Weissman’s College Talk — Episode 21 Prof. David Jones
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Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
There are many reasons why people decide upon a career. Some follow family tradition, others seek careers with the potential for a big paycheck, still others are inspired by a particular professor in college. But in certain cases, something more mundane explains how a person arrives at such a momentous decision.
“I grew up in a family where, every morning as I was eating my cereal before going to school, the radio was on with the news,” says Dr. David Jones, a professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences in Baruch College of the City University of New York.
“I was raised in a household where paying attention to current events was the norm, and I kind of thought that that was the way every household was. The more you listen to current events, the more you realize how much our lives are affected by government and interactions between government and citizenry. I was just always fascinated with it, and it seemed natural to me. It was more confusing to me why other people didn’t feel the same way,” says Jones.
A native of Summit, New Jersey, Jones obtained his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania and his master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He has devoted his professional life to studying politics in America, a subject that is as hot today as it has ever been. He says that the electorate is savvier than most people assume. “If people aren’t paying attention to Congress, they don’t know what’s going on there, how it can affect their votes or their other attitudes. My research, interestingly, found that people are able to use shortcuts to make some assumptions, reasonable assumptions, about what’s going on in Congress. People are smart enough to figure out who’s in charge in Congress and to hold that party accountable, and that was something interesting I found in my research.”
Does that mean that our democracy is healthy?
For Jones the responsibility does not lie only with politicians. “I would say that, from a personal perspective, I don’t like to see people complaining about what’s going on in politics if those same people didn’t inform themselves, didn’t show up to vote. You had the opportunity to have an impact and have an effect, and if you chose not to do that, then you lose your right to complain a little bit,” he says.
About the current confrontational state of politics in America he is very clear. “We are in a period when politics is very closely contested. The two parties are of roughly equal strength in the American population. Republicans are in control of the White House and the House and the Senate but really only by very small margins. There are people looking ahead two years, and it could go the other way. Whenever you have an electorate that is so evenly divided like that, you’re gonna have a few instances in which the popular vote might not match the electoral college.”
One problem that has been mentioned is that of gerrymandering, i.e., drawing electoral districts in ways that favor a political party instead of reflecting the will of the people overall. “A lot of the rules are left up to the states, so different states have taken different approaches to this. New Jersey, for example, has a bipartisan commission with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans that drew their districts. In some states the legislature gets to decide how the districts are drawn,” says Jones.
Another contentious issue is the filibuster, or the ability to block legislative action even if you don’t have a simple majority, something that was recently abolished by the Republican-dominated senate when approving the latest Supreme Court appointee. “The most positive thing to say for the filibuster is that it’s a protection of minority rights and minority preferences. It is important that in a democracy the majority should rule but also that they should be respectful of dissenting opinions. The filibuster can play a reasonable role there,” he says.
Another issue that he sees a problem with is the notion of ideological purity required by some partisan elites. “When no ideological purity is required, it’s easier to see some commonalities with people across the aisle and to socialize with them. Ideological purity occurs when political elites start to sort themselves out by clear ideological lines rather than traditional geographic lines and other reasons. Then citizens start to notice, and that starts to affect the citizenry. Citizens view each other as being in different camps.” Jones sees this ideological sorting as a malady perverting American politics.
Many American and even international observers wonder how someone who won the popular vote can lose the presidential election. “The closeness of American politics means this divergence can happen, but what we really want to know is what went wrong in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan. We don’t want to oversell and say that the polls are broken, that they didn’t work. Actually, they did a better job than they’ve done in some previous years.”
Jones acknowledges that the press played an influential—but flawed—role during the last election. “A lot of journalists didn’t appreciate the fact that they were just focusing on who was ahead and who was behind and ignoring the point that maybe eight percent of the public waited to make up their minds until the last minute.”
Jones goes further: “I think that if the election had taken place the week after the Access Hollywood video, Hillary Clinton would have won fairly decisively. I think that people have a short memory, and that it’s what’s going on right now.”
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Jones Studies the Condition of American Politics
This video blog is about the Field Center at Baruch College where you can make some of your ideas a reality.
