Comedian Steve Martin once said that teaching is like show business. Keeping this metaphor in mind, I try to approach each of my lectures like a live set. The idea is to keep my students present and engaged so that we can learn together in real time.

But what happens when the entertaining professor gets upstaged by a chatbot that can produce the lecture as well as write student papers and take the final exam? Does the college class become a meaningless joke?

Well, no.

There are people who fear that ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI bots will let students outsource their own learning. But I teach media history. I know that new media technologies do not make people obsolete. Video did not kill the radio star.

So rather than slip some language about ChatGPT in the policy section of my syllabus about plagiarism (which won’t stop students who know about the apps that can rewrite papers to evade detection), my plan this fall is to focus on creating interactive lessons that incorporate chatbots directly into my teaching.

Instead of letting chatbots change the learning process, I’ll show my students that anything that chatbots can do, they can do better.

Many of my students were already trying ChatGPT out last year. Because chatbots can be especially useful for performing routine tasks, one student explained that she had started to use ChatGPT at her job in customer service to generate quick responses to complaints, which she would then rewrite to improve.

While chatbots are able to do that kind of task well, more complicated tasks, such as historical essays, can be a disaster. But these limitations also open the door to teaching exercises that show students how to utilize this technology in their work.

Professors teaching writing skills can have chatbots generate outlines, drafts, and other lists of ideas. Then, the professor can direct students to work in small groups to rewrite the text for greater originality.

Chatbots also offer an opportunity to teach critical thinking and media literacy skills. ChatGPT is prone to making up false information out of the data-driven cloud—a phenomenon its handlers euphemistically call “hallucinations.” This means that students have to learn how to check facts and verify information, using citable sources and databases.

Professors can also teach students to be alert to the systemic racism and sexism that AI bots can perpetuate and amplify because of the source texts they’re drawing from. I once asked ChatGPT to write a list of some of the leading scholars of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. Its response only included white men—as if no person from another background, ethnicity, or gender ever studied the U.S. Constitution.

A solution to this problem? Show students how they can give the chatbot follow-up prompts that generate more complete answers—say, specifically to include persons of color, different genders, and diverse backgrounds. When I did this, ChatGPT readily listed Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ange-Marie Hancock, and other prominent constitutional scholars.

For my classes this fall, I’m also creating “AI Moments,” where my students will get a chance to see who does it better: the robot or the professor.

After I present a new lesson and talk about it with my students, I’ll prompt ChatGPT to give a lecture on the very same subject.

To test out this idea over the summer, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite my short lecture on the history of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, the text it generated was horrible. Just one cliché after another. It was as cold and dull as that slice of ham still relaxing in my refrigerator from the Fourth of July. Now there’s an unexpected image for you—the kind of surprise turn that ChatGPT will never accomplish. The AI-generated draft also made bad word choices—replacing the word “media” with “platform” (not all media are platforms).  It also changed my question, “Did the emergence of broadcast TV mean the end of going to the movies?” and instead asked “whether the emergence of broadcast TV resembled the demise of cinema attendance caused by the rise of radio.” This word choice altered the meaning of the point, which is that new media does not replace the old.

When I recreate this exercise in my classroom, I plan to have my students search ChatGPT’s lecture for bad writing that they will rewrite, turning each cliché into original imagery and poor word choices into something more precise. I’ll also ask them to find and eliminate bias and fact-check for inaccuracies.

What I learned from my practice matches with ChatGPT is that I know more about teaching journalism, writing, and media history—even though the chatbot can draw from vast amounts of information on the internet. And more importantly, it cannot share ideas accurately or in a creative and engaging way.

This is the kind of realization I want my students to have this fall when we engage with the AI-generated text, openly and transparently. My hope is that they will learn to learn to use AI effectively since these tools will become ever more common and maybe even indispensable in workplaces and in education. But also that through this they realize that when it comes to the contest of students versus robots, they will always come out on top.

The post Anything ChatGPT Can Do, My Students Can Do Better appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At my age, some physiological organ system was bound to go awry. I could have had a heart attack. I didn’t. Now I’m almost grateful for heart disease because it inoculates me from teaching in a classroom this fall. Letters from my physicians to Northern Michigan University, where I teach journalism, allowed me to obtain a medical deferral, to opt out of face-to-face instruction and deliver my lessons virtually.

I’m close to retirement, and this pandemic is far from over. I suspect I will never return to a classroom. This year, I certainly won’t be dropping into the newsroom of the school newspaper on production night, gathering students in a circle to workshop essays. And I won’t be standing in my cap and gown extending handshakes to seniors coming down the commencement aisle.

I came into the academy for the final third of my career after having been a magazine editor at a publishing company in Pennsylvania. Teaching has been a splendid profession—tenure track, a ninth-month schedule, funding for travel and professional development, time to research and write, young people to mentor, and summers to spend with my three sons.

