Sep 20, 2007
Posted | 5 comments
Congratulations, Illinois State University. You’ve turned your MBA program into a phys-ed class.
About two weeks ago, Illinois State University made the higher education newsrounds by requiring that students in the College of Business adhere to a dress code on campus. College Freedom expressed concerns about the restrictions and so did I [to date, I still haven't gotten a response from the College of Business regarding my prospective student status].
InsideHigherEd.com reports this week that ISU has decided to uphold the dress code - but they’ve tweaked the policy to allow for up to 10% of one’s grade to be determined by “professionalism.”
You know, the same way a K-12 student is punished for not having gym clothes.
Proper attire in a physical education setting is a safety issue. To date, I’m not aware of anyone in an MBA program bringing injury upon themselves or others for wearing jeans in a lecture.
InsideHigherEd.com says:
While the original policy offered guidelines ranging from color choices (“solid†for women) to upkeep (“pressed and never wrinkled”) to skirt length (“no shorter than four inches above the knee”), the revision — which goes into effect as soon as professors can announce it to their students — states simply that affected classes “will operate under standards of professional behavior that parallel those applied in the business world,†including “being dressed in appropriate business casual attire for class meetings, unless business professional attire is required.â€
ISU thinks its students are apparently too dumb to recognize themselves that jeans and an Iron Maiden t-shirt aren’t appropriate attire for a client meeting. Out of state tuition at ISU’s College of Business is ~$28,000/year. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to have listened to your mother and, if that didn’t take, hire a part-time nanny to dress you before work?
The main difference is an additional emphasis on “other professional behaviors deemed appropriate for class by the professor,†such as arriving on time and not interrupting the lecture (although those guidelines are already covered under the college’s Standards of Professional Behavior and Ethical Conduct). Under the previous policy, students who failed to dress business casual could be thrown out of class — meaning a potential loss of credit for assignments completed that day. Now, they could theoretically arrive in jeans without fear of getting kicked out, but up to 10 percent of their final grades could be docked instead.
A common sign of backpedaling - especially backpedaling when one’s proverbial pants are already at one’s ankles - is overlapping a criticized policy with an existing policy. Codified standards of conduct are important and necessary to ensure a civil academic environment; unfortunately for the proponents of the dress code plan, they’re justifying the new draft by citing support for a code that already covers most of the regulations. It isn’t a strong case.
Moving on:
David Horstein, the student body president, said the idea is that 10 percent of an overall course grade can go toward “professionalism,†including a student’s dress appearance and also other factors of professionalism, with the “hope that a professor cannot abuse†the dress requirement.
“The way that I hope this works,†Horstein said, is that it “gives the professors a lot of discretion with policies like that.†(Tim Longfellow, the chairman, said he understood the policy as meaning that “we’ll look across the board†in evaluating professionalism.)
… and this is the real tragedy.
Horstein and a largely-complacent student body are comfortable with having 10% of their evaluation come from non-academic criteria - including in graduate programs such as the MBA track.
I’ll steal a one-line description of the MBA curriculum from Wikipedia:
“MBA programs expose students to a variety of subjects, including economics, organizational behavior, marketing, accounting, finance, strategy, operations management, international business, information technology management, supply chain management, project management and government policy.”
An MBA program is singularly demanding; it’s difficult enough to justify candidates [generally] needing to work for a few years before starting the degree. The context that work experience brings to the intellectual rigor of the MBA curriculum produces a graduate who is well-prepared to lead in the business world and tackle the ever-evolving problems inherent in the field.
And now 10% of one’s readiness for that world is determined by one’s fashion sense and commitment to ironing clothes before stepping foot on campus. 10% of that MBA is now vocational.
