Who needs research anyway?

It's easy enough to consider research to find a cancer cure or other research to get us to drive/fly Jetsons-like craft powered entirely by the sun and see the utilitarian benefit from the research, even if delivery of a functional product remains far into the future. It's much harder, however, to make the case for the economic theory type of research I used to do, as exactly what type of application it might help to create is entirely unclear for the most part, while for a few pieces I produced it is quite clear that there will be no application produced whatsoever.  And I suspect if you were able to count produced research across all fields at the university as well as count all faculty with tenure or on the tenure track, you'd find quite a lot of the type of research I did by faculty who specialized in that, abstract and ethereal, rather than concrete and low to the ground. Who needs that?

I'm motivated to pose this question from seeing yet another piece in the Chronicle about the threat to tenure. I get frustrated when reading such pieces, partially because of the threat itself, which is real enough, but mainly because the defense seems too weak to me.  Those inside the academy take the need for research as a self-evident truth and mainly they talk with one another.  What about external audiences?  If they are much harder to convince what then might do the trick?  This is still too optimistic as a way to pose the question, for perhaps there is nothing that will do the trick.  What then?

And here is the thing.  At the administrative level, we in academe may not really believe in tenure to support research, at least the sort of research that isn't also supported by external grants. This other type of research, when done at a public university, is supported by other funding, mainly tuition and state tax revenue, nowadays with much more of the former than the latter.  Before looking at the data on this point for my university, let's note that there are a few reasons why research is expensive when viewed from the perspective of it being a tuition supported activity.  The first is the claim on faculty time, i.e., teaching loads.   Research faculty are required to report their time allocations as percentage of the total.  I would always report 50% research, 40% teaching, and 10% service.  I'm going to assume that is typical.

At the time I made such reports the teaching load in the Econ department was two courses per semester, so those two course supposedly took up 40% of my time working. The way the university counts, the load should be measured in IUs (instructional units) produced.  IUs are measured as the product of number of students and credit hours for a course.  When I taught intermediate micro, typical class size was around 60 and it was a 3-credit course. So my section would generate around 180 IUs.  Graduate courses in Econ were typically 4 credit hours, but with many fewer students.  (Except for the core courses, which I did teach for a while.  Those were larger because students from other departments, notably Ag Econ, took them.)  The expectation of a faculty member with tenure or on the tenure track was to teach one undergrad course as service and one grad class per semester.  And the faculty preference was to teach grad classes, not because of the fewer IUs, but because the subject matter was closer to the faculty member's research.   Adjunct faculty typically teach only undergraduate classes.  And they generate much higher IUs, either by teaching more classes or by teaching much larger classes.

The other factor that makes research faculty expensive is their salary plus non-wage compensation to support research, such as travel money and the ability to hire a research assistant.  I should note that whether on the tenure track or not the instructor needs an office and office space is scarce.  So allocating that might enter into the cost calculation.  But the reality is that departments don't rent the space they occupy.  They are assigned space that the university owns.  One might impute a rental price from that allocation.  But it is not the custom to do that, so I won't do it here. Likewise, the benefits that employees receive, nowadays mainly health insurance, are borne by the university but not costed at the departmental level.  (Illinois has an issue that most other public universities do not, as contribution to the retirement system is mandatory and the system itself is in arrears.)  With these caveats we can focus on just the salary number.  Tenure track faculty are paid more than adjuncts.  That reality is undeniable and contributes to making teaching with tenure track faculty a more expensive way to go.

Now let's look at some data, which are taken from the Campus Profile.   What is shown below are percentages of teaching by research faculty, grad assistants, and specialized (non-tenure track) faculty.  This is done with three different looks: overall, 100-level courses only, and all undergraduate courses.  I added the line space between each look to enhance readability.  Also shown are total undergraduate IUs, which have been trending upward.

This is an interesting table to examine and I encourage the reader to spend some time on it.  I don't know that Illinois typifies public research universities in these numbers, but I expect the picture is similar elsewhere.  The reason for the increase in undergrad IUs is to admit more out-of-state and especially international students, who pay much higher tuition.  And the reason to do that is because their tuition revenue serves as a substitute for state tax dollars, which have been declining. At the same time these high tuition IUs have been increasing, the fraction of undergraduate teaching done by specialized faculty has also been increasing.  Perhaps surprising, the percentage of teaching done by grad assistants has been declining. The percentage of teaching done by tenure track faculty has also declined, but only modestly, but sufficiently so that a plurality of undergraduate instruction is now done by specialized faculty.

