Noah D. Arney

Category: Politics & News

  • “A Stark Warning” on Ideological Control of Universities

    It’s been a while since I did one of these long replies to an editorial, but this one needs a response. The other week I was reading Peter MacKinnon’s “A stark warning about the state of Canadian academia: Universities are ostracizing monocultures that need reform“

    Peter MacKinnon often has interesting things to talk about, and I appreciate hearing his perspective, much as I often disagree with his solutions. So lets look at his evidence and solutions

    The Evidence

    The starting point to this editorial is a quote from Dr. Yuan Yi Zhu when speaking to the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research. I’ll give you the long version:

    However, I think it is fair to say that within Canadian academia, there is a monoculture where, if you deviate even very slightly from what is fashionable and what is commonly accepted by your peers, not only will you be ostracized, but often you will not be able to have an academic career in the first place.

    Unfortunately, when I advise my students, I have to tell them, “You know, if you are in any way not progressive, you have to hide your views until you actually have at least a dissertation accepted, because otherwise you will never get ahead.”

    https://openparliament.ca/committees/science-and-research/44-1/111/dr-yuan-yi-zhu-2

    This was said in the context of concerns being raised regarding the use of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion requirements in applications for federal research funding. Dr. Yuan also had concerns that the approval of funding applications was often tied to the use of specific buzzwords rather than the strength of the research proposal. He proposes that both the requirement to speak to EDI and the preference given to buzzwords means that federal research funding tends to follow ideological trends.

    I think it’s important to point out that Dr. Yuan’s perspective here is that the funding awarding needs to be non-ideological, because that is not what MacKinnon takes away from it. Instead his reading of it is influenced primarily by the other presenters at the same committee session, Eric Kaufmann and Christopher Dummitt.

    Although Mr. Kaufmann tried to connect his perspective with Dr. Yuan’s, his perspective was that the problem is not lack of neutrality, but rather that the reviewers are politically left leaning and the political perspectives of the granting council need to be balanced

    I think that the values of the general public that supports research are what should prevail, not the values of academics, I’m afraid—or at least the vocal academics who wind up participating in these committees.

    I disagree with Mr. Kaufmann here that his perspective is the same as what Dr. Yuan stated. It may align with what Dr. Yuan believes and has said elsewhere, but it does not align with what he said in this case and so I have no interest in trying to attach Kaufmann’s perspective to Dr. Yuan, unfortunately, this is exactly what MacKinnon does.

    MacKinnon links in an editorial to support him written by Jamie Sarkonak, which is focused more on what Dr. Christopher Dummitt discussed at the committee, around a lack of “viewpoint diversity” in academia and that this leads to conservative academics “self-censoring” which, he says, damages any attempt to have universities be a “truth-seeking and truth-validating research enterprise”.

    Sarkonak condenses all of this into the declaration

    Together, they described an environment of injustice and conformity — cultivated in part by the ideologically guided hand of the federal government through its research funding agencies. It’s just not fair.

    Although beginning with the quote from Dr. Yuan, the true starting point for MacKinnon is that the combination of DEI statement requirements as well as the lack of politically conservative members of the decision panels means that access to federal research funding is not a level playing field and leads to a lack of viewpoint diversity. That term is important because it is a term that is never mentioned by MacKinnon, but is in the title of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute study (“The viewpoint diversity crisis at Canadian universities” by lead researcher Dr. Dummitt who I previously mentioned) that he uses to transition from talking about federal research funding to the actions of professors collectively, and to bring up his concerns with the the political beliefs of professors.

    MacKinnon continues by citing the Liberal Party of Canada’s 2021 political platform encouraging diversity in various areas. Of note, from what I can tell, the result of this platform four years later is the creation of a leadership development initiative and the hiring of less than two dozen “culturally competent and trauma-informed” counsellors.

    These three points, MacKinnon, contends, have led to a situation where “students fall silent rather than challenge orthodoxies presented to them in classes”.

    This provides the background to the rest of his editorial. His evidence then is:

    1. Dr. Yuan’s statements about how Canada has gone too far toward trying to use federal research funding to encourage Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and instead the funding should be ideologically neutral.
    2. There is a lack of conservative viewpoints among federal research funding reviewers.
    3. The current government party talks about wanting to increase diversity across Canada.
    4. There is a lack of conservative viewpoints among professors in Academia.
    5. The lack of conservative viewpoints among professors discourages conservative students from expressing themselves.

