New Digital Divide:  Children Spending Too Much Time in Front of Screens!

 

Dear Commons Community,

Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times calling on parents to be more forceful in restricting their children’s time in from of TV and computer screens.  She especially makes the case for minority children who are spending more time in front of screens than white children.  Here is an excerpt:

“According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their white peers, and they use computers for up to one and a half hours longer each day. White children spend eight hours and 36 minutes looking at a screen every day, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while black and Hispanic children spend 13 hours.

… the deleterious effects of too much screen time are abundantly clear. Screen time has a negative effect on children’s ability to understand nonverbal emotional cues; it is linked to higher rates of mental illness, including depression; and it heightens the risk for obesity.

In 2004, Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Hospital wrote in the medical journal Pediatrics that “early exposure to television was associated with subsequent attentional problems.” Even when controlling for socioeconomic status, gestational age and other factors, he discovered that an increase of one standard deviation in the number of hours of television watched at age 1 “is associated with a 28 percent increase in the probability of having attentional problems at age 7.”

Every additional hour of TV increased a child’s odds of attention problems by about 10 percent. Kids who watched three hours a day were 30 percent more likely to have attention trouble than those who watched none. A 2010 article in Pediatrics confirmed that exposure to TV and video games was associated with greater attention problems in children. Meanwhile, Paul Morgan at Penn State and George Farkas at the University of California, Irvine, have found that black children are more likely to show symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than their white peers.

Unfortunately, too often the message we send low-income and less-educated parents is that screen time is going to help their children. Fifteen years ago, when I was a Big Sister to a girl who attended one of Brooklyn’s worst middle schools, her mother was given strict instructions by teachers to purchase a faster computer as soon as possible to get her daughter’s grades up.

Today, thanks to lucrative contracts with school districts, tech companies are happy to bring screens into the classroom and send them home.

But there is little evidence that such programs are helping students. Take Maine, which guarantees a tablet for every student. According to NPR, “at a cost of about $12 million annually,” the state “has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores.”

When politicians and policymakers talk about kids and technology, it is usually about “bridging the digital divide,” making sure that poor kids have as much access as wealthier ones. But there is no evidence that they don’t. According to a 2015 Pew report, 87 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 have access to a computer. For families earning less than $50,000 a year, that number is 80 percent. As for a racial divide, Pew finds that African-American teenagers are more likely to own a smartphone than any other group of teenagers in America.

Make no mistake: The real digital divide in this country is not between children who have access to the internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success. It’s time to let everyone in on the secret.”

Ms. Schaefer-Riley has an interesting point in that children are spending too much time in front of screens but there are several holes in her argument.  First, she relies too much on older research and citations (2004, 2010, 2011).  Second, she combines watching television and using computers  because they both have screens but they are different technologies and experiences.  Television is a very passive “watch  and look” technology while computer applications can be very engaging and require interactive mental processes to read, watch, and respond.  Third, she limits her observation to children but what about adults many of whom spend inordinate amounts of time in front of computer screens as part of their job.  Most white-collar jobs today require access to databases, newsfeeds, and email that result in constant interaction with computer screens.  In fact, many white-collar workers could not perform their responsibilities without on-going computer access.

In sum, there is a case to be make about how society has become addicted to computer technology but let’s not limit it as a problem for minority children only.

Tony

 

President Who Loves Making False Accusations Suddenly Pleads ‘Due Process’!

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump has suddenly become a champion of due process at least while referencing last week’s revelations of domestic violence by White House staffers, Rob Porter and David Sorenson.  The Huffington Post has a compilation of several times that President Trump publicly accused others without any proof.  

“On Saturday, Trump tweeted:  

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

The president was referring to the recent departure of White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned earlier this week after allegations from his two ex-wives surfaced, detailing that he was abusive to them. Colbie Holderness, Porter’s first wife, alleged that he punched her in 2005 and provided photos of bruises she says he inflicted on her. 

His first wife, Colbie Holderness, provided photos from a vacation they took together in Florence, Italy:

And on Friday, White House speechwriter David Sorensen resigned after his ex-wife accused him of physically abusing her.

Trump himself has been accused by more than 20 women of sexual misconduct and abuse. It might not come as a surprise, then, that Trump would be eager to protect those accused of abuse rather than those who say they’ve been victimized by it.

“Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” the president asked in a tweet. It’s a fair question, for sure. It’s also something Trump has previously not seemed to care about. Here are just a few times that “due process” didn’t matter to Trump.

