Part II: Iota
 
 

Convictions of the Middle Years

or

The mule of academe that engenders nothing*:
Conservatism and the classroom in America
 
 

Table of Contents
 

(1) "Freedom from" and "freedom to":
The Tussman tribulations and recent replications
Page 5 of 38

(1.1) Trouble in Utopia Page 6 of 38

(1.2) Power and pedagogy Page 9 of 38

(1.3) A short wake will cheer us up Page 11 of 38

(2) So it goes, more or less forever Page 13 of 38

(2.1) EGAD! again Page 14 of 38

(2.2) Mitchum for President Page 16 of 38

(3) This or that technique: Masters and Johnson more or less forever
Page 18 of 38

(4) The EGAD! system and the deterrence of diversity Page 22 of 38

(4.1) Containment
Page 25 of 38

(4.1.1) An obiter dictum on publish-or-perish, times two
Page 28 of 38

(4.1.2) Spurious diversity Page 29 of 38

(4.2) Cheating Page 31 of 38

(4.2.1) Who cheats? Page 32 of 38

(4.2.2) Who really cheats? An honor system without honor
Page 33 of 38

(4.3) Authoritarianism: A power system without responsibility
Page 35 of 38

Note: Page 39 of 38
 
 
 

--Vine Deloria
 
 

Time: a Monday morning, many years ago

Scene: the front steps of a university building, at the foot of which is a large gathering of students silently blocking passage
 

Professor X (facing students, shouting angrily): "You people are just a bunch of long-haired brownshirts! You damned fascists understand nothing but force! If you think this university is going to knuckle under to this kind of coercive crap, if you think force is going to work here, you're crazy! I don't like ROTC or Vietnam any better than you do, but by god if you think you can simply impose your beliefs on the rest of us, you'll damn soon have another think coming. Now, let me pass!"
 

Time: about two weeks later

Scene: a departmental faculty meeting, in which a student-initiated proposal to eliminate various course requirements is under discussion
 

Professor X (addressing the student representatives): "Oh, right, this is all very logical. Why don't we just toss out all our requirements? Why not let students come around and do whatever they please, and not bother ourselves about whether our degree means anything at all? You people know as well as I do that the only way we can get most of you--uh, most of your fellow students--to give serious attention to systematic bodies of knowledge is by setting up required courses. Some of you are as indolent as you are insolent! This may look coercive to you, but sometimes compulsion is the only approach that works! If you don't like the program offered here you are free to vote with your feet. There are many options elsewhere. We've always had the highest standards in this department, and we intend to preserve those standards even if we have to resort to compulsion."
 

#

--Ladd and Lipset
 
 

--Joseph Tussman
 
 

--Dean of Faculty, 1997
 
 

--Me, a few days later, 1997
 
 

--My colleague, a few seconds later, 1997
 

Well, consistency isn't everything: Don't worry about Professor X. But creativity--the ability to think, for yourself, with originality--that is everything. And it is the central problem of American higher education. We don't help people to see the moon in a new way. We don't create Huckleberry Finn. We don't know why Huckleberry Finn should be created.

As for the fiery dialogue on academic freedom, I still say it's one word.

(1) "Freedom from" and "freedom to":
The Tussman tribulations and recent replications

Out of the wind-meandered rubble of the "first battle of Berkeley," back in the 'sixties, arose an experimental program, the Tussman College, intended as a revolutionary alternative to the existing two-year, general studies "sequence" of courses--the non-sequential variant of which is nowadays making a comeback. The life of this experiment--this paramount experiment with the higher learning in America--followed the contours of the standard graveyard spiral of aviation lore. A Hobbesian helluvanote: Solitary in its impact, poor in its ultimate aspirations, nasty in its self-reflexive deviousness, brutish in its overarched philosophy--and mercifully short thanks to its God-givenness. Its chief architects were quick to point out that their ambitious plans were underway long before the appearance of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; a claim, similar in its purpose to Jacques Barzun's insistence, in his preface to The American University, that the Columbia University uprisings of 1968 had not influenced him in any way except for good, and for clearer thinking. It was Marx who told us that the anlagen may be up and milling about for many decades before they explode to life, and one gains the impression in reading about the Tussman experiments that the campus turmoil of the times was a powerful motivation, and that if the campus had remained tranquil throughout the 'sixties the program would surely have withered for lack of administrative or faculty support. But there it was, whatever the impetus, and it must be studied and assessed: It was predictably not a harbinger of the future, but it may take us beyond the future and before the past. As an academic experiment it was highly ambitious, and it tells us a lot about the ways in which the lesser amoebas of the higher learning push around their pseudopodia.

In the beginning everything looked promising, and without doubt this innovative "first program" had much to recommend it--many prospective students, in fact, had to be turned away. It was inspired by the legendary Alexander Meiklejohn, founder of an experimental college at Wisconsin in the 'twenties, and directed by one of his ardent disciples, Professor Joseph Tussman. It was given carte blanche by the Berkeley faculty (after some skillful maneuvering among the appropriate faculty committees) to develop a lower-division program free of the crazy-quilt course system, free of rigid scheduling, free of conventional grading, free of distribution requirements. It was able (with surprising difficulty) to attract fine senior faculty from Berkeley and elsewhere, and the students who opted for the program seemed to be capable of extraordinary intellectual achievement. Physical facilities--a large former fraternity house, not created originally for its "ruin value," recently bought by the university--seemed ideally suited to the creation of an informal learning environment. The curriculum, heavily laden with the classics of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and America, could hardly prove inadequate if the faculty and students proved equal to it. Most auspicious beginnings!

Tussman's Experiment at Berkeley, which tries to explain it all, is a hodgepodge of repetitious philosophical discourses coupled with mild self-reproach, assorted progress reports, apologia to the faculty (some aborted and some apparently delivered), orientation papers for incoming freshmen, and a charmingly short reading list. One cannot help but wax enthusiastic about some of Tussman's many insights, commitments, and condemnations. For example, his comments on the tension between the college and the university, and the unwillingness of most professors to do anything about it:
 
 

The most significant conflict on the modern campus is not the most dramatic one. It is not between students and administration, or faculty and administration, or faculty and students; it is the subtle conflict between the university and the college. It is a peculiarly internal conflict between two tendencies within the same company of men [sic], two purposes, two functions ...
 

The last sentence, of course, if true, is utterly appalling. If you wish to engineer another Huck, your colleagues--you over bigtime--will fuck.

Justifying his short but demanding reading list, Tussman also decries our disastrous emphasis on speed-reading--although he falls short of my traditional demand that Evelyn Wood be declared Public Enemy No. 1. He decries our equally disastrous tendency to make teaching into a solipsistic exercise in which we hardly ever consult seriously with our colleagues regarding content, techniques, evaluation, or anything else. He decries our disastrous neglect of follow-up studies, of serious institutional research, that might test large and controversial theories of socialization such as his own.

(1.1) Trouble in Utopia

Why, then, did this program ultimately find so little support on the Berkeley campus? I do not pretend to know, but if I had been in the enviable role of an incoming Berkeley freshman I would have stayed away from this one for a host of reasons. To begin with, Tussman's preconceived ideas about how to staff the Experimental Program created an effective reversal of the traditional practice in which undergraduates are taught largely by young scholars and teaching assistants, while having little access to the established "mandarin" professors. If Tussman had had his way--and eventually he did--only senior professors would have taught in the "first program," for only they (in Tussman's view) have the wisdom, fortitude, detachment, time, security, or whatever else it may take to teach in such a program. Needless to say, this restricted definition of the pool of eligible professors led to chronic staffing problems, and Tussman's decision to dismiss the program's teaching assistants en masse after the first year of operation--they were, he thought, insufficiently mature as scholars--left students with access only to a small handful of senior faculty.

This situation probably did not harm the students beyond redemption, or beyond what we usually accomplish, but given the apparently close collegial interaction among professors in this program, just think what a joy it would have been if a few faculty Young Turks had been around to prod, or be prodded by, the mandarins! If the Young Turks of academe, fearful of losing, say, a tenure decision, do not behave according to the established YT traditions, then we have a much, much deeper problem--which must also be addressed forthwith. Discussing half the problem, The Chronicle of Higher Education (12/10/99: "To Many Adjunct Professors, Academic Freedom Is a Myth") says that part-time, revolving-door faculty (graveyard spiral?) are nowadays in terrible trouble if and when they wish to speak freely. Young Turks of taciturnity.

In any case, the demand that students be taught only by senior professors, or only by teachers beyond the TA level, probably has the same special payoff as the demand that students be taught primarily in small classes--the evidence does not typically show any special benefit. And certainly the university bureaucracy will find life easier if class size and faculty seniority are allowed to vary.

Tussman's unbending predilections about faculty capabilities and inclinations involved some massive contradictions that seemed to escape him altogether. At one point, he states his official rationale for the exclusion of "junior" faculty:
 
 

Yes, I should think the recovery phase requires at least a decade, given what the university is proposing to do to this poor guy! Virtually every human culture, across the millennia and throughout the inhabited universe, has believed that when a brilliant man or woman has a fire in the belly for ideas, this is precisely the moment when s/he should be turned loose among the youngsters. S/he may end up imbibing the traditional hemlock, but while the passions rage let us make the most of them.

