Education « Organizations and Markets

Posts filed under 'Education'

One-Size-Fits-All Higher Ed?

| Peter Klein |

Alternative title: “An Economist Tries Talking to an English Professor, and Gives Up.” Perhaps one of you wants to take up the mantle over at UD?

The point, which I’ve raised in previous posts (e.g., here and here), is that higher education isn’t one, well-defined thing, but a variety of things, and we should welcome experimentation, innovation, and — well — diversity. Blockquoting myself:

“Diversity” is the primary mantra of higher-education institutions. So why not have some diversity in organizational forms? “Education,” after all, is not a homogenous good. As with healthcare, one size doesn’t fit all. Shouldn’t we encourage entry, and applaud entrants who experiment with alternative curricula, teaching methods, incentive structures, sizes, and shapes? Let a thousand pedagogic flowers bloom, I say!

7 comments 19 August 2010

The Unbearable Hotness of Being

| Peter Klein |

Does blogging reduce research productivity? Are we O&Mers worried about posting something we’ll later regret? Nah, we think blogging is good for us, professionally. But we have another problem, more difficult to remedy: we are hot. I mean smokin’ hot. Harrison Ford in the first Indiana Jones movie? Forget it. He looks like some dork philosopher compared to us. Colleagues and students — females, especially — don’t take us seriously. “We know why you got this job!” We get one-line student evaluations: “Yum.”

Apparently, this is a real problem for some faculty members, according to a recent Chronicle story. “[I]n academe, being hot has a downside: Professors who are considered too good-looking can be cast by their peers as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude.” As the article points out, students have been falling in love with their professors for years, but only now do they have a chance to express themselves, often anonymously, at sites like RateMyProfessor.com. One professor — an economist, no less! — got so annoyed with the leering after making a hot professor list that he moved out of town. “He found notes under his door asking ‘what it would take to lasso me.’ And female students coyly ask his advice on whether it’s OK to date professors once a class is over.” I feel for the guy, really I do.

One anonymous professor quoted in the article puts things in their proper perspective, however: “on a scale of hotness academics aren’t all that hot, relatively speaking, and to make a list of hot ones is thus, relatively laughable.”

6 comments 13 August 2010

Academy of Management Conference Open Thread

| Peter Klein |

Much of the O&M extended family is heading home from Montréal, site of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. I presented one paper, discussed several more, facilitated a research roundtable, and spoke at a doctoral student consortium. Then there are business meetings, editorial board pow-wows, and planning sessions. Plus the really important stuff: socializing, networking, exchanging gossip, and enjoying good food and drink. It was great to see so many O&M bloggers, former guest bloggers, regular and occasional commentators, lurkers, and secret admirers.

Several sessions dealt with pedagogy, data sharing, research collaboration, and other issues being transformed by the web/wiki/blog/tweet/Facebook revolution. There was even a session on academic blogging featuring some of our friends from That Other Site. Clearly the O&M community is on the cutting edge of organizational research, teaching, and policy.

What did you think of the conference? What were your favorite sessions, papers, discussions, and activities? What could be done to improve future conferences? (Believe it or not, many high-ranking AoM muckety-mucks are regular O&M readers, so now’s your chance to be heard!)

3 comments 11 August 2010

University Websites

| Peter Klein |

xkcd, via Roderick:

9 comments 31 July 2010

Misc Academic Links

| Peter Klein |

Academia’s love-hate relationship with wikis.
Deathbed witticisms from Voltaire, Hegel, and other interesting persons.
Should research universities exploit the internal division of labor?
Tips on academic job talks from Fabio’s valuable series.

2 comments 19 July 2010

Mises Quote of the Day

| Peter Klein |

From Human Action, chapter 15, section 11 (via JGL):

In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.

4 comments 15 July 2010

Too Much Research

| Peter Klein |

Bill McKelvey is one of the signatories to a controversial Chronicle piece that ran last month, “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research.” The five authors, from a variety of academic disciplines, argue that “the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs.” As evidence they point to increases in the numbers of journals, journal pages, and authors and decreases in average citation rates.

[I]nstead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe.

I think this assessment is generally on target, in my own field at least. What percentage of the articles in your favorite scholarly journal do you read, let alone remember? How much of the research in your field really adds value? Of course, search tools make it easier to find relevant information, so I’m not sure the point about lit reviews is all that compelling. Still, it does seem increasingly difficult to sort wheat from chaff.

