Q. Are we not researchers? A. We are professors

I've been thinking about 80s music a lot lately.

 What follows is a digressive and only partly thought-through exploration of a tough topic. I'm posting it as an excuse to work through some of my own thinking about the responsibility of academia to the public, the scholar to the student, and the discipline to all other parties. I hereby reserve the right to admit that I'm completely wrong about everything.

Why should the public pay taxes to support our research?

This used to be an academic question, but officeholders like Tom Coburn and Jeffrey Flake have put the question squarely before political scientists. Other disciplines have faced this moment before, as physics did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and still more will face it in the future. My reasoning is plenty motivated, so I think that the case for funding basic academic research is pretty good. Like a lot of social scientists, I'm frustrated by the often self-inflicted lack of solidarity among academics ("Which social science should die?") and the professoriate's inability to sustain a campaign to make our arguments. Even the political science blogosphere's concerted arguments in favor of NSF arguments probably did less to move the needle than one foolish New York Times op-ed.

The outlook for funding for the social sciences and academia more generally is a lot dimmer for my generation than it was for the two or three generations of academics before us. At worst, they had to look forward to long periods of stagnation (unless you were a Sovietologist); at best, you could go from nothing--literal non-existence--to a seat at the grown-up table in the time it takes some disciplines' doctoral students to finish a dissertation. As the funding pool dries up, there's bound to be a lot more friction and fighting among academics than there was when the only question was how to divide up the increasing pie.

The situation won't get better on its own. I'm unconvinced by the idea that state governments' spending will naturally pick back up as the economy does, since it relies both on the idea that the economy will pick up--green shoots!--and also that politicians will refrain from directing that savings from their structural adjustments toward other priorities. And even if it does, higher education is under increasing pressure to justify its business model in every dimension:

• Why should college be a physical location, and not an MMORPG-cum-TEDtalk?
• Why should professors be hired and promoted based on their research skills--most without ever having had any practical or theoretical training in pedagogy--when the public's understanding of funding universities rests on their teaching productivity?
• Why should there be an expectation that tuition should rise faster than inflation?
• Why should an English degree take as long to complete and cost the student as much as a physics or an engineering degree?

All of these are different ways of asking the "why-pay-for-my-research" question. But historically we've only had to answer one or two of them at a time. And now we have to respond to all of them in a way that recognizes that answers to questions that were serviceable ten years ago--in 2002!--may now be unpersuasive or unrealistic.

At root, we largely rely on one of two arguments to answer all of these questions. The first is that the knowledge produce is a public good, and that institutions are organized to support our knowledge production for the maximal good of society (or, at least, that reform would cost more than it would gain--that we are in a stable local maximum). The second is that our research leads to better learning outcomes for our students. Winning the future, then, requires academics to have maximum time for research, even if there are short-term tradeoffs for the students.

I think the first answer is better, since it does at least appeal to the innate beauty of knowledge, but it tends to obscure the third reason that we voice silently--that learning, like art, is a luxury good. We can't say that aloud, since it carries with it the implication that  opposition to learning is opposition to civilization itself, and that the superior culture is the more refined culture. That is a line of argument that has never played well with the citizenry, and these days would not play well with the mythical one percent.

The second answer--better research, better students, better jobs--is, to put it bluntly, not overly persuasive. It is, in fact, close to being faith-based. We expect better evidence and stronger argumentation from our students when they turn in term papers than when we produce public justifications of our budgets. Why should we ask students who want to be lawyers to sit through four years of an undergrad degree and then three years of law school when the British and others manage to produce serviceable advocates after three years of law-focused undergraduate studies? And much of the other justifications for our teaching--our students learn critical thinking! statistics! data visualization! discipline!--only beg the question of why students should learn those skills by majoring in our subject instead of majoring in something more practical in which those skills are foregrounded.

