I wasn't surprised to read that a majority of college presidents say that people from outside of higher education are less likely to be successful at leading colleges. Flip the question around and nobody would argue. Would a lifetime academic be likely to be better at running a Fortune 500 company than someone from within the industry?  

Of course not. The rules of engagement are different. But for some reason, recognition of that seems to run mostly in one direction.

Part of it, I think, is that most people don't give much thought to the difference between running a public college and running a public company. Their goals are different, their cultures are different, and their accountabilities are different.  I saw the clash firsthand when I worked at DeVry, which tried to be both a college and a company. At the time -- and I don't know if this is still true -- it finessed the clash by having different reporting lines: the admissions office on campus didn't report to the campus president. It reported directly to Home Office. "Sales" (meaning admissions) and "operations" (meaning academics) had different bosses, even on the same campus.  

When enrollments were climbing, it sort of worked. Yes, there were clashes around allowing students who had flunked out to re-enroll, but those were mostly on the margins.  But when enrollments started to drop, and the two sides clashed over which way to go, "sales" always won. Growth papered over all sorts of conflicts, but when the growth reversed itself, the conflicts came roaring back, and the “sales” side always won.

Colleges are less like most businesses than they are like local governments. They can’t just pursue money, or any one good. They have to balance multiple and conflicting goods in the service of a mission that’s both inspiring and hard to measure. Shared governance carries a weight in higher education that it doesn’t in most corporations. (Political scientists will recognize interest-group politics in the context of many curricular battles.) The stakeholders in higher education are far more numerous, and hard to isolate, than shareholders in a corporation.  And in public higher ed, the tension between “shared governance” as shared among members of a campus community and “shared governance” as in sharing with state and local governments raises issues very different from those typically faced in corporate America.

And that’s before addressing, say, tenure and unions.  In the private sector, unions are the exception at this point, and tenure is simply unheard of. In public higher ed, they’re both common. From a management perspective, they change the game fundamentally.

Corporate and collegiate cultures have their own logics and their own virtues. At their best, corporations are insanely productive; at their worst, they’re predatory.  Their wealth comes at the expense of stability. At their best, colleges provide spaces for reflection, experimentation, and learning. At their worst, they’re insular and sclerotic.  Their stability comes at the expense of speed.  Each sector has its place, but they’re different -- and rightly so -- because they serve different purposes.

Trustees more often come from the business world than from the education world. In an unfamiliar setting, it can be tempting to go with what they know. Presidents who speak “business” can “sound right” to trustees who haven’t taken the time to think through what makes the sector different. That works until it very much doesn’t, as in the case of Simon Newman.  Applying the logic of one sector to the innards of the other tends to end in tears. Worse, the people doing the damage honestly think they’re right. That’s why they keep going until forced to stop.  

Leaders in higher ed -- and especially public higher ed -- have to be fluent in both idioms. If they can help trustees, politicians, and other stakeholders understand education’s needs in terms that make sense to them, everyone can win. But pretending that a college is a car dealership does justice to neither. And that’s true in both directions.

An essay in The Wall Street Journal and similar essays elsewhere have set off a debate over whether Vassar College tolerates anti-Semitism. The recent discussion centers around comments made by a guest speaker criticizing Israel in ways that some say crossed a line into anti-Semitism. Those accounts also state that the speaker asked the audience not to record her comments, so there is not a definitive record of what was said. The Wall Street Journal piece, "Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar," is by Mark G. Yudof, former president of the University of California system, and Ken Waltzer, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes the movement to boycott Israel.

Not everyone agrees that Vassar has a problem with anti-Semitism. Abigail Johnson, a junior at Vassar and president of the Vassar Jewish Union, published an essay in The Forward, a Jewish publication, this week in which she described a vibrant Jewish life at Vassar with no more anti-Semitism than one might find in all parts of American society.

Catharine Hill, president of Vassar, has invited alumni and parents to an online discussion of the issues Thursday. She said that the authors of the Journal piece were off base in their criticisms and that she had invited them to campus to see for themselves. Further, while not commenting on the substance of the guest speaker's talk, Hill wrote, "Just as I objected to the call for the American Studies Association boycott of Israeli academic institutions, I will defend the faculty’s right to bring speakers of their choice to campus. I also will let the faculty who invited the recent lecturer speak for themselves."

photo courtesy of Bill Smith

I recently had a fascinating conversation with Rebecca Kennison about the ambitious project she and Lisa Norberg first described publicly in a white paper back in 2014. They examined the complex landscape within which scholarly research is published and came up with a plan to build a new system for funding humanities and social sciences publishing that would make it open to all while preserving it for the future. Their plan is breathtakingly audacious. It’s also thoughtful and respectful of the interests and concerns of all stakeholders. Essentially, the plan is a way to say “we can make all humanities and social sciences research open if we want to. But every institution of higher learning will have to chip in.”

The Open Access Network (OAN) is turning the white paper’s key idea into action. It has already gathered some institutional partners and recruited some pilot non-profit publishers that want to make the shift to open access but currently don’t have the financial means to do so. At the same time, the OAN is continually exploring the complexities of publishing in these fields with humanists, social scientists, and their scholarly societies.

We’re nearing a tipping point in scholarly publishing. Neither scholars nor the general public has access to a lot of the work being produced by academics, and publishing just for the sake of adding lines to a CV is no longer an acceptable cost of doing academic business. Assuming a critical mass of scholars will have access to research libraries that can afford to provide nearly everything is not realistic or sustainable, even though libraries spend enormous amounts of money trying to provide as much access as possible with rising costs and shrinking budgets. The idea of open access is gaining traction among scholars, and any number of experiments are under way to develop new ways of making it possible.

