The semester is over, or about over, in colleges and universities across the United States, and in the majority of those universities another set of rituals will be acted out.  No… I’m not talking about graduation.  I’m talking about the return of “student evaluations” to professors and instructors. The entire idea of student evaluations is a largely American phenomenon that caught hold sometime in the late 1970s, and it is now a monster that not only threatens the very concept of improving education, but it’s also a poster child for the hypocrisy of most college and university administrations.

Now… before we go farther, let me emphasize that I am not opposing the evaluation of faculty in higher education.  Far from it.  Such evaluation is necessary and a vital part of assuring the quality of faculty and teaching.  What I am opposed to is the use of student evaluations in any part of that process.

Take my wife’s music department.  In addition to their advanced degrees, the vast majority have professional experience outside academia.  My wife has sung professionally on three continents, played lead roles in regional operas, and has directed operas for over twenty years.  The other voice professor left a banking career to become a successful tenor in national and regional opera before returning to school and obtaining a doctorate in voice.  The orchestra conductor is a violinist who has conducted in both the United States and China.  The band director spends his summer working with the Newport Jazz Festival.  The piano professor won the noted Tchaikovsky Award and continues to concertize world-wide.  The percussion professor performs professionally on the side and has several times been part of a group nominated for a Grammy.  This sort of expertise in a music department is not unusual, but typical of many universities, and I could come up with similar kinds of expertise in other university departments as well.

Yet… on student evaluations, the students rate their professors on how effective the professors are at teaching, whether the curricula and content are relevant, whether the amount of work required in the course is excessive, etc.  My question/point is simple:  Exactly how can 18-24 year-old students have any real idea of any of the above?  They have no relevant experience or knowledge, and to obtain it is presumably why they’re in college.

Studies have shown that the closest correlation between high student evaluations is that the professors with the easiest courses and the highest percentage of As get the best evaluations. And, since evaluations have become near-universal, college level grades have experienced massive grade inflation.  In short, student evaluations are merely student Happiness Indices – HI!, for short.

So why have the vast majority of colleges and universities come to rely on HI! in evaluating professors for tenure, promotion, and retention?  It has little to do with teaching effectiveness or the quality of education provided by a given professor and everything to do with popularity.  In the elite schools, student happiness is necessary in order to keep student retention rates up, because that’s one of the key factors used by U.S. News and World Report and other rating groups, and the higher the rating, the more attractive the college or university is to the most talented students, and those students are most likely to be successful and eventually boost alumni contributions and the school’s reputation.  For state universities, it’s a more direct numbers game.  Drop-outs and transfers represent lost funds and inquiries from state legislatures who provide some of the funding.  And departments who are too rigorous in their attempts to maintain or [heaven forbid] upgrade the quality of education often either lose students or fail to grow as fast as other departments, which results in fewer resources for those departments.  Just as Amazon’s reader reviews greatly boosted Amazon’s book sales, HI! boost the economics of colleges and universities.  Professors who try to uphold or raise standards face an uphill and usually unsuccessful battle – as evidenced by the growing percentage of college graduates who lack basic skills in writing and logical understanding.

Yet, all the while, the administrations talk about the necessity of HI! [sanctimoniously disguised as thoughtful student evaluations] in improving education, when it’s really about economics and their bottom line… and by the way, in virtually every university and college across the country, over the past 20 years, the percentage growth in administration size has dwarfed the growth in full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty.  But then, why would any administration really want to point out that perceived student happiness trumps academic excellence in every day and in every way or that all those resources are going more and more to administrators, while faculties, especially at state universities, have fewer and fewer professors and more and more adjuncts and  teaching assistants?

Somehow people, especially students, don’t get it.  As the title above suggests, just because something is newer, it isn’t necessary better – even in computers.  I have yet to find a commercial graphing program in existence today that is anywhere even close to the Boeing Graph program of some 25 years ago.  And as techno-historians know, the Beta videotape system was far superior to the VHS system.

What’s interesting now, though, is that for some applications – such as viewing student voice teachers and critiquing them – VHS tapes are far superior to DVDs.  Why?  Because the tapes can be paused at any given second, or rewound to a precise point.  Commercial DVDs and equipment can’t.  When a voice professor is studying vocal dynamics, that’s important.  Having to play through sections, even at high speed, takes time and often overshoots or undershoots the point in question.  Yet my wife’s pedagogy students complain that she uses “antiquated equipment” and makes them use old-fashioned tapes instead of new hip digital disks.  What they don’t seem to understand is that “new” isn’t better if it doesn’t do what you want it to, especially when “old” technology does.