I’m less impressed with the authors’ proposed solutions — limiting the number of publications that can be considered for promotion and tenure, making greater use of impact factors, and enforce tighter page restrictions. These strike me as superficial fixes. The main problem is the vast increase in the scale and scope of the “scientific” enterprise itself, almost all of it due to public funding. There are simply too many universities and institutes, too many research faculty, too many granting agencies, too much research money. It’s a self-perpetuating process, almost exclusively driven by supply-side considerations (who on earth “demands” the output of most English departments?). Some of you will be shocked by the claim that there’s “too much” research money, particularly in today’s austere climate. But I mean too much relative to some social optimum, not too much relative to what university professors want.

Why would we expect this kind of system to produce high-quality research? Perhaps it’s a miracle that any good work gets done at all.

13 comments 8 July 2010

Speak Like a Philosophy Professor

| Peter Klein |

From Shrek the Third (text courtesy of IMDB):

Prince Charming: You! You can’t lie! So tell me puppet… where… is… Shrek?
Pinocchio: Uh. Hmm, well, uh, I don’t know where he’s not.
Prince Charming: You’re telling me you don’t know where Shrek is?
Pinocchio: It wouldn’t be inaccurate to assume that I couldn’t exactly not say that it is or isn’t almost partially incorrect.
Prince Charming: So you do know where he is!
Pinocchio: On the contrary. I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably
Prince Charming: Stop it!
Pinocchio: …do or do not know where he shan’t probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he isn’t. Even if he wasn’t at where I knew he was,
[Pigs and Gingerbread Man begin singing]
Pinocchio: That’d mean I’d really have to know where he wasn’t.

4 comments 6 July 2010

Isomorphism in Higher Education

| Peter Klein |

Amitai Etzioni is upset that new firms are entering the higher-education market and offering — gasp! — a differentiated product. Worst of all, they operate on a for-profit basis! (“For-profit,” as all liberal intellectuals know, is synonymous for “evil.”) Consider:

The education students receive at for-profit colleges bears little resemblance to the kind they would get at a true liberal arts college. Neither does it resemble the collegial image the for-profit colleges love to project. Professors at these schools often work on short contracts. There is no tenure. The executives make staggering salaries. Most students are taught online, often by poorly qualified professors who have very limited contact with the students. . . .

The schools’ stripped-down curricula and poor instruction often make for nearly worthless degrees. When students graduate from these colleges, many cannot find jobs — or at least not the kinds they were promised — and eventually, many of them default on their loans.

Of course, this in no way resembles the situation at traditional colleges and universities, at which all instructors are highly qualified, administrators make minimum wage, instructors spend lots of time with their students, and all students get exactly the jobs they were promised and pay their loans back immediately. (more…)

17 comments 1 July 2010

Duke LLM in Law and Entrepreneurship

| Peter Klein |

We mentioned before Vanderbilt’s PhD program in law and economics and Arizona’s program in law and entrepreneurship. Now Duke Law School is offering an LLM degree in law and entrepreneurship. “Open to an inaugural class of about 20 JD graduates, the curriculum will blend rigorous academic study relating to the legal, business, institutional, strategic, and public-policy frameworks and considerations that apply to entrepreneurs and innovation, with practice and research opportunities that allow each student to develop skills in representing clients.” Obviously, this is a program for lawyers, not for entrepreneurship scholars or management practitioners, but there may be lessons here for business schools and other academic units seeking to offer interdisciplinary programs in entrepreneurship studies. I particularly appreciate the Duke program’s broad, functional concept of the entrepreneur: “[T]he entrepreneurship LLM will not only be ideal for the entrepreneur, but also for those in large institutions and firms who operate with the spirit of an entrepreneur.”

Add comment 2 June 2010

IRB Flames

| Peter Klein |

Zachary Schrag’s excellent Institutional Review Blog highlights the discussion on a recent Chronicle post about IRBs. As you can imagine, most of the comments are from frustrated researchers who see the campus IRB as their enemy, not their ally. Sample: “At my current institution, humanities scholars are subject to an IRB that only makes sense for scientists collecting blood and doing life-threatening experiments on small children.” Zach points out that a few comments defend the local IRB, but these comments “are vaguer and less eloquent,” and “none tells a story of an IRB review that proved necessary.”

