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Cut-out and erasure texts

This is a post for my paper engineering class, with whom I promised to share a small selection of cut-out and erasure texts. Here it is!

A Humument, by Tom Phillips. Phillips did a number of versions of this one: each one starts with A Human Monument, an obscure Victorian novel, and creates a new text by painting over each page, leaving some of the words unpainted to create a new story.

Dante’s Inferno, by Tom Phillips. This one uses the same method as A Humument but, obviously, taking the Inferno as the starting point.

Jen Bervin, Nets. This is an erasure version of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (So the title is an erased form of [Son]nets.) Bervin greys out most of the poems to create alternative and often resistant readings with the remaining black text.

Ronald Johnson’s radi os (or “radios”) is similar to Bervin’s book but completely erases the unchosen words and uses Paradise Lost as the base text.

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! uses a different kind of base text: the court documents surrounding the 1781 murder of 133 enslaved Africans on a British ship (the Zong). Philip’s work is complex remixing and breaking up of the source text rather than a more straightforward erasure.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes takes erasure to another level by die-cutting the unused words out of the pages, creating three-dimensional layers of text. This one’s source is Bruno Schulz’s short story collection The Street of Crocodiles, originally published in Polish.

Yasmine Seale’s artwork uses a method like Tom Phillips’s to rework a nineteenth-century translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Seale has now published her own translation of The Thousand and One Nights (marketed as The Arabian Nights, though Seale objects to that translation of the title).

By Erik, ago

Paper Folding Magic: The Trouble Wit

I’m learning about paper engineering, which is super-fun. I need a place to pop some information, so I’m going to use this post for that purpose.

Today, Kelli Anderson told us about Harry Houdini’s book called Houdini’s Paper Magic. Archive.org has a number of scans of the full book. Here is one, and if all goes well, it will open to page 130 automatically: the description of the “Trouble Wit.”

As Houdini explains, the “Trouble Wit” is a kind of storytelling routine with a prop: a piece of paper with a basic folding pattern (as far as I can tell, an accordion fold with two hinges). The performer tells a story, reshaping the paper to create the impression of a series of different objects that illustrate the action. The routine was sufficiently common, says Houdini, that magic stores sold the paper patterns for home use. (Houdini also refers to three other books already describing the routine. I’m in the process of tracking them down.)

In the later book Paper Magic, Robert Harbin traces the “Trouble Wit” routine hundreds of years back to China, then to Continental Europe (as the French “Papier Multiforme”) and on to England.

Stanyon Ellis’s Conjuring for Amateurs offers an early version of the three-section construction of the paper prop (and reinforces the Chinese associations of the trick by calling it the “Chinese Fan”). Steve Biddle’s The New Origami gets down to details, with all the steps and illustrations necessary to create the whole mechanism.

By Erik, ago

Resources for Pandemic Teaching: A Miscellany

When I started teaching, I had enough youthful optimism to imagine that I could remember, from year to year, what I thought about my past classes: what readings worked well, how I wanted to tweak assignments, which great new ideas I had encountered and wanted to incorporate. You see where this is going: experience soon showed me that I could not remember all of that from year to year, so I started a document called “Teaching Ideas,” organized mostly by course, to which I outsource the tasks of memory.

This year, it grew a new opening section: ideas and resources related to online teaching in the pandemic era. As usual, I was taking these notes for myself, to inform my planning for my fall classes. They have now grown into a fairly large pile, very loosely organized and lightly edited. Please add other ideas you have found useful in comments!

