Can I get a second opinion?

This fall, I'm using a first draft of my book manuscript in my Economic Analysis of Social Issues course. I have asked my students to carefully proofread it for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and am rewarding them for finding mistakes.

The response has been overwhelming. They've found dozens of errors that I and several others have repeatedly overlooked. It's impressive, and humbling, and a bit embarrassing, and totally worth doing.

I will never again send anything out for publication without having a second set of eyes look over what I've written.

The most reasonable argument for free trade I can muster: A parable.

Bob and Phil live in North Dakota just south of the Canadian border. Bob is a rancher, Phil is a farmer. They have been trading Bob's beef for Phil's corn for the last five decades. They trade high-quality products at an exchange rate that both find attractive.

One day, a government official comes calling with the news that 100 years ago, the US Geological Survey made an error in surveying the border, and that Phil actually lives in Canada.

Bob promptly stops trading with Phil and buys his corn from Neil, who lives in Nebraska. It costs more, and it's not as good, but at least he's buying American.

Steve Jobs on Creativity

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

On Rick Perry

When asked by a schoolkid about his views on evolution, Texas Governor and Presidential hopeful Rick Perry answers, "In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution, because I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one's right."

So, according to Perry, one is right, and one is wrong. And apparently the little guy is smart enough to figure out which is which, but his teachers and his school board and his state board of education and his Governor are not. Because if they were, they would recognize the foolishness in teaching something in public schools that they know to be wrong.


You can't have it both ways, Governor.

Scholarship, revisited.

Last night, I dug out the table of contents that I developed when I first started my textbook project, and compared it to the current table of contents. The big ideas are largely the same, but:

• Many--very many--of the things I had indicated I would cover in each chapter have been discarded and replaced with better things.
• I have discarded a chapter or two altogether, and have added about five.

My book is a much better book for those changes. And those changes are the result of hours and hours and hours of thought that occurred both while I was sitting at the keyboard and also during the hours between writing sessions. Those hours of thought, hours that would never have existed had I not been writing, revealed that some of the ideas I began with were silly. They also showed me that to establish a unified thesis for the entire text, I needed to cover topics I hadn't considered at the outset. 

I had been teaching the topics covered in the textbook for years before a single word was ever committed to paper. And if I'd never written a word, the course would have been good enough. But putting pen to paper has made my course and my teaching better: sharper analysis, greater rigor, better examples and deeper ideas. Those hours have clarified my thoughts and made me a better professor. And that, to my mind, is the importance of scholarship. Scholarship and teaching are not necessarily substitutes, wherein more of one means less of the other. They can be complements, in which more and better scholarship results in better teaching.

Scholarship

Last week, a group of faculty met to discuss professional development. It was interesting to watch the conversation unfold -- as it did, it was clear that the faculty were making a distinction between professional development (examples of which might include attending conferences, teaching workshops, and the like) and scholarship (which implies some research project or creative activity with an original end product). At Baker, professional development is a required chunk of the duties we are evaluated on; scholarship is viewed as a subset of professional development. At Baker, that ordering implies that you can't get tenure/promotion without professional development, but that it is possible to do so without any scholarship.

Keeping in mind that this is my opinion only, I think this is unfortunate. One reason that it is unfortunate is that it is through the process of scholarship--of taking a problem and really wrestling with it--that we deepen our understanding of our field. Anyone who has ever written a term paper knows that it is one thing to read about a topic, but another thing entirely to write about it. The writing process helps us clarify and organize our thoughts in ways that reading, and even deep thinking, cannot.  If you'll forgive me quoting a bit of economics jargon, Dierdre McClosky sums this up: "Economically speaking, the production function for thinking cannot be written as the sum of two sub-functions, one producing 'results' and the other 'writing them up.'The function is not separable. You do not learn the details of an argument until writing it in detail, and in writing the details you uncover flaws in the fundamentals." The same, of course, holds true for creative activity--it's one thing to look at, and even critically evaluate, a piece of art; it's another thing entirely to create artwork of your own.

A second, and not inconsequential, reason that I believe a faculty should be engaged in scholarship is that it brings recognition to the university. As a university, we want people to know who we are and what we do. We want them to see that we're an engaged and active faculty. We want them to think, "These people at Baker are doing interesting things. When my kid is ready to go to college, I want him to think about going there."

But the most important reason for faculty to engage in scholarship is the simplest. As an institution, we routinely ask our students to research, write, and create. We laud the virtues of becoming lifelong learners. Our gen-ed program is based on a foundation of inquiry-based learning, in which students ask interesting questions, figure out what tools they'll need to answer those questions, and then actually work toward finding an answer and sharing it with others. If we, as a faculty, are going to ask our students to do these things, shouldn't we be doing them ourselves? Shouldn't we be modeling lifelong learning? Won't engaging in our own scholarship help us teach that process to our students? Won't we understand our students' struggles better if we routinely face the same struggles ourselves? Economist and mathematician Steven Landsburg summarizes these ideas for his daughter in his book, Fair Play: "When choosing a college, try this thought experiment: Imagine that you've walked into a living room where a small circle of people is talking animatedly and excitedly while several others sit quietly on the sidelines. If you wanted to know what the conversation was about, who would you prefer to ask? If you think the participants would give you a more accurate and enticing answer than the observers, then you should go to a university where you're going to be taught by active researchers."

I think the Baker faculty are wonderful. I think they accomplish a lot with limited resources. I would be happy to send my own kid here. But I think the fact that scholarship is not a required element of our work does our faculty a disservice. I don't want new faculty to be relieved that research and scholarship aren't required at Baker. I don't think we should hire the type of person who is relieved that scholarship is not required. I want Baker to be a place were faculty are challenged to develop their intellects, just as we challenge our students to develop theirs. And I want Baker to be a place where scholarship is both encouraged and supported.

I find it strangely comforting when . . .

friends who profess to hate capitalism and corporations and who extol the virtue in buying local feel joy when assembling their new IKEA furniture.