I never really liked marshmallows

The Bing Nursery marshmallow experiments, conducted in the 1960s and now back in the news, were supposed to show that 4 year old children who are capable of deferring gratification grow up to be more successful adults.  The scientist took a 4 year old into a room empty of everything except a table, a chair, a bell, and a plate with a treat on it – a treat the child had previously expressed liking for.  He told the kid that she could eat the treat any time, and if she did so and wanted to leave the room she could ring the bell and he would open the door.  But if she waited for 15 minutes, he would come back and give her two of the treat.  The children were tracked in later life and those who were able to resist and wait tended to do better.

If you watch the videos and think for minute, you’ll see it’s full of loopholes.  The main loophole for me is something I haven’t seen raised by the critics.  It has to do with the fact that no matter how hard the scientists try to speak to the child neutrally, any kid can tell – like any adult can tell – that the point of the thing is to wait;  the adult, without meaning to, is suggesting that waiting is a good idea.  The way the children behave thus has as much to do with how well they respect authorities and structures of authority as it does with an ability to defer gratification.  My conclusion: children who wish to please adults are more successful later in life.

Spring cleaning for Tom and Mole (12)

So here is what happened.  I blogged about Jonathan Petropoulos’s dealings with the Pissarro and the Nazi.  People, mostly strangers, left comments.  A man got in touch with me and, as a result of our conversation, I added an update.  A second man then got in touch with a third man, who got in touch with a woman, who got in touch with me, telling me that to make things okay with the second man I should go and speak to a  fourth man.  I did that.  And afterwards, I unpublished the post.  Anyone who wishes to speak to me about the matter is welcome to get in touch.

But there was one discussion in my original post that I want to preserve, having to do with the way institutions try to hush scandals up by repressing information;  I want to preserve this discussion, and – unsurprisingly, considering the brief account I’ve just given of my own involvement — to stress it.  The institution in this case is Claremont McKenna College, which hired lawyers and experts to investigate the situation, lawyers and experts who traveled to Europe delving, one assumes, into every aspect of the case, lawyers and experts who produced a report exonerating Petropoulos, a report which has not been released to the public.  But my thoughts are by no means confined to CMC.  I’ve seen many institutions act this way.

Why hush it up?  Because the story behind Petropoulos’s involvement with the Nazi is incredibly complicated: lots of details spanning 20 years, lots of deception, lots of players.  The institution probably believes that were it to release the report, people would grab onto bits of it, misrepresent the case, drag the scandal up again and again;  they probably believe that even if they could defend themselves and Petropoulos adequately against every charge, some taint would remain.  I can understand this.  It’s true that people are more likely to remember that there was an accusation of wrong-doing than that it was disproved, even with the information under their noses.  But this holds all the more so when you cover it up.  If you refuse to release the information, people will know there was an accusation and won’t have access to facts they can weigh for themselves.  CMC has made the wrong choice.

By the way, this is the first time I’ve given a post a cryptic title.  I’ll try to do it more often in future.  A bottle of wine will be awarded the first correct solution.

The liberal arts again

Kim Wilcox, provost of Michigan State, thinks that people like me should stop kvetching about universities revising their curricula to achieve relevance, as this is something they have always done. He notes with almost audible scorn that, once upon a time, universities, including his, “used to offer majors in elocution.” Well!

Let’s say, for a moment, that he’s right: that we must do what we have always done and keep up with the times, gearing our curricula to the needs of real-world employers.  But in the same article, one can read that 89 % of employers are looking for people with “the ability to effectively communicate orally.” Am I the only one who sees this as suggesting that in order to become relevant we should replace today’s majors with yesterday’s majors? Let us bring back elocution! With the difference, maybe, that today’s elocution classes will allow or encourage the splitting of infinitives.

Let me be clear. If employers – as is reported by the study I’ve just referred to – want people who can speak, write, and think, and if Michigan State wants to produce graduates who will please employers, dumping the study of classics and adding a major in global studies is not the way to go. Wilcox might be right to suggest that dumping classics is akin to dumping elocution, and he might be wrong to suggest that either is a good idea. At any rate, that he uses elocution as an example proves he hasn’t thought things through.

