What is Mr. Singal's evidence? His evidence is anecdotes from three embittered graduate students. Three! This is sufficient to attack the entire edifice of American higher education. More than that; it's sufficient to gain plaudits from the usual suspects, including, of course, the Atlantic, which is always eager to highlight any attack on the academy, no matter its evidence.
I don't doubt that Singal's graduate student interviewees are being accurately represented. I don't doubt that Singal finds this situation genuinely distressing. What represents a major failure is the inevitable lack of proportion between the evidence weighed against the academy in this piece and the response and interest it will generate. I'm afraid that experience teaches me that even educated readers will usually not say "this is interesting, but he's getting anecdote and impressions from three people who have agendas." Most will likely just take the dire rhetoric at face value, without really evaluating the evidence or the contest at all.
So I don't mean to jump on Singal; I do mean to jump on the institutions like Boston.com or the Atlantic or the New York Times that consistently choose to embrace the worst anti-university instincts of journalism. I've found that many journalists and pundits love to attack the academy. My guess is that this is generally out of resentment towards the academic project. As a field, journalism is deeply hostile to any other systems of knowledge generation. It is particularly unfriendly to those who would attempt to counter the worst failings of the journalistic enterprise-- its ludicrously short attention span, its impatience, its desire to condense complex phenomena into pithy sound bites, its lack of moderation of its messages, and more than anything, its absolute dogged attachment to sensationalism and provocation. Against these, the academy pits depth over breadth, the slow accumulation of qualified knowledge, the gradual acquisition of right practices, and moderation, moderation, moderation.
Neither system is perfect and both are necessary. I am here writing this on a blog, after all. I am here writing in the mode that I am criticizing, more or less. I wouldn't want to function in an intellectual landscape without journalism. How could we? But the rules of the two cultures leaves the academy totally disarmed when criticized inaccurately or dishonestly of the journalistic profession. The system of peer review and multilayered stages of fact and methodology checks has benefited mankind's quest for knowledge enormously. But it is no good for a knife fight. No, when your goal is short-term point scoring and rabble rousing, it's far better to be able to talk to a few disgruntled members of a system and proclaim their stories knowledge. That sort of approach would get you laughed out of an MA thesis defense, but no matter; it usually sells, and it did here.
I'm going to quote Tyler Cowen in the Great Stagnation again:
In contrast to earlier in the twentieth century, who today is the marginal student thrown into the college environment? It is someone who cannot write a clear English sentence, perhaps cannot read well, and cannot perform all the functions of basic arithmetic. About one third of the college students today will drop out, a marked rise since the 1960s, when the figure was only one in five. At the two hundred schools with the worst graduation rates, only 26 percent of the students will finish. The typical individual in these schools-- much less the marginal individual-- is someone who struggled in high school and never was properly prepared. It also may be the student who, whatever his or her underlying talent level may be, comes from a broken and possibly tragic home environment and simply is not ready to take advantage of college.
Educating many of these students is possible, it is desirable, and we should do more of it, but it is not like grabbing low-hanging fruit. It's a long, tough slog with difficult obstacles along the way and highly uncertain returns.
This is sober, it is measured, and it is self-limiting, which is another way of saying that it is not destined for the front page of Boston.com or the hallowed ground that is the Atlantic's webpage. (But you can get great tips for hacking your soup.) Could anyone see sentiment such as Cowen's getting real play in the journalistic space? I certainly can't. It doesn't make for headlines or page views.
But those are the rules of the game. One of the truly dark and truly comic aspects of the rise of the Internet is that we can now see critiques of journalism pop up, be debated, be assimilated, and then ignored by those who have read and understood them. At least in the past, you could halfheartedly convince yourself that maybe journalism as a field was simply ignorant of all of its petty corruptions. Now, you can be sure that journalists know, but choose the other option anyway. It is a simple and stark choice: choose discretion and get a more accurate story; choose sensationalism and get a more popular story. I'm not a journalist; I don't have to make the choices they make. I have sympathy for Singal and every other journo who is working in a competitive and financially uncertain field. But when simplistic university bashing is pursued over a measured consideration of the challenges to an overwhelmingly successful enterprise, we have a problem.
The academy has real problems. I've written about them often. Reforming the institutions and fixing the problems is going to take an honest and sober appraisal of them, and it is also going to take a lot of very hard choices about who we make eligible for college education and what our commitments to egalitarianism really are. But pieces like this one, and so many others flogged by institutions like the Atlantic, don't make that more likely. Instead, they simply ensure that more credulous readers will pledge to donate less money to the university and push their legislatures to defund public universities even more. This will only deepen and exacerbate the problem. Some will call that progress.
