Physics professors at California State University at Long Beach have had remarkable success in turning out physics majors. The university is the largest producer of undergraduate physics degrees among master’s- and bachelor’s-granting institutions in the United States. It’s also above the national average in student diversity. About half of its 60 or so majors in 2019 were Latinx, one-third were female, and one-fifth were women of color.
The department created a peer-tutoring system in which students are trained through a three-credit course in physics pedagogy. And professors reimagined the tutoring center so that it is a regular part of the undergraduate experience, like going to the gym. “The normalizing effect,” Pickett says, “is that everyone is going to have a problem, and eventually everyone is going to be the one with the key insight.”
Those changes have given more students confidence that they can do physics, says Pickett. The peer tutors, for example, look like them and have done well in the given course. So why couldn’t they?
They also added a “B.A. in Physics,” which looks like a nice balance of key math and physics courses and room for exploration.
Peer tutors is something that is done (to a small degree) at my university, but it feels like an “extra help” kind of thing, rather than an integral part of any course. (Attendance hovers at around 6 or 7 out of 300 registered students.)
In addition, I have an ideological knee-jerk reaction to paying undergraduate students to perform instructional work. I’m concerned that departments could quickly become dependent on their relatively cheap labor in place of lecturers or graduate student TAs.
However, this article seems to suggest that peer tutors are brought in more as mentors for ensuring that a sense of community emerges among the students. This sounds like something worth paying for.
Louis Epstein has long been frustrated by grades. Grading systems are somewhat arbitrary, says Epstein, an assistant professor of music at St. Olaf College, “even if we bend over backward to try to make them transparent and objective and fair.” Students, meanwhile, are conditioned to pay a lot of attention to their grades, sometimes at the expense of their learning.
In the beginning, students were anxious about assigning their own grades, Melby says — something I’ve heard from other professors who’ve tried ungrading. They asked questions, Epstein says, like: “How will I know what number I should give myself?” — a reminder that they’re accustomed to external evaluation. Throughout the course, the instructors emphasized that evaluating one’s own work is a useful skill in the professional world.
What isn’t mentioned is how the students’ self assigned grades deviated at all from what Epstein might have given anyway or if his university’s administration had any objections or concerns about ungrading. Still, I’m curious to try this.
[It is] the first book of its kind: one that gives voice to a seething and justified resentment of the academic elite by those teaching at non-elite institutions. Its publication signals that there is now more to be gained than lost by challenging a profession unwilling to acknowledge disparities in “income, power, and prestige.” It speaks to divisions long papered over and suggests that the myriad challenges now faced by faculty at non-elite schools are likely to be visited soon upon those who teach at research universities.
A crucial feature of the still dominant historicist approach to Shakespeare and his world is its insistence on “alienation.” The New Historicism, Daniel Vitkus argues, “sought to reconstruct the past in ways that defined that past as radically different. So much so, that sometimes the perceived strangeness of past cultural practices functioned to disconnect that strange past from the familiar present.” This emphasis on alienation may work brilliantly in Ivy League classrooms, but, as many of the contributors to this volume — almost all of them trained in this methodology — have come to discover, “the hermeneutics of suspicion” fares less well at schools where most students come from working-class backgrounds.
This makes me wonder how much the ideas, debates, and perspectives in which graduates of the “central” anthropology departments (and their students) are immersed are failing to land with students they teach at non-elite institutions.
On one chapter by Denise Albanese:
Her mostly first-generation students have worked hard to get where they are, and often bring to the classroom a “naive” predisposition — one that we all began with at some point in our reading experience: a desire to identify with literary characters, to think of them as real people. She concludes that her students are “not necessarily well-served by our insisting on disenchanting the literary object.”
How does this translate to the teaching of anthropology? Perhaps if anthropology is failing to connect with students, then this may not be just a failure to make it more “accessible” but that the theoretical underpinnings of the version of anthropology we present don’t speak to them.
Continuing with my recent data experiments, I’ve produced a new graphic which visually displays which anthropology departments in the US (with a handful from the UK and Canada) produce the most graduates, and in which universities those graduates end up. I think of it as showing which universities tend to exercise the most power in defining what counts as cultural anthropology in the US, and in what institutions they exercise that power.
In the graphic below, the blue dots each represent one university. The size of the dot is proportional to the number of dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology” that university produced. The gray lines connect the institution where the supervisor received their Ph.D. to the institution where their supervisee received their Ph.D. In other words, each line represents one dissertation, and connects the supervisor’s Ph.D. granting institution with the student’s.