I arrived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a remote, sparsely populated and largely forgotten part of America, in 2001. Residents here scrutinize maps of the United States on television, in newspapers, and on products to find if the U.P. is missing or perhaps drawn in as part of Wisconsin or Canada. Often it is. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, my then 8-year-old son came home from his new grade school and asked if terrorists would come to the U.P. I shook my head, “Not a chance. Don’t worry.”

Not so with disease. In March, the virus, carried by a worker, infected a nursing home a few blocks from my house and killed several residents. A well-known township official who got infected did a phone interview on the local TV, advised listeners to obey the quarantine, and then died two days later.

The regional medical center is here in Marquette—about a half mile from me—where the most severe cases come for intensive care. In this small college town, most people mask up. But when I venture into the hinterlands and the national forests and stop into little grocery stores for supplies and fishing bait, my mask and I get stares. What are you afraid of? Gradually attitudes are changing, but it’s taken far too long.

This summer, the virus put the kibosh on all the beer, music, food, blues, lumberjack, art, fishing and folk music festivals, as well as the Upper Peninsula State Fair. Yet tourists from “down below”—what we call the rest of Michigan and the Midwest—flood across the Mackinac Bridge, hauling campers and boats, disgorging kids and dogs, renting cottages, and jamming the campgrounds. Going up north is what Michiganders do in summer, and after the lockdowns and the COVID carnage downstate, the U.P., with fewer than 1,000 lab-tested cases and just 18 deaths as of late August, probably seems safe and disease free.

Thousands of miles of shoreline rim this peninsula—lots of beach for physical distancing—but several times this summer young people collected on public bathing areas and grooved like there was no tomorrow and no coronavirus. It was akin to the super-spreader scenes we’ve all gawked at on television, and a portent of the conduct occurring as undergrads return to the university, swelling the population of Marquette by one-third. Students fuel the economy and provide labor in restaurants, coffee shops and bars, but do we really want them back? And do their parents want to pack them into those petri-dish dorms?

I’m a parent, too. My youngest son, about to turn 21, has asthma, and is moving into a house with three other students at Michigan Tech. Another son, living at home, works a summer parks-and-rec job for the city and encounters maskless knuckleheads drinking and picnicking in park pavilions. My oldest son, in Colorado, operates video production for the Professional Bull Riders. Flying on airplanes and working in partially filled arenas in Vegas, Sioux Falls, and Tulsa, he plays lab rat for the “let’s bring back sports” experiment. Cowboy up, they tell him.

I am not sanguine about any of it.

In all of the back-to-school rhetoric, it has been gratifying to hear students pine for the classroom and personal interaction with professors. When I first came to campus 20 years ago, students routinely knocked at my office unsolicited to chat about writing and get extra help. As technology advanced, later generations preferred to text, e-mail, or call rather than talk in person. That way, they didn’t have to lift their faces from their phones.

Personal conferences now typically require coercion or messages like “you better come see me because you are flunking this class.” As professors, we are just as complicit. We have “retention software” that sends “Red Flag” warnings with canned responses to alert students of poor academic performance. Oddly enough, it seems to work.

For years, universities peddled online education with superlatives about the efficacy of instruction, improving outcomes, and providing content to far-flung students. Universities drove down operation costs by running virtual classes, and yet still tacked on new, online fees.

Once upon a summer session, Northern Michigan University held in-person classes. It was a lovely time to teach. No icy sidewalks and mountains of plowed snow. Lake breezes wafted through open windows. We wore our summer clothes and led our classes outside, where students sat cross legged beneath shade trees, and chattered about books. We studied nature writing and trekked into the national forests on field trips. The school’s motto was “Northern Naturally.” Over the last ten years, the majority of summer classes have moved online. Campus is nearly undergrad free. Teach English in summer and you’re tethered to a computer checking e-mails and monitoring discussion forums.

Virtual instruction has its place, especially in a pandemic, and some students clearly flourish in such an environment. I volunteered early on to learn the tools and the lingo of remote learning—synchronous and asynchronous, the Moodle platform, audio conferencing—and then after a few classes decided it wasn’t my cup of pedagogy. The experience served me well, however, when the shutdowns came in March. I delivered what I felt was an effective remote learning course while some professors struggled to post to the gradebook and learn Zoom.

My home office now resembles a recording studio, with cameras and microphones to produce instructional videos and narrate PowerPoint presentations for my classes. My colleagues in the English department were supposed to begin face-to-face teaching last week, but now have to wait; a laboratory in Chicago could not process all the COVID test results from thousands of incoming students and faculty in time. My own test took six days to come back—useless for contact tracing. As I write this, already some 40 students have tested positive and are holed up in quarantine. I read daily missives from the university about its reopening plans. No doubt, administrators are sincere with their task forces, safety protocols, quarantine dorms, Plexiglas panels, and school-branded masks. They canceled all fall sports. Yet there are no guarantees.