This video blog is about how you can make some of your ideas a reality from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Uncategorized, Videos
This is the video version of the interview for the radio show “College Talk” by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. with Prof. Denise Patrick about the important of messages in communications in the modern world
When people are the message from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
“I’m really happy to talk about history because I find it a very exciting thing that helps us to understand the present and figure out how to analyze all the different things around us.” That is the way Dr. Katherine Pence explains why studying history is important beyond the stereotype of being a subject about dates and names.
“It’s good to have few dates in mind so you can figure out causes and effects and what comes before and after a certain date, such as the end of World War II in 1945. The world changed dramatically after that date,” Pence explains. “The most important thing is to figure out how to analyze what was going on in the past in order to deconstruct and figure out how we got to where we are today.”
A native of Oxford, England, she received her bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in California and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Michigan. Today she is an associate professor and department chair in the Department of History of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences in Baruch College.
Pence has specialized in the history of one of the most influential countries in the world: Germany. “I do have German heritage. My ancestors came over in the 19th century, and I studied the German language in both middle school and high school, and I remember certain things, like how people talked about Germany in terms of the Nazi period, how prominent that was in people’s memory,” says Pence.
“When I was in elementary school, there was a little German kid. The others didn’t know how to pronounce his name, and these kids were calling him a Nazi. I just thought it was very interesting to think about. How do you recover as a country from that cataclysmic destruction of democracy?” she says. And that is why she specialized in postwar history.
Instead of looking at the history that most people have heard about, she approached the question by studying how women and other everyday actors experienced big changes in political regimes and events. “What I liked was how history allows you to look at all different kinds of sources, whether it’s literature or statistical data or material objects, and to analyze those historically, which provides us with a lot of fertile ground to understand where we are today.”
One of the topics she studies is how the citizens of the former East Germany adapted to their integration into a unified democratic German state. “They weren’t just pure victims of a regime but also had their own integrity, and they were developing a culture that was somewhat separate from West Germans. They had gained a lot of strength in navigating the structures of both the difficult political situation and also the constraints of a shortage economy, which meant that a lot of things were not available much of the time. They figured out really ingenious ways to work around the limited opportunities they had on the market,” explains Pence.
What makes this process really complicated is the fact that at the same time the Germans, “have really been trying to work through their Nazi past, much more so than the United States has with its history of slavery. I think that’s something that the Germans have been really concertedly focusing on just in the past couple of decades. I think that trying to maintain this openness to the world is a way to atone for those past legacies of fascism.”
As a good historian, she visits the country she studies to grasp subtle things that cannot be found in any book. “My first experience in Germany was in 1989, in the spring before the wall came down. I was living in West Berlin, and there were American troops all over the place. It was really interesting to have a large military presence there that I wouldn’t experience even in the United States. There’s been a very close relationship between the U.S. and Germany from that time, and that’s continued. We have this very close strategic collaboration with our European partners, and so that’s something that has been stabilizing Europe after the war,” she says.
Now Pence is working on another project, which is related to Germany’s relationship with Africa after the 1960s and examines how the Cold War and decolonization fit together. “Specifically, there were some mobile exhibitions that the West Germans put on in a variety of African countries. These trucks rolled throughout the countries and displayed what West Germany was all about. It was an education system; they had a display of the Berlin Wall; and they were trying to gain partners and allies in Africa. So, there was a lot of hopefulness about Africa in its new future, as these newly independent countries were coming out of imperialism. I think Germany was interested in hooking its own future as a demilitarized, post-Nazi state to the future of this new Africa.”
Pence discovered that although the German government had good intentions, they whitewashed their own history in Africa. “They conveniently glossed over that past—there was the genocide that the Germans committed against the Herero tribe in Africa, for example. But Germany had its colonies taken away after World War I, and they were given to the French and the British. In the ‘60s, the French and the British were experiencing these colonial revolutionary struggles, but Germany could conveniently forget about it because they already had had their colonies taken away. So, they came in and said, ‘We’re gonna be your partners in progress.’”
PDF Version:
Pence Teaches, Studies the History of Germany
This video describes the current exhibit at the Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College in New York City of Latin American Self-Taught Artists from the Aldemaro and Ana Romero Collection. The exhibit will be open until May 19, 2017.
Latin American Self-Taught Artists Exhibit from the Aldemaro and Ana Romero Collection from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
This is a video summary of the Art-A-Thon series of events that took place on March 7th, 2017, on the campus of Baruch College in New York City.