The Central Park Five

In 1989, a group of black and Hispanic men were convicted but later exonerated in the rape of a female jogger in New York City’s Central Park. 

As police coercion and false allegations ruined these men’s lives, Trump spent $85,000  to place ads in four daily New York City newspapers to demand the innocent men be killed.

“Muggers and murderers should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote in the ad at the time. 

Despite their names eventually being cleared, Trump still wouldn’t stop saying they were guilty. 

“The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty,” Trump told CNN in 2016. “The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.” 

President Barack Obama

For years, Trump has promoted the conspiracy that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim who was actually born in Kenya and is lying about his identity. None of that is true.

Trump later retracted his false statement during his bid to become president. But the damage was done. 

Last year, Trump falsely accused Obama of having ”wires tapped” in Trump Tower. The Department of Justice flatly denied the claim.

Hillary Clinton 

Even after winning the election, Trump has been unable to let his former presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, go. Trump has repeatedly said Clinton lied to the FBI regarding her private email server. Meanwhile, former Trump administration official Flynn pleaded guilty last December to misleading the FBI about talks he had with Russian officials.

“Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI, nothing happened to her,” Trump said last December. “Flynn lied and they’ve destroyed his life. I think it’s a shame.”

Former head of the FBI James Comey, who Trump eventually fired, told Congress in a July 2017 testimony there was “no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” 

‘Treasonous’ Democrats

Just this month, Trump made the bold and outrageous accusation that Democrats who did not clap and praise the president during his recent State of the Union address are “treasonous.” 

“Can we call that treason?” Trump said of Democrats last week during a campaign-style rally in Cincinnati. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.” 

Committing treason is a deeply serious accusation for a president to make. U.S. law states that whoever “owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason.”

To be clear: Not clapping for the president does not qualify as treason. 

‘Mexican’ Judge

In June of 2016, Trump accused U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of not being able to make a fair ruling regarding lawsuits against Trump University. The president alleged that because he has made it clear he wants to build a wall to separate Mexico and the U.S., the judge’s heritage would be a “conflict.”

Curiel had “an absolute conflict” because of his “Mexican heritage,” Trump claimed.

He then doubled down on the claim in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that same month.

“Look, he’s proud of his heritage, OK? I’m building a wall,” Trump told Tapper.

Curiel is an American who was born in Indiana.”

This compilation is an example of how Trump sees the world.  There is no truth or consistency in what he says, just what is opportune at the moment for his twisted view of reality.

Tony

Let the Games Begin – Opening Night Ceremonies at the 2018 Winter Olympics!

Dear Commons Community,

For those of us who watched the 2018 Winter Olympics Ceremony, there was much to be enjoyed.  Dazzling light displays, beautiful music, national costumes,  the singing of John Lennon’s Imagine, and a synchronized drone display.  The Ceremony’s theme was one of peace and permeated much of everything on display.  The message that mankind can live in harmony ran through every dance routine, song and light show. South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in described these Games as a “festival and celebration of peace,” and the competition’s curtain-raiser certainly set the tone.  The show of unity was not lost on International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, who said North and South Korea had set a “great example” for sending “a powerful message of peace.” Unfortunately, Vice President Mike Pence looked uncomfortable throughout the evening as he sat in a reserved box just to the right of North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.

A beautiful evening!

Tony

New Book:   “Trumpocracy” by David Frum!

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading David Frum’s new book, Trumpocracy:  The Corruption of the American Republic.  Frum is a senior editor at the The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush. He understands the White House and he paints a sad picture of our current president who he says is undermining our most important institutions to the extent that our democracy is at stake.  This book is a careful, well-researched treatment of Trump’s talents and weaknesses.  Frum has almost fifty pages of notes and covers his subject in depth.  It is a far better read than say Michael’s Wolff’s Fire and Fury which teases the reader with lots of gossip but never cites any sources. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times Book Review:

“Frum argues that Trump’s greatest talent — his genius really — is spotting and exploiting weaknesses. The Republican establishment spent $100 million to put the crown on Prince Jeb Bush’s head. Trump incinerated Bush (and all that cash) with his gibe about “low energy.” He then proceeded to incinerate “little” Marco Rubio and “lyin’” Ted Cruz. Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton was in some ways a model of how not to run campaigns — he lurched from crisis to crisis and never bothered to enumerate any detailed policies. But he understood her great limitation: that she represented the nexus between meritocracy and plutocracy, indebted to Big Money and divorced from millions of heartland Americans.

