"certain codes of conduct"

[thompnickson2]

Glen,

A Bleeding Heart Liberal [hereafter, BHL], such as myself, believes that there is something to be valued in that which we collectively intend.  So, it's good when we get together, make a plan, and try to execute it.  We BLH's stipulate that there are perils in such collective action, that it creates opportunities for idiotic perseveration and entrepreneurial corruption within the systems it creates.  Still, the motto of BLH's is "We Go Down Trying".

Allow me to strawman an alternative to BHL, the Nasty Jaded Libertarian [hereafter, NJL], who can see in collective action ONLY the ills stipulated above, and regards all attempts at collective action as inherently dangerous and inevitably exploitative. NJL's see value only in the short-sighted strivings of the individual.  The NJL motto is, "Let What Happens, Happen."

Would you agree that these two threads exist in FRIAM?  In all of us, if not in each of us?   If so, how do we integrate (entwine?) those two threads, or should we even try.

Wow!  Entwine is a word!

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 8:32 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

I thought we did reply to it. My reply was basically that such a managed evolution will have unintended consequences that will likely be worse than the problem it's trying to solve. Solutions to problems like this should be, IMO, *in* and *of* the ecology, not artificially strapped to it with bailing wire and glue.

Unfortunately, that implies you have to LEAVE YOUR HOUSE and engage those dirty, infected people in the streets ... you know the ones that our joke of a public health system is *supposed* to help. Unless we're willing to do that, we might want to just stay silent and die alone in our damned houses. Abstraction is the disease. Discrimination is the symptom.

The umbrella org of Renee's hospital just backed out of a deal with a couple of (authentic) non-profits in providing a Community Center for the homeless. The argument is essentially about the homeless using the services (taking a shower, washing clothes, warm place to rest, etc.) without passing a screening test, indocrination. The 2 actual non-profits want to continue allowing anyone to take a shower or whatever ... just because they fscking need one. Renee's hospital, which claims to be a non-profit but has a LOT of cash stashed away in bank accounts and pays their executives competitive ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fscking humongous salaries, wants them to first prove they're trying to "get better", "improve themselves", ... you know, conform, apply for jobs, print resume's, be motivated by the American Dream™ of home ownership [ptouie], etc. Once they jump through their firey hoop screening process, then, and only then, can they take a shower.

My guess is your National Discrimination Observatory would end up in a similar position, abstracted, out of touch, useless, and expensive.


On 7/28/20 8:29 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Nobody has responded yet to my idea of a National Discrimination
> Observatory, whose job is to identify systematic disadvantaging of any type and a redistributive taxation code that counters the that disadvantage.  The idea is that there will always be invidious assignments in any society based on one or another silly criteria and the important thing is to see that they don’t get reinforced by economic consequences.  Soon the disadvantaged people will be heard to say, “Yes, I may have attached earlobes, but with the tax refund I got yesterday, I am making more than you are.”
>
> I know, Glen.  Only a fundamentalist Liberal like myself could even conceive of such an idea.

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[gepr]

It's kinda weird. I feel like you didn't read a word I wrote. What you're calling "collective action" is NOT collective action. It is abstraction of some objective into an individual organization, like a government agency, corporation, NGO, etc. Both of your BHL and NJL are hostile violations of collective action and engagement. They are abstraction. And it is abstraction, the purposeful ignoring of details, that is the disease. So it doesn't really matter if we see both types in FriAM. They're both disease ridden.