Big commercial publishers have seen the writing on the wall and are busy launching new open access journals and doubling their bets by offering so-called “hybrid” journals – ones that make money on subscriptions and then make more money by setting individual articles free for a price. Last year, a staffer at Nature Publishing Group told me that their journals now published more open access articles than paywalled articles. It’s becoming the new normal in the some fields.  

Scientists in many disciplines can build the cost of open access publishing into grants, and increasingly funders require that research results be open to all and are willing to pay for it. But – surprise! – there isn’t a lot of cash available to fund the publication of humanities and social sciences research. The “author pays” (more accurately, the “author wrangles the money from someone else to pay”) model of financing publication isn’t going to work. Nor can we rely entirely on ad hoc volunteer efforts or even well-planned and thoughtfully financed projects of limited scope. We need a sustainable system for scholarship writ large. The one we developed for a print era when public funding of higher education was generous is over. Luckily, we have new ways of sharing knowledge. We just have to make the shift, somehow.

Librarians have known the old system was unsustainable for years and have thrown themselves into library-supported publishing. Many institutions have repositories where faculty can post their work. Many provide labor and software support for publishing open access journals and books. However, all this work hasn’t replaced the broken system. It has created more avenues for publishing, but it’s a parallel universe, not a fix. Besides, this isn’t a library problem for libraries to solve. It’s a higher education problem. We need all hands on deck to fix it.  

Rebecca argues that thinking big about the entire system, not creating piecemeal solutions, is what is needed now. The OAN will be focused on bringing together scholars, their societies, university presses, and institutions of higher learning of every size and stripe to build a new infrastructure to fund “open everything” – journals, books, digital projects, open textbooks and other learning materials. This is an attempt to think holistically about what an open world of knowledge looks like.

In brief, the idea is for all institutions of higher learning, regardless of size or mission, to contribute to a common centrally-managed fund which will disburse resources to publishers – societies, university presses, and others – to pay for the publication and preservation of research. Though there are many moving parts to this model, it’s designed to be a big-picture process for engaging institutions in supporting an open, transparent, sustainable, and durable infrastructure for scholarship. The first step is to model this infrastructure with early-adopter institutions and scholarly societies. Then, the OAN will encourage wide adoption by institutions, based on their size and taking into account contributions they have already made to open access through establishing repositories, supporting publishing, or investing in various open access projects such as Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, and Lever Press.

Though institutions are currently used to taking a competitive stance, this collaborative support for openness should be attractive even in a self-interested way. Our graduates are currently shut out of the expensive resources that institutions provide to currently enrolled students at great expense. Wouldn't they be happier if that funding meant they had continual access? It should appeal to the public, which has lost faith in the competitive and costly way higher education works today.

The OAN doesn’t lack chutzpah. It hopes to recruit half of higher education institutions to pay into a common fund by 2018. Ambitious? Yes. But I can’t think of any other project that has thought through the entire landscape of scholarly publishing as thoroughly as OAN.

I suspect one reason Rebecca is able to see the big picture while working out the nitty-gritty details is that she has seen scholarly publishing from many angles. After a few years of teaching English courses at the college level, she became the managing editor of Cell and worked as a production manager at Blackwell. She worked for database companies (remember Silver Platter?) in the early days of making print research digital, and later became Director of Production at PLoS – a ground-breaking open access science publisher. More recently, she was Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University. She knows scholarly publishing from many angles and is a dab hand at project management.  

While this is a very large project to manage, it’s exciting to see such a big-picture attempt to build a new framework for a new way of communicating scholarship that will be open by default. It’s not realistic to assume that business as usual will go on. The OAN is thinking about the whole process, from creation and innovation of new publishing platforms to preservation of the record, working out a map for how to build and sustain new kinds of publishing that meet the needs of all stakeholders through collaboration and a commitment to openness. I’m impressed, and I hope it gathers a lot of support in coming years.

An influential Republican state senator has criticized Ray Cross, president of the University of Wisconsin System, for meeting with student leaders last week to talk about how to improve the climate for minority students, The Wisconsin State Journal reported. Steve Nass, vice chairman of the Senate University and Technical Colleges Committee, issued a press release in which he said Cross shouldn't have held the meeting. "President Cross needs to stop wasting time appeasing the political correctness crowd demanding safe spaces, safe words, universal apologies for hurt feelings and speech/thought police," Nass said in a press release he issued.

A university system spokesman declined to comment on the statement.

Occasionally, one hears grumbling from faculty who assign writing in their courses about the apparent lack of preparation of students to successfully execute those assignments. They wonder what’s happening in the general education writing courses when so many students seem to arrive in without the skills necessary to succeed at college-level writing, particularly research-based analytical work.

As an instructor of first-year writing it can be hard not to take these things personally.

I do my best to help students succeed for the future writing occasions they’ll confront in college and beyond, but the truth is, I cannot properly prepare them for what’s coming.

Semester’s end causes me to consider why this is the case.

So, some thoughts on why I cannot effectively prepare students to write their (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) papers.[1]

1. First-year writing is only one semester long.[2]

2. The students are young or inexperienced or both, and writing is a skill that develops over our lifetimes, not a semester. We are all works in progress. The notion that a first-year writing course is a kind of vaccine that prevents bad writing going forward is a fantasy. (We do not expect this expertise of students in other types of writing courses. Having taken a single creative writing course, students are not expected to become published authors.)

