So easy yet so hard.

I am now month three into a workout program.  This is the most committed I have been to consistent and strategic exercise in over 4 years.

And annoyingly, I feel better than I have in years.  My head is clearer, my sleep is better, and I am a better husband/father/boss.

It's so annoying that at times, it is that easy.

~ Dizz
-- Listening to: Social D 

Bentham and Paying For College

I am currently teaching a seminar course using Thomas Sandel’s Justice as one of the main texts.  It is an excellent book that concurrently digs and prods but that remains grounded in how peripheral and exercise-laden much of moral philosophy can be.  Having never waded through many of these tenants of philosophy, I have had a good time wrestling alongside the students.

We recently explored Bentham’s Utilitarianism and his idea of pain and pleasure as sovereign masters and the guiding principle of the greatest good for the greatest number.  He works out an example of this through his Pauper Management Plan where he suggests that beggars on the streets do not maximize happiness because when working folks see beggars, they become less happy because 1) they are disgusted or 2) they feel guilty.  Thus, in order to maximize happiness for all, he suggested that all homeless folks be locked into a home out of sight.  They would have to work everyday to support their stay in this house (i.e. lodging, meals, utilities, etc.), thereby costing the society virtually nothing.  Workers would be incentivized to turn in homeless people with a cash reward that would in turn be tacked on to the homeless person’s bill.  Thus, most folks who work would now be happy because they would no longer have to look at homeless people while walking throughout their day.  Greatest good for the greatest number.   

There are several responses to his plan.  Some may find it undemocratic and a violation of individual rights to lock people in a home to work off some sort of imposed bill.  An alternative indentured servanthood.  Ideally, if a person wants to not work and live on the street, he should be able to do just that.  Others my find this plan somewhat enlightened.  They might suggest that if we could get folks off the street, they would be more likely to spend time on those streets – spending money, attending shows, etc.  To a degree, several cities across the US have outlawed homelessness or some variation thereof.

Regardless of one’s personal feelings on the idea of greatest good for the greatest number, we must acknowledge that it is often a senior guiding principle of our time. Wars, taxes, social security, etc. are based on the greatest good for the great number principle.  

My university is located in the bible belt and serves a highly republican/tea party student base.  As would be expected, our discussion on the greatest good generally took a very Libertarian rebuff until we approached the current higher education system in the United States (and our very institution).  The discussion took a very interesting turn.  

Collectively we explored the idea of scholarships, grants, and student loans.  I asked the class how they felt about agreeing to subsidize the education of a fellow student because he could jump higher and/or because she could swim faster because the university felt that it was in our general best interest to have these students representing us in athletic competition.  Interestingly, they all agreed.    

I asked the class about the university arrangement that allows for un-athletic students (and students who can’t debate, play an instrument, sing, etc.), who score lower on standardized tests to pay more to sit in class next to students who scored higher on the same exams in order to partake in the institutional prestige brought on my enrolling students with higher test scores.  Students felt that it made sense for lower-scoring students to pay more in order to mutually reap the benefits of the university’s name on the degree certificate.  They felt it very fair to charge certain people more money in order to subsidize the education of those students who scored higher, who were poorer, who were underrepresented, and so forth.  This conversation was getting further and further away from where I expected it to go.  The closeted liberal that I hide deep inside my psyche was growing more and more excited - could it really be?

Further, they fully agreed that the government should take money from each of our paychecks in order to redistribute the money in the form of grants and loans to folks who could not afford to pay for college tuition.   They felt that an educated citizenry was critical to the function of our society and that we should help those who can’t afford tuition, bills, and housing. 

At this point I became ecstatic.  Thrilled. 

Feeling lucky, I decided to go one step further. 

I asked the class that since they felt that way about redistribution of income to support the education of the whole, would they support taking tax payer dollars and cents to help pay electric bills of those who were struggling to pay. 

That question was followed by a chorus of boos, shouts of rebuttal, and a general disdain for poor people who don't want to pay their bills.    

And…now were back.     