    Unfortunately MacKinnon does not directly connect from the first three points to the final two, allowing the reader to make their own connection, but as I see it, the argument is that the Liberals have imposed their view (evidence point 3) on the granting councils (point 2) which can now be seen in Dr. Yuan’s perspective (point 1) and because they have done this it has changed the political ideology of professors (point 4) and that is impacting students (point 5) and is further changing the makeup of granting councils (point 2). The implicit argument is that this is a cyclical problem which would make things worse eventually for those who are not left leaning.

    In support of his point is Drs. Dummitt and Patterson’s research that 88 percent of professors identify as voting for left leaning parties and only 9 percent for right leaning parties. Now, if this is a cyclical problem advanced by the ideology of the Liberal Party it means that it must have something to do with the ascent of the Liberal Party ten years ago. Thankfully we don’t have to take their word for it, we can look at previous research such as that published by Nakhaie and Adam in the Canadian Journal of Sociology in 2008 (PDF) which helped form the foundation of Dummitt & Patterson’s. As seen in these tables, although the headline of Dummitt & Patterson’s research is what political direction they claim to lean (88/9), the research on how they voted is different.

    Self-reported voted for1993199720002021
    Right leaning1311118
    Left leaning80837877
    Professors
    Self-reported voted for1993199720002021
    Right leaning35383837
    Left leaning62606060
    General Population

    As you can see from these comparisons there is very little change over time for the general population in Canada. Just under 40% of the population votes for right leaning parties while around 60% votes for left leaning parties. And there is a noticeable change for professors, but the biggest change for professors is actually an increase in voting for non-major parties, which moved from 2.7% to 7.4% between 1993 and 2021.

    Unfortunately this leaves the evidence rather shaky. If the proportion of left/right hasn’t changed much in thirty years, then this is not a new problem, rather this is something that is simply reflective of who decides to work in academia. The political ideology of professors has not substantially changed (if using who they vote for as the assessment) since 1993. Which means that the makeup of granting councils is unlikely to have changed. And since there was no actual material changes made by the Liberals in their push for diversity with the exception of adding the EDI statements, points 2, 3, and 4 are flimsy, but point 1 still stands. Point 5 was an extrapolation by MacKinnon from the first four, which without further evidence seems unsupported.

    Unfortunately this leaves us where we started, with Dr. Yuan’s statement on the importance of research funding being independent from ideology being the only evidence we have going into MacKinnon’s solutions.

    The Problem and Solution

    This problem, according to MacKinnon is best seen by his first solution:

    What is to be done? There is a short-term and long-term answer to this question. A prospective change of government in Ottawa should reverse the present government’s agenda that has been imposed on the sector, and provincial governments should insist that their universities focus on excellence and the search for truth, not on progressive or social justice goals. Failure of any institutions to do so should be reflected in funding decisions.

    The problem represented here is that the government’s focus on and requirements around diversity distracts from, or harms, a “focus on excellence and the search for truth”.

    That would line up well with Dr. Yuan’s perspective that mandating diversity statements is harmful to research independence. However, the final line of the proposal is not about government, but rather about institutions needing to abandon “progressive or social justice goals” and that the government should cut their funding if they don’t. Because some research is directly and intentionally about progressive goals or social justice goals, this means that MacKinnon is not advocating neutrality in funding allocation, but rather is advocating replacing the Liberal Party of Canada’s ideology with another party’s ideology.

    Although this does not align with Dr. Yuan’s words, it does align with Dr. Dummitt’s and Mr. Kaufmann’s. The problem for them is not that the government needs to get out of the role of imposing their ideology, but rather that other ideologies should be able to be imposed.

    MacKinnon then continues into his longer term proposal, which is governance reform. Here he identifies several threats to good university governance.

    1. Substantial institutional growth
    2. Faculty unionization leading to Senate dysfunction
    3. Student councils using member fees for causes students don’t support
    4. Flawed Board appointment processes and dysfunction

    His questions then are:

    how do we strengthen statutory governance bodies, boards and senates? How do we ensure that freedom of expression and academic freedom prevail over institutional and personal politics? Should we insist that fees collected by students or on their behalf be used for student services, and not for political causes inimical to the interests of some that pay them?

