Radio Pick: Value of University Forum

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's radio pick comes from CBC Radio One's The Sunday Edition. Public forums bringing together people from across a nation can be quite informative, as was the case of CBC Radio One's forum on university education held in Halifax and broadcast this week. While host Michael Enright brought out the baseline positions of the various guests in the first hour, the really interesting side issues came out in the second hour of the broadcast, making for some interesting radio. I will not soon forget Laura Penny's outburst "All of western civilization is a bubble," for example.

Listen to streaming MP3 of The Sunday Edition "Is A University Education Worth the Cost?"

Economics: Why Isn't It Required Coursework?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I am sometimes amazed by how little the average person in North America seems to know about economics. The educated can debate vigorously about concepts or fine points of monetary policy, stimulus packages, or tax reform, and I don't mind arguing with someone that treats Milton Friedman as more of a deity than I do. What annoys me is when an interlocutor has no concept of the role of taxation, or the difference between socialism and communism, or doesn't understand that he or she might not be counted as unemployed even though they aren't working.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising. Where I grew up in Washington state, no course in economics was required in order to graduate from high school. I did take economics as an elective in high school, and despite being taught by a football coach, it was one of the most practical courses I took in those four years. That was the first time I ever saw a form from the Internal Revenue Service. It was the first time I ever looked at stock tables in a newspaper (try finding those in most papers today!) in order to see how a fake portfolio was doing (boy do I wish I had really held the shares of Union Pacific that I pretended to have then).

Despite having course materials donated by a business association (I regret that I cannot remember which one), it was not all about capitalism. I specifically remember a test question asking about the difference between socialism and communism--something that was not even covered in the college-level Economics 101 course that I took. After a unit on different economic systems, there was extensive coverage of different ways to save money--I probably would not have known about anything except savings accounts had I not taken that class, never mind the rules for contributing to an Individual Retirement Account.

Combine that semester-long high school course of the basics with years of listening to American Public Media's Marketplace, the first public radio show I ever started listening to not long after its debut in 1989, and not much more education is needed to become economically literate. Marketplace provides information on economic issues from a consumer perspective and does a great job of teaching about contemporary policy issues. In contrast, the college-level course I took on economics was so highly theoretical that I'm not sure I've used any of what I learned there outside of arguing about policy.

Economists spend a lot of time lamenting the lack of savings and reliance on credit in the United States and Canada. It seems to me that investing in a little practical education, mandatory economics courses including things like compound interest would make a lot of sense, and I don't understand why it isn't contemplated more often.

Education: The Anne Rice in My Life

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The author Anne Rice has been in the news recently for publicly renouncing her Roman Catholic faith. She used her Facebook page to make the announcement. Some questioned why this was news at all--Rice had previously left the church when she was 18 and only re-avowed the faith ten years ago. Certainly, NPR News has received quite a bit of criticism for its eight-minute interview of Rice on All Things Considered, which aired Monday.

However, Anne Rice has never been an author to me. Anne Rice was the best Reading teacher I ever had, in the sixth grade at Odle Middle School in Bellevue, Washington. The middle school gifted program I was in had self-contained classes, most taught by two gifted specialists, Linda Oman and Anita Bhat. However, there were more classes for the three grade levels than they were contracted to teach and thus outside specialists were brought in for various courses, usually Science and Math, but in this case, Reading.

Mrs. Rice made an impression right from the first day of school. For students already reeling from the structure of middle school compared with free-form elementary school, entering her classroom was an additional shock. Her diction was absolutely perfect, and it would remain that way the entire year. She made it clear that she would not tolerate students being late or any distractions in the classroom. The fact that we would learn that Mrs. Rice was sensitive to sunlight just seemed entirely appropriate for a strict Reading teacher. Yet, rather than feeling threatened by the expectations, I think most of my class viewed it as a chance to prove we were mature enough to handle it.

Fundamentally, this group of gifted students rather liked Reading, so the fact that we had a teacher that was going to push us was actually rather nice. I don't remember most of what we read in that class, but I do remember being questioned about vocabulary and learning more about the origin of words than I had ever encountered before. Through it all, Mrs. Rice wasn't actually that stingy about giving positive reinforcement, but it did have to be earned, and when you heard a comment like "Very good!" you knew that she meant it.

I believe her class was the first time I ever tackled any Shakespeare, and I specifically remember reading "Romeo and Juliet" aloud. We would be assigned the various characters at the beginning of class, and mostly those assigned Romeo and Juliet would be working for their grades on a given day. One day, I was assigned Friar Laurence and managed to go through a fairly long passage (perhaps the beginning of Act II, Scene III), barely taking a breath. At the end of class, someone commented that they hadn't gotten a chance to get a good grade that day. Mrs. Rice just stated back, "I bet our Friar Laurence today thought the same thing at the beginning of class. Sometimes you have to take advantages of the opportunities you do have." Those of us listening learned an important life lesson that day.

