David Trinh

Sterling Memorial Library-- temple of knowledge or gaudy luxury?

I’ve made it know before that I’m not a big fan of Kevin Carey, the oftentimes false policy director of Education Sector; that said, Carey does have a decent piece in the most recent Washington Monthly where he makes the case for expanding online education.  In particular, Carey zeros in on one online university called “StraighterLine” that offers unlimited introductory online college classes for the low, low price of $99 a month:

This, Smith [the founder of StraighterLine] explained, was where StraighterLine came in. The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call- center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses à la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run. Burck Smith simply decided to get there first.

Luckily for those of us here at dear ol’ Yale, Carey argues that this new business model isn’t going to do much damage to the nation’s elite schools.  However, Carey thinks that America’s middle and lower-tier schools could be in for a world of hurt:

Ivy League and other elite institutions will be relatively unaffected, because they’re selling a product that’s always scarce and never cheap: prestige. Small liberal arts colleges will also endure, because the traditional model—teachers and students learning together in a four-year idyll—is still the best, and some people will always be willing and able to pay for it.

But that terrifically expensive model is not what most of today’s college students are getting. Instead, they tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn’t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return.

I take a little umbrage at Carey’s assertion that the Ivy League merely sells ‘prestige’—honestly, this charge simply smacks of bitter ressentiment—but I think the rest of his analysis is pretty spot on.  Speaking from first-hand experience (I went to the University of Minnesota before I came to Yale) I can attest that giant lectures at state universities often lack a little in quality.   Case in point, I learned micro econ from a TA at the U who could barely speak English; when I got to Yale I learned econ from this guy.  Because I’m nearly certain that the quality of intro micro economics at StraighterLine surpasses the same course at the U of M—anything could really—I can see how certain colleges may be threatened by the emergence of new low-cost online schools.

All this said, I really think there is some value in traditional college students (e.g. those between the ages of 18 and 25) attending real brick and mortar institutions.    I know it’s a bit cliché to say that one learns more in college in the dining halls than in the classroom, but, hey, things are clichés because they’re true.  Accordingly, while I may be able to get behind the idea of StraighterLine expanding its reach into older students who are returning to the educational marketplace late in their careers, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that a great number of younger Americans would be better off taking classes from online universities.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to dear ol’ Yale, so I suspect posting will be a bit light over the weekend as I unpack my boxes and (perhaps) find time to celebrate my birthday.

Phelps Gate-- photo by Adam Soloman

I’m going to make every effort to keep up a somewhat regular posting schedule during the upcoming term but, as you can probably guess, classes tend to take a pretty substantial toll on side projects like this.  That said, I’ll try to keep paying attention to the gubernatorial race in Minnesota and hopefully I’ll have time to write a bit about some of the goings on in New Haven.  Yale tends to attract a few notable speakers every year from which I might manage to write something worth your time.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

DT

I don’t approve:

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book…

…Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

In my mind, the dilemma over whether or not to reproduce these controversial cartoons lays bare a conflict on the left between (1) protecting free speech and (2) striving for political correctness, a clash of values that has become increasingly prominent in recent years.  Of course, one could, perhaps, argue that this is strictly a pragmatic way to avoid riots and the (possible) loss of human life.  I don’t buy that argument though, because I really can’t see a small printing of a strictly academic work arousing much controversy even on the radical right of the Arab world.  Rather, it seems that Yale is choosing to value political correctness over free speech.  Which is fine.  But, let’s not pretend that this is consistent with liberal values.

I dunno, maybe I’m being insensitive but I can’t help scoffing a bit at this decision.

Sunday’s copy of the New York Times contained a very true article that described the role which technology plays in the morning routines of millions of Americans.  I, like every other wholesome person, ordinarily find it next to impossible to drag myself out of bed.  Fortunately, my trusty lil’ electronic friend who sits prominently next to my bed (and who sometimes even shares my pillow) gives me reason to keep my eyes open once I’ve been roused by my alarm. Every day, as soon as my alarms sounds, I check Twitter, Political Wire and my email accounts; after I’ve completed these tasks, I’m sufficiently awake enough to be persuaded to get into the shower.  If I didn’t have a little electronic crack to keep me from hitting the snooze button, I suspect I would miss almost every 9AM class.

Over at the Timothy Dwight Blog, one of my fellow sophomores Devin Smith (TD ’12) offers up some wisdom about dining at Yale.  For the most part, I think he is dead on: the food at Yale is pretty decent (although I’ve never seen venison on the menu), New Haven’s restaurants are stellar, and ‘Sustainable Food Thursdays’ leave much to be desired.

