Adventures in Bad University Administration

Leave it to the Aggies. An administrator in the Texas A&M system has proposed a novel "merit-based" bonus system for teaching faculty: awarding financial bonuses to instructors with good (i.e., better than other instructors) student evaluations.

I recognize the value of student evaluations, but I'm not naive enough to believe that they provide an accurate metric for excellence in teaching, especially across disciplines and courses. At my institution, I teach required, core sequence classes that all music majors take. My evaluations last semester were really good, but I can't imagine they are as good as they would be if I were teaching, say, the history of hip-hop or a course on the film scores of John Williams. That is, I think students and their evaluations are colored by the nature of the course (thinking back my student days, it is probable that I gave lower evaluation marks to good teachers of uninteresting classes than good teachers of interesting classes).

Similarly, I am fighting (or trying to fight, at least) grade inflation; I have a steep grading scale and am considered to be a "hard grader"-- most in my classes received B's and C's last term. Grading leniently (even the perception of grading leniently) has an effect on student evaluations, a fact admitted even by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. Does this, in effect, bait instructors to inflate grades in hopes of a $2,500 bonus?

So what is really going on here? Take it from Texas A&M's associate provost Karan Watson, as quoted the Byran-College Station paper, The Eagle:

"Karan Watson, Texas A&M's dean of faculties and associate provost, admitted that the bonus program has shortcomings, including a disadvantage to professors such as Loudder. It's also more likely that the instructor of a fun elective is going to get higher ratings than someone who teaches a mandatory class, Watson said.
But the fundamental purpose of this program, she said, is to measure student satisfaction, not teaching effectiveness."

(emphasis mine)

Christ. If I want to win that award, I'm going to start having no exams, teach only pop culture topical subjects, and have a dime bag as a required course material. I don't say this because I have a low opinion of students, either. I think students have vastly different expectations for different courses. A class on the cultural psychology of the Velvet Underground carries a different expectation than Organic Chemistry III, and I would argue that it would be much easier to get better evaluations with the former. In the fall, I'm teaching a class on modes of listening, which will be for the general student population and include mostly popular music. I guarantee I will get better evaluations for that course than for my post-tonal theory class-- it is human nature. It will be less work, closer to their experience, and likely an easy 'A'.

The point here is that a nebulous, "consumer-y" phrase like "student satisfaction" (as opposed to "teaching effectiveness") is a pretty shitty metric. I'd be okay with it if they polled my students five or ten years from now; if they are satisfied with the skills and knowledge they learned in my courses at that point, I think it becomes meaningful.

From the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation's David Guenthner:

"Universities were created for the education of students, not as a jobs program for adults," said David Guenthner, a spokesman for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Reforms such as performance bonuses based on student evaluations will improve the quality of education students receive by making universities more responsive to students, parents and employers."

I have a real problem with Mr. Guenthner's thoughts on this. This displays a fundamental lack of understanding about how the university works in society. We are not here to provide a comfortable experience for students. We are not here to be popular, and we are certainly not better off mimicking the consumerist drivel that companies spew forth 24 hours a day. We are here to challenge, to guide, to impart skills and knowledge, and to create a foundation for life-long learning. When you degrade these goals down to Scantron bubbles on a 1 to 10 system, or a comment card you might find at your local Wendy's, you miss the fucking point completely. Let us do our jobs. Let scholars and people who work in academia, who know the system and its challenges, deal with its problems. If evaluations are bad, there are problems, to be sure. The administration will deal with them. Students are not afraid of calling out bad or lazy teaching, nor should they be. I'm thrilled to have students that hold me to high standards of teaching. But that doesn't mean their opinions at the end of a long semester are a good metric to decide whether I am a better or worse instructor than others on my campus. This is a university, not American Idol.

I'm just wild about Harry... or something...

Harry Reid has never been my favorite person. He is less so today; the lack of leadership that he and his Senate pals have shown on the automaker bailout bill is damning. I just don't get the logic from an economic standpoint-- less so from a strategic standpoint.

