Weissman’s College Talk — Episode 22 Prof. Thomas Teufel
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This is a video version of the radio interview for the radio show “College Talk.” It is a conversation by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. with Dr. Gerard Dalgish, of the Department of English of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College about teaching English as a second language.
The charm of teaching English as a second language from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
In the last few weeks a number of news events have taken place that may not have been very noticeable, but which can seriously affect higher education in a very detrimental way.
The first event was the publication of the results of a survey conducted by New America, a non-partisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C. The poll surveyed 1,600 people and found that the American public is becoming more and more ambivalent about the value of higher education. Three-quarters of the respondents agreed that it is easier to be successful with a college degree, but one-quarter said higher education is “fine just the way it is.”
Although more than 60 percent of respondents said higher education was good for society, about 26 percent said it was primarily a benefit for individuals, a belief that was shared by those who describe themselves as conservatives, as well as those who identify as liberals. These findings may not seem like such bad news, but the level of dissatisfaction with higher education has continued to increase ever since polls about this issue began being conducted.
In a poll published just two weeks ago and conducted by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), an American nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational group, more than half of respondents who identified as white and working class agreed that college was a “gamble that might not pay off,” instead of a smart investment.
If you combine all these numbers the political landscape for higher education looks far from promising. With the majority of state legislatures and governorships in the hands of Republicans, they are seeing that their base is largely skeptical about higher education and not overwhelmingly supportive of it as a public good. That means that they will get no pressure to maintain – much less increase – support for public higher education.
In the New America poll, for example, 80 percent of those who answered the survey said that community colleges contribute to a strong work force, are worth their cost, and prepare people to succeed – more positive perceptions than for any other sector of higher education. Interestingly, the demographic in the poll that corresponds to Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s to 2000), had the highest estimation of public two-year colleges. But most politicians see those colleges as the real engines for more work-force preparation, not full-fledged universities, which are viewed as “elitist.”
Other news that has received little publicity among in the current swirl of political scandals has to do with student debt. Already acknowledged as the main source of dissatisfaction about higher education in this country, some political decisions at the federal level are going to make things worse.
What has happened in the last few weeks is that the Trump administration has taken action on three important areas: The first is that the federal government has weakened accountability for the companies that administer student loans. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has documented thousands of cases in which loan companies have misdirected payments, lost paperwork, and charged the wrong interest rate on loans. This move means that these companies will no longer be facing regulatory and legal challenges for its dealings with borrowers, meaning that abuses as well as college student debt will continue to increase.
Second, the Department of Education is making it more difficult for borrowers to apply for, and stay enrolled in, income-based payment plans. In order to enroll and stay in those programs, you need to demonstrate that your income qualifies you for the programs.
To do that, borrowers need access to data from the Internal Revenue Service through its Data Retrieval Tool. Yet, on March 3 the Trump administration took down the online Data Retrieval Tool until at least October, making applicants’ lives much more difficult because now they have no way of applying for these programs online.
The third important move was made to give banks more latitude to charge borrowers higher fees (as much as 16 percent of the balance owed) if they fall behind in the repayment of their loans. This means more profits for the banks and higher student debt in general, particular for those individuals with really low incomes since they are the ones with diminished capabilities to pay on time. This is not just greed; this is being mean to the poor.
The only appeal that the victims of lending agencies have is the U.S. Consumer Bureau, an agency that is also in the crosshairs of the current administration and Congress.
Given that together Americans owe more than a trillion dollars in student debt, these new measures will make a bad problem worse. And who will the politicians blame for that? Not the government (federal or state), but the universities themselves. This has been the approach they have been taking for many years, that student debt is a direct consequence of rising tuition and fees, of uncontrolled spending, and in the maintenance of academic programs areas they consider unnecessary, meaning those that they don’t see directly leading to a job.
How do public universities respond to this challenge? So far, it’s not been very intelligently nor particularly courageously. First, the public university leaders whose jobs depend mostly on the good will of politically appointed boards will avoid to point the finger towards the real culprits – politicians who continue to defund public education. After all, they don’t want to lose their jobs. Second, they will continue to market their institutions on the parts that have nothing to do with academic achievement or professional preparation: athletics and campus amenities, or on meaningless rankings.
As one politician often tweets: “Sad!”
