Academically Adrift

A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, offers refreshing insights into the problems plaguing higher education. Based on information from over 2,000 students on 24 United States campuses, Academically Adrift paints a disturbing picture of the failures of modern education.

In short, students are not working hard enough:

1. Students are not spending enough hours studying : only 12-14 per week. Most of that time is spent in “group” study sessions that are little more peer socializing with a veneer of self-deceptive justification that studying might be occurring. The study also found that solo studiers fared better.
2. Students are not learning enough in some majors. Business majors, for example, showed far fewer educational gains than those in liberal arts. This reflects the non-academic, vocational emphasis of business courses compared to the intellectual challenges offered by courses in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy.
3. Students are not being required to read or write enough. This is hardly a surprise, considering that so many college students are unable to form even basic ideas into coherent sentences.
4. Students involved in fraternities and sororities learned less. This is, again, no surprise, as such socialization can only detract from time available for studying.
5. Arum & Roska’s work concludes with the damning statistic that 45% of students see no improvement in their first two years of college work, and 36% fail to have improvement over all four years of college.

UC Corruption

The highest-paid officials of the University of California have decided that they're not being paid enough.

Specifically, 36 of the top 200 earners in the UC administration have recently threatened to file suit if their retirement packages are not recalculated to avoid a $245,000 federal limit. Because these workers earn more than that, they feel they should be entitled to have their retirements recalculated based on their current incomes rather than this federal cap. They are demanding this despite the financial chaos of the last few years, which have seen a 32% increase in UC feeds in 2009, and an 8% increase in 2010. And they want the money retroactive to 2007.

The average wage in 2009 was $49,777; a retirement benefit above $245,00 would be, therefore, almost five times what the average worker makes.

Such superstar compensation might make sense if these leading UC administrators were actually doing a good job. If they had, for example, used their political contacts and influence to prevent the state of California from cutting its education budget, then they would have earned their salaries. Police union representatives certainly earned their salaries, as they were so successful in preventing cuts to bloated law enforcement budgets. But it seems no one is there to help defend education. Not only did these administrators fail to force Sacramento from making its draconian cuts, it seems as if they hardly even tried.

A more just and equitable system would be this: Let the salaries and retirements of the top 200 UC administrators from this point forward come entirely as bonuses paid from the funds they prevent from being cut. If Sacramento cuts the UC budget, they receive nothing. Perhaps this would motivate them to take the battle to Sacramento with the same enthusiasm Sacramento has displayed for destroying public education in California.

Those executives would argue that such a salary structure change would, as they put it in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, "jeopardize the system's ability to recruit top employees." The unasked question is--are these really the "top" employees, when they so miserably fail to protect their system? And what is it they do, anyway, that justify such salaries?

Let Obama Be Obama

In the West Wing episode (Season 1, episode 19) 'Let Barlet Be Barlet,' the fictional president Jed Barlet is failing.

On every front, when facing challenges from opposing Republicans and the military brass, Barlet choses to make meaningless gestures, "dipping his toes in" rather than fighting for his values. He lets one of his aides have a meeting with military officials about gay members of the military, but makes clear that this will not lead to repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Barlet half-heartedly considers appointing reformers to the Federal Election Commission, but realizes that Congress has already staked claim to the openings.

After a confrontation with his devoted chief of staff, President Barlet realizes that he needs to start fighting now if he ever hopes to achieve his agenda. The episode concludes with all staff members pledging to follow their president's wishes.

President Obama should Netflix this episode and watch it twice.

The tragedy of the first two years of the Obama administration is not that this highly-talented, fiercely-smart president was unable to achieve his legislative agenda; the tragedy is that he did achieve it, and that the bar he set himself was so low.

A half-hearted health care reform was passed, but without the critical components that would have made it a truly monumental reform. Don't get me wrong--it's great that more kids will be eligible to be insured, but the individual mandate means that by law their parents now must buy unaffordable insurance. Obama took the bold--and obvious--solution of expanding Medicare to everyone off the table very early, before it was ever seriously considered.

Obama also acted prudently to keep the US economy from plunging further into financial chaos. But while the "stimulus bill" helped banks, it did nothing to create jobs. We now creating a small fraction of the jobs we need each month just to keep pace with population growth; projections are that twelve million jobs would need to be created just to reach the point we were last at when the economy collapsed in October 2008. Instead of taking the bold--and obvious--step of revamping the Works Progress Administration and directly hiring unemployed people, Obama's talk of tax credits for businesses sounds limp.

Obama could have done much more. And now, with his enemies poised to usurp the House, he will have the chance to do far less.

In many ways, Obama is Barlet brought to life. Both are Nobel laureates. Both brim with intelligent and verbal clarity. Both are fundamentally good people. Here is what Obama wrote in his book Dreams of My Father:

"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children in Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder--alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware--is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism, dooms us all."

Obama is of the mettle of Lincoln, for no other modern president has been so eloquent and empathetic, and of all qualities in a person, empathy is the most important, while eloquence shows the quality of thought. After the nightmare years of the inchoate Bush reign, Obama's mind is a like waking up and taking a breath.

Let us hope that, like Lincoln, his victories will be more plainly seen in retrospect. During Lincoln's terms, one could have mistaken his tactics for chaos--an unruly cabinet, disobedient generals, a war stalled in its early years. The martyred, brilliant Lincoln is hardly the pre-Appomattox Lincoln, who was widely mocked and criticized almost until the moment when he achieved total victory.

