In a previous posting I described the disturbing phenomenon that so many Americans seemed to be living is a reality-free world. I argued that this was because they were being systematically misled by people who should, and do, know better.

Further support for my somewhat cynical view comes from an article by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind that appeared in the October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine and that deserves to be better known because of the light it sheds on the extent to which the current administration is ideologically driven. His article has this chilling anecdote:

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

What you have on display here is a world-view that is so arrogant that it believes that it has the power to create its own realities.

It is not unusual in the hey-day of empires for its leaders to have the feeling that they alone can direct the course of events, that they can overcome the realities they face, and that nothing can stop them from achieving their goals, whatever they may be.

What is perhaps extreme in this case is that this arrogance seems to be causing the leaders to ignore the actual realities and to think that they can create their own version of it. In other words, they believe that what they want to believe actually exists. Now, in some ways, it is always possible to do this. Reality is a complex business, composed of many disparate elements, and it is always possible to pick out those elements that support one’s fantasy, ignore the rest, and act accordingly.

But what is happening here is deeper and more disturbing. What this administration is doing is trying to make reality irrelevant by creating an alternate “reality.” They do this by quickly and repeatedly and strongly saying the things that they wish the public to believe are true and depending on the media or the Democratic Party to not call them on the lack of support for the assertions. As a result, after a short time, the administration’s assertions enter the public consciousness, become the new “reality”, and thus become the basis for vacuous ‘policy debates’ that have nothing to do with the actual situation.

We saw this happen in the run-up to the war with Iraq and we are seeing it again with the recent killing in Lebanon of Rafik Hariri. Using a combination of innuendo and bombast, the administration has managed to make people think that Syria is the culprit even though, until today, no evidence in support of this claim has been presented and there even exists some counterevidence. On the other hand, Robert Fisk reports today that the UN investigation team is due to make a report that will allege that there may have been a cover-up of the investigation by Lebanese and Syrian authorities, so that the situation is still murky.

What most reality-based people realize is that while forcing your own version of reality on events can win you short-term political victories, it is a prescription for long-term disaster because eventually the contradiction between the ‘virtual reality’ and reality become too stark to make your actions viable. The “judicious study of discernible reality,” sneered at by the senior Bush advisor, is the way to arrive at reasoned judgments that have a chance of producing policies that make sense.

In many ways, universities have to be reality-based. The work of universities rests on empirical bases, on data, on evidence. This does not mean that they restrict themselves to describing just what is. Speculative ideas are the life-blood of academia because that is how new knowledge is created. Making bold speculations and pushing the limits of theories is part of the job of universities.

But such efforts must always rest on an empirical basis because otherwise they cease to be credible. You can build on reality, but you can’t totally depart from it. Academics know that their credibility rests on their ability to balance speculation and theorizing with empirical data. For example, a physicist who proposes theories that do not have a basis in data would be ridiculed.

But no such constraints seem to restrain the current political leaders. At one time, the media might have played the role of injecting reality into the public discussion, by comparing official statements with the facts on the ground and providing historical context. But now that the press has largely abdicated that role (see the previous postings on The questions not asked part I and part II) in favor of either acting as a mouthpiece for the fantasies of political leaders or debating tactical points while not questioning the core fantasies, it is up to the universities to fill that void.

This is why efforts like Ohio’s Senate Bill 24 that seek to restrict what university instructors can and cannot say are so dangerous. They seek to bring universities also under political control, to suffocate one of the few remaining viable reality-based institutions. While opponents decry universities as being too “liberal”, what really make universities “dangerous” is that they are fundamentally reality-based institutions that cannot be easily co-opted into accepting fantasies as reality.

It seems ironic that universities, long derided as ivory towers occupied by pointy-headed intellectuals out of touch with the “real world”, may in fact need to be the force that brings reality back into public life.

