The media has been in full-scale, full-court press noting Peter Thiel’s fellowship fund that gives $100,000 to 24 students who who have to write a proposal for their idea. If they win, they get to go work in Silicon Valley where Thiel believes, they will learn more than they would if they went to college.

There have been various and sundry responses, as Thiel outspokenly argues that going to college is a waste of time and money.

Oddly enough, I agree in some ways. ZOMG, a college professor said that? ZOMG! Why that’s just proof!

Um, no. I’m saying that if your plan is to go to college so that you can make money, there are other, faster ways of making money. And if some zillionaire is going to give you the capital and the connections to do that, go for it. If you fail, so what? You can always back to college if you want to. Or you can start over.

One of my brilliant colleagues, Darius Lackadawalla, said once “You’re always teaching.” Just so, you’re always learning, too. It’s the fundamental rule of human interaction and communication. You can learn and teach anywhere. I don’t have a monopoly on anything.

It’s weird, but college athletes might actually be a good comparison here. Kobe Bryant and Lebron James did not go to college. Straight from high school to the NBA, they are probably now much, much better off financially than had they foregone that income to go to college. And as an instructor who has plenty of athletes in my class who would rather not be in my class…why not let them go do what they love the most in the world–what they are willing to spend 10 hours a day practicing at? Rather than make them suffer through school they don’t like.

Instead, let the ones that have used to sports to go to college, well, go to college, and let the ones that are using college to get to sports…go do their sport.

Michael Jordan went to college first, and I’d argue it did benefit him financially. Much, much savvier about handling the press because of learning it under the wing of UNC coach Dean Smith (a man I respect greatly as an educator), than Bryant, Jordan’s endorsements probably exceed Bryants’ by an exponent–not inconsequentially because Bryant showed his young adulthood to the world and, like many young adulthoods, it wasn’t at all a pretty one.

And like college athletes, the truth is, most basketball players, even players in the NBA, are not Kobe Bryant or Lebron James or Michael Jordon. They aren’t. Plenty of them benefit from the additional time they get to mature in college. (Whether they should do that in college, or in a farm system that the NBA has to pay for, is another debate).

Just so, most of us are not people who are going to be among the 25 people who get handed $100,000 at the age of 18 or 19 from Thiel, and many of us, like me, would never get that from our parents. I also don’t see banks stepping in to capitalize a kid’s idea, either. But, again, if so, more power to you.

I have moved across socio-economic classes in the US entirely because of education. That, to me, has been a nice subsidiary effect of learning about the world that I occupy, and, most importantly, learning the contours and eddies of my own mind and spirit.

That is what education is for. Like food, it has its pure utilitarian value–how much money it puts in your wallet or takes out–and its pleasure value.

For those in and around the planning academy, we’ve been having a discussion about the request from the head of the Republican Party of Wisconsin to read all of Cronon’s emails since January 1, the ones that contain words of particular interest to them.

Cronon’s response is here. His response is well-reasoned if a mite too long. But his basic takeaway point is that much of his university email has to do with students, and they are entitled to privacy.

The reason for subjecting state emails to FOIA requests are evident enough. But the restriction on political content goes to back to trying to make sure that elected officials and state workers do not use state emails and electronic media to conduct campaigns–at least outwardly. Things from a .gov email address should be about .gov business, not about campaign business.

Various responses have been posted, but one sent in to the planning listserv is potentially very counterproductive: to send Cronon email with the word “Republican” or ‘republican’ in it so that they have to sort through all those emails.

There are text mining methods that take the tedium out of such work, and the resulting word cloud can be interpreted to mean anything. Which is one of the problems with word clouds, in general. So if you were to do anything like that, it would allow the political content to pop out of the analysis, which is what they want.

As it is, I suspect the naturalistic word cloud from Cronon’s emails, if they are anything like mine, would read “CAN I HAVE EXTRA CREDIT?” and “THE COMMITTEE MEETING WILL BE HELD….”

I propose the following:

By all means, read my email from January 1 onward. But for each subject that arises in those emails, you have to write a summary of that subject–only a sentence or two–interpreting the content and context of that subject, the same way a rigorous qualitative researcher would have to do. You want to wade through 10,000+ emails, go right ahead, but you don’t get to use text mining to pull things out of context and create your cudgel with which to beat me until you’ve done the work to understand what I’m writing emails about.

To Cronon’s larger point, that the request is abusing the Freedom of Information Act, yes. It’s kind of interesting that the requester seems to think that all this information should just be sent to him. What country do you live in, Pumpkin? Because in my world, where I regularly go through archival information from big state institutions, I’m spending my life (or student’s lives) actually going to the institutions that have the information I request.

