Fisher v Texas, Affirmative Action

Fisher vs. Texas is a very interesting case, because in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 and maintained that colleges were allowed to pursue racial diversity through affirmative action, the court said that every college would have to demonstrate that all other alternatives that do not involve racial preferences have not worked, and that affirmative action is the only workable option that will lead to racial diversity within that college. This is very different from the outcome of Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003, in which the court supported universities using racial preferences to choose the candidates that would be accepted into their schools. That case in 2003, was a 5-4 decision, in which 4 justices disagreed with the decision. The fact that the 2003 case was a very close decision and that Fisher vs Texas put some restrictions on the use of affirmative action, saying that it can only be used as a last resort, shows that affirmative action is a very important topic and that those who are for it have very good reason to support it and that those who are against it also have understandable reasons why they don’t agree with the policy. However, last semester when I took an Intro to Sociology class, and the topic of affirmative action was brought up, the professor basically said that anyone who doesn’t agree with affirmative action is a racist. She said that those opposing affirmative action claim that they disagree with the policy because they favor equality, but in reality, this is a form of color-blind racism, and it is unacceptable to disagree with affirmative action. I was very shocked at this because whether or not I support affirmative action, college is a place where both professors and students can voice their opinions on hotly debated topics such as this one, and to shoot down one side of the argument and label it as inherently racist, in my opinion, is very inappropriate.

 

Response: “Noncompletion Success in California”

Ashley Smith’s article, the “Noncompletion Success in California” on our class website caught my interest. After all, one of the markers of a successful college is a high completion rate. If many students are not making it to graduation, applicants often assume that the college does not offer adequate support. So colleges will often take certain measures to discourage dropouts and avoid getting a bad reputation. For instance, when I was registering for classes freshman year, I learned about the “Learning Community” system. The “learning community” refers to two linked classes that are for incoming freshman. In other words, if a student is to take a certain English section, they are required to take a certain history section as well. The hope is that students will have more time to connect with the other students, forge friendships and offer support. Specifically within Macaulay, incoming freshmen are paired up with an upperclassman that will hopefully address their concerns and become a mentor and a friend.

Smith’s article challenges the notion that dropout rates are such a strong indicator of the success of a college. Some students intend to take only a few courses to broaden their knowledge of a certain subject and make them into more competitive job applicants. And the numbers show that these “skills builders” (so termed because they are taking these few classes to brush up on their skills in a particular area) are in fact seeing returns with a significant median wage gain of 13.6 percent. Clearly there is monetary value in each individual course (that is, earning potential) and the cynical idea that bosses just want a piece of paper may in fact be a misconception. This, of course, is in addition to the value a course has in making a you into a more well-rounded thought-out individual, but in the case of skill builders, earning potential is the driving force.

It’s probably safe to assume that those who dropped out in middle of a course would not be considered a “noncompletion success,” but other than that, we have no easy way to distinguish between students who intended to only take a few classes and those who dropped out because of lack of support. As a student in Brooklyn College, I am presumably more familiar with the student body than an applicant would be, so I see beyond cold hard statistics, but an applicant is likely relying on these statistics when making their decision about where to go for college. I would say that an applicant’s best bet is probably to talk to someone who is already enrolled and ask them how the college faculty and administration works with students in completing the requirements needed to graduate (if that ‘s what the applicant’s end goal is).

On a side note, I have found these skill builders to be particularly interesting to speak to and have in a classroom. They are often older than the typical 18-24 year old student and have had more experience in the work force as well as in other areas of life. It’s actually quite ironic because while these students may bring down the reputation of a school on a web search, they are often a source of pride within the college since they add to the college’s diversity.