Can these trends continue or will something fracture if they do?  Who knows?  At root here is whether undergraduate instruction needs faculty who are research oriented to make the instruction high quality.  Really, the issue is how this is perceived by the students and their families, at the time when they are applying for admission.  But one might also consider the question whether the same course would be taught differently depending on whether it is taught by a tenure track faculty member or an adjunct, regardless of the perception by potential students.  And then one might ask, in addition, whether when such a difference exists if it matters for the student post graduation, via the type of human capital that the student acquired while in college.

I don't believe we know the answer to this, but I want to note my own view about how my course might matter to the former students who took my Economics of Organizations class.  I'd expect for it to not matter much at all for students in entry-level positions.  It might matter some for those who attain managerial positions, though this would be more for mindset broadly considered than for specific knowledge.  This, too, is how I believe critical thinking skills impact people in the world of work.  In other words, there is a long fuse before the education really pays off.  And couple with that the preoccupation students have with boosting the GPA which makes them myopic and focus on that very first job out of college. So they themselves might not see the long-term benefit of their education this way, which might explain why they may not care whether the instructor is an adjunct or not.

* * * * *

Published research is a public good, at least to the extent that everyone has access to it.  So we should consider the public good benefit from the research, even if the public are free riders and don't fund the research directly or indirectly.  The previous section was meant to get at the benefit to those who are doing the funding.  Here I want to take up the benefit to the free riders.  Is there really such a benefit or not?  I will stick to economics in considering an answer to this question, though the question should be posed for any discipline that does liberal arts education and is not vocational in its orientation.  Among such disciplines, economics may be closer to the vocational end of the spectrum than other disciplines (comparative literature, for example), at least as perceived by the students I considered in the previous section.  I want to observe here, in contrast, that the research I mentioned at the outset of this piece has no vocational value whatsoever.  In this regard, the main difference between economic theory and research in other fields within the liberal arts is the reliance on math models as a necessary part of the discourse.  In this sense, economic theory research is about developing interesting (at least to other economists) math models and drawing the implications from those.

If the set of beneficiaries of the research includes only other faculty members at other universities and/or graduate students who are aiming to become faculty members in the future, one might view the research self-serving and not necessary at all.  So the first step here is to identify potential beneficiaries outside of higher education.  Some economics research might benefit public policy, or how organizations (trade associations, labor unions) go about their business, or how individual companies do likewise.  It might also benefit how news organizations report economic phenomena and thus how the general population comes to understand those phenomena.  And it might filter down into the teaching of economics in high school which, arguably, should be about preparing citizens to understand the economic phenomena that they learn about from their news sources.

Thus, it might be tempting to parse that sort of research with evident potential for external benefit from other research that is simply too abstruse to produce such a benefit.  The former then might be necessary but the latter surely is not necessary.  Is that right?

I'm going to try to counter this naive view in a couple of ways.  One is to note that process by which research is produced.  An individual author or a set of co-authors work through an idea and produce a draft of a working paper.  This is an intermediate product.  They then will want to present their paper in a departmental seminar and perhaps externally. The conversation the authors have with the audience, both during the live presentation and also in individual office visits, serves as an additional input for producing a revision of that first draft.  In a very real sense, all research is a community product, even if those lending comments don't get acknowledgment for their input.  (Comments offered during an office visit might be acknowledged in a footnote.  Those offered during the live workshop session are typically not acknowledged that way.)  The process can sometimes be adversarial or even combative, though my experience is that an underlying collegiality is essential to make it work.  The important point is that research as a community affair may not be well understood by those outside academia.

If it were understood, then we'd want to know what makes somebody an effective member of this research community.  My answer is that at a minimum, the community member must be doing research.  And my experience is that those who do applied research benefit from having conversation with theorists, at least those theorists who can translate the theoretical issues in a way appreciated by the applied scholars. This gives the potential for theoretical research, which provides no direct external benefit, to nonetheless produce a substantial indirect external benefit, by giving credibility to theorist who then interacts with the applied researcher on an equal footing and helps to make the research better.

The other point is to note that the distribution of research output across research faculty is heavily skewed with the superstars producing the bulk of the research, but even with that there is some difficulty in measuring research output.  One measure is lines on the CV, perhaps weighted by the quality of the journal where the paper appeared.  Another measure is of impact, perhaps by counting citations for the paper.  But impact can happen in other ways, for example, by being part of the readings assigned in the core curriculum or in the appropriate field course. The superstar who writes the seminal paper in the field needs other scholars to extend the work and draw out the full implications.  And sometimes important papers have errors in it, which go unnoticed for some time before they are corrected.   I will illustrate with some of my own work.   The following is from a post I wrote as eulogy for Leon Moses,  prior to participating in a workshop held at Northwestern to honor his memory.

