Years later I learned to write the function like this:

y = 2^x

where x is the number of days that pass, and y is the loot that results.

Exponential functions work in your favor when you’re negotiating for an allowance.  But then later on I was thinking about, well, sex.  More specifically, why it matters to us so much.  I have two parents, and each of them has two, and so on.  That doubling is at work again, where x now equals not the number of days but the number of generations.

In other words, I only have to go back 31 generations to have two billion direct ancestors.  Now, 31 generations ago the world population was less than half of that.  So clearly, some branches on my family tree were hooking up with each other.  (Don’t snicker; so were some on yours.)  In fact, mathematial models of mitochondrial DNA suggest the mild incest was so rampant that the most recent common ancestor of all humans now alive was pitching woo only 2-5,000 years ago.

This cuts going forward in time, too.  The genetic contributions of a child-bearing adult my age will be reduced by half in the next generation, then halved again in the next, and so on, blending inexorably and indiscriminately with those of his peers, rivals, and sworn enemies.  Just as our ancestry mushrooms exponentially, so does our influence dwindle, to a vanishing point closer than we think.

Now, consider the emotional and mental capital we lavish on deciding whom to — I’ll put this delicately — date.  For all that obsessing and flirting and exhilaration and anguish, you’d expect it to matter, a lot, and for more than a few millennia.  But at that distance the upshot is precisely naught.

So why have we been selected to fuss over it so?  In other words, in terms of their fitness for survival and impact on the deme, wouldn’t our Paleolithic ancestors have been better of using that energy to farm?  Or floss?  There’s a puzzle here.

I think the solution has ramifications for those of us in the education biz, where the object is to preserve and perpetuate culture.  I’m not breaking new ground when I compare the propagation of ideas to that of organisms.  I’ve done so before on this blog, and it’s behind current tropes like the word “meme.”  If you buy that analogy — and I do — then you could wonder the same thing about reproducing culture.  What is it that prompts my colleagues and me to work so hard?  It ain’t the money, it’s the mission.  We think we matter, and not just temporarily.

Is that a trick of perspective?  Like the intensely important feeling of romantic conquest, or parental love?  The delusion of relevance?  Or, in spite of the sobering function y = 2^x, are our physiological responses actually getting at a deeper truth?  I think they are, and I think it’s this:  it does matter.

Our influence is ephemeral, but it’s all we have, and it’s real.  In the aggregate, these hard won accomplishments do add up, even as their accumulation erodes the contributions of any one of us.  We live better today than we did in antiquity because our predecessors took care, and moved us along, and left behind something incrementally better than they inherited.  As legacies go, that’s a good one to shoot for.

I’ve never been to Africa, and so jumped at the chance.  (You can see my gawky tourist snapshots here.)  Since getting here, my first impressions have corroborated what I knew of Africa from a distance.  Kenya has its share of challenges with wealth distribution, resource management, and government.  It’s doing better than some of its neighbors, with a shaky but visibly emerging democratic tradition after years of dictatorship.

Between meetings a couple of the administators chatted about a recent scandal involving Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza.  Last New Year’s Eve she was entering a shopping mall when the security guard there — also a woman — stepped up to frisk her.  The judge was offended, claiming that she was above such things.  It escalated until Baraza went to her bodyguard’s car, pulled out a gun, and used it to threaten the mall cop.

A couple of things I took away from this story:
- My hosts told it in a very funny way.  They grew up in a Kenya where high officials really were above the law, and so they’re inured to some of the scarier story points.
- Yes, this is a country where you get frisked going into the mall, and the judges — who face nothing like the threats leveled at their counterparts in, say, Mexico — nonetheless bring armed bodyguards to go shopping.

My hotel is a gated compound that hosts a casino, a few swimming pools, a nightclub, and eight restaurants, leaving me little reason to breach the perimeter.  The entrance to the university has five security guards, one with a mirror on a stick to check the underside of each entering car.  Yet the country feels safe.  At the end of each day we leave the enclosed university to walk back to the enclosed hotel, on the same road the students take.  The biggest threats are dust and swerving cars.