Update: Singal responds in an email:
If I wrote a blog post in which I claimed higher ed was broken because three of my grad-school friends were pissed off, then yes, I would have been guilty of severe journalistic malfeasance. But I didn't. My column wasn't of the form "I am going to argue that X is true via pieces of evidence A, B, and C." Rather, it was of the form "I am going to state that X is true and offer as possible explanations A, B, and C." Right at the top I pointed to the Arum/Roksa survey. I don't have the chops to evaluate the survey on its own merits (that's why I've applied to public policy school: so I can attempt to develop said chops and not be just another talking head), but I poked around and folks who are much smarter than I am seemed to view it as credible. Moreover, to be perfectly honest (although this is a less important metric), it aligned very much with my own experiences, both from working with college students at "selective" universities and from talking with folks who do. If you have serious methodological qualms with Arum/Roksa, or know of good critiques of them, point them my way. I'm probably going to do a followup "Singal doesn't know what he's talking about!" blog post anyway, and that would be a useful thing to include.
I agree completely about the collapse of the labor market and how it affects all of this. It used to be that, as an 18-year-old, you could look ahead and see a realistic future that involved work, reasonable renumeration for that work, health-care and retirement benefits that other Western societies have long ago taken to be rights, not privileges, and, if you so desired, a family supported by all of the above. That's no longer the case. Now, you're told that you need to go to college to qualify to compete in the "global economy" or some other such line. Then, after you've accrued a lot of debt, whoops! Still no jobs! Don't even get me started on this stuff. But my column didn't set out to address that -- I think if you read it fairly you'll see that all I do is quote my friends, who offer up a number of culprits. Even when they sound like they're blaming the students, they're not. On one end of the spectrum, it's not the fault of an 18-year-old who can't read that he was invited into a situation for which he is wholly unprepared; on the other end, although she is a less sympathetic character, it's not the fault of an 18-year-old who thinks she is brilliant because she's been told she is every step of the way (and she got into Wesleyan, which totally proves it!) that she complains when a TA has the gall to pull her aside and explain what a sentence fragment is and why they're usually bad.
This is all very, very complicated, and I thought I had captured some of that complexity the piece. If I didn't go into the socioeconomic causes and ramifications -- which are legion -- it's because the point of the piece was merely "here's what a few grad students have to say about the matter." It had modest ambitions, and I specifically went out my way to dispel any voice-of-god sense by pointing out real, actual research at the top and by saying quite explicitly "this stuff is anecdotal."
Anyway, I have a lot more to say on this matter but I've written enough. I think you're probably smarter than I am, for what that's worth, but I still don't think you've given the column a fair shake. My sense is you applied to it a lot of (completely accurate) critiques of the media that don't apply. Shouldn't the proper line of critique be to argue I based everything on a bullshit survey, if you think it's bullshit, rather than to criticize my anecdotal approach, given that I was very upfront about its anecdotality (not a word)?
Either way, thanks for the back-and-forth.
Update II: Do please consider Conor. Unless you've followed him here, in which case you've already considered him.
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7 comments:
Why are you focusing on the Boston Globe and not on the Arum and Roksa book _Academically Adrift_ from which it takes its inspiration?
The Boston Globe is basically guilty of bad science writing, here.
Hi Freddie -
Just sent you an email, but had to throw in two cents defending myself on the post itself.
I would never assume something to be true because three of my friends said so. If you think Arum and Roksa are wrong, and that I shouldn't have based my column on shoddy work, that's a fair critique, but nothing in my column suggests I would base a rather major assertion on evidence along the lines of "Because my friends think so!"
Best,
Jesse Singal
Look like you jumped the gun on that one.
I am not sure there is much gun-jumping here. Singal's piece ends by suggesting, "Running laps is a foolish response for failing to meet academic standards. But not that much more foolish than what is allowed to go on at many of the nation’s colleges." That is a fairly strong claim. No reason he should not be held accountable for it.
I am also a grad student. I work at a large university. One thing that wearies me about grad students discussing undergraduate students is that we are, as a group, overwhelmingly focused on the negative. Whoa be to the outsider unacquainted with grad students who asks about the experience of grading student papers. Whether the negativity comes from having to grade too many papers in conjunction with the normal workload or our ideals being dinged by the reality of how bad student writing can seem or something else altogether, I have no idea. But the basic premise of the Singal piece is not that students come into college largely ignorant of how to write, which it seems to me they do. His premise is that they may not be learning anything.
