How much time should it take?

Via The Valve, two posts on the historical trend toward longer and longer periods of graduate training: in the 60s, it used to take 4-5 years past the BA; it now may take up to 11 years. The comments in the post in the Valve are also pretty interesting. Commenters mostly explain this trend as a result of the saturation of the market: since there are few jobs anyway, doctoral students draw the process out, trying to get a very good dissertation in the process, something really publishable. I tend to agree (it fits with my experience); what do you think? And how long is too long?

The State as a Form of Technology, Cont.

A while ago, I mentioned that I was working on a proyect on the state as a form of technology. I've now completed a second full draft of a paper for this proyect and posted it to my website [Link(PDF) - now it works!], thinking it might well be of some interest to readers of this blog (I'll be presenting it at the MPSA meeting). It's still a pretty rough draft, especially in the final sections; I'd love to hear your thoughts on it (the first section greatly benefitted from the comments to my earlier post on the subject). There's a section on the law which might especially benefit from some criticism from this group. Here's a selection (more after the break):

We may conceptualize the law for our purposes as constituting a network of authority and authorizations: one node in the network (a person) authorizes another node in it (another person) in some regular, speech-based way (via “legal speech”) until we reach an actual human being who is thereby empowered to act in the physical world, that is, to stamp a piece of paper, to move a physical object, to arrest another person, to speak some words out loud, and so on, or the reverse (prevents someone from stamping a piece of paper, moving a physical object, and so on). Authority and authorization thus “travel” from node to node, person to person, authorizing some and prohibiting others to act. The law is thus a kind of network technology: it ties together different individuals through relatively stable “protocols” (the language of the law) and systems of interpretation of these protocols (e.g., law courts) so as to regulate the basic pattern of their interactions.

“Legitimacy,” from this point of view, is simply membership in one such network of authorizations. To those who are nodes in the network, the network itself is legitimate, that is, they in principle (though not always in practice) accept the assignments of authority coming from properly placed people in the network and in turn properly authorize others to do or omit doing particular things. By the same token, legitimacy breaks down when a substantial part of this network of authorizations ceases to be properly connected to the rest of the network, that is, it ceases to accept assignments of authority or to properly authorize others to do or omit doing particular things.

Note that such a network, if we consider it to be law (or the result of law) strictu sensu, is coextensive with a political community, at least as long as legitimacy has not broken down. No one in the community is outside the law, that is, every one is a node in the network of authority and authorizations constituted by it. It is also only weakly tied to other such networks: these may be nested inside each other, but at the highest level they are only weakly laterally connected to other networks of authorization. There is thus always a plurality of such networks, though in principle a single one could eventually comprise the entire population of the planet. Hence the relative weakness of “international” law (whose strength nevertheless waxes and wanes), and the well-grounded idea of the legal sovereignty of distinct political communities: the laws of one place are not the laws of another, and those authorized to act in some ways in a given political community may not be so authorized to act in another. (Indeed, the distinctiveness of individual political communities is partly rooted in the finitude and relative isolation of “top-level” networks of authorization: this is what distinguishes one political community from another, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or any other cultural markers that may also separate one community from another).

If the law is or constitutes such a network, then it may be characterized according to the kinds of connections among nodes it displays. From this point of view, we may say that customary law (at its most “customary”) is de-centered: there is no single point from which authority flows “downwards” or to which authorization flows “upwards,” but only changing “attractors” – sets of people that temporarily exercise authority or authorize others to act according to relatively stable linguistic conventions. The nearly stateless world of Western feudalism, in contrast, had some stable nodes of authority: church, cities, kings; and the modern state (with some qualifications) stands at the center of the particular network of authorization we now call the law. In this latter case, authorization, ideally, flows “upward” from individuals to the state and “downwards” from the state to them, and the state can be said to (almost) monopolize legitimacy. Such a state would thus be (in the ideal case) also fully “autonomous” from society as well as “strong” in that social life would be necessarily mediated through it but not vice-versa. Of course, the “state” here is just the particular node that stands at the center of this network: it is the center of gravity of the network, not a single, fixed place.

(I've omitted several footnotes). Any thoughts on this conception of law?