This isn’t confined to the sometimes arcane area of vocal pedagogy, but applies across our techno-society. Typewriters do a far better job of filling in forms – at least those not available on one’s own computer – than do computers. Word Seven is a much faster word processing system for text than is the current version of Word [which I do have for the other applications], and the search capabilities of fifteen-year-old WordPerfect 6.0 still exceed those of any current version of Word.  As I noted in an earlier post, a keyed ignition is far more effective at turning off a runaway engine than a new high-tech keyless engine, not to mention safer.  My “old” color ink-jet printer delivers a far cleaner and clearer image than does the new and improved laser-jet printer, even if the laser is faster. And in terms of overall medical effectiveness, in terms of all factors, there’s no solid proof that the newer NSAIDs have any more benefits and more effectiveness than does good old aspirin, and although aspirin does have a slightly higher propensity to create gastro-intestinal bleeding, it also has many other benefits, such as reducing the risk of heart attacks and colon cancer – and it’s one of the oldest drugs around. Certainly, the now-retired Concorde passenger jet was far superior to any commercial aircraft now in service in getting passengers across the ocean quickly, and more than a few pilots still claim that the retired F-14 exceeds anything now flying for total air superiority.  Photographic film still provides a better image than does comparable digital photography.

Going back to recording equipment, if you happen to have a phonograph with a working needle, you can still play vinyl and other old records nearly a century old.  You certainly can’t do that with tapes even half that old, and a single light scratch effectively destroys the usefulness of a CD.  That’s fine for entertainment products that aren’t meant to outlast the current fad, but is it acceptable for recording data or information with a longer lifespan?

So why aren’t newer products always better?  The plain fact is that superiority is often far down the list in product qualities, usually behind cost of production/operation, novelty appeal, style, ease of operation, and profitability.  Another factor is that, especially in computer and communications products, manufacturers try to cram in as many applications as possible so as to appeal to the widest possible number of consumers. The multiplicity of applications generally results in the overall degradation of the capability of all functions, but that degradation usually isn’t perceptible, or relevant, to most users.

This often results in cheaper products, but the downside is that those products often don’t suit the needs of professionals in specialized fields… and because it’s getting harder and harder to develop or produce products for users with particular needs – such as my professorial wife – those users have to make do with either improvised or older equipment… and risk being termed dinosaurs and out of date,

In the end… newer isn’t always better; it’s always only newer.

It’s now official.  According to my editor and Macmillan Company, the parent of Tor Books, every single one of my titles has now appeared somewhere as pirated edition, in some form or another.  I’d almost like to claim this as a singular distinction.  I can’t. Macmillan also believes that every single book they’ve published in recent years – something like the last three decades – has appeared in pirated editions of some sort.

I can’t say I’m surprised.  Every time I attempt to check up on how my books are doing, I discover website after website offering free downloads of everything I’ve ever written, including versions of titles that never were issued in electronic format and even those that haven’t been in print in those particular editions offered in more than twenty years.  I could spend every minute of every day trying to chase them down… without much success.  So I grit my teeth and bear it.

Ah… the wonders of the electronic age.

Coincidentally, and unsurprisingly, the sales of paperback mass-market fiction books have also begun to decline.  Part of this is likely due in part to the collapse of a section of the wholesale distribution system, but that shrinkage doesn’t account for most of it, because it’s also occurring in the case of titles and authors who were never distributed widely on a wholesale basis, and whose books were largely sold only through bookstores. This hasn’t been so obvious in the F&SF field, because, while the average paperback print run has decreased, the number of paperback titles has increased slightly, but according to knowledgeable editors, the decrease is happening pretty much across the board, and some very big name authors – far bigger names than mine – have seen significant decreases in paperback book sales… and that’s without a corresponding increase in e-book sales.  Obviously, this isn’t true for every single author, and it’s impossible to determine for newly published authors because, if they haven’t published a book before, how can one accurately determine if their paperback sales are falling off from those of their previous book?

Despite all the talk, it appears that the popular mantra that information and entertainment need to be free remains in force for a small but significant fraction of former book buyers – even if such “free editions”  reduce authors’ incomes and result in publishers eliminating yet more mid-list authors because declining sales have made them unprofitable, or even money-losing.