The other paper marked my switch from the dissertation research to study of oligopoly models, where I had more success.  One of these was a paper on dynamic duopoly with inventory.  I'm rather proud of this paper, as it made a fundamental point that wasn't in the rest of the literature.  Heretofore people who worked in this area assumed that asymmetric outcomes (one firm is the market leader, the other is a follower) were a consequence of some asymmetry in the initial conditions (the leader got there first and leveraged that for strategic advantage).  My examples showed that you could have symmetric starting conditions but still get asymmetric outcomes and, indeed, that is to be expected in these sorts of models. Google Scholar says the paper got  32 citations, which is second highest among the pieces I've written.  I would never had thought to write on this topic at all if it had not been for the earlier work with Leon.

Some years later Thomas Sargent, who would subsequently win the Nobel Prize, gave a talk in the department on some macroeconomics model he had written with a co-author. (I can't remember who the co-author was now.)  My research was not in macro, but the model Sargent showed us was linear-quadratic and it shared some of the same properties that the model in my duopoly paper had.  So after a fashion I asked, do you know if your equilibrium is unique?  (He had assumed that it was.)  In posing that question I was pretty sure it was not.  He became noticeably flummoxed by that question.  It simply hadn't occurred to him to ask it himself.  I had hit a nerve by posing the question.  Even the Nobel Prize winner needs assistance from other economists now and then to get at something that is good and correct research.  This is an argument for having some larger tail of non-superstar scholars who nonetheless are competent researchers active in the profession.  Yet I would readily agree that how large that tail should be is not easy to determine by criteria we would all deem sensible.

* * * * *

I tried to be careful in the previous section by talking about the potential public good benefit from research.  Here I want to ask, if the potential is there is it actualized?  As in my previous post I led off with a point from Peter Drucker - the active party in any communication is the receiver/listener - I will contain myself to consider the issue of actualization from that perspective.  Is the message of the research well received or is it ignored?  If it is ignored, then the potential beneficiaries clearly don't need the research.  And if the ignoring part is willful rather than inadvertent, one might then presume that such potential beneficiaries actually view the research as a waste of time.

Alas, this bring politics into the question.  Those who believe that shrinking government is the right answer will view research that demonstrates effective government programs as pernicious.  Is it possible then for academics to make a convincing argument to those people about the benefit of research so they'll change their mind?

There is a second issue here, which sometimes goes under the label of corporatizing the university.  The audience already knows what it wants and has the means to get its wishes so then pays for research to deliver just that.  The Koch brothers are notorious for supporting research centers that produce libertarian anti-government policy proposals.

Evidently there is some of both of this going on.  Given that, what of arguments to protect tenure, and thereby enable research by scholars who are independent and not beholden to an external audience? Can those arguments possibly work?

My sense of things is that they can't work as long as Republicans control most of the state governments, with the attack on tenure as part and parcel of that control.  The arguments might work as part of setting the stage for future Republican defeat and a return to control by Democrats, but I'm guessing that this issue is pretty far removed from most voters who vote mainly for Democratic candidates.  The student indebtedness issue has gotten most of the bandwidth in the press, when considering higher education.   Teaching with adjuncts is a way to contain the cost of instruction.  In this world view, research seems like a luxury we can't afford.  Are we ready to come to grips with that perception?

* * * * *

If there is actually a substantial public good benefit to the university, in both its teaching mission and in the research it does, the latter as described above while the former as discussed in this post, then the university should largely be funded out of tax revenues, as that is the correct way to fund public goods.   It occurs to me that this might still be possible - if we federalize the system.  I believe we've outgrown the current approach and we'll be seeing public research universities continue to decline in the future as the current approach persists.  One reason for this is that the current approach is poor on cost containment, particularly on the matter of salaries and other perqs for high caliber research faculty.  A federalized system would be better that way and thus be more sustainable, plus there is a larger potential tax base from which to draw to support the system.  Then, too, one might argue that there is superfluous redundancy of public research institutions.  Does every state really need at least one?   I don't know.  It's not a question you see a lot of people asking.

In the absence of federalizing the system as an answer, academics should be prepared to hear from friends who are not in academia that what they do is esoteric and unnecessary.  We need to engage those people in thoughtful argument.  I'm afraid, however, if we do that, too often we'll end up getting the short straw.  This one is tough.