The county health departments are underfunded and understaffed for testing and contact tracing. The governor of Michigan issues public health orders only to be sued by the legislature. Wacky militias with heavy weaponry threaten to again invade the capitol building in Lansing. The federal Center for Disease Control weakens recommendations for school openings. Arrogance, incompetency, and sheer lunacy reign at the national level. There’s no plan. We are on our own.

I won’t go back to the classroom—not until there’s a vaccine, an antiviral treatment, a coordinated national policy, and some end to the selfish behavior I see in the streets. Until then, I just don’t have the heart for it.

The post A Letter From Northern Michigan, Where Remote Is Not Remote Enough to Escape COVID appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many faculty members objected to the holiday, but few were as visible and vocal as professor Burt Green Wilder, who would go on to become a defining, if little-known, figure in American higher education.

Spring Day built upon a relatively new tradition: During the 1890s students began holding a dance and fundraiser, the Navy Ball, prior to major fall regattas. Not surprisingly, on the day of the regatta, class attendance was low. But attendance became even more abysmal in 1901, when the students moved the Navy Ball to March and reorganized it as a “circus parade” and noontime concert to benefit the Cornell Athletic Association. Faced with almost no students in classes, the administration capitulated and declared Spring Day a holiday. But Wilder, a pioneering physician, anatomist, and natural historian, hated it—for reasons that turned out to be prescient.

Hired in 1867 as one of Cornell’s original professors, Wilder was a man of 19th-century values but 20th-century sensibilities. Whenever the Spring Day festivities took place in front of McGraw Hall, where his office was, he made clear his feelings about the concession, by writing his disapproval in five languages on a large blackboard, according to the Ithaca Journal-News. He began in French, “O athletique, que de folies on commet et ton nom,” and continued in English and Latin—“In an individual folly may be merely a fault; in a university it is a crime. From fake show to fake scholarship facilis descensus (it is easy to descend).”

Yet students who dismissed him as a curmudgeon or an anachronism were wrong, or at least not entirely right. Wilder could be grumpy, surely. But what is the point of aging if you can’t be grumpy? And Wilder’s case of grumpiness is instructive. In the ways he insisted upon applying traditional values to the culture of higher education, he proved to be a man well ahead of his time.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of exceptional transformation in the United States. An older culture that had emphasized the importance of character and stressed moral qualities was eroding. By the turn of the century, a new one emphasized materialism, scientific and technical improvement, leisure time and recreation. The concept of character was replaced by a focus on personalities, one that stressed the need for respect, admiration, and above all, success.

Wilder felt the tension of being caught in between. As a scholar of anatomy, he was an agent of change and progress. And he was optimistic by nature. But he was also grounded in the principles of his youth, principles that were fixed in the crucible of the Civil War. The words that Wilder associated with his youth were words such as duty, discipline, work, honor, reputation, morals, and integrity.

Wilder was born in Boston in 1841 to parents who were “members of the New Church,” also known as Swedenborgians; as such they were homeopaths, haters of oppression, and strict vegetarians. Late in life he summarized his parents’ influence. From his father he inherited “a hopeful spirit and tendency to seek new facts and to devise original methods.” From his mother, he gained a disposition “at once active and cautious, an unwillingness to sacrifice principle to expediency, and a tenderness towards animals which has prevented his hunting for sport and restricted his physiologic experiments to such as are painless.” From both parents he drew a life-long commitment to personal and societal improvement.

When Wilder graduated from Harvard with a comparative anatomy degree in 1862, he knew he should join the Army of the Potomac but he believed he lacked both the training and aptitude necessary. Fortunately, he was offered a position as an acting medical cadet in a Washington hospital.

The war, which was transforming American medicine and medical research, created the opportunity for a bright comparative anatomist with little medical background but with a compulsive work ethic, an ability to perform autopsies, and access to medical texts to grow professionally. Wilder soon found himself at the forefront of anatomy and medicine.

He also had his consciousness expanded. By May 1863, he had accepted a commission as an assistant surgeon in the newly formed black 55th Massachusetts Volunteers. During the 28 months that he served in the regiment, he developed a profound respect for the courage and commitment of the black soldiers.

His army experience also let him develop professionally. In what little time he had when he was not attending the sick and wounded or studying medical books, he collected species for his natural history collection, including a large silk-spinning spider he discovered on Folly Island in 1863, that was later given his name (Nephila wilder).

In the two years after the war, Wilder obtained a medical degree from Harvard while also working at its Museum of Comparative Zoology and publishing a half-dozen scientific papers. That, and a glowing reference from Louis Agassiz, a prominent naturalist, led to his appointment as Professor of Natural History at Cornell University, one of the new land-grant colleges. He would teach there until 1910.

