By Doug Ward

Add another lock to the ivory tower.

A majority of college students say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and 20 percent accept the idea of resorting to violence to keep an undesirable speaker from campus, a poll from the Brookings Institution finds.

John Villasenor, a senior fellow at Brookings, conducted the poll to gauge students’ understanding of the First Amendment. The survey contained responses from 1,500 students in 49 states and the District of Columbia. It has a margin of error of 2 to 6 percentage points.

elements of bill of rights on a tablet screen
The Blue Diamond Gallery

The results are disturbing, although not surprising given the recent campus reactions to controversial speakers:

  • More than 40 percent of students say that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech. (It does.) Women (49 percent) are considerably more likely than men (38 percent) to believe that.
  • Male students (57 percent) are considerably more likely than female students (47 percent) to say that shouting down a speaker is acceptable. Democrats (62 percent) are far more likely than Republicans (39 percent) to agree.
  • Men (30 percent) are more likely than women (10 percent) to say that violence is acceptable to keep a speaker away from campus.
  • Nearly two-thirds of students say that the First Amendment requires that a campus provide an opposing view to a controversial speaker. (It doesn’t.)
  • A majority of students (53 percent) say they would prefer a campus environment that prohibits offensive viewpoints to one that exposes them to many different viewpoints, including offensive ones. Democrats (61 percent) are more likely than Republicans (49 percent) to choose the prohibitive environment.

Villasenor issues a pessimistic assessment of the results.

“Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses,” he wrote.

Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, sees this as part of a fraying of liberal education, which he says isn’t vigorously promoting the idea of discussion and dissent to hone thinking.

“Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds,” he said in a recent speech.

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, sees this lack of willingness to engage with opposing viewpoints as part of a “rise of identity consciousness.” A movement that started in the 1980s has led to a “pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities,” he writes.

Lilla says this approach has been helpful in improving inclusiveness on campuses and on exploring ideas of neglected groups. “But it also has encouraged a single-minded fascination with group differences and the social margins,” he says, “so much so that students have come away with a distorted picture of history and of their country in the present — a significant handicap at a time when American liberals need to learn more, not less, about the vast middle of the country.”

Any discussion of how to rekindle the ability to engage in reasoned debate and dissent must include an understanding of the First Amendment. That understanding needs to start in middle school and high school, Villasenor argues. At colleges and universities, he said, professors and administrators need to do a better job of creating an environment that values free and open speech. He was pessimistic about that, though, saying he thought faculty responses to his survey would probably be similar to students’.

Students’ ignorance of the First Amendment not only diminishes an open airing of ideas, he said, but foreshadows changes in society as students’ understanding of free speech will “inform the decisions they make as they move into positions of increasing authority later in their careers.”

In other words, we need to help students learn to listen to many views and embrace disagreement as a natural process of improving themselves and society. It we don’t, they will find that an ivory tower isn’t just a place of safety. It can easily become a place of intellectual imprisonment.

Budget cuts and the imperilment of public universities

State budget cuts and reductions in federal funding have clouded the future of public research universities, especially those in the Midwest, Jon Marcus writes in Washington Monthly.

Not only have university budgets become shaky, he says, but many faculty members have left Midwestern universities for better jobs, public research universities in the Midwest have fallen in national rankings, and spending on research and development has fallen. These universities are “experiencing a pattern of relative decline,” Marcus writes. (He uses a definition of “Midwest” that encompasses Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.)

He cites some startling statistics that put his premise into context:

“The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion. Together, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, which enroll about 50,000 students combined, have more than $73 billion in the bank to help during lean times.”

Additionally, a decline in federal research spending comes at a time when other countries have put additional money into research activities at their universities.

“This ominous reality could widen economic inequality,” he says, in part because students with higher degrees who stay in a state after receiving their degrees bolster that state’s economy. It could also threaten communities in which universities are the primary employer and ultimately threaten the national economy, he says.

The tone of the article seems overly alarmist at times, but the financial challenges at public research universities is very real.

“These schools are desperately needed to diversify economies that rely disproportionately on manufacturing and agriculture and lack the wealthy private institutions that fuel the knowledge industries found in Silicon Valley or along Boston’s 128/I-95 corridor,” he says.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

If you’ve noticed that your students still don’t have required course materials, you have lots of company.

That’s because more students are delaying purchase of course materials, if they buy them at all, and paying more attention to price when making decisions, according to a report by the National Association of College Stores.

That’s not surprising, as students have said for several years that they have been avoiding the purchase of course materials. It is still worth watching the trends, though, because it is difficult for students to succeed if they don’t have the books and other course materials they need for their classes. Students who avoided purchase of books reported lower GPAs, the report said, even though two-thirds of students said that they suffered no consequences.

Jeffrey Betts, Stocksnap

The report, Student Watch: Attitudes & Behaviors Toward Course Materials, is based on surveys of students at 90 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada in the spring. Among some of the findings that stand out:

  • 20 percent of students waited until after the first week of classes to buy course materials, compared with 12 percent in each of the three previous semesters.
  • Only 40 percent of students reported that they had all course materials by the first day of class.
  • 25 percent of students said they gained access to course material by borrowing, sharing or downloading them (most likely through illicit means). That is up from 15 percent in Spring 2017.
  • The amount students spend on required course materials has been on a steady decline over the last decade, falling to $579 in the 2016-17 school year from $701 in 2007-08.
  • Freshmen spent an average of $633 during the last academic year, compared with $481 for seniors.
  • The average cost of a textbook was $81 during the 2016-17 academic year.
  • Students in health professions and business spent the most on course materials, the report said. Those in computer science and math spent the least.

