"We saw a lot of road kill and thought of you." —my sister
For more information on oil prices, click here. Podcasts of My Intro Economics lectures (in .wma format) For my 2005 Radio Economics MP3 podcasts, go to the bottom of the page that lists the lecture podcasts.
Canada
United States
Israel
My email address: [email protected] My 2005 post about the housing crisis, before it happened, is here.
The campus at The University of Regina is a large collection of buildings constructed around a central ellipse and all connected (presumably so that people can get from building-to-building without having to go outside and freezing to death in the winter). One result of this design is that there are some very long corridors.
The longest hallway, by far, is on the south edge of the central campus running past the phys ed dept, the gyms, and all the way to a pit that has vending machines and ping-pong tables. When I first saw that corridor thirteen years ago, I had an inexplicably intense desire to stand at one end and try to see if I could throw or roll a ball to the other end.
Alas, I didn't do it, and now there's enough lounge furniture in the way that I'm not sure anyone could get the ball through the morass.
However, there are other corridors. The one in the photo below runs from the east end of the ad-hum (admin-humanities) building past the library and down to the east wall of the classroom building.
There's a large-screen tv-type monitor that you might be able to make out at the far end of the hallway.
This year I didn't wait. I ordered some superballs from Amazon:
and took two of them with me to campus on Monday to try throwing them.
On the first two attempts, I tried throwing them overhand, but I was horrible and didn't get them past the doorway that you can see in the first photo (there's a reason I never made it as a pitcher in little league).
And so I collected the two balls and threw them underhanded (or rolled them with great speed? I'm not sure). Each of these two attempts barely missed the center post in the doorway and went the full distance. This is where they ended up [the shadow above them in the photo is the shadow of big-screen display unit]. I don't know if they actually hit that wall, but I'm guessing they did:
Looking back down the hallway, the east wall of the Ad-Hum building is way off (I figure about 2 miles*) in the distance.
The rolls had to be fairly straight to get through the initial doorway, and both attempts barely missed that centre post; but after that for all I know the balls bounced and caromed their way to the end. From what I could see, though (keep in mind it was nearly two miles*), both of them went right to the far wall.
Test completed! Success! Fun!
Now to organize a "Superball Long Hall" party with my friends!
*okay, okay, it wasn't really two miles. I'd be surprised if it was over 100 metres.
Through a series of fortuitous events, I am once again teaching at The University of Regina. But this time for only the summer term (no more winters in Saskatchewan for me!). After my previous experiences (and as I rethink my experiences over the past 84 years of teaching), I have decided, once again, to revise and update my open letter to students.
To my students:
University is different from high school: you have to work.... really hard if you want to learn much. You have to read, you have to study, you have to think. If you don't do these things, you will likely fail or receive a low mark. I'm appalled by how little work students seem to think they should do in university.
Reading all the material and going to class does not guarantee you an A or even a B unless you are considerably above average in ability. You actually have to study too. I expect you to do about two hours of work out of class for every hour in class.
If you miss class, please do not ask me if anything important happened: I wouldn't give the lecture if I didn't think it was important. What do you expect me to answer?
“Yes, actually, on the one day you missed I decided to give a pop quiz that counts for 20% of your course mark. Then we discussed the answers to the upcoming final exam, and then I gave everybody doughnuts and coffee with Drambuie.”
In my 84 years as a prof, I've probably heard most excuses: Deaths in the family, apartment fires, tears on command, cars breaking down, feigning symptoms of depression, computer crash, you name it: I either knew someone who used it or have had to deal with it. I have a pretty good feeling for when you are trying to bull$hit me, so don’t try. And while I am very sympathetic if your excuse is legitimate, I am ruthless if you lie to me. (For example, see this).
Computer crashes are your responsibility, not mine. Begin your written assignments long before they are due. Back up your work: use Dropbox, Google Docs, a USB stick or something.
Oversleeping is not an acceptable excuse. Set alarms, if you need to. [what's the risk? who's the least-cost bearer of that risk?]
If you plagiarize work for my course, I will report you, and I will fail you in the course, and I may try to get you expelled from the university (as I did several years ago with one student whose offence was repeated and flagrant). Don't plagiarize. I will probably catch you even if TurnItIn.com doesn't.
Use ChatGPT! Yes, use it! But use it carefully and then rewrite what you learn there but with your own thoughts and words.
Cell phones are disruptive. Please turn them off before you come to class. If yours rings in class, you will have to leave. In fact, because of past disruptions from students playing games or text messaging, if your cell phone is on your desk or in your lap, you will have to leave class, regardless of whether you are actually using it.
The same thing applies to laptop computers or iPad web-surfers and the like. Don't bother bringing your laptop to class because I will just ask you to close it and put it away. If you really would rather spend your class time surfing the internet, just change majors to hydraulic socionomology or transfer to Athabasca (or Calgary).
And while we're on "don'ts", please do not eat in class. Doing so is very distracting to the students around you. And it's rude.
During the lectures and discussions, I may seem fun and amusing, but that does not mean my tests are easy. My exams can be hard.
My classes are not like Canadian Parliament --- heckling is not permitted.
Please do not send me nasty e-mails about an exam or mark when you are fired-up and angry or in a drunken stupor at 4am. Believe me, you will regret it the next day.
I'm getting old and forgetful. Please forgive me if I tell the same story more than once.
Incompletes are for students who, for legitimate, documented reasons, could not finish the class. If you don't like your grade, you may not take an incomplete. And, no, I do not give "makeup" exams so students can try to raise their marks.
If you take the midterm and do badly, and then don't drop the class, and then write to me 3 months later and try to act as if you were never in my class and you want me to sign a form, I won't. I'm a pushover for many things, but that does not include unwillingness to accept responsibility for your own actions or inactions.
If you are failing this course, do not make sly little suggestions about what you might do to earn a passing grade. You are failing the course — why should I think your performance would be better in any other areas? Besides, I'm too old to care.
If I see you out on the town or at a sports bar, and you want to buy me a drink, you cannot currently be in my classes or ever take any of my classes again. Then probably you can buy me a drink.
If you see me out on the town or in a mall or whatever, and you're too shy to come over and say "Hello", we'll develop an official course gesture that will stand for, "Hi. I'm in your class."
When you tell me, “I’m getting kicked out of school because of the grade I got in your class,” this might make me feel bad, but it certainly makes me question whether this is the first/only bad grade you have ever received.
If you come to see me because you are worried about your grade, and you use all the study suggestions that I might provide, and I really honestly believe that you are trying hard but you are still getting a bad grade, I will wish I had the courage and integrity to tell you that not everyone is meant for university, and in my curmudgeonly dotage, I just might!
If you ask a stupid question in class, it's probably not stupid. I shudder whenever I think of all the stupid questions I have asked (but which helped me learn).
In fact, please ask all the questions you want in class. I learn from my mistakes, and I suspect that most other folks do, too, so ask away. If I see anyone so much as roll an eye, I will pull them aside after class and tell them their behaviour is inappropriate. If it is a very large class, though, and your questions seem to be dominating the class discussion, I may have to ask you to save some for after class.
And, please, if you liked my class, if you feel that it changed the way you think, if you learned a lot, if you were challenged, please tell me. Because people in our economy face limited resources and time, seeing the lights go on for you is what keeps me going. I love teaching, and I am clearly not in it for the money. Actually, this last item goes for all your professors.
Let me ask yet again, what is it about the famous Milton Friedman quip about monetary policy that today's central bankers don't seem to get? According to Friedman, monetary policy had (has?) an effect but only with a long and variable lag. Were all of today's central bankers trained by rational expectations cowboys to believe that all markets always clear instantly?
Here are monetary data from FRED for the Canadian economy:
Fascinating how M1 exploded early in the pandemic and then was followed (with a long and variable lag) by inflation that central bankers seemed surprised by. The last two Governors of the Bank of Canada oversaw this expansion and acted far too late to reduce the inflationary pressures in the economy (and I'm disappointed since both of them got PhDs from UWO).
And look at the money supply data in the past few months! The money supply is actually shrinking in Canada. No matter what the economy is like now, this decline in the money supply strongly indicates we're in for a serious recession, again after a long-and-variable lag.
How long is the lag? Nobody can be sure, which is why Friedman answered the way he did. My guess: 18 months +/- six months.
hat tip to David Laidler, who kindly discussed this situation with me earlier this week and who told me that Cdn monetary data are available on FRED.
Is it acceptable to ask whether there really was an historical Jesus?
Is it acceptable to ask whether cold fusion will ever be a possibility?
Is it acceptable to ask whether Ashkenazim Jews are, on average, smarter than Sephardic or Ethiopian Jews?
Is it acceptable to ask whether blacks are, on average, better athletes than whites?
Is it acceptable to ask whether socialism does a better job than capitalism at looking after the poor?
Is it acceptable to ask just how many people were killed by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Turkey, the Hutu, the English, Americans or Canadians conquering First Nations people, the Japanese in their conquests of Korea and China?
Is it acceptable to ask whether members of different racial groups are more susceptible than others to some diseases?
Is it acceptable to ask whether fiscal policy is ineffective as an economic stimulus?
Is it acceptable to ask whether, on average, roughly speaking people of one race tend to be smarter or cleverer or have better memories than do people of other races?
You get my drift, I'm sure. ... if you do, please kept reading. Are there some questions it is just wrong to ask in the first place, never mind the answers? How do you decide which questions are acceptable and which ones aren't? And more to the point, how should a university (or any other institution or group, for that matter) set guidelines as to which are the acceptable and which are the unacceptable questions to ask? Is it good policy for universities to say, "We'll wait until we see the answers"?
This week, Western’s psychology department finally called [the late Phillipe] Rushton’s research for what it is. Racist...
“Academic freedom and freedom of expression are critical to free scientific inquiry,” the statement said, “However, the notion of academic freedom is disrespected and abused when it is used to promote the dissemination of racist and discriminatory concepts.