That said, I think Devin talks up the food in TD’s dining hall a bit too much.  Not to rag on my own college but TD’s Harry Potteresque tables aside, the TD dining hall is pretty subpar.  True, the staff is fine, ostensibly it serves the same food as every other dining hall on campus and it’s never crowded.  However, because of the low volume of students that eat at far-flung TD, the food is almost always cold and there do seem to be fewer options at Timothy Dwight than at other colleges, especially Berkeley and Branford.

In my opinion, by far the best place to go that’s affiliated with YDS is the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS).  The hallway leading up to the dining hall in HGS actually makes you feel like you’re in a castle (Harry Potter points!), and Yale must like its grad students a bit more because the food is ALWAYS better than whatever is served in the residential colleges.  Seriously.  I’ve had pizza that could rival Pepe’s here, as well as pad thai that flies just under Bangkok Garden’s.  Another good option that used to be available to Yalies was the law school but sadly the university has decided to cut us off from the over-priced sushi and sandwiches that could be purchased here.  For shame Yale.

Cash-strapped universities (including dear ol’ Yale) across the nation are hurting but evidently none are hurting more than Harvard.  Harvard’s bottom-line is so beleaguered that Vanity Fair asks:

Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university?

As much as I relish the thought of Harvard sinking into an abyss, Crimson probably won’t be totally toppled by the recession.  Still, the picture is pretty bleak for an institution that is used to riding high on a cushy endowment.  Recently, the university has had to halt construction at the Harvard Hole and is now selling its assets at fire-sale prices—a painful process that leads to wonderful conversations like this one:

Jane Mendillo, who in July 2008 became president and chief executive officer of Harvard Management Company. Knowing that Mendillo was trying to unload assets, he offered to buy back Harvard’s sizable stake in his private fund. As he recalls, the surreal dialogue went something like this:

He: “Hey, look, I’ll buy it back from you. I’ll buy my interest back.”

She: “Great.”

He: “Here, I think it’s worth—you know, today the [book] value is a dollar, so I’ll pay you 50 cents.”

She: “Then why would I sell it?”

He: “Well, why are you? I don’t know. You’re the one who wants to sell, not me. If you guys want to sell, I’m happy to rip your lungs out If you are desperate, I’m a buyer.”

Ouch.  Best I can tell Harvard’s chief blunder was trying to follow the David Swanson endowment growth strategy minus any contingency plan that provided adequate liquidity in case of an economic downturn.  Old Blue is facing hard times too, but at least Yale put some cash aside that it could draw off of, as opposed to being forced to sell assets in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  Also, Yale didn’t do stupid shit like this:

Unwilling to sell its assets at fire-sale prices, [Harvard] needed immediate cash to cover, among other things, what my sources say was approximately a $1 billion unrealized loss from interest-rate swaps. That’s a staggering figure: $1 billion, roughly a third of the university’s entire operating budget for last year.

Those swaps, put in place under Harvard’s then president, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, in the early 2000s, were intended to protect, or hedge, the university against rising interest rates on all the money it had borrowed. The idea was simple: if interest rates went up, the swaps would bring in enough money to cover Harvard’s higher debt payments.

Instead, interest rates went down. And for reasons no one can explain to me, even as interest rates were plunging in 2007 and 2008, the university simply forgot, or neglected, or chose not to cancel its swaps—with the result that Harvard wound up facing that $1 billion loss! (Bold mine- DT)

Whoops.  And, with that I’ll leave you with one hedge-fund manager’s opinion about Harvard’s finances:

“They are completely fucked.”

I think we’re going to have to figure out a way to work that into a cheer for The Game this fall.

A few days I ago I went to a gathering of Yale alumni and current Yale students who are here in the Twin Cities working at internship in the area.  Ostensibly we were supposed to be discussing legal careers (all the alums were lawyers) but somehow the conversation meandered and one of the alums ended up telling us about her college work experience in the dining halls.  I was surprised by this story because I wasn’t aware that students at Yale had ever been allowed to work in the dining halls, although apparently just over a decade ago these used to be common, on-campus jobs. 

This made me remember that the absence of students in the kitchen was one of the most surprising things about coming to Yale after going to school at the University of Minnesota for a year.  At the U of M, almost all the employees in the dining halls are current students.  At Yale on the other hand, we have this sort of bizarre system where Yalies have their food prepared and served to them by (largely) poor, black residents of New Haven. 

