Ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge?

http://eres.olin.wesleyan.edu/eres/docs/12989/dunnwhy.pdf

I really liked this link from Brent Swearingen (via Dick Ellis). Here’s an example from the longer piece on “competency theory.”

"The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own."

So perhaps this is why you often can’t explain to the “B” student what an “A” paper looks like or to a faculty member who gets low evaluations why others get so much higher evaluations. This isn’t to say that all “developmental efforts” (for students or for faculty) are useless (the paper makes the opposite case), but it does help explain why so many Honors students have “the imposter syndrome” and why so many poor students can’t understand why they’re not getting higher grades. There’s also an interesting point at the end about how to get more women into fields such as Science and Engineering.

Kuh on Student Success Literature

Kuh’s one of the “big dogs” in the student success field. Here’s a summary of some of his key conclusions.

First, almost all of the key student success information is available for free, so why would you pay a consultant to help you with admissions and retention as many institutions are doing?

Second, there are some pretty specific “high impact educational practices” that all institutions should be working on.

"High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter," published this year by the American Association of Colleges and Universities — include learning communities, writing-intensive courses, study abroad, student-faculty research, and culminating experiences like capstone courses, comprehensive exams, and theses. Equally important, participating in some of those activities seems to have compensatory effects, in that they also improve the performance of students of color and first-generation students.

See also this report - http://nces.ed.gov/IPEDS/research/papers.asp.

Third, if institutions really want to demonstrate support for student success, they should talk less and do more on the topic.

To encourage movement in that direction, such reporting templates as the Voluntary System of Accountability, designed for public universities, and the U-CAN college Web site, for private colleges, could feature a high-impact-practices index: the ratio of the number of students who annually participate in activities with a positive influence on student success to the total number of undergraduates at an institution.

This sounds somewhat like what JBU is doing with its student data warehouse, but we've got a long ways to go before we get to what Kuh would like to see institutions like ours really do.

What makes good teachers?

A New York story from Malcolm Gladwell. The short version is that “presence” (“withiness”) matters more than book knowledge.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1

"A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."

Why do women outnumber men in study abroad?

The short answer is that no one really knows. The long answer appears to emphasize the curriculum typically studied (which tends to be in more "female" fields), the growing numbers of women in higher education more generally, the fact that parents are more concerned about safety for their daughters than sons (so less "independent" travel for women), and that many women are worried that if they don't travel in college, they won't get another chance until after their children are out of the house.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/04/genderabroad

The coming age of digital textbooks?

I keep reading that this age of digital textbooks is right around the corner, but it never seems to materialize. Maybe this time, that prognostication is correct? I certainly am starting to see the signs of it at JBU and in my own work.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i14/14a02901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Who needs profs when you have computers?

Some of the more sci-fi conjecturing in this story don't make a lot of sense to me, but when they point out how revolutionary computers have been just in the last decade in how we in the academy operate, I wonder whether these ideas are more than mere flights of fancy.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i14/14a01301.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Informal tutoring trumps formal mechanisms?

One of the interesting asides I heard at the CIC conference last week was that tutoring efforts in general are not really more effective than not having tutoring sessions available, at least at residential institutions like ours. I’d seen other studies to that effect, so that point wasn’t the surprise. The reason the presenters offered for the seemingly strange result was the surprise. When the researchers followed up in focus groups, the students at residential institutions who didn’t use tutoring services quickly explained that they get informal, “free” tutoring in the evenings from someone down the hall, so why bother seeking out the “official” tutors through the regular institutional channels. Take away the formal tutoring, and the use of these informal mechanisms just increased, but add more formal mechanisms, and you didn’t get much additional bang for that buck since most of the “real” tutoring continued to take place in these informal contexts.

Those doing the investigating took that information and responded in two ways. First, they focused their official tutoring mechanisms on commuter students, those at off-campus sites, and those who in general were not part of the residential community and didn’t, therefore, has as much access to these informal networks. Second, they developed a system of “trained” students in all of the residence halls who could help with math and writing skills in particular. There would be, for example, a “trained” math student on each floor of each residence hall who would have a special sign on his or her door (a star, in this case) to denote someone who could help with these kinds of informal, late-night tutoring. These two changes significantly increased the effectiveness of their tutoring and remedial services without adding much cost. Something to think about.

"Free market" budgeting in higher education?

A lot of higher education institutions have been experimenting with cost-center budgeting in which each individual unit gets to keep a certain percentage of any revenue generated but also is responsible for making cuts if revenue from that area declines. Here's a recent example at the University of Cincinnati.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/11/cincinnati

As someone who has pushed for exactly these sorts of measures at JBU, I can certainly relate to the kinds of conversations these efforts are generating. We so far have decided to do this kind of work only on the margins (our ancillary budget process and our Grad budgeting "boat"), in large part because our units are not autonomous in which the academic unit responsible for cost would also be responsible for revenue generation. Those efforts are separate (academics and admissions), so if academics can only partner with (not run) the revenue generation side, it doesn't make much sense to have them fully responsible for the cost side as well.

