Timing is everything. Forty years ago, when I first started to consider going to graduate school, in a field I didn't study much as an undergraduate, I didn't think the decision that odd.  I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.  So trying something that was a gamble, certainly, but seemed a possible good fit was about as much as I could hope for.  I was a math guy but didn't think I could hack graduate school in math.  I had a social science interest but never considered going to grad school in political science, which was my unofficial minor.  Economics seemed a reasonable mixture of those two interests.  I didn't think at all about what would happen end of pipe, what sort of job I'd get, whether I'd be happy in that, whether I could support myself let alone a family.  All I asked was whether I could get into being a graduate student.  And the story I told myself, once I got into Northwestern and accepted their offer, was not to make any decision on that until after the first quarter concluded.  Since I got a fellowship, if I dropped out after that to try something else, which many of my classmates ultimately did, I wouldn't have out of pocket expenses to recoup.  That was the full extent of the thinking --- then.

How would such decision making go today for me, if I were the same sort of student now.  I ask this, in part, to try to make sense of the article linked below.  By doing so I also hope to make overt other considerations that should matter in doing studies such as the one at Berkeley.  The other part I that motivates the question is how the rise in reliance of adjuncts for instruction would impact this decision.  It is probably impossible to now be as naive about career prospects as I was back then.  Would having more information about career prospects block the PhD path, because it would seem too dismal up front?

I was only 21 when starting graduate school, single and with no dependents.  Many of my cohort were older.  Some were already married.  One already had a kid.  Several were international students, studying in the U.S. for the first time.   For this part, I'm going to assume age-wise that I'd be in the same situation.  Also, I want to note that the world looks quite different as a first-year grad student than it does in the third or fourth year.   Here's how this matters.

While I did look for apartments in Evanston where I'd have one or more roommates, I ultimately opted for a one bedroom in Rogers Park that I'd have to myself.  While this was a no frills place, it was a step up in the quality of housing that I had in grad school.  The best part of life at 509 Wykcoff in Ithaca as an undergrad were there people who lived there.  I had a great time with many of them.  What I had in common with them was where we lived, not what we studied.  I lost that when going to grad school, but I was going to lose that no matter what else I did as long as I left Ithaca.  In terms of the physical quality of the place, particularly the sharing of bathroom facilities, it really was no great shakes.  I didn't have more lofty expectations at the time.  I bought crappy furniture.  That was okay.  After a couple of years I started to wake up with my back hurting.  I regretted having such a poor mattress.  That got to me after a while.  By the time I was writing my dissertation, I was kind of fed up with living like a pauper.  A reasonable argument might have been made at the time that I spend an extra year at NU to write a bang up thesis and have an even better job market.  But I didn't consider that because of the low income path as a grad student.  By then I wanted a real job.

So where in the trajectory are these student surveys being delivered?   First year doctoral students are apt to answer quite differently from more advanced doctoral students.  Then, as recast myself into the present, I wonder if my expectations for housing/quality of life outside of school would be different now and if being driven by more materialistic concerns if that would steer me to finding a job rather than go to grad school.

Next, let me talk about the intellectual quality of life, both the schoolwork itself and the social life.  Graduate school was much more intense than undergraduate and require a much greater personal commitment, or so was my experience back then.  It turns out that I was ready for that; it was something that fit me pretty well.  What I missed, however, was having friends who were not studying what I was studying.  I didn't really want to narrow in the non-school part of life, which there was little of during the first year, especially the first quarter, but which grew more important over time.  Living by myself may have been a mistake in this regard.  Who knows?  What I wonder now is whether one can get more diversity in social life if outside academia, or if somebody who is on the shy side as I was, would tend to find friends at work, but not elsewhere.  In any event, this narrowness can contribute to a depression.

The last bit I want to consider is whether the subject matter itself might seem a betrayal from one's expectations or if it fully captivates the mind.  At the time I went to graduate school, and perhaps for the next ten years thereafter, economic theory was in its heyday and I was trained as a theorist I found it quite captivating.  Twenty years after I started graduate school I began to become disillusioned with the theory - it really didn't say much unless you made some arbitrary assumptions up front to get more specific conclusions.  That plus the rise of computing has made empirical economics much more valued.  But even there, economists are pretty much stuck with the data they can get.  The can't perform experiments in situ.  There is a branch of economics that does perform experiments, frequently with college students as subjects, but these are classroom as laboratory type of experiments only.  If I had more skepticism about the discipline itself in advance of attending grad school, would that have encouraged me to not go for a PhD?

These sort of hypothetical questions don't have right answers.  I should add here that I don't see some alternative path that is obviously better.  I can envision a public service project in lieu of a stint in the Peace Corps as a possible alternative, the one I have in mind now is to author online interactive content for K-12 to be made freely available to schools and students, and that might engage me and help me mature some so I could better answer the question of what to do next.  Maybe watching The Graduate a couple of times would help or just the bit that produced the answer, "plastics."  In retrospect, we didn't have such good answers back then.  Why is it that we assumed otherwise? 

Here's another plug for my blog, The Daily Rhyme, showing a kwout of a kwout.  I wonder if American kids would have scored higher had the length of the wood been 40 inches instead of 40 centimeters, since most don't know the metric system.

The passage below is from page 17 of the pdf, found at the ERIC site.

It is obvious that not every student should, or would wish to, attend a research university. Without attempting to characterize students at other kinds of institutions, it might be said that the undergraduate who flourishes at a research university is the individual who enjoys diverse experiences, is not dismayed by complexity or size, has a degree of independence and self-reliance, and seeks stimulation more than security. A research university is in many important ways a city; it offers almost unlimited opportunities and attractions in terms of associations, activities, and enterprises. But as in a city, the requirements of daily living may be taxing, and sorting out the opportunities and finding like- minded individuals may be difficult. The rewards of the ultimate experience, however, can be immeasurable.

I suspect that well less than half of the undergraduates at Illinois fit this set of desiderata.   My guess is that the population we're talking about is no more than 20% of the student body, quite possibly less.  In the preceding paragraph of the report, they write:

A New Model
WHAT IS NEEDED NOW IS A NEW MODEL OF UNDERGRADUATE education at research universities that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole. Universities need to take advantage of the immense resources of their graduate and research programs to strengthen the quality of undergraduate education, rather than striving to replicate the special environment of the liberal arts colleges. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between all the participants in university learning that will provide a new kind of undergraduate experience available only at research institutions. Moreover, productive research faculties might find new stimulation and new creativity in contact with bright, imaginative, and eager baccalaureate students, and graduate students would benefit from integrating their research and teaching experiences. Research universities are distinctly different from small colleges, and they need to offer an experience that is a clear alternative to the college experience.

If I'm in the ballpark on how many students fit the desiderata and if the New Model mentioned above is predicated on the assumption that near 100% of the students fit the desiderata, then there seems an obvious big issue with the argument before it has really started.  So I've momentarily interrupted my reading of the rest of the report to pose the following questions.

Is there an alternative model that would be more functional for the majority of students and yet remains consistent with the research character of the place?  Or are we stuck with the characterization of the old model provided in the report, where the education of most undergraduates is given short shrift? 

Let me add here some factoids about the business side of undergraduate education, regarding what has changed since the report was published 17 years ago.  We, and really here I mean all public R1s, are much more dependent on tuition revenue now.   Thus a strategy that said reduce the size of the student body to get much closer to that 100% numbers is likely not feasible.  Then there is the much greater reliance on non-tenure-track instructors now, many of whom do no research.  And, finally, the small liberal arts college alternative, which might be more suitable for many students on purely learning grounds, has become so pricey tuition-wise that the in-state public R1 has become the first choice of many students for what economists would refer to as liquidity reasons. 

My inclination is that the necessary change that might enable some progress here has to be found at the promotion and tenure level, not on a campus by campus basis but systematically across all R1s.  These changes must lower the bar on the research side of things and raise the bar on undergraduate teaching, which all tenured and tenure track faculty must do in a significant way.  People need to recognize the Prisoner's Dilemma aspect of what is at play here.  That will block any possible alternative model in favor of preserving the status quo.  The only way to stop the Prisoner's Dilemma is by some systematic change that promotes teaching at the expense of research.  I fear that we will not get there and that the current model will break.

Now back to reading the report. 

I finished reading the Boyer Commission Report this morning.  In this post I want to address only the recommendations for student writing.  But before I do that, let me observe that I had read the report many years ago.  I did a search  on my computer to find out when it was that I first read it.  The earliest thing I found was a presentation from back in 2002 - my job talk as it turns out.  The operative slide is below.  (Too much text for my taste now.  But in defense of this there was no paper to give out ahead of time, only the talk.)


By the time I was past the halfway point in reading this time around, I had the feeling I had appropriated many of the ideas in the report for my own.  Indeed, there is quite a bit of similarity in intent between the recent series of posts I wrote, Everybody Teaches, and the teaching part of the report. However, it is hard for me now to identify the sources of my own thinking on these matters.  For example, another influence was knowing Chip Bruce and supporting his work on The Inquiry Page.  Another influence was the NY Times site, Writers on Writing.  And then there were books on learning by several authors, Donald Schon, Jerome Bruner, and John Dewey himself among others.  All of these blended into a whole for me.  Yet as I haven't read any of this stuff recently other than the report, I started to attribute more of my thinking to having read the report than to other sources. 

The teaching message in the report is straightforward.  Abandon knowledge transmission as the primary approach.  Some knowledge transmission might still occur en passant but should be nothing more than that.  Instead, embrace an inquiry approach from the get go. In so doing, undergraduates can be brought into the core function of the research university, which is inquiry and the production of new knowledge that follows successful investigations.  

In my short post on the report from Tuesday I raised the issue of whether students are ready for the type of education the Boyer Commission envisions for them.  Here I want to focus on what readiness means for this particular recommendation on writing.

3. Writing courses need to emphasize writing "down" to an
audience who needs information, to prepare students directly
for professional work.

I don't like the expression writing down, as I will indicate in what follows. What it refers to here is somebody with a specialist's knowledge writing for a non-specialist.  It sounds too much like dumbing down and that is not really the essence of this sort of writing.  The reader should not be treated as stupid, but rather as quite intelligent.  Smart people who are non-specialists in a field deserve to have their intelligence respect yet need to be educated on points where they are ignorant.

My main contribution in this piece is the following point.  The only way you can write this way with any proficiency whatsoever it to read a lot of this type of writing and come to view it as a way to become broadly educated, an activity that is ongoing and lifelong.  Absent this prior reading experience, there is no way to get a good mental picture of the audience.  Armed with this experience, the reader develops a sense of taste for what good writing of this sort looks like.  Then as a writer style-wise this can be done by imitation of the writing the reader likes with himself or herself as in "generalist mode" as the audience. Indeed, it is my view that all students need to learn to communicate as generalists as well as insider in their given field of study. 

When I was in high school I would read at least some of the New York Times, which my dad would bring home from work.  I confess that first I turned to Red Smith or Arthur Daley.  But I also soon developed a fondness for Russell Baker and then the full Op-Ed page.  I also had subscriptions to magazines - first Sports Illustrated, then The New Republic, and Scientific American as well.  With the latter two, sometimes the pieces were over my head.  But I immediately liked the TRB column and learned to like the film review of Stanley Kauffman.  I should add here that this sort of reading was not in lieu of reading book, but in addition to it.

Today I really couldn't say what would make for a good diet of generalist readings.  I know what I like, but I don't want to prescriptive that way, other than that there should be multiple genres and a variety of writers to sample their style.  My sense is that many kids whom we admit to our research universities don't do this sort of thing.  But, as old fashioned as it may sound, I believe it is still the ticket now.  This is preparation that is really needed for college, more than the AP courses, more than the zillions of extracurricular activities. 

And in the spirit of promoting this idea, I would change General Education to Generalist Education and indicate that we should all be generalists, so we can communicate with one another, and each of us should be a specialist too.  This sort of rebranding would help on two fronts.  It would give more purpose to Gen Ed and instead of viewing those courses as one from column A and two from column B, make them all part of a whole.  It would also help to communicate expectations to would be college students about how they should prepare for college.  And, in my heart of hearts, maybe it would help to get students to like school, instead of where we are now where so many kids seem alienated by it in one way or another.

This morning I want to pose the question whether the various administrative structures we place around formal learning actually impede inquiry.  Let me do this only in the context of supervising an undergraduate thesis meant to give honors credit to the student.  I am supervising one such student now and had a different student I supervised last year.  Each of them had taken my Econ of Organizations class and done well in it and presumably they liked the structure of that class.  After conversing with an Econ Department adviser and learning what was required to graduate with honors, they asked me if I would supervise their project.  I agreed to do so.  So I am posing this question with that experience in mind.

Let me also note that perhaps my situation is unique in that while I still engage in inquiry in some way, much of which is express on this blog where the big question is how can we do better with undergraduate education?, I don't see that investigation as being economics for the most part.  So I can't simply make these students research assistants in my ongoing project.  If I could, perhaps the answers to this question would be easier to come up with.  A big deal issue with students doing a research project is what question should they be trying to answer and who comes up with that?

The first time around I had a project in mind that was a bit off the beaten path. It was about (lack of) preservation of our cultural heritage via the folk music our parents listened to on vinyl.  There was an economic policy question here.  Most of this music was still under copyright.  A good chunk of it hadn't yet been digitized.  Should copyright be suspended in this case so people who had these records could make digital versions and place those in the public domain?  Music companies, which own the copyright in most of these cases, might balk at this even though they wouldn't lose a dime on sales of these albums because those albums are not sold anymore.  The issue for them is whether allowing public copying in this case would somehow impact making copies available of more recently released music.  So there was a real question here that the student could nibble on and see what headway might be made. 

The next time around in my preliminary conversation with the student he indicated interest in doing something with data.  I am not a data guy.  I am a theorist.  But I didn't try to steer him away from his interest.  Rather, I simply posed the question - what data could he get with which to do a project?  So I suggested he do something on graduation rates, because I thought that sort of data would be readily available.  He agreed, though the specific question he would address was left unspecified and was up to him to determine.  He took quite a while doing that - reading what he could about graduation rates and seeing what the education researchers said about the matter.  Ultimately he glommed onto a project on transfer students from community colleges, a specific look at what I would term the educational production function.

In both cases (the second one is still ongoing) I've had the feeling of being end gamed on the projects.  The students would be graduating at the end of the semester, so the project would finish then, regardless of whether it had really run its course or not.  The paper that got produced the first time (this time the paper has not yet been written, even as a first draft) was a rushed job.  So it very much feels like the process produces half a loaf only.

At the outset we had to determine how many credit hours this project should count for.  Neither of the students needed the credits to graduate.  In both cases I suggested 2 credit hours and told them individually that this translated into about 6 hours per week of time commitment on their part.  Perhaps that was an error.  Maybe it should have been 3 or even 4 credit hours to generate a greater time commitment from the students.  I really don't know whether my conclusion from the previous paragraph would have been altered had the projects been for greater credit.  On the flip side, if the student spends a lot of time spinning his or her wheels, not uncommon when doing research, and as a consequence the project produces meager results, it seems wrong to award a lot of credit for doing it. 

I never published anything out of my dissertation for the doctorate.  I did produce working papers from it, submitted those for review, got a revise and resubmit from R.E.Stud on one of them, but ultimately it didn't get accepted.  I had to change my research agenda to get stuff published.  I did have some non-thesis work published early, stuff I co-wrote with Leon Moses, so it wasn't a fatal blow that the thesis wasn't published, but it was quite distressing.  I put a huge amount of time into the thesis work.  I mention it here only to point out that the half a loaf outcome seems quite likely to me for undergraduate inquiry, especially if the undergraduate is the principal investigator rather than the research assistant. 