3. Many students arrive in the college classroom with writing processes stunted by a near-exclusive diet writing in the context of standardized assessment. They are armed with the 5-paragraph essay and an ability to parrot existing information. The shift to writing analysis and argument is very very difficult, and a semester (or even a year) is not enough time for this to happen.

4. One of the biggest reasons students have a hard time writing analysis and argument is because they often don’t have sufficient subject and domain expertise about what is being argued. They can describe what someone else says, but don’t yet have the knowledge to build upon that information. I see this time and again in the analytical research papers I assign as students struggle to insert their ideas into debates they’re not yet prepared to join. If your (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) course is the first time they’ve encountered your field, they will struggle.

5. If I am successful, students exit my course armed with a flexible and adaptable writing process rooted in an analysis of the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, genre), but when they encounter a new genre they often regress, often in every dimension, even down to the sentence level.

6. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that students do not understand the genre you are asking them to write within. Inside of our own fields, we usually have thoroughly internalized genre conventions to the point that we don’t even think about them.

7. But to students, the genre of a (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) paper is entirely new.

8. Actually, it’s worse. It’s not entirely new, but somewhat familiar, which means they will trot out the closest template with which they’re comfortable and try to use that. Rather than making choices rooted in a rhetorical situation, they fall back to “rules” that may or may not apply.

9. When faculty in other disciplines complain that students “can’t even write a decent sentence,” (likely true when looking at the actual assignments), the problem is not that students don’t know grammar and syntax, but because they are struggling badly with making meaning, and because they have no idea what they’re trying to say, why they’re trying to say it, or to whom, flailing commences.

I don’t mean this list as an excuse for unprepared or underperforming students. No one wants student writing to be better than the first-year writing instructor, but my time in the trenches tells me that we could be doing more to help students achieve success.

Occasionally I get asked for advice on assigning writing in non-English courses. I say the following.

1. Help students understand the genre they are writing in. They should know not only the genre’s conventions, but the source/rationale behind those conventions. For example, rather than commanding students use a particular citation style, help them see that a citation style is rooted in a specific audience need, that we cite sources so other scholars can come in afterward and check and respond to the work.

2. Rather than listing these conventions as rules, ask students to build them through a process of observation, inference, and analysis through examining examples of the genre. Make them confront all the dimensions of the rhetorical situation (including audience), so that when it is time for them to write, they know who they’re writing to and why.

These are not guarantees of success – as my own struggles teaching first-year writing attest – but they give us a fighting shot.

We can bridge some of the disconnect between what we want students to do and what they think we want them to do, but it’s up to us to build that bridge. And let's not forget that having students struggle is actually an excellent educational outcome.

But that struggle must be meaningful to students, and so even if they are defeated, they are better armed for the next battle.

Like a lot of people, I’m scratching my head over Americans’ apparent capacity to believe six or more impossible things before breakfast. Donald Trump (and others in public life) attract a following in spite of saying things that are demonstrably false (there was no television news report that showed thousands of people in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center) or likely lies (as when Trump claims that when he twitched his arms convulsively and said “you should see this guy,” the guy being a reporter with a disability, he was actually gesturing about ethics in journalism). Yet Trump keeps doing well in polls.*

He’s  not the only one who bends the truth to his will and gets away with it. Too often I hear people explain this credulity by saying “Americans are stupid.” I don’t think, by and large, that they are. What I think has happened is that a sizeable percentage of Americans simply don’t trust social institutions that we have turned to in the past for arbitration. That includes the fourth estate and scholarship. But it's not just distrust of institutions; now I’m wondering whether basic epistemological assumptions about how we should make up our minds – say, through weighing evidence and critically analyzing arguments – are up for grabs.

I’ve seen theories that go beyond “Americans are stupid.” It could be that our current information landscape is as polarized as our politics, that changes in the way we get information tend to cocoon us in a like-minded bubble of affirmation. Google and Facebook are designed to show us things that fit a personal pattern to “improve our experience” , and keep us clicking, so we get stuck in what Eli Pariser calls a Filter Bubble. These systems also seem mapped to consumer choice behavior – we’re encouraged to shop the internet in search of products that satisfy our individual tastes. Others point to the rise of Fox News and the blurring of news, entertainment, and opinion in news media, where news consumers are able to find content that matches their political beliefs, turning political discussion into dramatic tournaments of winners and losers. I wonder, too, how much the political climate that led to the defunding of public higher education, encouraging private-sector-style competition for paying customers, has influenced distrust of educators, scholars, and scientists – and their methods. Or it could simply be psychology. In a culture where winning is so important, it’s striking that a majority of Americans feel their side is losing. We also tend to cling to our beliefs even in the face of the evidence. In fact, being presented with factual counter-evidence can strengthen our original beliefs.  

From a librarian’s perspective, I'm wondering how can we address a situation where the basic epistemological foundations of our practice are up for debate. For academic librarians, the new Framework for Information Literacy has a strong emphasis on context and on making meaning rather than finding and evaluating it in finished form. It’s not so much “here’s how to do it right” as “if you have a critical understanding of how these social systems operate, you’re better positioned to participate and raise questions.” I’m still a bit skeptical that librarians can effect this shift in perspective – it has to be built into students’ coursework – but it invites us to model a more critical and big-picture understanding, from the fifty-minute one-shot instruction session on up.

