Three Most Intellectually Exciting Books in the Past Ten Years

This is my version of one of those "how many books do you own, etc.?" lists that is circulating through blogland.

In the comments, or in your own blog, talk about the three most intellectually exciting books you've read in the past decade. I don't mean so much old books (in which case Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals and Darwin's The Origin of Species would be on my list), but more contemporary books. Let's say books written since 1990.

At the top of my list would be Mechthild Gretsch's The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform. I read this book in O'Hare Airport from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. one morning while waiting for my flight back to Boston from Kalamazoo. I was entranced. To me this book is one of the great technical masterpieces of medieval scholarship. Yes, I know, some very knowledgeable people have quarrels with Gretsch's treatment of glossography. I am not really qualified to mediate that dispute. But I am qualified to see the supreme beauty of an amazingly complex technical argument in which all the tools of philology and historical analysis are used to take a scattered mass of individual facts and weave them together into a coherent narrative.

Until I read Gretsch, my own book was a confused mess of ideas and observations. After I read Gretsch, I saw how all of the independent observations I had made fit into a larger, literary-historical narrative. I love this book and have read it three or four times (and it is not an easy read). One of the real triumphs of German philology. Also. Gretsch's work caused me to revisit the work of Michael Lapidge, in particular his Anglo-Latin Literature: 900-1066.

Next on the list is Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous IdeaDennett found ways to solve many of the problems of inheritance and culture-building that I had been struggling with, first in my notebooks and then in my dissertation. He showed how memes could work to explain culture (and, in his more ambitious formulation, consciousness). But most importantly, the book did two other things: First, it showed me how philosophy could be done without all the obfuscation and angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin circularity with which I had always associated philosophy. Second, it showed how one could make substantive scholarly contributions and also write for an audience of intelligent non-specialists. I hope my book will do the same (though, in actuality, it's probably closer to Gretsch than Dennett).

Finally, Dennett pointed me to Richard Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype. I use Dawkins' "meme" idea (which comes from his The Selfish Gene), but Extended Phenotype is such a beautifully constructed argument (and it contains almost everything that's in Selfish Gene) that it also blew me away. Dawkins quotes a colleague as saying "Richard Dawkins has rediscovered the organism." That is meant to be a criticism of Dawkins' stereotyped "gene-centric" view of life, but actually the colleague hit upon an enormously important point. After breaking down organic life and its evolution to its absolutely most simple building blocks, Dawkins is then able to build everything back up. It's what Russell and Whitehead did for mathematics (yes, Gödel squashed some of that, but we'll have that discussion another time), and it's exactly what I hope can be done with memes and culture: show how everything has to be consistent with the logical/mathematical foundations of the theory and then re-examine the much larger and more complex phenomena generated by the simpler rules.

All three books (and also Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, though I've fallen out of love with it, because I think Gould is quite wrong in important places) really changed me life. That change was in terms of intellectual practice and a knowledge of what was possible (i.e,. not a change the way Dostoyevsky's The Possessed (though they're caling it, The Devils now, which is a more literal translation of the Russian title) changed my understanding of life).

Now that I've started this, it's hard to stop, and I want to add more and more. But it's a good time to stop since we had a very long day (I had both children all day, then we went to Rhys' gymnastics, then to a farewell party for a dear colleague who is leaving Wheaton, etc., etc.) and am falling asleep as I type.

Medievalists on the Market

I have a general rule of thumb (more honored in the breach than in the observance) of not linking to anonymous bloggers because so much anonymous commentary on the internet is so nasty. But Prof. Blogger is one of those exceptions because he doesn't ever use his anonymity to be a jerk, and also because in this recent post he discusses a really serious problem in academic job searches at most institutions.

Prof. Blogger points out that the odds are that no one on the search committees for the places he is interviewing is likely to be a medievalist: we medievalists "have to face hiring committees of well-intentioned, smart people who, despite their best efforts, are not really in any position to judge the merits of the various candidates." Thus:

This lack of informed input leads to some bizarre interviews in which, despite their best efforts, the hiring committee is unable to mask their ignorance of the medieval field. For example, in one interview, the Professor mentioned an article he had written that was, at that time, under review in Speculum. Speculum is the oldest, and arguably the most respectable, journal in the field. One of the reviewers asked, "Speculum? Is that a local journal?" In another interview, Prof. Blogger was asked who one of his letter-writers was -- and the person in question is arguably the most prominent medievalist working today... In most cases, being unable to weigh the merits of various publication venues, committees are left simply counting numbers of articles. Three articles in Pudunk Journal of Stuff by Local Yokels counts for more than one article in Really Highly Influential Journal in the Field.

This is a very serious problem in hiring, for which there are no obvious good fixes. Non-medievalists are appallingly ignorant of medieval studies. It's not just the lack of understanding about the prestige of the journal, but also a basic inability to understand what is important in contemporary scholarship that creates bizarre appointments (two very high-profile ones in the past couple of years, in my field, that are clearly the result of search committees having absolutely no clue that the people they were choosing were below mediocre, regardless of their academic pedigrees). For example, it seems to be very hard to convince most non-medievalists that identifying a significant source is a big deal but that writing, say, a postmodern analysis of Beowulf is, well, pretty tired and tedious at this stage of the game (the committee will have no idea that certain things have been done to death; to them, a post-modern analysis of Beowulf will communicate the idea that the candidate isn't old-fashioned, hidebound, boring, etc. -- all qualities which they project upon medievalists and are often just the opposite of the truth).

The British system, in contrast, at least rewards people who have done something that is major yet technical. Discover a source, propose a really important emendation, edit some previously neglected Anglo-Latin texts, and the British system will (generally) reward you with a solid position. Of course there is still tons of snobbery, and one's OxBridge undergraduate college probably has too much to do with your future (or at least that what my friends in the British system tell me). But because the British system uses outside electors, major figures on the field, to nominate jobs (at least for high-profile places like Oxford and Cambridge), the recommendations for hiring are strongly influenced by people who know what they are talking about. (This does not, by the way, eliminate politics, etc., but at least those elements of the hire are leavened with actual knowledge of the field).

I would support the creation of some kind of elector system to become one part of the American hiring system (though it's unlikely to happen without, say, some foundation spending a pile of money to set something up). It's also unlikely to ever come into being because for most departments, hiring a productive scholar in medieval studies is only one of the goals of the search. Most departments are searching for someone to fit in, someone who will not make them miserable for the next thirty years. They (consciously or unconsciously) want people like them (however defined). For some this can mean politics, for others academic pedigree (look at Princeton's English department: more than half have Princeton Ph.D.s), for others methodology (all the tedious, self-involved post-modernists Stanley Fish lured to Duke before he and they destroyed that English department). For us at Wheaton it would mean a strong focus on teaching and some kind of indication that the person wouldn't be planning to ditch us in five years.

Of course all of these things are very hard to divine through an on-paper application process in which every candidate appears to leap tall buildings in a single bound (recommendation letters are rife with hyperbole) and in which every sensible candidate will attempt to tailor his or her presentation to the specific insitution. So things like the source of the letters of recommendation (rather than the letters themselves) or the academic pedigree are used as proxies for other things that aren't easy to measure.

It sure is a stupid system, but I don't know how one would make it better. Some kind of a national exam won't work: advanced graduate students and assistant professors should be adding to human knowledge. An exam can only show what has already become discovered and assimilated to the knowledge base. An exam will thus always be a few years (maybe more) out of date. A board of electors would be nice if they only gave a recommendation that could be added in to the overall application. A really great candidate from an unlikley place, or one whose technical contributions are hard to appreciate outside the field would be advantaged by such a system. But the practical problems in setting one up and keeping it from degenerating into politics are so enormous I'm not sure how one would even go about solving them.

The Other Side of Collegiality

One of the reasons I love Wheaton is that we actually have what other places claim to have, but don't: collegiality. We eat together, we talk constantly about our teaching and our students, and even in the English department (English departments are known throughout academia as wretched hives of scum and villiany, snakepits of backbiting and intrigue), we pretty much all like each other.

And thank God (and it's also a big reason I'm planning on staying. Or, as my wife put it in exasperation: they're only going to be able to get you out of Wheaton in a box).

But the price we pay for collegiality is work. Lots of work. We have collegiality because we are not very hierarchical (which I like) because we, as members of committees, do most of the work done by individual deans at larger schools.

I was just chosen to be chair of our Education Policy Committee, and boy, am I seeing how the system works up close (I was on EdPol when we re-wrote the entire Wheaton curriculum; I was also the recording secretary, so I got the fun experience of having every iteration of the stinking Minutes word-smithed).

Today we had our final faculty meeting, where we approved the degree candidates, confirmed reports from the standing committees, approved the calendar for the next seven years, etc. I loathe faculty meetings and have been skipping them religiously for the past two years. Now it's payback time . Not only did I have to be there because people would have noticed, but I was stuck behind at the meeting for 1.25 hours.

Most of what I'm doing is listening (people who know me personally are already laughing at the poetic justice) and trying to give an honest hearing to various concerns. But it has become shockingly clear to me in the past couple weeks that one of the reasons that Wheaton works so well is the very inefficiency that makes me hate faculty meetings. If everyone gets his or her say and gets a respectful hearing, people are more willing to accept change and to try new things. I'm trying to impress this upon people new to Wheaton: yes, having a complex, open process with defined procedures is a huge pain for seemingly simple decisions, and it wastes time for all involved (and I whined ceaselessly about meetings for years).

But... process, transparency and involvement lead to buy-in across the college. So when a decision finally gets made, it's supported everywhere.

