There was an important article by Mel Cappe, former Clerk of the Privy Council about the importance of analysis in public policy. it also goes with the article I referred to Wednesday about Cass Sunstein (Link here), which talks about how Sunstein imagines the possibility of really making a difference in people lives through the design of "choice architecture".
I thought this line from Mel Cappe's piece was good and important:
The importance of ideas and analysis has never been greater. How should we present complex issues for elected officials, mere mortals all, to come to grips with? Simplification can be trivializing, and it misses the subtlety in both challenges and solutions. The answer lies in building evidence and expertise into the process.
It's not always easy to understand what kind of expertise is needed in public policy, or within government. In most cases you don't need a PhD in an area to understand the basic mechanics and problems at hand and even come up with solutions. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that politicians should be overriding a nuclear safety commission, (at least on a regular basis) without at least some good analysis.
He also points to the big challenge underlying the current situation in the public service:
Even with robust supply, however, there is inadequate demand. Ministers should be demandeurs of public-service expertise, requesting analysis and evidence, options and alternatives. But who needs evidence and expertise when you have ideology?
There are serious questions however about the role of the public service in providing advice, given the multitude of sources available to everyone. What is the role of in-house experts when you can find a ton of information a simple google search away? This is easier in some areas to justify than in others. I believe that there needs to be some serious thinking about how the public service policy function is exercised, and a rethink of its role.
This points to two separate questions. One is how the policy function is carried out, how it is organized. You could call this the plumbing and mechanics. The second is more about the role. You could call this the what, or the substance. I think the rising nature of horizontal challenges, and also problems which ignore disciplinary boundaries point to the need for better collaboration, where teams of people with different expertise can come together and really think a problem through. This is needed to break down silos. Even if such exercises were merely to identify issues and challenges rather than implement solutions they would be welcome and useful.
It's interesting to read David Brooks, because he's obviously someone who is quite intelligent, but it is frustrating to see him denigrate people who have expertise. While he might argue that he's disparaging the "certainty" that bureaucrats or technocrats have in their analysis, it often comes across as bashing expertise. This is the external challenge, people are increasingly skeptical of expertise, and lord knows there are a litany of failures in forecasting, and in dealing with problems. The alternative can't be ignorance or ideology, which won't help explain real problems so that we can do better.
This faith that government has a role to play and also that analysis is important appears in some ways to be what differentiates those who believe the in the "liberal" or welfare state from conservatives and libertarians. I'm not sure I would frame it quit the same way, but this article points to the difference between the liberal state and the watchman state.
In my estimation even a limited state, would be better prepared in the areas it did intervene if it had good analysis and a good sense of what it is trying to achieve.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Big short
So I'm not expert in finance and the business of Wall Street. I already knew that, but it wasn't until I had almost finished the complicated and convoluted story that Michael Lewis covers in the Big short that I finally got the title. This is not to say that it isn't a great book, it really is. it's simply to say that the world of finance has its own language, pace of events and opaqueness.
In fact this opaqueness ifs a main part of the story in The Big Short. I won't ruin it for those who haven't read it, but the essential story is about a group of characters , who discover the rot at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. and decide to short the market. End result, they were right, even though nobody believed them. Everyone else was wrong. But the one point that comes out strongly in the afterword, is that essentially both sides of the bet got rich. No one who was truly responsible for destroying large chunks of the real economy through their fancy manipulation has been held accountable.
For anyone who believes that it was the borrowers who were the problem, I suggest you read this book, and think again. It's hard to even come up with words to describe how crazy the whole thing is, and the lack of due diligence done on the part of the banks. One of the characters at the centre of Lewis' story calls the subprime market the doomsday machine.
What's the saying? ," if I owe you thousands of dollars, good for you, but if I owe you millions, watch out". Something along those lines. I honestly don't know how people could imagine that lending over 700K to someone who makes $12,000 a year is good for anyone. I find it unbelievable that people could overlook the fact that even if they can pay the "teaser" rate for two years, that the real crisis will hit when interest rates reset. This insight is in part what allowed these traders to bet against the market, basically to bet that all hell would break loose and they were right.
What Lewis is so good at achieving is the unbelievable nature of what happens to all parties. Even those betting against the market, can't believe that it is being allowed to happen, that no-one else sees the disaster coming, and that so many people are on the wrong side of the bet.
