Archive for Andrew Potter
Searching for a higher education strategy
No party is making a serious effort at providing federal leadership
Today, the good folks over at Higher Education Strategy Associates released their long-awaited analysis of the party platforms regarding post-secondary education. They were clearly rejigging parts of the analysis right up to the end – the document is larded with pictures of the party leaders taken from VintageVoter.ca.
The analysis looks at federal education policy proposals under main headings: Student Aid, Transfers to Provinces and Institutions, Research, and Apprenticeships. The section on student aid takes up over half the analysis, largely because – as the report points out:
Looking across all party platforms, one is struck by how much the cost of postsecondary education dominates all other issues. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking this was the only issue that mattered to federal parties.
Details on education transfers are notable for their absence in the Conservative and Liberal platforms and for their incoherence in the New Democrat one. Apart from a Conservative regurgitation of last month’s budget, policies on scientific research are essentially absent. And everyone apparently thinks Apprenticeships are a Good Thing but not so good as to actually require policy. Apart from these topics, only the New Democrats have shown any ambition at all in the area, with their promises on childcare and Aboriginal Education. Within PSE itself, the lack of vision and ideas is palpable.
The upshot is that federal approaches to higher education amount to this: The Conservatives are offering slight tweaks to the existing student aid system, while the NDP are proposing to just throw more cash at it. The HESA analysis credits the Liberals with having “the most intriguing and certainly the best thought-out” platform regarding student aid; the Learning Passport idea is the only one that hints at re-imagining the way student aid works, and the only one that promises to inject even a modicum of progressivity into the system.
But overall, the analysis is pretty depressing. Jean Chretien was the last prime minister to make a serious effort at providing federal leadership in higher education and to have a vision for the role higher education can play in a modern economy, but that was fifteen years ago. Since then, federal policy has been a wasteland of boutique tax breaks and minor tweaks to student aid. Any grander conviction that a country’s universities are among its most crucial institutions, and that supporting those institutions is in the national interest, is completely absent.
How not to defend the liberal arts
Study philosophy if you are bothered by philosophical problems
Spend long enough studying philosophy, and eventually someone — most likely a member of your family — is going to ask, “what are you going to do with that?” It’s a tough question to answer, since philosophy isn’t really something you do something with, like a screwdriver. It’s more like something you just do — like fly fishing. But academic philosophy, like every other department in the university, is in the selling game, trying to attract customers and the money they bring, money that enables you and your colleagues to keep doing philosophy.
And so during my time in academia, I spent a number of days at university fairs, these events in big convention-style halls where you set up a little booth, pile a few texbooks in front of you, and wait for prospective students to wander by. And when they do — parents hovering skeptically in the background — they want to know why they should study philosophy. One year, I remember manning the booth with a fellow grad student, and we had come up with what we thought was a pretty clever sales pitch. “It’s great preparation for law school,” we told our customers. “Think of it as like cross-training for your brain.” etc.
The truth is, neither of us really had two clues why anyone should study philosophy, or what you would do with it. It didn’t really bother us though, since philosophy was interesting, we were young and curious, and the harder, more pressing questions seemed a long way off. But the fact that the best we could do by way of justification for philosophy was its instrumental or technocratic benefits says a lot about our own disciplinary insecurity and the ideological tenor of the times (which, it has to be said, has only intensified over the last decade).
So that’s one bad way of defending philosophy (feel free to substitute your own favoured discipline for “philosophy”). The value of studying philosophy can’t be that it’s a form of preparation for law school, or that it provides a sophisticated critical/analytic training for your brain.
But at the same time, the liberal arts has to be useful in some sense, doesn’t it? I say this because there is a defense of the “squishy subjects” that makes the opposite error, by making their value far too, well, squishy. A case in point is a recent piece by Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution, which was printed in the Wall Street Journal. According to Berkowitz, the true aim of liberal education is to prepare citizens for the proper exercise of freedom. “Education for freedom” or “Education for citizenship” is an old idea; here’s Berkowitz’s version of it:
How can one think independently about what kind of life to live without acquiring familiarity with the ideas about happiness and misery, exaltation and despair, nobility and baseness that study of literature, philosophy and religion bring to life? How can one pass reasoned judgment on public policy if one is ignorant of the principles of constitutional government, the operation of the market, the impact of society on perception and belief and, not least, the competing opinions about justice to which democracy in America is heir?
This makes me more or less uncomfortable, depending on how we are interpret the thesis. On a “strong” interpretation, Berkowitz comes close to saying that only people who have studied the liberal arts are truly indepedent thinkers and are positioned to judge public policy. At the extreme, only these people are truly citizens. I’ve never really been persuaded by these sorts of arguments, and it strikes me as a dangerous route for the defenders to take by moralizing the study of the liberal arts. It is a commonly held position in academic circles though — more than a few humanities profs console themselves with the thought that even if they aren’t as important or as well paid as the hotshots in the sciences or engineering faculties, at least they are better people.
