Academics in the New Millennium

I get excited when my students get excited. Recently I was talking about intelligence and family size, pointing out that the average family IQ is negatively related to the number of children in the family. Large families on average have lower IQs than smaller families.

Once she had a chance to think this through, one of my students called me at the office and left this voice mail: “If it’s true that the least intelligent people are having the largest families, what does this mean about the future of the human race?”

An honest answer to this is so politically incorrect that most scientists and most textbooks refuse to address it. There are sociologists and some die-hard behaviorists who argue that intelligence is NOT inherited and thus, with appropriate social interventions, low IQ can be overcome. The chairman of my division at the college where I teach, a sociologist, has until recently espoused such a view.

A more honest and realistic analysis confirms that intelligence is MOSTLY inherited and that environment plays a significant role only in the most extreme of cases. It is indeed true that the lower the IQ of the parents, the larger the family is likely to be. Also of interest is the finding that, on average, each child in the family will have a lower IQ than the child born immediately before. So in a family of seven kids, the whole family is likely to be of low intelligence and the last child will be the slowest of the bunch. Of course, there are ethnic implications as well. What does this forecast for the future of the human race? Nothing good. The answer, from the politicians, is to hope and believe that these differences CAN be overcome with social programs, affirmative action, and so forth. Sandra Day O’Connor said recently in her court opinion supporting affirmative action that “hopefully these measures will no longer be needed in 25 years.” Let’s pray she’s right. Clearly this is the type of thing that, when mentioned in an undergraduate class, will get the instructor in VERY hot water with the administration and local and state leaders of ethnic communities, who then demand that such heresies, true or not, not be presented to students in public settings. Don’t ask me how I know.

A few years ago a meeting was scheduled at the University of Maryland to examine genetic issues in crime. The legislators in Washington got wind of it and insisted that it be canceled. Which it was. Why? “There are some things about each other we are better off not knowing,” said one of them.

It is said that the wife of a lord bishop upon hearing the details of Darwin’s theory of evolution remarked, “Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true; but, if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known.”

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will likely upset someone with political influence.

So we learn to keep our mouths shut about these issues in class. Free speech in this country and academic freedom are both happy illusions.

Selling It

There has been an insidious trend in higher education over the past twenty years or so that challenges a two thousand year old tradition regarding the best ways to teach adults. This new thinking suggests that we abandon the traditional methods of the past and approach the offering of college classes as we would selling dishwashers. Education is a product that must be marketed, promoted, advertised, and all but hawked on the street corner. As with selling dishwashers the key is to identify what the public wants and then provide it to the customer as cost efficiently as possible. And yes, in this new marketplace, the customer is always right.

There are several aspects of this new improved view of college that I personally find highly disturbing, not the least of which is the education, experience, and motivations of those who espouse it. Twenty years ago I taught at a moderately large state supported university in Texas. The president of that institution had worked his way from the lowly level of Assistant Professor in Entomology to the higher levels of administration. For him, college was about teaching and learning, questioning the easy answers, exploring the world through scientific research and philosophical inquiry. The board of regents hated him.

I clearly remember one faculty meeting early in the academic year where the chairman of that very same politically appointed board of regents angrily denounced the university’s faculty, to our faces, for publishing articles in professional journals that were so erudite that he was unable to understand them. He told us that we needed to simplify what we did; we needed to dummy it down for plain folk, like himself. At this point we all knew what was to come: our university’s scholastically oriented president was doomed.

The president who replaced him was a businessman who believed that we the faculty needed to sell a product, that product being education. Our goal, he proclaimed, was to be an efficient business. One of his first acts as president was to cancel the math requirement for the bachelor's degree. Why cancel it? Because students were having too much trouble passing math, and they resented the inconvenience. He told the faculty on many, many (too many) occasions “I’m not telling you to lower your standards. But...” But lower the damn standards. The more people that graduate, the more money the college makes. More product out equals more income in.

You see, it’s no longer about education. It’s about buying a degree. I recently challenged an Honors class where I currently teach , “We ought just to charge you one large fee at the beginning of the year and give you your final degree then. You’d never have to go to class at all.” The cretin in the front row agreed: “Awwww Right!!!!”

So today we invest in telecourses for students who want to earn college credit by watching TV, Internet course for those who want credit for playing on the World Wide Web, while we suffer declining enrollments in the classrooms where the real, dirty, hard, interactive learning actually occurs. Yet, the most common course grade today in the majority of college classes is A (there are as many 4.0 grade point averages among currently enrolled students as there are recent college graduates who can’t explain who Aristotle was). We send students to a consortium of higher learning here in my city that is so weak academically that its graduates have essentially no chance of successfully completing postgraduate training at one of the reputable state universities or private colleges (but it is about earning a degree, right?).

To facilitate the decline in academic integrity we hire administrators with doctorates earned weekends in extension courses and who have never taught in a college classroom. Thank God they have jobs as college administrators because they’d never survive in the teaching trenches of academe or the board rooms of industry; what would they do? What could they do?

"You'd like to enroll in our college/university? Wonderful! Would you like fries with that?"

If I offend, forgive me. It is said “Those whom the truth does not convince, it angers.” I don’t wish to anger. After all, the customer is always right. Even when he isn’t.

A Dimming of the Light

I watched television last night sober. One should never do that. Alcohol is the only thing that makes television programming tolerable, even on a Sunday night, a night that is targeted for the largest audiences of the week. This is made even worse by the absolutely mindless accompanying commercials. Is every month “Truck Month”? Apparently it is in this state.