-- Dizz


- Listening to Johnny Cash & Social D          

I Am Expendable and We Will Be Great

As I mentioned in a previous post, there has been a lot of angst, frustration, tension, anxiety, and uncertainty surrounding the financial situation and proposed personnel and infrastructure cuts at my university.  Emotions are running high, conspiracy theories running deep, and common sense and ecumenical beliefs are giving way to childish reactions and devilish schemes.  Grown-ups forgetting they are Christians and acting like children.

I have been guilty of acting like a middle schooler during this time as well.

My wife, who has been feeling the same level of anxiety as the rest of campus, said something profound last night that has been a powerful reframing moment in our household.

She said that we were both expendable.

We could both lose our positions or voluntarily give up our positions and someone would follow us and do a good job.  The institution would carry on - students would still be taught, things would still be administered, and the university would press onward.

But...

We're the only husband and wife each other have.

We're the only parents our child has.

When I get my son out of bed each morning, I am cashing in on a finite amount of dark, sleepy, early morning hugs.  Those will go away.  Soon, he will be too big for me to pick up.  Soon, he will get out of bed on his own.  Dress himself.  Feed himself.  And press onward.  These moments aren't expendable.  My relationship with my wife is not expendable.  There is not someone who will come in after me and do a good job loving her, supporting her, and building a life with her.

I am it.  And she for me.  

It was a moment of priority shift for me.  A significant priority shift.

And it feels right.

The university will be fine.

We will be great.

Dizz
-- Listening to Eluvium 

From The Vault of Richard Beck...

One of my favorite writings of Dr. Beck.  Good fodder heading into the weekend.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2010/09/shipwrecked-and-catchers.html#more

Dizz

Small and Grand

I remember that distressing moment (it now seems like decades)
when all of my dissertation data collection had been completed and I was sitting in my home with a mountain of data just waiting to be sorted and coded.  

Swimming in data.  

Drowning in data.  

As a qualitative researcher, my data is often less numbers and more interview transcripts, hundreds and hundreds of pages student handbooks, thousands of pages of articles, recordings, journals, etc.  I guess a more accurate analogy is sludging (instead of swimming) through a philosophical swamp of reflection, literature, bias, conversations, and information from the schools/people/departments/students I had spent time with.  

Man, I don't miss those days at all.

I was recently reflecting on this particular research project and my recent research into small colleges and universities.    

So today, on this windy Friday afternoon, here is what I am coming to know and believe.

Small, mission drive colleges and universities are powerful, powerful communities.  They are dynamic little communities that have been called "invisible" (Astin & Lee, 1972)  and "committed" (Bonvillian & Murphy, 1996).  They are places of change and growth with significant self-efficacy problems.  

We believe in these small communities because we believe in the capacity and calling...that by influencing and changing the life of the single person and sending them out into the world, a marriage can be influenced.  A family can be given direction.  A community can be influenced and moved.  A church can become purposeful.  A nation can rise.  A group of starving children can be fed.  A missionary family can be clothed.  A house can be re-roofed.  A child can be adopted.  A student can be inspired to teach.

After poring over pages and pages of literature, discipline codes, student handbooks, traveling to many, many universities and meeting with many higher education practitioners outside of my current institution's heritage and tradition, and with an admittedly healthy dose of passion overriding a lack of empirical data,  I have come to believe that small colleges and universities generally have the heart, position, passion and backbone to become institutions of true higher learning that seamlessly integrates the breath giving mission of Christ and his love with the ability to question/struggle/develop/challenge in a live, pulsing community; to learn to live in community of scholars and practitioners where students are equally important to the administration who are equally important to the faculty and professors who are equally important to the light bulb changers and the lawn folks---and where the practices and policies reflect that belief.

Where the entire community is about the business of student success - one student at a time - because everyone sees their role as integrally linked not to selfish professional ideation, not to academic or pet-program sustainability, not to power and prestige, but to a belief that Christ represents us all and all is made up of many "individuals" and it is our responsibility to teach individuals how to play their role in that larger community.  And we teach that by our conversations, our programs, the way we teach classes, the way we hold students accountable, the way we simply refuse to accept less than a student's best in the classroom.  The way we model boundaries and work/life balance.  The way we balance cost and student debt.  The way we say no.  The way we have hard, hard conversations and ask certain team members to take their talents to other communities where they may be a better fit.  Where acknowledge the difficulty of living in a community of believers is hard...and where we need each other.  

