Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Education

The Second Degree

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Many years ago I created a profile on LinkedIn, not because I had any vision of what I wanted to do on it, but because that is what people did.  I soon discovered, as I suspected, that LinkedIn does not have much utility for academics.  LinkedIn is a terrible platform for developing robust professional networks in academia and it is just about worthless as a place to cultivate employment opportunities.  Given my efforts to keep up with friends on Facebook and engage a wider network on Twitter, tending to my LinkedIn presence seemed tiresome and a waste of effort.  Over the years, I usually ignored the emails I regularly received informing me of people requesting to “Connect”.  I signed into my account a couple of times a year out of renewed curiosity, took a quick look around, and confirmed that it was not worth my time.

Now, though, I regret that I did this.  I still do not think that LinkedIn is professionally useful to me.  But what I failed to see over the years is that my participation in LinkedIn could have been helpful to others.

What I did not know until recently, as my children began to graduate from college and look for jobs, was that one of the first pieces of advice that career services provide to students is to create a LinkedIn profile and use their networks to reach out to others.  It is, in fact, seen as a necessity; this kind of networking is vital in many fields, even if not in academia.  So – and probably the only people who do not know this belong to small cohort of older academics – recent graduates regularly use LinkedIn to connect with more established professionals who might offer them advice (or even a job or job lead).  They are more likely to find such professionals, and have them respond, if they are already connected, whether through their college or as a “second degree” connection through others.

This, I realize, is where I fit in.  If I have a robust network of my own, I could serve as a “connector,” the link between a recent graduate and a potential mentor or employer.  As an academic, especially one who has been at the same job for two decades, my professional network is of limited use.  However, should my network include many of my former students, that might be useful.  A recent graduate might be much more willing to reach out to a second degree connection, and the two would potentially share a common interest (i.e., the topic of a class I taught) and classroom experience.  This service requires very little of me, other than cultivating my own network.

So that is what I have begun to do.  I am beginning to build my network on LinkedIn, and starting this year will encourage my students to join it.  Should other academics do the same, it might really help our students.

I have no love of or financial interest in LinkedIn – like many such sites (e.g., academia.edu), it is geared toward making money off of my freely supplied data.  All of these sites may well be ephemeral, in time making themselves so seemingly invaluable that we do not leave them when they begin to charge for their services, and/or simply collapsing under the weight of their own corporate greed.  But this is the world that we live in, and we may as well use such tools as best we can to help others.

 

 

So You’re Going to College…

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open+course+catalog

I originally published this in 2015, but am re-upping it as the new college year begins.

 

Over the years, I have offered scores of first-year students advice.  I have encouraged them to clarify their goals; to create long term plans; to think strategically about what they want to get out of the next four years; to explore intellectual interests outside of their comfort zones; to challenge themselves.  I have rarely encouraged students to take (or not take) specific courses or professors, a practice that I have always found questionable.  Most of my advice has inevitably been ignored.  That, though, doesn’t seem to trouble anyone.  First-year students, who by the time they see me, are overwhelmed with advice and the entire newness of college are usually just happy to leave with their PIN and the administration feels like it has done its task in offering advising.  I have tried to avoid cynicism.

This year, although I will not formally advise first-year students, is a little different.  This year I have skin (and an absurd, unsustainable amount of money) in the game.  My son enters Brown next year and it has made me think hard about what I want him to take. Below I sketch out my advice to him.

First, a few words of introduction.  Brown is unusual in that it has no core curriculum or general education requirements.  So in many respects that is what this is, my vision of what every college educated students should take, or at least know by the end college.  It probably mirrors in some way the requirements at many other colleges, although I hope that the brief explanations I provide of my reasoning are useful.  It is also tailored to my son’s own background, with his unique set of strengths and weaknesses, as I briefly indicate below.

1.  Philosophy: 1-2 courses.  Everybody should have some idea about how to formulate the “big questions,” e.g., how to live the “good” or meaningful life.  One class should focus on major thinkers (more a history of philosophy); the other class either on moral philosophy or some specialized, non-analytical topic (e.g., idealism, existentialism).

2.  Political Science: 1 course.  This should be on political theory.  Every citizen should have an understanding of the theory that undergirds our society as well as alternatives.

