(Advance warning: this post is far longer than I originally intended.)

Photo: Me and Wendy Maxian, Ph.D., my first doctoral advisee. Often overworked, I hope she never felt like a “disposable academic.”

Setting aside family, my doctoral program represents the single greatest experience in my life.

No experience before Indiana allowed me to singleminded, obsessive stalk that which I loved most, and although I adore being a professor, it’s just not the same.

For four years I chased intellectual pursuits with abandon. I worked with mentors who may have peers but have no superiors.

This experience allowed me to become who I am. I miss it often, and if I won the lottery tomorrow, there’s better than even odds that I’d show up in Bloomington tomorrow looking for another Ph.D.

lt is about the journey

If the fascists win out and higher education were abolished tomorrow, I’d have to find a nonacademic job. Even if that occurs, I’ll never regret my doctoral program.

A former colleague this week asked me about the value of a Ph.D. after reading this article, titled, “The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time,” in The Economist.

OK, so the author, whose name I am not clever enough to find does say “often.” And sensations headlines garner clicks. But this piece fundamentally misses so many points.

Uniquely your program

Although a vast variety of fields offer the degree titled doctor of philosophy, no two are equal. That’s for two reasons. First the practical reason.

As a faculty member, I attend commencement exercises frequently. As much of the “warm up” speeches by university officials rarely change, my mind often drifts to the commencement program. I enjoy reading titles of graduating doctoral students’ dissertations.

Being quite the outsider, some titles amuse me. Many — especially those in the “hard” sciences and engineering — I cannot even pronounce or decipher the titles. The technical jargon doesn’t make sense.

Some background reading

Common denominators exist. At Texas Tech, for instance, all doctoral students must pass qualifying exams following their coursework and before the dissertation. The content obviously varies, but even the format varies fundamentally.

Some departments, such as my own, require in camera (closed-book) exams. As a doctoral student, the process slightly terrified me. However, some of us believe that to qualify to write a doctoral dissertation, one should be able to demonstrate both breadth and depth of the subject matter without resources.

Others disagree, focusing primarily upon the quality of work that can be accomplished with time. Some programs, for instance, provide students two weeks to respond to each question (there are often four, but I have no data to support that this is the most frequent). Clearly faculty hold much higher expectations in these instances, and they are looking for a different skill set.

So various faculties even administer a common structural feature differently.

From here, the process differs wildly. In truth, although I hold a joint doctoral degree in mass communication and cognitive science, I have no idea what a dissertation requires in the humanities or, say, physics.

Everyone says that humanities dissertations can stretch more than 1,000 pages. I also have heard accounts of a mathematics dissertation containing fewer than 40 pages. For reference, I just looked. Mine was 200 pages on the nose (plus 17 pages of front matter and 6 pages of academic resume that are not numbered).

Comparing academic disciplines, then, truly does represent comparing apples and oranges.

The facts of academic life

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, 19.1% of the population held a bachelor’s degree, and 10.% had an advanced degree in 2008. Although I cannot find the exact data, according to this table, earned master’s degrees outnumber earned doctoral degrees in 2007 by about 10:1 (i.e., 604,607 earned master’s degrees in 2007 compared to 60,616 earned doctoral degrees).

This coincides with the general wisdom that I’ve always heard, about 1% of the U.S. population holds a doctorate (i.e., if approximately 10% of the population holds a master’s degree, and 10 master’s are granted for every doctoral degree, it follows that about 1% hold a doctorate).

But is 1% too many? The Economist claims:

There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

But is this true? As you may have guessed by now, it varies widely by discipline.

Public relations case study

Within my broader field of mass communication, this quotation is unequivocally false.

Interest in the Watergate scandal and other social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s drove undergraduates toward journalism in great numbers. Over time, especially recently, these undergraduate have shifted toward advertising (my own department) and public relations. Yet mass communication undergraduate enrollment remains strong.

In particular, public relations enrollments exploded during the past 15 years. Yet few students earning those bachelor’s degrees in public relations went on to graduate school. Demand to teach these courses surged, but supply simply didn’t exist. In that timeframe, the number of universities and colleges seeking to hire public relations faculty grossly outnumbered the number of people receiving doctoral degrees in that branch of mass communication.

During my first academic year at Tech, 2006-2007, one practically could not hire a public relations professor at any price.

Myriad causes underly the shortage. As an academic discipline, public relations is nascent. Thus the establishment simply has not existed to grind out the numbers. Before the current recession, the best graduates picked from top jobs, which all pay far more than graduate student stipends. And the ugly truth about many (but by no means all) mass communication students is that they’re running from math.

Advertising and public relations typically require fewer math courses than marketing, so we pick up too many “majors” this way. When I talk to otherwise outstanding undergraduates about graduate school, this “bad at math” problem frequently surfaces. Most graduate programs require some quantitative method coursework, and the Graduate Record Exam includes an intense quantitative section.

The field evolves, the recession nixed many positions with hiring freezes, and supply comes closer each year to meeting demand. But if you’re a dynamite doctoral student in public relations, you’re in a great place. Advertising remains only a half step behind as a seller’s market.

So why the difference?

You get what you pay for

Pardon the cliché, but it applies here. For most professions, the truism holds: the more “fun” a job is, the less it pays.

Which would you rather do with your time? Do someone’s corporate income tax or write stories about sporting events. Most people pick the latter, and that’s why accountants make much more than sports reporters.

Many of my students want to go into sports marketing or promotion. Although it is my job to help them achieve their dreams, I always try to point out that these types of positions typically pay far less than corporate equivalents. Simply put, it’s a lot more fun promoting the Dallas Cowboys than BP.

And the same is clearly true for doctoral programs.

Supply and demand

Want to teach military history? Good luck. That’s fun stuff. There’s a reason I have the History Channel, History International, and the Military Channel on my not-top-of-the-line cable package. People love that stuff.

Seriously, I think that there is something about Nazis on at all times on my AT&T U-verse.

And it sounds amazing to get paid to learn more about it.

But guess what? Lots of people have that idea. And although I do not have the data, the ratio of history doctoral graduates to tenure-track history faculty positions (without going into it, just assume this means “traditional” if you’re not an academic type).

The same is true in English. Who wouldn’t love to get paid to read Shakespeare or Chaucer? You may not love it, but way too many people do.

The American Medical Association carefully polices the number of people receiving M.D.’s each year. The same is not true for doctoral degrees in English and history.

In fact the system encourages the kind of “abuse” decried by The Economist.

It’s hard to imagine a college or university without required courses in English and history. All undergraduates must take them. That’s a lot of volume. And given states continually shirking their duties to fund higher education, relatively inexpensive doctoral students fill these teaching loads.

And that part of the system is very much broken.

It’s not personal, just business

Doctoral students in overpopulated fields compete for their slots. Even though countless sections of freshman composition and U.S. history since 1865 must be filled, those slots are not endless.

And even inexpensive doctoral students often cost more than part-time adjuncts, the true slave labor of higher education.