The takeaway from the report is that instructors must pay more attention to the cost of course materials they assign. More and more students simply won’t buy the required materials. I’ve heard many professors say that’s the students’ faults, but the reality is more complex. More than a third of students said instructors never used the required texts they bought, and more than a fourth said the materials were hard to understand or use. Nine percent of students at four-year universities said they had to borrow money to pay for their books, and 18 percent said they had to wait for financial aid before they could afford books.

Seemingly fishing for some good news, the report highlighted a finding that 97 of students bought at least one required text during the spring semester.

Yes, one.  If only learning were that simple.

So long, computers?

At least that’s what many faculty members speculated in a survey by the magazine Campus Technology. The magazine asked faculty members what technologies were most likely to disappear in the next decade. Desktop computers and laptops landed at the top of the list, followed by clickers and non-interactive projectors and displays.

Interestingly, the survey didn’t ask people what would replace computers. (Probably smaller computers.)

The survey was too small (232 volunteers nationwide) to provide any real validity, but the responses were interesting nonetheless. For instance, faculty expect virtual and augmented reality to grow in importance, along with mobile devices and apps, and 3D modeling, scanning and printing.

Here’s a conundrum, though: Eighty-one percent of respondents said technology had improved their teaching, and 81 percent said it had improved student learning. When asked to identify the technology they wish they didn’t have to deal with, though, faculty members said learning management systems, mobile devices, printers and computers.

Apparently faculty think technology works well as long as they don’t have to use it.

A thoughtful reflection on concealed carry

“To me, the college classroom is a sacred space—a place to practice dealing with conflict without recourse to violence,” Lisa Moore of the University of Texas, Austin, writes. “My professional judgment as a teacher is that the kind of security we need in the classroom is incompatible with the presence of a loaded firearm.”

Her thoughtful essay on the site of the Association of American Colleges and Universities is well worth reading.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Students aren’t always sure what to make of a flipped class. Some resist and complain. Others take to the format immediately and recognize how it helps them learn. Most are somewhere in between.

A class in film and media studies that Anne Gilbert helped transform provides a good example of student reaction.

“The students who are in the class, they’re learning a lot,” she said. “They’re a little bit overwhelmed in the beginning. They sort of have this look on their face: ‘There’s so much going on. I love all of this, but I’m so scared.’ ”

Anne Gilbert answers a student’s question as other students (background) work in groups on the basics of video lighting

The class she describes is Basic Video Production, or Film and Media Studies 275. Gilbert, who was a post-doctoral teaching fellow at KU and is now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, worked with Meg Jamieson, the instructor of the class, to transform it into an active learning format. Rather than lecturing to students about concepts and then having students explore those concepts in lab, they shifted much of the material to a hands-on format in the classroom.

“The hope is that the connection between studies and practice, which is at the heart of film and media studies as a degree, can be implemented a little more deeply with the flipped classroom,” Jamieson said.

The accompanying video explains more about the approach that Jamieson and Gilbert took in remaking the class. They worked with other faculty members in their department to home in on what students needed to take away from FMS 275 to prepare them for subsequent classes. They created videos and other assignments that allowed them to shift some in-class material online. That gave them freedom to experiment with in-class techniques like a series of stations that students rotated through to learn the basics of lighting. That, in turn, freed up lab time so that students could spend more time creating, editing and honing their video productions.

None of this was easy. Gilbert said that she and Jamieson spent 10 to 15 hours a week planning and creating materials in the semester before they taught the class in a flipped format. They created a pre-test so they had a better sense of students’ skill levels when they entered the class. Other faculty members contributed material, as well, and helped with some of the class sessions.

There were glitches along the way, as there are in any course redesign. Some students saw the new format as too much work. And, not surprisingly, the graduate teaching assistants in the class needed help in adapting to the new format. That’s a crucial aspect of any change in a class. Everyone involved has to understand the goals and the methods.

Meg Jamieson leads students through some of the components of effective lighting for video

Gilbert spent a considerable amount of time helping the GTAs understand teaching styles “that don’t involve standing in front of the classroom and explaining things.” They were “a little unsettled at their changing position,” she said.

That led to discussions about what teaching involves, and ultimately helped improve the class and helped the teaching assistants improve their work.

“They don’t necessarily understand that when the students do an activity in class and you’re circulating around and helping them – that is teaching,” Gilbert said. “They don’t see that as teaching. They see that as the students doing an activity. They ask how students are learning things because I haven’t taught it to them. It’s like, ‘Well, this is teaching. This is how they are learning.’ ”

Students did indeed learn. Gilbert and Jamieson both said that the quality of student projects had improved with the flipped format. Other instructors have found the same, and the evidence about flipped teaching and other forms of active learning continues to grow.

You can read more about teaching in a flipped format in the CTE portfolio and poster gallery. Instructors in music, economics, engineering, Latin, psychology, and physics have all had good results with flipping their classes. They are good examples of how instructors, not just students, are learning in a flipped format.


Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

CTE’s Twitter feed