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Colleges May Take Blame for Government Actions
Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
Sometimes people in academia get their inspiration from unsuspected sources. That is the case with political scientists such as Dr. Roseanne McManus. “While in middle school I started reading novels by Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. Reading about the strategic interaction of countries in these books made me interested to learn more both about the former Soviet Union and about how countries interact with each other and how they choose their strategies to get what they want,” she says.
This native of Towson, Maryland, went on to obtain a master’s degree in government and politics at the University of Maryland and later a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “After I finished college, I worked for a few years at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency, so that further strengthened my interest in international security.”
Today she is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York.
When asked about how much of international relations is conducted in the open, she is very clear. “We know that there is a lot of backchannel diplomacy. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was really resolved with back channels. There was some public communication, but the key negotiations were done through back channels.”
And many times, public statements can do more harm than good. “In my forthcoming book, I argue that one of the key factors that determines whether the statements that leaders, and especially U.S. presidents, make are effective in actually influencing other countries’ behavior is the ability to follow through on them. That includes the military ability to follow through, which the U.S. usually has a pretty good amount of,” says McManus.
“In terms of effective threat making, the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that back channel diplomacy combined with public threat works. That strategy was not without risk, but I think it was effective in making the threats credible,” she continues.
On the theory that leaders who are perceived as crazy can be effective, McManus has something to say. “Based on our content analysis of newspaper articles, it seems that leaders who are perceived as crazier are less likely to achieve conflict outcomes that shift the status quo positively in their favor, although they are more likely to become involved in international conflict.”
This brings us back to the old theory that having nuclear weapons is necessary to keep peace. “Given that we have them, I think it would be hard to get rid of them, but I’m not necessarily someone who believes that having a deterrent balance is entirely stable. The Cold War is held up as the example of perfect deterrence, perfect balance, but the Cold War is full of close calls,” she says.
Given that the total elimination of nuclear weapons seems to be an unlikely possibility, one wonders what the best way to avoid a nuclear conflict is. “One can argue that increased openness is one of the best ways to ensure deterrence, and I think that’s probably correct. I think that with Russia we’ve moved a fair amount in that direction. We have regular mutual inspections; we have mutual satellite surveillance. We even have occasional airplane flights under open skies, so we do have a fair amount of transparency at least with Russia, though not so much with some of the other nuclear powers.”
That does not mean that there are no other strategies to keep the peace, such as the reduction of the nuclear arsenal. “When we mutually agree to reduce our arms and keep them at the same level, that’s showing that we’ve made an agreement that neither side is going to have this first-strike advantage, and also again the transparency comes in with arms control because arms control treaties tend to lead to inspections; but we haven’t yet reduced the arsenal size to what we might consider safe for the world,” says McManus.
And that brings us to North Korea. “There are a number of people who think that Kim Jong-un is just totally off his rocker, and then there are other people who think he is crazy like a fox. He’s doing this to get concessions from the international community, which has been a semi-effective strategy for them. Under his father, Kim Jong-il, North Korea was pretty effective at winning concessions. Not quite so much under Kim Jung-un, just because people have sort of noticed this pattern and are less willing to give the concessions. A third theory is that he’s doing it for domestic reasons to rally the population against a domestic enemy and to make the government look powerful.”
Has the national security establishment in the U.S. improved since 9/11?
“I became a little bit of a skeptical consumer of intelligence because after having seen the process, I know that there are so many different sources of intelligence, and that some of them are reliable and some of them are not reliable, and it can be very difficult to tell what is a reliable source and what is not,” says McManus.
Case in point: the Iraq War. “Perhaps the Bush administration had an idea already in mind of what they wanted to do, and instead of starting from scratch and looking at all the intelligence and deciding the truth, they were just sort of looking for information to verify their existing opinions, which I think is actually a common problem, not just in the Bush administration, not just for Iraq, but for other issues and for other administrations as well,” she explains.
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McManus Studies, Teaches International Conflicts
This video blog is about Baruch students setting up a performance of the musical Godspell and how that has impacted their lives
Baruch students setting up a performance of the musical Godspell from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Today “College Talk” episode is the presentation by Dean Aldemaro Romero Jr. for the annual diversity talk on diversity at Baruch College-CUNY on the topic of diversity of thought.