Covid Thinking

  • Beginning of the term
    • Divide discussion boards? (Gernsbacher suggests 6 to 9 in each discussion board group)
  • Weekly schedule
    • Weekly newsletter to each class previewing the content and tasks of the week
    • But casual short videos as in Flower Darby article
    • Weekly checklist of graded assignments: by day, with points, making sure to build in points for interaction, follow-through, and self-assessment
    • Karen Costa on writing groups
    • End-of-week shout-outs to classmates (either direct or back-channel and shared by me later)
  • General resources
  • Resilient Pedagogy
    • Andrea Kaston Tange on Resilient Design for fall teaching and subsequent Twitter thread about principles. Key question: “How can I design a class that could function wholly online if it needed to, but that has assignments and modes that could work in person if we have the ability to meet that way?”
      • Examples: group notes that get distilled for key points to share; rotating responsibilities on discussion boards; short teacher videos that set up the readings and such
      • Reducing complexity with exceptional, step-by-step clarity of instructions
      • Face-to-face discussion as precious and focused, used only for purposes that can’t be achieved asynchronously
      • Redundancies: discussion assignments that use the same prompt for message board or in-person discussion
      • Note the links to related resources at the bottom
    • Aimée Morrison on Resilient Pedagogy (series of blog posts)
      • Stable, semester-long groups (with the introduction to the series)
        • Groups of 3-5 are the key to everything else
        • Groups rotate through assignment responsibilities, such as choosing or summarizing readings for the class or making lecture notes
      • Collaborative class notes
        • “This assignment is a classic win-win-win-win: it produces a classroom where disability accommodations do not need to be asked for, it makes my life as a teacher a lot easier, it calls forth a sense of ownership and responsibility among students, it allows for a greater number of resources to be shared and documented. And if the main teacher has to disappear for four weeks, and then the whole shit show has to suddenly move online? Well, most of the record of the course is already there, waiting, ready to be picked up by whomever is able, as they can.”
      • Other posts to come, according to the first installment:
        • One-page reading summaries
        • Short assignments, different modalities
        • Short assignments, not sequence
        • Flipped classroom: pedagogy of gentle provocation
        • Meta-cognitive classroom: teaching the teaching
    • Joshua Eyler Twitter thread
      • Key point: “As opposed to other contingency plan models, which require faculty to do lots and lots of extra work (what does X activity or assignment look like in f2f? in online synch? in online asynch?), the resilient model advocates for designing 1 time & using regardless of modality.”
    • Bill Hart-Davidson on Resilient Pedagogy
      • “A resilient pedagogy requires planning for the important interactions that facilitate learning.”
      • “Ultimately, I think the work of building a resilient approach to teaching and learning should be work to preserve and celebrate the best ways to be together, face-to-face or online, so that we make the most of the time we have set aside for learning. When I select a suite of tools to enable learning in my own classes — online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of both — I try to build a studio. I ask questions like, how will students see and learn from one another? How will they be able to reflect on their own progress? ?How, when I am demonstrating, will students be able to shift perspectives in order to answer their own questions?”
  • Peer learning, groups, engagement
    • Ideas from Andrea Kaston Tange, Borrow These Ideas:
      • Start class in breakout sessions for conversation
      • Have students write the check-in questions to ask each other at the beginning of class
      • “Ask students to write about what an article, the first chapter of a novel, a recipe, an economic theory, or anything else they are reading assumes they already know.”
      • “Assign roles in small groups: synthesizer, skeptic, note-taker, reporter. This is particularly helpful if you have some remote students and some in-person ones, as the remote student could have the role of skeptic or synthesizer and produce starting points for conversation that might happen in class (which they might miss), and the note-takers will then have produced notes that those who miss the synchronous discussion can use.”
      • “Flexible Synchronous: Assign students to working groups based on their own schedule and availability. Give each group different questions about the reading to work through, and ask them to make notes in a shared document.”
      • “Wholly Asynchronous: post a question in a Q&A style forum, where students have to post some kind of response before they can see anyone else’s. Have a follow-up assignment where they have to read through the threads and each come up with one synthesis statement that draws together two or more observations made by others, and post that to a shared google doc.”
    • Asynchronous discussion on Piazza (with help from Laura Sinnett). Advantages:
      • Ability for students to ask questions and get answers in public–and questions can be anonymous
      • Ability to set up stable groups (as in Morrison essay linked above)
      • Standard discussion formats or Wiki-style collective composition
      • Also allows posting of resources, so can replace Blackboard completely for my purposes
    • Georgetown site on peer learning
    • Melissa Wheler, Building community (also see the next section here)
    • Tips for online discussion, Edwige Simon
    • Short video responses!
    • Ali Briggs, “Ten Ways to Overcome Barriers to Student Engagement Online” 
      • Among other things, make contact before the course begins (with welcome video as well as text), use reminders and checklists for helping students stay on track
    • Morton Ann Gernsbacher “Five Tips for Improving Online Discussion Boards” (PDF download)
      • Divide into groups of six to nine students–separate, parallel discussions 
      • Direct traffic: make initial posts and subsequent discussions into separate assignments with their own deadlines, and use further direction such as respond to someone who doesn’t have a response yet, or different from whom you’ve responded to before
      • Assign actions for the responses: “Find three quotations that interested/surprised/annoyed you and explain why”; use verbs such as find, compare, explain, describe, identify–they imply work getting done, not shooting the breeze.
      • Incorporate student interactivity: jigsaw prompts (find an X that nobody else has found), snowball prompts (build on something a previous student provided). Or 3C+Q: response to another student must include at least two of compliment, comment, connection, and question.
      • Deter parachuting (which is doing the discussion post without doing the underlying assignment)
  • Videos
  • S3 UDL (Universal Design for Learning) hacks from Britt Abel in ACM Workshop
    • Add modalities: could video or audio be an alternative to writing? Even for first steps in a scaffolded assignment? (Essay by Karen Costa on [not] requiring camera presence)
    • Scaffolding with cognitive support (providing outlines, summaries, graphic organizers)
    • Align assessment criteria align with goals of assignment
  • Grading and self-assessment
    • Beloit Student Feedback Strategies (in Documents as PDF)
      • Such as Three things that have engaged you, 2 things you will use in the future, 1 thing you still have questions about