What Does Free Speech Mean? Some Issues to Consider

I want to begin with two observations/questions.  The first comes from reading Peter Drucker.  He models communication as a message being sent and then received.  Drucker asserts that the active party in any communication is the recipient (listener).  It is an interesting perspective as most people probably assume that the active party is the sender (speaker). If you take Drucker's view seriously, it would seem that both the sender and the receiver have rights that must be taken into account.  How is that done in practice?

The second observation is about this blog.  I make posts at my leisure, when I want to.  So on that score I seem to have complete freedom.  Yet I have very few readers now and, frankly, I'd like to have more of them.  In part, that is why I re-post to Facebook, rather than simply link to a post.  I'm guessing that more of my friends will read it that way.  But out on the Web, it is much more hit and miss.  Ten years ago there were a lot of hits.  Nowadays, it is mainly miss.  Am I exercising free speech now or not?  Does free speech demand having an actual audience, not just the potential for having such an audience?

One can go a long way in trying to address these observations in a coherent manner and I encourage the reader to try doing that in a way that might produce a consensus answer.  I am going to answer these here with my own views only, not claiming they are how everyone else thinks about them.  And the case in point that I will use to base my response is receiving unsolicited emails from vendors.  I get quite a few of these.  I feel no obligation to even read them.  When I do read them on occasion, mainly I feel no obligation to respond.  Once in a while, when the sender is using my current campus address (@illinois.edu) but not the old address (@uiuc.edu) and the sender seems earnest yet is ignorant that I have retired, I will respond by noting that and asking the person to take me off their mailing list.  While I strongly believe in collegiality as a rule, I do this mainly not to be a good citizen, but to avoid getting future emails from this person.  I don't feel a strong social obligation in this case and indeed it is an uphill battle, since new vendors whom I've never met send email with their own unsolicited spiels all the time. I can't say whether the vendor has better luck with other recipients, but if I am typical of those recipients then the vendor doesn't deserve an audience.  To sum up, the vendor does have free speech, but the audience can safely ignore the message, so that when there isn't an audience it doesn't mean that free speech has been denied.

Now we should take the discussion from individuals to groups of like minded people.  Whereas an individual receiver can simply ignore the message from a sender, a group of receivers may have sufficient power to block the sender's transmission.  In this case, is the group denying the free speech rights of the sender?

I deliberately used an online example above, my blog post, because such avenues are freely available to anyone.  They can't be blocked.  As an alternative to writing out a post like this, I could record a talking head video on my computer and post to YouTube or some other online video host.  If that avenue is always there, does a group blocking free speech in a face to face setting then constitute denial of free speech, or is it merely pushing the speech to another venue?   This is not such an easy question to answer.  And it is confounded by the following.  Speech may be a market activity, meaning the speaker expects to get paid for giving the talk.  The speaker then may not want to produce a freely available online alternative, as that might cut into earning speaker fees.

The practice of students on some campuses blocking a speaker from giving a talk has drawn a strong reaction in many circles.  For example, consider this piece from the Boston Globe about the episode at Middlebury College, where the speaker Charles Murray was blocked from talking.  I've been asking myself, what if the protest had been somewhat milder, a boycott that strongly discouraged attendance at the talk but without any threats of violence to those who did attend or to the speaker.  Contrary to what actually happened, suppose Murray did give his talk but the auditorium was largely empty.  Would that have produced much the same reaction in the press, or quite a different response?  In other words, is it the violent blocking that is at issue or any sort of blocking whatsoever?   I really don't know.  If a certain type of civil disobedience was deemed acceptable, even if it had the consequence of reducing the size of the audience, my preference would be to embrace that form of protest and shy away from the violent forms.  However, I'm far less certain whether that is a matter of preserving free speech rights of the speaker or simply a distaste for violence.

Then, I want to consider a different situation where the receiver/listener is in a somewhat captive situation and thus is unable to ignore the message sent by the sender/speaker.  This happens, for example, when both are students in a discussion-based class.  As I've written about this example in the past, in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A", I want to try to unpeel the issues some first before discussing possible ways to address them.

