Category Archives: Academia

I want to live in their world.

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In my “Ethics in Science” course, we talk a lot about academia. It’s not that all the science majors in the class are committed to becoming academic scientists, but many of them are planning to continue their scientific training, which usually means pursuing a graduate degree of some sort, thereby putting them in contact with a bunch of academic scientists and the sociopolitical world they inhabit.

But, as we’re talking about the dynamics of the academic sector of the tribe of science, the students express some interesting, often charming, assumptions about how that world works. Two recent examples that stick with me:

  • There is some mechanism (analogous to student evaluations of a course and its instructor at the end of the term) by which graduate students regularly evaluate their graduate advisors/lab heads. And, these evaluations of the advisor have actual consequences for the advisor.
  • Getting tenure ensures financial stability for the rest of your life.

Would that it were so.

Some years ago I wrote a glossary of academic science jargon for the class. I’m on the verge of adding to it a brief description of a generic training lab (though maybe not properly a “typical” one, given the amount of local variation in labs), sketching out different career and training stages, levels of connection to the institution (with the financial security and power, or lack thereof, that go with them), and so on.

But now I’m tempted to get each new batch of students to tell me how they imagine it works before I point them towards the description of how it tends to be. Some of the features of the world they imagine are much nicer.

Can nothing be done about the exam-talkers?

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That isn’t a typo — the issue is students who talk to each other while taking exams.

I received the following via email from a reader (lightly edited to remove identifying details):

I’m wondering if you and your readers can help me analyze this situation.

I caught two students talking during an exam.

This is not the first time for this pair. The first time this happened, I explicitly communicated my expectations about conduct during an exam to all of my students, specifically stating that talking during an exam will be taken as cheating. The academic integrity section of the undergraduate bulletin also states that conversation during an exam is not allowed.

After the second incident, I wanted to penalize both students with a zero for said exam and forfeiture of the dropped-lowest-exam-score policy. The students immediately said they will appeal to the dean and their parents have been hounding the chair as well as the administration.

The message I’m getting now is that I cannot prove the talking during the exam actually took place (although I saw it). Not only that, I’m basically being bullied to drop it for fear that the parents will file a law suit, maybe because the administration has decided the university cannot deal with another scandal after a recent one fueled by alcohol.

My question is, when did talking during exams become acceptable? (That it’s acceptable is the message I’m getting regardless of what’s written in the academic bulletin). I have not been teaching long but have read about faculty being fearful of repercussions when reporting cheating students. I don’t want to end up like that, compromising my principles for fear of repercussions such as loss of job (I’m not protected by tenure). Unfortunately, this is where I am headed. This whole incident is very demoralizing. Is it too much to expect students to abide by a shared code of conduct during exams? Is this response by chair and administration common?

I’m going to give my advice on this situation, but since my correspondent specifically requested help from you, the commentariat, please post your advice in the comments, making sure to point out ways you think my advice goes wrong.

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Things that are not entirely interchangeable.

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In heavy throughput grading mode, you sometimes notice interesting confusions or conflations. Among those I’ve noticed the past week:

  • “The chemical” for “the bacterium”. (Sure, a bacterium is composed of chemicals, but it’s got something extra, that spark of life, right? Or am I being a silly vitalist here?)
  • “IUPAC” for “IACUC“. I reckon you probably do want to use the correct nomenclature when describing the compounds you use in any research (including research with animals), but IUPAC has no special powers to approve or oversee your research protocols.

How can you have a university without a philosophy department?

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It’s no secret to readers of this blog (or residents of these United States who have been paying attention to the world that exists more than six inches from their faces) that the last few years have been rough for state budgets, and that the budget woes are especially noticeable for state university systems.