    • Each assignment: task, purpose (long-term as well as immediate), criteria (including examples of successful practice)
    • Make self-assessment/check-in regular and graded!
    • Linda B. Nilson, Specs grading and assignment bundling
    • Abby Mullen, Contract grading (and Miriam Posner version)
    • Cia Verschelden on bandwidth replenishment
    • Attendance: “we miss you when you’re gone” approach, with follow-up conversation, rather than docking grades
  • Evidence-based learning in general (partly from GalaxyKate thread)
    • Brown et al., Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
    • Bruning et al., Cognitive Psychology and Instruction
    • Clark and Mayer, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
    • Mazur, Peer Instruction (short video)
    • Sarah M. Leupen, Evidence-Based Instruction (lecture)
  • Two contrary insights to hold onto about learning in a traumatic world:
    • James Baldwin “It’s very hard to look at a typewriter, and concentrate on that, if you’re afraid of the world around you.”
    • Toni Morrison: “I get angry about things, then go on and work.”
By Erik, ago

Frankenstein: The Creature’s Pronouns

In every discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that I’ve seen in heard, in person or in print, everyone has used masculine pronouns to describe the creature. Except one: a few years ago, I taught a Romanticism seminar in which one student referred to the creature as “they.” While fully supporting any person’s autonomy in choosing their pronouns, I resisted applying “they” to the creature. All of us were using masculine pronouns to describe Victor Frankenstein, Henry Clerval, and other characters; the creature seemed to fit into the same categories of manhood and masculinity as those characters. Surely the creature identifies as a man, as we would now put it?

Certainly, the book’s other characters identify the creature as a man, and the creature follows models of male desire and violence that he encounters–I think of Frankenstein as a great modern myth of learned, toxic masculinity–and there is some oblique evidence that Victor has created him with male organs of reproduction. But I wanted to take my student’s implied question seriously and point to a moment in which the creature clearly labels himself a man. However, whereas Victor, for instance, talks about himself specifically as a man, I’m not sure the creature ever does.