Trump’s political operatics worked because he understood deeper weaknesses in American society. The white working class is suffering from two great hammer blows. The first is to its economic well-being: A group that thrived during the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s has seen its incomes stagnate and its job security disappear. Great swaths of white America now suffer from maladies that are all too familiar to black America: broken homes, drug addiction, listlessness, early death. The second hammer blow is to its psychological well-being: Even as their economic position has declined, members of the white working class — particularly white working-class men — have seen themselves denounced, often by people who spend more on college education in one year than they earn shoveling dirt, as agents of privilege and oppression. What better way to respond to being defined as a problem than to vote for a man who promises to punch back?

Trump grasped that America is suffering from an epistemological weakness as well as economic ones: The line between truth and falsehood is becoming dangerously blurred. Again, America’s knowledge elite is partly responsible for this: Armies of postmodern academics had prepared the way for Trump by arguing that truth is a construct of the power elite. But the biggest culprit is technological progress. Digitalization is not only creating a deafening cacophony of voices. It is also making it harder to finance real journalism while simultaneously making it easier to distribute tripe…

…[Trump is] a Manhattan-based playboy who has had life handed to him on a silver platter might look like a strange vehicle for the pain of the American heartland. But Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser: He is consumed by imagined slights to his fragile ego, hypersensitive to the pretensions of smarty-pants liberals, a man who spends many hours a day watching cable news and seething with anger. He is also an anti-intellectual with the soul of a postmodernist: He believes that reality is something that can be bent into any shape you choose provided that you have enough power.

What does Trump want to do with all his power? The answer, Frum argues, certainly does not lie in helping the white working class that put him in the White House. His tax cuts will widen America’s already high levels of inequality. It lies instead in “the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.” The essence of Trumponomics is running a country just as you run your family business: appointing people with whom you have strong personal ties, ideally ties of DNA, directing business to your properties, using public resources to avenge private grudges. Trump’s appointments to the White House staff included his former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” Perhaps the most telling moment in his first year was when he asked his daughter Ivanka to sit in his seat at a G-7 meeting, thereby reducing a great republic to the level of a family property.

Frum thinks the combination of Trump’s drive for self-aggrandizement and America’s current weaknesses is nothing less than a threat to the democratic order. “The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.” Any supposed solutions to Trump’s behavior, however, may be worse than the disease: American liberals have found themselves investing extraordinary hopes in the generals who now surround the president.

Trump isn’t alone in the weakness-exploitation business. Some of the most eye-catching investors in his real estate empire since he won the Republican nomination hail from countries where there is a faint line between business and politics. And some of Trump’s biggest ideological backers have an almost apocalyptic sense that America needs to be purged in order to be saved. Hanging over everything is the figure of Vladimir Putin, a man who has devoted his career to accumulating information on weaknesses, both personal and political, and turning that information into power. Rather than Russia turning into America, as America’s policymakers argued in that great age of illusion, the 1990s, America seems to be turning into Russia.”

I highly recommend this book for all those who want to understand better how America has gotten to where it is and maybe where it is going.

Tony

 

Winter Olympics Open Today in Pyeongchang, South Korea!

Dear Commons Community,

Every four years, the Winter Olympics turn some small mountain town or village into a sports mecca for two weeks as athletes from around the globe compete in sking, figure skating, luge, curling, etc.  Today, the 2018 Winter Olympics will open in the isolated, rugged mountain town of Pyeongchang, one of the coldest parts of  South Korea.  In addition to the sports competitions, there is a potential for a lot of political drama. As reported in various media:

“The athletic aspect of these games has been overshadowed in the buildup to the opening ceremony by a frenzied, increasingly momentous fire-hose spray of political developments. The two rival Koreas, flirting with war just weeks ago, are suddenly making overtures toward the no-longer-quite-so-absurd notion of cooperation.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister, making an unprecedented visit to South Korean soil, will now likely attend the same opening ceremony as U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who’s vowing toughest-ever sanctions on the North. Could they meet? That and other theories have engulfed South Korean media.

Pyeongchang was not supposed to share the spotlight with Pyongyang. This was not supposed to be, as some in Seoul grumble about the “Pyongyang Games,” a play on the North Korean capital’s phonetic similarity to Pyeongchang.”

Let the competition begin!