In my opinion this is a shame.  Not only is this relationship more than a little uncomfortable but it also plays into a stereotype of Yale that, at least I think, is pretty antiquated.  And this would be an easy problem for the University to fix!  Let more people work in the dining hall!  As far as I can tell the only positions that are open to students right now are weird management positions, but I think this could be corrected without much hassle.  If students don’t want these jobs fine, but I think it’s a little strange that Yale has decided not to even offer these jobs to undergraduates.

Matt Yglesias takes on contrarianness:

My strong sense is that contrarianness reached its apogee in the 1990s when a general sense took over that politics was basically silly and that punditry should be seen as basically akin to the college debate circuit wherein the idea is to construct the most clever possible argument rather than to actually hit on the truth. When this general spirit of the times merged with the elite press’ inexplicable loathing of Al Gore you started getting really bizarre arguments being made with a straight face. People would say that one good thing about George W. Bush was that he was dimwitted, which made him understand leadership. Or that a big problem with Gore was that he was interested in public policy.

This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, thousands more killed in a senseless war, and eventually the collapse of the world economy. But that in turn has at least to a small extent reminded people that it actually does matter what happens and who’s right. (DT- bold mine)

Indeed.  This love for the contrarian was one of the things about Yale that shocked me the most when I first arrived on campus last fall.  In the Yale Political Union, and on the right of the Union especially, I think there’s a particularly bizarre emphasis on making ideas “interesting,” “edgy,” and “original” instead of, you know, correct.  And hey!  This is fine in a collegiate debating society, especially one filled with a lot of smart people—debates would get incredibly dull if everyone just parroted the same, smart, conventional wisdom ad nauseum.  Listening to a speech which argues that foreign aid to Africa is bad because it ‘engenders a culture of paternalism’ is much more interesting than a prosaic exhortation to ‘Save Darfur;’ however, we need to remember that the former argument, while clever, isn’t necessarily a persuasive case for cutting off foreign aid to needy nations in the real world.

I think the real problem is that too often people pick up these habits in college and carry them through the rest of their lives.  This is especially apt to happen if people spend their entire careers working and socializing with other really smart graduates of elite colleges and universities. If the people who float in your circles are all equally brilliant and have the same set of conventional values, there’s really no way to distinguish oneself intellectually other than by adopting some rather unorthodox beliefs.

Look, being an interesting person is great (it’s my understanding that the self-proclaimed mission of the Party of the Right in the YPU is to turn its members into ‘interesting people’) but it’s also important to be right, or at the very least, close to the mark!  And, judging from the political leaders and thinkers who have been produced by our nation’s leading schools, too often than not we prioritize creativeness over correctness.

Over at The Quick and the Ed, via Yglesias, Kevin Carey bemoans the lack of information about the quality of education at colleges, a knowledge deficit that he argues prevents students and parents from choosing the right educational institution:

[L]et’s say I was trying to choose the right college for my (non-existent) 17-year old daughter. And let’s say I’m the perfect higher education consumer from the academy’s perspective–I don’t care at all about climbing walls or fitness centers or luxury dorms or any of that stuff. I care about all the truly important things I’m supposed to care about: the quality of the teaching, scholarship, and academic environment, how the school will help my daughter become an enlightened, ethical, fair-minded public citizen.

How would I choose? Where would I get that information, in a way that would allow me to decide among hundreds of alternatives? Answer: nowhere, because it doesn’t exist. Colleges may complain about having to market themselves based on dorm-based pilates studios and whatnot, but it’s not like they have some other secret brochure in a filing cabinet somewhere, filled with all the real information about the true meaning of higher education, materials that they would gladly distribute far and wide if only students weren’t so coddled by their helicopter parents and addled by the rap music and the video games.

In fact most colleges don’t systematically gather this kind of information, or if they do–via the National Survey of Student Engagement or something similar–they don’t release it to the public. Yes, yes, colleges are lot more complicated than televisions. But nobody can say with a straight face that colleges are doing nearly as much as they could to provide consumers with information about teaching and learning that’s useful for making consumer choices–that is, presented in a way that allows for institutional comparisons.

Color me confused.  Has Carey ever glanced at the US News College rankings or browsed through theU.com?  True, these two sources don’t provide a complete picture of the caliber of a school’s academic regimen; however, the factors that do go into compiling the rankings for US News certainly aren’t things like ‘dorm-based pilates studios.’  Rather, these rankings are created by using statistics such as graduation and retention rates, as well as factors such as faculty resources and peer assessment—presumably the sort of data that Carey is clamoring for.

