At the Huffington Post, some commentators on my post “A Student’s Unlovely View of UC Berkeley” denounced what they called “coddling”:

That’s Berkeley. No coddling.

Berkeley still is a sink or swim place, with no coddling or significant support system. So what? Grow up.

Coddling? Having your nails done, sleeping on a super-soft bed, being served a fancy dessert — that’s coddling. No one needs coddling, true. But what about basic nutrition? Is being served food with enough Vitamin C coddling? I don’t think so.

The student who spoke to me said that UC Berkeley did nothing to help her find out (a) what she was good at and (b) what she enjoyed. That speaks volumes about UC Berkeley, of course. Students need to learn these things about themselves — everyone does. To go through life without learning these things is a tragedy. It is not asking to be coddled to want these things.

To serve up an education that fails to provide these crucial ingredients is just as unfortunate as a parent or an orphanage serving food that fails to provide essential nutrients. The effect in both cases is the same: Development is stunted. If students weren’t forced to go to schools like Berkeley in order to get a good job (”I’m here for the name” the student told me) it would be less unfortunate. But they are.

Some commentators said Berkeley was somehow better for resembling “the real world” where no one holds your hand. Huh? College students are still growing. Growing things need special environments to grow properly.

One commentator said there are ways to learn on your own: “Go to a library, surf the net, watch TV.” True, there are. But UC Berkeley makes it hard for students to do this because classwork is so time-consuming. Not only does the school serve its students bad food, it makes it hard for them to find good food.

The original post.

From The American:

Rich Karlgaard, the technology entrepreneur who is publisher of Forbes, tells the story of a trip he took with Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the early 1990s. On the flight, he asked Gates, “Who is your chief competitor?”

“Goldman Sachs” was Gates’s surprising reply.

Gates went on to explain that he was in the “IQ business.” Microsoft needed the best brains available to make top-shelf software. His primary rivals for the smartest kids in America were elite investment banks such as Goldman or Morgan Stanley.

“Microsoft must win the IQ war,” Gates said, “or we won’t have a future.”

Contrast this with open-source-leader Eric Raymond’s beliefs (expressed in this talk) about software development. He repeats the idea that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” — implicitly meaning enough diverse eyeballs. That I am writing this with Firefox gives some sense of who (Gates or Raymond) was more realistic.

Part 1. Charles Murray vs Charles Murray. How important is IQ?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Philip Weiss makes a shrewd (and I think correct) point about Jews marrying non-Jews:

A lot of meritocratic Jews like me were hoist on the petard of superiority. If you bought into the ideology of intellectual excellence–the ideology of the meritocracy, which we Jews helped to build so we could get into the good schools (and which the WASPs then helped us to festoon with prestige, to disguise the fact that none of us would have to actually serve in Iraq)–then you would inevitably look around for smart people to socialize with, and most of them turned out to be gentiles. See, it’s my family’s fault [that I married a non-Jew].

Weiss went to Harvard. “Ideology of the meritocracy” is a good phrase. Richard Herrnstein, the late Harvard professor of psychology and Bell Curve co-author, was indeed meritocratic — in a narrow way. (Which is the trouble with ideologies.) When I was a graduate student, he gave a talk at my school (Brown) and several graduate students, including me, had lunch with him. He was on the Harvard admissions board. During lunch, he said that some kid was the perfect candidate: “800′s on his SATs, plays football, plays the flute.” He was serious. Surely the best candidates should be less easily described, I thought.

I recently met an undergraduate named Samantha who is majoring in Economics at UC Berkeley. She is almost done. I asked her a few questions about her education:

SR: Did UC Berkeley help you figure out what you were good at?

Samantha: No. In UC Berkeley classes you don’t get to do any individual searching. You just have to do what they tell you. Because it’s all theoretical, none of it is very practical. You don’t do any practical projects. The classes don’t give you any idea of what you want to do career-wise.

SR: Did UC Berkeley help you figure out what you enjoy doing?

Samantha: No.

SR: Why not?

Samantha: I’m here just for the name. It scares you away from trying new things. Intimidating class sizes, professors that don’t seem invested in the students.

A student advisor’s view.