“Scientists have an obligation to society to speak loudly and actively in opposition of such abuse.”
Would it have been acceptable to the university and to the psychology department if Rushton had asked the questions he asked but had come up with the answer, "There was no statistically significant difference"?
If so, then it must be that what people objected to was his answer, and not his asking the question. If they didn't and don't like his answer, they should have blown him out of the water, academically. However, contrary to the implications of this column, most open minded people who were openly hoping David Suzuki would demolish Rushton in a debate sponsored by the university back then, reluctantly realized that's not what happened. Suzuki's only point was basically, "How dare you assert such things?" He presented zero evidence to show that Rushton was wrong. I note, too, that the linked column provides no references to what I would hope is abundant literature dispute Rushton's claims. I know there's a wealth of literature arguing that he was wrong; but I also know that there is a wealth of literature arguing that he was right.
I will not defend Phillipe Rushton's findings. I didn't like them. I will say, however, that he was always calm and mild-mannered, as the column says, and it was very difficult for someone not up on the literature to argue with him.
More to the point though, is that the recent denunciations and apologies by the Psychology Department at The University of Western Ontario should send a strong shiver down the spines of all academics still teaching there. It says, in essence, "Yes, we believe in academic freedom... so long as we like your results."
It should not be a matter of liking or not liking results. It should be a matter of furthering academic inquiry. If it's okay to ask certain questions only if we like the answers you get, I fear for the future of academic and intellectual curiosity and questioning.
The Globe and Mail has reported that Tiff Macklem has been appointed Governor of The Bank of Canada as of June 2nd . This is great news!
Tiff Macklem (Western Ph.D. 1989) Named as Future Governor of the Bank of Canada
Tiff Macklem (Western Economics Ph.D. 1989) has been named the new Bank of Canada Governor by Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Macklem, former Senior Deputy Governor and Chief Operating Officer at the Bank of Canada, was appointed Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in May 2014. Macklem has remained closely involved in nearly all of the Bank's major initiatives. He will replace Stephen Poloz (Western Economics M.A 1979, Ph.D. 1982)...
Tiff was a teaching assistant for me waaayyy back, probably in 1979 or so. He was a kind and diligent student then, and I was both pleased and not surprised when he became Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2004.
About ten or eleven years ago, we met up again when he was on campus to talk about his role at the Bank of Canada and at the Ministry of Finance during the financial crisis of 2007-8. He was great then, and I'm sure he will be great again.
This new job won't be easy for him.
During the regime of Stephen Poloz, the world and Canadian economies were slowly emerging from The Great Recession. Steering monetary policy was comparatively easy over the past seven years (until this past January), as economic growth continued, inflation rates were kept low, and the unemployment rate dropped to levels not seen in decades (see this).
However, as I have posted before, Tiff Macklem will have to deal with what most economists expect to be a serious world-wide and continent-wide recession. Furthermore, he will have to control (i.e. fight against) intense pressure from the government to monetize all the newly created debt we are seeing.
The government is borrowing now to pay for all their new programmes (in addition to all their previous deficit spending of the past few years), but who can they borrow from? They can't just wade into the money markets and drain all the liquidity from those markets; and foreign investors won't want all of the newly issued Canadian debt. So, as has happened before (see 1977-82), the Bank of Canada will be obliged to step forward to buy up a HUGE percentage of the newly issued government debt.
The government will be injecting billions of spending dollars into the spending stream but their borrowing won't be from the public and won't drain off much of that extra liquidity created by the spending (and transfer payments). Borrowing from the private sector through the money markets would help ameliorate the inflationary pressures, but if the government tries to borrow enough to cover all their increasing deficits from the private sector, it will drive up interest rates and crowd out what little private investment there is right now.
What can Tiff Macklem do in this situation? He's between a rock and a hard place.
If he refuses to monetize the debt, he'll be in the midst of a major clash with the government, reminiscent of The Coyne Affair of 1961. If he does continue to monetize the debt, he'll be in danger of setting off more rapid inflation than would be politically tolerable, once again hurting people who are currently locked into fixed nominal contracts and creating uncertain expectations for the future.
One option I would like at least to see on the table is for the Bank of Canada to pursue nominal GDP targeting, advocated lucidly by Scott Sumner (who blogs at EconLog and The Money Illusion). From the Wikipaedia article about Sumner,
Sumner contends that inflation is "measured inaccurately and does not discriminate between demand versus supply shocks" and that "Inflation often changes with a lag...but nominal GDP growth falls very, very quickly, so it'll give you a more timely signal stimulus is needed".[10] He argued that monetary policy can offset fiscal austerity policies such as those pursued by the British government in the wake of the 2007 economic crisis.[10]
Selling that policy, or even trying to do this as a matter of unannounced policy, will be difficult, though. Politicians will continue to want to spend more and more and more, and voters will resent both higher taxes and higher rates of inflation. Macklem has his work cut out for him.
---
As an aside, the continuing influence of PhDs from The University of Western Ontario on monetary policy both in the Bank of Canada, and elsewhere (e.g. the C.D. Howe Institute and the Fraser Institute) is a reflection on the high quality of education provided for students at UWO in monetary economics back in the 1980s. Canadian monetary policy has been highly regarded by all leading policy makers and financial economists around the world for having done an admirable job with monetary policy.
Professors David Laidler and Michael Parkin, in particular, played major roles in teaching and training students like Stephen Poloz (current governor of the Bank), Tiff Macklem, and Timothy Lane (senior deputy governor of the Bank). These students were fortunate to have studied with such scholars before the rational expectations, manufactured-data-general-equilibrium models dominated the field. Canadians are fortunate, too.
- - -
My recent posts about the upcoming recession, inflation, etc.:
According to this article in The Boston Globe, one reason Harvard won its affirmative action defense in the suit launched by Students for Fair Admissions was that they presented testimony from African-American and Hispanic students to the effect that their admission to Harvard was tremendously beneficial to them.
To combat the statistically heavy case presented by two experts from Students for Fair Admissions, eight black, Latino, and Asian-American Harvard students and alumni took the stand to share their personal stories of making it to Harvard and the benefits of using race in admissions. Students for Fair Admissions [SFA] did not call any students or present any cases of applicants who were specifically disadvantaged by Harvard’s admissions process.
Apparently, by implication, the Students for Fair Admissions [SFA] lost in part because they didn't send a parade of students to the stand to testify that not being admitted to Harvard hurt them.
There's a good reason, I suspect.
The hypothetical, potential value-added from going to Harvard for those on the cusp but not admitted to Harvard would likely have been negligible. They almost surely went to other high- or possibly even higher-quality schools and ended up doing, roughly and on average, just as well as they would have done had they been admitted to Harvard. The SFA apparently presented no evidence that these students were harmed, undoubtedly because the value-added of attending Harvard is minimal for bright, capable students, relative to their next-best options.
This same argument should also be reversed and applied to all the students who were racially favoured by affirmative action at Harvard. If they, too, were bright and capable students then they would also likely have ended up attending some other high- or even higher-quality university. The enormous benefits to which they testified were almost surely not all due to having attended Harvard.
The Harvard defense team's strategy, at least in this regard worked, in part, because it is difficult to argue the counterfactual in court.
Let me add, though, that weighing the benefits to those who gained admission versus the losses suffered by those denied admission is the wrong approach. Racial discrimination is morally wrong, and here's hoping Harvard loses on appeal.
I am the Esquire Bedel for The University of Western Ontario. That means I carry the ceremonial mace for many events, mostly convocations*, walking in front of the Chancellor, replicating the old role from centuries ago when an Esquire Bedel walked in front of a dignitary, carrying a seriously real mace to clear the rabble from the way and to protect the dignitary.**
My next Bedeling performance will be in late October for the installations of the university's new Chancellor and new President. Yesterday we had a meeting to go over the ceremony, step-by-step; it will be slightly different from the standard convocation ceremonies.
I was discussing the new procedures with a friend with whom I've done some baseball sportscasting, and that led to a fun exchange that he started, incorporating paraphrases from common sayings by various baseball broadcasters. Here's what we came up with (additions and amendments welcome):
The ceremony calls for me to stand down on the floor in front of the stage facing the audience, holding the mace, for what will likely be at least 20- 25 minutes. Presumably as Bedel-with-mace, I'm standing there as a symbol of Bedels-gone-by, guarding the Acting Chancellor and the Chancellor-Elect.
["He stood there like a house on the side of the road (as the change-up passed him by )"].
Then I have a slow walk across in front of the audience, up the side stairs, and across the stage
[and so he slowly drug hisself back to the dugout]
where I present the mace to the new Chancellor, who promptly hands it back
[in the dugout we see him talking about bats with the batting coach. The coach says there's nothing wrong with the bat he's using; he just needs to adjust his grip on it.]
and then the Chancellor asks the Bedel to place the mace in its proper place (nice rhyme)
[Just go put your bat back in the bat rack and take a seat on the bench, old-timer].
Former President, Paul Davenport, was also a huge baseball fan, and we had a great time just before a convocation over a decade ago, pretending the mace was a baseball bat. Paul claimed he struck me out.
*The University of Western Ontario holds about 25 different convocation ceremonies each year to accommodate the growing enrollments at the university. The events are seen as very special by the students, parents, and grandparents.
**The closest I've had to come to protecting dignitaries was one time when I nearly had to elbow photo-taking parent out of the way; nearly because I thrust my elbow outward and he backed out of the aisle. Other times I was concerned involved a chancellor and a convo speaker who were both far from popular.
Recently, Jack sent me this link to a Forbes article that purports to list the 25 smartest countries. I have no idea why someone chose to make this ranking, nor do I know how or why they chose the criteria they used.
The list includes no countries from Africa, Central America, South America, or the Middle East (other than Israel).