Professor Tussman's remark describes precisely the qualities we seek--at least, the qualities we should seek--in any teacher and in any student. The problem is to get the novice as fired up about students as she is about her peers and about her specialty. There may be impediments along the way, but they have nothing to do with Tussman's oxymoronically brilliant disqualifications. I am amazed by Tussman's failure to see the obvious connections, his failure to understand the self-fulfilling prophecy arising from his own unexamined biases, his failure to appreciate that the "novitiate" he describes is often a process of fitting men and women for an unfit fitness, his failure to realize that a truly radical experimental attitude would not, for instance, take "publish or perish" (an arrangement he seems to decry) and oftentimes nit-picking scholarship, combined with an aversion for teaching arising from its low status, as an ultimate given. If students have an opportunity to be broadly educated, to develop their minds within a variety of general education requirements, then why shouldn't professors? It is hypocritical for us to set up GER's--general education requirements--and then go back to obsessing on the hind legs of fleas and how to publish diagrams of the latest advances therein. On the other hand, if you are one hell of a broadly gauged entomologist, you should be wound up and set free in any context in which somebody wishes to learn something important.

Tussman's attitude toward the student-power bugbear was similarly inflexible and unreflective. His contention that students are not scholars and therefore should have no role in educational decisionmaking commits the either-or fallacy: The mere fact that a young woman is not a scholar does not mean that her ignorance is so abysmal that she should have virtually no influence over the nature and content of her own education. It is simply wrong to assume that young college students are uniformly ignorant about what interests them--or about what is in their interest. William Wilson, in The Declining Significance of Race, shows that although job recruiters from big corporations and big government agencies hardly ever showed up at black colleges back in the early 'sixties, nowadays black institutions are saturated with recruiters as if they were traditionally non-black institutions, and students who seek jobs must learn a tremendous amount from this elaborate selection process--they almost certainly know more about job specs than the typical faculty member knows. They find out who wants what, and they may even try to find out why. A few students retain the total ignorance that Tussman assumes--like the young man who refused to take a required course in calculus because he wasn't the least interested in dentistry. But it is not this "hard core of chronic know-nothings" who ask to have more say, and the rest of the students have enough sophistication that we should listen to them, and listen carefully. And help them overcome their inhibitions, brought about by a thousand years of Tussmanism.

Professor Tussman, then, believed that students should have next to nothing to say about the nature of their own education. This attitude derives from a conviction widely held--and it is still strong--that it is somehow invalid to insist that a university be run in a reasonably democratic fashion. (Faculty helots, outside the typical ruling oligarchy, don't have much say either--but that's another issue.) It makes more sense, says Tussman, to insist that a baseball game be run democratically. In Tussman's ideology, anything that has to be voted upon must by virtue of that very fact be trivial and worthy of little attention or deliberation; the big issues are already settled, and there is an "end of ideology" in education as elsewhere. If, however, one accepts the basic principle of democratic decisionmaking--namely, that anybody within the polis who is affected by a decision has a right to participate meaningfully in it--then it follows that recognition of student power must be forthcoming. (Faculty helots--especially you poor folks at Hillsdale College when you've wiped away the tears and the smiles--take note! You may be next.) Tussman dismisses the grand traditional ideology of student power--admittedly a bad term--as "unconquerable nonsense" without bothering to ask himself (1) why it is nonsense and (2) why it has proven to be unconquerable. "What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer. But in this case the burden of proof, at least for the first question, is upon Tussman: If you wish to suppress democratic decisionmaking, you must come up with compelling reasons for doing so. Since this proof has never been forthcoming, it is easy to understand why authoritarians routinely resort to other means.

(1.2) Power and pedagogy

Tussman's unrelenting diatribes against what was once called the student-power movement--a movement that should be revived immediately, with the proviso that power entails responsibility--reflect a deep misunderstanding of the nature of power in human relations. Sociologists usually define power as the ability to influence the behavior of others, even against their will. Under this definition it is possible to envision a range of social situations involving varying degrees of power. If, for instance, two individuals interact intensely but have little influence over one another's behavior--say, a pair of randomly selected politicians debating something, or two bump-car mentalities colliding on the Internet, or a used-car salesman and an indifferent customer--the relationship between them is characterized by minimal resort to power. On the other hand, parties suing one another for divorce, or politicians competing directly in order to end one another's careers, or boxers in a title match, or a professor trying to manipulate conditions to minimize student cheating, or a Board of Regents trying to get unwilling professors to undertake something called post-tenure review--all such relationships involve a relatively large resort to power. There are winners and losers; more importantly, there are rules, referees, arenas, strategies, and tactics. Under the sociologist's definition, in other words, there is no law of conservation of power comparable to the ancient energy laws of physics, and this is precisely where Tussman went astray. He assumes that the elimination of faculty power vis-a-vis students--for instance, eliminating required courses--would necessarily produce commensurate increases in student power vis-a-vis professors, and that at this juncture our autonomy as scholars would be seriously impaired.

One objects to this conclusion by pointing out that the mere fact that person A no longer controls the intellectual experiences of person B does not mean that B must now control the intellectual experiences of A. The interaction of A and B, if it continues, must now be governed by the social forces to which I just alluded: rules, referees, arenas, strategies, and tactics. Most importantly, rules.

Years ago, the more intelligent student-power advocates tended to think of the exercise of such power as a temporary means of bringing about the withering away of illegitimate faculty, administrative, and governmental power in higher education. This is not conservation of power; rather, it is dissipation of power, and with such sophisticated theories it is surprising that the students did not come much closer to success. But the dialectics of that argument must have gone right past Tussman.

To give substance to the specter of student power Tussman must conjure up a frightful vision, a caricature of the more pathological elements of the "political revolution" of 'sixties fame, while saying nothing about the commendable aspirations of what student radicals used to call the "cultural revolution." The cultural revolution, remember, intended to minimize clashes of will and the employment of power in human relations generally. We still do not understand these essential distinctions. Here is a typical Tussmanian misinterpretation:
 
 

It is deeply fitting and ironic that the students whose behavior most disturbs the adult world come to the college equipped with a "philosophy" which is only to a slight degree a parody of that of their elders. It is not the newness of the ideas which shocks; it is their haunting familiarity. Ivan is being confronted with Smerdyakov. Shall we review the standard items?

"The only language they understand is power." Authority? Legitimacy? Nothing but power clothing its nakedness in rhetoric. Principles? Rights? Rhetoric, unless there are battalions of bodies. International law and morality? It comes down to power. Therefore, student power. Very perceptive; very orthodox.

Tussman was never able to see the softer, socio-emotional side of the 'sixties "movement." He never understood why it is that many of us may not wish to be a small stone in somebody else's mosaic.

The student-professor relationship in this society, typically involving a large power disparity, is analogous in many ways to the man-woman or husband-wife relationship, and it is significant that the feminist movement of recent decades appears to be less concerned about achieving power and dominance for women than it is about the need to eliminate male dominance and machismo, especially their more abusive varieties. Getting out from under is not always tantamount to getting on top. The millions of women who have established families without men attest to that, and even though female-headed families do indeed have their problems, and even though there appears to be a continuing public policy that intends to beat down the number of such families (even when they are non-black!) in American society, the trend does not seem to be reversing itself. American individualism has given us religious devotees without clergy, patients without doctors, and children without parents. It would not be at all surprising if the next trend were toward students without professors, a policy that corporate America would probably learn to support with considerable enthusiasm once it discovered the possibility of tax reductions combined with relatively cheap apprenticeship programs. This anticipated corporate boosterism would give students without professors a big advantage over women without husbands or, say, children without parents.

Interestingly, Tussman himself knew how to remove the shackles: The program was granted a modicum of freedom from all sorts of external restraint and coercion. Internally, by contrast, it celebrated the same unfreedom that prevails elsewhere: In its refusal to confer what Erich Fromm used to call "freedom to" it was typical of the sorts of "reforms" that characteristically take place, usually cyclically, in American universities. The fine historian George Mosse used to get all over us campus radicals because--so he thought--we knew how to tear things down but had no idea how to build things up. He should have carried the message to his learned colleague at Berkeley: Serious reformers begin by questioning the basics, the continued existence of campuses, academic certification in all its EGAD! splendor, any sort of grading including pass/nopass (one word?), prescribed curricula, sharp distinctions between student and teacher. But serious reformers also end somewhere: They end by seeking new definitions of the relationships among the higher learning, the public it serves, the larger society, and the world. Clearly, Tussman and his Berkeley colleagues were not interested in serious reform. Fromm would have been bored by it all. So would Mosse.

(1.3) A short wake will cheer us up

I never met Tussman. He must be retired by now, or close to it. He is a great man. In 1997, in The Beleaguered College, he sums up his career as reformer. Tussman loved the ancient Greeks, and he knows about pathos:
 
 

In the end, the program must be judged to have made no enduring difference to the quality of education at Berkeley. The sea of normal life has closed over the sunken hope, the surface now unbroken, the depths unvisited. I have never been tempted to launch a salvage operation or to get back to the educational wars, since, apart from other reasons, I seldom see a banner raised that seems worth repairing to--only trivial proposals, not worth fighting for, not worth opposing. I have had my chance.

This ending is very sad, and it calls for a celebration. I celebrate Tussman and his wisdom. I do so by invoking the preface to a set of short stories. This preface answers Tussman's feelings about war, while allowing me to emulate John Belushi in that fine epic of college life, "Animal House": See if you can guess who I am now, judging by this single paragraph. See if you can guess why it is that--far from frustration and defeat, and gazing not only at the moon but across the vast, hazy distances toward Berkeley--I am now adjudged, in the minds of a few of my beloved colleagues for whom believing is seeing, to be one of William & Mary's top ten sex offenders:
 
 

I must confess: In describing the woman, I said that if it is possible to get pregnant by making noise, then she is going to have quintuplets. Peccavi! Peccavi! Peccavi! Alas, all my best efforts too "must be judged to have made no enduring difference to the quality of education at Berkeley" or to the quality of polymorphous perversity at William & Mary. Unlike Tussman, however, I haven't given up.