A good example is our new curriculum: we had an interminable 18 months in which we held study groups, had faculty-wide discussions and answered hundreds of emails. I thought it was a huge time-waster, and remember saying to the Provost: "why are we doing all of this? We've got the 55 votes we need; let's just vote." She, being much wiser, ignored me. And at the end of the process, despite the fact that the curriculum was a major change, and depite the fact that not everyone was thrilled, the new curriculum passed 93-3 (and I know that at least one of the "no" votes was simply to keep the vote from being unanimous--"which would make us into a bunch of sheep"). Now even skeptics work to support the new curriculum and have devoted immense quantities of time and energy.

Something to think about, particularly for administrators and chairs.


[Only 32 more papers to go and the grading is done...]

News

[UPDATE: Thanks to all who have commented, emailed and posted to congratulate me. Your kindness means a lot. I've been buried under grading, or I would have responded personally (which I'll still try to do)]

I've been sitting on some news that I had to keep quiet about until it was officially announced:

Last week I was awarded Wheaton's William and Elsie Prentice Professorship. The Prentice is one of the only chairs Wheaton has for which Associate Professors are theoretically eligible, but it's really nice to get a teaching award from a school that highly values teaching. The award, which lasts five years, is for outstanding teaching and so, in the beautiful logic of academia, I get to teach fewer classes each year.

But in fact I am going to use the award time and support to revamp almost all of my classes. I want to add some kind of cross-cultural comparisons to the classes, and this is going to require lots of work. For example, I will begin studying Japanese at Harvard so that, one hopes, by the end of the five-year period I'll be able to teach parts of the Tale of Genji in my medieval lit in translation course. One of my rules has beem that I won't teach anything in translation that I can't read in the original, hence studying Japanese for Genji. I also hope to be able to add Old Norse in alternation with Anglo-Saxon, and to teach an Oral Tradition course (which will violate my "have to read everything in the original" rule, since there's no way I can pick up Serbo-Croatian, Xhosa, Finnish and Ancient Greek in any reasonable amount of time (though maybe before I die...).

The most important thing (to me) about the award, more than the award itself, is that I feel as if Wheaton has continued to reciprocate in the loyalty that I have shown the institution (and that it showed to me in my tenure case). It's nice to be appreciated, and it certainly will motivate me to work harder and support Wheaton (and, as if by magic, I was just appointed to chair the Educational Policy Committee, which is one of those things that people say is "a big honor -- which is true -- but by which they really mean "is a huge pain in the butt").

Other news: I received my copy of
Tolkien Studies Volume II:
Essays Included in this Volume are:
'And She Named Her Own Name': Being True to One's Own Word in Tolkien's Middle-earth
-Richard C. West
Richard C. West: A Checklist
-Compiled by Douglas A. Anderson
Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon
-Miryam Libran-Moreno
The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire
-Judy Ann Ford
World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in 'Aldarion and Erendis'
-Elizabeth Massa Hoiem
'Tricksy Lights': Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien's Passage of the Dead Marshes
-Margaret Sinex
Tolkien and Modernism
-Patchen Mortimer
Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius
-John Wm. Houghton and Neal K. Keesee
A Definitive Identification of Tolkien's 'Borgil':An Astronomical and Literary Approach
-Kristine Larsen
Love: 'The Gift of Death'
-Linda Greenwood
Tolkien's Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth
-Michael J. Brisbois
Obituary: Humphrey Carpenter (1946-2005)
-Douglas A. Anderson"
Plus a great many book reviews, "The Years' Work in Tolkien Studies 2001-2002" by David Bratman, and Bibliography (in English) for 2003.

Deathbone



Deathbone is my favorite birthday present this year (I received him just before I left for Kalamazoo). I had gotten tired of the saccharine characters of the My Little Ponies, so I invented Deathbone, the meanest pony of all. I told of his epic battle with Sky Wishes, Pinkie Pie and their minions and how he, and his consort, Stinkie Pie, were plotting to destroy Ponyville and send all the My Little Ponies to the glue factory.

So Raquel and Rhys made Deathbone for me. Note the bone for the "Cutie Mark." (If they ever make me a Stinkie Pie, she will be brown with a yellow mane and a toilet for a Cutie Mark). Yes, I've had very little sleep over the past few days and not only have to grade papers, but move 4 cubic yards of topsoil before garbage day. Why do you ask?

Apparently I did know the way to Kalamazoo.

And, to the joy of my spouse, who now does not have to run me over with a garden-weasel, I knew the way back as well, even with only two hours of sleep (thanks, Midnight Dance! Thanks, Loredana!!). Coming back on Mother's Day made for a lot of work, with meals needing to be cooked immediately and much dogpiling on the floor and wrestling to be done. It was great to be back to my two little monsters. And to find that Raquel hadn't been forced to duct-tape them to anything and no one had to sleep in the shed.

Kalamazoo itself was one of the better ones I've been to. Everything certainly ran smoothly, nearly effortlessly. I give credit to the two organizers I know: Paul Szarmach, who manages to run the conference, be charming, and take time to talk about scholarship even during the conference. And someone whom I was thrilled to meet because I read her blog: Elisabeth Carnell, who was one of the organizers who had organized exceptionally well. [P.S., Elisabeth, the picture on your site does not do you justice at all. You should definitely post one from the Midnight Dance].

The quality of the papers was quite high as well. As usual, the best session was the "'New Voices'" in Anglo-Saxon Studies," in which graduate students gave papers under the auspices of ISAS, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. Papers by Brian O'Camb, Mary-Louise Fellows, Sarah Downey, and Matthew T. Hussey were all stimulating: interesting ideas, well-presented. I was particularly thrilled when Fellows cited my "Anglo-Saxon Wills" paper, because now I know the identity of the one person who has read it.

Most of the time a paper isn't important in the sense that it gives you a powerful presentation of a major piece of scholarship: the format just doesn't allow for that kind of communicative economy. But these papers were important in the sense that they made me want to rush off and delve more deeply into what the presenters were discussing. I came up with ideas as to how Downey's paper on Guthlac can be improved, and l actually had contemporaneous suggestions for Fellows. (and, Mary-Louise, I am so happy that someone is using the corpus. You don't know how many hours I spent getting the wretched thing in order. This was before there was an electronic Sawyer at Cambridge).

So I walked out of the conference with that most precious thing one can get at Kalamazoo: new enthusiasm. New joy in the field. New connections with old friends. And also, an offer to submit a long paper for a journal and to get some other stuff into the form of a Note.

My talk itself, which I've posted here as notes and a handout in .pdf, seemed to go over well. As you read it you'll notice that I didn't bother to write down most of the important details (I just talked them), but you can probably get a look at the theory, since by Christmas, you'll be reading it!

Yes, that's right. MRTS gave me a real date: galleys in July, book to the printer in October and back to me in December. Soon you may be able to purchase How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century for yourselves, making me, and hopefully you, immensely happy.

Well, there's lots more on Kalamzoo (my favorite quote: "there I was, sitting next to the World's Most Disgusting Couple.")
But it is late and I am tired, and I must prepare for the arrival of
DEATHBONE


[UPDATED to remove a tremendous number of typos]

Do you know the way to Kalamazoo?

Yes, most cliched title ever for a medievalist's blog post. But on Thursday I'm off to Kalamazoo, Michigan for the 40th Annunal International Medieval Congress. Last year was the first time in a decade that I'd missed 'zoo (here's why), but I'm heading back this year to give the paper with the all-time worst title in the history of Kalamazoo: "Repetition, Pattern Recogntion and the Evolution of Traditions: Some Old English Examples." That, my friends, is what happens when you agree to submit an abstract to a session but are still too early in your research to have a catchy--or even mildly interesting--title. I'm sure my fellow medievalists will be beating down the doors to come to this paper.

Kalamazoo is a bizarre and amazing combination of huge academic conference (stand in the lobby of the conference long enough and you will meet nearly every medievalist in the western world -- "long enough" might be a couple of years, but you get the idea), graduate school reunion, and wild party. There's a midnight dance on Saturday night that really should be painted by Bosch. There are great papers, mediocre papers, dazzlingly disastrous papers. There's an enormous book area, medieval films, plays and concerts...

But mostly it is for the socializing. Yes, there's networking and schmoozing, etc., but because of the diffusion of hiring power at most institutions (often there will be no medievalist on a hiring committee to hire a medievalist), there's a lot less overt and disgusting sucking up than there is at MLA. Medievalists also tend to be nicer human beings for some reason (author excluded, of course, but the kindness of medievalists is well known), and the conference is so big that it's very easy to fall in with a group of friends and just have a good time catching up.

Western Michigan University itself is beautiful in the spring (though the weather is totally unpredictable: I've been there for snow, and I've been there for temperatures in the 90's). Medievalists with money stay in the nice hotels off campus, but I tough it out and stay in the dorms -- huge, cinderblock constructions from the 1960's. When I brought two students to Kalamazoo a few years ago, they described the dorms as "the most ghetto dorms I've ever seen." But one of those students is coming back for a third time this year, and the other emailed to say she wished she was going.

in the dorms, one shares a connecting bathroom with a stranger, which leads to sometimes strange moments. As do wide-spread drunkenness, room parties and people carrying on affairs in public (or very noisily behind closed doors. One year two friends of mine, who were just starting their relationship at the time, bought an air mattress and brought it back to the dorms. I am not making this up. It's all interesting.