    I agree with MacKinnon that Senates and Boards need to be focused, strong, and know what their roles, goals, and objectives are. Further, I think he may be correct that substantial institutional growth and changes in faculty labour relations have caused some of the lack of focus and unclear roles in governance. I probably disagree with him on how to solve that however, because although MacKinnon doesn’t present any full solutions, he does hint that one solution is more oversight through external board appointees who are more in line with the public interest as determined by the government. Or to put it another way, more in line with the ideology of governments. And as mentioned in his short term solutions, a government without a left-wing ideology.

    It’s the final two questions that make me raise an eyebrow. He advocates for freedom of expression and for academic freedom (two separate things). But he also has concerns with how student councils operate. He earlier states that “student councils use member fees to support causes that are an affront to some of those obliged to pay them”. Student councils are elected by other students. He seems to be advocating for universities to mandate how these councils may operate. But that would indeed be the institution rejecting the freedom of expression of students, as displayed by their choices in a student council election.

    My worry here then is that his short term solution is not independence, but rather requiring adherence of universities to a government ideology (just a different one than currently), and his long term solution is not freedom of expression, but limiting expression to ideology approved by the university.

    A Stark Warning

    Peter MacKinnon is indeed giving a stark warning. It’s a stark warning that when he looks at the problems in Canadian Academia he sees the problem is not that it is a “monoculture” but that it is the wrong “monoculture”. If we work from the short term solution to the long we see this:

    1. Replace a left-wing ideology in government with a right wing ideology
    2. Ensure that the new government ideology is reflected in funding decisions for research
    3. Reform University Governance to better align with and implement the new government ideology
    4. Limit student expression that does not align with the new government ideology

    I want to close off where MacKinnon does

    Everyone in our universities, and governments responsible for them, should be chilled by the diagnosis of Professor Yuan, and should ask themselves if there is truth in his words. If their answers are yes, as they should be, they must commit to reforms that are necessary for their institutions to survive and again command wide public support.

    I ask myself if there is truth in Professor Yuan’s words, and the answer is yes, on the concept that research funding should be ideologically neutral. MacKinnon then says that I must commit to reforms, but the reforms that MacKinnon proposes are not ideologically neutral, but rather are the opposite. What is proposed is not neutrality in the search for truth, it is adherence to the ideology brought in after “A prospective change of government in Ottawa”.

    MacKinnon is right, the idea of someone as well regarded as he is proposing more government control of research and university governance, and limitations on student speech should be a stark warning to everyone in Canadian academia.

  • This is how you get an academic survelence state.

    Sometimes great ideas start throwing up red flags very quickly.

    I love data. Data is my jam. It’s why I’m currently on the Strategic Enrolment Management group at my university and why I’ve been part of a similar group at two previous institutions. Data and assessment are a great way to enable us to make things better for students. So I’m coming at this as the type of person that the author of this piece want to recruit toward their way of thinking and I need to tell you OH HELL NO.

    Higher Education Needs Its Own Version of Moneyball

    Lets start with part 1 of the premise:

    Higher education needs its own version of moneyball—a set of active, predictive and creative measures that can be deployed to improve student outcomes and fulfill their promise of student success.

    Makes a lot of sense, and I fully agree. This is what a culture of assessment and SEM looks like. It’s amazing and I am here for it.

    And then in the next sentence the red flag gets waved high:

    Postsecondary institutions must be able to collect and instantaneously analyze student progress data and have intentional plans for adjusting in the moment to the needs of their learners.

    There’s the oh hell no moment. Moneyball style analysis uses publicly accessible and consensually given information and visible information to work. This asks us to tie every moment of a student into a machine.

    Ok, lets dig into the points that support the premise.