I suspect that some of this researcher frustration can be alleviated by recognizing that IRBs exist not to protect research subjects, but to protect the university. The IRB’s goal is to prevent the university from being sued or otherwise losing Federal funding. Protecting research subjects, improving research methods, and contributing to the growth of knowledge are incidental.

7 comments 15 April 2010

Outsourcing TAs?

| Peter Klein |

An interesting make-or-buy decision for colleges and universities. Best line, from Roosevelt University B-school dean Terry Friel: “Faculty have this opinion that grading is their job, . . . but then they’ll turn right around and give papers to graduate teaching assistants. . . . What’s the difference in grading work online and grading it online from India?”

5 comments 8 April 2010

On Academic Writing

No comment necessary (via PLB).

4 comments 31 March 2010

Shareholder-Stakeholder Smackdown: Jensen, Freeman, Mintzberg, Khurana

| Peter Klein |

This looks like a fun event. Watch the Big Guys debate the future of the firm, management, and management education. It’s Fordham University’s W. Edwards Deming Memorial Conference, 11 May 2010 in New York City. Kudos to Mike Jensen for his willingness to walk into what will be, presumably, a line of fire. And remember, management theory is not to blame.

Add comment 11 March 2010

Mises Quote of the Day

| Peter Klein |

Nothing can be known about such matters as inflation, economic crises, unemployment, unionism, protectionism, taxation, economic controls, and all similar issues, that does not involve and presuppose economic analysis. All the arguments advanced in favor of or against the market economy and its opposites, interventionism or socialism (communism), are of an economic character. A man who talks about these problems without having acquainted himself with the fundamental ideas of economic theory is simply a babbler who repeats parrotlike what he has picked up incidentally from other fellows who are not better informed than he himself.

This is from Mises’s introduction to the 1959 edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s massive 3-volume set, Capital and Interest. Mises gives some further admonitions: “A man not perfectly familiar with all the ideas advanced in these three volumes has no claim whatever to the appellation of an economist.” This is, shall we say, a minority view. And my personal favorite: “A citizen who casts his ballot without having studied to the best of his abilities as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties. He neglects using in the appropriate way the power that his citizenship has conferred upon him in giving him the right to vote.”

Those lacking time to study Capital and Interest in its entirety may enjoy this new edition of Böhm-Bawerk’s essay “Control or Economic Law,” which is more easily digested.

8 comments 10 March 2010

How Grad School Is Just Like Kindergarden

| Peter Klein |

Another gem from the PhD Comics guy (click to enlarge).

Add comment 2 March 2010

Quote of the Day: Bartley on the Marketplace of Ideas

| Peter Klein |

I happened to be looking today through Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth by W. W. Bartley, III, who passed away shortly after this book was published. Bartley, a student and colleague of Karl Popper and the Founding Editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, was a brilliant and penetrating thinker whose work is not very well known outside of a few professional circles. Unfathomed Knowledge, a book about higher education (with the subtitle “On Universities and the Wealth of Nations”), was written for a general audience and is full of insights about the crazy business of academia. Here’s one passage:

Analogies have often been drawn between a free market in ideas and free markets in goods and services. Yet intellectuals tend to dislike such comparisons. They see the free market in ideas as something on a higher plane, qualitatively different from free markets in commodities and the like. Many of them indeed even hate the marketplace as traditionally conceived, and would want nothing to do, even analogically, with a free market in coal, housing, fish, or petroleum.

Take a few examples. Several scholars, including Edward Shils, of the University of Chicago, strongly protested the analogy when it was drawn by Michael Polanyi at the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One called Polanyi’s comparison between free markets in goods and in ideas “clever but questionable” in that a man who offers commodities in the free market “is not bound by anything” whereas in science one is bound to an objective method. Shils added that members of the scientific community, by contrast to businessmen and traders, act in accordance with overriding standards, a “common law” above and beyond individuals.

