Posts filed under 'Education'
Organizations or Markets in Morality?
| Benito Arruñada |
Moral codes can be produced and enforced through markets or through organizations. In particular, Catholic theology can be interpreted as a paradigm of the organizational production of morality. In contrast, the dominant moral codes are now produced in something resembling more a market.
The organizational character of Catholicism comes from its centralized production and enforcement of the moral code by theologians and priests and the mediation role played by the Church between God and believers. The epitome of both features is the old institution of confession of sins, a cultural universal that reaches full sophistication — for good and for bad — within Catholicism. My forthcoming JSSR paper argues that confession was a strikingly organizational solution to the production and enforcement of morality, something that Western societies now do mostly through markets. (more…)
2 comments 30 June 2009
The MBA Oath
| Peter Klein |
As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.
Therefore I promise:
- I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.
- I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
- I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
- I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.
- I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
- I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.
- I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.
- I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.
This oath I make freely, and upon my honor.
This comes from a group of second-year Harvard MBAs and was featured in last Friday’s New York Times (HT: MGK). Here’s their blog. I eagerly await the analysis of the O&M commentariat.
8 comments 5 June 2009
Plowing Under Rural Sociology
| Peter Klein |
From Randy Westgren:
The aggie world, and to a lesser extent, the sociology world, is reacting to a decision by Washington State University to dissolve its Department of Community and Rural Sociology. There is a great deal of rancor developing about this type of budget-cutting strategy, as opposed to making everyone suffer equally. If one looks closely at the budget documents made public by WSU, the ag school is getting a smaller cut (5% teaching + 8% research) than many colleges, including the B-school (13%, 12 vacant positions). The budget plan can be found here. It looks like the Dean’s decision, rather than the CEO’s (The Dean is an agricultural economist).
I was stunned to see a comment to a piece written in Inside Higher Education on this battle from an engineering prof — well, not actually stunned, more like chagrined.
“As for the rural sociology department, while I can sympathize with their plight in Pullman I do not see the loss as intellectually serious. As a member of an engineering faculty at a major university for more than 25 years, I’ve known quite a few sociologists. Most of them publish little stories that are not much sounder empirically, and usually less interesting substantively, that a good fiction writer. With very few exceptions, sociologists I know and have known are mathophobes! The few who have some ability in math use it on their omnibus snapshots of human populations taken at widely spaced intervals and then try to figure out from those “data” what happened and why. Ridiculous! Continuous observation is probably not possible, but you need closely spaced observations that focus on the specific processes that are the point of your investigation! If you have continuous-time observations, you need calculus in order to analyze your data. If you have closely spaced discrete-time observations, you need something more than shotgun regressions to analyze your data. Most of what sociologists publish is a waste of time and money.”
Obviously, this scholar has not followed the closely reasoned defense of fuzzy, ill-defined concepts at orgtheory.net.
Teppo and Brayden, if you are watching, ask Dave Whetten about his take on the Chancellor of SUNY Albany who undertook a similar department-cutting strategy during the New York State budget difficulties of the late 1970s.
3 comments 20 May 2009
Missouri J-School Tastes the Apple
| Peter Klein |
Many colleges and universities require students to purchase a laptop with particular capabilities. Some schools are considering requiring Kindles or similar book readers. The University of Missouri School of Journalism, however, is going one better by mandating not just a particular type of device — in this case, a portable media player — but a particular brand. In a decision sure to warm Teppo’s heart, the school announced last week that incoming freshmen will be required to own an iPhone or iPod Touch. Not only are these high-end devices, for their class, but in the case of the phone a 2-year AT&T service contract is part of the package. The ostensible reason is to allow students to listen to recorded lectures and other multimedia presentations related to their coursework and projects.
If you think this places an unfair burden on students, given that they can listen to these materials on any personal computer and most portable music players, don’t worry: university officials immediately announced that the requirement won’t be enforced, but is merely a cynical ploy to let students add the cost of the fancy toy to their financial aid applications. No doubt makers of rival devices are delighted by the university’s move.