I'm the lone medieval literature scholar at Wheaton, so Kalamazoo gives me a chance to catch up on what is current in medieval studies outside of my immediate subfield. The ISAS conference (which meets every two years; it's in Munich this year and unfortunately I can't go, as I'm not inflicting my one-year-old son upon trans-Atlantic passengers) is better in that the papers are all directly relevant to my work and of a superbly high quality, but Kalamazoo gives you the opportunity for fortuitous learning, for stumbling into a session and discovering a new idea or a new scholar who inspires you. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

(Ok, not quite as much as the social aspects).

The Problem with Theory

Or maybe this should be "A Problem with Theory."

When I was discussing Chaucer's Retraction with my class on Thursday we ended up using little bits of theory here and there. For example, one student argued that if Chaucer only made his Retraction because he was worried about the Church being angry about his works, then she was disappointed in his not standing up for his art. I asked her if she thought that there was some specific priest standing by Chaucer's deathbed, pressuring him. No, she said, but it's more that he took in Church teaching and then let that teaching control him. I then brought up Foucault on the internalization of discipline. Yes, the said, that's what I mean. But isn't the point of Foucault that the imposition of that kind of discipline and its internalization produces identities? So isn't Church discipline, assuming, arguendo, that this was really the reason for the retraction (I'm not so sure), a part of Chaucer's actual identity? Why isn't that internalized discipline part of the Chaucer. I tried the following though experiment, suggesting to the student that she has been disciplined by parent, school, culture, etc., to hate racial prejudice. She agreed. Could I take away the "hating racial prejudice" part of you without taking away part of your identity? No. So can we take away internalized Christian penitential discipline without taking away from Chaucer's identity?

The student still felt that perhaps we could, and I realized that this was a perfect example of Dennett's "if you make yourself really small, you can externalize anything" comment. But there wasn't time to explain all of Dennett, so we just muddled through ourselves.

It was an excellent, deep, literary/philosophical discussion, and I wondered why such discussions don't happen enough in some of my classes, and came to the tentative conclusion that one of the problems is the use of theory. Theory, as it is taught and imbibed by students, tends to provide pre-packaged answers (yes, I know, one important reason people developed theory, was to avoid pre-packaged answers). But the way theory is written, the way students have to "master" it and "accept" it (both quotes from Profs. at Carnegie Mellon when I was an undergrad), creates an impression that the texts and the problems are the questions, and theory is the answer. There's a plague of dissertations by people around my age who just run through Anglo-Saxon poetry or medieval lit applying their chosen theory to a whole variety of texts: The Written Body in Elene, The Written Body in Wulf and Eadwacer, The Written Body in Resignation, etc. There are people in my cohort who have done this for all their published work (and it does get published). I did some of the same during my dissertation time but then stopped (thank God). I think that this approach, which shows up all over the place (Reading the Built Landscape in Morrison, Reading the Built Landscape in Faulker, Reading the Build Landscape in Vonnegut...), has re-invented exactly what everyone hated about the New Criticism (Dark, Light and Ambiguity in Beowulf; Dark, Light and Ambiguity in Andreas; Dark, Light and Ambiguity in The Dream of the Rood).

I'm not actually anti-theory, just anti- the way theory is applied. Ok, I am anti-theory, but that's because I think people should start using different theories. Like mine, which I'll discuss in another post. But first it's time to talk about Kalamazoo. Stay tuned.

Finishing the Canterbury Tales

Today was the Chaucer class where we read the Parson's Prologue, parts of the Parson's Tale (I am the only person my age that I know who has actually read the whole thing in Middle English, and I don't inflict it upon my students), and the Retraction.

It's my experience that students do not react well to the Retraction. I do my best to try to put it in context, to explain how Christianity gave a very powerful worldview in the Middle Ages, that to ask Chaucer to follow our standards of "standing by his art" is unreasonable.

But they just don't buy it.

One student was particularly peeved that Chaucer was "once again trying to have it both ways," retracting his works in a text appended to those very works. "If he really wanted to retract his works, he could have burned them." Students pointed out that in some ways the retraction is just like Chaucer's attempt to distance himself from the bawdiness of the Miller's Tale while still writing it and taking credit for it: it's the Miller's Tale, and he's a churl, so if you don't want to be offended, turn over the leaf (interesting suggestion there that the Tales were to be read, not orally performed, the way Chaucer is depicted reading to the court in the Cambridge Troilus manuscript).

One student asked if we could blame the Retraction on social pressure. I said that we had no evidence that there was some priest standing next to Chaucer's deathbed saying "you'd better retract these things." "No," she said, "what I mean is social pressure inside of Chaucer; his ideas of what was right and wrong."

"How can you separate that from Chaucer?" I asked. And we then had an absolutely amazing literary / philosophical discussion. Of course my thinking on these matters is strongly influenced by Dennett's philosophy, which I know is controversial. But I was able to keep myself out of the discussion a lot, and the class really came alive. I think by the end they got an idea of how much is at stake in our understanding (or even construction) of authors. And they'd gotten there themselves (with a little guidance from me), not by decoding a theoretical text. Cool stuff.

[This leads me to my next post, called "The Problem with Theory," which I hope to work on tomorrow. Then a post on the Hieronymus Bosch painting that is the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo (and I say that in the most affectionate way possible). But it's the end of the semester and many meetings of many sorts take precedence. Students first, who are worried about papers, exams, etc., but also preparation for my term as Chairman of the Educational Policy Committee. Everyone who hears that I've been chosen says "that's a real honor." So you know which kind of pain in what location it's going to be. ]

News
Apologies for a dearth of insightful posts (or even replies to good comments). I have been drowning in proofs of one sort and another as well as a birthday party for my one-year-old son and the subsequent respiratory infections that are sweeping the house. Things are starting to calm down, but now I have 32 English 101 papers and 20 Chaucer papers to grade by Tuesday.

But there is good news as well. My college course on CD, Bard of the Middle Ages: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer should now be on sale in Barnes and Noble bookstores. It's not on line yet, from Recorded Books' The Modern Scholar, but since my copies just arrived in the mail, I'm guessing that it will show up on the website any day.

Tolkien Studies volume II is at the printer right now and should be out any day now. I think it's as strong as volume one, with some very good pieces, and not all by 'the usual suspects' in Tolkien criticism.

Work on the Encyclopedia is proceeding apace. If you haven't received an invitation to contribute and think you should, please get in touch. We've had some difficulty with invites bouncing due to spam filters, etc. I'm tracking these down individually, but it takes time to figure out if someone never received the email or if he or she did but just didn't want to contribute. There will also be a "second wave" of open topics as I figure out what is and isn't covered and integrate the many suggestions for entries that keep coming in.

Finally, it's less than a month until Kalamazoo, the 40th International Medieval Congress. Last year was the first time I missed the conference in a decade, but I'll be there for all four days this year, soaking up the medieval scholarship (and hopefully some nice Michigan spring weather). My paper has perhaps the least appealing title in the conference's 40-year history: "Repetition, Pattern Recognition, Metrics and the Evolution of Traditions: Some Old English Examples." This is what happens when you throw everything and the kitchen sink into an abstract because you haven't written the paper yet. I did come up with an alternate title: "Beowulf 1864a and the Memetic Evolution of Traditions," but that wasn't exactly a barn-burner, either. On the other hand, the paper is, I hope, challenging and should be a good fit for the Oral Tradition session I'm in. But now I must go and comfort my son, the incredible mucous machine.

Some thoughts on reading The Lord of the Rings out loud

Last night I finished reading LotR to my daughter, who is four and a half. We had started very soon after Christmas (when we had finished The Hobbit) and finished on Easter, which comes pretty close to mirroring the time it took the Frodo and Sam to go from Rivendell to Mount Doom. I absolutely loved reading the books to Rhys and watching her reactions, and 90% of the time when I was reading I wasn't analyzing, just reading. I do a few voices for her when I read (Gimli--with a Yorkshire accent--the orcs, Treebeard, Saruman), but mostly I just read.

Now I've read LotR easily 40 times, so it wasn't likely that I'd suddenly discover anything new. And my first introduction to Tolkien was my dad reading the books aloud to me, so I'm familiar with the aural effects. And yet I did notice a few things:


Tolkien spends an enormous amount of time on physical description of geography. There is just passage after passage describing, in detailed but not purple prose, the land, and the largest portion of this writing describes topography. Foliage and water flow gets some description, but topography really takes the lion's share. I think this is particularly interesting because Tolkien gets criticized regularly for archaic or inflated style, but none of that style is evident in these many, many passages.

The Fellowship of the Ring is by far the most engaging of the three books. I have always been a lover of The Return of the King because, of course, it's the climax, with the great battles, the destruction of the Ring, etc. But Fellowship is so powerful because it all happens at a much more personal level -- at least in the eyes of a four-year-old. Fellowship is also a lot scarier: the Black Riders, the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs and the Mines of Moria are just a lot more viscerally frightening than the more intellectually frightening battles and monsters later on. In fact, rather than progressively building to more and more terrifying monsters (such as whatever is living in Minas Morgul, or even Shelob), the monsters in the Shire and on its edges are more emotionally powerful. Part of this is probably due to the hobbits being on their own at the beginning, and less experienced, etc. But I think that Tolkien does a very smart thing dramatically by building up the tension so quickly even for such a long work.

"The Counsel of Elrond" is long and difficult, but not (contra so many) boring to a four-year-old. I think, though, that if I hadn't been able to explain back story, etc., it would have been more difficult for her. The most tedious chapter for her was "The Voice of Saruman" : she wasn't impressed by the rhetoric and debate.

Lothlorien, and particularly the Lady Galadriel, is incredibly powerful. Even with all the excitement throughout LotR, Rhys' favorite chapters were in Lothlorien. Her next favorite moments were Eowyn slaying the Lord of the Nazgul and the ents destroying Isengard.

