that is not entirely accurate is that you cannot explain the phenomenon by simply appealing to wealth and connections. (And it may not be particularly relevant at all.) There were plenty of these students whose parents did not attend Harvard. There were plenty of them who came from families like mine--not rich enough to be active in philanthropy, but not on financial aid. Plenty of them show no particular athletic or artistic ability. In the intervening two decades, I have not gained any better insights into this mystery.

Published on Leave a comment on Kids Today

I am finally back in the classroom, and as every year passes, I get another year older than the crop of mostly seniors and juniors who show up in my finance class. Next year, if not already, I will likely be twice as old as some of them. And after that ... a genuine generation gap.

The Boston Globe has two recent articles about college students. There are kernels of truth in each of them, though neither is entirely accurate. Here they are:

The New Me Generation

The crop of talented recent graduates coming into today's workforce is widely
seen as narcissistic and entitled. And those are their best qualities.

At the elite colleges - dim white kids

What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Enjoy!(?)

Published on Leave a comment on Commencement 2007

The mildly inclement weather abated yesterday over Hanover to allow for a fine graduation ceremony. The featured commencement speaker was Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson '68, who shared some fond memories and good advice. You can find the transcript and audio here, along with the speeches by President Wright and Valedictorian Nikolas Primack. Blessedly, there was no trace of this lunacy to detract from the event.

This part of President Wright's speech was particularly inspiring:

You have learned that the world can sometimes be a scary place. You have seen individuals guided by the dark voices within them or led by demagogues of hate from without. You grew up with scenes of Columbine, were stunned by 9/11, and now you reflect on images of Virginia Tech.

But as Dartmouth graduates, you know neither to accept pessimism or fatalism nor to hunker down in fear. There are in this world vastly more people who care than there are those who hate. Love and respect and caring can stand up to evil and hatred. They can do so if those who embrace those values will stand.

One of the problems of our time may be the growth of a culture of fear, where our children grow up afraid of strangers and wary of the strange. Walls and gates of security come with some costs. Liberty, freedom of thought, of speech, of belief, and of association; a culture that welcomes the different and a society that assumes responsibility for the less fortunate; openness, generosity, curiosity—these explain American society at its best. They are not abstract sentiments to be traded for a false sense of security.

Congratulations and so long, Class of 2007.

Published on Leave a comment on Who Cares If Harvard Doesn’t Love You?

This weekend, my local paper reprinted a very thoughtful column from April 9, "Why doesn't Harvard love me?" by Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times. While I commend the whole thing, I wanted to focus on two parts and then add my own views. The first is the very low acceptance rates among the most selective colleges:

IN THE LAST few weeks, the anxiety of high school seniors awaiting news of their college fates seems to have spilled over into the general population. It's easy to see why. UCLA received more than 50,000 applications, more than any other university in the country, and accepted just 11,837 of them. Harvard turned down 91% of about 23,000 hopefuls, 1,100 of whom had perfect SAT math scores. Acceptance rates for Stanford, Yale and Columbia were 10.3%, 9.6%, and 8.9%, respectively. That means thousands of valedictorians and people with grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher were passed over in favor of whatever form of superhuman DNA now constitutes a worthy Ivy Leaguer.

The statistic we should care about is not the probability of a student getting into a particular college but of a student getting into at least one college of a particular caliber. Many of the applicants to any one of these schools also applies to several of the others. The probability of getting into at least one is higher than getting into a particular one. But this is a statistic that is calculated person-by-person, not school-by-school, so it is not readily available or calculated at all.

Second, Meghan reports a widely overlooked phenomenon; namely, that most schools don't have the luxury of being very selective at all:

Believe it or not, the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling's most recent Annual State of College Admission Report shows that the median acceptance rate for four-year colleges, private and public, is about 70%. Do less flashy schools provide a faulty education? Do they lack high-quality professors? Judging from the brilliant academics I know who would be grateful to get a job anywhere, I doubt it.

A median of 70 percent is very high. A look at any US News ranking will show that acceptance rates rise fairly quickly with rank. Here's a graph based on the 2004 acceptance rates of national universities, from the August 2005 rankings:

I've taken a 5-school moving average by rank here to make the graph more readable. By rank 11, we're at an acceptance rate of about 20%. By rank 21, we're above 30%. In the low- to mid-30s, we cross 40% and then 50%. There are plenty of well regarded schools in those ranks.

Daum's larger point--with which I agree completely--is that it is a huge mistake to elevate these rankings in importance. It is true that on average, going to a school with a better ranking opens up more opportunities later in life. But I doubt that the difference between schools accounts for much of the variation in lifetime opportunity.

More importantly, I would hate to think that our colleges and secondary schools are conditioning students, particularly our best and brightest, to rely so heavily on factors like "which school you went to" in their thinking about their futures and how to succeed.

Published on Leave a comment on School Choice in Utah

Apparently, Richard Kahlenberg of The Century Foundation would like to redirect this award to the state of Utah, for its new school voucher program. He writes:

In debate over the voucher scheme, proponents made much out of the legislation’s provision that public schools losing enrollment would retain a portion of state funding for the first five years after a student departed. A similar “hold harmless” provision helped ease the passage of a private school voucher initiative for low income students in the District of Columbia. But harm to public school budgets is not the leading reason that plans like Utah’s are unwise. The cause for concern goes far deeper.