3 comments 12 May 2009
Skepticism and Greed
| Dick Langlois |
One of my University colleagues, who works in instructional technology, sent a few of us a post from a mailing list-blog at Stanford called Tomorrow’s Professor. The site has a lot of interesting stuff on teaching and the academy, which O&M readers may find interesting. But this particular post, reprinted from a blog at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, prompted me to send in a response. Here is what I said. (Take a look at the original post, but I think you can get the idea from my comment.)
I certainly endorse what I take to be the central idea of post 944 — that students of business and economics would benefit from a liberal education.
Having said that, however, let me also note that I think the post gets things exactly — and perhaps dangerously — backwards in many ways. It is a constant trope in the popular press that the idea of “free markets” is some kind of dogma among economists (and perhaps society more broadly). In fact, economists believe that markets exist only within institutional structures, and economics — even so-called free-market economics — is actually about getting the institutions right, not about letting people do whatever they want.
In my view, moreover, economists are the real skeptics in the academy. Despite his (marketing) claim to being a “rogue” economist, Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame is actually a better model of what most economists do than is Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan. Unlike most other academics, economists are rewarded for taking skeptical and iconoclastic positions, at least when they can back those positions up with hard data and clear analysis.
By contrast, few people outside of economics departments or business schools have any understanding whatever about how and when — or even whether — individual action can lead to beneficial unintended consequences. Economics is actually counter-intuitive in many ways. Humans evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and as a result our intuitions about how a large open society operates are often wrong or backwards.
For all these reasons, it seems to me odd to suggest that economists (and students of economics) are dogmatic and would be made more skeptical and thoughtful about the economy by studying other liberal fields. In my experience, it’s rather the opposite. (Which is not to say, of course, that students won’t benefit in many ways from studying other fields.)
The post itself is a case in point. It starts out in the right direction with a marvelous story from Keynes about the nature of the money supply. But then it goes on to talk about “greed” as the central issue, ending with a quote from Roosevelt that “heedless self-interest” is bad economics. In fact, however, it is pointing to “greed” that is unexamined dogma. Why exactly has the level of greed changed over time? Is that really an explanation of anything? In stark contrast, many professional economists (including such serious scholars of the crisis as John Taylor and Karl Case) would point out that the most fundamental cause of the crisis was the expansive monetary policy of the Fed, which pumped money into the system and caused an asset bubble. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors endowed us with intuitions about greedy individuals; but they didn’t leave us intuitions about how a fiat money system works in a huge economy of non-face-to-face exchange. That we have to learn in an economics course.
3 comments 8 May 2009
Diversity of Opinion at the University of Missouri
| Peter Klein |
Who says the modern US university doesn’t reflect the full diversity of American social, cultural, and political opinion? Sure, most of the faculty at my university are Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, Prius-driving, union-loving, New-York-Review-of-Books reading ACLU supporters, but they also like to hear from the other side:
Chairperson of U.S. Communist Party to Speak on Campus
Sam Webb, the Chair of the Communist Party, USA, will be speaking on Tuesday April 28th at 7:00pm in Ellis Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. Sam Webb’s speech will address the current role of/possibilities for the Communist Party, USA and other progressives in the current political climate, confronted as our country is with the economic crisis, environmental crises and two wars. Webb writes extensively on politics, economics, international affairs, and Marxism, and is the author of a number of theoretical pamphlets, including “Reflections on Socialism,” and “The Nature, Role and Work of the Communist Party,” both of which were published in English and Spanish.
Announcement sponsored by ORG — Organization Resource Group
Thanks to Per for noticing.
1 comment 22 April 2009
Missouri’s View of Charter Schools
| Peter Klein |
Missouri Democrat Chris Kelly, who represents my district in the state legislature, has introduced a bill rescinding a 2007 Missouri state board of education rule restricting the sale of public school buildings to charter schools. The 2007 rule prevents public school buildings from being sold to “charter schools, liquor stores, adult entertainment venues, distilleries, and landfills.”