A few weeks ago I was contacted by the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Econ, as were the other instructors supervising undergraduate theses (there are 12 of these projects and I would guess somewhere between 200 and 300 students graduating with a degree in economics), about whether the student's project was deserving of a departmental award.  So doing such a project is already a plum, but we then seem to want to add another plum on top of that.

Anticipating that the project might not turn out to be a world beater, last year I told the student I'd prefer the grade be credit/no credit only.  She agreed, but this proved to be a huge hassle and ultimately I believe I had to assign a letter grade. This time around the student queried the department about this in advance and was told that to receive honors credit, he needed to get a letter grade for the course.  So I will enter one at the end of the semester, though I haven't graded any of the intermediate work.  It doesn't seem to me appropriate to do that.  We're less than three weeks from graduation.  Grades really don't matter now.  Graduating matters now.

If the student ends up doing other economics research in the future, the half a loaf aspect of the current project might actually provide durable benefit as it will help the student to not make the same mistakes again and provide fodder for asking what needs to be done to get a full loaf the next time around.  As the second student is going into a PhD program starting in the fall, I'm hopeful that the project will have this effect.  But let's face it, this is not the maintained reason for having students write an undergraduate thesis.  

If we want such projects to have more direct benefit to the students, the issues sketched here need to be ironed out.  I am not going to try to suggest what improvements should be made, other than to observe that the institution appears rigid to me and there needs to be some flexibility to try alternatives that might have a chance of doing better. 

I've written this piece because it may have seemed from my prior two posts on The Boyer Commission Report that I was idealizing the benefits from moving to an inquiry based approach.  I'm not nearly so idealistic on the prospect of all students engaging in inquiry that produces new knowledge, even when this is done as a research assistant.  As an alternative, I do think there would be substantial learning for most students were they to engage in inquiry on subject matter that was already known, but not yet to the students.  This would still contrast sharply with a knowledge dissemination approach and help the students mature as thinkers.  Whether it would also work from the instructor's perspective remains an open question, one we should spend some time trying to answer.  The question of whether administrative structures impede inquiry goes for that as well. 

....or is there only "different points of view?"

In his column last Friday Paul Krugman writes:

The 2016 campaign should be almost entirely about issues. The parties are far apart on everything from the environment to fiscal policy to health care, and history tells us that what politicians say during a campaign is a good guide to how they will govern.

It seems to me that this paragraph is uncontroversial.  The parties are far apart.  Would anyone question that?  One might imagine on going down the list of issues, noting the current positions, and then asking, can the parties reconcile on this one?  What would it take to achieve such reconciliation?  If there were a right answer on a particular issue and if one of the two held positions were the right answer, one might expect that over time there'd be convergence to it, as evidence accumulated to support that position.  But there are reasons to believe this won't happen and as Krugman writes people seem free to deny the evidence or to deny their articulation of what they previously believed.  Further, because the focus here is social issues, there really can't be controlled experiments to test hypotheses and disprove the false ones.

But there are other reasons why there might not be convergence.  The most obvious of these is that neither position is the answer, perhaps because each position is articulated in a straightforward way but the right answer is complicated.  Or it might be that the right answer is not that complex but it is other than the two positions as articulated.  In this case the evidence will never point to either of the positions convincingly.

I tend to think there is still a different reason that explains the lack of convergence most of the time.  It is that we don't know what it is we want because we can't imagine it in the absence of seeing it.  So we are not rational in the way the previous reasons imply.  And this lack of rationality keeps us from learning about a right answer, because in the absence of rationality there isn't one, as a right answer depends fundamentally on what it is that we want.

An alternative that recognizes this dilemma would be to view our beliefs as evolving based on what we learn from experience and that everything we hold true at present is contingent on current beliefs.  Alas, most people seem to find this approach quite unsettling.  They want things to be more certain.

I wrote about this issue some years ago as I tried to write a book on the  precepts that should underlie undergraduate education, which I called Guessing Games, because developing good intuition is at the heart of critical thinking.  I ultimately gave up on the book writing because I became aware that I was lecturing in many of the essays and readers don't like to be lectured at.  I then didn't know how to reconcile the points I wanted to make without lecturing.  I still don't know how to do that.  Indeed, this post might very well seem like lecturing, though I'm less concerned about doing it in individual blog posts.

The passage below is from the chapter Just The Facts and Guessing.  It sets up my concluding section.

* * * * *

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function.

* * * * *

In the Op-Ed page from Friday there was an essay by N.D.B. Connolly entitled Black Culture Is Not the Problem, which argues that the problems we've seen in West Baltimore stem from the extant power structure and the predatory business practices which create a breeding ground for disaffection and ultimately destructive violence.  In the same paper there was a column by David Brooks, The Nature of Poverty, which I read as a blame the victim piece, even if the title conveys the idea that the victims can't help themselves.  This is the way opinion pieces are written - to argue for one position on the matter.  The Times doesn't always present two pieces in the same day with competing views, but clearly they believe that competing views need to be presented, which is why they have Conservative and Liberal Columnists and while they will have guest columns from people whom the Editorial Board clearly disagrees with.

Indeed go back to the 1970s and consider 60 Minutes, a highly respected and well viewed program at the time.   Their Point/Counterpoint segment celebrated this form of debate.  We don't seem to have innovated on how news shows present argument since then.

What we don't have, in other words, are examples for newspaper readers and TV viewers of a first rate mind in practice thinking gray on the matter.  One wonders why not.  Would the audience be turned off by that because the complexity would dumbfound them?  Or is it that such first rate minds are too scarce?  Or might it be that media outlets don't view it their job to teach the audience on how to analyze and synthesize news and opinion.  Leave the analysis and synthesis for the audience to perform; the media's job is simply to present the raw ingredients so the audience can get at it.

I do want to single out Thomas Edsall here, the exception that proves the rule.  Not only does he seek out even handed treatment on whatever topic he discusses, but he always consults a variety of experts yet weaves his own compelling narrative that does help to educate the reader about how to think through the issues.  I wish Edsall were the norm.  But he is not.  The norm is that if you care about an issue you take one side of it or another, but not both.  If you don't take sides it means you don't care.

I'm afraid the same is true at universities across the country, with the Salaita Case an exemplar from my campus. I wish our rhetoric could embrace a thinking gray approach.  For the most part, however, my experience is that it doesn't.

When you come to the fork in the road....
A good background on Yogi Berra quotes in general and this one, in particular.

I don't like scripts that I have to follow.  I don't even like them when cooking, where I probably should follow a recipe.  I definitely don't like them in teaching.  I don't really like having a GPS, or that voice in Google Maps, at least most of the time.  I want to do what I want to do.  I don't want to be told what to do by somebody else, definitely not by by some machine.  If there is a chance that I might screw up (there always is) and I'm aware of it ahead of time (not nearly as often) then I might want some help right before the fateful moment.  Making a plan in advance that I will adhere to so as to avoid the screw ups, however, is overkill.  Getting a general idea, sure.  You don't want to do anything totally blind.  Filling that in with detail?  Absolutely not!

Until a few days ago I knew this about me, but I didn't understand why.  Now I have a better idea.  That came from reading this paper by Bruffee (1984), Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Let me explain how that came about in a bit. First let me note that Bruffee was a teacher of writing and his piece was meant at the time for others who taught English.  The rest of us, who teach whatever it is that we teach, could learn a thing or two about how to teach our courses better if we first asked, how would a teacher of Writing go about the teaching task in my class?  Only after chewing on that one for a while and coming up with some spark on something new to try should you then ask, now what do I have to do to modify the approach to fit my subject matter?

Bruffee's paper is about that triad: conversation, thinking, and writing.  And his key point, I'm not sure it is original to him (Vygotsky is mentioned somewhere in the paper but I haven't read Vygotsky) is that these are really all the same thing, conversation, a social concept that requires more than one participant.  Thinking is internalized conversation between the thinker and imagined others.  So thinking, often envisioned as a solitary act, is really a social activity and it proceeds according to conventions defined by social discourse.  Writing is then externalizing the thinking, bringing the conversation of the mind out to where others can participate in it.

I so liked this framing.  It definitely captures what I do.  Indeed, it is why I like the slow blogging approach to writing - it is conversational at root.  It may explain why I struggle with digest forms of email, such as from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle, where each blurb is not conversation but instead more like an ad for some conversation to follow. It's also why I struggle with micro forms like Twitter.  If you have all these different and disjoint blurbs running around in your head, is there a unifying conversation in which to embed them all?  Most of the time to me it just sees like a lot of noise.  Perhaps there is visceral appeal in an individual item.  Lead us not into temptation.  There's already too much of that with the sidebar in Facebook.

I've now reached the fork in the road in this essay. Are we human beings hard wired for conversation, with each of us thrilled to be in a discussion where all the of the participants can hold up their end and seem to be doing just that but they are also sympathetic to the others so will help if one stumbles?  Or is it that some people have a predilection for conversation, Bruffee for one, me for another, while other people get their jollies in some other way?  My story is better if conversation is fundamental to the human condition.  But if that is true it remains a puzzle why more people don't engage in conversation more often. My best explanation for that is people often act out of fear first and foremost.  In this case they are fearful that they can't hold up their end of the discussion.  This make sense to me for shy people.  For the gregarious types, it must be something else, though I suspect many of them don't venture beyond very familiar terrain, so that most of their conversations don't go anywhere.

The high point for me in having actual conversation was in college at 509 Wyckoff Road, during my junior and senior years at Cornell.  It's not that I didn't have conversations in high school.  But I had fewer friends to have real talks with so there was less variety in what we talked about, and I don't remember any conversations outside of school in a group setting, while in the kitchen/eating area at Wyckoff Road that was the norm.  It may be that a few close friends is all you need to have a really good talk, though I like to explore different things and I need others to help me get there..  With one close friend you can go deep, but it's less likely that you go wide as well. 

My first few years as an administrator, running SCALE and then CET, I was able to spend a good chunk of the time in conversation.  The Espresso Royale on Sixth and Daniel was my unofficial other office.  I got to talk with a wide variety of people there - faculty, other administrators, teaching with technology types, and once in a while pure technology types too, though many of those discussions happened someplace north of Green Street.  It was either good fortune or me shaping the job to do what I liked.  Over time, there was less of that and more of the dreaded time suck ---- committee meetings.  My calendar became more crowded.  My enjoyment at work started to wane.  One real reason for starting this blog was to get back that sense of joy.  If I couldn't have the type of conversations I'd like to have with others very often, then I'd have them with myself.

There is a question for me whether I would have stuck with the activity had I kept the blog private, in essence a journal or a diary.  Bruffee helped me to understand that one too.  Most of the stuff in this blog is potentially interesting to people I know, or people I know of, or people where I've read what they've written and I'm commenting on that.  This doesn't mean they'll want to read my stuff or like it if they do read it.  But there is that possibility.  So in that way the blogging is holding up my end of a larger conversation.  A private journal is something else entirely.

Now let me get back to making it up as you go along, which I do quite regularly in writing.  So the blogging I do is different that way than how I would write up an economics paper aimed for publication in a refereed journal.  For that sort of thing the thinking would precede the writing.  I would spend an inordinate amount of time working through a model, perhaps 3 months or more.  During that time the model became my universe and I'd try to understand everything that was in it, intuit what my main results would be and how to prove them.  Only as I neared completion of this modeling part would I begin on the writing.  So the writing was other than learning.  It was communicating what I had already learned in a way that might be intelligible to others.

It is quite different with the blogging and with some of my other mental sojourns that I end up not writing about at all.  There it is just exploration via conversation and if the exploration seems promising, I'll start writing then still with a lot to discover ahead of me.  I hope it's now obvious why you have to make it up as you go along this way.  If you do that, there is something to still talk about.  The mystery isn't yet solved.  The verdict hasn't yet been rendered.  The outcome is not known.  (I'm sure there are yet more metaphors here for describing the uncertainty in the process, but I hope the reader gets the idea.)  This is not the skillful writer holding back information till the last possible moment to build suspense.  This is the writer himself not knowing where things will end up other than some vague idea that he will not insist on if he misses that mark.  Keeping the internal conversation going is a way to find out how things will turn out.

This allows the discussion to cover familiar themes, make only a mild departure from prior conversations, and still be absorbed with the discussion because it has a freshness to it that is captivating.  I could not produce a blog post by first making a detailed outline of what I want to cover and then writing paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, adhering to that outline.  And individual sentence or two might be better that way since my full attention could be brought to how to shape what it is that I'm going to say.  But my commitment to the activity would wane well before I'd finish.  That approach with outlines would end up killing my interest in writing.

There's one other thing that making it up as you go along does for you.  If you produce something tolerable that way, it builds some confidence in you to try it again.  Being able to improvise in the moment, I suspect, whether a jazz musician in a band, or a comedic actor doing a sketch with fellow actors, a painter trying a new technique on a canvas, or a slow blogger like me writing on a different theme, is an act of confidence.  If you try it, a spark will come.  Logically, it's not necessarily true.  There are those excruciating times where you fall flat on your face. As an empirical regularity, however, for me with the writing it seems true most of the time, especially if it is open ended when the writing will stop, meaning where there is no day job or other regular obligation that takes precedence.

I do throw out pieces that I've started but that don't seem to have enough oomph in them to make it worthwhile to finish them.  But most of the time I do finish. And when I come back later to reread the piece, I frequently like what I'm reading.  Maybe that's narcissism, though I tend to be quite critical of my own performance when I find it below par.  It's hard to argue for objectivity on this score.  But I'd wager that any one who practiced making it up as they go along and did it for quite some time, they'd start to like the results of what they produced.  And the reason, in case it isn't clear, is that when you have a good conversation it comes to a good conclusion. 

But you also better watch out.  I'm cooking tonight!

Among other categories, the campus tracks enrollments by race.  Using those categories, last fall I had a majority non-white class.  It was the first time for me.  I suspect it won't be the last.  Here is the breakdown, though before I provide it I want to note that instructors are not given this information.  The information they are given that comes from Banner (the Student Information System) is the home address.  Based on that and other identifying information, of the 23 students overall who completed the class 8 were international students (7 Chinese and 1 Korean), 3 were Asian-American students, and 1 was Hispanic. 

I suspect that many instructors will never look at the home address in Banner.  Will they be aware of what category each of their students is in, simply by an eyeball test?  In yesterday's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof's column, called Our Biased Brains, argues that very early on we learn about racial identities and most of us (African Americans are the exception) develop a preference for the race we are a member of. No doubt we are conscious about race, but do we make mistakes from time to time in assignment of category?  And might it be that our own mental categories don't coincide with the official categories the campus maintains?

One troublesome aspect in the official categories is that International Student is a designation, which in theory encompasses all the races but in practice has come to imply East Asian, witness the piece from Inside Higher Ed, The University of China at Illinois. In other contexts the expression, "they all look alike to me," is offensive.  Yet to the unwitting instructor (I include myself here) it is quite easy to mistake an Asian-American student for an International student and vice versa.

Another category I struggle with is Hispanic.  There is first the Hispanic-Latino naming dispute.  The campus seems to be hedging its bets on this one, where one of the race categories is Hispanic yet in area studies there is the Department of Latina/Latino Studies.  More to the point for me is not really knowing who counts in this category and how my mental model of who counts is not reliable this way.  To illustrate, I did a Google Image Search on Sephardic Jew.  Below is one of the pictures I found, apparently a well known actor, Hank Azaria, though I was not familiar with him.  Is he Hispanic?  My immediate answer is, maybe.  He was born in Queens, where I grew up.  His grandparents apparently came from Greece.  Is that what's decisive or is it largely immaterial?   In my process of looking via Google I learned that Jerry Seinfeld is a Sephardic Jew.  I do not consider Jerry Seinfeld to be Hispanic. 



