How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

 

Daniel Markovitz "How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning", Atlantic, May 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

Changes in the weightings so tiny that they are obviously arbitrary make material differences in the rankings. In this year’s law-school report, U.S. News issued multiple corrections—for example, eliminating a 0.25 percent weight for the “credit-bearing hours of instruction provided by law librarians to full-time equivalent law students” (whatever that is) and increasing the weighting of the bar-passage rate by 0.25 percent. These maneuvers altered the rank of 35 law schools, including nine in the top 30.

COMMENT

     This article about the fierce competition to get into elite colleges cites library instruction as a particularly absurd measure of excellence.   Apparently, law students are no longer expected to know how to do their research. 

Everything All at Once

Bill Nye, Everything All at Once, Rodale, 2017.

When I was a kid and I wanted to look up an odd or obscure fact or a piece of information, like Millard Fillmore’s politics party affiliation, I hit the books — the actual paper books— in a library.  Or in high school if I wanted to know the atomic number of rubidium, I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or if I was feeling hard-core, the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (the ol' CRC).  Nowadays I just pull out buy laptop or buy fancy new phone and go to Google. Then 586,000 results and 0.46 seconds later, I learn that Fillmore was the last president affiliated with neither Democrats nor Republicans, lucky guy.  And 146,000 results tell me that rubidium, symbol Rb, has an atomic number of 37, which means that it contains 37 protons.  …In the old days, you had to look things up in just a few reliable sources to save time.  In today’s data-soaked world, though, you easily can do quite a bit of extra sleuthing.  Information comes at us so quickly now that the challenge is not speed and efficiency but figuring out which of those 146,000 results contain the highest-quality answers. [pp.188-189]

COMMENT

Bill Nye the Science Guy documents changes in ready reference in order to promote nerd culture that seeks evidence-based answers.  Librarians no longer need to direct patrons to encyclopedias or CRC handbooks.   That turned out to are a problem because rubrics for counting reference statistics differentiated between  “easy/directional questions,” “ready reference” and “research help.”  The decline of ready reference misled some librarians into thinking that there was no longer any need for reference services.  They failed to notice that not all “easy/directional” questions were actually simple to answer, and that sorting through six-figure results makes it especially hard to find basic background information.  Nye understands that people  need guidance to sort through the overwhelm.  His chapter on “Critical Thinking, Critical Filtering” would make a useful reading for students who are learning the research process.  I once heard Nye speak at a library conference, and he's on our side. 

Draft No. 4

John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Draft No.4: John McPhee on the Writing Process, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 201,  pp. 129-155.

     Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed... silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara's words, a publication will believe in "turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs." [136]
...
     Today's fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and them ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond-- a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. [146]
...
    [On searching for the source of a Henry Moore quote] The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore's commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library main building.  After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC's The Listener.  In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fracker had rattled off to me. [p.152-153]
...
     [On verifying a date of birth] When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccocmbe was either twenty-one or twenty-two.  Which?  The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe's birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert "in his early twenties" when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
     By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, "June 14, 1706."[p. 155]

COMMENT

     What wonderful reference stories these are! Note that in the extreme sport of New Yorker fact checking, the library is only the second line of defense.  McPhee gives the same advice I would give to student researchers -- try the quickest, easiest thing first. However, if that fails, the true fact-checker will be willing to go to great lengths to verify the truth of information.  

     Libraries figure in two of McPhee's fact-checking anecdotes. In the first the New York Public Library comes through with flying colors. Careful cataloging and a well-curated special collection focused on the artist Henry Moore eventually lead the dogged fact-checker to the source of the desired quote.  

     The second anecdote turns up one of those annoying failures of previous fact checkers  How on Earth did whoever edited the complete works of Joseph Seccombe (a.k.a. Fluviatulis Piscator) fail to learn his date of birth?  Though to be fair, it takes even the superhuman brainpower of McPhee more than a day to think of a strategy to find the answer.  