Add comment 13 April 2009
IRBs Gone Wild
| Peter Klein |
We’ve noted before the strange behavior of university Institutional Review Boards. My own campus has a particularly prickly IRB, the result of an unpleasant incident a few years back involving the medical school. So, even social-science researchers must receive IRB training and have individual research projects — yes, every research project that involves “human subjects,” which includes research using secondary data — approved by the campus IRB.
My certification expired recently and I took an online test today to be re-certified. Some of you may find the questions interesting. Here is a selection. Keep in mind these are questions for an economist wishing to do research in economics and management, not for a pharmacologist or epidemiologist. (more…)
10 comments 9 April 2009
Kaplan on Sutton
| Peter Klein |
Here’s Steve Kaplan’s reply to Sutton, which makes several good points. The best, to me, is that Sutton et al. have no systematic evidence relating the incorporation of economics into the business-school curriculum and any particular economic or managerial outcomes. There were booms and busts, Ponzi schemes, corruption, and irrational exuberance long before “opportunism” and “agency costs” entered the MBA lexicon.I wonder what Sutton thinks caused the S&L crisis, stagflation, the Great Depresssion, the Panic of 1907, Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, or any other past economic crisis? For someone who claims to favor evidence-based management, Sutton applies a pretty weak standard of evidence to his own sweeping condemnation of an entire academic discipline.
Kaplan also notes:
Sutton does not really present a viable alternative. He believes that business schools should teach the nitty gritty of leadership and organization life. The challenge in doing this is that the nitty gritty often becomes just a collection of stories or anecdotes that cannot be generalized. The advantage of economics and the other academic disciplines is that they provide general, actionable frameworks that can be applied to new circumstances. In fact, this is probably a large part of reason the economics-type analysis has crowded out some of the other areas in the social sciences.
4 comments 8 April 2009
My Question About Ward Churchill
| Peter Klein |
I haven’t followed the Ward Churchill case too closely, but was aware that last week a Denver jury ruled that he had been fired unjustly from his tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado (and presumably will be reinstated). Fabio’s post yesterday reminded me of the biggest puzzle about this whole thing: How on earth did a person without a terminal degree, with few scholarly publications, and no record of the usual academic activities (membership on journal editorial boards, leadership positions in professional societies, mentoring of graduate students, etc.) get to be a tenured full professor at a major public university?
Assuming the wikipedia entry is correct, we learn:
Churchill received his B.A. in technological communications in 1974 and M.A. in communications theory in 1975, both from Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield.[8] Churchill began working as an affirmative action officer at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978. He also lectured on Indian issues in the ethnic studies program. In 1990, he was hired as an associate professor, although he did not possess the academic doctorate usually required for such a position. The following year he was granted tenure in the communications department, without the usual six-year probationary period, after being declined by the sociology and political science departments. He was presented with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Alfred University after giving a lecture there about American Indian history in 1992. He moved to the new ethnic studies department in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 1997. He became chair of the department in June 2002.[12][13][14]
Out of curiosity I googled his CV and found this copy (not hosted on a university site, so possibly inaccurate). There are a few items listed under “Scholarly Essays.” I’ve never heard of any of the journals (except Social Text, Stanley Fish’s journal and the hapless victim of Alan Sokal’s famous prank). Maybe they are highly ranked in the field of ethnic studies; I don’t know (but would be curious to see the impact factors).
Could someone tell me: Would this kind of academic record get someone a tenured full professorship at the University of Colorado in, say, biochemistry or political science?