These puzzles for me led to further mental associations.  I thought of the film version of West Side Story.  That movie came out when I was a kid and was something of a big deal, in part because Leonard Bernstein did Young People's Concerts that were on TV in NYC, and the music from West Side Story was sometimes featured in those. Anyway, in the movie George Chakiris (born in Ohio, of Greek ancestry) plays Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, The Sharks.  And Natalie Wood (born in California, of Russian ancestry) plays Maria, Bernardo's sister.  Then I started to think of other films where White actors play characters of other races.  One I came up with immediately, because I saw part of it on TV recently while doing my workout on the elliptical, was Remo Williams, where Joel Grey plays the Korean martial arts master, Chiun.  That movie is an enjoyable farce.  What about in a more serious setting, are there movie examples of that?  I thought of A Passage to India, which has at its core the tensions across race and culture in the presence of colonial rule.  The chameleon-like actor, Alec Guinness, plays an Indian character, Professor Godbole.  I'm sure the reader of this piece can come up with many other such examples.

For me, the effect of these examples is to blur what it means to be of one race or another.  In contrast, the type of bean counting that the campus does on enrollments, perhaps mandated by law, of that I'm unsure, seems to sharpen the distinction between the races.  I then asked myself a question I wasn't able to fully answer.  Which do we want, blurring or sharpening?  My partial answer is this.  Most people identify themselves with some subgroup of all human beings, and that subgroup serves as their primary identifier.  In some cases that subgroup may be racially defined, in which case sharpening the distinction is preferred.  In other cases the subgroup may be defined by other than race, religion for example, in which case the racial distinctions should be blurred.  But then, trying to apply this thinking to myself, I'm not even sure of what my own primary subgroup is.  I feel like something of an outsider to any one category, though my parents were Jewish, as were a majority of the kids I went to public school with, I'm completely non-observant now. Similarly, in some ways I feel strongly that I'm an academic and defined by my professional identity, but I don't try to publish in refereed journals anymore and haven't for some time.  How many people feel like outsiders this way?  I don't know.  I do know that I don't like to be lumped into the single category, White.  I hope with this to convince the reader that I feel uneasy with the entire discussion, but that much of these feelings are useful to keep in mind as we turn to the next part.

* * * * *

When I started at Illinois back in 1980, upwards of 90% of the undergraduate students were from within the state.  Most came from the more affluent suburbs of Chicago.  There was also a sizable population from down state.  The city of Chicago itself was underrepresented.   The only real way I learned how this mattered was via one of my fellow assistant professors in the Economics department, who happened to be the daughter of the Belgian Ambassador to the United States.  She said our students were too provincial.  That is not a word I used regularly in my working vocabulary, which is perhaps why I remember it now.  Also, as someone who grew up in NYC I had substantial fear of people from the Midwest, which my 4 years in graduate school at Northwestern didn't eradicate completely.  So I was accepting of that conclusion without wondering how she reached it.  It occurs to me now that she must have directly experienced some intolerance, a woman teaching economics was uncommon then, and somebody who spoke English with a French accent even rarer here.

Fast forward twenty years.  I am the representative from my campus on the CIC Learning Technology Group.  The CIC is the academic arm of the Big Ten but also includes the University of Chicago, which is not in the Big Ten.  At the time the group was sponsored by the Provosts.  The various representatives in the group were either Associate Provosts for Undergraduate Education or like me the leading Educational Technologist for their campus.   It was quite a collegial group and I became friendly on an individual basis with many of the members.  In a sidebar conversation with my colleague from UIC, our sister campus in Chicago, she tells me that my campus is not hospitable to African-Americans.  I was already somewhat aware of the this via discussions on my campus about "digital divide" that I was engaged in.  But I hadn't realized the issues impacted the entire university, not just my campus.  Regarding selectivity and the prestige of a degree, my campus was ranked much higher than UIC.  But qualified African-American students might nonetheless prefer attending UIC.  That was a real issue.  It probably still is.

The above two anecdotes are there to show that issues with lack of collegiality along racial/cultural lines have been with us on campus at least since when I began here as a faculty member.  Those issues are more prominent now.  There are several reasons why.  One of those is the change in demographics of our undergraduate student population toward a much larger share of international students coupled with a much greater reliance on tuition as a revenue generator for the university.  A second is prominent role that the Internet plays and its enabling of hate speech, even in circumstances where race is not really at issue, such as on whether to cancel classes or not due to cold weather.  A third is the greater attention being given to race at a national level as a consequence of the senseless killing of black men by police that has made the news. 

I am a fairly regular reader of the New York Times Opinion Page.  Among the regular columnists, Charles Blow is the one who writes regularly about race issues, often taking on the Republican attack machine in the process.  It might be expected that an African American columnist will write on race issues, but as a regular diet of columns I find this problematic.  So it occurred to me that Blow should swap columns with somebody else at the Times, Joe Nocera for example.  Nocera has written a spate of columns on the NCAA as evil cartel.  Imagine if for a month or so that Blow would write about the NCAA, race could certainly enter the discussion there but the constraint would be that there was a connection to NCAA issues, and Nocera would write about race relations, preferably entirely outside the world of sports.  The alternative perspective would be helpful to readers. 

In that spirit I am writing about issues that were taken up in a recent campus report on Racial Microaggressions. While I have written on race issues before, it is far from my usual fare and it is not easy for me to do.  This post is taking much longer to write than is typical for me.  It almost certainly would be a good thing if other voices who don't normally talk about race to begin to do so in a thoughtful way and do that publicly.  Perhaps this piece will encourage others to do likewise.

Part of the reason to do this is to show that while commentators are like minded, they do disagree on occasion.  For example, I took issue with some of the recommendations in the report, particularly its call for mandatory diversity training for all on campus.  The campus doesn't do mandatory training well.  It doesn't do such training okay.  It does a poor job.  The Ethics Training that all faculty and staff must do on an annual basis makes people resentful of the training and doesn't make them any more ethical in performance of their jobs.  I believe that newly entering students get Alcohol Awareness training, but that clearly doesn't work.  Even the training that the IRB administers for anyone doing research on human subjects is heavy handed.  One has the feeling taking this training that part of it is there for the campus to avoid liability.  Better educational approaches wouldn't worry about that at all, but instead ask what activities best get the trainees to appreciate the issues at hand.  This calls for the trainee to make some contribution to the product, as a co-author contributes to writing a paper.  Campus training doesn't allow for that.  It is much more heavy handed.

In the process of doing background reading for writing this piece I became aware of the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations.   Among other activities for students, they offer an I-Connect Diversity and Inclusion Workshop for all first-year students on campus.  I could not find on their Web site how long this office has existed nor could I find how many cohorts of students have been through the I-Connect workshops.  It would be good to have some sense of the efficacy of this workshop.  Lacking that here, I will simply move on.  But let me make one point first.  This office is part of Student Affairs.  That may explain, in part, why I was unaware of it.  Faculty tend to be more knowledgeable about the academic affairs side of the house.

In the concluding section I suggest several possible more bottom up approaches that potentially would be better than mandatory training.  These are things that might be tried.  I really don't know what will work.  I'm not sure anybody else knows that either.  But it seems to me there are many possible activities that could energize the community in a good way around race issues.  So I certainly don't want to argue that we should just sit our hands.  I only want to discourage top down mandates, which tend to be heavy handed and are therefore ineffective.  In the remainder of this section I'd like to recount a few other anecdotes to illustrate other dimensions of the issues.

The first of these is my own experience witnessing something very much like a microaggression, really a series of these, mainly coming from one student in particular.  This happened in a seminar for the Campus Honors Program that I taught in fall 2009.  I wrote about it at the end of the semester in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A".  The thing is, I inadvertently invited it to happen, without realizing I was doing it till too late.   Once the door is open, it is very hard to close it again.  What I didn't understand at the time, but have a better feel for now, is that kids who have a desire to avoid all the drinking that many undergraduates engage in on campus need some alternative that they find compelling and engages them.  For some students, this ends up being a faith-based living arrangement.  In that class several of my students resided in faith-based housing.  It was really only that one student who committed microaggressions.  Since there was another student in the class who lived at the same place, this other student was extremely quiet and spoke but rarely in class, many of his classmates also were very quiet, I take it that there were multiple factors in confluence which caused the microaggressions.  Based on that experience I conjecture that extroverts among the students, the type of kid who can dominate a class discussion, tend to be less sensitive to needs of their classmates and are therefore more prone to commit a microaggression.

Then, as I said, I encouraged this through my prompts for their blog posts, asking the students to bring in their own experiences into the discussion.  I didn't intend that encouragement to enable discussion of religion in our class, but neither did I proscribe such discussion up front.  I have continued to use blogging in my teaching and continue to provide prompts that encourage the students to relate the topic at hand to their personal experience.  And I haven't had another experience like the one in that fall 2009 class.  So I would deem that sort of thing unlikely, though not impossible.  I probably could manage it better were it to happen again.  It was a bit unnerving that first time.  The other issue I want to bring up here is that apart from deterring the microaggression, reasonable instructors might disagree about what the teacher's role should have been in this case.  As I wrote in the linked piece, my prior was that discussion of religion should be cordoned off from the classroom entirely.  I can imagine that in a biology course where evolution is discussed that religion might come up there and the instructor shouldn't entirely deflect the discussion.  Of course, we do have a Department of Religion on campus.  I really don't know whether instructors in those courses encourage students to discuss their own religious beliefs.  And I don't know whether other instructors would agree that discussion of religion should be cordoned off in the courses they teach.  That, in itself, might be an interesting question on which to poll the faculty, though getting at that might also create more enmity than it's worth.

The next anecdote concerns a class I taught in Behavioral Economics in spring 2011, the first time I taught since I retired in summer 2010 and a course that hadn't been offered by the Economics department before then.  It had been my intent in designing this class that I would teach it repeatedly thereafter, but my experience that spring was so bad that I taught the course only that one time.  I now teach a course on the Economics of Organizations instead.  In the behavioral course I had the students read the best selling book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein.  In that prior campus honors seminar several of the readings were popular books and that worked well, so I was prone to try it again.   This time around it created lots of problems.

Let me explain this by beginning with lessons learned and then working back from there.  Many students who study economics (and business too) are conservative/libertarian in their politics, have an instinctive distrust for government, and have a strong belief that people earn what they deserve.  If these people make a lot of money, it's because they worked hard for it.  And if they are poor, therefore, they most be loafers.  These students have views that are different from mine.  I am more liberal.  I think government has a positive role to play, though I do distrust excessive bureaucracy, but I also believe big business can be a threat and needs a counter force to rein it in.  I also believe that income-wise where you end up depends a lot on where you start and, hence, it is not only effort that matters in income.  Further, if you do fabulously well, you were apt to have had more than your fair share of good luck.  In most classes I teach neither the students' views nor mine come out in the open.  I prefer it that way.  In this class these views did come out and they clashed.  There wasn't microaggression.  There was overt hostility and anger.  I lost control of the class as a result.

The underlying philosophy in Nudge is something the authors call Libertarian Paternalism, a seeming oxymoron that the authors claim is really quite sensible.  The Libertarian piece is that people should be free to choose what they want.  The behavioral econ tweak of the neoclassical choice model, one that has substantial bite in practice, is that often people make choices passively rather than actively.  In other words, they come to accept what is first presented to them and then don't consider possible alternatives.  Thus, an agent who set the default that precedes the choice will influence the actual outcome.  The paternalism part comes from setting defaults in a way to achieve socially desirable objectives.

Ahead of time I thought the class needed some intellectual background on paternalism, the old fashioned kind.  So I assigned some readings that we'd discuss in class.  One of those was this piece by Amy Gutmann.  Gutmann is the President of the University of Pennsylvania and a distinguished scholar.  That mattered not to the students.  Some of the students went ballistic about me assigning this piece.  The class went downhill after that.

Let me add some things here that I conjecture about but don't really know.  Let's imagine that the conservative political views I described above are correlated positively with microaggressions, something that I don't think is too hard to believe.  Let's also consider the microaggressions themselves as symptoms rather than root cause, with the cause stemming from the students' underlying beliefs.  Then it will occur to some to want to address the cause directly. And in articulating why, one reason will be to protect students from microagresssions, which is consistent with the Student Code. But another reason will be to benefit the students who are apt to commit the microaggressions, to give them a healthier value system on which to based their judgments and actions.  If my experience in that behavioral econ class is any indication, there would be a lot of pushback from some segment of the student population that this is the worst sort of paternalism, liberals imposing their values on conservatives.  If something like this is to be expected, the issues are whether a treating the symptoms only approach can be effective and, if not, how progress can be made otherwise. 

The last anecdote is aimed at reminding us that a student being uncomfortable in class can at times be a good thing; the discomfort fosters learning and the student feels it should be overcome via the student's own efforts.  The following passage is from a Chinese-American student who took my class last fall, writing in her last post of the semester.  She liked the course but was nonetheless uncomfortable in participating in class discussion.

At first I was worried about the blogging since I feel that I am a horrible writer. I dreaded writing essays ever since middle school. It is usually tough for me to formulate my thoughts and make them flow. I would sometimes spend several hours on these posts, but most of that time, I was thinking about what to write and how to start writing about it. After that obstacle, it was a bit easier. Despite the difficulty, this was actually my favorite part of the course because I was pushed to make connections between my real life experiences and the economics behind it. If a professor were to just teach me topics like transfer pricing and the Shapiro Stiglitz model with definitions and graphs, there is no way I would recall the material several weeks from now, but bringing it to a personal level in these blog posts really helps with absorbing the concepts.Furthermore, I really enjoyed the structure of the class and the fact that it was discussion-oriented. Although I never talked, I felt engaged in the topics discussed and I was able to absorb a lot of information aside from days when I did not get much sleep the night before. You may have seen some "glazed" looks from me those times (I apologize for that). Moreover, the reason why I did not chime in as much as other students is because I either felt that I could not relate or was too shy to contribute. There were multiple times when I had wanted to but remained silent because I have a fear of being wrong in front of people even in the most trivial situations. This is due to a somewhat traumatic experience that happened in the past, but I am getting better! And hopefully I will continue to do so in the midst of searching for full-time jobs.

As my post title is about boundaries, an exploration of the boundary would consider what happens on both sides of it.  If instructors sometimes deliberately make students uncomfortable for good learning reasons, then student discomfort can't itself be taken as sufficient that there is a problem which requires some remedy.  What distinguishes the discomfort caused by microaggressions from the discomfort my student writes about?  Are those easy to parse or not?  We should be concerned with Type I and Type II errors here. 

* * * * *

What might we do to make things better?  Much activity of this sort probably should be about raising awareness.  If possible awareness would be about more than merely alerting people that there is a problem.  It would point them to instances where the problem doesn't manifest or where the problem has been overcome.  Then people might emulate these good examples.  Things will improve on campus if such emulation happens at scale.  But as the good examples might encourage some to deny that there is a problem at all, some documentation of the problem itself is surely necessary as well, just to counter the naysayers.

We live in a world where broad scale communication happens via social media, where online video is the preferred form of communication, and where if a video "goes viral"  it can then influence a very large audience.  I have made many instructional videos related to the courses I've taught.  None of these videos have gone viral.  I do not know "the trick" for making a video that will go viral.  So what I say next should be taken as aspiration only, not a game plan that were it followed is known ahead of time to succeed.

There are two courses on campus that I am aware of that satisfy the Advanced Composition Gen Ed requirement and entail video production.  One of these is Writing with Video.   The other is Writing Across Media.  Students do projects in these classes.  A part of each project is making a video from scratch.  This semester, one of my students from last fall is taking Writing with Video.  As part of one of his projects, he did a video interview with me and a clip from that became part of his project.  Based on this, I suspect many students taking these classes are looking for appropriate subjects for their projects and for people whom they can video interview.