I am a far bigger sap than my four-year-old daughter. Both at Thorin's death at the end of The Hobbit and the Grey Havens in LotR, I got all misty. Not so, Rhys, though she did feel very sad about Theoden's death.

UPDATE

The Silmarillion? To a four-year-old? Not as big a hit.

"Overproduction" of Ph.D.s

Last week I wrote a long and link-filled post about the "overproduction of Ph.D.s" problem, but blogger swallowed it and then one child got sick and then I had to give a lecture in NYC and then the other child got sick and then the proofs of two articles arrived on my desk with the standard "we sat on this for 28 months but now we need your corrections and revisions in seven days" letter and then the babysitter's great-grandmother died and then the babysitter's cat had to be put to sleep... (I am not making this up), so I have not had the chance to re-construct the post. And I won't here, either, since I have exams to grade. But here's the quick and dirty version.

John Bruce writes rather emphatically that he does not accept my analogy of academia to art, music or sports:

I see with some frequency the argument, always from tenured faculty, that to say there's something unfair about the academic economy if it overproduces PhDs is wrong, since there's no difference between the pyramidal food chain in academics and the same pyramid you see in sports, acting, music, art, and so forth. In other words, Hollywood (say) is full of wannabes. Only a few of those wannabes turn into Humphrey Bogart or Meryl Streep or Brian Dennehy. Thus, there are thousands of adjuncts, tens of thousands of TAs, and if the great majority never make it to tenure, that's no different from the minor league ball players who never become Joe DiMaggio.
Well, first, I can see why your average tenured prof would like this argument. It makes him or her into Maggie Smith or Ted Williams or Van Cliburn or Mary Cassatt or Ernest Hemingway. In fact, this is a real problem I see with this way of thinking. Nobody who says this is even remotely at the top of a talent-based pyramid. Nor is any of their colleagues, save only the Nobelist three states over. The fact that you got tenure, Prof. Throckmorton, makes you neither Leonardo DiCaprio nor Bruce Willis. You are instead an ordinary working stiff with pretensions beyond your station. No professor who hasn't shaken hands with the King of Sweden rises remotely to the merit of a top athlete or artist, and much as you'd like to think so, tenure isn't equivalent recognition. So let's get that out of the way.

Well, duh. I don't think I was even implying that getting tenure, even at Stanford, is the equivalent of becoming Humphrey Bogart. The economies of scale are very different, as the rewards differential shows. But getting tenure at a university can certainly be analogized to being a "working actor," who manages to keep gainfully employed at various jobs. Some of these actors will cross over to become more famous --the way a professor like Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins can cross over into mainstream publishing where he will make 10X his professor's salary -- but most will simply have a middle-class career at, say, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. And many, many more will invest years of auditions, poverty and struggle and end up with no tangible reward for it. I think the parallel with getting and Ph.D. and trying for a faculty job is obvious--and the odds are actually a lot better for a Ph.D. than for a hopeful actor.

But, John argues, it's different in academia because:

Nobody, except possibly the stars' cooks and gardeners, works at low pay in the system specifically to enrich a movie star in hopes of getting a payoff later. This, however, is specifically what grad students do. And a tenured professor at a research university would not be paid if there were not low-wage graduate assistants foregoing income in the system.

I've addressed this point before, but I see no evidence that professors are dependent upon low-wage graduate assistants in the way that John is suggesting here. As I wrote in the above-linked post, if someone made all graduate student teaching and assisting illegal tomorrow, the profession would go on with only a few changes. I can only speak for English, and it may be more of a big deal in the hard sciences, where research groups often rely very heavily on graduate students (but in those sciences, there are plenty of rewards for Ph.D.s outside the academy; only 1 person from my wife's "class" of Ph.D. students at Northwestern went into academia; the others went into industry and made money). But at Missouri, for instance, more than 75% of the English 20 (=English 101) TA's are M.A. students, mostly high-school teachers who are getting an additional credential to improve their salaries. So you'd have to replace 25% of the intro classes if you eliminated "overproduced" Ph.D. candidates. Not painless, but not hard. You could "place out" the top 10-15% of the students, who might benefit from intro English but not need it the way other students do. Then you could deal with the other 10-15% of students by slightly increasing the number of introductory classes taught by Professors (say, from 1 per year to 1.5 per year for a big department like Missouri). So to say that the tenured professors "would not be paid if there were not low-wage graduate assistants foregoing income in the system" is incorrect. Their jobs may be made easier (since intro courses are harder to teach than advanced courses), but the students and their revenue stream would still be there if the Ph.D. students were gone (in fact, at most places directing dissertations or having graduate assistants is not explicitly calculated as part of faculty workload; it's an add-on -- though teaching one or two graduate classes per year is part of the workload/salary package).

Now I don't want the above to be seen as a slam on graduate teaching or on adjuncts. That tenured professors don't rely on their "exploited" labor for their salaries does not mean that their contribution to the life of the college and the educations of students is negligible. I'll push the acting/music analogy a little further: the members of the ensemble in a Broadway musical are collectively essential to the success of the production. But they don't get the money and the security of the "stars" or even the established mid-level actors because although the collective work of the ensemble is necessary, any single ensemble singer can fairly easily be replaced by someone else who wants that job and is willing to work very hard for low pay as a way of getting a chance to move up.

Having gone to Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate, I know a fair number of actors and musicians. Some, like my best friend from college, have become stars. Others have not had as successful a career path, although quite a good percentage of them are full-time in their art (which, according to Bruce Springsteen, is the definition of success in the arts: when you can quit your day job). But among these folks there isn't the incredible sense of resentment that there is among people who have not had the same success in academia. Why is that?

I think the sort of folks (myself included) who tend to go into academia expect to be rewarded if they follow the rules: get into a top undergraduate institution, make A's, get into a good graduate school, make A's. The next obvious step is a TT job. When that doesn't materialize, because there are a lot of other people who are just as smart, hard-working and driven as you are who want it, then the rationalization develops that the system must be broken and you must be being exploited.

It is also the case that among Ph.D. candidates, graduates of the Ivies and other elite scholars are very over-represented. And, I have to say, my experiences suggest that these folks are heavily overinvested (emotionally, socially) in their undergraduate degrees. There is a very, very strong sense of entitlement among graduates of these elite schools (note how often the graduates tend to offhandedly mention their institutions -- Harvard grads are particularly repellent in this regard; there's a kind of up-talked, pseudo-question in the voice when, a Harvard grad has been asked where he/she went to school: "Harvard?")

I read a lot of the calls to reduce "overproduction" of Ph.D.s to be a thinly-veiled attempt to get rid of those hustling kids Missouri or Wayne State or Arizona or Notre Dame who are taking the jobs that rightfully belong to the graduates of the elite schools. For, make no mistake, if "overproduction" of Ph.D.s is somehow to be reduced by some kind of cartel system, it won't be the Ivies that will be asked to produce fewer graduates, and it won't be the Ivy programs that are shut down. The end result of such a process would be more intellectual inbreeding and stagnation. It will also push the decision tree of who ends up as a professor further back from graduate work to undergraduate work even to the (largely meaningless, imho) high-school work and test-scores that determine what undergrad institution one goes to (and lest I sound like the sour-grapes fox here, I was accepted to one Ivy and wait-listed at another but chose Carnegie Mellon anyway for my undergraduate degree).

This post is way too long, but let me also add that I do think there are problems with tenure (not so much Ward Churchill not being able to be fired for being a horse's ass, but the inability of colleges to separate out useless 'dead wood,' scholars who no longer teach well or do research, from productive people); and there are problems with intellectual close-mindedness; and all "speech-codes" are idiotic and should be completely scrapped; and the ridiculous proliferation of deans and sub-deans and various non-academic programs and centers should be radically reduced; and the single best thing that the country could do to fix college life would be to return to the 18-year-old drinking age so that the whole alcohol-Gestapo mandated by Congress and vulture lawyers could be dismantled. I'll try to address these things in other posts. But like the the medical system's problems, academia's flaws are not subject to one simple fix (from either left or right). Getting rid of tenure would have some good and some bad effects. Reducing the number of Ph.D.s would also have some good and bad effects, but I'm pretty sure that most of them would be bad for academia as a whole even if they might help individual Ph.D. candidates.

Some Problems with Teaching Evaluations

When you measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it, but when you cannot (or do not) measure it, when you cannot (or do not) express it in numbers, then your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
--Lord Kelvin

As part of the long, multi-person discussion going on about tenure and other aspects of academia (see John Bruce's blog and scroll down, and also see Jim Hu's comments), there has been some talk about the subject closest to my heart: teaching. John Bruce posts a few very negative reviews of faculty members from The Dartmouth Review and wonders how such people get hired given the current 'buyer's' job market. Jim Hu responds by examining what he can of one of the professors so harshly criticized, Fernando Commodari. Jim says that he takes such evaluations with a large grain of salt. I agree, except that I would add that you need a whole shaker.

Without a lot of context, student evaluations are probably meaningless--and I say this as one to whom student evals have been very, very good. For example, teachers in introductory classes get consistently lower numeric evaluations than they do in upper level courses. Science profs in particular get slammed on intro courses. There's also a pretty good correlation at the lower end of the scale between grades awarded and evaluation numbers, so that if you're a weak professor, handing out A's can increase your evals (science profs, especially in intro classes, don't usually have the luxury of very skewed grade distributions). At the upper end of the scale there seems less of a correlation between grades and evals, and in fact some of the very highest evaluated profs give out some of the lowest average grades (your truly included).