At Cornell, he developed a reputation as an innovative teacher and a captivating lecturer. He pioneered pre-med education, introduced dissection and laboratory methodology into undergraduate courses, built up a natural history museum at Cornell, and established the Cornell Brain Collection. As president of the American Neurological Association in 1885 and the Association of American Anatomists in 1897, he used his research on the human brain to challenge the scientific racism and gender biases of the time.

In 1893 his former students recognized his contributions to Cornell and their debt to him by producing one of America’s first Festschrifts—a German term for a collection of writing published in honor of a scholar.

While Wilder was a progressive where science and society were concerned, his perception of student conduct remained rooted in an earlier era. By the turn of the century, that brought him into greater conflict with some he called “stoodlums.” Cornell students in 1900 were different from the first students whom Wilder had taught. Students now expected an element of fun and diversion while at college. Football had become an all-encompassing passion.

Wilder disagreed. He had always argued that university students were a special and privileged group. Given the sacrifices that others made on their behalf and the benefits which they would receive, Wilder believed college students should be more strictly held to account than their peers. “Leniency towards transgression, particularly when intoxication is pleaded in extenuation, is seldom really kind to them,” he wrote to the university president in 1909. It was also unfair to well-behaved students.

A portrait of Burt Green Wilder in 1889. Courtesy of Kevin S. Weiner.

Wilder had a long list of student activities he opposed. He was foresighted in his targets, pointing at activities that still create problems for universities today. He objected to secret societies, intercollegiate athletic competition of any kind (on-campus sports were fine), betting and gambling, hazing, campus smoking, alumni buffoonery, Spring Day, leaves of absence for other than personal or scholastic reasons, and “stamping in class-rooms.”

He gained national notoriety in the 1880s and 1890s for his opposition to the growing popularity of football. Not only did that sport take students away from their academic work, he argued, but it caused more serious injuries than other activities and also coarsened its audience.

Wilder was always willing to challenge authority in ways that might resonate today. In June 1905, Wilder responded to an article by U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge in the New York Daily Tribune titled “The Young Man and College Life.” Among other things, Beveridge had written, “I never took much stock in the outcry against hazing.” How could the senator defend the practice, Wilder railed, when his government, after a long investigation, had just dismissed cadets and midshipmen from West Point and Annapolis in 1901 for their hazing abuses? Hazing, Wilder continued, corrupted law, morals and ethics by giving one group of students’ arbitrary power and authority over others. Hazing always implied a preponderance of power or advantage on the part of the aggressors. As a result it was not only brutal and unjustifiable, Wilder believed, “but mean, despicable and cowardly.”

Wilder, who had long supported women’s rights, took even greater exception to another of the senator’s paragraphs headed, “The More Fun the Better.” Beveridge claimed that nobody cares how mad the student pranks were. Wilder challenged Beveridge’s argument that, “We cannot change our sex or the habits of it. A young man is a male animal after all, and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with nature.” Although Wilder accepted that, “we cannot change our sex” as a truism, he was convinced “there are many, in college as well as without, whose unsexing would render this a cleaner and safer world.” While agreeing that the “habits of our sex” might not be changed in a day or a decade, Wilder was adamant that change was possible—and had to be possible if man was to be more than an animal.

Sometimes, perhaps, an anachronism is really not an anachronism.

The post The Pioneering Cornell Anatomist Who Sought to Bring ‘Honor’ and ‘Duty’ to College Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Mormons, under immense pressure from local and federal authorities, jettisoned their utopian separatism in favor of monogamy, market capitalism, public schools, national political parties, and military service. The question is, how can any human institution—much less a religion that historian Martin Marty has called the 19th century’s “most despised large group”—change so much so quickly?

The answer lies in understanding how Mormons determined that a pact with America was not a deal with the devil.

It also lies in American universities. In the same period that animosity between Mormons and non-Mormons reached fever pitch (the two decades between the death of Brigham Young in 1877 and Utah’s admission into the Union as the 45th state in 1896), a rising, influential generation of Mormons began attending the nation’s universities. On those campuses, Mormons enjoyed a rare, revivifying freedom from both outside aggression and ecclesiastical oversight. For them, the realm of American higher education was one of genuine dignity, hospitality, and meritocracy; it was a liminal, quasi-sacred space where they would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity.

As a result, a generation of Mormon leaders developed an enduring devotion to non-Mormons’ institutions, deference to non-Mormons’ expertise, and respect for non-Mormons’ wisdom. These extra-ecclesial loyalties would dismantle the ideological framework of Mormon separatism and pave the way for Mormons’ voluntary re-immersion into the mainstream of American life.

It was Brigham Young himself who in the 1860s and ’70s authorized the first wave of Mormon academic migration to American institutions of higher education—like the University of Michigan, the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia, and West Point. His hope was that a few exemplary Latter-day Saints could secure professional training in law, medicine, and engineering that would help reinforce Mormon independence.