From the link (a 26-slide show :( to maximize ad revenues?) there is little explanation of which criteria are used and no description of the weights used.
For a many but not all of the countries, the article lists average IQs, which I have copied and rearranged in the list below. I know IQ is not a perfect measure of intelligence. Also, it bears repeating that averages say nothing about any individual resident.
Recent correspondence with my sister reminded me of a special cheer my dad and the students from Albion College used to chant, (and still do!) "Io Triumphe!"*
After essentially being kicked out of Hannibal Junior College and then being told by a chemistry prof after two years at Drury College (Springfield, MO) that he would never get his degree there, somehow my father managed to get into Albion College in Albion, Michigan. He had very little money but with the help of an aunt was able to finish his Bachelors' degree in chemistry there.
During his first year at Albion (1938-39), he lived in a boarding house called "The Goodrich Club". Our mother and he were married after that first year, and my sister was born during his second and final year at Albion.
I think he was always grateful to Albion College for the confidence they (or someone there) showed by admitting him into their chemistry program. My dad was smart but probably not very serious as an undergrad in his early years (I had/have similar lack-of-seriousness problems).
In the early 1950s, our family made three or four trips to Albion for the fall homecoming parades and football games. I fondly remember those trips.
The homecoming parade took a U-shaped route. We'd all watch the parade go from west to east and then hurry north a few blocks to watch it come back. The only candy passed out was a bit thrown from the float with the Homecoming Queen. It all seemed so special.
One time, probably in the very early 1950s or so, we actually had a boarding house dinner at The Goodrich Club after the football game.
At the football games, Dad and a few alumni always wowed the crowd and the cheerleaders by shouting the following cheer rapidly at the tops of their lungs:
Io Triumphe! Io Triumphe! Haben Swaben Rebecca le animor Whoop te whoop te sheller de-vere-de Boom de ral de-i de-pa- Hooneka Henaka whack a whack a Hob dob balde bora bolde bara Con slomade hob dob Rah! Al-bi-on Rah!
I never completely learned the cheer, nor did my sister (Update: she says she could say the whole cheer nearly as fast as Dad could!), but I do remember that we learned the last three lines and joined in, much to the delight of Dad and his friends.
On the trip home one year, my sister and I were squabbling in the back seat of the car, and my Dad angrily announced, "If you kids don't stop that, I'm going to blow my top!"
My sister and I promptly began cheering,
Blow that top!
Blow that top!
Much to the amusement and delight of our parents.
And then my sister added, noting his partial baldness, "You don't have any top to blow, Daddy."
Very fond memories.
--
*From the Albion College site,
"Io Triumphe," a yell written by the Class of 1900. Some of its phrases were taken from other college yells, some from a Greek play that had been presented on campus during that period, and others were borrowed from the poems of the Roman writer Horace.
Also, apparently the "Io Triumphe!" cheer was adopted by an Occidental College, crediting Albion College with its origination.
The recent scandals involving wealthy people trying to use bribes to open a "side door" into universities for their children amused me. The problem for me went beyond the moral issues, the impact on their children, and the general amount of unspoken favouritism shown in the admissions process.
So why did it amuse me?
Because if parents want to bribe someone to get their children into university, why not have them just bribe the universities directly in a bidding war for a few admission places each year?
Here's an editorial I wrote on this topic nearly thirty years ago. It could and should be easily adopted by any university.
University Underfunding: An Immodest Proposal
by John Palmer
Ontario universities are in a financial bind. Our elected representatives have made it clear that increases in university funding will not keep pace with the rate of inflation; at the same time, universities are not being allowed to raise tuition fees as much as they would like. The result is the growing use of very large classes, less essay writing by students, and the loss of some of the world's best scholars to other universities outside Ontario. If revenues are not allowed to keep pace with costs, quality will continue to suffer.
These are times that call for creative adjustments. Raising tuition fees (along with greater OSAP awards) is a good beginning — charge more to rich students without discouraging low-income students from attending university. But these schemes are limited by the province and cannot deal fully with the underfunding problem.
Let me offer another partial solution: auction off fifty extra admission places to the highest bidders without regard to academic ability or secondary school performance.
Before the howls of indignation approach the volume of a supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier, consider these arguments in favour of the scheme:
1. The extra costs of providing a UWO education for an additional 50 students per year, even 50 who are less likely to be successful here, are probably quite low, perhaps no more than two or three thousand dollars per student. So long as the auctioned-off places bring in more revenue than they cost, they will provide a net gain for the university.
2. There appear to be many students, judging from our admission cut-off, who would like the prestige and education they could receive from attending UWO. It is likely that in a bidding situation some would offer quite sizeable donations to UWO in exchange for such a privilege.
Here's how the scheme would work: Every student who is denied admission to UWO on academic grounds would be sent a bidding form. Those wishing to bid for one of the fifty places would sign documents promising to donate to UWO the amount of their bids, if successful. They would mail the bids to an independent auditor, the highest fifty bids would be accepted, and the successful bidders would be legally bound to pay the bid.
Students making winning bids would not be identified on any university records (aside from provisions for anonymous followup research), and would not receive favourable treatment in future years. This would be a one-time donation to the university which would do no more than entitle successful bidders to pay tuition and to try to succeed in university. Even students donating $20,000 would be required to meet the progression standards set out in the Calendar.
If parents want to give out bribes to get their children admitted to university, Let them bribe the university itself instead of intermediaries, like sports coaches or others.
My sister recently decided to embark on a programme of studies for a divinity degree, beginning with a course on the Old Testament. She wrote to ask me why I decided to go to theological seminary in 1965. Here is what I answered (only slightly edited):
This is somewhat embarrassing. Oh well, here goes:
As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I was a student radical (of sorts). I decided I wanted to help change the world, especially in the realm of civil rights. I figured people went to church because of social pressure and while they were in church I'd have a captive audience and could set them all straight about how the world should work. Yes, I was that arrogant.
Also, seminaries had financial aid available, and that certainly helped. I was accepted at both McCormick and Chicago Theological Seminary [CTS] but CTS was VERY active in civil rights (Jesse Jackson was a year ahead of me there, and the seminary became Martin Luther King's headquarters in the summer on 1966). They recruited me very actively despite my awful undergrad record, so I went there. I'm glad I did. It was a valuable part of my continuing emotional and intellectual growth.
Old Testament. I never took the courses! It was winter term my second year at CTS that the dean said I had to take the Old Testament courses, and I explained to him that actually I had decided I didn't want to stay in seminary. He was a kind man. I offered to relinquish my scholarship, but he said I could keep it; and he let me register through the seminary for more math and economics courses at the University of Chicago.
Why did I leave seminary? I realized I didn't belong there.
In the summer after my first year, I started rereading economics and realized how much I liked it. I also started reading Milton Friedman (famous economist who had been criticized by all the east coast liberal elitist interventionist profs at Carleton College) and realized how much of what he said seemed right. But the crunch came one weekend when I was supposed to give a sermon at a small church on the near SW side of Chicago. I had the sermon written by Thursday and then started reading Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. I don't know why; maybe I knew where I was and just needed a push.
By Saturday night I had finished the book. I set it down and said something like. "That's me. I'm just a hypocrite. I don't believe any of this stuff, at least not the way the people in that church will think I mean it. I've been using Rudolf Bultmann's notion of demythologizing to come to grips with everything I've been studying, but I've been demythologizing everyone else's demythologizations. I don't believe this stuff. I know it. I can't do this."
Somehow, I got through the sermon and church service the next day, but that was it.
Adults over age 50 who watch several hours of television daily may be at increased risk for cognitive decline, according to a longitudinal study in Scientific Reports.
Researchers studied nearly 3600 dementia-free adults aged 50 and older who completed cognitive assessments and reported how much TV they watched at baseline. At follow-up 6 years later, those who had reported watching over 3.5 hours of TV daily showed greater declines in verbal memory than those who'd reported watching less than 2.5 hours daily. Additionally, the declines increased with increasing amounts of TV watched. The associations remained significant after adjustment for numerous confounders, including markers of sedentary behavior.
Meanwhile, TV viewing was not significantly associated with another measure of cognition, semantic fluency.
The researchers speculate that the "alert-passive" nature of TV viewing may contribute to the cognitive declines observed; also, TV may replace other mentally stimulating activities.
I don't really watch all that much tv, so maybe I'm safe. I often have sporting events on, but I often am doing other things at the same time [however, don't even think about trying to turn them off!].
I wonder if there are implications for children...
We all have reasonably strong views about the world, how it operates, and how we think it should operate. These strong views, or priors, affect how we interpret events.
So let me ask readers to pick an issue about which you have strong views. What would it take to get you to change your views?
Example:
One of my all-time favourite economics professors, the late nobel laureate Robert Fogel, was once a communist organizer. He became a Chicago-school near libertarian type economist because communism was wrong about the failures of capitalism.
Counterexample:
I have friends who are so strongly opposed to abortion, nothing would ever change their minds.
The former is a more scholarly approach; the latter is a more religious or moral approach.
So what would it take to get you to change your mind about ________?
For me:
Minimum wages. I think they're wrong; I don't think that on average they help all the people they're intended to help; I think that in general gubmnt intrusion into markets inhibits economic growth and makes future generations of poor people much worse off than they would be if we had more economic growth. I'm nearly religious on this. I'm not sure I could be convinced to change my views (informed by the study of economics and the studies I've read about minimum wages).
Global warming. I was skeptical about how much we're experiencing, but I'm beginning to shed that skepticism in the light of increasing data and information from some people I tend to trust. I'm still somewhat skeptical about how much is caused by humans. I'm not qualified to even try to understand the studies. I doubt that much we might do in Canada or possibly in North America will change things much. I do think we should prepare and help prepare to deal with it if, as, and to the extent we experience it.
Coventry School and the the confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial. This incident is what prompted this post. What would prompt you to change your take on the situation? What if the boys had been from a secular school and carrying copies of Michelle Obama's book?