But if Obama is not to enjoy Lincoln's post-assassination apotheosis, then he needs to start fighting for his values now. It is great to win a game, and unfortunate to lose, but it seems as if Obama has not even suited up. He has punted the ball on third down. It's time to get in the game.

Why TSA needs to change

A bladder cancer survivor has his urostomy bag ripped open by a TSA agent untrained to recognize such objects, and the cancer survivor is soaked in his own urine as a result; a TSA representative then insults him on television. A frightened, shy 1o year-old boy resists a TSA screening, and has his shirt taken off in public. An ABC producer reporters that she was groped inside her underwear. Victims of sexual assault report that the aggressive, invasive probes they receive at the hands of TSA agents are bringing back flashbacks of their assaults.

Something is deeply broken with our passenger screening process--and this new process does nothing to keep us safer.

According to Isaac Yeffet, former head of security for Israel's El Al airlines, these invasive patdowns are pointless and a waste of time. El Al knows a thing or two about security; Israel faces much greater daily threats of attack than the United States. Yet despite the danger Israeli airlines face, El Al's remarkably effective techniques do not involve "touching the junk" of passengers. We should consider learning from what works.

Flying involves lying to passengers. Every flight begins with a ridiculous video about exit procedures, and the location of floatation devices in the event of a "water landing." A water landing is otherwise known as crashing into the ocean. With the exception of Captain Sully's famous landing, and one other such event in the 1950s, every other such landing has been fatal to everyone on the plane. And in the case of Sully's landing, people did not rely on floatation devices. So untold hours have been wasted on the tarmac listening to an absurd broadcast about a scenario that has almost zero chance of happening.

One of the most pernicious lies, however, is that our checked baggage and shipping parcels have been adequately screen. As we learned from the recent Yemeni bombs, it is relatively easy to get timed bombs on planes In the case of the Yemeni bombs, they were only detected because of an tip from the Saudis--hardly an intelligence resource we can rely on in the future.

TSA needs to consider the needs of sexual assault victims. TSA needs to guarantee that those who are viewing images of naked Americans, including American children, have been screened for pedophilia. As things stand now, it's like the Wild West has taken over our airports, and no one is accountable for the indignities visited upon those with the temerity to want to travel in their own country.

Today's strangeness comes courtesy of Treeosaur.com, a site which expounds on the idea that theropod dinosaurs hunted by blending in with trees.

Okaaay then.

Money Well Spent

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he famously declared that the University of California system should not subsidize intellectual curiosity. What he meant is that taxpayers should not pay for the education of California students.

Several years later, Sen. Proxmire of Wisconsin began his annual "Golden Fleece" awards, where he pointed to what he considered to be examples of wasteful federal spending. These examples sometimes included scientific research, and in this vein Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have released a new report, titled "Summertime Blues: 100 Projects that give taxpayers the blues."

First, the word "taxpayer" is often trotted out as if had magical power. The phrase "as a taxpayer..." is spoken as if this incantation conferred special rights. But everyone is a taxpayer, and if everyone is part of a group, then no one individual in that group has any special claim.

The use of "taxpayer" is meant to stake a claim that as someone who has money automatically taken out of your paycheck, you have a right to decide how that money is spent. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you nominally have power to elect someone to decide how your tax money is spent, in reality unless you are a corporation capable of making substantial donations to PACs, then you have no say about how your money is spent, and no influence on who your elected official is. So right at the outset we should dispense with the fiction that "taxpayers" have some sort

Second, the Coburn/McCain report harps upon job creation as the standard for usefulness. In section after section, the report mocks expenditures in areas with unemployment, without mentioning the rather obvious point that this money is employing people. For almost every conceivable project, payroll expenditures constitute the majority of the budget. So criticizing such projects for not creating jobs is simply untrue.

Third, much of what is in the Coburn/McCain report is legitimate, useful scientific research. Here are some examples:

The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $2 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

...has received a stimulus grant for an experimental applied science project to assist indigenous Siberian communities in engaging Russian policymakers in local civic and environmental issues.

...$435,271 to develop iPod Touch or smartphone apps to teach introductory biology to high school students

...$266,505 in stimulus funds to continue its annual science education workshops for reporters

...MSU received a grant to send students to work with researchers at the Natural History Museum in Hangzhou studying various dinosaur eggs and other fossils.

...$300,000 in stimulus grant money to examine computer simulations to follow the formation of galaxies through the period 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang.

Really? Researching the Big Bang and the evolution of our universe is somehow unworthy of support? Sending kids to study dinosaurs, and possibly inspiring them into a career in science, is a wasteful expenditure? We should not fund workshops for reporters to communicate science better? We shouldn't explore using new technology to teach biology?

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you to read the Coburn/McCain report for yourself. It is a damning documentation of manifest philistine contempt for education, for learning, and most of all, for science itself.

Anti-Vaxxers Showing True Color

Anti-vaccination groups have reached a new low. The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is a group of conspiratorially-minded science deniers so intent on keeping people from getting vaccines that they have now stooped to harassing the parents of a baby who died of whooping cough:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/12/2951629.htm

According to this article, 32-day-old Dana McCaffery died last year due to pertussis. She was too young to have received the vaccine, although her parents later came out in support of other children being vaccinated. That was too much for AVN, which started harassing the parents, and sought to prove that pertussis could not have been the cause. It might have beens something else, they claimed, another disease that was now being hidden so that young Dana might be used as a poster child for pro-vaccination forces.

This shows the anti-vaxxers true colors: they are willing to exploit suffering of all kinds, and to wish for more of that suffering in the world, in pursuit of their irrational, anti-scientific, paranoid mission.