8 comments 8 April 2009
Big Bucks for Coach Anderson
| Peter Klein |
In light of our recent discussions of salaries for US college coaches (1, 2), I note that Missouri basketball coach Mike Anderson, whose team lost over the weekend to the Connecticut Huskies (good thing Dick Langlois and I didn’t have a wager on that), is likely to get a big raise this year. Anderson’s base salary is $850,000, a pittance compared to Jim Calhoun’s $1.6 million. (Indeed, Anderson’s predecessor Quinn Snyder, fired at the end of the 2006 season, pulled down $1.2 million.) Local media outlets guess that at least $1.3 million will be required to keep Anderson from bolting for openings at Georgia, Virgnia, or Arizona (and Memphis, if John Calipari takes the Kentucky job). University System President Gary Forsee, Chancellor Brady Deaton, and even Missouri Governor Jay Nixon made public statements over the weekend expressing their desire to keep Anderson. Not one mentioned the University’s delicate financial situation (a huge revenue shortfall has led to cuts in academic programs, research support, faculty and staff benefits, and other expenditures). I can understand the argument for “investing” in a big-time coach but, given the recession, wouldn’t you expect campus officials to be a wee bit more discrete when tossing around these big numbers?
9 comments 30 March 2009
Selection, Meritocracy, and Educational Quality
| Dick Langlois |
We have all heard complaints about the decline in the quality of students over, say, the second half of the twentieth century. The usual interpretation is that this has to do with decline in the quality of schools, especially high schools, or in the curriculum delivered in those schools. I always like to point out to people (that is, to non-economists) that much of the perceived decline is likely a matter of demographic and selection effects. Access to secondary and higher education expanded tremendously after World War II, which changed the underlying distribution of abilities of students finishing high school and attending college. (This is also relevant to discussions of the quality of American college students versus Europeans or others — the fraction of students going on to college is higher in the U. S. than elsewhere, so comparing just the mean is misleading.) Education also became more meritocratic after the War, in that colleges and universities began to screen students by academic ability rather by other characteristics (like income).
I just ran across an interesting new paper by Lutz Hendricks and Todd Schoellman that analyzes these issues in a thorough and illuminating way. Here is the abstract:
Student Abilities During the Expansion of U.S. Education, 1950-2000
Since 1950, U.S. educational attainment has increased substantially. While the median student in 1950 dropped out of high school, the median student today attends some college. In an environment with ability heterogeneity and positive sorting between ability and school tenure, the expansion of education implies a decrease in the average ability of students conditional on school attainment. Using a calibrated model of school choice under ability heterogeneity, we investigate the quantitative impact of rising attainment on ability and measured wages. Our findings suggest that the decline in average ability depressed wages conditional on schooling by 31-58 percentage points. We also find that the entire rise in the college wage premium since 1950 can be attributed to the rising mean ability of college graduates relative to high school graduates.
This has a number of significant implications. As the authors point out, average ability has declined at all levels of schooling. This should color our interpretation of the much-touted fact that real wages haven’t increased much since 1960. At the same time, the wage gap between low and high levels of educational attainment has increased over time — because improved sorting has selected people of higher ability into college and selected people of lower ability out of college.
2 comments 24 March 2009
Funding Higher Education
| Dick Langlois |
Inspired by Peter’s post about salaries at private universities, I thought I would write a bit about public universities, notably my own. It was big news in Connecticut this week when Jim Calhoun, our head basketball coach, got nasty with a self-styled activist who attacked him at a post-game press conference. The activist, who had gotten in on a photographer’s press pass, wanted to know how Calhoun could justify his $1.6 million salary at a time of massive state deficits. Calhoun pointed out that, essentially because of him, the basketball program is a big profit maker for the University: it apparently brings in on the order of $12 million and costs about $6 million. The controversy arose because of the less-than-genteel way in which Calhoun made his case, prompting Governor Jodi Rell to issue a rebuke.