On 7/29/20 9:37 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> A Bleeding Heart Liberal [hereafter, BHL], such as myself, believes that there is something to be valued in that which we collectively intend.  So, it's good when we get together, make a plan, and try to execute it.  We BLH's stipulate that there are perils in such collective action, that it creates opportunities for idiotic perseveration and entrepreneurial corruption within the systems it creates.  Still, the motto of BLH's is "We Go Down Trying".
>
> Allow me to strawman an alternative to BHL, the Nasty Jaded Libertarian [hereafter, NJL], who can see in collective action ONLY the ills stipulated above, and regards all attempts at collective action as inherently dangerous and inevitably exploitative. NJL's see value only in the short-sighted strivings of the individual.  The NJL motto is, "Let What Happens, Happen."
>
> Would you agree that these two threads exist in FRIAM?  In all of us, if not in each of us?   If so, how do we integrate (entwine?) those two threads, or should we even try.

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[thompnickson2]

Oh, God.  I've failed again.

n

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 10:46 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

It's kinda weird. I feel like you didn't read a word I wrote. What you're calling "collective action" is NOT collective action. It is abstraction of some objective into an individual organization, like a government agency, corporation, NGO, etc. Both of your BHL and NJL are hostile violations of collective action and engagement. They are abstraction. And it is abstraction, the purposeful ignoring of details, that is the disease. So it doesn't really matter if we see both types in FriAM. They're both disease ridden.


On 7/29/20 9:37 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> A Bleeding Heart Liberal [hereafter, BHL], such as myself, believes that there is something to be valued in that which we collectively intend.  So, it's good when we get together, make a plan, and try to execute it.  We BLH's stipulate that there are perils in such collective action, that it creates opportunities for idiotic perseveration and entrepreneurial corruption within the systems it creates.  Still, the motto of BLH's is "We Go Down Trying".
>
> Allow me to strawman an alternative to BHL, the Nasty Jaded Libertarian [hereafter, NJL], who can see in collective action ONLY the ills stipulated above, and regards all attempts at collective action as inherently dangerous and inevitably exploitative. NJL's see value only in the short-sighted strivings of the individual.  The NJL motto is, "Let What Happens, Happen."
>
> Would you agree that these two threads exist in FRIAM?  In all of us, if not in each of us?   If so, how do we integrate (entwine?) those two threads, or should we even try.

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

All this was 54 years ago.

Frank

---
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140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

--

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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[thompnickson2]

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Steve Smith]

I haven't been able to retrieve the reference but I recently read/heard something about the fact that post-feudal economic/political organizations inherited the paradigm of managing scale and complexity through hierarchy.   Capitalistic Republics/Democracies and Socialist/Communist societies with "Central Planning" are both effectively structured this way, in spite of attempting (each in it's own way) to empower or equalize the "common (hu)man"...  

I think what Guerin has been babbling <grin> about most recently (at least since Stockholm) is his vision of what an otherwise organized "collective awareness/action/consciousness/intelligence/etc" might be as well as what I think Glen might have been gesturing-at when he criticized Nick's recent offering up of BHL vs NJL.  

I'd be interested in more discussion of what I think Glen is alluding to with a purists notion of "Collective Action".   It might be contradictory to "talk about" something which is inherently not about talking/language, at least (or may entirely) in the common sense of "language".

I could rattle on a few more paragraphs describing my own half-baked ideas, but I'll save that until maybe there are more well-baked ideas on the table.

- Steve

On 7/29/20 3:02 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

All this was 54 years ago.

Frank

---
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[gepr]

Yes! My mind is, at the moment, polluted with modal logic, which will probably corrupt what I'm about to write. In my ignorance, I'll call the Hayekian principle: that the *imposition of engineered controllers on open systems* will bias the evolution of the system toward undesirable outcomes. What Merle is identifying is that these engineered controllers have resulted in programming in competitive tendencies that are not (may not be?) as likely/prevalent as they would have been with counterfactual, alternative controllers they *could* have imposed.

I can interpret Merle (and SteveG) [◇] as suggesting we might be (or might have been [□]) able to dig deep into the fundamental dynamics and allow the underlying system to *teach* us a more natural understanding of the mechanism(s) so that any controller we derive and then apply could be more "organic", "softer", "more human", more affine with the system being controlled. Even further, we may not need an abstracted controller at all. Any "governmental" manipulation of the system might consist of distributed tweaks, the logic of which is only descriptively coherent, but mechanistically decoherent/heterogeneous. I.e. the government(s) would be endogenous as opposed to exogenous, in/of the system being governed.