The late Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, articulated something more important. “Our public schools have played a major part in the building of a nation,” he argued. “They brought together countless children from different cultures—to share a common experience, to develop understanding and to tolerate differences....Only public schools are designed to educate every child; only public schools serve to bring many diverse groups together.”

He is right to focus on something other than money--we care primarily about the quality of the product, not how its purchase is financed. And I agree with Shanker's quote up until the interpretation of the last statement that "only public schools serve ..." The relevance of this last statement presumes that this historical role is still being served--that's open to debate. It also presumes that this would still be true even if private schools were placed on a more equal financial footing with public schools--that's also open to debate. But more importantly, we shouldn't get our priorities confused here. The primary objective of K-12 schools is to expand students' intellectual capabilities; everything else is secondary.

Later, Kahlenberg cites some of his own work to contend that:

[E]ducation research has long found that what helps students achieve is not whether they attend private or public school, but whether the school has a core of middle class families—who provide positive peer influences, active parental support, and insist on high quality teachers with high expectations.

Well, if that's his view, then he shouldn't object to a law that allows parents to choose their childrens' schools, provided each choice has such a core of middle class families. More importantly, he should be a supporter of reform efforts that promote the positive peer influences, active parental involvement, and high expectations which are the fundamentals to student achievement. Many of us simply believe that the most reliable way to get those fundamentals in place is to increase the choice of provider beyond the local monopolies that now often prevail.

Published on Leave a comment on Teachers and Technology in the Classroom

Catching up on my blog reading, via Joe Malchow, I find Steve Jobs taking issue with teacher unions in K-12 education:

CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

"Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, 'I can't win.'"

In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms.

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

I think Jobs has missed the mark here, in two ways.

First, the part of K-12 education that is off-the-charts crazy is how little choice there is for consumers. When did we decide that sending our children to education factories with hundreds or thousands of students was a good idea? With more choice and thus more competition, parents and students could better hold K-12 educators accountable for the quality of the services they provide. Bad practices--if unions and lifetime employment contracts are bad practices--wouldn't survive vigorous competition in the product market. Education reformers should be focused on expanding the choice of provider in education. Almost everything else would fall into place. The prospect of losing "economies of scale" in education doesn't scare me a bit. It shouldn't just be the rich and the religious who have choice, and we shouldn't be using our political system to actively undermine and restrict choice.

Second, as a wise man once said, "there is more to life than increasing its speed." I think the benefits of technology in the classroom are overstated. The best things to put in a classroom to promote a student's education are good instructors and good peers. The props are very much secondary. The best lecture is a conversation, not a slideshow or a video.

Published on Leave a comment on Leadership in Politics and Academia

I thought this column by Frank Rich today was pretty good in the way it quotes Barack Obama and discusses his candidacy:

But at least one rap against him [Obama] can promptly be laid to rest: his lack of experience. If time in the United States Senate is what counts for presidential seasoning, maybe his two years’ worth is already too much. Better he get out now, before there’s another embarrassing nonvote on a nonbinding measure about what will soon be a four-year-old war.

That's absolutely right. Experience means more than marking time in a position that other people envy. It means developing leadership capacity and a track record of taking responsibility for decisions. That's why, in the realm of presidential candidacies, a few years as governor of any state can trump decades in the Senate. Obama is later quoted in the article as saying, "They don't want experience, they want judgment." Given what typically passes for "experience" in this context, that's true as well.

Also this week, we learn that Harvard will soon have a new president. The Harvard Crimson reported that Professor Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War scholar who currently leads the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is slated to be approved by the Board of Overseers today. I wish her the very best of luck and hope for good things from my alma mater under her leadership.

Some of the reactions to her appointment surprised me. Consider these quotes from a Washington Post article:

Sheldon Hackney, who was president of Penn from 1981 to 1993 while Faust was a teacher there, said Faust was not only a great educator but always displayed sound judgment and was well-respected by her peers.

"She will be really good for Harvard," he said. "There is no big significant change that you can make in the university for which you don't need faculty support, and she will be able to get that."

Some educators said the choice of Faust was a surprise because she does not have extensive administrative experience. That was probably a plus, said George Washington University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg.

"They didn't want anybody with administrative experience," he said. "They wanted an inspirational leader, a political symbol, a decent person that everybody could feel good about to help them do what the presidents do best."

I'll go along with Hackney (and Obama) that sound judgment is more important than any particular administrative experience. But I don't see how he can assert that "she will be able to get faculty support." Tenured faculty at Harvard (or Hackney's Penn or my Dartmouth) are deeply entrenched in their positions, particularly on matters related to resource allocation. This was the biggest challenge facing Summers as he sought to position Harvard for the next century, and it will be Faust's as well. What's the evidence that she will be able to get faculty support for major initiatives, in which some will be winners and some will be losers, if not prior administrative experience in which she's done so on a smaller scale?

It is also impossible to believe that the presidential search committee really behaved the way Trachtenberg suggests. That warm glow that's being described--everyone feels good so they'll help her accomplish her goals--will vanish the moment this "inspirational leader, political symbol, a[nd] decent person" tries to tell one group of faculty that, in the allocation of resources across departments, their department will get less because other departments are more deserving.