Students, however, began harboring their own diverse ambitions, and their experiences left them ambivalent at best about Mormon independence. As law students at the University of Michigan, for example, Mormons James Henry Moyle and Henry Rolapp wrote home about how they relished the opportunity to wrangle with non-Mormon classmates over Utah’s bid for statehood and the church’s legal status. They earned the clear, abiding respect of their peers not by proselytizing but by engaging them in rational discussion and debate about law and politics, leaving matters of faith off the table.

It was a rehearsal for, and a path to, American citizenship. In correspondence published in 1883 for Mormons in rural, southern Idaho, Rolapp wrote, “We have had quite [a] severe time in our class regarding our religion, but after we determinedly let them understand, that while we were not on a preaching mission, we were nevertheless proud of our religion, and could not be converted by ridicule—they let us alone.” Non-Mormons did more than leave them alone. They would support Moyle in his bid for the junior class presidency and elect Rolapp to the law department’s Supreme Court. For downcast Saints at home, Rolapp exulted, “we have held our own in spite of coming from Utah.”

Other Saints had similarly exhilarating academic experiences, which official church periodicals celebrated and disseminated for audiences delighted to know that the church’s best and brightest could succeed in the proving grounds of American academia. Each student’s dispatch introduced a distant, prestigious school—Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Michigan, the U.S. Naval Academy, even the art schools of Paris—to Mormon youth. The feature articles contained large photographs and ample descriptions of each school’s distinctive strengths, religious milieu, entrance requirements, daily routine, social life, and insider language like “quiz” and “flunk.” The students thus assumed authority as culturally bilingual diplomats who allowed the faithful at home to experience, vicariously, the thrill of being welcome in America.

Richard Lyman, writing from Ann Arbor, bore some of the most ebullient testimony. He described the University of Michigan’s campus and surrounding town as “a perfect little garden of Eden.” He had arrived with fear and trembling, because Mormons tended to “go out into the world feeling that in some degree, at least, we shall be curiosities to people.” Anxiety nearly overcame him when he introduced himself to the university’s president, James B. Angell. Carefully examining Lyman’s credentials, Angell assured him, “I am very glad to see you. We have had a great many students from your state, and among them we have found only good workers.” Lyman’s relief was inexpressible.

Also from Ann Arbor, the Mormon medical student Julia MacDonald Place wrote that the University of Michigan possessed a redemptive power that lifted her to heights of romantic eloquence. “Here is one place in the world,” she enthused in her correspondence to young Mormon women, “where money and position are of little avail, unless coupled with ability, and conscientious application to study … So may it ever be, thou queen of western universities. Be ever as now, the friend and helper of the poor and struggling student, who but for such aid must needs sink beneath his load of poverty, and the frowns of those more fortunate than himself.”

John A. Widtsoe, who graduated from Harvard in 1894, became of one the first Mormons to earn a PhD. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Likewise, the first generation of Mormon students at Harvard luxuriated in the company of the university’s renowned faculty and student body. Reflecting years later on his arrival in Cambridge in 1891, John A. Widtsoe—who became one of the first Mormons to earn a Ph.D., president of the University of Utah, and a high-ranking church authority—enthused, “History, tradition, science, books—the dream had come true! My prayers had been heard. Who cared for the past, in full view of a glorious future!”

Harvard’s famed president, Charles Eliot, had intentionally created this sort of environment for his students. He exalted their freedom by promoting unfettered inquiry, making chapel attendance voluntary, and implementing an elective system that allowed students tremendous power to determine their courses of study. Widtsoe and his Mormon companions revered him. Widtsoe recalled, “In my generation he was easily the foremost citizen of America. Such men as he have the power to shape the world, and always for good.”

Ordinary Americans had no idea that a small cadre of Mormons was enjoying such lavish hospitality at Harvard. They found out in 1892, when the personal connections that Mormons had established with Charles Eliot led him to visit Salt Lake City. Before a crowd of 7,000 Mormons and non-Mormons in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Eliot delivered a speech on one of his favorite topics, religious liberty. He expressed admiration for the Mormons, who, he said, resembled the early Puritans in their willingness to endure hardship and travel great distances in pursuit of a religious ideal.

But reports of the speech drew a backlash. Non-Mormons in Salt Lake City and throughout the nation found Eliot’s comparison intolerable, even traitorous. Eliot only added to the storm of controversy when he acknowledged that there was indeed a “colony” of Mormon students at Harvard.

The aftermath of Eliot’s speech illustrated how badly Mormons wanted to be seen as fully American, and how far most of the country still was from seeing them that way. Mormons rejoiced when President Eliot continued to defend them in the face of public criticism. “They live together,” Eliot conceded, “but they are not colonists in the sense of propagating Mormon doctrines or endeavoring to secure proselytes. They are good students, but do not differ greatly from other young men in their habits and customs.” Mormons savored the soul-stirring respect.