But here supply and demand is the enemy. Undergraduates end up with degrees in history and English, and for whatever reason they don’t put those skills to use in the marketplace.

The reasons are many, but I still believe in a “liberal arts” undergraduate education, and it saddens me that business is the most popular undergraduate major in the nation. We need thinkers (I think we’d have a better world if more students earned undergraduate degrees in social sciences and then pursued at M.B.A.)

But far too few traditional faculty positions exist for the current number of undergraduates to opt into grad school and then professordom. Many choose this path for the right reasons, but many choose it because it’s the “natural” thing for someone with their training.

And as long as they line up for slots, they’ll be underpaid and overworked.

The road less taken

At some point this has to fall upon the student’s shoulders. When I considered graduate school, I asked questions. Although I have a dual love of the mind and mediated messages, it was instantly clear that one path was for more difficult. Psychology faculty positions are plentiful compared to English and history, but it’s a much tougher market than mass communication.

So my research (and some of my teaching) combines my two loves, but I am in an advertising department, where supply was far more friendly. So many of my courses are more practical.

And that was my deliberate choice. Would some part of me be happier teaching computational modeling at one of the world’s few “big” cognitive science programs? Sure.

But I love my job, love my students, and I can provide well for my family without having to drive all across a region scraping together adjunct positions at three or more institutions.

In this case, buyers must be wary. Before you consider a doctoral program, ask the important questions. When a department begins a search for a new faculty position, if its most pressing questions is, “Where can we get an extra conference room to store all of the applications?” then you should think long and hard before diving into that pond, small fish.

To an extent, we all suffer from Lake Wobgon Syndrome. You know, “where all the children are above average.” I can imagine the scores of would be doctoral students in hyper-competitive fields who just knew that they’d be the ones to land a tenure-track appointment at Harvard only to be crushed by mathematical reality.

Yet that’s not the point

And all of these already-too-many words focus too heavily upon the business of higher education, which remains broken. A would be graduate student simply cannot afford to ignore the economic realities entirely.

As I blended mind and message (inspiring the very title of this blog), perhaps students need to blend their interests in order to be competitive. For instance, we have an associate dean who recently spoke to me about a piece he was writing about journalists during the Spanish Civil War. Like me, he’s borrowing the method of another discipline to apply in a slightly more applied one.

As a side note, journalism is not a safe landing point today as newspapers struggle to find a business model. Yet the point remains. A would be public relations professor could reasonably study Nazi propaganda as a means of better understanding theories of persuasion. This would be both unconventional and uncommon, but I’d still bet this hypothetical individual lands a tenure-track position far faster than a traditional World War II era historian.

All of this still misses the point.

What the Ph.D. is really about

I have often said that my doctoral diploma should read “Annie Lang,” my adviser, rather than “Indiana University.” Her guiding hand meant much more to my doctoral development than the institution at large. The same is true for my cognitive science mentor, Mike Gasser.

These two shaped my program of study with the perfect amount of guidance. I was steered to see things that I otherwise I would not have seen, yet I was encouraged to grapple with my particular interests.

At its core, I believe that the doctoral degree must be about mentorship. And it must be about contribution of knowledge.

You see, it really is an epistemological thing.

And I’ve often heard that there’s no surer route to standing alone at a cocktail party than to utter the word “epistemology.”

But I strongly believe that this is precisely where most misconceptions about the doctorate of philosophy lie, and I’m saddened by how many smart people earn Ph.D.’s from good institutions without understanding this, and more importantly, where they fit.

How do you know what you know?

As a brief aside, please allow Mr. Preacher Man to restate that a doctor of philosophy is a research degree. If you have no interest in doing research (admittedly broadly defined), then you have no business pursuing a Ph.D. That does not mean that you are not suited for advanced study, but this should not be the degree for you. Back to our story.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, epistemology is, “The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge.”

So what does that mean?

I’m not a philosopher, but to the average doctoral student, it means that you should openly confront the question of, “What, to you, is the nature of evidence?”

This may sound trivial, but it is crucially important. Research is about asking questions — and — ultimately answering them. How can you possibly expect to provide new knowledge — that is, provide an answer to a question that has never before been answered — if you do not have a solid grasp on what evidence might look like.

This still may seem slightly trivial to you; however, allow me to assure you that once you begin to confront this at the deepest level, you will almost inevitably experience many Alice in Wonderland moments. That is, you should be disoriented.

You made it this far

For most non-philosophers,  a substantial body of knowledge can be acquired without confronting the nature of evidence. Certainly elementary, middle, and high schools fit this model. Someone stands in front of the class and teaches you things. The only difference is that she or he has read more books than you. Most likely no knowledge has been created.

And in many instances, this also is true of most bachelor’s degrees. Although there is a good chance that the person in front of the lectern does create knowledge, there is far less chance that this knowledge will make it into the course in any large part. In the instances where it does happen, it is far less likely that the knowledge generator will have time or reason to discuss with you her or his personal beliefs about how she or he knows that.

Thus you march onward acquiring ever more knowledge and skill, but rare is the occasion where your foundation is shaken. You’re just piling facts in the filing cabinet.

As a human being, you’ve learned to survive in this world, and you haven’t needed to question the pillars of knowledge. You merely need to survive, and practical biological survival is at best tangentially related to the nature of evidence.

If something hurts when you touch it, you simply don’t touch it again. Rarely do you question the “purpose” or pain, where it came from, and whether it was appropriate in this instance.

Simple, rough-and-ready stimulus-response suffices quite nicely. And I’m not trying to suggest that you have lived a life without deep philosophical thoughts. Indeed you have those. But far less likely is the probability that you confronted the question of how you’d assess the validity of an answer provided to that deep question.

Anyone seen my lab coat?

I’m a scientist. Science is my way of knowing. That’s what science is, after all, a way of knowing. The disconnect between “world” and “epistemology “could be no clearer than the fact that most people cannot define “science.” To most, it’s simply “biology, chemistry, and physics.”

And although it is true that almost all researchers within those disciplines employ the scientific method, those disciplines are merely a subset rather than a defining characteristic.

Again, from OED, “The state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied; also, with wider reference, knowledge (more or less extensive) as a personal attribute. Now only Theol. in the rendering of scholastic terms (see quot. 1728), and occas. Philos. in the sense of ‘knowledge’ as opposed to ‘belief’ or ‘opinion’.”

If the average person — even a highly educated person with a master’s degree in anything other than philosophy — gave a definition even remotely close to that for science, I’d be astounded.

But knowing how you know the world is key to creating knowledge. Otherwise, how would you know it’s knowledge?

Is any of this real?

This discussion of epistemology relates to, although is not causally bound to, ontology, which OED calls, “The science or study of being; that branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence.”

This is perhaps the even headier question of “what is reality?” Is there a reality out there, or do we all live in our own Matrix? Ontology represents an equally important foundational question that the doctoral program of study and outside research should confront.