POST SCRIPT 1

On Thursday, May 17) in the Guilford Parlor from 11:30-1:00pm there will be a forum on Ohio’s Senate Bill #24 (the so-called academic bill of rights. I will be on the panel along with Professor Mel Durschlag (Law), Professor Jonathan Sadowsky (History), and Professor Joe White (Political Science).

POST SCRIPT 2

Update on a previous posting:

I received a call yesterday (March 14) from a person associated with Students for Academic Freedom informing me that my op-ed had triggered the release of more information on their website, where more details are given.

Although the student referred to had not in fact given this testimony at the Colorado Senate hearings as had been alleged earlier, the level of detail (which had not been released until now) provided on the SAF website is sufficient to remove this story from the category of urban legends since it does give some names and places and dates. But a judgment on whether this constitutes academic bullying will have to await more details on what actually transpired between professor and student. My contact at SAF says that the incident is still under investigation and confidentiality prevents the release of more information.

Update on the update (3/15/05): It gets curioser and curioser.

The blog Canadian Cynic reports that new information on this case has come out and that Horowitz is now backtracking on almost all of the key charges that were originally made. Canadian Cynic highlights Horowitz’s statements now that “Some Of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point Was Right” and “”I consider this an important matter and will get to the bottom of it even if it should mean withdrawing the claim.”

See the article on the website Inside Higher Education. It seems to be the most authoritative source of information on this case.

Why go to college?

For some, college is just a stage in the educational ladder after high school and before entering the working world or going to graduate school. In this view, college is primarily the place where you obtain an important credential that is the pre-requisite for securing well-paying jobs. This is not an insignificant consideration.

Others might see college as the place where you both broaden and deepen your knowledge in a range of subjects and develop higher-order skills such as critical thinking and writing and researching skills.

All these things are undoubtedly valuable and worth pursuing. But for me, I think the primary purpose of college is that it is the place where you start to lay the foundations for a personal philosophy of life.

What I mean by this is that at least in college we need to start asking ourselves the question: “Why do I get up in the morning?” For some, the answer might be “Why not? What other option is there?” For others it might just be a habit that is unquestioned. For yet others, it might be that they have particular ambitions in life that they want to achieve. For yet others, it might be because other people depend on us to do various things.

But while all these considerations undoubtedly play a part for all of us, the question that I am addressing goes somewhat beyond that and asks what we think of as our role in the universe. What is it that gives our lives meaning? What should be the basis of our relationships with our family and friends and society? What is our obligation to all those to whom we are tied together by a common humanity? What should be our relationship with nature and the environment?

All of us think about these things from time to time. But I suspect that these various areas of our lives remain somewhat separate. By ‘developing a personal philosophy of life’, I mean the attempt to pull together all these threads and weave a coherent tapestry where each part supports and strengthens the other.

I think that the university is a wonderful place to start doing this because it has a unique combination of circumstances that can, at least in principle, enable this difficult task to be pursued. It has libraries, it has scholars, it has courses of study that can enable one to explore deeply into areas of knowledge. It provides easy access to the wisdom of the past and to adventures towards the future. But most importantly, it has people (students and staff and faculty) of diverse backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, nationalities, gender, etc.

But I wonder if we fully take advantage of this opportunity or whether the day-to-day concerns of courses, homework, research, teaching, studying prevent us from periodically stepping back and trying to see the big picture. In fact, it looks like the search for broader goals for college education is declining alarmingly. In 1969, 71% of students said they felt it essential that college help them in “formulating the values and goals of my life.” 76% also said that “learning to get along with people” was an essential goal of their college experience.

But by 1993, those percentages had dropped to 50% and 47% respectively, from the top ranked items to the bottom, being displaced by an emphasis on training and skills and knowledge in specialized fields. (Source: When Hope and Fear Collide by Arthur S. Levine and Jeannette S. Cureton, 1998, table 6.1, page 117.)

In my mind, this is an alarming trend and needs to be reversed.

One thing that events like the tsunami do, even for those not directly affected by it, is to bring us up short, to realize the fragility of life and the importance of making the most out of our time here. It reminds us that there are big questions that we need to ask and try to answer, and we cannot keep avoiding them.

