Harvard and David Hogg

Parkland survivor David Hogg, one of the most talented of that talented crop of activists, just got into Harvard. I’m happy for him. He was immediately attacked on social media by haters who called him unqualified. But he is a perfect example of Harvard’s long-standing admissions process, the “holistic” method they’re currently being sued over. That method is once again favoring a white kid. But it’s a reasonable and smart decision by Harvard.

The first thing to remember is that only about 10% of Harvard students are admitted strictly on academics. Most people assume it’s a hundred percent. It’s ten. (This figure is from Jerome Karabel’s excellent book, The Chosen. I should disclose that I do almuni interviews for Harvard, but am not using anything I’ve been told by Harvard itself for this post.)

Even that ten percent won’t necessarily have the best GPAs; Harvard turns down hundreds of valedictorians every year. A perfect GPA doesn’t hurt, but it’s not what Harvard’s looking for. Those ten percent are academically exceptional “in Harvard departmental terms,” meaning exceptional in a particular field of study. These are the students admitted to make the faculty happy. Some are strong in other areas as well. But some are “pointy, in admissions lingo, rather than “well-rounded.” Think of a physics prodigy who’s only a B+ student in English, or the future Pulitzer-winning historian who just gets by in calculus class. The ten percent of “scholars” are not the kids who always do everything they can to get a hundred on every piece of homework, but the kids who show some exceptional talent and might eventually help an academic field of study move forward.

Hogg’s application is private, and none of us know how it looks. But it’s not impossible that he’s in that ten percent. He intends to major in Government (what other schools usually call political science), and it may be that his hands-on experience in political organizing, and the skill with which he’s done it, is an asset that the Harvard Government Department wants in its classrooms. I am not saying that is the case; I have no idea.

Of course, the odds are nine out of ten that he’s in the rest of the admitted class. What are those people admitted for, beyond their grades? Things like “leadership” and “character,” which may sound like empty buzzwords but which schools like Harvard take deadly seriously. Harvard’s core business is producing future leaders. Business leaders. Political leaders. Leaders in the arts. Leaders of non-profits. Religious leaders, if they can. They are successful and rich because their alumni, as a group, are rich and successful. They are not joking about this. And they have spent a lot of time and money fine-tuning their strategies for finding kids who will be successful alumni some day.

They admit athletes in sports that will never make money, because they believe that leadership on the playing field prepares people for leadership in other fields. Does looking for future business leaders by recruiting the captains of prep-school fencing teams sounds crazy? Mark Zuckerberg was his prep school’s fencing captain. It sounds crazy, but it works.

Harvard admits kids who led a huge number of clubs at their high school; at various points their admissions office has referred to kids like this as “a wheel” or “Mr. School.” (Think “Mr. [Name of School].”) They’re not looking for kids who’ve just done a lot of extra-curriculars; they’re looking for kids who show the ability to engage and motivate others. They’re looking for people who are already showing leadership skills. They know it’s easier to develop students whose personalities incline them toward leadership roles than trying to teach “leadership” to students with very different personalities. Harvard has introverts, for sure, but there are a lot of extroverts on that campus.

Harvard also deliberately recruits students who’ve shown leadership in charity and volunteer work. There is, or used to be, a nickname for these applicants, too, taken from the building in Harvard Yard set aside for students’ charity work. Again, we’re not talking about the kids who participate in the annual blood drive, but about the kid who founded the annual blood drive.

Harvard also looks for kids with special artistic talents. If they took Matt Damon over someone with slightly better grades, that wasn’t a mistake. They did that on purpose. Did Yo-Yo Ma have the best GPA in his high school class? It could not possibly matter. Admitting Yo-Yo Ma was the right move and it has worked out beautifully.

(If you’re a role-playing nerd, or a recovering role-playing nerd, let me break it down for you: Harvard doesn’t just look for intelligence, or even for intelligence and wisdom. It looks for charisma.)

If a university obsessed with looking for signs of leadership gets an application from David Hogg, who has already shown enormous poise and leadership on a national stage, the outcome should involve exactly zero surprise. Harvard searches high and low for kids who might someday show the kind of leadership that David Hogg has been showing in public every day now for months. He is the closest thing to a sure bet that the Harvard Admissions Office will ever see. If you’re screening for leadership, that kid is a slam dunk, the surest bet the Harvard Admissions Office could have.

Politics has nothing to do with this. Harvard wants to produce leaders from every party. There are plenty of conservative senators who went to Harvard. And frankly, as a Harvard alum who wishes the school well, I couldn’t be happier about this choice. That kid has far too much potential to let Yale have him. I want him to be one of us. So, bravo, Harvard. And David: welcome to the family.

The Three Myths of Reverse Racism in College Admissions

Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in the tiny teacher's room of the little parochial school where I taught, talking to a few other people about the news. The principal's administrative assistant said something about affirmative action letting unqualified black students into Harvard, and I asked her if she thought that was a real worry. She actually gasped. "Don't you?" she asked, in shocked disbelief that I could not be concerned, nay scandalized, about such a well-known social problem.

But I had just graduated from Harvard the year before, and I had never seen these unqualified African-American students that everyone was always talking about. Was Harvard secretly running another secret campus, where they hid all these unqualified minority students people kept mentioning? Or, if the people I had met in college were the supposedly unqualified minority students, why had they kept kicking my ass in chess? It made no sense.

Where I'd gone to college didn't make any difference to my co-worker, who knew what she knew. After all, everybody knew it. The Unqualified Black Harvard Student was a truth universally acknowledged, something everyone accepted as a proven fact, at least among white people who had never been to Harvard.

Now it seems the Trump-and-Sessions Justice Department is planning to investigate American colleges and universities for their alleged racist crimes against white applicants. So the Myth of the Unqualified Minority College Student is going to get official government backing, reality be damned.

This changes the game from the past decades of anti-affirmative lawsuits, which have been brought by private individuals and have traditionally had a plaintiff problem, in that the applicants suing whatever school always turn out to be marginal candidates at best. We can call this the Myth of the Wronged White Genius, a necessary companion to the Myth of the Unqualified Minority. The implication is that there are a number of brilliant white students, who would obviously be accepted immediately into whatever school they apply to except that they have been done wrong by by those Unqualified Minorities. Everyone knows about these people, too: unmistakable stars who would be open-and-shut, slam-dunk admissions cases. But somehow when it's time to sue a college these applicants, the Wronged White Superstars, never show up.

Instead, the plaintiffs in affirmative action lawsuits are people who either would, at best, squeak in at the bottom of an admitted class (as in the case of Allen Bakke) or, as in the absurd case of Abigail Fisher, a student whose own lawyers had to admit she would not get into the university of her choice even if race were not an issue. Bakke v. California did eliminate quotas; UC Davis Medical School was setting aside 16 of its 100 med-school berths for minority applicants, in a system not terribly different from set-asides schools had reserved for veterans and other favored categories. So even in Bakke's best case for his argument he would be, at the very best, in the bottom 16% of the entering class.

Now, we have only Allen Bakke's own word that he would have gotten in if not for those 16 slots. He was convinced this was true. But even so, that makes Bakke at the very best 85th out of a hundred. And Bakke would only be 85th if  every single minority applicant were less qualified than Bakke on paper, an assertion with neither facts nor probability on its side. So the heart of Bakke's own claim is that, by his own lights, he should be in the bottom tier of admitted applicants, the 90-something best applicant out of 100.

Plaintiffs like Bakke (or Grutter, or Gratz) tend to be bubble applicants. Anti-affirmative-action lawsuits, by their basic logic, are about contesting the last slot admitted to a particular program. The argument is, and has to be, that the plaintiff has been done wrong by offering any affirmative action, because the affirmative action applicants booted the plaintiff out of that last available space. So the plaintiff is by definition someone whose best realistic hope was just barely to squeeze under the wire.

That means even the best anti-affirmative-action plaintiff is someone who might or might not get into a school or program any given year, depending on who else applied. The 96th-best applicant one year might be the 106th-best next year, because every year a different batch of people apply. And we should add that rankings like this don't work out transparently, so that one admissions officer might rank an applicant the 95th best and another admissions officer, equally qualified and equally well-intentioned, might rank the same person 105th.

The argument isn't just "If not for affirmative action, I would have gotten into medical school." It is, and has to be, "If not for affirmative action I would have just barely made it into medical school." That's not the world's most rousing chorus.