During the first two years of writing this blog, I was a campus administrator and indeed the blog was hosted on a campus Web site, though the blog was not linked directly from the Web site of the unit I supervised.  I thus felt that while I was representing my own thinking in the blog, rather than agreed upon campus thinking, I had an obligation to respect campus thinking and decision making.  This show of respect happened both in the tone of the post - exploratory, not accusatory - and in the way arguments are made, highlighting where "reasonable people might disagree."  I mention this because I think some of the free speech issues in the classroom are about tone and style of argument.  Speakers feel they can be blunt and uncaring about how listeners will react.  Also, if the speaker feels disrespected for the speaker's prior held views, the argument is apt to be made to win the point, rather than in a way to get at the truth.

On the matter of bluntness, one should then ask whether the speaker is well aware of how the listener will react, so is deliberately trying to do harm to the listener, or if the speaker is ignorant of how the listener will react and doesn't expect what is said to cause a negative reaction.  On the matter of the speaker feeling disrespected, that will promote anger and anger is a driver for trying to win the point.  It is also possible, however, that the speaker is not angry, but merely egotistical.  Arguing from the perspective of the speaker, If I know more than you I expect to be right and my job is to show you the error in your ways.  So lack of humility may be an alternate explanation to anger.  The two factors may mutually support one another, as well.

Some of the arguments I see being made about free speech seem to assume that the speaker can be willfully ignorant and make argument as the speaker sees fit, independent of the sensibilities of the listener.   And it matters not here whether this happens on the open Internet or in a captive situation, such as the classroom I described.   As you might guess from reading this piece, I believe the captive situation requires ways to contain the speaker some because the listener has rights too, while the open Internet does not, because there the receiver can ignore the message.  In my ideal, the best way to contain the speaker would be via a gentle education that aimed to encourage the speaker to seriously consider the listener's perspective.  Even with such an ideal, however, there should be a recognition that it would be a long time coming to deliver such education in an effective manner.  Thus, it is likely necessary to have some rules/regulations that govern speech in the captive setting.   Regulations are never perfect.  There can be too many regulations or a given regulation can be too onerous.  So this is a balancing act.  Purists don't like balancing acts.  But those same purists, when considering free speech, likely entirely ignore the rights of the listeners.

I want to close here by noting a couple of other pieces I've written on this general topic, which shows at a minimum that I'm fascinated by it and I don't believe it is well treated in the arguments I read about it.  A month ago I wrote a piece about embracing rules that move us from debate to reasoned argument.  If speech is viewed as a piece of reasoned argument then more people will embrace speech where there are diverse views expressed. Such rules then need to be seen as playing a dual role, one as constraint, the other as enabler.  I think having this duality view is helpful in considering free speech issues.  The other piece I wrote less than two weeks ago about speech in the classroom.  The instructor regulates student speech in a classroom in a variety of different ways.  In a well functioning classroom students get used to the flow and the instructor with a deft touch is appreciated by the students.  I believe that such an instructor actually embraces the rules of the previous post, at least implicitly.  The classroom is a place where students are meant to learn inquiry methods.  Thus, it is my belief that a well functioning classroom, which might take a chunk of the semester to operate well, can tolerate differences of opinion and that contentious speech would better be handled after the class has reached this high level of function than early on, where everyone is a stranger. More generally, by which I mean moving outside of the classroom context, I think an ongoing conversation of people with different perspective has the potential for producing interesting results if they engage in argument, but not debate.  The thing is, argument is slower and more time consuming.   It is impatience that makes productive speech hard to achieve and why there is so much fracture when it comes to contentious issues.

Blame It On The Bossa Nova

With society evidently in decline, there is a growing cottage industry of folks doing a historical look and from that trying to discern the cause of that decline.

On the liberal side of things, the year 1980 has become focal, witness this recent piece by Paul Krugman.  The idea, in a nutshell, is that the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of "Supply Side Economics," which largely proved to be a sham.  The tax cuts, deregulation, and hostility to organized labor didn't so much make the economy grow, as its adherents would have you believe, but rather created a boon for those already at the upper end of the income distribution, by shifting the return in income generation from labor to capital.  The rest, as you say, is an all too familiar history, featuring wage stagnation for families near the median in the household income distribution, and a variety of social ills that resulted once economic prospects for them appeared grim.  To a certain extent I have bought into this narrative, for example this commentary as rhyme entitled Trickle Down.  Yet I think there are issues with this story that focusing on 1980 tends to mask.  Some of this post is intended to bring those issues out into the open.