I was listening to a podcast of Planet Money which jokes about having 4th graders read contracts, to see how much they understand. What was amazing was that someone had taken the effort to redesign a privacy notice into simple language that even these kids could understand. It was amazing how much they were able to understand when it was presented clearly. I'm a big fan of the new rules on credit cards we have here in Canada which force companies to post how long it would take to pay off the bill if you only paid the minimum. One recent bill said 17 years!
I read the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein (recent profile in the NYtimes here and Richard Thaler during graduate school and I did find some elements of it really interesting. What I like about this approach is that it is very practical. The approach examines a problem and says, are there ways in which we can encourage people to behave in a way that's in their interest. There is a section that talks about how to make people understand the complicated contracts that are part of modern day life, such as cell phones. Providing examples to people of how things will affect them, make a lot of sense. Building this into regulation is actually a way of encouraging market forces and ensuring they work better.
The credit card example demonstrates the power of information as a policy instrument, which is often overlooked, but in the right situation can be a powerful and relatively cheap way of achieving real results. I think this is one thing that the open data people have right. Information can be powerful.
NB: I'm going to attempt to post twice a week as of today, *fingers crossed*
In fact this opaqueness ifs a main part of the story in The Big Short. I won't ruin it for those who haven't read it, but the essential story is about a group of characters , who discover the rot at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. and decide to short the market. End result, they were right, even though nobody believed them. Everyone else was wrong. But the one point that comes out strongly in the afterword, is that essentially both sides of the bet got rich. No one who was truly responsible for destroying large chunks of the real economy through their fancy manipulation has been held accountable.
For anyone who believes that it was the borrowers who were the problem, I suggest you read this book, and think again. It's hard to even come up with words to describe how crazy the whole thing is, and the lack of due diligence done on the part of the banks. One of the characters at the centre of Lewis' story calls the subprime market the doomsday machine.
What's the saying? ," if I owe you thousands of dollars, good for you, but if I owe you millions, watch out". Something along those lines. I honestly don't know how people could imagine that lending over 700K to someone who makes $12,000 a year is good for anyone. I find it unbelievable that people could overlook the fact that even if they can pay the "teaser" rate for two years, that the real crisis will hit when interest rates reset. This insight is in part what allowed these traders to bet against the market, basically to bet that all hell would break loose and they were right.
What Lewis is so good at achieving is the unbelievable nature of what happens to all parties. Even those betting against the market, can't believe that it is being allowed to happen, that no-one else sees the disaster coming, and that so many people are on the wrong side of the bet.
I was listening to a podcast of Planet Money which jokes about having 4th graders read contracts, to see how much they understand. What was amazing was that someone had taken the effort to redesign a privacy notice into simple language that even these kids could understand. It was amazing how much they were able to understand when it was presented clearly. I'm a big fan of the new rules on credit cards we have here in Canada which force companies to post how long it would take to pay off the bill if you only paid the minimum. One recent bill said 17 years!
I read the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein (recent profile in the NYtimes here and Richard Thaler during graduate school and I did find some elements of it really interesting. What I like about this approach is that it is very practical. The approach examines a problem and says, are there ways in which we can encourage people to behave in a way that's in their interest. There is a section that talks about how to make people understand the complicated contracts that are part of modern day life, such as cell phones. Providing examples to people of how things will affect them, make a lot of sense. Building this into regulation is actually a way of encouraging market forces and ensuring they work better.
The credit card example demonstrates the power of information as a policy instrument, which is often overlooked, but in the right situation can be a powerful and relatively cheap way of achieving real results. I think this is one thing that the open data people have right. Information can be powerful.
NB: I'm going to attempt to post twice a week as of today, *fingers crossed*
Saturday, March 19, 2011
A follow-up on the role of universities
I thought I'd follow-up on a previous post on university before moving on to other topics.
There have been a few recent articles about the value of education. Paul Krugman wrote an article claiming that there is increasing danger of outsourcing even jobs requiring education if they can be easily done by computer or for cheaper overseas. A recent podcast on Onpoint , also started to question the wisdom of "College for all". Here one of the commenters suggested that in fact the difference between the stable jobs and those that face bleaker prospects, was the degree to which the job was "offshorable".
It's something I've thought about as well in terms of the push within the culture towards getting higher and higher levels of university education.
The data on this is interesting, as the "gap" that Canada faces is in getting people to pursue Phds, and also in business education. There is some data that compares business managers in Canada to those in the U.S and shows that they are less educated in general and much less likely to have an MBA. This is the empirical basis for the Canadian government's decision to focus expanded funding on business education in a recent budget.