Dean Aldemaro Romero Jr. : The Importance of Diversity of Thought. Diversity Talk at Baruch College from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
One of the discussions around accessibility, cost, and quality in higher education revolves about private colleges and universities. Are they for rich kids only? Do they graduate students at a higher rate than do public institutions? Are they more efficient at managing their money? Can they save taxpayers money? And, more importantly, is there a place for them in the future of higher education? These and other questions have been around for a while and a study recently published on these issues provides us with some of the answers.
These and other questions are particularly relevant, especially in states that face significant expected enrollment growth, such as those in the southwest U.S., or in states like New York where the issue of the private colleges and universities accommodating increasing enrollments is an important one.
According to this new study, private non-doctoral (PND) non-profit colleges and universities (providing mostly bachelor’s degrees) deliver benefits at a far lower per-degree cost to states (mainly costs for state grant aid provided to their students) than the cost of supporting students and institutions in the public sector. States, the report concludes, should consider a better use of these institutions in their quest to increase bachelor degree production.
The study, titled “Utilizing Independent Colleges and Universities to Fulfill States’ College Degree Attainment Goals,” was authored by William Zumeta, professor of public policy and higher education at the University of Washington in Seattle and Nick Huntington-Klein, an assistant professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton. The report was published by the Council of Independent Colleges, an association of 765 nonprofit independent colleges and universities and higher education affiliates and organizations that has worked since 1956 to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society.
To put things in context, there are more than 7,000 four-year nonprofit PNDs in the United States, serving about 1.6 million students and awarding nearly 150,000 degrees annually, mostly bachelor’s degrees. Their impact is significant.
The report shows that PNDs graduate students at higher rates – and significantly earlier – than do public institutions that enroll similar types of students. These advantages apply to students from all demographic groups. The study reported that “PND colleges and universities are significantly more successful in retaining students who indicate in their first year that they are interested in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or health major and progress to completion of a bachelor’s degree in one of those fields.” These authors call this “The PND Advantage.”
The study found that “private colleges and universities outperformed their public-sector comparison group by substantial margins in both four-year and six-year graduation rates. The PND advantage was large and statistically significant for all students combined, for each gender, and for the four racial/ethnic groups.”
The study also reported that PND colleges and universities outperformed the comparison group in the number of enrolled student years required to produce degrees, “which reflects dropout rates and time-to-degree among graduates.”
And because of the increasing importance of the cost of college to students, parents, and policymakers, the study also compared the private and public sectors on various dimensions of cost and found that PND colleges and universities collect substantially more tuition revenue per degree awarded than public institutions, after taking account of tuition discounts and institutionally provided aid. “This is because the private colleges and universities do not receive significant appropriations of state tax funds, although federal funding (mostly student aid) to the two sectors is similar,” the study’s authors wrote.
Further, once all the real resource costs were calculated per degree and the “opportunity costs” of additional time out of the labor market for public sector students (who average a longer time in college) were included, the study concluded that each bachelor’s degree in the PND sector costs society about $89,000, compared with more than $115,000 at similar public institutions. Without the opportunity costs included, greater degree production efficiency gives the PND colleges and universities an edge in societal costs per degree of $63,231, compared with $68,963 for public ones.
The PND colleges and universities were also found to have a substantial advantage over their matched public counterparts in terms of costs borne by state and federal taxpayers. They also outperformed their public-sector comparison group by substantial margins in both four-year and six-year graduation rates. PNDs also have a cost advantage in both student aid and institutional appropriations provided by states. As the study asserts, “nearly all states already have on the books one or more student aid (or “state scholarship”) programs for which state resident students enrolling in accredited, private nonprofit colleges and universities are eligible.” Thus, state policy has already institutionalized the idea of subsidizing some student choice through student aid.
Does all this mean that we should stop funding public higher education and give the taxpayer’s money to private colleges and universities? Not at all. Public education provides opportunities to lower-income students and those living in more rural areas. What this report means is that when developing state and federal policies for state and federally funded institutions, the role of private colleges and universities should not be ignored, and that with appropriate funding public institutions will be able to follow the example of private ones by providing smaller class sizes and increased opportunities to students.
Higher education suffers from many problems. PNDs can be part of the solution as long as we never forget that the major problem facing public colleges and universities is the lack of appropriate financial state support.
