Something happy

...though in a twisted way, the post right before this one could be classed as happy.

I missed posting this on Father's Day, but that's OK; part of it was that I was on the phone with my own dad. But I do want to share this story; it's one of my favorite memories from that time of my life and, I think, proof of Why My Dad Is Awesome:

I attended one of the "Public Ivy" universities. My dad taught at a much smaller school - it was kind of one step above a community college. I could have gone there for free but he encouraged me to go to the (expensive) "Public Ivy" because they had a much better biology department.

But to try to save some money - and also get done faster - I took a lot of the distribution courses and cognate courses over the summers from his school. They were free, and also they allowed me to get things out of the way.

One big one was Physics. Everyone who knew anything about majoring in science told me "Do not take physics and organic chemistry at the same time; it will make you crazy because of the workload."

So I decided to take Physics in the summer at my dad's school. Physics I one summer; Physics II the next.

Physics I went really well. The teacher was older - I think just a few semesters from retirement. He was a good teacher, and he was easygoing and had a good sense of humor. Also, the topics - vectors and electricity being two I remember - made sense to me and I did well in the class.

Physics II was the next year. This was the year my dad took early retirement, and he had hired me (once my class was out for the day) to help him for a couple hours each day to pack up his office, to pack up the stuff he had bought on grants that was his "personal" lab equipment he could take with him, and also to clean up/clear out the research labs so the new guy would have an easier time setting up. So every day after Physics I went over there, we worked for a while, ate lunch together, and then when he went home, I rode with him.

Well, the first day of Physics II, the prof walked in the room. He gave us all (it was a pretty big class, in one of those big auditorium like halls) the stink eye, and said:

"I know why you're here. You're here because you can't pass Physics during the regular semester, and you think it will be easier in the summer. It. Will. Not. Be. Easier."

Now, first off, that statement is full of fail in at least three ways:

1. My experience with summer students is generally the opposite. Students take summer classes because they want to graduate early. Or because they are working and know that a lighter class load in the fall makes life easier. Or because they can go for free at their dad's school and get the distribution courses out of the way.

2. Even if you believe that your students are slacker idiots, you don't SAY that to them. Because it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. Even if 1 and 2 don't matter, saying something like that to your students will make them hate you. I know I disliked the guy after he said that.

So anyway. He started in.

It was Optics. I am not so good at Optics. Optics confused me.

I tried my best, but when the first test rolled around, I knew I didn't really have it. (Also, the test was different from what I expected).

The next day in class, he handed the tests back. I earned a D. That was really hard, especially considering that I was a (mostly) A student. I guess lots of other people did, too, he proceeded to berate the class for being 'stupid' and for not studying and similar things.

He finally said, in frustration: "Okay. You need to go and get tutoring. The tutor for this class will be my wife. Tutoring sessions are $8 a half-hour."

That was twice the going rate for the graduate student tutors in other classes. And more than twice what I asked for when I tutored one of the neighbor kids in French.

And it irked me that he was hiring his WIFE - first, he makes a test that might just be a wee bit TOO hard, then he yells at us, then he tells us, "Pay my wife and she'll help you get a better grade.

(Later on, a couple of the other students went and complained to the dean. And he agreed that it was a conflict of interest and told the guy to stop and to hire a grad student instead. And the prof yelled at us for that).

Anyway. The class went on, but I didn't hear much of it. I was upset about the D, and also upset about the way he was treating us.

Walking across campus to my dad's building, I kept thinking about it. I couldn't drop the course, and I couldn't fail it. Doing either would mean I'd either have to take Physics II with organic in the fall, or I'd have to delay my graduation by another semester - neither of which seemed desirable. And I kept thinking about it, and worked myself up into a state. (I am good at doing that, even still).

By the time I walked into my dad's office, I was in tears. He asked me what was wrong. I think I got it out in one of those long, don't-take-a-breath-in-the-middle sentences that you sometimes do when you're crying and are afraid you're going to sob in the middle.

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he hugged me. Now, in my family we have never been real big huggers. We are kind of standoffish and shy, physically speaking. We love each other but we express it in different ways. So it wasn't like some of my friends where everyone was always grabbing everyone else and hugging them.

And then, he whispered in my ear (very quietly because there were other people in the office and I don't think he wanted them to hear):

"I'm sorry you got the asshole professor."

HAH hahahahahahaha.

That wasn't a word he commonly used - at least not around me. And it had two effects: first, it startled me a little and I stopped crying (as I said, not a word he commonly used). And second - and I realized this as the semester ground on - that was really the only appropriate descriptor for the guy.

My dad did know the professor - he hadn't said anything about him to me so as not to prejudice me - but later on I learned that he had served on committees with the guy and had a low opinion of him (seems the guy was the kind of person who needed to air every grievance he ever had, whether it was the right forum or not).