What if the principal investigators of the Racial Microaggressions paper met with the course coordinators of the video production classes, offering to send a solicitation to all the students who were asked to complete the survey that formed the basis of their paper, asking those students whether they'd be willing to appear in a video interview as well as to identify friends they might have of another race who'd be willing to appear along with them?  Part of the solicitation would be to note that the video projects might very well have a half-life beyond the course where the projects are created, so to also request that the students being interviewed give permission to make the videos public.  If such a solicitation produced some positive response this would enable a social experiment aimed at making things better.  (There are a host of logistical issues that would need to be addressed to make this work.  I am not going to get into those here.  My point is that something like this might be tried, not how to orchestrate it if it were tried.)

Beyond this, what of diversity education for faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants that would be of the opt in kind?   There are many potential venues for this.  The various college teaching academies offer one possibility.  CITL has a variety of different workshop series that provide a different possibility.  But who with the appropriate expertise would offer these sessions and wouldn't they end up mainly as preaching to the choir? 

Scratching my head about this for a while it occurred to me to trying something like a particular training session for learning technologists that I was involved in for the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Program back in 2007.  We made a video vignette of a "how not to" kind, deliberately campy in style so that when it was shown to the group in attendance it elicited quite a bit of laughter.  After the showing of the video was completed, the group was instructed to find all the errors that were made during the video.  It worked remarkably well in that setting.  So my question is might something similar work for diversity education?  I should note here that though we didn't plan it at the time that video was used again in later institutes, after the people who were involved in the video were no longer in attendance. 

At issue here is whether the real felt pain from actual microaggressions gets diminished this way, so as to disregard the problem that the training is trying to address.  If that happened, of course, then this sort of approach would fail in a fundamental way.  So there would be a risk in trying this, no doubt.  But there seems to me an upside potential as well.  If the videos were sufficiently illustrative of what is at issue then the campy humor would help to make the audience larger and the message better understood.  For that reason it seems to me worth trying, though I will admit here I'm entirely uncertain as to who would get the ball rolling. 

Let me wrap up.  Ghandi said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."  To this I'd add that up front most of us don't know what it is we want.  We need to think it through, try out some tentative possibilities, and then go from there. So let's talk about this some more, let's try some things while we're doing that, and in so doing let's make things better by practicing the art of the possible. 

Universities supposedly have a bunch of smart people working for them.  Why do they continue to rely on such poor methods for evaluating teaching?  Is this really the best that can be done?  Why haven't we seen innovation in this area?  (Simply putting the paper evaluations online doesn't count as innovation to me.)  Below let me suggest questions to ask that might motivate the type of innovation I have in mind.

Let me begin by noting that often when I attend a workshop on teaching there is an evaluation performed at the end.  This is for a single session, which usually goes for an hour.  It suggests the possibility that something similar could happen in a course.  Indeed, I tried this once in my own teaching.  Technically, I relied on Google Forms, which was easy to use and allowed me to share the results with the students.  Content-wise, I didn't try to imitate the end of semester course evaluations at all.  Instead I concocted my own metrics for what would be it a good class session.  (The reader should note that this was in an honors seminar with only 17 students.)  Eventually the students tired of this and the response rate got so low it didn't seem worthwhile any longer.  But while we were getting good response the information the students supplied helped to shape subsequent sessions and the students could see their own influence in the course trajectory.  So one might imagine early on that this sort of more formative feedback would encourage student participation.  If anyone else tried something like this one might not want to do each session individually, but say have the survey done at some frequency - weekly, biweekly, monthly, I'm not sure which of these is best - or if the surveys should only be at the start of the course and then taper off.  What I'd like to convey to the reader here is not that I know what is optimal, I don't, but in determining what is optimal there is some tradeoff in getting timely formative feedback while not burning out the students in providing that feedback.

So envision some system of formative feedback provided by the students within the semester.  Now a bunch of related questions.

• Should that feedback be used only within the class or should it shared with the department and others on campus to count for measuring teaching performance?
• Should the type of questions asked in the formative feedback be standardized (within department, within college, on campus) to make cross course comparisons,  the way instructors ratings are now used for measuring teaching performance?  Would standardization of this sort lessen the effectiveness of the feedback?   Would it, in contrast, encourage more instructors to try the approach?
• Suppose, hypothetically, that an outside observer were also to attend each class session.  Would that observer come up with similar impressions to the students, as measured by the questions on the feedback form, or differ from the students in significant ways?  Would it then matter who that observer was, whether a faculty member in the same department, a faculty member in a different department, a campus pedagogy expert, a student not taking the course but instead representing the student senate, or outsiders of campus on an accreditation visit?  
• In that seminar class I didn't give exams.  Should there be formative assessment about the exams too?  (In a recent piece in the New York Times, Richard Thaler, one of the founding fathers of Behavioral Economics, wrote that students care about raw scores on exams even when there is grading on a curve, so rationally they shouldn't care. But they seem to prefer when the outcomes are near 100 in raw score, which seems to convey the message that mostly they understand - even if it really doesn't.)  If such formative assessment was given and if it indicated student disposition about the exams and if that proved to correlate highly with how the course was rated in the end of term evaluation, what would the campus response be?  After all, in this contingency the data would be showing that course evaluation is essentially irrational reaction to testing. Wouldn't that put pressure on campus to lessen its reliance on course evaluations for evaluating teaching?

I could go on, but I hope with this brief list that the reader gets enough of an idea of possible innovations with teaching evaluation and that much experimentation in this domain would be a very good thing, to point at innovations that really make things better

Let me close with one other point.  The piece linked below talks about instructors manipulating their course evaluations, with one technique baking chocolate chip cookies for the students.  So there has been some innovation in the way courses are conducted generated by need to boost teaching evaluations.  Might some of these innovations in instruction be useful if severed temporally from when the end of semester evaluations are given?

In particular, I like the idea of having a celebration in class somewhere around mid semester and I'm all for the instructor bringing in treats for this purpose.  It creates a little bond between teacher and students and it shows that at least in some ways they're all on the same team.   I came to understand this a few years ago when in the middle of the semester I spent 5 days in the hospital and had to miss a couple of classes as a result.  That hospital stay coincided with Halloween, which my wife and I missed that year.  As a result there was a bunch of candy in the house.  The first class where I returned to teaching I had each student come up to the front of the classroom, give me a high five, and take a piece of candy.  I know I was touched by that moment.  I think some of the students were as well.

The next year (I now teach one course a year) around the same time of the semester I received a small inheritance.  This was a different cause for celebration.  This time it was donuts and cider.  I ditched the high five, though now I'm not sure why.  Then last fall we had a celebration again, though this time there was no external event that warranted the celebration.  It just seemed to me a good thing to do based on the prior experience. 

Are there other things instructors might do as regular practice that they first tried just to boost their teaching evaluations?  I don't know.  I do know that we don't experiment enough with our teaching overall and if some experiments happened for less than ethical reasons, that should not itself condemn the practice, particularly if the ethical issues can be addressed.  So let's improve teaching evaluation.  And in the process, let's improve teaching as well.

I have a fondness for old underwear.  The give and take between its shape and mine has reached a tacit understanding.  With something new you're never sure what you're getting.  I trust the tried and true.  It's not that I'm averse to taking risks of any sort.  I experiment - fairly often - with my teaching and sometimes with my writing too.  Some prior thinking, wishful though it may be, suggests a likelihood of success.  The thinking can be wrong and sometimes the thinking is okay but the execution is poor.  Either way, the experiment fails.  I can handle the failure, at least most of the time. I understand the principle, nothing ventured nothing gained.  And I believe that over the long haul an experimental approach produces much better results on average.

What I dislike, detest really is a better word to describe my feelings, is to be scammed.  I recall being scammed in the 1980s, when I was still single.  I was trying to buy a dining room table, custom made by the Amish with my own design on the top.  I went through the middle man in Champaign, which proved to be a big mistake.  I should have gone to Arthur and negotiated directly with the people who would build the table.  As it played out, the middle man took my money for a down-payment, then nothing.  Eventually I heard that the store went bankrupt.  It was probably already on the verge of that when I gave him my check.  My paying was throwing money down the drain. 

Some years later my parents were scammed by their then financial adviser, who worked at Prudential-Bache.  It was part of a larger scam; it wasn't just this one guy who was the one rotten apple.  Nonetheless, this guy was really slimy.  He took language lessons from my mom at our house, which in retrospect amounted to a way to get my parents to drop their guard and take this guy at his word.  My parents were retired and this was their life savings we're talking about.  The whole thing was vile.

I tell these stories to note that in both cases the person being scammed was highly educated.  In my case, indeed, my degree is in economics, which at a minimum should make make me wary of the moral hazard that is present in any such transaction.  And nowadays I teach about this very thing in my economics of organizations course.  Market transactions come at a cost, as Coase noted.  Sometimes those costs manifest as scamming.  Even in my parents' case, while my mom was pretty clueless about financial transactions, which is why I paid her bills and managed her portfolio after my dad passed away, my dad was a lawyer and knew which way is up.  Yet it wasn't enough to get him to walk away from the con before it had a chance to play out.  There is a lot of talk about predatory behavior on the poor and uneducated.  I have no doubt that this happens, in great volume.  But I want to note that being upper middle class and well educated doesn't itself make you immune from these threats, even if it does lessen the risk.

I don't know how you'd measure this in a meaningful way, but I have a sense that the scamming is on the rise.  Consequently, I've begun to see it everywhere, including in quite ordinary settings.  Consider for example the checkout at the grocery store.  Did they always have tabloids and candy at the checkout or is that a comparatively recent phenomenon?  I don't know.  I can remember as a kid going shopping with my mom at Bohack's or Waldbaum's and that the store was so crowded, unlike the wide aisles there are now where I shop.  But I have no recollection of what the checkout was like then.  Since in some sense "the market works," the placement of those items in the store is a tribute to human weakness as a driver of some (much) of our behavior.  I don't know if the tabloids can be found elsewhere in the store as well.  I'm quite sure the candy has its own aisle.  One can walk right past that aisle, no problem.  One cannot avoid checkout.  The bible says, "lead us not into temptation."  The market says otherwise.

Then think of the sponsored ads in Facebook, which appear in the right sidebar adjacent to your news feed, just below the trending items.  Those ads have a tabloid feel to me and recently I've had the thought that the checkout at the grocery is being recreated in other facets of our lives, often in virtual environments where they are even more pernicious because they appear to be omnipresent.  I never bought a tabloid at the grocery store - never.  (It's not that I'm a purist.  When I did ride the subway during the summer after my sophomore year in college, I would on occasion pick up a discarded copy of the Daily News that somebody left on their seat.  But I never paid for a copy of the Daily News myself and most people wouldn't even regard it as a tabloid.)   Quite recently I have clicked on occasion on those ads in Facebook.  We do things on our own computers at our own homes that we'd never do in public. 

Next, think about those online threats that are obviously more pernicious, phishing and malware.  Because I still monitor some listservs for information technologists I know that phishing threats are on the rise.  I know further that on my own campus they've taken a proactive step to deter phishing by not allowing an immediate click through on links embedded in email.  This seems necessary, though it is somewhat cumbersome.  Anyone remember the Microsoft Vista OS?   The necessity has arisen because education efforts aimed at making users more alert to phishing have failed.  I asked myself why education of this sort doesn't seem to work.  When I was in the campus IT organization I argued for more of this sort of education effort.  I really don't know the answer to this question, but my guess is that advertising is so pervasive and people click through so often, mainly in an unthinking way, that too often they don't perceive the threat until it is too late.

The economist's "solution" to all this moral hazard as scamming, which should gum up markets so they don't function well at all, is to look to "money burning" for the answer.   The issue is inference and what an uninformed consumer makes out of such an action by an informed seller, given that at first such money burning appears entirely irrational.  A paper that influenced my thinking at the time I read it, by Milgrom and Roberts, treats product pricing and advertising as conjoined signals of product quality.  The argument is very clever.  But it is either wrong or incomplete when applying the theory to practice.  Too often consumers make the wrong inference, in actuality.  In theory, consumers figure out what is going on. This seems true not just for ordinary folks like me and my parents.  It seems just as true for top-flight regulators vis-à-vis the markets they are supposed to keep on the straight and narrow. Consider that Alan Greenspan thought the financial markets were self-regulating.  How could he believe that considering all the evidence to the contrary?

* * * * *

I rarely go to the movie theaters these days.  The last picture I can recall seeing at the theater was Lincoln.  One reason for this is that my tastes diverge from the mainstream so that even so-called good movies quite likely won't appeal to me.  Couple this with an inherent sensibility as a cheapskate; the thought of paying money to sit through a movie I don't like offends me.   As an alternative I sometimes surf the various movie channels on the satellite TV to see whether any appeal to me enough that I might record them.  The supply is abundant.  Very few of the films make it through my own internal filter.  I can't explain what it takes for a picture to grab me.  Even some of the films I do record I end up watching only a bit and then turn them off. 

Last week, when the rest of the family was out of town, I recorded two such movies that I hadn't seen before.  The first I'll mention is The Wolf of Wall Street.  It gets quite high ratings on the IMDB site and the main review is very favorably disposed to the film.  But I could only watch a little of it before I became disgusted with it and turned it off.  The story is told from the perspective of the scammer, the consummate salesman, a complete bs artist.  It's not a perspective that provides entertainment for me.

The other movie is Noah.  It starts off in a weird way, with odd special effects.  It occurred to me while watching it that I really only have the briefest of sketches in mind about the Noah story - the flood, the saving of the animals, the building of the Ark.  I don't know the details at all.  I had the sense at the beginning of the movie that it was straying substantially from the story.  So I paused it and went to read the review at IMDB.  The review confirmed my suspicion.  It said the movie was horrible as did the generally low rating.  Nevertheless, I continued to watch it.  I did find a different review that was quite enchanted with the film and its director, Darren Aronofsky.  That was part of the reason I kept viewing.  The other part was asking how Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly would agree to make a film that seemed this bad.  I recalled the Freedom Writers had started out pretty awful and for the first half hour was hard to view, but ultimately turned into a worthwhile film.  By the end of Noah, I felt likewise.  And maybe it didn't stray too far from the actual Noah story, though on that I'm not sure and I'm not driven to read it just now.  Here I simply want to consider it an allegory that is relevant to the present.

Noah has the reputation as an honest, strong, and good man. This is why "The Creator" chose him.  (The word "God" is not mentioned in the move.)    But Noah makes a mistake in trying to understand what The Creator has asked him to do.  Noah correctly understands it is his task to save the animals.  But he incorrectly infers that mankind is to die out, as punishment for all the sins.  This includes his own progeny, who themselves have not sinned.  Noah sees there is badness in all of us humans.  From that he infers that humans should not be allowed to live beyond saving the animals, who don't have the evil in them that is in humans.  Based on this belief Noah makes a horrible and irreversible mistake.  He allows the potential mate for his son Ham to die when he was in a position to save her.  Where the son trusted the father until then, now the son has doubt about whether that trust is warranted and if instead he should seek vengeance on his father for this horrible act.

Further, by a miracle, the wife of Noah's other son, Shem, is taken with child after she had been thought to be barren from a near fatal injury wrought in childhood.   Noah pledges that if the baby is female he will kill it, to keep his promise that mankind must die out.  By his behavior Noah loses the embrace of his wife and the rest of his family.  They plot to rescue the parents and the baby.  But Noah foils the plot.  At birth it turns out there are twins, both girls.  Noah starts in on the task of ending their life.  But he can't go through with it.  They live and mankind can then regenerate.  Noah becomes a recluse, punishing himself for his bad acts.  At the end of the movie, however, he reconciles with his family, who have forgiven him.  They wonder why he didn't carry through on his promise to kill the babies.  Noah tells them that when he looked at the babies he saw goodness in them.