Review of "Rethinking Faculty Work"

Read the book and heard the main author, Ann Austin, present at the CIC. The basic argument appears to be that technology and social changes are all creating a much different academic world than the one we were previously accustomed to. As a consequence, we need to be much more flexible and transparent in our various hiring, development, and teaching efforts.

Since I work at a small institution that emphasizes (or at least believes itself to be emphasizing) flexibility and innovation, I didn't find too much new and exciting in this book or this presentation, but it was nice confirmation that what we're doing at JBU is on the right track.

Creating a sabbatical/severance pay fund?

One of the institutions I talked to at the CIC (much bigger and with more resources) does something like the following, translated into our JBU context.

1) A portion (1/6th?) of each faculty member’s salary is withheld each year into a separate pot.

2) If the faculty member passes both three-year formal evaluations and/or the next promotion review, then that professor can do one of two things with that full-year’s salary that has accumulated.

- Take a one-year sabbatical at full pay with the saved money being used to hire a full-time replacement.
- Keep working but get a one-time bonus of the equivalent of a full-year of pay.

3) If the faculty member does not pass the formal evaluation at the three year mark, they would be let go with the equivalent of a half-year’s salary as severance pay. If that person fails the 6-year evaluation or the promotion review, that person is let go with the equivalent of a full-year’s salary as severance pay.

4) I didn’t follow up on the details to determine what would happen if someone left of their own volition at any point in this process.
My sense is that this institution didn’t implement this policy by holding back more and more money over time but by diverting salary increases over time into this sabbatical/severance pay fund. Not sure if this is a feasible and even intriguing option for JBU, but it’s a direction I’ve never heard of before, hence my noting it here.

Satisfaction = Organizational Commitment?

My colleague Dr. Rick Froman runs our faculty opinion and climate surveys. He's been trying to explain to me that when we in administration think of satisfaction, we tend to think of "constituency needs" and so we tend to operate like politicians making campaign promises to various groups. But in practice, "satisfaction" is probably more closely connected to someone's basic (and original?) commitment to the organization (and its mission?) than anything else. That fact might indicate that we should be paying even more attention than we already do to "institutional fit" and compatibility with the mission of the place in the hiring process than to some of the professional competencies (what courses can this person cover) that we typically focus on. Southwest Airline's adage "hire for personality and train for skill" is probably an example of this type of thinking. Rick will probably tinker with our faculty satisfaction survey to see if we can get at this correlation more directly at JBU than we have in the past.

Review of Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"

Took me awhile to get to this one (it's been out since 2000), but it's still a great read, though not as interesting to me as Gladwell's "Blink." The basic argument of Tipping Point, is that small things can have big consequences, particularly if a few key people are great "connectors," "salesmen," and "mavens," if the "context" is ripe, or if you've found a way to make your message (or product) particularly "sticky." Much of reality, therefore, functions more like an epidemic with exponential swings up and down for reasons that seem almost impossible to predict in advance or even to determine after the fact (witness the recent financial collapse).

Gladwell offers a number of case studies of how this process works, the best being, from my perspective, the Paul Revere story about how a counterpart attempting a similar ride on that same night had almost no effect compared to the great effect that Revere had. Gladwell's a very effective story teller.

Some of what he said could have direct application for our educational setting and is probably closely connected to the whole "engaged learning" approach in which the goal is not so much to review facts but to find ways to create enthusiasm for learning (a contagion) and to help make that learning life-long (sticky).

Another interesting application of the "Tipping Point" philosophy is to the world of marketing and sales in which Gladwell argues that "word of mouth" is becoming even more important and not less as we might suspect in this age of efficient electronic communication. But what happens when everyone can receive everything on-line is that we become "immune" to all of this stuff being thrown at us, and we only really trust what people we really know, and know to be experts (mavens), tell us. Those mavens help us cut through the clutter, and so they are increasingly the unofficial gatekeepers to modern marketing success.

Which reminded me very much of the whole "new markets" initiative that we've been working on at JBU in which we attempt find key influencers at important organizations and market to them instead of just trying to do a mass appeal via print ads or some other major media approach. That would make sense in a "tipping point" world. We'll see how well it works at JBU.

The culture of higher education organizations

I found this to be a helpful summary of some of the major issues facing higher education.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/16/tierney

The Scandal of the Republican Mind?

In our evangelical circles there's a famous book by Mark Noll called "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Many of us in Christian higher education have spent our entire lives trying to overcome that scandal.

What David Brooks points out is that despite much previous effort to establish a solid conservative mind, the Republican establishment in recent years has increasingly tossed aside its philosophical and intellectual roots in favor of cultivating the "common touch." 30 years ago, for example, Buckley was the Republican intellectual leader in various media outlets. Now it's Rush. I like Sarah Palin a lot, but when she rejects not just D.C. but the entire east coast (where almost 50% of all colleges and universities are located), and the Republican party lauds her for saying it, we appear to have our own "scandal of the Republican mind" going, from which, I fear, it will take us a very long time to recover.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?em

Transcending the faculty-administration divide

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/07/estwood

It’s a long article, but the gist is this. Higher education (especially in Research I institutions) is increasingly sclerotic because faculty’s goals are disciplinary, personal, and very high stakes (up or out) while administrator’s goals are campus-wide and impersonal. These two worlds are drifting further and further apart, making higher education more and more unwieldy. Faculty who become administrators are particularly conflicted as try to bridge this gap.

