Category Archives: Education

An Entertaining Form of Corruption

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NCAA FOOTBALL: OCT 11 Arizona State at USCAs I’ve noted many times over the years, big-time college football is an entertaining form of corruption, but corruption nonetheless.

Several recent articles reminded me of this corruption and the almost pathological obsession of the mainstream media to avoid addressing it, particularly during the highly entertaining football season.

First, there was this Joe Draper/NY Times article on how the highly valuable Big Ten Network is changing the financial landscape of college sports.

Not once is it mentioned in the article that the people who are actually creating most of that value – i.e., the young athletes – are forced to compete under a system of highly-restricted compensation while some bastions of higher learning profit from the value that they create.

In their honest moments, how do the academics rationalize that sort of exploitation, particularly when much of it involves undereducated, young black men?

Meanwhile, this breathless Pete Thamel/NY Times article reports on how the regulator of this corruption – the NCAA – is really cracking down now on coaches who have the audacity of attempting to provide to the athletes a pittance of the compensation that the bastions of higher education are preventing them from receiving. Not once in the article is it mentioned that the system is exploiting these athletes for the benefit of the NCAA and its member institutions.

Finally, this William Winslade-Daniel Goldberg/Houston Chronicle op-ed thoughtfully points out the ethical issues that arise as a result of exposing young athletes to serious and often undisclosed risk of injury and loss of potential future compensation.

So, what is it about football that generates such cognitive dissonance when young professional athletes in other sports such as golf, tennis, and baseball are not subjected to such arbitrary restrictions in compensation?

Are we concerned that the sacred traditions of college football might change if the current system is altered to compensate the young athletes fairly for the risks that they take and the wealth they create? Are those traditions truly worth the perpetuation of such a parasitic system?

There is nothing inherently wrong with universities being involved in the promotion of professional minor league football if university leaders conclude that that such an investment is good for the promotion of the school and the academic environment.

But do so honestly. Allow the players who create wealth for the university to be paid directly. If they so desire, universities could establish farm team agreements with NFL teams and cut out the hypocritical incentives that are built into the current system.

Not only would such a system be fairer for the players who take substantial risk of injury in creating wealth for the universities, it would obviate the compromising of academic integrity that universities commonly endure under the current system.

So, why are the leaders of our institutions of higher learning not leading the way toward a fairer system?

Perhaps the problem is that they are really not leaders at all?

“A powerful and alarming documentary about America’s failing public school system”

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That’s what this NY Times reviewer calls Waiting for Superman, the much-anticipated documentary on the failure of the U.S. public school system. Here are the John Heilemann/New York Magazine, the Lloyd Grove/Daily Beast and John Nolte/Big Hollywood reviews (h/t Craig Newmark).

Watch and think about this one, folks. It’s for our children and grandchildren.

Preparing for Life

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john-grisham I’ve never been a fan of John Grisham’s novels, although I concede that a couple of them have been made into entertaining movies.

But after reading this Grisham/NY Times op-ed, I’m a big fan of John Grisham:

I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this, and I shall never mention it again in writing.

Then, during the summer of my 16th year, I found a job with a plumbing contractor. I crawled under houses, into the cramped darkness, with a shovel, to somehow find the buried pipes, to dig until I found the problem, then crawl back out and report what I had found. I vowed to get a desk job. I’ve never drawn inspiration from that miserable work, and I shall never mention it again in writing, either.

But a desk wasn’t in my immediate future. My father worked with heavy construction equipment, and through a friend of a friend of his, I got a job the next summer on a highway asphalt crew. This was July, when Mississippi is like a sauna. Add another 100 degrees for the fresh asphalt. I got a break when the operator of a Caterpillar bulldozer was fired; shown the finer points of handling this rather large machine, I contemplated a future in the cab, tons of growling machinery at my command, with the power to plow over anything. Then the operator was back, sober, repentant. I returned to the asphalt crew.

I was 17 years old that summer, and I learned a lot, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company. One Friday night I accompanied my new friends on the asphalt crew to a honky-tonk to celebrate the end of a hard week. When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window. I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.

Many of us had similar experiences to Grisham’s before finding our life’s work. In talking with young folks these days about their uncertain futures, I find myself often advising them that uncertainty is, for most of us, an unavoidable part of life. Although often difficult at the time, those experiences help define our character and spirit.

I decided to go to law school while working on a loading dock on Produce Row in Houston. I’m eternally grateful for that loading dock. What was your loading dock?

John Cleese on Creativity

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Find a way to avoid the distractions, at least for a little while (H/T Presentation Zen).

Sidewalk Socrates

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Sidney Morgenbesser.jpgIn several respects, my mentor and dear friend Ross Lence was similar to legendary Columbia philosophy professor Sidney Morgenbesser — a consummate teacher and witty thinker who didn’t care much for academia’s preoccupation with publishing.

So, I enjoyed reading this James Ryerson/NY Times Magazine profile (H/T Al Roberts) of Morgenbesser that reminded me of a funny philosophy story involving Morgenbesser that Professor Lence had passed along to me with relish many years ago:

In the academic world, custom dictates that you may be considered a legend if there is more than one well-known anecdote about you.

