Tag: Teaching

Since I teach the sort of courses Mike criticizes, perhaps I should come to the defense of the “assign readings, lecture and give objective-answer tests” approach. One objection to that approach is that it doesn’t encourage critical thinking. But that seems to me to depend as much on the content of the course as it does on the form.

It’s easy to teach a course that encourages students to think critically but in effect insists that they criticize the same things the instructor criticizes, and in the same way. It’s probably easier to write a paper that tells the instructor what he wants to hear than it is to give the right answers on a test requiring short-form answers and calculations; the difference is that writing the paper requires the student to simulate the appropriate opinions while the exam doesn’t.

(I still remember with loathing being required in high-school literature classes to write essays about novels, poems, and plays which I had read but to which I didn’t respond to at all. It was clear that “Silas Marner wasn’t worth reading, and I only wish the author had suffered as badly as her characters and her readers” &#8212 which was, and is, my reaction to that novel &#8212 simply didn’t count as an appropriately “critical” response.)

On the other hand, it’s completely possible to be didactic without being dogmatic. I try to be careful to say at the beginning of each course something like “This is one way to look at these phenomena; I don’t claim that it’s The Truth about them, but I’m asking that you suspend your criticism of this approach to the topic until you understand what it means to those of us who think it valid.” I also say that my remarks about methods of analysis should be taken as authoritative within context of the discipline of policy analysis, but that my opinions about actual policies are merely my opinions, and that it is no part of the purpose of the course to have the students’ opinions conform to mine.

Moreover, when I teach about matters of controversy such as drug policy and crime control, I’m careful to include a healthy dose of readings from those whose views don’t match mine, and to emphasize, within the lecture format, points of controversy, aspects of the problem that a narrow definition of “policy analysis” might miss, and instances (of which there are plenty) in which some previous view of mine which I regarded as a fairly robust analytic conclusion proved to be wrong descriptively or theoretically or where actions taken on the basis of that conclusion turned out badly.

If student reports are to be believed, my conservative students find me unusually sympathetic to their viewpoints, while my liberal students find me unusually challenging. (The high point of my fall quarter was when a member of the Bruin Democrats, carrying the placard she was about to display as part of an organizing effort, came up to me after my lecture on Schelling’s “Economic Reasoning and the Ethics of Policy” and said, with apparent gratitude, “You really messed with my head!”)

Not that Mike is wrong to say that the current classroom activity mix could be usefully moved in the direction of providing the students with more experience doing things rather than listening to things. He’s certainly right. But it seems to me that most of the gain from that approach would be increased attention and emotional involvement, leading to increased retention of the material, rather than in boosting critical-thinking skills. After all, having people do things simulates the workplace, which is on average noticeably less fostering of critical activity than is the typical classroom.

I’ve been the beneficiary of great lecturers (Mike Walzer, Harvey Mansfield), great seminar teachers (Paul Desjardins, Tom Schelling) and great case-method teachers (Phil Heymann). And I’ve tried all three approaches myself; it turns out that I’m a very effective lecturer, a decent seminar leader, and a rotten case-method teacher. Better, I think, to find your natural strength and play to it than to bend yourself all out of shape trying to fit yourself within a particular pedagogic tradition. The right mix can be accomplished at the level of the program or department rather than at the level of the individual faculty member.

Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy responds here to my posting about “Dartmouth Review” vs. “Federalist Society” conservatives. He isn’t as sure as I am that these are genuinely contradictory approaches, but seems to think that conservatives need a combination of the FS’s “conciliatory” approach and the DR-types confrontational, publicity-attracting stunts. He also, interestingly, suggests another approach, which I’ll call the “Benedictine” or “remnant” conservative strategy, which involves designing completely alternative institutions, rather than trying to either attack or slowly work into dominant institutions (like law schools)-Patrick Henry and Ave Maria Universities are examples of this.

I would suggest that while Todd seems to think that the FS&DR approaches might have affinities with one another, the real links are probably between the DR and remnant types. The FS approach assumes that the dominant institutions are at least sufficiently healthy and valuable to be worth (from a conservative approach) reforming. As a result, FS types would want to be very careful about attacking fundamental standards of civility in those institutions, because they would want them to be healthy places once conservatives have established a beachhead there. DR types, by, as the Marxists used to say, “maximizing the contradictions,” may succeed in stripping those institutions of some of their legitimacy or prestige, but at the price of making them less attractive and workable places. This would tend, at the margin, to mainly strengthen the Benedictines, by diffusing energy away from changing dominant institutions (why try to fix them if they’re rotten?) to investing in alternatives.

I should also note that the “FS” and “DR” categories here are ideal types, and like all ideal types, they don’t necessarily map onto every actual FS and DR member.

