There are plenty of colleges and universities in the United States named after communities. And many schools are in suburbs outside of cities. But, I had a hard time coming up with colleges with “suburb” or a form of that word in them. Here is the only one listed on a site containing over 6,500 colleges and universities:
-South Suburban College in South Holland, Illinois.
A good number of schools were founded before the mass suburbia of the twentieth century but many have started since then. Is “suburb” or “suburban” too generic? Does it not provide the level of prestige or status a school seeks? It is hard to drum up for support for a school linked to a sector of a metropolitan region or identified with suburban life?
Two recent encounters with arguments made – one on a podcast, one in a book meant for a broad reading audience – reminded me of the unique ways academics assess arguments. In both cases, the makers of the argument made connections across different sources and sets of evidence to present a particular point of view. As I considered these arguments, here are two features of my own thought processes that stood out:
A tendency to defer to those with expertise in a particular area rather than assemble broad arguments with multiple data sources. It is difficult to make big arguments with multiple moving pieces as this might cover ground addressed by numerous scholars across different disciplines. In academia, scholars often have fairly narrow sets of expertise. Can one argument adequately represent all the important parts of knowledge? Why not assemble a larger argument from the clear expertise multiple scholars hold rather than try to do it as one person or a small team?
An interest in assessing the methods and form of the argument from a disciplinary perspective. Different academic fields go about the study of the world differently. They have different methods and think differently about what might count as evidence. They put their arguments together in different ways. The content of an argument or the rhetorical force of an argument matter but we often expect them to be presented in particular ways. Go outside these methodologies or formats and academics might struggle to past this.
Based on this, I wonder how well academics can work with arguments made to the public when we have been trained in specific that work within the parameters of academia.
What do students learn by taking sociology? What is lost if fewer students do? It struck John Reynolds, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, that these are the kinds of questions his discipline can help answer. While the Board of Governors overseeing the state’s public universities on Wednesday voted against a proposal to pause and collect more evidence to assess the impact before taking its vote, the “budding social scientists” in his “Sociology of Education” course were learning the very skills needed to conduct such research. So he walked students through the process in class on Thursday.
Reynolds and his students examined various arguments key players had made for and against keeping sociology. Then Reynolds split the 37 students into small groups and had each propose a research study to evaluate those claims using one of the research methods they covered in the course — school ethnography, intensive interviews, social survey, and analysis of school administrative data. Reynolds plans to award a small prize to each group whose proposals “were most detailed and true to the strengths of the method they were assigned,” he told TheChronicle in an email…
Offering a course as an avenue for meeting a general-education requirement signifies that the state regards it as important, said Alison C. Cares, an associate professor and the associate chair of the sociology department at the University of Central Florida. And while there’s overlap among disciplines — students have many options for developing critical-thinking skills — sociology has something unique to offer, she believes. Sociology is a discipline that “really jolts students out of an individualistic approach,” Cares said. Of course people have individual agency, she added, but at the same time, “there are predictable patterns, based on how society is organized, that make decisions and actions more or less likely.” Understanding that can enhance the way a doctor cares for a patient, or a teacher instructs a student, or a businessperson leads a company.
The second reason involves the way that required general education courses help students find courses and what they want to study:
Students will still be able to take introductory sociology — and it could still meet other university-specific requirements — but professors anticipate that its absence from the gen-ed menu could significantly reduce enrollment. This is partly because of exposure — a large share of students likely have found or been pointed to the course in order to fulfill the social-sciences requirement. Sociology is what one professor called a “found major,” that is, one that students might not have heard about before they get to campus, but fall in love with during their first course…
That’s not the only problem. Some degree programs (or combinations thereof) have such exhaustive requirements that students often look to meet as many of them as efficiently as possible, so they are unlikely to take other courses even if they really want to. The ability to meet a state requirement while taking introductory sociology is especially helpful, Aranda said, for students planning to attend medical school, many of whom have sought out the course since the MCAT added a section on social sciences nearly a decade ago.
I imagine faculty in many disciplines would make this same argument. Their field of study offers a unique perspective that students benefit from. This is the reason we have different academic disciplines: they have particular ways that they study, write, and operate. Additionally, general education classes offer gateways for more students into that field of study. Not all disciplines are represented in required courses so this is valuable real estate.
Sociology and other disciplines will continue to have to make arguments for why they should be included in curricula and why students should take their courses. If college courses and majors are a marketplace where students respond to different incentives, disciplines offer different perceived advantages and disadvantages. Whether this market logic should determine the worthiness of disciplines and their presence is worth debating but there is no doubt that the market does have some patterns and cycles.
As a sociologist who has regularly taught Introduction to Sociology over the years, these two issues come up in this class. What value does sociology have to college students who may never touch sociology again or know little about it? I enjoy teaching sociology and its methods so this is a fun challenge.