The other interesting thing revealed in the data is that the Quebec system of Cegeps makes data comparison difficult. Cegeps count as post secondary education which they may or may not be, but pump Canada's statistics , and making it difficult to evaluate the claim that Canada has the highest level of post-secondary education in the world.
There is a deeper issue around university education. It comes down to the role of the University and there are competing understanding of it. To some extent people view it as an elitist activity, and this is driving concerns about bringing that kind of education to the masses. You won't hear many explicitly make this argument but it is hidden underneath concerns about quality and about the dumbing down of the university.
An additional concern is whether the role of the University is to train people for jobs or whether it is to educate and create citizens. These are completely opposing views and proponents offer very different perspectives. On the training side, they push the current model of supporting extensive (and expensive) business schools, engineering schools and focusing on research. On the other side, you have those who want to focus on the humanities, basic science research and a focus on teaching. It isn't clear how to reconcile these two models. Perhaps there is no need to reconcile them, but perhaps change the balance.
I think the answer is to reinforce technical training outside the university while maintaining the role of universities in more of the humanities / basic science areas. This would allow technical colleges to be more entrepreneurial and attract private funds and work with industry while avoiding some of the dangers that corporate influence could have in a more academic setting. The CEGEP model which exists in Quebec is one possibility, as is the move in British Columbia towards polytechnic institutes.
There have been a few recent articles about the value of education. Paul Krugman wrote an article claiming that there is increasing danger of outsourcing even jobs requiring education if they can be easily done by computer or for cheaper overseas. A recent podcast on Onpoint , also started to question the wisdom of "College for all". Here one of the commenters suggested that in fact the difference between the stable jobs and those that face bleaker prospects, was the degree to which the job was "offshorable".
It's something I've thought about as well in terms of the push within the culture towards getting higher and higher levels of university education.
The data on this is interesting, as the "gap" that Canada faces is in getting people to pursue Phds, and also in business education. There is some data that compares business managers in Canada to those in the U.S and shows that they are less educated in general and much less likely to have an MBA. This is the empirical basis for the Canadian government's decision to focus expanded funding on business education in a recent budget.
The other interesting thing revealed in the data is that the Quebec system of Cegeps makes data comparison difficult. Cegeps count as post secondary education which they may or may not be, but pump Canada's statistics , and making it difficult to evaluate the claim that Canada has the highest level of post-secondary education in the world.
There is a deeper issue around university education. It comes down to the role of the University and there are competing understanding of it. To some extent people view it as an elitist activity, and this is driving concerns about bringing that kind of education to the masses. You won't hear many explicitly make this argument but it is hidden underneath concerns about quality and about the dumbing down of the university.
An additional concern is whether the role of the University is to train people for jobs or whether it is to educate and create citizens. These are completely opposing views and proponents offer very different perspectives. On the training side, they push the current model of supporting extensive (and expensive) business schools, engineering schools and focusing on research. On the other side, you have those who want to focus on the humanities, basic science research and a focus on teaching. It isn't clear how to reconcile these two models. Perhaps there is no need to reconcile them, but perhaps change the balance.
I think the answer is to reinforce technical training outside the university while maintaining the role of universities in more of the humanities / basic science areas. This would allow technical colleges to be more entrepreneurial and attract private funds and work with industry while avoiding some of the dangers that corporate influence could have in a more academic setting. The CEGEP model which exists in Quebec is one possibility, as is the move in British Columbia towards polytechnic institutes.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
A response to Andrew Potter
This is a response to this article by Andrew Potter, which suggests that Parliament is failing and the Liberal party in particular is not doing its job as the Official Opposition.
He wrote:
What this means is that the job of an MP is itself pretty frigging simple. The House of Commons has two main jobs: Make a government, and hold it to account. It does this Siskel & Ebert style, by giving thumbs up (offering support) or thumbs down (withdrawing confidence). Literally everything else a non-government MP does is either an embellishment of this function (e.g. sitting on committees) or a distraction from it (the much-vaunted “constituency work”). The key benefit of this simplicity is that it makes the lines of accountability crystal clear. The government does stuff, the rest of the House holds it to account. At election time, voters can decide how they feel about it.
