The Classroom Conservative

In Defense Of Flat Fees

The University of Toronto has suffered criticism of its move to introduce so-called "flat tuition fees," fees charged per semester rather than per course. As coverage in University Affairs demonstrates, the practice is common throughout Ontario, so why is this story generating controversy? I think it is related to a wrong-headed defense of the working student: not people with careers who attend university part-time, but full-time students who edge closer and closer to concurrent, full-time work.

Just to be clear: if a student wants to attend the UofT on a part-time basis, that student still pays just for each course. Students who want to take three or four or five courses, however, all pay the same amount. There are many advantages to this approach, not the least of which is that students now get real encouragement to take a full course load and finish their degrees in four years, and not five or six or seven or more. Thus, it is quite likely that students will, over the course of their university careers, pay far less in compulsory charges and rent. But, if done properly, the amount of tuition paid through eight semesters of "flat fees" should also be less than if paid by the course.

Imagine, for argument's sake, that a course at university now costs $500. A student doing five courses pays $2,500; a student doing three courses pays $1,500. Let's speculate that the average course load for all students is 4.3 courses: many do five, but many others do four or three. The average student load thus generates $2,150 in tuition each term for the university. Over forty courses in an undergraduate degree, each student pays $20,000. Proceeding from the average load of 4.3 courses, let us now allow the institution to charge for 4.5 courses: everyone pays $2,250 per term of undergraduate study. The institution receives, on average, an extra $100 per student each semester, and that money is welcome in these tough times. But the student who was already doing a full course load pays $250 less, and that could be a month's rent if four people are sharing. If a student was used to doing four courses, bumping up to a fifth course is accomplished at half-price for that extra course.

A university might argue that, eventually, everyone has to do at least forty courses, and so they lose out by introducing what amounts to a tuition cut. No so. As the UofT has argued, there is considerable administrative cost in charging fees and doling out refunds on a sliding scale, and that cost could be eliminated. The extra enrollments, if handled properly, could be absorbed into existing classes. I am not talking about expanding that 80-seat class to 120; rather, I mean that enrollment management could help ensure that every class offered is at least 85 percent filled. Right now, with great uncertainty about how many classes students in our programs will take each semester, there are many classes scheduled that launch though they are only half-full. Small class sizes represent an admirable goal, but they should be small by design, not small because the people we expected to show up, the people who were scheduled to do a course by their program sequencing plans, decided to cut back to three courses. Eventually, of course, we have to put on another section for those people, leading to a lot of inefficiency in the system.

But the real mutual benefit exists in retention. Universities lose out on tuition, in the long run, because some of these "part-time, full-time" students fail to complete their degrees. Drop-out rates are complex things, and people leave without their degrees for a variety of reasons. But the longer it takes for someone to finish, the more chance there is that whatever force claims unsuccessful students, from money problems to family issues to waning interest, has more of an opportunity to claim them. Helping focus students' attention, giving them the best plan for their success, is simply the right thing to do.

There are excellent reasons for some people to do less than a full course load. Our learning strategists each year recommend a reduced course load for a variety of people, students with exceptional family responsibilities, students with disabilities. There could surely be some exception made here, still, moving forward. But the outcry from Ontario is really about the person working thirty hours a week who wants to take only three or four courses. As sympathetic as I am about student finances, we cannot design a system that condones this practice. I have written before in this space that our system of loans and grants is wrongheaded. Governments in Canada and the United States have thrown at banks and automakers enough money over the past eighteen months to educate a generation of young people. Money is still tight for students. But the fact remains that having ones mind half on school and half on work is no way to get an education. University was intended, and must still be moving forward, a full-time endeavor for most people. Students need the ability to leave class and think about what they have heard and what they have said, not leave class and think about what size shoe the lady just requested from the stockroom. We do everyone involved a disservice by believing that students can work full-time and study full-time and do an adequate job at either thing. There is a role for genuine part-time study, just as there is a role for genuine part-time work.

We must do more to ensure that people can afford to go to school and get enough out of the experience to justify the sacrifices they make. Legislators who fret about the quality of a university education should consider how what compromises they have enabled outside the walls of academe have contributed to the diminishing of the educational experience. And let us hope that they do not cave in to the pressure of short-sighted individuals who oppose structural changes meant, ultimately, to protect the integrity of universities themselves.

Facing The Next Generation

I wrote in this space recently about how difficult it is to face graduate students entering the worst academic job market I have ever seen. Well, I spent three days with a few dozen of them last week, at a conference in Brighton, England. I heard papers from a number of well-established scholars, but it was more heartening to listen to some top-notch work from people just piecing together their doctoral theses. Upbeat? I do not know if I would describe them as upbeat, exactly: they were dedicated to the profession, certainly, and, as it was an international conference, different people were responding to very different circumstances.