Here’s how FOIA requests go for the average community member who would like information released about any number government documents:

1. You can have the information, but not electronically, and we don’t sort through documents to suit you. You can get the emails, but they will be printed out with big black Sharpie strikethroughs redacting information that identifies students or personnel.

2. You may not leave the building with the big stack of papers. You must photocopy them at 5 cents a page. We don’t want your FOIA requests sucking up taxpayer resources, now do we? Oh, and the copier will be up three flights of stairs, which you will have to run up and down 14 times because the copier (which hasn’t been replaced since the Carter administration) keeps getting jammed, resetting, or refusing your code/card/instructions.

3. Alternatively, you may bring in a pen scanner to scan line by line. That’s some special awesome fun there.

Nothing can be boxed and sent, as that would take up state worker time and postage. You must come to my office, leave proof of your identity, and then work with the archive of my email with the supervision of the librarian. We should do a background check on you beforehand. Can’t be letting the terrorists win by taking advantage of our open government, can we?

Enjoy your reading, sir.

On happier things, William Cronon’s work matters–a lot. As a historian, his work is nothing less than magisterial. I have two favorites to recommend:

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

Finally, let’s look at this scary scary guy who needs such watching:

I bet he *rides a bicycle* to work. Commie.

The Economist has a very good obituary for economist Alfred Kahn, who (for better and worse) revolutionized passenger and freight transport in the United States. Reading through it reminded me of why tenure matters and why the academy matters, despite all the criticisms and self-lampooning from a lot of academics who, as often as not, want to be cool kids with the nonacademics while, of course, partaking in all the benefits of academic life.

An excerpt from the obit:

Breezily, too, he winged his way in government. He was an academic, after all; he had nothing to lose, so he would speak his mind. Asked once by a reporter if he could defend the defence budget, he said “No”. Told off for using the word “depression” in public, he replaced it with “banana”, and announced that the country was heading for its worst banana in 45 years. Told off by the head of United Fruit for using “banana”, he made it “kumquat”. As the oil price continued to soar he called the Arab producers “schnooks”, earning yet another rebuke; but he didn’t care. He could always go back to being dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, as he did in 1980, even though “dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.”

No, the academy is far from perfect. There are plenty of frauds here, too, like that guy who faked his findings connecting autism to inoculations. Eyugh. The pain he’s caused.

But there is something really important about having people around who aren’t afraid to lose their jobs if they tell the truth as they see it, and who have the time to consider issues. Certainly experts aren’t the only source of interesting or important ideas, but there are an awful lot of people around me on a daily basis who do, in fact, have incredible ideas. I’m proud of my colleagues and wonder just about every day what I did to deserve to be employed where I am.

Yes, it takes years to earn the privilege of not losing your job when you tell the truth (i.e., “we are in a recession, or a banana, or a kumquat: call it what you want, but people are suffering.”). Yes, there are those who overstate their findings, or the importance of what they think. There are those who try to make you conform, even in the academy–but don’t try to tell me that people are powerless to resist that. They can. And do.

There are even those protected by tenure who have very little of value to say. It happens.

But for every one of those types, I swear there is another person, like Alfred Kahn, and like many of my wonderful colleagues, who have interesting and meaningful things to say that would be nearly impossible for them to say if they had to worry about losing their jobs.

For example, I recently got into an argument with our Op-Ed gatekeeper at USC because I wrote something that remarks about how Jerry Brown is being gutless about taxes–and gas taxes in particular. Our Op-Ed guy (who is wonderful–well-read, reflective) said that such a proposal is “politically dead on arrival” so it’s irrelevant. I pushed back: it’s not my job to take good ideas off the table just because powerful and entrenched interests don’t like those ideas. My job is the opposite of worrying about what people like. I’m not selling soda.

Socrates told the Athenians not to kill off their good generals. He told them not to make unnecessary trouble with the Spartans. They killed him for saying so, and for failing to pretend afterwards that he wasn’t 100 percent right. But he did his job, and his decision left us with one of the most beautiful passages of literature I have ever read, from Plato’s Phaedo:

I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or Thus we follow him to the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Thinking about this stuff has become all the more poignant as I have been thinking about Glenn Beck and his characterization of Francis Fox Piven as an “enemy of the Constitution.”