The country has set an ambitious course for itself called Vision 2030. The plan is supported by three pillars, one of them promimently featuring (surprise!) education.  Like another country I work in, Kenya wants more graduates.  It sees this as prerequisite to meeting challenges in the environment, social and economic justice, and its future material well-being and civic health.  So, same siren song, poorer siren.

My work schedule been the typical round of on-campus meetings, and the best (as usual) was with students.  USIU is a private non-profit, which by a quirk of history enjoys U.S. regional accreditation.  It draws a well-to-do enrollment, the great majority entering prepared for college learning.  Persistence and grad rates are high.  Curriculum is on the American model, with generous helpings of breadth.

Despite the fortress entrance, the community looks for opportunities to leave the bubble.  Many students live off campus, in apartments along that road we walk.  Some take a semester off to earn tuition, starting and running fast food businesses along the same corridor.  Service learning is required in every degree.  Their parents work for the civil service or NGOs.  Most of the students I met are business majors, and everyone worries about the employability afterward — faculty and administrators focus on it, the students worry about it.

Within this context, I learned from the students that USIU’s general education has made a poor case for itself.  Those who came in curious about the world like general education.  Those on a mission to get in and get out employable — or who just already knew what they like — didn’t see the need to take Classes in Other Things.  Some of them chose business because it sounded broad.  Two — TWO — expressed a passion for finance, and would have been happier with grad-school-style narrowness.

The more they talked to each other about the value of liberal learning, the more the skeptics came around.  I tend to cheerlead about such things, but tried to cast my questions as hypothetical (e.g. “what if you were convinced these courses improve your ability to innovate, and employers look for that?”).  I probably skewed the results by habit.  Hell, they were probably already skewed because someone flew halfway around the world to come hear about their GE, making it seem at least noteworthy.

But the upshot is this:  advocates and skeptics alike, the broadly curious and the narrowly dedicated, all said the GE courses needed to connect to the outside world, and NOT to the major.  That was my big lesson.

I think this generation lives with connectedness, growing up with interdisciplinarity like ours didn’t.  The business majors don’t need “English for Business Majors” and “Math for Business Majors” and “Chemistry for Business Majors.”  They came in knowing all these subjects connect in unpredictable ways.

But they do want relevance and timeliness.  They want their GE heavy on skills, and lighter on content, which they get from the web anyway.  Many said GE looks too much like a rerun of high school.  This group agreed that if we’re set on keeping content in, then we need to emphasize its usefulness and relevance.  As one put it, maybe oversimplifying to make a point — “don’t give me biology, give me first aid.”

For now, USIU’s solution is to connect faculty, and strengthen shared intellectual experiences like community service, the First Year Experience, and capstone courses.  With an enrollment under 5,000, they can go for more unity and consistency than we can in the CSU, where we enroll over 400,000 and our GE is taught mostly in the community colleges.

So I don’t think we’ll have their emerging brand of unity on a large scale.  But that relevance thing stuck with me.

By this perspective, opposable thumbs and upright walking get their due, but are eclipsed by speech and culture.  And then by our different means of propagating them:  cuneiform, moveable type, the internet . . . each epoch seems to bring the planet closer to functioning as one massive neural network.

This can stoke some optimism.  If the settled village trumps the nomadic clan, and connecting villages into city-states is even better, then surely the global village commons is the best yet?  Maybe together, across the range of human cultures and ways of knowing, we’ll finally tackle some of the big problems?  That is, now that we have Facebook and containerized shipping, can social justice be far behind?

Well, not so fast.

In my home state of California we have a particularly blunt instrument for collective governance, “direct democracy.”   Half a million people can put anything they want to referendum, and the rest of us decide it.  Our ballots can get enormous, dense and arcane.