Tom Perrotta, author of the novel Little Children, was an undergraduate at Yale, a graduate student at Syracuse, and a teacher at Harvard and Yale. I assume this passage from Little Children is based on that experience:

What did her in [as a graduate student] was the teaching. Some people loved it, of course, loved the sound of their own voices, the chance to display their cleverness to a captive audience. And then there were the instructors like herself, who simply couldn’t communicate in a classroom setting. They made one point over and over with mind-numbing insistence, or else they circled around a dozen half-articulated ideas without landing on a single one. They read woodenly from prepared notes, or got lost in their muddled syntax while attempting to speak off the cuff. God help them if they attempted a joke.

Curious. To “love teaching” is to love hearing your own voice and showing off. This passage seems to imply that Perrotta’s teachers either “loved teaching” in this unpleasant sense or were muddled and awkward failures. I would have thought that in a non-occupational-skills class (such as sociology, history, or literature), what a good teacher does is tell lots of stories. Apparently this didn’t happen much in Perrotta’s experience.

At the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, which I attended because of my interest in connoisseurship and gifts, I learned some sad truths about elementary-school education. A San Francisco public school teacher told me:

1. The curriculum is mandated. Tests are mandated. And they disagree. For example, you are forced to teach what a certain word means. You spend two weeks teaching that word and then the tests use a different word for the same idea.

2. There is no allowance for differing rates of learning. Some kids learn faster than others. Teachers are not allowed to adjust.

3. There are rules about what teachers must put on classroom walls. If a federal inspector comes around and you don’t have the proper material on your classroom walls, a note goes in your permanent file.

4. The Reading First program requires that reading be taught before everything else. Some kids are relatively slow to learn to read but they are able to learn in other ways. The effect of the mandate is that these other kids sit in the classroom baffled and unhappy and lose self-confidence.

5. The rigidity of the curriculum — which must be exactly the same for all students — squashes encouragement. For example, suppose a student is interested in bugs. You could encourage reading by giving the student books about bugs. This is a natural, effective, and easy way to teach reading. This way of teaching is not just discouraged but prohibited.

6. A friend of mine says that bookstores should be divided into “real books” and “other books.” Children’s textbooks, which are worse than anything in a bookstore, deserve their own category. A fifth-grade teacher got around the awfulness of the textbooks by putting real books in the center of the classroom tables and having children sit with their textbooks open around them. This allowed the students to read the real books but if the principal came by the teacher would not get in trouble because the assigned textbooks were open in front of the students.

Excellent posts about elementary-school education by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok.

I started talking with Catherine Pauling, who has worked at UC Berkeley more than 20 years, because I confused her with someone else. While she was head student advisor in the Math Department, she increased the number of majors from 170 to 600 in 5 years. “Some math professors were afraid this was too many — it could only occur because we were bringing in inadequate students, they believed,” she said. “But the percentage of students having trouble and excelling remained the same.”

When advising math majors, she told me, “sometimes I felt there should have been a Red Cross on my door.” She learned to preach compassion — compassion for the professors. She said over and over to the students,

You have to realize it’s not you. The professors will say terrible things like ‘You know nothing.’ But that’s because in the process of becoming the best in what they do, they’ve neglected certain social and communication skills. So we have to appreciate and learn from their gifts and have compassion for their lack of development in these other areas.

Over the years, she was repeatedly shocked by how undergraduates were treated. “If someone has achieved so much, I would have thought it would be easy to be generous. Instead of an interest in mentoring the next generation, I often found impatience and dismissal,” she said. “One student explained to me the difference between Stanford and Berkeley. At Stanford, if a student has a problem, they [faculty and administrators] assume that they’re approaching it wrong and they try a new approach; at Berkeley, if a student has a problem, the assumption is that we made a mistake in admitting the student.”

One recent Dean of the College of Letters and Science (also a professor) began his tenure as dean, she told me, by giving a talk in which he emphasized his belief that students were “gaming the system.” He acted on this belief by rigidly enforcing the rules, with few exceptions. (Many Berkeley students suffer serious hardships, including homelessness and major mental disorders.) When he stopped being dean several years later, it was to take a better position at another university. The next dean was less strict.

For whom do colleges exist?