***

I recently heard, through an untraceable and reliable source, that a dean at Brock University is proposing that 14-week courses could be taught as intensive courses over the space of a week. Apparently this is something students want and the dean doesn’t see any good reason not to give it to them. On the chance that the dean is a regular reader of this blog, let me explain why the professorate, as my source tells me, received his suggestion with palpable terror.

1. The students won’t have time to do the reading.
2. The professor won’t be able to remain dynamic for such long stretches of time.
3. The students will not have time, energy, or inclination to discuss the class material over late nights in their dormitories, which is how much real learning takes place.
4. The students will not have time for any life-experiences during the duration of the course by which the theories they are being presented might be measured, found true or untrue, taken back to the class, thrashed out, and thus understood.
5. As a result of the four points just listed, the students will forget every single thing they learned immediately after writing the (multiple-choice) exam.

Recent reading

Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform Thirteen features a passageway, concealed in King’s Cross Station, between our world and a magical realm;  a boy with a glorious heritage adopted as a baby and for the next decade mistreated by his parents, forced to live below stairs, and tormented by their natural son — a boy around his own age, fat, whiny, spoiled, and fond of eating knickerbocker glories;  and assorted ghosts and giants.  Other notable characters include a group of frightening creatures who are hired, despite misgivings, by the good magical people when ruthlessness is called for;  the misgivings are proved reasonable when they bungle their jobs from over-use of violence.  The story follows the boy as he learns of his true parentage and destiny.

Ibbotson’s book was published in 1994, a few years before the Philosopher’s Stone.  One can speculate that she decided not to sue Rowling after Nancy Stouffer — who, in the ‘80s, wrote a book about “Muggles” and another about “Larry Potter” — lost her suit so spectacularly, finishing with a fine of $50,000 for her temerity.  Wikipedia, however, quotes Ibbotson saying that not only has she no hard feelings, she would “like to shake [Rowling] by the hand.”  I see no reason not to believe her.  Rowling had many sources, ranging from the New Testament to Enid Blyton, and her series is nevertheless its own creation.  Besides, one imagines that Ibbotson’s sales rose considerably after the success of HP.

The Secret of Platform Thirteen is a good book but not a great book.  The pacing is too fast;  it moves along without much development, and mostly lacks the ability to make you feel you’re in a new place or someone else’s mind.  Two much better books we’ve read lately are Noel Langley’s The Land of Green Ginger and Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel. The Land of Green Ginger is probably thought of now as orientalist and bordering on racist, but really it’s not.  The wicked princes Tintac Ping Foo and Rubdub Ben Thud are thwarted by the good prince Abu Ali, and this is as it should be.  Carbonel, a very different book, is equally fine.  The plot involves magic, but also provides a leisurely picture of mid-20th century England.  The details of Rosemary Brown’s life in a tiny furnished flat with her seamstress mother and those of her friend John’s life in the mansion of Tussocks are just as compelling to me and my six-year-old as the business of gathering together broom, cauldron, hat, and spell to release the Cat Prince from his enslavement.

Differentiation

A former student of mine, now grown-up and teaching, tells me that her school’s accountability policy involves determining standards to prove that one is “differentiating,” or “presenting the same information in different ways to meet the needs of learners who aren’t good at reading and listening.” I’ve just marked a paper premised on the fact that Matthew and Galatians are books of the Hebrew Bible (representing the religion of the Jews), while Genesis is part of the Old Testament (i.e. the bible of the Christians). My heart sinks. I should have differentiated! But on second thought no. One of our course texts was Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to read that with care and continue thinking that Jesus is the god of the Jews. Not my fault; not this time anyway.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about why the new drive to accountability bothers me so much. The clearest (or most honest) statement I can make is that I believe the people who are judging us are not qualified to do so. My area is ethical philosophy.  I think and write about the nature of goodness or responsibility – of accountability if you like. This means that the accountability people are on my turf;  lacking training in the history of ethical philosophy — in the history of thought about the nature of response, responsibility, accounts, and accounting for things — they are nevertheless the ones making the ethical judgments. Not, granted, that they insist on making the decisions all by themselves.  They haven’t gone that far yet.  But what they do insist on is almost as bad, namely, that I provide an account of myself that can be understood by people who have read neither my work, nor the thinkers I work on, nor necessarily any thinker I regard as worthwhile.  I am expected to lay out my standards and then to judge myself on them in the space of a few pages. Such an endeavour necessarily omits everything important. Because here’s the thing.  The worth of my teaching and research (which deals, in its entirely, with the subject of “worth”) is complex.  If it weren’t complex I’d be out of a job, and rightly so.