I’m wondering whether any these Constitution thumpers can actually describe what’s in it, let alone what the ekklesia were, what a republic is, who John Witherspoon was–or Polybius, Plutarch, Tacitus or Cicero. Can they describe the considerable differences of opinion expressed by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton (another intellectual hero of mine) and James Madison? Or is the Constitution just something about the right to have guns and not pay taxes because you don’t want to and spout whatever prejudiced garbage you believe—and being able to whine like crybaby about your precious “values” or “identity” or “rights” being threatened when somebody calls you on your ignorance—undoubtedly one of Palin’s least attractive behaviors.

Certainly, they can’t have much faith in the Constitution if they believe that educated people, by discussing ideas, threaten it. I believe strongly in ideas, don’t get me wrong, but I have faith that the Constitution will survive the spiritual and intellectual squalor the American people have constructed around it and themselves—a far bigger threat, if history is to believed, than any scholar–even a great one like Fox Piven.

It seems like every day since I actually got tenure there’s been somebody on the web screaming about tenure. This may be simply be perception, but I don’t think so: Slate recently started in on it, arguing that tenure is bad for professors, too, making the system too rigid, scaring bright people away and into industry and sucking up endowments.

I think most of the arguments are a crock, made made by people who don’t understand labor markets very well, and who want to curry favor with a public that is resentful–the economic envy argument–about the veneer of a potentially unproductive person having a job for life when they, supposedly to have to fight to keep their jobs. This particularly gleeful piece in GOOD annoyed me mightily, as his argument is that tenure and its focus on research promotes poor quality education.

Yeah, right, because you know, the absence of researching responsibilities has done just wonders for K-12 teaching in the US. There are many many universities across the country that tenure is based on teaching rather than research. So what does that mean for the connection between teaching and tenure?

Mark C. Taylor in particular seems to have no idea what he is talking about:

Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Columbia University department of religion and author of the forthcoming Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, calculates that someone who serves as an associate professor with tenure for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years costs a private university $12.2 million.* Public universities pay $10 million over the same period. And because most universities pay tenured professors out of their endowments, each professor freezes up tens of millions in otherwise-liquid endowment money for a generation. University debt jumped 54 percent last year, with an average debt of $168 million. If the average university tenured about 15 fewer professors, they’d be in the black.

link: The case for getting rid of tenure. – By Christopher Beam – Slate Magazine

For anybody who actually understands labor markets, this whole paragraph makes your eyeballs cross with its illogic. Tenure isn’t costing the university millions; employing faculty is costing the university. Yes, we all know that employees cost money, we didn’t need a proffie of religion to point that out.

Because tenure eliminates some risk for the laborer, the actual salary renumeration that they command is lower; so yes, the lifetime salary commitment freezes up money, but it probably freezes up *less money over time* than market-rate wages for the same people would. In other words, tenure probably saves the university money at the same time it makes funds less liquid. And you can *seriously* discipline an unproductive faculty member with tenure. If you are unproductive after tenure, your ability to move becomes very limited. Suddenly, you start getting 0.5 percent raises year after year and what seems like a great job you can’t get fired from is a lousy-paying job you can’t really leave.

Tenure benefits both universities and faculty in different ways, but the result would be a wash in the labor market between higher-paying private industry jobs with more risk and comparatively lower paying, higher benefit university jobs.

And everybody knows that you can save money by running out and hiring cheap adjuncts. We’re talking about what it would cost to keep people like Gen Giuliano or Richard Green or Dana Goldman around without tenure.

No matter how much little reporters from GOOD seem to think faculty are like teachers who merely teach 13th grade and squander their time on silly books and articles, tenured faculty at the Columbia level are a highly specialized labor force who do a lot more than show up in the class room. Research *is* worth money to the university; I pay for my salary and more out of the external funding; I strongly suspect that even though Robert Service does not get a lot of external funding, the fact that he’s a super-duper famous historian who writes best-selling books attracts lots of check-writing students to Oxford. The faculty are the premier talent of the university; as a result, those of us who are really premier can charge economic rents–regardless of whether an angry public likes it or not.

Not everybody can do what Robert Service or Elizabeth Currid does–even if, as an exaction, universities make them teach 13th grade as well. For people like Robert Service, tenure is a good deal for the university: it’s why universities are risk averse about handing tenure out; it can be expensive to them if they make a bad choice, but it’s probably an economic benefit if they bet on a star.