The biggest thing was that it made me feel validated. Like I wasn't just being a whiny baby complaining about the guy. Or that I wasn't "that student" who does poorly on an exam and cries, "But I get As in all my other classes, honest."

That it wasn't me, it was him.

And then, after that, my dad took me out to lunch. And we figured out a plan. One of his friends had a son who was an engineer with the Navy, and Art was on leave that summer. So we hired him to help me with optics (figuring if anyone could do it, a Navy engineer could). So Art helped me, I figured out what I needed to know, I worked hard, I did better on the tests.

I ultimately earned an A in the class. And I felt like I won. And I realize that the "asshole professor" probably never even cared that I earned an A. But it was important to me. And I like to think that it made my dad a little proud, too, that I fought my way back from that initial D.

So, a belated happy father's day to all the "good dads" out there.

The Financial Aid Bubble(?)

This is a semi-serious post, for a change. But it's something I've been thinking about since Darren posted the question (originally from Instapundit):

Will higher ed be the next bubble to burst, with student loans providing the easy credit that inflated it?

That got me thinking. I think there would be a number of short-term bad impacts, but there might be some longer-term good changes, IF colleges are intelligent about things.

The bad, first:

1. A certain number of students would find themselves unable to go to college - students who want to go but whose families don't have the money. This is probably the worst impact, but then again, it might open up the market for smaller, less expensive schools. Or it might encourage some kind of flexibility, like the night-school programs many places have for MBAs and such. (I have no idea how good those programs are; all I know is some of my students have said that online programs - like University of Phoenix - vary widely in their quality. And I suspect that taking a degree online shorts a student in the human-interaction side, and perhaps to an extent in the problem-solving side. Certainly, it's hard to do lab science well if most/all classes are online. And arguably impossible to do lab science well if course delivery is 100% online).

There would be a period of "retrenchment" where people who could not afford college and could not get loans would have to figure out a plan B.

2. On campus, some of the systems that are suffering right now (libraries, perhaps landscaping, "deferred maintenance") would suffer more. I worry what would happen to my campus library under severe budget cuts; having served on that committee I can see how close to the bone they are operating now. Probably most journal subscriptions would have to be dropped. (Which might actually have a beneficial ripple of forcing the journals to drop their prices, or do away with the annoying "library supplement" that doubles or triples the price of the subscription for libraries).

3. Non-tenured folks on campus would be let go. This would be another potentially bad impact - it would be difficult for years thereafter to attract quality people, at least in any discipline that is "marketable" outside the academy. We have had a hard time keeping geneticists because industry tends to hire them away from us.

I also fear, if things got really bad, there'd be RIFfing - Reduction in Force, which is a legal way to fire tenured faculty (who are otherwise performing OK). I don't know how they'd do it for sure - if it would be seniority based (which would mean at my school, I'd be third or fourth in line on the chopping block) or if it would be based on "duplication of effort" (in which case I'd be safer, as there are two courses I teach that no one else could, and a third that I co-teach with the only other person on campus who could teach it).

I do think the sciences would likely be safer than some of the humanities; we still need doctors and engineers and nurses and soil scientists and such even in bad economic times. (Or at least that's how it would look to administrators)

I also suspect that the Rise of Adjuncts will continue; there's an army of poorly-paid, non-benefit people mostly teaching intro-level classes, especially on campuses without much of a graduate school. And I do not think this is a good thing; you cannot live on adjunct pay and often adjuncts are working more than one job.

4. There might be pay cuts for faculty. I could deal with that IF I felt they were justified, and other cuts had already been made (I would be extremely angry, and seriously consider quitting, if, say the college president continued to receive a $300K salary while the faculty are being told to give up $10K or more each per year).

5. There might be benefit cuts. Again, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with that - though I wouldn't want to see medical (at least not MAJOR medical) insurance go away for us.

6. Outreach to the community might decline, which would probably be bad long-term. Pressures for "giving" would probably go up, which would be annoying. (Already alumni get dunned way too much, IMHO).

7. Some universities might decide to drop the charade of undergraduate teaching and become solely research based institutes dependent on grant or industrial money. Not sure if that's good or bad; certainly there are some schools you don't want to go to as an undergraduate because despite their good names, you will be taught nearly always by TAs and you will be a number in a multitude of numbers.

Other schools might go the other way - grind the effort of research to a halt and become more like the old "Normal Schools" - where teaching, and especially education the next generation of educators, is the main mission. Again, I'm not sure that's an entirely good or entirely bad thing.