Today I know who I am, what I believe to be real, and what I trust as evidence.

I didn’t flip a coin to decide these things, and in many ways my answers were always inside of me. So it’s no surprise that I predominantly employ laboratory experiments and computational modeling.

Control is important to me. In the lab (and in computer simulations), we control everything we can. We systematically manipulate variables and measure responses. The variables we measure, known as dependent variables, have been vetted at both the broader conceptual level and the precise ways in which we measure them.

Mixing the brain with mediated messages entails great complexity, and unexpected results occur not uncommonly. Science is not about being right all the time. It’s about having a framework with which to interpret the evidence. It dictates our next step when counterintuitive data arise. We scrutinize the data, the method, and the theory. Then we make reasoned predictions — hypotheses — that when tested should either confirm or discount our new explanations. We follow the data in a systematic nature.

New foundation

During the first year at Indiana, Annie (that’s what she’s always had us call her despite the fact that such familiarity would be sacrilege in some places) forced me to deal with these issues.

And it tears apart your understanding of the world. On the other side, however, awaits a knowledge foundation built on bedrock.

You reinterpret the world. Data are no more or less valid, but the way that one interprets them changes.

The intellectual journey stimulates the mind in a way that no other journey can.

At its core, this is what the Ph.D. should be all about.

Economic realities exist. One must be practical. But in this materialistic, multinational corporate world, one last refuge of pure intellectual pursuit must persist.

In some places, for some people, the doctor of philosophy embodies this knowledge safe haven.

Individual tailored study

Before anyone embarks on a doctoral program, that person should have identified a handful of scholars that appear to be the only ones in the world capable of serving as a sherpa for that personal journey.

Institution quality matters, of course, as most coursework will not be with one’s advisor (under our system). So due diligence is required here. Only Will Hunting got excellent mentorship from a community college teacher. But mentor quality breaks all ties.

And despite my liberal use of cliché in this post, purpose guided the word choice “sherpa,” as the traveller-guide metaphor best captures my view of learning.

That’s the second point (from far above) why no two doctoral degrees are equal. Each Ph.D. is an unduplicated journey of mentor and student.

Find potential mentors. Learn about them. Read their stuff. Talk to their former students. Unless honorifics in that discipline preclude it (find out) , talk to the potential mentor. Here’s the first paragraph that Annie ever wrote me,

Will you be at ICA or AEJMC this summer? It would be nice to meet with you and talk about your interests and what you want to do etc. Also – you can interview some of my X-students – as well as those of the other professors you are interested in studying with – to see what the different styles of training/teaching/working etc. are.

That was May, 18, 2000, more than 6 months before doctoral applications were due. Her students also reached out.

I’m biased, of course, but I could not give a program a higher recommendation. I feel as if I owe the current trajectory of my academic career to Annie. She not only taught me how to conduct research, she taught me a lot about the ins-and-outs of the life of a professor.

This kind of communication predicted the success I enjoyed.

At long last, a conclusion

Here’s how The Economist concluded:

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

I shall conclude on a slightly higher note. The doctor of philosophy offers the promise to transform the very way you know the world in which you live. If you prepare, investigate, and choose wisely, it should be the defining experience of your professional life.

If you do these things poorly, then perhaps you shall become the “disposable academic.” But in this era of information technology, there’s no excuse to be ill-informed. I e-mailed with my eventual mentor and her former students (then both successful assistant professors at respected programs) more than a decade ago. There’s no reason not to know.

In the end, I’ll quote one of the many wise things offered by Annie over the years.

“The Ph.D. is a license to teach yourself,” she said.

As a terminal degree, a committee of (hopefully) experts in your field sign off on your ability as an independent scholar when they approve your dissertation. That means no further degree awaits you. Instead, you’re certified as able to create knowledge. You can teach yourself.

Too many college students don’t know what they want to do for a living yet feel enormous pressure to decide quickly.

Choosing a major is simply too important of a decision to be done hastily or under duress.

Of all the students who come through my office door, this is the conversation that we have most often:

“What do you want to do in the short-term after you graduate,” I ask.

“I’m not sure,” he or she replies.

“That’s OK,” I say.

The student stares at me with surprise.

Finding an intellectual home

I study human memory, so I find my own to be particularly interesting. For reasons that escape me, I have an especially strong geospatial memory. That is, I am particularly adept at remembering where things happen.

Almost everything else, however, I forget.

Accordingly, I remember the exact spot where I decided to return to college (for what led up to that moment, you can read here).

It was spring 1991, and I was driving my ‘91 Jeep Wrangler Renegade south on Missouri highway 45 near Beverly. My then girlfriend (now wife) was riding with me, and I told her that I wanted to go back to school to become a psychiatrist. In what turned out to be an incredible stroke of luck, she was extremely supportive.

So began my desire to continue my education.

My years as a pre-med student

I was soon enrolled in Johnson County Community College and had learned much from the pre-medical advisor. I’m obsessive like that, and I quickly memorized all the things that one must do in order to garner admission to medical school. I sought out friends with medical school ambitions, enrolled in science courses, and anticipated a bright future.

Navigating some changes in fate, a year later I lived in north Scottsdale, Arizona, and continued my pre-med courses at Paradise Valley Community College.

Although my mind excels at places, I cannot recall exactly pushed me toward the brain. As a high-maintenance teen, I had some run-ins with psychiatrists, so perhaps I merely wanted to do it better. But this focus waned rather soon, especially as all the advice suggested that medical school applicants faced a tougher battle if they declared a specialty during the application process. So I began to explore all possibilities.

Interestingly I made it that far despite the fact that I really don’t like being around sick people. Even then I found it incomprehensible that some M.D.s specialized in infectious diseases, and this was still the era where there was great fear of health professionals contracting HIV from patients.

The road not taken

One day in the library, I was pursuing either the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association, and I ran across an image titled something like “images in clinical medicine.”

It was an extreme close-up, and I couldn’t tell what it was. So I read the caption. This photo involved parasites and a body part that I’d rather not explore on anyone.

That gave me pause.

In very close temporal proximity, my still girlfriend (now wife) had the cold or flu, and we headed to the physician in search of a remedy.

Lots of people must have been sick, as the waiting room was packed with illness. After some wait, Em went back to see the practitioner, and I sat there alone.

And then it dawned upon me: some poor physician was going to have to see almost every one of these not-so-beautiful people in some state of undress.

In an instant, I was out. I admire health care workers, but I was not destined to be one. I love everything about the theory of medicine, but the practice is not for me.

Career exploration

When you have things figured out — and then you don’t — it can cause a crisis. This did, and I enrolled in a career exploration course at PVCC. It was a great experience, and tests such as the Strong Interest Inventory were quite helpful.

This is the time I began asking all of my professors about their Ph.D. experiences, and I was lucky to have community college professors with doctorates from research universities.

Heavily political at that point in my life, I settled upon political science, and I took several classes that I quite enjoyed.