* * * * *

When I was in college it was popular to believe that you could judge a person by how they acted when the chips were down.  Somebody who came through then you could trust.  Somebody who punted then was a jerk.  Subsequently I learned there's a bit more to it.  First, there may be a  mitigating circumstance so that a person doesn't come through but that is not enough for you to infer the person is a jerk.  Second, many of us are neither purely trustworthy nor purely a jerk.  We have our better angels but at other times make a pact with the devil.  Batting average matters here.  Then there is that ignoring ordinary behavior and looking only at situations where the chips are down is throwing out a lot of information, some of which is apt to matter.  Someone who regularly demonstrates small acts of kindness in circumstances that aren't quite so stressful deserves to be trusted.

As a campus administrator I learned about a different way to earn trust.  This was about how to manage bad news.  The approach is called "No Surprises" and is based on the idea to get bad news out early, so people can act on it and take appropriate mitigations.  I should note here that getting bad news out early is not something that will be appreciated at the time.  People will react to the bad news, first and foremost.  The fact that you're letting them know early is of secondary importance to them, at best.  So No Surprises works primarily in the negative.  If you conceal bad news that in retrospect does come out and people feel they were entitled to hear the news early, then your reputation for honesty is lost and it subsequently becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to repair the reputation afterwards.  In other words, No Surprises is the policy you embrace when you realize that the cover up is always worse than the original crime.

You would think that No Surprises would epitomize decision making within Higher Ed administration, but my experience is that is often not true.  The near term goal arises to "control the story" and such a goal is inconsistent with No Surprises.  So information that might have some elements of bad news in it gets held closely and is not released for public consumption.  Bad news invites criticism.  The fear that such critique might turn into a tidal wave of protest via social media, a fear that has some foundation, tends to trump the potential good from avoiding a coverup. 

Many people make free speech their cause.  They argue that when dissenting voices are silenced we all lose.  We become too smug in our own beliefs.  We fail to see the error in our ways.  This view gets sanction, of course, from the First Amendment of the Constitution.  There is no Amendment of the Constitution that directly addresses No Surprises.  There is instead something else, a tradition of muckraking based on Freedom of the Press.  It is the job of the Fourth Estate to expose the bad news.  One can't trust people in authority to disclose it on their own.

As an empirical matter this is perhaps true.  But I'd like to look at the two taken together, freedom of speech and No Surprises both.  Were both to hold sway, public criticism of ideas must be a normal function, something that is tolerable, even if the criticism is expressed in extreme form.  But real and meaningful criticism, the type that promotes debate which forces the original ideas either to strengthen or to die out, seems a rarity to me nowadays.  Instead, we have the preaching to the choir type of critique only, which forces positions to harden rather than to be reconsidered.  And in this way No Surprises has a potential very large role to play to reverse things, because people in the know don't see the release of information as an ethical issue to which they themselves are accountable.  If it were otherwise, it could very well shift the nature of the debate itself.

* * * * *

In this last section I want to briefly consider Paul Krugman's column from last Friday on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  This is the salient paragraph from the piece:

In any case, the Pacific trade deal isn’t really about trade. Some already low tariffs would come down, but the main thrust of the proposed deal involves strengthening intellectual property rights — things like drug patents and movie copyrights — and changing the way companies and countries settle disputes. And it’s by no means clear that either of those changes is good for America.

In writing this Krugman is taking on the Obama administration.  Not that long ago, Krugman was found extolling the Obama Presidency.  So this critique is unlike the criticism, really ridicule is a better description than criticism, of the President from the Right, where Obama bashing has become a kind of sport.  While at the beginning of his essay Krugman lauds the administration for its mainly transparent approach in governing, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership the administration has been anything but.

Contrast what Krugman says to what Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker says in a recent interview on the Charlie Rose show.  She argues that TPP is mainly about opening up emerging markets in Asia, where high protective tariffs prevent U.S. firms from competing, "on a level playing field."  It is believable to me that the overall picture is sufficiently complex that there are instances which support what the Secretary says.  But those instances don't suffice in making the argument.  What is the the gist of TPP?  I can't determine this on my own.  I rely on what I read about from pundits like Krugman and what I hear from government officials like Secretary Pritzker to form my opinion.  All I can say for sure is that regarding the gist of the TPP the two views are inconsistent. 

So I'm in a position where to make a determination I need to make an inference.   The facts that I'm aware of are insufficient in themselves to do the task.  In other words, I very well might be fooled.  Given that, I look at who has incentive to mislead me, which is deciding things on quite other than the merits of the arguments about TPP. 

If this is really the best that can be done, how is possible to keep the electorate from becoming extremely cynical, where it might not have been already?  Or am I reading this wrong?  I have several friends who are strong supporters of the President.  Several of them tend to agree with what Krugman says as well.  In this case you can be one or the other but not both.  It would be good for us to argue about TPP, but as I've already discussed in the previous section, we don't seem capable of having these sorts of discussions.  The loud tend to drown out the reasoned.   That becomes quite unpleasant.  Then why bother? 

In the movie Noah, Ham leaves the family because there is nothing left to keep him together with them.  That's the type of feeling I have now, on the scamming and on TPP as well.

In my second year of graduate school at Northwestern, 1977-78, I took the year-long graduate math analysis sequence.  The professor was Robert Welland, who had an interesting persona, with a certain flair and personal idiosyncrasy.  He kept his hair long and sometimes in the middle of lecture would pull out a comb to straighten his hair.  I've never experienced another instructor doing anything like that. In class, and in conversation too, he would often preface what he had to say with the admonition, "Christ, man!"  This was his alert that what you said wasn't quite on the mark.

I may have been the only non-math graduate student in the class, though of this I'm not sure, but Welland liked me for studying economics and, at least during the first quarter, that I seemed to have more on the ball than the other students.  He told me he read my face while in class to measure how his lecture was going.  If I seemed to show comprehension then things were going fine.  If I looked confused then he assumed the class as a whole was in trouble.

I may have had certain advantages over the other students to achieve this position.  Some or all of them may have been in the first year, and graduate school is a slug then.  Also, I had that topology class at Cornell which I've written about before, most recently here, so I had some confidence going in that I wasn't over my head with the math.  There is also that if you study pure math sometimes you lack for a sense of why the concepts matter.  The economics helped me there, in particular when we studied Hilbert Spaces, since the inner product of two vectors is used in economics where one vector is a price system and the other vector is a commodity bundle and then the inner product yields the value of the bundle. 

By the third quarter for sure and quite possibly earlier, some of the other students had overtaken me as class performers, but also by then Welland had formed an impression of me that would sustain.  The consequence is that a few times I had discussions with him outside of class and on topics mainly unrelated to coursework.  In one of those talks we are walking on the landfill east of Norris Center next to Lake Michigan.  He gives me his view of economics, which at the time was quite futuristic and in retrospect still seems remarkable to me.  He said that economics would die as a discipline as computing power took off and all transactions could be recorded and stored in some big database.  There no longer would be a need for economic models.  The data could tell the full story.

I don't know if Welland was aware of Moore's Law then or not, but even Gordon Moore wasn't predicting this law would hold over many decades at the time he made his famous prediction.  And computing was remarkably primitive when I took Welland's class.  This was before the personal computer.  If you wanted to run a program you had to write it up on punch cards and submit it for a batch job on the mainframe at the Vogelback computing center.  So, based on what was actually possible at the time, Welland's prediction seems kind of fantastic.  Nonetheless, it appears he had a substantial interest in economics, based on the book titles he authored, so he clearly came to his ideas with much forethought.

Though Welland didn't say this to me, his thinking seems to imply that socialism would eventually take over.  At the time I was in graduate school, decentralization was a popular idea among economic theorists.  Here decentralization means many atomistic decision makers making choices independently, coordinated by the invisible hand or some other mechanism, rather than decision making by one all powerful center.   There were other reasons for valuing decentralization apart from limiting computing ability.  Another biggie was limited speed in information transmission.  If the lag was too great, between the time when information emerged at the edge of an organization till the time that the information was received and well understood by the center, it would be more efficient for the decision to be made at the edge, even if the decision maker couldn't factor in other information that might be relevant to the decision.  A third issue was incentives.  People might have reason to misreport the true information, so as to increase private gain.  The last reason I'll mention here is complexity.  Centralized decision making works best when the nature of the information to be collected is already understood.  So, for example, a Web form could be used to elicit the requisite information.  Decentralization is apt to perform better when there is so much uncertainty that it is unclear even how to describe the current situation, in which case making some sense of it requires a good deal of creativity.

* * * * *

There still is economics as a discipline.  Welland was either wrong about the possibility that data can tell the full story or he under estimated how much computing power it would take to achieve that end.   But the recent rise in concern about smart machines coupled with emergence of analytics as a field makes it seem at least possible that we are marching toward Welland's vision.  I really don't know. Instead of further speculation, now I want to turn from how things actually are and likely to be in the near future to pure science fiction - how things might be if computing did advance in the way Welland envisioned. 

In this utopian vision, smart machines are the salvation to our economic woes and, to turn things on their head, enable the economy to fully employ all people who are willing to work, pay them a decent wage, and restore a middle class lifestyle to the bulk of the population.  How do we get there from here?  Let's envision a bunch of different open source software development projects into artificial intelligence that are aimed at fundamentally changing capitalism as we know it.  The first one, which I will describe in some detail for illustration, is called The Virtual CEO.

As our story opens, the year is 2050.  Moore's Law is miraculously still alive and well.  Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point that it is quite capable of performing the executive decision making function. Actually, it can perform it better.  The Virtual CEO never has a feeling in the gut to drive decisions.  All choices are made based on available data.  The Virtual CEO remains focused on long term objectives for the organization.  It cares not for scoring short term profit at the expense of long term positioning.  It is never venal and always fair with customers, employees, shareholders, and the larger community.

The Virtual CEO functions best in flat organizations that aim for democratic decision making with employee input an important factor.  Indeed, a big part of the impetus behind the open source software development project that has produced The Virtual CEO is to convert existing hierarchical organizations to this structure and to create new organizations with this structure that can out-compete the older hierarchical organizations in the marketplace.

Such organizations will feature a flat compensation scheme for employees.  Since the Virtual CEO, which really functions for all upper level management in the organizations, demands no compensation whatsoever, there is more revenue available to pay existing employees a decent wage with solid benefits and to actually take a labor intensive approach to the work the organization produces.  This is part of the underlying objective of the organization.  Another part is to do well by customers, offering them a good service at a fair price.  One of the sidebar consequences of the Virtual CEO project, an important one to be sure, is the discovery that people would much rather interact with other people than with machines, once they are convinced that the people are there to help them rather than to screw them.  Machine interaction is maintained for the routine stuff but much is not routine.  It is heavily customized.  In effect, each customer has become the designer of an experience that the organization helps to provide.  Much of the organization staff serve as consultants for this design.

Still another part of the object is for the organization to be socially responsible.  There are several components to this.  One, of course, is to embrace environmentally friendly production techniques.  Another is to be a contributor to the community where the organization is located, to help keep it a place where people want to live and interact outside of work.  A third is to be a fair competitor in the marketplace.  This means that product and service quality are what the organization focuses on.  The organization shuns market manipulation via merger or acquisition, predatory pricing, and other unfair practices.  A codicil in the organization charter prevents individual shareholders from  concentrating ownership.  The Virtual CEO software maintains a steady vigilance, much like current day anti-virus software, to ward off attempts at stock purchases aimed at concentrating ownership, masked by the names of faux individual owners.

Companies run by the Virtual CEO software might still fail from time to time, either because the product they set out to develop failed to realize its potential or because competitors came up with something better and they couldn't catch up.  But companies managed by the Virtual CEO software share information to better mitigate general business risk and thereby to better anticipate where they should be heading.  The Justice Department is okay with this sort of information sharing because they know it won't be used for insider trading or other market manipulation.  In this way the market coordinates where human managed firms never could, so some of the needless destruction we associate with capitalism is avoided.

As a consequence, the half-life of a Virtual CEO managed organization is longer and such places of work become attractive career opportunities. In turn, part of the Virtual CEO software aims to manage employee careers, providing opportunities for personal growth, suitable mentorship, and helping each employee balance work with life events. 

* * * * *

This vision is deliberately ironical in viewing automation as a substitute for the top executive function, instead of how it currently is regarded by going for the lowest rung of the ladder first and the climbing to successive rungs.  It seems clear who in the current ways of things would resist this sort of change, so would be cast in the role of heavy in our story.  I wish I knew how to write a compelling short story myself, that would be a fun and engaging read, to create a broad audience for these ideas.  But I lack that sort of skill.  Perhaps one of my readers will take up the challenge.

To conclude this piece,  let me note that once the premise from the previous section is embraced, that executive function can be performed well by artificial intelligence, then there are clearly many other areas of our economy where we'd want to see it deployed.  Given its current very low approval rating, who wouldn't want a Virtual Congress, for example?

But the real reason to have such a story, or perhaps many such stories with a similar theme, is to get us to ask what would things look like if they were fundamentally better than they are now.  If we could actually agree on that, couldn't we try to head in that direction without machines needing to run the show?  Then, wouldn't we have benefited from Welland's vision even if he was quite wrong in his prediction?  Sometimes, I think, it is better to have the intelligent mistake than the right answer.

Senator Elizabeth Warren at the Re/code conference was asked a question about getting voters to participate and tying that to requisite investment in America.  She responded first with the sort of investment the questioner was talking about, then by blaming the plutocrats, and then saying the only way for things to change is for voters to get mad as hell - the Howard Beale line.  She is right that these things are needed but she is wrong in seeming to imply that this can somehow happen on its own.  It can't.

First, even if the Democrats retain the White House, if Republicans maintain control of Congress, even just one branch of Congress, little can be accomplished.  This possibility looks likely from here.  Understanding that, the response of the typical voter is more inclined to be "Woe is me" than it is "I'm madder than hell."  Something needs to be done to break this realistic and dismayed apathy.

Second, if one were to do a serious post mortem on the initial stimulus package in Winter 2009 after President Obama took office, while it may be concluded that it was the best that could be done at the time, given the rush job that was necessary to get the bill passed, it generated a lot of criticism and disgust from the other side that there was no discipline about what got into the bill.  Were the Democrats to actually sweep Congress in the 2016 election, would something similar happen again?  Voters likely wouldn't want that.  They'd want what the country needs but not in addition the private agenda of each Democratic member of Congress.  If voters are expected to participate in great numbers, they should demand, in return, some assurance of disciplined legislation to rebuild the country.

Third, Rome wasn't built in a day and one should not expect America to be rebuilt via one election cycle, even if the 2016 elections are very important.  The requisite sort of investment needs to be sustained.  The idea that there is a negative reaction to the in party so the following cycle flip flops who is in control, needs to be squarely addressed.  Otherwise this looks like a lot of talk but not a real commitment to action.

My regular readers know that I wrote a document last December calls How to Save the Economy and the Democratic Party - A Proposal, that attempted to address these issues.  I didn't really expect it to get much traction, but I was hoping to see something similar from party leaders, like Elizabeth Warren.

Our media fascination with the Presidential election fails us here, given that divided government produces gridlock.  We need voters to be aware of Congressional races much more than they have in the past to understand whether the candidates for House Membership and the Senate share the same views about the appropriate policy with the Presidential candidate.  Voters really want to approve a shared policy agenda that makes sense to them.  The process as it is now leaves much of that agenda to be negotiated once the candidates have assumed office.  It is that process which must change if voters are to turn out in high numbers.

Is it possible for that message to get through to the party leadership?