The answers these authors propose are five. Emphasize teaching and service more (and scholarship less), have the budget process be more transparent, do a better job with faculty development, organize into smaller groups, and allow faculty (individually or in groups) to “own” some of the tough decisions. In short, public, research I schools should become more like us.

Community and rule of 150

I'm finally reading through "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell about how little things can make a big difference. I just finished his chapter about the rule of 150, and it finally explained something that I've been hearing at JBU for years about the supposed loss of community and why that may have happened.

Most have said that the fundamental change is just one of size. But what is it about size that matters, and when does that size problem become significant? Gladwell argues (with lots of evidence) that our brains are wired to handle no more than about 150 relationships at a time. Any group that gets larger than that "tips" into needing a whole host of bureaucratic and heirarchical structures in order to accomplish things instead of being able to rely on informal conversations and personal relationships. The Gore company (of Gore-tex fame) doesn't allow any of their plants to get larger than 150 employees, for example, and they don't have any heirarchy (everyone is an "associate"), budgets, strategic planning processes, salary scale, employee handbook, etc. As long as they spin off each a subset of a plant as soon as a group gets near 150, the system works (and apparently works incredibly well). Hutterites use the same organizing principle.

So, to return to the JBU situation, when did we start hearing laments about the loss of community at JBU? From those I talked to, it's when we were about half the size we are now, i.e. roughly at 150-200 employees. Coincidence? I think not. And that means that we'll never be able to restore the campus-wide sense of community we used to have. The best we can hope to do is follow the "small group" model of having a series of smaller semi-autonomous groups that we manage simultaneously, which is, by default, what I think we're increasingly doing.

The growth era in higher education is over?

I disagree with most of this argument (we can’t raise tuition anymore, and govt. money/fund-raising/endowment potential is now tapped out as well, meaning that a long period of higher education austerity is upon us), but I hear it more and more.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/09/29/burke

My response is that productivity rates in the economy and international trade continue to increase. That means that even if the economy grows only slowly over the next decade (and I'm more optimistic than that), the percentage of income dedicated to non-service areas will continue to decline, and the percentage of income allotted for things like health care and education will continue to go up. I’ve seen projections of a slowdown in these rates of increase, but absolutely no serious talk about a reversal of these trends toward more and more money being spent on health care and education.

What I do see as increasingly possible, however, is a number of bubble institutions failing in a recessionary economy. That’s what’s supposed to happen in a recession, right? The marginal institutions fail and the strong institutions get stronger. Since I believe us to be one of those strong institutions, I see this eventuality as an opportunity and not something to be overly worried about . . . yet.

Review of "Moneyball"

A great book and a fun read in which famed author Michael Lewis provides the inside story about the Oakland A's ability to outperform their low salaries and how their mercurial GM, Billy Beane, has developed their model for success. The basic story is the use of scientific thinking (starting with Bill James in this case) to find value in players that the market wasn't recognizing. In 2002, that meant an emphasis on offense, particularly by focusing on on-base percentages (walks are encouraged, steals and bunts are not).

As with many of these "social science for the masses" books that I've been reading lately, this one's well written and compelling. I'm just not sure how much it translates into the world I live in. Baseball has tons of performance-based information, huge amounts of money, and a real "market" in which things (in this case people) can be traded. Education has none of these.

But let's say you wanted to create something similar in the world of higher education to what Billy Beane has done with the A's. You'd need a highly centralized administrative system that generated a lot of data, much of it new (such as nationally comparable student evaluation information, nationally comparable student motivation information, nationally comparable pre and post tests, and so on). Then you'd have to charge a premium for a "premium" product to generate the additional revenue needed. Finally, you'd probably have to make all of the profs part-time adjuncts so that you'd have the freedom to let them go if they didn't meet the very high cutoffs that you're looking for.

All of that looks way too much like the University of Phoenix model for the comfort of most people. But I guess that's the point. If there were an acceptable way to do the Billy Beane approach, then there wouldn't be value to be gained in this particular marketplace, because lots of people would be doing it. Very few people in baseball think Billy Beane is on to anything substantive, which is why Billy Beane can continue to succeed.

How China got rich?

After much delay to deal with JBU budget issues, I've finally finished reading "The Undercover Economist." The last chapter, about how China got rich, was particularly intriguing. The crux of the argument is that China already had a lot of the necessary pieces (well educated people, access to world markets via Hong Kong & Taiwan, and huge labor and capital supplies), but they were missing the necessary incentive systems to develop. Deng put those in place, and voila, the most rapid economic expansion in the history of the world.