Chapter 1 Questions

  1. How does society and the industry decide what major/degree is more acceptable/professional/certified over other majors?
  2. How can we stop the diminishing value of the bachelor’s and master’s degree? Is there a possibility of a new degree being created that is better than a doctorate degree?
  3. Higher education seems to be focusing on making money and prioritizing that over actual student education, how can this be changed? Prioritizing actual student education would help society in the long run.
  4. It is stated that building a law school saves a lot of costs over building a medical school, therefore creating a subtle bias between the two. Is there a way to remove this bias?
  5. How can the issue of “over-qualification” with multiple majors be fixed?

The Coddling of the American Mind

Although this isn’t directly related to our topics at hand, I recently recalled a great article I read earlier this year that is relevant to today’s higher education. The September issue of The Atlantic featured a cover story, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, that raised a lot of questions about the way college students protect themselves from words and ideas that they don’t like in the name of emotional well-being. Their basic premise was that the hypersensitivity rampant on most college campuses is damaging both to students’ education and their mental health.

Students have more and more been using “emotional reasoning” as legal evidence; the argument “I feel it, so it must be true” is considered legitimate. For instance, a white student was found guilty at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The picture of the Ku Klux Klan rally on the book’s cover offended another student, despite the fact that the book valued the student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. Examples like this one show that it has been considered unacceptable to doubt the reasonableness of someone’s emotional state, especially when tied to group identity. Claiming offense to something has become “an unbeatable trump card.”

Something else very common among college campuses is the use of trigger warnings in class. Students assume that they know how others will react, and that reaction will be devastating. Preventing this becomes a “moral obligation” incumbent upon everyone. Some books that have been called out for trigger warnings include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (racial violence) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogyny and physical abuse). The authors point out that according to basic tenets in psychology, it is completely counterproductive to help someone with anxiety disorders avoid the thing they’re afraid of. Furthermore, it is detrimental to one’s education as a student and a person to just skip over the parts of history and literature that are uncomfortable.

The list goes on and on, and the examples get even wilder. One professor faced angry demonstrations after he lowercased the I in the word indigenous in a student’s paper, which she had capitalized; students claimed it was an insult to her and her ideology. One student wrote a satirical piece for a student newspaper about students’ hypersensitization to absurd microaggressions. He was terminated from another paper he wrote for and his dorm room door was vandalized with raw eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”

“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” Lukianoff and Haidt write. In terms of education (the point of college?), this atmosphere creates “intellectual homogeneity,” and in fact does a disservice to students by allowing them to think that they can make everyone agree with them. Instead, college should be a place where students feel intellectually engaged with diverse viewpoints and honest discussion. The way it stands now, we are perpetrating the idea that you can’t learn anything from someone who thinks differently than you, which is harmful to students’ learning process and mental development.

Real life doesn’t comfort people by giving them “trigger warnings.” College shouldn’t be a cocoon where we can snap our fingers and make all ideas we disagree with disappear. Instead, our college education should be equipping us with the skills needed to respond to people we disagree with in an open way, not in one that allows extreme subjectivity to reign and demonizes our opponents. We need, of course, to be respectful and sensitive to all students, but we need to do that while allowing for students and their opinions to grow and be heard. Universities need to rethink the type of student they want to develop.

I highly recommend you read the full article; it’s much more interesting than I make it seem. The authors go into a lot of other interesting things happening on campus as well as a sociological account of why this is happening with the current generation of students. Also, I’d be really interested in hearing people’s thoughts, because at it’s very nature, this is a sensitive topic. Do you see this sort of behavior on Brooklyn College’s campus?

Teaching Teachers to Teach…Using Psychology?!

A couple of days ago, Inside Higher Ed rolled out a blurb about the latest episode of “The Pulse,” a monthly podcast hosted by Rodney B. Murray, executive director of academic technology at the University of the Sciences. “The Pulse” is an über nerd podcast that usually focuses on ‘e-learning’ and class design. This month’s podcast strayed a bit from its typical topics, having more of a psychological theme due to its guest/interviewee.

Murray interviewed Victor Yocco, a design researcher and author of a recently published book (Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design). Their conversation largely covered Yocco’s interests in how to improve higher education using–yes, just as I teased–psychological findings and innovative techniques.