I think it’s that I getting depressed. I usually do this time of year. It has something to do with the shorter days and reduced exposure to sunlight. I think it has something to do with the outcome of the recent election as well. My squeeze in a die hard Republican. When I examined the issues one by one with her and she disagreed with W on every single one except the tax cut. But she voted for W anyway. As one astute observer noted “It’s not like people voted the issues, it’s more like they voted for their team.” So it would seem.

On the local news last night we find that some religious militants are in town from the state up north. It seems that a national article had identified a local high school student (or students) as being gay. This loving group of Christians is picketing the gay’s church with “God Hates Fags” signs, and plan to go to the gay’s high school today for another round.

Recently there was a letter to the editor in the local rag. Seems a good Christian was upset that at a sports banquet he attended the opening prayer was led by a Moslem (when did Moslems become Muslims?). “That Moslem doesn’t pray to the same God I do. I think it was entirely inappropriate to have one of those people lead us in prayer.” I’d bet my next paycheck this person is a strong proponent of required prayer in public school.

I lived through the Nixon administration. I noted the cheers in the class I was taking at the time when we found out that J. Edgar Hoover had died. And yet I’ve never been ashamed to be an American, until now. I find this turn toward the right, toward hatred, and bigotry, and a new American imperialism extremely depressing. More depressing yet, I have no control over it. This country is in very serious trouble and doesn’t have the sense to see it.

America the Corpulent

I’ve been to Europe three times in the past several years. I’ve visited Britain, France, and Italy. The one consistent observation of these three countries is that the people who live there are rarely fat. When one does see an immensely overweight person it is a good bet that he or she is American. In Venice a very fat woman and her somewhat fat husband were boarding the same boat as my squeeze and I were. “Hey, USA! Where ya from?” “Minnesooota” was the reply.

This observation of American obesity is not mine alone. On several occasions on my trips fellow American tourists would remark “Have you noticed that no one here is fat?!” Yep. I noticed. In the recent French animated film The Triplets of Belleville, Belleville is clearly New York City (we can discern this because in the harbor of Belleville is a chubby Statue of Liberty). All of NYC’s citizens are shown as rolly polly figures waddling up and down the streets of the city. Obviously, the French have noticed that we’re fat too.

Every time I mention our national plumpness to one of my countrymen this is always the reply “Oh, that’s because...” and every explanation differs. Some say the Europeans exercise more (they do), or eat less (they don’t), or food-match, or eat more fresh food, or eat less red meat, or... well, fill in the blank. This are always offered as objective fact and thus a complete and undeniable explanation. Of course, these are only untested hypotheses. It may be any one of these explanations, or all of them in combination, or none at all. I don’t know the answer.

I know that I came home from Italy the heaviest I have ever been. I exercised the same as the Italians, I ate the food they ate, I rarely could eat everything I was served in a restaurant (so I didn’t) and I still came home fat. Genetics seems an unlikely culprit; bring an Italian to America to live for a couple of years, and watch him inflate. Societal forces? That’s always the easy explanation from those who don’t think things through much. Why would it be acceptable to be fat in America and not in Europe? Where did that social force come from? When someone offers a societal forces explanation it generally is based on the assumption that societal forces are the result of capricious whim and thus really have no explanation. I reject such non thinking (to the chagrin of the sociologists in my circle of acquaintances - without capricious whim, the discipline of sociology has little justification for its existence. Fine with me).

So we’re fat. We’re so desperate not to be fat that we even catapult books on weight loss by Dr. Phil, a fat guy, into national prominence. It’s a interesting phenomenon,

Italy

My squeeze and I were in Italy this May. We visited Rome and then Venice. It was her trip really. She had always wanted to visit Italy whereas I, the neoclassicist I pretend to be, had heard that Italy was a disappointment for many eager American tourists. Indeed, a dear friend, married to an Italian-by-ancestry man, found the Italians rude, and the country wanting.

I don’t know where those other people visited, but it wasn’t the Italy I encountered. The people couldn’t have been nicer. The food was good (those folks really DO eat a lot of pizza - I thought that was a myth; but if you order pizza with olives be prepared for olives - whole unpitted olives that will roll off the slice you’re trying to put in your mouth, and onto your lap).

Rome, of course, is the most historically significant city in the West, perhaps the world. It was the seat of the greatest empire ever forged, a significant contributor to the Renaissance, and a powerful influence on religion even today. Its streets are filled with history, art, churches, and fountains. Lord, the fountains. They are everywhere. Beautiful, magnificent fountains.

But it is Venice that so totally took my breath away. A few days before we were to leave Rome for Venice, my squeeze and I were talking to the doorman at our hotel. We told him our next stop would be Venice. He replied “Yes, many of my countrymen go there for their honeymoons. It is a good place to go if you can’t afford to leave Italy.” I guess in his mind Venice would be a good second choice for a honeymoon behind... where? Dresden? Liverpool? Wichita Falls? We should have explored that with him.

The train ride from Rome to Venice is for another blog, as is the Venice experience. It’s funny, I wasn’t expecting much from the trip and I actually came away with one of the most moving experiences of my life. Ain’t that always the way?

Rome

As I wandered around Rome, I kept asking myself, what happened to these people? They used to be the masters of the entire known earth. What was it that led to their decendency? And what have the Romans ever done for us? Again, Monty Python.

REG:
What have the Romans ever done for us?!
XERXES:
The aqueduct?
REG:
What?
XERXES:
The aqueduct.
REG:
Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3:
And the sanitation.
LORETTA:
Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG:
Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS:
And the roads.
REG:
Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads—
COMMANDO:
Irrigation.
XERXES:
Medicine.
COMMANDO #2:
Education.
REG:
Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1:
And the wine.
FRANCIS:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO:
Public baths.
LORETTA:
And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS:
Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
REG:
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES:
Brought peace.
REG:
Oh. Peace? Shut up!