Topics They Don't Seem to Teach in Undergrad

[twofish-quant]

I'm also on a committee for academic standards: we consider students who petition the university for things like waiving requirements, suspected cheating, selecting the valedictorian, etc- those should not be up to a single person.

There are lots of different multi-person decision mechanisms that are possible that don't involve committees. For example, there are relatively few committees in most businesses. One person makes the decision, but in the process of making the decision, they have to consult with other people. The point of having one person make the decision is so that if it turns out that it's a bad decision, you have one person responsible for it.

You can have one person have the authority to make a decision subject to approval by some other person. In a lot of situations, there is a deliberate effort not to create a committee so that the other person reviews the decision independently.

Then you have markets, which is a very complex system for making decisions that don't involve committees.

 

[twofish-quant]

There are advantages and disadvantages to the various approaches. The US produces better rounded students (at least that is the goal) but at the expense of less training in their degree discipline.

To be fair, one of the purposes of US colleges is to teach things that would have been taught in secondary school in other countries.

 

[twofish-quant]

The real reason we do things the way we do is that we Americans are a pretty conservative lot.

I think it's also a function of the fact that US education is extremely decentralized. For example, if you wanted to push classes from college to secondary school, then in a lot of countries you'd have the national Ministry of Education issue new standards and that's it.

In the US, the Department of Education doesn't have this sort of power, and most people don't want the USDOE to have this sort of power, so if you want to do something major it involves negotiating with a thousand different stakeholders with different goals.

Also, if you look at the history of how stuff happens. It's usually that one school tries it, it works, and then everyone copies them.

Another factor appears to be a laissez-faire attitude by the American Physics Society. I don't see a recommended curriculum at the APS site. Other professional societies are much more vocal than is the APS regarding undergraduate education.

I think that part of it is that there is less professional coherence in physics. For example, for aeronautical engineers, we can reasonably assume that the purpose of a degree of aeronautical engineering is to train aeronautical engineers and so we can get a group of professional aeronautical engineers together to figure out what training is necessary

For the undergraduate physics degree, it's difficult to get agreement on what the point of the degree is.

 

[Andy Resnick]

There are lots of different multi-person decision mechanisms that are possible that don't involve committees. For example, there are relatively few committees in most businesses. One person makes the decision, but in the process of making the decision, they have to consult with other people. The point of having one person make the decision is so that if it turns out that it's a bad decision, you have one person responsible for it.

You can have one person have the authority to make a decision subject to approval by some other person. In a lot of situations, there is a deliberate effort not to create a committee so that the other person reviews the decision independently.

Then you have markets, which is a very complex system for making decisions that don't involve committees.

Yes, but academic institutions- all academic institutions public and private- involve the idea of 'shared governance'. This is a fundamental quality control issue- without shared governance, administrators decide what students learn (see, for example, intelligent design).

 

[twofish-quant]

Yes, but academic institutions- all academic institutions public and private- involve the idea of 'shared governance'. This is a fundamental quality control issue- without shared governance, administrators decide what students learn (see, for example, intelligent design).

1) Shared governance effectively gives people veto power for any sort of change, which means that nothing gets done.

2) Given the number of people that believe in creationism and intelligent design, I don't think it's that effective a quality control mechanism. One issue is that by the time the student gets to college he or she is already influenced very heavily by their surroundings and the type of education they've already gotten, and that's something that is out of the control (and should be out of the control) of most academics.

One reason that things would be easier with smart thinking students is that if you view students as something other than empty vessels ready to have knowledge poured into them, it becomes a lot less important what ideas they are exposed to.

And you really can't control what ideas someone is exposed to. Even if you don't teach intelligent design in the classroom, the student is going to learn it in church, from their parents, and from a million different places on YouTube.

You can teach the student the basic philosophy and culture of science so that when someone does see an video on intelligent design on YouTube, the person can think from themselves and reject the ideas as being unscientific, but that involves having the student accept the basic philosophy and culture of science, which is impossible to do if your institutions are authoritarian. Actions speak louder than lectures.

There's a weird bizarre contradiction here "Think for yourself, we are ordering you to!"

The other problem with shared governance is that it's not really that shared. Adjuncts and students aren't part of the shared governance, and that produces a nasty class structure that undermines the cultural message that I think we are trying to present.