Seriously, for each contentious issue, I think it would be a good idea for us to ask ourselves, "Is it possible that I can be convinced otherwise?" If not, we're debating religion, which I'm willing to do in some settings [do we have a multi-verse with 11 dimensions? what caused the big bang? etc.]
and as I wrote [edited here] in a comment on my Facebook page earlier today:
I shouldn't do this, I know, but my views: 1. I'm anti-Trump, as I hope most of you know. But I'm probably anti-Trump for reasons different from those that many of you have. At the same time I know some very smart and caring people who are pro-Trump. My point? Don't use your or anyone else's views about Trump to judge a particular situation. Please. 2. I'm not anti-abortion, but I'm pro-adoption (my daughter was adopted). Colour me woefully ambivalent on the topic. My point: please don't use my or anyone else's views on abortion to judge a particular situation. 3. From what I've read and seen, the school the boys were from teaches stuff I strongly disagree with. That doesn't mean I hate these boys; that doesn't mean they were in the wrong at this confrontation. 4. I am not a fan of MAGA (I actually had to google it when the incident was first written about). 5. In this incident, no matter what you might think about the boys and their school and their hats, what did they do wrong in this confrontation? Especially I don't know what the one student did who was confronted by Phillips. He smiled or smirked, as we were taught to do in the Civil Rights movement; he reacted non-violently. 6. If you condemn the boys for their behaviour in this instance because of their school, their hats, their parents, their politics, their views on abortion, etc. you've missed the point I was trying to make. 7. Like the writer of this Atlantic piece, I've held some wildly different, and (many would say) hateful or objectionable views over my lifetime. I have done some pretty uncaring things in my lifetime. But I hope people will not use those views or actions to judge me in any given situation. I know some do and some have, but please keep this in mind when writing about this particular situation.
I'm sure I could write more. I probably will. I'm feeling so despondent though because of the comments I've read, both yesterday and today.😕
Addendum: Many of us can, and do, change our views on religious-type topics as well. I was once a conscientious objector to war. I think I may have been drifting away from that moral position but 9-11 sealed it for me. I was no longer a conscientious objector after that event. Also, I was once an atheist but cosmological questions turned me into a devout agnostic.
A review of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education
“We don’t need no education” [Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”]
As an undergraduate, I always crammed for exams and rarely remembered anything I may have “learned” beyond the next week. I certainly did not remember much after a several months, not to mention after a year or two. So long as I received the grade I was shooting for, I had succeeded.
More than four decades of teaching at the university level convinces me that my experiences are no different from those of most students. This observation is at the heart of Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018).
The major point of Caplan’s study is that high school diplomas and undergraduate degrees generally do not show that the students actually learned and retained much that will be useful after graduation (those who go on to teach are, to some extent, exceptions). Rather, completion of high school or the BA signals a student's ability, intelligence, work ethic, and willingness to perform to satisfy teachers’ requirements.
Caplan reviews the compelling evidence that even after taking account of ability, intelligence, and a host of other variables, those students who complete high school on average earn more than those who don’t, and those who complete a BA earn more than those who don’t. Completion of a programme clearly means something in the job market to potential employers and is valuable. The puzzle is: why do those students earn more even though they don’t remember, much less use, most or any of what they studied?
Caplan’s answer: The very fact that they completed high school or received an undergraduate degree is worth a great deal to future employers because completion conveys valuable information about students’ character traits and general abilities, despite telling very little about specific skills and learning. Students spend years and years (and years and years and years) studying things they don’t remember and never use. Why? To generate signals to potential employers that they have what it takes to be productive employees; or, in the case of high school students applying to college or university, that they have what it takes to be successful undergraduate students.
I have been reading these ideas from Brian Caplan for nearly a decade, as he has posted them at the blog Econlog. I was so persuaded by them that several years ago I gave a public lecture at The University of Regina “I Didn’t Learn a Thing as an Undergraduate.” in which I summarized his ideas.
When I first started teaching, every year there was a student or two who would plead for a higher grade, and my reaction was usually, “I won’t certify that you know this material when you don’t.”
Even then, I knew I was in the business of certifying something, but I thought I was certifying the students’ knowledge of economics. According to Caplan, though, I wasn’t – instead I was certifying their intelligence, their ability to buckle down and study enough to get a certain grade, and their ability to “learn” (at least for a brief period) whatever it was I wanted them to learn. I was certifying their ability to generate signals about character traits that employers and educators believe are valuable.
Caplan questions why we need so much education if the primary purpose of education is to certify and to generate signals, but not to foster learning. He points to all the language courses students are forced to take but forget quickly, to the history courses despite which so many people know so little basic history, and even to the math and science courses that so many students take in high school only to signal their suitability for university. If the primary reason students take these courses is to signal character traits, not skills or knowledge, then it seems mighty wasteful for them to be spending so much time and energy on coursework. Surely students would be better off if they spent more time learning skills and less time signaling.
Let’s face it: you don’t need a BA for many, maybe even most, of the jobs that require them, but employers require BAs because students with a BA signal that they have more ability, better work ethics, and greater willingness to conform to the employers’ work standards. The BA hasn’t taught the students anything useful for the job, but it has signaled character traits that many employers are willing to pay for.
While that might be correct overall, it likely does not hold for any given individual. A reasonable student can rightly ask, “How can I send a reliable message to potential employers and universities about my abilities and personality if not by completing my education programme? Doing so is next to impossible.”
As a result, the student quite sensibly decides to signal quality by getting more education. And so do zillions of other students, all contributing to a signaling war with each one trying to send a signal that they are better-suited --- i.e. better credentialed --- than other job or college applicants.
The result is an attempt to generate better credentials than the others have who might be competing for the same position. The students quite properly say, “I know what employers want – diplomas and degrees. If I want to get the job I need a diploma or degree.”
Caplan’s conclusion is clear: all this signaling is costly and wasteful. He sees it as what economists and others refer to as a negative sum game: Everyone devotes more and more scarce resources (time and money) to advancing themselves and/or their progeny in the credential war, trying to create more impressive (albeit more costly) signals.
High school students take courses that signal their willingness and ability to submit to the rigours of college or university coursework. They also join extra-curricular activities to prove they are well-rounded; they participate in or even start their own charity fund-raisers to show they care about others; and they vie for “leadership” positions in local groups to show their leadership potential. Many sign up for SAT training courses or buy books with sample questions and guidance on how to improve their SAT scores. These are all attempts to signal. They have little to do with producing what economists call “human capital”—i.e. skills and useful knowledge.
In my own case, in high school I had a friend who had some SAT study books. I had never heard of studying for the SATs. I naively believed the SATs were truly aptitude tests. But we studied the books, and I felt they helped me increase my SAT scores.
Also, in my last year of high school, I had read that someone who restored an old MG was regarded highly by Yale. As a result, when I was visited by an admissions officer for an elite liberal arts college in the US, I made a point of mentioning that I had built the hi-fi system I had. She seemed impressed, but I don’t know that it mattered. The point is that apparently even then, nearly sixty years ago, I was well-aware of the importance of signals.
Later in my studies, after having been an abysmal student at Carleton College, I was speaking with the admissions director [then-famous labour economist, H. Gregg Lewis] for the economics graduate programme at The University of Chicago. He told me he wouldn’t admit me, despite the lax admission standards there, because I had such a low grade point average from Carleton.
“The best predictor of someone’s likely success in our graduate programme is their undergraduate grade point,” he told me. “The next best predictor is my personal impression from their letters of recommendation.”
“But,” I argued, “I have very high scores on the mathematics and economics portions of the Graduate Record Exams [GREs].”
He said those were horrible predictors of success in graduate school. His predictors were signals. And my low grade-point signaled to him that I would not be a success in the graduate programme at The University of Chicago. If I had wanted to signal my ability to succeed there, I should have buckled down and gotten better grades as an undergraduate.
In many ways, signals are good things. They aren’t perfect, but they are short-hand ways of conveying generally useful information. When someone completes high school, they signal they have the mental ability to grasp the basic material, and they also have the personal ability to withstand boredom, to do as they are told, to jump through hoops. This is an important signal to potential employers. Further, if they get high enough grades and high enough SATs, they signal they probably have the mental ability and the personal characteristics to finish an undergraduate degree.
Similarly, completing a BA tells potential employers the student has even more ability intellectually and more stamina and conformity.
Caplan asks how many college and university graduates actually use the things they studied as undergrads. The answer, overwhelmingly outside certain professions, is very little.
As an example, I know one person who majored in English literature with a minor in Religious Studies at a top-ranked university. He ended up getting a job with a major corporation only because he had become fluently bilingual in French on his own. He has since gone on to head up their business-to-business web sales programme, despite studying zero business or computer science in high school or university. When I asked him how much of his schooling he had ever used on the job, he answered “Four percent. Writing all those essays helped me learn how to organize and structure my time.”
Put differently, his university credentials (coupled with his ability to speak French) signaled a set of abilities valued by the corporation. They indicated a strong probability that he would be highly productive.
This story is repeated everywhere. Students who work to earn diplomas and degrees signal things that are valued by employers, no matter what subjects they study.
Caplan goes on to suggest that from a societal perspective there must be a more efficient way to generate these signals. Having people spend, say, 16-17 years in school to create these signals seems like a very expensive way to do it.
Indeed, some of his critics have argued that if there were a more efficient way to acquire this information, employers and intermediaries would have developed mechanisms for doing so by now. Caplan’s first response to this is weak: he responds that the signals from education are so strongly embedded in our culture and psyches that we don’t trust alternative signals. If that is the only reason, I expect things will change, and fairly quickly over the next few decades.