[Recent replications, holistic programs]

(2) So it goes, more or less forever

The Tussman college is not the only noteworthy disappointment. During my forty years as a struggling young faculty member there has been abroad in the land a belief that course content, requirements, degree programs--in short, the whole range of things we call "the curriculum"--have been changing substantially in response to all sorts of wholesome social forces, including student protests and demands, assorted disquietudes of administrators and faculty, political pressures, public opinion, high technology, globalization of the economy, and so forth endlessly. Not so. Take another look at the 'sixties, when all sorts of traces were allegedly kicked over. In those days when all hell was supposedly breaking loose, a careful survey by Dressel and DeLisle led to the conclusion that
 
 

Indeed one can--it is done as a matter of routine. And in so doing, the faculties create a form of "social loafing" that dissipates energies that otherwise could be devoted to serious reform--not to mention serious scholarship. This is one of the major reasons why most faculty meetings are as wasteful of expensive resources as a traffic jam on the Hollywood freeway, and why such meetings are usually about as edifying as a chain-reaction crash on a foggy night.

(2.1) EGAD! again

As we shall see, a large part of the difficulty in revamping the curriculum--or anything else in academe--arises from the continued existence of the constraints and rigidities of the EGAD! arrangement, of which the grading system is the central core. But here, of course, we have another area in which there is said to be a vast amount of "experimentation." Any reasonably sophisticated observer could probably have predicted from the outset that the results of the grand grading experiments of the 'sixties would generally be considered favorable by the students and unfavorable by faculty members, while having serious consequences for neither. Indeed, the research on non-traditional grading has been sufficiently ambiguous to provide grist for both mills. In part this is due to the fact that research on innovations in higher education, for reasons that somebody ought to investigate, is often methodologically weak, conceptually muddy, and theoretically vacuous. The worst questionnaires I've ever seen, for instances, are those used for student course evaluations. A given course has far greater dimensionality than, say, George and George Bush; yet Gallup surveys on presidential politics are vastly superior to anything ever issued by my local institutional research program. In any case, the major upshot of this research is that non-traditional grading experiments apparently have produced no substantial change in the structure and functions of American higher education. And for this there are good reasons.

It appears, for instance, that student motivations for taking the pass/fail (or credit/no credit) option--an option in which no distinction is made among levels at which students can pass a given course--are not so commendable as one might have hoped when these programs were created years ago. Students sometimes indicate that they take pass/fail courses to save study time, to complete general requirements that they consider a bore, or "to make their burden less onerous." In addition, nearly every survey of this issue to date has found that pass/fail students are strongly motivated to "reduce pressure" by opting for non-conventional grades. The biggest disappointment is the fact that, although the strongest advocates of non-conventional grading once hoped that laudable goals such as "reduced pressures" would encourage "exploration"--i.e., an experimental attitude toward one's academic life--students rarely use the pass/fail option to take coursework in fields unfamiliar to them; they do not seek out academic exotica. They can't fail safe--an F is still an F--but they can make sure that they make sure, i.e., they can push down further the risks that are already low.

The compartmentalization of knowledge, the narrowness of overspecialization, the "two-cultures" schism of hard and soft academic disciplines--all appear to have stood mightily against the endless ripples of grading innovation in American colleges and universities. When I propose that I be allowed, without grading, to teach mathematical sociology in Spanish to highly motivated students from all three departments--with the prospect that we might actually find out what the sociologists at the veracruzana are doing these days with (untranslated) mathematical modeling of social processes--the administration laughs at the idea, and I laugh at their mindless absurdity--I laugh for the same reasons that made Phil Rieff cry, so I'll probably out-live him. And what is the administration's problem? It is simply this: Many of the students will know more Spanish or mathematics or social science than I do, so how can I possibly grade them? Never mind that there remains, on the contrary, one important way that I can make a special contribution to this course: I must know more Spanish than students who know more math than I do, more math than students who know more sociology than I do, etc. That is, the faculty member in this case must have what Tussman would regard as breadth. But even under the first assumption--that some students know (and could teach) more Spanish, let's say, than the professor--the grading travesty will abort the course early on, and the folks at the veracruzana cannot expect to hear from us any time soon--if they give a damn.

Incidentally, I have just explained, in part, why most programs that claim to establish "interdisciplinary studies" are phony. Additional phoniness will be manifest when your colleagues punish you for spending so much time on Spanish and sociology, when you're supposed to be a mathematician.

Given their savvy skittishness about these matters, it is ironic that students who opt for unconventional grading appear to be academically superior to those who do not. This is a little sad and a little scary, because it implies that we are not training our best students to be intellectually bold, adventurous, audacious--they won't enter a warm kitchen unless we provide them a fireproof suit. An early study of the pass/not pass option at Berkeley provides evidence that "should dispel once and for all any thought that pass/not pass grading is a refuge for the incompetent." This is encouraging. But why should we provide a refuge for the highly talented and under-motivated?

Again paradoxically, these academically superior students seem to have as many misgivings about conventional grades as their fellow students of lesser academic achievement; perhaps we should listen to these bright kids, instead of providing the traditional refuge. In large part, this selection process that seems to tie bright students to grading experiments may be due to the fact that at many institutions the unconventional grading option is available only to those students who have already proven their ability to succeed under conventional grading, i.e., to those students who would appear to have the least need for unconventional grades. This is a paradox enforced by professors and administrators, and it indicates clearly that the tacit intention of unconventional grading is to open new options for those students least likely to deviate--despite their misgivings--from what professors and administrators consider appropriate student conduct. --

Getting back to their worries about levels of achievement, the "traditionalists" see another huge, revealing problem: While unconventionally graded students often out-perform conventionally graded students in a given course, they typically perform below the levels established by their own past performance. Such generalizations are possible, of course, only because of our readiness to beg the question, to use conventional grades as a yardstick for evaluating unconventional grades. Remember, unconventional grades are usually simple translations of conventional grades, i.e., the registrar receives A's, B's, C's, etc., from a professor, and then changes the conventional grade into a pass or no-pass. In a third of all the institutions in which unconventional grading exists, professors do not know which students in a given class have elected the unconventional option. Here, the functions of secrecy are not entirely clear, but they must have something to do with a desire not to risk changing professorial behavior in the face of these spectacular onslaughts against tradition. This arrangement, of course, is precisely as professors and administrators want it--they sandbag experimentation--and it is not surprising that among Berkeley students who have experienced the pass/no-pass option "the broad consensus was that there were few important differences between these experiences and experiences in courses taken for a standard letter grade." Again, very sad: A little like what happens when you get a fire in the belly for, say, interdisciplinary studies. But I digress.

(2.2) Mitchum for President

So, we observe lots of foot dragging, but invariably this unwillingness to allow anything new has an impressive self-reflexive, self-validating rationale, which works as follows:

Students who have funny courses or funny teachers or funny grades or funny degrees listed on their transcripts are said to have difficulty in gaining admission to graduate school, and may even find that un-funny employers tend to discriminate against them. Among several factors that account for the severe underutilization of the pass/not pass option at Berkeley "... the only one that was important to the undergraduates was that they needed letter grades to help them assure their admission to graduate school ..." A survey of graduate-school deans produced evidence that "... moderate percentages of non-traditional grades--less than 10 per cent--are little hindrance to a student's chances for admission to graduate school ... However, once a student records 10 per cent or more non-traditional grades, his chances for admission and financial support are jeopardized." Similar results appeared in a large survey of college registrars by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and by another survey of graduate-school deans under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Hofstra University. These findings--it goes without saying--force us to take the necessary steps "to protect the interests of our students." In brief, we'd better figure out some way to enforce the ten per cent threshold. Otherwise, we might look funny.

The assorted deans and registrars are no doubt correct in their assessment, and it clearly would be risky for us to ignore the many dangers. However, we must remember that graduate school admission decisions are almost invariably made by faculty members themselves, at the departmental level; the deans and registrars have no direct role. It is the faculty itself that creates this problem, and it must then struggle to adapt! So once again we think of Catch-22 or, better yet, the scene in "Dr. Strangelove" where the President of the United States, played by Peter Sellers, tells General Turgidson that he doesn't give a damn what Turgidson considers to be impossible; and, not quite in the proper juxtaposition, the later scene where Dr. Strangelove himself, also played by Sellers, is explaining to us what we must do in order to survive, but he cannot stop his own hand from reaching up violently and trying to strangle him. Professor Strangely-Turgidson is a similarly difficult, conflicted personality, and it requires great temerity for Strangely to lament unconventional grading or unconventional anything on the ground that it reduces a student's chance for admission to graduate school. If students with unconventional grades find it difficult to gain admission to graduate school, this unhappy circumstance is not imbued in realities virtual or otherwise. It is merely the self-fulfillment of a faculty prophecy, a sort of self-immolation: We shoot ourselves in the foot while tying our hands behind our backs. And employers who will not read a funny transcript merely compound the same mistake.

One of the reports cited above states that the more paranoid students at Berkeley resent professors "who are perceived as grading more stringently students who elect the pass/not pass option." (For further investigation: How do professors breach the secret and identify the victims?) Again, we shoot ourselves in the foot while tying our students' hands behind their backs.

The Sellers example works well, but the late Robert Mitchum provides an even better image. Mitchum once played a psychopathic preacher in a movie called "Night of the Hunter." After turning his wife into a terrified, emotionally starved, half-crazed neurotic, he proceeds to drown her for being a terrified, emotionally starved, half-crazed neurotic. Of course, she's definitely guilty.