And the more I looked into the issue, the more I began to realize that there is a much stronger case for “they” than I had anticipated. The creature’s crucial assertion of masculinity, for instance, seems to be his explicitly Adamic request for a female partner. But even there, the evidence is slippery. The creature says, “You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.” I concede that we have to read against the grain pretty aggressively not to see that as an expression of the creature’s desire to possess a woman in a way that he’s learned from, among other things, Paradise Lost and Felix de Lacey, who thinks that “the captive [Safie’s father] possessed a treasure which would fully reward his toil and hazard.” And that kind of desire is gendered masculine in the novel.

Even in this case, though, it’s really Victor who does the work of gendering the creature and the potential hetero partnership with Creature 2, as in his statement that “They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form?”

The lack of a third-person narrator means that the Voice of the Novel never has to use pronouns for the creature. The 1817/8 Preface that Percy Shelley wrote never genders the creature, either.

But we have a statement from the author describing the creature in the third person: Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction. I went to the text, fully expecting it to settle the question in favor of “he.”

Quite the contrary. Shelley first refers to imagining the creature as “the phantasm of a man”–so man, yes, but what to do with that “phantasm”?–but from that point on, the creature is a “thing” and takes “it” pronouns: “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days.” Even if the creature is not human, as this introduction and Victor both suggest, Shelley could use masculine pronouns but chooses not to.

The more I look into this, the more unexpectedly interesting it becomes. I think you can make a case for the creature being and identifying as male all along, with my whole way of thinking here constituting presentist over-reading. In many ways, I still accept the case for “he,” and so far, I have continued using it myself.

However, I can also see a good case for reading the creature as Falling into masculinity, as represented by the way it? frames its desire for a partner and more generally starts to shape its life in the mold of the novel’s men.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Advising in the time of coronavirus: a time capsule

Advising at a Distance, Letter 1

Hello from Grinnell!

Dear advisees,

As we prepare to make the transition to Grinnell online for the rest of the semester, I want to check in with you, collectively and individually. I hope you are safe and settled into your location for the rest of the semester. I’m going to convey a few different things in this letter, so it is a little long, and I appreciate your attention.

A Short Survey: Where and How Are You?

I know this is a disruptive and scary time for everyone. I want to offer consultation and comfort however I can. To that end, please reply to this message (just to me) within a day or two with answers to these questions:

  1. Where are you? (Just the location is fine, so I understand how to think about time zones and such; if there’s anything else you want to share about your living circumstances, you’re welcome to.)
  2. Do you plan to remain where you are for the rest of the semester?
  3. How’s your internet? Do you have reliable wifi? Are you worried about any sites being blocked that your teachers might ask you to use?
  4. I will be communicating primarily by email when I need to share information with you (as in this letter). Do you anticipate any problems being able to read email regularly?
  5. What are your biggest concerns about the rest of the semester?

Academics in the Time of Coronavirus: A Mindset

It’s difficult to offer general thoughts about navigating the current time. Some people are wrestling primarily with the restrictions of social distancing. Others have pressing and alarming concerns about the disease itself, mental health, family and living situations, money, and more. We are all probably experiencing, at least, some manifestations of communal grief, whether specific to our own circumstances or generalized and anticipatory.

I hope that you are finding your teachers to be modifying your classes in ways that reflect the new constraints of our situation. You can also make choices that can help yourself as well. For the obvious example, you can choose to convert any or all of your classes to S/D/F (pass/fail) grading, an option I strongly recommend. I would not normally recommend S/D/F for most circumstances, but given the College’s implementation of the special policy for this semester, you have the flexibility you need to do it. And lots of colleges and universities are making pass/fail grading the default or even mandatory option, so employers and graduate schools will understand what they’re seeing when they look at transcripts for Spring 2020.

When you consider that and other options for making your near future easier to handle, try to project yourself into the near future a little bit. And I need to be bleak for a minute, in an effort to be helpful. Exponential growth—the way highly transmissible virus spreads—is hard for humans to grasp. But if you look carefully at the current data about this virus, on a site like this excellent one from the Financial Times, you’ll see an inescapable conclusion: in the United States and in many other places, the impact of the virus is about to get much, much worse. Many other parts of the world are on similar trajectories. When you make decisions now about academics, keep in mind that you are making those decisions on behalf of your future self, for a time when the effects of the virus and related circumstances—such as increasing restrictions on movement and socialization—may be further draining the resources you bring to academic work. I’m specifically thinking of the S/D/F option here, but you may consider other ways in which you can plan now to help your future self.