Lately, anti-affirmative action groups have tried to resort to finding Asian-American plaintiffs, as in this recent piece from the New York Times. Of course, the NYT piece leads off with an apparently very qualified student who is not actually suing Harvard, as the NYT only admits near the bottom of its story. The Times also mysteriously fails to mention that this is not the first time Harvard has been sued over accusations that it should admit more Asian-Americans; we actually know a good deal about Harvard's admissions processes because of discovery from that previous lawsuit. Oh, and Harvard won that earlier lawsuit about this issue, so that might have been something the Times story mentioned, too.

But in any case, the Asian-American-plaintiff gambit doesn't really advance the case that affirmative action is discrimination against whites. The heart of that argument is that colleges are allegedly depressing the number of Asian-American students, and that someplace like Harvard should be 40% Asian-American instead of a mere 20 to 25%. That would lead to fewer white students, not more. This argument is basically that so-called liberal schools are already discriminating in favor of white applicants.

Now, the new Department of Justice is going to go for the gusto and claim anti-white discrimination. This may get around the problem of white plaintiffs with mediocre test scores by making the federal government itself the plaintiff and rendering all of the issues more abstract. Instead of arguing in court for a real but not-overwhelmingly-qualified white person, they can make the case about the imaginary wrongs done to all white people and bring the strictly imaginary Wronged White Geniuses, who would be academic stars if not for those pesky minorities, back into the conversation.

The strongest anti-affirmative-action cases have been against public universities, which are arms of the government. The case that an outside party can dictate the policies of a private university, like Harvard or Yale or your local small liberal-arts college, is a lot murkier. Also, anti-affirmative-action suits have generally, although not always, done better in cases of law or medical school applications instead of undergraduate admissions. This is because professional schools look at a smaller and more quantifiable set of qualifications and leave out murky questions like "character" and "promise."

That brings us to the third big anti-affirmative action myth, the Myth of the Clear Ranked Order. This is the assumption that every stack of college or grad-school applications can clearly be sorted in order of quality, from #1 to #103 to #19,346. But it never works like that. No healthy college admissions pool is going to have an applicant who is clearly and unambiguously better than everyone else in the pool. (That would be a sign that your school is getting an application from a student it usually couldn't land, so you're probably having recruiting trouble already.) And there's never, ever a clear line demarcating the last applicant who gets in from the first applicant who doesn't. That's always a judgment call, and another committee another year might swap around who just made it and who just missed.

The more accurate way to think about applicants is in groupings. There's a group you'd be very happy to have, another group that will clearly get in. There's also a group, which you'd always like to be small, of people who have no hope at all of getting in, and a group of people who are okay but who you are clearly not going to find the space for considering who else is in the pool. But these groupings will never coincide perfectly with the number of spaces available. If you have 100 spaces, or 2000 spaces, or 4000 spaces, you are never going to get exactly 100 or 2000 or 4000 applications from people you obviously want to admit and then a sharp drop off to much less qualified people. There will always be a batch of people who might have made it in and might not have.

This is most obviously true when schools are looking like character, leadership, originality, and so forth, and when they are judging things like extracurricular activities, letters or recommendation, and personal essays. Those things have to be judged qualitatively. Are all those clubs the student is in just resume-padding, or is there something real and interesting going on? In the school orchestra because you think colleges would like that, or because you're really interested in music? That has to be a judgment call, but every admissions office also has to make it.

But this is also true of academic qualifications. If selective colleges reduced everything to a question of GPAs and scores, they would not be happy with who they got. They would believe that they'd let in some people who weren't actually as smart as many of the people they turned away. (There are colleges, of course, where it is just about grades and scores, but those are schools who aren't finding enough students they want at all; they are simply screening out people who are likely to flunk, and taking everyone else.) Take it from a white kid, with no legacy or athletic preference, who got into Harvard without straight As. Harvard took me over kids with better GPAs, including my own valedictorian and class president, for essentially academic reasons. Now, they may have been mistaken, and you don't have to agree with them. But other admissions offices made a similar mistake about me that year, and there's no sign of any nefarious motive. They just thought I would be a good college student.

This is all to say that suing a school like Harvard over alleged discrimination against white kids will get murky very fast.  It's not just grades and scores. It's also the classes the students took, the rigor of the school they go to, what their letters of recommendation say, the quality of their essays. You are not going to find that mythical Clear Ranked List running from 1 to 1600 or 1 to 2000. It just does not exist. Now, Harvard and schools like this certainly exploit the murkiness of this process to do what they want with admissions, including giving advantages to athletes and legacies, and even giving special preferences to academically undistinguished children of major donors. (Hint: rhymes with "Mar-ed Bushner.") But they also use that messy, murky process in pursuit of intellectual and academic excellence.

Now, my high school had a long drought during which we didn't get any applicants into Harvard at all, for something like 25 years, which really stings when you're a school in Massachusetts. It wasn't just my year's valedictorian that they turned down. They turned down years and years of our valedictorians. (I'm happy to say that my old high school now places some students at the Big H every year or two.) So, the year before I got in, some people decided that the only hope was ... affirmative action. A lot of hopes got pinned on one of the school's few (at that time) African-American students, someone whom I will call "Edward." Edward wasn't going to be valedictorian or salutatorian, but he was in the Honors Society, and ... you see where this was going. Some teachers and administrators, and some students, reasoned that although our white A students couldn't get in, a black A- student would. It was the Myth of the Underqualifed Minority, put into practice with the best intentions in the world. Everyone involved genuinely liked him, thought he was smart, and wished him the best.

Some people believed, as a totally self-evident fact, that Edward's race would make him a lock for admission. Once, when he was fretting about whether or not he'd get in, I heard his best friend tell him, in a get-real-already tone, "Edward. You're black." That simple. (The assumption baked into the Myth of the Unqualified Minority, of course, is that Harvard has to take A- students as the only way to reach its affirmative action goals. I mean, how many black A students could there be in America? No one at my school would have accepted that premise had it been presented to them explicitly. But that's what the Myth of the Unqualified Minority implies.)

Edward did not get in, of course. He went to another very good school, but he may never have been in serious competition for Harvard. But because so many people around him, including adults, had bought into the Myth of the Underqualified Minority and sold it to him, Edward was set up both for deep disappointment and, worse still, for guilt. After he got rejected, I literally heard him say, "I feel like I let everybody down."

You didn't let us down, Edward. It was the other way around.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

No, Colleges Still Teach Shakespeare

You may have seen news stories, timed for Shakespeare's more-or-less birthday, claiming that top American colleges have stopped requiring Shakespeare. This is not news (nothing about college requirements has changed lately), and not really true. The study uses a very specific and misleading definition which allows it not to count most of the ways that Shakespeare is actually taught in college English departments. The study refuses to accept anything but a required stand-alone Shakespeare-only course as a "Shakespeare requirement." If Shakespeare is only part of required courses, that doesn't count. And if a department has a requirement that drives most of its students into Shakespeare courses, that doesn't count either. This is misleading.

Worse, the study then rants about the various things that can be "substituted for Shakespeare" at various schools, cherry-picking various electives with titles like "Detective Fiction," "Digital Game Theory," or "Creatures, Aliens, and Cyborgs" and fulminating that these trendy classes are replacing Shakespeare. This isn't just misleading. It's outright dishonest. The authors of the study, having read the requirements for the fifty-two schools they're discussing, know full well that these courses don't fulfill the requirements that would otherwise demand Shakespeare. The schools offering the three courses I just named require courses in earlier literature, and those courses do NOT fulfill them. The authors of the study know this. They just pretend not to.

Now, I myself could only benefit from more Shakespeare requirements. I'm a professor of Shakespeare, after all. And I certainly value Shakespeare at least as much as the folks who wrote this study did. But this report is a big nothing. When you take out the dishonesty and spin, it's less than nothing.

A little background: this study is from ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a conservative organization dedicated to having trustees and donors micromanage academic decisions that have traditionally been left to faculty. (ACTA says it's for "Academic Freedom & Excellence," but in practice it seems upset that academics have too much freedom to make academic judgements.) And ACTA, for its own reasons, limited its study to the fifty-two highest-ranked colleges and universities in the US, according to the US News & World Report rankings. (They got fifty-two by taking the top 25 "National Universities" and top 25 "Liberal Arts Colleges"; because of ties in the rankings, that's a bit more than 50). So they didn't bother looking at the schools the vast majority of students actually attend, which might or might not say something about ACTA's own biases.