Such a position does not withstand examination. Someone offering commodities in a market — far from being “not bound by anything” — is governed by enforceable law relating to fraud, credit, contract and such like. The analogy does have limits, but of a different sort: in the marketplace of ideas, fraud, plagiarism, theft, false advertising (including false claims to expertise and the whole mystique of expertise), “conspiracies of silence,” casual slander and libel, breach of contract, deceit of all sorts are more common than in business — simply because there are few readily enforceable penalties against offenders, whereas “whistle-blowers” are severely punished. This is so especially in those areas (the humanities, social sciences, the arts — as opposed to the profitable fields) where the transaction costs of enforcing such things as property rights, priority claims, or even accurate report5ing usually outweigh the advantage in doing so, and where the transaction costs of trying to defend oneself against such things as slander are prohibitive.

5 comments 25 February 2010

Endogenous Indoctrination

| Dick Langlois |

I have been wanting for some time to write about an interesting paper by Gilles St. Paul called “Endogenous Indoctrination.” (I wasn’t familiar with his work, but he seems to do interesting things, including this.) Here’s the abstract:

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting views play an important role. Those views are shaped in part by an educational bureaucracy. It is documented that the beliefs of that bureaucracy differ substantially from those of the broader constituency. I analyse a model where this effect originates in the self-selection of workers in the educational occupation, and is partly reinforced by the insulation of the educational profession from the real economy (an effect which had been discussed by Hayek). The bias makes it harder for the population to learn the true parameters of the economy if these are favourable to the market economy. Two parameters that govern this capacity to learn are social entropy and heritability. Social entropy defines how predictable one’s occupation is as a function of one’s beliefs. Heritability is the weight of the family’s beliefs in the determination of the priors of a new generation. Both heritability and social entropy reduce the bias and makes it easier to learn that the market economy is “good,” under the assumption that it is. Finally I argue that the capacity to learn from experience is itself affected by economic institutions. A society which does not trust markets is more likely to favour labour market rigidities that in turn reduces the exposure of individuals to the market economy, and thus their ability to learn from experience. This in turn reinforces the weight of the educational system in the formation of beliefs, thus validating the initial presumption against the market economy. This sustains an equilibrium where beliefs and institutions reinforce each other in slowing or preventing people from learning the correct underlying parameters.

I was catalyzed to write today because of a related article I recently saw in the Times, which enthuses giddily about a paper called “Why Are Professors Liberal?” by two sociologists called Fosse [N. B. not Foss] and Gross. The Times lauds the paper for its sophistication and use of the quantitative. (more…)

6 comments 24 January 2010

The Virtual Firm

| Peter Klein |

If the proprietor has been to business school, it can never be smaller than two persons:

Bonus material, via Craig Newmark: the Boston Globe ponders “The End of the Office.” But it won’t happen, IMHO.

3 comments 21 January 2010

Is Grad School a Cult?

| Peter Klein |

A Chronicle piece by a pseudonymous English professor, urging prospective humanities PhD students to consider alternative career paths, generated some buzz last week. I prefer the same writer’s 2004 article, “Is Graduate School a Cult?” (via Vedran Vuk). “For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience.” The writer focuses on the humanities, but the arguments could just as well apply to the social sciences. Check out this list of cult characteristics, and see if they sound familiar:

Behavior control: “major time commitment required for indoctrination sessions and group rituals”; “need to ask permission for major decisions”; “need to report thoughts, feelings, and activities to superiors.”

Information control: “access to non-cult sources of information minimized or discouraged (keep members so busy they don’t have time to think)” and “extensive use of cult-generated information (newsletters, magazines, journals, audio tapes, videotapes, etc.).”

Thought control: “need to internalize the group’s doctrine as ‘Truth’ (black and white thinking; good vs. evil; us vs. them, inside vs. outside)” and “no critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate.”

Emotional control: “excessive use of guilt (identity guilt: not living up to your potential; social guilt; historical guilt)”; “phobia indoctrination (irrational fears of ever leaving the group or even questioning the leader’s authority; cannot visualize a positive, fulfilled future without being in the group; shunning of leave takers; never a legitimate reason to leave”; and “from the group’s perspective, people who leave are ‘weak,’ ‘undisciplined.’”

Comments are open for everyone except University of Missouri graduate students.