[◇] Not that they actually *said* anything like this ... only that I can decode what they said this way.

[□] Whether we could get to such a societal state (with an endogenous government) is *reachable* from the state we're in, now, without going through a major heat bath, is an interesting question. It's possible competitive structures are frozen into society at this point and no amount of tweaks can get us from here to there.

On 7/29/20 5:00 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

> I haven't been able to retrieve the reference but I recently read/heard something about the fact that post-feudal economic/political organizations inherited the paradigm of managing scale and complexity through hierarchy.   Capitalistic Republics/Democracies and Socialist/Communist societies with "Central Planning" are both effectively structured this way, in spite of attempting (each in it's own way) to empower or equalize the "common (hu)man"...  
>
> I think what Guerin has been babbling <grin> about most recently (at least since Stockholm) is his vision of what an otherwise organized "collective awareness/action/consciousness/intelligence/etc" might be as well as what I think Glen might have been gesturing-at when he criticized Nick's recent offering up of BHL vs NJL.  
>
> I'd be interested in more discussion of what I think Glen is alluding to with a purists notion of "Collective Action".   It might be contradictory to "talk about" something which is inherently not about talking/language, at least (or may entirely) in the common sense of "language".
>
> I could rattle on a few more paragraphs describing my own half-baked ideas, but I'll save that until maybe there are more well-baked ideas on the table.
>
> - Steve
>
> On 7/29/20 3:02 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
>> Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.
>>
>> The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.
>>
>> The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

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[thompnickson2]

OK.  So nobody likes the National Discrimination Observatory.  And nobody likes my idea of randomizing the little labels that mothers and babies get in maternity wards over night and shipping the babies out at random the next morning.  So how about this.  Let it be the case that all people are created equal.  That would mean that, ex hypothesi, all differences in our economic, educational, ands social circumstances are invidious. So, how a strongly progressive income tax structure, a free, high quality educational system available free to all, a vigorous anti-discriminatory housing policy, a universal voting initiative, etc.  Oh, wait a minute?  Where have I heard all that before?  

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 8:32 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

I thought we did reply to it. My reply was basically that such a managed evolution will have unintended consequences that will likely be worse than the problem it's trying to solve. Solutions to problems like this should be, IMO, *in* and *of* the ecology, not artificially strapped to it with bailing wire and glue.

Unfortunately, that implies you have to LEAVE YOUR HOUSE and engage those dirty, infected people in the streets ... you know the ones that our joke of a public health system is *supposed* to help. Unless we're willing to do that, we might want to just stay silent and die alone in our damned houses. Abstraction is the disease. Discrimination is the symptom.

The umbrella org of Renee's hospital just backed out of a deal with a couple of (authentic) non-profits in providing a Community Center for the homeless. The argument is essentially about the homeless using the services (taking a shower, washing clothes, warm place to rest, etc.) without passing a screening test, indocrination. The 2 actual non-profits want to continue allowing anyone to take a shower or whatever ... just because they fscking need one. Renee's hospital, which claims to be a non-profit but has a LOT of cash stashed away in bank accounts and pays their executives competitive ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fscking humongous salaries, wants them to first prove they're trying to "get better", "improve themselves", ... you know, conform, apply for jobs, print resume's, be motivated by the American Dream™ of home ownership [ptouie], etc. Once they jump through their firey hoop screening process, then, and only then, can they take a shower.

My guess is your National Discrimination Observatory would end up in a similar position, abstracted, out of touch, useless, and expensive.