Unsurprisingly, ISU’s leaders are as patronizing and condescending toward Holstein and other student leaders as they are toward the student body as a whole:
[Marketing Dept. Chair Tim] Longfellow praised the student leaders in a press release, saying, “I truly believe that shared governance, a strong and valued tradition on this campus, has prevailed. The Department of Marketing is pleased and believes that the compromised wording for the business casual dress standard allows the department to accomplish its initial purpose for establishing the dress standard, to provide an opportunity to enhance the overall professionalism of our students and to hopefully provide them with an additional advantage as they begin their career search.â€
They’re adults, Chairman Longfellow. You’ll notice their “overall professionalism” enhance itself when you start treating them as adults.
I’m not sure if Horstein and the student body are done with this issue, but it sounds that way:
Horstein began receiving complaints from students soon after the policy was announced two weeks prior to the start of classes this semester. “At first, I was afraid to even take on the issue,†he said, worrying that administrators would “make us look like a lazy student body†for protesting the dress code. Then he learned that the policy apparently ran afoul of the university’s Student Bill of Rights, which has an explicit prohibition against mandatory dress codes.
Yet they still appear to have given up.
Tim Longfellow’s lack of logic had to have hurt his GMAT scores a great deal:
In an interview, Longfellow said he has not received any direct complaints about the policy to date, and that concerns about accumulating appropriate attire to attend class were mostly exaggerated at a business school where most students have recently completed or will soon complete internships.
Most of your students “have recently completed or will soon complete internships” and your graduate students come in with work experience, yet the College of Business needs to mandate their dress to teach them about professionalism in the real world? I have to ask - weren’t those internships and jobs undertaken at real, functioning business in that real world?
The summary? Poor, offensive judgment, condescending treatment of its students, bizarre backpedaling and a total lack of logic.
Again, ISU: Congratulations on your new vocational business program that is, as Longfellow and your other leaders have demonstrated, 10% gym class.
Sep 20, 2007
Posted | 0 comments
It’s that time of week again… the Carnivals are up and commanding attention.
The 137th Carnival of Education is live at The Education Wonks including my entry about the Ed in ’08 campaign. You can also browse last week’s Carnival at History is Elementary.
Beverly Hernandez at About Homeschooling hosts this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling - it’s a clean, easy format with lots of solid posts.
Secondhand Thoughts has given Best Practices in Education the nod for this week’s Wednesday Website. It’s a good choice - 30plusteacher’s content is informative and engaging and I, like Eric, would love to see more of it!
Sep 19, 2007
Posted | 1 comment
There’s been some buzz about installing BlogRush on WordPress-hosted blogs.
If you use WordPress standalone on your site [like I do], you can just install the code in the sidebar.php file. If you have a WordPress blog that’s hosted by WordPress [ie., the URL contains "wordpress"], you can’t install widgets - including BlogRush.
Beartwinsmom did the legwork and found the citation in WP’s help/FAQ:
According to the FAQ at WordPress:
“Anything that has a line like this:
script type=”text/javascript” [brackets removed]
or that uses Form or Input tags for instance is not allowed. There are other tags but the effect is the same - they disappear.
There are no exceptions to this.â€
If you have a WordPress blog hosted on its own or use Blogger, Typepad or Movable Type, BlogRush has some solid video tutorials to facilitate the install.
Sep 18, 2007
Posted | 11 comments
Take heed, elementary teachers, administrators and parents: PENCILS ONLY. No pens, no exceptions. Enforce it.
As the image says, ‘Paid for by the Council for No Trapper Keepers.‘
When I googled “no trapper keepers” I got ~25,000 results, most of which are school supply lists that ban the Trapper Keeper. I had no idea the TKs caused such problems.
I do wish the public service announcement had specified Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and banned those rotten Empire makes, but I’ll take what I can get.
Sep 18, 2007
Posted | 2 comments
The Mickey Mouse degree is a course of study characterized by lack of intellectual or scholarly rigor and is generally considered irrelevant, as are the individual classes that make up such a degree.
