AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

The Collegian, the independent student newspaper of the University of Tulsa has a story covering a political phil course without grades. Hooray!  As an alum of a school without grades, I can testify to the educational benefits of removing grades from the curriculum. It looks, however, that it will simply a reading group offered 'extracurricularly'.  Seriously disappointing.

The Collegian Online: Grade-less political philosophy class offered next semester

It “is intended for the intellectual benefit of those who wish to participate,” Hittinger said, in an announcement about the reading group. “No grades, no tests, no papers. Just reading and conversation.”

Lou Marinoff at CCNY has a confessional on insidehigered.com about last year's search:
Career Advice: Inside a Search - Inside Higher Ed
It is, in my mind, the best example of what's wrong with the discipline. Marinoff should be commended for being honest. We know everyone does this crap, but he's the only one admitting it.  Here's the problem.  The mission of CCNY is:

The City College of New York (CCNY), the first college of The City University of New York (CUNY), is a comprehensive teaching, research, and service institution dedicated to accessibility and excellence in undergraduate and graduate education. Requiring demonstrated potential for admission and a high level of accomplishment for graduation, the College provides a diverse student body with opportunities to achieve academically, creatively, and professionally in the liberal arts and sciences and in professional fields such as engineering, education, architecture, and biomedical education. The College is committed to fostering student-centered education and advancing knowledge through scholarly research. As a public university with public purposes, it also seeks to contribute to the cultural, social, and economic life of New York. (from http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/prospective/about/index.cfm

And Marinoff's criteria for the 'long list' of people who got face-to-face interviews were:  read more »

I caught this story on PRI's 'The World' tonight:
Apology campaign for British Nazi code-breaker | PRI's The World
It's about fucking time. (sorry, but I think that is a perfectly appropriate use of the expletive).

The petition, which is limited to citizens of the UK, is here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing.

I'm either behind the curve, or this has sparked an internet wildfire. The hits on google just keep growing. Here's a sample of the coverage:

Pardon for Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing? - Channel 4 News (8/19)

RichardDawkins.net Forum • View topic - Alan Turing - Campaign for government pardon and apology (8/19)  read more »

BB&T, which has donated a significant amount of money to a number of different colleges in exchange for teaching Ayn Rand, just donated $500 million to Queens college for the same purpose:
BB&T donates $500K to Queens University - Charlotte Business Journal:

“However, capitalism is perceived to be either amoral or immoral. How can an immoral economic system produce a better outcome? We believe there needs to be a deeper understanding of the morality of capitalism.”

Allison said he believes the best moral defense of capitalism is presented in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, and he is interested in seeing Rand’s philosophy of objectivism become more widely discussed in academia.

You will no doubt remember back in Feb when Darryl Hale, professor at Western Carolina University, raised objections to BB&T's donation. Is there any ethical basis for the equivalence of product placement in the curriculum?  This practice, I fear, corrupts us all - for if we don't accept such money, we'll fall behind. Worse yet, everyone will assume that we have.  It's a bit like accusations of 'liberal bias'. We fear the accusations so much we tamper our critiques of conservative positions and allow bullshit into the classroom in the name of hearing both sides.

The NY Times had an article last week (5/17) on the rise of cheater-enabling sites like coursehero.com, cramster, koofers.com, and sparknotes.  These sites are worrisome enough, but here's my primary concern. The columbia student that the NY Times interviewed said:

Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Click Here. - NYTimes.com

“Many professors who return homework won’t tell you how you got it wrong — just that it’s wrong. This way you can complete the feedback process, which is essential to learning.”

Uh... Yeah. That's the point of grading. Isn't it? Am I missing something here? Do other faculty actually turn papers back without giving feedback?  Is that why I see all my colleagues relaxing in the week before grades are due? Isn't providing feedback on student work the central task of teaching?

Shelia J Curran, consultant and "former executive director of the Duke University Career Center and served in a similar role at Brown University", has an article in Business week titled:

Philosophy Majors: Get a Job - BusinessWeek
She concludes, roughly, that experience in the work-world is more important than intellectual achievement when it comes to hiring decisions, and hence:  read more »

Erasmo Clazadilla, a self-described 33-year old teacher of Phil at the University of Havana tells of the difficulty of teaching Philosophy in Cuba today.  While the story is certainly not complete here, he claims that one of the problems motivating and/or excusing his dismissal from the University was that his students couldn't tell what Philosophy was. Of course, we all know that Philosophy is:

...a science, the mother of all others, studying the most general laws of reality and thought, and that it establishes the relationship between being and thinking. This science, they say, is above all concerned with establishing whether the material or the spiritual is primary, and that true philosophy-ours, Marxist and revolutionary, confirmed by the advances of science-establishes that being determines thought.

The Philosophy that I Liked to Teach (I) - Havana Times.org

Even without knowing the full details of the story, I have to say that I stand by Clazadilla.

MSU's TA assistant center has a document reporting the most irritating behaviors by professors. The data is pretty unreliable--it is based on a survey of 50 students at the HUGE Michigan State U, (45K students according to Carnegie), and doesn't rank-order the results. However, the traits that show up MORE than 20% of the time are:

(1) Show up late for class.
(7) Don't show up for office hours.
(8) Make students feel stupid. ("Put down", "Inferior", "Dumb", "Lack of respect")
(10) Write on the board but block the information (Also, talk to the board).
(14) Don't get to know students.
(22) Don't follow the syllabus.

Here's the link:
http://tap.msu.edu/PDF/thoughts/tt10.pdf (application/pdf Object)

I'll finish this with one of my standard pithy comments: that's why students shouldn't go to schools of 45K. They should go to small colleges, where the professors are (1) always in class, and if not, just across the hall, (7) Pretty much always in their offices. (8) Rarely make students feel stupid (unless they deserve it), (10) don't use board (much) (14) know our students (how could we not?) and (22) vary wildly from the syllabus frequently. Well, that last one is universal, I suspect.

It's on the problem of University education, not undergraduate education, so it isn't directly relevant to my normal topics, but Mark Taylor's op-ed yesterday points out a commonly-known number of problems with the university model. His suggestions for fixing those problems include:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions.

Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com

I think I've heard this somewhere before. Wait. Maybe... Evergreen? Or was it Dewey? Or my long-suffering alma mater Antioch? Or just the basic notion of liberal education for which all small, liberal arts colleges strive? Maybe he should have just said "Don't go to universities. Go to colleges." And saved the planet all that ink and paper.

 read more »

I usually avoid ethical topics on this blog because there are too many to follow and ethics isn't my area of interest or teaching. However, I noticed this article in the Chronicle today by Robert J Sternberg, dean and professor of psychology at Tufts:

A New Model for Teaching Ethical Behavior - ChronicleReview.com

...eight steps of behaving ethically:

1. Recognize that there is an event to react to.
2. Define the event as having an ethical dimension.
3. Decide that the ethical dimension is significant.
4. Take responsibility for generating an ethical solution to the problem.
5. Figure out what abstract ethical rule(s) might apply to the problem.
6. Decide how abstract ethical rules actually apply to the problem, in order to suggest a concrete solution.
7. Formulate an ethical solution, at the same time possibly preparing to counteract contextual forces that might lead you to act unethically.
8. Act.

Seriously. This is "New"?  Like... to Plato?  Honestly. What is "new" here? The idea of putting them into a checklist? How can teaching students to follow a prescribed checklist possibly train students to "Take responsibility" (3) or "Recognize" that ethical issues arise where they might not expect them (1)?  read more »