On 7/28/20 8:29 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Nobody has responded yet to my idea of a National Discrimination
> Observatory, whose job is to identify systematic disadvantaging of any type and a redistributive taxation code that counters the that disadvantage.  The idea is that there will always be invidious assignments in any society based on one or another silly criteria and the important thing is to see that they don’t get reinforced by economic consequences.  Soon the disadvantaged people will be heard to say, “Yes, I may have attached earlobes, but with the tax refund I got yesterday, I am making more than you are.”
>
> I know, Glen.  Only a fundamentalist Liberal like myself could even conceive of such an idea.

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[Eric Charles-2]

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
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140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

That is interesting and sounds correct to me, Eric.  However, people who major in engineering need a specific set of skills which, not held, will cause them to be incompetent in an engineering job.  That said when I was a freshman in the College of Engineering and Science one of the deans told us that the goal of their approach to undergraduate education was not to prepare us for a job but to teach us to learn how to learn because we would learn what we needed to know on the job.  As I've said before, after a year and a half I transferred to UC Berkeley which was a much less nurturing environment.  I was a math major which meant I was in the College of Letters and Science with all the implied breadth requirements to satisfy:  social science, humanities, English, foreign language, biological sciences, physical science and the requirements specified by your major department.

After the first semester at Carnegie my class's average gpa was 1.75.  To transfer to Berkeley you had to have a 2.8 grade point average.  Today students are despondent if they have less than 3.0.

Frank

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:02 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

[hidden email]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
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twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
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[Angel Edward]

Frank,

Your dean at CMU was right. Any technology we might have learned then was not relevant five years later. In my only undergraduate electronics course, we learned to design vacuum tube circuits. Just when transistors were coming in. 

I’ve taught over 100 professional short courses around the world. The largest group of attendees has always consisted of technical people who had or were about to loose their jobs because the skills they had learned in college were no longer relevant.

When I came to UNM in EE, I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get students to learn that although they would get jobs at graduation based on what they had learned on Electronics 1, 2, 3, 4,….., they were not going to get the good design jobs. Fortunately it was not a problem for me when I moved to CS.

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]
505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jul 30, 2020, at 1:48 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is interesting and sounds correct to me, Eric.  However, people who major in engineering need a specific set of skills which, not held, will cause them to be incompetent in an engineering job.  That said when I was a freshman in the College of Engineering and Science one of the deans told us that the goal of their approach to undergraduate education was not to prepare us for a job but to teach us to learn how to learn because we would learn what we needed to know on the job.  As I've said before, after a year and a half I transferred to UC Berkeley which was a much less nurturing environment.  I was a math major which meant I was in the College of Letters and Science with all the implied breadth requirements to satisfy:  social science, humanities, English, foreign language, biological sciences, physical science and the requirements specified by your major department.

After the first semester at Carnegie my class's average gpa was 1.75.  To transfer to Berkeley you had to have a 2.8 grade point average.  Today students are despondent if they have less than 3.0.

Frank

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:02 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

[hidden email]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Steve,

Hierarchy is an efficient way of doing business/getting things done.  It breaks down and becomes oppressive if the guys at the top always look alike and stay too long ("the patriarchy"). Leaders waiting to emerge in organizations are often suppressed by static hierarchical structures--not to mention the dependence on "experts"-- and we lose the potential wisdom and action of potential change agents.  "The Wisdom of Crowds" makes sense.  Collective action is more necessary than ever.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:01 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I haven't been able to retrieve the reference but I recently read/heard something about the fact that post-feudal economic/political organizations inherited the paradigm of managing scale and complexity through hierarchy.   Capitalistic Republics/Democracies and Socialist/Communist societies with "Central Planning" are both effectively structured this way, in spite of attempting (each in it's own way) to empower or equalize the "common (hu)man"...  

I think what Guerin has been babbling <grin> about most recently (at least since Stockholm) is his vision of what an otherwise organized "collective awareness/action/consciousness/intelligence/etc" might be as well as what I think Glen might have been gesturing-at when he criticized Nick's recent offering up of BHL vs NJL.  