Tony

Raj Chetty – New Study Shows CUNY SEEK Program Proves to be an Engine of Social Mobility!

Dear Commons Community,

Last year a study led by Raj Chetty of Stanford University came out with a report measuring exactly how much each college in the nation helps working-class kids rise up the economic ladder. It was the largest data gathering project ever to track how much students earned after they left college .  Predictably, the economists found that some low-income students joined the top 1 percent after attending an elite college but very few poor kids get that opportunity. Meanwhile, many more low-income students attended lower-tier colleges and didn’t enter the middle class afterward. CUNY ranked 6th on the list of all colleges nationally for the percent of students from the bottom 20 percent who were able to earn in the top 20 percent after graduation. Now Chetty and his colleagues are trying to figure out how some colleges manage to pull it off and see if there are things that others can copy. They began at the City University of New York (CUNY) by examining its SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program which started fifty years ago.  As reported in The Hechinger Report and U.S. News and World:

“Last month, John Friedman of Brown University, one of the economists working with Chetty – along with David Deming of Harvard University and Nick Turner of the Federal Reserve Bank – gave a preview of this new of line research at a meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C.

The economists tracked more than 10,000 students who had been admitted to a CUNY program called SEEK that helps academically borderline, low-income students complete a four-year degree. They found that SEEK students earned more money as adults in their late 20s and early 30s than academically similar students from higher-income families.

“Giving them access to the SEEK program is giving them $4,000 a year,” said Friedman. “Maybe there are more impactful things that could be done. But those data suggest that something does seem to be working well in the SEEK program.”

The results are interesting because the SEEK program, which stands for Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge, has been around for more than 50 years and was an early attempt at CUNY to give low-income students a boost. Today, CUNY invests more resources in newer and sometimes more expensive programs to help struggling low-income students. However, this research shows that old ideas can still work.

Almost 11,000 students were enrolled in CUNY’s SEEK program as of the fall of 2016, the most recent year for which data is available. Some 420,000 students have been through the program over the course of its 50-year history.

The SEEK program gives extra financial, academic and counseling support to low-income kids who just miss the requirements for admission to one of CUNY’s four-year colleges, such as Hunter or John Jay in Manhattan, because their grades or test scores are too low. The students are poor enough that federal Pell grants and other financial aid already cover their entire tuition, currently more than $6,500 a year. CUNY kicks in additional funds to cover their fees and gives them a stipend to pay for books. From the student’s perspective, it’s a free ride for four years, except for living expenses. Together with the extra instruction and counseling, SEEK costs roughly $2,700 per student or $11,800 over four years.

The economists compared the future earnings of students who were born in the 1980s and were admitted to the SEEK program in the late 1990s and early 2000s with two different groups of students who had also applied to CUNY’s four-year colleges. The first group of roughly 17,000 students was just as poor as the SEEK students but their applications were much stronger and they were accepted because of their high school grades and test scores. Some of these poor but smart students attended CUNY; others attended more prestigious colleges. Friedman found that later in life, the SEEK students earned the same as these students.

The second group of almost 14,000 students was denied admission to CUNY’s four-year schools because their academic records were too weak. If they had been poor, they would have been eligible for SEEK, but their families’ incomes exceeded program limits. Many of them began their studies at one of CUNY’s two-year community colleges. Some went to other institutions. Years later, the low-income SEEK students earned $4,000 more a year, on average, than these students from more affluent families. The economists believe that this earnings differential will probab persist their entire working lives, adding up to $120,000 over 30 years.

It’s unclear why the SEEK program works, whether it’s the extra financial aid, the extra instruction or the extra counseling. Friedman suspects that the key ingredient might be different for a student with a college-educated parent compared to a student who’s the first in his family to attend college. The economists hope to tease that out in future research.

They also hope to reproduce this type of research, analyzing other efforts to help low-income students at 200 colleges with whom they’ve partnered as part of an initiative called CLIMB

“The goal is to understand not just broadly what works, but what works specifically,” said Friedman. “What works for a poor student in Rio Grande Valley in Texas might not be what works for poor students in CUNY in New York or rural students at Iowa State.”

Excellent piece of scholarship on the part of Chetty and his colleagues. 

BRAVO!

Tony

Trump Wants a Military Parade – “Cheesy” Idea!