Other leading educators beat a path to Utah in the 1890s. The ambitious and idealistic head of the nascent Brigham Young Academy (later BYU), Benjamin Cluff, who had spent years at the University of Michigan, inaugurated a series of summer schools that brought the church, and Utah, into close communion with academic royalty. Guest lecturers included Col. Francis Parker of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago (1892), James Baldwin of the University of Texas (1893), and Burke Hinsdale of the University of Michigan (1894). Hundreds of Mormon and non-Mormon teachers attended the summer schools to hear lectures on the latest methods in education and psychology. John C. Swenson, a member of the Brigham Young Academy faculty who had never set foot outside Utah, recalled that the event fueled his desire to pursue university training in pedagogy and psychology at the glittering new Stanford University, starting in 1894.

As a result, by the dawn of Utah’s statehood, university-trained Mormon students possessed a new status and authority perhaps best exemplified in the career of Martha Hughes Cannon, MD. In 1896, Cannon became the first American woman to serve in a state senate—defeating her polygamist husband, Angus, in the election. She held three degrees from outside Utah, all earned in the early 1880s: a bachelor’s in medicine from Penn, a second bachelor’s from Philadelphia’s National School of Elocution and Oratory, and her MD from the University of Michigan. In the mid-1880s, during the federal raid on Utah polygamists, she had gone into exile in Europe, pregnant, to help Angus avoid arrest. There, she had visited training schools for nurses, and she had opened her own training school in Salt Lake City in 1889, before entering politics.

Such resilience and success made the 1890s heady times for the young scholars of the church. From Stanford, John C. Swenson wrote to Benjamin Cluff that with statehood secured, there was no telling “what we cannot do.”

Celebration of the students’ success would forestall a resurgent Mormon anti-intellectualism until the early 20th century, when conservative members of the church’s hierarchy, even some highly educated ones, began to fear that Mormon scholars’ respect for “the theories of men” had gone too far. They recast students’ enthusiasm as arrogance, their diplomacy as treason. As education turned into the main battleground in the 20th-century war to define Mormon identity, patriarchal scrutiny would often make Mormon scholars rebel or cower.

In the tumultuous late 19th century, however, Mormons needed their intellectuals—and American universities—to show them that becoming American would be neither humiliating nor irrational.

The post How Attending Elite Universities Helped Mormons Enter the Mainstream  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Being undocumented in California wasn’t easy. My parents first left Los Angeles a few years ago because they were being threatened by a gang member because they wouldn’t pay protection money for the right to sell food on the street. Their undocumented status made it hard for them to complain to the police.

But living in Indiana—now as a college student—has given me new respect for how Los Angeles deals with its undocumented citizens.

I started my college studies in Los Angeles, and received tremendous support in learning to navigate the educational system and create study habits. I paid in-state tuition for my courses at East Los Angeles College, as a result of 2001 state legislation. Students like me also benefit from the California Dream Act of 2011, which has helped undocumented students get access to more scholarships and state financial aid. A more recent California State Assembly bill, AB 1366—if passed—would encourage universities to provide more resources to help undocumented students complete their degrees.

In essence, the state of California treated me like other Californians: It was investing in me. Which made sense. More than one-third of California’s workforce is immigrants, and undocumented people are needed for their work and productivity, and as future taxpayers. And making sure undocumented people had college degrees was good economics; RAND’s Immigration Policy Center has estimated that the average 30-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in the United States with a bachelor’s degree will pay $5,300 more in taxes annually compared to the same individual who holds a high school diploma or less.

None of this made getting an education easy in Los Angeles, a very expensive place. I was living on my own with a well-paid job as a salesperson at a Chevrolet dealership, but to make a good living I had to work more than 40 hours and sell eight cars a month. I soon noticed my grades falling. So I took fewer classes, in order to sell more cars. Eventually, I decided to move to Indiana with my parents in order to finish my education.

The differences here in Hoosier State are startling. Indiana has a history of seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants such as myself from higher education. In 2011, Indiana passed House Bill 1402, which prohibits in-state tuition for students who are unlawfully present in the United States. To be undocumented in Indiana means to be a worker—not a student. But many students in Indiana have defied the state’s limits by going to college.

I learned from Radi, an undocumented student from Ivy Tech Community College in Elkhart, where she is president of the Latino Student Alliance (LSA) club, that at first she had decided not to go to college because of House Bill 1402. She has been living in the United States with her family since 1997, and has been an Indiana resident since she was a girl. But she couldn’t afford higher education as an 18-year-old, so she took a couple years off to save up for community college.

