Tag Archives: academic life

Education for Profit

Open admissions sounds like a good thing. Who doesn’t want to enable people a chance to get a university education? However, this has two major flaws: most students are underprepared academically and, at least in the case of a for-profit institution, there is a distinct cycle of abuse. I will address both of these flaws dealing from my own experience from within an open admission, for-profit university (OAFPU).

Underprepared

The first is fairly straightforward: most students (from my experience) who attend open admissions universities do so because they are unable to gain admission at a ‘normal’ (i.e. selective admissions) university. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Many community colleges are geared towards taking in underprepared students and building up an underprepared student’s knowledge. Some might require a student to first complete remedial courses before enrolling in other courses. This is a good thing because it prepares students for higher education and it prevents the (further) ‘dumbing down’ of courses. However, when remedial courses are prescribed as ‘optional but recommended’, students only harm their own education. For example, at one of the for-profit universities where I have taught, I have found students who are unable to cite material in any format, double-space a paper (in MS Word), or even properly format a header. That’s in addition to having little to no grasp of grammar and spelling. The result is that these students do poorly in written assignments despite having some intriguing content (the university’s grading rubrics require a dedicated grammar component). What’s sad, though, is that this includes students in their third and fourth years of their education.

Connected to being underprepared, I have noticed that most of these students simply do not have the time or effort to do their assigned work. Students rarely, if ever, read the assignments beforehand. In order to fit their schedules, many classes at the OAFPU meet just once per week for four hours each meeting. Oftentimes, the material for one intro-level course is compressed further so that one meeting might cover what other universities might have made into an entire course by itself (e.g. the Mathematics course covers trigonometry in one week, statistics in another, etc). Add into that mix the fact that most students want to leave an hour early because they have to wake up early (as early as 6 hours from the end of class) for work, family, etc. The result of this mix is that the OAFPU has reduced its educational goals to overly-simplified ideas which do not resemble those of a university. For example, it is an institutional requirement that students upon completion of intro level (100/1000) courses are merely able to identify concepts. For a world religions course, this means being able to correlate a pantheon of deities (with names, of course) to Furballism.

Again, this might sound practical, but the way in which it gets executed is horrendous. The tests, as mandated and planned by the institution (i.e. instructors are not supposed to go rogue and make their own examinations), really focus on how well a student can look up the information in their textbook. To suit this end, the institution has created the tests online in their learning management system (LMS) and indicated that these tests are open book and have a very generous time limit (roughly one hour for every twenty multiple choice answers). If an instructor wants to do these in-class (many of my students ask for this because they claim to not have time outside of class to do the tests outside of class), that’s one to two hours less of lecture material. When I have asked about the open book tests, the response from the administration has been that students really only need to learn how to look up information rather than waste their time learning Hamster Fur Weaving or Gerbil Literature (despite these being required general education courses). Oh, and I should not forget that many students arrive late — despite any penalties attached to it. An instructor might only have 30 minutes of good class time in a week if she were to follow the institutional requirements and wait for students to appear.

At the OAFPU, instructors are expected to be engaging and provide a good educational service to their students. This means that instructors should not lecture for more than fifteen minutes at a time, should incorporate ’30-minute documentaries’ (read that as ‘shows from Discovery and History channels’), lengthy group discussions about students’ opinions on the material, and anything else which might involve students. The rationale behind this is based on the theory that ‘adult learners’ are different from other learners and do not wish to ‘suffer through traditional lectures’ but rather want to add their own insight and discuss the material (the same material which they have not read). The institution uses the process of administrative observation to verify that instructors aren’t ‘boring the students with a lecture’. The wondrous observation occurs randomly and consists of the observer counting to see which students are concerned with the class session, regardless of content (i.e. even if the ‘presentation’ is ‘engaging’ according to their plan, students which can’t be bothered to be engaged count against the instructor).

Abused

I now wish to turn to the more important aspect of this post: the cycle of abuse. It is deeply connected to the OAFPU’s ‘commitment’ to educating the underprepared. For students to attend the great OAFPUs, they must, of course, spend money. Tuition at these institutions tend to run much higher than the local public/non-profit open access institutions. Places like the University of Phoenix charge around $10,500* a year for a full-time load over five years in a BA/BS program in business marketing (total is $53k provided that the student does not repeat any classes). In contrast, local open admissions schools cost a third of that price (even their out-of-state/non-resident costs are lower) despite these schools providing the same degree of education with the same schedule flexibility.