    1. part time learners don’t complete their programs as often so they should be assessed more
      • But part time learners often have other things outside of school like work or family responsibilities, which normally means that they are more likely to be financially disadvantaged students. So you’re asking us to have more surveillance of those who we know are already over surveilled and over policed?
      • Also there are often reasons why students pick their course load. Supporting them in increasing that course load is a great idea, forcing them to increase their course load without supporting the reasons they didn’t think they could is awful.
    2. Productive credit hours as a measure – do students take more classes at certain times or days, or are there too many gateway classes preventing moving forward
      • This one makes sense and I’m here for it, but this is just proper scheduling and doesn’t require real-time analysis, just semester based analysis which is what SEM already does.
    3. Predictive metrics
      • There isn’t any information given for this one so I’ll have to make assumptions. “This planning starts with insights that enable institutions to identify opportunities for accelerating student progress and predict the efficacy of those interventions on retention and graduation rates.” Predictive metrics mean one of two things:
        • Constant surveillance of students (how often do they attend events, library use, computer on campus use, assignment submission times, in-semester grades) which is problematic and sounds like a surveillance state.
        • Assumptions of students based on statistical models which often break down when applied to the individual. For example, in the USA, ~1-5% of adults are diagnosed with ADHD, but ~25% of adults in prison in are diagnosed with ADHD. Does that mean ADHD is a predictor of crime, or that people who are institutionalized are more likely to receive a diagnosis? What about when you find out that ~20% of adults in post-secondary education have ADHD? Are the predictions based on data always reliable? They might be in aggregate, but the idea here is to take that aggregate and apply it to the individual. That’s like looking at a normal curve and saying “well, people over 7’4″ don’t exist” when we know for a fact that they do, but they are rare.
    4. Make the stats open to all
      • Again, statistics in aggregate about the student body, even when looking at relatively small groups, is a great idea. How many students take classed in X department, how many of them pass it, how many are International student, etc. This data is important for SEM to identify gateway classes, problem pathways, programs that are missing something, or departments that are under-enrolled. But using it in specific is dangerous.
      • Do we really want a professor to be able to know how long a student takes to complete an assignment in someone else’s class? What about whether or not they use the library? How much data do you need about the specifics of someone? I don’t even like that my LMS lets me know how long ago a student accessed the system.

    Where this article is right: SEM is the way forward. Data is important, and needs to be viewed by as many people as possible. Universities and Colleges are filled with brilliant people, getting more eyes on a problem with the relevant data means more potential solutions.

    Where this article is scary: implying that we need to feed all data about students in real time into a data analytics system, and then turning that into and using it as predictive metrics of success.

    It feels like an article written by someone who isn’t seeing students as people, but as bundles of data that they can access. That way lies teaching machines, but the way forward toward better developmental and lifelong learning outcomes for students (regardless of academic outcomes) is through relational connections on the individual level that are supported by using data on the macro level.

  • Ohio Micromanages PSE

    Ready for a wild ride?

    https://legiscan.com/OH/text/SB83/id/2745695

    Legislation in Ohio has passed the house to micromanage the public post-secondary system. It now goes to the senate. It is being opposed by nearly every post-secondary association and freedom of speech association and is generally a contradictory mess. Don’t believe me? Well here’s the best (worst) bits:

    Every institution must change its mission statement to affirm that it is committed to tolerating differences in opinion, but they must also allow students to formally evaluate professors on their ideology and require departments to teach controversial topics (being those that are believed by a substantial number of Americans).

    I’m sure the faculty of science will enjoy needing to include a class about how the moon landing was faked and the earth is flat (both believed by 10% of the US).

    They must both “Prohibit political and ideological litmus tests in all hiring, promotion, and admissions decisions” while also requiring that promotion decisions are based at least partially on student’s evaluation of the professor’s ideology.

    They must both treat all equally while being prohibited to provide the support required for those who were treated unequally by other levels of education. Essentially a return to the 1970s era post-secondary access.

    And strangest of all they will be mandated to collect and report on all demographic data including race and sex, and report publicly on academic achievement by those disaggregated demographics while at the same time are prohibited to have any policies that use any of the collected data for improving results. If information is mandated to be collected but not used by one group, then you can guarantee that it will be used by those mandating it. And since those mandating it has no way of actually using that data to improve things then the only thing I can see is that it’s being collected not for improvement but for something else.

    Finally, it bans all sex segregated extracurricular activities and residence housing. Which seems strange considering other things the republicans have been complaining about the last few years.

    I’m more than a little concerned at the US trying to burn down its post-secondary system, and very worried that the same ideas will come up here (some already are).

  • Youth Unemployment Issues

    A reminder that I love StatsCan data (yes, I’m a nerd). Well I was looking at unemployment and labour market participation over the last decades (1990-2022) averaged yearly and broken out by 15-64 and 15-24 groups in both Canada as a whole and just BC. I was hoping to see if BC was an outlier anywhere and we really aren’t. But I found something else very interesting.