My main criticism is that it’s not as easy as he suggests to clearly understand the role of MPs in our system. A recent report by the organization Samarra report was entitled: Welcome to Parliament: A Job With No Description suggests as much. It is based on research done through MP exit interviews and as the title suggests it points out the difficulty in defining the role of MPs, given their various responsibilities to constituents, their party, their leader, etc..Andrew Potter's suggestion that he knows what the role of an MP is, raises my eyebrows given that MPS themselves don't seem to agree fully.
(NB:I haven't yet read the report myself, but I heard a talk about it on The Agenda)
Now perhaps it is easier to define the role of the opposition, but I see just as much conflict in their role, given their responsibility of "opposing" but also presenting an alternative to the government and also holding them accountable.
His main complaint in some ways seems to be that they didn't follow his advice, a few weeks back which suggested that the Liberals should withdraw confidence continually until Bev Oda resigned or they forced an election.
Partly I think this response is based in the weakness of the Liberal party right now, and I think the biggest problem the Liberals face is not having a strong sense of grassroots support. Their traditional role as the “natural governing party’ enabled them to circumvent the need for grassroots support because they exercised the traditional patronage appointments and the trappings of power, but since Trudeau destroyed the Liberal brand in Western Canada, and their traditional areas of support are under attack by Conservatives (particularly the ethnic constituencies). This coupled with their slow response to changes in the financing of political parties has removed their fundraising advantage.
However a talk this week got me thinking about the other aspect to this, is that Potter's argument highlights the interesting, but difficult nature of a Westminster Parliament. I went to a talk this week entitled " which was bout the changing nature of the Westminster Parliamentary system. It was a reminder of some of the academic discussions which are going on about our system, and the "three moving parts", Parliament, the Public Service and the political executive (or what we commonly call "the government", i.e the PM and cabinet)
The talk highlighted one of the difficulties of a system built on convention, which is that it only works as long as there are shared conceptions and understandings, and as these break down, the system doesn't work as well.
This notion of share understanding is key to where I think Potter's argument falls down. If everyone agreed on the rules that he asserts, it would be easy. However in Canada we are in a period of flux, where these traditional conventions are breaking down. If the Conservatives invoke cabinet solidarity and defend actions that in the past might not have been defended, it changes the shared understandings and conventions.
While the talk presented some interesting thoughts on the common challenges faced by Westminster systems across the world, notably, Canada, the U.K. Australia and New Zealand and how each of the system is adapting to these challenges.
It was pointed out that Canada seems to be the country that lurches more from change to change, rather than slowly adapting, as the U.K. and Australia and to a certain extent New Zealand does as well though they radically changed their electoral system in the early 1990s and adopted at MMP proportional representation system.
In this context it was interesting to see that in response to the changes brought about by increased political fragmentation (interesting this is the first time that there is a minority government across all four countries) and the breaking down of conventions, New Zealand has actually written out a book codifying in one place an understanding of the Westminster system. I believe Australia has also done so, while the U.K. is also embarked on a similar project, which fascinatingly enough is being done by their Clerk.
Perhaps this is what we need to establish the ground rules, which would help the opposition better understand their role, and perhaps also the role of MPs.
He wrote:
What this means is that the job of an MP is itself pretty frigging simple. The House of Commons has two main jobs: Make a government, and hold it to account. It does this Siskel & Ebert style, by giving thumbs up (offering support) or thumbs down (withdrawing confidence). Literally everything else a non-government MP does is either an embellishment of this function (e.g. sitting on committees) or a distraction from it (the much-vaunted “constituency work”). The key benefit of this simplicity is that it makes the lines of accountability crystal clear. The government does stuff, the rest of the House holds it to account. At election time, voters can decide how they feel about it.
My main criticism is that it’s not as easy as he suggests to clearly understand the role of MPs in our system. A recent report by the organization Samarra report was entitled: Welcome to Parliament: A Job With No Description suggests as much. It is based on research done through MP exit interviews and as the title suggests it points out the difficulty in defining the role of MPs, given their various responsibilities to constituents, their party, their leader, etc..Andrew Potter's suggestion that he knows what the role of an MP is, raises my eyebrows given that MPS themselves don't seem to agree fully.
(NB:I haven't yet read the report myself, but I heard a talk about it on The Agenda)
Now perhaps it is easier to define the role of the opposition, but I see just as much conflict in their role, given their responsibility of "opposing" but also presenting an alternative to the government and also holding them accountable.
His main complaint in some ways seems to be that they didn't follow his advice, a few weeks back which suggested that the Liberals should withdraw confidence continually until Bev Oda resigned or they forced an election.