2 comments 11 January 2010

Do Top Scholars Make the Best University Leaders?

| Peter Klein |

Yes, says Amanda Goodall here and here. Here’s a summary and here’s some commentary. Her argument is based on inside knowledge, the ability to set appropriate standards, signaling, and legitimacy. Signaling strikes me as the most plausible (non-academic administrators may not have knowledge or legitimacy but they can hire subordinates who do). I haven’t studied the work carefully, however. Kudos to Goodall for tackling an important subject.

Her Vox article singles out economist-administrators for special mention. They seem to be doing quite well, Larry Summers notwithstanding.

2 comments 8 January 2010

Things Professors Don’t Know

| Peter Klein |

Useful information for undergraduate instructors, provided by students, from the Chronicle (via Ross Emmett). Sample:

There is no need to put those “just for fun” optional readings on the syllabus. We will never read them. If I even see the word “optional” my eyes glaze over and I will go back to thinking of something pointless, like how many grapes I can possibly stick in my mouth without suffocating. There’s a better chance of me shimmying into class followed by a conga line of maroon pandas than actually reading your optional paper.

And this: “seeing you in a place outside of the academic setting is one of the most awkward moments ever. When you’re done with class everyday we like to think that you disappear, surfacing at random moments to check your email, and then slinking back into oblivion.” When you live in a small college town, as I do, and occasionally do crazy stuff like go out to eat or go to the movies, this can be a problem.

11 comments 18 November 2009

Incentives Matter, Football Helmet Edition

| Peter Klein |

Latest example of the Peltzman Effect, courtesy of the WSJ: “Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?” E.g.: “[W]hile [hard-shell] helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often.” Economics teachers, if you’re tired of using the seat-belt example, or the one about airplane child-safety seats — or Dwight Lee’s slightly more risqué version — try this one instead.

5 comments 11 November 2009

Professorial Role Models

| Peter Klein |

Mine is of course Professor Kingsfield from “The Paper Chase”:

Best line: “Loud! Fill the classroom with your intelligence.”

My co-bloggers are of course warm-and-fuzzy types. Anybody have a clip of the scene from One True Thing where the Renee Zellweger character remembers visiting her father’s classroom as a child? “So, I guess this is the last class of the semester. Thank you for taking this journey with me.” (Students all stand up and applaud, shake his hand as he walks down the aisle, etc.) Then there’s the scene from Better Off Dead with the high-school math teacher played by Vincent Schiavelli. Classic!

4 comments 11 September 2009

Blogging About the Academic Job Market

| Peter Klein |

Political science profs don’t like it. The passage on job-market-rumor sites caught my eye in this Inside Higher Ed piece on the poli sci market (via Randy).

One change in the hiring process that is clearly frustrating to many graduate directors and search chairs is the popularity of Web sites devoted to the latest news and rumors about the status of searches. . . . Some in the audience said that they should try to discourage graduate students from frequenting the sites, given that postings are not only of questionable accuracy but are sometimes “hateful,” as one political scientist said. . . .

PoliSciGuy, one of the anonymous editors of Political Science Job Rumors, reached via e-mail, defended the site. He noted that his e-mail is on the site so he can respond to complaints about postings, and said that there is some moderation to remove certain posts. But he said that there is a strong demand for the information — even unverified information — from job seekers. “If we tighten things down too much, then a new board will spring up without moderation. So, we try to strike a balance between allowing enough free flow of information that this board remains the focal point for all political science rumors, and still being responsible about what we allow to remain posted.”

He also said that grad students know how to place the site’s information in perspective. “I’m not sure if graduate students actually rely on this message board, per se,” he said. “I think that they likely take it as one data point along with information they gain from other graduate students, advisers, and the rumor mill that has always existed at every conference bar.”

Exactly. There has always been a job-market rumor mill, in academia as in every other profession. Until now, this information has been restricted to faculty and students at elite schools, in particular specialized networks, who happen to know the guy who knows the guy. . . . Rumor-mill websites simply democratize this information. Yet another example of the great keepers of the democratic flame opposing something that looks like actual democracy.

Update: Maybe the hiring schools should just tweet their openings (HT: Cliff).

1 comment 8 September 2009

Bayes of Our Lives

| Peter Klein |

I’ve already shared my Bayesian anecdote. On a more serious note, Andrew Gelman is asked (by Bill Harris) to recommend overviews of Bayesian methods for practitioners (analysts, managers). Andrew provides several helpful suggestions. Any others? Any recommendations for teaching Bayesian (or classical) statistics to MBAs, executives, even undergraduate business majors?