One feature of summer and breaks for college faculty is the possibility of more time for writing and working on projects. While this writing time does not always happen given other responsibilities in life, time is needed to develop academic projects. And we may need numerous summers, breaks, and semesters to fully put together works. What do we need this time for?
-Becoming familiar with the already-existing literature.
-Collecting data and evidence.
-Analysis.
-Crafting narratives that align with the research question, existing scholarly conversations, and the evidence we have.
-Writing and rewriting.
-Conversations with others.
-Presentations, whether to the public, academic groups, students, or others.
-Responding to reviewers and editors.
-Thinking (all throughout the process)
While the activities above are in a rough order from a beginning of a project to the end, it does not always work this way. These are also not necessarily discrete stages; they can blend together and are often recursive and connected as working on one part leads to going back to an earlier step or portion.
All of this means that a single writing project can easily take years. Some projects take longer than others. It can be hard to predict how long a project can take. What does this all add up to? Hopefully a coherent and compelling project.
If we added to publications and presentations a clock for the time involved, this could help reveal the time spent. Without letting such figures turn into a competition or a quest for efficiency, it could open conversations about processes and resources.
By the time university leaders concluded the gathering, an estimated 50,000 students and visitors had come to the campus to pray, said Kevin Brown, Asbury’s president. The outpouring attracted students from more than 260 colleges and universities, many drawn by social media livestreams and posts. Similar prayer services cropped up at other Christian universities, including Lee University in Tennessee, Cedarville University in Ohio and Samford University in Alabama…
The surge of worshippers overwhelmed the campus and the sleepy town of Wilmore, which is home to roughly 6,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Cars streamed into the city, backing up traffic and filling the town’s parking spaces.
“We have two stoplights, to give you an idea of how large our town is,” Brown said. Suddenly having to figure out how to accommodate thousands of visitors “on the fly” was “unnerving and unsettling.”
“Our town and our institutions are just not equipped to absorb such a large influx of people,” he said. “On the other hand, it was really, really sweet and really beautiful to see so many different people, so many different ages, representing so many different geographies … just to see everyone in one space, united and experiencing something together.”
The juxtaposition of religious activity and visitors in a small town is worth considering. Three questions come to mind:
1. How many communities would be prepared for a large influx of visitors there for religious purposes? What exactly would they need to respond and what would mark the interactions and activity outside of the clearly marked religious spaces?
3. Are the conditions of small town life more or less conducive to religious fervor? Americans often have romantic notions of small towns yet big cities are denser and have more people coming and going.
I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about things being “reified.”) Haimo told me that there was: the language of statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard now is introductory statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in 2005. “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample? How are you gathering your data?’ ” he said. “I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s part of any good critical analysis of things.”
It struck me that I knew at once what Haimo meant: on social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge. Today, a quantitative idea of rigor underlies even a lot of arguments about the humanities’ special value. Last school year, Spencer Glassman, a history major, argued in a column for the student paper that Harvard’s humanities “need to be more rigorous,” because they set no standards comparable to the “tangible things that any student who completes Stat 110 or Physics 16 must know.” He told me, “One could easily walk away with an A or A-minus and not have learned anything. All the STEM concentrators have this attitude that humanities are a joke.”…
Haimo and I turned back toward Harvard Square. “I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”
I suspect this level of authority is not just true on a college campus: numbers have a particular power in the world today. They convey proof. Patterns and trends. There can often be little space to ask where the numbers came from or what they mean.
Is this the only way to understand the world? No. We need to consider all sorts of data to understand and explain what is going on. Stories and narratives do not just exist to flesh out quantitative patterns; they can convey deep truths and raise important questions.
But what if we only care today about what is most efficient and most able to directly translate into money? If college students and others prioritize jobs over everything else, does this advantage numbers and their connections to STEM and certain occupations that are the only ways or perceived certain ways to wealth and a return on investment? From later in the article:
In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change.
If American society prizes money and a certain kind of success above all else, are these patterns that surprising?
In recently hearing a radio discussion regarding how much content different kinds of media personalities generate (regular columnist vs. social media maven vs. radio host and so on), I wondered: are academics also content generators? Here are several of the kinds of content we provide:
-Classroom lectures and experiences. These are geared toward learning in the moment through discussions, experiences, lectures, and additional pedagogical options. This is often delivered to students in a classroom but it can be done remotely, through video, and through other formats.
-Publishing. The academic articles, books, reports, reviews, and more go through a particular academic publishing process and they come out as packaged content.
-Advising. Academics can answer a lot of questions ranging from what courses students should take to questions about life paths to inquiries about our areas of study. Such responses are not typically captured formally.
-Additional venues including academic presentations, media outlets, community forums, and more.
If content is just information or things that can occupy the attention of people, these may all qualify. There is also competition in all of these areas; could you learn from a textbook or Youtube video or on the job rather than in a classroom?
What, then, might be different about academic content?
-The classroom setting is a unique one with potential for engaging and transformative learning experiences and communities.