The Academic Labor Market

This post by Steven Teles at The Reality-Based Community has some interesting ideas about the way the academic labor market operates. Here's the gist (more after the break):

the sorting processes of the academy are characterized by substantially incomplete information. The information that hiring committees have available to them varies in predictive quality, from the dissertation (could be more a function of the good ideas of the candidate's advisor than the candidate), to the job interview (could be more a measure of slickness of presentation than underlying intelligence or productivity) to recommendations (which may simply operate as a proxy for the candidate's PhD granting institution, since their substance is often remarkably similar). Furthermore, academic hiring committees are committees--because of the need to put together majorities, committees may converge on non-offensiveness, not predicted productivity. So, while the job market for freshly minted PhDs is probably a less than perfect predictor of future academic productivity.

The initial sorting of PhDs to institutions would be self-correcting if mistakes at this first stage were corrected in the “secondary” market for job candidates. But—and this is the key to the argument—there are reasons to believe that this will not occur. First, initial allocations are sticky, because PhDs are less mobile in the secondary market than they were in the initial job market. Once they have settled in to an institution, and their spouses have made a life wherever they initially landed, there may be limits on reallocation.

Second, and most important, quality (as measured by scholarly productivity) is to a significant degree endogenously produced by initial allocation to institutions. Rick Hess has published an interesting article in PS that shows that it is almost impossible to “write your way out” of low-ranked institutions. The reasons for this are obvious to anyone who has spent time in a variety of different university settings. In lower ranked institutions, a great deal of scholarly time is taken up by grading, and opportunities to teach courses that closely track with research interests are limited. Resources for research are more limited the further down the pecking order one goes (funding and time off of teaching in particular). As one goes down the pecking order, the average quality of research assistance one can obtain from graduate and undergraduate students declines. Institutions further up the pecking order have a constant flow of visiting speakers that help stimulate ideas for research and expand scholarly networks. Funding sources are also more willing to support research at higher-ranked institutions. For all these reasons, PhDs at higher ranked institutions will find it considerably easier to produce a stream of high-quality work than their counterparts at lower-ranked institutions.

The consequence of this is that initial allocations of individuals to institutions will tend to be highly sticky—high potential PhDs who end up at the “wrong” institutions in the original sort will have a hard time producing the scholarship that shows that they “deserve” to be at the higher ranked institutions (that is, that shows that at the higher ranked institutions they would produce more quality scholarship than incumbents). At the same time, those who have the good luck to end up at the “right” institutions will produce significantly more quality work than they would if they had been sorted into the institutions that matched their inherent potential.

As a consequence of this, those at the higher-ranked institutions will, as a consequence, appear as if they really do have more intrinsic “merit” than those at lower-ranked institutions. And on average, given that the original sort is not random, they will. The point, however, is that the endogenous production of academic quality will make it look like the original sort was more efficient than it actually was.

If true, this is a bit depressing, since it seems that your first job closes off a lot of options. But are there any strategies to prevent this from happening if by chance you happen to land a job at a less than perfect institution, for whatever reason, and want to "move up" eventually, or simply want to produce good quality research? My first thought is that there must be some way to increase the productivity of say, grading and other non-research-related activities - by designing better courses and tests, relying more on peer evaluation, and so on - so that they do not detract as much from one's research and so on. This might entail some significant upfornt investment, but it might (just might) pay off. Technology (e.g., blogs, e-mail exchanges, etc.) might also compensate (to some limited degree) for the lack of first-class scholarly networks. (All this assumes that one wants to move up to a more prestigious institution - which of course one may not want to, for any number of reasons, both personal and professional. Lots of people are perfectly happy where they end up). Thoughts?

A correction

In my previous post I confused the idea of a "best" state of society with the idea of a state of society that ought to exist - typical confusion of right and good. These aren't clearly distinguished in classical political thought (where the good clearly has priority anyway) but it may modify the presentation of the puzzle, since the "best" state of society may serve only as an unatainable guide for improvement, not as a required state of society in some normative sense.

Still, the idea is that, generally, tyranny ought not to exist; it is unjust, not right. If this is so, it would seem to make sense that there must exist actions and activities that can be done to prevent or end it; yet sociologically speaking, in some circumstances, such actions have a vanishingly small probability of occurring. Can we still speak of ought implying can?

Ought implies can: A puzzle

Here's a possibly stupid question, which has been bothering me in trying to think about the causes of tyranny. It is a commonplace of ethical thinking that "ought implies can." That is, obligations properly (not so much supererogatory acts of virtue) must be such that they would be possible for a "normal" human being. The puzzle is: does this apply to societies? Or perhaps: can this apply to societies?