There there are the comment-sheets, like that published by the Dartmouth Review, in which anonymous students can savage a professor. These are completely useless, imho, since we have no context as to what other beef the student(s) may have with the prof. A cheating scandal, a refusal to give an extension, a disagreement over partial credit... anything can cause a student to blow up and write a scathing negative review. I've had colleagues get comments like "never available outside class" when I know for a fact that these profs are on campus 8-5, at least four days a week. But because the student didn't want to come in for 8:30 a.m. office hours, he or she wrote "never available."

Thus I give you Prof Commodari's take on his being listed as a terrible professor in the Dartmouth Review:

It'stoo late for me to go into the innaccuracies in that Dartmouth Review 2004 (In the same article they rake the new President of Dartmouth over the coals for being an "outsider"). I never taught Chem 5 there. I only taught Chem 6, after declining the invitation the year prior, in the Spring of 2004 (March 15-June 30, 2004) during mud season. There is a revolving door of temporary faculty at places like Dartmouth where the tenure-track and tenured faculty often need a break from teaching freshman chemistry. The fellow before me left and never returned. I took the job as an oportunity to checkmy experiences in teaching in mostly public non-priviliged settings with one in an ivy school. In my class of CHEM 6 atDartmouth, there was an element of students who could not adapt to my teaching style, using power point to allow for more time for problem solving. This 10% took it upon themselves to compare me in a "survey" / petition to a tenured faculty member who did nothing but chalk with his back to the class, as opposed to the more interactive approach that I use, after 15 years of evolution. It was awful. They passed this survey in my class unbeknownst to me, until other students came to me, and upset a good part of the class that was very content with my teaching. I had made the mistake of "blitzing" or e-mailing the whole class with the class emails unhidden (I did not bcc), and this small element would e-mail the whole class, unbenownst to me, trying the to convince the other students to have me give up the powerpoint. This was only one week into my teaching there. They made it very difficult for me, I did try to appease the minority by adding more chalk-talks, but the minority had already poisened the atmosphere in my class. At the end, my class average was a B+ higher than the B that was the Dartmouth "traditional" grade for the class, and I was pressured to change this, but I could not justify it based on Z score calcualtions etc. I can assure you that my standards were no less than anyone who taught Chem at Dartmouth, as I teach with a focus on substance. Unfortunately, the 90 % of the students who were happy don't post on blogs. Let me say, that in all my years of teaching, the students, five years later, are most thankful to those professors who were rigorous and layed a strong foundation in the basic (chemistry) class in preparation for the future, even if at the time they might not have appreciated a professor who always challenged them to go beyond the average.
Fernando Commodari, Ph.D.

I want to focus on the last sentence of prof. Commodari's email: "Let me say, that in all my years of teaching, the students, five years later, are most thankful to those professors who were rigorous and layed a strong foundation in the basic (chemistry) class in preparation for the future, even if at the time they might not have appreciated a professor who always challenged them to go beyond the average. " That kind of rigor (and I have no reason not to take Prof. Commodari's word for it) can alienate students who are overly-concerned about GPA and also students who have a different comfort level with different styles of teaching.

So how do we evaluate teaching? At Wheaton we focus on the actual comments by the students rather than their numeric evaluations. We look for things like use of superlatives, discussion of the difficulty of the class, and phrases like "tough but fair." If students give specifics of what they learned, we take that as a big positive. But that still isn't a very good metric, and so our knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. What we really want is for students to have learned a lot from a course. If they did, it was a good course. But we don't have very good ways of measuring that knowledge without using up resources on before-and-after evaluation (costs time and money to develop instruments, grade them, administer them again, and do the statistical work to make meaningful comparisons).

In the meanwhile, it's worth being skeptical of student comments either in anonymous college publications or at sites like ratemyprofessors.com or whatever it is.

Tenure, Again

John Bruce at In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood has a number of challenging posts about tenure and its problems. For instance, John notes that departmental staffing can take a very long time to adjust to student demands. It's certainly possible to have a department full of tenured professors teaching classes with four or five students in them while in another department all the classes are completely overcrowded. Administrators would like to address the problem, but if you can't reduce the number of tenured faculty in department A, it's budgetarily dangerous to increase the number of tenured faculty in department B. So things just stay the same, and administrators make up the difference with exploitation of adjunct faculty. It is difficult to determine what the "legacy" departments are, though, particularly at a small school like Wheaton which has several departments that have only one or two members. Things change rapidly. When I started at Wheaton there was some grumbling that English had a lot of staffing (we're the biggest department, by one, over psychology) and not too many majors. A few years later, we have more majors than we know what to do with.

Obviously administrators would have a lot more flexibility in staffing courses if they weren't constrained by tenure. Administrators could also continually replace senior faculty with less-expensive junior faculty. The senior faculty and all the junior faculty who hope to become senior faculty (i.e., all the faculty in TT or T jobs) know this, and it is by far the biggest reason for the ferocity of the defense of tenure. Everyone fears that, were tenure eliminated, expensive senior professors would be fired to save money. And where would they go? How would a professor support him- or herself when let go at 53 so that a 'young turk' who got paid a lot less could be hired?

Now the non-academic sector seems to handle this problem fairly well, it seems to me -- in that there's not a gigantic number of late-career professionals constantly being fired to be replaced by cheaper new college hires -- but I honestly think that when professors think about the ending of tenure, it's this kind of result they fear far more than being muzzled for controversial speech.

But economic self-interest is not a particularly good defense for a practice as expensive as tenure. I do think, as I wrote previously, that tenure can save colleges money in many situations: I would certainly be lured away for more money more easily than I have been (i.e., I have thus far stayed) if Wheaton hadn't awarded me tenure. But the cost/benefit analysis is beyond my economic competence, especially since it is going to involve hard-to-measure things like productivity, insitutional memory, wisdom, flexibility, etc.

Thus it will be very easy for people to attack tenure. I can in fact imagine a successful movement to eliminate the practice at public universities: I don't think many people realize just how much middle-class anxiety and anger there is out there about college costs (and admissions, but that's another post). Because the financial system is set up in such a way as to deliver a strong financial punch to just about everyone who is middle class (i.e., if you make more money, you get less aid, and full tuition is so ridiculously high) a populist attack on "lazy" professors who get paid too much and can't be replaced, and who can be tarred (fairly, in many cases but certainly not in all) with the "anti-American" brush, could be quite a potent political force.

This is one reason why I find the Ward Churchills of the academy so despicable. They, like the journalists who abuse the hard-earned authority of their profession for fleeting partisan advantage, are eating the seed corn. When the whole system comes toppling down, the good with the bad, the 200 idiots at CU defending Churchill's violation of every professional norm will blink their eyes and wonder what happened, and it'll be the responsiblity of the younger scholarly generation to clean up the mess.

One of the big reasons for tenure and 'academic freedom' is to allow universities to be keepers of the light, protectors of hard-won real knowledge in the face of the tides of politics and fashion. I don't mean that academia has to be hidebound, dusty and boring (though a little bit of these things can be a useful counterweight to a culture that is very much in the 'now'), but there's a presupposition that it is worth listening to those who have spent their lives in study and teaching. When their pronouncements are no better than those of a below-average Op-Ed writer, the people start to wonder why they occupy a privileged position, and even why that position needs to exist. I have no problem with leftist or rightist or any other ideas occuping a refugium in academia, but they should be ideas of a quality that can't easily survive somewhere else. That Moron Ward Churchill does not meet that test, and thus he undercuts the existence of the very tenure system by which he profits.

What would a better hiring system look like?
John Bruce of In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood asks in the comments to this post what a better hiring system might look like in the humanities.

John, don't you realize that I'm an English professor? We're supposed to complain and opine, not offer concrete solutions that might actually benefit actual human beings. Did you think I was an engineer or something?

Well, I'm married to an engineer and went to an engineering college for undergraduate, so maybe something rubbed off. But I should start by being honestly fatalistic and saying that I don't think the system--as unlovely as it is--is likely to change.

The problem is that each institution and department wants to have colleagues that "fit" and that the definition of "fit" changes from place to place. At Wheaton it means a dedication to teaching. At Yale a focus on research and a desire to avoid undergraduate teaching at all costs. At Berkeley it may mean a particular political background, etc. One would like colleges to be intellectually adventurous, but in this end it's a committee decision and thus likely to cater to the lowest common denominator in the committee.

The British system -- in which outside "electors" determine who will get certain professorships -- breaks through that logjam by selecting the "best" person for the job without having to live in the same department as that person. At the high levels in which this system is used, departments are filled with scholars of surpassing excellence (think the Anglo-Saxonists who have recently been at Cambridge).

Such a system has its pitfalls, of course, and it would be a giant workload issue for US colleges. But I think if there were some kind of balance -- an "outside" group of electors recommends a slate of candidates and then the department selects from that slate -- such a solution might produce better outcomes. Or you could switch things around: the department selects ten possible candidates and then the "electors" choose one or two. The "electors" would have a thorough knowledge of the sub-speciality that was being hired and could rank the candidates in various ways -- teaching experience and ability, publications, importance of dissertation, etc. Or, the electors could simply produce a brief report on each candidate.

I don't love the system I've outlined above and can already see large potential problems, but it might squeeze some of the randomness out of the process and produce potentially fairer outcomes.

Another possibility would be to have the system work something like the way the medical intership process works, but I'm not enough of an expert on that to comment intelligently (it does seem to me that the matching of candidates with medical internships is more Pareto Efficient than the way we do things in the humanities.

Anyway, those are my brief thoughts. This trying to figure out solutions instead of just pointing to problems is way harder than it looks. Thanks, engineers, for all that hard work!

