The National Association of Scholars is running lists of people’s top ten favorite novels and nonfiction books. Here are mine:

NOVELS
Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
Elizabeth Bowen, “The Death of the Heart”
A.S. Byatt, “Possession”
Charlotte Bronte, “Villette”
Wilkie Collins, “The Woman in White”
Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend”
George Eliot, “Middlemarch”
Toni Morrison, “Beloved”
John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”
Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

NON-FICTION
Peter Ackroyd, “Dickens”
Peter Ackroyd, “London”
Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood”
Richard Ellmann, “James Joyce”
Sander Gilman, “Seeing the Insane”
Jonathan Harr, “A Civil Action”
Tony Horwitz, “Confederates in the Attic”
Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, “The Shadow University”
Frank McCourt, “Angela’s Ashes”
Ruth Richardson, “Death, Dissection, and the Destitute”

See what others say here. And please list your own in the comments.

The stories of corruption at the NCAA Division One level are so common that they’ve become white noise. And the pseudo-penalties for schools that get caught are so pathetic that we tend to treat them as white noise, too–that’s what people do when they have no place to put their disgust.

Webster University economist Patrick Rishe has some thoughts on how to change all that:

On Friday, Ohio State University athletics director Gene Smith announced that the school was going to vacate each of their wins from a 12-1 season in 2010. This includes their victory over Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl which is of course a BCS Bowl Game.

Vacating wins is symbolic, and it robs the participants the future comfort of strolling on campus and seeing their achievements commemorated from decades before. Perhaps it deprives former players from future feel-good moments.

But ultimately, it is mostly white noise. A smokescreen. A public relations ploy to curry favor with the big bad sheriff known as the NCAA in the hopes that feigned severity/sincerity of self-imposed sanctions will lead to softer penalties.

I say enough with the bullspit.

If schools are genuinely remorseful about wrongdoing, then it’s time to start putting your money where your mouth is and vacate revenues earned from using ineligible players rather than vacating wins.

We all agree that part of the reason why the frequency of cheating in college athletics is so prevalent is because of the money involved. The economist in me says that if you raise the costs associated with committing the crime, you’ll see greater deterrence and less crime.

Vacating wins is nothing more than feigned let’s be tough on ourselves rhetoric. It’s grandstanding and groveling all at once, and the more I see it the more disingenuous it feels.

First of all, Ohio State, if you were genuinely remorseful of your misdeeds and truly wanted to set an example of atonement and self-punishment, then you should have passed on last year’s Sugar Bowl.

Second, when you learned of your coach’s misdeeds, you should have cut the cord right then and there.

But to the point herein, and this point applies to all cheaters in college athletics who then try to “self-penalize” in an effort to look remorseful and retroactively compliant, vacating money earned when using illegible players is the most honorable thing you could do because it shows the NCAA and the public that you’re willing to take a bullet in the place it hurts the most.

Your wallets, your budgets, and your bank accounts.

Rishe does a bit of math and figures that Ohio State ought to vacate somewhere between $10-20 million.

“If the NCAA truly wants to institute change while scaring the bejesus out of Division I coaches and administrators, it needs to ‘man up’ and legislate specific and strict financial penalties that would surely cause a reduction in infractions,” he concludes. “Otherwise, we might as well do what some have clamored for…and just cut college football (along with college basketball) loose and officially recognize them as de facto minor league feeder systems for the NFL and NBA.”

It would also help if the public would digest the situation a little more thoroughly. I find big-time college sports unwatchable now that I have an idea of what goes on behind the scenes. I’m a fan of great sport and great athletes–but not of lying, stealing, corruption, cheating, exploitation, and so on. When we watch Division One college football and basketball games, more often than not, we’re seeing both. But as long as the public doesn’t know / doesn’t care / doesn’t care to know, the incentive to overlook and even reward the dishonesty remains. After all, the revenues wouldn’t be there if the fans weren’t.

… then why can’t the president of the United States?

From the New York Times:

The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.

[...]

On Wednesday, in response to repeated requests for comment that The Times first made in mid-June, shortly after the book’s release, a White House spokesman chose not to dispute either Ms. Scott’s account or Mr. Obama’s memory, while arguing that Mr. Obama’s broader point remained salient.

“We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” said Nicholas Papas, the spokesman. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”

In her book, published in May by Riverhead Books, Ms. Scott writes that Mr. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, had an employer-provided health insurance policy that paid her hospital bills directly, leaving her “to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

Mr. Papas suggested that even if Ms. Scott was correct, Mr. Obama had not mischaracterized the facts because his mother needed her disability insurance payments to cover unreimbursed medical costs.