    Three types of data tell us what’s going on: 1) unemployment rate (how many people in the workforce aren’t employed) 2) participation rate (how many people are in the workforce who could be) and 3) the difference between youth and all unemployment and participation.

    This gives us info like knowing that generally high unemployment aligns well with low labour market participation because people will self-select out of the labour market when it’s bad. We also see the shift over the 90s as more people under 24 are in post-secondary showing a substantial decline in their labour market participation but not a massive raise in unemployment (because they’re not unemployed, they’re in university. This info also tells us that the unemployment rate changing for youth but not for the whole labour market is an impact that only hits youth.

    So what happened during those 32 years? Well 1997-2004 was a bad time to be a youth looking for work. Youth labour market participation was going back up after the dip in the early 90s but the jobs weren’t there. Overall unemployment was fine, but if you were under 24 you were having a hard time. Then the strangeness that led me to writing this, 2005.

    Suddenly youth unemployment across the country drops. It’s a small blip in Canada, but in BC it’s massive. Youth unemployment in BC goes from a high of 15% in 2002 to a slow drop to 13.5% in 2004, that’s normal. But in 2005 it’s 10% and by 2007 it’s at its lowest in the entire data set at 7.7%. It’s so sudden and impactful, and localized to only BC it must have some cause, but I don’t know what it is, and I was in that age range at the time. I remember a lot of help wanted signs, and I remember that for the first time in my adult life I could easily get a summer job or part time job.

    This should have been fantastic, but the 2008 financial crash and oil price crash ended it. Unemployment for youth shoots right back up to 13% by 2009. The 2009 issue is clear, but what caused the drop in the first place? It was noticeable that youth in BC rejoined the labour market because of it. And it is very clearly a youth phenomenon because the dip for the all ages unemployment is minor.

    Moving forward from that time though after the recovery from the financial crash the youth unemployment rate starts going down again, slowly this time, hitting 7.7 again in 2018, and then looking to stabilize in 2019 at 9%. I say stabilize because after the shock to the system from COVID it’s back to the 8-9% that seems to be a “normal” youth unemployment rate.

    So what did I learn from the data? Youth participation lags youth unemployment slightly, but more perceptibly than all ages. Perhaps that means that youth are more likely to leave the workforce for school and other reasons if they can’t find work? Also, something happened at the end of 2004 or early 2005 to change youth employment in BC and it was impactful until the 2008 crash.

    Finally I learned that the changes in the economy impact youth first and most. In every increase to total unemployment youth are impacted months before the general unemployment rate. The gap grows every time there’s a crisis and it always takes several months after the general unemployment goes down for the gap to begin shrinking.

  • When the opposing protest is the speech

    It was interesting to read this article in Inside Higher Ed today:

    Shouting Down Speakers Who Offend
    Over the course of a month, students on several college campuses shut down speakers they disagreed with. Why is it so hard to forge a consensus on what protecting free speech really means?

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/04/13/shouting-down-speakers-who-offend

    The article portrays using crowds and shouting down speakers vs providing a platform for a speaker some consider controversial portrayed as a left-right division of free speech. The specific example is the SUNY Albany students protesting Ian Haworth at a Turning Points USA student event. To me this all seems more in line with the American understanding of free speech that loud group free speech is an appropriate response to something that is harmful (side note, I’ve seen similar confusion a lot from US academics as they conflate academic freedom and free speech in odd ways, I don’t know if that’s the case here).

    We see this when groups try to shout down a right wing speaker, we see this when groups try to protest an abortion clinic, we see it when groups try to shut down drag story time at a library. In all cases those protesting see the thing they are protesting as being harmful and therefore the protest is a legitimate display of free speech. In two of the cases it’s a matter of free speech vs free speech. In all cases those on the other side of the political spectrum see it as too likely that the protesters will resort to violence (as has recently happened in some of the library protests) and therefore consider it illegitimate protest. But that’s not what this article is critiquing. It seems to be saying that controversial (non-illegal) hate speech at an event is an exercise of free speech, but shouting down the speaker is not. And that seems strange because of how the US views protest on public property.