What is notable is that the focus on "Top 25" schools means that ACTA included three schools that do not have English majors. West Point, Harvey Mudd, and MIT have "literature" majors instead. MIT's literature major has two tracks, one of which looks like a traditional English major (and thus tracks its students toward studying Shakespeare) and one of which doesn't. The others have more general literature requirements that aren't necessarily focused on literature in English at all, which makes the lack of a Shakespeare requirement not terribly newsworthy. French and Classics majors mostly aren't required to take Shakespeare either. That didn't stop ACTA from listing these schools without English departments as schools where the "English major" doesn't include Shakespeare.

Now, of the 52 schools that ACTA deigned to examine, it's true that only only 4 require a stand-alone course in Shakespeare-and-nothing-else. But there are three things that ACTA isn't telling you about:

1. Historical period requirements. Nearly every school that ACTA surveyed, 47 of 52, requires English majors to take at least one course, and sometimes three or even four courses, in literature written before a certain date. For more than 40 of those schools, that date is 1800 or earlier; for another half-dozen or so, it is before 1900, 1850, or 1830.

What does this mean? It means that to "get out" of taking Shakespeare you have to take something else from a similar time period, or earlier. There are about six schools on ACTA's list where you can hypothetically get off soft by reading Bleak House, Moby-Dick, or Wordsworth. (But to be fair, it would be pretty hard to fulfill all of Swarthmore's three required pre-1830 courses with writers from 1800-1830.)

At the rest of the schools, the vast majority that ACTA looked at, the choice isn't between Shakespeare and Lady Gaga. It's between Shakespeare and Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, or - at some places - Shakespeare and enormous quantities of Alexander Pope.

In practice, most students fulfill these requirements either with a Shakespeare course or with a thematic course that include a hefty amount of Shakespeare. (I once taught a course called "Love and Sex in Renaissance Literature" that included his sonnets, two of his plays, and his long poem Venus and Adonis, but also Sidney's sonnets, Spenser's sonnets, a chunk of The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and healthy servings of poems by Donne, Herrick, Wyatt, Surrey, Petrarch, etc. This, by ACTA's lights, is "not a course focused on Shakespeare." And the word "sex" was in the title! Gadzooks!)

If students don't fulfill these requirements with Shakespeare, they're often taking a course in early literature that's harder, less popular, or both. Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, and Donne are all more difficult for undergraduates to read, and more challenging on a line-by-line level, than Shakespeare is. And here's an insider's tip: the 18th century, although wonderful, is the least popular literary period for English majors. It's much easier to get students to read King Lear than Clarissa.

This is not dumbing down the curriculum. Not by any means.  English majors graduating having "only" read Paradise Lost and not Hamlet is not a big crisis. But ACTA doesn't want to count these schools as "requiring Shakespeare." Smith College makes its students take TWO of three single-author courses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Those who avoid Shakespeare by reading Chaucer and Milton aren't going to be especially ill-educated. And in practice, almost all of the students will take Shakespeare and one of the other two. What does ACTA say about this requirement? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required." Oh no, the sky is falling!

2. Survey Courses. These are less popular than they once were, but several schools on ACTA's list still require students to take survey courses that include Shakespeare. Those courses have titles like "Major Poets," "Literary History," or "British Literature to 1700."

Most of the few actual English departments that don't require courses before 1700, 1800, or 1850 require a survey instead. Some schools require a number of courses before 1800 AND the survey. So students do get taught Shakespeare, in a way that's required for all majors.

This doesn't count for ACTA, either. So, for example, Yale University requires its majors to take THREE courses before 1800 AND two survey courses: "Major British Poets from Chaucer to Donne" (the semester that includes Shakespeare) and "Major British Poets from Milton to T.S. Eliot." But students can get out of the surveys by taking four advanced courses on the poets on the survey, two from each semester. So you could theoretically get a B.A. in English from Yale by reading The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost instead of Macbeth. But it would be a pretty rare student who does. Yale actually has a fairly conservative curriculum. But ACTA's verdict? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required."

With requirements like that, does it have to be?

3. Limits to the number of Shakespeare classes.

Since the whole point of ACTA's polemic is that Shakespeare is being done wrong and pushed out of the curriculum, you'd think that they would point out that FIVE of the schools on their list limit the number of Shakespeare courses that can count toward requirements. (When we throw out the schools without English majors, that's 10% of ACTA's total.) At Bates, Bowdoin, Columbia, Princeton, and Rice students can only use ONE Shakespeare course to fulfill the pre-1800 requirements.

This doesn't mean that students at those schools aren't allowed to take more than one Shakespeare class. It means that the second, third, and so on Shakespeare courses are just electives. More importantly, it means that those schools require their students to read challenging early literature besides Shakespeare. The problem isn't that students at these schools are avoiding Shakespeare. The problem is that they use Shakespeare to avoid Chaucer, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton. So students have to be steered to reading more widely in early periods.

These schools don't require Shakespeare because Shakespeare is doing just fine on his own. Also, the dining halls at these schools do not require dessert. That's not some liberal War on Pudding. That's because the requirement isn't necessary in the first place.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Confidence, Rejection, and Criticism: Advice from Actors to Academics, Part Three

Christmas week is especially hard for young academics trying to get a job, especially in literary studies. The annual rhythm of the job search means that most first-round interviews (the interviews that take place at major disciplinary conferences over the winter) get scheduled during the first half of December. By this time of year, grad students (and recent PhDs) looking for a job are counting the meager number of schools where their applications are still active; they may have applied to dozens of jobs and gotten one or two first-round interviews to show for it. Worse yet, many people are getting nothing but the long and lengthening silence that tells them, day by painful day, that nothing is happening for them this winter.

And then many of those eager job-seekers, who've been tops of their classes all of their lives, have to fly home for Christmas and explain to their family that they're not getting a job this year, that they're not even in the running for a job this year. The darkest time of year is pretty dark for people in my business.

So, since it's that time of the year, it's time for a third installment of "Career Advice from Actors to Academics," inspired by Robert Cohen's classic book of advice Acting Professionally. As I wrote in part one, an academic career has become like a career in the arts because of the scarcity of work and the pervasive rejection. So academics, especially newer academics, can learn from our brothers and sisters in the theater (and in the other arts as well), who've been dealing with rejection and penury since back in the day.

But the hard truth is that artists are better prepared for rejection than scholars are. Few arts careers have the kind of heartbreaking schedule that the academic job search demands, where two-thirds of your job prospects for the year can evaporate within a window of a few weeks. Actors get rejected all year round. So do writers, dancers, sculptors, painters, and filmmakers. A stand-up comic who lives in the right city and works hard enough can get rejected every single night of the week. But none of those artists have to watch most of their chances for the year slip away just before Christmas. Artists get to space out the rejections better, and to inure themselves on a daily and weekly basis. (When I was an undergraduate theater bum, every show for the semester did make its casting decisions during the first week of the term, which is the only thing in my life that even remotely prepared me for the annual MLA conference.)

More importantly, almost every working artist, including the ones who've gotten an MFA, have started racking up rejections from their early twenties at least, while scholars don't begoin to experience the hard knocks until they've been systematically unprepared for it. Every actor gets turned down at auditions constantly, and many who enter a graduate acting program have been turned down many times before they get to school. The same goes with writers and other artists. After all, if people were already putting you on Broadway, you wouldn't go to acting school. But in fact, people are not putting you on Broadway. So actors who get a graduate degree have had to toughen up at least a little; they're prepared for the hard realities of the market because they've already tested them.

The scholar's career path is completely different. The rejections don't start until after you get your PhD. Graduate school is tough in all kinds of ways, but it promises to reward all of the deserving, as the job market will never do. If you earn a degree, you will get that degree.The working life of many doctoral students is a long series of A grades, scholarships, fellowships, and departmental awards until graduating with the doctorate. Then the working life suddenly turns into a long, bitter round of pummeling rejection. Most people aren't ready for that at all. How could they be?

The only thing that will get you through is confidence, which is not at all the same as ego. Let's go to Cohen's working definition:

Confidence is the power a person has over his or her own personality; it allows the person to accept criticism and at the same time rise above it.