There are answers, of course. One part is that it's that the ivory-tower academics are not the ones who are out of touch with the real world. Rather, frequently it's our critics who deride us for not taking "real-world" problems seriously enough who have no idea what the real world is actually like. This sounds counterintuitive, but sober reflection or residence in Washington (or Jefferson City, or Albany, or wherever legislators gather) will quickly remind you that politicians and activists who make these claims frequently have no idea about what either academics or businesspeople or bureaucrats actually do. The "soft skills" matter, and those are hard to impart at a distance or by paying professors less than a living wage. As Tim Burke, the charge of know-nothingism applies with especial force to fact-free discussions about information technology and teaching.

A second part would be to forcefully stress how social science matters by discussing our research. This is easy in the abstract but harder concretely. Yes, individual scholars and individual projects make tangible contributions, but how many of us are willing to say there are scholarly consensuses about issues in social science as there are in comparably observational sciences like geology? Where we are most consensual, we are least interesting; where we are most interesting, we are least consensual--and often (as with the democracy-promotion agenda of the Bush administration, or the debate over whether there is a resource curse) most dangerous. So we're left with the unsatisfying choices of either "teaching the debate" or picking sides among competing findings where there is real and lasting disagreement. (One way of squaring the circle is to find and promote popularizers of our research--popularizers in the real Carl Sagan or even Stephen Jay Gould tradition--and let them handle the rhetorical aspects.)

But the third part is to recognize that we should probably systematically invest in and require better teaching and measurements of teaching effectiveness. We measure research productivity decently well--by no means as well as we should, or as we as we ought to given the importance of the measurement and the time we've spent on it--but we rely on ... student surveys to monitor teaching effectiveness. We lack a well-defined progression of introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses comparable to what other disciplines have. (What should students learn in Introduction to Comparative Government? We don't have an answer to this question that we could explain to a congressman in the same way that economists could say what Intro Micro is about.)

Achieving comparability, however, would require some conscious moves toward standardization. Such measures would reduce the autonomy of the individual instructor. And it would also prompt us to begin to assess what the discipline is and what it should become. In one sense, that means picking winners and losers, at least at the level of undergraduate instruction. And that likely would require the formalization of much political-science instruction (graduating students who don't know the median-voter theorem or the differences in free-trade voting preferences of workers and capitalists should be acutely embarrassing). It might even mean dropping one subfield--or, better, prompting that subfield to more clearly engage with the questions and methods the rest of the field has adopted (something that would benefit both sides of the debate). The relationship between international studies and political science would be redefined, perhaps drastically.

At the end of such a process, though, the relationship between our instruction and our research would be much clearer. The risk of intellectual monoculture would be blunted by the fact that different institutions would naturally choose to focus on different parts of the field. And our students would likely have a clearer idea both of what to expect in graduate school (an IR Ph.D. is not Foreign Affairs with more footnotes) and also of what the key insights of political science really are.

Of budgets and values

It is shockingly hard to come up with an image
to accompany a post about budgeting.

Budgets are beautiful.

Gordon Gekko's motto--"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good"--was willfully contrarian but hardly persuasive. Greed has the virtue of predictability, but it is not good unless incentives are extremely implausibly aligned.

But budgets are beautiful.

Budgets are beautiful because they are stark and truthful. They tell you everything you need to know about an organization. Does the organization assign resources politically or logically? Does the organization think hard about planning for contingencies? Does the organization recklessly commit all of its funding with no reserve?

Budgets are especially beautiful when they are based on lies.

Consider what Enron's balance sheet said about the organization. The budget was based on lies, and because it was based on lies you could tell that the organization was based on lies. A management that has to lie to make its numbers is an organization that's condemned to fail. (Although not necessarily quickly.)

But it's impossible to make those lies last forever. Eventually, revenues have to meet expenses. And eventually assets (and equity) have to total liabilities.

Organizations do lots of things that aren't beautiful, because they don't have to be true. Organizations sponsor charitable works, even when those organizations' missions are the antithesis of charity. Organizations pass resolutions declaring that they're in favor of women or civil rights, even when those organizations are opposed to both. And organizations say they hire and promote on merit, even when all the top-ranked people in an organization look and sound the same because they're from the same school, same town, same class.