A recent case in point: owing to budget shortfalls in Nevada, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is poised to eliminate its Philosophy Department entirely. The current chair of that department, Todd Edwin Jones, has an eloquent piece in the Boston Review that explains some of the reasons that this budgetary strategy is likely to impoverish the UNLV educational experience. He writes:

Philosophy has prompted confusion and anger ever since Socrates, one of the first practitioners of the discipline, was sentenced to death in 399 B.C.E. for “corrupting the youth.” Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford.

Yet people think of philosophy as a luxury only if they don’t really understand what philosophy departments do. I teach one of the core areas of philosophy, epistemology: what knowledge is and how we obtain it. People from all walks of life—physicists, physicians, detectives, politicians—can only come to good conclusions on the basis of thoroughly examining the appropriate evidence. And the whole idea of what constitutes good evidence and how certain kinds of evidence can and can’t justify certain conclusions is a central part of what philosophers study. Philosophers look at what can and can’t be inferred from prior claims. They examine what makes analogies strong or weak, the conditions under which we should and shouldn’t defer to experts, and what kinds of things (e.g., inflammatory rhetoric, wishful thinking, inadequate sample size) lead us to reason poorly.

This is not to say that doctors, district attorneys, or drain manufactures cannot make decent assessments without ever taking a philosophy class. It’s also possible for someone to diagnose a case of measles without having gone to medical school. The point is that people will tend to do better if, as part of their education, they’ve studied some philosophy. (This is one of the reasons why undergraduate philosophy majors have the highest average scores on the standard tests used for admission to post-graduate study.) No matter what goals someone has, she can better achieve them through assessing evidence more effectively, which philosophy can teach her. Questions about whether this or that goal is one that is good to have or whether certain goals are consistent with other goals, in turn, concern ethics and values—other subjects that philosophers have long pursued.

Philosophy is sometimes described as revolving around “the big questions” — what can we know, how sure can we be, what do we value, how can we get along in a world where others have very different values than our own. etc. They aren’t big because they are insurmountable (although some of them are wicked-hard). Rather, they are big because they keep coming up in all sorts of contexts, and because getting them right (or more right than not) is important.

Philosophy classes make students grapple with these questions. In the process, they help students develop strategies for dealing with other questions in other context. In the process, philosophy students learn to think carefully, to argue clearly, to evaluate evidence, and to think through sensible objections to their own views. Philosophy students have to become proficient with language, both oral and written. They have to think analytically — and often, abstractly. Philosophy is a discipline that pushes book nerds to be more math-y (what with the formal logic most philosophy degrees require) and math geeks to be more verbal (with all those essays and class discussions).

Philosophy classes leave students with skills more broadly applicable than dissecting individual axons out of a fruit fly embryo.

Not, of course, that I want to argue that the value of a college education or its component parts lies solely in the delivery of practical jobs skills. (Indeed, I’ve argued against this view.) But if we want to rank the value of academic departments in terms of the valuable and/or widely transferable job skills they impart to their students, I reckon philosophy will hold its own against the more “practical” disciplines one might name.

These are skills we try just as hard to impart in “service” courses (i.e., those taken largely by students in other majors to fulfill general education or distribution requirements) as in courses aimed at our majors. Moreover, they are skills that our peers in other departments and college recognize that we have some skill in imparting, given that they call upon our expertise to do things like develop ethics curricula for their majors. (It is true that these ethics curricula are often spurred into existence by an outside accreditation agency for a discipline, or by funding agency strings attached to a training grant. This strikes me as more evidence that organizations beyond the ivory tower — including science and engineering organizations — identify a central strand of philosophy as important in the training of people entering these non-philosophy disciplines.)