Why the Hiring Process Produces Such Uneven Results

John Bruce at In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood discusses previous posts by me and by Jim Hu about the hiring process and closes by asking:

Jim Hu comments on and confirms Michael Drout's observations for other disciplines, and he makes it plain that the hiring process as it exists could hardly be more collaborative, intensive, analytical, holistic -- whatever you want to call it -- and yet I challenge both Jim and Michael to explain the error rate, the assistant profs who are hired whose accents are too thick for sophomores to understand, whose mastery of the material in the 101 course is dodgy, who lecture with their backs to the class, who break out in tantrums at students, who assign soap operas instead of readings, who stay out for a week with a toothache. . . how can this happen with a formal procedure that appears to be so rigorous? (Read the Whole Thing

Now I'm not a real scientist (though I try, sometimes, as in my Anglo-Saxon Medicine Project), but it seems to me that the most likely explanation for the, let's be charitable, uneven results one finds across academia, is that the data that are going into the decision are bad. I think the problem is the result of the combination of inflation with what Stephen J. Gould would call a "right wall" on the data. The two processes together create a situation where it is exceedingly difficult to extract meaningful information from the data that are collected, and so the actual hiring process ends up being arbitrary, capricious and inefficient.

Inflation is pretty simple to understand: even in hard sciences, average grades have steadily crept up over the decades, and the problem is much worse in the humanities. Rumor has it, for instance, that medical schools are now looking at the second decimal place of grade point averages because so many applicants have 3.7 or better GPAs. When I was at Stanford, the average GPA for undergraduates was a 3.5. Someone who, unlike me, didn't get a C in DiffEQs and a D in Linear Algebra (though I did get an A in Stats and a B in Stats II), can check my math intuition here, but I think that the distinctions between a large group of students who average 3.5 out of 4 are mostly noise (i.e., inflation wouldn't be in and of itself such a problem if there weren't that 4.0 wall on the right of the plot, but as it is everything is squeezed in). Larry Summers claims that physics professors at top-25 universities are 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean, but if the mean is 3.5 and the maximum is 4.0, those standard deviations might not be meaningful in terms of content even if they are statistically significant. If the difference in getting into graduate school is the difference between having a 3.75 and a 3.87, it's likely that those decisions are essentially random (within that particular population; there may be some relevant information in the disintinction between someone with a 3.2 and a 3.7, though I have my doubts. [n.b.: I think that this inflation is one reason why MCATs and LSATs are still important despite decades of anti-test lobbying].

The inflation problem has propagated throughout academia (i.e., inflation in graduate programs, where almost everyone gets A's) to the point where transcripts, although included in a dossier, are completely ignored. I can't think of when I looked at one during a search.

Of course for many institutions, the place where the candidate received his or her degree is used as a proxy for quality. I have posted on how stupid this is several times, in large measure because where someone gets his or her Ph.D. often has more to do with where one went to undergrad, which has a lot to do with grades in the junior year of high school. I don't think that's a very good metric.
So if transcripts are meaningful only in the sense that they are used to select for graduate school (adding a huge dollop of randomness and poor decisions into the recipe right at the beginning), and graduate program shouldn't be a very good metric (though it is often used as one). If it's not, the next two sets of qualifications come into play. These are scholarship and letters of recommendation. These are, unfortunately, similarly inflated and even more capricious.

With the proliferation of journals, conference-proceedings volumes and essay collections, many candidates have a publication or two to the vita in addition to their dissertations. Whether or not these are good publications is very difficult to judge because there is so much sub-specialization and narrowing of scholarship. It's very hard to judge a dissertation, anyway, and the mere fact that one has completed a dissertation does not always mean that a student is doing quality scholarship (and conversely, the fact that one hasn't completed a dissertation can simply mean that one's advisor flaked out in some way or that interpersonal, funding or other issues arose). So, a publication in a top-tier journal means a lot, and other publications, that might even be of higher quality, matter little. Ph.D. students are rather clever, and they've figured out how to game the system, so some put more effort into turning one chapter of the dissertation into an article for a big-name journal than they do on the rest of the dissertation. In short, reading a person's scholarly record at the stage where they have only a couple of articles and you can't tell the trajectory of work (which is what a tenure committee should look for more than any specific journal) is bound to give bad data.

Letters of recommendation are just as inflated as grades. In my estimation, over 80% of the letters are not just positive, but two single-spaced pages long praising the candidate to the high heavens. The rhetoric has gotten so inflated that I think if one writes "Candidate X is an excellent scholar and teacher who would be a perfect fit for your job," most committees would take it as a subtle warning that Candidate X is a loser. This rhetorical inflation particulary hurts candidates from British institutions applying for jobs in American, since the British tradition really is to write one- or two-sentence letters.

Letters of recommendation are inflated for a variety of reasons. First, a professor's reputation is enormously enhanced when his or her graduate students get jobs in a difficult market, so there is a great incentive to gild the lily. Second, as in all inflationary scenarios, the expectation of inflation leads to more inflation. If I know that the dissertation directors of my student's competitors are going to inflate accomplishments of their students, then I have to do the same just to maintain parity.

Also, the 'confidentiality' of letters of recommendation is suspect. It's common knowledge that many students find ways to see their own 'confidential' letters -- I heard one assistant professor in a talk at Kalamazoo talk about how she had had a friend at another institution request her credential file as part of a search and then photocopy and send the letters to her. She did not seem to be ashamed at this. I know other people who have simply requested a credential file themselves while adjuncting (i.e., they fax on letterhead from the school where they're adjuncting and have it sent to that school, where they snag it from the mail pile or from a friend in the department). When you have good reason to believe that your students will be reading the 'confidential' letter you wrote, you probably write according to those expectations [n.b.: I have no idea what is in my credential file]. I should note, however, that although letters are inflated, personal recommendations by a dissertation director can mean a lot, exactly because they are personal, confidential and involved in that professor's individual reputation.

So at this stage, the data from transcripts are bad, which leads to admission to any particular graduate program being bad (i.e., you can't be sure an Ivy U Ph.D. really is better than one from Unheralded State [update: I changed the names of my hypothetical schools to avoid giving the opposite impression of my intentions here]). The data from scholarly publications are mostly bad, since there isn't enough data to show career trajectory and the system can be gamed. Data from completing a dissertation might be good, but every candidate has done that, so it provides no contrast. Data from letters of recommendation are inflated and hence bad.

So what you have are committees working incredibly hard to attempt to extract some kind of meaningful information from an enormous proliferation of bad data. At Wheaton we put a lot of weight on the candidate's cover letter, syllabi and writing sample. Our experience has been very good: we've gotten amazingly good people, professors who are excellent teachers and who do first-rate research. We feel we have been able to use the job market situation to cherry-pick the best people out there, and we haven't been disappointed. But there's no doubt that the process is not logical in any way and perhaps we have just been very lucky.

Given that there is no agreed-upon metric for quality work in the humanities, it's easy to see how politics, fad and fashion, nepotism and corruption can creep into the process. For example, it's rumored to be quite common for weak professors to deliberately steer searches into hiring weak candidates so as not to provide any competition for them. A candidate who seems too strong and thus may be threatening to an established professor or department can easily be elminated from contention not from any real flaw, but from any kind of weird post facto case assembled by anybody in the department.

There are other problems, too. To me one of the worst aspects of contemporary academia is its rich-get-richer nature. Students who for whatever reasons got into a good undergraduate school then get into a good graduate program, get more funding, have more opportunities, and have the 'name recognition' of the school. They then just seem to get more additional funding throughout their careers (it's a snide and obnoxious comment, but so often made that it has a ring of truth to it, that if you have a degree from University of Chicago you will get ACLS and NEH stipends regardless of how stupid you or your project actually are; I don't know this from experience, since the only Chicago grad I'm friends with actually is very smart).

So, over time, the fact that Albert got an A on his final chemistry exam junior year in high school while his friend Bob only got a B can end up ramifying through such a large number of decision trees that Albert ends up as Professor of English at Stanford while Bob is part-time adjunct at Community College even though there is perhaps very little difference in intellect or effort between the two. Such is one of the very worst aspects of our academic system (and the real horror is that it's a marvel of openness and opportunity compared to the academic systems in Europe).

With the lock-in created by tenure (so that even excellent scholars are often unwilling to think about moving institutions), with all the bad data backing the decisions, and with the problem that if even a small minority of the faculty members at an institution want to institute, sub rosa, a series of political, ethnic, or institutional tests, they can do so pretty much unobserved, the "market" for professors fails miserably in allocating resources or making good decisions.

That the whole system is not an even bigger disaster is due almost entirely, in my opinion, to the ad hoc efforts of indivdual professors and administrators, scattered throughout the system, who find a way to spot and reward good scholarship and teaching. But it's a tough battle, and many people just get tired of fighting it.

Perhaps a better way to allocate professor jobs would be to replace the entire disgusting, unjust, cruel and inefficient hiring process with fights to the death at the MLA convention (I recommend they fight using the Lirpa). It would make the convention more interesting, and it would probably be less painful and humiliating to the graduate students currently being ground up the by academic machine.

The Hiring Process: Or, How Did an Obvious Horse's Ass Like Ward Churchill Get Hired, Anyway?

Short answer: he probably didn't go through the real hiring process, but a pro forma search was conducted with a pre-determined conclusion. It's quite possible that the position was so narrowly conceived that Churchill was likely to be the only person eligible for it (though you never can tell. I was originally hired at Wheaton in part because I could teach medieval lit of various sorts, basic writing, fiction writing, and journalism. Try to find that particular skill-set in any one applicant).