-The academic training and processes that informed the work. From the time spent studying to the disciplinary-specific methods and perspectives, an academic approach to a topic is different.
-The particular formats in which academics operate more often are more likely to involve schools and academic publishing processes. This does not mean that academics work outside these systems but their work is recognized and rewarded in specific systems.
If the world today is just about generating content, do we lose something by suggesting academic work needs to fit the broader need? The fate of colleges and universities in the coming decades may depend on academics expressing and living out a satisfying answer to how what they do is valuable in a landscape full of information.
It’s notable that “when we get a break in class, the first thing that almost all of the students do is pull out their phone and engage through the deice,” said Professor of Sociology Dr. Brian Miller ’04, who studies emerging adults and social media.
But these students aren’t the first Christians to embrace new media.
Miller says American evangelicals in the twentieth century were quick to take up new technology forms and adapt them to Christian uses. Miller points to the National Association of Evangelicals and its concern that evangelicals had a radio presence. As other media forms were introduced – television, Internet, and social media – Americans evangelicals have adopted and used them.
“My sense as a sociologist is that we’ve often innovated and adapted [to new technology] and hten asked questions later,” he said.
Right now, for instance, Miller said more Christians might consider asking some questions, such as, “Is what we’re doing on social media as Christians good or useful?”…
Miller is encouraged about ways Wheaton students, staff, and faculty might be able to address some of these questions related to using social media responsibly. How could we build some best practices, consider the worth of social media fasts, or figure out how to gauge social media addiction?”
Now that social media is maturing – it has been around on a mass scale for almost two decades now – I would hope we in college settings could be effective in providing information and options for students and ourselves regarding how we engage with social media. When the interaction with social media is almost always on an individual-by-individual basis, it can feel chaotic and difficult to change patterns. Why not encourage more positive community-based practices with social media?
Particularly in faith-based settings, why not more direct conversation and instruction about social media and its effects? The majorities of congregations and people of faith are engaging social media throughout their days, yet my sense is that religious institutions provide limited guidance on how much to engage, what it is useful for and what it is not so useful for, and how social media shapes our perceptions of the world and life. Sociologist Felicia Wu Song’s book Restless Devicesis a good resource for this.
In thinking about how I have passed the statistical midpoint of my life, a rough calculation based on life expectancy figures from the CDC, I am reminded that the college years tend to occur early on in many people’s lives. If students graduate from college anywhere between age 21 and 26, they will have, on average, more than fifty years of life after college.
These numbers present a different perspective than a description sometimes attached to college: “the best years of your life.” They may be good, interesting, unique years. (They also may not be.) But, if they are the “best years,” what does this mean for the decades of life after college? What happens with all of those years after graduation?
This perspective of decades of life post-college might also provide depth to the idea of life-long learning. Even as college happens relatively early in life and it is a relatively short experience, there is potential for the content, relationships, patterns, and dispositions learned and formed to affect multiple decades afterward. Many are worried about what job or career comes right after the college degree; a longer-term view puts college in the context of a longer life with more twists and turns.
As people age, a college experience recedes further and further back in years. In the growing decades after college, what remains from college?
Here’s how Kevin Gannon draws the distinction. Courses can be difficult intellectually; they can be difficult logistically. Professors sometimes conflate the two, imagining that content and policies move together. But they need not, says Gannon, who directs the teaching center at Grand View University, where he is also a professor of history…
From this vantage point, flexible course policies might not be at odds with demanding rigor, as the terms of the debate are often delineated. But intellectual rigor turns out to be tricky to pin down…
Instead, the faculty developers think that professors often rely on the wrong information as evidence they’ve achieved rigor. Grading on a bell curve, they argue, doesn’t prove a course is rigorous. It compares students with their classmates, but doesn’t demonstrate what they know or learned. Neither does assigning a lot of work: There’s no strong correlation between learning and the quantity of information taken in or repeated back. Yet much of the evidence of rigor comes down to either grades or time on task…
Despite the many biases found in course evaluations, Sonal Khullar, an art historian who is an associate professor of South Asian studies at Penn, has found they can provide useful evidence that she’s hit the mark on rigor. Khullar was surprised to hear grades, assignments, and standards held up as key evidence of rigor. “I measure it by their own standards,” Khullar says. The goal isn’t for students to hit some benchmark she has set; it’s for them to improve…
Most professors aim to both support and challenge their students. It’s just that some of them think the standard structures of higher ed work toward those goals— and others aren’t so sure.
I am consistently surprised as a college instructor about how much could be in each class I teach. Regardless of the subject, there is always more we could get to or worth through. As noted in this article, a question about rigor can be expressed as the difference between covering content and applying that content or developing depth with that content. There can often be much knowledge to share and work with but applying and utilizing the knowledge is key. Thinking about Bloom’s Taxonomy can help guide classroom efforts.
I clearly remember how I experienced this as a K-12 and college student: the instructors who had high expectations but also provided the encouragement and the resources necessary to reach for those expectations.
Legally Sociable 