I'd be interested in more discussion of what I think Glen is alluding to with a purists notion of "Collective Action".   It might be contradictory to "talk about" something which is inherently not about talking/language, at least (or may entirely) in the common sense of "language".

I could rattle on a few more paragraphs describing my own half-baked ideas, but I'll save that until maybe there are more well-baked ideas on the table.

- Steve

On 7/29/20 3:02 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

All this was 54 years ago.

Frank

---
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140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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[thompnickson2]

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

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[jon zingale]

Speaking of Marxists, I am reminded of the situationist graffiti:
'Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.'



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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
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twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

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[David Eric Smith]

You know what is interesting in this, Merle and Nick, 

is that it begs for a structural analysis of the whole educational system.

I wish I could remember where I saw it, but there was a write-up in some reputable place (higher-ed journal?) on schools with real scholarships that let in kids who really would be shut out without them.  The super-rich offer more of those as a fraction of the whole body than the big mercantile universities one tier down.  It’s the scrappy private schools (BU category), or the public-but-not-really-public-anymore mega-Us, like Georgia Tech or ASU, George Mason, Virginia Tech, etc. that come under the criticism of Ginsburg in The Fall of the Faculty, where they must fish for tuition to support the administrations without the help of as large a set of very-rich donors (relative to their size).  So that leads to skewings like fancy and expensive student centers to compete for the kids of people who can pay full-fare, heavy heavy recruitment of foreigners whose parents or countries can pay full-fare for them to come, or the redirection of need-based grants to “merit-based” grants which are viewed as “venture capital” in bringing in a net positive from the remainder of tuition that most merit-recipients’ parents can afford, rather than being a net negative which they would be if they were actually covering students whose parents couldn’t pay the remainder (that last one was in some other article, not in Ginsberg).  

The super-rich institutions seem to have an important symbolic role in setting a model against which the rest of the structure is set in competition, but in terms of where the most exclusion gets done to the greatest number, it could be that it happens down on the shoulder.  

The mechanisms one might use to intervene in the different tiers could be somewhat different, even if the assessment of the harm done in the system as a whole is as you describe.

There are ps’s above, but I don’t know how to make nice symbols for footnotes like Glen and Jon do.

1. We saw the Us fight off Miller and Trump on the foreigner bans.  In the internal mailings, the language is all about the fact that we value our foreign students and don’t want to be xenophobes, and I am certain that for most of the people involved, that is personally true.  But it’s a truth that they have the privilege of feeling because of their circumstance.  The reason they got Miller and Trump to reverse, having sent the desired signal to their base (so for them, mission accomplished) was that the admins of the Us will fold in months without the enormous income stream coming from China, Gulf states, perhaps a bit from India, and bits from here and there where wealth is concentrated or state-sponsored foreign education still is used.

2. What I meant by public-but-not-public is of course that these universities remain public in name, but they had little state support before and it gets cut by a few percent further each year.  Meanwhile, the admins remain at their 400% of the size in the 1970s and as expensive as any of the private schools.  So the named-public schools still have to squeeze students for all they can get out of their parents (and their lenders), and prioritize money-based research, making the internal dynamics largely indistinguishable from the private non-profits.

3. A colleague pointed me to the following article, which looks at structure of the exposure of different universities  https://www.profgalloway.com/uss-university

Best to all,

Eric

On Jul 31, 2020, at 6:04 AM, Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
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505 670-9918
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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Frank, I never gave a gift to M.I.T. either, and my youngest son was not accepted.   He went on to graduate from UCSD with a 4.0 average and sold the GIS company he co-founded to Kodak when he was 23 years old.  I have always assumed he was turned down because he went to a public high school in the South and came from a middle class background.  