I love this logic. With similar insight one of the top preachers of the Nixon administration, Treasury Secretary George P. Shultz, discerned an important self-exemplifying lesson in the Watergate scandal, pointing out that Watergate proved the claim of Nixon and his cronies that big governments run by bad people tend to be corrupt, and to mess things up terribly. If we wish to avoid future Watergate's, also known as *.gates in computer parlance, we must follow this particular Nixon doctrine more closely than most of the rest, and reduce the power of the federal government. Professors claim by precisely the same argument that because they cannot restrain themselves from destroying any effort toward changing academic travesties such as the EGAD! system, we cannot hope to change things in general, and the situation is hopeless for anybody who gives a damn. It helps, of course, if you don't give a damn.

And another irony: On the one hand, those who lament "grade inflation" are firmly convinced that increasingly high grades of recent decades do not reflect actual student achievement; but on the other hand, those who claim that pass/fail students often receive relatively low grades--at least, relative to their own performance in other coursework--invariably assume that lower grades are a valid measure of achievement in pass/fail courses. Apparently, then, high grades tend not to measure performance accurately, while low grades do. This makes the grading system a sort of psychometric freak, and our best statistical programs may not be able to sort it all out.

But the dying professor of Tuesdays with Morrie sorts it out clearly: "... the culture we have," he says, "does not make people feel good about themselves. ... And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."

The artificially contrived "problem" of graduate school admissions, along with other imagined, contrived, or real difficulties, will continue to act as a powerful deterrent against the outright abolition of grading and associated drivel, so that in the end the status quo--the EGAD! system in all its glory--will be preserved in essence. Given the many safety features of the typical phony experiment, and the vulnerability of real experiments to sabotage by faculty, administrators, alumni, parents, and employers, it is not at all surprising that phony programs have been widely adopted--they are totally risk-free, they are totally protected, they are completely condom-encrusted, and the PR boys sop 'em up.

(3) This or that technique: Masters and Johnson more or less forever

Nor has there been a dearth of "experimentation" on mere technique, independently of content--another manifestation of the Useless News superficiality syndrome. Back in the days of campus unrest, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin--Madison caused more than a slight twitter by calling attention to a new study that suggested that different teaching methods do not make any important difference in how much students learn. To those who have read about American higher education, it should come as no surprise that what takes place in the contemporary American classroom often fails to produce the intended results; if we do get positive results, they are usually more surprising than our failures. Gathered over a period of several decades, the evidence on pedagogical technique is by now highly compelling, and after reviewing the original data (as opposed to the conclusions, which were alleged to be unreliable) presented by no less than seventy-four independent comparative studies of teaching methods, Dubin and Taveggia were forced to conclude that "the results of this research are unequivocal--no particular method of teaching is measurably to be preferred over another when evaluated by student examination performances."

This conclusion, and the many studies on which it is based, are not unassailable. For example, it appears that the vast majority of comparative analyses of teaching techniques have used the final examination as the sole indicator of student achievement, and one might well question whether all the right "outcomes" have been assessed; again, we beg that particular question. Proficiency in taking final examinations requires a special kind of talent and a special kind of art. But in addition to the immediate cognitive effects of a course, one could raise a number of questions about the broader, long-term effects, if any. For instance:
 
 

(1) Do students experience joy? Do professors? Would they bother with the course if they didn't "have to"? This is not just a cheap shot, a concession to teeny-bopped fun culture. It is fundamentally important. If we do not get off on ideas, on intellectual creativity, more or less the way a healthy human gets off on death-defying sex, then we are making a true botch of things. If clever students end up hating the processes of using their heads, and if we ourselves slowly die--"burn out," implying that at least for a time the fires crackled--while busily corrupting youth, it probably doesn't matter how clever the youngsters are: We all end up swallowing the hemlock.

From the never-fear department: I am aware that the latest research on Socrates suggests that just after swallowing the hemlock, which he took to be a type of near-beer used in a traditional Phoenician torture, he is supposed to have said, laughingly, "remember, my friends, this too will pass--and the sooner the better!" (He actually got over it pretty fast.)

(2) Are the participants working hard, in a steady, disciplined way? Again, this is not merely a sop--for puritans. If, for instance, you wish to learn French well, you must (a) rivet the language and its literatures into your brain; (b) learn to pop an occasional rivet, or perhaps a few dozen at a time, knowing that if you don't have the rivets down tight you can't really send them flying; (c) bend and twist your liberated brain around, folding it over itself and under itself, making it end up totally groovy like Einstein's--his brain was groovy, literally, I ain't kidding, read the research on it. Then you'll realize what Einstein discovered: His brain merely replicated the subtle space-time convolutions of the universe. It don't mean diddly whether his classes were large or small.

Lope de Vega, an Einstein of letters, made the same discovery: "When I have to write a play," he said, "I lock up the rules with six keys."

(3) To what extent are students doing outside reading (in the broad sense), tangential to the course itself? Or outside anything?

(4) How many students continue taking coursework, or doing other kinds of work, in this particular field? Do they develop an abiding interest in the subject? Studies of Vassar alumnae and the doctoral foreign language requirements provide disappointing results on this criterion. The language requirement, of course, is already ancient history: A major disaster, another shot in the foot, another instance of failing to take ourselves and the rest of the world seriously.

(5) How much of the content of this specific course will students retain, say, ten years from now? (Again, Ph.D. foreign language exams provide what we call a negative role model.)

Where "values," "moral impact," and "emotional learning" are deemed admissible, the range of possible outcomes is wider still. But in this era of cost-benefit economics, this-and-that accountability, this-and-that assessment, post-tenure review and all the correlated screwings, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect our precious precision "planners" to have an eye for the intangibles, or even for the long run.

Again, the point is made far more convincingly by analogy. Consider sexual intercourse, as compared to intellectual intercourse: No matter what techniques are resorted to within an ever-growing catalogue, sexual intercourse tends to lead to certain immediate, predictable, invariable results:
 

(a) orgasm

(b) exhaustion

(c) sleep

(d) friendship

Everybody over thirty--and now, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, everybody over nine--is willing to concede that, in this instance, technique is not the most important consideration. Technique, in fact, is no more than a means of facilitating what is possible, and what is possible--the total range of possibilities--is what is truly significant. As for the long-term consequences (or correlates, for we cannot always distinguish) of sex--well, some are amorphous, unpredictable, and always delightful, like love; some are quite substantial, fairly predictable, and occasionally delightful, like babies; in other cases it is, as Dubin and Taveggia might say, all sound and fury signifying not a hell of a lot.

In other words, people who study teaching techniques have been the Masters and Johnsons of pedagogy. Here, of course, we're talking about the Playboy-endorsed volume on the highly elusive clitoral orgasm versus vaginal alternatives thought to be even more fleeting, and we're talking also about M&J's battery of techniques for capturing either of these fugitive phenomena (or both simultaneously) and harnessing it (or them) for the greater good of the species. Remember also the later volume which, with far less engineering panache, tackles the more tangible topic of pre-Viagra therapeutic penis-pinching as an aspiring antidote to impotence, an early invention that, no matter how effective, is now on a back burner. Think about the M&J analogy as we continue: The existing research literature on classroom technique confronts us with comparable ambiguities and consequent difficulties of interpretation. When Dubin and Taveggia said that "there is no difference between lecture and discussion in face-to-face teaching" (cf. face-to-face intercourse, where there probably is a difference), what they really meant was that among the approximately fifty-six independent comparisons reported in the literature over the preceding forty years or so, about half favored the lecture method and half favored the discussion method. Far more intriguing questions, then, could be raised about the specific conditions under which one method is superior to another, on any given criterion. "Background" conditions worthy of being systematically manipulated would include subject matter, characteristics of students (e.g., motivation, aptitudes, interests, past experiences), qualities and characteristics of teachers, the types of learning sought, evaluation procedures, the general classroom environment, and so forth. At the end of it all we would probably conclude--as I now hypothesize--that individual differences among students, teachers, classes, schools, or other units of analysis are paramount and that the opportunity for configuration experimentation per se is the truly big variable; that results in this area, due to the inherent complexity of academic productivity, are exceptionally hard to predict in general; that learning (to paraphrase Percy Bridgman) is the process of doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds barred.

We conclude that although it is sometimes possible to generalize and make predictions about the dynamics of teaching, learning, and (to be redundant) research, the complexity of these processes necessitates intensive idiographic scrutiny of individual cases, essentially in the style of the National Transportation Safety Board when it goes about the task of explaining a major transportation disaster: A degree of predictability and generalizability do not vitiate the responsibility for intensive case analysis. And we would then face the horrifying responsibility for spelling out the policy implications of our findings.

The policy implication, as I see it, is that content will flourish in a multimedia environment where motivation is alive. If you wish to see how a multimedia environment works, read the old Paris Review interview series on "Writers at Work." In the realm of technique, good writers have almost nothing in common. They've all tried everything at least once, and rejected most of it at least twice. At the moment, each has his/her own weird configuration, more or less unlike anybody else's. (The finest--perhaps the only--common element is that nobody seems to work more than about three hours per day.)

On the matter of policy, Dubin and Taveggia recognize that, to the average legislator, trustee, regent, or administrator, the following perverse logic will appear to have the majestic quality of cold common sense:
 
 

Prescient, to say the least.

Recognizing, however, that the one common characteristic of most commonsense notions is the fact that they are not very common, the authors develop an equally convincing rationale for a delightful set of "radical innovations" that we might well ponder, and perhaps even adopt. If, for example, self-study and video and other electronic media are as good, on the whole, as face-to-face contact in promoting learning, "then the need for students to confront their instructors physically is materially reduced ... [and] radical innovations might involve dispensing with the campus entirely or modifying it in major dimensions." This is the famous "Wisconsin plan"--the notion that the "campus" should encompass the entire state--taken seriously. Nowadays we call it distance learning.