It turns out that Calhoun is not only the highest-paid University employee, he is the highest-paid State employee. (See here for a roster of the top state salaries.) The next two on the list are football coach Randy Edsall ($1.38 million) and women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma ($1.31 million). The next three are physicians at the UConn Health Center — in the same specialties noted in the Chronicle article Peter cites: reproductive medicine, dermatology, and neurosurgery. (Basketball may not be brain surgery, but Calhoun won his 800th career game on Wednesday, and Auriemma’s team is a juggernaut likely headed for another undefeated season and a national championship.) UConn president Mike Hogan is seventh on the list. (There is an old story about the university president who was asked how he felt about making less money than the football coach: “he’s had a better year than I have,” was the answer.) (more…)
4 comments 27 February 2009
Top Earners at Private US Colleges and Universities
| Peter Klein |
Some interesting factoids in this Chronicle of Higher Ed. story on compensation at 600 private US colleges and universities (via Gary Peters):
- Of the 88 employees earning more than $1 million in 2006-07, only 11 were chief executives. Most were coaches or medical school faculty.
- Median salary for full professors with MDs in the clinical sciences: $238,000
- Median salary for full professors in all other disciplines: $122,159
- Highest-paid employee: USC football coach Pete Carroll ($4.4 million)
- Second highest-paid employee: Columbia University dermatologist David Silvers ($4.3-million)
- Highest-paid economist: Columbia’s Henry Levin ($302,053)
- Highest-paid film-studies professor: Wesleyan’s Jeanine Basinger ($250,854)
No information given on marginal revenue products. I imagine Pete Carroll’s is at least $4.4 million. Don’t know about the rest.
See also the graphic below (click to enlarge):
3 comments 25 February 2009
The Future of the Textbook
| Peter Klein |
Cliff Kuang at Fast Company points us to smARThistory, which looks very nice, and asks:
Why the hell are we still teaching kids from textbooks? Granted, the system works. But you’d at least expect more experiments in the genre, along the lines of smARThistory. For one, textbooks for each student routinely cost hundreds, even thousands per year — and a massive chunk of those costs aren’t in the production of the material, but rather its printing and distribution. Better to give kids laptops, and dynamic textbooks with high production values (like smARThistory). You could arrange them with assigned lessons that require modules to be checked off. A system of clicks or periodic questions could ensure that the kids are engaged. And what about flash animations that illustrate physics or math concepts? The list goes on. If done right, a virtual textbook would far outshine any print textbook we’ve ever cracked.
In economics and management we sometimes use online simulations, experiments, and other interactive learning tools, but the traditional textbook (or set of journal articles) reigns supreme. Do the newer tools work? Which are most effective? And, most important, what clever names can we give them? huMANresources? pricECONnections?
Add comment 10 February 2009
Econ Courses at Open Yale
| Peter Klein |
Robert Shiller on financial markets and Ben Polak on game theory. Thanks to Joshua for the pointer and a link to Academic Earth, an aggregator for free online courses from several top US universities.
2 comments 7 February 2009
New Theoretical Developments in Strategic Management
| Mike Sykuta |
“New Theoretical Developments in Strategic Management: Opportunities for Research Contributions” is the topic of an interactive online seminar Thursday, 26 February, 12:00-1:30pm EST. The speaker is Michael Hitt, Distinguished Professor of Management and the Joe B. Foster Chair in Business Leadership and the C.W. and Dorothy Conn Chair in New Ventures at Texas A&M University. During the 90-minute seminar participants will explore theoretical developments in strategic management including the resource-based view, institutional theory, and a new concept of strategic entrepreneurship, and will offer updates on how more established theories such as TCE and agency theory are being applied.
The seminar is sponsored by the Agribusiness Economics & Management (AEM) Section of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA). The AEM Section has sponsored online seminars previously on topics that may be new or less familiar to its members, one of the more valuable contributions any professional society provides. Although many of the “new theoretical developments” described above may not seem quite so new to frequent O&M readers, they are certainly more novel in the context of agribusiness research.
You can register for the conference as an individual or as a host location for as many people as can fit into your local class or conference room. This is an especially good opportunity for graduate students and faculty to learn more about the research opportunities in this area. I expect several of our Missouri colleagues and grad students will be participating. Check out the conference website for information about technical requirements and registration.