Note the importance here of accepting criticism without feeling belittled by it. The false confidence of a heavily-defended ego cannot take criticism at all. But an ego like that can never survive an artistic, or an academic, career. You have to have a healthy perspective that can take criticism on board (although you don't necessarily allow any given critic to override your judgment completely) and find ways to use it.

It's important here to distinguish between criticism and rejection. If you have a fragile ego, those two things sound the same, or nearly the same. In fact, they are fundamentally different. Criticism, even if it happens to be mistaken, is almost always a gift. Someone has taken time and effort, neither of which are in great supply, in order to help you improve. Some criticism is not helpful, but all criticism is an attempt to be helpful.

Rejection does not come with criticism. It just says no, and moves along. The eerie silence that haunts some job-seekers the week before Christmas, or the brief formal rejections that some hiring departments send, don't offer any tips on how to improve.

You also need confidence to deal with the polite silence of rejection. Here is Cohen again:

 [Confidence] allows an actor to believe in the reality of his or her performance even when no one else does. A person may have all kinds of doubts about his or her potential for career success, but may not doubt that "he is an actor," that "she can act."

Note that confidence is not a prediction about results. I will be a star someday is not confidence. I am an actor, even when you've been turned down for the fifteenth audition in a row, is confidence.

In the same way, your conviction that you will get an incredible and shiny job this time out is not confidence. (In most cases, it is simply magical thinking, which is unhealthy.) Confidence, in the sense Cohen is using it, is not about predicting career outcomes. These businesses are too precarious for predictions like that. Confidence is not your will to believe that the plum Ivy League job on this fall's listings will be yours. Confidence is the belief that your work is valid, that your scholarship is actually a contribution. You might note the distinction here is very close to a distinction between believing in "yourself" and believing in your work as something separate from you, which I think is largely a healthy distinction.

Confidence, in Cohen's sense, is about believing that the work you do is useful and worth reading: that what you do is scholarship, no matter what the external rewards are.

I would add one further thing about weathering rejection. In all of the arts, the psychologically healthy rule of thumb is that successful artists (read: academics) get rejected all the time, and that they are rewarded only sometimes. To put it another way: you will be rejected even if your work is good, indeed no matter how good your work is, but you will never be accepted at all unless your work is good.

That means that you should usually only attach meaning to the good results, and write the rejections off as the normal cost of doing business. That would be an irrational approach in most other endeavors, but in the arts, including the scholarly arts, that approach accurately describes the real facts on the ground. If the talented are only rewarded one time in ten or twenty, then the single success is more meaningful than the nine or nineteen rejections.

If you are a struggling new academic and you are finding that the rejection is truly universal -- if, for example, you applied for three dozen jobs this fall and none of them even asked you for an additional writing sample -- then you probably need to change something about what you're doing. Most likely, there is some qualification that you need and don't have, something that you need to add to your CV in order to enter the pool of viable candidates.

But if you are getting small flashes of encouragement inside dark, watery depths of rejection, then you are perfectly rational to take the encouragement, and not the rejection, as meaningful. No one can afford to reward all of the deserving job-seekers. There are too many good people to offer them all even a first-round interview. This is the literal truth. But at the same time, no one has any need or reason to waste their own time with someone who isn't, on some level, a viable candidate. You only get asked for extra materials if your CV is up to snuff. You only get a conference interview if the committee thinks they might actually hire you. And even if you don't progress to the next round of interviews, you should remember that the people who interviewed you saw you as a professional doing real work.

There are more good people than there are rewards for good people. So even the good are only rewarded rarely. But only the good are rewarded at all. Forget the failures, because everyone fails. Remember the successes, because there is only one explanation for success.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

What College Trustees Are For

cross-posted from Dagblog

So it turns out that New York University has bought its president a summer home on Fire Island (h/t Tenured Radical). Or rather, a special foundation associated with New York University has loaned the university president, John Sexton, around a million dollars to buy a beach house, and there seems a real possibility that much of that million-dollar mortgage will eventually be forgiven, so that Sexton won't have to pay it back. NYU has also made similar vacation-home loans to other top administrators and VIP faculty, at least some of them on the same forgive-over-time plan. This represents a brave new financial frontier in higher education. No other university buys its executives second houses. This seems like an obvious story of an out-of-control administration. But more importantly, it's the story of a board of trustees failing to do its job.

A college or university's board of trustees oversees the long-term financial health of the institution. They approve the budget, keep tabs on how the school's endowment funds are being invested, hire and fire the president, monitor debt levels, and decide how much of the school's annual investment returns should be invested in running the school and how much should be reinvested in the markets. It's an absolutely necessary function.

Lately, there has been argument about how far boards' fiduciary authority extends, an argument that involves both genuine gray areas but also examples of poorly-thought-out overreach. Because their central job is financial oversight, trustees tend to be business and legal types. NYU's Board is fairly typical in that (except for two emeritus NYU presidents whose appointments may be honorary) the Board includes no one with a background in education. Barry Diller and Maria Bartiromo aren't necessarily the people you want to ask about how to teach history or which physics researchers to hire. They have (and need) a totally different kind of expertise. In the traditional arrangement, the faculty takes the lead in questions of teaching and scholarship, the administration takes the lead in daily management, and the trustees take the lead in questions of overall financial management. Some boards do seem intent on micromanaging things better left to the other two spheres (as in the recent CUNY mess, or last summer's debacle at the University of Virginia), but no matter how far a particular board believes its brief extends, fiscal oversight is its original core mission. Providing fiscal oversight is the reason any board of trustees exists in the first place. And when a board neglects that duty, bad things happen.

When the trustees don't do their jobs properly, the university administration begins to overspend on things that administrators tend to value: more administrators, higher administrative pay, more spending on big-ticket athletics (which can run up staggering deficits), and higher construction debt. University presidents have strong personal incentives to spend lots of money on large, impressive new buildings; putting up a "signature building" is considered a major achievement, and can help the president move on to a better job. Of course, raising the money for fancy new buildings really is a significant achievement, and a sign of a president's overall fundraising skill. But some university presidents don't want to wait until they've raised the necessary funds before they put up their big new construction project, or they have construction ambitions that are beyond their fund-raising skills. If the trustees don't holds the reins properly, a president can go on a building spree with borrowed money, saddling the institution with tens of millions of dollars in debt that will eventually have to come from other revenue. A healthy board should keep that from happening.

(What faculty generally want, on the other hand, is more money spent on the annual operations of the education side, including on faculty compensation but also on more faculty, more financial aid, and so forth. A university tilted to far toward faculty interests spends too much of the annual return on its endowment on the yearly operating budget and doesn't reinvest enough of those funds for the future.)

NYU doesn't blow its money on a football or basketball team. (It's Division III, which means no athletic scholarships.) It has been doing a lot of new building since Sexton took over, and is planning much more. Exactly what that means depends on the details of the financing. If Sexton has gotten donors to fund most of that construction, he's been doing exactly what the trustees hired him to do. If a lot of that construction has been financed with debt, on the other hand, that would mean the trustees haven't done their duty to the school.

On the question of executive compensation, however, NYU's Board seems to have lost its senses completely. There has already been a long history of controversy over how much NYU was spending on top executives. Buying those executives second homes ends the debate by proving the critics right.

NYU's board chairman, Martin Lipton, has written a letter to the New York Times defending NYU's practices while missing the real point. Lipton argues that the University needs to pay what it takes to attract and keep top talent, who other schools want to hire away from NYU, etc. But it's clear that Lipton doesn't get it. No one objects to paying employees what it takes to keep them. The problem is that NYU is paying certain favored people more than they could conceivably get anywhere else. It is a failure of the Board's fiduciary duty.

To get a few things out of the way: many universities, especially those in expensive real estate markets such as New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area, give their faculty housing assistance. Even some schools in fairly inexpensive areas help their faculty buy homes: for example, chipping in if the faculty buy a house in the neighborhood around campus. (Fair disclosure: none of my employers have given me housing assistance of this kind. Would I take such assistance if it was offered to me? Probably.) But if you're trying to run a world-class college in Manhattan, helping your hires with Manhattan real estate is part of hiring them. That is not crazy.

Also, just about every college provides the college president with a house, whether that's a mansion on campus or another place that the school purchases for the new hire. The college president is the school's most important fundraiser, and she or he needs a big, impressive house to throw functions for guests and donors. The house is part of the job, and the school provides it. That's not crazy, either.