Law school seemed like the logical option, and I largely stayed on course, transferring to New Mexico State when Em and I had amassed two years of credits.

I change my mind a lot

For some reason, I didn’t really feel the love for law school, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do with a degree in political science. I was overly practical in those days.

Arriving in Las Cruces, N.M., in May 1994, I enrolled in two Summer II classes: Judicial Process and American Military History. Both classes were fun, but I still felt adrift.

As I’ve written before, I poured over and over the course catalog looking for a “better” major.

My parents ran a radio station before I was born, and they have waxed poetic about it my entire life. I grew up in their subsequent advertising agency, and we spent many evenings and weekends in a production booth. I made newspapers as a child, and so it’s quite fitting that I ended up a journalism major. Media are in my blood, so to speak.

In the end, I graduated with almost 40 more credit hours than necessary. But here’s the point: I never regretted a single class (well maybe the poetry one). I learned so much about the world and about myself, and I’m glad that there was no ridiculous pressure on me. If I had hurried to graduate, Id be doing something today, but it wouldn’t be what I do now, and I love my job.

Fourth Estate

Although I loved my work at the student newspaper and the courses, I wasn’t enchanted with the actual life in industry. I tried so hard to embody my believe that “money follows love, not the other way around,” but I failed.

Low pay and terrible hours clouded my passion for journalism.

I lasted two years.

Grad school seemed like the best option, and off I headed for the A.Q. Miller School at Kansas State.

And there I met my future mentor (and department chair here for the next 45 days), Bob Meeds. That meeting might never have happened, but it did, and the story turns out well.

There were other fluky twists and turns, and I changed my mind several times, but I was allowed to explore my interests.

Take life where it goes

The point is that my education really was about the journey and not the destination. I followed my intellectual curiosity where it went. I made bad guesses and got to correct them.

If I’ve learned anything during my many missteps, it’s this: You’re not who you’re going to be when you’re 18.

For one thing, your brain’s frontal lobes are strongly involved in social judgment. They’re not fully developed, on average, until about age 25.

Thus, it’s not an adage. You really aren’t who you’re going to be when you’re 18.

And this is my problem with tuition increases and graduate quickly incentives. College cannot be about a factory. Taking 18 hours a semester to graduate faster is a disservice. Packing in summer classes and eschewing an internship or study abroad also is a disservice.

Within my own department, we have made systemic changes that have the side effect of making it easier to become an advertising major if you decide that along the way. Although that was not the intent of our changes, it is a happy side effect.

Data show that most people change careers in their adult lives, and the rapid pace of technological change seems to exacerbate that rather than diminish it.

It’s a shame, to me, that we seem so destined to truncate what should be the best intellectual journey of most people’s lives.

Reach out

But for the reader who comes across this feeling lost about not being able to find a major, let me say this:

Relax. Your answer is out there. If you’re at a two-year school, you likely have a course on career exploration. If you’re at a four-year school, you likely have a career center. Ask to take the Strong Interest Inventory by name. It will show how you compare with people who are really happy in their jobs for a host of occupations. If you’re still in high school, talk to everyone.

Mostly, talk to your professors. Not one, but five, or ten. Ask about their choices. Cumulate their advice. Look for overlaps. Look for your truth. Find your passion.

And if all that fails, send me an e-mail. There’s lots of links on the right to help you find me.

Really good people gave selflessly of their time along the way. I always try to pay that forward.

But if you force yourself into a box that feels uncomfortable at 20, it’s going to be miserable at 40.

Updated: Sunday, November 14, 2010, 1-:48 a.m.: Several (although likely not all) typos corrected.

Opportunity: It’s not nearly as evenly distributed as you might think.

I have a wonderful life. I am married to my best friend; I have wonderful children; and I have a great job.

Much of this owes to the fact that I had the ridiculously good fortune to have been born in the late 20th Century in America. But it doesn’t have nearly as much to do with that narrative would have you believe.

I will always believe that I have disproportionately benefitted from being born as a white male. I didn’t always believe that, of course.

My father’s father completed the fourth grade. He drove a truck for Sinclair Refining, and he operated a family farm for much of his life.

My father, his son, made it to the ninth grade before heading to the South Pacific to serve in the Army. There, however, he met an officer who implored him to get an education (my dad and I have not had this conversation in years, but I am pretty sure his name was Turner). That was not enough. DNA may have given him the talent, and his commanding officer may have provided the motivation, but the G.I. Bill provided the means.

If you’re scoring at home, that’s a government program. An entitlement, if you will. One that by some estimates is the most profitable investment that the U.S. government has ever made.

Progressively better

My father as a young man.

My dad trained to be a television engineer, but the FCC mandated a freeze on TV licenses, so in 1949 when he graduated, dad (also named Sam Bradley) headed for KCHS-AM in Hot Springs, New Mexico (later named Truth of Consequences).

Dad climbed the career latter, eventually eschewing radio for the more lucrative field of advertising but not until he had built his own radio station, KSLI, and served as president and general maanger.

My life was easier. By the time I was ready to be enrolled in school, my parents’ fledgling agency was making money, and we had moved to the Kansas City suburbs.

But Kansas City public schools are and were a complete mess.

So they invested money that they didn’t have and enrolled me in Pembroke Country Day School. It was perhaps the defining moment in my life (read more about that here).

There I received a world class education, and those early years provided the foundation that has served me so very well.

Never one to make things easy

Despite having every opportunity and advantage, I am both blessed and cursed with an overwhelming suspicion of authority.

Rules chafe my soul, and my tendency to rail against them as a young man caused problems.

When I was relatively young, my dad made me watch Scared Straight, a remake of a late 1970s documentary about kids and prison. As I recall it, they took a bunch of inner city kids into jails to scare them into staying out of trouble.

Well, this narrative fit well with my existing personality traits, and I have always been terrified of going to jail We’ll never know what proportion of the variance is owed to the documentary, but I never wanted anything to do with jail or prison.

So, looking back, my teen and pre-teen years were largely devoted to getting in an much trouble as possible without ever getting into real trouble.

I lived on the line. But I knew where it was, and I never crossed it.

In hindsight, I did a remarkable job. We were about as obnoxious as kids can possibly be without ever even seeing a pair of handcuffs.

Authority always wins

Even though we managed to stay out of  big trouble, my general mischievousness combined with my contempt for authority began to accumulate.

And by my sophomore year in high school, my hijinks were compiling.

Early in the academic year, I joined some friends for a joyride off campus during a break in classes. We got caught, and it was against the rules. Only seniors were allowed off campus.

I got in trouble for perhaps the dumbest thing I have ever done, which I shan’t belabor here. Suffice it to say, not everything they do in professional wrestling is, indeed, fake. I was stupid. I could have hurt someone, and I regret it deeply. I don’t regret my punishment, however, which was to go to the University of Kansas Medical Center library and look up what the potential health consequences might have been. That visit just might have planted a seed.

Many months after my first off-campus foray, we ventured off campus again. I was actually pretty paranoid about this, and I had an admirable track record of towing the line. But it was spring, the weather was warm, and the open road called.