I remember two points standing out two me during the 25-minute long podcast, both of which have come up in class.

The first was about college professors not knowing how to teach. Or rather, about how most professors having not been taught how to teach college students efficiently and effectively. Rather, most professors at most universities are trusted to rely upon their own instincts and idiosyncrasies to educate their students. Yocco talked about his experiences in instituting skill-based (meaning, everyone could start out at different levels of ability but end up in the same place systematically) seminars on teaching at universities/colleges for faculty.

It only takes one semester with a droning cardboard cutout of a professor to see why such training programs make so much sense. Just because someone has six degrees from MIT doesn’t mean they know anything about transferring information pleasantly and intelligently to students. But we’ve exhausted this topic.

The second point Yocco spoke about was the importance of faculty knowing how to use technology properly and helpfully in the classroom. He made a clear distinction between fad/showpiece technology (e.g., aggressively slinging a sack of iPads at students, commanding them and their professors to LEARN!) and proven helpful technological practices and devices. Yocco and Murray bonded over the stubborn resistance of professors to learning new (and usually better) ways of doing things with technology, as they usually deem such things to be merely trendy and superfluous. Yocco brought up that actually having a fellow faculty member teaching his or her peers (as opposed to an outside speaker) about these new educational platforms fights this resistance significantly.

Seems logical. Seems relatively inexpensive. Will most universities go for it? Probably not.

What else is knew?

-Alex

Click’s Case

Communications Professor Melissa Click’s controversial case is making headlines once more after she has been fired from the University of Missouri, as reported in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In November of 2015, Click called for the forced removal of a student journalist from a protest on campus, violating several of the university’s faculty guidelines and calling into question the freedom of speech on campus. While these violations seem worthy of dismissal to many, whether or not Click’s firing is just is being called into question because of how the decision was made. Both articles describe the University of Missouri Board of Curators’ ruling as a violation of due process in the eyes of other faculty members.

If there was already an approved system in place for faculty review, why did the Board of Curators “ma[k]e one up as it went along,” in the words of Professor Ben Trachtenberg? Well, probably in part due to threats to reduce state budget, as reported by The Kansas City Star. The budget cut plan proposed by House Budget Chairman Tom Flanigan on February 23 of this year outlines $400,000 worth of salary cuts affecting Melissa Click, the chair of the communications department, and the dean of arts and science. An additional $7.6 million of proposed cuts would be aimed mostly at the president’s office and at (surprise, surprise) the Board of Curators. Two days after this plan was proposed, Melissa Click was fired.

As we have been discussing in class, every college today is essentially a business. When a traditional business’s financial backer doesn’t like what it sees, the backer threatens to pull its investment until a compromise can be made. That may be just what’s happening here in an astonishing game of “chicken,” but what does this say about the system of higher education as it stands? If these threats to funding are what caused, or even encouraged, the Board of Curators to make its final decision without following the university’s policy for the formal investigation of a professor, has the University bailed on its principles of defending a professor’s rights for the benefit of funding? Furthermore, now that Click has been fired, will Flanigan repeal his proposal? This seems unlikely to me, as Flanigan’s plan also included cuts of K-12 funds, but perhaps Click’s firing will serve to lessen the severity of the budget cuts. I will be interested to see what, if anything, comes of these recent developments in Missouri.

Chapter 2 Questions

Do you think that there are any positives to treating colleges and universities and businesses?

 

Do you agree with Selingo when he says that the Millennials are part of the “Me Generation?”

 

As a student I don’t believe that the teachers owe the student anything just because the student pays an exorbitant rate. I believe that the student should be performing well because they are paying so much money. Do you agree?

 

Do you feel Macaulay as program diverges from the whole “college as a business” mantra because all students are given full scholarships?

 

Do you think Macaulay is better suited for education because it’s free?