In this world, the well heeled have little trouble advancing their interest by hiring signature-gatherers to block shopping malls and grocery stores.  So, rather than harvesting our collective wisdom — I think of it as a Progressive-era anticipation of Wikipedia — it instead adds to the concentration of influence, and then hitches a ride on our collective folly.  We legalize pot but then stuff our prisons on the three-strikes law.  We limit taxes, we grant ourselves entitlements, we race to insolvency.  The ballot initiatives approved by California are a window into our shortsightedness, ignorance, and greed.

I was musing about this last week during one of the meetings I don’t much enjoy attending, between the head of the California State University system and his 23 campus presidents, when I realized the big guy was fulminating on this very subject.  He referred his chief execs to a recent Daily Show interview with John Burton, head of the state’s Democratic Party.  It’s a good interview, appropriately angry and pretty funny.

Liking Burton’s point is easy; knowing what to take away, as we build a better future out of a dizzyingly connected world, is harder.

In my high school civics class I didn’t know why we needed an Electoral College, but that was before I moved here.  Now the authority of the E.C. has all but atrophied, while elsewhere our decisions would clearly benefit from some mediation.  But whose?

Afterward, the performers stayed for a Q&A with the audience.  We heard that in gathering the material, interviewers learned that the hate crimes now shared emotional space with the recent hike in UC fees.  They were surprised to discover that the fee outrage went beyond the predictable response of people asked to pay more for the same thing.  The student interviewers I met noticed a deeper connection.

This turned out to be prescient, of course.  Last week the fee unrest — subsequently a sit-in — ended with the notorious pepper-spraying incident that was caught on video, went viral, and now threatens the university’s top leadership.

We’re seeing sit-ins and protests in the CSU, where I work.  Like education itself, setting tuition rates seems to go all the way to students’ sense of themselves.

Admission to a university hinges on a summary of your academic life to date.  “We’ve looked at who you are, and we think you’re worth investing in.”  It can feel more like a marriage proposal than a business proposition.  When the Davis students learned their fees were going up, some said they felt lied to.  Those passages were some of the best parts of the performance.

California students protest fee hikes regularly, in undulations matched to the state’s political and economic tides.  The shouting and picketing can puzzle spectators like me.  (We are a fiscal mess, without public resources to redirect.  What exactly are people protesting?  Arithmetic?)

Last week I was in Washington when back at my office a crowd interrupted a meeting of the CSU Board of Trustees.  There were several injuries and an estimated $30,000 in property damage.  It was a big deal but off-key.  For one, these weren’t just students.  For another, it wasn’t just about education; many held signs criticizing banks, making the action feel trumped up, or at least misdirected.  Compared to the sit-in at UC Davis, this action was a harder incident to report on, or react to.

But days later we’re still going to work past boarded up doors and broken glass.  It’s a reminder that money can be personal, measuring not just the worth of education, but also the depth of our commitment to each other.  Yeah, it’s simple arithmetic, but arithmetic that expresses our values.

Yet lower-division courses are hard to teach this way.  It’s one thing to conduct research with the hotshots who survived into your capstone; less typical to explore unanswered questions in the opening survey course, including everyonein the work , including those at risk of dropping out.  Yet the apparent value for persistence and gap closing could mean it’s worth figuring out.

At the end of the two-day workshop a participant from Monterey Bay — himself a kind of celebrity of CSU undergraduate research — asked representatives from the chancellor’s office how we might better support a research culture in a system of universities that has historically put teaching first.  We didn’t really have an answer.

The following day I left for the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Summit at UW Oshkosh.  A faculty leadership team there spent last summer developing a new GE curriculum, and this year’s summit — unlike its predecessors — had a political purpose mixed in with the faculty development:  to introduce the broader campus to the proposed new framework.

Over lunch with the leadership team, I learned they’re being careful with the roll-out.  As on the CSU campuses recently revising GE, Oshkosh reformers want to stay with design principles for as long as possible, building buy-in and getting as close to consensus as they can before letting the discussion turn to “implementation,” and the scramble for FTES.  I was there with fellow guest speaker Robert Zemsky to hold the focus on larger, national issues up to the last minute, the day before roll-out of the new model.

