On Twitter, I follow an adjunct professor from my alma mater, Kutztown University. Recently (actually, always!) she has posted some pretty eye-opening stuff about the way adjunct faculty are treated by major (and not-so-major) universities, both generally and in comparison to full-time faculty. Campus Equity Week is a yearly attempt to call attention to inequities by encouraging faculty to perform numerous activities to draw attention to the plight of the adjunct. This awareness campaign feels particularly relevant right now as our ENC 1101 students are debating the relative merits of social movements.

One “post-ac,” Joe Fruscione, “Storified” his tweets from that week, a process that involves using a third-party website to organize pertinent tweets into a story/timeline. He writes that though “it’s been over a year since [he] left academia for a career as a freelance editor and stay-at-home dad. . .[he has] thoughts about higher ed and adjuncting, which #CEW2015 has brought to the fore.”

I thought that after our discussion tonight regarding the usefulness of a grad writing course focused outside of the academy, and after many discussions about the state of the university in general, this might be interesting to some of you.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s newest New Yorker article, Thresholds of Violence: How school shootings catch on.

Gladwell references a theory first published nearly 40 years ago by sociologist Mark Granovetter.

“Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.”

Gladwell applies this theory to school shootings and says that a lot of kids and young adults who are currently planning and executing mass shootings may actually have pretty high thresholds of violence; that is, they really don’t have an inherent, evil desire to do harm or any real emotional reason to do so. He also gives evidence that at least one of these young people has planned or committed violent/mass shootings as a “symptom” of being on the autism spectrum (!).

The whole thing is fascinating. It makes me wonder, are you more, less, or just as worried as you’ve ever been about encountering a gunman on campus or in the grocery store?

In conferences this week, I found myself repeating to students, “Don’t be afraid to speak up.”

I find this tendency to stay quiet in the classroom comes from a student feeling inadequate, or nervous that they don’t know the “right” answer. I explained that in class discussions, there is no “right” answer, and that we need everyone’s voice to be present in order to take part in our conversation. But upon reading their reflections, I found many had labeled themselves as poor writers when the course started. Thankfully, the students recognized their growth throughout the semester, but this initial self-classification can be dangerous. It can hold up a student’s confidence early in the writing process, before they even put pencil to page.

I recently read an NPR article, “Never Too Late: Creating a Climate for Adults to Learn New Skills,” which discusses creating a growth mindset in the classroom. This moves students beyond self-labelling based on perceived skill level towards considering initiative and effort as the materials for growth. It’s a simple concept, but worth repeating.

The article also discusses taking risks as a teacher. It’s easy to get caught in routines, and to (one day) claim we know what works and what doesn’t in the classroom. Even after half a semester, I can feel myself adopting a specific teaching style and persona, and enacting similar drills and discussion activities. But like my students, I need to continue trying new approaches and taking risks.

In this New Yorker article, “What is College Worth?” John Cassidy considers the value of higher ed. Proponents of expanded access to higher education have often championed its role in meeting overall civic goals — more clergy, more doctors, “better citizens,” — rather than its mere benefits to the individual. Today we often hear about bolstering the economy, boosting productivity by educating the workforce, etc. It’s good for the individual, but we really want to improve the U.S. economy as a whole.

Economist Kenneth Arrow proposed the “screening model” of education that posits college as a sorting or filtering system that provides a series of hurdles a student must pass in order to demonstrate a certain minimum level of mental fitness, the ability to accomplish assigned tasks and sociability.

Certainly there are common assumptions that a college degree 1) is necessary and 2) is a somewhat magical guarantor of future happiness and prosperity. People with college degrees do earn more on average than those without, but why, asks the article, are there so many highly educated adults taking jobs that do not require  higher education?

“Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.”

It seems like a depressing article, but he actually ends on an interesting note:

“Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education.”

There’s a lot to this article and it’s certainly worth a read.