The other major myth is that “you’d no run no other business in this way.” Please. Can the rampaging neoliberal ethic of the world take a break, just for a second, and get over itself? Regular businesses operate this way all time and hides it under the rubric of seniority and contracts. Yes, you can fire adjuncts. And yes, you can fail to promote junior faculty. Try firing an incompetent staff member at any public or private university. Just try it. You’ll be told in hushed tones that “it’s impossible because…”

So in other words, my job protection may have an easy-to-pronounce label like tenure, but there are plenty of bone-idle incompetent people in the US labor force who are protected by their buddies, seniority, or institutional position. Can we say: run company into the ground, I-banker still gets $15 million bonus? I think we can. You think that’s not a corrupt labor market but tenure is? And if the business world is so rife with cutting-edge competitiveness, why are the archetypes of Dilbert so familiar–to everybody?

What Taylor really wants–and what Gordon Gee wants–is the power to further bully faculty–because they are both administrators and once you grant tenure, your ability to screw your faculty goes down by a lot. They also want to save a quick buck and make their deficits go away. They’re right, tenuring fewer people would make that happen. By all means, Mr. Taylor, you go ahead and try it. USC would be on Jeffery Sach’s door the next day with an offer of tenure and a raise and a house for him.

The other thing I don’t understand is why anybody in the world thinks that deconstructing a system with job stability is a good idea given what we know has happened to US workers more generally in the last, corporate greed riddled decades. Yes, by all means, let’s make government and university jobs lousy just like corporate jobs–rather than the other way around–to make sure that dividends never suffer ad tax bills in no way cut into in the top fifth’s money for island villas and designer handbags. That’s justice, right there.

I have always contended that tenure protects departments–departments like Mark Taylor’s, in particular. Tenure keeps ambitious provosts and administrators from cutting departments like religion and turning universities just into giant training schools for businesses. It’s keeping civilization alive, albeit in deeply flawed way.

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I photocopied some materials this morning to share with a colleague of mine who is teaching a class on teaching–something USC does for our students that my beloved alma did not do for us. When I mentioned teaching there, I got chewed out. It’s not about teaching, I was told. It’s about research.

Of course it is.

But then, when I went out and got my first teaching job, I was underwater trying to put together courses and syllabi–all things I could have been learning in graduate school.

What nobody tells you is that teaching and researching go together in terms of time management. It’s not enough to exhort young scholars not to “spend too much time on their teaching” because 1) teaching is a very hard job and researching is a very hard, and that means that scholars actually have two very hard jobs to do when classes are in session; 2) there are about million false time economies in teaching (if you take late work, you stretch the hours you spend grading; if you refuse to take late work, you spend hours listening to students rationalize, lie, and complain and/or enforcing your “no late work” rule); and 3) if you don’t manage your teaching well enough, the emotional energy and work it drains from you detracts from your research. The opposite can be true–teaching can support your research, quite easily, in fact–but it often doesn’t because of the willingness that senior faculty have to plug junior faculty into teaching roles that don’t draw on their existing areas of expertise.

Most universities are scrambling to cover courses, and it’s hard to match teachers with subjects exactly. Nonetheless, it is easier for scholars to teach in their areas of expertise than it is to teach outside them. And it helps to teach in your area because you can acquire knowledge of how teach the material instead of having to learn the material yourself as you teach the material.

Yale President Richard Levin eulogized James Tobin, one of my favorite economists, when Tobin passed away. I love this eulogy because it is fond without sentimentality. It is a very truthful appraisal of Tobin as a member of a university community, and to me it epitomizes what happens when a great scholar is allowed to teach the material he’s a master of:

He was so clear, so coherent, so perfect that one understood not only the particular models he explicated and their limitations, but also how one might ask and answer a large family of questions in the same conceptual neighborhood.

Two things: Levin doesn’t spend any time time discussion Tobin’s research contributions. Those will either stand out–or not–and withstand the test of time on their own, or they won’t. Chances are, you win a Nobel, you don’t have to fret too much about your legacy. Instead, Levin talks about the invisible work of a great scholar–the greatness that Tobin exemplified as the master of his field, and how the assurance he had in the mastery of the material made for clarity and presence in the classroom.

If my recent research on this is any indicator, young female faculty and very senior male faculty are *far* more likely to get shoved into the frontlines of teaching undergraduate general education course than young male faculty or senior female faculty. In the case of the universities I sampled, senior male faculty outnumbered senior female faculty 7 to 1; you are more likely if you are senior female faculty to be holding administrative responsibilities than if you are a male, which means these senior women are less available to teach in the froshie frontlines. Male junior faculty are much more likely to be teaching upper division and graduate classes in their fields.

So that thing about being a master of the material is differentially allocated between male and female scholars, and departmental housekeeping is allocated in an oddly gendered way, yet gendered nonetheless.

I’m thinking about calling this paper “Masters and Mommies” because of the way in which young female faculty are teaching 13th grade.

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