If interested readers want to figure out how the "system" works (more likely we are now descending into academic shoptalk that will bore many readers to tears), you can scroll down and read my previous post and also read what Jim Hu has written about the tenure process.

Reading both of these posts should make it clear that, nowadays at least, the biggest hurdle and the best opportunity for both quality control and sleaze is the hiring process, so I thought I would attempt to give just a bit more detail about how it works.

Once a department decides that it needs another "line" (that is, a tenure-track position), the Provost and President have to be convinced and there has to be money there. So the department will define the position, the first time, in whatever terms are most likely to appeal to the Provost. Obviously there will be politics, etc., involved, but the constraint of asking for something one is likely to get, rather than asking for all that one wants is a factor.

Once the position has been approved by the Provost, the department drafts an add for the job list. This has to be approved by the Provost, also, but in general this is where the real manouvering and heavy politics come into play. A carefully crafted add can be used to exclude certain candidates or can be ambiguous to allow for a wide variety to be reduced later, or can just be a laundry list of wishes. It depends on the department and the particular meeting at which the add is drafted.

Then, when the job list comes out, anyone who can possibly spin their qualifications to be even marginally qualified for the add will apply. Really. I've seen candidates argue that they really are in one field when they've given one conference paper in it, while everything else in the vita is in a different field.

In our department every single file that comes in (cover letter and vita) goes into a xerox paper box in alphabetical order. There's a cover sheet for each file that has the candidate's name on top, a list of all department members down the left side, and the categories Definite No, Probably No, Probably Yes, and Yes across the top. Department members read a file and check the appropriate box next to their name, adding in a comment or two. When the file receives two "Definite No" votes it goes into the "No" file (although it can be resurrected at a later date). Two "Definite Yes" checks and the candidate gets a dossier request (dossier is letters of rec, transcript, writing sample).

Of course, because this process is run by academics, most check-marks are in the "Probably" categories. The search chair makes a determination when a file is leaning one way or another and either requests a dossier or does nothing (i.e., Probably No filed don't go in the No box). This process leaves us with 40 dossiers, which are then whittled down in a long and tedious meeting to 10 MLA interviews. (I discussed this in more detail in the previous post).

Clearly there are hardly any real checks at the on-paper stage, and this is in my opinion the worst part of the system. Someone could, for instance, go through and "No" any candidate for any reason and make only the most cursory explanation (or even have a tendentious, dishonest explanation). If the other readers aren't reading closely, it's likely that they might just go along with the "No" for the purpose of quickly reducing the giant stack of files to read. Theoretically two members of the department could conspire to eliminate just about anyone (though there are some members of the department who search the "No" pile to bring back candidates, so this is 100% possible), though I've never seen that happen (and if the same two people kept writing "No," it might raise some red flags for the search chair).

As I said, I've never seen malfeasance like that, but I do think the system invites superficial rejection. When you're faced with 150 cover letters, all written in tiny font with stretched margins, its very easy to look for any excuse to stop reading. It's also easy to find an excuse that would let someone engage in just about any kind of discrimination he or she wanted to engage in, either personally (i.e., I don't want that guy) or systematically (i.e., no Ivy Ph.D., no military historians, no non-marxists, etc.).

So, assuming they did a search for Ward Churchill, how did such a loser get hired? Well, the add could have been crafted just for him, or some individuals could have sabotaged all of the most competitive candidates by finding fault with some small aspect of their applications. It's also theoretically possible for small groups to hold the entire search hostage (particularly in small departments), continuously raising objections to all other qualified candidates until they get the one person they want. So while I think John Bruce may be right that there was adminstrative pressure to hire him, but it's also quite possible that everything could have been coming from inside the department. He was around campus, a known quantity, and an affirmative action data point. That, sadly, was probably enough.

P.S.: Clueless me, I just learned that Churchill had been invited to speak here at Wheaton and that his invitation was rescinded. That's going to be a discussion of it at AAUP. Too bad I won't be able to go to that meeting.

More on that Moron Ward Churchill

John Bruce at In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood has a typically incisive post on the Ward Churchill affair:

The real issue in the Churchill scandal, it seems increasingly clear to me, is the lack of transparency in academic culture overall, with particular focus on how tenure decisions are made. I think the issue of 'political correctness' is a false lead, except insofar as it shows what a sham 'politically correct' views really are at a place like CU: the administrators appear to have justified hiring Churchill on the basis of false 'ethnicity', when this was most likely just a convenient beard for hiring a psychopath who'd charmed (or whatever else) the pants off them. Nor is it an issue of free speech; Churchill was a bad hire long before he started talking about 'little Eichmanns'. As I've discussed already here, though, the tools are available, and likely will be used, to fire him for unrestrained extramural speech, as they've been in other cases."

Yes. Lack of transparency is everywhere a problem, but it is particulary bad in academia, and particularly bad within academia at large institutions and state-run schools.

Let me describe how tenure decisions are made at Wheaton and then compare and contrast, so readers outside of academia (and perhaps those within) can see how the process works and can be corrupted.

You start with hiring, but I don't want to go into in specifics because Wheaton has a search going on right now. What I will say is: the department argues about how to define the job. Then an add gets wrangled over and written. Then the add goes in the Job List. We get 100+ applications that include cover letter and vita. We ask for "dossiers" on about 40 of those 100 -- dossiers include letters of recommendation, transcripts (which everybody ignores) and writing samples. We argue about those 40 finalists and whittle it down to 10. Three members of the department -- usually the chair of the search committee, who isn't always the department chair, but usually is, and two others -- interview the 10 candidates at the MLA conference. They return to Wheaton and discuss with the department. We invite 3 finalists to campus. We ask them to teach a class in their subject area, meet each member of the department formally, have a formal interview in front of the whole department (and several dinners, etc.) and meet the Provost. Department then decides who gets the job offer. The Provost has to approve.

Larger places operate similarly, with a few exceptions: most places don't involve the entire department in just about every aspect of the seach (we are only 12, so we can do that). Instead, a committee handles everything. Most places have the candidate give a lecture about his or her research rather than teach a class. This is the "job talk" that Ph.D. candidates prepare. Most places have several more layers of administration that have to be appeased, including one or more Deans. Wheaton has a Provost and two Associate Provosts, who are regular faculty members rotating through the job, and that's it. The Associate Provosts have no power over the job offer.

Ok, so the person is hired, usually on a two-year contract. After the first annual review (when the new assistant prof. submits all scholarship, teaching, service, etc., and writes a long letter about it and then responds to the chair's response... Wheaton loves long, discursive, self-analytical paperwork, oh yes we do), the department chair and the tenured members of the department discuss the new hire. If everything seems to be progressing, and the person seems to be a good fit for the department, a second, 4-year contract is offered. At this point the person is on track for a tenure review. No one outside the department has reviewed scholarship or teaching.

In the summer before the sixth year, the department prepares to bring the assistant professor up for tenure. Every member of the deparment must write a letter (either or recommendation or not; it's confidential, but everybody has to write a letter). The tenure candidate has to submit the names of six outside referees who can judge the scholarship. These people have to have an 'arms length' relationship -- no shared publications, not previous teachers, etc. -- the candidate has to promise not to contact these people from that point on until the end of the process. Only the Provost and the Tenure Committee knows which outside reviewers will be chosen, and which will agree to serve, but almost no one ever turns down such an important job.

Now to the tenure committee, who will decide our candidate's fate. At Wheaton we are very unusual in having no official administrative veto over tenure. That is, the decision is made by a 7-member committee that includes the President and Provost and 5 faculty. To be awarded tenure, the candidate must receive 5 votes. So even if the President and Provost vote "no," theoretically the faculty can all vote "yes" and prevail. The President does have a veto in the sense that it is the President that makes the recommendation to the Board of Trustees, but no President has ever gone against the committee. Since actual vote-counts are kept secret (i.e., I don't know if I was 7-0, 6-1, or 5-2), we don't know if it has ever been a 5-2, faculty against admin, but rumor has it that this has never happened either.

The tenure committee spends the entire Fall reading all of the candidate's scholarship, all student evaluations (i.e., not just the redacted numbers), letters from the department, other faculty, and current and former students (who are soliticted by the college). In November the letters from the outside referees come in. In the first week of January the committee meets and makes their decision. All proceedings are tape recorded, but the tapes are sealed in the archives for 25 years after the professor's retirement, unless there is an appeal.

How are other places different? There can be administrative veto by any number of Deans up the ladder to the Provost. The Provost or the President can also veto, and they don't need to give any reasons. There are also in-department vetoes at some places (we don't have one officially, but it is unlikely that someone would be tenured if their entire department wasn't behind them), and by this I mean that there are small committees, controlled by single individuals or small groups, that can effectively veto a candidate.

Where can there be corruption and malfeasance? Obviously at any stage where there is a veto that doesn't need to be explained. The next most obvious places are with the selection of outside referees. Due to super sub-specialization, it is at least theoretically possible for people to choose their friends or obvious supporters and for the Provost and Tenure Committee not to know that this has happened. If there isn't an obvious paper trail, the Provost and President won't see that the possible conflict of interest. People do look out for their friends and political fellow travelers. And the biggest problem of all is that nobody really wants to be a bad guy. So once someone gets to the tenure process, it's very hard to stop it from happening. Referees don't really want to write negative reviews. Faculty members don't want to write negative letters (they'd rather just ignore the whole thing in many, but not all, cases). Most people are only willing to be negative when it appears to be safe--thus the over-emphasis on any hint of certain politics. It's easy, make the writer feel righteous, and doesn't require cross-disciplinary work.