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump has asked the Pentagon to plan a large military parade complete with tanks, artillery, missiles, and other instruments of war.  The response been mostly negative.  Senator Lindsay Graham thought that displaying military hardware as is done in some other countries would be “cheesy”.  It would be an unnecessary ostentatious display of military might that serves no purpose. Below is a New York Times editorial on the issue.  Its summary says it all.

“Mr. Trump is trying to exploit the armed forces as a political prop, even as he daily undermines the country’s other real and enduring strengths, including an independent judiciary and a free press. During the Cold War, such military spectacles were a hallmark of the Soviets. Today, North Korea regularly stages its own robotic displays of military power in an effort to intimidate adversaries.

To defend itself and its allies, the United States must have a strong military. Yet what Americans and the world need from Mr. Trump is not martial pageantry, but a demonstration that he understands that national strength relies on much more than military power.”

Tony

=========================================

Trump Wants a Big Parade. It Would Be a Big Mistake.

By the Editorial Board  

Feb. 7, 2018

The United States has the world’s most capable fighting force. But do we really want to spike the ball at a time when the country is embroiled in two wars, with no end in sight?

The president seems to think so. President Trump, apparently taken by the Bastille Day parade in Paris, which he attended last summer, has instructed Pentagon brass to organize an even bigger show of military strength, down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington — tanks, missiles, jets and rows of uniformed troops marching in precision. “We’re going to have to try to top” the French procession, he told reporters. No date has been set, but the planning is underway.

It’s all a bit silly. But leaving aside, for the moment, Mr. Trump’s insecurities and his desire to do everything bigger than anyone else, there are some serious reasons to reject his idea.

Mr. Trump’s parade would further militarize America’s image. And it would be expensive, costing millions of dollars and most likely tearing up Washington’s streets. Does that make sense when the Pentagon is complaining that its $700 billion annual budget is inadequate, Congress is cutting vital programs, the State Department is being eviscerated and a Republican tax cut for the wealthy has added billions of dollars to the deficit?

The United States used to regularly hold national military parades, generally to mark military victories. They took place after the Civil War, World War I and World War II. Most recently, the first President George Bush presided as 8,800 troops, with weapons, marched through Washington after the 1991 Persian Gulf war ended. But after American combat troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, the Pentagon declined a ticker-tape parade in New York for gulf war veterans, saying it would not be proper while Americans were still fighting in Afghanistan.

So what would be the purpose of organizing such a parade today, with Americans still fighting in Afghanistan and again in Iraq? The White House says Mr. Trump wants to support “America’s great service members who risk their lives every day.” Yet, especially since 9/11, most Americans have been acutely aware of, and overtly appreciative of, the service of military troops and emergency medical workers, who are regularly recognized at public events and in public speeches.

Mr. Trump, who dodged the Vietnam War with five deferments, has developed an unusual reliance on the military. His defense secretary and chief of staff are retired generals, and his national security adviser, another general, is still on active duty. The president is doing everything he can to make the Pentagon his prime instrument of national security policy by promising “one of the greatest military buildups in history,” expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal and issuing threats to use military force.

Mr. Trump is trying to exploit the armed forces as a political prop, even as he daily undermines the country’s other real and enduring strengths, including an independent judiciary and a free press. During the Cold War, such military spectacles were a hallmark of the Soviets. Today, North Korea regularly stages its own robotic displays of military power in an effort to intimidate adversaries.

To defend itself and its allies, the United States must have a strong military. Yet what Americans and the world need from Mr. Trump is not martial pageantry, but a demonstration that he understands that national strength relies on much more than military power.

 

Sharon O’Dair and the “Hypocrisy” of the MLA!

Dear Commons Community,

Sharon O’Dair, professor emerita at the University of Alabama, has an op-ed in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “Shamelessness and Hypocrisy of the MLA.”  She focuses on the MLA’s efforts to assist young Ph.D.s in English to consider careers in areas outside of academia.  She bases much of her commentary on her attendance at the recent MLA annual meeting.  Here is an excerpt:

“Twelve percent of this year’s program was devoted to sessions about “The Profession.” In 1987, the first year I was on the program, it was about 8 percent, and few sessions, if any, offered this by-now-predictable range of topics: “A Tool Kit for Doctoral Student Career Planning”; “Academic Writing in Graduate School”; “Administering Feminism”; “Careers Beyond the Professoriate for Humanities Ph.D.s: The Employer Perspective” (which is what counts); “The Circuitous Path Into Higher Administration”; “Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop”; “How to Get Published”; “Humanists in Tech”; and one of my favorites, “What Tenured Professors Can Do About Adjunctification” (could do, but won’t).