Art-A-Thon 2017 at Baruch College, New York City from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
In past columns, I have reported on more than one study that shows that expectations for “brilliance” for women in higher education were much higher than that for males. For example, when a research paper is co-authored by a male and a female the assumption by many is that the male did “the real work.”
Now comes a study showing that there is a similar bias when it comes to students – only this time the differences are based on race.
In a study published in “Economics and Education Review,” it was found that when evaluating the same black student, white teachers expect significantly less academic success than black teachers, particularly when it comes to black males.
According to the study, carried out by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, when a black teacher and a white teacher evaluated the same black student, the white teacher was about 30 percent less likely to predict that the student would complete a four-year college degree than was the black teacher. By the same token, white teachers were also almost 40 percent less likely to expect their black students to graduate high school.
According to one of the authors, Nicholas Papageorge, an economist at Johns Hopkins, “What we find is that white teachers and black teachers systematically disagree about the exact same student. One of them has to be wrong.”
But the problem pointed out by this article are not just a matter of bias (conscious or unconscious) but, more importantly, the effects that such attitudes have on the students themselves. The same study reports that low expectations could affect the performance of students, particularly disadvantaged ones who lack access to role models who could counteract a teacher’s low expectations.
Teachers may not disparage students directly, but students are very perceptive and can sense what the teacher thinks of them by the way others are treated in the same classroom.
One of the immediate effects of such perceptions is that students come to believe that the teacher is right, that they are indeed not smart enough and that there is no future for them in education. As a consequence, they may dismiss any hopes for advancement and, eventually, drop out of school.
The authors of the study analyzed data from the Educational Longitudinal Study. Begun in 2002, it is an ongoing study following 8,400 10th grade public school students and their interactions with teachers. That survey asked two different teachers, who each taught a particular student in either math or reading, to predict how far that student would go in school. With white students, the ratings from both teachers tended to be the same. But with black students, boys in particular, there were big differences. The white teachers had much lower expectations than black teachers about how far the black students would go in school.
Among the many results of this insightful work are that white and other non-black teachers were 12 percentage points more likely than black teachers to predict black students wouldn’t finish high school, and that non-black teachers were 5 percent more likely to predict that their black male students wouldn’t graduate high school when compared to their black female students.
Another interesting fact the researchers found was that black female teachers were significantly more optimistic about the ability of black males to complete high school than were teachers of any other demographic group. They were 20 percent less likely than white teachers to predict that their students would not graduate from high school, and 30 percent less likely to say that when compared with black male teachers. White male teachers were 10 to 20 percent more likely to have low expectations for black female students.
There were also differences based on subjects of study. Math teachers were significantly more likely to have low expectations for female students. For black students, particularly black males, having a non-black teacher in a 10th grade subject made them much less likely to pursue that subject by enrolling in similar classes. This finding suggests that biased expectations by teachers have long-term effects on student outcomes.
This research, supported by the American Educational Research Association, has implications beyond high school. We can envision similar situations in college, the workplace, and even in the criminal justice system.
For years, a number of studies have shown that when it comes to hiring, names that may indicate the ethnicity of the applicant influence not only who will be hired, but also who will be interviewed for the job.
We all know that when it comes to selecting who is going to be the “face” of a corporation or an institution, appearances matter. We are also all aware of the fate that minorities have to confront when dealing with the criminal justice system. No matter how many laws have been passed to alleviate those issues, they still persist in our society.
Another of the study’s authors, Seth Gershenson, an assistant professor of public policy at American University in Washington, D.C., said, “While the evidence of systematic racial bias in teachers’ expectations uncovered in the current study are certainly troubling and provocative, they also raise a host of related, policy-relevant questions that our research team plans to address in the near future. For example, we are currently studying the impact of these biased expectations on students’ long-run outcomes such as educational attainment, labor market success, and interaction with the criminal justice system.”
It is time for us to analyze our attitudes toward people who are different from us, whose experiences and backgrounds also diverge from ours. It is not just a matter of social justice, but also about our own character and our ability to deal with others.
Despite constant accusations of “political correctness,” the fact of the matter is that we are failing at one the most important experiences we offer: education. And if we fail at that stage we are failing all of society.
PDF Version:
Study: Students Often Perceived Differently by Race