But how Deng put those incentives in place is fascinating. He didn't use "shock therapy" the way Russia and some of the E. European countries tried (and mostly failed). Instead, he insured that the state economy would continue with its current structures and quotas . . . but no more than that. Any extra production from the state businesses would go back to the businesses, not the state. Since it's the marginal production (the last unit) that matters, this allowance for profit on the margins revolutionized the economy while the assurance that the old system would not be (immediately) destroyed avoided most of the panic and revolutionary chaos that occurred elsewhere.

The basic argument here is an old one that revolutions do not happen because people are poor or miserable. They occur because people with a little (or a lot) fear that what they have will be taken away from them. But in order to produce more, people need to know that that "extra" production will go to them and not just back into "the system." Deng managed to address both ends of this change continuum, and the spectacular growth in the new areas (which, crucially, included new competitors at the local and international levels) soon dwarfed the old state economy.

What lessons then for JBU? One of my main arguments related to health care policy at JBU is that we need to move to a system where decisions "on the margin" redound to the benefit of the individuals making the decision instead of to JBU as a whole. An HSA system, for example, would do much more of that than our current structure does. But the second half of the equation is that the change is much easier to do if you can assure people that at least initially, they won't lose anything. You need to "buy out" the inertia and potential political opposition of the old system and allow the new resources to flow to those who are most "productive."

I've tried to apply this fairly straightforward thinking in a variety of areas (such as the ancillary budget system, the loads and caps documents, the various innovation funds, and our summer scholarships), but the big challenge in all of these cases, as was also true of the Chinese situation, is that redirecting "new" resources requires that you're actually generating new resources. Growth is the key to change. The new incentive system that China implemented probably would not have been enough if it didn't have to the other factors in its favor (as India has not, for example) to work from.

In JBU's case, the reason that we've been able to do any of the above "new" ideas is that we've had increasing student numbers, lots of money from fund-raising, discipline within our current spending to insure that the new money doesn't just do old sinkholes, and, most importantly, good people who can develop and implement these new ideas.

Externality pricing

I'm reading "The Undercover Economist" and reflecting on his chapter regarding externality pricing. The basic point is that markets are "perfect truth disseminators," so we're better off trying to price externalities and let people themselves figure things out (driving my car into a city causes congestion, so slap on a congestion tax and let me decide what to do instead of banning driving, raising the parking costs, and so on).

I guess that's what I've done with small classes at JBU. Instead of creating rules about which classes to close and/or trying to make those decisions for people, I've said that the externality of a small class (need for more class time, more profs, more offices, etc.) mean that we should reduce their number, so if divisions have smaller classes, they have to pay a "tax" on offering small classes. How programs want to handle that problem is now up to them.

I think the idea is working, but I recognize the problem the author notes that the "rich" people who have lots of students in their courses can bypass the tax, and the student-poor programs such as Music become even poorer because they have no other options except to pay the tax. Hmm . . .

Scenario planning

I've been doing some thinking about strategic planning options for our institution. Right now, we do that work primarily through conversations regarding budgets and student learning outcomes. But in many ways, those conversations are too precise for this sort of long range thinking. We've been pondering "theme of the year" strategic narrative discussions, educational philosophy white papers, and a vastly expanded workshop format. Here's another idea, scenario planning, that the business world has being doing a lot of in recent years. Perhaps this connects to the "Black Swan" idea that it's difficult to forecast the big events just by extrapolating from current circumstances, so here we have a "non-rational" way of trying to ge at major trends and issues of importance.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12000755

The power of prayer?

So does prayer have a physical effect? Not surprisingly, the results are mixed.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/pray-at-the-pump/#more-2969

College is a waste of time?

Murray, he of Bell Curve fame, has two main points in his new book. First, most people are not really capable of developing the critical faculties necessary to succeed in college and to lead society, so we're spending a lot of effort on higher education that could be better spent elsewhere. Second, since most of higher education is about offering a rough first-screen of student knowledge and ability to employers, we should be focused on certifications instead of bachelor's degrees for most students (those who really shouldn't be going to college anyways) and recreating solid liberal arts education for those who do have college-level capacities.

Here's the short version, from the Wall Stree Journal, of Murray's perspective.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Here are two reviews of this argument, both of which are essentially agreeing with the critique of higher education in the second point while sharply disagreeing with the IQ determinism of the first point.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/21/carey

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/21/perry

Bidding for courses?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/the-coase-theorem-rules-at-nyu-law/

Here's an interesting approach to course registration. Even more interesting to me is that in the response section it is clear a lot of schools have a points/bidding system for courses in which all students start with an equal number of points (that can be increased or decreased by various things such as seniority) which they then use to bid in multiple rounds on the classes they want. That kind of information would potentially tell an administrator like me a lot about which courses, majors, and professors were the most popular. Hmm . . .

Review of "The Chosen"

It's been 25 years or more since I last read The Chosen and maybe 20 years since I watched the movie of that book. What I remember striking me then was how inspirational that story was in terms of my own intellectual development. Here was a way to become a man by developing my mind and soul through intellectual inquiry.