I sat on a round table about possible futures for graduate students. My colleagues offered tips on how to make oneself marketable by getting out of the academic job market; how to reconfigure one’s ideas about employment since professorships are gone. The apparent lesson was that whatever you do (spreadsheets, certificate design, networking, squeezing stress balls), in no way expect to emulate your professors, who read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them. You will not be able to read a lot of books, think about them, write about them, and talk about them, the logic went, and it’s better to get with the program sooner rather than later.

Instead of assuring the 30 or so graduate students and young Ph.D.s in the audience that it’s best to become bureaucrats or tech workers rather than critics, scholars, and teachers, I tried to direct their gaze to a central fact: Graduate programs continue to produce too many Ph.D.s.

According to the MLA’s report on the federal Survey of Earned Doctorates, the number of earned doctorates in English and literature peaked at 1,414 in 1973 and then began a consistent decline, to a nadir of 668 in 1987. That number then steadily increased, reaching a consistent level of around 1,000 per year, which is just about midway between the figures in 1973 and 1987. This is a rough count, however, and the data are difficult to parse: In its annual reports, the MLA separates doctorates in literature from those in rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and speech and rhetorical studies; if you total all of those, the current numbers are closer to 1,200 per year — closer to the apex than to the nadir. That fact is significant: What would job prospects look like if each year we graduated 500 fewer Ph.D.s?

Put another way, we’re either invested in training academics for academic work, or we aren’t. But the rhetoric of the MLA and of universities is shamefully and shamelessly aimed at getting Ph.D. students out of the professoriate.

Whose interests does that rhetoric serve? Not the students’: If the way to a career with a Ph.D. in English is to take one-third of an M.B.A. program, why not take the M.B.A., a mere two years, rather than the six or eight years for a Ph.D. in English? Why spend all those years studying slave narratives, if your digital-humanities work is going to get you a career in an IT department? #OpportunityCost, if you want to get businesslike about it.”

O’Dair provides a brutally honest analysis of the situation for many new Ph.D. in the humanities.

Tony

 

SpaceX Launches and Recovers Falcon Heavy – World’s Heaviest Booster Rocket!

Dear Commons Community,

SpaceX made history yesterday when it successfully launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket carrying an electric car bound for deep space and returned two of three 15-story boosters back to Earth for perfect vertical landings.  The initial test launch of what is now the world’s most powerful operational rocket marks the latest milestone in billionaire Elon Musk’s quest to send humans to Mars and eventually colonize the red planet.  As reported by various media:

“The Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 rockets, which SpaceX has been using for years to deploy satellites and run resupply missions to the International Space Station. With 27 engines, Falcon Heavy gives off more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — equivalent to 18 Boeing 747 aircraft — and is capable lifting 140,000 pounds into orbit. That’s equivalent to a fully loaded 737 aircraft. 

That Tuesday’s launch at 3:45 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida went off without a hitch is remarkable. 

“This is a test mission,” Musk told The New York Times ahead of liftoff. “There is so much that can go wrong.”

In an interview with CNN, Musk warned that spectators could expect either “a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen.”

The payload on the inaugural test flight was, rather appropriately, a product of Musk’s other brainchild, Tesla. The electric car, a red convertible Roadster, is slated to be deployed six hours after liftoff. If all goes well, it and a dummy driver named “Starman” will be sent into orbit around the sun. They will reach a speed of 7 miles per second and travel approximately 250 million miles from Earth, eventually passing close by the red planet.

The car could remain in orbit for a billion years. And there’s an “extremely tiny” chance that it could crash into Mars, Musk told The New York Times. 

“That was awesome,” a SpaceX commentator said roughly five minutes into the launch. “That’s all I can really say.” 

Along with a successful maiden launch, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, managed to recover two of its boosters. Both were used during previous flights in 2016 and landed simultaneously on land at Cape Canaveral.

A third booster was expected to land on a floating platform in the Atlantic. But instead of capturing a successful landing, the onboard camera appeared to show smoke before cutting out entirely. More than 45 minutes after the launch, SpaceX had not provided an update on the fate of the center booster. 

In late 2015, the company sent shockwaves through the space community when it landed a booster back on Earth — the first ever successful attempt to recover a rocket from an orbital flight. At the time a SpaceX commentator compared the feat to “launching a pencil over the Empire State Building, having it reverse, come back down, and land on a shoebox on the ground during a windstorm.” 