A different narrative has emerged from some conservative commentators and/or liberals who are critical of upscale voters and how insular they appear to be.   An example of the latter is this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.  He takes on the little tricks by which those who already are doing well preserve their advantage or better it and then pass on those advantages to their children.  A particularly pernicious way this happens, according to Reeves, is via zoning restrictions in housing that in not so many words are aimed at keeping the riffraff out, consequently denying these people opportunities that really should be open to them.  Many refer to this sort of behavior as gaming the system. The well to do are usually quite expert at such gaming.  They know how to make the system work for themselves.  Yet others complain (not just the riffraff but many people of more modest means) that the system is broken.   I wrote about this some years ago in a piece called Gaming The System Versus Design It, where I argued that even very accomplished people don't  know what a well designed system looks like. Then they tend to make an intellectual error and assert that the status quo is quite okay - because they do well by it.  So Reeves piece resonated with me.

David Brooks takes a somewhat different tack on the matter in this piece, The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite, though he comes to a similar conclusion as Reeves.  Brooks contrasts the current system, which he describes as a meritocracy, with what came before, where people of privilege - White, male, Protestants from families of means - ruled the roost.  Meritocracy is fairer and therefore a better system, according to Brooks, except for one thing.  In the old system, the people of privilege did learn a kind of social responsibility, a variant of noblesse oblige, which perhaps survives to this day in organizations like Rotary. The meritocracy seems deficient on educating people on social responsibility.  Thus, the gaming of the system is undisciplined by consideration of the consequences on others.  Brooks wants a meritocracy where the highly educated behave in a socially responsible way.

This point also resonated with me as I recently wrote a post, Sensitivity and Social Responsibility - Can They Be Taught?  I should note here that in college (and in K-12 as well) we do teach the students to game the system, though perhaps inadvertently.  The most obvious way where this shows up is in the rampant credentialism, which invariably gets the hard charging student to juggle more balls than is intellectually nourishing, for the sake of padding the resume.  The kids learn to care a great deal about their GPA and in far too many students that I see in the course I teach this overwhelms curiosity and intrinsic interest in the subject.  Thus, the students get a sense that adults are fundamentally instrumental about achieving ends.  It is this mindset which supports the gaming behavior, with no holds barred.

There is something of a puzzle here.  On the one hand, Krugman and his ilk, who focus on 1980 as the beginning of the decline, want to blame conservative Republicans and their anti-government bias.  Brooks and Reeves, in contrast, want to blame educated elites, who tend to be liberal Democrats.  It is their hypocrisy which is to blame.  Given the politics behind these competing narratives, one would think they are opposed to each other.  Yet, as I've said above, each of these stories rings true to me to some extent.  How can that be?  Is it possible they are actually the same story, but being told from different vantages?  I wanted to take on these questions below.

Sometimes in such circumstances I consider my own life events and try to view the circumstances personally.  Having done that I then see if I can generalize from my experience. Indeed, 1980 was a very important year in my life, as that fall I started working at Illinois as an Assistant Professor.  Actually, I was ABD at the time I was hired, but in my contract I got all the perqs of a new Assistant Professor - a course buy out in the fall, summer support the following summer, which was not conditional on finishing my dissertation, though I did get my PhD the following spring.  Conceivably, I could have stayed at Northwestern for another year and gone on the market with the degree already in hand. I chose not to do that.  There were many reasons.  The ones I want to focus on here were quite materialistic.  I was tired of living like a graduate student, in my dingy apartment with crappy furniture, particularly my bed with a way too soft mattress which was giving me lower back pain.  I wanted to make a decent living and have reasonably good things.  I never considered myself a yuppie.  But for that moment I shared with yuppies the view that quality of life is found in material things.

So I started to ask myself whether that yuppie perspective was itself a consequence of being tired about what had come before.  I'll get to that in a second.  First, I want to note some of the social changes I observed going from being an undergraduate at Cornell to a graduate student at Northwestern.  There are many possible explanations for these changes: college town versus (sub)urban university, students mainly from the Northeast versus students mainly from the Midwest, Ivy League versus an aspirant to be a peer institution, the various majors I saw as an undergraduate student (math, philosophy, poli sci) versus the econ majors I saw as a TA, and then the changing time in which we lived.  My definite impression, clearly not a scientific study but something I hold to quite strongly, is that at Cornell the ethos was somewhat anti-materialistic and heavily influenced by the counterculture.  The undergrads I had in my Econ classes at NU, in contrast, seemed far more materialistic - yuppies in the making, if you will.

Now let's get to why the yuppies turned inward.  The antecedents that tired people out were the Vietnam War and then Watergate, but I view them as one bigger thing or two jumbled together.  Had there been no Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Democrats would have held onto the White House in 1968 and our history would have been entirely different. It seems to me that Krugman, Reeves, and Brooks should all consider the consequence of the Vietnam War and ask if it really is a better "first cause" to explain America's subsequent decline.