More realistically, if different sorts of instructional techniques do make a difference under specific circumstances, then it would appear that the wisest and most productive pedagogical strategy would be to maximize options for all participants. Let us call our own shots. Let every student and faculty member put together his or her own multimedia configuration. Uniformity of teaching techniques--let alone research techniques--cannot be justified when no particular technique is consistently more effective than any other. Why should everybody be forced to buy a Ford? A cogent argument for uniformity could be made only if a single technique or a very short list of techniques had consistently proven superior to all others. If the social structure, demography, and classroom ecology of a college or university preclude, or render extremely difficult, the free selection of teaching/learning techniques (along with curricula) by students and faculty members, then that college or university is interfering with the processes of free "sifting and winnowing" (in the words of a famous motto cherished at Wisconsin), and it is incumbent on students and faculty to seek ways of changing or circumventing the letter and/or spirit of official regulations, the deadening unannounced folkways of tradition, the ghastly hidden curriculum.

(4) The EGAD! system and the deterrence of diversity
 

--George Fox
 

I don't know, George: I wouldn't say they were "whole." Talk to Morrie Schwartz.

The conventional wisdom on the socio-economic purposes of grading, degrees, etc., is conveniently summed up by a handy series of platitudes:
 
 

Graduate schools, employers, and parents are the heavies, forcing the onerous tasks upon us. Graduate schools and employers could do their own personnel work, but why should they bother? Why spend resources readily donated by somebody else?

We must use grades to signal to students how well they are doing with their minds, or they will develop hazy self concepts and dissipate energy through social loafing, the internet, the theater, snuff, sports, tongue piercing, sex, booze, cars, sex, drugs, bikes, chewing tobacco, frisbees and, last but not least, sex. The students look to us for deliverance from all these traps, especially STTI's.

Sexually transmitted tongue infections. What did you expect?

We must issue grades in order to persuade ourselves that we are actually teaching something; more importantly, to convince the administration and our other fans of same.

And we hear essentially the same rationale, not unexpectedly, at the high school level; one even hears occasional horrorshow stories about advanced kiddiegarter grade-grabbers. Implicit in all such speculations about the official functions of public evaluation, credentials, and all such truck are the assumptions that, first, university and college professors generally have a sufficient degree of skill as psychometricians, and are sufficiently conscientious about the task, that they are able to devise reasonably objective, reliable, and valid measures of student intellectual performance; second, that such measures, if they truly exist, are highly correlated with later indicators of quality of performance (e.g., occupational achievement) and are therefore useful as predictors. And here, I'm delighted to report, we have a huge problem: There is much evidence that these assumptions are at best shaky and, at worst, utterly untenable.

Given the way many human societies operate, however, this sort of anomaly--one in which the conventional wisdom persists even though its basic premises turn out to be nonsensical--is certainly not uncommon and perhaps not always inappropriate: Tossing away a vast amount of nonsense, chucking our favorite fables in one swell foop, would probably kill us all, you crazy kid! Thomas Schelling, in The Strategy of Conflict, argues persuasively that a certain amount of mindless arbitrariness is inescapable in any society, for in many instances it is more important that decisions be made promptly and definitively than it is that they be made rationally. The U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, is not the final court of appeal because its decisions are always right. Rather, the Court is right because it is the final court of appeal. It may put out sheer nonsense, like Plessy v. Ferguson. Democratic elections are another prime example of Schelling's argument: It does not particularly matter whom we elect to a given office, so long as transitions be made more or less amicably and no incumbent can anticipate an open-ended term of office with all its enhanced opportunities for graft and corruption. Similarly, strictures against the EGAD! system often elicit the comment that "you may be right, but you must provide a workable (i.e., functional) equivalent that will function (i.e., work) just as well."

This is a valid point. Evolutionary biologists say that there are many more ways of being dead than of being alive. Sociologists say that there are many more ways of being irrational than of being rational.

It is hard to believe that any equivalent procedure would be less rational than those now in force; but again, one must concede that current arrangements do indeed crank out decisions that, for the most part, stick. One easily envisions several alternative arrangements, including the highly commendable possibility that outside agencies themselves--mainly graduate schools and employers--assume the major responsibility for their own personnel selections. (If mom and dad want to know what I'm thinking about, or whether I'm thinking at all, let them fucking ask!) If these agencies do not trust their initial judgment--their own potential Plessy-Ferguson snafus--one sees no reason why they should not adopt probationary periods, apprenticeship systems, "up-or-out" arrangements comparable to academic tenure and post-tenure, or the whole battery of compression techniques (I got that from my thesaurus) whereby some of our better teacher-training programs push potential teachers through the pipeline (my thesaurus got that from me).

Much of what our leading educators say when they try to justify the EGAD! system turns out to be bunk. I use this delightfully pejorative term, bunk--a preceding alternative from the same page of my criminal-slang lexicon would serve just as well--because I strongly believe, with Peter Berger, that a large part of what a social scientist does, or ought to do, consists of debunking. That is, it is our major responsibility to expose society as prevaricator, prestidigitator, promulgator of self-delusional nonsense; my earlier Useless News critique serves as an exemplar, if not a model. Our major operating premise, then, holds that the ostensive reasons for given social structures are not the real reasons at all, but merely a set of semi-mystical "collective representations." Rarely are such "reasons" examined; eventually, they take on the majestic quality of a law of nature. Or of common sense, which is even more dangerous than a law of nature.

The EGAD! system has a number of hidden consequences that, in their total impact, are far more important in keeping the moribund system alive than the official purposes cited by the system's pernicious apologists. Of these hidden functions, I now propose to discuss several: (1) the containment of students; (2) the reinforcement of cheating and duplicity, each of which contributes to the containment of students; (3) the maintenance of faculty authoritarianism and the continuation of cheap, "efficient" manpower channeling. I do not claim that my short list is exhaustive--there must be at least a few more items--or that it applies equally to all types of schools. In the main, however, I think it reveals more than a few things about lots of schools.

(4.1) Containment

"One is obliged to suspect, at times, that the student comes to be regarded as a mere disturber of ideal schemes, and as a disquieting element in what, without him, might be a fairly pleasant life." These are the words of president Taylor of Vassar, uttered in 1893. And the problem, alas, has by no means disappeared. The contemporary university professor has been defined as a man or woman who seeks a "student-free sanctuary"--this is what we call the preferred faculty water holes (which, by now, may have dried up) on my campus. Students, as one might suspect, are not unaware of this attitude: A survey conducted at Berkeley as a partial basis for the "Muscatine report" showed that forty-two per cent of the students believed that most professors are more interested in research than teaching. (This attitude, incidentally, testifies that we have done a beautiful job of impressing students with the alleged tension between research and teaching.) The report recognized clearly that one of the major difficulties involved in trying to improve teaching is that the current reward structure is not at all conducive to that goal:

Our major difficulty has been that since achievement in research is a very rare commodity, it tends to enjoy in a faculty that aspires to preeminence in graduate education a greater prestige than achievement in teaching. Hence our ... [faculty members] have given a fuller measure of attention to evidence of research. Even granting that research is itself in some measure an indicator of qualities valuable in teaching, as the system is presently implemented there is danger that deficient performance of teaching is not adequately recognized and outstanding performance not given due credit.

To Tussman, the system as "presently implemented" appears to be chained to the moorings forever. At Berkeley, at the time, things may have looked that way. And more's the fool, at places inhabited by "scholarly teachers" the same rigidities prevail. But how can an intelligent professor with a fine predilection toward experimentation operate indifferently on the deadly premise that teaching and research must be forever at war with each other? Read Feynman: Teaching and research--not respectively--are love and nurturance. They go together. They keep each other alive. They are Romeo and Juliet. Aucassin and Nicolette. Bogie and Bacall. They should not attend segregated schools.

When they do so they create what we shall call, in a moment, spurious diversity.

In any case, regardless of the causes of publish-or-perish arrangements, their possible effects are well worth talking about. One could speculate that the current professorial reward structure at actual or aspiring "research institutions" may tend to create a sharply curtailed world-view, an over-specialization, among professors who might otherwise become "cosmopolitans" in a very special sense. Robert K. Merton's famous distinction between locals and cosmopolitans may well be applicable to American university professors. Such an application was attempted by Alvin Gouldner, who found among other things that cosmopolitan professors differed from locals in having a stronger research orientation, fewer friends within the immediate college community, little sense of attachment or loyalty to the local community, and in receiving most of their intellectual stimulation from sources outside their immediate academic settings. This may be a nice, quiet way to live, but the syndrome tends to weaken the local "community of scholars," if indeed it has any potential value. A later article by Gouldner showed that "there were two kinds of cosmopolitans, the outsiders and the empire builders, and four kinds of locals, the dedicated, the elders, the true bureaucrats, and the homeguard." How did he define these categories? Why should we care?

The outsiders and empire-builders of Gouldner's typology, traditionally understood to be the true cosmopolitans of the academic community, are not an attractive lot: Their bag (or, in the older Skinnerian metaphysic, their box) is definitely to publish or perish. Mainly, publish. Seeking a national or international reputation within the narrow purview of an academic specialty with only a few dozen practitioners throughout the world, these unidimensional cosmopolitans--wonderful oxymoron--find most aspects of local community life anathema to the ambitious interests of career: Administration is for Gouldner's local bureaucrats, the students--specifically the undergraduate students--are the primary enemy, the EGAD! system is the single most important means of containing them, and humanistic studies are largely irrelevant (i.e., inadequately funded) and therefore a waste of time. The reward structures of the most prestigious and influential American universities, not to mention government and the foundations, have supported this breed as lavishly as they do our beloved high-level administrators, and the most persuasive critics of American higher education--William Arrowsmith comes to mind--point to these acolytes of abstracted empiricism as exemplifying the predominant, modal type of adaptation among American university professors. Researchers, in short, although often nice folks, tend to be disastrously over-specialized.