    In the US most state universities would be considered public property, so the bar for stopping these protests is very high (similar to trying to stop them in libraries, though because they are protesting events targeted to children instead of to adults there may be nuance I’m missing), which means that shouting down a speaker as long as you don’t bar them from accessing the venue (they didn’t in the main case used here) and you don’t stop them from speaking (they could speak but it would be hard to be heard over the crowd) would be legal. Of course when the event was moved to a private area of campus that disallowed the protestors the laws would have changed.

    That leaves us with a question, because if we put two events up against each other we have left and right both protesting in public buildings to stop events they feel includes harmful speech. My basic understanding of US law is that the government isn’t supposed to shut down a speaker just because the hecklers *might* get violent in response, neither are they supposed to stop non-violent protestors in public spaces. However, at this point nearly everyone (though maybe not in a legal sense) has agreed that if the actions of the protestors include violence then that is a threat that prohibits the speech.

    Context is important

    This event didn’t happen in a vacuum. Although TPUSA is a big national organization it took about ten seconds to find that their last big event on campus brought in just under 30 students and no protestors, it was held in a closed room that wasn’t open to a public space. This second event then was in a larger room fitting over 100 people and directly connected to a public space, meaning two things: 1) they expected over three times the number of people from their prior event 2) they held this event specifically in a space that would be considered public property. Finally when they did move to a closed private space for the event, none of the media coverage or even their own comments, mention not fitting their attendees in, and all of the photos of the event show that the space was nearly entirely filled with protestors.

    The other thing to know is that the first event gathered no press at all, I didn’t even see something in the local paper. The second event had a week of national media coverage over it.

    Which implies to me that there was intent here. The meta speech of the event by the hosts *was* the protest. That is what publicized and amplified their speech, it’s what made people listen to them, see them, and pay attention to them. Thus there are three speech items at play, not two.

    • Group A held event (speech)
    • Group B peacefully protested event in a way that made the speech impossible to hear at the time (counter-speech)
    • Group A was able to have broader and louder speech because of the protest (counter-counter-speech)

    So if group A got what they wanted and intended out of the event then is this actually a crisis of free speech, or is it exactly how the US system of free speech operates? No one was directly violent, and the closest thing to violence reported is that someone destroyed a bible. Which brings me back to the beginning. How should universities respond to this?

    If the protest was prevented from happening not only would the speech of the protestors have been stopped by government actors, but the speech of the hosts would not have been as public as they wanted.

    I think I’ll end off here by bringing up the idea of violence. Violent acts change the equation, but legally violent implications without immediate action isn’t supposed to. However, in the US it is difficult because it is so easy for things to change from implication to action because of their lax firearms laws. At what point of the violent spectrum should we step in?

    • Violent potential (where this protest was)
    • Violent implication
    • Violent possibility
    • Violent threat (where most of the anti-drag protests are)
    • Violent past actions
    • Violent preparation
    • Violent action

    I think that’s a much more important discussion for us to have, and one that completely sidesteps any discussion of academic freedom but instead focuses on when we should shut competing speech down.

    Post event story changes

    In the immediate reporting by one of the hosts it’s clear that the event moved and proceeded. In the post event reporting it was said (by the same person) that the event had to be canceled. In addition, no one claimed the bible, which makes me unclear whether it was a protestor bringing it to destroy it, or a protestor taking it from an attendee and destroying it. Since grabbing a bible out of someone’s hand would clearly be something that would be reported in the media since it fits a certain narrative of the event I’m suspicious. Mostly it lends credence to the idea that the counter-counter-speech wasn’t only a benefit for Group A, but was in fact the point of the event.

  • Grade Inflation And Bullshit

    Adapted from a twitter thread.

    Remember back at the end of September when it came out that a university professor Chris Healy was part of the pro-fascism deadly protest in Charlottesville five years ago? Well, it’s important to connect the dots sometimes because he’s also the person who collected data on grade inflation that has been used for the last decade and a half to complain about modern universities. And data collection is fine, but he also put a spin on that data which has impacted how it’s been used. Biases and perceptions are important and concept that you can fully remove your biases from your interpretation of data is probably a fools errand. Well, turns out his biases may have impacted his analyzing of the data.

    If you haven’t seen it before, “grade inflation” is used as an attack on under-represented minority students in university by many groups (looking at you Fox News), but turns out it really happened because rich white parents wanted it for their kids. No seriously, he doesn’t interpret it that way, but Chris Healy’s own data shows it.

    There’s 2 issues that show up in the data: the SATs and the difference between Private and Public universities and student results.