Instead, the primary site of financial abuse is through student loans. Like many universities, the OAFPU accepts federal financial aid (loans and grants) as well as other education benefits (e.g. GI Bill). Many students enroll at OAFPU because they will get a refund check from their financial aid. The attendance policy at an OAFPU is very liberal (a student is dropped only if she is marked absent for four consecutive weeks), and the academic integrity policy is a joke (the worst consequence listed is a F for the course in which the student was caught plagiarising — and that’s only if the student is a repeat offender with a major infraction). However, these two policies keep students enrolled so that the university gets profits. This is in addition to the OAFPU’s aggressive policy of getting students to enroll in future terms (regardless of academic standing) and to attend often enough to evade being dropped from their courses. Some of these activities include the administration phoning absent students weekly, the requirement that instructors are also to communicate with the absent student, and paid academic advisers who spend two-thirds of each term phoning students either to enroll or encourage students to communicate with their instructors and attend class.

The worst case of students are those who enroll and attend until they receive their financial aid check. Chances are, these students have no intention of paying back any loans. Rumours have circulated that there is a subset of students who transfer from OAFPU to OAFPU until they are expelled after the many generous probationary terms. However, the generous and liberal nature of university policies which allow these students to persist leads me to suspect that the primary purpose of these policies is so that the university can extract as much profit from these students rather than to attempt to educate them (or remove them if they are not interested in acquiring an education). I believe that is the danger and harm in corporatising education: the goal of profit will always supersede the goal of education often at the expense of education.

To take underprepared and uninterested people as students and cater to their desires (e.g. a degree without any difficult academic work) is a great recipe for profits. However, it is also a horrible recipe for a university; and this is where the corporatised university leads us: the decision to provide education as an institute of higher learning versus the decision to make profits as a ‘student-oriented’ corporation selling an ‘education product’ through ‘engaging lectures’.

 

*NB: Phoenix seems to have two different prices: a nationwide cost per credit hour for ‘lower-level’ courses and a regional cost per credit hour for ‘upper-level’ courses, so the price may fluctuate a bit. I compared the prices for New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Denver, CO; I used the least expensive of the three.

Privatising Knowledge

As I have begun to enter the world of academic publishing, one thing hit me hard: the cost of subscribing to journals. While journals in the humanities tend to be on the cheap side compared to some major STEM-subject journals (e.g. Nature), the cost is still significant. Recently, an article in The Guardian (link) pointed out that there has been a growing discontent with publishers charging high fees for what amounts to very little work. For the most part, the publisher’s paid staff does makes connections (i.e. gets authors, editors, and reviewers). However, the articles are written (for free) by academics. They are reviewed (again, for free) by other academics. The editors (who are generally unpaid) construct the CFP for an issue, make sure the contributions are anonymous before peer review, and then finally pass complete, edited, reviewed articles to the publisher who then prepares them for print, prints issues, and mails them to subscribers. Nobody doubts that the publishers should be paid for the cost of the work they produce (and, perhaps, a profit if one is so inclined). However with the advent of internet publishing platforms (from WordPress to Open Journal Systems), the extent to which that process can be automated is clear. Add in some technical geekery through Pandoc and a well-prepared LaTeX (or some word processor) template and a printable document is ready.

I’ve worked in the print industry, so I have an idea of what it might cost to print and even mail a given quantity of journals. That number, by the way, is nowhere near the $50 an issue journals charge. Even at retail cost, a journal like the Jornal of the American Academy of Religion (roughly 300 pages of black-and-white text, cut to roughly 9″x6″, then bound with glue and a cover) can be printed for $26 a pop. With 12 issues per year, the $228 annual subscription sounds like a steal. However, given the sheer number of subscriptions, that $26/book cost gets significantly reduced even if still done at retail (I’d guess a place like FedEx Office would charge ~$18 a book for just 100 books to print and mail). If there’s any additional discounts (e.g. corporate deal, larger volume discount, etc), and we’re looking at even cheaper production costs which make the $228 subscription sound quite high.

The Powers That Be in Nature would like us to think their paid staff does a lot of work by making the data interactive, perhaps creating graphics, and maintaining a website. The exact list of staff contributions are: ‘identifying the author and the article’s aim, assessing and editing the draft, selecting peer reviewers, working with the author to build on their advice, developing illustrations, rendering the article into print and online forms, maintaining it online and including links, citation statistics and other enhancements’. Yet, in most cases, these are done by the unpaid academics. In many cases, the author must provide keywords and an abstract of the article. Does the publishing staff simply make sure those things are present (something which an automated online system like OJS does). The staff assesses the draft? Makes sense if the paid staff member is knowledgeable in the particular field. Otherwise, that task is given to peer reviewers. I’ll allow that the paid staff does copyediting (a very useful service). The staff selects peer reviewers? Oh, so you mean the staff looks up which peer reviewers (who have identified what areas they are competent for reviewing) have expertise close to the article’s field (something which an automated system can do). The staff ‘work[s] with the author to build on their advice’ sounds a bit like the staff ‘passes on comments from the peer reviewer’. Developing illustrations. I’ll give that one. Render the article into print and online forms? So easy a program can do it for you (see Pandoc, above)! Maintain the online form including links and citation statistics? Ah, so they copy-and-paste from one form to another, then perhaps add links to other articles already published in their journal, then let the system count the journal equivalent of pingbacks/trackbacks. Oh wait, there’s a program which already does that. I’m not sure what ‘other enhancements’ are and if they even exist, so we’ll take that one out for now. So, the reason why Nature charges $32 per article for online access and requires an unlimited and exclusive license from authors is to have a copyeditor, and graphic designer, a manager to oversee them (or perhaps two: one for each department), a middle manager to oversee the lower managers, upper management to oversee the middle managers, and (finally) their profit. Again, Open Access Journals have shown that they can do all of the above (minus, perhaps, the rendering into print) at no cost for readers (though they may charge for printing and delivery if one wants that).