Now that I'm on the other side of the father-son story, what strikes me is the challenge of raising a son to become a man who has both a mind and a soul. Instead of being inspired as I was earlier, however, I'm now more overwhelmed and intimidated by the examples so artistically rendered in this book.

I guess it's the old story of thinking I knew it all and was capable of doing it all when I was young and now being painfully aware of how little I know and how little I can actually achieve now that I'm on the other side of 40.

The passing of Solzhenitsyn

My father is one of the foremost Solzhenitsyn scholars in the world, so I would be remiss if I didn't note Solzhenitsyn's passing and also my father's tribute in the Wall Street Journal to the great man and his work.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121822920626825461.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Review of "P.J. O'Rourke on The Wealth of Nations"

Despite having a philosophy minor and an interest in economics, I just couldn't bring myself to read Wealth of Nations, so I've taken the easy way out and read famed satirist O'Rourke's take on this quintessential text. It was a pleasant read, but I can't say that I got as much out of it for my own purposes as I have from some other recent works, probably because Wealth of Nations focus on macroeconomic issues (why property rights, global free trade, paper money, etc. matter).

A few things, however, did lodge in my brain as possible applications.

1) I wonder at times when I attend conferences whether it's in my institution's best interests for me to present about the wonderful things we are doing. Won't that just help my competition? Smith's answer, I think, would be the "global free trade" argument that if higher education as a whole becomes stronger because we all share "best practices" with each other, then my institution as well will be better off. Plus, if it were all about "knowing" the right information, then the "doing" part wouldn't be so hard.

2) I've been pressing for a lot of "bottom up" innovation at JBU instead of top-down strategic planning. I can't find too many other CAOs who are following this same path, however, so I wonder whether this approach has that much long-term value. My initial experiences have been mixed with a lot of people looking at these requests for innovation proposals as just more paperwork. If much of the "bottom" isn't interested in participating, does that obviate the "bottom up" strategy? Smith would seem to argue when he talks about property rights that over the long-run, the bottom up approach will be much more effective, both because of "buy-in" and also because the changes that do happen are more likely to be ones that will really matter as opposed to something that someone up on top just dreamed up. He's certainly right at the macroeconomic level, but we'll see whether this logic also applies at a small organization like ours.

3) Even great minds such as Smith speak a lot of nonsense. O'Rourke has great fun with some of Smith's oddities and his misfires regarding various political trends. In the immediate wake of Solzhenitsyn's death, I've seen a lot of similar statements about his writing (some eccentric ideas thrown into the mix of his searing and profound truths). It's always a good reminder of our fundamental fallen condition to see that even the great writers are often wrong.

Convergence in American higher education?

After a two-day dean's conference in Conway, I'm back to pondering what appears to me to be the growing convergence, at least in terms of budget models, of public and private 4-year colleges and universities. 50 years ago, public institutions got almost all of their resources from state funding while private schools received their money from tuition and fund-raising. But now what's the situation? Our private schools, with just a few exceptions (Hillsdale, Grove), are very closely tied to government resources (student aid in particular) while public institutions are seeing government aid make up a smaller and smaller percentage of their overall budget. Tuition and fund-raising, what had been the purview of the privates, is making up a bigger and bigger share of the public school pot.

So what happens after another 50 years of these trends? At what point will some of the big state schools with big endowments decide to get out from under the state's thumb and go private? At what point will the privates get so worried about the increasing regulatory burdens that congress has been attaching to its financial aid contributions and follow the Hillsdale model? And if neither of these occur, how will publics and privates handle their increasingly direct competition with each other?

You know, maybe someone should write a book on the subject. Hmm . . . I think I need another sabbatical, maybe this time for a full year?

Bush as Truman?

A president who won an election he was supposed to lose, fought a war that was deemed at the time to be a major mistake, launched a world-wide policy of containment against an ideological foe, was reviled by much of the public when he left office, and was considered both very stubborn and not very bright. Sound familiar? Obviously, there are some problems with the historical analogy, but I was persuaded by the argument that Bush, as with Truman, will see his reputation rise (hard to see it fall, huh?) in future years.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10309

Women & math

Here's another one of those studies that explains that on average, women are as good as men in math and the sciences.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3191/girls-as-good-as-boys-at-math-study-finds?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Doesn't everyone who has really looked at this question agree with this conclusion? The real issue is not about averages but about performance at the extremes. Why are there so many more men at the very top of the math and science fields when on average women are just as good at these subjects than men?

The potential answers I've heard are three.

1) Men have a greater tendency to perform at the extremes, either very well or very poorly, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that women on average do as well in math as men but that men still predominate when it comes to tenured faculty.

2) There are cultural and social pressures that keep equally talented women from following up on their God-given abilities. This argument often comes in a "rampant discrimination" format, but not always.

3) There's also a biological argument that child-bearing just makes it problematic for as many women as men to become the completely work-obsessed types who often rise to the top of their fields. More positively phrased, some argue that women are more balanced and connected to the real world for the same reason.