We got caught. First time in months. But we got caught. At least I got caught. I cannot even recall my co-adventurers.

And all of this is a lesson, too, as I had supplied an axe to grind to the teacher who turned me (us?) in.

So I got a one-day in-school suspension — the first and only in my life — and this poured gasoline on my anti-authority fires.

Didn’t even know who Timothy Leary was

Today, just about two decades later, I am powerfully humbled by how right I thought I was. I thought that I had the world figured out.

I was convinced that I had the world pegged.

How woefully wrong I was.

But stubborn has always been something I do well.

So I decided to drop out of high school after the 10th grade. An elite, expensive private school, and I was ready to walk away. I was convinced that the “system” could not be changed from the inside, and I was convinced that I could change it from the outside.

Again, how stupid I was.

Of course, my parents, friends, and loved ones waged an epic battle to show me the error of the ways.

But I was stubborn. And, hey, my dad quit high school, and he had a big house, nice car, and a successful business.

I repeat: I was an idiot.

So fall 1989 began my time as an outsider. Fighting the system from the outside. Sixteen and stupid with my own apartment.

I took a job running delivery for a message service in Kansas City, and as I love to drive, this was fun for a week or two. You see, in addition to hating authority, I hate repetitive tasks.

To his credit, my amazing father reached out to me. Despite my attempts to poison the blood between us, my father and mother encouraged me to come back to work for them at the advertising agency, where I had worked part-time since I was 12. I did, and we remain close to this day.

Didn’t see that coming

Not long after I returned to the family business — where at the time I saw my career playing out — fate caught up with me.

Unethical, despicable people reneged on business deals with the agency, and it crumbled. Make no mistake, that agency fell at the hands of liars and thieves.

But if my dad had been through the rigors of an MBA program, I’m guessing he would have done things differently. My father is the most decent person I know. He trusted people. And I can only imagine that his kind of optimisim would have been bludgeoned out of him in an MBA program. But that’s just surmising.

So all of a sudden, I needed a Plan B and fast!

There were some life lessons along the way, but rather than fighting the system, I realized that I needed an education.

And that’s where we return to opportunity. In 1991 in America, if you had any modicum of ability and a little money to pay, there were educational opportunities for you.

Thus, at the same time I would have if I hadn’t dropped out, I looked to enroll in college.

Not growing up in a college family, I literally knew nothing about it. The University of Kansas was just down the road, so I gave them a call (remember, no Internet in 1991).

I had missed the deadline to apply. So I called Johnson County Community College, and so began the great adventure of my lifetime.

Here again, opportunity was important. I had the good fortune of living about 12 miles from one of the top community colleges in the nation. And I happen to have tried to correct my mistakes in an era before rampant tuition inflation.

Give or take, my first semester’s tuition was about 100 hours of work at minimum wage. Money was tight after the agency folded, but this was doable.

For comparison, although JCCC is quite affordable today, tuition is about 155 hours of minimum wage, according to their Web site and some simple division. I’m not sure I could have afforded that.

Great Western adventure

Shortly after beginning at JCCC, my dad took a job in Phoenix. So in July 1992, we moved. My future wife moved with us, but that’s a story for another day.

Again, amazing opportunity shined upon me.

My dad found a place to live, which, it just so happened, was four miles from Paradise Valley Community College, a then basically brand new facility with great instructors.

As I had missed the KU deadline, we had missed the Arizona State deadline. So I headed to the affordable PVCC and got a great education. Again, we were lucky to have an opportunity at our feet.

When we had amassed all of the credit hours we could at community college, we set off for New Mexico State, not for any academic reasons but for rainbows, sunsets, and because my dad had lived there a half century before and had instilled a love of the Land of Enchantment.

There I continued to take advantage of the American educational system, which allows one to rise to the height of their own abilities.

And although my dad had very little information to offer about the specifics of college, he always espoused a love for education, so I intuitively felt that it was important.

My community college classes were small, and kind professors were willing to talk to me. I asked a lot of questions. I found out what it meant to earn a Ph.D., what a dissertation was, and a lot about navigating higher education.

I found mentors in Las Cruces who were willing to help an eager student, an eagerness that I understand so well today as a professor myself.

Better to be lucky than good

But all of this was built upon a foundation of opportunity. My excellent education during those early years taught me well. I’m ridiculously adept at standardized tests, and when an NMSU mentor encouraged me to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), I had little time to prepare but still did very well.

Those GRE scores (and my 3.93 college GPA that was altogether unlike my dismal high school GPA) were my ticket to the world in a system that still values ability.

Four years and three months after I graduated from NMSU, I enrolled as an Ivy League doctoral student at Cornell University. I transferred to Indiana, but that, too, is a story for another day.

So I live in America, where an idiot 16-year-old can drop out of high school and enroll as a funded doctoral student in the Ivy League 12 years later.

And I’m not sure that this is that same America. I’m overwhelmingly confident that it won’t be in another 12 years.

Bootstraps are an opportunity, too

Me with three of my graduate students: Jessica Freeman, Wes Wise, and Nikki Toulouse.

It’s easy to want to tell my story as one of me being down and pulling myself up by my own bootstraps.

But I fundamentally believe that’s not the Sam Bradley story.

Instead, I am the grandson of a man who died before I was born. A man who believed in being decent and good. A man with a textbook example of what we call the protestant work ethic.

That man had a son, whom he named Samuel David Bradley II after his own father.

That boy was born in 1928 when American was about to plunge into the worst economic times of its existence.

He watched his dad work 12 hour days and still tend to the farm. He learned to work hard. And he doubled his father’s education.

As a child, he had the incredible good luck to visit the World’s Fair in New York, an experience that I believe shaped him. Technology was exploding, and my dad would later train to be a radio engineer.

My dad suffered the reoccurring news of his friends dying in World War II, and he enlisted the day that he could. Here, too, he had good fortune, being born just late enough to never face major hostilities.

In the Philippines, he somehow earned the admiration of his commanding officer. This was before the Civil Rights era, and it’s hard to imagine the exact same relationship would have existed if my dad had been African American.

And somehow, that commanding officer motivated my dad to continue his education.

And there’s no way that I’m a professor at a large research university if that bond did not take hold.

The G.I. Bill made that education possible. There’s no way my grandparents could have afforded it.

With an education, my father and mother moved into the middle class. They started a business.

My dad was 45 when I was born and dubbed Samuel David Bradley III.

He already had stumbled a few times along the way. But I inherited his name, his (and his father’s) work ethic, and his passion for education.

I had opportunity galore, and I still tried pretty hard to squander it. But opportunity so abounded during my formative years that I profitted despite myself.

I’m not dreaming

And it would be easy to think I’m yet another instance of the American Dream. But I say, “no.”

The American Dream is a nice story, but true rags to riches stories are so rare as to be nonexistent. It’s a fairy tale.

