Last night at dinner I met a Beijing high school student. He wants to finish high school in America. “Was that your idea or your parents?” I asked.
“Both,” he said.
“What’s the reason?” I said
“Chinese high school is too stressful,” he said. “The test [tests?] is too hard.”
He left the dinner early to study for the TOEFL.
Nine months ago, the New York Times reported that Lila Nachtigall, a New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology, put her name on an article ghost-written for her by a drug company. The article, when published, failed to disclose the ghost-writing. In response, New York University officials have done nothing, as far as I can tell.
In response to the same fact about one of their professors, McGill University opened an investigation. The same document that revealed what Nachtigall had done showed that Barbara Sherwin, a professor of psychology, obstetrics and gynecology, had done the same thing. Supporting my idea that medical school professors have different ethical standards than the rest of us, an article about the McGill case by Montreal Gazette reporter Peggy Curran used the word plagiarism. One comment was “plagiarism, pure and simple.” Does NYU president John Sexton find plagiarism completely acceptable? Apparently.
Thanks to Anne Weiss
I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:
Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.
Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.
What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in. (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.
Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Tsinghua students vary a lot, said my friend, who has been a Tsinghua student for five years. How so? I asked. She explained:
Dimension 1. Some students spend most of their time studying, others spend most of their time on activities. It’s best to have a balance, she said.
Dimension 2. Some students are rich, some poor. Rich students have better cell phones than poor students. As freshmen, they are much more familiar with computers. (My friend, whose family is poor, hadn’t used a computer before college.) In the campus store, rich students will buy items that cost 15 or 20 yuan ($2 to $3). Rich students will sometimes eat off-campus. There are a lot of rich students at Tsinghua. Do they get in the usual way? I asked. (Doing extremely well on a national test.) Maybe not all of them, my friend said, but if they get in other ways it’s a secret. (Unlike the University of Illinois.)
Dimension 3. Students vary in how much they cultivate their own interests. Some do, some don’t. Students with wide interests are the happiest, my friend said. They are less controlled by how well they do academically. This was a mistake she had made: paying too little attention to her own interests.
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, the saying goes. What if there are no candles?
Ken Rousseau, a software manager in Silicon Valley, went to Caltech in the late 70s. He didn’t have a good time. He was a physics major He took a required course on electricity and magnetism where the average score on the final was 15 out of 100. As he took it, he thought, I guess I can’t be a physics major. He got a 16 — a solid B. That a professor would design such a demoralizing test revealed, he believed, that the professor didn’t care about students. At Tech, lack of caring for students was shown in big things and small. Every building on campus was air-conditioned except the student houses, and Pasadena gets really hot in the summer. The graduation rate around that time — the fraction of entering students who graduate in four years — was 59%. At MIT it was 80 or 90%. When a student drops out of Tech, it’s a lost opportunity on both sides, Rousseau felt. It was/is very difficult to get into Tech. To send 41% of admitted students away struck him as a terrible thing.
He did graduate. For many years, when Tech would ask him for money, he would say no, sometimes with a letter about why. But he kept in touch with other students who had lived in the same undergraduate house (Fleming House), one of the seven student houses. Every year, a bunch of them would have a weekend-long beach party. At one of them the idea arose: Let’s start a Fleming Fund. To help the students buy beer, that sort of thing. Tech is a tough place, let’s help them get through it.
In the 1990s, Rousseau got a letter from the president of Caltech that made him angry. Tech was #4 in the U.S. News rankings, it said, mainly because of the low fraction of alumni giving. Let’s make Tech #1 by giving more, wrote the president. Rousseau responded with a five-page letter that made one simple point: Alumni giving is so low because the people in charge cared so little about students. Their lack of concern is being reciprocated.
By 2003 or 2004 Rousseau had enough money that he got a personal visit from the development office. His visitor knew his wife’s name, the approximate ages of his children, and the high points of his professional career. Rousseau told him of his residual bitterness. “You’ve obviously benefited a lot from your Tech experience,” said the development officer. “Why have you only given $163 over the years?” He had it wrong, Rousseau said. He had given $1. His wife, who had also gone to Tech, had given $162.
He told the development officer he was interested in helping Tech students — particularly Fleming House residents. In essence, he wanted to bring the Fleming Fund into existence. Around this time, Frank Bernstein, another Caltech alum who was working as a patent attorney in Silicon Valley, was also solicited. “Frank, I’m looking for a really significant donation,” said the same development officer who had approached Rousseau. Bernstein, who’d also lived in Fleming, told Rousseau about the conversation and they again resurrected the idea of the Fleming Fund.
The development officer came back to them with ideas. Maybe you could fund a lecturer, he suggested. Or graduate student salaries. Helping undergraduates was clearly a new and difficult concept for the development office. They were looking for contributions that, in their words, “directly benefited the Institute.” Bernstein pointed out to them that this was a narrow and self-defeating view. They want alumni to contribute. They want to get them in the habit of contributing. A Fleming Fund will help with that.
Because Rousseau’s daughter, a high school student, was considering going to Tech, Rousseau visited the campus in 2006. He met with Tom Mannion, the administrator for student affairs, and came to believe that the administration cared more about students than they had in the past. A new incoming president, Jean-Lou Chameau, appeared to genuinely care about undergrads. (Later events have validated that view. Chameau has made a point of discussing student life in his public discussions and has started to push administration officials to discuss what they’re doing with regards to student life.) After that, Rousseau and Bernstein met with the development officer who had solicited them and started working on the details. The Institute set a minimum of $100,000. Once the fund reached this level, income from the fund would be given to the students to spend.