I am responding to the article linked above, particularly to the paragraph that's been excerpted, especially the line - those were hardier souls.  I doubt that very much.  Certainly, I was not.

In tenth grade, I was mugged along with a friend of mine while we were on the stairwell at Cardozo H.S.  The school was on split session and in tenth grade we started our classes at 11:40 AM.  This happened before that first class.  The incident cause me a great deal of distress emotionally in its aftermath and was a contributing factor to having a depression later that year.

Subsequently I had a meeting with my mom and some Associate Principals who handled that sort of thing.  They asked me why I didn't fight back.  I was 6'1" and about 240 lbs.  So they seemed surprised, though I've never been in a real fight in my life and couldn't punch my way out of a paper bag. Rationally, I lost 3 dollars, not much in the grand scheme of things.  Who knows what would have happened had I tried to resist. 

I really have no sense of how common it was to get mugged at school, but I was panhandled waiting outside of school quite regularly and gym class was something of a nightmare as well.  So the feeling of being afraid in one's environment was fairly frequent, though I want to make it clear that most of the time I felt perfectly safe.  Had there been a way to feel safe 100% of the time, I surely would have embraced it, even if I didn't learn to tough it out.

For some reason, reading the piece linked above triggered some memory of the Bernie Goetz shooting and that much of the public reaction to this was enthusiastic endorsement. 

Harvard Professor of Government James Q. Wilson explained the broad sentiment by saying, "It may simply indicate that there are no more liberals on the crime and law-and-order issue in New York, because they've all been mugged."

My point here is that what you regard as sensible behavior versus being completely over the top depends on perception of the risk.  Vigilante justice isn't. But it might seem otherwise when no other deterrent manifests.

I also want to take on the argument that somehow we all learned to argue vigorously with people whom we have fundamental disagreement.  My first year at MIT I sometimes would go to the Union for socializing.  Quite frequently, some Christian Fundamentalists would come over to proselytize.  I had absolutely no desire to engage with them then and on that things haven't changed at all since, except that now I will walk away at the start while then I thought that rude and initially I didn't want to be rude.  I didn't learn anything constructive from these encounters.  To assume otherwise seems to me idealistic beyond belief.

Where I learned about collegiality and disagreement was at 509 Wyckoff Road, after I transferred to Cornell and I argued with housemates about politics (but not about religion).   This happened with people I liked and respected, even if I disagreed with them now and then.  You can disagree if a spirit of trust has been established.  That's as hardy as I ever got.

But maybe Judith Shulevitz, author of the piece, isn't referring to me and my generation but rather to my parents and their cohort, coming of age during the Great Depression and surviving the Holocaust.  My parents probably were tougher than I am, though when they retired they moved to Century Village, a gated community seemingly full of displaced New Yorkers, located in Boca Raton Florida.  So much for learning to deal with the riff raff. 

Coming up is an anniversary of sorts.  I actually started writing posts for this blog in February 2005, but for the first few months I had a very small audience - the bulk of the comments were from Burks Oakley, who got me started with ALN way back when, ten more years before that, and was one of the handful of people I alerted about this blog. 

The particular event I'm referring to is a post by Scott Leslie on his Edtechpost site announcing my blog and recommending it as a worthwhile read.  From there Stephen Downes picked it up.  Suddenly I had a bunch of readers. 

What has changed in the way I go about writing for the blog over those ten years?  One big thing is that I was much more connected to the profession then, the profession being educational technology or, if you prefer, teaching and learning with technology.  I am quite disconnected now and maybe that makes me less interesting to read.  Another thing, style-wise, I was quite conscious of running two or three parallel threads in each post that I would "weave" together.  I thought of it then as a way to make the writing richer and also as a way to imitate my role model in writing, Stephen Jay Gould (his writing for the New York Review of Books).  I no longer try to do this explicitly, though it happens now and then.  I now simply consider the blogging as a think aloud exercise and aim for coherence in the argument. 

The last thing I will mention about what has changed is that I'm much less interested in the technology itself now.  When I started the blog the campus was just beginning to roll out its enterprise learning management system, which we called Illinois Compass (the software was WebCT Vista), and at the time that was my baby.  Looking back at the history, the technology part of that project crowded out the learning part to a large extent, in a way that seems inevitable to me now.  Then I wanted to be mainstream and pull the campus along, with technology the hook for doing so.  Now I prefer my own idiosyncratic ways even if they don't generate any followers.

Economists aren't much concerned with the emotional side of decision making.  Even behavioral economics, with its hyperbolic (time inconsistent) discounting and its thinking fast and slow (time inconsistent and inconsistent in other ways as well), abstracts from much of  the emotional side in decision making.  Here I'm referring to stress and how people respond to it, quite apart from the merits of the case in the situation where a choice must be made, irrespective of what those merits are.  It seems to me that we should pay more attention to the emotional side, learn to speak openly about it, and teach our students about it as well.

Let me begin with a mantra I developed  when I was a campus level administrator:

Anybody can be a hero in a sprint.  Nobody is a hero in a marathon. 

The slogan makes the most sense if the normal situation is neither sprint nor marathon, but something else and that while not entirely stress free is reasonably manageable.  Then the decision maker encounters an unusual situation, in which case an important thing to identify is whether it is a sprint or not.  In a sprint the adrenalin rush, putting in yeoman's hours, and in general rising to the occasion is sufficient to restore things to normal.  The fire does get put out.  People can breathe a sigh of relief.

This, however, is not the right way to respond in a marathon. With the sprint response the person will wear down completely, well before the issue has reached any sort of resolution.  What then?  Part of the answer must be self-protection.  The person needs to get enough sleep, exercise with some regularity, eat right, provide enough recreation that is real diversion, etc.  In other words, everything that we associate with wellness needs to get done. 

But often that necessity is ignored.  Part of the reason is that people don't make the right determination of whether it is a sprint or marathon.  Another part is that they feel responsible and the sprint response is the only way they know how to discharge that responsibility.  A third may be that early on the sprint response is actually thrilling, so it becomes addictive.  The harm from wearing down takes a while to happen.  Absent the proximate cause, the problem is ignored until it is too late.

Many of my friends in higher education who hold administrative positions seem to have gotten beaten up on the job.  The circumstances I'm referring to are self-evident to other campus administrators (or former administrators like me) but may be invisible to faculty and staff who haven't had to confront stress of this sort.  Budget duress is one obvious cause.  Another is the always on Internet and that criticism is apparently omnipresent.  There also may be less civility in our normal discourse - people understand that unless they complain, LOUDLY, they will be ignored.  This factor likely is a byproduct of the other two.  I mention it here because people tend to understand the tactical advantage conferred by their own loudness but to disregard the impact it might have on the well being of others at whom the loudness is directed. 

There is a natural tendency to block/deflect criticism when it is painful to address it squarely.  It may be necessary to do this as a survival skill, but it goes against the grain when considering what thoughtful leadership is supposed to be about, in particular thinking gray.  (See the first chapter of the Contrarian's Guide to Leadership.)  One wonders whether it is possible for campus administrators to sustain thinking gray while not getting beaten up in the present environment.   Finding that seems like the search for the Holy Grail.  It is that question which motivates the next bit, a look at antecedents and some consideration on how they matter, in the hope that something constructive might be done even if finding the Holy Grail remains elusive.

* * * * *

I'm taking my lead here from Eric Hoffer.  The following is from a post written five years ago that I think gives a good summary of the issues.

I didn't have my fill of Hoffer and looked for more of his writing. Ultimately I found Between the Devil and the Dragon. The Library has a copy, which I checked out. The Dragon, we learn immediately, is the symbol of our struggle with nature, a concept that is earlier than the Devil, which he attributes to the Hebrews. They were the first group to see man as living above nature. God made nature, but God made man in his own image. Once living above nature is possible, a different battle commences, the one with our inner selves. The fall happened in the Garden of Eden, when innocence was lost. As we evolved from brutes, the devil emerged to do us ongoing battle. The devil was there with God, right at the outset. Compassion is the result when a battle with the devil is won.

Let's translate this into the current discussion.  I will define shyness here as stress found in a situation that many others (who are confident) would not perceive as stressful.  The shy person is aware that others think of the circumstance as ordinary.  Hence there is shame about being shy.  The sense of shame compounds the stress.  The molehill has turned into a mountain.  It is the shame piece rather than the initial stress where the devil is found. 

The shy person gives into the devil by making an apparent safety play - not engaging with others and remaining quiet.  There is fear of calamity in doing otherwise.  But complete disengagement is not really safe, as it means life passes one by.  Over time, with at first very tiny experiments at interaction, the shy person learns to overcome these limitations to some degree, finding some circumstances where engaging in them more fully is possible. Then when interacting the shy person is apt to be charitable and collegial, understanding full well how fragile comfort and security in interaction actually is.  This is where the devil has been defeated and compassion found.

Hoffer makes another related point, about the source of creativity.  Hoffer divides people into the strong and weak.  The strong are satisfied with the status quo and therefore don't require things to change.  The weak are distressed by how things are as they are traumatized by their current circumstance.  The weak look for solutions out of their dilemma.  That is the spur to creativity.  If a good solution is found the weak become strong as the status quo gets overturned.

It seems an easy translation to map the weak-strong distinction into the shy-confident version.  Much of Hoffer's argument remains intact.  But there is one point that needs elaboration.  Is the now confident person who was once shy compassionate about they shyness of others or instead, having repressed the memory of the former shy self, like the strong as Hoffer describes them?  I can imagine it either way, though my guess is that compassion would fade as the memory of the shy self fades with it.   In my way of thinking, this is another place where the battle with the devil manifests.  We should not let those memories die an easy death, painful as they might be.

This is especially important if most of us are like fish - sometimes in water, other times not.  In other words, if even the seemingly gregarious and confident person is placed in a sufficiently unusual and alien circumstance, the person then will act in a shy manner.  There are potential lessons to be learned from these experiences.  If we are to become more tolerant of one another, this is how it will happen.

There are other aspects of world view that differ whether one is strong or weak.  Looking at our personal history, the strong are likely to recount an earlier age when everyone was strong, as the weak were invisible to them then.  My post from a few days ago can be understood in this way, a weak person taking the strong to task for romanticizing the past, though the example I used had nothing to do with sexual misconduct, and I am a guy, rather large physically, so by an eyeball test wouldn't be taken as weak.

There is also the matter of how our social strictures should be designed to manage transgressions, when the weak get injured via some predatory behavior.  The strong are apt to embrace Social Darwinism.  In other words, the weak need to learn to fend for themselves from the School of Hard Knocks.  In contrast, the weak and their protectors among the strong think that society needs to defend the weak.  The predatory behavior must be proscribed.  Other protections need to be put in place as well.  You see these positions in our national politics when talking about income distribution, just as you see them on our campuses when considering Freedom of Speech versus showing respect for all individuals when in public discourse.

* * * * *

The previous discussion was done in quite an abstract way, making the argument divorced from any specific context.  I did that deliberately, to deflate the balloon so it wouldn't pop.  But now it's time for a real example that makes the emotion more evident.

Before getting to it let me make the following observation.  I'm writing this piece finishing it up Friday morning, a day after I started it.  In the middle of the day yesterday I read this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, For Northwestern, the Kipnis Case Is Painful and Personal.  The piece linked to another authored by Professor Kipnis, the one that started the maelstorm called, Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.   (The Chronicle errs by keeping these pieces behind its pay wall.  There is a general public interest in the issues raised in these essays, so they warrant a broader viewing then other content the Chronicle delivers.  For folks at Illinois, the links to the full pieces should work if you are on the Campus network or from home using VPN if you used TunnelAll as the Group when you connect.)   For as well as Professor Kipnis makes her argument, she wasn't an eye witness to what the graduate students went through.  So I thought it would be useful to consider a different situation, one where I was an eye witness, where the power relationships were similar but where there was no issue of sexual predation.  In that other context I draw something of the opposite conclusion that Professor Kipnis reaches.  Either one of use must be wrong or context matters a great deal in making these sort of arguments.  That is worth puzzling about and might add some additional interest to the example I provide.

This is about my first year in graduate school, 1976-77, coincidentally also at Northwestern, and in particular the macroeconomics courses we were required to take.  In the first quarter we had Robert Eisner, who seemed to us students at the time the real world embodiment of the fictional Professor Kingsfield from the film The Paper Chase.  Both kept a seating chart of the class using Delaney cards for that purpose.  Both would call on students in class by making reference to the seating chart, addressing the students as Mr. (or in one case Miss, there were 27 of us at first, only 1 was female) followed by last name.  Both would make some marking on the Delaney card based on how the student answered the question.  (It is worth nothing that John Jay Osborn, who wrote the novel that the film was based on meant it as a searing critique of the brutality of Harvard Law School in the way it treated the students.  While the film showed some of that, it also glorified this trial by ordeal by presenting it from the perspective of Mr. Hart, a student who flourished in this environment.  As I've come to learn, sometimes Hollywood takes rather dark fiction and puts a shine on it.  Another example of that is The Natural.)  Many of my classmates were intimidated by this course and on occasion humiliated when then couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer to Professor Eisner's question.  Fear can motivate some students to study hard.  But I've come to conclude it is not a desirable environment to promote in the classroom, as I will elaborate on below.

For my part, my reaction to Eisner was different.  He reminded me of my dad, which was a good thing.  I needed a father figure then.  He definitely sounded like a New Yorker, which for me was welcoming.  This was my first time staying for an extended period away from the East Coast and I was bothered by being the only New Yorker in the class.  (The Yankees being in the World Series and watching them at Norris Center along with others from New York also helped in this respect.)  And though I had only taken very little economics as an undergrad at Cornell, I was academically better prepared than most of my classmates and thus ready for the work the faculty threw at us.  (That said, we read Keynes'General Theory in Eisner's class and a good chunk of it was over my head.  But my guess is that the same can be said for many other economists who have read Keynes.  It is a sophisticated book and it's tough to make good meaning in some sections of it.) 

This sense of intimidation in the classroom continued into the second quarter of macro, this time taught by Robert Gordon.  He was also the director of graduate studies and the one in charge of making the financial aid decisions for the second year students.  He used his class as a screen for that purpose.  It made the students ruthless in a way that was its own sort of nonsense.  At the time we had readings from bound periodicals in the Library.  (In the first quarter the readings were mainly from a book by Breit and Hochman or available in the Reserve Room for a 2 hour loan.)  One student for sure, and perhaps a couple of others as well, tried to get a leg up on the rest of the class by getting to the bound periodical early and either re-shelving it in an improper location, so the rest of us couldn't find it, or ripping the article out of the binding, so the rest of us couldn't access it at all.  Perhaps some competition in the classroom is beneficial for learning.  But this was unfair competition that clearly was pernicious.

I should add here that the funding environment was brutal that first year and the program wasn't forthcoming about that fact until the first quarter was well underway.  Some of us, like me, were on fellowship.  Others received no stipend and indeed were paying tuition as well.  I don't know how many were on fellowship that first year but I was told that funding was being cut, so there'd be a smaller number on fellowship the second year.  (By the second year some students became research assistants and got funding that way, which was a partial offset.)  At the outset I had thought my fellowship was guaranteed, but it turns out it wasn't.  This tight funding contributed to the tension many of the students felt in the classroom.

The first of our cohort to drop out left after the fall quarter.  Another dropped in the middle of the winter quarter.  I found it particularly upsetting.  The program didn't seem to care about these people at all.  They were emotionally distressed.  One may have gone over the deep end.  That part I don't know well, but I have some memory of seeing the guy wandering aimlessly around campus.  Ultimately about half our cohort left.  In the second year, I believe there were only 13 of us.