So that's the bad, as I see it. There might be some neutral, or even good, outcomes, if the universities are intelligent about things:

1. One way money could be saved would be by trimming and flattening administrations. Most campuses I've been on have pretty bloated administrations - lots of v.p.s that do things that may be important, but which campuses seemed to get along without 10 or 15 years ago. Sometimes campuses "kick people upstairs" they want out of the classroom for whatever reason (but can't fire because of tenure). Possibly, altering tenure to include a "If you are demonstrably offensive to the students, if you teach from 30 year old crumbling notes you have not updated since the Reagan administration, if you can't speak English, or if you have demonstrable conflicts of interest, we can fire you, tenure or no tenure" clause might help with this. I'd also like to see an end to the "let's reward him with an administration post" dealings - too often in that case, good people get yanked from the classroom.

2. As I said, I think the sciences will be pretty safe, as will the "core" disciplines like English and Math. However, some of the more fluffy of the majors - the Various Studies majors, the Pop Culture majors, some of the edgier art stuff - may go away. I'd hate to see art and theater and music go away, because they are an important part of the university, but I think there's a difference between providing Art History classes so people are well-rounded and allowing someone who COULD be out in the "workforce" making and trying to sell his art on the open market to do endless years of graduate work under the university's "protection" so to speak.

I think also perhaps education departments could be re-thought. Require to-be-teachers to major in an actual discipline - be it math, biology, English, Spanish, History...and have them get the same background as the actual majors. Do away with some of the more theory-based Ed classes. And let's please not turn out any more math "teachers" who don't know fractions or algebra, please.

I would also like to see the more politicized of the majors go by the wayside, but I'm not sure that that would happen.

In a very draconian system? Maybe departments could "justify" their existence based on the percentage of their recent graduates who are in or working towards (like are in dental school) a job related to the major. Those that seem to be turning out a lot of 7-11 managers might want to consider how they could better serve the students.

English departments will always be needed; we need to teach people to write and to read literature intelligently. I think music and theater departments are needed because as a people, we need art and entertainment. I'm not so sure that some of the departments where they train the next generation of activists are so necessary; that seems that that could be on-the-job training.

(And yes, yes, I know: I'm doing something I hate right here: being coldly pragmatic. Yes, college should be a time when you can go and learn about stuff you may never use again. Yes, there should be lots of options there. But in a horrible economy, where it's hard to get a job to begin with, you don't want to be selling a major to a student where it's very unlikely they will ever get a job. I LOVED my linguistics classes and briefly considered majoring in it, until I realized the ONLY real employment would be as a Professor of Linguistics, and I worried how many departments of Linguistics might exist in the future)

3. Perhaps we as a culture may rethink what a college degree means, or what a degree is needed for. I could see how someone with, say, lots of natural talent at playing the violin, who has worked with masters for years, could go straight into performing without a college career. Now, true, it might help for them to have some "performance" classes or to hone their talent further - and it might help them to have some business oriented classes so they don't get screwed by some agent - but I do see a lot of things you probably don't need a degree for. And unfortunately, in this country, there are two classes of people who didn't attend college: the "rare genius" like Bill Gates, and "losers." And that's not true at all. There are a lot of people who can have good and important careers without a college degree (as I often point out: you don't need a B.A. to be a good plumber). While, again, some courses might HELP (I can see where business and bookkeeping classes could be very important to someone in business for themselves as a plumber or roofer or something), people who know they want to do skilled trades probably are not best served by whiling away 4+ years on a campus - unless they really WANT to.

4. And that brings me to another issue: the young person who is sent to campus because it's status for the family. I've actually had an occasional student admit to me that they were "trying" to flunk out because they didn't want to be in college, but they felt they had to "prove" to their parents they didn't belong on campus.

And that's sad. That wastes the kid's time. That wastes the parent's money. And it can - if the student just crashes and burns without any mitigating explanation- help lead to professorial burnout. (I still take it kind of personally when what I see as a "smart kid" fails in my class. I know, I know - they failed, not me, but still).

5. Perhaps some of the grandeur and pomp, especially as befits the administration, will decline. (Honestly, the difference on some campuses between faculty and administrator offices is a little shocking - the faculty have pressboard desks and 20 year old indoor-outdoor carpeting, while the administrators have custom-made furniture and Persian rugs. And it's a little bit demoralizing, I think, for faculty to go to a meeting in one of those offices and get the feeling of, "Oh. So that is a marker of how our relative value is seen.")

So, I guess my conclusion is - not all restructurings are bad. There could - if colleges choose to be intelligent about it- lots of good that comes out of it: smaller leaner campuses, perhaps a cheaper way of doing college (maybe less grand fancy student unions, fewer Persian-carpet-lined administrative offices). Hopefully more of an emphasis on what makes college college: learning, preparation for a career, focusing on the enterprise of teaching and research.