As always, there's probably some truth in each argument, but I see precious few studies that try to analyze these more nuanced elements. Instead, we get more of these "biology is destiny" studies about whether men or women have particular genetic gifts. Sigh.

The Wall Street Journal and others seem to have analyzed this data much better than did the New York Times.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0728hm.html

Gender imbalance and the hook-up culture

I'd wondered whether these two trends were fueling each other. Sure enough, when you have 2 girls for every boy at a school, bad social behavior follows. So what's going to happen in China when you have an entire culture with this sort of gender imbalance? Post-WWI France essentially legalized and encouraged the vastly outnumbered men to have mistresses. I guess that's one answer to channel the potential bad behavior, though I don't think that answer will work in too many other places.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i46/46a02301.htm?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Government Chemistry

From one of my chemistry profs. Not necessarily a laugh a minute bunch, those chemists, but this one struck me as pretty humorous.

Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known toscience. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistantneutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving itan atomic mass of 312.These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which aresurrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. SinceGovernmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected,because it impedes every action with which it comes into contact.

A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normallytake less than a second to take from four days to four years tocomplete.Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2-6 years; it does notdecay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of theassistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since eachreorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe thatGovernmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. Thishypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an elementthat radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as manypeons but twice as many morons.

How the internet has rewired our brains

I had long noticed the same thing this author refers to, my increasing inability (or lack of interest?) in reading long books. In college, I read Shirer's 1200 page "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" for fun. In grad school, I read for two years straight for my dissertation research. Now, reading one book for more than two hours has me falling asleep. What happened?

Apparently, the internet and Google happened. My brain is literally being rewired by the way I read information on a daily basis, mainly via the web. I'm becoming an information gatherer instead of a reflective and thoughtful human being. Of course, Plato warned that writing on papyrus would destroy our intellectual abilities, so this is a very old "luddite" argument, and therefore probably a very bad "luddite" argument, but I am at times worried that, as the title of the article has it, Google is making me stupid.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

How Teachers Learn

When later historians of education write about the transformation of American education from 20th century "industrial production" models to 21st century "learner-centered information age" models, the work of Wendy Kopp and Teach for America are likely to be at the forefront of those narratives. The very bright people who have developed a love for teaching through this program since its inception in 1990 have now started changing the entire educational system in the United States (setting up KIPP, carrying out major experiments in New Orleans and D.C., and starting dozens of charter schools). Here's a review of a major new book on TFA and some of its related efforts.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/309marzm.asp

Stifling innovation?

So I've started this new curricular innovation process, but I'm apparently violating about half of the "rules" for effective innovation in doing so. Hmm . . .

http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1086&p=3#0

A star is made

I ran across this article again, and it reminded me of the basic argument by the experts in this field that regarding performance that talent is vastly overrated. Most high level performance is developed over years of targeted training (with specific goals and frequent feedback). I believe the 10,000 hour rule is how it’s typically stated (you must spend 10,000 hours, roughly 5 years of 40 hour weeks, in concentrated practice with those specific goals and feedback in order to reach true mastery).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Personally, I think this argument is a bit overdone. People tend to give this much focus to an area of their life because everyone around them sees such natural talent in them that it’s clear that they should devote this kind of time to becoming really, really good. But for the bulk of humanity, we’re just not that genetically predisposed toward any one particular thing that will prompt us to try to perform at this level.

The basic method for excellent performance, however, still seems to be correct. You find an area that you love and appear to have some natural talent in, then spend lots of time and effort in that area via concentrated practice with specific goals and constant feedback. What might we learn from such an approach to how we operate in our education world?

1) When it comes to our organizational groups, we perhaps need to do a better job in setting those specific goals and developing systems for constant feedback. That is why Rob’s doing the assessment work he is, and we’ve been developing the dashboard system and other information tools that we have.

2) When it comes to faculty development, we might conclude that we need to do more with the 3 year plans that faculty put together as part of the goal-setting aspect of our work. We increasingly have the feedback systems in place, but are people really working through the goal-setting phase? I know that that’s always the most difficult part of the process for me.

3) With our innovation fund proposals, we may need to focus on what it is that JBU has some clear passion and ability to carry out and to try to leverage those strengths into national-level performance instead of trying to be pretty good in all of our various areas.

Just some thoughts as I’m in the middle of working on evaluation and planning documents that are obviously trying to get at how well we’re performing and how we can do even better.

Cool book summary sites

Okay, so don't let your students know about these sites (I'm sure they do already as the internet age successors to Cliff Notes), but I've taken to reading through these book summaries to make sure that a book is worth my money or also for items that I have marginal interest in, but not enough to buy the book.

http://www.bookjive.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://wikisummaries.org/Main_Page

Review of "Stumbling on Happiness"

I'm still on a "social sciences for the masses" kick right now, and my next book is by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the subject of happiness (with cover quotes from both Gladwell and Levitt). His basic argument is that we have difficulty even knowing what happiness is, how we perceive it, and, most importantly, how we will perceive it in the future. Our brain fools us in all sorts of ways (a similar theme to "Fooled by Randomness") that might make evolutionary sense but are still problematic for effective decision making. With all of this uncertainty, at best we "stumble" on happiness instead of it being something we can predict.