But budgets can't be hypocritical. An organization either spends what it has on a priority or it doesn't. Budgets, therefore, are the ultimate statement of an organization's real values. If an organization values foresight and preparedness, the budget will reflect that. If it's a risky and venturesome organization, the budget will reflect that, too. And if the organization is rotten to its core, then the budget will reveal that, too.

Everyone hates adultery

John Sides and Matt Yglesias delve into the General Social Survey to see why people's attitudes toward adultery have changed.

Hester Prynne by Flickr user Billhd

The GSS is great; it may be my favorite dataset of all time. And I remember the first time I sat down and started playing with it I immediately gravitated to the variables about social behavior--extramarital sex, premarital sex, pornography, gay sex, and so on. Political scientists hardly ever get to play with these sorts of variables, and guys who do International Relations absolutely never have time to wonder what causes adultery. And Sides, like Douthat and Yglesias, is right to be shocked at the levels of support for extramarital sex--it is striking the first time you plop these into Stata to see that your parents' or grandparents' generation enjoyed a bit on the side.

Sides observes that more-educated Americans have gotten less accepting of adultery, and speculates that the availability of divorce has something to do with it. Yglesias notes that an alternative theory is that female empowerment has made women less reliant on breadwinners, and so the "marriage market" may have allowed them to find more suitable mates and enforce better behavior by holding out an exit option.

I think these are both plausible theories worth investigating. But I want to add some data and some thoughts to this debate. What follows uses only descriptive statistics (for now), so no interpretation is needed, just some careful thought. But I want to drive down one main point: Adultery used to be at least somewhat popular, but everyone hates adultery more than they used to, and this shift has affected practically all subgroups over the past forty years.

First, let's take a look at some additional data. The two charts below show shifts in opposition to adultery by sex and by race over the period 1972 to 2010.

First, a couple of notes. I follow Sides in defining opposition to adultery (and, yes,  I am using the shorter and judgmental term) by using the GSS question XMARSEX. (By the way, this is how we refer to GSS variables at my department--"XMARSEX," "PORNLAW", "HOMOSEX", etc. Way cooler than standard variable names like "V16".) In this case, I am conservative: Opposition to adultery includes only those who say adultery is always wrong.

Second, we should be aware that the GSS responses constrain our ability to answer these questions. What we want to know is under which circumstances people believe adultery is acceptable, but we merely know if they think it is "almost always" or "sometimes" wrong, or "not wrong at all." It is possible that the categories we're measuring have changed--that the person who thought in 1975 that extramarital sex was almost always wrong would believe that given today's divorce laws that it is now simply wrong to engage in affairs. There are strategies to cope with challenges such as these, but I'm not going to get into them now.

Third, we should always be aware that America has changed a lot in the past 40 years. In 1972, only 11 percent of respondents had a college degree; in 2010, 29 percent of respondents did. Similarly, in 1972, about 84 percent of respondents were white; in 2010, only about 76 percent of respondents were. (That's one reason why I just use "White" and "Black" as categories in the race chart--there aren't enough observations to support finer-grained categories across such a long time period.)

Getting back to the charts with these caveats in mind, though, we can see that the same picture that John held out is broadly true: even groups (like men) that used to be favorable to adultery are no longer supporters. The same pattern can be seen by looking at religious affiliation, which I present in two ways. The first looks at Protestant versus Catholic attitudes and the second at all respondents who view themselves as religious versus those who have no religious preference (e.g., atheists and agnostics). (Again, data limitations prevent me from displaying anything more fine-grained.)

Here we begin to see an interesting pattern. The shift in societal mores has affected even atheists and agnostics, contrary to what we might expect if we get all of our news from Glenn Beck. Secondly, although nonreligious respondents are more tolerant of deviations from marital fidelity, the gap is narrowing quickly; nonreligious respondents are now almost as willing to condemn adultery as Catholic respondents were in 1972.

Just for fun, I also looked at a partisan breakdown.

Although there is a widening split between the parties on this issue (and others), nevertheless Democrats and Republicans alike have grown less tolerant of adultery, at least at a mass level.