If you are not in a situation of personal emergency, I do want to offer some general advisorly advice about managing the coming weeks. (I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of things like this podcast about helpful routines.) Creating a structure for a typical week will help a lot—something like your Grinnell routine with adjustments for your own needs. Remember that your body interprets all screen-watching as a strain, whether it’s work or Netflix. Anything you can do to get away from the screens—reading, walking, stretching—will help relieve that stress. And specifically, watch out for overconsumption of news and social media. I have suspended some social media accounts and put automatic time limits on the rest, and I find those limits very helpful.

Staying in Touch (Including a New Office Hour)

Again, I know that everybody’s in their own situation, and some of this advice may feel inappropriate to your circumstances. If it feels that way to you, I sincerely apologize. Please understand the advice, and everything here, as a manifestation for my concern for all of you, my worry about you, my deep wish that you can find your own ways to navigate this situation safely and find your way back to thriving as soon as possible. If I can help you in ways that I have not imagined here, please let me know.

One way to get in touch with me is through an office hour I’ll hold every week just for you in my Webex room. That office hour will be at 10:00 a.m. Iowa time. (I’m also holding office hours for each of my classes. My old office hour schedule, which was not so good for global time zones, no longer applies.) We can definitely talk by phone or chat if Webex isn’t possible or convenient for you; just send me an email, and we’ll set up one of those alternatives. And if the time doesn’t work, we’ll find another that does!

Please know that I’m thinking of all of you, wishing you and your loved ones health, safety, and comfort. Do take care.

ES

By Erik Simpson, ago

Small Classes and the Liberal Arts College

The Chronicle has a new piece up exploring the links between class size and learning. It quotes Dan Chambliss, who, as usual, offers useful thoughts about the ways the data has been misinterpreted in ways that mislead us about a given student’s experience. I now teach entirely small classes (or up to the small side of medium), but I took some fantastic large classes as a university undergraduate. My thoughts about the Chronicle piece:

  • The messiness of the data strikes me as compatible with a very simple idea: a small-group learning environment is essential or at least transformative for some kinds of learning but not a big deal for others. I’ve lived in the middle of course scheduling and space planning for many years now, and I see statements to this effect frequently from my colleagues: class X can be as larger, but class Y needs to be capped.
  • Students at Grinnell College generally chose the liberal arts college model because they want to be in small classes. But when they have a choice between being, say, the 26th person in a class with a certain professor or the 5th person in a class with a new professor they don’t know, in my experience, they will almost always choose the former–and other factors such as time of day will win out over class size as well. I have seen many students express their appreciation of smaller class sizes (even among our universally smallish classes); I have almost never seen a student select a class because it is smaller than another. I therefore perceive a large gap between stated and revealed preferences.
  • The primary advantage of small classes may be their ability to gives students the experience of close mentoring in their scholarly or creative work, either during the semester or afterwards. If so, it may make sense to sprinkle a few large classes in a curriculum to enable more students to experience that kind of close mentoring, and I’ve heard that model suggested many times. My sense, however, is that most people drastically underestimate the difficulty of creating a new large class in a culture dominated by smaller ones. If any of you readers have heard of successful recent efforts to create such classes, I’d love to hear about them.
By Erik Simpson, ago

The Last Time Trump Paid Taxes

#TheLastTimeTrumpPaidTaxes, Internet Explorer was not yet a thing. Amazon was a wet thing. Craig’s list had groceries. Google was a misspelling.

DVDs were the technology of the future. The Dow had never hit 5,000, and the federal speed limit was still 55. Gabby Douglas had not been born.

When Trump last paid taxes, Cuthullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling sound. His spear leaned against the rock. His shield lay on the grass by his side.