     In the scholarly literature of librarianship there are articles [1] that advocate replacing low-paid reference librarians with part-time staff hired from among the working poor. The primary argument for this money-saving strategy is that a category of question that used to be called "ready reference" (essentially fact-checking) has largely vanished due to the ease of Internet searching.  In theory, most of the questions that still come in are too "easy" to require expert assistance.  The problem is, there is actually no way to pre-determine whether a particular question is "easy" or "difficult."  The question about Seccombe's birth date sounds pretty easy, but in practice it was a stumper.  It turns out that regardless of various query-difficulty scales, the best proxy to measure difficulty is is, how much time it took to answer a question. [2]  Many libraries keep reference statistics, but treat "extended" questions as anything over about 15 minutes. A question that takes days or weeks to answer is not that unusual, but this type of question is barely even on the reference service radar. 

     The best librarians will take the time to follow the really difficult questions all the way through. It's good a way to keep in practice and develop a sixth-sense about how to approach questions.  The worst librarians "instruct" patrons how to do the research and then abandon them because they imagine that there is really no skill involved in tackling reference questions, or that they somehow think that skill can be acquired in a 15-minute consultation. On more than one occasion, I've observed  desk staff (librarians and non-librarians) give out information that is just plain wrong. There has to be some spark of passion for the importance of fact-checking.  If you don't have it, you should probably not present yourself as a reference librarian. 

     These days, weaponization of information has made Internet fact-checking into a minefield.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has identified disinformation as a danger that is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to Armageddon. [3] Unwary researchers are are likely to encounter unfiltered lies in disinformation generated by corporate-financed think-tanks, Russian trolls and hyper-partisan news stations. It seems urgent for librarians to re-focus information literacy instruction so that it's less about constructing scholarly bibliographies and more about fact-checking. 

[1] Susan M. Ryan, "Reference transactions analysis: The cost-effectiveness of staffing a traditional academic reference desk." The Journal of Academic Librarianship;34, no. 5 (2008): 389-399. This frequently-cited article invalidates itself when the author admits that she couldn't find a method for coding the queries so she made one up. I, too, can get any result I want by jiggering the coding system. 
[2] Sarah LeMire, Lorelei Rutledge, and Amy Brunvand. "Taking a Fresh Look: Reviewing and Classifying Reference Statistics for Data-Driven Decision Making." Reference & User Services Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2016): 230.
[3]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement. 

Invisible Hand

Andrew Marantz, "Invisible Hand," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, October 15, 2018, p.

Last Monday night, about fifty New Yorkers of diverse ages and nondiverse politics showed up at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for the first in a series of “Midterm Explainers”—informal talks ahead of the November elections, followed by cheese and screw-top wine. The evening’s topic, according to a flyer, was “The invisible hand of the super PAC.” The explainer was Zephyr Teachout, who was identified as an anti-corruption activist and a “veteran candidate”—a polite way of saying that she ran for governor of New York, in 2014; for Congress, in 2016; and for state attorney general, this year, all without enduring the potentially corrupting effects of winning.

COMMENT

   Here is an example of a public library fostering civic engagement by hosting a political lecture series.  
   In the article, Teachout is attempting to give an information literacy talk about how to follow the money in politics. Her audience, according to the reporter anyway, is surprisingly unreceptive considering that they all showed up to hear her talk. When she tries to tell them how to use Facebook to uncover the source of funding behind political ads they say, "we don't use Facebook," and then claim never to watch political ads.  As Teachout keeps pointing out, it's not about them.  It's about the people who do get their political information from Facebook ads. 
     When she asks if anyone knows who their state senator is about 1/3 of the audience raises their hands. This is actually a much higher than the rate than I have ever observed, especially among young voters.  When I ask college undergraduates if they can name the politicians who represent them they can all identify the president; a few know who their congressman is; but only once did I have a student who could name the governor.  The State Legislature (the ones who can allocate finding and make rules that affect the State system of higher education) are a complete mystery to students.  
     I believe that this ignorance of State-level politics is because young people do not read local newspapers. In part the currant breakdown in American politics is due to too much emphasis  on national politics and not enough knowledge of state and local politics where individual values can have a far more direct influence. Despite overblown hopes, the Internet and citizen journalism have turned out to be inadequate substitutes for local news reporting.  
     In some places without local newspapers libraries are trying to fill the gaps, in some cases by actually publishing community newsletters. It's an imperfect solution. Libraries have an obligation to both-sideism that, as lazy journalists found while reporting on the 2016 elections,  leaves the gate ajar for inadvertently spreading deliberate disinformation and propaganda.  Also, unlike real reporters librarians can't leave work to report breaking news.