Yes, College Is Too Easy

This article questions rhetorically whether college has gotten too easy, citing a drastic, across-the-board decline in out-of-class study hours among college students.

I thought it might finally be time to stop talking in generalities about the Arum and Roska book, but I suppose, realistically, that time may never come.

There are many reasons beyond study time for why college is too easy: despite astronomical tuition rates, a shortage of (tenure-track) faculty afforded the time and institutional support to properly teach their subjects; related, classes that are too large for students to reasonably learn material that requires dialogue and discussion, e.g. in the humanities; a culture of obsessive parents who would prefer to take responsibility for their adult-aged children rather than have their children take responsibility for themselves in college; the conversion of colleges from places of teaching and learning to luxurious fantasy camps loaded with distractions, and so on. Here, however, I'm going to focus only on the issue of declining study time as a function of college being too easy.

(I should say that the Post's slightly alarmist headline about college being 'too easy' is really about people not learning what they need to in college; so the purpose of this post is not to argue for putting students through some sadistic educational hazing process, but to argue for making college more about productive learning.)

That college students spend less time studying should not be surprising. This is the case because, the way we conceive of college and instruct our young students today, you achieve 50 percent of your incentive to go to college before you even show up on campus, just by getting in; and you achieve the other 50 percent of your incentive to go to college just by graduating, which can be done by doing anything but outright failing your courses. At no point does actually learning anything figure prominently into this incentive scheme.

For one, college is an admissions tournament. If you went to Harvard, for example, very few people care what you learned at Harvard, or how well you did at Harvard. Even if Harvard really does offer the greatest education in the world, most people could care less. The fact that you *got in* to Harvard is what people care about. Judging by our lousy college graduation rates, the world is littered with college dropouts from middling and low-tier colleges and universities; yet I'd imagine very few of these people enjoy the resume points and romantic admiration of the Harvard dropout. Nor do we write news articles on famous dropouts hailing from the likes of Southeastern West University of the North.

Of course very few people aim to get in and drop out of college; but when getting in is such a big deal, it's not hard to forget that getting in is just the beginning. The point is that, for too many parents and employers, just getting into a selective college or university, even if it's not Harvard, is enough. We teach our high school students that winning the admissions tournament means they're smart and prepared for whatever the world throws their way. We may not intend to send the tacit message that we value the fact that they won the admissions tournament more than what they do with their winnings; but we shouldn't be surprised when students' priorities for going to college include getting in and finishing, but not much in between.

The second part of this equation, then, is completion. And again, when we treat college as merely a credential that qualifies you for white-collar employment, while our employers simultaneously scorn the academic experience as not of 'the real world,' are we surprised that students will do the bare minimum in order to graduate with a respectable degree that doesn't disqualify them from candidacy for a white-collar job? This topic--employers demanding a college education for menial office work, then turning about and demeaning education as irrelevant--is for another post; but the more we make higher education about white-collar vocational training and 'job competitiveness,' the less we can expect students to learn in college. After all, if a student is only enrolled in college to get a high-paying job, and the high-paying job boss is the first to tell the young college intern that what s/he's studying in college is but a minor part of what she should expect to do at the office, then why should this student study for even a second longer than it takes to get a credential and get out?

Alas, the most telling bit of information, buried, of course, at the very end of the Washington Post article, is this:

Colleges that rate high in study time are typically small liberal-arts schools, often set in remote locales. Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., and Centre College in Danville, Ky., all report more than 20 hours of average weekly study for freshmen, seniors or both.

Despite the trends toward vocationalizing the college curriculum, there are still many people who go to college primarily to get an education. Not surprisingly, then, liberal arts institutions, increasingly maligned in the unthinking press for their audacious mission of providing a rich and holistic education designed to prepare citizens rather than employees, boast students who spend the most time on education. Of course, there could be many different reasons for why students in remotely located liberal arts colleges spend more time on their courses; but I would be curious about what Arum and Roska have to say about vocational incentives and study time. I would expect an inverse correlation.

Science Training, the Kardashians, and Consumer Culture

Though academia is most certainly no 'Ivory Tower,' nor does it necessarily house greater numbers of 'smart' people than other sectors and professions, I am comfortable suggesting that those who go into research and academia tend to be more interested in the pursuit of knowledge than the average person. If you weren't interested in the pursuit (and teaching and sharing and preserving) of knowledge, I wouldn't think you'd be very happy in academia, and certainly not better paid than you could be if you left it for *greener* pastures.