The way that we realize that by operating an institution with Christ's name in the title or in the mission statement, we are reflecting ideals bigger than ourselves.  This realization is reflected by our willingness to integrate with and among the community, to edge and water the grass, treat others with dignity and respect, build buildings worthy of wearing the name Christ, and hold a standard or excellence and accountability.

In short, small colleges and universities can be authentic, demanding, Christ-centered, educational communities that believe that in the face of God, all questions, temporary conclusions, challenges, and disagreements fall short of being fearful...and are in fact welcomed.  For it is by pushing boundaries, asking questions, challenging authority, having disagreements, and being blessed with the opportunity to forgive others, to have our spheres of comfort melted, and by being dependent on the greater community  - similar to Christ's relationship with his disciples - that we can truly resolve and grow.

Getting there would be excruciating, difficult beyond measure, and tiring beyond belief....just like Jesus said it would be. 


Dizz 

      

Individualism and The Pendulum

May be the best article I have read in a long while.  We simply cannot continue on our one-track obsession with the misaligned notion of individualism.  The foundation of communal interaction is the most powerful underpinning of our individual and collective being.  And though expensive from an operational standpoint, collective learning in an educational context is still critical.
 

Online Higher Education's Individualist Fallacy

By Johann N. Neem

There has been much talk of the “online revolution” in higher education. While there is a place for online education, some of its boosters anticipate displacing the traditional campus altogether. A close reading of their arguments, however, makes clear that many share what might be called the “individualist fallacy,” both in their understanding of how students learn and how professors teach.

Of course, individualism has a long, noble heritage in American history. From the “age of the self-made man” onward, we have valued those who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, as Warren Buffett has made clear, even the most successful individuals depend heavily on the cultural, economic, legal, political, and social contexts in which they act. This is as true for Buffett as it is for other so-called self-made men as Bill Gates. And it is certainly true for students.

But many advocates of online learning ignore this simple point. The economist Richard Vedder, for example, believes that being on campus is only useful for “making friends, partying, drinking, and having sex.” Anya Kamenetz, in her book DIY U, celebrates the day when individuals are liberated from the constraints of physical campuses, while Gates anticipates that “five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”  

These advocates of online higher education forget the importance of institutional culture in shaping how people learn. College is about more than accessing information; it’s about developing an attitude toward knowledge.

There is a difference between being on a campus with other students and teachers committed to learning and sitting at home. Learning, like religion, is a social experience. Context matters. No matter how much we might learn about God and our obligations from the Web, it is by going to church and being surrounded by other congregants engaged in similar questions, under the guidance of a thoughtful, caring pastor, that we really change. Conversion is social, and so is learning.

Like all adults, students will pursue many activities during their time on campus, but what distinguishes a college is that it embodies ideals distinct from the rest of students’ lives. If we take college seriously, we need people to spend time in such places so that they will leave different than when they entered.

Some argue that large lecture courses make a mockery of the above claims. Admittedly, in a better world, there would be no large lecture courses. Still, this argument misleads for several reasons. First, it generalizes from one kind of course, ignoring the smaller class sizes at community colleges and the upper-division courses in which students interact closely with each other and their professors. Second, it dismisses the energy of being in a classroom, even a large one, with real people when compared to being on our own. Even in large classes, good teachers push their students to think by asking probing questions, modeling curiosity, and adapting to the class’s needs. Finally, it disregards the importance of the broader campus context in which all classes, large and small, take place.

The goal of bringing students to campus for several years is to immerse them in an environment in which learning is the highest value, something online environments, no matter how interactive, cannot simulate. Real learning is hard; it requires students to trust each other and their teachers. In other words, it depends on relationships. This is particularly important for the liberal arts.

Of course, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s recent studyAcademically Adrift makes clear, there are great variations in what college students are learning. All too often, higher education does not fulfill our aspirations. But none of the problems Arum and Roksa identify are ones that online higher education would solve. As Arum and Roksa make clear, students learn more on campuses where learning is valued and expectations are high. If anything, we need to pay more attention to institutional culture because it matters so much.