Partly I think this response is based in the weakness of the Liberal party right now, and I think the biggest problem the Liberals face is not having a strong sense of grassroots support. Their traditional role as the “natural governing party’ enabled them to circumvent the need for grassroots support because they exercised the traditional patronage appointments and the trappings of power, but since Trudeau destroyed the Liberal brand in Western Canada, and their traditional areas of support are under attack by Conservatives (particularly the ethnic constituencies). This coupled with their slow response to changes in the financing of political parties has removed their fundraising advantage.
However a talk this week got me thinking about the other aspect to this, is that Potter's argument highlights the interesting, but difficult nature of a Westminster Parliament. I went to a talk this week entitled " which was bout the changing nature of the Westminster Parliamentary system. It was a reminder of some of the academic discussions which are going on about our system, and the "three moving parts", Parliament, the Public Service and the political executive (or what we commonly call "the government", i.e the PM and cabinet)
The talk highlighted one of the difficulties of a system built on convention, which is that it only works as long as there are shared conceptions and understandings, and as these break down, the system doesn't work as well.
This notion of share understanding is key to where I think Potter's argument falls down. If everyone agreed on the rules that he asserts, it would be easy. However in Canada we are in a period of flux, where these traditional conventions are breaking down. If the Conservatives invoke cabinet solidarity and defend actions that in the past might not have been defended, it changes the shared understandings and conventions.
While the talk presented some interesting thoughts on the common challenges faced by Westminster systems across the world, notably, Canada, the U.K. Australia and New Zealand and how each of the system is adapting to these challenges.
It was pointed out that Canada seems to be the country that lurches more from change to change, rather than slowly adapting, as the U.K. and Australia and to a certain extent New Zealand does as well though they radically changed their electoral system in the early 1990s and adopted at MMP proportional representation system.
In this context it was interesting to see that in response to the changes brought about by increased political fragmentation (interesting this is the first time that there is a minority government across all four countries) and the breaking down of conventions, New Zealand has actually written out a book codifying in one place an understanding of the Westminster system. I believe Australia has also done so, while the U.K. is also embarked on a similar project, which fascinatingly enough is being done by their Clerk.
Perhaps this is what we need to establish the ground rules, which would help the opposition better understand their role, and perhaps also the role of MPs.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
What is the role of the University?
I was listening to a podcast from Australia the other day about the role of universities and whether they should be teaching a course on practical ethics, and while the discussion was interesting to me, the most interesting aspect was about the role and function of the university.
First, I find it really interesting to listen to these Australian podcasts which I do only intermittently, because they show that many of the same issues are being faced but seen through a different lens and perspective, which can often be enlightening. They also get a lot of good U.S. speakers so it’s not that different at times from listening to them speak on the CBC or NPR. The two issues that I find most interesting (and the ones where Canada shows up explicitly most often) are the constitutional stuff, particularly when they talk about having a charter of rights as Canada does, and Australia does, and Aboriginal issues, where they discusses issues such as their own apology for the stealing of Aboriginal children.
Back the main topic of universities. Despite being out of university, or perhaps at a point now where I can look back with a touch of perspective, I am interesting in questions about the role of the university. I am interesting particularly in the debate surrounding the difference between training and education. This podcast talked at length about the need for universities to play a role in educating people and shaping values.
It’s an interesting idea and one that I agree with but that some may find controversial. I find it interesting that the side of technical training is winning, especially as someone point out in the lecture, given the amount of technical change expected, how useful is it to have specific skills? Particularly as was brought up, given the fact that current students can expect to have a huge number of different jobs ( he suggested 29), in industries that don’t currently exist over their lifetime. I’ve heard often, but not sure where the data comes from that suggests that the specific technical learning an engineer goes through is obsolete five years after they leave school.
Where then does this leave the university? There is increasing pressure and funding for science research, for business schools, for engineering schools, for professional degrees. There is increasing focus on the need for commercialization, for patents, for research. This means there is less focus on teaching, and on the social sciences and humanities.
I would argue that there is some awareness that there is a need for a broader ‘education’ that goes beyond technical training, and that there must be way to combine elements of both. I have heard the president of U of A talk about how in her native India there is a need to reinforce the social sciences side of education, as there is such prestige attached to engineering and business schools it’s crowding the other stuff out, and that that is what is needed today in India.