In all of this stumbling around, what do we know and don't know about what makes us happy? Feeling in control matters. Controlling where we're headed doesn't. That last part is the counterintuitive crux of the book. We are such bad "futurians," Gilbert argues, that our ability to control that future is pretty feeble and mostly futile. Our sense of our own feelings is so distorted by our own experiences (or lack thereof), by all of the ways that we intuitively (and incorrectly) fill in the gaps in our understanding, by our current frame of reference, and so on, that we just aren't rational decision makers most of the time.

As a historian, the part that intrigued me the most was our overriding "presentism" that makes it both very difficult to get inside the minds of people in past eras and utterly impossible to envision a future significantly different from our own present (a point that Taleb makes strongly in his arguments about "Black Swan" events in that we are very poor predictors of randomness). Of course, that's what makes the constant writing and rewriting of history necessary as each generation needs to be reintroduced to a subject on their own terms because they won't understand how it was described by previous generations who were viewing events through their own lenses and talking to people within their own cultural and historical contexts.

As for my own work context, I was intrigued by this idea that people need control to be happy, but they don't actually need to be in control of where they are going. It's sort of like my enjoyment of driving. I like being the driver, but I'm perfectly content for my wife to navigate. I frequently find in my interaction with faculty at JBU a similar dynamic. I expect them to be deeply interested in the details of the various campus-wide initiatives that I am working on. But they typically are not, at least the vast majority are not. As long as my work doesn't impinge significantly on their control of their classroom environment, they really don't care too much about where the organization as a whole is headed.

Here are a few other random reflections on points the author makes.

1) We are not very sensitive the absolute magnitude of an event but on its difference from preceding events. It's the old argument that people who are poor who don't start revolutions, it's people who had something and now are losing that something who decide to fight for major change. From this argument, I've long concluded that you can make major overhauls of a system as long as you do your best not to have people lose out in any significant way in the short term. It's that immediate and concrete difference from someone's current circumstance that gets noticed, not the huge reordering of the organization.

2) Our psychological immune systems keep us happy by constantly adjusting the rose colored lenses so that they're just rosy enough to keep us positive and moving forward, but not so rosy that we become out of touch with reality. But we do all of this adjusting in ways that we are completely oblivious to. We think we'd rather be rejected by a "jury," but in fact, we'd rather be rejected by a single "judge," so then we can blame that one person for his or her bad decision and feel better about ourselves (I'm not sure if this means that our decisions for grants and merit pay should be made by groups or just me--guess it depends on whether we want people to be "happy" and hate me or be unhappy and hate themselves).

3) We regret inaction more than bad actions. "Don't just stand around, DO something," even if it's a bad something. The appearance of action is very important to people. The results themselves? Not so much. This explains a lot to me about modern politics.

4) We have an easier time handling really bad experiences than only somewhat bad ones. Intensity matters in our psychological immune systems. We therefore fear too much passing along really bad news, and we don't worry enough about passing along the routine bad news.

5) The more inescapable a decision, the better we handle it. We think we want lots of choice, but too much choice also means more options for regret. Once a decision has been made, in other words, making it "stick" is crucial. Once it's inevitable, people have an easier time adjusting, just the opposite of what everyone thinks will be the case.

6) Unexplained events and "anonymous" comments are a much bigger deal in our minds than anything for which we can create a rational story line around. Knowing the explanation allows us to file away the information and deal with it better. Cliffhangers hold our attention. In other words, don't pay too much attention to anonymous comments on evaluations or surveys because they will plague your mind.

7) The best predictor of whether we'll be happy with a decision is to see how others who are currently going through that decision feel and think. We are all much more alike than we typically believe (our desire for uniqueness is overwhelming), so knowing what others feel about something is much better than relying on our our own imaginations about what we may think about something. In other words, rely on those Netflix and Amazon ratings and don't rely on your gut reaction to those ads for that new movie or book.


5)

Mandela's Lessons in Leadership

I'm not a fan of these overly generalized leadership lists (which typically amount to "be perfect"), but I did appreciate getting to know and understand Mandela a bit better from this story.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1821467,00.html

Picking the right teachers?

Interesting article that basically says we really don't know in advance what will make someone effective in the classroom. An education degree, a master's degree in education, National Board Certification, etc., all appear to have little or no predictive value. As with undergraduate admissions applications, the best predictor appears to be previous track record. If a student had a high GPA in high school, they're likely to have a high GPA in college. If a teacher helped increase test scores in the past, they are likely to help increase test scores in the future. Whether high GPAs and test scores really matter is another question entirely.