    First the SATs. Now, there are a lot of problems with SATs, and I’m sure the decision in the 60s to make it harder (and thus showing a drop in SAT scores over the next decade) had nothing to do with more Black students applying to universities /s/. But that’s not what I’m talking about today.

    Healy assumes that SAT should directly predict GPA. But those who study education know that the ways to game the SATs are many and varied, and usually used for those trying to get into either elite private universities or into elite STEM PSIs, aka the schools he identifies as having GPAs lower than what the SAT should predict. Meanwhile students less likely to game the SATs tend to be in the schools he identifies as having a higher GPA than the SAT would predict. The takeaway should be that the SAT doesn’t predict success (and that rich parents generally pay for more SAT prep than poor parents), his takeaway is that public flagship universities are inflating grades more. Except his earlier finding in his data is that public flagships inflated grades substantially less than the private equivalents.

    So the second problem, public vs private university comparison. What his data seems to show is in the 1950s private universities started inflating grades (I’m sure this has nothing to do with how private universities became the bastion of segregation for a decade as wealthy whites sent their kids to them). Then when the last of the Ivy League universities kinda desegregated, the public universities started increasing grades to keep up with the substantial grade inflation that had ALREADY HAPPENED in the private universities.

    Yep, the grades were the same until private universities decided to inflate grades, a decade later the public universities played catchup, but they never actually caught up to the inflation of private universities, because the inflation slowed drastically in the mid 70s as both private (.4 GPA increase) and public (.2 GPA increase) flattened out. It remained that way for the next two decades in public university while private continued to creep up. Then the public universities began to increase again. The end result being private universities were 0.7 above their 1950s average GPA and public universities were 0.4 above. And remember in 1950 public and private had the same GPA average.

    TL:DR what it shows is private universities having massive grade inflation, and public ones following suit a decade later to try to keep up.

    So though the stick of “grade inflation” is used to complain about lowered standards because of historically excluded students, it’s actually happening because legacy rich white students didn’t like that black students or poor students were getting the same grades as them.

    I’m 0% surprised by that, it’s exactly how the US higher education system works, and how they like it to work. It’s another case of privilege laundering.

  • Alberta’s Draft Curriculum Is Built on Sandy Ground

    A former twitter thread

    In June 2021 Calgary Herald published an opinion piece by Dr. Martin Mrazik. It had a lot of issues, but most importantly it tipped the hand about how shaky the foundation of Alberta’s now introduced new curriculum was.

    “The capacity to critically think emerges from a solid foundation of well-sequenced factual background knowledge.”

    https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-albertas-draft-curriculum-provides-strong-base-for-critical-thinking

    That’s… not true. Dr. Mrazik is making two of statements in that single sentence:

    1) critical thinking is a result of background knowledge

    2) specifically well-sequenced knowledge (and in context he means chronologically sequenced)

    The capacity to critically think is aided by background knowledge, but it doesn’t emerge from it. If critical thinking emerged from content knowledge then the banking/blank slate method of education would always lead to critical thinking. We have over a century showing that isn’t true.

    What is true is that critical thinking is improved by and relies on background knowledge, which is wildly different from emerges from.

    Generally speaking, chronological sequencing makes it so that in the early grades students are taught an uncritical version of the content because the critical assessment of it is beyond their current abilities.

    Chronological sequencing is one way to teach, and this curriculum is very interested in that. However, concept based sequencing is another way, and one that is more supported by constructivist and humanist educational theories.

    The problem isn’t a new one from Dr. Mrazik. He said something very similar in May 2021 in the Edmonton Journal (side note: it was very telling that Dr. Mrazik was basically the only academic supporting this curriculum).

    I spend so much time working with people who follow constructivist, humanist, transformative, and Indigenous education paradigms that I sometimes forget that there’s still a strong group of cognitivists out there.

    Dr. Mrazik is a clinical neuropsychologist whose research is primarily into concussions and psychometrics. That’s where these editorials are coming from. From that perspective I understand what he’s trying to say. That having a “knowledge-rich curriculum” is important.

    However, he seems to be ignoring, or perhaps critiquing (he mentions but doesn’t enumerate what he calls “controversial pedagogy and questionable teaching practices”) the theories that have come from the constructivist thread of theories, such as experiential learning theories.

