The Cranky Professor

How Can "Highly Selective" Colleges BE so Highly Selective?

Jay Mathews has a sane and useful opinion piece in the Washington Post this morning. Pity it runs on a Saturday. Mathews answers the "how can 'highly selective' colleges BE so 'highly selective'?" by pointing out that the most selective school work VERY hard for those 10% acceptance rates --

College applicants act like hungry patrons crowding the restaurants that have the longest lines at the door. The places that are hardest to get into must be the best. But there is little research to back up that assumption, and one reason that Harvard, Stanford and Yale got about 20,000 applications each last year is that they asked for them.

I get to spend an afternoon and evening at the heart of many American academic fantasies -- an Oxford college for tour, talk, and dinner -- next week. I'll keep reminding myself that the fantasy (the 19th century model) was a decayed form of medieval canonical life with celibacy requirements for Fellows until the late 19th century (how else could they be expected to live in college's premises and on the salaries they were paid?), a curriculum so narrow that even experiemental American Great Books curricula can't execute it, and a parasitic dependence on a state church that failed to work effectively after the Industrial Revolution and the rejection of the enthusiasts of the Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism. I know that's a callow summary but not far off base.

Every time you hear someone talk about curriculum or faculty forming a community or building campuses in a series of interlocking quadrangles* you should ask yourself "is this a notalgia for something that involves Oxbridge fantasies?" Oxford is a legitimate historical model for organizing higher education, as is the German proseminar (the fantasy in the background of most graduate education talk), but to the degree that the suggestion is based in nostalgia for the residential college system, the tutorial, and a curriculum focused like a laser on the Classics we have to wonder how useful it would be for a contemporary context.

*The campus masterplan at both of my institutions of higher education, Rice and Emory, occasionally gets swayed by the idea of creating quads. Why quads? Why do we call them that? Oh, go read Tom Brown at Oxford or Gaudy Night. The former presents the full-blown ideal 19th century University experience. The presents us the disjunction; the women's college in the Dorothy Sayers novel is a recent foundation trying to construct a working Oxford college with limited funding and without the career path for its graduates of ordination in the Establish Church.

David Hockney - Artist of the 20th Century

Well, David Hockney can't be the artist of the 21st Century because he's retro enough to defend smoking in print. I wonder if museums in California will be compelled by statute to deaccession his work?

If smokers are to be kept out of "public spaces", as though smokers have no rights in them, then one would think, with 23% of the public smoking, some smoking public areas could be arranged. The whole notion of "The Public" as one is an obnoxious political philosophy. There are thousands of publics - they come in all sizes.

via Prof. Norm Geras.

No Homework, Please - We're Americans!

I am endlessly fascinated by people who think their children shouldn't spend much time on homework or - as in this Washington Post story - do any on weekends.

What do they think weekends are for? Family time. Sports. Church.

I did all those things when I was young. They didn't take all night on Friday or all day Saturday or Sunday. How much television is getting added in to this formula? Remove half an hour of the glass tit and the third grader will be fine.

Cheaters Often Prosper

And here's the story of one who's suing his university for failure to catch him sooner, more or less. The thought that he might win his case is bizarre, but the lesson for professors is reduce your liability by enforcing standards early and often.

via my friend at Mirabilis.ca.

Argh. Spam Comments!

Mt-Blacklist is a great solution, but the spammers are persistent. Ugh. I just deleted about 40 comments from a truly disgusting site. I guess I have to figure out how the comment-throttling works, since all of these had to be posted in a fairly short period.

College Graduation Season - Who Finishes?

What's all the ruckus about the high percentage of people who don't begin but don't graduate from college? Here's the New York Times coverage of the numbers released the other day.

There are lots of things going on in the coverage of the study, most of which are pretty predictable -- debt, academic unreadiness, racial differentiation, etc. It may surprise some readers that the unit of measure is not 4 years but 6; that's a trend that has been developing for a long time but has failed to enter the general consciousness.

It would indeed be interesting to know what the schools more successful than their comparison groups (Binghamton vs. other SUNY schools, Miami University of Ohio vs. their comparison group) are doing. I can tell you what's up with Georgia -- they have a massive, gambling-funded tuition program that pays most of the tuition for any high school graduate with a certain average; it's not working.

The reason the Georgia program isn't producing a vast crop of college graduates, the reason that not everyone graduates, is that a college education is not the philosopher stone and plenty of people figure that out before 6 years is up.

Not everyone needs to go to college.

School Embezzlement Follies

According to the Washington Post a school principal used the vending machine money to become a wheeler-dealer in school busses. Sorta. Read about his failed scams here.

"If you're in the business of being the instructional leader for the school, why do you need the sideline of allegedly being a bus salesman?" said Darlene Allen, the PTA official.

"How do we continue to hire people who turn out not to have had the interests of our children at heart?"

Discretionary funds are a dangerous thing for weak principals or men of weak principles.