Being interested in the pursuit of knowledge is by no means incompatible with being interested in the puerile and pop-cultural; but it's also very important, I believe, to be able to assess and filter the quality of information and cultural productions one is exposed to on a daily basis. Those of us who study literature have an advantage here, as we regularly have to make or address rigorous (and some not so rigorous) arguments that have been in play for centuries about what's worth reading, studying, teaching, and talking about. We can apply this knowledge to what we're exposed to in our lives outside of professional scholarship with relative ease; and even some of us, in the dreaded 'cultural studies' pop-culture wing, even do professionally assess pop-cultural productions from advertisements to Xena, Warrior Princess.

On the other hand, the work of a natural scientist is not so translatable in this respect. Though the scientific method can be fruitfully applied in spirit to virtually anything (in fact, basic literary criticism follows the same steps, only without the possibility of falsification), its professional application in the natural sciences requires that a standard of objective proof be met. This standard is simply not available for evaluating and filtering information and cultural productions.

I'm tempted to go on anecdotally about the many natural scientists I know, and the extent to which lots of them don't seem to bother filtering information in any serious way once they leave the lab. I'm tempted to draw unsupported and prejudicial conclusions about the fact that some of my smartest friends can carry a conversation about multiverse theory or Kim Kardashian, but are pretty much lost if the conversation veers toward anything in between.

The fact is, however, that it's not just an unrepresentative sample of natural scientists who build a wall between serious intellectual life and everything else. Many of us do it, particularly, it seems, if we actually have a rich intellectual life, which takes up significant energy and time. At the end of the day many of us do need to turn off and watch trash TV. But it is worth considering the implications of the mentality that if it can't be measured or definitively quantified then it's not worth thinking about or processing rigorously. If you can't see the difference between Hard Times and Hunger Games, let alone the difference between Harry Potter and Real Housewives of Orange County, we're all in trouble.

Yes, there's value in being able to judge the relevance and importance of this book or that, this movie or that TV show. Everything outside of your intellectual or work life isn't the same; and just because it's creative or cultural or artistic doesn't mean its implications are confined to the realm of entertainment, or the unserious world. If you're old enough to remember when you could go to a baseball game and witness an exhilarating play at the plate without an announcer coming on and saying 'Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life,' you intuitively understand what I'm saying here. If a commercial market for cheap, inane, bitter, nasty, vindictive, and superficial reality programming, pumped full of product placement, consumer cues, and horrible people comes to define the ideas and representations we consume, think about, and discuss in our daily lives when we're not at work, we're screwed.

The only way to get unscrewed is to be more selective about what we put in our brains, and to understand that even if this is not a process that leads to falsification, we can be rigorously selective about such things. There is a way to discriminate between cultural productions without hard measurement, and to do so reliably and rigorously. That doesn't mean entirely forsaking guilty pleasures and cheap entertainment. Your doctor may want you to cut down on cholesterol for the sake of your health, but she's not asking you to become a vegan.

A Brief Note on Secularism, Separation of Church and State, and Same-Sex Marriage

Much of the world looks at the United States and sees a political culture that is saturated with religious discourse. In fact, however, the US political system is designed to be among the most fundamentally secular political systems in the world. The reason this seems counterintuitive for Americans and non-Americans alike is because there remains great confusion over what the term 'secular' actually means.

Whereas the US is stringent in allowing no singular religion special access above others to the political and legislative processes, England, for example, has an official Church of England. In practice, the English do a fairly good job of keeping their political discourse secular, such that the the nominal Church of England typically does not wield its political capital to disproportionately affect English political policy; but the very fact that England has an official state Church whose governor is also the English Head of State is actually a fundamental violation of secularism. In the US, where there is no official church, there are many loud religious voices in mainstream politics. Culturally speaking, the US is a more religious country than England, at least on a surface level (number of people who would identify as 'religious'). Yet US secularism is still very much alive and well.

Misunderstandings of secularism come from both the left and the right; and the primary form of misunderstanding is in fact common to both sides of the political spectrum. Whereas secularism is properly a form of plurality, designed to protect individual citizens with the freedom to believe in any religion, or not to believe at all, without the state adopting an official religious stance that would give one set of believers unequal preference over another *in the eyes of the state,* too many people seem to think that secularism simply means the opposition to religion in the public sphere.

On the left, then, we see atheists contort and tarnish the meaning of secularism by invoking it in opposition to any kind of political expression that draws on religious belief. On the right, 'secularism' is similarly mistaken for atheism, such that the basic protection that secularism offers is lost amid attempts to defend a vague set of implied 'Judeo-Christian' values within the national political tradition. These attacks on secularism, from both sides, have threatened to diminish its value and prominence within American history and political culture.

People on the left need to understand that secularism does not and should not prevent religious citizens from invoking religious beliefs publicly and standing for public office on platforms informed by general religious principles. People on the right need to understand that, whereas secularism protects their rights as individuals to believe freely without state persecution and to lobby for elected officials whose political choices are informed by religious belief, secularism also prevents a religious elected official from enshrining a particular religious doctrine in the law of the land.