3.  Literature. 1-2 courses.  While many students will have taken such courses in high school, college literature classes will increase their ability to engage with and profit from great literature.  At least one of these courses should not be a survey; the goal is to learn to read in a particular way.

4.  Art/History of Art. 1 course.  Art and music provide alternative ways of understanding and expression.  They also can serve as a great source of pleasure, whether in their production or consumption.

5.  Music/History of Music. 1 course.  See above.

6.  Economics. 2 courses. For better or worse, we live in an age that thinks economically.  A couple of courses will help students better understand what that means and give them some skills that might help them when it comes to employment.

7.  Math: 2 courses.  We live in an age of big data.  The ability to understand what to do with that data is valuable, not only potentially for career preparation but in many other contexts (e.g., evaluating claims in newspapers).  So statistics is a must.  For a second math course (my son has already taken BC calculus) I would recommend probability, as a way to understand risk.

8.  Computer Science. 2 courses.  As with economics, computers are a fundamental part of our society.  Computer science courses provide a better grasp of them; practical skills; and a logical and rigorous way of thinking that is applicable in other areas.  At least one of these courses should focus on programming.

9.  Laboratory Science. 1 course.  In college I took four semesters of laboratory science.  I didn’t like them and didn’t do well in them.  I’m glad I took them, though.  Everyone should experience a college lab and engage in the scientific method.

10.  Language.  I am less certain here.  My son is orally fluent in a second language and could continue study in order to have better facility in the literature.  Or he could take a new language.  Either way, some continued language training seems important.

11.  Writing intensive courses.  Very few things that one learns in college are is important as good writing.  At least one course every semester should involve extensive writing and the opportunity for revision, providing that the instructor delivers quality feedback.

12.  Class size.  MOOCs and online courses have been extensively discussed as potentially revolutionalizing higher education.  In the past few years we’ve also seen their limits, though.  For students in college, online courses might be a great way to “take” courses that focus on information delivery.  In fact, despite the fact that lecture classes can be quite enjoyable, I would advise students to take only a minimum of these courses in college.  The real “value added” of college is feedback and engagement, and the more time that one can spend in smaller classes the better.  Such a strategy might result, for example, in a student taking the introduction to macro economics online and then being able to take a smaller economics seminar.  This is not always easy to pull off (there is less motivation to do the assignments in a MOOC; one has to squeeze them in somewhere) but it seems silly to spend so much money on information delivery when there are so many cheaper ways to get the same thing.

13.  Research skills.  I am sometimes stunned by how poor the research skills are of some of my students.  I’ve had seniors who don’t know how to use a library (and their online research skills are hardly better).  In this case, as with writing, the discipline matters far less than the skill, and any class that helps one to develop basic research skills (history might be good here) is advisable.

This curriculum, over the course of four years, should leave room for most majors and several other electives.  It won’t, though, work for everyone.  Engineering, and some science, majors are locked into much more constraining curricula.  Pre-meds could probably do something along these lines but with fewer electives left.  Most importantly, though, it is important that the courses be seen not as things to check off a list but as enjoyable components of one’s education.

I don’t know if my son will take this advice, but if it was at all useful to you, let me know.

Grading in the Age of COVID-19

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In the midst of a global pandemic that is causing tens of thousands of deaths, ravaging the most vulnerable of us, and bringing millions to the brink of economic catastrophe, college students throughout the country are worrying about their grades.  How can they protect their GPAs at this unprecedented time?

Student stress is understandable.  Grades, students believe, are really important: good grades lead to good jobs and graduate schools which in turn is their ticket to upward (or at least not declining) social and economic mobility.  Many are socialized from an early age to focus on their grades (becoming, in William Deresiewicz’s memorable phrase, “excellent sheep”).  In my own experience teaching, over the last decade or so it has seemed to me that students are much more concerned with grades – and therefore much more transactional about their learning – than they used to be.

And in some areas, grades do matter.  Graduate schools, particularly professional ones such as law and medicine, use grades as a criterion for admission and some employers weed applicants by GPA.  On the whole, though, grades probably matter less than most students think.  The same schools and companies that consider GPAs know well that they are highly imperfect measures of genuine learning (and ubiquitous grade inflation has also lessened their utility as accurate measures).  Recognizing the limited utility of grades, some companies, such as Apple and Google, have changed their hiring practices so that they rely on their own assessments of a candidate’s skills rather than on student grades.