This kind of thoughtful introspection mostly occurs outside formal classes, in the private discussions that we have in informal settings, in dorms, lounges, parks, offices, and coffee shops. But how often does it happen? And how can we create a university atmosphere that is conducive to making people realize the importance of having such discussions?

The meaning that we attach to life will depend on a host of individualized factors, such as our personal histories, what we value most, and what we are willing to give up. And we may never actually create a fully formed personal philosophy of life. The philosophy we do develop will most likely keep changing with time as our life experiences change us.

But the attempt to find out what our inner core is so that we act in life in ways that are consistent with it is something that I think college is perfectly suited for. I only hope that most people take advantage of it.

Most of you would have heard by now about the bill pending in the Ohio legislature (Senate Bill 24) to “establish the academic bill of rights for higher education.�
The bill is both silly and misguided. It mixes motherhood and apple pie language (“The institution shall provide its students with a learning environment in which the students have access to a broad range of serious scholarly opinion pertaining to the subjects they study.�) with language that is practically begging students with even minor grievances to complain to higher authorities.

In a previous posting, I spoke about how lack of trust leads to poor learning conditions and that we need to recreate the conditions under which trust can flourish. This bill goes in the wrong direction because it effectively creates a kind of ‘thought police’ mentality, where any controversial word or idea in class can end up causing a legal battle.

Let me give you an example. The bill says “curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social studies shall respect all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.�

As an instructor, how would I respect “all� the knowledge in the area? What do we even mean by the word “knowledge.� How do we even separate knowledge in the humanities and social sciences from those in the sciences? What constitutes “dissenting viewpoints?� And how far should “dissenting� be taken? If a particular point of view is not mentioned by the instructor, is that grounds for complaint?

Take another example.

“Students shall be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study and shall not be discriminated against on the basis of their political, ideological, or religious beliefs.�

Grading is an art not a science. It is, at some level, a holistic judgment made by an instructor. To be sure the instructor has a deep ethical obligation to the profession to assign the grade with as much competence and impartiality as he or she can muster. But even granting that, a letter grade or a point allocation for an assignment is not something that can be completely objectified. Give the same essay or problem to two different teachers and they will likely arrive at different grades even if it were “graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge.� And this can occur irrespective of how agreeable or disagreeable the student’s views might be perceived by the instructor. So if a student complains about a grade, how can this be adjudicated?

As I said in a previous posting, the reason we currently have so many rules in our classrooms is that we seem to have forgotten the purpose of courses, and have lost that sense of trust that is so vital to creating a proper learning atmosphere.

This bill, rather than increasing trust in the classroom, will decrease it. Because as soon as there is legislation prescribing what can and cannot be done in the classroom, it will inevitably lead to teaching and grading issues ending up in the courtroom. And in order to avoid that tedious and expensive process, universities will start instituting detailed lists of rules about what can and cannot be done in the classroom, and teachers will start teaching and assessing defensively, simply to avoid the chance of litigation.

Is this what we want or need?

POST SCRIPT

Tomorrow (Thursday, March 3) from 7:00-9:00 pm in Thwing Ballroom, Case’s Hindu Students Association is hosting an inter-religious dialogue on how to reconcile a belief in God in light of major disasters like the recent tsunami.

There will be a panel of religious scholars representing all the major religious traditions (drawn from the faculty of the Religion department at Case and elsewhere) and plenty of time for discussions. I will be the moderator of the discussion.

The event is free and open to the public and donations will be accepted for tsunami relief efforts.

The more I teach, the more I feel that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of learning that occurs and the number of rules that govern the classroom. At its best, teaching involves trust between students and teacher, and among fellow students. The assumption should be that we are all there to learn and that we will help each other learn.

To be sure, the teacher has a responsibility to the students and the institution he or she works for to ensure that learning is occurring and that the unavoidable grades that have gained a stranglehold in our educational world are assigned fairly.