But buying Sexton a beach house is crazy, because it has no market justification. This is excessive compensation because there is no market justification for it. No other school is going to steal John Sexton away by giving him a million-dollar beach house, because no other school buys someone two houses. NYU is compensating Sexton in vast excess of his market value; it's like an NFL team giving the quarterback a private jet and saying they needed to do it to keep him. They don't need to give him a jet, because no one else would give him a jet. NYU doesn't need to give Sexton two houses to keep him, because no one else would ever give him more than one free house.

But it's even worse than that. In a market where no one buys anywhere more than one house, NYU has been buying more than one house for more than one person: not just Sexton but at least one executive VP, the dean of the law school and several law and medical faculty. This suggests that the Board is totally out of its mind. It's giving an unheard-of six-or-seven figure perk, which no one else would give to any employee, to multiple employees. This is like an NFL team giving private jets to the backup quarterback, the wide receivers, and the punter. It doesn't make any sense. Most importantly, it doesn't make any business sense.

It's not even clear who the Trustees think will hire Sexton away from them. The actual market for his services at this point is surprisingly small. There aren't a lot of other universities bidding for his services, because even at actual market rates only a few other universities could afford his services, and most of them likely aren't interested.

There aren't many schools that wouldn't represent a step down from NYU, either in pay or in the desirability of the job itself. In fact, most of the richer and more famous schools pay their presidents less. (Columbia, the Ivy uptown from NYU, does seem to pay its president more; call it the Manhattan premium.) Moreover, several of the filthy-rich schools that could conceivably afford to give Sexton a raise have long traditions of only hiring presidents with a degree from their own school, or prefer to promote from within, or both. Yale and Princeton hired new presidents in the last year; both hired their own provosts. If you take the already-small pool that could afford to give Sexton a raise and that would look like a step up from NYU, and then you subtract the Princetons, Yales, etc., how many places are left? NYU's Trustees are giving Sexton things that no employer gives, for fear that he will leave them for another employer who does not exist.

Business sense is what the Trustees are for. If they're not providing that, they're worse than useless to the university. But at NYU, business sense seems to have given way to business culture. Many of the Trustees themselves are part of a culture of excessive CEO compensation, and their sense of what is "normal" for executive leadership has trumped their ability (or their will) to make a hard-nosed evaluation of actual market prices. That lack of business judgement undermines NYU's financial strength, wasting funds that should have been invested in the institution itself. They are bidding against themselves to retain people who are in little danger of leaving, and they they pay their outrageous auction prices with the University's money.

The Other Thing College Is For (and Why It Matters)

cross-posted from Dagblog

If you ask anyone what colleges and universities are for, they'll give you more or less the same answer: to educate people.  That's a good answer. It's the one I give myself. But it's only half the truth. Colleges and universities actually fulfill two separate roles. We all know about both of them. We only talk about one of them. And because of that, we misunderstand almost everything about how higher education works and how it might be improved.

Every individual college and university exists to educate: to teach people things they did not previously know. (People disagree over what the goal of education should be, but agree that education is the goal.) But colleges also confer social prestige on their graduates. Some confer a large amount, some a smaller amount, and some confer little or none. Taken together as a system, the American colleges and universities have both a teaching function and a sorting function.

I dislike the sorting function and would rather it not exist. But saying that a deeply embedded social practice ought not to exist doesn't get rid of it. Too many people are committed to it, and too many people believe in that social practice as a simple reflection of reality. American higher education labels students by the "quality" (meaning the selectivity and prestige) of the school they attended. People by and large take those labels as real indicators of students' intelligence, likely prospects, and so forth. This social labeling is part of America's class system.

We don't talk about this much, because most people don't like talking about the class system. It's difficult and embarrassing. (And before anyone finds this discussion of class upsetting or insulting, let me say two things. First, I'm not saying that some people should have more social prestige than others. I'm pointing out that in practice they do. I'm trying to describe how the system works, not endorsing it. Second, while talking to another person about their class position can be insulting and a way of putting them down, not talking about how the larger system works is a way of keeping the system in place and letting the people on top get away with things.) But even when we don't talk about class, and maybe especially when we don't talk about it, we experience it a real force in our society. We all know that Princeton alumni enjoy advantages that alumni of poor public colleges do not get. We feel it.

Our public debates about higher education are confused because we don't talk openly or think clearly about the two different functions. It's easier to pretend that colleges are doing only a single thing. But that leads us into misunderstandings because we don't acknowledge how our things really operate or, worse still, talk about one function as if it were the other.

Some people talk about the "great education" a school provides when they really mean the social cachet it provides. Some perceive socially-disadvantaged schools as genuinely providing less learning, no matter the quality of actual education there; those schools are simply "bad schools." These people conflate education and social prestige without being aware that they're doing it, and have trouble perceiving educational quality separately from educational privilege. Other people sometimes deny that anything happens at universities but social differentiation, and are prone to claiming that no actual education happens at elite schools, and so on. This is also a radical misunderstanding, and saying that nobody at Yale learns anything that people don't learn in night school is such an overstatement that it undermines the speaker's point. If two schools have different budgets and different missions, there will be real differences in educational outcomes. No one who's worked in higher education can honestly deny that.

There are schools that are good at teaching students things. There are schools that are good at giving their students social credibility. There are schools that do both well, and schools that do neither. And some can only do one. There are schools that do an excellent job of educating their students but cannot give them any social prestige. There are also, I'm afraid, schools that provide mediocre or poor educations but do better at conferring social capital.

Why does this matter? Because those two basic functions, educating and conferring prestige, have distinct and opposed economic logics.

Education is an absolute and unlimited commodity. The more you produce, the better. Teaching people things is perhaps the ultimate non-zero-sum game.

Social prestige is a relative and inherently limited commodity. The value of selectivity and exclusivity lies in the fact that most people are excluded. In a perfect world, every student could be superbly educated, but in no possible world could every student be more prestigious than every other student. "Exclusivity for all" is a nonsense slogan. Conferring prestige on students is very much a zero-sum game, where one student can only gain from what some other student, somewhere, loses.

The prestige game matters because a school's prestige is its lifeline to more tangible resources, most importantly funding and potential students. A selective institution must maintain its perceived selectivity, its reputation for being hard to get into, for fear of losing access to the most desirable students. The difficulty of getting into a school is key to the social value of getting in to it, which is why exclusive universities trumpet their obscenely low admissions rate every year. Selectivity turns out to be self-fulfilling; if you lose your reputation for selectivity, the students you want most will stop applying.

If your college or university dedicates itself strictly to education without any thought of conferring social prestige, both the school and its students will suffer for that choice. The students and the institution will be stigmatized by many people, and their actual educational achievement will often go unrecognized. Graduates will face disadvantages on the job market; the school will be starved of resources. This is the story of public higher education in America over the past thirty years.

If your university protects its students' best interests, and its own, by working to build its own prestige (and thereby the prestige it confers on its alumni), it must enter a ceaseless zero-sum competition with its peers and rivals. This competition may strike some observers as dysfunctional, but it is an entirely rational and inevitable response to the underlying system of rewards. Since prestige is always relative, any institution must constantly be trying to keep up with its peers and stay ahead of the schools behind it. Every administration tries to move up in the pecking order, which is probably the only viable strategy for not falling further down in that order. You have to run just to stand still.

Understanding the prestige competition between universities is crucial to understanding all the other intractable, poorly-explained questions in American higher education: how admissions work, why costs keep rising, why there seems to be such emphasis on research, what the current rage of enthusiasm for MOOCs is all about. Unless you separate out the questions of education and prestige, it's hard not to misunderstand these questions.

Many people, for example, talk about the "high-quality courses" from Harvard and Stanford (which have taken the lead in MOOC production) being turned into MOOCs. But that is not an evaluation of educational quality; it is an evaluation of institutional prestige. If you don't make any distinction between teaching and creating prestige, then it seems self-evident that a class from Harvard is better than a class from Underfunded State. If you think of teaching and conferring prestige as separate things, the MOOCs look like a pretty bad deal.