Add comment 4 February 2009
Pittsburgh School Superintendent Tackles Absenteeism
| David Gerard |
Those of you that think that a football is round might not be aware that the Super Bowl is taking place this Sunday, where my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers will face the Arizona Cardinals. Every year brings its own story lines, and among the many questions surrounding this year’s game is: what is your favorite public-choice explanation for why Pittsburgh schools are opening late on Monday?
The Pittsburgh Public Schools will operate on a two-hour delay Monday because of the Super Bowl, Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said today. Noting that Sunday’s big game means a “late night,” Mr. Roosevelt said the delay should cut down on student and staff absenteeism.
Of course, not all work places are observing the delay, so this will create a few headaches for working parents who don’t happen to be teachers or staff in the Pittsburgh public school system. Perhaps Superintendent Roosevelt thinks parents will already have headaches Monday morning, so the incremental costs will be low.
2 comments 29 January 2009
Students: Consider Renting, not Buying, Your Books
| Peter Klein |
Chegg is the Netflix of college textbooks. Get your book in the mail, along with a prepaid return address label, don’t write in it too much, and send it back once the semester is over. I took a quick look and the savings appear to be substantial for brand-new books, modest otherwise (because there are robust secondary markets for used textbooks). The newest edition of a book I assigned last semester is $127 new from Amazon, $72 for a one-semester rental from Chegg. I wonder if the books come in those cute little red mailing sleeves? (Via cnet).
5 comments 13 January 2009
It Was Only a Matter of Time . . .
| Peter Klein |
. . . before someone blamed the financial crisis on agency theory. Sure enough, Raymond Fisman and Rakesh Khurana trace the source of the current mess not to expansionary monetary policy, or lax underwriting standards, or implicit (now explicit) government guarantees against market discipline, or the Basel Committee, or a host of other policy and institutional failures, but to business schools, and the critics’ favorite bête noire, the concept of shareholder wealth maximization.
[B]usiness schools [promote] a particular brand of free-market ideology — squarely focused on shareholder maximization theories — that forms the staple fare of MBA and executive education courses today. . . .
In the world views that underlie modern business education, the market always “gets prices right” and “managers” are merely agents for shareholders. An individual’s worth can be reduced to one’s worth in the market.
If I get $100 million in compensation, the thinking goes, it is because ‘I deserve it.’ There is no discussion of the role of circumstance, luck or market failure. It is the type of thinking that has resulted in literally hundreds of billions of dollars being transferred away from organizational resources and into the personal bank accounts of CEOs, and is now bringing capitalism to its knees.
So, teaching future managers how the price system works, how managerial behavior effects shareholder wealth, how marginal productivity affects wages, and the like is equivalent to encouraging managers to lie, cheat, and steal! I suppose it would be better to teach that water runs uphill, that central planning is more efficient than free markets, and that men are angels. Perhaps we should cover socially responsible statistics and accounting too.
Sumantra Ghoshal famously blamed transaction cost economics and agency theory for much of the world’s ills, including the Enron affair. At least Ghoshal offered some arguments. Fisman and Khurana can’t be bothered. (HT: Ben Asa Rast.)
11 comments 29 December 2008
Ability and Specialization Among Economic Researchers
| Peter Klein |
Forgive the navel-gazing, but some of you may enjoy Todd Kendall’s paper in the December 2008 issue of MDE, “Ability and Specialization Among Economic Researchers,” which looks at the relationship between a researcher’s human capital and the scope of his activities. The sample consists of academic economists at top-50 US universities. Kendall shows that economists from more prestigious PhD programs tend to publish in more general journals, controlling for quality, and to list more JEL subject codes per paper. The quality control is important because the most prestigious journals (as in most fields) are also the most general. But the sample includes prestigious specialty journals and lower-tier general journals.
Naturally I’m tempted to ask for the raw data so I can analyze some sub-samples containing people I know personally. But perhaps it’s better not to go there. I do plan to defend myself against charges of being “eclectic” or “unfocused” by referring to this study and calling myself a “distinguished generalist.” At least it avoids Rothbard’s Law.