Arguably, philosophy could also provide people with skills that are important to participating effectively — heck, to participating rationally in the governance of our nation, our states, our communities. As Jones writes:

It’s long been recognized that some tasks are best coordinated by governments, and that to succeed in these efforts, governments have to raise revenue from citizens. Since colonial times, Americans have recognized that education is one of the things that taxpayers need to support (and those were some lean times!). Sadly, over the last several decades, Americans seem to have grown accustomed to thinking that they can have roads, schools, fire departments, and Medicare without fully paying for them. Now that such thinking has proven a fantasy, taxpayers should have responded with a sensible, “We should have been paying for these things, and perhaps we should start.” Instead they have clamored to cut spending—usually on things that don’t directly concern them or whose immediate benefits aren’t apparent. Such thinking leads new Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval to propose a budget with enormous cuts to education (including elementary school). And it leads college administrators to insist that these cuts require eliminating the Philosophy Department.

(Bold emphasis added.)

An attentive philosophy student has a toolbox with which to analyze this magical taxpayer thinking, whether in terms of ethics or political theory, in terms of our ability to think down the links of a causal chain or our difficulties with empathy.

Surely, more facility with critical thinking, not less, is what it will take to bring us through a difficult economic climate.

Of course, when there’s not enough money in the budget (and when the populace and/or their elected representative have ruled out tax increases as a way to get enough money), stuff gets cut. Maybe some of that stuff really is of little value, but a lot of the things left to cut are going to hurt someone when they’re gone.

Eliminating a philosophy department may not cause the same degree of immediate harm as would, say, cutting off medical aid to the indigent or eliminating free school lunches for poor elementary school kids. But it will cause harm. Maybe that harm will take longer to smack the people of Nevada in the face, but this doesn’t mean that the impact won’t be devastating.

Professional advice (from a 10-year-old).

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Near the end of June, I’m going to a conference at the University of Exeter (in England). The information posted about the area notes that “June is generally a warm and pleasant month to visit Exeter. With temperatures ranging from 19° Celsius and lows at around 11°C with temperatures getting higher near the end of the month.”

Converting that to Fahrenheit (the temperature scale to which my intuitions are calibrated in matters of “dressing for the weather”), we’re looking at lows around 53 oF ranging to highs (?) around 66 oF. Maybe that’s warm June weather for England, but in this part of California, that’s chilly.

Indeed, since it was about 66 oF when it was time to retrieve the younger Free-Ride offspring from the afterschool program, I walked over without a jacket or a sweater. I shivered the whole way there and the whole way back.

On that walk back the younger Free-Ride offspring (speaking from the comfort of a fuzzy winter coat) said, “You should get ready for England by spending a lot of time in a room that’s kept at 66 oF. Eating ice cream and drinking ice water.”

“Or I could just dress for the weather,” I countered. “It’s just that packing to dress for the weather might require a bigger piece of luggage than what I originally planned. Probably fewer summer dresses and more trousers and sweaters.”

“But if this is a business trip,” the younger Free-Ride offspring said sternly, “you should be bringing suits. And tights, to keep your legs warm.”

“But this is a meeting of philosophers of science,” I said. “Dressing professionally does not require a suit.”

“For philosophers of science,” said the younger Free-Ride offspring, “I think you should wear a suit, and tights (to keep your legs warm), and a white lab coat over it.”

Dear readers, the sad thing is that I am halfway considering taking this advice. After all, the younger Free-Ride offspring’s fashion sense is better developed than my own, and a lab coat would provide an additional layer of warmth.

Well, at least we won’t need search committees.

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Academics have long suspected that the bean-counters at colleges and universities would happily do away with tenured faculty if they could. Indeed, from the administrative perspective, the only advantage to the tenured and tenure track faculty over non-tenure track folks (who can be paid less, given fewer benefits, assigned five course loads, and needn’t be rehired the next term) is that you can make them serve on committees. (Actually, non-tenured folks also get pressed into committee service, but it strikes me as pretty exploitative.)

Now, according to a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, there may be one less flavor of committee for service by the tenured and tenure-track — plus, the bean-counters may finally have a way to shrink the tenured professoriate until it’s small enough to drown in a bath tub.