Public libraries are particularly interesting when it comes to public discourse. Unlike many public institutions, people tend to have a high degree of trust in their local library and in the very idea of libraries as a trustworthy institution. People don’t trust the government,** yet a large majority of Americans think their public library is important to their community and generally give libraries high marks. I can’t think of another public institution that still seems to retain as much trust.

Libraries are both conservative and democratic in a lower-case sense. Rarely are they the site of partisan struggle, and they are open to all and patronized by a diverse demographic. Apart from organized book challenges (a small percentage of requests to remove books from public libraries originate from non-local pressure groups), it’s a space where people seem largely content to let different ideas exist side-by-side, and are willing to share that space with people of different ages and backgrounds. It’s tempting to think this is because libraries don’t profess anything or push an agenda – but they do. They stand for the value of public goods and shared resources. They stand for literacy and self-directed inquiry. They stand for the idea that citizens can make up their own minds without turning it into a contest of wills. That’s kind of radical these days.

I’m not sure if public libraries actually do much to preserve faith in facts, given their non-intervention policy when it comes to patron choice of information, but they do make me hopeful that we can have communal public places that encourage us to think – and don’t write off any segment of the population as too stupid.

*Nate Silver cautions us to approach poll numbers with a grain of mathematical salt – he estimates Trump’s supporters to be around 6-8 percent of the electorate and points out that people historically have changed their minds between the Iowa primary and the election.

**According to a Pew Research poll, 89 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of Democrats say they seldom if ever trust the federal government, though they do think some parts of it work pretty well.  

Geoff Marcy, a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, publicly apologized last week after a university investigation concluded he had repeatedly violated the institution’s sexual harassment policies. The allegations against Marcy involve unwanted physical contact with students over a decade, such as groping, kissing and massages. One of the incidents involved actions by Marcy at a scholarly meeting.

“While I do not agree with each complaint that was made, it is clear that my behavior was unwelcomed [sic] by some women,” Marcy wrote in a letter posted to his university web page. “It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional.”

The investigation, concluded earlier this year, came to light after BuzzFeed obtained a copy. Berkeley said that it gave Marcy “clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,” and that he risked suspension or dismissal if he didn’t follow them.

Astronomy, like other science fields, has been dogged by complaints of gender discrimination. But the American Astronomical Society also has taken a strong stance against harassment, developing a lengthy antiharassment policy. It includes procedures for reporting, investigation and possible disciplinary action by the association.

Fellow scientists expressed their outrage -- if not surprise -- at the news on social media and elsewhere.

“Geoff's inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest open secrets at any exoplanets or AAS meeting,” John Asher Johnson, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a former student of Marcy’s, wrote in a personal blog post, adding that he was sorry he didn’t speak out sooner against what he called his former professor’s “long con.” Johnson and others have said that Marcy’s behavior was enabled by his standing as the world’s most prominent figure in exoplanetary science, the study of planets beyond the solar system. He’s sometimes mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, for example. The New York Times last year called him a “finder of new worlds.”

“‘Underground’ networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe,” Johnson wrote. “Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn't, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.”

Some have criticized Berkeley for not reacting more strongly to the complaints.

Joan Schmelz, a professor of astronomy at the University of Memphis and a former chair of the AAS’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, told BuzzFeed, “I’ve seen sexual harassers get slaps on the wrist before. This isn’t even a slap on the wrist.”

The discipline is taking action of its own. David Charbonneau, another professor of astronomy at Harvard, reportedly asked Marcy not to attend the upcoming meeting of the Extreme Solar Systems III conference at the end of November, and to step down from the organizing committee. Marcy reportedly agreed.

Marcy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Berkeley said in a statement, “We consider this to be a very serious matter and the university has taken strong action.”

Some have called for Marcy to voluntarily step down from work involving students. Kevin Gorman, a recent Berkeley graduate and the university's first Wikipedian-in-residence, for example, wrote in an open letter that he understood doing so might cripple Marcy's lab. But "I don't care," Gorman wrote. "I'm unconvinced that you belong on our campus at all, but you sure as hell don't belong in any role that involves student contact. Redemption is possible, but redemption takes time, not a blame-shifting apology letter and instant forgiveness." 

Johnson said that even if Marcy is "expunged" from astronomy's ranks, the discipline still must defeat its broader sexual harassment problem. 

The three weeks before we left for our vacation in Paris were difficult ones. The psychiatrist friend from whom I sublet my private practice office informed me that the landlord was raising the rent so drastically she can't afford to keep the office. The club where my musical improv team performed every week suddenly discontinued its improv program, also for real estate reasons. We were offered a new venue, but the neighborhood is inconvenient and edgy. Several team members don't want to perform there. We may need to dissolve the team. And a film I am excited about being cast in lost its production company, necessitating new shoot dates that conflict with an important commitment I made months ago.

I have also been dealing with relatively minor, but still pesky, health issues — chronic sinusitis and stomach aches, pain from a bulging disc and microfractures of cervical vertebrae, unexplained low grade fevers. Neither my doctor nor I were particularly alarmed by any of this, but feeling subpar made navigating these professional mini-crises more fraught.

I was worried that I would be ill in Paris. Usually I am a good traveler, but I thought the uncomfortable airline seats, changes in air pressure, different food, and inability to swim daily (the activity that provides the best relief for my back and neck pain) were likely to exacerbate my medical issues. I warned my family not to expect too much from me this trip.