    There are many ways of looking at critical thinking. The one he’s approaching it from is the idea that you ensure a person has a store of knowledge and then you can teach them how to apply it and assess it critically. So first knowledge, then critical thinking.

    One that’s more informed by constructivists would say that if you learn something that is relevant to your experiences you are able to apply critical thinking to it now. That instead of a house where knowledge is the foundation, it’s a tree where knowledge is the leaves.

    Yes that means that you start with less of a knowledge store, but it means that from the beginning you train in critical thinking and apply critical thinking to all of the knowledge you gain.

    Here’s where it matters. If you apply critical thinking from the beginning you train that as a skill. If you try to add it at the end, you might learn it well, but much of your knowledge store was never thought of critically.

    And Dr. Mrazik is right, if you approach it from a cognitivist or perhaps even cognitive-structural development perspective this curriculum design makes sense. But it’s what Dewey would call education that is training for the future rather than present.

    Rogers would critique whether it actually allows the development of the self-concept or would produce incongruence. Freire would be the strongest critique calling this “banking style” education.

    Basically, we’ve spent the last several decades moving away from cognitivism in k-12 education because it doesn’t produce adaptable thinkers, it produces testable thinkers. So of course a cognitivist scholar of psychometrics will think this is a good curriculum.

    But, what is needed for the future is adaptability, and this curriculum doesn’t lead to that.

  • Thoughts on “The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be”

    A former twitter thread

    This is thoughts inspired by a book review of The Real World of College: What higher education is and what it can be, so take from that what you will.

    I empathize with what they’re talking about, and I have to assume that the book itself talks about this, but the shift isn’t a natural result of PSI’s movement. It’s a shift pushed by external factors.

    PSE has a few different stakeholder groups. Faculty and Staff, Parents and Students, Government and Board, Alumni and Community, and finally Industry and Professions.

    As the authors point out, the Faculty and Staff are pushing for transformational, so lets look elsewhere.

    Parents and Students overwhelmingly see PSE as a path to career. And they’re not wrong, it’s a well worn career trajectory that allows for a lot of variation. But in general they see transformational as being a good thing too as long as it helps career. So look outside the class.

    Industry and Professions maybe were a push toward transactional 20+ years ago, but now, because the advisors there tend to be the People Who Do The Thing in their areas, they love the transformational aspect of PSE and the transferable skills that come with it.

    I hear that in the US Alumni and Community have power over PSIs, maybe that’s good. It tends to be a slightly conservative hold trying to keep the institution looking like it always has. It’s not so much a push to something as an attempt to maintain a status quo.

    The Board and Government I think is where this shift happens. Through budget control, mandates, policy/guidance documents, hiring and tenure control, and control of the executive they have a massive amount of power.

    When power is used to meet government needs of increased employable people in certain areas to either build that area or decrease the cost of labour in that area (or unfortunately in service of an ideological goal) then it tends to be a strong push toward transactional PSE.

    How is that stopped? Well, in a democracy the government and the boards they appoint are supposed to be a reflection of the majority. So the way to change it is to be as public about the transformative nature of PSE as possible, and to be accessible in that.

    It’s not helpful if we talk about PSE as a transformative opportunity in a way that people don’t understand. It leads them to thinking that by transformative we mean something opposite to the ability to have a career at the end, or that it’s just academic jargon.

    We need to talk about how important a well rounded education with classes in many disciplines is, and how it leads to creative people who can think critically, can communicate with a wide variety of others, and are effective collaborators.

    We must push back against people seeing breadth requirements as being underwater basket weaving. Change the narrative about WHY we want students to take classes that aren’t about specific technical skills.

    Because if we change the narrative then politicians get more pushback from constituents when they call for removing discussion of race as something that impacts people. It would mean talking heads get seen as being silly when they complain about the worthlessness of college.

    Staff and Faculty are already on board. Students and Parents hear the narrative beyond the PSI, but are willing to go for transformational education if it also can be applied practically. Industry and Professions are already agreeing with us.

    Alumni and Community, except when they’re harnessed by politicians to score political points, are just a force for the status quo. The only stakeholders who seem to oppose transformative and favour transactional are politicians, so we need to change the narrative.

    We change the narrative by making transformational learning something that people understand. PSE tends to speak in technical terms to others who use those same technical terms. How do we explain it to those who don’t know those technical terms? That’s the way forward.