But apart from this minimal expectation, I feel that there should be no other rules, except those that are created collectively by the entire class in order that things run smoothly. It is for this reason that my courses are becoming progressively rule-free over time. This is also why I oppose efforts to treat course syllabi as quasi-legal contracts and to mandate what they should and should not contain

But I know that I am swimming upstream on this one. Many course syllabi are becoming increasingly crammed full of rules and regulations. Why? To my mind, this is a measure of the lack of trust that has developed between student and teachers. Students and faculty don’t really know each other as people. We don’t see ourselves as having come together for an endeavor (learning) which should be enjoyable and from which all of us will benefit and which will form the basis of a lifetime relationship. Instead we seem to see ourselves as temporary acquaintances engaged in a commercial transaction. The faculty member has a product or service (knowledge, grades) that the student ‘purchases’ with money, time, and effort.

A natural consequence of this commerce mentality is the need for rules, just like those in the marketplace. Students seem to feel the need to have rules to protect themselves from arbitrary actions by faculty members who are strangers to them, and faculty feel the need to have rules to protect themselves from complaints by students whom they don’t really know. This dynamic inevitably leads to a spiral of increasing rules since having written rules at all implies a lack of trust, which then results in people testing the limits of the rules, which creates the need for more protective rules, which leads to even greater distrust, and so on.

But the reality is that there are only a tiny handful of faculty and students who might take unfair advantage of one another in the absence of a detailed set of rules. In my work in many universities, it is hard for me to recollect cases of faculty members who did not take seriously their ethical obligation to treat students fairly.

This does not mean that faculty members cannot be arrogant, condescending, and unrealistically demanding. We are, after all, human. But it is rare that a teacher will act out of spite against a specific student. And if it does happen, there are mechanisms in universities to try and redress these wrongs when they occur, because the other faculty members know that we can only succeed if we as a learning community try to uphold the highest standards.

We don’t have written rules of behavior among friends. We don’t have written rules of behavior among family members. The reason is that the common interests that bring us together are strong enough to make us want to resolve the issues in a manner of friendly give-and-take. Why is it that we do not even try to create a similar situation in class? Surely a common interest in learning is strong enough to serve a similar role?

When I think about what is the one change that I would recommend to dramatically improve education at all levels, I come to the conclusion that we must create a greater sense of trust in the classroom so that we can minimize the number of rules and thus allow the natural enjoyment that true learning provides to emerge.

One of the questions that students ask me is why it is that they find some subjects easy and others hard to learn. Students often tell me that they “are good� at one subject (say writing) and “are not good� at another (say physics), with the clear implication that they feel that there is something intrinsic and immutable about them that determines what they are good at. It is as if they see their learning abilities as being mapped onto a multi-dimensional grid in which each axis represents a subject, with their own abilities lying along a continuous scale ranging from ‘awful’ at one extreme to ‘excellent’ at the other. Is this how it is?

This is a really tough question and I don’t think there is a definitive answer at this time. Those interested in this topic should register for the free public lecture by Steven Pinker on March 14.

Why are some people drawn to some areas of study and not to others? Why do they find some things difficult and others easy? Is it due to the kind of teaching that one receives or parental influence or some innate quality like genes?

The easiest answer is to blame it on genes or at least on the hard-wiring of the brain. In other words, we are born the way we are, with gifts in some areas and deficiencies in others. It seems almost impossible to open the newspapers these days without reading that scientists have found the genes that ‘cause’ this or that human characteristic so it is excusable to jump to genes as the cause of most inexplicable things.

But that is too simple. After all, although the brain comes at birth with some hard-wired structures, it is also quite plastic and the direction in which it grows is also strongly influenced by the experiences it encounters. But it seems that most of the rapid growth and development occurs fairly early in life and so early childhood and adolescent experiences are important in determining future directions.