2 comments 3 September 2009

Wanted: Human Capital Research(ers)

| Russ Coff |

Human Capital Interest Group? First a self-serving announcement. I’m part of an effort to create a new SMS interest group on Human Capital & Competitive Advantage (HC&CA). I need to gauge interest and identify people who would want to be involved if the proposal moves forward. We need people who are interested in: 1) Program Chair or Associate Program Chair, 2) Launch Planning Committee, or 3) Friends of HC&CA (email list). Please nominate yourself or others here.

General Human Capital and Competitive Advantage. Now for the meat: Why I think human capital is such fertile ground. Strategy research tends to adopt very unrealistic assumptions about markets for human capital. As a result, shorthand like “firm-specific” human capital inaccurately reflects its strategic potential. (more…)

Add comment 1 September 2009

Chalk or Dry-Erase Markers?

| Peter Klein |

I just committed a rookie teacher faux pas: wearing a black shirt to class in a room equipped with old-fashioned chalk and chalkboards. I do PowerPoint, but use the boards to make additional points and to guide Socratic discussion. Now I look like Woody Allen in the cocaine scene from Annie Hall. O Whiteboard with Black Dry-Erase Markers, Where Art Thou?

Now, I’m sure some professors and teachers among our loyal readership will have strong opinions on the chalk-versus-dry-erase controversy. Chalk generates more dust than markers, but the dust is easily washable and gives that disheveled, absent-minded professor look that many of us crave (especially when combined with tweed and elbow patches). Dry-erase boards are usually cleaner, but the dust and stray markings can ruin your clothes and make you look like a tattoo-school drop-out. What do you think?

NB: My favorite example of an academic Extreme Makeover relates to this discussion. When I was in grad school Andrei Shleifer came out to give a seminar, sometime around 1989 or 1990. He had the quintessential professor look — tousled hair, shirttail hanging out, chalk marks everywhere. I’m pretty sure there were no transparencies or PowerPoint slides, just Three Equations and a Cloud of Dust. Several years later, in the mid-2000s, I saw him give the keynote address for the ISNIE annual conference. This was after the Late Unpleasantness in Russia. In the transition to public servant, Shleifer had been completely transformed, now sporting a fashionable haircut, perfectly tailored Armani suit, bright purple tie, and legible PowerPoint slides (not up to Teppo’s standard, but a big leap for Shleifer nonetheless). Quelle difference!

7 comments 1 September 2009

Even Stanley Fish . . .

| Peter Klein |

. . . recognizes that politicizing the basic English composition classes — one of the crowning achievements of literary and cultural postmodernism, the movement once championed by Fish himself — wasn’t such a good idea (via George Leef):

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

Quelle ironie!

1 comment 26 August 2009

Discipline-Based Policy Advice

| Peter Klein |

As noted before, the economist long ago replaced the fortune teller as the most popular kind of policy adviser. The US, for example, has a Council of Economic Advisers but no Council of Anthropological Advisers or Council of Critical Literary Theorist Advisers (thank goodness). Now the sociologists want a piece of the action. And, as Rajshree Agarwal, Jay Barney, Nicolai, and I have argued, management scholars (a partially overlapping set with economists, it should be noted) may also have something to offer in understanding the current economic mess.

Here’s Richard Posner making a pitch for legal scholars: “with a few notable exceptions, such as Lucian Bebchuk, Edward Morrison, and Steven Schwarcz, academic lawyers (and Bebchuk and Morrison have Ph.Ds in economics, as well as law degrees) have not made a contribution to the understanding and resolution of the current economic crisis, even though it bristles with legal questions.” But he isn’t sure that academic legal training is currently very useful. Kenneth Anderson is more optimistic:

I think that legal academics will have much to contribute in the reform of finance in the remaking of institutions and markets with fewer panglossian assumptions about how they will find optimal solutions on their own, and with fewer panglossian assumptions that they will do so as a matter of natural necessity. But I also think, even more strongly, and will raise it in some subsequent posts, that lawyers will bring to the table an understanding of the unquantified risks and uncertainties that are written into financial contracts — derivatives, securitizations, etc. — that financial analysts, economists, many other non-lawyer actors, took for granted as not having any effect.

Who else wants a seat at the table?