There is also the opportunity, as appears to have happened with That Moron Ward Churchill, to have administrators put pressure on the department. It can be--at least theoretically, though I haven't seen this at Wheaton--as clear as the administrator suggesting that the tenure-line (i.e., the ability to hire a full-time person for that particular field, etc.) is dependent upon the department making a certain kind of hire. This could be affirmative action (i.e., if you don't hire a certain gender, race, etc., don't bother hiring at all), it could be place of Ph.D. (get a Chicago grad or don't bother), or it could be even a certain person, which again appears to have happened with That Moron Ward Churchill.

There is also the problem of the minds of the hiring and tenure committees. I have seen inviduals make what were to me absolutely bizzarre decisions, suggesting to me that they believed in very weird stuff. I'm sure there are some people at CU who would have voted for Churchill because they thought he was American Indian no matter how bad his scholarship was. They may not even have admitted this to themselves. If his scholarship were of a specific kind of badness (i.e., so convoluted as to be opaque), they may even have convinced themselves that he was too smart, that what he was doing was too cutting-edge, for them to judge.

Well, it's late and I've got a lot of English 101 papers to grade, so I have to bring this to a close for now. There is a process as best I can describe it. I hope that this adds a little transparency to the system, though it's obviously not the real transparency in every case the John Bruce is really calling for. And I agree with John. Although I understand the privacy and confidentiality arguments (we hope referees and othes are more likely to be honest when they know that their recommendtions are confidential), all the secrecy allows for dishonesty and corruption -- and their appearance even when their actuality isn't there. I'd like to see a lot more transparency at least in the sense of quantitative measurements: Scholar X, awarded tenure, had Y pages of publications, Z student evaluations, etc. Same for graduate student funding, by the way: I'd like to see student grades and test-scores posted (without names) with funded/not-funded breakdowns. That way people could see where they fall (in both tenure and funding) and argue their case if they are out-performing people who are ranked above them. But I also know that it is not that simple, and that many quantitative measurements of scholarship (such as number of pages) and teaching (such as the raw numbers of student evaluations) are not always good proxies for scholarship, teaching and service.

The Secret of Their Succe$s


What do the the Wall Street Journal's snippy reaction to the Eason Jordan affair and the Journal's regular defense of CEO pay, the Ward Churchill affair and Churchill's defenders, and
some of the more common critiques of tenure, teaching and the humanities at universities have in common with a a fairly lame Michael J. Fox movie from 1987?

(Maybe only the groggy brain of Mike Drout, whose 10-month-old son decided that 4:28 a.m. would be a nice time to wake up today. But let's see if I can convince you.)

The Michael J. Fox movie in question, The Secret of My Succe$s, depicts (if I remember it correctly from about 18 years ago), a kid who works in the mailroom accidentally rising up to CEO-like power in a company. The point of the movie was that just about anyone could do what the movers and shakers were doing, and in fact a new, young person, idealistic and not tied into office politics and greed, might do it better.

The Secret of My Succe$s was nobody's idea of a great movie, but it did tap into something in American culture, the idea that for the many jobs, the difficulty is in getting the job, not in doing it once you are there. I can think of many other examples. For instance, every few years there's a story about some guy who has fake credentials as a doctor or nurse but who ends up doing a pretty good job in an ER until he is found out. Or, as I said to my wife last night when the topic of Carly Fiorina, ousted CEO of Hewlett-Packard, came up: "I'm sure that I could have destroyed the company's stock price just as well as she did, and I would have done it for ten million, saving H-P ten million bucks. Everybody wins."

To connect this idea to academia, there are many people (most of them graduate students) who would argue that they are better teachers than the dinosaurs in their departments -- and they might even have the evaluations to back them up. For example, my evaluations at Loyola-Chicago for Basic Writing were higher than those of almost all other faculty members, including full professors in their own subjects. Thus the argument would be that graduate assistants, at <20K per year, are better teachers than full professors at >75K per year.

Similar thoughts have occured recently to those who compare bloggers and journalists. American Digest, for instance, argues that journalists are starting to be scared by bloggers, since bloggers can, it seems, write and report as well as or better than mainstream journalists. Roger's L. Simon's characteristically pithy and well-written take (hope your recovery from the gallbladder surgery is progressing well, Roger!), suggests that journalists are becoming jealous of the influence, and also the freedom, of some of the bloggers (people who could have been journalists but chose to do other things).

Thus one might reasonably ask if professors, CEOs, and journalists are being rewarded for being better teachers, managers, and writers than graduate assistants, mailroom clerks, and bloggers, or are they being rewarded for being better ladder-climbers?

This is not as easy a question to answer as many who have climbed (however far) the various career ladders would like to believe. I think that in fact the Secret of My Succe$s (just love the stupid typographical witicism) meme is very prevalent in American culture exactly because there's been very little successful logical, evidence-based discussion of the relationship between ladder-climbing skills and performance from the perch. Michael Moore got his start, after all, with Roger and Me, in which he tries to ask GM Chairman Roger Smith why Smith gets richly rewarded when his company is going down the toilet. It's a good question that I don't think has ever been satisfactorily answered.

I think prominent national journalists are in many ways in the position of Roger Smith in the Moore film (tendentious as Moore's work may be). Faced with Dan Rather and the forged memos or Eason Jordan's talking smack, journalists start invoking their superior sense of the public interest, the checks and balances, etc.

Having been a journalist (albeit a terrible one, but I do have a very pretty M.A. diploma from Stanford) I have to say that this is a bunch of horse pucky. There are two things that separate journalist from everybody else: writing ability and access to sources. Good journalists have contacts and know who to call, and they know how to boil down a lot of information into a good, clear story. Journalists are generally much better at reporting and writing up reporting than are bloggers, who may at times report, but who usually link to someone else's reporting, either to use it or to critique it and who aren't generally constrained by space.

The problem is, that at the highest levels of journalism, the journalists aren't actually journalists, they are opinion columnists, politicians, managers and pundits. To some degree they still have the source advantage--Dan Rather can get a phone call returned by Colin Powell; the Power Line guys can't--but most of their energy goes not into reporting, but into other endeavours. And at these endeavours they have no particular edge over bloggers. In fact, because bloggers can write as many words as they need for a story, writers like Wretchard at Belmont Club or the much-missed Stephen den Beste can write argument cum research cum speculation essays that are more interesting and challenging than a predictable column by Thomas Friedman or George Will or Charles Krauthammer (when columnists go out and use their access to sources and do actual reporting, it's a different story). In short, I think the metro beat writers at most papers are probably better journalists (both as reporters and writers) than most bloggers. But the famous journalists are, perhaps surprisingly, another story. When they demonstrate that they don't use good judgment, that they can't avoid blatant and stupid bias, and when they try to argue that they deserve special privileges that other citizens don't deserve, people start to think--rightfully--that they are better ladder-climbers than perch performers.

In academia we have similar problems. On the reseach front, when people become so specialized that there is no one else at a given institution who is 'qualified' to read their work, it's very hard to separate ladder-climbing from performance. This is yet another reason why I think scholarship in English can and indeed must be written in such a way that intelligent people outside the immediate subfield can understand it (I'd argue that intelligent laymen should be able to understand it, and I have tried to follow that rule in my own scholarship). In the case of Ward Churchill, we see that politics have trumped all pretensions to scholarly accuracy, intellectual rigor and not being a horse's ass. If Churchill's tenure review and his scholarship had been required to have been judged by intelligent people outside the sub-field, this might not have happened.

In terms of teaching, there's a general rule of thumb that the younger a professor is, the better the evaluations. Now many people dismiss student evaluations as being driven by professors wanting to suck up to their students (the National Review guys do this a lot, which is yet another reason why I don't self-identify as a conservative; the WSJ's defense of CEO pay is another, and their snippy editorial on the bloggers and Eason Jordan is a third -- I'm not a great lover of hierarchy of any kind), but when you correct for grades (i.e., discounting the evaluations of profs who hand out A's like candy), I think you get a pretty good idea of student involvement and motivation, which is a decent indicator of teaching skill.

But older professors bring something else to the table that might make up for the 'connection' younger profs and grad students make with students: experience can often allow a teacher to zero in on the student's particular problem or difficulty. That can make for better learning by the student, which is really the whole point. Older professors also have an awareness of the history of a field and so, supposedly, will be less likely to be taken in by things that are trendy, reinventions of old wheels, etc.

Is the older professor that much more valuable than the graduate student or new professor with the high evaluations? It's probably pretty close. I'm in the middle of the professorial career trajectory now, and I think things balance out: the enthusiam and energy of younger professors allows them to overcome their lack of experience; the wisdom of the older professors allows them to overcome their lack of energy. And the older professor can and should bring more to the table in terms of more sophisticated, complex and difficult scholarship. When these things don't happen, you have a good argument for post-tenure review or the elimination of tenure.

Let me try to close this extremely long essay. I mentioned earlier that we fairly regularly read stories of someone who pretends to be a doctor and has quite a few successes in the ER. My dad is a physician, and I asked him about this to tease him. He actually agreed that someone who has spent a lot of time in an ER -- as an assistant or even a janitor -- can probably learn to do almost all the things necessary. 99% of what goes on is routine, same old, same old. But, my dad said, in those 1% of cases where something isn't routine, someone who is a fake doctor rather than a real doctor will very often end up killing somebody.

The stakes aren't quite so high in journalism, management or academia, but I wonder if there isn't some important wisdom in my dad's comment. Maybe there is a difference in what a ladder-climber can do. I'd like to see those who are in their exalted perches tell us what those things are.