However, his second response has more strength: we have had a credential explosion as students (encouraged by their parents and by educators) scramble and slave to create better signals to make themselves more attractive to college admission officers and employers. A generation ago, people could and did do jobs with only high school diplomas but for which employers generally seem to require BAs today. People don’t need BAs to do those jobs, but having a BA signals things that employers want: intelligence, solid work ethic, and conformity.
Caplan argues that these signals are relative, in comparison with the applicant pools, and not absolute. If they were measured according to some absolute scale, then a high school diploma today would signal the same thing it did a generation ago (assuming high school standards haven’t changed much; however, see below). But when an employer is faced with a job applicant with stronger signals, like a BA, then the one with the BA tends to win.
According to Caplan, there are two big problems with this credential war that is set off when we use schooling to signal ability, work ethic, and conformity. The first is that the war, like many wars, is a negative sum game: it is beneficial for each individual to play the game but it wastes society’s scarce resources when everyone plays the game. It is to each student’s advantage to get a high school diploma (or to complete a BA), but only because they are competing with other students who are also spending time and money in the credential war.
Not all signaling wars are bad, though. For example, when firms advertise just their company names, they are signaling that they intend to have a good enough product that they wouldn’t want to have wasted money on the general, non-specific advertisements [see, for example, Klein and Leffler]. This type of signaling war encourages firms to produce reliable products and the competition is beneficial to all of society. Caplan argues, though, that using schooling to signal abilities and character traits has no social benefits and hence generates far too much waste, with students taking courses they don’t want and don’t need, only to create acceptable signals.
I like Caplan’s case that signaling is a major part of schooling and education. But there are some positive aspects to the signaling war that Caplan either ignores or dismisses too easily. The longer students are in school, the more they tend to learn and practice good work habits and conformity to teachers’ and professors’ assignments. Caplan’s response is that they can learn and demonstrate these same skills on the job if they go into the workforce; they don’t need to spend so much unproductive time in school to learn and demonstrate these skills. My sense is that the two are not the same, but Caplan does make a strong case.
Interestingly, throughout much of Canada students applying to university can pretty much blow off their time in the lower grades, even in high school. All they need is a high overall average in six different grade twelve courses [see the details here for Ontario]. What is more, they can retake courses to raise their averages, and apparently admissions officers tend to just look at the averages of the best six, as generated by a computer programme.
Here the important signal is grade point. Essays on “why I want to attend your university” aren’t required, nor are SATs or records of charitable work. And so at least some of the wasteful efforts in the signaling war are less valuable here.
The credential war has another pernicious effect however: it induces grade inflation. High school teachers feel pressure to ease up just a bit so students who might be borderline are admitted to college or university. Similarly university professors are under pressure from students to be lenient so that students can get into professional schools. And department chairs put pressure on the hard-ass professors to ease up so the students don’t migrate to other departments to take their courses.
There are numerous true stories about grade inflation and signaling. I’ll share a couple.
When I moved to Canada after being an instructor in graduate school at Iowa State University, I was informed that 80 is an A here and 50 is a pass. In most schools in the US, 90 is an A, 80 is a B, and you need a 60 to pass. The result was that I just adjusted my marking scheme. The numbers were far from absolute.
During my first few years, I had no qualms about giving marks that ended in a “9”. Several years later, a decree came from the department chair that we were no longer to give marks ending in a “9” because students were appealing them and chewing up too much important administrative and faculty time. We were to round everything ending in _8.5 to the next highest grade. That edict cut down on appeals considerably … initially…. And even in the long run to some extent. But of course many students soon figured out that all they needed was a 78.50 to get an 80 (an A), and so there were still appeals, just not as many.
For decades, the University of Western Ontario economics department had a rigid policy that in first year courses there was to be a set grade distribution according to guidelines we all agreed to. For the most part, these guidelines were strictly enforced to maintain inter-section equity. The guidelines were comparatively difficult for the students, though. As a result, enrolments in economics began to tail off over the years as students sought out easier courses in other departments that were more likely to give them the averages they needed to get into a top-ranked business school, law school, or other professional programme. Eventually the economics department caved in to the grade inflation taking place elsewhere in the university and eased up on its grading guidelines. Students wanted to generate grade signals, and we were under pressure to contribute to the signaling and credential wars they waging by being more lenient ourselves.
If students are increasingly studying less, as seems to be the case, and receiving higher grades, then the signals are being diluted. To that extent, students who want to impress employers and admissions officers need to generate additional and stronger signals. Many will choose to further their studies. Others will look for other signals. For example, students seeking admission to top business school programmes now are expected to do something to demonstrate their entrepreneurial drive and talents such as starting a business or organizing a fund-raising campaign. When I talk with these students, it is often the case that they don’t really want to do these things, but “it’ll look good on the application forms”; i.e. it’s part of the signaling war as they try to distinguish themselves from all the other applicants who have good, inflated grades.
Even if you are persuaded by Caplan’s arguments that schooling is mostly signaling and doesn’t really contribute much to the skills and talents of most students, you may be less persuaded by his recommendation for dealing with the high costs of signaling wars.
His solution: eliminate taxpayer support of education. As a life-long educator who has enjoyed feeding at the trough of the public fisc, I cringe at this recommendation. I am especially reluctant to endorse it for grades K-12. At the university level, though, it makes some sense to at least consider reducing the sizes of the government subsidies. I realize my experiences may not be generalizable, but they probably are: there are far too many students in university who will learn very little and use next to nothing of what they were taught. They are there, in part, because governments subsidize their participation in the credentialization wars.
Caplan’s book is an easy read. He writes with serious humour, if that makes sense. I have smiley faces in the margins all through the book. My major complaint is that the publisher chose to use endnotes instead footnotes, meaning I was constantly flipping back and forth to check the footnotes, many of which are well-worth the effort.
I certainly urge those who might be interested to read the introductory material in Chapter One. After that, Chapters four and five become tedious --- necessary to bolster his case, but tedious, as he develops and carefully references his case numerically. Also his conversations near the end of the book are interesting. But for those who want the Readers’ Digest version of the book, I highly recommend Caplan’s column in the Los Angeles Times, which presents his case extremely well.
[Addendum: if high school dropouts quickly learn that there is great advantage to having a diploma, I strongly suspect that many of them outright lie and say they have a diploma, fully expecting that potential employers won't bother to check. If so, then the signal for having a high school diploma has likely been seriously distorted and weakened.]
Note: a condensed, edited version of this review will appear in the April edition of the newsletter of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship [SAFS], a Canadian organization created to foster and defend academic freedom.
I'll probably never get another academic job after posting this information ( ;) ), but my last two "refereed" publications were in so-called "predatory" journals. Interestingly, I never felt preyed upon in any way. My co-author(s) and I agreed to the publications willingly.
The first one in the list below was actually a more-than-decent paper, we didn't pay anything to have it published, and the referees' comments indicated they had at least read the paper.
The second paper listed below was a good enough paper, not path-breaking probably, but it was a non-mainstream interdisciplinary piece that would never have found a standard outlet in the standard economics journals. The proceedings of the conference where we presented the paper were never published, and so when we saw the title of the journal, we all said, WTF, kicked in $50 apiece, and sent it there. The refereeing was horrid -- boilerplate comments that bore no resemblance to the article. But the title of the journal was perfect for our article.
We knew what we were doing. And we knew that most schools that don't have committees to actually read an author's work wouldn't much care, whereas the schools where people actually read the papers would nod and say the work was good. So let me repeat. We were not preyed upon. We were glad to have the outlets for our work.
If authors feel preyed upon by these journals, it's because they are ignorant whiners and/or because the current reward system encourages too many schools to count publications without reading people's articles.
I am quite certain that these last two items on my curriculum vitae would count against me at schools that assess people only by the prestige of the journals in which they publish. I call journals like those two, "vanity journals", not unlike the vanity press that publishes some authors' novels: pay-to-publish.
The problem is that reading a candidate's publications is time-consuming and difficult. It's easier to count publications and/or count publications weighted by the number of characters published, weighted by the prestige of the journals in which the articles appear, and perhaps weighted by the citations the article receives.
Misuse of signals is not an indictment of the efficient use of signals. Just don't say I was a victim for having chosen to publish in these journals.
---
Actually, my most recent c.v. item is forthcoming in a refereed conference volume. My article is "Property Rights and Contract Enforcement in the Post-Zombie Apocalypse".
“Misallocation Costs under Rent Control: Experimental Evidence” (with Jason Childs), Scientific Online Publications: Transactions in Economic Research, (May, 2014)
“The Economics of Culture: Implications and Underpinnings” (with Jason Childs and [the late] Gary Tompkins), International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science, (May, 2014)
The other day Otis sent around this piece bemoaning the fact that undergraduates are unable to engage in critical thinking and that they don't learn a thing about critical thinking at college or university. Some excerpts:
... [A]lthough faculty in the humanities and social sciences claim to be teaching critical thinking, often they’re not. Instead, they’re teaching students to “deconstruct”—to privilege their own subjective emotions or experiences over empirical evidence in the false belief that objective truth is relative, or at least unknowable. That view runs contrary to the purposes of a “liberal arts” education, which undertakes the search for truth as the academy’s highest aim. ...
Unfortunately, such internalization of meaning does not culminate in open-mindedness and willingnessto examine the facts and logic of differing views. Rather, it leads to the narrow-minded, self-centered assumption that there is a “right” way to feel, which automatically delegitimizes the responses of any and all who may feel differently.
All of this has a profound impact on students and explains a great deal of what is happening on colleges campuses today, ... Today’s students are increasingly incapable of processing conflicting viewpoints intellectually; they can only respond to them emotionally.
More to the point, that explains why employers keep complaining that college graduates can’t think. They’re not being taught to think. They’re being taught, in too many of their courses, to “oppose existing systems”—without regard for any objective appraisal of those systems’ efficacy—and to demonstrate their opposition by emoting.