The other day I came across an outraged comment about the price of an e-book version of my own Imager’s Challenge. The would-be reader was outraged that the electronic version was “only” a few dollars less than the hard-cover edition, especially since the paperback edition won’t be out for four months or so.  Somehow, it doesn’t seem to penetrate that while paper may be the single largest component of “physical” publishing costs, it still only amounts to something like 10-15% of the publisher’s cost of producing a book, i.e., a few dollars. Even without paper, the other costs remain, and they’re substantial – and publishing remains, as I have written, time and time again, a very low margin business. That’s why publishers really don’t want to cannibalize their hardcover revenues by undercutting the hardcover prices before the paperback version is on the shelves, especially given the decline in paperback sales.

There are many problems with piracy, including the fact that authors essentially get screwed, but the biggest one for readers seems to be overlooked.  The more piracy exists and the wider-spread it becomes, the less the choice readers will have in finding well-written, well-edited books, and especially of books that are not popular best-sellers.  The multi-million selling popular books – and the “popcorn books,” as my wife calls them – will survive piracy.  The well-written books for smaller audiences won’t.  So readers could very well be left with dwindling choices… and scrambling through thousands of self-published e-volumes, most of which are and will be poorly written and unedited in search of that rare “gem” – a good and different book that doesn’t appeal to everyone.

But… after all, information and entertainment want to be free.

Last Thursday, the stock market took its single biggest one day drop in its history, somewhere slightly over a thousand points, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Index.  While the market recovered sixty to seventy percent of that drop before the close Thursday, the financial damage across the world was not inconsiderable.  Did this happen because Greece is still close to a financial meltdown, or because economic indicators were weak?   No… while the leading cause or precipitating factor may have been a typographical error – a trader entered a sell order for $16 BILLION of exchange futures, instead of a mere $16 million, there are a number of other possibilities, but the bottom line [literally] was that, whatever the cause, all the automated and computerized trading engines immediately reacted – and the market plummeted.  Later, the NASDEQ canceled a number of trades, but that was long after the damage had been done.

From the Terminator movies onward, there have been horror stories about computers unleashing doomsday, but the vast majority of these have concerned nuclear and military scenarios – not world economic collapse.  While I don’t fall into the “watch out for those evil computers” camp, I have always been and remained greatly concerned about the growth and uses of so-called “expert systems” – in all areas of society, largely because computers are the perfect servants – they do exactly what their programming tells them to do, even if the result will be disastrous.

For example, Toyota is now having all sorts of problems with runaway acceleration.  When this first occurred, my question was simple enough:  Why didn’t the drivers either shift into neutral or turn off the ignition.  Apparently, it turns out, at least some of them may not have been able to, not quickly, because they had keyless ignition systems.  Yet the automakers are talking about cars that will be not only keyless but also totally electronic, that is, even the shifting will be electronic and not physical/manual.  And if the electronics malfunction, exactly how will a driver be able to quickly “kill” the system?  Let’s think that one over for a bit.

President Obama and the health care reformers want all medical records to be electronically available, both for cost-saving purposes and for ease of access.  The problem with that kind of ease of access is that it also offers greater ease of hacking and tampering, and, I’m sorry, no system that offers the kind of ease the “reformers” are proposing can be made hacker-proof.  The access and security requirements are mutually antithetical. Years ago, Sandra Bullock starred in a movie called “The Net,” and while many of the computer references are outdated and almost laughable, one aspect of the movie was not and remains all too plausibly real.  At least two characters die because their medical records are hacked, and changed.  In addition, national databases are manipulated and identities switched.  Now… the computer experts will say that these sorts of things can be guarded against… and they can be, but will they?  Security costs money, and good security costs a lot of money, and people use computers to cut costs, not to increase them.

As far as economics go, now that an “accident” has shown just how vulnerable securities markets are to inadvertent manipulation, how long before some terrorist or other extremist group figures out how to duplicate the effect?  And then all the programmed trading computers will blindly execute their trades… and we’ll get an even bigger disaster.

Why?

Because we’ve become an instant-reaction society, and electronic systems magnify the effect of either system glitches or human error. Those programmed securities trading computers were designed to take advantage of market fluctuations on a micro if not a nano-second basis.  For better or worse, they make decisions faster than any human trader could possibly make them – and they do so based on data that may or may not be accurate.