We had a particularly uncomfortable flight over. The seats were even more packed than usual. Ben and I had reserved vegetarian meals, but they ran out before they got to us, so he had potato chips for dinner; I had two glasses of wine. We had a layover in Iceland, but it was after midnight so all of the food kiosks were closed. Ben had potato chips for breakfast as well, and I went hungry.

We arrived at our hotel just in time to miss breakfast. We scrounged some bread and cheese before meeting my nephew and his wife, whom we met for the first time. We were already crazy about my nephew, and we all fell instantly in love with my niece-in-law. We spent the next five days walking around Paris, drinking oceans of coffee and wine, overeating rich food, traveling to Giverny by train and bus, and, mostly, talking  and laughing nonstop. I had a wonderful time, and I felt fine.

It wasn't until I checked my phone in the taxi back from the airport and found a series of emergency texts from my supervisory job that I noticed that my sinus headache and roiling stomach had returned. The following morning I woke up with a serious backache.

I am a psychologist and hypnotherapist. I have studied and worked with the mind-body connection for over 30 years—but sometimes I forget to check my own stress levels. I already meditate, exercise and eat a healthy diet, so I'm not sure what the solution is, other than winning the lottery and spending the rest of my life on vacation with loved ones. It was so nice to have a break, though!

At Macleans, Luc Rinaldi recently covered a lot of ground in “Does Peer Review Do More Harm Than Good?”, pointing out several issues arising from the way we publish today:

• Some journal publishers are allowing papers to go to the head of the peer-review line if they are paid for the expedited service. This undermines the purpose of peer review by creating a limited pool of reviewers who will turn their reviews in quickly if the authors pay for the service. This is, in part, to satisfy those who need CV lines stat and can afford it in journals that carry a prestigious publisher’s brand (such as Springer/Nature) but publish anything that passes the review process.
• Scammers have set up loads of pretty obviously fake pseudo-journals and conferences in much the same way that our email inboxes were flooded with a modern-day variation on the Spanish Prisoner confidence trick. Some call these “predatory publishers” but since they’re not really publishers at all, I just call them scams.
• Reviewing articles is a lot of hard work, gets little recognition, and often fails to spot problematic scholarship. There may be better ways to filter out bad scholarship, but we can’t agree on what they are.
• People living outside Europe and North America want the credibility of peer-reviewed scholarship, but may not be familiar with or respectful of the rules. (What Rinaldi says about this mainly comes from an interview with bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who published a widely-read opinion piece about unregulated faulty publications polluting science, but it’s not an uncommon complaint.)
• Because we now have new models for financing publishing and many new publications are being launched, it’s hard for scholars to keep up with what’s legitimate.  

There’s big one issue I don’t see on this list. Why does everyone have to publish so much? Are we really advancing knowledge, or is this some weirdly inflated reputational currency that is running out of control? I’m not saying we should quit doing research, but maybe we should be a little more selective about what we feel needs to be part of the record.

For one thing, it’s getting harder and harder to consult the record, as bloated as it is. It’s incredibly costly, both in terms of the time we put into writing and reviewing it and developing and sustaining systems for sharing and preserving it all. It also means that people are so frantically gathering up metrics of our productivity that we have less time to think, and some of our best thoughts require fallow time.

I’m reminded of Michael Pollan’s dietary advice: Eat food. Not too much. The mass production of research publications is unhealthy in so many ways.

What if we told people up for tenure that they could only submit some small number of publications (say, only three articles or book chapters) to illustrate their promise? I realize publication patterns vary enormously by field but we could come up with some way of saying “show us your best stuff; just not too much of it.” What if we said “it’s great if you publish, but please don’t overdo it” at annual review time. What if graduate programs and hiring committees and granting agencies said “hold on there, you’re over-producing. Volume is not what we’re looking for. Give it some thought.”

Perhaps technology is simply making it easier to create and share stuff, and what we're seeing is a lot of creativity that was hidden when publishing was harder. Maybe scholars just have a lot more to share about what we are learning about the world and we simply have more avenues for sharing it.

But I don’t think so. I think the problem with peer review isn’t paid fast lanes or fake journals or the need for a new kind of peer review. It’s that we too often use the adjective "productive" with the word "scholar" unthinkingly. In an era when jobs are insecure our reputational economy is suffering from runaway inflation. What’s the cost of being too busy to stop and think? 

It's our system. Would it really be that hard to fix?

While touring a factory in northern Wisconsin that makes millions of aluminum cans on a daily basis, we asked the plant manager whether he thought regional colleges and universities were meeting his company’s needs. He looked surprised by the question and answered, “You can’t teach [in a classroom] the way we make cans here.” If he had employees with basic skill sets in the field, he said, his company could train new hires to use their machinery and learn their procedures. 

Similarly, the human resources director of a large plastics manufacturer told us, “As long as [employees] have the basic knowledge and certain abilities, we can typically teach them the skills that they need on the job -- that’s the bottom line.”

Such responses beg the question: What are these fundamental, even nonnegotiable skill sets that employers seek in their employees? This is a question that our research group is investigating within the biotechnology and advanced manufacturing industries in Wisconsin. As part of a three-year study, we have interviewed over 150 C.E.O.s, plant managers and human resource directors in companies large and small, as well as educators and administrators at two- and four-year colleges and universities across the state, asking them about the skills and aptitudes required to succeed.

The Dominant Narrative of the Skills Gap

Throughout Wisconsin, we have found that the answer to this question is more complicated and nuanced than the dominant narrative of the skills gap suggests. 

