Seth's Blog

Jenijoy La Belle is a Professor of English at Caltech. Her tenure case, which started in the 1970s, is the main topic of this interview. Because of one person — Robert Huttenback — she was at first denied tenure. Amazingly, she managed to get tenure anyway. In the middle of the fight, which promised to become very embarrassing to Caltech, Huttenback became Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara.

Here is a related story from another interview:

One day on a Saturday or Sunday, I was in Baxter [Baxter Hall of Social Sciences and] picking up my mail upstairs. There was nobody else there but Huttenback and a young Turk— a young professor of economics, I guess, who is now of course a famous full professor somewhere, perhaps even retired. They were in the office that Jenijoy was going to have and next to it was the men’s toilet. And they were talking about playing a joke. The goal was to make the situation as uncomfortable—more than uncomfortable, offensive—for Jenijoy as possible. And I will not—I remember exactly what they were doing, but it is so crude that I will not tell you.

Here is one of La Belle’s comments:

In 1982, someone sent me a clipping from the Santa Barbara News and Review, from a column that sounded more like gossip than news. But it simply began: “Even in UCSB circles familiar with Chancellor Robert Huttenback’s perquisites of power, the situation has caused comment. Why do university cars and drivers transport Freda Huttenback, his better half, on personal business? Campus employees, from maintenance to clerical workers, tell us of receiving a Xeroxed map to the Huttenbacks’ home and directions to chauffeur her wherever she asks. These trips have reportedly included visits to a Ventura chiropractor. “Huttenback defends the practice by calling his wife a consultant to the university on interior design matters, saying that she occasionally needs a university car and driver for decorating business. Huttenback first denied he or his wife ever used the car for personal errands: ‘Whoever told you that must be someone I fired,’ was his reply.”

Huttenback was eventually convicted of fraud. He defends himself here.

A California assemblyman named Scott Wilk has proposed a “New University of California” whose only purpose would be to provide certification tests — tests that show you have learned the material of this or that college class. Here is what his bill says:

(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

(2) The New University of California is authorized to contract with qualified entities for the formulation of peer-reviewed course examinations the passage of which would demonstrate that the student has the knowledge and skill necessary to receive college credit for that course.

This is not online education. You can learn the material however you want — for example, by reading a book.

An unsigned New York Times editorial called the idea “particularly ludicrous” but did not say why. I think it’s a good idea. It gives students much more power: They can choose the learning methods and materials and times that fit them best (listening to lectures at work, for example), in contrast to the one-class-fits-all approach at almost all colleges. The cost in time and money will be much less than attending a typical university. The proposal helps employers because passage of these tests reflects a skill useful in many jobs: ability to learn on one’s own.

Compared to an ordinary college degree (say, from Berkeley), a degree or certification from the New University of California fails to show that you did well enough in high school to get admitted to Berkeley. This could be remedied by showing your prospective employer a letter of admittance to Berkeley.

In January I blogged about teaching a class in a new way. The obvious novelty was that I did no grading, but I was also pleased by the high quality of the student work.

The class, at Tsinghua University, is called Foundations of Psychology. It’s required of psychology majors and is taken by freshmen. Last time there were about 25 students. The biggest assignment was a final project where I allowed students to work on their own interests. They could do almost anything they wanted related to psychology and they could work alone or with others. I “graded” their work via a checklist: X points for doing this, Y points for doing that, and so on, with the possible points adding up to an A. The checklist was different for every project. They had about five weeks.

Here is a summary of one project, by Vista Zeng:

In the Frontiers of Psychology class this term, we, a group of three freshmen (Vista Zeng, Joy Wu and Michael Wu) conducted an experiment on Fujoshi. Fujoshi is a subculture that started in Japan and spread in East Asia. It has influenced many of our classmates and friends. When recruiting participants, we found 14 Fujoshis out of about 720 female students in Tsinghua University. (more…)

• Seth Godin’s criticism of schools
• Emily Nussbaum (New Yorker TV critic) podcast
• Joyce Cohen became oversensitive to sound due to loud ventilation
• Bariatric surgery trades obesity for alcoholism
• Edward Jay Epstein on the death of Boris Berevzofsky
• Chinese graduates from top schools play it safe
• ASMR videos. An example.