Morgenbesser, with his Borscht Belt humor and preternaturally agile mind, was the subject of dozens. In the absence of a written record of his wisdom, this was how people related to him: by knowing the stories and wanting to know more.

The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin.

During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative.

From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, “Yeah, yeah.”

On the future of education

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Jesse Schell, who teaches game theory at Carnegie Mellon, provides his spot-on observations regarding the future of teaching and education. (H/T Jon Taplin).

Rational Optimism

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The%20Rational%20Optimist.jpgMatt Ridley supplies a dose of good end-of-the-week vibes with this article based on his new book, The Rational Optimist (Harper 2010):

When I set out to write a book about the material progress of the human race, now published at The Rational Optimist, I was only dimly aware of how much better my life is now than it would have been if I had been born 50 years before. I knew that I have novel technologies at my disposal from synthetic fleeces and discount airlines to Facebook and satellite navigation. I knew that I could rely on advances in vaccines, transplants and sleeping pills. I knew that I could experience cleaner air and cleaner water at least in my own country. I knew that for Chinese and Japanese people life had grown much more wealthy. But I did not know the numbers.

Do you know the numbers? In 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

We invent new technologies that decrease the amount of time that it takes to supply each otherís needs. The great theme of human history is that we increasingly work for each other. We exchange our own specialised and highly efficient fragments of production for everybody elseís. The ëdivision of labourí Adam Smith called it, and it is still spreading. When a self-sufficient peasant moves to town and gets a job, supplying his own needs by buying them from others with the wages from his job, he can raise his standard of living and those he supplies with what he produces. [.  .  .]

So ask yourself this: with so much improvement behind us, why are we to expect only deterioration before us? I am quoting from an essay by Thomas Macaulay written in 1830, when pessimists were already promising doom:

ìThey were wrong then, and I think they are wrong now.î

Michael Shermer on Self-Deception

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Stick with this interesting lecture to the end.

The state of cancer research

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cancer-ribbon Following on these recent posts on the state of cancer research, John Goodman provides this timely and lucid post on the problems with ñ as well as the direction of – cancer research:

Why so little progress [in cancer research despite the large amount of money spent on  it]?

Some researchers believe we have been using the wrong model. Weíve been trying to combat cancer the way we fight an infection initiated by the common cold. But cancer is very different from ordinary infections and colds.

Suppose you have strep throat. Your doctor prescribes an antibiotic and the drug immediately goes to work fighting it. Letís say the antibiotic manages to kill 95% of the germs. Thatís enough damage to allow your bodyís natural defenses (white corpuscles) to take over and complete the clean-up job.

Now suppose we try to fight a cancerous tumor the same way. Letís say that through chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, doctors manage to kill 95% of the cancer cells. In this case, the white corpuscles wonít be able to pull off the clean-up, however. Once cancer cells multiply and become lethal, itís an all-or-nothing proposition. As long as even a single cancer cell remains, it will eventually multiply again. And it will continue multiplying until the fight must be initiated all over again. Eventually the cancer will metastasize (spread all over your whole body), which is a virtual death sentence.

Unlike ordinary germs, therefore, in fighting a carcinogenic tumor you have to kill (or remove) every single cell. If even one cell survives, the cancer will return and become lethal again.

Strange as it may seem, cancer appears to disable the human immune system in much the same way as a fertilized egg in a womanís womb. Why doesnít the bodyís immune system treat a fertilized egg as a foreign invader and try to attack and kill it? Because somehow the immune system is turned off. Cancer cells are able to do much the same thing. Although the ability of women to carry a fertilized egg is pro-life and cancer is anti-life, it seems likely that both phenomena act in the same biochemical way.

Somehow, cancer turns off our bodyís natural defenses. Many researchers believe the most promising response, therefore, is to find a way to turn those defenses back on. By way of encouragement, consider that ìnearly everyone by middle-age or older is riddled withÖcancer cells and precancerous cellsî that do not develop into large tumors. Somehow our bodyís natural defenses are keeping them at bay. Could those same defenses be employed to take on more challenging tasks?

That is a good way of thinking about the two new drugs that were announced last week. Rather than fight cancer the way we fight ordinary infections, fighting cancer by liberating the bodyís natural immune system seems to have much greater promise.

By the way, in case you missed it, U.S. News & World Reportís annual survey of U.S. hospitals recently ranked the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houstonís Texas Medical Center as the no. 1 cancer hospital in the country. Texas Childrenís Hospital, which is literally across the street from M.D. Anderson in the Medical Center, is ranked as the no. 5 pediatric cancer hospital in the nation.

On Leadership

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drking2 If you read just one article this week, make it this one (H/T Mike at Crime & Federalism)  ñ William Deresiewiczís lecture to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point last year. A snippet:

Thatís really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running thingsóthe leadersóare the mediocrities?

Because excellence isnít usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until itís time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why theyíre done. Just keeping the routine going.

I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason.

As I thought about these things and put all these pieces togetheróthe kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institutionóI realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years. [.  .   .]

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but donít know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but donít know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether theyíre worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we donít have are leaders.

What we donít have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Armyóa new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.