That is, if we say that a given ordering of society ought to be a certain way, does this imply that it can be that way? Certainly classical political philosophy seems to have thought that the answer to this question was negative (I have argued this for Plato).

Here's a complication. Suppose a certain ordering of society is "possible" (in the abstract sense that some sequence of human actions could be imagined that brings it about) but vanishingly unlikely in an empirical sense (e.g., the actions required are not available to normal human beings, only perhaps to people at the extremes - and yet more than the extremes need to do them). Can one still speak of "can" in a relevant sense here (certainly "ought implies can" in the individual does not seem to imply "even if the can is a vanishingly small possibility").

Or let's put the point in a different way. Social transformation - of a lasting, not superficial kind - unless it happens through impersonal processes, often requires heroism (which is highly unlikely). Does that mean that ought does not necessarily imply can at the social level? Or should we get rid of the principle "ought implies can" at the individual level too?

(The puzzle comes to mind as I was using a game derived from Carles Boix's Democracy and Redistribution in my class to think about causes of authoritarianism. It turns out that, according to the model, if the conditions aren't right [and for most of human history, they simply weren't right], it's almost impossible to have anything other than authoritarianism of various kinds. Of course, this need not imply bad government - though it makes it very much more likely).

Thinking of teaching and research

Sorry for the neglect of the blog over the past month; it's been a bit more hectic than anticipated, and I've done more than enough blogging for my class. At any rate, sometimes heated conversations with members of this group over the past two days on teaching have made me think about the purpose of research and teaching at a University. Here are some somewhat random thoughts and links I've found of interest (after the break).

First, "assessment." (An unlovely word - Catherine got upset about my using it to think about the evaluation of teaching today. It bespeaks a narrow, crabbed conception of education, full of metrics and numbers). Here's some context. There was a recent story in the NYTimes recently about a proposal floating around in the Bush administration to examine

whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

Needless to say, the idea is to some extent absurd - for one thing, college education is specialized, not general (unlike high school education), so it would make little sense to have a single lowest common denominator test. But, as NYU Philosophy Professor David Velleman comments over at Left2Right (see related posts here and here),

The last time I wrote about accountability in higher education, I said that universities "will have to develop better methods of evaluating instruction." And then I punted: "But that's a topic for another day." I guess that "other day" has arrived.

The failure of colleges and universities to assess the effectiveness of their instruction is manifested most clearly in grade inflation, which has accelerated since 1990, after two decades of relative dormancy in the 70s and 80s. (Statistics here.) At the University of Michigan, where I have seen the statistics broken down by department, the trend is largely confined to the humanties and social sciences, and indeed to particular discplines within those divisions. Faculty in math and science believe that they have lost enrollments to the other divisions largely because they have held the line on grades.

One cause of grade inflation is the reliance of administrators on "consumer satisfaction" measures to evaluate teaching. Courses that get high scores from students on exit surveys are assumed to have been well taught, and faculty are regularly held to the standard that falling below the average or median score counts as a failure: instructors must be above average in order to be considered any good at all. Faculty cannot help believing that giving their students lower grades during the semester will result in their getting worse evaluations from the students in the end. And there is some evidence that they are right.

So, somebody is going to do assessment, and it better be you who is in control. Moreover, are we so sure that we are doing things right when we teach in the humanities that grades have gone up accross the board? (Not that grades elsewhere are always a good indicator of learning, mind you).

There is also the ethical point: what is the extent of our responsibility for student learning? Some part of the responsibility belongs to the student; but there is a sense in which the learning relationship has a contractual aspect. Ideally, the student who does everything in the syllabus, fo example, with the appropriate degree of effort should "learn" something if s/he is teachable. But this is manifestly not the case except in the most superficial of senses, and part of the problem here is not the student but the teaching. To the extent that there is some truth in this contractualist view, moreover, I would argue that we have to figure out how to measure this learning (measure it in a broad sense, not just by means of numbers: figure out what works) and incorporate the results in our own practice.

There was also another story in the Times on a more obscure topic: online colleges (I mentioned this today at our talk). Here's the new reality:

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

Velleman again, in a different post:

The Times article cites opposition from traditional academics "saying there was no proof that online education was effective." The director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Privatization in Education is quoted as saying, "We have not found a single rigorous study comparing online with conventional forms of instruction."

This strikes me as an unwise approach for academics to take.