Strangely enough, one intention behind the original development of the internet was to allow easy and unfettered access to research for universities. Somehow, though, academics have let publishers erect paywalls to keep their hold on research as a marketable product. I, for one, support the move towards Open Access, full stop. There is no reason why major publishing companies should be able to dictate the terms on which research is produced, published, and accessed except that academics have been either ignorant or uncaring that their own research is often locked away and, in some cases, taken from them. Academics, as the ones who do the research and produce the articles, are the rightful copyright owners (since publishers defend their actions along the lines of copyright law) and should not need to give unlimited, exclusive access to their work in order for other academics to see it. I can respect the fact that publishers want to make a profit, but forcing academics into a give-or-go scenario must be stopped. What academics seem to not understand is that without their work, the publishers will suffer while academics can freely share their work. In other words, there is nothing to lose for academics but the chains which bind them.

Course Management Systems

As many have heard, Apple has unveiled its attempt to overtake Amazon’s dominance in the eBook market. Part of that includes their innovative approach to ‘revolutionise education’. However, with their horrible (and ingenious!) licensing agreement authors must agree to in order to produce ‘revolutionary’ books, it seems like a doomed experiment whose success relies on the laziness of authors.

However, I’m more interested in Healy’s response that ‘As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into course-management territory currently dominated by systems like Blackboard and Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky to the aggressively shitty.’ Do other educators have similar opinions with the current range of course management systems like BlackBoard?

I’d really like to get people’s opinions of current offerings. What are the shortcomings of these applications? Are there any redeeming qualities? What principles would make a good system? Would something based on an existing application (like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc) be helpful? For instance, if one was developed to work like WordPress.com (easy creation of a site and using subdomains so that a university could easily make something like phil100.blackboard.myuni.edu or even phil100.spring2012.blackboard.myuni.edu), would that be better? In short, if a developer were to focus on usability feedback from students and staff, what would be useful?

Academic Orthodoxy

My thesis, which I recently defended successfully last week, talks a lot about the development of orthodoxy in the history of Christian theology. While I was constructing my analysis and arguments, I began to think that orthodoxy is used in three different ways (which I call the theological, political, and ecclesial concepts of orthodoxy). However, I have also begun to see that many claims to orthodoxy are made through only the ‘political’ concept which is concerned with the maintenance of existing power relations. As a result of this usage, many discussions of theological opinion (i.e. whether something is theologically acceptable) and even social relations (i.e. whether a group which has different opinions is ecclesially acceptable) are used to hide the play of political power (i.e. only those which accept the authority of one can be considered ‘orthodox’ by that authority).

However, I think there are some less obvious applications which may prove interesting. In particular, I think this analysis can be applied to academia. There are at least two problems in the academy which revolve around this issue of orthodoxy: one is the restriction of a discipline to its own department and, two, is the breaking of such boundaries by academics when they approach other disciplines.

The first problem can be restated as the belief that (subject) can occur only in (subject) departments. Many of the conferences I have experienced do this, at best, subconsciously. However, a stronger example comes in rating places of study. Something like the Philosophical Gourmet Report seeks to determine the best places to study philosophy but excludes all non-philosophy departments. Syracuse (according to the report) has a great philosophy department with strengths across the discipline (though primarily in the analytic tradition), but it also has a strong grasp of the continental tradition in its religious studies department (sometimes even jokingly called the ‘continental philosophy department’ by the philosophy department). Rankings like the PGR overlook these strange arrangements and equates the entirety of a university’s expertise in a subject with the department which includes that subject in its title.

Through this approach to ‘orthodoxy’, imperfect rankings may be seen as the ‘canon of truth’ rather than as flawed but perhaps useful guides. In the case of the PGR, this is reinforced by the claim that the influential academics in that discipline chosen for the rankings survey are the collective voice of the discipline as if there could only be one priesthood and one orthodoxy. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting the PGR is necessarily incorrect or inaccurate but that it is incomplete and narrowly-focused on departments rather than subject areas. It is a lot easier to analyse the former and rank them, and the latter requires a lot more research and work to be done successfully.

