Congratulations CHSS grads

May 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences had its convocation Thursday on the football field. The students walked across the platform, shook hands with the president and the dean, then went back to the bleachers.

(MSU photo. Other pictures are here.)

I had nothing to do with the program. I sat on the stage with the other department chairs, and I stood up when the guys from the Dean’s office read the names of graduating Sociology majors. But if it had been up to me, I would have made a large backdrop of this graph showing scores on the CLA, an assessment of how much students learn in college.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The authors of the report* summarize their findings

There is notable variation in academic experiences and outcomes across fields of study. . . .While appreciating the diverse causes of differences by field of study, we observed several patterns in our data:

Students majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields, including social science, humanities, natural science, and mathematics, demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.

Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains.

*“Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” by Arum, Roksma, and Cho. (Full report downloadable here.)

Oh, Brother

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture has a nice post – theory by Roger Gould, data by Cornel West. Gould is talking about status hierarchies and reciprocity. West is talking about feeling snubbed by “my dear brother Barack Obama.”

Everybody, it seems, is West’s brother. “I was under the impression that he [Obama] might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman.” In the interview, recorded by Chris Hedges, West uses the word another ten times.

It reminded me of a story my brother (my real brother, Skip) told me long ago, back when he was an undergrad at U Chicago. Ralph Ellison had given a lecture there, and afterwards Skip asked him if The Brotherhood in Invisible Man was based on a real organization.

“It’s not the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean,” Ellison said. He added that the idea of brotherhood had been used throughout history as a cover for a variety of unsavory schemes. “When someone starts calling you brother,” Ellison said, “stick your hands in your pockets. And cross your legs.”

Name and Profession - A Positive Correlation

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve known for a long time that the brains behind Playboy’s marketing strategy, especially in its early decades, was a sociologist – A. C. Spectorsky (in 1955, he coined the term exurb in his book The Exurbanites). Now, thanks to Scott McLemee’s Inside Higher Ed review of a new book about Playboy, I learn that the A.C. stood for Auguste Comte.

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve been skeptical about the influence of names – the research purporting to show that batters whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out, that students with D-names get lower grades than do A-name students, that women named Laura are more likely to become lawyers and men named Dennis dentists, or that boys named Tennyson are more likely to go to college in Tennessee. (The posts are here and here .)

But now with A.C., I may have to rethink this name thing.

Win Ben Stein's Advocacy

May 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a comment on the previous post, “Anonymous” takes me to task for not writing about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the hotel maid as members of social categories (“a high-power white man attempting to rape an African immigrant woman”).

Now Ben Stein, in an American Spectator post yesterday, uses reasoning by social category but on behalf of Strauss-Kahn.

In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.

Drawing conclusions about an individual’s motivations, behavior, honesty, etc., based on these demographic characteristics – there’s a word for that: stereotyping.

• Powerful white men go around trying to rape powerless women.
• Very successful economists don’t commit violent crime.
• Privileged people get away with crimes against powerless victims
• Chambermaids, out of their own self-interest, can be dishonest.

Simple caricature and plotline. You can take the few facts that have become public and create the comic book you prefer. In fact, we often do convert the world into familiar stories. The trouble is that these stories are not always accurate.

The one thing that Stein says that is not in dispute is that Rikers (like jails generally) is horrific. I wonder whether he has ever before expressed this concern. I don’t know all of Stein’s oeuvre, but maybe others can enlighten me. (Obvious Ben Stein tag line here.)