So it’s actually a Catch-22. If I could defend, say, my Religious Ethics class in two pages, then the class wouldn’t be defensible.

A postscript from Andy

Accountability

Let me be clear:  I am willing to jump through whatever hoops are required.  What annoys me is that the nature of the hoops cannot be described all at once.  Months ago we heard that we had to come up with a set of disciplinary learning goals.   Only gradually did I learn that we would have to prove we were trying to teach our learning goals by producing assignments and syllabi that pointed in their direction.  And only a few weeks ago did I finally gather that we will have to create a set of rules for measuring whether and to what extent the learning is successful, as well as a method of assessing our method of assessment.  Had I understood the assignment from the beginning, I would have had to spend much less time accessing my inner apparatchik.

And one more word.  Nothing is going to make me see this as anything more than jumping through hoops.  Lovely people have offered winged words about how the endeavor might benefit us, giving us more awareness of who we are, of our mission, of the nature and purpose of the liberal arts.  Friends write to invite me to accountability workshops, as if such a thing could be anything other than three hours in hell.  I will do it because I’m a soldier.  But telling me it’s a valuable exercise won’t excite my sympathy, let alone my admiration.

Misc

A student writes at the beginning of her response paper that Aristotle’s Ethics is an instruction manual for a moral life.  At the end of the paper she writes that it is isn’t working very well as an instruction manual, as there are too many gaps.  It does not occur to her to use the second idea to challenge the first;  on the contrary, she sees in her juxtaposition a cohesiveness in focus.  What to me is the obvious next step — to ask if maybe the text is not an instructional manual — is not an obvious step for her.  In this she is typical of my students.  And I do not know how to correct them without saying what I believe:  that this way of reading bespeaks a character flaw.

I am planning a faculty resident event on Harry Potter, and have advertised quizzes and prizes.  This means I have to buy some prizes and, more interestingly, write some quizzes.  Eila and I are still devoting much of our time together to listening to the books on CD, now in the middle of our third time through the series, and I am noticing many repeated images.  For instance, in Books I, II, III, and IV, a bag splits open in the Hogwarts’ hallway.  It happens just once in each book, in different circumstances each time:  I forget whose bag in I, Harry’s in II, Hermione’s in III, Cedric’s in IV.  Does it also happen in Book V and Book VI?  I don’t know yet.

I’ll post the full quiz after the event.

My head space, catalogued in poetry

There are too many things to do.
The too many things to do are all individually meaningless.
I don’t know what the things to do are.
Other people who do know don’t care; but they want me to care with better doublethink than they need to show.
I want to do all these things better than anyone else.
I don’t want to do any of them.
I have things of my own I want to do.
I don’t know what those things are.
I don’t want to do those things either.
The things I have to do are preventing me from doing the things I want to do, or even knowing what those things are.
I care about (some) students and (some) colleagues and want them to care about me.
I can’t muster the energy to do anything about it.

This is mostly written by Z, in response to a request for a new analysis of my current malaise. It seems to be working. As is a gift from the same source: The Lost Tales of H.H. Munro, finally available in book form. Ya gotta laugh.

Boring, stupid

It hasn’t been that I’m too busy to blog.  It’s been that chairing is making me into a boring, stupid person who has no interest in anything real and whom I hate.

Not to say I’m not busy.  In fact, I’ve discovered the meaning of the word busy — it’s been one of my few insights this semester.  I used to wonder why people said “I’m too busy” to do something that would take two minutes.  Now I understand.  It’s because you have sixty two-minute tasks awaiting you as soon as your turn your mind to tasks.  In this state you don’t even prioritize.  You just do whatever’s in front of you until you stop and take some leisure, and then you go on.  Lots of small things just don’t get done.

Here’s something I’ve been looking for.  A piece on the fact that Canadian universities don’t hire their own graduates.  They want Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Oxbridge.  And, okay, sometimes UofT.  What this piece does not say is why, but that doesn’t take much brains.  They’re parochial, small minded, inferiority-complexed, resentful, and petty.