Madness!

\ Leave a Comment \ by

When I was a little boy I got hurt playing both football and baseball. The problem, we found out, was that I had what is often called a lazy eye. (officially: Amblyopia ). My mom made me quit all sports, and I lost all interest. That’s never changed, so the marketing hype called March Madness is just that to me: hype. I don’t have anything against basketball, but I don’t have that passion.

Still, I know that lots of people enjoy the entire ritual from filling out the brackets to the final game. What I find more interesting this year is that the basketball championships have produced two revealing exposes of college sports. First, was the Frontline report called Money and March Madness (I mentioned it last week), and then was a Real Sports episode (#168).

I’ve always thought that the emphasis on sports in college was a symptom of U.S. anti-intellectualism, if not one of its causes, and I knew that enormous amounts of money were generated by these programs, especially football and basketball, but the scale of both the profits and the exploitation ought to shock anyone. It’s not millions, or hundreds of millions, but billions of dollars.

That means we ought to be able to fund a big chunk of our college system on our love (even I might love sports if this were true) of a few sports. Instead, of course, as both shows illustrate, the money is funneled into administrative and coach salaries and expensive stadiums and the like. When it comes to reform, though, both shows focus too heavily on the athletes.

The athletes are certainly exploited and they should be compensated: the idea of a graduation bonus is long over due and after graduation the athletes ought to be paid if their images are used in video games or promotions and the like. That’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. I think that the profits ought to be pooled and used as a kind of permanent scholarship fund.

As the cliché goes, this would be a win-win situation. I don’t think athletes are greedy; they just want a cut. I also think that many of them would be happy to know that, along with their piece of the pie, they are helping to create opportunities for generations to come. We’d emphasize the importance of education. And we would damped the greed of couches and administrators.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Real Problems and Smoke Screens

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Discussions of the for profit online education industry can be irritating, not because the sector is unjustly criticized, but because the for-profit sector’s problems are too often discussed as if they were in no way related to broader economic problems. (See this piece, as well as the comments, for some examples.) Too often, problems in the for-profit system seem like a smoke screen for the education system at large.

The internet, and the for-profit higher education system were born in the same era of lax to no government regulation in the United States. Facebook and Twitter and the University of Phoenix all took root in a certain kind of laissez-faire capitalism. That lack of government control, most would argue, is one reason why the internet is such an important economic force. Anarchy is risky but dynamic.

Too often the emerging for-profit online education sector has fudged graduation rates and used high pressure sales tactics, to cite only the most obvious examples, in order to try to ensure its viability. These are real problems but they are also the sort of thing you find when regulations are weak; none of the internet era companies are entirely free of these problems. It’s not just the private sector, either.

This lack of regulation has distorted almost every aspect of our economic and cultural lives. I’d like to see the debates over for-profit online education use what I call a Frontline standard (the PBS documentary series). You can only understand the sorts of problems discussed in, “College, Inc.” in other words, if you also understand the sorts of problems discussed in “Money and March Madness.”

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Agnotological Power

\ Leave a Comment \ by

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just stumbled across a word that describes a phenomena that I find both fascinating and repugnant: agnotology, “is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.” It’s not just the right, as Doug Henwood has documented, it’s taken root in so-called alternative media, too.

A certain segment of the right– if that’s the word– rejects evolution, denies global warming, and believes that Obama was born and raised in Kenya. On the left– if that’s the word– we have 911 conspiracies, vaccine paranoia, and all sorts of quack medicine. Our nuts don’t seem to have the national credibility that right-wing nuts seem to have. I suppose the reasons for this difference vary.

A few racists believe almost anything about a black President. A few politicians are promoting these ideas simply because they generate headlines and endure them to their base. It’s the kind of thing that drives teachers batty, I think, simply because we hold so tightly to the old adage, “free your mind, and your ass will follow.” As it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not always true.

I think this phenomena has to begin to inform teaching, particularly the teaching of critical thinking. Why has conservative thinking– supposedly the realm of the middle-aged and older– grown so profoundly irrational? It’s entirely likely, as I said, that many of these people are good critical thinkers, in the sense of being able to buy a car or run a business or otherwise keep their lives in order.

It’s hard to imagine what sort of education system could possible inculcate a reasonable skepticism into American culture, one that would be cautious about political authority without falling into wild speculation, if not paranoia. The pedagogical dilemma: there’s a sucker born every minute. The real political genius of our age, apparently, is Gary Dahl, inventor of the pet rock.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Professional, Writing