The state of Illinois is close to finalizing details of a plan to make tenured faculty posts “hereditary positions”. This would mean that a tenured professor in chemistry (for example) could, upon her demise or retirement, leave that professorship (with tenure still intact) to “an appropriately trained designee”. Under the plan, the designee could be a spouse, or one’s child, or a sibling. The designee could also be one’s favorite grad student or post doc of all time. The department would get to maintain that tenured billet and would, presumably, have a qualified chemist in it without the time and effort of a search committee. As the article notes:

To pass on one’s position, professors will be required to file an “academic will” laying out the order of succession for administrative approval. Without such a plan — or if the persons specified in the plan are judged to be lacking the appropriate training — the position will revert to the non-tenure track pool for its erstwhile occupant’s department.

Here, the department still avoids the hassle of a search for a new tenured or tenure track professor.

According to the Chronicle article, an issue yet to be resolved in this plan is whether professors will be allowed to pass on their tenured position to their heirs upon retirement (rather than having to die to trigger the succession).

UIUC History Professor Linda Ethelred noted, “Our suspicion is that some faculty would happily retire, rather than staying in those posts past their prime, if they could appoint their own replacements. But retired faculty cost university systems money and the administration wants to cut one of those expenses, either the expense of maintaining the retiree or of maintaining the tenured post.”

What this plan would mean for university departments, if implemented, is not entirely clear. Maybe allowing senior faculty to choose their own successors would generally preserve a department’s strength in a particular area of specialization, but maybe it would entrench focus on an area that is some distance from where “the future of the discipline” is judged to be. Possibly, though, hereditary tenured posts will encourage more collegial relations within a department. If your senior colleague is in the position to pick your future colleague, helping that colleague to understand the value of your approach to the discipline (and working hard to appreciate the value of her approach to the discipline) strikes me as a pragmatic move, one that may positively influence her academic will-making. Indeed, it might even lead to productive conversations and collaborations before she shuffles off this mortal academic coil.

A totally separate issue is what this plan might mean for the family life of tenured and tenure track faculty.

Could this be favorable to couples who have trained in the same academic discipline? The chances of both partners getting academic posts at all, let alone in the same location, are frighteningly small in some fields. Here, if one has landed the tenure track job, the other may finally have a reasonable expectation of someday also having such a post. If a couple’s employment will be sequential rather than simultaneous, potentially this could change the realities of child-rearing, too — the partner providing the hands-on care for the children would no longer be abandoning hope of a tenured post and a fulfilling research agenda, but merely deferring it. (This is a place, I reckon, where it might matter a lot if the final plan allows the transfer of a tenured post on retirement as well as death. Personally, I like it when I’m worth more to my better half alive than dead.)

And who even knows what influence this might have on parental pressure to follow in professorial footsteps, or on offspring’s rebellion in the face of such pressure, or on the shape of sibling rivalry in families with multiple offspring. Indeed, the potential competition between an offspring pursuing the professorial parent’s field of study and that parent’s best graduate student might make for some very awkward dinner table conversation.

There are probably legal ramifications that need to be explored. For example, in divorce proceedings, would a tenured position acquired during the marriage be counted as community property? (I have no idea what the situation is in Illinois, but California is a community property state, and I expect the administrations of the University of California and California State University systems are looking at the Illinois plan with some interest.)

And, especially relevant in scientific disciplines, will federal funding agencies recognize such a transfer of academic posts and transfer the remainder of an ongoing grant to the academic heir of the original grantee?

Color me cynical, but I worry that some of these complications are features rather than bugs. The more ways there are to actually disqualify the designated academic heirs, or to practically undercut their ability to perform the duties of the job (like keeping a lab funded), the better the odds that the corresponding tenured posts will be abolished and replaced with non-tenure track positions that are much more subject to the whims of budget-focused administrations.

We’ll see how this plays out.

On the targeting of undergraduates by animal rights extremists (and the dangers of victim-blaming).