As I noted in a recent post, traditional colleges and universities are generally lax about measuring the effectiveness of their instruction, relying instead on consumer-satisfaction surveys. Internet colleges are in a position — and have an incentive — to collect far better consumer-satisfaction data for purposes of market research. And there is some reason to worry that their consumers may be more satisfied than ours. The operations that are seriously trying to teach (rather than sell diplomas) cater to highly motivated clientele, quite unlike the 18-year-olds for whom college is just the next stop on the main route to adulthood. Internet courses require their students to log on regularly, participate in online activities, and complete assignments on time. These students are likely to be more engaged, on average, than traditional college students, many of whom skip class and just cram for the final. We shouldn't be too confident that we will fare better than Internet colleges on our own chosen measure of quality.

More importantly, we need to avail ourselves of distance learning where we can, even if the distance involved is only that between the professor's office and the dorm. For some courses, online instruction may be successful, freeing faculty for courses where personal interaction is essential. We need to explore those possibilities with open minds, not rule them out from fear of commercial competition. We should also be exploring the use of online instruction for outreach to high-school students preparing for college, especially those from underserved populations attending sub-standard schools. Here again, a public posture of skepticism about online instruction will be counterproductive.

Finally, we need to broaden public understanding of what is valuable in a traditional college education, by dissolving the perceived conflict between research and teaching, not only in the public's mind but also in our own. A traditional student learns where knowledge is being created, from the people who are creating it, in a community dedicated to unfettered inquiry — a kind of frontier community, whose ethos is infused with a spirit of intellectual adventure and risk. We should explain why the value of a sojourn on this frontier cannot be measured with standardized tests.

We are entitled to make this argument, of course, only so long as we keep the relevant academic values alive, by infusing our instruction with the spirit of our research and by resisting the forces of mediocrity and conformism. So if competition from Internet colleges forces us to reaffirm these academic values, then I say: Bring it on.

The problem is that often traditionally educated college students don't seem to learn all that much better than students educated in some other way. Again, the point is: how do we know that we are making any kind of difference? I can keep my students engaged, or bored, sometimes both in the same period; I can give them tests and papers to write, make them play interesting games, but can I teach them? Or even help them learn, if the word "teaching" is too pretentious here?

I could quote from a more exalted source: Pierre Bourdieu's Academic Discourse, but I have to say that I don't have the energy to find a relevant quote and type it here. Bourdieu approaches the problem from the sociological standpoint and says it's the social structure of the university that makes it (university teaching) all hopeless. But I summarize much too simplistically, and anyway Bourdieu is thinking too much of the French system.

At a personal level, this is something I think about all the time as I'm teaching: is what I'm doing working at all? Of course, I've barely started, so this is to some degree unwarranted angst. I'll figure something out, I suppose. But it's a nagging thought as I go on day by day.

Then there is the more general question: is what I'm teaching really all that important to be taught? Who cares? Here's Timothy Burke, a Professor of History at Swarthmore college (whose weblog is well worth reading):

What I was thinking about is the extent to which even in a teaching-centered institution that promotes a pretty healthy degree of connection between the faculty, we mostly teach courses that narrowly service departmental curricula deriving from a state-of-the-art sense of what a given specific discipline entails. Broader, connective, integrative courses, or material that doesn’t belong to a conventional discipline, often falls out of view.

This has been on my mind a lot this academic year for various reasons. I spoke along with a colleague to our Alumni Council early this year on this problem, that the faculty don’t ask ourselves enough what it is that 18-22 year olds who are not going to be academics themselves really need to learn or would benefit from knowing, preferring instead to ask, “What’s the proper sequence of courses for this discipline”, or “what’s in the scholarly literature on this topic?” as if the discipline or literature’s benefits are self-evident. We review interdisciplinary minors here every five years, and sometimes do external reviews of departments, but we don’t really expect departments and disciplines to provide an ongoing, renewable and contestable sense of their relevance to the students, the college, the curriculum.

We have many ready justifications to the "so what" question, but unfortunately they are not always all that credible. I am borrowing other people's thoughts for this somewhat rambling and incoherent post; perhaps you might want to consider it an exercise in venting frustrations. (The part on research, following on the conversation with Jeremy, will have to wait a bit).

Rosen on the Republic

Here is the NDPR review of Rosen's study of the Republic, by Lloyd Gerson. It's an admiring, though somewhat negative on key points, review. Anybody read Rosen's book?