This covers the majority of dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology” (which includes some from ethnomusicology, folklore, and a few other fields) from my ProQuest data, which contains supervisor data for dissertations from about 1988, and institution data to much further back.
The universities are roughly divided into four groups. The group in the vertical row at the top are those with highest number of Ph.D. graduates supervising dissertations in cultural anthropology. This includes the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Cornell, Indiana, Penn, UCLA, Washington, UT Austin, Northwestern, and Yale.
The group with the next highest number is the column to the middle-right. This group is notable because it includes LSE, Cambridge, and Oxford, which are the only non-US universities in the top two groups. This is followed by the group to the middle left. This is where our friends in theology and missiology seem to be concentrated. The circle at the bottom are universities which had the fewest number of graduates supervising Ph.D.s, usually zero.
The full-size graphic, where the text labels are all legible and the arrowheads (which show which university is sending a graduate to which one as a supervising staff member) is too large to post, but even with this smaller graphic, it’s possible to see a number of interesting (but expected patterns).
One is the sheer level at which the most prolific universities hire their own. The large fan-shaped patterns coming out of the topmost group are supervisors at those institutions that received their own Ph.Ds at those institutions. These patterns do not hold seem to hold as strongly at other levels.
Another pattern is the density of lateral connections among members of the topmost group. This isn’t unexpected, but it highlights the extent to which if you’ve attended any one of these universities, you’re within a tightly knit community that includes all of them, regardless of your specialization within anthropology.
Perhaps most obvious is the density of connections between the top group and every other group on the map. This speaks to the again unsurprising fact that a certain group of universities will tend to have graduates everywhere, while the majority of other schools will produce PhDs, but tend not to be able to place them within the same field if at all.
Attention to the lines can reveal some things that might be interesting to explore further. For instance, there is a dense bundle of lines between the University of Oregon (in the second group) and the University of San Francisco (in the fourth). This probably comes down to one or two super prolific supervisors, but it would be worth looking to see if there is anything more to the connection. Another similar bundle exists between Cornell and Temple University.
What this particular image doesn’t show well is that some institutions in the “lower tiers” actually seem to have a tremendous influence on the higher ones. This usually goes from the major British universities to the top American ones: LSE and Cambridge especially, but also Oxford. Unfortunately, thesis data for the UK is kept in another database that I’ve not yet had the chance to explore, so I don’t know if this relationship goes both ways. I suspect it doesn’t.
A project that I’ve been working on from time to time for the past five years is to look for patterns in large quantities of anthropology-related data that I scrape from the web. You can see some of my past experiments on this stuff here.
Since overhauling this website, I’ve decided to revisit one of these projects, which looks at anthropology dissertation metadata from the Proquest database. The data I’ve collected includes just over 17,000 records for Ph.D. dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology.” The records include the title, the author, the year of publication, and the institution. Newer records include abstracts and supervisor (or committee) names. The data is US-centric (ProQuest gets their dissertation data from the Library of Congress), although most Canadian universities are included, as well as a few from other countries.
If you scan the records to find the universities with the largest number of anthropology dissertations, the names that appear are not that surprising. Universities with large and old departments, like the University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, and UC Berkeley top the list. (You can see one of my older visualizations of dissertation numbers by institution on the project page.)
Recently, I went back to the data to try and figure out other ways to think about which universities were responsible for defining what anthropology in the US. I decided to look not just for universities that produced a lot of anthropology dissertations, but also those that produced students who also supervised dissertations in anthropology. In other words, which universities are most successfully reproducing anthropologists?
The list is mostly the same as the one for the straight count of most dissertations, except for one major difference. A place called Fuller Theological Seminary in California has produced at least seven PhDs who each went on to advise at least one student who also wrote a dissertation in cultural anthropology. This makes Fuller more central to the reproduction of cultural anthropology (at least according to this measure) than UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, Brown, MIT, McGill, Michigan State, the New School, Princeton, Rutgers, and a few other famous names.
Before this, I had never heard of Fuller, but Wikipedia tells me that it is a “a multidenominational Christian evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California, with regional campuses in the western United States. The seminary has 2,897 students from 90 countries and 110 denominations.”
Clicking through to their website, I arrived at a description of their PhD program in Intercultural Studies which appears to be where anthropology is taught at Fuller. I don’t know anything more about what Fuller teaches, but the webpage suggests that the degree is focused on missiology, “a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural field of study” that examines “the nature of missionary work.” (Wikipedia says that in Europe, missiology is known as “intercultural theology.” This sounds like something anthropology would be useful in, and explains why Fuller is not alone in my data as a theology school in producing anthropology dissertations.