“As Ms. Scott’s account makes clear, the president’s mother incurred several hundred dollars in monthly uncovered medical expenses that she was relying on insurance to pay,” Mr. Papas said. “She first could not get a response from the insurance company, then was refused coverage. This personal history of the president’s speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs.”

Disability insurance, which primarily replaces wages lost to illness, was never at issue in the legislative debate over the Affordable Care Act.

The NYT says Obama “mischaracterized.” University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse says “lied” is a better word. She cites an extended quote from Obama’s 2008 campaign, wherein the “memory” of his mother’s insurance woes was extensively milked:

I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.

“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.

“The insurance companies were saying, ‘Maybe there’s a pre-existing condition and we don’t have to pay your medical bills,’ ” Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

Althouse goes on to note that Obama has used the sentimental advantage this story (emphasis on story) afforded him to accomplish a huge federal power grab–the centerpiece of which, of course, was the health care reform bill that the American people did not actually want.

Apologists for falsified memoirs argue that even if a book’s reported facts aren’t true, there can still be much “truthiness” to the story. That seems to be the angle the White House is taking. In other, far less consequential hoaxes, that sort of lame excuse hasn’t worked very well (Three Cups of Tea faker Greg Mortenson is now the target of two class-action lawsuits).

Will the “truthiness” claim work here? It shouldn’t. But it probably will.

“A recent survey of more than 30,000 first year students revealed that nearly half were spending more hours drinking than they were studying. Researchers from the University of Californina, Irvine found that a third of students surveyed expected B’s just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading….”

More here.

From the Asbury Park Press:

Last year Rutgers used nearly $27 million in university and student-fee money to balance its athletics budget. It was not unusual: since 2006, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million to cover athletics spending, a USA TODAY analysis finds. In 2010, Rutgers University said it would withhold scheduled negoatiated raises for its employees because of state funding cuts, a move expected to save $30 million.

The battle between academics and athletics is brewing nationally. Subsidies account for $1 of every $3 spent on athletics at NCAA Division I schools. Since 2006, athletics budgets at 219 Division I public schools have increased 22 percent, and subsidies — the part of the budget that comes from student fees and university money — have increased 26 percent.

But no athletics program has matched Rutgers’ subsidies; $115 million is the highest for any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest school among the power conferences — those whose football champions automatically qualify for the Bowl Championship Series.

Rutgers is trying various things to boost athletics funding, including a billion dollar capital campaign that would bring in $100 million for sports. So we can all relax now–this is clearly a reasonable plan, that the university will successfully execute, with all the money that’s been growing on trees lately, especially in New Jersey, where the public has no issues with wasted public education spending, none whatsoever.

Once upon a time I was a college athlete. So my thoughts on this subject don’t emerge from a “know nothing, don’t care, hate sports” attitude. I’m well aware of the good things athletics can do for student athletes, from scholarships that enable people to attend college to vital object lessons in discipline, teamwork, and sustained effort. Still, I can’t help thinking that the marriage of higher ed and athletics is a poisonous one, or at least has become so in the wake of its mega-commercialization. When you are stealing dollars from academics to support programs that are supposed to be secondary–even tertiary–to academics, when you are robbing your faculty to sustain an athletic money pit, you’ve jumped the shark. When your athletic budget continues to swell, despite the shortfall and despite cutting six teams, you’ve jumped it twice over.

But this should come as no surprise. This is the school that just paid Toni Morrison $30,000 to give a graduation speech. It’s also the school that paid Jersey Shore’s Snooki $32,000 to speak. Fittingly, Snooki’s advice, delivered to two standing-room-only crowds, exemplifies Rutgers’ budgetary priorities: “Study hard, but party harder.”

Indiana English prof emeritus Murray Sperber reflects on why so many college students–not to mention graduate students, whose intended careers hinge on writing well–can’t write to save their lives:

The poor writing of many American college students is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s much-discussed book Academically Adrift shows that most students don’t do much writing. The number of pages students have to write in most courses is depressingly low, but the problem, in my view, is much less one of quantity than of quality.

In trying to ascertain why so many graduate students have major writing problems, I began a pilot study with survey questions about the quantity of their writing in undergraduate courses. Often, they answered that they’d written well over 20 pages in individual courses and a total of over 100 pages per semester.

Yet, they still had difficulty mounting a logical argument, and had even more difficulty writing out that argument in coherent paragraph form. They had serious problems writing clear sentences; often they were addicted to passive constructions, believing that they sound “more academic.” When I asked them to unravel a sentence and explain who was doing what to whom in it, i.e., what the subject, verb, and object were, they looked at me as if I had arrived from another galaxy to torture them.