There were only 17 and a half states in the U.S.

Triangles had not yet evolved a third side, and—I remember like it was yesterday—a Coke cost a nickel down at the Ben Franklin.

When Trump last paid taxes, all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him.

When Trump last paid taxes: President Clinton. Heyo!

When Trump paid taxes, he didn’t even realize he was about to become part of the 47% because Mitt Romney was still working as a boy bootblack alongside the carriage house in Faneuil Hall.

Brangelina was nothing but the seventh-most popular order at the Orange Julius in the mall downtown.

Imagine, if you can, the excitement that was caused by the birth of Paul Bunyan! It took five giant storks, working overtime, to deliver him to his parents. And in celebration, Donald Trump paid his last installment of taxes to the federal government.

When Trump last paid taxes, the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Fossils formed in the deeps that are now wall sconces.

Red was still orangish, and cows yet had gills.

Towers rose that would fall.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Navigation by frustration

My astute and thoughtful colleague Sam Rebelsky has posted a righteously angry essay about the current state of Grinnell’s web presence. I will add one additional thought about the functionality of the site for members of the Grinnell community, who have to try to figure out how to navigate the public and private sides of the College’s web pages, in part by guessing which side of the public/private divide contains any given bit of information.

Each side of the wall has its own organizational conventions and search functions; the intranet cannot search the web and vice versa. We might take issue with the organization of information on either side of the wall, but that can, in theory, be fixed. The deeper problem lies in determining which side to search. There will always be information that seems like it should be on one side but is actually on the other–we’ve seen for many years how much disagreement we have among reasonable people about these decisions–so the current system will always be sending people down the wrong rabbit hole, and the only signal pointing to the correct rabbit hole is frustration. If you think something is public, you can only discover that it is on the intranet by exploring the public side of the site thoroughly and finally giving up. The same thing happens if you make the opposite mistake. Driving people crazy is a necessary and constitutive feature of the current setup. I will call this phenomenon, which I have experienced repeatedly, the Two Rabbit Holes of Unending Woe.

The only way around that problem is to eliminate the ambiguous cases as much as possible. I see two ways to do that.

1) You can put pretty much all the web content into the private intranet, so everybody knows to look there. But this won’t work: everyone knows, for example, that some events need to be advertised to a broader public, just as everyone knows that the Center for Careers, Life, and Service or the English department needs some public presence. Therefore, if you force other parts of those functions onto GrinnellShare, you necessarily create and maintain the Two Rabbit Holes of Unending Woe: anybody who chooses the wrong Rabbit Hole–and they will sometimes choose the wrong Rabbit Hole–has to explore it completely before frustration finally leads to the correct one.

(Sometimes, even the navigation of the correct Rabbit Hole doesn’t work. More than once, I have finally had to give up and contact staff to ask them to guide me to their content. We can’t have web architecture built on a foundation of phone calls.)

2) But there is another way! You can put all of the plausibly public content onto the public website. If the CLS needs a public presence, the only way for it to have a coherent website is to make all of its marketing and communications materials public. If they want to shape their information for different audiences, they can easily do so with the conventional means of pages “for current students,” “for alumni,” etc. If the categories fail for any reason, the user can use the search function as a backup, with a high likelihood of success: this is the Single Rabbit Hole of Completed Tasks and Happy Grinnellians. (In this scheme, an intranet* still has a useful function as a sorting system for internal documents that need controlled permissions. Departments, committees, classes, and ad hoc groups of individuals can use it to share what they need to share in a controlled way.)

We need to stop thinking that throwing more money and labor into approach #1 is going to solve the current, drastic problems of the site’s organization and usability. We have excellent people working hard on each of the two Rabbit Holes. They make their decisions thoughtfully and help people effectively when called upon. Their work will never pay off in a system that requires user frustration as an essential feature, perhaps the essential feature, of navigating between the public and private sites. This is a happy case in which the value of sharing our information with a broader public also produces in a site that is more welcoming and easier to use.