We’re seeing the same thing across society.  Today’s young people are being trained to react, rather than to think.  Instead of letters or even email, they use Twitter.  Instead of bridge or old fashioned board games like Risk or Diplomacy, they prefer fast-acting, instant reaction videogames with a premium on speed.  More and more of the younger generation cannot form or express complex concepts, even as technology is taking us into an ever more complex world.  Business has a greater and greater emphasis on short-term gain and profits.  People want instant satisfaction.

The societal response to the increase in speed across society is to use computers and electronic systems to a greater and greater extent – but, as happened last Thursday, what happens when one’s faithful and obedient electronic servants do exactly what their inputs dictate that they’re supposed to do – and the result is disaster?

Do we really want – and can our society survive – a world where a few high-speed mistakes can destroy more than a trillion dollars worth of assets in seconds… or do even worse damage than that?  Not to mention one where thinking is passé… or for the old fogies of an earlier generation… and where all that matters is instant [and shallow] communications and short-term results that may well result in long-term disaster.

A few weeks ago, the Canadian science fiction writer Peter Watts was convicted of “assaulting” U.S. border guards because he failed to listen/heed instructions to remain in his car when he was pulled over for a search at a border crossing.  Although the guards’ testimony that Watts had physically assaulted them was refuted, Watts was found guilty because, under the law, failure to follow instructions constituted “assault,” although the only action he took was to be stupid enough to get out of his car when he was told not to.  While he was fined and given a suspended sentence, as a now-convicted felon, Watts will henceforth be denied entry to the United States, and, if he were careless enough to sneak in and were discovered, he’d be in much more serious trouble.  While more than a few readers and supporters were outraged at Watts’s treatment, Watts and others were even more outraged at a law that classes “failure to obey” the same as assault.

Unfortunately, this sort of legal trickery and legerdemain has a long and less than honorable history in the United States, and probably elsewhere in the world.  The American justice establishment has found a number of indirect ways to place people in custody and otherwise convict and sentence them.  Perhaps the most well-known was the conviction of the gangster Al Capone, not for the murders, fraud, and mayhem he perpetrated, but for, of all things, income tax evasion.

In 1940 the Congress passed, and the president signed the Alien Registration Act, otherwise known as the Smith Act, which made illegal, among other things, either the membership in any organization which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government or even helping anyone who belonged to such an organization.  In effect, that meant the government could legally prosecute anyone who had ever been a member of the Communist party or anyone who ever helped anyone who had ever been a member of that party with any party-related activities, no matter how trivial. Initially, the Act was used only against those who had actually been involved in such activities, but in the late 1940s, the FBI and Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities charged thousands of Americans with violation of the provisions of the Smith Act. If someone admitted helping another who had belonged to the Communist Party, they could theoretically spend up to 20 years in jail.  If they denied it and proof was found otherwise, they were guilty of perjury and could also go to jail.  Eventually, the Supreme Court declared many of the more far-reaching interpretations and prosecutions under the law unconstitutional, but not before hundreds of people had been sent to jail or had their lives and livelihoods destroyed, either directly or indirectly, for what often amounted to association with friends and business associates.

Flash to the present.  According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Form No. 1651-0111 asks the following questions:

Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage, or in terrorist activities, or genocide, or between 1933 and 1945, were involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?

Are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

Now… it’s a safe bet that no one will ever check the “yes” box following either one of these questions, and many people will ask why the government bothers with asking such stupid questions.

The government knows no one will ever admit to either set or acts or intentions.  But… if anyone is ever caught even doing something immoral, not necessarily illegal, if the prosecutors can’t come up with as much evidence as they’d like to lock someone away, they can dig out the handy-dandy form and charge the “entrant” in question with perjury, etc.  It’s effectively a form of after-the-fact bureaucratic insurance.

Personally, I can’t say that it exactly reinforces my confidence in American law enforcement’s ability to find and prosecute the worst offenders when every immigrant who even shop-lifted or visited an escort service could be locked away.  But then, they did lock up Big Al, even if they couldn’t prove a thing against him on the worst crimes he ordered or committed.  So… maybe I shouldn’t complain.  Still… Peter Watts is now a felon for what amounts to stupidity, or at the least, lack of common sense, although he never threatened anyone or lifted a hand against either guard.