Communication

March 13, 2017 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Education’s Big Lie, Part IV: Human Arenas Where Words Often Play Second Fiddle

I am WORDS! I am the Concert Master, and First Chair, First Violin! When it comes to thinking, I play second fiddle to NO ONE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In my most recent post of this series, Education’s Big Lie, Part III: Visual Thinkers in the Spotlight, I highlighted three visual thinkers for whom words were not their initial line of attack when they tackled problems. Their minds focused immediately on images. Each of these individuals had very different reasons than the others for the use of images in their thought processes.

Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and inventor. He saw things. When facing a new problem, he would imagine a machine and a process that he envisioned solving this problem. The next thing he would do was to draw sketches of the machines and the processes that he saw in his mind. Although the pictures were quite vivid in his mind, he still had to put pen or chalk to paper to get a firmer grasp on the solution. Many of his sketches contain very few words. The words were secondary to Leonardo.

Albert Einstein was a scientist and mathematician, and a twentieth-century Renaissance man. He was a humanitarian, philosopher, and serious pianist and violinist. Einstein approached problems via his highly developed and practiced intuition. He had a feeling for problems and their proper solutions. He had insights into the physical world that no one else could envision. After satisfying himself that the mathematics and physics of a given solution worked, Einstein would turn to the task of finding words to describe his discovery “when he found the time.”

Temple Grandin is a scientist and outspoken advocate for animal welfare and accommodations for challenged children and adults. She came to those positions naturally since she grew up as a severely autistic child. She knows firsthand the challenges such children and adults face. Oliver Sacks, the world renown neurologist wrote in the forward of Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures that her first book Emergence: Labeled Autistic was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.” Sacks is also the acclaimed author of the bestseller Awakenings, which is an autobiographic novel of a fictional, American physician, Dr. Macolm Slayer’s use of L-dopa in a ward of catatonic patients who awaken after years in a vegetative state. This novel was used as the basis for the 1993 film of the same name starring Robin Williams. An encounter with the automatically opening door at a store led Grandin during her adolescent years to the conclusion that she thought in terms of pictures instead of words. She claimed that this ability helped her in redesigning and making the cattle chutes of slaughterhouses more humane. She came up with her design by transversing the chutes at the eye level of cattle, seeing what they saw and felt. Calmer cattle at the time of their slaughter was better for the cattle and people. More relaxed cattle produced more tender beef for consumers.

Sports announcers, music, food, fashion, art and film critics make their living using words to describe, praise and criticize performances, films and other works of art. However, a critique is not the same as experiencing the film or the work of art with one’s own eyes and ears. Even the artists themselves may have difficulty in using words to fully describe their works of art. We speak and write about the genius and talent that Michelangelo displayed in his painting of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. However, no words will take one’s breath away like the actual experience of seeing it does.

In the field of culinary arts, I find it ironic that I must use words to make my point. How many of you have heard the expression: “The proof is in the pudding!”? Chefs can use words to describe their creations. Culinary critics use words to praise or pan culinary dishes. However, the real test of the worth of a dish is in its visual appeal, aroma, consistency, and taste. When we eat, we use the whole cadre our senses of sight, smell, touch, temperature, and taste. One of the finer points by which we judge a creme brulee is the crunch, or sound the caramelized sugar topping makes when we break it with our spoon. A second judging criterium is the texture of the custard under the caramelized sugar topping. The popularity of cooking contests on television like Iron Chef America, Chopped, Beat Bobby Flay, and Worst Cooks in America and many others have spawned similar contests in a myriad of different settings. The phenomenon has spread even to the U.S. armed services.

On athletic playing fields, the ingenuity of individuals cannot be fully realized through verbal descriptions of their feats. The images of one example immediately come to my mind. Unfortunately, I didn’t witness this play. I have to rely on the memory and storytelling ability of my Babe Ruth League coach The scene is from Jackie Robinson’s early days playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie was known for his hitting and his speed and bravado on the basepaths. However, Jackie also used his speed to great advantage playing defense in the field. On one particular play, a batter hit a ground ball up through the middle of the infield. Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese both broke for the ball. With Jackie’s superior speed he was able to dive for the ball and flag it down in the outfield grass. However, there was no time to get up, turn his body and throw the batter out at first base. Seemingly without thinking, Jackie flipped the ball out of his glove to the approaching shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who caught it in his bare hand and threw it to first base to get the batter out. Although I am pleased with this verbal description of the play, it doesn’t really do justice to the play. It was unheard of when it first occurred. Later it became a standard weapon in the arsenal of defensive plays for middle infielders. When I played shortstop in Babe Ruth League, our coach would have us practice this play several times each week for the one time in our careers when it might be appropriate to use it.

Jackie Robinson swinging a bat in a Dodger’s uniform 1954. Published in LOOK, v. 19, no. 4, 1955 Feb. 22, p. 78. The photograph is by Bob Sandberg, Look photographer. This work has been released into the public domain by its copyright holder, Cowles Communications, Inc. This applies worldwide.

In the performing arts, one can describe theatrical scenes like the chandelier scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. However, a verbal description is not the same experience that one gets when one is actually sitting in an orchestra seat of a live performance. The verbal description does not raise the goosebumps on one’s arms that appear when a magical-like spotlight illuminates the chandelier hanging over your head, just before it begins a rapid descent to crash on the stage, or hearing the eerie organ music and haunting off-stage voice of the mysterious phantom singing:

You will curse the day you did not do All that the Phantom asked of you!

GO!