Add comment 17 December 2008
Interesting Blogs
| Peter Klein |
- Urban and Regional Studies, by Pedro Marquez
- Beerkens’ Blog, by Eric Beerkens
- Estzer’s Blog, by Eszter Hargittai
- Terminal Degree, by a funny music professor
1 comment 9 December 2008
Write Like Toni Morrison
| Peter Klein |
Remember the Universal Translator? Peter Wood, in like manner, provides a useful guide to translating regular English prose into the style of Nobel-prizewinning author Toni Morrison, probably the most frequently assigned writer on US college campuses. The basic rules:
- Misuse common phrases
- Embrace inconsistency
- Omit words to create more forceful expression
- Mix up parts of speech
- Chop in self-conscious micro-sentences
He provides some wonderful examples. For instance, this office memo:
Just to remind you, I will be out of the office Tuesday to meet with our supplier, Acme Explosives. Please finish your work on the 2Q budget and let the account rep know that Mr. Coyote’s order will be shipped Thursday.
becomes
The reminding can’t wait the hurry of it. I explain. I know you know of Tuesday, I and Acme Explosives is soon together meet. You can please work, perhaps, the budget’s second quarter, and knowledge the account rep of Mr. Coyote’s Thursday shipment.
Wood also reminds us that Morrison is “the undisputed master of wandering verb tenses” and that she “knows how deftly to insert evocative foreign terms.”
But it is the anachronistic little details that are Morrison’s signature. My favorite occurs late in the book: “Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow.” This is the 1690s, two centuries before the eccentric bird lover Eugene Schiffelin introduced starlings to the U.S. by releasing sixty of them in Central Park.
Schiffelin had no idea how the birds would proliferate, crowd out native species, and form enormous squawking, twittering, whistling flocks that seem to fill up whole forests. Starlings seem to propagate as fast as clichés and to descend like clouds of effusive blurbs on overpraised books.
2 comments 22 November 2008
Education Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
There is a settled mediocrity in American college teaching, surpassed here and there by talented and energetic individuals, but seldom disturbed in its languorous self-satisfaction. On most campuses, mediocrity can rightly pride itself on being a whole lot better than the conspicuous dreadfulness of a handful of professors who dedicate themselves variously to the nine muses of bad teaching: Boredom, Mumbling, Disorganization, Confusion, Forgetfulness, Stridency, PowerPoint, Textbook, and Vacuity.
That’s from Peter Wood, whose subject is actually the division of labor at many large US universities between tenured/tenure-track faculty, who do research and teach small classes to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and the specialized, non-tenured teaching specialists who handle the bulk of the undergraduate instruction, assisted by a “small army” of graduate and undergraduate TAs. Wood points out, rightly IMHO, that one day the universities may decide that the prestige and grant dollars and other bennies generated by the research faculty isn’t worth their high salaries, perhaps choosing to go the University of Phoenix route instead.
4 comments 21 November 2008
The Impotence of the Economists, Part II
| Peter Klein |
The financial-market bailout is one thing. While most economists, rightly in my view, strongly opposed the Paulson plan, one can at least imagine intelligent arguments for it. The proposed auto-industry bailout is something else entirely. Does any economically literate person support it? Industry bailouts are textbook examples of the fallacy of composition, taught in every Econ 101 class. When I teach it I use exactly this kind of example (bailing out Chrysler in 1980, bailing out the airline and insurance industries after 9/11, etc.). Saving the X industry simply harms the Y and Z industries, while substituting the political process for the market in determining the allocation of resrouces. And yet, here we go.
Along these lines, here are some sentences to ponder from David Yermack, writing in today’s WSJ:
In 1993, the legendary economist Michael Jensen gave his presidential address to the American Finance Association. Mr. Jensen’s presentation included a ranking of which U.S. companies had made the most money-losing investments during the decade of the 1980s. The top two companies on his list were General Motors and Ford, which between them had destroyed $110 billion in capital between 1980 and 1990, according to Mr. Jensen’s calculations.