For my revised survey, I still ask about quantity but my key questions are now: “How many comments did the instructor who assigned the paper put on it?” And: “Please describe the comments that the instructor put on the paper.” The answers are revealing–the vast majority of students indicate that the instructor (in upper division courses, usually of professorial rank) wrote but a sentence on the last page, often something like, “An insightful view of this subject,” grading it “A.”

(In today’s grade-inflated academy, even an “A-“ would require some justification in writing; a “B” would necessitate at least a paragraph or two of explanation; and a “C” or below could trigger a legal brief to ward off a potential lawsuit.)

Why do faculty members respond so tersely to student writing? Beyond wanting to avoid the work of justifying below A- grades, the reasons probably connect to the evolution of English composition instruction during the last two generations. We’ve gone from traditional grammar-based pedagogy to what is usually termed “holistic writing,” i.e., trying to get students to grasp the language as a whole rather than in its grammatical parts.

Thus, many faculty members justify their indifference to dreadful student writing by saying that when reading a paper, they mainly want to ascertain whether the student understands the ideas in the course and makes good use of them. Content alone matters, not how well the student has expressed it.

Sperber rejects that excuse and goes on to lay out a plan for improving college writing instruction. College writing instructors should teach grammar and they should line edit student work. Students should be required to take multiple writing intensive courses during their undergraduate years, they should take the Collegiate Learning Assessment several times, and they should also take a course in logic.

It sounds good on paper — but there is one small problem. The working assumption here is that college teachers are themselves good writers — that they know grammar and can explain it; that they can line-edit constructively with attention to the details of expression (grammar, syntax, and word choice), structure (how paragraphs are made and how they fit together; how introductions, transitions, and conclusions work), and content (how topics are introduced, how arguments are developed, how to reason well on paper). A great many college teachers belong to a generation that did not learn these things–and that suffers from some of the same deficits as the students do. The blind can’t lead — or teach, or edit, or grade — the blind.

That’s not to say what Sperber recommends is impossible–just that sheer scarcity of resources may make it tough to implement on the scale that is needed here.

For what it’s worth, I was a line-editor and detailed commenter when I was teaching English at Penn. I also read and commented on drafts for any student who wanted me to. There were MANY — and many showed me multiple drafts. Students were surprised by how much feedback they got on their writing (especially in literature courses, which were, sadly, understood not to be writing classes). And the ones who cared about improving their writing did. They learned to become their own editors, needing me less and less. It was very cool indeed.

This was incredibly time-consuming work. It was also repetitive and frequently dull. But it was important to do, and I tried my best to do it. I was acutely aware of how many of my colleagues had no intention of spending their time in this manner, even as they complained mightily about the terrible quality of student writing. Sperber very politely does not broach the phenomenon of the English professor who can’t be bothered to teach writing (often rationalizing that their job is to teach literature, not composition). But it’s very, very real–and it’s a roadblock to the sort of reform he’s recommending.

A former classic professor explains why she left academe–and offers some bracing words for those who stay:

A while a ago there was an NYT article about ‘adjunct’ lawyers. To me this was further proof that higher ed is DOA. And yet I see so many of my former students flocking to law school ignoring obvious signs of not just oversupply but MASSIVE oversupply. There are already too many people with advanced degrees, and there will not be new jobs created just for them, so the problem won’t go away. Especially since there are too many regular ol’ BA’s floating around now, too.

The preposterous income-to-debt ratio is exactly what defines the adjunct instructor class, and now it defines the debt-ridden, just-out-of-college class. I’m betting lawyers are about to experience the same exciting and precipitous decline academics have — I’ve already heard one lawyer say they got into this for love, and not money. Ha. It’s only cold comfort that MBA’s are next in line.

Things are absolutely, positively not going to get better just because any individual refuses to see that they are not a special case in this overwhelming tide of evidence. It’s time to start looking for jobs that don’t value that piece of paper — and while we’re at it can we please just admit that one American ideal (everyone deserves an education because we’re all equal) is directly at odds with another (a degree means you’re exceptional)? Embrace the cognitive dissonance, people, because it’s only going to get worse.

This is why I left. I decided that there was no way in hell that any individual teacher could make a whit of difference within this behemoth and nonfunctional system. I also deduced that teaching — real teaching — was a product no one wanted in this consumer-driven culture. No “customer” ever wants to be told they’re average or their project sucks and needs to be started all over again, especially by a real person instead of a computer. Making those computers do stuff, on the other hand…well, that looked like something that would continue to be in demand.