A weaker version of the thesis says something like the following: A healthy society provides a cadre of intellectuals with the time, space, money, and resources to think deeply and broadly about all sorts of questions. The goal of these inquiries is not “freedom” or “citizenship”, and it certainly isn’t more questions. The answers matter because the questions matter, though their practicality or application may not be always relevant or obvious. But it is worth having people think and argue about all sorts of things: immigration, equality, justice, voting behaviour, constitutionalism, race, culture, language, class and on and on, because we don’t really know what sort of problems we’ll face as a society.
On this view of things, the liberal arts work sort of the same way as your immune system. Your immune system doesn’t know what specific invasions it will face, so it just generates billions of shapes of antibodies, hoping that one of them will match the relevant antigen. I could go on, except I seem to have arrived at pretty much the same answer given by Paul Wells, in his excellent essay on the subject, which you must read if you haven’t yet.
The upshot: Study philosophy if you are bothered by philosophical problems. Study history if you are interested in problems in history. Etc. If you are lucky, you will have an interesting career. If you are very good and also very lucky, your work will be relevant and useful.
Why every day is amateur hour in the House
Two-thirds of our MPs have a university degree, compared to 93 per cent in the U.S.
Apart from sex, the only realm of human achievement where ignorance and inexperience are widely seen as virtues is politics. Sarah Palin is only the most notorious recent example of the phenomenon; the “vote for me, I have no experience” gambit succeeds with remarkable frequency, which speaks volumes about public attitudes toward the political process and politicians. Politics is seen as a profession in the same sense that prostitution is, practised only by people of highly suspect moral character.
Canadian politicians are no exception, and the merits of this judgment are clearest in this country in the daily disgrace known as question period. To call question period a zoo would be an insult to the relative civility and good temperament of wild animals; one suspects that the occasional parleys between Bloods and Crips in South Central Los Angeles are less partisan and hostile affairs.
There is a tendency to chalk this behaviour up to an excess of familiarity among parliamentarians—the result of too many lifelong MPs going at it hammer and tongs day after day, year after year. The obvious analogue here is the famously entrenched U.S. Congress, which is highly professionalized and yet beset by partisanship and scandal.
Indeed, not so long ago there was a gnawing sense among some Ottawa observers that the incumbency rates in the Commons had reached levels dangerously comparable to those in the U.S. Congress.
And so in 2005, Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail wrote a sharp column lamenting the steep rise of MPs’ salaries under Jean Chrétien. Canadians, he argued, had become increasingly alienated from the political process, which they saw as the domain of “an increasingly self-perpetuating political class, or caste, with its own vocabulary, rituals, defence mechanisms and, in many instances, rather old ideas.”
Except a new study out this week from the Public Policy Forum suggests just the opposite. Bluntly stated, the report’s conclusions are that the House of Commons is so bad precisely because it is made up (mostly) of men who have little experience and education, lack any institutional memory of how Parliament ought to function, and are widely ignorant of the proper relationship between politicians and the bureaucracy.
The report’s figures are striking. One quarter of Canadian MPs are newly elected, while just over two-thirds have less than five years experience in the Commons and only three per cent have been serving their constituents for more than 15 years. There is a sharp contrast with U.S. and U.K. figures: two-thirds of the U.S. Congress have more than five years experience and over a quarter of representatives have more than 15 years experience; in Britain, two-thirds of parliamentarians have more than seven years experience, and a third have more than 11 years experience.
One job you don’t need a degree for
You need a degree to teach, but 32 per cent of MPs don’t have one
To many Canadians, Parliament often seems like a Wild West saloon, lacking both the comparative civility of British parliamentary discourse and the sober professionalism of the U.S. Congress. It turns out that crude public perception is underwritten by some cold facts: according to new data crunched by the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum, 32 per cent of Canadian MPs do not have a university degree. In the U.S., only four per cent of members of the House of Representatives do not have a university degree, and in the U.K. that figure is 28 per cent. The breakdown along party lines in Canada is even more striking. While only 15 per cent of Liberals are without a chunk of sheepskin on their office wall, 41 per cent of Conservatives and 37 per cent of NDP members do not have degrees.
Does this matter? John Godfrey, a now-retired Liberal MP for Don Valley West with three postgraduate degrees (not to mention a bunch of honorary doctorates), said that while he found the statistic “interesting,” the study “didn’t alarm [him] in any way.” He doesn’t think educational background should determine whether someone is fit for Parliament. Perhaps not. But given that you need a university degree to teach Grade 1 math or to be a social worker, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the people hired to make and examine our laws might benefit from a few years of higher learning.