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This morning, the Speaking of Research blog brings news of an undergraduate science major targeted for daring to give voice to her commitments:

Earlier this week, the animal rights extremist group at NegotiationisOver.com posted an email they received from Alena – an undergraduate student at Florida Atlantic University – in response to their attempts to solicit local activists to attend an animal rights event:

Actually, I’m an undergrad researcher aiming to work at Scripps [Research Institute]! I currently test on animals and think that it is perfectly fine. In fact, it is the one of the only ways that we, scientists, can test drugs in order to treat human diseases. I’m sure someone in your family or even a friend you know has suffered from a disease or pathology that was treated (or cured) by medicines THAT ONLY CAME INTO EXISTENCE BECAUSE OF ANIMAL TESTING.

First off, we applaud Alena for standing up for what she believes in and for expressing support for the humane use of animals in research aimed at addressing the health and welfare of humans and animals alike. Not surprisingly, however, NIO launched an offensive of degrading and hateful emotional abuse that caused Alena to plead for them to:

…please stop saying such horrible, untrue things about me. It’s hurtful.

In response, they no doubt ratcheted up the threats, causing Alena to:

…denounc[e] animal testing and my involvement in it…. I will be looking for other career choices.

Not unlike perpetrators of child and spouse abuse who use fear of further attacks to ensure silence in their victims, NIO hopes that flooding the email boxes of young people with obscenities and rabid missives will ensure that the voices of scientists of tomorrow are suppressed. Even for NIO, this is a new low, and Speaking of Research sharply condemns those who chose to act like shameless bullies when harassing, threatening and intimidating any student, researcher or faculty member.

I’m guessing at least some readers, reading this, are thinking to themselves (or hollering at the computer screen), “Well, what did she expect? You can’t engage rationally with animal rights extremists! Sending that email to the extremist website was a rookie mistake, and now she’ll know better.”

Undergraduates may well be “rookies” in certain respects, but damned if I’m going to encourage my undergraduate students to give up hopes of rational engagement with the other people with whom they have to share a world. Giving up on rational engagement is how you end up with the current state of politics and “governance” in the United States. We can do better.

Anyway, I hope that a moment’s reflection will persuade you that blaming the victim of the harassment here is just as inappropriate as blaming victims of bullying or rape. “If she had just done X, Y, or Z differently, this wouldn’t have happened to her!” Coming at it this way may convince you that you are safe from such harassment because of how you are doing X, Y, and Z. You aren’t. The extremists can decide to target you regardless of what you do or don’t do.

Really.

The undergraduate targeted here by extremists was involved in research with fruit flies. And extremists have targeted scientists who no longer perform animal research (and their children). Indeed, they have targeted people who don’t do scientific research at all (like me) who have dared to express the view that animal research might be the most ethical of our options.

The extremists are not choosing targets because of what they do or how they do it. Rather, just existing in the public square with a view different from theirs seems to be enough.

Indeed, the extremist website Negotiation is Over offers its readers step by step advice on how to target undergraduate students in the life sciences:

How to Shut Down Vivisectors-In-Training in Three Easy Steps

  1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.
  2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.
  3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

We need to begin to actively identify those enrolled in scientific disciplines and isolate the students preparing for or involved in biological research. We need to get into the universities and speak to classes. This poses a minor, but not insurmountable, obstacle for many activists that have been trespassed, banned, or TROed. We need to team up with other aggressive campaigners who excel at engaging and educating. We need to implement a “good cop, bad cop” approach to keep our targets off balance and maximize our effectiveness.

Let’s take this point by point.

1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.

We start with a recognition that the undergraduates being targeted want to help people. But in the very next sentence, we get a picture of the established researchers deliberately indoctrinating these young do-gooders to transform them into gleeful animal torturers. (There’s no explanation here of how the grown-up researchers — themselves presumably once dewy-eyed undergraduates who wanted to save humanity — became evil.)

For the good of these young people, the extremists must intervene and “educate these young scientists with truth”.