Instead my story is a story of three generations (really more), each approximately doubling the education of the generation before. There’s lots of hard work, but there’s lots of luck, too.

If my dad got stuck in the infantry rather than a communications office, my world would be different. Very different.

My parents had the capital to send me to an expensive private school.

All of which gave me the opportunities that I have today.

And that is an opportunity built upon entitlements (G.I. Bill) and government subsidies (the in-state tuition rates that made college possible for me).

Not only did I go to an expensive private school, my parents had white collar jobs, so we lived close to good community colleges. The type of community college that draws an (ironically) Cornell-educated engineer to teach a math class in the evening in Phoenix, Arizona. The type of community college that has small classes, so I got to know that instructor. The type of instructor who takes interests in his students and helped at least one get a good job in a new town to keep paying that tuition.

To believe that this story is about me is to miss the point entirely. This story is about opportunity. The type of opportunity that dies when we pull back public funding of higher education, as we are so dramatically doing now.

My daughters have an obvious leg up, as most of the adults in their lives have graduate degrees. They have an opportunity to understand college better than I ever did. They’ve been in more college classrooms than most freshmen (that’s a joke … kind of).

But for the Sam Bradleys of 2011, I don’t know what awaits. The cost barriers are far higher. Some projections of state funding for higher education in 2020 hit almost zero.

My parents greatly subsidized our cost-of-living during the undergraduate years. It would not have been possible without them. But we still paid our own tuition, and I guarantee you this: my wife and I could not have afforded to go to the university at which I work today. Not a chance. Tuition is far too high. Already. And given the budget crisis in Texas, it’s headed north.

The Law of Unintended Consequences lives at the forefront of my mind. And I’m direly afraid that we stand to ruin the very best thing about this nation: opportunity.

It makes me sad to think of all the stories such as this one that will never happen or be told.

It caused some discomfort to walk into work Monday morning and see the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s banner headline about faculty salaries.

I get that I’m a government employee, but that’s still a sensitive topic.

The local daily newspaper seems to have finally realized that Texas Tech professors will, as a whole, get no raises this year.

Now, allow me to say that I know we’re in a recession, and in many ways I should be thankful to have a job when 9.6% of would be workers in American cannot say the same.

But this article raised many salient issues.

It seems the “average” Texas Tech professor makes about $82,000 a year, and this represents about $2,000 less than our peer institutions around Texas.

Note that this includes our college of business, where I doubt a single tenured or tenure-track professor makes less than that. It also includes the humanities, where surely most make less than that.

More higher ed hatred

Upon seeing an article such as this one, I immeditely scroll for the comments. Not surprisingly, the comments are filled with hatred.

To sum up, those ivory tower ingrates are on the dole and don’t deserve what they get. Joe Local doesn’t make anything close to that, so why should professors?

Nevermind the decade of higher education it takes to become a professor. We’re ingrates.

OK. But that’s not the bigger issue.

Matters of merit

No one enters higher education to get rich. It’s not a great strategy.

One of the reasons I took the job at Tech is the policy of merit raises. If you work harder, you get a bigger raise. Even then, they’re not big. A 5% raise represents a great year.

This provides some incentive to go above and beyond. Hard work is rewarded.

So a recession hits, and those go away.

But it’s not that simple.

Our would-be raise for the 2010-2011 academic year would have been based upon the work we did during the calendar year 2009.

I know of two professors in my college who had career years in 2009 (not me).

They were in line for the biggest raises of their career. But instead they get nothing.

And recall that raises compound. A missed $3,000 raise this year translates to a lost $30,000 over the next decade without considering compounded interest.

Again, just an artifact of a recession?

It’s not that simple. Because professors who simply mailed it in for 2009 also got no raise. That means there was zero reward for hard work and zero punishment for doing nothing.

A lack of raises also means that there was no relative disadvantage for being a slacker. Even if you get a 0.5% merit raise, psychologically you get some reward for hard work.

Given that I study human motivation, I can tell you that this hardly motivates excellence.

Especially when you read between the lines and forecast that there also figures to be no merit raises next year.

Oh, and tuition went up about 9% this year. So students and their families are paying a lot more.

Onward and upward

For a moment, let us return to the local comments blasting professors.

When I was the student newspaper editor at New Mexico State more than a decade ago, I wrote a lot of columns touting students as the only important constituent in a university.

And I was partly right. More than any other endeavor I can imagine, people define a university.

But this has more to do with faculty than I thought as a young man.

Of course students properly represent the focus of a university. But as individuals, they don’t hang around long.

When you’re in college, it may seem forever. But in truth, the entire student body turns over every five years for all intents and purposes.

I realize this every time I see someone on campus who reminds me of a former top student.

“Oh, yeah,” I think. “She graduated two years ago.”

Thus, improving a student body is comparably easy because of the turnover.

Every year, about 20% new blood infuses a campus.

But professors can remain for decades.

Or a very short time.

Unlike the locals lambasting profs on message boards, the overwhelming majority of our faculty are not native West Texans. They’re here because it represented a good job at the time.

We’re a mobile bunch, academics. And I can tell you from exhaustion, recruiting an excellent young faculty member and losing him or her two or three years later is painful. Faculty searches take time and money, so we need to keep the best in order to improve our university.

Merit raises are an important part of retention.

And, just for context, both health insurance premiums and copays increased this year. So everyone sticking around this year took an effective pay cut.

Brain drain

The point seemingly missed by the haters is that good professors have many options. Check the job sites, and universities across the nation are clamoring for mass communications professors.

And a candidate with two years of experience is especially valuable because they have done it. Hiring someone straight out of their doctoral degree is riskier.

So you have a talented group with no local ties, no merit raises here, and options.

The funny thing is that most commenters would self describe as avid capitalists. They blast us because we work for the government, but they simultaneously fail to realize that their beloved market forces remain at work.

Professors are happy to have a good job during a recession. But the free market remains. And if there’s one lesson of a free market, it’s ignore the market at your own peril.

Coming late to the recession

As a whole, Texas is lucky. We were touched late by the recession. We had no budget cuts when universities around the nation were making budget cuts.

Things seemed good.

But the recession did arrive. And you might think it’s good to come late to that party.

But other states have been dealing with these issues for a few years. They have made the painful cuts.

And they’re starting to emerge. Just as we’re plunging into budget cuts, other states (and their public universities) see light at the end of the tunnel.

They’ve had hiring freezes, but they are hiring now. They have money that we now don’t.

And our talented young faculty must look like low-hanging fruit.

So I’m worried.

Race to “Tier One”

All this might not matter much, but Texas Tech is desperately vying to become eligible for Texas’ newly created National Research University Fund, akin to a not really defined “Tier One” status.

There has been tremendous pressure on faculty to raise the level of their work, especially to bring in federal research grants.

More, more, more.

And I think all of us want to see our university get better. I do. But right in the middle of all this pressure for more productivity, it seems that the modest rewards available for hard work have been removed.

This could be a momentum killer. The timing could not be worse.