Chapter 6: The Online Revolution

  1. What are some of the ways new systems could be created that would allow for “certificates,” from online courses, to count as “credits” towards college?  Or towards earning any sort of crendtial?
  2. Online classes revolve around the idea of more avalability for people looking to get a higher education.  But it seems that it would be more avaliable for those who own a computer and those who are able to get internet acess for these courses.  There are resources such as public libraries where students can get both a computer and intenet acess needed for the class; but it would seem that this turns the idea of avalability on its head and reduce the problem of “not being able to get to campus” to, “not being able to get to a computer with wifi.”  With this in mind, do online courses favor those who have the resources to acquire laptops, home computers, wifi data, etc.?
  3. The on-going debate between whether in class lecture, or online courses are more useful, is more prevalent than ever.  But would not the simple answer be to offer both options?  Although one may be objectivley better, the prefrance of one way of learning over another is soley up to the individual.
  4. How does the offering of online courses both promote as well as hinder the agenda of higher educational institutions when interpreting these institutions to be businesses?  I see the implmentation of online courses, as a whole, to many educationl facillities, at once, more as a draw back for the business aspect of the insitution.
  5. “The Open Learning Initiative” at Carnagie Mellon is a perfect example of how online courses mkae it much easier to pin-point the problmes classes face when trying to learn ceratain material in a specific course.  How can this example be used literally and as a metaphor to sum up some of the more major issues with higher education as we know it?

Chapter 7: The Student Swirl

  1. This chapter begins by introducing StraighterLine, a rationally priced, online educating institution that doesn’t offer degrees. Jose Brown was only 6 math credits away from completing his general education requirements at George Washington University, so he takes these classes online and his school accepts the credits without an issue. When most people go to college, they dread taking their core classes. Would it be ideal for these types of people to take their general education classes through institutions like StraighterLine, so that when they attend their main college they can focus solely on their major?
  2. Selingo raises an interesting issue about the pricing of online classes. Burck Smith, the creator of StraighterLine, is bothered by the system in that “traditional universities and for-profit colleges typically charge the same price for online courses as they do for face-to-face versions, even though the online format is much less expensive to produce [79].” StraighterLines tuition only costs $99 for a month of classes! Many students can agree that an online class doesn’t leave as much impact and isn’t as rewarding as an in-person class. Therefore, the cost for online classes should be less than in-person classes.
  3. The process of transferring credits between two institutions is also an issue. Colleges are reluctant in accepting credits from StraighterLine courses simply because if they offer a similar course, they’d be missing out on revenue. This shows how the business aspect of higher education can be unfair to students.
  4. Selling makes a very interesting point when he suggests, “Degrees should be based on how much students know, not how much time they spend in a classroom [84].” Most colleges dwell on this tradition of the credit system, but knowledge should not be measured this way. The Competency-model is much more sensible in that it grants a degree to a student who earns the mastery of  the subject through a series of assessment tests and allows them to go at their own pace.
  5. The story of Mike Russo and his ability to receive college credits for his life experiences was very interesting. It’s great how colleges can look beyond the college classroom experience and accredit students for other learning opportunities.

The Trillion Dollar Problem/Issues & Questions (Ch. 3)

  1. Why isn’t there some clear cut financial aid counseling that provides first generation college students the knowledge needed to avoid these tremendous tuition debts? Especially because it’s a widely known issue.
  2. Non Ivy league college graduates are in more debt than Ivy League graduates.
  3. States are shortening funds going to colleges, which leads to colleges having higher tuition rates, along with a somewhat raise in financial aid (making the situation no better).
  4. Future college students are picking their colleges for wrong reasons (On emotion or just for it’s looks, rather than the price and quality of education).
  5. It is true that going to college and getting a degree is a must, but when tuition prices become extremely high, is it really worth it in the end? Getting in financial debt in order to get that degree, with that high possibility of not even getting a job at the end to pay off that debt?