For some reason, although I agree with the general thrust of the article, it provoked me to think about my own general lack of critical thinking ability. I wrote the following to Otis and friends (edited for this blog post). -----
I was not "taught" critical thinking as an undergrad, at least not in any formal sense.
In high school I was taught about syllogisms and Venn diagrams. I memorized what I had to about those things to get an "A", but I didn't internalize much. I learned what I had to learn to get by in my courses --- as an undergrad that meant getting C---- far too often. [As a satisficer, I upgraded that goal to getting a B---- in my senior year and an A---- as a grad student. BTW, those are minuses, not dashes.].
I didn't really learn about critical thinking until my 3rd year as an undergraduate at Carleton College (Northfield Minnesota). A number of things contributed:
I had a roommate who questioned things. His doing so forced me to question and think. He was VERY smart, an elitist interventionist, worldly. I will always be grateful to him and the memories I have of the challenges he posed for me. He and my other roommate combined to help me grow more, intellectually and emotionally, than I had before. For those who know me, I am referring to the late Fred Barra and the late Carl Young. I wrote about them here.
I was going through the most serious stages of the identity crisis, which opened me to new approaches and ideas.
I spent roughly 3 weeks mostly alone over Christmas break and had to face a lot of personal issues [the same thing happened again, with further development, when I lived alone in a rooming house after my first marriage ended -- more questioning, more critical thinking about many things: my life, my career, my relationships, economics, the non-meaning of life].
After that, I began to realize (slow learner that I am) that textbooks were not gospel truths. I began to read much more critically, not just underlining things to be memorized, but writing in the margins, questioning, challenging. A few years later, a seminary professor [Frank Littell] called this "dialoguing with the author".
I was such a compliant product of the conservative 1950s that it took me even longer to begin to question what professors were teaching.
But honestly, I believe that I never really learned to think critically.
Most of us do not think critically. Most of us do not question and examine things most of the time. My reflecting on the article that Otis sent helped me realize this fact. Well, at least it is a fact from my own biased perspective.
What helped me begin to think critically the most was being subjected to arguments, both in person and in print, from very smart people who had different views from my own. Only when this happened did I approach the possibility of thinking critically; it happened only when I was challenged in fundamental ways.
To be honest, as a professor, I NEVER wanted my students to think critically or to question or challenge me. I always wanted them to understand what I was teaching, and welcomed their questions in that regard. I never wanted them just to memorize but to learn to apply the tools I was teaching. But I didn't want any deconstructionist marxist humanist socionomologists challenging me in the classroom.
And I really don't think I was much different from many other profs (Ms Eclectic disagrees, but then she and I don't agree on other things as well). Professors want the students to question what they (the students) believe and what they think they know if it's different from our own perceptions of "truth". We are far from enthralled (for the most part) if they don't learn our truths and if they won't think critically about their own beliefs and attitudes the way we want them to.
In that regard, I expect we are no different from our deconstructionist marxist humanist socionomologist elitist interventionist colleagues. We all have our own versions of (or approaches to) truth; we all want students to challenge and think critically about views other than our own. ... with one set of exceptions: they may question and criticize us so long as they accept and believe our answers and rebuttals.
After reading the article Otis sent and thinking about it (and the comments!), and after writing what I've written so far, I wonder if the best way to teach critical thinking to university and college students is to subject them to the very best thinking, writing, speaking, and debating on many topics: The very best from allperspectives.
Perhaps that was one thing my education at Carleton College did for me. We had numerous outside speakers who presented various critical and different views about many different topics, and we were required to attend seven out of ten of these presentations (called "convocations") during each ten-week term. I don't remember much from those presentations, but they must have contributed to the overall tone of criticism, exposure, exploration, and questioning.
I know I would lose debates against the brightest elitist interventionists (I would lose against even those who are bright but who are not the brightest). I am not quick, and my mind is often muddled. Not surprisingly, I am not keen on the debate format for teaching critical thinking; debate seems to reward the glib and the quick. But presentations like those I experienced at Carleton, followed by open discussions in small groups, were terrific.
Nevertheless, I didn't begin my serious critical thinking about economics until I left Carleton College. There I had been taught by very bright Ivy League elitist interventionists that Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and "The Chicago School of Economics" were wrong. Unfortunately I didn't understand their counter-Chicago arguments very well and concluded I was stupid (despite 99s on the Graduate Record Exams in econ and math [puerile digression: I think I was more proud of my 69 on the verbal GRE]).
Then while in seminary I read the Friedman-Samuelson debates in Newsweek magazine. Friedman won, hands down; I thirsted for his column every third week. I felt a strong sense of loss when the columns/debates were discontinued.
Then I read some John Kenneth Galbraith and it made no sense.
Then I read Capitalism and Freedom and for the most part was persuaded (his take on race and discrimination in that book still bothers me).
And then I took courses from Robert Fogel and learned even more.
I finally realized I wasn't all that stupid, but my elitist interventionist profs at Carleton hadn't been all that bright either.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if students could go through these exposures to other ideas more efficiently than I did? Unfortunately, I fear increasing numbers of students are exposed to less and less critical thinking and fewer and fewer programmes and professors and courses challenging ideas this way.
A classroom, even a few classrooms, cannot provide the depth of exposure to new ideas that I experienced during my four years at Carleton College plus two years at Chicago Theological Seminary. Perhaps I am generalizing too broadly from my own experiences and my own attitudes, but I think professors' egos are too weak, for the most part, for us to provide unbiased and even-handed approaches to conflicting approaches; we won't tolerate much criticism.
It especially cannot happen within a given department.
How long would a Keynesian elitist interventionist last in the economics department at George Mason University [GMU]? Students there, while being exposed to very bright people, will likely never be taught by such economists.
How many students at the Ivy League schools are taught by Ayn Rand scholars? Hunh. Few, I suspect.
We drum our opponents out of our departments with the (often unspoken) belief that if they don't think the way we do, they are obviously not very bright.
In my own economics department at The University of Western Ontario, we lost one senior economist who had (horrors!) Keynesian leanings. Also we hired a few exceptional young scholars from Yale a couple of times who, after being here a year or two left. And you know what? I was glad they left then, and I'm still glad they left because I thought what they were teaching was crap (oops: misguided).
Still, to learn critical thinking, students need to be exposed to that stuff, to question and be questioned, to have our own views and approaches challenged. I just don't think it can happen in one department or institution.
Maybe it can happen at a place like George Mason where undergraduates are undoubtedly subjected to more interventionist views in other departments.
An alternative might be to bring in guest professors to teach for a term, making sure they teach from a different perspective. That sounds nice, but generally I doubt it would work very well. To caricature myself, I would never want any Keynesian intellectual elitist interventionists teaching at MY school, so that's probably not a very realistic alternative very often. [To its credit, the Carleton economics department tried to hire George Hilton (the economist, not the actor) when they received funding for an endowed chair; he ended up, appropriately, at UCLA].
Another alternative might be to encourage students to take a term or a year studying elsewhere. Yet again, I'd rather have my economics students study at GMU than at some Ivy interventionist school (well, maybe if they had classes from Greg Mankiw it would be ok at Harvard, but you get my drift).
To learn critical thinking, students need to be challenged and pushed and questioned, and they need this from many different perspectives.
I doubt that large gubmnt-funded universities can provide these experiences. And so, like the article that prompted me to write this post, I despair.
This post is actually about studying statistics. It is not about polls or the misuse of data or anything remotely political. No foolin'.
My older son, David Ricardo Palmer, is currently taking an online statistics course. When I learned about it, I suggested that maybe I could do some of the work alongside and along with him because I'd like to relearn statistics. No foolin'.
I studied a fair amount of statistics as a student: one course as an undergrad (in which I received a gentlemen's C-), and at least five courses as a graduate student. At several times, I put in to teach the "intro statistics for economists" course at The University of Western Ontario just so I could relearn statistics.
That never happened, though, and after nearly 83 years since last studying the topic, I figured my statistics tools had become a tad rusty.
Times have changed since I studied statistics.
First, for an MBA course they don't mess about with calculus proofs of existence or discussing the properties of estimators. It's a cookbook course, which I think is wise. I had a two-term cookbook course in gradskool, and it was the only one that stuck with me at all.
Second, back then we had to do all our calculations with pencil and paper or with hand-crank calculators. No foolin'. Nowadays, students are expected to use Excel. That's both good and bad. It's good because it saves them from the drudgery of performing endless calculations (e.g. to invert a 3x3 matrix). It's bad because Excel spits out answers and students don't really get a good grasp of the intuition, the understanding of the statistical tests and what they mean or how to interpret them.
Overall, it's fun. No foolin'.
And a special bonus: I get to spend more time with my son!
Goodhue Hall, a men’s dormitory with four stories. It was the first year of the dorm. Rooms were assigned by lottery but seniors and juniors first. Sophomores ended up on the first and second floors.
There were no cellphones in those days. And students were not allowed to have private phones in their rooms. There were public phones (not pay!) just outside the hallway in the stairwells. There were three staircases, and each floor had three phones. Again, each phone was outside the hallway, through a door, in the stairwell; but each phone had a bell that rang inside the hallway. When the phone rang, someone would answer it and then go find the person “for whom the bell rang” so to speak.
The perps:
I was a goof and a geek. I tried hard to be cool but wasn’t. That term I got a C in history, a C in math (a gift), and a D in introductory microeconomics.
Another perp was Kent Paul Dolan, who is still a friend on Facebook. He left Carleton at the end of that term. He spent most of his time in the computer room (the old days of Fortran 1 and punched cards).
I don’t remember the others. One might have been Pete Campbell; another might have been Bob Henry or possibly Tom Eller. Not sure though. There had to have been at least four of us to carry it off.
Someone else organized it. I didn’t have the planning, technical, or leadership skills. We were all from the east end of the second floor of Goodhue Hall. At least three of us were sophomores.