Priority reversal

When Guy Bailey was hired as Texas Tech’s president in 2008, I was optimistic about the future. In part, because Bailey argued that raising faculty and staff salaries was a top priority.

From the July 2, 2008, news release announcing Bailey as the sole finalist from the position:

Bailey counts among his major accomplishments at UMKC the completion of a $200 million capital campaign. He also created $10 million in administrative savings that was put into the core academic mission of the university, including, raising salaries to attract and retain faculty. During his tenure about $175 million in new construction was approved using primarily public/private funding partnerships.

During those first months, Bailey’s proven record as a salary raiser way often touted. Now it seems impossible.

The recession was hardly Bailey’s fault. I don’t envy his shoes. He had a plan, and state-mandated budget cuts threaten those plans.

However, as someone who cares a lot for this university, it seems as if we were on the top step of the ladder reaching for the next level when the economy kicked the ladder out from under us.

And market forces around the nation make unintentional corrosive forces.

I cannot predict the future. But another year of missing raises could have effects that linger for a decade. These are indeed dangerous times.

And all of this is discounting a seeming witch hunt against professors within the state of Texas (read my comments here).

As a final postscript, let me say that personally I am more concerned about the lack of staff raises this year than for my own peer group. If Texas Tech faculty are slightly underpaid, then our dedicated staff members are grossly underpaid. Even if faculty garner no raises next year, I only hope that our staff fare better.

Here’s a true/false question:

A well educated citizenry is good for a state?
A) True
B) False

The correct answer is clear, right?

That’s what I thought, too. But a series of recent attacks on higher education causes me to rethink the opinions of the masses.

Higher education … more specifically professors … seem to be under attack.

Educating the world

When I think of the many things that I love about America, higher education tops that list.

We educate the leaders of the world, and our system of higher education garners envy from most of the world.

More than any other part of America, our system of higher education is a meritocracy: you can climb to your own potential.

Someone like me, someone whose parents did not attend a university, can start out at a community college and end up enrolled in an Ivy League doctoral program exactly 10 years later (I eventually left Cornell for Indiana, but that’s a story for another day).

You can climb as high as your drive and intellect allow.

Times they are a changin’

But that system is under vicious attack. People hate tenure. They think we don’t teach enough. Mostly, they don’t understand what we do.

Nowhere is this clearer than in my own state, Texas.

The Wall Street Journal published an Oct. 22 piece titled, “Putting a Price on Professors: A battle in Texas over whether academic value can be measured in dollars and cents” (link).

There’s a push toward ROI, or return on investment. At its most absurd, people are taking a faculty member’s salary plus benefits and dividing by the total number of students they taught that year to derive a cost-per-student.

It’s a laughable system perhaps best typified by the skewering of a Texas A&M first-year biology professor who spent the first year setting up his lab, advising only two students.

It was his first year. Who knows what insights might come out of that lab in the next decade.

I looked up Dr. Criscione’s Web site at A&M (link). He offers an impressive resume. Broadly speaking, he studies the biology and evolution of parasites, including issues of drug resistance.

In short, it’s possible that the next black plague may be averted due to Dr. Criscione’s research with parasites.

That is, in a word, valuable.

Instead the young scholar got lambasted because the lab took time to set up. I can imagine that it involved more than throwing a microscope and a bunsen burner on a table.

At the same time, a senior lecturer topped the rankings due to the volume of her teaching.

I’m sure she’s an amazing teacher and a tremendous asset to my rival university in College Station. But do we truly believe higher education would be better if only we took a few more pages from Henry Ford’s assembly line playbook?

Frightening, really.

Let’s take some criticisms in turn.

Myth: tenure is outdated

Tenure allows researchers to pursue unpopular ideas. Science is about knowledge, after all, not convenient “truths.”

I kid you not when I say that I wouldn’t have written this post before Sept. 1 when my own tenure was official.

At Texas Tech, I teach advertising. I investigate the cognitive processing of media. At the end of the day, most of my research can be used to better persuade the masses. Many would argue that this is a bad thing.

We look at sex, violence, and even negative political advertising. Most people want less of this in the media. We, however, seek to understand the underlying cognitive processes.

We ask why viewers flock to this kind of content despite most people expressing a desire for less of it.

As a father of four, I understand this.

But I am a scientist, not a normative policy maker.

We published a piece examining the underlying effectiveness of negative political advertising. We published a piece looking at how mainstream consumers cognitively process advertisements with homosexual imagery.

Now, it’s possible that a public group might show up on my doorstep protesting these ideas.

Tenure provides some isolation from this kind of pressure. I should not have to fear these kinds of reprisals. I can investigate theories and practices relevant to our industry. I seek answers, not judgment.

Put another way, it’s not my job to explain why sexual imagery in advertising is bad. I would — and should — lose all credibility in my research if I set out to “prove” such a notion in advance.

When I step in the lab, I leave my father’s hat at the door and do my best to become a dispassionate researcher.

And tenure provides me some protection to seek knowledge rather than follow an agenda.

Are there bad professors who get lazy after tenure? Absolutely. But any restraints on tenure would attack the pursuit of knowledge, and that’s a valuable baby to throw out with the bath water.

In the age of polarized public opinion and partisan news outlets, tenure is more valuable now than ever before.

We don’t teach enough

In my six years as a professor, I can attest to this: almost no one outside of academia understands what I do.

Most people can recite the “publish or perish” mantra, but no one really understands it.

First and foremost, my classroom is not a junior high or community college classroom.

I am a professor at a research university. It would be a grave disservice to my students if I only knew more about my subject than my charges.

Instead, I create knowledge.

Yesterday, I stood in front of 170+ students in my Principles of Advertising class lecturing about branding. I know a lot about this. Surely more than students taking an introductory course.

But that’s not my value. My value is that I have yet-to-be-published research on this topic. Yesterday my students got to hear state-of-the-art, brand-new, known-to-no-one-else-in-the-world research about branding.

It’s not enough to regurgitate the textbook. I go beyond the textbook. And in doing so, I strive to create an atmosphere of lifetime learning and knowledge pursuit. And they’ll go out on the job market knowing some things that their employers don’t know. It’s not a history class. It’s a right-now, today class.

You may have noticed that it’s a large class. That’s the current business of higher education. I have 176 students enrolled in principles this fall so that I will be able to give hands-on attention in Advertising Writing next spring with a cap of 18 students.

With a class of 18, I can get to know the students personally. I can give direct feedback in a meaningful way and get to know them. I learn their talents and career desires. And no matter what you say, I believe this is what higher education is about.

Why do we rail against large kindergarten class sizes and press for ROI at the university? How can it not be abundantly clear that faculty-student contact is crucial to real learning?

Sitting in a meeting Monday, I got a text message from a former student. She was in the very first college class I ever taught — Ad Writing — as a master’s student at Kansas State University in Spring 2000. There were 14 students in that class although it could have accommodated 18.

I have regular contact with three of those 14 students a decade later. A decade later!