From an economic perspective, it makes little sense. The sum was $25 billion. An unfathomable amount of money, sure. But in the context of $700 billion, what's the difference, really? To put it in terms I can roughly deal with, if I'm going to give $700 to save the asses of some irresponsible jerks in hopes of staving off a ripple effect, why can't I cough up the extra $25 to help save the asses of a few stupid jerks who employ hundreds of thousands of people and provide an economic engine for thousands of small businesses?

The ridiculous part is that the $25 billion is already there, earmarked for helping the companies retool for producing more fuel efficient cars. But the Democratic leadership in the Senate said 'no'.

But there was little sign that Democratic leaders would go along.

"We have to face reality," Reid said.

They are vehemently opposed to letting the car companies tap the fuel-efficiency money — set aside to help switch to vehicles that burn less gasoline — for short-term cash-flow needs.

Fat lot of good the retooling will do if the companies go under. Or is the plan to let them go into Chapter 11 and then sell of the parts of the companies to the Japanese and Korean automakers? So they can operate more non-union plants in North America? If this is the case, the Senate Democrats are complicit in some Reagan-style union busting.

This is bad for Democrats from a perception standpoint. No one will remember that the worst anti-bailout vitriol came from the Republicans. They will only remember the party in the majority. The Democrats finally just welcomed hard-hit, blue collar states like Indiana and Ohio into the Blue State Club-- if they aren't careful, they are going to piss it all away. The biggest problem Democrats face in these areas is the perception that the national Democratic Party is out-of-touch and elitist-- the Republicans (who are the real out-of-touch elitists) were able to foment this distortion and use it to win elections. Now finally over that hump, Reid and friends aren't helping the cause going forward. Couple that with the challenge John Dingell is facing from Henry Waxman for chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and union autoworkers might be getting pretty impatient with a party that already makes a habit of talking more about labor than actually helping it.

Dear John McCain...

You ain't president yet. And after seeing your incredibly shortsighted response to the crisis in Georgia, I hope more than ever that you never will be.

Read This. (h/t LGM)

I must confess that McCain has crept into an elite group of assholes who cause me to turn the radio volume down when they are on NPR. Most of this campaign season, I've had no problem with listening, but after the third replay of his asinine declaration that "I know I speak for all Americans, when I say we are all Georgians now" or something of that ilk (I know both clauses there came out of his mouth, but I'm not sure which order, so don't kill me), I can't take it anymore.

Anyone who supported or supports now the Iraq war has precisely zero moral high ground to discuss the territorial integrity of sovereign nations. Absolutely none. And the fact that McCain's attempt to look tough (and against Russia, too, to add to his salivating dream of becoming the Second Coming of Reagan) appears, as noted in the linked post, to actually be affecting Bush's policy...well, let's hope that Condi has more sense than her bosses, shall we?

Because I mean really, if we're bound and determined that the "international community" should be doing something to "punish" Russia, well, what should the international community do to us?

And I think I'd rather, if I'm going to be unilaterally assumed by a presidential candidate to be in solidarity with another nation I've never been to and that most people couldn't find on a map, that it be Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Or Sudan. Y'know, places we might actually be able to help.

But, well, they're WHITE people in Georgia, right? And not Muslims? (Please excuse my sarcasm. It's early and I have a vicious head cold.)

But can you imagine how McCain would react if Obama perhaps declared his solidarity with Iraqis, or Sudanese?

Natalia has more.

And hilzoy has video.

(cross-posted. and I'm going to try to be more on top of politics, I promise.)

Channeling my inner Paul Harvey...

And now, the rest of the story (about the regulation of pesticides in California).

In 1977, a company was spraying an herbicide in Mendocino County, California (an important county for agricultural production—not only marijuana, though pot exports from the county are estimated at around $5 billion a year!) in an effort to retard the growth of hardwood trees in favor of growing more coniferous trees, which the company was harvesting. The spraying was done by plane, and the herbicide was found off the company’s property in several areas (including all over a school bus).