Given the relationship of adultery to marriage (long recognized by playwrights among others), we might want to investigate whether those who are married have different ideas than the population as a whole. A plot of opposition to adultery by marital status reveals a surprising pattern. In this case, we see that although married respondents have always been intolerant of adultery, divorced/separated respondents and never-married respondents have quickly caught up.

Note that fewer than half of single respondents in 1972 thought extramarital sex was "always wrong," which explains Mad Men. Very interestingly, in the early 1970s divorced respondents were fairly accepting of extramarital sex, but over the past few years their attitudes have converged on those of married respondents a generation ago. (One wonders if there isn't a natural ceiling to how strongly divorced respondents will condemn adultery, since some of them, at least, are presumably divorced because of an affair.)

Finally, I looked at whether levels of workforce participation by women have tracked with changes in perceptions on adultery. The first chart takes women who are working either full or part-time and compares their attitudes with women who are not (e.g., laid off, never working, retired, and so forth).

Here, we can see that there is support for a modified version of the Yglesias hypothesis. If the effect of women getting jobs is to make them more likely to demand marriage equality and fidelity, than that effect is recent. In the 1970s and 1980s, women who worked approved of adultery at nearly the same rate as men.

 However, there does seem to be some support for the idea that male attitudes have changed. The chart immediately above compares the attitudes of men whose wives work full- or part-time with those of men who are unmarried or whose wives do not work. Whereas there was practically no difference between those two groups throughout the 1970s or even the George H.W. Bush administration, a wide gap opened up during the Clinton-Bush administrations. (It remains to be seen whether the steep decline in 2010 is a blip.) This is consistent with Yglesias' (girlfriend's) hypothesis: male attitudes have shifted faster and more consistently than women's.

Finally, I want to point out that the GSS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This is what federal support of social science underwrites. It's critical to have these data in uninterrupted time-series, and it's essential that guys like Tom Coburn not be allowed to take away funding for such projects.

What do professors do?

The question, from the Hon. Mr. (Matthew) Cameron [Yglesias blog understudy]: How can we raise the teaching productivity of the university?

The answer: The quickest route is to sacrifice research.

I think that there's a widespread misunderstanding of what professors actually do and what universities are actually for. Teaching is secondary. This is not true by biomass--the bulk of tertiary education institution are, indeed, devoted by teaching--but in terms of societal value research is the primary goal and justification of the academic enterprise.

Let's unpack the fallacy. Cameron argues a point that a lot of people find intuitively appealing: Universities are soooooo inefficient, because they use large in-person lecture courses to teach! We should just put those online and use the savings to drive down tuition costs to help the Struggling Middle Class and make college more accessible for the Honest Working Classes. (I think all of this is important, so I'm not mocking the SMC and the HWC themselves, but rather pundits'--often Ivy alumni who frankly don't know many authentic SMC and HWC members--invocation of these mythical creatures.)

Consider how Cameron phrases the difficulties:

Universities have little reason to cut costs because their reputations directly benefit from higher per student academic spending. So even if a school achieves cost savings without sacrificing quality – say, by replacing large, intro-level lectures with online courses – it will be regarded as less prestigious by many ranking methodologies. ... inally, university faculty view online technology as a threat to their role at the heart of the higher education system. This was evident during an exchange between George Mason University Prof. Tyler Cowen and Stanford University Prof. Tim Bresnahan at yesterday’s conference. When Cowen raised the possibility of universities employing fewer professors once online courses are widespread, Bresnahan responded defensively by asserting that he does more than just teach.

Cameron then lays out what he sees faculty as doing:

Obviously, Bresnahan has a point – the specialized expertise and personalized guidance that professors can convey to students in higher-level college courses truly is indispensible. For entry-level lectures with hundreds of students, however, faculty members often don’t do much more than teach. They don’t grade papers, they don’t meet their students and they aren’t able to delve into the finer details of the subjects they teach. These classes aren’t just a waste of students’ money, however; they’re also a drain on professors’ time. If they were freed from their obligation to teach such classes, professors would be able to devote more effort toward their niche in the higher education system – stimulating students’ intellectual curiosity through personal interactions and engaging learning experiences.