One presenter who worked on legal policy, which he said encompasses tricky ethical issues at times, spoke of the fact that lawyers were no good at providing that synthesis, all encompassing perspective, that they focused on the mechanics to the exclusion of other elements, while economists were worse, retreating into their models which did not reflect the reality of the situation. He noticed that it was historians, those who deal with the study of people, who were often good at connecting the issues at the kind of analysis it required. This isn’t to say that we don’t need lawyers or economists (though I’m not a big fan of economists), but that in some situations it’s not technical specialists we need to think things through.
I was shocked and surprised (perhaps it’s my idealism getting in the way) at the level of indifference and frankly incompetence of other students I saw during my M.A. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I found a level of challenge and discussion below my fourth year undergrad courses, or even my third year undergrad. I saw the worst presentation (and several that were close) of my entire university career during those 2 years. Almost everyone was there for the credential alone. The grades were inflated beyond belief.
The university school had been given extra resources in that first year, based on signing up additional graduate students, and my specific program was targeted for an increased number of students. Coupled with the Ontario “Double Cohort” and you had classes bursting at the seams. Graduate level courses of 30 people, lowered standards and inflated grades, those were the hallmarks of my graduate experience. I don’t want to generalize too much, but if this is the case elsewhere than there are big problems.
For those after more info; after writing this I found an interesting article for Stanley Fish in the NYtimes here
First, I find it really interesting to listen to these Australian podcasts which I do only intermittently, because they show that many of the same issues are being faced but seen through a different lens and perspective, which can often be enlightening. They also get a lot of good U.S. speakers so it’s not that different at times from listening to them speak on the CBC or NPR. The two issues that I find most interesting (and the ones where Canada shows up explicitly most often) are the constitutional stuff, particularly when they talk about having a charter of rights as Canada does, and Australia does, and Aboriginal issues, where they discusses issues such as their own apology for the stealing of Aboriginal children.
Back the main topic of universities. Despite being out of university, or perhaps at a point now where I can look back with a touch of perspective, I am interesting in questions about the role of the university. I am interesting particularly in the debate surrounding the difference between training and education. This podcast talked at length about the need for universities to play a role in educating people and shaping values.
It’s an interesting idea and one that I agree with but that some may find controversial. I find it interesting that the side of technical training is winning, especially as someone point out in the lecture, given the amount of technical change expected, how useful is it to have specific skills? Particularly as was brought up, given the fact that current students can expect to have a huge number of different jobs ( he suggested 29), in industries that don’t currently exist over their lifetime. I’ve heard often, but not sure where the data comes from that suggests that the specific technical learning an engineer goes through is obsolete five years after they leave school.
Where then does this leave the university? There is increasing pressure and funding for science research, for business schools, for engineering schools, for professional degrees. There is increasing focus on the need for commercialization, for patents, for research. This means there is less focus on teaching, and on the social sciences and humanities.
I would argue that there is some awareness that there is a need for a broader ‘education’ that goes beyond technical training, and that there must be way to combine elements of both. I have heard the president of U of A talk about how in her native India there is a need to reinforce the social sciences side of education, as there is such prestige attached to engineering and business schools it’s crowding the other stuff out, and that that is what is needed today in India.
One presenter who worked on legal policy, which he said encompasses tricky ethical issues at times, spoke of the fact that lawyers were no good at providing that synthesis, all encompassing perspective, that they focused on the mechanics to the exclusion of other elements, while economists were worse, retreating into their models which did not reflect the reality of the situation. He noticed that it was historians, those who deal with the study of people, who were often good at connecting the issues at the kind of analysis it required. This isn’t to say that we don’t need lawyers or economists (though I’m not a big fan of economists), but that in some situations it’s not technical specialists we need to think things through.
I was shocked and surprised (perhaps it’s my idealism getting in the way) at the level of indifference and frankly incompetence of other students I saw during my M.A. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I found a level of challenge and discussion below my fourth year undergrad courses, or even my third year undergrad. I saw the worst presentation (and several that were close) of my entire university career during those 2 years. Almost everyone was there for the credential alone. The grades were inflated beyond belief.
The university school had been given extra resources in that first year, based on signing up additional graduate students, and my specific program was targeted for an increased number of students. Coupled with the Ontario “Double Cohort” and you had classes bursting at the seams. Graduate level courses of 30 people, lowered standards and inflated grades, those were the hallmarks of my graduate experience. I don’t want to generalize too much, but if this is the case elsewhere than there are big problems.
For those after more info; after writing this I found an interesting article for Stanley Fish in the NYtimes here
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