I give Northwestern  high marks for the Economics training I received during that first year taking core courses.  I give them a failing grade, however, on showing human decency and caring about the welfare of each student, regardless of how the student was performing in the classroom.  I don't believe that Eisner intended the intimidating environment he created in his classroom.  I think it was just the style he was used to.  I'm less sure about Gordon.  But given that they gave us exams as well, it really wasn't necessary to use classroom performance as an additional screening mechanism.  Indeed, it didn't happen that way in the microeconomics sequence.  It also didn't happen in the third quarter of macroeconomics taught by Robert Coen.  Under Academic Freedom each professor has wide discretion on how to run his own classroom.  But if somebody else served as advisor to these students and learned how distraught they were about their classes, that evidence could be presented to instructors in a way that protected the individual identities of the students.  In turn, the instructors might then modify their approach in conducting class in a ways students would find more welcoming.

* * * * *

This experience in the first year of graduate school had a profound effect on my own teaching.  I have never used a seating chart and don't call on students in class as a performance measure.  Students sit where they like, on a first come first serve basis, though I'll admit that when I've taught in a classroom that has many more seats than students I do encourage those at the back of the room to move closer to the front.  Students can opt into the class discussion by raising their hand and having me call on them.  Students can also choose to remain quiet.  The decision is theirs to make.  While I don't do it perfectly, I try to make the classroom interesting and welcoming for the students.

I do think it is necessary for students to open up about their own formative thinking on the subject matter.  That is a critical aspect in their learning.  I give them more than one channel to do so.  Apart from participating in class discussion, which is voluntary, students are required to write weekly blog posts that I comment on and then they respond to my comments.  Many students are initially shy in this writing activity.  But the vast majority of the class comes to like it.  The students find my comments thoughtful, most of the time, and the comments are divorced from any grading, which comes much less frequently.  Constructive feedback on formative thinking is a way to encourage the students to open up in subsequent writing, possibly also in class discussion.

Starting with a fall 2009 seminar for students in the Campus Honors Program, I've gone through something of a sea change in my own thinking about class discussion.  I first wrote about it in a post called Teaching Quiet Students, which was a reflection on the issue as it pertained to that honors class.  Going in, my ideal was universal participation in the class discussion by each student contributing to it.  Since writing that post I've not taught in the honors program and, if anything, get even a smaller fraction of the class to participate in discussion on a regular basis.    What I've come to realize is this.

Some students who are perfectly comfortable raising their hands and asking a question or voicing an opinion nonetheless prefer to listen in class.  They are quiet not just in my class, but in all their classes.  That is their nature.  Other students are quite shy in the classroom.  It is not my job as a teacher to get them to overcome their shyness.  Indeed, as their inclinations are formed as much or more by the other classes they take, whatever I do in my classroom at most contributes to this overall environment rather than determines it decisively.  Giving students the opportunity to speak in class is consistent with this view.  Requiring them to do so and then evaluating their performance is not.

I also have some evidence, not a lot but some, of students overcoming their shyness in ways where they control the pace at which they do so.  Consider this rather poignant ultimate post for the semester from a Chinese-American student who is quite forthcoming about her own shyness in class.  A different student, this time an international student from China, also didn't say a word in class.  But she volunteered to participate in a weekly discussion group I ran this spring and became the most regular participant in that group.  I want to note here that in the discussion group, where there were two other students, both male and both international students as well, I did feel the setting sufficiently comfortable that I would ask them individually to contribute to the discussion if they hadn't don't so for a while.  It was non-threatening to do this sitting around a table drinking coffee or some other beverage.  The discussion group itself was not for credit.  Thus, I have seen that an otherwise very shy student can get comfortable in the discussion group setting, although it took a little while to reach that point of comfort.  Humor mattered a lot here.  It was easier for me to joke with them in the discussion group than it is for me to do likewise in class.  The humor helps everyone to relax.

It remains an open question for me whether something like this can scale and afford shy students opportunities to open up with instructors more on their own terms.  If it is possible, shouldn't it be a direction for the campus to head in?

* * * * *

I wonder what Professor Kipnis would make of the above argument.  I also wonder whether Professor Kipnis has witnessed shy students in her own classes or been aware of her own shyness or phobias in some areas not covered in her Chronicle essay.  It is possible that students in the School of Communication at Northwestern, where Professor Kipnis teaches, are prone to be extroverts and thus the experience may be much rarer for her than it is for me.

Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow develops a term he calls WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) to explain how a decision maker ignores information that is potentially available but not immediately and instead focuses solely on what is at hand when making a choice.  Reading her essay it was unclear to me whether Professor Kipnis was guilty of WYSIATI or not.  It might be she knows shy people, students and otherwise, but regardless of the context her view is that shy people need to learn to interact socially in a competent way and not drag their feet about it.  My preferred approach then would be too soft for her taste.

Alternatively, as I suggested above, it might be that the context matters.  I don't have a ready explanation for why the context should matter so I'd like to leave it an open question whether it does, while noting that if it does matter, discerning why might illuminate not yet articulated issues that are important to consider.  I will make one more point and then close.

The rhetorical style in Professor Kipnis' Chronicle essay is to argue for her preferred view of the matter and then to diminish counter arguments.  This is the style in a debate.   People take sides of an argument in a debate.  One side wins.  The other loses.   For those trying hard to think gray, perhaps hearing the full debate is just what the doctor ordered, in which case making a strong argument is the responsible thing to do.  But it may be that both sides are not presented equally well.  Then we get preaching to the choir instead of real debate.  In this case the socially responsible thing may be to present the issues not as one side in a debate but rather as a thinking gray exercise itself.  I tried to do that in the section of this essay where I discussed Eric Hoffer's philosophy.  As a general matter, if essayists in academe were to pose this sort of question for each public piece they write and then produce works of both types as a consequence, perhaps it will take some pressure off our campus administrators and keep them from getting so beat up.  That would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

What if Facebook added another button in addition to "Like?"  Suppose it said "Cogitating."  What would you be trying to communicate by clicking that button on somebody else's Status Update?  Might the person who posted the Status Update prefer that sort of response some of the time?

A less commented upon aspect of our always on, face into our portable devices culture is how we come to react to the information we receive on those devices.  The first-thing-that-popped-into-my-mind reaction seems prized over a more deliberate sort of thinking.  The syllogism that springs from such an observation goes like this.  If we are creatures of habit, and our habit is to give snap responses, then that is how we will make judgments all the time. And we'll come to believe that making such snap judgments is thinking, though it really isn't.

I am not entirely opposed to what Malcolm Gladwell calls thin slicing of information.  It is appropriate in certain domains, where an experts is looking at information of a repetitive sort from which a pattern has already been established.  What if the determination is being made by a non-expert, or if the circumstance is a one-off, or even if it is a repeat it is one where a pattern has yet to be found?  Do we really want snap judgments to be made in these instances as well?  Perhaps the reader can identify some instances where thin slicing is still desirable.  I don't want to deny that possibility.  But would any reader want to argue that it is desirable all the time?

I'm particularly interested in making judgments of the form - this is boring, let's look at something else, or of the form - this is really bad, can't we turn our attention elsewhere?  Consider the Big Bopper's famous song Chantilly Lace and, in particular, the tag line from the song - You know what I like.  Doesn't that sound like it blocks anything new, including stuff that is potentially pleasing?

I did a Google search on "how can you avoid snap judgment" (without the quotes). On the first page of hits is a piece by Judith Johnsson at Huffington Post Healthy Living site calle, Why You Should Break the Habit of Snap Judgments.  Here Johnson is referring to condemnation of others, something we do all too often, without recognizing the harm that is so created.  I agree.  We also need to stop making snap judgments about our own preferences.  There is harm in doing that as well. 

Max Beerbohm once declined to be lured into a hike to the Summit of a Swiss Alp. "Put me down," he said firmly, "as an anti-climb Max."
From page 40 of the Puns section in Jokes, Riddles, and Puns which in spite of (or maybe because of) the title is the middle section of the book. 

My dad got us that book in 1962, when I was 7.  His inscription said:  To Marlene, Lanny, and Peter - The joke's on me.  I have that book now.  It's something I took out of the old house before my parents sold it.  The book is a constant reminder of my dad and how important humor was to him.  Here's another from the book, our favorite.  It's from the last page of the Riddles section and is #2 in a series about the Bigger family.

Q:  Mrs. Bigger had a baby.  Now who was bigger?
A:  The baby, because he was a little bigger.

As much as I liked jokes of this sort, at some point in my life, I think it was during high school but maybe it was college or even later, I segued mainly from telling canned jokes to mostly trying for spontaneous humor, reacting to the situation, whatever it was.  I don't know what drove that exactly, but I'm guessing it came out of playing with friends.  Below are a bunch of snippets to illustrate.


This is before high school.  How much before I can't remember.  David Sterman was my best friend and his family had a second home in New Jersey that I went to on occasion along with them.  On the return of one of those trips David and I are sitting in the back seat of their car, with David's mom and dad up front.  His dad is driving.  We are laughing uncontrollably.  We did that fairly often.  Apparently we were getting on the nerves of David's Dad.  He told us to stop, but we wouldn't or couldn't.  So he made us count the license plate numbers of the cars ahead of us.  My parents never did that with us.


This is either junior or senior year in high school.  I'm not sure which.  We're on the math team and we took a course called math team workshop, which had its own weirdness and humor built in, from the antics of Harold Rosenthal, the former chair of the math department, to Feuerstein claiming he had a proof of The Butterfly Theorem, only he didn't. Mr. Conrad was the coach.  He told us if we didn't know the answer to a question to write eight over five pi.  (I'm spelling it out here.  We were supposed to write it in symbols.)  Not surprisingly, at a math meet there is a problem I can't get so I follow instructions, or so I thought.  Afterward Mr. Conrad gives me some grief, not because I didn't get the problem but because I wrote eight fifths pi.


Now it's definitely senior year in high school.  I'm playing on the tennis team, first doubles with my partner Jimmy Kraft.  And I'm driving him bonkers because in the middle of a match I'm singing to myself the jingle from the Diet-Rite Cola Commercial.

People who don't need it, drink it.
Folks not on a diet, try it.
Everybody likes it...Diet-Rite Cola.
Everybody likes it...Diet-Rite Cola.
Everybody likes - and you know why?
Cause it tastes so good. 

Kraftella thought this was a distraction, which is why it was annoying him.  But I have an inner need to keep singing it, a way to stay in the point.  The second line of the ditty grabbed me.  As a result, the rest did too.


This one is probably senior year too.  I am with some friends from the Program Office (possibly Leslie and Margot, maybe the Grooper as well) and one or two teachers (one was definitely Mr. Sarrel) and they've decided to go to Stratford to see a play by Shakespeare.  On the drive up we pass a pickup truck that has a bunch of tires in the cargo area.  I say aloud, "I wonder if that driver is tired."  My Sarrel responds, "Oh, Lanny!"  His response was appropriate.  It was a terrible joke, with no cleverness to it at all.  But it is one I remember telling, with it clearly situational, and evidently I didn't care about making a fool of myself in the presence of an adult, something that seems particularly important for developing a sense of humor.


This one may be both junior and and senior years.  There were several commercials on TV that were for the NYC metropolitan area only.  One of those was for a place that sold appliances called JGE.  In the commercial the tagline was - What's the story Jerry?  Then Jerry would tell you how he can get the appliance for you at the wholesale price.  A different one of these was for Savings Bank Life Insurance.  The tagline there was - No dice Nevada, you can't buy SBLI.  Somehow Billy Seiden and I internalized the No dice Nevada part and used the line quite a lot when talking with each other.  (For a while we were very good friends.)  Why this line was appealing, I can't say.  But there is no doubt that we glommed onto it.


I could go on.  Instead I want to switch to the present.  Quite often now when a friend writes something - a post in Facebook or an email message, for example - I get a feeling inside me that I need to say something clever in response.  Sometimes I act on that feeling.  Other times I let it pass, especially when I sense that what I've come up with may cause regret after the fact.  So the feeling is there quite often, even more frequently than I express it.  I have no doubt that the origin of the feeling can be found in the elements sketched above, though how much of it is nature and how much is nurture I really don't know.  I do sense my father in me.  Every time this feeling arises I am reminded of my dad.

I wonder how many other people have something like this as part of their personality.  We all repeated jokes we were told as kids, but I'm guessing that not everyone moved onto situational humor and the improvisation that goes with it, after they "graduated" from the joke telling.  While there are some who are quite at ease engaging in friendly banter with people they know very well, which indicates they have the wherewithal to perform situational humor, they nevertheless wouldn't dream of trying out anything like that with people who are only remote acquaintances. For me, I do it with a broader audience.  This way, I get a lot of practice.

Apparently there is some connection between humor and creativity, thought the research reported in the piece at the link is about people viewing the humor generated by somebody else and that making them more creative, while above I've been talking about generating humor on a situational basis.  I wonder if that too has been studied.  This piece suggests yes, but the author appears to be a consultant, and it is unclear to me how much science there is behind what he has to say.

So now I'm just going to assume it is true and assume further that in society as a whole we want to produce more creative people.  Given that, we should want kids to learn to make situational humor from the elements they find then and there. Where might they learn this?  Are they getting lessons in situational humor now, either in school or on the outside?

My sense is that the accountability movement one associates with standardized testing and No Child Left Behind is particularly humorless.  Then the focus on improving tests scores may be turning kids into dullards.  What a horrible punchline.

When an 8 or 9 year old shows some aptitude and inclination for sports, an adult who spots this may know himself what sort of activities - the things to practice and how much time to put into that practice, movies of star performers to view who might serve as role models, coaches to seek out for more specific advice and possibly private training - will help the kid advance further and sustain interest at the same time.  Alternatively, suppose the kid shows neither interest nor inclination but the adult would like to jump start the kid as an athletic performer.  Can that be done?  What activities would be involved here if it were possible?  How would he know these things stand a chance of working?

Perhaps something similar might be said/asked about musical performance, dance, comedy, drama, art, and any other activity where an audience can see and/or hear what is going on with the kid.  That rules out activities where the kid uses her mind, reading being the quintessential example but watching a challenging show on TV should also count, as would playing on the computer.  These activities of the mind are largely invisible to the adult.  A parent, teacher, or librarian might see a kid absorbed reading a book, that much of what the kid does is viewable by others.  But what the kid is thinking while the kid reads is anyone's guess.  Similarly, when kids are at school (and at pre-school too) their behavior in ensemble activity can be observed to some extent.  The teacher can recognize who is following the discussion and who appears distracted and some performance variables can be garnered in this setting.  It is much harder to get at anything interesting about the kid's thinking when she is engaged in solitary activity. 

Perhaps the best that can be done here is for the kid to perform some after the fact reflection, record that either in writing or speech, and then have those reflections shared.  On this point let's borrow from Weight Watcher's who argue that tracking all you eat by writing it down makes you more mindful of what you are putting into your mouth and helps you stick to your diet, without having lots of little cheats that most dieters are prone to indulge in.  While too much of this might make a kid anal retentive, a bit of it each day could give the kid focus.  When I was a kid we did something like this with individualized reading.  You kept a notebook where you'd write down each book you read, title and author, perhaps when you started and finished it, and a sentence or two about what you got out of the book.  Then, once a week, you'd have a conference with your teacher, after the teacher had a chance to read through your notebook.  Something similar could be done now.  Those student-teacher conferences could be recorded as well.

Further, those reflections and student-teacher conferences, when considered in aggregate, especially in conjunction with more ordinary school performance information, would be an incredibly interesting object of study.  Would the reflections of a really good student be qualitatively different from the more typical student?  If so, how?  Can kids who seem to be slow starters catch up with their classmates with the right sort of encouragement from the teacher?  What does that encouragement look like?