That narrative is rather simple: employers need certain skills, usually said to be occupation-specific technical aptitudes. The nation’s high schools, colleges and universities, which should be preparing students for entry into the workforce, are failing to provide these skills. Because of the lack of technically skilled workers, the argument goes, many companies reportedly cannot take on new accounts or hire new workers.

The oft-reported notion that employers are unable to find appropriately skilled workers has become intertwined with the sentiment that the liberal education model and the broader College for All movement have produced too many students with poor career prospects and massive student debts. Stories abound of Starbucks baristas and parking lot attendants with expensive baccalaureate degrees in the humanities, while 70 percent of the new jobs created through 2020 in states like Wisconsin will require less than a four-year degree.

How big of a problem is this? Instead of being part of the normal ebb and flow of the labor market, some suggest that, when coupled with demographic shifts that include mass retirements of the baby boomer generation, a perfect storm may be brewing that spells disaster for certain sectors of the economy in Wisconsin and the nation -- even the White House is rushing to figure out how to solve the nation’s skills gap.

The Skills Gap and Public Policy

The solution to this state of affairs has been to continue pushing the educational sector to align its aims more closely with the supposed needs of employers.

In Wisconsin, the ascendancy of this viewpoint has manifested itself most directly in Governor Scott Walker’s approach to higher education policy. While the administration has recommended $300 million in cuts to the University of Wisconsin System, a network of two- and four-year public colleges and universities across the state, it has proposed language to the system’s charter about meeting workforce needs and directed over $35 million to develop new training programs in the state’s technical college system -- all with the explicit goal of recalibrating public education to meet the skills-related needs of the state’s employers.

This emphasis on tailoring education to fit industry needs has also taken root at the national level. In the 2015 State of the Union, President Obama underlined his intention to connect “community colleges with local employers to train workers to fill high-paying jobs like coding, nursing and robotics.”

As part of this effort, the president has also articulated a national goal of finding “faster pathways” for students to get “the best skills possible at the cheapest cost,” while in the past he famously poked fun at art history degrees.

At the state and national level, the policy response to the skills gap idea has been to focus almost exclusively on training students in the so-called hard skills, or the technical knowledge and ability to perform tasks like welding or computer-aided design programming in two-year technical colleges. This focus is also marked by an attendant de-emphasis on general education and the liberal arts across the entire postsecondary spectrum, but especially in the nation’s four-year colleges and universities.

Even if we grant the first (mostly unexamined) assumption of the skills gap narrative -- that institutions of higher education should be geared toward training students with the kinds of skills that industry leaders demand in the short term -- we are still faced with two important questions. First, do employers want new hires with solely technical skills? Second, do our current education policy choices actually reflect the desires of industry? The answer to both questions -- based on our extensive work in the field -- is no.

Employers Want More

While our research indicates that business leaders certainly need employees who have basic knowledge and technical expertise appropriate to their job type and industry, the evidence clearly indicates that they place a high premium on other qualities as well.  These skill sets, often denigrated as soft skills, are not viewed as optional competencies but are indispensable complements to technical expertise.  

Our data reveal that the skill that is in most demand among employers in Wisconsin is a strong work ethic. Employers spoke of work ethic not only in basic terms such as showing up to work on time but also in terms of being persistent and sticking with a problem until it is solved.  Both employers and educators alike underscored the challenges that one person termed “the work ethic problem,” as it implicates not only formal education but also parenting, social norms and company-specific traditions and expectations. 

Interestingly, a strong work ethic implicates another attribute that is rarely discussed in the skills gap debate -- the desire to continually learn throughout one’s working life, or what some call lifelong learning. This aptitude is particularly important given the rapidly evolving nature of technology and the subsequent changes in the workplace. “A diesel technician 10 years ago would work on the same pump every day for years and become experts in it,” one employer told us. “Now we're flowing employees to different product, so... we're really looking for people that can handle change and can adapt.”

Businesses are also searching for employees who can effectively work well in teams. For instance, the C.E.O. of a biotechnology firm spoke of the importance of collaboration in their team-based contract work. “We have an example here... a tremendous scientist, but virtually impossible to work with in a team,” he said. “That's just not conducive to the work we do.” An integral part of working in teams is also being an effective communicator, both in writing and in everyday conversation.

Employers also perceived critical thinking, or the ability to problem solve and think on one’s feet, as an important quality in new hires. An executive at a manufacturing company explained, “To be able to think analytically and problem solve... is a critical skill.”

A growing body of evidence supports these findings. A 2011 survey of manufacturing executives revealed that the most serious skills deficiencies were in the areas of problem solving, basic technical training, fundamental employability skills such as work ethic and technology skills. Along similar lines, the National Research Council, the industry-supported Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the Department of Labor are beginning to conceptualize skills in ways that extend beyond the traditional focus on hard skills alone.

Thus, the issues facing our workforce are much more complicated than a shortage of technically skilled employees that can be addressed through more fast-track programming in our nation’s two-year technical colleges. Indeed, what employers are seeking is not simply a cadre of workers who are technically proficient, but engineers who can work easily with customers, chemists who can write clear, succinct prose and CNC operators who can collaborate with coworkers.

While contemporary policy and rhetoric suppose an either/or dichotomy between technical training and liberal or general education, it is evident that employers want to see skills and aptitudes that are associated with both models of education. “To meld the creative side with the practical side,” as one manufacturer told us, should be the ideal. Instead, he and others found few job applicants who represented this ideal -- which is what we argue is the true skills gap.