While most of even my high school teachers are now retired or teaching elsewhere, I was amazed to find that Mrs. Rice is still at Odle as she has been since 1981, though she now mostly teaches Social Studies. She even has a web site which expresses her philosophy exactly as I remember it, that discipline creates a level of comfort that leads to everything else one should expect from an education.

I bet today's students are still getting that education in her classroom, and furthermore that Anne Rice is still making sure that they're paying attention to it.

Education: On Jaime Escalante

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The passing yesterday of legendary high school mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante has prompted an outpouring of memories about his impact on students in East Los Angeles and later Sacramento. Most people were introduced to Escalante through the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, which dramatized how he had taught Advanced Placement Calculus at Garfield High School. In the wake of the movie, Escalante went on speaking tours, and I had the opportunity to see him speak at Stanford University.

There was a surprising low-level hostility in the audience at Stanford. A significant portion of students felt that Escalante had sold out by going to Sacramento to teach instead of continuing to teach in East Los Angeles, not knowing the school politics that had caused him and a supportive principal to leave Garfield. Escalante probably didn't win any of them over, as he focused on his recipe for success rather than his conflicts in the school district.

Walking away from that speech (and likely influenced by the movie), I was left with a two-point vision of why he had been so incredibly effective, with the first point different than Escalante would have stated. Exceptional teachers have to be able to express understanding of students, culturally and emotionally. A Bolivian like Escalante had the cultural and language skills to reach inner-city Hispanic students. It wouldn't have been impossible for someone of another background to do the same thing, but it would have been much more difficult, possibly prohibitively so. Every student may have the capacity to exceed expectations, but not everyone has the ability to motivate them to do so.

The second point has come to be uncontroversial, if not universally implemented. Expectations are incredibly important. If students are not faced with high expectations, they will not overachieve. Some may need more motivation and need to work much harder to reach for the high expectations, but every student has a better chance to succeed when they are expected to succeed. Almost without exception, this is a part of the formula at every school where students demonstrate high levels of academic achievements.

Jaime Escalante became a legend because he was the right person to reach young adults and set high expectations for a generation of students. The fact that even a legend wasn't allowed to continue working his magic said more about the educational system than about Escalante. (And the fact that he couldn't afford health care in his final days said more about the health care system.) Now, we have just memories of Escalante, and a movie to inspire us, rather than a passionate individual.

Education: Declaring a Major

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Recent discussions among some of my acquaintances about the hoops they had to go through to proceed with a course of study have reminded me of the amusing story of when I declared a major as an undergraduate. I had behaved for most of my early undergraduate career as a chemistry major. However, the reality of the need for a PhD in order to be taken seriously in the field, and the realization that a surprising number of my graduate student teaching assistants in chemistry courses were miserable--not a common thing at a sunny California university--caused me to reconsider. (One teaching assistant of a lab course even committed suicide while I was in his section, which made that course pretty hard to complete with any enthusiasm.)

Toward the end of my sophomore year, I finally decided to declare chemical engineering as a major, while taking only the introductory course to the field. At the time, the department's policy was that all students wishing to declare the major had to meet with the department chairman. That year, Dr. Gerald G. Fuller was serving as chairman, so I arranged a meeting with him. I was instructed to bring my transcript.

Upon being invited into his office, the man that I would eventually come to know as Gerry (it was a small department) requested my transcript and then asked some banal question about my experience at the university. As I tried to give a reasonable answer, he started to peruse my transcript. After about twenty seconds, he held it up in front of his face, seemingly to get a closer view. When I paused in my answer, he moved his head to the side and asked another banal question I do not remember, then returned his head to my transcript. When I finished answering his second question, he put the transcript down on his desk, looked me in the eye, and said:

"You're going to be successful in this major."

I never asked him what he was looking for on my transcript. At the time I was borderline offended that he reached that conclusion apparently based on what he saw on a piece of paper, rather than any real knowledge of my capabilities or enthusiasm for the material. Perhaps he was at least in part seeing how I would react to his attention being somewhere other than on what I was saying, even if it was focused in some sense on me.

In any event, for an instant at least, I had been given a vote of confidence in a field about which I still knew very little. That's something any declaring student could use, and made the "obstacle" of having to meet with the department head not much of an obstacle at all.

Politics: What's Wrong with Arizona State?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - On 13-May, United States President Barack Obama gave the commencement address at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. However, unlike at the other two universities where he gave speeches--including his controversial speech at Notre Dame--Obama did not receive an honorary degree at Arizona State. This strange decision is yet another in a line of odd executive decisions that have led some to ask what is wrong with institution.