The proposed changes at Oshkosh are exciting:  as a Wisconsin campus involved in Give Students a Compass, the university is considering many of the same innovations on deck for the CSU.  I’m glad their effort benefits from realpolitik.

Yet, like the brain-teaser about supporting undergraduate research, I find the need to defer implementation — read, faculty competition — hard to address.

Shouldn’t we be eager to unleash the innovation of individual faculty members?   In well functioning markets, success is its own reward.  Create a tablet computer that people want, or a cure for arthritis, or a chain of attractive coffee houses, and that’s that.  You’re ready to roll it out, and don’t have to cool your jets first, while policy makers like me try to downplay everyone else’s incentives first.

But in higher ed, it’s apparently not enough to advance knowledge in your discipline while simultaneously improving undergraduate success, nor enough to create an updated, coherent and engaging general education curriculum.  Creative, cutting edge improvement is only half the job.  The other half, for now, is persuading colleagues it’s worth donating their effort, even if it costs us all a little more, and earns us the same or less.

For one, their state’s GE transfer curriculum is already in pretty good shape.  What they call the General Education Requirements Transfer Agreement, or GERTA, is a lot like our IGETC.  It’s just as efficient — carving the lower-division common core into discrete, interchangeable areas of coursework for maximum portability — and just as prone to downplaying the engaging, integrative, and purposeful aspects of education that may help us keep our students enrolled.  We spent much of our time together focusing on ways to preserve transferability while deepening the learning.

For another, people in North Dakota are considering the same changes we are:  wider incorporation of “high-impact practices” like learning communities, civic engagement, and undergraduate research, and use of a tool like Lumina’s Degree Qualifications Profile to focus educators and students alike on the goals of higher education.

There are a couple of striking differences from California, too.  For one, as the Association of American Colleges and Universities noted in a recent issue of Peer Review, North Dakota is unusual for inviting the whole spectrum of institutions into the conversation — private and tribal colleges as well as the easier-to-convene publics.

For another, they’re — well, they’re smaller than we are.  Lighter on their feet.  Even when they include schools from outside of their public system, they can get everyone into a room.  With room to spare for a tourist from California.

The inaugural meeting of the North Dakota General Education Council overlapped intentionally with the Reflecting on Teaching Conference.  Officers were elected, and it was hard not to get the sense of a newborn organization standing up for the first time.

What I came away envying the most was the sense of adventure.  They are leaving no assumptions unexamined.

Worth keeping an eye on.

He took the point, and added that the CSU’s growing section caps (maximum enrollments allowed in one scheduled offering of a course) are recent.  In one budget downturn faculty are paid more to teach extra students, realizing efficiencies for the physical plant; and the next downturn the extra pay goes away but the classes stay big.

He added another wrinkle, connected in particular to our hopes to embed deeper learning and “high-impact” educational practices into lower-division GE:  those courses are disproportionately taught by adjuncts, who are spread even thinner.  It’s hard to imagine them having any more time-per-student to devote.

And, so the observation goes in Academically Adrift, that reduced bandwidth-per-student creates an incentive for an inadvertent, unspoken deal between the teacher and student:  don’t expect too much of me, and I’ll return the favor.  So that’s grim.  If we’re going to go all-out for high-impact practices, do we first need to re-engineer the business model?

The silver lining came with a discussion I had yesterday on this with Wayne Tikkanen, who directs the CSU’s Institute for Teaching and Learning.  He knows of a CSU campus that wanted to adopt “writing across the curriculum,” assigning (and therefore reading and grading) routine writing assignments into more courses, not just those in English departments.  To incentivize that, they created prestigious certificates for faculty trained in writing-intensive teaching.  Certification qualifies you for courses with lower section caps.  Cool, huh?

Jim liked that idea.  I was wondering if we might also eventually certify in other high-impact practices, like undergraduate research and service learning.  Among other benefits, the act of certification could provide structure for ongoing faculty development.  Say it expires every two years.  That gives you the chance to check in, maybe norm some rubrics, have faculty across disciplines talk about what they’re doing.