Here we see the thinking behind the critique of the large lecture course from the point of view of those whose only engagement with academia has been as a student:

• Professors are primarily teachers;
  
• teaching is best carried out in face-to-face interactions;
  
• large lecture courses make it hard for professors to have face time with students;
  
• ergo, large lecture courses are a waste of time.
  

There is a corollary argument for replacing these courses with online courses:

• The Internet is cheap, and allows for on-demand scheduling;
  
• Students from the HWCs and SMCs are motivated and disciplined;
  
• Online courses suffer from all of the disadvantages of large lecture courses (no face time, no instructor engagement, etc) but at least they are cheaper to provide;
  
• Universities will pass on all cost savings from eliminating large lecture courses to students;
  
• Universities will be unharmed by losing those tuition dollars;
  
• ergo, let's move large lecture courses online.
  

These arguments collapse at several points because their assumptions are valid. The argument for online courses is staggeringly weak. In the first place, the success of the University of Phoenix belies pundit optimism about distance education. Students in online courses have higher drop-out rates than their in-person equivalents, and universities have no reason to pass on cost savings to students. Indeed, if universities did have a reason to do so, then the adjunctification of higher ed would have been accompanied by plummeting tuition costs. But I am less interested in those reasons than in the wildly naive view about what it is professors do and how that conditions this debate. When my non-grad school friends and my family ask what I plan to do after finishing my doctorate, they invariably ask if I plan to teach. I invariably respond that I would, in fact, very much like to be a professor. But I never use the verb "teach" in describing that position.

I love teaching. I think I am good at it. I work very hard at doing well at it. But given a choice between being a mediocre teacher and a great researcher, or a great teacher and a mediocre researcher, I would take the former every time. Every time. Because if I just wanted to teach, there are many more lucrative and less demanding ways to do so--most of them involving majoring in education as an undergraduate and getting a better-paying job in a nice suburban school system or a good private school. (Yes, the BLS shows that political science "teachers" earn more than secondary school teachers, but that does not account for wages foregone--which can be substantial if you take five or six years to finish your degree--nor the survivor bias for university salaries: all of the washouts have already washed out of that pool, because for university instructors tenure is a privilege, not an entitlement.)

I don't think that the choice is that stark. And I think that, frankly, teaching is not really as hard as it seems. Yes, being the bestest teacher in the whole wide world is very tough, but that is to say that giving Steve Jobs-level presentations is incredibly more demanding than giving a very good presentation. Acquiring a relatively high level of competence seems to be more a matter of discipline and minimal training than of massive investment (certainly less than, say, learning game theory). (Veteran professors are welcome to disabuse me of my naivete.)

Yet that is almost irrelevant. Granted that universities--all of them, even Harvard--need some faculty to work hard at teaching, the real value-added from universities does not come from teaching. It can't, by definition. Both the best and the worst pedagogue in the world alike are limited by how good their subject matter is. There can be no calculus teachers without calculus, no physics teachers without physics, no political science teachers without political science research. Who cares how well we are teaching if what we are teaching is wrong?

And, by definition, only research can be progressive and expand our capabilities and understanding. But the value of humanity's understanding of a subject is bounded by the most perceptive, not the mean. When the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was asked how many people understood his theory of the expanding universe, he thought for a moment before replying, "Perhaps seven." Professors are often criticized or mocked because their research is so obscure, but it is precisely that obscurity which often leads to breakthroughs with startlingly practical applications.

This is at the heart of Professor Bresnahan's response to Cowen that he does more than just teach, and it is why Cameron has so badly misunderstood what the professoriate does. It is not a question of "the specialized expertise and personalized guidance that professors can convey to students in higher-level college courses." It is the fact that that expertise did not spring forth fully-formed from Zeus' head. Rather, it was hard-won, mostly by professors who were probably notoriously bad teachers.