It would be one thing if this were just a matter of dueling fact-sheets. Of course, one of the things we hope we’re teaching our undergraduates is how to be critical consumers of information. Among other things, we want them to recognize that the facts are not determined by who shouts the loudest.* So whatever claims the extremists — or their professors — make about animal research are only as good as the evidence that backs them up, and finding that evidence may require the student to do some legwork.

I’m OK with that. Moreover, I trust my students to reflect on the best information they can find, to reflect on their own values, and to make the best choices they can.

The extremists, though, want to influence those choices with more than just “the facts” as they see them:

2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.

Please note that these threats are not tied to any particular kind of animal research — to research that causes especially high pain and distress, or to research with nonhuman primates, or to research that violates the prevailing regulations. Rather, the bombs, home demonstrations, and targeting of family members are being threatened for any involvement in animal research at all.

The extremists do not have a nuanced view. Merely existing with a view of animal research that differs from theirs is provocation enough for them.

And, they are happy to make their case with threats and intimidation — which suggests that maybe they can’t make that case on the basis of the fact.

3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

Who needs facts when you have cyber-bullying?

Indeed, the extremists are pretty clear in advocating “smear campaigns” that they are happy to lie to get their way, and that “abusers-to-be” (that is, anyone who doesn’t already agree with the extremist position, or who hasn’t decided to totally disengage) have no right to privacy or peace of mind.

Again, I suspect a reader or two in my age group may be thinking, “Well, if those whippersnappers didn’t post so much information about themselves on the Facebooks and the MySpaces and the Tumblrs, they wouldn’t get into this trouble, dagnabit!” But note again the willingness of the extremists to engage in smear campaigns. They don’t need to find embarrassing pictures, videos, or posts, because they can make stuff up about you.

And, regardless of how much online time undergraduates spend in what I (or you) would judge “overshare” mode, I am not willing to tell them that the best way to deal with extremists is to go into actual or virtual hiding. I am not prepared to cede the public square, the marketplace of ideas, or the classroom discussion to the extremists.

Disagreement is not a crime, nor a sin.

Threatening and harassing people because they disagree with you, on the other hand, is a pretty lousy way to be part of the human community. Calling this behavior out when we see it is part of what we grown-ups ought to be doing, not just to set an example for the grown-ups-in-training, but also to do our part in creating the world those grown-ups-in-training deserve.

——
* The one obvious exception here: the fact of which side is shouting the loudest is determined by which side is shouting the loudest.

 

Midweek self-criticism: what about that logic and critical reasoning course?

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Back in mid-December, a reader emailed:

If I remember right, you were at one point talking about teaching a course on logic, scientific method[s], etc. If so, and if it happened this semester, is it possible to get a copy of the syllabus? It sounded interesting, and I once taught such a course and might in the future.

On the other hand, maybe I remember wrong, and you’re wondering WTF I’m talking about. In that case, uh… um… Happy Holidays!! that’s the ticket.

My correspondent did, in fact, remember correctly that I was discussing the planning of this course, although that discussion here pretty much stopped when my semester commenced kicking my butt.

In any event, given that I taught the course fall semester, it was planned at least enough that I was able to deliver it to the enrolled students. How did that go?

I would not describe it as an unqualified success.

One issue was that it was really hard to fully integrate the two distinct threads of the course (distinct threads which, as I noted, flowed from the laundry list of learning objectives for the course’s general education area). On the one hand, we were concerned with critical reasoning, grappling with actual “arguments in the wild”, recognizing strengths and weaknesses of such arguments (including many flavors of informal fallacies), and having the students develop their own skills in framing arguments of their own, often in response to the arguments put forward by others. On the other hand, we were tackling the formal properties of arguments — which meant mucking around with symbolic logic, truth-tables, truth-trees, methods of proof, and the like.

I’m sure there exist approaches to weave these two threads together, if not seamlessly, then with more success than I had.