One of the MOOCs that gets the most press is a version of one of Harvard's most famous gut classes, a class universally known among undergraduates by a derogatory nickname. (I can't remember ever hearing a Harvard student call that course by its actual name. For practical purposes "Heroes for Zeroes" is its name.) I won't call it a bad course. (I've never taken it.) But there are plenty of classics professors at much less glorious places capable of teaching equally useful courses on the same material and making those courses more challenging for the students. Questions of prestige aside, taking that particular course at Harvard is not a better deal than taking an equivalent course at any number of less-glorious schools.

But the MOOC version of that notoriously-easy class is actually much easier than the Harvard class itself. At least students in the actual class write a few college papers, which get read and graded by teaching assistants who are studying for their own classics PhDs in the field (i.e. by smart people who can read classical Greek in the original). That's not possible for MOOCs, especially because of the Massive Open part. So someone taking the MOOC version just takes multiple-choice reading quizzes instead. And instead of a weekly face-to-face discussion session with one of those doctoral students (who actually knows what's going on in the material), there are lightly moderated online discussion boards. Now the educational product is very clearly inferior to taking a real class on the subject almost anywhere. Even a face-to-face version that's not quite as good as the face-to-face Harvard class is still much better than taking the Harvard MOOC. Talking about the MOOC as superior to a real course at Inglorious State is simply delusional. And replacing face-to-face classes at poor schools with MOOCs from rich, famous schools would be a rotten deal for students at the poor schools.

Does this mean that Harvard doesn't do as good a job educating its students as less prestigious schools do? No. It spends more resources on education than poorer schools can dream of spending, and that matters. But it is not going to spend the kind of money it spends on its own handpicked students on every random stranger who signs up for a MOOC. It could not and would not. Harvard will always save its high-cost, high-value educational products for its own students.

Cheerleaders for MOOCs talk about how they will make education more democratic, breaking down the exclusivity of the elite schools and making elite educations available for all. That has nothing to do with reality. The two most prominent MOOC providers, Harvard and Stanford, are currently wrestling for boasting rights over whose admissions rate is lower. (Stanford's rate finally fell below Harvard's by a tenth of one percent. They want everyone to know. Harvard wants everyone to forget.) Both universities are intent on turning away more applicants every year, and publicly boast about how many excellent students they have turned away. These are not schools committed to breaking down exclusivity. These are schools committed to being the most exclusive. Exclusivity is their business.

If you take a MOOC produced at Harvard or Stanford, you don't get the full educational value that the real Harvard or Stanford version of the class provides. But you get absolutely none of the prestige that Harvard and Stanford gives its students. Part of the cachet of going to those schools is getting into a school that turns down more than 94% of its applicants. MOOCs take everyone who logs on. Harvard and Stanford have enormous social value because they are clubs almost no one can get into. MOOCs are clubs that will take anyone as a member.

In fact, the point of a Harvard or Stanford MOOC is to remind you that you are NOT at Harvard and Stanford, that you are NOT one of the chosen few who gets to take the real class. They get to go to the selective school. You get to wish that you were one of them, with your nose pressed up against the monitor glass. The point is not for Harvard and Stanford to reduce the educational difference between the haves and the have-nots. The point is to increase the prestige difference between the haves and the have-nots. It isn't democratic. It isn't even very nice.

Blogging Like Chaucer

cross-posted from Dagblog

I love academic bloggers. Academic bloggers worry me sick. And the bloggers who keep me up at night are the ones who have adjunct or alt-ac jobs but are trying to move to the tenure track. Some of those people are using blogs and social media to advance their careers in ingenious ways which I would never have foreseen. But others seem, at least from my vantage, to expect or hope that their online work will help their career in specific ways that it will not and cannot. Being online can help an academic career. But it's important to be clear about what it can help and what it can't.

Last week a blogger at Inside Higher Ed, a person who has a prominent and well-established online platform but teaches off the tenure track, wrote a post about her frustrations on the job market and her sense that no amount of professional achievement would be enough to get her a tenure-ladder job. There was a brief kerfuffle, with various unhelpful comments on her original post and one great and insightful response post by John Warner. But the issue I would like to highlight is that what she calls her "rather high-profile blog," a gig writing for Inside Higher Ed two or three times every week, did not tilt the job market in her favor. There, I think is the key lesson. Even blogging from terrific, high-profile platform was not enough.

[A few important caveats here: 1. The IHE blogger's larger point that in this market you can do everything right and still not get a job is absolutely true. There are far more qualified people than there are jobs, and so qualified people go without. Everything else I say should be read with that larger problem in mind. 2. I have no intention of commenting on the IHE blogger's specific case except for the fact that blogging seems not to have served her as a job credential. She's not asking my advice.]

But here's the big takeaway:

You can't blog your way to a tenure-track professorship.You simply can't. Even a gig at IHE or The Chronicle for Higher Education is not enough. That doesn't mean blogging is not professionally useful to you. It means you need to be clear about what it's useful for.

Blogging and other social media serve academics by bringing you to other people's attention and building your professional network. It works largely as publicity for your other work, and it widens your potential audience while strengthening your connections. (I, like many bloggers, mainly do this for non-professional reasons, but this is a fair assessment of blogging's professional benefits. And because academia is a small world, you can get most of those benefits even with a pseudonymous blog.) The most successful academic bloggers I can think of, such as Tenured Radical and Historiann, are productive bloggers who've built up a strong community of readers and commenters on one hand while also maintaining a steady output of strong scholarly writing on the other. Their blogging works as what military types call a "force multiplier" for their other work, making their scholarship more effective by drawing more audience attention to it.

What blogging never does is substitute for other academic writing. It doesn't get counted as scholarship. It does not serve as an employment credential. (If you wish to argue that it should, I can't help you. I'm interested in describing what is, not what ought to be. If you wish to argue that someday your blog will be recognized as cutting-edge scholarship, I would point out that "someday" will be too late.) This distinction doesn't pose a problem to science bloggers, or to most social scientists or historians, where the difference between a journal article and a blog essay is usually self-evident. But it can be tricky for people who work in literature or cultural studies, who can be tempted to blur the distinction between writing scholarship about new media and doing other writing on new media platforms.

Blogging functions for today's academics much the way that poetry functioned for poets like Chaucer or Spenser, which is to say that you can't actually make a living at it but it can help you make connections for other jobs. Chaucer's poetry only served him economically or professionally by building his reputation at court while he looked for various civil-service gigs. Writing The Canterbury Tales was a good way to get a customs or weights-and-measures gig. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar led him to a career as personal secretary to important noblemen. Making a living off the books themselves was out of the question for both men. Poetry might have been their true vocation, but it wasn't their actual career. It was simply grease for their career. If you are an academic blogger, the same is true of your blog. You write it for personal satisfaction and to express various interests and for the pure joy of making something. The exposure it brings might also help your career. But it won't be the main driver of your career. The exposure only helps if you have other credentials to bring to the table.

Consider, for example, the Chaucer blogger himself, who writes "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog," and tweets as "LeVostreGC." He's an inventive, sophisticated, and hilarious user of social media who also holds down a junior-professor job as a medievalist. He's even published a selection from his blog as a book. But that book isn't going to be his main source of income. It didn't get him his job, and it won't get him tenure. What is has gotten him is attention from other literary scholars, whom he has impressed and made laugh. (He is very, very funny.) And people in our strange little profession know who he is, sooner than they likely would have otherwise. So being Chaucer the blogger is a bit like being Geoffrey Chaucer the Ricardian poet: it's not a living, but it does help you in your day job.

For an academic, blogging is the writing you do to get attention for your other writing. Blogging, even with my open-secret secret-identity, means that I'm more likely to be on some people's minds, and that they're more likely to come to one of my conference papers, glance at one of my articles if they see my byline, or read a review of my book. And I have professional friendships that are largely kept up through the blog and other social media. Blogging helps to get and keep you on people's radar. It's a good thing to do. But it only serves to assist your other work.

In Praise of the Writing Binge

When I got my first job, I also got a book of advice for new professors. It gave me some sensible-sounding advice about writing. Avoid binge writing, it said. Write at regularly scheduled hours and keep each session brief. Too many graduate students are used to writing in crazy binges, the authors said, rather than developing steady writing habits. Faculty had to learn to write all the time, and also had to learn to STOP writing even if things were going well. And I tried to take that advice seriously. I have always believed in good writing habits and deplored the way graduate school undermines those habits. I drank the no-binge Kool-Aid with a smile, in an appropriately moderate serving. But that advice is fundamentally wrong. If I had kept following it, my career would now be a smoking ruin.