Again I'm going to personalize this and use 1968 as another focal time.  I became a teenager in January of that year and then started high school that fall, which was also the time of the big NYC Teachers Strike that closed the schools for a couple of months. The thing is, initially I went to the wrong high school, Bayside High, because my mother thought that would be better for me.  But it was a disaster and I soon transferred to the local high school, Cardozo.  The experience marked a change in my relationship with my mother.  I became aggrieved and untrusting of her, insofar as her making decisions on my behalf.  I concluded that if an authority is to make choices for us, the authority must justify the choice and demonstrate it is good and proper.

Indeed, this was my main lesson about the Vietnam War.  The government made extremely poor choices, often doing so under false pretenses.  From that, quagmire followed.  The war divided us - the hard hats versus the hippies, in a kind of division that has morphed some but still survives to this day. The show that best captured this divide was All in the Family.  Archie Bunker became America's favorite bigot.  He worked the loading dock and was a Nixon supporter. The Meathead, his son-in-law, had the long hair that hippies wore and was much more liberal in his views.

I can't say how much of what we associated with hippies - dope, love, and rock music in addition to the long hair - would have happened anyway as a matter of course.  But peace became a crucial part of the mix and because it was so long in coming it hardened the view that authority couldn't be trusted.

This sense that authority couldn't be trusted and that the country was dividing us wore people out.  Who could possibly want to be concerned with social responsibility.  It didn't get us anywhere, or so it seemed.  After Watergate concluded, many people must have felt, couldn't we just get back to normal?

I don't have an adult sense of what normal was like.  The TV shows I watched as a kid, Leave It to Beaver and Gilligan's Island I will offer up as emblems of a lot of other programming, presented a Caspar Milquetoast alternative reality, but I wonder if many thought the world largely safe in the way those shows presented it.  Were there strong divisions between liberals and conservatives in the late 1950s and early 1960s or was a unified world view far more common then?  I don't know, but if so we lost that as a consequence of Vietnam and never really got it back.

Sometimes this division existed within families.  Would hippies as teens and young adults stay as hippies for life?  Or might some of them abandon it all and then become yuppies?  The show Family Ties captured this tension with a light touch.  My sense of things is that there are many who were hippie types in the early to mid 1970s who became conservative when Reagan was President and more conservative as they grew older.

Now let me make two more conjectures.  One is that the Vietnam War crowded out the good elements of LBJ's Great Society, particularly with regard to civil rights.  If achieving racial equality, legally and as a practical matter as well, had been the only issue to occupy the national attention because there wasn't a Vietnam War, I believe we could have made a lot more progress.  To be sure, George Wallace was a candidate for President in 1968 and there clearly were forces of reaction that wanted to block progress on civil rights.  But a much more concerted effort for progress would have been made, and if Democrats had retained the White House in 1968, there wouldn't have been a Southern strategy so evident in changing the political realignment.  Our politics might then have become more earnest and far less cynical.

The other conjecture is based by juxtaposing the film Easy Rider with the current furor about the NFL banning players taking a knee during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, which one might use to remind ourselves that some people react very strongly to the symbolic behavior of others when they deem it disrespectful and inappropriate.  Many people held hippies in contempt, as a threat to their own way of life.  That contempt created a strong negative reaction that served as enabler of the hard right development in our politics.  Without the Vietnam War, even had their still been hippies, I believe they'd have been seen as a curiosity, perhaps, but not a real threat.  Drugs did scare people, certainly. But I believe it would have been considered far more benign, had there been no Vietnam War.

So I'd argue for the Vietnam War to be blamed as the cause in the country's path to decline  You can see the selfishness of the educated elite as a consequence.  You can see that anti-tax mood of Republicans from Reagan on also as a consequence.

* * * * *

Let me wrap up.  There is always a difficulty in trying to identify a first cause and use that to absorb the blame, when we know that history didn't start with that.  A case may be made for the JFK assassination being primary.  If JFK had remained as President, with his prior faux pas at the Bay of Pigs, he may have learned from his mistake and we might have then avoided a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.  LBJ didn't have that prior experience.  So he stepped in it, the biggest pile of poo ever.