At the very least, the relative paucity of degrees among MPs suggests that being a parliamentarian is not seen as a long-term career to which one might dedicate years of careful study. Indeed, the same study found the average tenure among members of our Commons is only seven years, compared with 11 in the U.S. and 10 in the U.K. All of which helps explain why question period often seems like amateur hour. It’s because it is.
A textbook scam: Potter
Some book publishers giving kickbacks to US colleges
For years, it has been standard practice in the college-textbook biz to churn out “new editions” of textbooks, even in such slow-moving fields such as formal logic or metaphysics. In fact, in order to even get a textbook contract with most publishers, profs have to agree to produce x-number of new editions within a set period of time—typically, something like three editions in five years.
Everyone knows it is bogus, that the sole purpose of the new edition is to undercut the used textbook market; it’s effectively a tuition surtax on students (or their parents) that gets paid directly to profs and publishers.
Now some colleges in the US are going one better: They’re publishing department-specific textbooks—usually some standard text with an added chapter that consists of something like the department style guide—and printing an (illegal) notice on the book that reads “This book may not be bought or sold used.” The publisher then sends a royalty (aka a kickback) to the department, which usually forgets to tell the students about this arrangement.
Real classy stuff. Attention students and profs — anyone know of anything like this going on in Canada? Send me private emails if you like.
How do I get a reference letter?
You’ll need one to get into grad school, so start early. Lesson 1: Be an annoying keener.
With distressing regularity, anyone who has taught in a university for any length of time receives an email that goes something like this:
Dear Professor Smith,
You probably don’t remember me, but I was a student in your Intro 101 class back in 200X. After working for a few years, I’ve decided I would like to go to graduate school, and was wondering if I could possibly trouble you for a reference letter. I got a 74 per cent in your class, and I have appended my resumé showing what I have been up to since I graduated. I know this is a shot in the dark, but you are almost the only professor I could even ask, and I could really use your help.
Sincerely yours,
“A” student
Reference letters are a necessary part of any application to graduate or professional school, along with a writing sample, statement of research interest, standardized test scores, and a transcript. The relative importance of each of these varies depending on the discipline and department, with grades and test scores mattering a great deal for admission to law and medicine, whereas humanities departments tend to pay more attention to the writing sample. Yet backing it all up are the ubiquitous reference letters, testimonials written on the student’s behalf speaking to his or her ability, character and personality.
Unfortunately, many students shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to getting reference letters, and those who write meek pleas like the one above are making two fundamental errors. The first is pretty simple to fix: don’t be sheepish or apologetic. Writing reference letters for students is not a favour that professors grant to their students, it is one of their professional obligations. Crazy as it seems, professors want to get their best students into grad schools, and writing strong letters on their behalf is part of the job.
The second mistake is a bit harder to fix after the fact. The time to start making your case for a reference letter is not when you decide to go to graduate school. Rather, you need to start setting the stage for possible letters when you are still an undergrad, with your academic future still dimly imagined. This stage is built on three pillars: your course selection, your choice of professors, and your behaviour in class.
Start with course selection. It is hard for profs to get to know you in a class of 200 or 300 students, which is why you have to find at least a couple of courses, preferably in the upper years, that have a maximum enrolment of 30 students or so. Take these courses even if you aren’t particularly interested in the topic, since the attention and recognition you will get from the professor will more than make up for dull content.
Second of all, pay attention to who is teaching the class. At almost every university in Canada a great deal of instruction is being off-loaded to grad students, adjunct faculty and contract workers. They tend to be young and desperate, and consequently put a lot of effort into their teaching. But they are also itinerant workers, with very little status within the profession. When you go looking for reference letters a few years down the road it might be hard just finding them, since they could be literally anywhere in the world. And even when you do track them down, chances are that they will be either still working on contracts, or even out of the academic business altogether. In either case, any reference they give you will carry relatively little weight within the profession. So when selecting your courses, do a quick check in the department calendar and find out which instructors are permanent members of the faculty, and take as many of their classes as you can.
Finally, it is useful to keep one thing in mind: professors can only write you a good letter if they know who you are, what you are like, and how your mind works. It is very hard to write a strong letter for a student when all you can really say is that “so-and-so took my class and got a B+.” So do all the readings and go to class. And when you are in class, ask a lot of questions. Then make a point of dropping by during the prof’s office hours, and pepper him or her with comments about the lecture or the readings or the assignment. In short, be the annoying keener that everyone hates.
References aren’t the most important part of your application, and it would take a truly outstanding letter to make up for miserable grades or an incompetent writing sample. But reference letters are a necessary part of your application, and they signal your acceptance into a community of scholars. If you are an undergraduate student with even the slightest thought that you might someday want to go on to graduate school, it is never too early to start working on getting those letters. Be as strategic and mercenary about it as possible—you have nothing to apologize for.