Can anyone truly imagine that a bond such as that would have developed if the class had 90 students?

So, yes, I am teaching two classes this semester. Principles has 176, and my Advertising and Society class is one student beyond capacity at 36. Literally, when they all show up, we have to hunt for an extra chair.

Does that mean that I’m working 15 hours a week?

Hardly. Ask my wife. Or kids.

In addition to those students, what you won’t see are the four doctoral students and two master’s students I am advising. Two Ph.D. students defended their qualifying exams last week, a tremendous amount of work for their committee chair, albeit rewarding.

I don’t just teach the next generation of advertising students. I advise the next generation of advertising professors.

I didn’t teach Monday. So did I take the day off? Once again, hardly. Meetings with a visiting book publisher, planning the department’s summer class schedule, writing letters of recommendation, and fielding phone calls about job seekers filled the day. When I looked up, it was 6 p.m., and I had promised my wife that it was time to come home.

My research? Well, it waited for another day.

After dinner, I worked on Tuesday’s lectures and answered a half dozen e-mails from my students.

And don’t get me wrong. I love my job. But until you’ve walked a mile in our shoes, teaching two classes sounds like a dream. The reality differs markedly.

So what happens if I were to teach four classes, as at least one political action committee in Texas desires?

For one thing, we’d become a community college. There would simply be no time for research or mentoring graduate students.

I benefitted greatly from my community college experience. They are a great asset. But they play a role, and that role is not knowledge creation.

Shackle research university faculty with unrealistic teaching responsibilities, and America will almost overnight stop leading the world in science.

Studies show that our middle school students might not clean up in math and science, but pick up the preeminent academic journal in any field, and it’s written in English and dominated by scholars publishing from American universities. How is it unclear that this is a good thing?

The ROI push can have only one effect: drive class sizes larger. In informal polling, not one of my students thought that they learned more in large classes than smaller ones. But the only way to make the ROI fraction “better” is to inflate the denominator. Translation: more students, less contact.

Economic realities

In response to the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article, a fellow professor wrote, “Although even the good [articles] put in statements like ‘States spend about 11% of their general-fund budgets subsidizing higher education’ but never mention that, adjusted for inflation over the last 30 years, state allocations for higher education have gone straight down the [toilet].”

According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, “Higher education accounted for 11.5 percent the state’s total all funds appropriation of $188.0 billion and 15.7 percent of the state’s general revenue appropriation of $80.6 billion for the 2010-11 biennium.”

Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of money. A convenient target for budget cuts in tight times such as these. $5.2 billion of that went to universities.

But has spending gone “in the toilet?”

According to the limited data I could find, it has.

The oldest Texas budget I could locate was on the Web was at http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/. In 1992 Texas spent $4.7 billion on “tertiary education,” but that represents 18.8% of the $25 billion in total state spending.

Thus, spending on higher education, as a percentage of the overall budget, is just 61.2% of what it was 18 years ago. And the trend is falling.

Who picks up the bill? Students and their families. As state funding has plummeted, tuition is skyrocketing. Who is failing American students? It’s not professors. It’s state legislators who continue to shirk their duty to educate the daughters and sons of their states.

What awaits?

No one can know how we will survive this current scorn toward higher education, a jewel of America.

One can only hope that people will realize that we’re the knowledge generator that drives the world, and their local legislators have dropped the ball.

As for Texas A&M, I wouldn’t want to be recruiting faculty there this year. Administrators in College Station have invested more than 20 years slowly dragging our Land Grant university up the national rankings. It’s now routinely mentioned among the top public research universities in the nation.

Their work over two decades is stellar and impressive.

It’s difficult to rise that far that fast, but all that has to be in jeopardy. Articles such as the WSJ one cited above proliferate on the Internet. And any would-be professor can be expected to perform due diligence and know the climate into which she is about to leap.

And for anyone at any level, I cannot imagine any thought other than, “Why on earth would I want to work there?”

As a parent, I can attest that the lasting impressions that you leave with your children scarcely correlate with those you intend.

That brilliant “teachable moment” stands about as great a chance of being remembered as an offhand comment. Still, you do your best and hope the meaningful life lessons interweave in their developing brains.

Reading, or actually listening to, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers the past two weeks has elicited much thought from me, as any good book should.

In the first half of the book, Gladwell outlines a compelling case arguing that hard work, talent, and dedication tell but a small part of the story of success.

Blended with these traits, he argues, must be an exceptional opportunity. And it’s amazing how many people benefit from these exceptional opportunities. Likewise, it’s also amazing how success eludes the talented without opportunity.

This leads me, quite naturally, to ponder the secret of my success. What extraordinary opportunity in life allowed me to attain the success that I have?

My answer is twofold.

Remarkable Education

Although I’ve heard the story many times, I cannot quite isolate the one crucial factor that caused my parents — then owners of a modest Kansas City advertising agency — to invest a disproportionate amount of their modest income in my kindergarten tuition at Pembroke Country Day School (now Pembroke Hill).

That decision, an investment really, stands alone in my mind as the greatest stroke of luck in my life.

The education that I received differs so markedly from what I see in my daughters’ education today that it staggers me. I learned creative thinking and problem solving. I learned to learn. My children learn to pass standardized tests.

There were bumps along the way, to be sure. But the foundation that I received during those early years cultivated a lifelong love of learning. For that I will always be grateful.

At Pem Day, we were introduced to the personal computer exceedingly early. Memory prevents me from recalling exactly when those squat little Macs entered our lives, but they did, and we used them, and they changed my life. I’ve loved computers ever since, and more importantly, I have never feared them.

A computer represents a tool, and I simply try things. That owes somewhat to personality but also an introduction to computers before it occurred to me that one could break them.

Programming in BASIC

About the same time, I was given an IMB PCjr. Given that the model was introduced in March 1984, I will guess that I was given mine for Christmas in 1984. I was 11. This is the same year of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh.

So 1984 was a good computing year for me.

Most valuable to my IBM PCjr was a cartridge that allowed me to learn to program in the BASIC language. For whatever reason, I loved this.

I wrote programs for whatever I could, including a cash register program that would allow a hypothetical waiter or waitress to enter a table’s order and calculate the total with sales tax.

Pretty simple actually, but not bad for an 11-year-old writing in a linear programming language such as BASIC.

These skills have always served me well, but they really came to use when I found myself enrolled in a cognitive science doctoral program at Indiana that heavily leaned on computational modeling.

So much of what I do today is shaped by that learning experience, much of which would not have been possible had I not been immersed in the personal computer at its dawn after several years of exceptional education.

I’m lucky. Incredibly lucky that my parents invested so heavily in me. When they decided to buy that computer, it cannot have seemed possible that it would become perhaps the most defining moment in my educational life.

But it was. And all of the drive and dedication in the world might not have been enough to overcome the experience I would have had in a public school with scant exposure to a computer.

Thank you, parents. And thank you Malcolm Gladwell for fostering these thoughts.