Moreover, I’d like to note that Carey’s imaginary daughter is really going to be in for a rude awakening if she bases her admissions decision solely on ‘objective’ characteristics such as the quality of “teaching, scholarship[s] and [the] academic environment.”  Sure, these things matter but it’s also important to go to a school with which you can jive.  I’m reluctant to single any particular school, but I can say from first hand experience that the social environment in college is just as, if not even more, important to the success of your education than the hard statistics of educational quality.  Alas, such information is difficult to distill into data that ‘perfect higher education consumers’ can easy use.

Fortunately, the system that we have for selecting colleges which uses admissions requirements and standardized testing (dont’ want to get in over your head), college visits (check out the scene, make sure you can make friends) and college rankings (a sprinkle of objective commentary about the ability of the school to land you a job on Wall Street) works pretty well and I don’t think we need to cry wolf about a shocking lack of educational statistics being provided to would-be college students.

I read an amazing essay this morning in the American Scholar (honestly, it’s one of the finest pieces I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, go check it out) about boorish people and so much more.  A few excerpts:

Schopenhauer had this to say about the perils of reading: “It comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking, just as the man who always rides forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.” Schopenhauer reminds us of a simple fact: when we read, or at least when we read badly, read lazily, “another person thinks our thoughts for us.”

Dead right.  This past year at Yale I was in a program called Directed Studies which assigned works from the entire spectrum of the Western canon.  It was wonderful and I loved it.  Works I ordinarily would have hated (Wordsworth and lyric poetry probably top the list), instead enthralled me-a true delight.  This summer when I returned to Minnesota I began reading a Brothers Karamazov which had been talked up to me by more than a few people as ‘the single best novel on the human experience.’  False, I thought after I completed it, it was instead plodding and raised weighty philosophical issues in a predictable and boring way.  However, after a few days of mulling my opinions over about Brothers K, I realized that it wasn’t the quality of the literature that was so lacking, but rather it my lack of reflection as I read the novel that led to my poor impression.

I had indeed “read badly, read lazily” because I was used to being challenged by my professors and peers in section.  Turned lose into such an expansive novel with only sparknotes to buoy me I sank beneath the weight of the work.  I’m not really sure how to deal with this problem, how to ‘read myself smart’ so to speak, so I’ve essentially given up reading ‘great works’ this summer and instead am dabbling in non-fiction and lesser reading (not that this isn’t fun, as I’m currently reading Main Street which is based on my hometown of Alexandria, MN-a real treat).

More brilliance:

Perhaps my allergy to bores-along with an attraction to reading that can border on addiction (hell for me is being caught in a strange place with nothing to read)-is at the center of a paradox: we want to be told authoritatively, once and for all, what’s what-and we want nothing of the kind. We love the character that therapists call the Subject Who Is Supposed to Know: he (and it almost always is a he) promises Truth. But we’re sickened at the thought of taking our truth from another-it’s belittling. And maybe we’re dismayed, too, at the idea that the world, so rich in appearances, with its strangeness, beauty, horror, and the rest, should give way and open to one golden key. What a shrinking of the manifold! What a bringing down of the angels to dance minuets on the head of a pin.

We like to build altars to this god or that and then tear the altars down. We fall all over ourselves praising an author, a statesman, a director, a music maker. For a while this person is all in all. But soon the prophet lets us down. We find the flaws in his bookkeeping: his numbers don’t crunch. So we defile his relics and pull his statues down. All of our tabloids go to town on him. But do we ever learn? Soon, won’t we be chasing after another ideal the way a starving man chases down a bread truck?

This reminds me of a ‘Tom Friedman phase I went through last year which lasted about six months.  At first I was absolutely smitten with Friedman’s writing and thought ‘The World is Flat’ and ‘Lexus and the Olive Tree’ were some of the most profound works of non-fiction I had ever read.  A few months after this spell began though, I had lunch with Friedman and listened to one of his talks (all this through winning some obscure essay contest) and came to realize his ‘insights’ into globalization didn’t amount to much more than an awareness of the existence of the internet and a basic understanding that trade generally diminishes the prospects for war.  None of this was at all earth shattering, and I was disappointed an intellectual figure I had built up so much turned out not to be such an inspired figure–a bit of a boorish scholar if you will.

Recently though I’ve come to realize that it’s important that I don’t pull all of Friedman’s ’statues down,’ as I believe his writings on the Middle East are generally very solid (see ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem,’ entirely disregard his idiotic ’suck on this’ comments), even though I certainly don’t regard him as the luminary scholar that I once did.  Some of Friedman’s ‘numbers might not crunch,’ particularly his prediction that no two countries with a McDonald’s will ever go to war against one another, but that doesn’t mean all his ideas are overly cute and devoid of substance.

Alright, so it’s probably clear from my rambling that the subject of this essay is largely unclear, but, it’s good, so go read it.  Seriously.