My oldest son got into grad school at the U. of Chicago because a friend of mine who was a Chicago alum and well-known politician wrote a letter. Milton ("There's no such thing as a free lunch") Friedman adopted my son as a protage and turned him away from righteous pursuit.  I've never forgiven that wicked business school.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:05 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Wow, your son did very well, Merle I hope your other son will return to righteous pursuit.

After my daughter was admitted to Chicago I received a call from their admissions office.  The caller said that they were surprised that they hadn't heard from her.  I apologized for not having answered yet but said that we had decided that she would go to Michigan because we wanted her to have a more well-rounded college experience.  She said  incredulously that she was amazed that we would consider sending her there when she had been admitted to Chicago.  Money wasn't the issue since Carnegie Mellon would pay the majority of the tuition in either case.  She was and is very happy with her Michigan education.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:23 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, I never gave a gift to M.I.T. either, and my youngest son was not accepted.   He went on to graduate from UCSD with a 4.0 average and sold the GIS company he co-founded to Kodak when he was 23 years old.  I have always assumed he was turned down because he went to a public high school in the South and came from a middle class background.  

My oldest son got into grad school at the U. of Chicago because a friend of mine who was a Chicago alum and well-known politician wrote a letter. Milton ("There's no such thing as a free lunch") Friedman adopted my son as a protage and turned him away from righteous pursuit.  I've never forgiven that wicked business school.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:05 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of course not, Frank, but evidently, many do.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:46 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

My daughter was admitted to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan and I never gave either university a gift.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 3:13 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I'm a Piketty fan, and he takes on this subject in "Capital" in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are so well endowed by alumni that they get a 6.2% return and they become what Piketty calls "rentiers", people and institutions able to support themselves through their capital income. The rentiers gifts get their kids in. And this is just one example of the absence of equal opportunity in our most prestigious universities. If we "allowed broader segments of the population to have access to (these institutions), this would surely be the most effective way of increasing wages at the low to medium end of the scale and decreasing the upper decile's share of both wages and total income."

I was excited to find, also,  Piketty's pairing of climate change and "improving educational access" as two of the most challenging issues facing humanity.  The knowledge that will be needed in the next future is hard to imagine, but if we are to keep the peace as the systems continue to collapse, we need to get everyone ready to cope.

Later in the book Piketty pairs climate change with the idea of improving educational access as two of the greatest “challenges” to the human race.  Ameliorating schooling is even more important than fixing governmental debt: “the more urgent need is to increase our educational capital” (568)

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:23 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric,

 

A Marxist would say, I think, although I have barely ever known one, that every act of training is simultaneously an act of indoctrination and class reproduction.  If the declaration of independence is correct, what an extraordinary coincidence it is that the children of wealthy well educated people tend to be wealthy and well educated!   Well, some would say that that’s because ABILITY is inherited.  But that precisely is racism, isn’t it? 

 

So if, as our colleagues are starting to assert, technical proficiency is an evanescent benefit, what precisely remains of a “good” education but indoctrination in class values and the  inheritance of class benefits?  This is NOT for me a rhetorical question, because I gave up on the technical proficiency justification (except perhaps for writing) before I even became a  professor.  So what WAS it I was conveying to my students all those years, if not the indoctrination of class values and the inheritance of class benefits?  Inquiring Readers Want to Know!

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 1:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Come on Nick... outside new disciplines emerging, those who will change a discipline over the next 20 years are typically well embedded within the discipline now. That's kind of how cumulative knowledge construction works. But... to emphasize it a bit more bluntly.... The primary purpose of college isn't to reproduce the professoriate, or produce the next generation of innovators within the professorate: It is to provide a general set of skills (sometimes called the "hidden curriculum"), which provides a baseline of things a person with a college degree can reasonably be expected to be able to do. College is justified by the assertion that you can't really get those skills outside of trying to do something intellectual with some seriousness; what you are trying to be intellectually serious about doesn't matter nearly so much, though obviously some skills will be emphasized more in some areas. 