Mendocino County, which has been on the front lines of a number of environmental/agricultural regulation issues (from pesticides to banning GMO crops to seeking to certify marijuana grown there as organic), decided to regulate the aerial spraying of the chemical. This 1977 county ordinance was tied up in the court systems until 1984, first being challenged by California Attorney General George Deukmejian (Deukmejian was a Republican who later became governor; his administration rolled back countless environmental provisions in deference to business interests). The law was challenged on grounds that this kind of regulation was the state's jurisdiction, not that of municipal goverment. In 1984, the California Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the use/application method of a herbicide/pesticide did not conflict with any state law, in that it did not duplicate or contradict any extant state law. From the reading I’ve been doing, it seems that logic went as such: since the state law did not expressly grant the right to use a particular method of application, the county ordinance banning it did not contradict a right expressly given by the state. Similar cases have arisen in the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to the conflict of federal and local laws, with somewhat mixed results. The Environmental Law Institute’s Deskbook of Pesticide Regulation has an interesting (if somewhat hard to follow for those, like me, who are among the legally uninitiated) discussion of the gray areas of these laws.

Industry quickly lobbied for a new state law-- the 1984 state law was quickly passed. This new law took on the municipal regulations head-on and expressly prohibited local governments from regulating “any matter relating to the registration, sale, transportation, or use of pesticides” and declared the local ordinances “void and of no force or effect”. Harsh, no?

That leaves us to California AB 977 (24 years later...), sponsored by Fiona Ma. This would restore the ability of local governments to regulate pesticides. This would be a hell of a law for a Republican to oppose—it is so easy to frame as a “Big Government telling local communities what do to” issue. Not that I find a great deal of ideological consistency on the right; it seems a non-rabid conservative could get behind something this, at least from an anti-Big Government standpoint.

Pandering over the Gas Tax

Just before I asked her to join Alterdestiny, Sarah wrote a fantastic post about this ridiculous proposal to suspend the gas tax. She wrote:

Suspending the gas tax, sure, will make gas a few cents cheaper a gallon for the rest of the summer. And hell, I could use that few cents a gallon–it’ll add up.

But it will do NOTHING to alleviate the real problem, which is our dependence on a finite oil supply that largely comes from the Middle East, and it’ll also do nothing to stop the record profits of the oil companies. It’ll just take more money out of the government’s hands to do things that we desperately need it to do.

I could not agree more. This is pandering to the worst degree. Not only is it pointless and will make almost no difference to Americans' pocketbooks, but it is absurdly bad policy. I'm really disappointed in Clinton for supporting the idea. I expect bad ideas from McCain, but it is unacceptable for leading Democrats to support them.

First, how I can trust a candidate to deal with climate change who wants to give people incentives to drive more? I basically can't. On a similar issue, if we are at the point of suspending the gas tax, when we will decide to drill in ANWR, despite the fact that production there is years away and it only has a very small amount of oil? It can't be far off.

Second, as Sarah points out, our nation's infrastructure is falling apart. If anything, we need a higher gas tax to deal with this! Or do we want more bridge collapses like in Minneapolis? While it may seem that our tax money just disappears (and certainly this administration has come with many new and inventive ways to flush our money down the toilet), these taxes are necessary for making sure that our roads and bridges are safe when we drive. Eliminating the gas tax begs the question, where is the money for infrastructure going to come from?

Third, I want to fight for a society that stops talking about "tax burdens" and starts talking about all the good things taxes do for you. Like paying for your children's education, providing you with sewage lines, and making sure your bridges don't collapse when you are driving on them! This kind of rhetoric that Clinton is buying into does not help our nation in the least. It just reinforces the idea that taxes are a burden on Americans.

Besides, if you really want gas prices to go down, strengthen the dollar. But no one is talking about that. Why? Because it makes rich industrialists richer and props up the stock market at the cost of hurting poor Americans through higher gas prices.

Fourth, if this gas tax is suspended, will it ever come back? The answer is probably no. And again, where does the replacement revenue come from? Voters might be marginally happy that their gas goes down by 20 cents. But if the dollar remains weak and gas prices continue to rise, that will be erased quickly. Then, in a few months, the gas tax comes back? And we see a 20 cent jump in a day. You think any politicians are going to allow that to happen? No way.

Finally, this is just pandering. It's McCain and Clinton appealing to the most short-sighted desires of the American people. We don't need pandering, we need leadership. Obama's refusal to support the suspension of the gas tax is a good thing in my book, helping to make me believe that he is the best choice to lead the nation.