Since we're so bad at predicting good teaching, this article's conclusion is that those schools that do well do it mostly by giving a set time line for determining who has performed well, offering lots of support and supervision during that timeline, and then making a real "up or out" decision at that point (after two years, in this case). Hmmm . . . sounds somewhat like we've ended up with our 3-year contract system where most up or out decisions are made after year two.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195147

Review of "Fooled by Randomness"

Taleb's follow up, "The Black Swan," has gotten more press and is probably the better book, but they cover the same ground, and I picked up the first book on a lark and on sale. The basic idea is that we live in a much more random universe than we imagine (lots of "black swan" events that are unpredictable and overwhelming, such as 9/11), and it's becoming more and more random all of the time. But for all sorts of reasons, however, we're psychologically and culturally "fooled" by this randomness. We want to tell understandable narratives even when there isn't such a thing.

I found the basic argument compelling, though the author's snarky tone was off-putting at times. As a former historian, I always had difficulty with the 20-20 hindsight carping that makes up much of historical narrative as well as political commentary. As an avid sci-fi fan and game player, the idea that a particular "big" event (such as the start of WWI) could just as easily be explained as the random coincidence of lots of bad choices in this particular timeline out of the infinite number of other timelines that could have occurred. In short, WWI was an "accident," not something that could have predicted with any degree of certainty. Sure, after the fact, we can see why this or that problem might have caused the war to break out, but that overlooks all of the other possible sequences of events that could have occurred based on the same set of problems. See Niall Ferguson's review of "The Black Swan" for a similar argument (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/04/22/do2201.xml).

On the other hand, applying Taleb's insights to the business world that I live in (higher education) is a bit more difficult for me to do than it is to apply it to how I understand history. Perhaps Taleb's thinking reinforces my long-standing argument that we need to be more willing to innovate in higher education and to provide resources for such projects. That's been my big push in terms of budgeting at JBU, but the concern has always been that in practice, we find it so difficult to say "no" once we've started a project, that "innovation" at an institution like ours will more likely mean "funding pet projects" that will have no real long-term positive consequences. And it that's true, why shouldn't we just give out more money to "everyone" instead of giving out that money to just a few to do something they have particular passion for.

I do take the point, and one of Taleb's key arguments is that you have to have the discipline and intelligence to include "stop-losses," markers when you will indeed pull the plug on a "position." That's really hard for us to do in higher education, especially because that "position" is usually a real live person who you will now have to fire. If you can discipline yourself to determine where that stop-loss is and then be willing to make the hard call when you hit that stop-loss, however, I think Taleb's argument is absolutely correct for our organization. Now if I can just get everyone else to agree and to actually do what it takes to make this strategy work.

As an addendum, Taleb argues that people tend to agree with him in theory but find it very difficult to do in practice. That's been very true in my case. Taleb says that "competition" types (very much me) are too concerned about win-loss records and "optimizers" (again me) spend too much energy trying to find that best solution. Both tendencies cause people to risk too much the huge defeat that will wipe them out completely in their pursuit of playing perfectly and winning each game.

Sure enough, in my game playing, my work, my personal life, etc., I find myself making exactly this mistake over and over again. To take just yesterday's example of playing a game called St. Petersburg, which I've played hundreds of times, I knew what the "right" first round play was for the most efficient eventual score, but I wasn't playing the computer, I was playing real people who don't always act rationally or even know what the most efficient solution might be. So I risked on turn one getting knocked out completely in order to have the best chance of winning a standard game. Sure enough, when the standard game didn't occur, I came in last, and by a wide margin from the first place finisher. If I had protected myself against the disastrous outcome, I might have only come in second or third in this four player game, but I would have at least had a shot and still been in the game. In other words, I made the "black swan" error not even a week after having read a book that convinced me that I should be avoiding "black swan" errors in my life. Yep, it sure is hard to internalize these things.

Review of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"

Here's another book I'm ashamed to say that I never got around to reading, despite my background in military history. And from that military history perspective, I found much of the advice interesting and worthwhile, especially all of the permutations of when to fight and how.

But "The Art of War" has gotten more press in recent decades as a business book, which is the category it's listed under on the dust jacket of my copy. From this perspective, however, I found little to recommend it. Perhaps the "capitalist warrior" model made more sense in the 80s when this book was so popular (the great line from "Wall Street" in which Gordon Gekko say "greed is good"), but in the "flat earth" internet age of instant information, this "us vs. them" with the use of "spies" and iron discipline being the main means to success seems misguided if not downright inappropriate for much of our contemporary business context.

On the other hand, the most famous line from the book, about knowing both yourself and your enemy, is one of those universal truths that seems obvious in hindsight but was probably novel and inspiration when this work was first put together over a couple thousand years ago.

Bottom line, an obvious classic, especially for military matters, but I personally didn't find as much to use in my leadership role as I did from reading "The Prince."

Return to Action

After six months of implementing some of the ideas I generated during my sabbatical (a curricular innovation fund, revisions of our evaluation and salary systems, reorganization of our Graduate and Professional Studies programs, and the launching of our Strengthsquest initiative), I'm returning to limited blog duty, in part because I've finally had time to do a bit more reading. My posts will likely be less frequent and less comprehensive, but this is a good place for me to keep track of some of the ideas I continue to have about higher education in particular. In other words, this is mostly a "personal journal" blog, but if any readers have things they would like to add to the conversation, please do.