In 2008 the details were hammered out. There would be two sort of restrictions: 1. Obvious limits on what the money could be spent on (no bail, no illegal drugs, etc.). 2. An oversight committee of three people, including the past president of Fleming House. The oversight committee only gets involved when the amount of money is more than the house’s usual budget. The income, at least at first, would be about $10,000 year for a house of about 120 students.
In May 2009, the fund was announced during a Fleming House reunion dinner at Tom Mannion’s house. Many undergrads came up to Rousseau and told him it was a “really cool idea.” They were touched that someone out there cared about them. The Institute is thinking of repeating it with the other student houses.
Ah, the rest of the world is catching up with me. This long article in the NY Times describes a middle-school English teacher who lets her students read what they want instead of having every student read the same thing. I started doing something similar six years ago. There was always an assigned reading, but students always had a choice: They could do the assigned reading or they could find something else on the topic (e.g., bipolar disorder) that they preferred. About three-quarters of the students did the assigned reading.
My criticism of American higher education is two-fold: 1. Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All hear the same lecture, read the same texts, do the same homework assignments, take the same tests. I came to realize that my students differed greatly in their talents and career goals. I can’t remember meeting a Berkeley prof who seemed to be aware of this. When a professor would describe a student to me, it was almost always on one dimension: more or less smart, which meant more or less good at doing the sort of tasks professors are good at. I think the diversity of talent and career interests I saw in my students is no accident or exception (which is supported by the fact that a middle-school English teacher saw the same thing); I think it’s at the core of human nature and it’s at the center of my theory of human evolution. 2. Professors teach how to be professors. Most students don’t want to be professors. Every Berkeley prof I ever met was extremely good at research; a few were extremely good lecturers. And every one of them sounded like an idiot the moment they started talking about how they taught “critical thinking” or whatever grand-sounding term they had for it. “Teaching students to think” was a common way to describe teaching students how to be professors. To say such a thing to a psychology professor is like saying to a chemistry professor that the world consists of four elements (earth, air, fire, water). “Are you aware how stupid you sound?” I felt like saying. But instead I would say that there are many kinds of thinking.
Giving students more power over what they learn solves, or at least reduces, both problems.
Kent Pitman argues that college is overpriced. Perhaps the way out — freedom from needing to go to college to get a decent job — will look like this:
1. American colleges adopt gap years. (I proposed this to the Chancellor of UC Berkeley. My suggestion was brushed aside — impractical, I was told.)
2. A larger and larger fraction of students realize that they can profitably continue to do what they do during the gap year. So they don’t go to college.
3. Given a substantial number in both categories, businesses notice that students who haven’t gone to college (who have, equating for age, more useful skills) do better than those that have. I’ve heard complaints about Ivy League graduates not knowing basic stuff.
4. With less demand for college, there is less demand for college teachers. This causes research universities to shrink because, with less use for a Ph.D, they won’t be able to attract as many graduate students. Harvard is out in front here.
Just as the Pentagon is a tax on women (because the military is almost all men), so are colleges a tax on everyone who isn’t a professor. (It’s an arms race because if your competitor for a job has gone to college, so must you.) As the American economy implodes — in In The Jaws of the Dragon, Eamonn Fingleton says the rate of American decline has no historical precedent — non-professors and non-professors-to-be will become less willing to pay this tax.
A professor complains about ivorytowerism:
In the epistemology of academia, no knowledge truly is knowledge if it is not vetted and approved through the channels it has established over time. Those channels are esoteric, made up of the “few, though worthy” who are the elect in the kingdom of knowledge. The epistemology of academia proceeds on the basis that the public has nothing to do with real knowledge. It doesn’t make any sense intellectually, of course, but it makes perfect sense if the primary goal is not really the development of knowledge but the preservation of a well-designed, internally self-confirming authority economy.
Some professors go further than this: The public shouldn’t know about academic research. Several years ago, a colleague of mine in the Berkeley psychology department was approached by a journalist. He was writing an article for The Atlantic about her area of research. She wouldn’t talk to him. She felt his article would somehow be wrong or unseemly.
Open access is changing this, of course. I’m a big beneficiary. Because my long self-experimentation paper was open access, it could be read by people outside of psychology. As a friend put it, “It cost Steve Levitt nothing to say he liked your paper.” Whereas inside psychology departments, you’d pay a price.
When Tucker Max was in law school (at Duke, a top-rated law school), he made a bet with his friends. He claimed he could sign up for a class, attend none of the classes, do none of the reading, never study, and — armed only with class notes from a friend (who attended the class) that he brings to the final without previously studying — get a 2.5 or better on the final, thus passing the course. (Highest possible grade is 4.0.) And he would let them choose the class.
A friend chose Federal Tax. A really tough class, it was said. The final lasted two hours. It consisted of several hypothetical situations to which you write an essay-like answer. Tucker finished 20 minutes early. He got a 2.7, which wasn’t the lowest score in the class (of about 60 students).
More trouble with the basics at Duke. For whom do law schools exist?