Then the good news: The establishment of the DACA program opened the door for her and other students, making it easier for them to stay in the country and work so they can go to school. But they still do not receive in-state tuition from the state where they grew up. This puts incredible stress on undocumented students who are pursuing a higher education to find good-paying jobs, to apply for many scholarships, and to keep up their grades so they can hold onto the scholarships they win.

And if they do graduate, undocumented bachelor’s graduates may not be able to pursue work in their chosen profession in Indiana particularly if they involve any sort of state licensing. I know a registered nurse here in Indiana not able to start her career as a nurse in the state because of her undocumented status. She meets all the state’s requirements for testing. She has the state approval in Illinois and passed her licensing in Michigan. But two years after graduating with a nursing degree in Indiana, the state denies her the right to take the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX).

This reality is pretty jarring for an undocumented Californian.

DACA was established by President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order—it protects undocumented immigrants by giving them a work permit if they pay $495, pass a background check, and provide their biometric data. But President Trump has the power to end the DACA program. If he does so, as he promised during his campaign, young people who pay taxes, attend college, and own homes could be deported to countries they don’t really know. And America will be poorer; the Center for American Progress estimated that ending the program would reduce the U.S. Gross domestic product by $433 billion over the next decade.

The state legislature in Indiana is following Trump’s lead by putting more pressure on undocumented students. In 2017, two state bills were introduced in Indiana’s House and Senate that would prohibit state universities and colleges from adopting sanctuary policies to protect immigrant students. Another bill would prohibit educational institutions and agencies from acting to restrict federal immigration law in anyway. Failure to comply would make institutions ineligible to receive state funds.

As a student in Indiana, it’s hard to understand this failure to invest in undocumented students who want to get college degrees, and eventually master’s degrees.

I’m one such student, and I think I’ve had an impact. At Ivy Tech Valparaiso, I served as the Student Government Association (SGA) vice president. My responsibilities were to make our school campus inclusive for all students, engage students in campus life, and create a culture of civic engagement and cultural acceptance. To meet those goals, my cabinet and I created voter registration drives, took a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, connected students with the Campus President and Chancellor, and provided support to the Straight and Gay Alliance club. I filled this student government role while working 40 hours a week to pay for school, which was about $2,000 per semester, and keeping my GPA above 3.5.

In my last semester at Ivy Tech I was accepted to Valparaiso University, a private Lutheran school listed in the Forbes Top College list, with a $27,000 scholarship per year. This fall I will start my junior year, studying political science.

At my graduation in May from Ivy Tech Community College Valparaiso, Ivy Tech’s President Sue Ellspermann, who was Indiana’s lieutenant governor under Governor and now U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, said that the new economy will require workers with degrees. She added that today’s graduates still represent a minority of Hoosiers who have earned a degree, and that the states need more degree holders. As I walked the stage, I shook hands with Ellspermann, and made a point of telling her that to fulfill her mission of increasing the number of graduates and preparing Hoosiers for the future economy, the state needs to invest in undocumented students too.

Earning my Associate’s Degree is one of my proudest achievements.

The tale of my two states speaks volumes about values. California seeks to include everyone, and Indiana does not. In my short time here, I have heard a lot of conversations about Hoosier values, which are hard work, personal responsibility, and faith. So why doesn’t Indiana value undocumented Hoosiers who work hard, take responsibility for themselves, and pursue their dream with the faith that they will be respected and treated equally, someday, in the state where they have made their home?

Indiana doesn’t have to look overseas to know how to do this. They could go to California to see what sorts of policies are needed. Or they could ask me, and I would be sure to find some time between my full-time class and work schedules to explain how it’s done.

The post Why an Undocumented College Student Left California for Indiana appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Put simply: How do we know how much we learn in college?

If you search for answers to these questions today, prepare to be disappointed. Popular college rankings such as U.S. News & World Report’s are based on factors such as subjective judgments of schools’ reputations and on the difficulty of gaining admission. Rarely if ever are rankings based on direct, value-added assessments comparing how well students perform when they graduate college with how they performed when they first enrolled.

It may seem odd that our colleges and universities—which study complex topics ranging from the spin on subatomic particles to the precise time of the Big Bang—would have so little data with which to assess their own effectiveness. What might cause these institutions to be so complacent, and so reluctant to pursue information that would help them understand their own impact on students?

Some colleges may fear that the results will prove to be embarrassing. Some may argue that college skills such as writing proficiency cannot be measured accurately (even though schools assign their students grade point averages with three digits of numerical precision).

But the biggest reason why college effectiveness doesn’t get measured is that schools, policy makers, parents, and students take for granted that undergraduates’ skills improve during college. This assumption of improvement may seem intuitive, but it is not backed up by much in the way of evidence. There’s been some study at the K-12 level, which is instructive. One such report, by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and based on research conducted by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education, found that more than 90 percent of the interventions that schools adopted to improve learning outcomes for their students showed no evidence of effectiveness. In another set of studies described in the book Academically Adrift, more than 45 percent of college students showed no improvement in critical thinking during their time in college.