That’s the update on the workload and incentives front.

As we think about changes in our civic mission since the 18th century, it’s worth remembering that the very idea of the nation-state hadn’t taken off until just a few centuries before our revolution.  Until around 1500, most of the world lived in villages, city-states, or tiny kingdoms.  With notable exceptions (e.g. China), few had the civil-bureaucratic skillset to play on a larger stage.  That changed around the time the old world discovered the new, when developments like the printing press, large standing armies, and the public finance of exploration made consolidation look smart.  And even then Europe itself hosted some prominent laggards; Germany didn’t finish until 1871.

Given nationalism’s relative recency, and given its lengthy, sputtering roll-out, we shouldn’t assume the game is over.  What’s next?  Or, like the man sang, Imagine there’s no countries.

I think it could happen sooner than we think, at least in many ways.

National borders have lost much of their relevance within living memory.  Communication is the obvious example; we still print stamps one country at a time, but wonder if we need a post office.  Commerce and human migration are another, poignant case:  cultural distinction is starting to feel like biodiversity, as we all sort of mix into ubiquity.

There are detours and setbacks — Greece may leave the Euro, for example — but we saw that with the consolidation into nations, too.  The trajectory of history, the one we’re supposed to be pointing our students to meet, seems headed toward something different from the civic paradigms we grew up in:  more murky, collective, and dynamic than humans have seen before.

In such a context, the best recourse seems a return to core principles:  behave ethically, cultivate versatility, pitch in where appropriate.  Hang on tight.

Yet hope springs.  Go figure.  Lately I get my fix from two groups of people not found where I work:  faculty, and students.  The students are in a beginning screenwriting class I just started teaching this past Saturday, for the fun of it.  You know, the way other people bowl.  It’s a blast.  First-day-of-class honeymoon phase, maybe, neither side comfortable enough yet to start getting on each other’s nerves.  But it’s also the learning:  this entry-level course is such an eye-opener for people who don’t know how movies are created.

And that’s what education’s all about, of course, that sheer epiphanic rush, and how it feels when you share it with others.  It’s essentially human, this emotional dimension of learning, making us want it.  I think we owe our success as a species to that.  Our collective intellectual curiosity has carried us through plagues, famine, and tyranny, and will survive the trigger cuts.

So, students.

My second wellspring of optimism — one more connected to my day job here in the death star — is the faculty around the CSU system.  In the last couple of weeks it looks like the Compass Project has secured the funding it needs to make real progress reforming our general education transfer curriculum — the coursework required of all students, regardless of campus, major, or whether they start here or in a community college.

In its first phase the project ran for three years, supporting good work on three CSU campuses, one in partnership with a local community college.  That partnership has become the model for the entire second phase:  a linked network of CSU-community college “dyads” up and down California, all testing new ways to embed engaging experiences like learning communities, undergraduate research, and civic engagement into the classes everyone takes.

Ordinarily in higher ed the prospect of change is, oh, off-putting.  University rewards are often rigged to benefit the faculty who prioritize their independent work in the discipline, at the expense of student learning and success.  Proposed changes in education pull that professional attention back into the classroom.  Support too much innovation in teaching and learning, and you can wreck a career.

But for some reason, not here.  Maybe it’s the teaching-centered mission of the state universities and community colleges.  Or maybe it’s just that California’s fiscal freefall invites a certain recklessness.  But so help me the faculty I know in the CSU and community colleges are not afraid to roll the dice.  At least not so far.

For three years they’ve supported and followed Give Students a Compass through its first phase.  At the same time, the CSU was an early and heartfelt adopter of the College Level Examination Program, with our faculty awarding appropriate credit for prior learning not just in the elective area (where it helps students the least), but toward actual degree requirements.  That single policy — admittedly a bit obscure — has made the CSU a national model of higher ed’s shift to an outcomes orientation.  Last year the community colleges followed suit, and — epitomizing student-centered service — matched their policy to ours, providing our transfer students with consistency and clarity.  And the CSU remains the only university system in the country to grant pilot status to a promising new approach to math remediation called Statway, also embraced in the California Community Colleges.