In other words, secularism is a double-edged tool, designed to allow religious freedom to the extent that it doesn't infringe in any official, state-sponsored way, upon the belief systems of those who believe differently. An evangelical Christian candidate for the US Senate, for example, could campaign on banning same-sex marriage and even win, just as, theoretically, a fundamentalist Islamic candidate could campaign on banning Catholic Nuns from wearing the Habit; but once either of these candidates becomes part of the state, with the privilege of legislating, the same secular principles that allow them their beliefs as private citizens--as well as their right to campaign on such religious beliefs--also prevent them from imposing those beliefs on the belief systems of others.

In effect, then, there's no problem, as far as secularism is concerned, with broad expressions of religious faith in the public sphere. If an evangelical Christian candidate who is opposed to same-sex marriage can gain the trust and esteem of some voters (and the ire of others) by proclaiming that s/he opposes same-sex marriage, there's no reason why such a candidate should be prevented from expressing publicly those views, which are of course political as well as personal. But I would argue as well that such a candidate enters dangerous territory for respecting the secularist tradition in American politics if s/he seeks to enshrine a religious belief against same-sex marriage as law. Th difference between having policy positions informed by religious belief and having policy positions that amount to religious belief is crucial. An example of the former--'the Bible teaches me that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I don't want the government telling me otherwise'--is consistent with a secularist approach. An example of the latter--'the Bible teaches me that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I will do everything I can to enforce this at the state level'--is nothing short of an intent to violate secularist principles. In neither case does a secularist oppose the invocation of a religious belief in political context, as many on the left mistakenly desire; the problem with the second example is that it expresses intent to make the state favor a particular religious doctrine.

In summation, secularism is not about religious prevention, but religious tolerance; and religious tolerance is about protecting all religions equally from state sponsorship, and not allowing religious beliefs to become state policy.

On Trying To Leave Facebook

There's no shortage of opinions out there on the wonders and evils of Facebook, but I'll give you mine anyway, and concisely: it's not good.

I'm not one of these people who thinks Zuckerberg is a diabolical genius or Facebook is a deliberate mind-control device, but I have my reservations about its value and effects nonetheless. On one hand it's an easy way to stay in touch with people; on the other, 'staying in touch' seems increasingly an exercise in voyeurism more so than friendship maintenance. Facebook's design is such that there's an immediacy to everything, which is kind of creepy and usually, at least in my experience, unfulfilling. I suspect that many of us have the experience of pausing at our desks with the realization that we've just done little more than waste a lot of time browsing the insipid details of people we barely know in any meaningful sense (and even if we know them well and care about events in their lives, we don't care about ALL the events in their lives).

It doesn't take a genius to point out that this level of contact is very superficial. We accept this as given when we use and talk about Facebook; we don't really think we're actually 'connecting,' despite Facebook's fondness for that particular gerund, unless we take 'connecting' about as literally as it means to 'connect' your computer to an ethernet port. This is to say that, whether or not Facebook makes us lonely, it probably doesn't do us much good relative to the time it, by design, commands.

When I thought about this, and what else I could be doing with my finite time on this planet, it occurred to me that this sort of connection is very appealing to people in their (relative) youth, when they're not thinking about whether someday, when they're old and dying, they'll wish they'd gone outside on a sunny day or read a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel or baked bread for a neighbor instead of staring at a Facebook page, waiting for a little red '1' to appear at the top of the screen signaling a new event of banality. Generally I don't like to partake of dramatic, sweeping, 'goodbye cruel world' gestures like unplugging myself from entire digital worlds; but I figured that sometimes it takes a little bit of a grand gesture to break a bad or unsatisfactory habit. So I explored seriously the idea of leaving Facebook, and warned my 'friends' of my intentions.

A funny thing happened.

Much of what I've read about disputes over the intellectual property of Facebook concerns claims to various portions of codewriting and/or the kind of general idea for an online 'face book' that at least one person in every college had back in 2003. But the real genius of Facebook lies in the fact that, in its present state, which may well have been envisioned to some extent, leaving Facebook means leaving your friends. Yes, I would love to leave the entity known as Facebook by the wayside, and I don't think I'd miss it; but in the process of trying to shed this thing, I provoked a range of responses from friends, ranging from merely annoyed to downright upset. How else would they be in touch with me? Would they have to subscribe to another or an additional social networking service? Wasn't that bold of me? Won't I be back?

Yes, the great genius of Facebook is that, while it's easy enough for a principled person to say no to faceless and possibly insidious corporate entity, it's not so easy to say no to your friends.