This does not mean that we should reject technology when it can further learning, as in new computer programs that help diagnose students’ specific stumbling blocks. But computers will never replace the inspiring, often unexpected, conversations that happen among students and between students and teachers on campuses. Because computers are not interpretive moral beings, they cannot evaluate assignments in which students are asked to reflect on complicated ideas or come up with new ones, especially concerning moral questions. Fundamentally, computers cannot cultivate curiosity because machines are not curious.

Technology is a tool, not an end in itself. As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier has written in his book You Are Not A Gadget, computers exist to support human endeavors, not the other way around. Many techno-utopists proclaim that computers are becoming smarter, more human, but Lanier wonders whether that is because we tend to reduce our human horizons to interact with our machines. This certainly is one of the dangers of online higher education.

The individualist fallacy applies not just to online advocates’ understandings of students, but also their conception of what makes great teachers and scholars. Vedder, for example, echoes Gates in his hope that someday there will be a Wikipedia University, or that the Gates Foundation will start a university in which a few “star professors” are paid to teach thousands of students across the nation and world. Of course, this has been happening since the invention of cassette tapes that offer “the great courses.” This is hardly innovative, nor does it a college education make.

Vedder ignores how star professors become great. How do they know what to teach and to write? Their success, like Buffett’s, is social: they converse with and read and rely on the work of hundreds, even thousands, of other scholars. Read their articles and books, listen to their lectures, and you can discern how deeply influenced and how dependent they are on the work of their peers. In short, there would be no star professors absent an academy of scholars committed to research.

Schools like the online, Gates Foundation-funded Western Governors University free-ride off the expensive, quality research completed by traditional professors when they rely on open course ware and curricula. Take away the professors, and many online schools will teach material that is out of date or inaccurate or, worse, hand control over to other entities who are not interested in promoting the truth -- from textbook companies seeking to maximize sales to coal and pharmaceutical companies offering their own curriculums for “free.”

The Web and new technologies are great tools; they have made more information more accessible to more people. This is to be celebrated. Citizens in a democracy should be able to access as much information as freely as possible. A democratic society cannot allow scholars, or anyone else, to be the gatekeepers to knowledge.

Certainly, we will expand online higher education, if for no other reason than because wealthy foundations like Gates and ambitious for-profit entities are putting their money and power behind it. For certain students, especially working adults pursuing clearly defined vocational programs rather than a liberal arts education, online programs may allow opportunities that they would have otherwise foregone. But online higher education will never replace, much less replicate, what happens on college campuses.

Even as we expand online, therefore, we must deepen our commitment to those institutions that cultivate a love of learning in their students, focus on the liberal arts, and produce the knowledge that online and offline teaching requires.

Johann Neem is associate professor of history at Western Washington University
.

A Lawn Chair, a Sparkler, and a Grin

Several years ago, one of my best friends graduated with his MBA.  One night over dinner we discussed the great case study questions of his program and the philosophical concepts of an upper-level business degree.  One of the most intriguing questions was this:   Could a business ever get too big to fail?  At the time, it was simply a question of theoretical gymnastics - it was assumed that we would never have to actually answer such an abstract query with real decisions.

Awesome.

So fast forward a few years and as a young higher ed scholar, I am in a similar position.  I have read often about presidential transitions; beloved leaders retiring to be followed by young, gunslinger, business-minded presidents; faculty discontent; mission and heritage realignment; grandiose vision and strategic plan implementations; gen ed and overall curricular overhauls; layoffs; Provost transitions; Vice President transitions; line-drawing between academic leadership and administrative cabinets; and the great what-ifs of a market-driven educational operation as opposed to a mission-driven educational operation.  

As luck would have it, I have a ring side seat watching each of these case studies coming to life ~ at the same time.  Some dragons are bigger than others...but the rumbling is deep and dark and it feels as if every niche and corner is gearing up for a William Wallace-esque type adventure.    

And I'm soaking it all in, listening as much as possible, watching as much as possible, and being a good steward of the position I currently have.  Metaphorically, I am sitting in a lawn chair with a sparkler in one hand, a hotdog in the other, wearing one of those drink hats with the double straws, and a large smile on my face.

And if my the case studies and literature from other generations and institutions is of any predictive value, we're in for a good show.

Dizz