In my experience, this is inaccurate for the vast majority of students. His evidence is largely based on writing that is graded by TAs. While the writing assignments I have graded when I was a TA have indeed been terrifying, I think the problem rests more in the nature of a class that requires TAs (that is, a large class). Writing is hard. It requires time and pressure. And in the impersonal space of the lecture hall, students do not seem compelled to improve. But my experience in teaching my own classes, early writing classes, has allowed me to see great improvements - with respect to the majority of my students - in writing. Over time in these small and writing-intensive courses, theses begin to appear. Paragraphs that summarize, contextualize, and comment on the work of other writers become convincing. And students gain confidence in their work and discussing the work of others.
I think, part of the difference is that in the early writing class, they have to maintain a relationship with me. If they miss two classes in a row, I send an e-mail. After they write papers, we have 1-on-1 conferences.
Admittedly, the problems with the college system are large, but to explicitly wave the flag of "students aren't learning anything" is irresponsible, regardless of whether one wants to point to one study and ask overworked and underpaid grad students to gripe about student writing. Why not do more research in peer-reviewed journals that discuss academic pedagogy. While you will find an abundance of research that discusses the failures of the college system with respect to writing, you will also find great optimism, as professors suggest methods they have found productive and argue for systemic changes that could improve the current system. At least, this is what I have found.
At bottom, most students do not seem to like to read and write. They find it challenging. But when compelled to, again, in my experience, they do learn to get better at both.
This too is anecdotal. But rather than hyperbolizing about students not learning anything and trying not to take responsibility for your writing because you use the word anecdotal to describe your method, can we have a conversation about why we have systematized writing assignments in lecture halls where students are not held accountable for their work? Can we talk about the meager income that the TAs and untenured faculty receive to teach these classes?
I mean, if getting something out of the academic system is a priority, if people actually care whether or not college students learn to write well (and it often feels as if those of us in the academy are the only ones who do), why aren't we having a conversation about getting the resources into the educational structure, so we can try to ameliorate its problems?
Sorry - this is long.
I'm an academic, and I have mostly scorn for what journalists do, especially when it comes to covering anything having to do with knowledge. Every academic has devoted years of work to his or her area of specialization, and has extensive training in the methodology of his/her discipline. Compared to this, why would I want to hear what some blogger has to say about, say, Egypt, or recent advances in neuroscience? With a few exceptions, they don't know anything about the topics they write about! In general, I look at journalists and bloggers the way seasoned jazz musicians must look at performers like Kenny G: they definitely sell a lot of albums, but their overall contribution to the tradition is a negative one, and when the histories of jazz are written, they won't get much mention.
A p.s. from the last commenter. I just noticed this sentence from Singal's response, which would get any academic first laughed out of the room and then banned from his/her discipline for life. Seriously, these people have such low evidential standards that it makes me want to throw up. "Don't have the chops"? Then why the hell are you writing an article with this as your sole bit of evidence?
"I don't have the chops to evaluate the survey on its own merits (that's why I've applied to public policy school: so I can attempt to develop said chops and not be just another talking head), but I poked around and folks who are much smarter than I am seemed to view it as credible."
As someone who was a TA nearly two decades ago, some of the quoted anecdotes sound familiar: there were plenty of students in my classes who were unprepared for the work, professors who clearly didn't care much about teaching, etc. None of this is new.
But even if one assumes that such anecdotes are representative of reality, does it prove that the academy is somehow failing in its mission(s)? The research produced by the US academy is, in the disciplines where it really matters, still of high quality, and motivated students can still get a top-flight education. If there is a problem, it's that unprepared students aren't weeded out sufficiently quickly, and in many cases are permitted to graduate without the necessary skills that the degree ought to signify. But again, this is nothing new; the gentleman's C is a longstanding academic tradition.
With regard to the question of whether journalism hates academia--I think Conor's rebuttal is on point. Certainly, SOME journalists do, and there seems to be a concerted focus among movement conservatives to undermine science as a source of knowledge, which often gets reflected in writings. But much of the bad behavior of journalists--petty, shallow, and sensationalist coverage in particular--is not reserved for academia; its a feature of the profession whatever the subject.
A big part of the problem is that reporters frequently CANNOT specialize; they have to write about a car wreck one day, crop futures the next, and their local Congressperson's doings on the third.
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