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Private Colleges Can Partner to Solve Issues
Aldemaro Romero Jr. College Talk
Most people don’t know what a philosopher does, but philosophers take their profession seriously, no matter what first drew them into it. “I tried to decide what to do, and I figured one way to know how to become an artist would be to find out what philosophy is and also what philosophy is not in order to then be able to paint,” says Dr. Thomas Teufel, who initially wanted to become an artist.
“The word philosophy comes from the Greek ‘filo-sofía.’ Sofía means ‘wisdom,’ filo means ‘lover of.’ Thus, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom—as the Greeks would say, wisdom in all of its forms,” explains Teufel.
He cites one of the most famous of all philosophers to describe how philosophers operate. “Plato has a very nice encapsulation of what philosophers do. He said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ That’s what philosophers do. They examine life in all of its forms.”
A native of Neuss am Rhein, Germany, close to the border with the Netherlands, he has had quite a journey as an academician. His education includes an undergraduate degree from the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, a master’s from the University of Western Ontario, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Today he is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences in Baruch College of the City University of New York.
In these times of “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” one wonders how philosophers feel about their reputed devotion to seeking the truth. “That’s one of the questions that philosophers are engaged in: What is truth? Is there such a thing as truth? If there is such a thing as truth, what would it be and how would we know it? All of these are philosophical questions,” he says.
That doesn’t mean that their importance is always acknowledged in the academic world. “I think philosophers have been marginalized to some extent in academia. There’s a real need for us to spread our wisdom and be out there more. The technological revolution of the past several years has actually helped us, because there are many blogs and online outlets now for philosophers to reach folks who aren’t necessarily already engaged in academic philosophy. Philosophy has a PR problem in the sense that there’s a misconception about what it is and another PR problem in the sense that we’re not very good at broadcasting what it is that we do,” Teufel observes.
Despite the fact that science has answered many questions posed by philosophers in the past, he believes scientists and philosophers have mutually benefited each other. “Karl Popper in the 20th century famously described scientific inquiry as engaged not in a pursuit of truth so much as in theory formation, and then the idea was that what you do with these theories is you try to falsify them,” he says. “That’s why so many scientists working on big theories were also very interested in philosophy.”
Philosophers are stereotyped as people who spend all their time thinking, but the reality is much more complex than that. “I sometimes like to tell my students—you know how there’s a saying, ‘It’s all in your head’? I give a slightly different version of this. I like to say that it’s all in your head, including your head. In other words, we can’t escape thought, and this is an insight that the famous rationalist René Descartes had, that somehow thought has primacy, thought comes first,” explains Teufel.
“On the other hand, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to complicate that picture by saying, ‘Wait a minute, you’re forgetting reality over here; but thought has this inescapability that means we’re never in reality (or at least it’s very difficult to justify that we’re in direct touch with reality), because the direct touch is always modulated, mediated through some measure of thinking,’” he says.
Teufel is currently working on several projects. “One is a book on Kant’s teleology—that’s essentially Kant’s philosophy of biology. ‘Telos’ is a goal or an end state that you’re trying to reach, and one of the ways in which we understand biological life is to think of it in terms of organisms that are somehow functionally organized, that pursue aims, goals and purposes; and that’s what makes biological organisms different from physical and inanimate objects.”
Teufel’s interest in these ideas comes from the fact that he is always studying the interface between science and philosophy. “Kant has a lot to say about what that biological teleology is, what it looks like, how we can understand and justify it and so forth.” The other book project Teufel is working on is related to the previous topic but is bigger in a way. “My main interest is Kant’s third critique. He wrote three big books: the first critique is the Critique of Pure Reason; the second is the Critique of Practical Reason; and the third is the Critique of Judgment. I’ve been working on this third book for a long time now, and my medium-term project is to write a monograph on the book in its entirety, because it’s a very difficult book, and it hasn’t really been treated as a coherent book,” he says.
“People kind of dig into it and pick and choose what they can find,” explains Teufel, who adds, “It’s very difficult to see what the coherence of this thing might be. Which is strange, because it’s his book on systematicity and on the integration of parts into a whole, so it’d be very funny to have that book in particular be the one that’s kind of unorganized and unsystematic. My goal is to show how the book on systematicity is in fact systematic.”
When asked if we need more philosophers in our times, his answer is overwhelming: “Yes.”
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Teufel Thinks That We Need Philosophers Now More Than Ever
This video blog is about how some of our math students won a national completion.
Blog about Baruch students winning a big math competition from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.