 

Most jobs most people want require "a college degree". They don't require a college degree in anything in particular. That makes sense, IF college degrees are reasonably well correlated with having some set of skills most general employers value in most of their employees. It generally helps to have employees who can read, write, and math at a certain level, who can present things in standard forms orally, graphically, and in writing. It generally helps to have employees who can integrate ideas and come up with solutions, who can balance various priorities, who can adapt to arbitrary requirements that a boss or company might impose. It generally helps to have employees who can work productively on team projects, as leaders or followers. Etc., etc. The less college degrees reliably indicate those skills, the less valuable they are (on average). 

 

There is a quirky college that revamped it's curriculum a few decades ago to focus on "8 Abilities": Communication, Problem Solving, Social Interaction, Effective Citizenship, Analysis, Valuing, Aesthetic Engagement, and Developing a Global Perspective. It looks like they've gone back a bit towards traditional majors, but still all classes, in all majors, have to explicitly focus on developing at least one of those abilities in the students. (https://www.alverno.edu/Undergraduate)

 

Most colleges are not doing anything so dramatic, but many are still making great strides in helping students figure out skills that others arrive with, so they can at least start from a more even place. See examples here:  

 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum 

 

http://thehub.georgetown.domains/realhub/experience/mastering-the-hidden-curriculum-1-2/ 

https://college.lclark.edu/live/events/297173-the-hidden-curriculum  

 

 

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:54 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thanks for laying this out.  I think some of it’s wrong, but it’s clear and provocative.  I apologize to non-academics on the list for my focus on academia.  I suppose one might argue that the best thing that might happen to Massachusetts is the dismemberment of Harvard and the distribution of its buildings for housing and it’s endowment for income equalization.  But I don’t think so.  Not yet, any way.

 

To the extent that psychology and White Psychology and Rich psychology and poor psychology are all the same, and if they all should be or will be the same 20 years from now as they are now, your analysis makes sense.  But, while I would like to think that psychology is like physics in that regard, I think I have to admit that it isn’t.  So, teaching everybody who comes to, say, the Harvard Psychology Department, the skills of  contemporary (mostly white) psychologists, precludes the learning not only of what non-privileged psychologists know, given the drift of things demographically and ideologically, it precludes the learning of what Psychology will be in 20 years.   

 

I don’t know what the solution is.  Every once in a while a student in my evolution classes would remonstrate with me for not giving equal time to biblical creation theories.  I would say, in response, “Because everything I know tells me that they are wrong.  Furthermore, I cannot teach what I do not know, and I don’t know those theories.  I am not the person to be your teacher if that is what you want to learn.”  Now of course, that’s a pretty lame response, but it has the marginal benefit of being honest. 

 

But what if we knew, for sure, that the country was going to be run by Baptists in 20 years.  Under those conditions, wouldn’t my best response be, “I can’t; you’re right; I resign.”

 

I am sure the metaphor is creepy in some way, but it’s the best I can come up with.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

 

Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic system, our global economic system, and our international governance system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.

 

The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944 has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.

 

The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships-- that created our major social, economic and political systems are the result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.

 

I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself. 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.  

 

Merle,

I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to reform. 

 

One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also, if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm not saying you have to agree with how the professional community does things, just that you should be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though the curricula should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated, that's the whole point. 

 

In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum. College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges should be more adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an unfortunate choice of  where to go. 

 

Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading, writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly pursuing. 

 

Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree, and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context). 

 

If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you are afraid that enforcing any strict requirements might make you an imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek to benefit by getting them. 

(Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a reply.) 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over backwards to review books written by women of color.

 

 

 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those readings.  The readings included the following:

  

Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

Victory by Conrad

The Republic by Plato

All the King's Men by Warren

Brave New World by Huxley

 

Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.

 

I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in a political science or US history class at Berkeley.

 

All this was 54 years ago.

 

Frank

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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Center for Emergent Diplomacy
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