And that is why weakening the edifice of the university by forcing its scholars to become pedagogues first and researchers second, if at all, is so frightening. Research will continue, with or without the university. But research outside of academia is proprietary and narrow, and whole disciplines--especially the social sciences--will vanish or become so transformed as to be unrecognizable. (Think of the niche field of "retail anthropology.") Universities exist to provide public goods, and piecemeal "reforms" such as blindly sacrificing large lecture courses and the cross-subsidization they provide both to research and to those much-ballyhooed higher level courses will profoundly alter the production and transmission of knowledge.

What is an academic poseur?

The question, from a backbencher: You've laid out the case for bringing back the insult poseur. Are there poseurs in academia?

The answer: Are there poseurs in academia? Are there animals in the zoo?

A poseur wants you to think that he's genuine when he's a fake, and knows it. Consequently, an academic poseur wants you to think he's a genuine scholar when he's just faking it.

Paul Ryan is a policy wonk poseur.

I think that it should be self-evident that this is a common type, not only among graduate students but faculty -- even quite senior faculty.

The distinction between knowingly faking something and just not being good at something is critical. It's the personality version of plagiarism: wanting the benefits of expertise without the hard work of developing it. Empirically, however, the poseur is even worse at his job than the plagiarist is at his. The plagiarist copies expertise, but the poseur may not quite know whose expertise to copy.

How can you tell the difference? The biggest difference is that the poseur wants you to think he understands, say, deconstructionism or maximum likelihood estimation. And he'll even know many of the keywords, and he'll do a lot of the low-cost things that you'd do if you were a serious student of the subject. (In the quant methods version, this would be signing up for the Gary King twitter feed; I don't know what it would be for the po-mo stuff, but let's say that it's wearing only black.) And he may even ask questions--"How are you handling endogeneity?", "Did you try robust standard errors?"--that are very similar to the ones that someone who really knows his stuff would ask.

But on close interrogation, you'll note that the questions are always the same, and that his discussions of the subject always hinge on lore, not logic. (All academic fields have rich traditions of lore, which is the oral culture of the discipline. Lore reflects the actual practice of the bulk of researchers working in a field. Typically, lore is to the discipline's formal methodology as the religion of the faithful is to the theology of the clergy.) And that lore itself may be outdated: anyone who claims to like methods but has a preoccupation with R-squared, for instance, probably doesn't understand what R-squared actually means, and certainly hasn't done the very basic reading on the subject of interpreting linear regression.

There will be other signs: interpreting logit regression results without understanding that MLE coefficients don't represent a constant marginal result is a trivial matter, but a common one. Another will be recommending the newest gee-whiz method in a case where it's not really appropriate--but it will impress the senior faculty around the table, who themselves have never heard of the new method and are sure to think that anyone who has is a frood who really knows where his towel is.

By now, you may be wondering if you are a poseur. It's possible. I have been a poseur; I have denied my poseurness; I have overcome it. And the secret to overcoming it is the essence of Socratic wisdom--admitting that you know nothing--leavened with a bit of Buddhist humility (that is, letting go of your attachments to impressing others). But if you believe that there is a royal road to understanding, then you should know that you are a poseur.

Am I ready to teach?

The question, from a backbencher: The Rt. Hon. P.M. will begin teaching his first solo university course next week. Is he ready?

The answer: As much as can be hoped.

The logistics are pretty well done. I spent the Fourth of July indoors, revising my syllabus for the Introduction to International Relations course I'll be teaching in a few days. I ordered the textbooks for the course months ago, so my biggest questions were whether I had to add too many additional readings (not really) and which of the dozens of articles I'd read on nuclear war were suitable for freshmen and sophomores. (Not many.) In what may yet prove to be a triumph of whimsy over experience, I also made Dr. Strangelove an "optional" reading--or, rather, viewing--for that day, which means that I now have to reserve a screening room.

What I'm most nervous about, of course, are the basics--whether the course is paced well enough, whether I can actually recall some of the treacherous details (like the precise ordering of the payouts of Prisoner's Dilemma), whether I'll be able to connect with a remarkably diverse group of students. The operationalization of this nervousness has come down to worrying about trivial things, like what template to use for my Keynote presentations or whether I can trust the University to consistently have technology unlocked in my room.