The Prank:
About 3 am we went outside (likely after playing bridge in the east lounge until all hours). We sat out on the hill on the north side of Goodhue and watched. We waited until the lights went off on the fourth floor, and then we waited another 15 minutes or so.
Step 1. We went in and up to the fourth floor. At the top of each stairwell, someone (I don’t remember doing this myself but I probably participated after receiving instructions) removed the doorknobs from the doors leading from the hallways to the stairwells on the fourth floor. This was the dangerous part. If there had been a fire, the men there would have had difficulty escaping. They could have, but it still gives me the creeps. We left the doorknobs in the phone booths out in the stairwells. Then we signaled to a person on the hill that we had done step one.
Step 2. The power boxes with circuit breakers were also in the stairwells, next to the telephones (I can’t remember if they were next to the telephones for each floor or if all of them were outside the phones on the first floor). On a signal from someone with a flashlight on the hill, each of us who was inside, turned off all the power on the fourth floor. There had to be three of us, one for each stairwell; it was probably the same three who removed the doorknobs. Then we went to the stairwell windows and signaled to the person we had done it.
Step 3. On the next signal from the person on the hill, we all went to the phone on the first floor in our respective stairwell and called the phone in that same stairwell on the fourth floor.
No one could answer the phones because they couldn’t open the doors to the stairwells. Furthermore they couldn’t see what they were doing because the power was off.
We sat on the hill and watched as slowly people tried to turn on lights but couldn’t, found flashlights, then tried to get to the phones. Eventually at each stairwell, someone managed to use some sort of tool to open the door. The first time that happened, we took off.
For some bizarre (some would say sick) reason, I've always been impressed by the planning and co-ordination required to pull off a caper like this.
Former student David Henderson makes this point clearly in a recent post at EconLog. He points out that many of the people in the top 1% are professionals whose positions are protected by laws that restrict entry and keep out the competition. Quoting Jonathan Rothwell, he notes,
For lawyers, doctors, and dentists-- three of the most over-represented occupations in the top 1 percent--state-level lobbying from professional associations has blocked efforts to expand the supply of qualified workers who could do many of the "professional" job tasks for less pay....
Proportion of lawyers in the top 1 percent? 15 percent....[EE: Shakespeare comes to mind]...
Proportion of physicians and surgeons in the top 1 percent? 31 percent. ...
Proportion of dentists in the top 1 percent? 21 percent.
Please check either David's post or Rothwell's paper for explanation and details.
I might be tempted to add tenured university professors to the group. I know tenure isn't explicitly a statutory provision, but it has similar effects. I hope David will consider including them/us in his forthcoming research.
Interestingly, it isn't raw, nasty, big-corporation monopoly that David is talking about; it's monopolies created by gubmnt, particularly barriers to competition in the professions.
As Harold Demsetz once wrote many years ago [paraphrased from memory], "the major cause of monopoly is government."
Professors at Columbia University have taken sides, with some pro-BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] and other anti-BDS.
The Elder of Ziyon has an interesting take on the split:
Of the 69 Columbia professors who signed a pro-BDS petition. 15 of them work in the anthropology department, six in philosophy, 13 in Middle East studies, two in Gender & Sexuality Studies, four in art history, six in history and eight in English, and only one in law.
The pro-Israel petition, on the other hand, has 26 signatures from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, 75 from the Columbia Medical Center, 27 from the Law School, and many others in the engineering and other medical fields.
In other words, the professors who support Israel are overwhelmingly specialists in fields where the truth often means the difference between life and death, and the ones who are anti-Israel largely do their work in fields where truth is a quaint and elastic concept.
The Fraser Institute has just released its ranking of Ontario's secondary schools. It is a convenient and easily searched ranking. Click here.
As has long been the case, London's Central Secondary is near the top (ranked second of 676 high schools). Interestingly, the new catholic school on the north end of town is ranked reasonably highly for being a new school.
Also, I see that what many parents believed to be the case still holds in Clinton: St. Anne's significantly outranks Central Huron high school, which is roughly on a par with the Goderich secondary school.
In the summer of 2012, I gave a public lecture at The University of Regina. In that lecture I criticized higher education because most people don't remember much of what they studied as undergraduates. As an alternative, I emphasized signaling theories of education. I also emphasized the importance of learning-by-doing and the importance of learning from one's own mistakes.
Below is a link to the lecture on YouTube. Unfortunately, the technician forgot to turn the microphone on until the 26-minute mark. So you will miss the introductory remarks by Hafiz Akhand, who was the economics department chair out there at the time. You will also miss my own introduction in which I chronicle all the evidence I had from my own life about everything I may have learned but then quickly forgot. Here is a snippet from the notes I had prepared for that talk:
Old exam story. Saw an intermediate theory exam I’d taken as an undergrad. “Did I know that then? I don’t remember having studied or learned that.”
Disclaimer and personal history.
The fact that I didn’t learn or retain much as an undergrad would surprise none of my undergraduate professors. Ds in two econ courses, Failed a math course, barely passed and barely graduated. Majored in bridge and the identity crisis, and if there’d been an exam in bridge, I’d probably have failed that.
Re-took all the math. Even after only three years, remembered very little.
Okay, okay, I remembered a few things. Dy/dx when y = xn
Virtually no Russian. No Henry James. No Plato, etc. No chem-phys. A bit of Hemmingway. One specific paragraph from Tropic of Cancer that I won’t recite for you now.
Not much econ, really. One item that I remembered and that stood out was the result of a phone call to my prof. Technology change. Used it in gradskool.
Micro theory? Bad sense of analytic geometry by prof. Also methodology (and Machiavelli).
Money and banking? A lot of IS-LM and a prof who looked out the window and cancelled classes.
As I said, I was a bad student, but I think I was fairly typical. How many of you remember very much from the undergrad courses you took (aside from, but maybe even including, fields in which you have continued to work?)
Another example from a different realm: It may be old age, but when I look back at some of the things I wrote the blog 7-9 years ago, I think, “Really? I don’t remember that.” The point I’m making is that memory deteriorates, even with continued refreshing. In Econ speak, if memory is a capital good, like a machine, it deteriorates over time, and (speaking as a senior citizen) it requires continued gross investment to keep it working.
So suppose we do remember very little and use practically none of what we may have learned. What does that imply about higher ed?
Before I try to answer that,
Teaching experiences and thresholds for law and biz.: Experiences at UWO: 70 for bizskool, 80 for lawskool numbers have changed but the idea is still the same.
Couldn’t let them through unless they had demonstrated….. what? That they had learned enough?
Well that fits in nicely with the “human K theory of ed”
But does it follow if we don’t remember any/much of what we are taught? And what if what we DO remember has nothing to do with our future productivity?
What I seem to be moving toward is a challenge of the “human capital theory” of education, which says we get education, at least in part, so we will be more productive in the future.
Those are just the notes for the first 26 minutes. If you would like to see the entire set of notes, I'll be happy to send them to you. Just write me or post a comment requesting them.
And here is the link to the YouTube video [it's about 1 hour and 41 minutes long. I think the last 35-40 minutes are questions-and-answers.
Friends will recognize two things (aside from my general lack of gift of glib):
The necktie. A colleague and I bought a bunch of them on sale and distributed them among our colleagues at The University of Regina, dubbing them "the official economics department necktie."
Much of my thinking on this topic was heavily influenced not just by my own experiences and by those of my friends and students, but also by the posts of Bryan Caplan at Econlog. See the links to his posts here.
Finally, let me say that I was really pleased with this lecture. I'm glad I was finally able to salvage this much of it.
Apparently Bernie Sanders is sucking up to the irresponsible student vote by urging that massive student debt should be forgiven.
Phhtt.
A policy like that will only encourage more students to take out more loans to major in socionomology at places like York or Calgary. If he wants to enlarge student aid, he should outright favour more needs-based grants, not forgive loans that students have committed to repay.
As Ted Frank has said on Facebook (actually Twitter, but I saw it on FB),
"Crushing debt" is a very good sign that you shouldn't be incurring it. Debt [is] only crushing if degree not worth cost.
And in response to a question about positive externalities arising from higher education (i.e. positive social benefits from having more students attend college or university), Ted responds,
In 2015, it seems to me that the majority of higher education creates negative externalities. College-educated millenials support Bernie Sanders, which shows a real failure of education.
Last night I was doing a show in Sarnia, about an hour west of London. After the show, I met Bert. He told me he had been an economics student in one of my classes at UWO back in the early 1970s. He said that he wasn't surprised to see me acting now since I'd had a bit of a flair for presentation way back then.
I probably looked something like this when Bert was in my class:
I have long been opposed to proposed boycotts of Israeli and Jewish scholars by those who disagree with Israel's policies in the Middle East. I've been writing about my opposition off and on for over a decade on my blog. I even went so far as to acquire affiliations with Bar-iLan and Haifa universities.
I recently learned of a group of scholars that has been created and which reflects my views. Steve Horwitz writes,
I do not support the BDS movement's attempts to quash academic discourse, put a stop to intellectual exchange, and turn scholarly work into a political tool. I will not join their boycott of Israeli academics or those of any other country. Boycotts can be legitimate and effective tools, but not when they are used against innocent people to punish them for the actions of their governments.
Because of that, some friends and I made this. I know that not all of you will agree with us. I hope that those of you who do will sign your names and share this widely.
Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek has recently had some excellent posts about what belongs in a well-taught introductory economics course. Calculus is not a prerequisite for understanding these concepts, nor is even much more than basic arithmetic and algebra (for the examples, not the concepts).
Note well that these ten points are different from the ten main points put forth by Greg Mankiw in his intro text.
And yet if I tried to argue that these points were the most important to emphasize in an intro course, I'd be hooted down by most economists who seem to think the most important thing to do in an intro course is to prepare students for advanced courses.
I disagree with that approach for the very simple reason that most students who take an intro course do not go on to take advanced courses.
