by Herb Childress ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2019
An informative screed on a depressing trend that continues apace.
A biting monograph—some of it research-laden, some of it personal—about how universities are undermining both student learning and the lives of temporary teachers.
Childress (The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don't Know (but Should) about Doctoral and Faculty Life, 2016, etc.), the former dean of research and assessment at Boston Architectural College who now runs an “ethnography-based consulting firm,” is well-positioned to advance his forceful arguments about academia. As he shows, on many campuses, a significant minority—or even a majority—of courses are taught by faculty members known as adjuncts, a polite term for underpaid, powerless part-timers who stand little chance of attaining full-time status. At the extreme, some of the adjuncts sleep in their cars and rely on food stamps, a situation that can occur even if they have adjunct positions at multiple campuses. At the base of the author’s anger is hypocrisy: While university administrators and their funders claim to value the transformative power of higher education, they treat countless part-time faculty like expendable employees. Though the book is clearly an outlet for his own anger, Childress also seeks to inform families of college-age children what they will encounter in classrooms. He shows why so many campuses have chosen to reduce tenured faculty members and advises current graduate students hoping to teach on whether it is still a wise career path. In addition, the author addresses financial implications for families, especially in a chapter titled, “If We Don’t Pay Teachers, Why Is My Tuition So High?” Of course, some degree seekers still obtain permanent faculty status, and Childress addresses how those fortunate professors complicate the adjunct mess. As a holder of a doctorate that led, at least for a time, to campus insider status, Childress harbors ideas for change, but he does not seem optimistic that change is in the offing.
An informative screed on a depressing trend that continues apace.Pub Date: April 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-226-49666-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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