Whenever I try to explain the difference between a Mickey Mouse class and a worthwhile class, I usually contrast two examples:
“Principles of Economics, Micro/Macro”
vs.
“Gender Inequity in 17th-Century Siberian Basketweaving”
The latter isn’t a real course, but it isn’t far from many I’ve seen in terms of irrelevance.
We’re less likely in the United States than in Britain to judge negatively a student who studies fluff; after all, we’ve spent 15 years telling a kid to be himself and blossom as a beautiful flower no matter what type of fertilizer promotes his unhinged growth. This attitude is not all bad, but it has consequences on the value of the average body of knowledge transfered to one who completes a degree.
It’s easy to reduce a course title or dissertation topic into eye-rolling and snarky judgment and we know that those judgments aren’t always accurate. Indeed, “Gender Inequity in 17th Century Siberian Basketweaving” could posit that the basketweaving trade lured Cossacks and the greater Russian empire into the area, sparked a lucrative, specialized economy and expanded trade in a way that justified the path of the Trans-Siberian Railway centuries later.
I’m making all of this up, but you get the idea.
Boris Johnson [former Shadow Minister for Higher Education, current MP and short-lister for the Conservatives' run at London's mayoral race] is no stranger to the epic battle between the proponents of expanding Mickey Mouse programs and the hardliners who bemoan what they see as the rapid erosion of higher education.
Johnson breaks down the case against Mickey Mouse courses appropriately and makes three valid points in a recent piece:
- Those who think we need more vocational training too often think it’s best for every kid but their own;
- Mickey Mouse degrees are, in a way, vocational training;
- The market is the ultimate judge of a degree’s value and will determine whether that vocational training is a credit.
When we hear about Mickey Mouse degrees in Equine Psychology - essentially ‘horse-whispering’ - it’s important to consider whether there’s a market for such a service. And this point comes up often; as much as I think the concept of a “Life Coach” is absurd and unnecessary, there wouldn’t be life coaches if no one signed up for coaching. No signups, no life coaching. No horses in need of whispering, no horse-whispering degrees. At some point we have to trust the judgment of our society/culture and deal with its demands.
That doesn’t mean we have to assign the same respect to a degree in Urban Insect Nutrition Studies as we do to a degree from MIT’s Astro-Aero Department - they’re two very different endeavors. It does mean that there may or may not be justification of a degree’s viability and we need to take that into account in this debate.
I’ve pasted below Johnson’s thoughtful piece, “Mickey Mouse degrees are just the job.” He’s known for his candor and is thought by some to be more entertainer than politician, but we’d do well in the United States to have a public figure who addresses difficult topics in education with such frankness and sense. I’d give anything for a Boris-like speech instead of the stale, trite weekly reminders that ‘it takes a village.’
Here’s how a real politician addresses education:
OK then, let’s have a good snigger. Let’s all look at the list of these so-called degrees, and sneer at the pathetic delusions of the students who are taking them. In the saloon bars of England, it is by now a settled conviction that the university system is riddled with a kind of intellectual dry rot, and it is called the Mickey Mouse degree.
Up and down the country - so we are told - there are hundreds of thousands of dur-brained kids sitting for three years in an alcoholic or cannabis-fuelled stupor while theoretically attending a former technical college that is so pretentious as to call itself a university.
After three years of taxpayer-funded debauch, these young people will graduate, and then the poor saps will enter the workplace with an academic qualification that is about as valuable as membership of the Desperate Dan Pie Eaters’ Club, and about as intellectually distinguished as a third-place rosette in a terrier show. It is called a Degree, and in the view of saloon bar man, it is a con, a scam, and a disgrace.
Kids these days! says our man with the pint of Stella, slapping The Daily Telegraph on the bar. Look at the rubbish they study! ‘Ere, he says, finding an account of the recent investigation by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which has compiled a list of the 401 “non-courses” being offered by our universities.
In a satirically portentous tone he reads out the brochure of Marjon College in Plymouth, which really is offering a three-year BA (Hons) degree in Outdoor Adventure With Philosophy.