In his speech (read the full transcript here) Obama actually embraced the logic of Arizona State's decision--that his most important work was yet to come. In his normal conciliatory manner, Obama used that as a theme of his speech to graduates, saying their most important work was also yet to come.

Whether true or not, the optics of the decision were terrible. Few civil rights activists have forgotten that Arizona voted in a 1990 proposition to not observe the Martin Luther King, Junior holiday, well after it had been proclaimed a Federal holiday starting in 1986. With that history, many feel that Arizona has a special responsibility to be supportive of civil rights (or face repercussions like the relocation of the Super Bowl that occurred in 1991), and having a public institution seem to slight the first African-American President of the United States was not the way to uphold that responsibility.

Administrative issues at Arizona State that have been thought to be political issues have been in the news before. I distinctly remember a controversy in 2006, reported in Chemical & Engineering News, in which Chemistry professor George R. Pettit had his research group fired by the university. The university claimed it was because Federal funding had been lost. Pettit and several of his colleagues complained that the university was trying to gain control of his research, which had done under the auspices of the Pettit-headed Cancer Research Institute since 1975. They claimed the university wanted the research, which included several promising drugs in clinical trials, under the university's new Biodesign Institute. Less charitable outsiders claimed that the move was downright political, even precipitated by the anti-science bias of the Bush administration, with the university making it impossible for the group to order the chemicals it needed for research and hence make meaningful grant applications. The consensus among scientists seems to be that whether the move politically motivated or not, Pettit was being academically violated and his work had been significant. The Journal of Natural Products was so impressed with Pettit's work that they dedicated an issue to his work in 2008. Peace was apparently reached since Pettit is still teaching courses at Arizona State.

It's hard not to see a pattern here. The administration at Arizona State is apparently either blind or doesn't care about how their decisions look outside or even inside the university. I'm not familiar enough with the institution to understand how that came to be, but as a general rule, when administrations act in such an unconstructive manner, it means they believe they are above accountability. The citizens of Arizona, through their legislature, likely need to do something about that, or Arizona State University's reputation will suffer more from future hard-to-explain decisions, and I won't be the last to ask, "What's wrong with Arizona State?"

Education: Race and Washington D.C.

TORONTO, ONTARIO - As a white person that grew up in a substantially white suburb, it was difficult to truly relate to the significance of the events in Washington, D.C. today. Tens of thousands of African-Americans cried, wept, and cheered, saying that the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents and generations before had finally paid off in an African-American taking office in the most powerful and respected position in the country. They were intermixed with tens of thousands of people of other backgrounds who were equally excited by new president Barack Hussein Obama and his words heard around the world on this day.

Interestingly, Washington D.C. in a very real sense provided my first exposure to the realities of race in America. The number of African-Americans in my classes in elementary school and middle school could be counted on one hand. I had one elementary school teacher that was Black, but she never talked about her race; she was just our teacher (and a good one, at that). Asians and Latinos were more numerous, but again any substantive difference on the basis of race was never discussed.

In middle school, I had the opportunity to travel to the national Mathcounts competition in Washington D.C. For the first time, I saw an area in which literally half of the residents were African-American. I had never seen anything like it before, but it wasn't any different than seeing the Washington Monument--I had read and seen on television that large numbers of Black people existed, and now I had seen them in person.

One day, while riding Washington's Metro subway system, I was careless with my backpack. In approaching my seat, I moved such that the backpack was flung right into the face of a man in a suit on an adjacent seat. It hit him hard enough that it actually knocked his glasses off. As statistics would predict in Washington D.C., the man happened to be Black. I apologized; the man said he was okay and soon got off the subway. For the remainder of the trip, I was worried that I would forever be tagged as a racist because I had nearly injured a Black man on the Washington Metro. That such an act had nothing to do with racism was something that at the time I had no way to understand.

Eventually, I would have more significant interactions with African-Americans. In my undergraduate years, I had my first boss at a part-time job that happened to be Black. I had a roommate one summer who was a football player that happened to be Black. Each of them actually talked about what it meant to them to be of something other than the race of the majority, and I started to better understand the social context of race and what a day in which a non-white would become the President of the United States might mean.

Yet, I'm not certain that the blatant ignoring of race that occurs in Washington state was so bad from an educational perspective. I wasn't taught that people of "other" races were in any way different than I was, and my early experiences actually served to reinforce that idea--none of the African-Americans I met through high school seemed significantly different than anyone else around me. Some coverage of racial experience in high school instead of waiting until college probably would be wise, but the baseline experience--at least in a place like suburban Seattle--probably did more to prevent the genesis of a racist perspective than any formal instruction could have done.

Now, above all, it may be role modeling by President Obama that leads the way in educating young people about how African-Americans are not fundamentally different than anyone else.