Being DOA goes double (if that’s existentially possible) for the humanities — the funding is gone, and not coming back. Humanities get no respect. Why? Because the court of public opinion just doesn’t care. I’d even say it actively despises abstract thinking. Meanwhile science, math, and pseudo-science are still getting an automatic hall pass for being all, y’know, sciencey and stuff. Did you see Obama giving prizes to humanities teachers? I didn’t.

But humanities people, j’accuse. I’m not a huge fan of ‘Darwinian’ economics; deliberately ignoring reality, on the other hand, means I stop feeling bad for you. Where’s the free will here? Or are you too invested in your pseudo-monasticism to admit that normal Americans don’t care about what you’re doing? No, they really don’t, and they also don’t read the NYT or listen to NPR, while we’re at it.

And yes, I know, politicians also lie when they claim they are speaking for the many, but at least they are speaking to the many because they are using bazillions of dollars to saturate the media. Teaching is not. Higher ed is not. The humanities certainly are not. In my experience, academics are actually proud of how few people care about their subject, which is just sick. This is why I hated many, perhaps most, people I came in contact with as an academic. I’m frankly shocked I have so many academic fans.

Anyway. I thought, why not get get myself into a position of some security, in a field where people did have power and money and influence on the majority, and then maybe try to talk to them about history — gently, in the course of normal conversation, as it should be done, rather than bludgeoning them over the head with things they don’t know. To me, this was putting my money where my mouth was, not only by attempting to show that (e.g.) Plato was useful to normal people but also by showing that my humanities-based problem solving abilities were broadly applicable (or “extensible” as we say in the trade), and so making an argument against the “narrow” interpretation of what humanities are good for.

The higher ed Titanic has already struck the iceberg. It’s time to jump off the sinking ship and start a new colony, hopefully by doing something different. This does not mean whining about how unjust the world is, or blaming people for not caring, or throwing up hands about firing teachers. This is no longer news, and it’s really not helping anything.

So if you ask me what to do, yeah, I’d tell you to leave. I don’t think change will ever happen from within. Go find a job that doesn’t kill you and pays you enough not to worry all the time. You’ll be amazed at how much energy you have to think great thoughts. And if you miss letting other people know about Beowulf, make a damned webinar and distribute it on YouTube. You’ll reach more people that way — though you won’t get to pull that martyr, poor-a-holic crap, which often seems to me the thing that academics really thrive on.

Only when the humanities can earn their own keep will they be respected in modern America. And that will only happen when you convince the majority of people to be interested, of their own volition, rather than begging or guilting them into giving you that money to translate your obscure French poem on vague grounds of “caring about culture.” So either figure something out, or shut up and accept that the humanities are an inherently elite activity that will rely on feudal patronage. Just like they always have. (If you think of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s obvious why the leisure class, which generally has money, sex, food, and security taken care of, has been in charge of learning.)

You have no idea how much it pains me to say this, but speaking from experience I now believe that private industry is doing a better job of communicating, persuading, innovating, of everything the university has stopped doing. I do not take this as indicator of how well capitalism works, I take it as an indicator of how badly universities have failed, while still somehow aping the worst aspects of corporate capitalism. (And no, I sure as hell wouldn’t bail them out.)

There’s even more.

It’s refreshing, and I can vouch for the bits about finding that job that doesn’t kill you and does let you use the skills you were supposed to be using in academe, but which were really just squandered or twisted by it. Also totally agree with the point that you need to pull your weight in this world–which means, if you deal in ideas, you need to actively convince people that your ideas are worthwhile and valuable.

The university model is structured in such a way as to insulate professors from this fact–especially those that don’t bring in research dollars to support their labs. In the case of the humanities, this has been hugely warping–not just because of the proud parochialism it has produced (see above), but also because of the weirdly contorted rationales for relevance that have emerged in recent decades. The politicization of the humanities arose out of a felt need to defend the meaningfulness of the academic endeavor–but it arose in a smug vacuum, and wound up making the humanities even more obscure and marginal than they already were.

I’ve said many times on this blog that if academics want to conserve “the professorship” as they know and love it, they need to make their case to the public, and they need to do it in a manner that respects that public and actually engages with it. Holding the public in contempt–for being anti-intellectual, or conservative, or irrelevant, or similar–is a recipe for failure, which is what is happening. It’s called biting the hand that feeds you. And it really never works.

White Peril has an excellent post up about the ugly intersection of student loan debt and the overweening sense of entitlement that has become one of the uglier parts of our culture. The occasion is Eli Mystal, the hapless Harvard grad (B.A., J.D.) who has been writing heartfelt online confessionals about why the system has betrayed him and how he should be able to void–via tactical defaulting–most of his six-figure student loan debt.