But what kinds of experiences are the crucial ones for determining future academic success? Now things get more murky and it is hard to say which ones are dominant. We cannot even say that the same factors play the same role for everyone. So for one person, a single teacher’s influence could be pivotal. For another, it could be the parent’s influence. The influences could also be positive or negative.

So there is no simple answer. But I think that although this is an interesting question, the answer has little practical significance for a particular individual at this stage of their lives in college. You are now what you are. The best strategy is to not dwell on why you are not something else, but to identify your strengths and use them to your advantage.

It is only when you get really deep into a subject (any subject) and start to explore its foundations and learn about its underlying knowledge structure that you start to develop higher-level cognitive skills that will last you all your life. But this only happens if you like the subject because only then will you willingly expend the intellectual effort to study it in depth. With things that we do not care much about, we tend to skim on the surface, doing just the bare minimum to get by. This is why it is important to identify what you really like to do and go for it.

You should also identify your weaknesses and dislikes and contain them. By “containâ€? I mean that there is really no reason why at this stage you should force yourself to try and like (say) mathematics or physics or Latin or Shakespeare or whatever and try to excel in them, if you do not absolutely need to. What’s the point? What are you trying to prove and to whom? If there was a really good reason that you needed to know something about those areas now or later in life, the higher-level learning skills you develop by charging ahead in the things you like now could be used to learn something that you really need to know later.

I don’t think that people have an innate “limitâ€?, in the sense that there is some insurmountable barrier that prevents them from achieving more in any area. I am perfectly confident that some day if you needed or wanted to know something in those areas, you would be able to learn it. The plateau or barrier that students think they have reached is largely determined by their inner sense of “what’s the point?â€?

I think that by the time they reach college, most students have reached the “need to know� stage in life, where they need a good reason to learn something. In earlier K-12 grades, they were in the “just in case� stage where they did not know where they would be going and needed to prepare themselves for any eventuality.

This has important implications for teaching practice. As teachers, we should make it our goal to teach in such a way that students see the deep beauty that lies in our discipline, so that they will like it for its own sake and thus be willing to make the effort. It is not enough to tell them that it is “useful� or “good for them.�

In my own life, I now happily learn about things that I would never have conceived that I would be interested in when I was younger. The time and circumstances have to be right for learning to have its fullest effect. As Edgar says in King Lear: “Ripeness is all.�

(The quote from Shakespeare is a good example of what I mean. If you had told me when I was an undergraduate that I would some day be familiar enough with Shakespeare to quote him comfortably, I would have said you were crazy because I hated his plays at that time. But much later in life, I discovered the pleasures of reading his works.)

So to combine the words from the song by Bobby McFerrin, and the prison camp commander in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, my own advice is “Don’t worry. Be happy in your work.â€?

Sources:

John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds., How People Learn, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.,1999.

James E. Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain, Stylus Publishing, Sterling, VA, 2002.

Veteran actor Ossie Davis died last Friday. In reading the tributes to him, I was struck by what he had said just a year earlier when he received the Kennedy Center awards.

“We knew that every time we got a job and every time we were on a stage, America was looking to make judgments about all black folks on the basis on how you looked, how you sounded, how you carried yourself. So, any role you had was a role that was involved in the struggle for black identification. You couldn’t escape it.”

This comment underscores research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson on what makes black students underachieve academically. They identified one possible cause as something they named ‘stereotype threat’. When members of an identifiable group are placed in a testing situation where failure would reinforce a negative stereotype of that group, this places a pressure on them that makes them under-perform. This was true for blacks in any academic situation, for women being tested in mathematics, and even for white men competing academically against Asians, as is illustrated by this cartoon.

In Davis’s case, we can see that he felt immense pressure to always succeed on stage and never do anything that would reflect negatively on him or his performance. Any action that would be a sign of individual failure if done by a white person would, if done by a black, be taken as a sign of black people’s incapacity or incompetence.