Writing binges are things of wondrous beauty. I can't do without them, and all the work of which I'm most proud was done in flagrant violation of the no-binge rule. Part of that is simply who I am as a writer. I will never be a 45-minute-a-day writer, just as I will never be an early-morning writer no matter how much I would like to be. (I am a nocturnal writer, and that's that. Every attempt to become a virtuous early-bird ends up wasting a morning and leaving me too sleepy to work later when I'm feeling productive.) But more importantly, some things cannot be written at all without some form of binge. You cannot build them out of six hundred brief sessions, any more than you can train for a marathon by running two miles a day. Some pieces of writing demand the writer's full attention in a way that cannot be kept up forever. They require weeks or months of intense focus to complete, after which the writer goes through a rest period, working at a more relaxed pace and paying more attention to tasks that have been put off during the most strenuous writing.

Now, the book that advised me to write in brief, regular sessions could itself have been written in a number of brief, regular sessions. Its structure was simple, its prose was not complicated, and neither really were its ideas. Likewise, those books that tell you how to write your novel in one hour a day could have been written in one hour a day. But you can't actually write a good novel in one hour a day any more than you can drive from Boston to Los Angeles in one hour a day. Doing it that way is not efficient. Neither can you write a book of complicated or original scholarship in nothing but short sessions without losing the thread. To sustain a complicated argument over hundreds of pages requires sustained focus.

Obviously, you cannot write anything so complicated in a single sitting. This part of the no-binge rule makes sense. Procrastinating until the deadline arrives (or passes) and pulling an all-nighter is obviously counter-productive. So is banging out three 25-page term papers over a week and a half, as the semester system requires many graduate students to do. That is not a writer sustaining focus. You need to give a project your attention for the full time it needs. Otherwise, it's like trying to drive from Boston to Los Angeles in a single go without stopping.

I spent six weeks in the middle of this spring semester on a writing binge. It wasn't a frantic graduate-school-style binge, and it couldn't have been. I can't drop everything else and hole up in my study for days. I continued teaching and grading and going to meetings. I continued my weekly multi-state  commute to see my spouse, and continued paying attention to my spouse. I continued cooking the meals. But I arranged things during those six weeks to clear all the time that I could for writing. I set aside that time in large blocks. And I made getting my writing done during those six weeks my priority. There were no deadlines but the ones I set for myself, and the recognition that I could only keep my window of time open for so long. The results were excellent; I completed a few projects that had been almost-but-not-quite finished for seemingly forever, and then finished a monster article that I had been wrestling with for over a year. Working on that article in short, manageable stints had inched along like a glacier, taking a step back for every two steps forward, and every time I was forced to set it aside and deal with something else I would lose the thread. (Of course, spreading out the work on the articles over such a long period ensured that work on it would be interrupted repeatedly, that I would have to work on something else or have a week with almost no writing time.) In fact, the fragmentation of the writing process was damaging the piece, fragmenting its structure as the months went by. But a sustained six-week march made it into a unified whole for the first time, and got it out the door.

In the six weeks since that binge, I haven't been nearly as productive. I've had to pay the committee-work bills I'd deferred during the binge, and a bunch of new ones that have come due. One reason that I set my private deadline when I did was that I knew that the end of the semester would bring demands that would leave little time for sustained writing. Oh, I've written a lot over the last six weeks: memos, e-mails, reports, an application form, a questionnaire for a survey, even a form rejection letter. All of those writing tasks fit easily into routine, manageable sessions. And for the last six weeks, my scholarly writing has mostly happened in sessions of an hour or so at a time, which means not much gets done. But I'm less frustrated than I would be if I had hoped, unrealistically, to set aside the same amount of time or produce the same number of pages every week. Instead, I experience this crush of busy-work as simply a fallow period between one season of strenuous writing and the next. I have another week or two of grading and bureaucratic reporting, and then summer will have come in and it will be time to write hard again. When that new season starts, I have to be ready.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Harvard's Cheating Scandal and the Failure of Mentoring

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Harvard cheating scandal has ground to something like its conclusion, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 students being suspended asked to withdraw. There's been a lot of discussion, from different perspectives, about student ethics, educational standards, and what the world is coming to. (Harry Lewis's blog provides some of the smartest inside perspective, shaped by a strong personal viewpoint.) There are those who claim the students are getting a raw deal, while others view those students as symptoms of an ethical collapse. But none of those opinions are based on full information since the school, rightly, will never release the specific details of individual students' misbehavior. College students should face appropriate consequences for their actions, but they should also be allowed to live their bad decisions down.

Some people. including very smart people, are calling on the university to be more open about exactly what went wrong in this particular course (whose design did have some genuine and documented flaws which contributed to the problems). But that will not and should not happen, not because Harvard is circling its institutional wagons (although it might be), but because it has chosen to protect the faculty member involved, a junior professor a few years out of graduate school. That is a sound ethical position for them to take. In fact, Harvard refuses even to name the course or the faculty member involved (although both, at this point, are widely known), and I will follow their lead by leaving him unnamed.

Does this mean the professor is getting off unpunished? No. He is finished at Harvard. They are not protecting a powerful faculty member from the consequences of his actions. They are behaving ethically toward a faculty member they are in the process of firing. His ability to find future employment has already been severely damaged. Nothing is served by damaging his career further with a public report detailing his mistakes. He slipped up out of normal carelessness, with hideous results; there is no question of malice or dishonesty. He should be allowed to try, at least, to rebuild his career. And the truth is, Harvard may have let this faculty member down.

When a junior faculty member messes up this badly, there has almost always been a failure of mentoring. The reason might be the junior faculty member. Not everyone accepts or acts upon the guidance they are offered, and not everyone interprets that guidance well or puts it into practice effectively. But some people are also given bad guidance, or no guidance at all. That is an abdication of professional responsibility.

New PhDs do not turn into fully professional members of the faculty overnight, or by themselves. It is the responsibility of a junior professor's senior colleagues to guide her or his professional development. Everyone at Harvard knows this. And most likely some members of this professor's department were specifically assigned to be this junior colleague's mentors, as an explicit component of their teaching and advising load. Mentoring junior colleagues is not simply part of an obligation to the colleagues themselves, but to the students. If you put students in a classroom with a relatively inexperienced teacher and you give that teacher no professional feedback or guidance, bad things can happen. In this case, bad things did. A large lecture class ended with at least a quarter of the students suspended and more on probation. The school has taken a beating in the press. And a promising young scholar's career has crashed and burned so badly that I can smell the smoke from here. My question is: where were this person's senior colleagues? Where was his department chair? What advice were these people giving him?

It's clear that the course where the cheating happened had a well-established relationship as a gut, whether it developed that reputation before this faculty member took it over or after. Many of the students had taken the class because of this reputation. It is also clear that during the semester when the cheating occurred, Spring 2012, this changed to some extent, and the exam questions became significantly more difficult than the students expected them to be. But the professor is alleged to have spoken about how easy the class was at the start of the semester, which if true suggests that there was some change of direction after the course had begun. It's also well-established that the course assignments were structured in ways that made collaboration, which was explicitly forbidden, fairly easy: four take-home exams which students were given more than a week to complete, during which time they were allowed to use their books, their notes, and the internet but forbidden to discuss the exam with one another. So the exam design created substantial opportunity for cheating (which does not excuse the students, but should still have been avoided).

The faculty member in question was coming to the end of his fourth year at Harvard, which meant he was also undergoing a year-long, make-or-break review. According to Harvard's faculty handbook (which they publish online), he would have undergone an earlier review, designed to give him feedback on his progress, during his second year. If he succeeded in his fourth-year review, he would have been given another four-year contract, a somewhat better job title, and a chance to earn tenure in year seven. If he did not succeed, he would be given a last year teaching at Harvard while he looked for another job. His job title seems not to have changed, which suggests that he did not pass his review and that he will be leaving Harvard after the spring 2013 semester. Whether he was in trouble before the cheating scandal, or whether the scandal itself sank its chances, is impossible to tell.

(That this person has presumably been looking for a new job this year, during the same months in which people have been calling for full public disclosure of his role in the scandal, makes it obvious why Harvard would not release any damaging or embarrassing information. Doing so while he was actively seeking a new job would have done him material harm.)