And, because I like to end on a light note, perhaps we should consider an antecedent to the JFK assassination.  This gets me to the title of my post.  The song performed by Eydie Gormé came out earlier in 1963. It has the word blame in the title so was useful for my purposes. And it serves as a reminder that temporal precedence is not sufficient for causality.   In any event, surely we've made many mistakes along the way.  Focus on a first cause only as where we should concentrate our blame doesn't get us to ask why we didn't rebound better but instead descended into the abyss.  That sounds like a topic for another post.

There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom

I am reacting to a piece from the Chronicle this morning,  I want to make a general point that free speech doesn't happen in the classroom.  Instead, the instructor regulates student speech.  In a course where otherwise the students are satisfied with how the course is being conducted, this observation is mundane, and the examples I will use to illustrate that will show as much.  So, when an outside group comes in and cries foul about how a particular course is being conducted because a student's free speech rights have been denied, it may make for interesting press but one needs to ask, do they really have a leg to stand on?

Before getting to my examples, let me make clear that the main pedagogic issue is quite the opposite.  Many students don't open up in the classroom.  There is a "shy student" problem that vexes many instructors.  This is true even when the students are quite able.  Some years ago I wrote about the issue in a post called Teaching Quiet Students after having taught a class for the Campus Honors Program.  I was surprised then by how many of these honors kids were reticent to participate in class discussion.  Ultimately, I learned that the best way to address the issue is to give multiple modes for communication.  One reason I now have students do weekly blogging is that they can express themselves in writing and some ultimately are more comfortable doing that then speaking up in the live classroom.

Now to the speech in the classroom issues.  When an instructor lectures, the instructor may take clarifying questions during the lecture, but other questions are deferred till a Q&A session at the end. This delay in allowing students to pose a question is a (temporary) suppression of student speech in the name of letting the instructor provide the foundational content in the lecture.  Nobody considers this a violation of the First Amendment.  It's normal classroom procedure.

Let's move to consider classroom discussion.  The instructor regulates the flow of discussion.  The student who speaks next must raise his or her hand first and then be acknowledged by the instructor.  This is the standard procedure.  Students shouldn't blurt out and shouldn't interrupt another student who is speaking.  These prohibitions aren't specified in the syllabus.  They are so much part of the norm in the classroom that it is reasonable to expect them to be obeyed without delineating them.

Are there times where the instructor won't pick a student with a raised hand?  Yes.  When that student has already commented repeatedly in class, the instructor might very well ask, does somebody other than _____ want to chime in?  This is done in the name of promoting broader class participation.  The student with the raised hand might feel a bit frustrated by this, and if no other student does chime in then it's proper etiquette to ask the original student about what the student had wanted to say.  However, if other students do eventually enter the discussion, the instructor may not feel obligated to return to that first student.  This is okay.  The real issue is whether  there is a good flow in the discussion.  If that has been obtained, the instructor has achieved the main goal.

Are there other times where the instructor will interrupt a student who was speaking?  I can think of two possible reasons for interrupting a student.  The instructor has a responsibility for keeping the discussion on topic, giving students some leeway for sure but not complete freedom on this score. If the instructor is unable to tie what the student said to the previous class discussion, the instructor should cut the student off, perhaps asking the student to reconsider the point in a way that it does tie to the discussion, but to think about it for a while first. The other possible reason might surprise the reader, and I may be distinctive in my teaching approach for doing it this way.  When the student makes a very good point, I sometimes immediately cut the student off by saying, "stop."  I want to emphasize the point just made and have the class reflect on it, for fear that if I had let the student keeping going, the point might get lost in what else is said. Admittedly, it is a bit rude to do this, though the class gets used to it after a while.  And the student who made the good point does get some acknowledgment of such then and there.  So it is not punitive, certainly.  The take away here should be that an individual student does not have the right to hold the floor in the classroom, for even a moderately long time.

I want to say two other bits about the Chronicle piece and then close.  The piece mentioned that the student had missed the prior class session, where some of the issues that introduced.  Students who miss class without having an excused absence have less status in my view than those who attend right along.  I would expect such a student to be somewhat circumspect for having missed class.  That didn't seem to be the case here.  The other point is about how escalation should occur when there is a conflict between student and teacher.  The right next step, in my view, is for there to be a one-on-one conversation between the two of them.  This is usually not pleasant, at least at first, so there is some temptation to skip this step.  But it is the better alternative.  If either party is not satisfied with how that step has played out, then taking the matter to the department head should happen next.  Indeed, what is so strange in the case reported in the Chronicle piece is that there appeared to be no other university governance on the matter, at least until it had fully escalated already.  The prospect of that repeating is truly frightening to me, and why I'm writing here.