I have two interrelated core beliefs about how smart kids learn and the type of habits we'd like to see established in all kids so they can be smart.  Both of these are based on Ericsson et. al. and their notion of deliberate practice, as the way expertise gets developed.  The smart kid is one who gets lots of the right sort of practice in learning.  Other kids get less practice, or none at all  The first belief is about learning as play/entertainment.  Kids will persist at play.  It's what they want to do for its own sake.  The smart kid has discovered how to make learning a playful activity.  It would work wonders if all kids could discover that.  The second belief is that when kids encounter areas where they are less proficient than their peers they immediately need to get friendly coaching to let them slowly improve their performance in this area.  With the coaching and the steady practice that accompanies it, they learn to overcome their shortcomings and not let those harden into phobias.  They develop confidence that they can transcend their own limitations.  In contrast, once the phobia has formed it becomes incredibly difficult to undo it.  Learning may be permanently blocked in this case. 

I'm not sure at what level in school kids become concerned with their grades, but I suspect it is much earlier than is desirable.  A friend who goes back to elementary school with me recalled one of those experiences that really set her back.  She got a bad score on a math test in third grade that became known to the class as a whole because she protested it with the teacher and the teacher responded none too kindly.  This was third grade!   In my college teaching now I see many students who are math phobic.  I suspect that this can be tied to such early experiences that had no associated remedy to get the kid over the hurdle.  We need to understand this phenomenon much better than we currently do.  The people who argue for accountability need to understand the inadvertent blocking of learning it engenders.  The way to show this is to get evidence of the sort I'm talking about here - students reflecting on their current experience.  It is possible to do this and it is how the learning agenda can be fundamentally altered. 

Whether my beliefs about smart kids are spot on or not, an ethnographic approach to the kids reflections would help us understand these ideas and related matters.  It also would help teachers be able to individualize their instruction in a way so that all students can make improvement from where they currently are.  We are now overly concerned with snapshot performance measures of entire classes and entire schools.  We should be much more focused on whether kids are improving - moving down their own learning curve.  This approach would get the kids to think that way as well.

There is a related issue that needs to be considered seriously about workload for the teachers.  If teachers have to grade homework and exams, how will they have the time to carefully consider student reflections as well?  The answer to this, I believe, is that two quite different things need to happen.  First, there must be much greater automation of homework, while at the same time making the assignments more meaningful and not mindless drill.   I observed mindless drill in much of what my kids did for the math homework when they were in high school.  Automation is especially possible with math but is also do-able in some science and social science subjects.  It is a shame we haven't made more progress here.

The other part is to make teaching more labor intensive.  People will ask how this is afforadable, given that many states are in fiscal trouble and if anything have been laying off some of their teachers.  Consider this possible solution.  National service, for both young adults and able bodied senior citizens, should be on the radar for those arguing that college should be free.  It is a natural to tie national service to free college, just as has been done for military service for years and years.  It is also clear the our labor market will be soft for years and years to come, so arguments against national service because they rob the labor market of talent are not compelling now.  There is then the further thought that good students are not going into teaching at present.  But if they experienced life as a teacher via national service and enjoyed the activity, some would make it a career. 

Let me make one more point and close.  Even Diane Ravitch errs by asserting that our schooling is pretty good in wealthier school districts, so assumes the entire problem with K-12 education is in schools in low income districts.  But many kids from the wealthier districts don't learn up to their potential, though they mask the non-learning better.  Instead of real learning these kids play the credential game.   In my view they do this because they have been stigmatized in various ways - "I'm not good at x."  Maybe in some instances they really aren't.  But in many cases they simply haven't allowed for deliberate practice over a sufficient duration to let them really learn.  The above arguments that I am making should probably be tried in wealthier school districts first, to see if they matter there. 

Maybe well to do parents don't want to admit that their daughter hasn't been learning to the fullest, but it does seem to me that some persuasion on this point, based on the sort of evidence I see when teaching some of these kids as juniors or seniors in college, is more apt to convince parents, thus enabling piloting of these ideas.  And the wealthier school districts almost certainly have ways to get around apparent resource constraints.  So I'd start there.  But I mean these suggestions to ultimately find their way for all kids in school if they seemed to work well when tried in pilot mode.  For those who are not pleased with current reforms, doesn't this sound like something worth trying? 

You don't need to be an economist to know that things are different now.  It used to be that if you were Liberal that the single variable you cared most about as representation of how the macro economy was doing was the unemployment rate.  Inflation came next in importance.  If you were Conservative the order of importance was reversed.  There was thought to be a tradeoff between the two represented by the Phillips Curve.  Maybe for a while there was.  Now that no longer seems to be the case.  Having a job is no longer a plum.  As the gallows humor goes - now you need to have two or three of those jobs to make a decent living.  In other words, when we used to talk about the Phillips Curve most jobs were good jobs.  Now good jobs are rather scarce.  We never used to talk about income distribution.  Now its the rage.

On matters of trade, particularly trade across national boundaries, I'm afraid that our rhetoric is biased in favor of hardware, which is clearly private good and sells at a price, and against software, which is often public good (meaning the incremental cost of another user getting it is essentially zero).  I am using these terms metaphorically here.  Digital video is considered as software in this view.  Likewise, a prescription drug is software.  I hope the reader can come up with many other such examples.  In this piece I will be concerned mainly with how software is priced, though let me briefly mention that bundles of software and hardware packaged together also should be a concern.

Consider doing a Google search and then going to some of the Web pages recommended by the search engine.  Is that trade?   I use a program called StatCounter (the free version, which has ads in it) to track hits on my blog.  No doubt my use of StatCounter is trade.  But what of people who read my blog?  Is that trade too?  There are no ads.  No money changes hands as a consequence.  Below is a list of the origins for the last several hits on my blog.  Does the fact that all of these are from abroad make those hits international trade?

India FlagGhaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India
Chile FlagTalca, Maule, Chile
Switzerland FlagGeneve, Switzerland
Greece FlagAthens, Attiki, Greece
Greece FlagThessaloníki, Thessaloniki, Greece
France FlagFrance
France FlagParis, Ile-de-france, France
France FlagFrance
Hong Kong FlagCentral District, Hong Kong 

If it is trade, but non-monetized trade, how can it be valued?  I can give an economic theory answer.  If the people who generate those hits are better off having reading whatever post(s) they looked at, then the value is the sum of their willingness to pay for the privilege.  But that theoretical answer is not very satisfying in practice.  As is well understood in the economics of public goods, practical attempts at eliciting people's willingness to pay in order to allocate the cost of the public good to the users will fail miserably because of what is termed the free rider problem. 

As an author rather than as an economist, I have a different conception of the value of my blog posts.  The number of hits, something which is easy to count, is a poor measure of value.  Here I think the well known Dorothy Parker quip is applicable.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. 

The hit is very much like leading the horse to water.  Value happens when the reader has found what she was looking for in the search or, even if not that, it gives the reader some ideas she didn't have before.  I have two ways of knowing that my posts have some value.  One is via reader comments where they say as much.  Another is from observing readers who repeatedly come to the site.  Why make a return visit unless there is value expected in doing so?  For the others who visit the site only once and don't comment, I don't know if there is value or not. 

Software pricing can seem quite arbitrary and often is.  Consider this little example.  After all these years of being addicted to The West Wing, I think I've finally reached the point where I'm fatigued with the show.  I watched it first in reruns (I believe on the Bravo Network).  Then I got the entire series as a boxed set of DVDs.  Then I watched it online via Netflix and Amazon Prime.  (We have both, go figure.)  When it was TV programming it was public good, paid for by the commercials.  The DVDs made it into a private good.  My wife paid for it when she gave me the boxed set as a gift.  Streaming the video over the Internet puts it back into the public goods arena.  Netflix pricing is pure access pricing.  It's like buying a library card.  Once you are a member you have access to everything in the library.  (Unlike a book lending library, you never have to worry about another reader checking it out first.)  The value of access then depends on what's in the library.  Amazon Prime offers something of a mixed model.  Some items are pure access, like Netflix.  Others are pay per view.  The odd thing with The West Wing is that when I first went online to watch it it was pure access for both Netflix and Amazon Prime.  But now it is still pure access on Netflix yet pay per view for Amazon Prime.  Why?

This is not an isolated example.  Another is the schlock but adorable movie about George Sand and Chopin called Impromptu.  It used to be pure access at both Netflix and Amazon Prime.  It is no longer available at Netflix and is now pay per view at Amazon Prime.  Access, it seems, is for a time window only.  Outside this time window access is limited.  Whose interest is served when what was once freely available to members of the subscription service is no longer free or no longer available at all?

With hardware pricing the usual trajectory over time is for the new product to be fairly pricey at first and then for price to come down, as a result of learning by doing in production, Moore's Law, and entry by rivals, all of which encourage price to drop.  The trajectory of software pricing should be different, especially software like the videos I've mentioned above that once produced have no incremental production costs such as from needing to be remastered or modified in some other way.  Better here to think of the production costs as entirely sunk, at least at first pass.  Those costs were incurred in the past.  Standard economic efficiency arguments would then suggest that socially optimal pricing would be to make the items free and readily available, after they have had their run where access charges or pay per view were in force to cover their production costs.  That we are not seeing this but rather something else suggests that market power is determining the pricing.  Whether that is market power by the Hollywood Studios or by Netflix and Amazon or a combination of the two I can't say.  I don't know the contractual details between the parties.  An insider, I'm sure, could set us straight on this matter.

I am writing this piece in reaction to Tom Friedman's column from this morning.  I didn't like the column at all.  Friedman takes as a given that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good thing for America and therefore since House Democrats blocked it they must be evil in some way (they are moving leftward in a populist way).  But the argument presented amounts to trade is good - by assertion.  If you are against trade you must be evil.  It seems to me we could make the discussion a bit more nuanced as follows.  TPP might lower entry barriers for small companies who then can export to Pacific countries that they find difficult to penetrate at present.  TPP might also enhance market power of large multinationals, particularly those in the software business (as I've defined software above).  How much of it is one and how much of it is the other?  And how would you know the answer to that?  Posing it this way, we might conclude that the devil is in the details of the agreement.  Who understands those details?

Even the opponents of TPP (I'm thinking specifically of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren here) seem to have fallen into a trap in arguing about this because they use NAFTA as a point of reference and therefore consider it only from the angle of whether it is a jobs destroyer or not.  Most economists when thinking about market power and legislation think of intellectual property law and antitrust law.  On the first, I've written a while ago about how horrible copyright law is at present in a piece called Kopy Wrong.  Term structure is much closer to the pure monopoly solution (favoring Hollywood) than to the socially optimal answer and the nature of the business, as a consequence, has come to rely on the occasional blockbuster with many quite expensive bombs being produced as well in the oft chance it will turn into the next big cash cow.  I am less knowledgeable about patent law, but I do have a sense that sleeping patents are now being used by the big guys as a way to deter entry and to beat up on rivals.  How much attention is that issue getting?  Companies that we now think of as innovative, like Apple and Google, might readily become ossified, content to earn their monopoly rents, if they no longer need to be concerned about the threat of entry.  What does TPP do on this score?   I have no idea.  Does Friedman know?  Do any of the other pundits who are supporting TPP know? 

Antitrust law, here I mean the Sherman Act and the subsequent Clayton Act, came into being because the way the Constitution originally envisioned industry should be regulated, by the states, proved to be inadequate by the late 1800s.  I wrote about this in a post on Progressivism, with the relevant section of the piece linked here. By essentially the same argument, in Friedman's flat world the right scope of authority to regulate large multinational companies would itself be an international organization.  Thus, one role that TPP might play is as the 21st century analog of antitrust law.  Is it doing that?  A cynic might argue that what's happening is that the big multinationals are writing the legislation themselves as a way to block subsequent legislation of this sort that might have more teeth to it.  Does anyone know which is happening here?  How would one tell?

Let me take on one other point that Friedman makes and then wrap this up.  It is on the immigration issue, particularly by East Asian young adults who are going to college in the U.S. and whether they should be on the fast track for a green card after they graduate, if they so desire.  The recommendation sounds like the smart thing to do.  (The ones I've had in my class are often quite talented and even more often very hard working.)  But like most of the ideas in this piece today, this one isn't fully fleshed out.  Consider Chinese nationals, in particular.  They are apt to be the only child in their family.  What of their parents?  Can the parents get a green card too?  What sort of immigration policy would it be if it allowed the child but blocked the parents?  Alternatively, since the parents would not have gone to college in the U.S., might not be nearly as proficient in English as the child, and yet might consume social services without having previously paid taxes to fund those social services, if the parents are part of the package it is less obvious that overall it is a good deal.  It might still be, but it is a harder case to make.

Indeed, that is my main point.  Even when considering the market power issues, overall TPP might be a good deal.  But you really need to work these things through, because it might not.  And then it might be that reasonable people disagree about whether it is a good deal or not.  But instead of working it through you get endorsement of TPP coupled with the criticism that anyone who is against it is a populist of the far left or the far right.

Can't we do better than that in arguing about the policy? 

In my Facebook News Feed this morning there was an ad for PowToon, a cartoon making software that has a free version to it, but really has a tiered pricing structure. In the old days, I would have put in substantial amount of time into playing with software like this and find out what it was capable of, making a few cartoons myself to put the technology through its paces.

I no longer have the energy to do this, even though I have a lot of time on my hands.  Part of this is definitely simply aging and having less oomph in all things as a consequence.  Another part, however, is lessons I learned from the last time I tried something like this. 

It began with this Mockumentary that I made eight years ago.  If you view it now you'll find the technology it demonstrated rather quaint.  I leave it to the reader to determine whether it is still really watchable.  At the time, I shared it with some friends and I got a positive reaction to it, though I will note it didn't get a very wide viewing, so they may have been humoring me more than anything else with their responses. 

It used Camtasia and PowerPoint.  The music was a midi version of the song converted to an MP3 and then inserted into a sound track in Camtasia.  All the images were found on the Web, either jpegs that were downloaded or screen shots of content found online.  I subsequently found even easier ways to produce the content.  My ultimate goal was to get students to make these sort of things as their project in my course.  In this the technology should empower the students, which is why ease in the production technique matters. 

As to the content of the piece, the key was finding a quote from Steve Jobs in talking about the Kindle.  He said it would fail because, "nobody reads anymore."  In retrospect it is hard to know if he was talking out of both sides of his mouth then or if changed his mind after the Kindle started to make headway.  It certainly seems that the iPad was response to the challenge the Kindle posed. 

In any event, I glommed onto that quote and particularly the word "nobody."  I found a New Yorker cartoon that had a picture of a nobody sitting around a table with a couple of others - somebodys.  And the music I chose was Your Nobody Till Somebody Loves You, which I also used as the punchline, so the video plays like something of a shaggy dog story.  Putting the pieces together, this focus helped to keep them connected.  Establishing some theme that carries through for the entire piece is necessary to turn the presentation into a story. 

A year later I had students make something similar in a course I taught for campus honors students.  I had some students make something similar this past fall, as an extra credit project.  I do think doing projects of this sort has some long term value.  The thinking in making something like this is very similar to the sort of thinking needed in writing a good one pager, especially one that serves as executive summary for a longer document.

It may be harder to find an overall theme that can be easily represented and that encapsulates all the ideas in the presentation in that projects that the students work on than it was in my mockumentary.  But it also might be that students don't know how to find such a theme, even when one might be available. 

Instead of the dreaded six paragraph essay, the introductory rhetoric class should teach students how to tell a story.  Even if it did that, however, the students would need a lot of practice to get that lesson to stick.  Right now it seems they get neither the lesson nor the practice ahead of taking my class.  That makes me lukewarm on wanting to try this sort of thing again and the real reason why the technology doesn't grab me now.  Maybe an instructor with more energy than I have will try it and let us all know how it worked.