My question is what the junior professor was told before and during his personnel reviews. Certainly, he would have been advised, repeatedly and emphatically, to pay enough attention to publishing his research. Harvard's research expectations are extremely high, and the junior professor also needed a strong research record for the outside job market (since tenure at Harvard is often a long shot). He would have been told to compile a strong teaching record as well. But exactly what was said to him about teaching is an open question. He would almost certainly have been told both that his teaching should be good, whatever "good" means, but also that he should be careful not to spend so much time on teaching that his research suffered. Teach well, but budget the time you spend teaching. That's already a pretty complicated message for a brand-new professor who's working up all his courses from scratch and learning to teach completely new kinds of courses. (No graduate student oversees a course with hundreds of undergrads and a team of teaching assistants.) But then the really thorny question: what does the university mean when it says good teaching? What actual benchmarks does that imply?

Is the goal to keep your teaching evaluation numbers high? That goal could pretty easily lead a new faculty member to turn a large lecture course into popular gut for students seeking easy A's. And teaching such a course would also be less time-consuming, for someone being urged to protect his weekly research time, than teaching a class with more challenging assignments and tougher expectations. So a young teacher creating a popular if notoriously easy class might think he was acting on the advice he had been given. On the other hand, a young teacher developing a reputation as a soft grader might also get pushback from his colleagues, and be urged to shed that reputation. Even at a school where grade-inflation is the norm, standing out as an easier-than-normal grader is risky.

I'm curious about the timing of the apparent shift in the troubled course's difficulty, with the professor allegedly talking genially about how easy the class was at the beginning of the semester but the exam questions subsequently becoming harder than students expected. It's worth noting that the professor's department would have voted on his review case early in the semester, sometime in January or February, after which the professor would have gotten a formal letter containing professional feedback. If he'd been told, officially or not, that he needed to change his reputation for easy grading, he might have felt pressure to show signs of that change as soon as possible, even if that meant breaking with sound teaching practice by holding students to a standard they did not expect.

That is mere speculation, of course. And it will remain that way, because Harvard is not going to publicize details that might damage their students or their junior employees. Certainly, those individuals should be held responsible for their decisions, and they apparently have been. But the buck does not stop with the junior members of any university community. The responsibility ultimately lies with the people who hold the power within that institution, the administration and the senior faculty, who have been specifically charged with the responsibility to oversee the educational mission. Harvard needs to look hard at itself, as any school does after a scandal. But it is the senior faculty, the people responsible for setting the standards and guiding newer faculty to meet them, who need to look hardest at themselves.

Do PhDs Expire?

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last week the annual job list for college literature professors went live, in an annual ritual I've blogged about before. And it looks like the worst list for Shakespeareans in history.

Two years ago, I used this space to explain how the 2008 crash had killed the already far-too-small job market for new PhDs, and how poor the rebound was two years later:

When the financial crisis hit in 2008 ... [w]hat had been about five dozen jobs teaching Shakespeare or Milton became four dozen, or less, although there were still the same hundred and fifty or two hundred or two hundred and seventy-five people trying to get them.

[In 2009] there weren't even four dozen jobs advertised in the fall. There were still 200 smart young Shakespeareans, Miltonists and Tamburlaine experts out there looking for work. In fact, there were more, because the forty or so who'd gotten jobs the previous year had been replaced by two or three times that many new PhDs.

 And in 2010 there were only about two dozen entry-level jobs for my younger Renaissance colleagues. Four years on from the crash, it's worse than ever: the initial job list has only 13 entry-level tenure-track jobs teaching Renaissance lit in North America. There were 19 jobs; three are outside the country; three are senior positions for people who are already well-established (as in "full professor at the University of Chicago" established). That leaves thirteen for new PhDs who want to stay in the profession and have a middle-class salary. Thirteen. Some more jobs will trickle in over the next few weeks, and there will be a smaller round of listings in the spring (if the listing can, indeed, get any smaller), but thirteen jobs for a year's crop of Renaissance lit PhDs is a famine. And it isn't just one year's crop of PhDs, but all of the accumulated jobless graduates from the past few years.

As if all this wasn't grim enough (and some other subfields are having better luck than Renaissance is, but not much), this year two universities that are hiring decided to declare that people who hadn't gotten tenure-track jobs during the crunch years were now persona non grata.

Colorado State advertised for a job teaching pre-1900 American literature, but specified that applicants had to have gotten their doctorates in 2010 or later. Their explanation was that it was an entry-level job with an entry-level salary, and they were trying to screen out people who'd already been on the tenure-track for several years. That part is fair enough. But their language obviously ruled out people who hadn't gotten a tenure-track job, and who'd been toiling away as adjuncts or lecturers since, you know, the whole economy cratered. An uproar ensued (see great posts from SEK, Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and what the heck, more SEK) and Colorado State changed the wording of the ad. It further turned out that Harvard's Comparative Lit department had published a job ad asking for PhDs from 2009 and later, and they too changed that wording. But the cynic in me doubts that someone who's been teaching college off the tenure track for more than a year or two will end up with the Colorado State job. (That someone who's been teaching off the tenure track for more than three years would land the Harvard job is out of the question.)

The ugly question, "Does a PhD expire?" has two answers: one for search committees, and one for job applicants. To search committees, I say: it is obtuse and inhumane to screen out job candidates because they've been underemployed in an irrationally savage employment market.  We all know that there are talented and deserving people without steady jobs, because there are many more talented and deserving people than there are steady jobs, so don't turn away qualified applicants for no damned reason. Just read their CVs. Yes, you have hundreds of CVs to read. Screening out the adjuncts and lecturers won't shrink your pile in a meaningful way. It will only shrink your heart, and blind you to potential hires who could help your department enormously.

But for the talented and deserving people working away out there, trying to find a job with a future in our profession, I have hard news.

PhDs do expire. Absolutely. But you have to let them.

I have two graduate degrees, in two related but distinct fields. One of my degrees has expired. I could not get a job, nor apply for a job with a straight face, on the basis of that degree. It is, at best, an interesting thing on my CV, but only to someone who is already interested in me because of my other degree, which I have not allowed to expire. One of my degrees has value as a job credential and the other has not, because I have maintained the professional value of one and not the other.

My first graduate degree is expired because I have not published in that field for years. It had expired by the time I got the second degree. (All my publications in the first field are from the years I was studying for that degree. My last publication is from the year I graduated and switched fields. It couldn't be more legible on my CV.) I no longer practice that discipline. I don't teach it, although I have taken over a beginner's class when the scheduled teacher fell through. But I would not teach an advanced course, let alone a graduate course, or direct even an MA thesis. I don't do that anymore. My qualifications have lapsed. On the other hand, I am working in the field where I got my second terminal degree, and that degree has kept its value as a job qualification because I continue adding value to it.

What about those tenured people who haven't published in years? Why haven't their PhDs expired? The answer is that they have. None of those people could get another job in the field. They can hold onto the jobs they have, but they can't even apply for others. Is it unfair that they hold onto those jobs? Sure. (Although sometimes not; I think that there are sixty-somethings who no longer have the fire in the belly for new research projects but who are nonetheless entitled to a professional autumn as teachers.) But the question isn't what's fair. It's what's best for you. And if you do not yet have a job, you need to keep your doctorate up-to-date by continuing to do work in the field.

In the humanities that means writing and publishing, no matter how heavy your non-tenure-track teaching load is. If you got your degree in 2008 and don't have a peer-reviewed publication since then, search committees won't give you a pass because you've been teaching so much comp. They have plenty of applicants who have been publishing more recently than you have, including applicants who were teaching the same brutal loads that you have. If you haven't published since you got the degree, departments will view that degree as nothing more than a technical qualification. It will no longer be a sign of your actual qualifications, no longer a reliable predictor of success. Not publishing suggests to search committees that you won't publish, and they are not crazy to think that. This isn't a job market where you can get credit for qualifications that are not in evidence. A degree that hasn't been followed up by published research will be construed as a sign that you're finished as a researcher. If that's an unfair assumption, it's also the only assumption that hiring committees can feel confident in making.

Getting your degree is an achievement you can be proud of. But more importantly, it is an indicator of your potential for future achievements as a scholar. And you need to keep demonstrating that potential by achieving more things. Your degree has as much value on the academic market as you give it. Use it or lose it.