While it is true that publishing and/or perishing do not preclude the multidimensional, cosmopolitan style of a C. Wright Mills, it is also true that one's position as a successful organization man does not preclude one's becoming a first-rate poet: It is simply that one's prospects are a little attenuated, about as good as another Nixon resurrection. The problem of the organization man is the same as that of the academic. It is structural. It lies in the fact that the contemporary organizational mores of capitalism encourage young women and men to make their personal futures a function of the futures of organizations that (with the exception of a few clever advertisements) are generally anti-poetic in their world-view, so that even if anybody bothered to write poetry there would be little reason for reading it. In the smoothest system, of course, we do neither. Vine Deloria may gaze at the moon, but the rest of us gaze mainly at Mammon.

Everybody who has had Sociology 101 understands role complementarity, and the chancellors of Chicago, UCLA, and many other universities--and books such as Axtell's The pleasures of academe--are doubtless correct when they insist that teaching and research are not antagonistic to one another, and may even be mutually supportive. But here we have the fundamental nasty rub: Being a good teacher and a good researcher at the same time, and expending a lot of effort in trying to make these delightful activities complementary, is probably the most difficult sort of work known, except for digging long tunnels and picking short nits. Most research-oriented professors protect themselves, I suspect, by subscribing to the belief that research potentially might help their teaching, while simultaneously not believing that their teaching, at least among undergraduates, is likely to contribute to their research. This belief is disastrous. And teaching faculty, if they are required to do research, probably cherish the same self-delusional system in an inverted form. So, when they propound the "complementarity" argument the learned chancellors evade the central issue entirely--while nevertheless managing, as ever, to sound good. Their point may go over as an aspect of an ideology of rule, but the real issue has to do with time allocation, finite resources, the reward structure at any given school, and the structure of values with which the reward structure interlocks.

It seems likely, then, that one of the major latent effects (read: functions) of the EGAD! system, certainly at research-oriented institutions, is the sheer containment of students. That is, the system keeps students from pestering "scholars." The academic degree, paradoxically, has the dual purpose of initially forcing people (along with their resources) to come to college and then, once they are here, providing a way of holding them in check.

If it is true that the EGAD! system fends off students so that they do not make excessive demands upon scholarly faculty members, then we would expect such professors to be least in favor of breaking up the present EGAD! structure. Furthermore, if there is anything to the idea--implicit in the Berkeley Muscatine report--that publish-or-perish institutions create the most serious disparities between rewards for good teaching and rewards for good research, then we would expect the relationship between research involvement and support for the present grading/degree system to be most pronounced at such institutions. Presumably, as the more scholarly professors "make it" by virtue of their research and publication, the publish-or-perish system begins to look more and more legitimate; among professors of lesser productivity, the reward system does not appear to be all that reasonable and just. Some years ago, at a time when students had forced upon us the range of EGAD! issues that we customarily ignore, the massive faculty surveys conducted by the Carnegie Commission and the American Council on Education provided considerable support for these speculations: Among professors who do little research and/or are not affiliated with research institutions, one-third or more (up to forty-five per cent) favored the abolition of the grading system; among professors at research institutions, about a fourth favored such a change. If future students should happen to get riled up anew over social issues like Vietnam or Kosovo, this lovely dissensus will probably surface once again.

(4.1.1) An obiter dictum on publish-or-perish, times two

From time to time the oligarchs of the governing boards or the Sundance Kids shooting up the statehouse decide that something must be done about publish-or-perish and its alleged negative impact on undergraduate teaching, and these officials can usually be counted on to demonstrate that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing--very little, very dangerous. Sophomoric in the classic sense, these leaders are semi-sophisticated morons. For instance, when Reagan was governor of California, one of his cherished goals was to pass a law stipulating a certain minimum number of "contact hours" per week for faculty members employed by the state, an arrangement that would definitely be anathema to the many senior professors who enjoy only token involvement, if any, in undergraduate education. The president of the University of California opposed the Reagan proposal with the argument that learning is not confined solely to the classroom and that "... professors actually put in a work week of 60 hours, including 25 to 35 hours on various elements of teaching such as preparation, grading, leading seminars and counseling ..." The major flaw of the UC president's argument (along with several minor flaws) is that the 60-hour week is often devoted largely to the training of highly specialized graduate students who are themselves actual or potential research collaborators and disciples.

The UC president also raised an intriguing pair of questions that Reagan and I, although both sociologists, decided to treat as more or less rhetorical: "How many hours a week does a surgeon spend in the operating room? Or a minister delivering his sermon?" Ron and I do, however, wish to point out--although I'm not sure that Ron ever understood this postulate--that analogies inevitably break down: Surgeons and clergypersons are rarely distracted from their main duties by a competing reward system that attaches immense prestige to activities other than surgery or sermonizing. (Ron wanted to trot out Kevorkian and Jim and Tammy here, authorities on sermonizing and surgery respectively, but I don't yet grasp the point.) These central activities are not regarded as infra dig, as is often the case for undergraduate teaching.

So I says, "Ron, why don't you also worry about the guy who loves teaching, but doesn't give a rat's backside about research? Isn't he just as big a problem as your quintessential professor who ignores undergraduates?"

And Ron says, "uh, uh, are you really sure Clint Eastwood's a perfessor? And what exactly is this, uh, this thing, research?"

In writings elsewhere, I've tried to show that the anticipation of financial reward probably does not strongly motivate professors to cultivate "merit." Merit is too mushy, rewards are too iffy, one's luck has gone fusty. Accordingly, it is doubtful that the publish-or-perish reward structure would be changed significantly merely by paying more money to those who achieve proficiency as teachers, even if we agreed on how to assess it. It may well be that the most important features of a reward system have to do with one's value in the eyes of peers, reflected in deference, esteem, collegial support for one's activities, and so forth. Peter M. Blau once made a good case for the idea that the scholarly reputation of a faculty has a larger impact on a given professor's scholarly productivity than his/her own personal qualifications, a finding that implies that professors become good scholars when scholarship is in the culture.

William H. Wilson, explaining a somewhat different situation in The Truly Disadvantaged, nevertheless describes the same social phenomenon when he tells us that "concentration effects" due to living in a neighborhood devastated by poverty have a major impact in undermining ambition among residents of central-city ghettoes. In academe, the same argument would maintain that professors may become good teachers when good teaching is in the culture or, as we aviators like to say, in the atmosphere. If poverty is in the atmosphere, it is also likely to take hold in your mind. Impressionistic evidence, for instance, persuades me that professors at research-oriented institutions often get together spontaneously for informal "brownbag" symposia to discuss their research and writing. The routine presence of such symposia invariably shows that scholarship is a flourishing part of local culture. (On the other hand--and this is an anomaly--I know of few instances in which faculty members at what appear to be "teaching institutions" get together to discuss their teaching.)

And here we have an excellent opportunity to play mad libs: Everything I've said about the distortions created by publish-or-perish institutions applies equally to "EGAD! or get the hell out (GHO)" institutions. If teachers don't give a damn about research, they'll be third-rate. Second rate if they read research and use it; first rate if they actually do it. Someday, even the Ron Reagans of the world will realize this.

(4.1.2) Spurious diversity, publish-or-perish, and EGAD! or GHO

If California has a highly insular, breast-beating Alcoholics Anonymous chapter for older one-legged non-white upper middle-class Roman Catholic lesbian rural high-school tenth grade physics teachers who don't speak Spanish but commute by bus to San Luis Obispo Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, does that mean that California has "diversity"?

Of course not. It means the precise opposite.

Apologists for publish-or-perish or its dialectical opposite, EGAD!-or-GHO, love to argue that diversity among colleges and universities is inherently desirable and that therefore the sharp distinction between "research universities" and "teaching institutions" ought to be maintained, no matter what. They are appalled by the deadly specter of "homogenization" or "leveling" raised by those who urge teaching institutions to do more research and research institutions to do more teaching. What makes their argument fallacious is that it only considers diversity at a given level: It is committed to maintaining diversity among institutions. It says nothing about diversity within institutions, within departments, or within individuals. I don't give a damn whether California has AA chapters with specific configurations of characteristics as finely nuanced as those listed above: If there are a hundred such chapters, they are uniformly boring. If, on the other hand, there were a chapter in California or anywhere else that varied all over the place by age, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, social class, religion and religiosity, sexual orientation, neighborhood of residence, occupation, language background, and lifestyle in general, I would join immediately despite the fact that I haven't had a drink since the last time I tangled with one of my glorious Boodles macromartinis, back in my pre-aviation days. Those of us who advocate "homogenization" among academic institutions--again, this is newspeak, as in saying that the California AA chapter represents "diversity"--do so in the interest of creating the same infinitely wide range of opportunity within all educational institutions, so that each professor or student, who on the whole has access only to the resources of her own institution, can create her own mix. An inspired, capable teacher in a publish-or-perish or EGAD!-or-GHO institution is hardly able to do that. Nor is a student.

I've lived both ends of the spectrum. Madwis in the 'sixties was a mess. And the "scholarly teachers" at places like William & Mary usually appear to have suffered brain death back in the winter of '77. Of the three central activities--teaching, research, and servility--we're only really good at two of them. Come post-tenure review, we're allowed--nay, encouraged--to substitute the third for the second.