 

*Note: Edited from “GrinnellShare.” We need some way to share files, not necessarily the Microsoft way.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Declaring my candidacy for President?

I am ready to declare my candidacy for the Presidency, having won the very tiny caucus of the Interrogative Party. Motto: “You’ve got answers? We’ve got questions!” My wobbly platform will consist only of complicated questions that I don’t know the answer to and would enjoy hearing your thoughts about.

First plank: Aside from issues of access, what would happen if we made American public higher education tuition-free?

(I’m not dismissing the importance of access. I care deeply about it and have Very Strong Opinions about how to achieve it. But plenty of people, including other Presidential candidates, are debating that issue already.)

Starting points:

1. At any given time, about a third of American college students are attending two-year public colleges, and among students at four-year schools, nearly half have had some experience at a two-year school. At the two-year schools, the average tuition is about $3,800 per year. Michigan-Ann Arbor’s out-of state tuition is about $43,000 per year, or about $14,000 for in-staters. (These numbers are tuition-only, not comprehensive fees, and do not account for financial aid.) How would zeroing out tuition change the respective roles of two-year and four-year public education in the American system?

2. At flagship public universities, the non-tuition costs are approximately $15,000 per year for residential students. How would the amount and significance of these costs change in a tuition-free system?

3. How would the role of international students in American colleges and universities (both public and private) change if the public ones stopped charging tuition?

4. How would changing the source of operating income from (primarily) tuition to (largely) direct government funding change the roles of politicians and their appointees in the governance of higher education? How would the mode of education itself change?

5. We often hear about European systems in discussions of tuition expenses, but the U.S. has a different kind of system of private higher education. How would the American system of private higher ed affect (and be affected by) the dynamics of a shift to tuition-free public higher ed? What changes in cultural capital and competitive dynamics would result from the shift?

I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts on any of these points. I’d prefer that nobody mentions any politicians from other parties. Ambivalence, uncertainty, and especially curiosity are very welcome.

By Erik Simpson, ago

Does patience pay off on the job market? Here’s an article that won’t tell you the answer.

Last week, I was in conversations with two groups of people seeking or soon to seek academic jobs. Though located at two different institutions and coming from a wide range of disciplines, the groups shared a new concern added to the usual ones: the new Chronicle of Higher Education Article called “On the Academic Job Market, Does Patience Pay Off?” Many readers seem to share the alarm of (currently) the first comment under the piece: “This is extraordinary information… more evidence of how merciless the academic job market has become. Graduate students need to be aware of these numbers from the moment they start a program.”

Seeing the impact of the article on the job seekers, I read the piece, and I found a problem: it does not answer the question it asks. “Does Patience Pay Off?” is an answerable question, at least at the level of statistical generality, and we can make it more precise by rephrasing it: “If a candidate stays on the job market for multiple years, does the probability of securing a job in any given year go up or down over time?”

The piece in the Chronicle, however, answers another question: of the jobs secured in a given year, how many are given to people at each stage of their job search? The cited statistics reveal that, across many fields, about half of jobs go to applicants who are ABD or in their first year after completing the doctorate, and a strong majority of jobs to to candidates who are ABD or within four years of completion.

The shape of these numbers is entirely explicable by the nature of a competitive market: assuming a constant number of new applicants per year, a much lower number of new jobs per year, and an equal chance for every candidate to get a job, a mature market will award roughly half the jobs to applicants in their first two years on the market and, of course, many more to the group that also includes the next three classes of applicants.

That is, of course a lot of  jobs go to the classes first hitting the market: that’s where the largest numbers of applicants are. Those classes are bigger than the more seasoned ones because some of the latter applicants will have gotten jobs already, and some of them will have dropped out of the market entirely. You can see these effects play out in a simple spreadsheet model that I made. My applicant-bots have the same chance of getting a job every year they apply, and as their market matures, it produces data similar to the Chronicle’s.

So does patience pay off in the academic job market? I’d still love to know.

By Erik Simpson, ago
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