The second problem of academic ‘orthodoxy’ might seem unrelated at first because it is focused on the membership of the department: not even everyone in a (subject) department are true believers of (subject). An example here might be the Syracuse religious studies department because some might complain that there is a contingent of philosophers who don’t study religion and therefore see the single department as two separate halves joined together by administrative alchemy rather than an affinity or shared interests in the study of religion. (This argument is mostly hypothetical. I do not know the department well enough to say it is factual.) Yet here is how it relates to the first problem (and perhaps could be re-formulated): interdisciplinary work is acceptable only from one’s own discipline. While the (hypothetical) group of ‘philosophers’ in the religious studies department see themselves as people doing work in both subject disciplines of religion and philosophy, the ‘pure’ scholars who are ‘real’ philosophers/religious scholars both see the ‘hybrids’ as outsiders. The ‘orthodoxy’ of the disciplines excludes the interdisciplinary work as heterodoxy and subsequently invalid.

However, the strangest thing is that those who consider themselves ‘orthodox’ scholars feel perfectly fine in claiming to understand properly other disciplines. Biologists like Richard Dawkins (or physicists like Stephen Hawking) feel that they understand the humanities (religion for Dawkins, philosophy for Hawking) to make bold statements and claim that their ‘orthodoxy’ supersedes the understanding that the other scholars possess (religion is terrorism, philosophy is unnecessary) while they deny the possibility of the reverse (philosophers and scholars of religion either possessing more detailed knowledge of their own subject or any useful knowledge of the sciences). What this amounts to is the installation of one’s own discipline as the ‘queen of the sciences’ which mediates all other forms of knowledge and understanding. Rather than seeing disciplines as inter-related, separately focused, and perhaps useful in society, a zero-sum game is formulated and played so that their own orthodoxy is the only one allowed. Academic ecumenism (in the form of interdisciplinary work from one discipline) should be employed for evangelistic or colonial purposes: to convert the heathens or colonise their discipline as a subset of orthodoxy in which only those deemed acceptable are allowed to speak for the discipline. No actual study of a discipline is needed because the orthodoxy speaks for itself as the only possible (and common sense) way to understand reality. Pluralism is disallowed and actively rejected in the academy.

The end result is the absence of interdisciplinary work and the virtual image of every scholar as interdisciplinary in order to protect their own discipline rather than work together with others. That which follows is the establishment of multiple orthodoxies within each discipline because if one’s judgement is questioned and one possesses orthodoxy, the other must be surely a heretic. Academic disciplines have been replaced by departments which generally exclude other departments by name rather than by the disciplines represented in their staff (even though one may have a PhD in philosophy from an orthodox university, if one works in a religious studies department one surely cannot be a philosopher any more!).

The Quickening

I haven’t been around much for the past month because I’ve been beating a long-dead horse, namely my thesis/dissertation. At the end of May, I had a complete draft sitting at approximately 72,000 words. Since then, I’ve gone through two more edits (bringing the word count up to 84,000) and am nearing the completion of the third and final edit. I’ve read through this thing so many times, I’ve begun to have dreams about presenting some of it in a lecture (oddly, one of those lecture dreams had me teaching theology through a maths department!?).

The thesis was signed off by my supervisors at my last meeting with them last week, and the examination committee has been decided, as well as the date of the viva voce (dissertation defence in American-speak) — it’s in mid-August for those few readers interested. I’ve now completely gone through and proofread the thesis from start to end, checking internal references, finding a few repeated sentences (four pairs of them! often chapters apart!), looking for grammatical errors, wording issues, etc. In addition, I’ve been lucky to hook two people into proofreading it, hopefully minimising the number of stylistic errors (word of advice: if you’re writing a thesis in UK English and having an American proofreader, you may want to mention some of the basic spelling differences such as -ise, -our, and -tre [instead of -ize, -or, and -ter]!). If I don’t submit my thesis tomorrow, Monday would make for a fun double-entendre (since it’s the celebration of the signing of America’s Declaration of Independence from the UK…).

However, that is only part of the fast-paced life in the past month. In addition to that, I had organised a conference at the beginning of June which, while it had a small attendance, was quite interesting because the general call for anything related to theology and religious studies ended up creating a conference theme around ‘identity’ quite unintentionally (from my end at least). Furthermore, my wife and I will be leaving Glasgow shortly (mid-July) to return to the US (before the UK government tries to kick us out by force). So, for the past month, I’ve been finishing my thesis/dissertation, organising a conference, and preparing our house for yet another transatlantic move. The last days of a thesis move way too quickly — and just when you might think it’s all over!