Category Archive

There’s a new book out called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses that got a lot of ink last week. It claims that only 55% of American college students improve their scores on a standardized test of critical thinking in their first two years of college, and that only 64% of students improve on that test during their entire time as undergrads.

I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t speak in too much detail about its contents, but a few things leap out from the coverage.

First, there’s the fact of what the study doesn’t measure. Because it’s based solely on performance on a generalized test, it tells us nothing about what students have learned in their own fields of study, a fact that many news stories on the book have failed to mention, or buried. (That misrepresentation began with the study’s authors — Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa — who titled a Chronicle essay on their work “Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything?” — a question which even their own work would lead them to answer with “Yes, definitely. At least 64% of them, and probably a lot more.”)

The study’s value is also, obviously, dependent on the value of the test itself. Very little of the book’s press coverage has explored the question of what, exactly, the test measures, and what counts as improvement under the authors’ interpretation of the results.

A third issue is what pollsters call “the internals” of the study — the breakdown of how the results differ across communities. Are the least-prepared students learning the most, or the least? Which kinds of campuses, which kinds of students, which majors, are most successful? These kinds of questions are essential to making sense of the study’s findings, and with the exception of some meager ethnic data, they’re absent from the coverage I’ve seen.

It’s also important to note that the study fails to situate its findings in a historical context. The test the authors rely on was first used in 2004, so it tells us nothing about whether today’s students are learning more than previous generations, less, or about the same amount. This is particularly important given the incredibly widespread (though largely ungrounded) belief in college students’ intellectual and moral decline: Anytime anyone says “today’s college students suck,” a lot of listeners are going to hear “…compared to those who came before.”

There are other problems with the study. More than half of the students who took the test as first-years, for instance, weren’t tracked down for the follow-up. The authors’ methodology in assessing how much time students spend studying has been criticized as well. But my point here isn’t so much to criticize the study — which, again, I haven’t read — as it is to point out the perils of relying too uncritically on its representation in the media.

Offline life has been hectic the last couple of days, but I’ll be back with a bunch of really cool stuff starting Monday.

At least fifty protesters — Twitter reports say as many as eighty — were arrested this morning at the University of Puerto Rico as new student fees went into effect. (article | translation)

Student activists shut down UPR for two months last spring in protest against fee hikes and other initiatives, and won reversals of many proposals. But officials brought back the fee hikes in the fall, and both the government and the university have suppressed student protests much more aggressively in recent weeks than they had in the past.

Today’s arrestees included student activists, at least one faculty union leader, and — according to one news report — “some nuns.”

I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, and promised to post about it today. The day’s kind of gotten away from me, so this’ll be as quick as I can make it.

In November 1964, weeks before Martin Luther King was to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, an anonymous correspondent sent him a package in the mail. The package contained an audiotape, and a letter.

The tape was a compilation of material recorded via Bureau wiretaps over the previous year. It consisted of off-color jokes and remarks King had made in private, among friends, interspersed with the sounds of him having sex with someone other than his wife. The letter included the following challenge:

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability … you are no clergyman, and you know it. … You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. … You are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. … The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [it]. … You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

The letter was mailed 34 days before Christmas.

King did not receive the package until after he returned from Oslo, and after the 34-day deadline had passed. When he listened to the tape he quickly concluded that it could have come from only one source — the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He was right.

The FBI had been wiretapping King for over a year by then, and Bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover made no secret of his loathing for the civil rights leader. The suicide package was prepared by Hoover deputy William Sullivan, an Assistant Director of the Bureau and the head of its Domestic Intelligence Division.

When you teach American history, as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But I’m not one to ridicule such theories, either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-six years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide.

That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on.

January 2014 Update | I don’t know why, but this post keeps spurring requests (here, by email, on Twitter) for proof of the story I recount here. It’s a little weird. I’m reproducing a letter, which is about the easiest thing in the world to Google — a Google Books search for the first five words I quote turns up no fewer than 272 hits, including a raft of well-respected scholarly works on both the FBI and MLK. I suggested this approach in comments a few weeks ago, but the queries keep coming in for some reason.

Maybe this will help.