Here is Professor Boudreaux's list:
[A] well-taught principles course ... is one that teaches, and teaches well, at least ten vital foundational lessons:
(1) the world is full of both desirable and undesirable unintended consequences – consequences that are largely invisible but that even a course in ‘mere’ principles of economics gives us great vision that enables us to “see,”
(2) intentions are not results;
(3) our world is unavoidably one of trade-offs and not “solutions,”
(4) market-determined prices
(4a) are not arbitrary,
(4b) connect millions of strangers to each other in productive ways that almost none of these strangers are aware of, and
(4c) cannot, save under the rarest of unrealistic circumstances, be controlled by government without causing consequences quite the opposite of those that are ostensibly desired,
(5) productive and sustainable complex economic order emerges without design or intention,
(6) individuals respond to incentives,
(7) individuals, and not collectives, choose and act,
(8) wealth is not fixed in amount (and it is not money),
(9) government officials are no smarter or better-motivated than are people operating in the private sector, and
(10) the economy is inconceivably more complex than someone with a poor understanding of economics realizes – so complex that the promises of social engineers are revealed to be fantastic delusions.
A good principles-of-economics course teaches us to appreciate the marvels of the spontaneous market order and, in doing so, teaches humility. Sadly, far too many advanced courses in economics teach the opposite: by their whiteboard rendering of economies as GDP-producing machines, such “advanced” courses instill the mistaken notion that economies are far simpler than they really are. It would be much closer to the truth to say that most of what you learn in Econ 800 is wrong, for in too many cases it dilutes or destroys the truths you learned in a good Econ 101 course.
The most recent reports say there is a crisis in child services in the United States. The cost of daycare spaces has reached absolutely astronomic levels. Placement at the University of Missouri, for example, easily breaks the $40,000 threshold. And if your toddler is lucky enough to squeeze into Yale, which has some of the most craven caregivers, the most swaddled cocoons and safe spaces on the continent, it will set you back a minimum $60,000. But hey, if you want the very best day care for the intellectually infantile at any of the top Institutes of Higher Whining, that’s why God gave you noses — so you could pay through them.
Parents are rightly grieved. “The fees are unbelievable,” said one parent. “And then there’s the cost of bubble wrap, organically-sourced pacifiers, printing out the tidal surge of trigger-warnings, the personal grievance manual (Why I’m Angry and Acting Out, Today) and the escalating costs of updating the daily identity politics kit. And of course the helicopter rides to check on little Brent or Stephanie, they really hit the home budget.”
It’s sad, but the Higher Whining and Advanced Fatuousness of American campus life takes a lot of mommy and daddy’s moola.
There's more in a similar vein at the link. Enjoy!
My former student David Henderson posted about what he loves about teaching economics. It is a beautiful posting. It captures so much about what I loved when I was teaching.
Another excerpt [from a posting by Steven Landsburg about Dierdre McClosky]:
Rising food prices or rising oil prices can't explain inflation, at least not by the mechanisms most people imagine. A frost in Florida won't cause a shortage of oranges. When there's an increase in the price of steel, car prices will rise by less if the auto industry is monopolized than if the auto industry is competitive--though several members of the president's Council of Economic Advisors had believed otherwise.
Steven's whole piece reminded me of why I'm looking forward, at age 64, to starting my new class next week. I never tire of teaching some of the things mentioned above...
One of the things I tell my students, whose median age is about 31 and who (at least many of them) have seen more of the world than I have, is "you'll learn things you never knew you never knew."
Then between the first and second hours of class, to bring them back into the room, I play this song by Norah Jones. And no, I'm not saying that I will kiss my students. (I do hug.) It's just my way of communicating that we're going to go on a wonderful adventure together. [emphasis added. What a great way to think about teaching price theory!]
I spent too much time in my introductory economics classes trying to cover too many topics. Here is a good example.
I covered this topic in all my classes. I wish I had gone through it more, repeatedly, and made sure every student understood it well enough that they could explain it to their parents. From Scott Sumner:
One of the basic principles of public finance is that it makes no difference whether a tax is legally borne by the buyer or seller. The burden of the tax will depend on the relative elasticity of supply and demand, and the economic incidence of a tax doesn't depend at all on the legal incidence. Stephen Gordon did a post discussing this issue, and provided a nice set of graphs for comparison: In this case most of the burden of the tax falls on buyers, in the form of higher prices. But his post also shows the opposite case, which is more likely to apply to labor markets (where sellers of labor, i.e. workers, are believed to absorb most of the burden of a payroll tax, whatever its legal incidence (which is 50-50 in the US.))
I have often summarized this result as the "Bill Murray" result, quoting from his chant in the not-so-famous camp movie, "Meatballs",
It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!
If all students learned this, and if they could see that it doesn't take long for the new equilibrium to be attained regardless of where a tax is imposed, they would likely understand a heckuva lot more economics.
[Reposted, even though I haven't taught at the university level for 2 years]
Through a series of fortuitous events, I am once again teaching at The University of Regina. But this time for only the fall term (no more winters in Saskatchewan for me!). After my experiences last year (and as I rethink my experiences over the past 74 years of teaching), I have decided, once again, to revise my open letter to students.
To my students:
University is different from high school: you have to work.... really hard if you want to learn much. You have to read, you have to study, you have to think. If you don't do these things, you will likely fail or receive a low mark. I'm appalled by how little work students seem to think they should do in university.
Reading all the material and going to class does not guarantee you an A or even a B unless you are considerably above average in ability. You actually have to study too. I expect you to do about two hours of work out of class for every hour in class.
If you miss class, please do not ask me if anything important happened. I wouldn't give the lecture if I didn't think it was important. What do you expect me to answer?
“Yes, actually, on the one day you missed I decided to give a pop quiz that counts for 20% of your course mark. Then we discussed the answers to the upcoming final exam, and then I gave everybody real, not invisible, chocolate chip cookies. Too bad you missed it.”
In my 74 years as a prof, I've probably heard most excuses: Deaths in the family, apartment fires, tears on command, cars breaking down, feigning symptoms of depression, computer crash, you name it: I either knew someone who used it or have had to deal with it. I have a pretty good feeling for when you are trying to bull$hit me, so don’t try. And while I am very sympathetic if your excuse is legitimate, I am ruthless if you lie to me. (For example, see this).
Computer crashes are your responsibility, not mine. Begin your online quizzes long before they are due. For projects or term papers, back up your work: use Dropbox, Google Docs, a USB stick or something.
If you plagiarize work for my course, I will report you, and I will fail you in the course, and I may try to get you expelled from the university (as I did several years ago with one student whose offence was repeated and flagrant). Don't plagiarize. I will catch you even if TurnItIn.com doesn't.
Cell phones are disruptive. Please turn them off before you come to class. If yours rings in class, you will have to leave. In fact, because of past disruptions from students playing games or text messaging, if your cell phone is on your desk or in your lap, you will have to leave class, regardless of whether you are actually using it.
The same thing applies to laptop computers or iTouch web-surfers and the like. Don't bother bringing your laptop to class because I will just ask you to close it and put it away. If you really would rather spend your class time surfing the internet, just change majors to hydraulic socionomology or transfer to York (or Calgary).
And while we're on "don'ts", please do not eat in class. Doing so is very distracting to the students around you.
During the lectures and discussions, I may seem fun and amusing, but that does not mean my tests are easy. My exams can be hard.
My classes are not like Canadian Parliament --- heckling is not permitted.
Please do not send me nasty e-mails about an exam or mark when you are fired-up and angry or in a drunken stupor at 4am. Believe me, you will regret it the next day.
I'm getting old and forgetful. Please forgive me if I tell the same story more than once.
Incompletes are for students who, for legitimate, documented reasons, could not finish the class. If you don't like your grade, you may not take an incomplete. And, no, I do not give "makeup" exams so students can try to raise their marks.
If you take the midterms and do badly, and then don't drop the class, and then come back 3 months later and try to act as if you were never in my class and you want me to sign a form, I won't. I'm a pushover for many things, but that does not include unwillingness to accept responsibility for your own actions or inactions.
If you are failing this course, do not make sly little suggestions about what you might do to earn a passing grade. You are failing the course — why should I think your performance would be better in any other areas? Besides, I'm too old to care.
If I see you out on the town or at the sports bar, and you want to buy me a drink, you cannot currently be in my classes or ever take any of my classes again. Then probably you can buy me a drink.
If you see me out on the town or in a mall or whatever, and you're too shy to come over and say "Hello", we'll develop an official course gesture that will stand for, "Hi. I'm in your class."
When you tell me, “I’m getting kicked out of school because of the grade I got in your class,” this might make me feel bad, but it certainly makes me question whether this is the first/only bad grade you have ever received.
If you come to see me because you are worried about your grade, and you use all the study suggestions that I might provide, and I really honestly believe that you are trying hard but you are still getting a bad grade, I will wish I had the courage and integrity to tell you that not everyone is meant for university, and in my curmudgeonly dotage, I just might!
If you ask a stupid question in class, I will try not to laugh at your question. I apologize if I do. After all, I shudder whenever I think of all the stupid questions I have asked (but which helped me learn).
In fact, please ask all the questions you want in class. I learn from my mistakes, and I suspect that most other folks do, too, so ask away. If I see anyone so much as roll an eye, I will pull them aside after class and tell them their behaviour is inappropriate. If it is a very large class, though, and your questions seem to be dominating the class discussion, I may have to ask you to save some for after class.
And, please, if you liked my class, if you feel that it changed the way you think, if you learned a lot, if you were challenged, please tell me. Because people in our economy face limited resources and time, seeing the lights go on for you is what keeps me going. I love teaching, and I am clearly not in it for the money. Actually, this last item goes for all your professors.
"I really enjoy your site, and I'm planning to assign your blog to my students. I love to find "real world" examples to supplement the text, and your blog is terrific for that. Thanks for writing it!" -- J.A.B.