Behind this is my desire to be the Ultimate Teacher, who gives the sort of presentations that a cyborg melding of Randy Pausch, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and Steve Jobs unveiling a new iPad would only dream of. This is unlikely to happen, although I think that I am a competent lecturer, for two reasons:

1. I am a competent lecturer, but not THAT great.
   
2. Giving a course is not like giving a presentation.
   

The first reason is easy enough to understand. The second is, I think, something that people misunderstand for reasons of both left and right deviationism. The right-deviationist attitude is that a course is essentially a transmission of ideas from the sage on the stage to the groundlings below. The objections to this are easy to list, and the most important is that this is not, actually, how people learn.

But the left-deviationist approach has just as many, if not more, flaws. It draws from the idea that courses are supposed to be some sort of egalitarian, Montessori-like exercise in self-development and growth. This, I think, might well be true, but practicable only in courses of, say, five or six--roughly the same size as graduate seminars, and for much the same reason. The expectations that this approach holds out are simply unrealistic. I have 42 students. I can't get to know them all as individuals in any sort of holistic manner in the span of five weeks; there simply isn't enough time. And at least some of the students, as a statistical regularity, will not be interested in sharing a deep learning experience--they would just like to pass.

So, this is the dilemma of the large lecture course. It's impossible to do much more than lecture for the bulk of the instructional time, but we also know that real, in-depth learning does not come from engagement with learning. Rather, as Richard Mitchell once noted, "It is not as we read the page that education illuminates us; it is when we look up." But I can't do that in the large lecture course. How, then, to avoid this Scylla and Charybdis? Well, in the first place, I do intend to take Andrew Gelman's advice about conference presentations: "Don't try to blow them away, just do something solid."

Some of my lectures are, I think, going to be pretty good. But I want them all to be good and thorough expositions of the important arguments that help students go beyond the reading and help them analyze the questions that we are dealing with.

In fact, that may serve as a nice mission statement for university lecturers: Don't teach the reading, teach the questions. We don't get into this business to engage with "The Literature," and I suspect that I am not alone in finding much of "The Literature"--that mythical, corpulent, ancient, ever-rotting leviathan--to be deathly dull. Rather, we find the world itself to be exciting, and the puzzles we try to solve to be fascinating.

This post has been nothing more than an excuse to link to Robert Morrison's talk on "The Lecture System in Teaching Science", which says everything I've wanted to say much better. So you should probably read that. But if you don't read the whole thing, at least read this:

What makes a teacher stimulating? Is it really the elegant presentation of a beautifully organized lecture? The students may admire a performance like that, and enjoy it as a tour de force; the lectures may be enormously popular and play to packed houses — but are admiration and passive enjoyment really what is wanted? What we really want to do is strike a spark in the students' minds. We want to reveal to them the beauty of ideas and concepts and rationality. The teacher and his personality play the key role in this. But it is not the teacher's wit and polish and delivery that are important. It is the teacher's enthusiasm for the subject that is enormously contagious. It is the students' seeing how a mind better trained than theirs approaches an intellectual problem. It is the intense pleasure the students get when they are led, like Socrates' slave-boy, to use, really use, their own minds. Surely, this is the kind of stimulation that we are looking for.

Now, like a real professor would, I'm going to go do research.

Is college worth the cost?

The question, from the Honorable Mr. Phillips [Freakonomics blog]: "Is college worth the cost?"

The answer: I do not know, but I have some ideas about how to answer the question.

The first point is that we should begin by disaggregating whether all college diplomas are worth the same. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that we agree that degrees differ at the broadest level first by subject area (mathematics probably the most challenging, fashion design probably the least) and then by university quality (Harvard probably the best, Fort Snot Mid-State University and Cooking College probably the worst).

