December 30, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Scatterplot has had a discussion about campus visits for job candidates. Good timing – at Montclair, we’ve just completed a search. We reviewed several dozen applications and had two people come to campus for interviews. But why?
Interview isn’t quite the right word. Neither is ordeal, though it comes closer. The person spends an entire day on campus: there’s morning coffee, then The Talk presenting her research, informal chats and lunch with faculty, an interview with the dean, maybe teaching a sample class, a campus tour, dinner with faculty.
I’ve become convinced that these visits are useful only for seeing how you’ll get along socially, not for anything truly academic. It’s sort of like a first date or, in societies with arranged marriages, the pre-wedding meeting that a couple may have. And about as useful for predicting compatibility.
For the task part of the job, for gauging how the person will be as a scholar and teacher, the campus visit may be worse than no visit at all.
That’s especially true for teaching. We used to ask candidates to do a sample class. This time around, we dropped that requirement, though for logistical reasons not methodological ones. Still, it was the right decision.
A class session taught by a job applicant is anecdotal evidence, and it puzzles me that a group of social scientists would use it at all.
It’s not just anecdotal evidence, it’s unrepresentative anecdotal evidence. You have your candidate teach one session of another teacher’s course – students she’s never seen before and as many as half a dozen faculty members watching from the back of the room.
Nevertheless, just as the dramatic story is often more convincing than a ream of statistics, seeing someone in person can outweigh more systematic data, even for sociologists, who should know better.
In discussing the candidate later, when someone cites the outstanding evaluations the person has received in several courses at her home university, someone else might say, “Well, she didn’t seem so good with our students,” as if this bit of anecdotal evidence wiped out the systematic evidence of the all those evaluations.
As Stalin is supposed to have said, “The death of a million Russian soldiers, that is a statistic; the death a single Russian soldier, that is a tragedy.” And even among sociologists, statistics can be less compelling than tragedy.
The Job Interview - Anecdotal Data
Palm Christmas
December 24, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
A Wall Street Journal article by John Steele Gordon reminds me how deeply entrenched in my mind are the images of Christmas – all those wintry images of snowmen and skaters, pine trees with tinsel icicles, chestnuts roasting, and all the rest. Then I got down here to Florida. The decorations were the same – stockings, wreaths, Santas. But they were framed in palm trees, and I was wearing shorts.
Those Christmas lights should be reflecting off the snow, not off the water in the marina.
Gordon notes that the Christmas I’m thinking of is a fairly recent creation and has little to do with the birth of Jesus (which is O.K. with me). I’ve visited Bethlehem, and it didn’t seem like the sort of place you’d find Frosty the Snowman, even in December. (And as Gordon says, it’s likely that the actual date of Jesus’s birth was in the spring or summer, when shepherds abide in the fields, not in the winter, when the flocks are in the corral.)
Even the holiday shopping didn’t have the same feel as it does in cold weather. Here, it just seemed like a lot of people in Best Buy.
No, this is more what I had in mind (I took this one last week).
Posted by Jay Livingston
The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway . . .
But it's December the twenty-fourth . . .
Those Christmas lights should be reflecting off the snow, not off the water in the marina.
Gordon notes that the Christmas I’m thinking of is a fairly recent creation and has little to do with the birth of Jesus (which is O.K. with me). I’ve visited Bethlehem, and it didn’t seem like the sort of place you’d find Frosty the Snowman, even in December. (And as Gordon says, it’s likely that the actual date of Jesus’s birth was in the spring or summer, when shepherds abide in the fields, not in the winter, when the flocks are in the corral.)
Even the holiday shopping didn’t have the same feel as it does in cold weather. Here, it just seemed like a lot of people in Best Buy.
No, this is more what I had in mind (I took this one last week).
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL
Schmucks With Powerbooks
December 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Americans usually think about class as money. But there are still areas where structural position and power trump income. Athletes, in strict Marxian terms, are part of the proletariat. They toil for wages, they have a union.
They aren’t the only well-paid workers of the world with a working-class consciousness. As we speak, some very well paid writers of movies and TV shows are walking the picket lines. The studios made an offer last week which they claim will pay writers an average of $230,000 a year. The Writers Guild considered it an insult. The offer and the claim were misleading, but
even if they were accurate, the Marxian class division – bourgeoisie and proletariat, owners and workers – would still hold.
Nearly thirty years ago, Ben Stein wrote a book about the way Hollywood writers portrayed America (The View from Sunset Boulevard, 1979). The writers were making what by most standards was a lot of money. Stein, a conservative then and now, seemed to be especially puzzled by their demonization of business and wealth, not just in the scripts they wrote but in their private beliefs.