In England, post-secondary education could be facing a twenty percent cut in funding. There is talk of closing some institutions, and established scholars will be shown the door. Graduate students in the United Kingdom inherit a very uncertain future.

But the most interesting interaction I had was with a young woman who, the day after I had given my paper, sat next to me in the audience. Having been in England less than a day, and having made the decision not to use an audio-visual component in my presentation, I began by managing their expectations. Essentially, I suggested that I am a modest scholar with, on this day, at least, a modest little argument to make. This humility seemed to have made an impression on the young woman, who explained to me that she had used, in a draft of her thesis, a book chapter I published about a decade ago.

I am always thrilled to be recognized for my work. My enthusiasm was not at all blunted when she told me that she used my chapter in order to disagree with my argument. My head was still spinning when she said, "Now that I met you, I might want to go back and look at it again." Oh, no, I thought. Scholarly debate is a good thing. "You should not be shy about questioning what I had to say," I reassured her. "It's not that I reject what you think," she continued, "but I should be more clear that I am building on what you said."

How civil. In these tough times, we should all be so civil to each other.

David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed In Flames

This latest collection of essays from humorist David Sedaris features more than the requisite number of laugh-out-loud passages. "Solution To Saturday's Puzzle," for example, finds our hero on an airplane next to a young woman who turns angry and coarse when he will not trade seats with her husband. How to demonstrate to everyone around you that you are reasonable and your seatmate is the irrational one? What happens if you then sneeze your cough drop into her lap?

The story most often quoted, a passage from which Sedaris read on Letterman, is probably "Buddy, Can You Spare A Tie," a discussion of various clothing quirks and accessories. If you know how life in a bow tie presents challenges, imagine what happens when you attempt to employ a "Stadium Pal," a mechanism for public urination.

Some of the stories, like "Town And Country," are downright bizarre. Who would guess that there is so much casual vulgarity exchanged between strangers? "Aerial" describes how Kate Bush's last album drove birds in the French countryside to coordinate a Hitchcockian assault on Sedaris's home. The "home" stories with which his readers would be most familiar are those rooted in his childhood, like "The Understudy" and "This Old House," though those written about his domestic life with partner Hugh achieve the same insight: "Keeping Up," "All The Beauty You Will Ever Need," and "Old Faithful" are good examples. Sedaris is best, perhaps, when he highlights his own quirks. "In A Waiting Room" demonstrates how his poor French translates into misadventures abroad, and "April In Paris" chronicles his obsession with spiders. But most poignant are those stories, like "Road Trips," that hint at how it was to grow up gay in the American South.

The book ends strong with "The Smoking Section," a quarter of the text that chronicles Sedaris's quest to quit smoking in Tokyo. Unflinching and uncompromising, the story makes little apology for his habit. He quit, he claims, so he could stay in nice hotels on his travels. Sedaris is expert at showing his readers the exotic, and when combined with a critical eye that often turns the analysis inward, the prose is captivating. But my favorite story is "That's Amore," a longer treatment of Helen, his eccentric old neighbor in New York City. One could write a novel about Helen.

And this is the most interesting point about Sedaris. Some readers have begun to question the veracity of his "autobiographical" content, but such quibbling is fruitless. These stories represent his "truth," and there can be little doubt that they are rooted in fact. The stories emerge as finely crafted as fiction -- and even more true.

Vacation? What Vacation?

University professors, like other educators, spend a lot of time defending their summer activities. "Classes end in April," people say, "so you must enjoy your four months off." The problem, of course, is that summer is filled with committee work, preparation for new classes, and research. When you live in Canada, a country that virtually freezes solid in the winter, summer is also the best chance to get out there and disseminate your research. If you leave for a conference in January, you will be lucky to get back by February. Many years, I encounter snow when I go to autumn conferences.

So, if you do not mind vacationing in places with good libraries, you can combine conference and research travel with a little rest and relaxation. Now, granted, England or the American northeast is not exactly Turks and Caicos, but it can still be a lot of fun. This year, I am giving a paper in Brighton, one of my favorite places in the United Kingdom, and then hitting the books in London and Dublin. Nice work, if you can get it.