Integrating Education and Training

Beyond a reconceptualization of which skills and attributes are needed to fuel the 21st-century economy, what is missing in the national debate is a clear plan of action for the nation’s business and postsecondary leaders.

In Wisconsin we have found numerous examples of educators and corporate trainers who have created education and training programs that focus on the entire skills spectrum. The key ingredients in these programs can be distilled to the following three components.

1. Appreciate the role of liberal and general education in preparing students for the workforce.

The thinking on essential workplace skills needs to shift from the traditional focus on technical training to a more comprehensive view that acknowledges liberal and general education’s role in cultivating these varied skill sets. This is not necessarily an argument for more art history majors or that cultivating varied skill sets is impossible in shorter-term programs, but that the modern workplace demands adaptability, broad-mindedness and creativity -- competencies that are well developed in programs based on a liberal or general education model. This is true for all postsecondary programs, from one-year certificates to baccalaureate degrees.

2. Support educators in using active learning techniques in all postsecondary classrooms.

A striking aspect of the skills gap debate is the lack of attention paid to issues of curriculum and instruction, especially approaches specifically designed to integrate technical, content-based instruction with other skill sets such as critical thinking and collaboration. These techniques, broadly known as active learning, are grounded in research from the learning sciences and include techniques such as problem-based learning, Socratic lecturing and peer instruction. Fortuitously, active learning is being actively promoted in colleges and universities across the country, particularly in the STEM disciplines.

But one thing is clear -- asking educators to teach the skill sets that employers need requires substantial resources, since few postsecondary teachers are trained in these instructional techniques. Yet the looming budget cuts to higher education in states such as Wisconsin, Louisiana and Arizona will likely translate into fewer resources to support professional development, and will ultimately mean that one of the principal tools for providing employers with the skilled workforce they so desire -- education -- is being rapidly undermined across the nation.

Other promising approaches include internships and apprenticeships, where the blending of academic training with real world experience frequently results in students who are highly sought after by employers. And as several of our study participants from industry have reminded us, the responsibility for cultivating these valued skill sets lies not only in the hands of our nation’s educational system, but also in corporate training programs that should also strive to integrate education in basic concepts with more hands-on training.

3. Create opportunities for partnerships between educators and employers.

While it was not uncommon to hear our study participants say lines of communication between local colleges and industry “do not exist,” we found that education-industry relationships are critical for both sharing of information about job opportunities and as a platform from which collaborative initiatives that leverage the respective strengths of each partner can emerge. Whether the result is an online corporate training program designed by local technical college educators or advisory councils where local business leaders have a voice in shaping the curriculum -- promising collaborations in Wisconsin usually depend on policy mandates or visionary leadership to bridge the gap between education and industry.

What Is the Purpose of Higher Education?

Ultimately, the skills gap debate raises questions about fundamental issues facing society, many of which are overlooked when the discussion devolves to a focus on what employers need or do not need from graduates. What is the purpose of higher education? Is the current effort to frame this purpose of higher education as primarily vocational in nature beneficial to our economy, our democracy and the long-term success of our population? These questions need to play a more central role in policy making and debates about education-industry relations. As the University of Wisconsin at Madison military historian and native Wisconsinite Lieutenant Colonel John Hall recently wrote, “I understand and respect the notion that the purpose of an education is to prepare students for a ‘good job,’” but “this is not the only purpose of an education.”

Matthew T. Hora is an assistant professor of adult teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Ross J. Benbow is an associate researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at Madison. Amanda K. Oleson is an assistant researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

There is an unusual level of conflict going on in our house these days centered around the piano. The children are constantly fighting over whose turn it is to practice and frequently I will see a line of children waiting to play. Plus, the music they are playing sounds pretty good and the songs are always recognizable. This is a far cry from just 6 months ago when I had to beg them to practice and the level of music they were playing was not that advanced. This can all be attributed to our new piano teacher and his unusual musical philosophy.

When we moved to our new house I sought out recommendations and was led to this new music teacher who was in high demand (at first he couldn’t even squeeze us in). When he showed up at the door, I was happy to be greeted with an enthusiastic gentleman who had a kind manner and was generous with the praise. The only thing that seemed strange to me was that he placed little numbers on the keys and said that he was not going to teach them to read music. All my children can already read a little music and to me that seemed an essential part (maybe even the purpose of) taking music lessons. The piano teacher informed me, though, that his philosophy was that music should be fun, all about playing, and that they should be drawn in by being able to play whatever song they wanted using the number system. He told them to start making lists of their favorite songs and by the end of the lesson, my son was playing the beginning of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (his choice). Piano man also instructed me that I was never to remind them to practice and that they should want to play when the mood strikes them.

I’m very torn on this new philosophy and I think it is connected to my more general values in regards to education. What is the purpose of the music lesson? I guess if my goal is to get them to play cool and classic music on the piano, then his method makes sense. But, is part of the music lesson teaching the structure of the music? In many ways, I see piano lessons as just as much about teaching children a new type of language and that the reward for sticking with it is to play beautiful music.

Of course, my son was already becoming bored with the music because he couldn’t play anything interesting and probably would have quit piano altogether had Piano Man not walked into our lives. Yet, when I walk past the numbers on the keys (he’s added letters in the last week), I feel kind of like we are “cheating.” Am I now teaching our children instant gratification? My daughter can play “Let it Go”  but can only read the music for “Mary had a Little Lamb.” Are they getting the dessert before the vegetables? Then again, in my own teaching, I do adapt play as part of my curriculum. When teaching about early language development, my students use clay to explore cuneiform. The notion of my children skipping over steps and leaping into these advanced pieces reminds me of our non-linear world. Is learning mimicking the Internet culture and losing its hierarchical structure? Is play and gratification more important than discipline and the rewards to attention and focus? The children are playing more and more every day and it’s certainly more pleasurable to listen to, but though they can play piano are they learning to be piano players. Does it matter?