But a few pages later, Stein describes the structural position of the writer in classic Marxist terms:
The LA Times has been running a good colloquy – or “dust-up” as they call it – between a writer and a media mogul discussing the strike. You can find it here.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Americans usually think about class as money. But there are still areas where structural position and power trump income. Athletes, in strict Marxian terms, are part of the proletariat. They toil for wages, they have a union.
They aren’t the only well-paid workers of the world with a working-class consciousness. As we speak, some very well paid writers of movies and TV shows are walking the picket lines. The studios made an offer last week which they claim will pay writers an average of $230,000 a year. The Writers Guild considered it an insult. The offer and the claim were misleading, but
even if they were accurate, the Marxian class division – bourgeoisie and proletariat, owners and workers – would still hold.Nearly thirty years ago, Ben Stein wrote a book about the way Hollywood writers portrayed America (The View from Sunset Boulevard, 1979). The writers were making what by most standards was a lot of money. Stein, a conservative then and now, seemed to be especially puzzled by their demonization of business and wealth, not just in the scripts they wrote but in their private beliefs.
Even those with millions of dollars believed themselves to be part of a working class distinctly at odds with the exploiting classes – who, if the subject came up, were identified as the Rockefellers and multinational corporations. For an obscure reason,(Stein was a big Nixon fan and obviously sensitive to any mention of the name of his hero. He’d been a Nixon speechwriter, and some years later – I wish I could track down this quote – he said that Nixon had “the soul of a poet.”)the name of Nixon was also thrown in frequently.
But a few pages later, Stein describes the structural position of the writer in classic Marxist terms:
The Hollywood TV writer . . . is actually in a business, selling his labor to brutally callous businessmen. One actually has to go through that experience of writing for money in Hollywood or anywhere else to realize just how unpleasant it is. Most of the pain comes from dealings with business people, such as agents or business affairs officers of production companies and networks.And the current clash seems to be over surplus value (another Marxian term) in the form of residuals. It’s also about the owners’ expropriation of the workers’ product, for regardless of who actually creates the words in a script, the legal author of a movie is the studio. And I also suspect that at some level it’s about respect. I get the sense that the studios’ basic view of their employees hasn’t much changed since the days of Jack Warner, who said famously
Actors – schmucks. Writers – schmucks with Underwoods.Except now the schmucks have Powerbooks, agents, and unions.
The LA Times has been running a good colloquy – or “dust-up” as they call it – between a writer and a media mogul discussing the strike. You can find it here.
Jocks - Wealth vs. Power
December 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Phil, in his comment on the previous post, says that as food for thought, he asks students “to chew on the class position of David Beckham.” How to reconcile the fabulous incomes of these sports stars with their subjugated structural position? True, Beckham and Barry Bonds are not exactly the proletariat of Dickensian London. But they do earn most of their money, whether on the field or from endorsements, by working for the owners. They have much wealth but relatively little power. Is the fault in our superstars, dear Beckham, in our Marxist theories, or in sport itself?
William Rhoden, a sports writer for the New York Times, argues that black athletes, even the very well paid, are still the exploited. They are Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and when they
threaten to revolt or seize some small bit of power, the white establishment reacted strongly to retain control. We all know what happened to Ali when he challenged the Vietnam war, and if we’ve seen The Great White Hope, we know about Jack Johnson. But who knows about Rube Foster, who tried to form a baseball league with black-owned teams?
What’s interesting – and disappointing to Rhoden – is how few black athletes have used their wealth to move into positions of ownership. Successful musicians start their own record labels or even clothing lines (P. Diddy). But athletes, white or black, have not become brands, nor even noticeably entrepreneurs or owners. It’s Jay-Z, not some former athlete, who’s a co-owner of the Nets.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Phil, in his comment on the previous post, says that as food for thought, he asks students “to chew on the class position of David Beckham.” How to reconcile the fabulous incomes of these sports stars with their subjugated structural position? True, Beckham and Barry Bonds are not exactly the proletariat of Dickensian London. But they do earn most of their money, whether on the field or from endorsements, by working for the owners. They have much wealth but relatively little power. Is the fault in our superstars, dear Beckham, in our Marxist theories, or in sport itself?
William Rhoden, a sports writer for the New York Times, argues that black athletes, even the very well paid, are still the exploited. They are Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and when they
threaten to revolt or seize some small bit of power, the white establishment reacted strongly to retain control. We all know what happened to Ali when he challenged the Vietnam war, and if we’ve seen The Great White Hope, we know about Jack Johnson. But who knows about Rube Foster, who tried to form a baseball league with black-owned teams?What’s interesting – and disappointing to Rhoden – is how few black athletes have used their wealth to move into positions of ownership. Successful musicians start their own record labels or even clothing lines (P. Diddy). But athletes, white or black, have not become brands, nor even noticeably entrepreneurs or owners. It’s Jay-Z, not some former athlete, who’s a co-owner of the Nets.
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