The second is that we should realize that college degrees are, at least to some degree (so to speak), positional goods even beyond rankings and subject. That is, the classic economist's signalling argument--that mere completion of a (say) University of Southern Indiana degree may signal something more valuable than dropping out of Cornell a year early--does hold. One of my favorite examples of this is a job posting (long since closed) from Penny Arcade, which included the following lines:

"And here are some other things we’re using to weed people out. It’s
not fair. I know. Life’s not fair.

- A Bachelor’s degree is preferred. I don’t care what it’s in.
- 2-3 years experience in a professional workplace as a designer
- You should probably be a fan of Penny Arcade. Probably. Yeah. "

PA, of course, was founded by two guys who never completed any post-secondary education. (Note: Actually, one of them may have, but I'm a thousand miles away from my reference books here.) And not that there's anything wrong with it! There are different standards for "talent" and "entrepreneurs" than for the people they employ, and that is how it should be. The point, however, is precisely that even Holkins and Krahulik (and Robert Khoo, in this case) are insisting on the credential as a credential and not for its "value." Cornell and USI are indeed equivalent here.

How would you disentangle these different strands? I'm not going to post the different empirical research here, both for reasons of time and also for reasons of not being at an IP address with clean access to JSTOR, but I think the readership knows that the arguments are actually a little bit more nuanced than the normal ones we hear thrown around. Suffice it to say that estimating the causal effect of attendance at Harvard versus Michigan is a little bit easier than estimating the causal effect of attending Wayne State versus not attending at all. Some clever empirical estimations have been done, but they are necessarily long-term (e.g., the ones exploiting the Vietnam draft lottery) and not necessarily relevant to today's marketplace.

That's important, because the fundamental driver for this question is now frankly financial. As it should be. In no other field of our normal experience, even including medicine, do we throw around so much money with so little idea of the benefit. When it comes to medicine, at least we have some confidence that more money may equal more life. For the Harvard/Michigan question, though, I'm not sure that we know how to answer that -- or whether the answer for someone at the 99th percentile is different for someone at the 99.99th percentile, or whether the economic benefits from attending Harvard have more to do with the social status of going to Natalie Portman's alma mater or more to do with the fine faculty. I mean, I think we all have private theories, but we don't really have any proof.

And that is the biggest problem here. The social scientific data is at least ambiguous about the effect of attending for most people, and certainly offers no direct advice about what people should major in. And yet the voices of authority that parents and their college-bound offspring listen to are uniform in their encouraging people go to college immediately and rarely draw a distinction between high- and low-quality schools (as opposed to high- and low-cost schools).

My caveats above aside, I am certain that a degree from the University of Oklahoma is better than one from Oklahoma State, and that one from Oklahoma State will travel better than one from Southwestern Kentucky Bible College. (I apologize if there is a SKBC.)

The data may be ambiguous, after all, but the costs are not. In the era of non-dischargeable student debt, that should be a real concern.

(There is a post that readers should read, and which I am including here so I don't lose it: Andrew Gelman offers some observations on the state of our knowledge about college degrees and how not to conduct a quantitative counterfactual.)

To be selfish for a moment: Most troubling, however, for a graduate student is this bullet point from Phillips's post:

Only a quarter (24%) of college presidents say that, if given a choice, they would prefer that most faculty at their institution be tenured. About seven-in-ten say they would prefer that faculty be employed on annual or long-term contracts.

Are we really moving toward a world in which public school teachers are going to have more job security and better pay than college faculty? I don't mean to be peevish, but this certainly triggers some destructive and non-productive feelings--like the feeling that if university faculty, for whom tenure was designed and for whom tenure has a real academic purpose, are going to be denied tenure while kindergarten teachers enjoy it, then maybe I'll just take a job at McKinsey after all.

Research professors on film

Alyssa wonders how best to portray research professors on film.

The answer, of course, is that Chuck Lorre has already solved this problem in The Big Bang Theory, using a Rocky montage. (I'd embed the YouTube link, but embedding is disabled.)

That depiction, of course, is not entirely accurate. In my experience, it misses two critical points: (a) caffeine and (b) occasional profanity. But the essential elements -- silence, nerds, concentration, and a dry-erase board -- are all there.