Less than a year later, after four failed attempts to land a Falcon 9 on floating platforms in the Atlantic, SpaceX nailed a seemingly impossible at-sea landing aboard a drone ship named “Of Course I Still Love You.” 

SpaceX is developing rockets that can be reused in an effort to make space flight cheaper and easier. While it costs between $200,000 to $300,000 to refill the rocket, the rocket itself costs $60 million, Musk has said. 

The effort has come with many setbacks. In September 2016, for example, a Falcon 9 burst into flames on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Musk called it “the most difficult and complex failure” the company has had in its 14-year history. 

In 2016, Musk unveiled plans to make humans a “multi-planet species.” He hopes to eventually build a self-sustainable Martian colony of 1 million people by building a massive “Interplanetary Transport System.” Like something out of a science fiction film, giant spaceships would shuttle upward of 100 people ― perhaps many more in the future ― plus luggage and other cargo to and from the red planet.

To help pay for it, the billionaire business magnate and tech entrepreneur has proposed launching a network of 4,425 satellites ― each the size of a car ― to provide the entire globe with high-speed internet.”

Congratulations Mr. Musk!

Tony

 

Enrollment Plummets at Illinois Colleges!

Dear Commons Community,

First-time freshmen enrollment at Illinois public colleges and universities has been plummeting thanks in part  to Governor Bruce Rauner’s engagement in a bruising two-year budget battle with the Democratic-controlled legislature that led to furloughs, layoffs, and emergency measures. A Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests budget worries have created unease among prospective Illinois students about the long-term health of their home-state higher-ed options. As per the article:

“For the fourth straight year, the University of Illinois system has frozen tuition for in-state students at its three campuses. Announcing the move in January, the system’s president, Timothy L. Killeen, was explicit about its purpose: to stop the hemorrhaging of Illinois residents enrolling at out-of-state colleges and universities.

Many have laid the blame for that exodus at the feet of state leaders. A bruising budget stalemate between Illinois’s Republican governor, Bruce V. Rauner, and the Democratic-controlled legislature, stretching from 2015 to 2017, led to furloughs, layoffs, and emergency measures at several Illinois public colleges. Some observers say the affair created unease among prospective Illinois students about the long-term health of their home-state higher-ed options.

Sure enough, since the impasse began, enrollments at many Illinois public universities have slid precipitously from year to year. (Just this fall, freshman enrollment at Western Illinois University fell by 21 percent.) And preliminary data indicate that a greater number of freshmen sought higher education outside the state, while fewer out-of-state students chose to study in the Land of Lincoln. In 2016, the state experienced a net loss of 19,195 students, a 15-percent increase from 2014’s 16,000-student gap, and second only to New Jersey’s 29,000-freshmen deficit. The deepening loss was largely driven by more Illinois residents seeking to study in other states.

But the fact is that Illinois has been losing students long before its budget mess. In both 2012 and 2014, before Governor Rauner’s election, around 33,000 Illinois residents attended college as freshmen outside the state. The state filled only about half of that deficit with the enrollment each year of about 17,000 out-of-staters. Over the last decade, Illinois has averaged a net loss of 8,000 freshmen in each of the five years that data were collected. (The federal government surveys colleges about freshman-migration patterns only in even-numbered years.)

In fiscally stable times, that migration deficit might have been problematic, but it wasn’t dire. But the budget stalemate exposed and exacerbated a long-running problem: Without regular and certain state funding, public and private colleges needed to enroll more Illinois residents to raise much-needed tuition revenue. However, the uncertainty created by the impasse led more students to take their dollars elsewhere. Hence, as a last resort, the years of tuition freezes.

The feedback loop of uncertainty that Illinois has been stuck in is relatively new, and pressing. But researchers say the broader phenomenon of freshman migration has been present for decades.

“You can trace it back to the 1960s,” said Eric Lichtenberger, deputy director of information management and research at the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “It’s nothing new. It’s been going on for the past 50 years or so.”

The best way for Illinois to keep its students in state might have little to do with tuition discounting or recruitment strategy, said Larry A. Isaak, president of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact. A year or two without pessimistic headlines about the state of public higher education could make a real difference in Illinois.

“Students are reading newspapers and watching news programs on television,” said Isaak. “They look at what is happening. And so I would advise certainty in budgets and certainty in financial-aid funding.”

A sad situation for what has historically been a great public university system.

Tony