The almost impossibly dumb “Bruin Alumni Association” naming of the “Dirty Thirty” UCLA profs (accusing them of bring tools of trendy academic leftism) brings into sharp relief one of the more interesting divisions in modern conservatism, between what we can call the “Dartmouth Review” and the “Federalist Society” conservatives. To be a DR conservative, one does not have to actually have served on DR (although, as in the case of Laura Ingraham, it helps): it is enough to adopt its techniques. At the core of those techniques is a combination of harsh ridicule and high-profile events or actions designed to encourage liberal institutions to impose discipline, so as to make visible those institutions’ bias and prove that they are hypocritical (the similarities to the Yippy left of the 60s is no accident). The “Dirty 30” list is a classic example of this sort of strategy, designed not to encourage reform in the institutions they are attacking, but to weaken them and cut away at their public legitimacy.

On the other side of the conservative divide are what I’ll call “Federalist Society” conservatives. In an interview for the book I’m now finishing, one of the organization’s founders noted that, when it was created in the early 80s, the small group of Chicago, Yale and Harvard law students consciously sought NOT to create an organization like DR, which they saw as a group that encouraged conservatives to act like caricatures of themselves. Instead, their strategic judgment was that, while criticizing liberal institutions was important, the more effective strategy for institutional change involved building up a cadre of lawyers steeped in conservative and libertarian ideas, combined with sponsoring debates in which the best conservative legal scholars faced off directly with those on their left. This strategy was based on a very different strategic judgment than that of the DR activists: the Federalist Society founders assumed that there was a group of moderate liberals out there who could be convinced by their ideas, if they were presented in a rigorous, scholarly, and civil way. Rather than mimicking the excesses of the left, the Society’s founders guessed that, if they scrupulously attended to balance and debate, they could force the legal academy to take their ideas seriously. Guess what-for good or for ill, they succeeded.

It strikes me that there’s a similar conservative strategy available where arts and sciences are concerned. This would require, contra the BAA, that conservatives pick out the small number of those on the left who genuinely abuse their responsibility by using their position as teachers to vent their non-relevant political views to their students, or who fail to maintain any reasonable balance in their assignments. The truth is that the probably larger number of moderately liberal faculty would love to have someone do something about the often thuggish behavior of the academic hard left. But by going beyond supporting principles that can get wide assent across the political spectrum, to “exposing” faculty simply for their extra-classroom attitudes (including faculty who are not all that lefty), they succeed only in creating a community of interest among everyone but the hard-core of DR-type conservatives.

In short, not only is this obnoxious, it’s strategically stupid. The guy who thought this up should be fired for incompetence.

My feelings are hurt.

The “Bruin Alumni Association (which consists, as far as I can tell, of one self-promoting wingnut too slimy and too crazy even for the taste of David Horowitz) has posted a list of thirty-one radical leftist professors at UCLA and I’m not on it! What am I, chopped liver?

Now, a carping critic might point out that I’m not actually a radical leftist. Technically, I suppose that’s true. But neither is Jonathan Zasloff, and he made the list. I’ll stack my radical leftist credentials up against Jonathan’s any day of the week. It’s rank discrimination, that’s what it is!

[Why, Walter Williams himself, a member of the BAA Advisory Board, once called me “a friend of tyranny” on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. (Williams disagreed with something I’d written on tobacco policy; naturally, as a believer in free discourse, Williams refused to allow me on the air to defend myself.)]

It’s true that I try to keep my political partisanship out of the classroom; but, as Steve Bainbridge points out, the BAA doesn’t seem to distinguish in-class from out-of-class activity. Any inclination toward liberalism by someone who also teaches at UCLA seems to be enough to put someone on BAA’s “dirty thirty” list.

My first reaction to the whole BAA nonsense was to ignore it, and urge my colleagues to do likewise, in order to starve BAA’s promoter of the publicity he so craves. I was happy leaving the task of criticizing pseudo-conservative nonsense to real conservatives like Bainbridge and Eugene Volokh (twice) and Steven Thernstrom, and the task of promoting it to other pseudo-conservatives: Glenn Reynolds, for example. I have even refused a couple of interview requests. But that strategy clearly didn’t work.

Anyway, if spying on your “radical leftist” professor is worth $100, why should my students be left out? I need to remain competitive in the marketplace, after all.

So I think I’m going to help the Bruin Alumni Association continue its good work, and spend whatever wingnut money it raises from its current publicity burst. As it happens, all of my lectures are already taped, and posted on my course websites. So I’m going to encourage all my students to nark me out to the junior brownshirts. And I’m such a nice guy that I won’t even ask for a cut of the take.

Today’s S.F Chronicle, reporting on new research about insect aerodynamics from Cal Tech and UNLV, unintentionally raises an issue that goes to the heart of American science and technical education woes, and perhaps larger discontents.

And by the way, I don’t think theology is properly an exercise in recitation and obedience either. I don’t mean by this that science should trump faith; I mean that theology should be carried on by using, not jettisoning, rationality. The fundamental rule applies here as well: at least one of two things that can’t both be true isn’t, even if considerable authorities are putting them forward; contradictions deserve to be examined and resolved. Indeed, it’s impious, possibly blasphemous, to treat knowledge of God as though it doesn’t deserve the application of the highest human rational capacities.

This post officially opens a thread on pedagogy, especially higher education pedagogy.