The specious argument against "homogenization" recalls a favorite male-supremacist argument that the traditional role diversity between men and women, whereby men play an "instrumental, task-oriented" role and women an "expressive, emotionally-oriented" role, ought to be maintained because diversity and complementarity are inherently good--and perhaps even "functionally necessary." The women's movement counters correctly that what we must strive for is diversity at the level of the individual, so that both men and women may alternate freely between instrumental and expressive roles without upsetting their identities or running afoul of social norms that try to enforce "la différence." Betty Friedan, famous for The Feminine Mystique, showed us how it is possible to be a scholar, writer, mother, politician, lecturer, wife, and journalist, all at the same time. Any other reasonable combination should be possible. What is important is that we value real diversity, so that, as Franklin Roosevelt used to say, each of us can "stitch and meld and weave" together his or her own throw rug.

As this society moves inexorably (one hopes) toward increased freedom from traditional sex roles, it is unavoidable that "homogenization" of the sexes will occur; again, we must reduce diversity between in order to increase diversity within. (Statisticians take note: This is really a problem for analysis of variance, involving a separation of "within" and "between" variance. I'm essentially coming down on behalf of within variance as an eternal good.)

The idea of creating diversity within small social units is intimately bound up with the old Port Huron, radical-student concepts of "participatory democracy" and "decentralization." The former can work only in the context of the latter, and both are a means to the end of creating small, manageable, democratic social entities in which there exists the widest range of opportunities for "self-fulfillment," i.e., diversity, and in which there is the widest possible diffusion of power, wealth, information, and respect. There are those who argue, on a cost-benefit premise, that large diversified social units are less expensive than small diversified units, but the logic of that argument is not immediately clear. And even if true, the smaller units may well be worth the cost.

(4.2) Cheating

One of the major consequences of the EGAD! system is dishonesty. More accurately, dissimulation and duplicity in the relationship of students and teachers so massive that they raise important questions about academic freedom, if there still is such a thing. There is no academic freedom in a dissimulation-and-duplicity factory--for instance, a university PR office. And dissimulation and duplicity do not necessarily mean straight-out lying. Here we must remember once again Lawrence Lipton's famous distinction--I believe it made "NBC News"--between bullshit and horseshit. If you're bullshitting somebody, you at least know that you are lying. If you're laying on lots of horseshit--well, in the words of the ancient poem,

Long since dead and longer buried
Deep in the muck his own hands carried.

Horseshit, then, is much more subtle than bullshit, for in this case we have also succeeded in deluding ourselves. Again, consult your university's PR office for the latest advances in scatological research.

The claim that the EGAD! system, creating dissimulation and duplicity, is an affront to academic freedom may appear startling at first, but if we define as a threat to academic freedom any externally imposed condition or authority that interferes with efforts of students and professors to undertake free intellectual inquiry, then the argument is readily substantiated. And I don't give a damn if you think there is some sort of justification for the imposed condition or authority. Unless we're talking about somebody's screaming "fire" in a crowded theater or making a sick joke on a 747, there is no justification.

(4.2.1) Who cheats?

Take, specifically, the matter of cheating. Several years ago sociologists at Columbia University made a comprehensive survey of cheating in American colleges and universities. Significant findings, often replicated:
 

First, at least half of the approximately 5,000 students interviewed had engaged in some form of cheating as college students.

Second, cheating rates varied substantially among different types of students, with the highest rates occurring among males, upper-division students, academically "weak" students, and students motivated by non-academic, extracurricular goals--social life, sports, parental pressure, and the like.

Third, cheating is more likely among students in career-oriented majors such as business, engineering, and education, than among students who major in the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Fourth, high schools often provide a training ground for cheaters who then continue a practice that, as we have seen, may peak among upper-division students, who have clearly gotten the message.

The prevalence and distribution of cheating, it appears, are precisely as one would expect on the theory (call it an hypothesis) that the strongest incentive for cheating is found among those students who are most likely to be harmed by low grades (juniors and seniors, academically weak students, students in professional schools) and among those most likely to have frivolous and extraneous motivations for coming to college (athletes, members of fraternities and sororities, students subject to strong parental pressure to do well in school [see Astin, NY Times, 1/12/98). These sorts of situational factors appear to have a much greater impact on cheating rates than do various personal attitudes, such as one's general moral orientation, one's beliefs about the ethical status of cheating per se, or one's personal commitment to getting good grades. Nor does cheating have an appreciable association with other forms of transgression--say, drug abuse or lying to one's friends. And, perhaps most important of all, those who have a high capacity for feeling guilt over various acts do not feel guilty when they cheat in college. The lack of guilt feelings among cheaters, in other words, does not appear to arise from a general incapacity for feeling guilt; rather, it appears to be an incapacity created by the demands of a specific social setting. There is a small amount of experimental evidence, in fact, that cheaters may define the college classroom situation as one that justifies cheating--situational ethics, ¿verdad?--and a high degree of tolerance of cheating in others.

In brief, the problem is not bad people. It is a bad social structure.

(4.2.2) Who really cheats? An honor system without honor

This is not a healthy situation: It is a nasty little hidden curriculum. What these findings tell us is that college and university honor systems create a sort of moral bubble chamber in which not a hell of a lot happens until a truly malicious particle--an obvious plagiarism, for instance--comes a-whuppin'-ass through the juicy fluency, having entered from the distant peripheries, from some alien outside corruption. But even for the obvious cases the system doesn't always work so smoothly: Not long ago I reported to a William & Mary faculty grievance committee what appeared to several of my students to be a substantial outbreak of cheating amongst their sophisticated senior colleagues, and the committee went whuppin'-ass out the room. For the subtle cases, faculty committees do not show up at all.

Moral bankruptcy is not the only consequence. One of the inescapable outcomes of this deplorable situation is that teachers are often incapable of making any significant effort to help students in areas where many of them desperately need help. Among our major abdications of responsibility as faculty members is our failure to teach students to write well, and yet how could it be otherwise? Aside from the quandary of having too many students, which in itself nearly precludes our paying real attention to the problem of student writing, we are faced with the more or less inescapable fact that any time we receive a set of term papers a substantial proportion of them will be the product of what we used to call "numerous inter-campus term-paper rings," i.e., what we now call the internet. Porn, bomb recipes, nazi horseshit, term papers--all are readily available just a few clicks away. And the good folks at plagiarism.com can't catch all of it.

Although "functionalist" explanations in the social sciences assume that vested interests usually have mustered sufficient political power to protect the status quo that serves them, it appears that those who have a direct vested interest in cheating, such as organizers and profiteers of term paper mills, have little power and probably could not provide much support for the grading-rating system if it were seriously challenged. They're a little like drug traffickers: They need to cultivate the clientele. Academic dishonesty may function as a subtle dimension of containment, and therefore many faculty members have an interest in maintaining it. A student who cheats is a student contained. For fear of being found out, he or she is not going to come around and bother us, or raise serious issues in class. Faculty members who spend their entire careers bending into a low profile while chasing after and jumping on any consensus calliope that comes down the pike, no matter how obnoxious the noise, will welcome serious student or collegial argumentation with the enthusiasm of a biologist asked to debate a creationist, a sociologist asked to debate a racist, a university PR peckerwood asked to debate reality.

It is always shocking to discover among one's colleagues men and women who profess a grand indifference toward academic duplicity, who treat it as an epiphenomenon, a peripheral corrosion that could not possibly have a powerful impact on our efforts to establish something approximating a community of scholars. This attitude reflects an extraordinary sociological and psychological naivete. Cheating per se is merely one small dimension of a set of conditions that force students and professors to interact in ways contrary to the will, and probably the better interests, of both parties. It is this larger structure of oppression, within which cheating on examinations and term papers is merely a small deformity, that kills education. Those who express this splendid indifference toward cheating are in effect arguing that it is not at all harmful, at least to those who do not cheat, to permit dishonesty, duplicity, dissimulation to become institutionalized within the academic community. But our more perceptive students recognize this attitude for what it is: an active complicity in hypocrisy. And it harms non-cheaters for the same reasons that racism, sexism, and ageism harm non-racists, non-sexists, and non-ageists.

It is not surprising that nearly all research into cheating among college students has focused on narrow questions--whether or not respondents have ever plagiarized a term paper or, more frequently, cribbed on an examination. Research into student achievement is usually self-limiting in much the same way, even when achievement is thought to go beyond the superficial inanities of recent U.S. News & World Report "college rankings." Achievement is very likely to be assessed by examination performance. But achievement has many more dimensions than mere performance on what is typically an "objective" examination. Similarly, cheating has dimensions far more complex and subtle than mere cribbing or plagiarism. The more disturbing forms of cheating by students involve those who play "intellectual for a day," who "filibuster" as a means of killing class time, who feign a strong enthusiasm for professors they detest, for courses they detest, or for an educational system they detest, who strive mightily to hide their intellectual deficiencies or, conversely, who treat intellectually committed students as "rate busters" or "grinds"--insert the latest terminology. Among professors, one of the more serious forms of cheating is that which treats these games as if they were tolerable in a scholarly community, or that which promulgates the phony myth of collegiality that always seems to flourish at precisely those institutions where faculty hatchet artists do all in their power to bring down an occasional "bad apple," i.e., any colleague who has fled the aforementioned low-to-the-ground consensus calliopes wheeling their way slowly against all resistance, against all reality.

