Why American College Students Hate Science

See here.

The Confusion on Campus

Here is a column about higher education.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "Colleges Chase as Cheats Shift to Higher Tech" (front page, May 18):

In spite of an increase in the number of colleges putting honor codes in place, I don't believe that the current climate of academic dishonesty will change in the foreseeable future. Given this situation, imagine if all academic institutions agreed to a system like this:

¶Clear-cut instances of cheating and plagiarism result in an automatic expulsion from the institution.

¶Starting at the high school level, all confirmed instances of academic dishonesty, even seemingly minor ones, become a permanent part of the offenders' academic record.

¶All cheats are registered in a national database that summarizes each offender's academic transgression for all institutional officials and potential employers to check.

I am sure that many students would think twice about cheating if their behavior would result in concrete, severe, lifelong negative consequences.

Miguel Roig
Rumson, N.J., May 18, 2006
The writer is an associate professor of psychology, St. John's University.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill was born 200 years ago today, in London. If you haven't read Mill's autobiography, you should. It's a record of a most unusual education and a busy life. I have always enjoyed Mill's description of the importance of logic to his intellectual development:

From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced stage in my course of instruction; in which the main object was no longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves. This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the Organon, and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the Organon, my father made me read the whole or parts of several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute account of what I had read, and answering his numerous and searching questions. After this, I went in a similar manner, through the "Computatio sive Logica" of Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of thought than the books of the school logicians, and which he estimated very highly; in my own opinion beyond its merits, great as these are. It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from me, to make me as far as possible understand and feel the utility of them: and this he deemed peculiarly fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, the usefulness of which had been impugned by so many writers of authority. I well remember how, and in what particular walk, in the neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath (where we were on a visit to his old friend Mr Wallace, then one of the Mathematical Professors at Sandhurst) he first attempted by questions to make me think on the subject, and frame some conception of what constituted the utility of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this, to make me understand it by explanations. The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time; but they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards. My own consciousness and experience ultimately led me to appreciate quite as highly as he did, the value of an early practical familiarity with the school logic. I know nothing, in my education, to which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own. They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory thought, before their own thinking faculties are much advanced; a power which, for want of some such discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack; and when they have to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such arguments as they can command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists; and, therefore, at the utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on argument, a balanced one. (John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, The Library of Liberal Arts, ed. Oskar Piest, no. 91 [New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957], 13-5)

Mill is one of my favorite authors. I have learned as much from him as I have from anyone, in or out of philosophy.

Addendum: If you want to read Mill's autobiography, here is an Internet version. I cannot vouch for its accuracy. In fact, I can vouch for its inaccuracy. To save time, I copied and pasted the paragraph from the Internet site (instead of typing it up from my book). When checking the text against my book, I found several minor errors, all of which have been corrected.

Cheating

Here is a New York Times story about student cheating.

David B. Hart on Theology

Religion, after all (as everyone knows), is a realm of purely personal conviction sustained by faith, which is (as everyone also knows) an entirely irrational movement of the will, an indistinct impulse of saccharine sentiment, pathetic longing, childish credulity, and vague intuition. And theology, being the special language of religion, is by definition a collection of vacuous assertions, zealous exhortations, and beguiling fables; it is the peculiar patois of a private fixation or tribal allegiance, of interest perhaps to the psychopathologist or anthropologist, but of no greater scientific value than that; surely it has no proper field of study of its own, no real object to investigate, and whatever rules it obeys must be essentially arbitrary.

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. Even if one entirely avoids considering what metaphysical content one should attach to the word "God," one can still plausibly argue that theology is no more lacking in a substantial field of inquiry than are history, philosophy, the study of literature, or any of the other genuinely respectable university disciplines.

(James R. Stoner, Jr., et al., "Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium," First Things [May 2006]: 21-7, at 26 [italics in original])

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "When the Professor Is a Tough Grader, and Your Dad" (Education page, May 10):

The potential pitfalls of having a parent as a professor go beyond the parent's classroom.

Though I never took a class with my father, I majored in French at the University of Illinois while he was the department chairman. In fulfilling my major, I'm not sure who was more worried—I, that my professors would tell him if I skipped class or did poorly on my homework, or my professors, that I would tell Dad if they weren't good teachers.

There were other issues, too. I would agonize over how to address my professors, often family friends whom I'd known since kindergarten. It was strange to be both their friends' daughter and their student.

Being the department chairman's daughter had its perks, though. Having my father read out my name at graduation was one of the most special moments of my life.

Meg Kibbee
Chicago, May 10, 2006

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

David Brooks laments the inattention by educators to helping students learn to manage distractions and develop good academic work habits.

What should be stressed is the power that good work habits confer on students.

Students with good work habits are noticed from their earliest years and held as examples for peers and siblings. They are offered opportunities for leadership both in and outside the classroom. Leadership positions then show up as commitments to meaningful activities on college or job applications.

The good news is that research on volition (persistent striving) has uncovered effective strategies for teachers to use to promote academic engagement in students. Mr. Brooks is correct: it is time for educators and policy makers to pay attention to these findings.

Lyn Corno
Sherborn, Mass., May 8, 2006
The writer is president-elect of the educational psychology division of the American Psychological Association.

Dad—I Mean Professor

How would you like to take a course from your father (or mother)? See here.

Freud

Here is philosopher William H. Gass's op-ed column about Sigmund Freud, on the occasion of the latter's 150th birthday.

Thomas O'Mara Winner of 2006 Sellars Prize

The Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Univeristy of Texas at Arlington is pleased to announce that Thomas C. O'Mara has won this year's Sellars Prize. O'Mara, a philosophy major and a senior in the department, won for his essay entitled, “Euthanasia: A Deontological Approach.”

UT Arlington’s Sellars Prize, which carries a monetary award in the amount of $200, is named in honor of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), whose published work includes significant contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Mark Tushnet on Critical Legal Studies

Critical legal studies sometimes presented itself as a theory of law. That led professionally trained philosophers to subject critical legal studies to examination with the tools of their trade, resulting in a judgment that, considered as philosophy, much in critical legal studies was amateurish. For example, sometimes critical legal scholars gestured in the direction of Wittgenstein when they talked about the indeterminacy of law, but philosophers who knew Wittgenstein better than the lawyers did also knew that the very most that could be wrung out of Wittgenstein for purposes of the critical legal studies arguments required one to rely on interpretations of Wittgenstein that were, at the least, extremely controversial among professional philosophers.

(Mark Tushnet, "Survey Article: Critical Legal Theory (Without Modifiers) in the United States," The Journal of Political Philosophy 13 [March 2005]: 99-112, at 102 [footnotes omitted])

Must Looted Relics Be Ignored?

See here.