To the surprise of no one, disgraced journalist and serial bullshitter Jonah Lehrer is back[1].

Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, press-released the news of the forthcoming, The Digital Mind: How We Think and Behave Differently on Screens to be co-written by Lehrer and UCLA Anderson School of Management, professor and behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi.

At the time of his defenestration from The New Yorker and other reputable publications, I observed in a blog post on this very site, “I’m pleased to see that Jonah Lehrer has been caught and discredited, that his own magazine believed in the truth enough to investigate further, even as I'm certain he will return to prominence as a journalist in the not-too-distant future.”

I wasn’t alone. Roxane Gay writing in Salon about Lehrer and the myth of the young male genius declared in July 2012, “There are those who will say Monday was the day of Jonah Lehrer’s fall from grace, but he is a product of a system that encouraged and enabled his behavior. This is about sowing and reaping. That same system will help Lehrer find redemption. At some point in the future, not too long from now, there will be a book deal.”

So, knock me over with a feather.

Portfolio publisher Adrian Zackheim said, “Jonah Lehrer is one of the most gifted nonfiction writers of his generation. No responsible publisher could entirely overlook his past mistakes, but the prospect of working with him was also fantastically appealing.”

Professor Benartzi also acknowledged that Lehrer had made “serious mistakes” and that he is “truly gifted.”

While I do not think that Jonah Lehrer must serve some kind of lifetime ban from publishing -- say, stalking Manhattan in a hair shirt, displaying his welted skin as a warning to other transgressors -- I was hoping that his return wouldn’t be quite so simple and that it just might include an honest accounting of his past sins.

The party line appears to be that Lehrer made “mistakes.” Personally, I’m a big believer in the power of learning from one’s mistakes. In fact, in my courses I teach the writing process as an ongoing series of failures, mistakes that we learn from and seek to overcome or remedy.

We make mistakes because we do not know better prior to making them. Even when we should know better, we may still make errors in judgment and call them mistakes. A child can be told a stove is hot, but need to experience it for himself to be sure.

Or as another example, it was entirely foreseeable that during my first semester freshman year, getting wasted on rum drinks the evening before my 8am Econ 101 exam was a bad idea, but only after seeing how bad an idea it truly was did I realize the extent of my mistake.

But Lehrer did not make mistakes. He engaged in an ethical and moral breach of the core values of his profession. Prior to his inventing a quote from Bob Dylan, Lehrer was well-informed of the prohibition against fabricating facts in journalism, and yet he did it anyway. When caught in these fabrications by Michael Moynihan, Lehrer engaged in a comically bad, transparently stupid attempt at a cover-up.

Someone who had made an actual mistake wouldn’t have tried to throw Moynihan off the scent. People who make mistakes acknowledge and even appreciate it when someone else diagnoses that mistake.

Lehrer’s was not an error in judgment, like a doctor making the wrong diagnosis based off of incomplete or contradictory information. He proved himself unfit for the profession, like a doctor deliberately treating his patient incorrectly, amputating a leg when the gallbladder needed removing. (And then lying about it.)

While “mistakes” is the wrong word to describe Lehrer’s actions, so too is “gifted” to describe the man himself.

The proper word is not “gifted,” but “privileged.”

In her Salon article from 2012, Roxane Gay demonstrates how Lehrer has benefited from the “young genius” narrative, and shows how Lehrer has benefited consistently from this categorization.

When he was caught recycling his own material, it was viewed as a mere bobble, an aberration, because Lehrer so perfectly fit the established image of the genius – young, white, male, and a little nerdy, but not in an anti-social way.

As Gay says of the 2012 incidents, “This is also about entitlement. Only entitlement can explain why someone would choose to lie in plain sight. For whatever pressures Lehrer faced, there is no ignoring that he plagiarized himself and fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan of all people!) because he could.”

Perhaps Prof. Benartzi will play the role of chaperone in the relationship, making sure the young genius doesn’t stray over the line. I’m trying to resist judgment, but I can’t imagine what kind of process leads a respected academic to embrace a working relationship with a known fabricator. That Benzarti choose to excuse Lehrer’s past actions as “mistakes” doesn’t suggest a particularly clear-eyed view of things on his part.

To me, these events suggest that Jonah Lehrer just might not have deserved the “young genius” label, that this has been a figment, though obviously one that’s very hard to dispel. It’s easy to be a genius when you allow yourself to play by a different set of rules. Was Lance Armstrong the greatest cyclist of his generation or the product of the most sophisticated doping program in the history of mankind?

I have another name for Lehrer and it isn’t kind, but I think it’s more accurate than "gifted."

Hack.

--

I got the news about Lehrer via Twitter.

Michael McAdoo, formerly a football player at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has sued the institution, saying that by guiding him (and other athletes) to fake courses, it deprived him of an education, the Associated Press reported. The suit seeks to become a class action on behalf of other athletes who were steered into fake courses. The lawsuit says that coaches and others "enticed these football student-athletes to sign the agreements with promises of a legitimate UNC education.... Instead, UNC systematically funneled its football student-athletes into a 'shadow curriculum' of bogus courses which never met and which were designed for the sole purpose of providing enrollees high grades."