I was a student in Mr. Jensen’s business-school class around that time, and one day he put those rankings on the board and shouted “J’accuse!” He wanted his students to understand that when a company makes money-losing investments, the cost falls upon all of society. Investment capital represents our limited stock of national savings, and when companies spend it badly, our future well-being is compromised. Mr. Jensen made his presentation more than 15 years ago, and even then it seemed obvious that the right strategy for GM would be to exit the car business, because many other companies made better vehicles at lower cost. . . .
Over the past decade, the capital destruction by GM has been breathtaking, on a greater scale than documented by Mr. Jensen for the 1980s.
See also: Lynne Kiesling.
5 comments 15 November 2008
B-School Naming Rights Up to $300 million
| Peter Klein |
At Chicago, anyway, now home to the Booth School of Business.
Here’s an interesting (if slightly dated) Business Week story on B-school naming rights. Wisconsin has taken the most innovative approach, announcing earlier this year that in exchange for $85 million it would pledge not to name the school for 20 years.
Here at Organizations and Markets we are committed to honest and open inquiry, free from restrictions imposed by corporate or individual sponsors. However, if you’d like to have this blog named after yourself, we’ll toss those principles right out the window. Send all inquiries to naming-rights@organizationsandmarkets.com.
10 comments 10 November 2008
Dan and Chip Heath on Presentations
| Peter Klein |
A new entry for our PowerPoint series: Dan and Chip Heath’s “How to Avoid Making a Bad Presentation,” from the current issue of Fast Company. They’re the Made to Stick guys, in case you forgot. (Not, sadly, the people behind my all-time favorite ice cream.)
Add comment 27 October 2008
Heckman on Academia
| Peter Klein |
Steve Levitt links to this update on the travails of the University of Chicago’s proposed Milton Friedman Institute. Jim Heckman, an Institute supporter who has recently expressed public doubts about its conception and development, is on the hot seat. Heckman makes an interesting observation, in passing, that relates to a previous discussion of research funding:
Heckman added that all institutes are affected by bias, citing hiring decisions as a source of bias throughout the University.
“I doubt there is a truly unbiased academic. Besides, most biased people don’t see themselves as biased. If you think the [Chicago Graduate School of Business] is an unbiased environment, think again. They are recruited for their views. I wonder also how many free marketers would get jobs in anthropology or sociology,” he said.
“It’s true for any institute. You state a mission, attract funders. They expect the mission to be fulfilled. Very rarely do people fund pure knowledge,” he said.
Add comment 23 October 2008
Advice For Junior Faculty
| Peter Klein |
Last Friday the Chronicle of High Ed published the first in a series of articles giving strategic advice for pre-tenure faculty. In “A Call for Clarity” Cathy Trower and Anne Gallagher identify four common pitfalls facing early-career professors:
- Vague and inconsistent tenure guidelines
- Lack of constructive feedback
- A culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”
- Divergence between policy and practice
In response they suggest that universities adopt formal written policies, offer tenure workshops, and provide clear interpretation of tenure rules. Good advice. (Thanks to Fabio Chaddad for the pointer.)
3 comments 24 September 2008
Best Few Sentences I Read Today, University Edition
| Peter Klein |
Fred Schwarz, writing about University programs to have incoming freshmen read and discuss a particular book (usually a propaganda piece like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed but in this case Garry Wills’s tedious Lincoln at Gettysburg):
I dislike the whole idea of making everyone read the same book. . . . Why do college administrators persist with schemes like this? They usually say they’re meant to give students “something in common.” So administrators spend half their time dividing students into groups by race, sex, religion, and so forth, and emphasizing their differences; then they spend the other half devising programs, workshops, and silly ideas like this to help everyone overcome them. Nothing surprising there; running a university, like many jobs, is largely a matter of making work for oneself.
Add comment 19 September 2008