It is possible that because of this fear, Davis could not afford to take risks in performing and try edgy and unflattering roles, the kinds of things that might have made him an even greater actor. He may have suffered from ‘Sidney Poitier Syndrome’, which I have named after another great actor who seemed to always play characters that were kind, noble, clever, “perfect in every way” as Mary Poppins said.

This was carried to an extreme in the nauseating film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in which Poitier played this brilliant, wonderful, flawless human being whose white fiance’s parents struggle to overcome their prejudices and accept him as their son-in-law.

I wonder how much Davis and Poitier regret that, even at the height of their powers, they were not able to expand their skills and improve their craft by playing unflattering, evil, sinister, or criminal characters, the way white actors like Harvey Keitel or Robert De Niro do. Perhaps they take comfort in knowing that their sacrifices enabled later generations of black actors to do so.

Similarly, it was not that long ago that Doug Williams faced a similar stereotype threat when he was the first black quarterback to play in a Super Bowl (XXII in 1988). There was a ridiculous notion floating around then that quarterback was a ‘brains’ position and that perhaps blacks could not handle it. I remember Williams saying that he felt pressure to succeed just to prove that blacks could do it.

Fortunately Williams, like Davis and Poitier, was a gracious man and handled the pressure exceedingly well (340 passing yards, four touchdown passes) and his Washington Redskins handily defeated their Denver opponents. He was even awarded Super Bowl MVP honors.

These days the presence of top-flight black quarterbacks at all levels of the game is taken for granted, and it seems hard to imagine that anyone could have questioned their abilities. But we do not know how many black quarterbacks before Williams, or actors before Davis and Poitier, did not handle the pressure as well as these pioneers and hence had lesser success or even outright failure and did not make it to the heights that they did.

But even though stereotype threats have been somewhat suppressed in football and acting, it is still alive and well when it comes to schooling and is likely to continue to suppress academic performance of the affected groups until we break free of that kind of thinking.

Sources:

1. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual
Test Performance of African Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 5 (1995): 797—811.

2. David J. Lewin, Subtle Clues Elicit Stereotypes – Impact on Black Students,. Journal of NIH Research, November 1995, 24-26.

Sometimes it seems to me that there is no half-baked idea that originates anywhere in the known universe that does not quickly find influential adherents anxious to institutionalize it in Ohio.

Barely has the dust settled on the push to include Intelligent Design into Ohio’s science standards than we now have Marion state senator Larry A. Mumpers introducing Ohio Senate Bill 24 in order to “prohibit instructors at public or private universities from “persistentlyâ€? discussing controversial issues in class or from using their classes to push political, ideological, religious or anti-religious views.â€? (Sorry, no link to this quote from the subscriber only Columbus Dispatch news item by Kathy Lynn Gray on 1/27/2005.)

This is bound to raise the free-speech, academic freedom debate in all its full-blown glory and I am not going to revisit that. But one statement by Senator Mumford jumped out at me. He feels that college students need this kind of legal protection because “These are young minds that haven’t had a chance to form their own opinions.�

Such words can only be uttered by someone who has never really listened to adolescents and young adults or tried to persuade them to change their minds. Does he really think that young people have not already formed strong opinions about things?

The education literature is full of research on how people’s minds are resistant to new ideas. Students cling to Aristotelian ideas of motion, and harbor serious misconceptions about the seasons and the phases of the moon, even though they may have been taught the standard views many times in the course of their education.

And this happens in the area of physics, where students do not even have a commitment to retaining their old ideas, or are often unaware of what those ideas are until asked to explicitly articulate them. Imagine how hard it would be to change their minds about politics and religion, which are much closer to the surface of their consciousness.

Many a professor (including myself) has been aghast at discovering that all their careful lectures and arguments have had little impact on what students really believe, even though the students may be highly adept at reproducing the professor’s views on exams.

This kind of comment betrays at best a naivete, and at worst a contempt, for the ability of college students to think for themselves and resist indoctrination by their teachers. But this is not going to prevent politicians like Senator Mumpers from going ahead in their condescending efforts to “protect� students.

Get ready for the legal battle…