(4.3) Authoritarianism: A power system without responsibility

Step inside any university building that isn't locked up, and look around: You'll see part of the problem--its spatial ecology--even if it is a quiet Sunday afternoon and nobody's around. In each of the several universities I've served, disserved, and perhaps deserved over the years, there are at least a half dozen classrooms on each floor of the social science building alone that provide splendid examples of what Norman Mailer once aptly called "totalitarian architecture": The walls, floors, and ceilings are lifeless, drab, totally inartistic, and the dull structural lines are broken only by an occasional protruding coat hook, monstrously ugly--especially in the lower latitudes where coat hooks are never repaired; "no smoking" signs, one for each wall, the new literary genre that now must protect secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and especially us quinary smokers whose lungs no longer tolerate the deadly potentiation of baser mortals--all these artifacts remind us that the phrase "thou shalt not" epitomizes well what occurs within these depressing walls. And there is more. Numbered seats, bolted to the floor, tiered row upon rigid row toward the rear of the room and designed and spaced in such a way that, by comparison, the granite pews of the toughest fundamentalist, muscular-Christianity churches must be more than comfortable. Students struggle mightily, like ballerinas in straitjackets, just to turn their bodies around in these racks--one hesitates to think what would happen if anybody toward the middle of a tight-packed row, suffering the boozy version of morning sickness, should have to exit quickly. In the front of the room is a stage, the ever-present lectern-escutcheon, and a blackboard containing inspired words such as "psych 101 no class today." Such a room destroys any chance for flexible, free-wheeling, non-threatening learning environments; all it tells us is that no trial plus no error equals early death.

Although I know of only a handful of studies that try to test, at least by implication, Robert Michels' iron law of oligarchy as it relates to the academic community, the studies with which I am familiar have found evidence that rigid hierarchy predominates and shapes nearly all relationships; that a virtual monopoly of power is held by a small coterie of tenured, high-salaried professors, long-term administrators, and reactionary regents, elders, visitors, trustees; that social and intellectual interchanges are merely a reflection of the underlying hierarchy of power, prestige, income, wealth--a tight little fasces that, as Paul Goodman once said, makes a sham of the notion of a "community of scholars." And those located near the bottom of the hierarchy--probationary faculty, assorted faculty helots and troublemakers, most students, members of the "support staff"--have an overwhelming and realistic sense of their own irrelevance and powerlessness. Paul Nash, who once wrote a penetrating analysis of power and authority in American academe, comments that

it is essential to differentiate clearly between authority--which is often necessary--and authoritarianism--which is always pernicious ... The belief in the value of order for its own sake is a basic feature of an authoritarian philosophy. ... There is a constant danger in schools that authority will degenerate into authoritarianism, because teaching unfortunately attracts those who consciously or (more commonly) unconsciously wish to exercise authority in order to satisfy some unfulfilled need within themselves.

The famous study by Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, showed that the reciprocal of authoritarian aggression is authoritarian submission--that is, the authoritarian has a facility for bashing those below him in a hierarchy, but he is very careful not to offend those above, from whom he/she receives the necessary ammo, Nintendo style. And being inoffensive usually means learning and applying diligently the arts of kissing ass. Teaching, research, servility.

But don't take my word for it. If you're a faculty member, stick around until you have a chance to live in a department run by a nasty claque of authoritarians with an agenda. If you're a student, talk to the most alienated professors around the place. Find out how they got that way. Then, write it up in a term paper!

Back in the 'sixties, for a time, black and white radicals used the term "nigger" in reference to black and non-black people who were seen as being highly submissive, as having "Uncle Tom" personalities, attitudes, and behaviors. With this usage in mind (there were several others), Professor Jerry Farber wrote an extraordinary essay called "The student as nigger." Widely circulated among American college students by the underground press, this paper accurately summarized the contemporary lifestyle of the vast majority of college and university students and also made some penetrating observations on the authoritarian aggression/submission of faculty members. If students are niggers, in Farber's view, then professors are rednecks--with redneck deference, of course, toward those above them. Farber may have distorted a few things and exaggerated others, but it was only a few weeks ago that my Arts and Sciences colleagues, in solemn assembly, pressed on itself the idea--in my estimation, an outrageous absurdity--that we must save dusty old bluebooks and term papers for a much longer period of time than formerly, because students who wish to make grade appeals sometimes require a year or so to overcome their fears and inhibitions and to call forth the courage to assert what is taken to be a right. And the irony is that these colleagues represent an institution that claims that its prime goal is to instill in students something called "personal autonomy." Foma.⁽¹⁾ But even though they lack autonomy, the students of today rarely sink to the level of Farberesquely obsequious deference attained by the tenure-track junior faculty, or by the uniformed senior faculty seeking administrative gigs.

The highly edifying journal called Army, published by the United States Army Association, once ran an article designed to acquaint ROTC students and instructors with various features of American academic life. Like Professor Farber, they were right onward:
 
 

When students and faculty criticize the authoritarian nature of the military, don't deny it. But don't display only one side of the coin. Mention the junior officers' councils now spreading throughout the Army, and ask the educators whether or not they have anything comparable for their instructors and assistant professors. If they sneer at the dividing line between officers and enlisted men, or concomitant social barriers between families, ask them about the social pecking order and bitter hierarchical fights that mark the academic world. ...

Give Tussman a shot at a few of these questions.

This anonymous author has insight: I have no idea how s/he missed administrative tyranny over faculty members, which happens to be about as deadly as a runaway atrabilious bazooka. But Tussman covered it: "The world of higher education," he said in 1997, "is dominated by an establishment that is utterly unimaginative, conventional, safe, and hopeless." Enough said, although I had to repeat it the other day to my beloved provost.

Those academicians who thrive on this sort of arrangement, who find it impossible to slog along satisfactorily without the ability to come down hard on students or on faculty subordinates, who wish to preserve the current system and its many buttresses, constitute a vested interest of considerable political power, and that power must be overcome if we are to change the system in any significant way. Remember: Authoritarian aggression coexists with authoritarian submission, and our students (not to mention the faculty) will probably continue their current mode of abject acquiescence in the larger travesties until they have known the experience of revolt.

But there has been one big change: Students nowadays have an immense and increasing impact on faculty evaluation, easily suppressing salaries or destroying careers of those teachers whom they find objectionable for whatever reason--nobody, of course, asks the shoot-from-the-hip "undisclosed source" to justify anything--and one might therefore argue that "the stockholders" have an extraordinary opportunity to break out of the traditional rigidities of authoritarian folkways. But, again, we must remember: An authoritarian social system, by the definition proposed above, always allocates and re-allocates irresponsible power. Practices such as the nearly universal use of student course evaluations (SCE's) involve precisely this sort of power, which is intolerable. An isolated student checking off items on an SCE form has far less responsibility than the traditional tenured faculty member serving on a personnel committee: The latter, although surrounded by all sorts of buffers, is nevertheless identifiable and, on rare occasion, may be challenged under semi-juridical circumstances. It is ironic that while such faculty members may initially blow off the occasional challenge as nothing more than the puling and whining of the inept, they are at least known, they have professional competencies, and they may from time to time try to use these competencies to justify tough decisions. If the student of today, wielding the omnipresent ten-item, forty-five second checklist, is sitting on a log opposite Mark Hopkins--who will of course be blindfolded--he can indeed jump off without warning or reason, and laugh triumphantly as his glorious mentor flies. This is unprecedented, and it is dangerous. It is dangerous because, among other things, it creates massive intellectual dishonesty.

Confrontation politics (or any effective brand of politics) would not be inappropriate; however, at the present moment I should like merely to bring about a confrontation of ideas. The idea of education governed by irresponsible power is incompatible with the idea that the most desirable learning environment is democratic, non-directive, and non-threatening, and those who consciously or unconsciously impose the authoritarian structure they favor, no matter how subtly, discreetly, or indirectly they may do it, are making an assault on academic freedom. Their actions or inactions should be exposed for what they are, and those who have philosophies of education that collide with the consensus-founded compulsions of the prevailing philosophy must refuse to continue their complicity in the existence of a system that is unjust, demeaning, oppressive, and inhumane.

If we could somehow overcome the current attitude of resignation, the nasty Astin syndrome [note], we might eventually arrive at a delightful state of affairs in which students--and perhaps their potential employers, why not?--would be able to initiate courses, to participate fully in planning and implementing curricula, to use whatever classroom (or beer tavern) procedures they and their mentors consider promising, to opt out of the grading-rating system, and to influence personnel decisions in numerous ways through effective formal and informal mechanisms. The nature and extent of such powers must be sharply defined, and all such powers must be limited. Most importantly, power--especially that which allocates rewards--must involve responsibility, as opposed to the contemporary penchant for using anonymous checklist questionnaires, self-selected (maybe) student informants cozy with administrators, and faculty members who will accept anything if you do not assault their solipsistic interests. For some kinds of decisions--for example, the decision to establish a new course--the consent of a relevant student plenum ought to be a sufficient condition, if somebody is available who knows the subject in question and is willing to teach it. In other cases, students should exercise a veto. In still other instances, students should have (vaguely) some modicum of influence. Furthermore, a given decisionmaking procedure may be applicable to some courses, but not to all courses; some departments, but not to all departments; some divisions, but not to all divisions; some colleges, but not to all colleges. The current inflexible political posturing of faculty members and administrators does not envision the many available options, which would truly challenge our ingenuity. But don't take my word for it: Go to a faculty meeting (many of them, by laws rarely asserted, have to be open to the public), wait till the assembly prepares to elect colleagues to a powerful, key committee (if this particular body has any), get the floor and raise a point of information (if you're allowed to do so), say that you would like the candidates to make ten-minute speeches defining their platforms (if they are attending the meeting and have anything to say), and see what happens (if you have not yet been removed from the assembly hall). You will then understand a large part of the problem. It is foma.

Note:

*This title contains a restrictive clause, and thus has no comma. There may be a few mules out there that actually engender something.

1. "Foma, of course, are lies."--Vonnegut