Mystal feels he was duped, taken advantage of by evil conniving creditors who never explained what $100K in students loans would mean for his ability to carve out a career, start a family, and get a life after school. He also feels abandoned by all the bystander adults who never sat him down and told him what the loan sharks (i.e., Harvard, the government, perhaps a private lender or two) were about to do to him. He was ignorant, uninformed, innocent, a sitting duck. And he’s so mad he doesn’t think he should have to pay anyone back–or work in a job he dislikes so that he can earn enough money to make the payments.

Megan McArdle has had a lot to say about Mystal’s moral and economic reasoning over at the Atlantic. White Peril makes a more elemental, crucial point: that the “I didn’t know any better” excuse is not an excuse–but a lie, and a big part of the problem:

Megan and I don’t know each other, but we were in basically the same major, at the same college, at the same time. I assume we had the same sorts of conversations with our friends junior and senior years. Everyone knew that the kids who went to medical or law school were basically mortgaging their twenties and early thirties in exchange for very high earning potential, which they would only really get to enjoy in middle age after soldiering through years of punishing, soul-destroying work for demanding superiors and paying off their debt. (Everyone also knew—this was twenty years ago—that tenure-track jobs in the humanities were getting scarce, which makes you wonder about all these people in the last decade who assumed they’d sail from their PhDs into secure, comfy professorships, but that’s a topic for another day.) The big loans were reasonable because of the big payoff later as long as you didn’t mind locking yourself into one career. This was the sort of thing people talked about all the time.

This was true when I was in college, too, more than twenty years ago. My choice of a public university over a private one had much to do with economics. So did my decision to enroll in a PhD program where I had a full five-year fellowship–as opposed to Berkeley, which was ranked higher than Michigan was, and which admitted me, but which did not offer me any funding. As one of my Berkeley professors said to me when I was wrestling with the decision, “Never pay for a Ph.D.” And so I didn’t. And I worked that much harder in grad school, knowing it would be harder to get a tenure-track job coming out of Michigan than out of an Ivy or Berkeley. And I graduated with no debt and even some savings. Never regretted that.

So White Peril’s point–that the “I didn’t know any better” line is just that, a line–is well taken. It’s not like you need a Wharton MBA to know that if you borrow a huge amount, you will have a huge amount to repay.

Caveat: I do think schools should educate students much better than they do about what student loans mean. They should explain how interest works, what their payment obligations will be when they graduate, what that means for what kind of major they can afford to pursue, what kind of job they will have to get, and what kinds of challenges they may have down the road when it comes to buying homes, raising families, etc. It’s well known that many undergrads today are bordering on innumeracy. A great many are financially illiterate. As I have argued before, colleges and universities have an obligation not only to ensure that they address those deficits through required coursework, but also to avoid exploiting those deficits by arranging loans they know most of their students can neither understand nor pay back.

That said, we are a worse country, not a better one, for the belief we seem to have that we should not have to be responsible for our mistakes–especially when those mistakes involve overspending and extreme debt.

The Nation’s Report card is in. The results, as usual, are dismal: Only a third of fourth graders know the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Only two percent of twelfth-graders know that school segregation was the issue in Brown vs. the Board of Education–even though they were supplied with this statement to interpret: “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” And so on.

I took the test for grades 4, 8, and 12. Aced them–which is not saying much. They are very, very easy if you are a nominally attentive adult who has thought even moderately about the world, time, and our place in it. Emphasis on nominally. It’s also the case that many of the questions don’t test your knowledge per se, but your ability to reason through the multiple choices with a modicum of logic.

Consider this question from the Grade 4 test:

The dotted lines on the map above [there is a map of Europe, Asia, and North America showing a trade route from an unlabelled Italy to China] show some of the main trade routes between Europe and Asia in the time before Christopher Columbus.

What is one reason why Europeans looked for new trade routes across the oceans?

–Goods made in the Americas were believed to be cheaper and better made.
–Asians no longer needed any of the products that Europeans wanted to trade.
–European traders were hoping to find cheaper and shorter routes.
–European Kings and Queens no longer allowed trade along the old routes.

You don’t need to “know” the answer to get it right. You can get it right if you eliminate the most outrageous options. In this sense, these history tests are also critical thinking tests. That makes the results even more damning, I think, since one of the arguments against making students memorize facts is that if they learn critical thinking they can operate successfully without a big trove of rote knowledge packed away in their heads.

Test yourself here.