These sorts of studies should serve as a wakeup call—if schools aren’t measuring student learning, we cannot know whether students are actually learning.

Along with our colleagues, we recently published the results of a nine-year study designed to answer whether students finishing college write any better than they did when they first enrolled. Of course there is more to college than writing, but we studied writing because it is one skill that students, schools, and employers see as critically important. We selected a small private university in the Southwest as our test case, and we randomly sampled students for testing. We modelled our study as closely as possible on randomized clinical trials, the same standards used to determine whether new medicines have their intended health benefits. We tested students both cross-sectionally (comparing first-year through fourth-year students on a single day) and longitudinally (tracking specific students over the course of their undergraduate years).

There was good news. We found that students improved their writing scores, as judged by expert assessors of writing who were blind to the identities of the students and to the purpose of the study. That improvement was approximately 7 percent from the first to the fourth year of college, a statistically significant increase. The same degree of improvement was found in both persuasive and expository writing, for both the cross-sectional and longitudinal data, for both male and female students, and for both humanities/social science majors and engineering/natural science majors.

Our findings, while showing that learning is happening, also suggest an opportunity for improvement: Now that we have a benchmark, we can test new instructional interventions to see how much they improve upon (or prove worse than) the status quo. While 7 percent improvement is not trivial, we would hope that it would be possible to do better. However, in order to know if new programs and interventions are actually leading to improvements, schools need to engage in value-added assessment of their students. Without such testing, we will be navigating blind.

For college administrators who believe that studies such as ours are too expensive and time-consuming to conduct, we encourage them to think again. Universities spend countless hours and resources developing curricular requirements, establishing tutoring centers, and otherwise attempting to improve undergraduate instruction. But they typically fail to establish a formal assessment system to determine whether those interventions are effective.

Studies like ours are simple and inexpensive compared with other common initiatives on campus. And such studies are the only way we can know whether schools are accomplishing their goals.

We hope that universities will begin testing their entering students, not just on their writing skills but on other critical skills as well, so that four years down the road they can see whether their teaching has made a difference. When you bother to collect the data, before-and-after-college comparisons are not that hard to make, and they can make a big difference.

The post How Much Do We Learn in College? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, keep your eye on rankings that rely upon a different set of numbers: Namely, graduation and retention rates. That’s because the current trends in enrolling and graduating low-income and minority students threaten social justice in higher education.

American Council on Education statistics show that college enrollment among low-income students has fallen to 46 percent, 20 percent below the national average. While African-American and Latino/a enrollment is rising somewhat, there are troubling gaps in outcomes for these students.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, among students enrolled in four-year institutions only 41 percent of African-American students and 53 percent of Latino/a students ultimately attain bachelor’s degrees. That’s compared to at least 70 percent of Asian counterparts, and 63 percent of Caucasians.

To see these contrasts in detail, just take a look at the chart accompanying this text. It’s based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Education Trust, and University of California Riverside, where I’m chancellor.

While some institutions focus on efforts to ensure low-income and minority students en masse get their degrees and move into rewarding careers, they’re probably not listed among the private colleges and universities that dominate the top 10 lists in the U.S. News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, or Forbes rankings. The nation’s public higher education institutions, less frequently cited at the top of these rankings, enroll more than 70 percent of all four-year college students—including a preponderance of low-income and minority students.

So applicants and their parents should look to other higher education resources to gauge more relevant measures. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard allows you to compare tuition and living costs, graduation rates, and income after graduation.

Furthermore, there are important questions students should ask about any school they’re considering:

What is the diversity picture? Will you be 1 in 100 on your campus, or 1 in 5? Statistics show having a critical mass of diversity in the student population makes a difference. If you have a group of people like you on campus, you are more likely to succeed.

Does the institution offer first-year programs such as learning communities, which help create small cohorts of freshmen studying particular courses? Experience has shown that these programs help students keep up with studies and get off to a good start toward graduation. At larger institutions, learning communities can help keep the collegiate experience from being overwhelming for freshmen. Thanks to learning communities, we’ve been able to recently increase our freshmen retention rates at UC Riverside by more than six percent, with particular success among women, Hispanic, Asian-American, first-generation, and low-income students.

Low-income and minority students should always ask about these types of programs and support systems. When it comes to enrolling, retaining, and graduating students, these are the efforts that make the difference.

Investment in a college degree transforms society, and improves an individual’s chances of getting ahead. University of California research shows that, within five years of graduation, UC students who qualified for federal Pell Grant aid have an annual income of approximately $50,000—more than double the combined salaries of their parents.

So start your college search not with a default to high-profile rankings systems, but with an earnest look at the measures that will guarantee your success in college and beyond.

The post Why College Rankings Are Anti-Diversity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.