COVID-19, and student panic over grades (rather than, primarily, their learning), should give us pause.  Like all such crises, this one brings into relief certain structural assumptions that deserve to be reconsidered.  The very practice of grading is by no means the most important of these, but our present moment does help us to articulate and debate a basic question: Why grade?

Grades are thought to serve two purposes: to incentivize learning and to certify that a student has learned.  Yet multiple studies have shown that grades are actually good at neither task.  Grades correlate well with a student’s ability to do the assignments according to certain criteria but far less well with measures of true learning.  Someone who receives good grades is likely to be good at following directions and grinding through difficult, sometimes unpleasant, tasks (the quality of “grit”), but those same grades say little about whether a student has really mastered and is able to apply particular skills to new situations.

Recognizing that grading is at best a crude incentive and measure, and at worst a detriment to genuine learning, leads to a further question: When, and why, did we come to believe that grading was an essential part of higher education?

Grading is a relatively recent addition to higher education.  Final, often oral, examinations were a common part of university education in Europe and the United States well into the nineteenth century.  These examinations were meant to measure expertise and they were usually assessed as a simple pass or fail.  Only in the mid-nineteenth century did colleges, especially in the United States, begin to experiment with assigning grades to students, and then they were meant only for internal use so that faculties could award prizes to students that they judged to be outstanding.  Over time, in large measure due to the larger cultural shifts toward industrialization and quantification, the practice of assigning grades became widespread.  It was not until the twentieth century, though, that colleges became not just institutions of learning but institutions of sorting.  They were moving toward fulfilling an emerging, unstated contract between the companies that needed increasing numbers of mid-level bureaucrats who had grit and certain (often non-creative) skills, student “consumers” who wanted those jobs and the security that they provided, and the colleges happy to accept increasing amounts of money to keep the pipeline moving.

Our economy is not like that of our parents and grandparents.  It is “flatter” and more service oriented.  Increasingly, students need a set of skills that grades do not do a good job measuring.   The question we need to ask ourselves is whether grading still makes sense.

In my own work in the college classroom, I have become increasingly distressed about what grading and, more importantly, student anxiety about grades, does to learning.  Grades often encourage students to stay in their comfort zones, where they can protect their GPAs, and take the paths that they deem safe over the paths that lead to learning and intellectual growth.  Grades often serve as a perverse incentive to not learn.  In such a classroom, my role shifts from educator and mentor to sorter.

We can reimagine college as a place that educates rather than sorts.  Companies and graduate schools can, and should, take more responsibility for their own assessments: Do candidates have the appropriate skills and knowledge?  Let colleges do what they do best, which is educate.  And let students focus not on grades, but on driving their education forward, even during these challenging times.

New Course: Introduction to Digital Humanities

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Almost since the beginning of my career I have been involved in projects that fall under the umbrella of what we call today, the “digital humanities,” especially my project Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.  Only recently, though, I have I begun to think of myself – or really part of myself – as a “digital humanist,” as I’ve explored conferences and tools (and even learned a bit of Python).  So I figured it was time to start thinking both about giving myself a more systematic introduction to the field and incorporating it into my teaching.

The result is a new course that I’ll be teaching (yes, that makes two new courses this semester, which is its own story), a graduate course (although I’ll take advanced undergraduates as well) called “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” the first time a course like this has been offered at Brown University.

The course has three primary goals.  It should:

  1. Introduce you to DH as a field, with its own sense of theory, methodology, and best-practices;
  2. Give you hands-on training in the basic tools of DH;
  3. Facilitate the development of your own project in DH, whether at an early stage (e.g., a concept paper, research paper, or draft of a grant application) or a more developed prototype.

The syllabus is here.  Comments welcome!

Course: How the Bible Became Holy (Again)

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I have taught an introductory level undergraduate course, “How the Bible Became Holy,” several times at Brown and will be doing so again this fall.  The course gives (but does not insist on) a loose narrative to the history of the biblical text, but is really intended to introduce students to biblical literature and history and to think more deeply about the intersection between the two.  Every time I teach the course I tinker a bit, and this time is no exception.  My ideal would be to teach this course using my own book, but that feels too weird to me.

The current version of the syllabus (in pdf format) can be found here.  Suggestions for improvements in future renditions are always welcome.