I look at this willingness to experiment, and the foundation support accumulating for the second phase of the Compass Project, and I have to rub my eyes a little.  Am I really seeing this?  Are we going to go for it?

If so, then from the speaking and consulting I’ve done around the country I think our beleaguered state could become a national model in this way, too.  Lots of institutions do amazing things with the general education curriculum of the students who come to them as freshmen and stay put.  But we at the system level haven’t figured out how you do that in an environment of accelerating student mobility.  California’s faculty — those who actually teach in the state’s community colleges and state universities — seem ready to try something better, on a grand scale:  a transfer curriculum that permits local faculty innovation, engages students from the first day of college, yet still facilitates access and transfer.  We want something cool and integrative and cutting edge, but intelligible to our colleagues at neighboring instutitons, where we know many of our students will go before they’re done.

I have no idea what that will look like.  But I think we may be about to find out.

Especially that invisible hand:  it’s a comfort to think we might all be better off if we each look after ourselves.  The alternative, especially if you grew up in the 1970s, looked like a public sector that was both corrupt and inept.

But since leaving college, I’ve been increasingly struck that we’re all in this together.  Ant scientists call a colony of concentrated togetherness a “superorganism,” all the individuals constituting an integrated whole, practically sharing a single consciousness.  I think that’s what we’re becoming, as global travel, the internet, and commerce concentrate our human togetherness.  We always relied on each other; now it’s just harder to deny.

I recently read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner for history.  It’s about the intellectual crisis of faith that followed the American Civil War.  Disruptive change was casting 1840s sectionalism, reform and Utopianism in a silly light, and leaving us with Darwinism, industrialism, the Gilded Age.  When your remote agrarian settlements are suddenly united by railroads, time zones, central finance, and mass market pop culture, you have to rethink some things.

One part struck me as especially helpful, as I rummage around for a worldview.  Menand writes of educator-philosopher John Dewey’s take on the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case in the Supreme Court:

Dewey argued that in thinking of majority decisions as the sum of so many independent selfish preferences, Maine had committed the empiricist’s error of assuming that what we can see is more real than what we can’t see — that individuals exist but “the popular will” is a fiction.  This, Dewey thought, was exactly backward.  “Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case,” he wrote; “the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away.  Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction.”  (Ethics of Democracy, 1888.)  Democracies are not just the sum of their constituent atoms because atoms are not independent of their molecules.  They are always functioning as parts of a greater whole.  Participation changes everything.

Cool, huh?  And at the same time as I’m reading this, I’ve been watching episodes of a National Geographic documentary series called Hard Time about life in Georgia prisons.  The screenwriter in me has to chuckle:  in Hollywood we cast these inmates as dangerous masterminds, but in real life they’re mostly hapless losers.  They come from crummy towns, crummy families, and a few confess they don’t know what they’d do with themselves if they ever made parole.  By their own account, they’re unequipped for freedom.  An invisible hand does them little good.

I watch that with Dewey in my head, and feel like we’re a superorganism in denial, pretending illness at one extremity can’t affect the rest.

And yet, there’s something salutary about that denial, that I can’t put my finger on.  I work in the public sector, and can tell you we’re no less error prone than we were in the ’70s.  I wince with every executive order we issue, and I secretly wish the Tea Party were more articulate.  They throw away a valid perspective when they couch it in nonsense.

I travel a lot:  to stay alive, let alone get anything done, I rely on pilots and air traffic controllers I don’t know.  I’m probably scanned for weapons and explosives a few hundred times a year, trading my privacy for a ride shared with strangers, who like me, want to know that we’re all benign.  Going through that frame doorway, advocating for public universities, insisting with Dewey that we’re something more than a mass of aggregated units, and then going back home through another frame doorway, I’m feeling less like Kant these days, and more like Candide.