But before anyone gets too envious, let us not forget what is necessary in the weeks leading up to departure. Giving a paper, you have to research and write it. I actually dragged home a microfilm reader from my office so I could finish my paper in the evenings. You also have to clear all the pressing projects on your desk -- and prepare those that have to be turned around quickly on your return. But what about the email? I have cleaned out more than one thousand messages over the past ten days, and by putting on my "out of office" message a couple of days early, I have slowed the regular flood to a trickle. I still expect that hundreds will be sitting there when I get back.

One of the other under-acknowledged anomalies of university life is how difficult it is for someone to cover for you. What does not get done while you are away will need to be done, by you, at some point later.

You have to wonder why we leave at all.

Reif Larsen, The Selected Works Of T. S. Spivet

One way to approach The Selected Works Of T. S. Spivet is as an encyclopedia of narrative conventions, new and old. This story of a brilliant "mapboy" from Montana features, for example, the manuscript within a manuscript, as twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow finds and reads his mother's fictional imaginings of their ancestors. This story is read on the road, as our protagonist travels east to Washington, D. C. But the defining characteristic of the text is its hybridity, the illustrations that demonstrate T. S.'s capacity for drawing maps. Readers must alternate between the body of the text and the extensive marginalia. The cartography trope is pervasive; Larsen examines various ways of knowing, determining finally that an intuitive understanding is preferable to a scientific examination of our physical surroundings. While T. S. sketches more than his local geography, finding ways to map processes, it is his mother's writing that remains beyond the realm he can draw, his mother's writing that maintains his sense of wonder once he has tamed his environment.

The first third of the book is, in many ways, the most compelling. The Spivet Family, living on the Coppertop Ranch just south of Butte, presents a fundamental dichotomy. Dad is a rugged rancher; mom is an obsessed scientist. T. S. is, himself, quite different from his sister, who lives a conventional teenaged reality of benign rebellion. Always in the background is the memory of a brother who died in a rifle accident. There are questions whose answers T. S. cannot chart: what relationship has his mother with his mentor, Dr. Terry Yorn? what responsibility has T. S. for Layton's death?

But just as readers sharpen their curiosity about life in Montana, T. S. flees to ride the rails to Washington. Yorn has nominated him for a Fellowship at the Smithsonian, and the trustees award it, not knowing that their favorite new illustrator is pre-pubescent. Our protagonist makes the appropriately reckless decision to tell no one. The "fish out of water" stuff is deferred, though, as we follow T. S. across the country. Brilliant but not particularly resourceful, this young man is no Huck Finn. Larsen can do little but get him into an RV on the flatbed of a train and drag him to Chicago. What, in other books, would be the conflict is underplayed, for the most part, and, when it is central to the plot, it is resolved in unbelievable ways. This is the part of the novel that relies on "Dr. Clair" Spivet's notebook fiction, and it takes some time to build empathy for new characters. By the time T. S. sleeps his way through the final leg to Washington, in the cab of a racist trucker's rig, we are ready for resolution.

T. S. is, like so many people before him, disillusioned in D. C. Administrator Gunther Jibsen, and everything else at the Smithsonian for that matter, is not what T. S. was led to believe. There are some touches, like a secret society, that are either red herrings or, perhaps, central to the plot all along. One wishes that Larsen had left himself more time for this final section. The politics of this book are delicious, lambasting both an unnamed, jingoistic administration and those politically-correct effetes who fail to grasp the true importance of T. S.'s work. But, that said, the lightning-quick resolution feels perfect, and it leaves readers with profound questions: what really happened? and what will?

Mourning Michael Jackson

I was in a hotel room in Edmonton when I heard that Michael Jackson had died. In case this proves to be as significant an event as, say, the death of JFK, people may ask this of us all. I was actually in a hotel room in Edmonton when CNN first reported that he had collapsed and, then, that he was in a coma. The BBC news service soon pronounced him dead, as did TMZ online. CBC Newsworld simulcast the BBC while Perez Hilton, online, proclaimed a hoax that never was.

How different is the media from a dozen years ago when Princess Diana died? I had three channels back then, and no internet at home. CBC broke the news, running in the late evening the stories to which Londoners were just waking up.

I have hundreds of channels now, and, as so many of them are obliged to report on this story, there are many, many ridiculous angles covered. I have no doubt that the outpouring of grief is genuine, but when compared to that afforded his friend Diana, the coverage seems forced, contrived.

How many people mourn Michael Jackson through their own disappointments? How many people see him as one who found his greatest fame when we felt our greatest promise, as individuals and perhaps as a society? How many people lament their own unfulfilled promise, knowing how much more he could have been, and wondering what we might have done? And, I wonder, how many people look back at Michael Jackson and remember a time when everyone, seemingly, shared the same point of reference, a time when everyone knew Thriller?