Yes, he says with incredulous sarcasm, the dons at Marjon College give instruction in the ancient discipline of Outdoor Adventure by examining its “underpinning philosophy, historical antecedents, significant influences, environmental and sustainable aspects and current trends”; and just in case you thought that wasn’t quite rigorous enough, they guarantee that “the modules will include elements such as journeys, environmental management, creative indoor study and spirituality”.
Absurd! cries saloon bar man, and then jabs his finger at yet greater absurdities: a course at the University of Glamorgan in “Science: Fiction and Culture”; and get this - the Welsh College of Horticulture is offering anyone with four Cs at GCSE the chance to study for an Honours degree in “Equestrian Psychology”! It’s a degree in horse whispering! he says. It’s bonkers.
Why, he asks rhetorically, are we paying for students to waste their time on these Mickey Mouse courses, when it is perfectly obvious what they should be doing. Trades! Skills! Craft! This country doesn’t need more bleeding degrees in media studies and whispering into horses’ ears! What we need is people who can fix my septic tank! We need more plumbers,” he raves, and it’s not just because he resents paying so much for his Polish plumber; it’s because the whole university business is - in his view - such a cruel deception on so many young people. They rack up an average of £13,000 of debt for some noddy qualification, when they would have been far better off getting stuck into a job after leaving school and engaging in an old-fashioned apprenticeship.
That’s what he thinks; and that, I bet, is not a million miles from the view of many eminent readers.
And yet I have to say that this view of higher education - pandemic in Middle Britain - is hypocritical, patronising and wrong. I say boo to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and up with Mickey Mouse courses, and here’s why.
The saloon bar view is hypocritical, in the sense that it is always worth interrogating the saloon bar critics about their aspirations for their own children or grandchildren. Would they like them to have degrees? Or would they like them to have some kind of explicitly vocational training?
It is notable how often a critic of university expansion is still keen for his or her own children to go there, while a vocational qualification is viewed as an excellent option for someone else’s children.
It is patronising, in that you really can’t tell, just by reading a course title, whether it is any good or not, and whether it will be of any intellectual or financial benefit to the student.
The other day my normally humane and reasonable colleague Andrew O’Hagan paraded the idea of a degree in “Artificial Intelligence”, as though it were intrinsically risible, and for 20 years we have all been scoffing at degrees in “media studies”.
But AI is one of the most potentially interesting growth areas in computer science; and the truth about Media Studies is that its graduates have very high rates of employment and remuneration.
Of course there are mistakes, and of course there are a great many students who drop out, get depressed, or feel they have done the wrong thing with their lives.
But the final judge of the value of a degree is the market, and in spite of all the expansion it is still the case that university graduates have a big salary premium over non-graduates. The market is working more efficiently now that students have a direct financial stake in the matter, a financial risk, and an incentive not to waste their time on a course that no employer will value.
It is ridiculous for these saloon-bar critics to denounce “Mickey Mouse” degrees, and say that the students would be better off doing vocational courses - when the whole point is that these degrees are very largely vocational.
We can laugh at degrees in Aromatherapy and Equine Science, but they are just as vocational as degrees in Law or Medicine, except that they are tailored to the enormous expansion of the service economy.
It is rubbish to claim that these odd-sounding courses are somehow devaluing the Great British Degree. Everyone knows that a First Class degree in Physics from Cambridge is not the same as a First in Equine Management from the University of Lincoln, and the real scandal is that they both cost the student the same.
There again, who is to say where a Mickey Mouse course may lead?
The last time I looked, Disney had revenues of 33 billion dollars a year - and if any university offered a course in the Life and Works of Mickey Mouse, I wouldn’t blame them in the least.
You can view more articles by Boris Johnson [education, international/local politics, etc.] at his weekly archives or check out his mayoral candidacy at www.backboris.com.