Thanks to  Bryan Castañeda and Joyce Cohen.

• Natto Commuter Pass. Really. A Tokyo restaurant has innovative ways to sell/serve natto.
• How to give an academic talk. I agree with almost all of this but it leaves out two important things: 1. Be as emotional as possible. Convey as much emotion as possible. 2. Tell stories. A good talk is a story.
• Repetition in the history of diets
• Fermentation bubbles back into the mainstream (newspaper article)
• Stinky cheeses in China
• Aaron Swartz lawyers accuse prosecutor Stephen Heymann of misconduct
• Michael Wolff on Renata Adler

Thanks to Rashad Mamood.

• Low pay at Weight Watchers. “The $18 base rate for running meetings has not increased in more than a decade. . . . The restlessness over low pay extends across the weight-loss industry to Weight Watchers’ rivals, including Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem.”
• At Berkeley I told undergraduates: “Do as many internships as possible. Take as few courses as possible.” Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) has a similar view and suggests that college should be built around this idea.
• The Umami Burger empire
• The Positive Deviance Initiative
• Michael Wolff on Edward Jay Epstein’s Annals of Unsolved Crimes
• Another teacher who stopped grading. “It has honestly been the best thing I have implemented in my career.”

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

A friend of mine taught at Harvard for a few years. Her husband needed a job, so he taught a writing class. He said his students were so bad it appeared to be an experiment: How stupid can you be and succeed at Harvard? They had not been admitted based on SAT scores or grades, that was clear. In a recent article called “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, Ron Unz described considerable evidence of exactly what my friend’s husband noticed: Harvard admission not based on the usual “meritocratic” measures, such as SAT scores and grades. For example, he found evidence of an Asian quota. If Asians weren’t penalized for being Asian, far more would be admitted.

In a follow-up article, Unz wrote: (more…)

• Japan Korea kimchi dispute
• Dirt restaurant in Tokyo. The dirt is treated to kill bacteria, which I think is a mistake.
• Around 2005, a teenager combined DNA analysis with public data to find his biological father (a good example of personal science — using science to help yourself). Recently some professional scientists showed this wasn’t a fluke. The teenager was far ahead of the professionals, in other words. Just as I discovered that my acne was antibiotic-resistant long before professional dermatologists discovered (or at least published) the idea that some acne was antibiotic-resistant.
• Edward Jay Epstein and Vladimir Nabokov. I told this story here.
• If high-school students designed their own school

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, defended traditional lectures in a New York Times op-ed titled “The trouble with online education”. He described how he teaches. When he teaches, he fails to

1. Pay attention to what students want to learn.

2. Treat different students differently (beyond giving them different grades).

A few weeks ago, I described how doing these two things made teaching much easier. It’s like swimming with or against the current. You can take advantage of human diversity (my approach) or you can ignore it (Edmundson’s approach), which means fighting against it.

An American writer named James McGregor (in One Billion Customers) called China “a nation of bookworms”. In China, entry into college is heavily controlled by a nationwide test called the gao kao taken near the end of high school. For hundreds of years, China had the most sophisticated civil service entrance exams in the world. Chinese students study much harder than American students. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (in which a mother puts a huge amount of pressure on her daughters to succeed in conventional ways) was presented by Chua as reflecting Chinese parenting values. It’s true that Chinese parents push their children much harder to do well in school than American parents.

All of which might lead unsuspecting Americans to believe that Chinese people value being a good student. Not at all. A Chinese friend explained to me that being called “a good student” is essentially an insult. “You are a good student” is what you say to someone when you can’t think of anything nice to say. It means

1. You are not interesting.

2. You have no sense of humor.

3. You have no interests outside of school.

Drone might be the closest English equivalent to the Chinese “good student”, except that no one would ever say to someone “you are a drone” and the meaning of the term has recently changed (to mean mini-planes flown remotely).