However, a pretty serious stumbling block for me was the fact that maybe half of the students had a fairly easy time with the symbolic logic, while the other half struggled with it. And, it’s hard to find the time to illuminate the connections when you’re working on getting the basic idea across (and when it’s taking at least three times longer than you had hoped it would take).

If I had to do it again (and I might!), I’d be tempted to split up the semester into two distinct blocks, the first focused entirely on the formal properties of arguments, and the second on “arguments in the wild”. Getting what seems to be the harder material out of the way might open up some space to then see how it connects to the natural language argumentation with which the students are more at home.

It might also result in a lot of the students who are most freaked out by the symbolic logic dropping the course within the first couple weeks, but I had a bunch of people hoping spaces would open up so they could add the course. Front-loading the difficult material might actually be a kindness to the students who recognize their inability or unwillingness to deal with it, so they could drop the course before drop day.

I was pleasantly surprised at the students’ ability to engage with arguments in English (as opposed to Ps and Qs). Both in class discussions and in their essays, they did quite well at identifying the premises that were being put forward to support a conclusion, at zeroing in on implicit premises, at finding places where the link between premises and conclusions was not as strong as the person making the argument would have you believe, and at mounting persuasive counterarguments of their own. In other words, they demonstrated their ability to bring critical thinking to their reading of the op-ed page. This is a very good thing indeed.

On the other hand, some of the students hadn’t figured out how to ask good questions (or in some cases, any questions) about material they were having trouble understanding (again, mostly the symbolic logic stuff). This became painful in the class meetings and review sessions devoted to helping them get clear on the concepts and skills on which they were unclear. If you can’t even tell me which problems from the homework you want to see worked on the board, or whether, once you see they worked on the board, they make more sense to you, then I need telepathic powers to figure out how to help you learn this stuff.

Sadly, I do not have telepathic powers.

As it shook out, I don’t think I’d use my own syllabus again. Still, I will probably come up with a couple drafts of syllabi for the next iteration of the course. One will try to address the issues I discovered with the particular student population I had. The other, to satisfy my hunger for Platonic ideal forms (one of which must exist for a logic and critical reasoning course), will propose the mix of topics and activities I’d want to teach with no regard for externally imposed learning objectives or for the existence of students who might actually be resistant to spending more than the minimum time and effort on learning the material (and maybe even caring about it).

I reckon that drafting those syllabi would be a nice diversion from the mountains of grading. When it happens, I’ll post them here.

Random bullets of “I guess we’re back in the thick of things!”

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My semester has, in the last 10 days or so, shifted from “close enough to equilibrium to seem manageable” to “who parked their ton of bricks right on my soul?!” I suppose I should have seen this coming, right?

  • That weekend sprog blog never materialized. The proximate causes were a whole mess of grading, and the younger Free-Ride offspring working on yet another school project (for Band, which is technically an extracurricular activity, but I was too busy grading to pursue it).
  • Plus, it turns out that Dr. Free-Ride’s better half seems to have already recycled the aforementioned booklet on how to keep your kids safe (from cyberbullying, sexting, and the like) online. Perhaps this is evidence to indict us as bad parents. However, I think the record will reflect that we’ve been attentive to the dangers of creepy internet stalkers since at least late January of 2006.
  • Best thing at a science fair: the kid who can explain in detail how (and why) all of his strategies for measuring the variables of interest ran into unforeseen difficulties, and how (given more time, if not better instrumentation) he might MacGuyver his way around them. Especially when the kid is not defeated but enthusiastic about the challenges science presents, not to mention the fun of tackling those challenges.
  • Sadly, that good thing didn’t keep the worst thing in my inbox from knocking the wind out of my sails. It sounds like “the management” of the public university system of which my fair campus is a part is planning to go Wisconsin on the faculty union’s collective posterior as we negotiate our contract. After all, this is a terribly cushy job, and I and my fellow faculty members personally orchestrated the financial collapse.