In the introductory post of this series on Education’s Big Lie, I criticized Education for buying into the philosophical position that “One size fits all.” In researching this series I came across an article, the title of which I thought was right on! The article I Think in Pictures, You Teach in Words: The GIfted Visual Spacial Learner was written by Lesley Sword and published by Talent Development Resources. Lesley Sword is the Director of Gifted & Creative Services Australia, a consultant who specializes in the psychology of the gifted and has worked with gifted people of all ages. Sword’s article dealt witha portion of the problem I see in education. That portion is the problem of serving the gifted students. Two other problems with education are it underserves the disadvantaged and underprepared students, and how it ignores the students in the middle. In Part V and VI of this series, I will speak to how education ignores or underserves the gifted students. In later posts, I will deal with the other problematic areas.

March 8, 2017 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Education’s Big Lie, Part III: Visual Thinkers in the Spotlight

Throughout history, some of the greatest minds, artists, scientists, and inventors of humanity have been visual thinkers. Some of them realized this and talked openly about their thinking style. In the case of others, we must deduce their primary thinking patterns from the evidence that they left behind concerning their thought processes. In the presentation of my case, I would like to call three witnesses.

My first witness is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Even though only 15 of his paintings have survived, for centuries Leonardo has been considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived. He was also a superior sculptor, mathematician, engineer, scientist, botanist, anatomist, and musician. He has been labeled the archetypical Renaissance man.

Since we can’t ask Leonardo any questions in person and he never spoke directly about his thinking processes, we must rely on his personal notes that have been preserved in codices for his testimony. The following example is a page from one such codex.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketch of his intricate design for water wheels and screws to be used in an irrigation system. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain because it is a faithful reproduction of a work created by an author who died in 1519.

Leonardo’s codices are dominated by sketches with writing intermittently spaced throughout the work. This seems to indicate that Leonardo’s creative process began with visual images of his paintings and inventions. I have no further questions of this witness.

For my next witness, I would like to call Albert Einstein. Einstein was born in 1879 and died in 1955. He was a world famous physicist known for his work on relativity theory and quantum physics. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Time Magazine named him the Person of the Century on December 31, 1999. In the introduction to their article, they described Einstein as “… the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Albert Einstein’s shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.”

Einstein may be best known for his famous equation: E = mc². This equation indicates that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin. They are directly related to each other via a natural constant which is the speed of light squared.

Since Einstein is dead, we are no longer able to ask him about his thought processes. However, many times during his lifetime, he was asked what was the secret to his genius. The answer that I found most enlightening came from a private conversation with an unnamed friend. Alice Calaprice later included snippets from this conversation in her book, The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Consider the following example: “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration…. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason…Imagination is more important than knowledge”

The most direct answer to whether Einstein was a visual or verbal thinker came from the professor himself. His answer to this question was referenced in Abraham Pais’ book Subtle is the Lord: The Life and the Science of Albert Einstein. At a physics conference in 1922, Einstein told the audience that he used images to solve his problems, and only later he sometimes found the words to explain those solutions. I believe this indicates that Einstein was primarily a visual thinker.

For my third witness, I call Temple Grandin to the stand. She is still very much alive. Grandin has a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois and is a professor at Colorado State University. She is a very vocal spokesperson for visual thinking, so I am sure that Grandin agrees with this position. After growing up with autism, Grandin became a highly functional and accomplished adult. She is the author of six books, including the national bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation. In the publicity blurbs for Thinking in Pictures, Grandin stated, “Rigid academic and social expectations could wind up stifling a mind that while it might struggle to conjugate a verb could one day take us to distant stars.” Temple delivered a February 2010 TED talk entitled The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.

In the first post, Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction , of this series, I began with an example where words failed children. However, we know that words not only fail children. They often fail adults with physical and mental challenges, to which I can well attest. At times, words can also be insufficient for well-functioning adults. In my next post, Education’s Big Lie, Part IV: Human Arenas Where Words Often Play Second Fiddle, I will deal with a number of areas where words can easily be in second or third place to other means of expressions.

February 25, 2017 By B. Baylis 1 Comment

Education’s Big Lie, Part II: We Can Think without Words

As I noted at the end of Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction, I have learned that we can think without words. However, in much of today’s world, particularly those parts of it touching the education enterprise, communicating without words is much more difficult, if not next to impossible. Although as the following giggleBites cartoon illustrates communicating with words can have its own drawbacks.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Cartoosh, author of the cartoon. Wikimedia has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in its permission archive.

One thing that the above cartoon brought forcefully to my attention is that the expression “A picture is worth a thousand words” implies “words” are the basis of value. Pictures and ideas are valued in terms of words. Have you ever heard anyone ask how much of a picture does one word equal? In any exchange of objects of value using two different currencies, one of those currencies is considered dominant. The transaction is then conducted in that currency. In education, we tend to try to force the exchange of ideas in the currency of words. We almost never let pictures speak for themselves. We have to “explain them.”

“Let me explain this idea to you.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

If words are our basis for the exchange of ideas, then we must have a storehouse of words to express our ideas. Aphasia is an insidious deficiency in that it steals one’s words, the basis of exchange, but not the ideas, the real objects of value. Ideas are locked inside one’s head with no easy way to communicate them.

I have managed to deal with my aphasia because of the verbal proficiency that I built up over my 60-year love affair with words. The filing cabinets in my head are filled with words. After the TBI’s, I still had a treasure trove of words in my memory which I found I could access intermittently.

Finding the right words. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

However, even with my experience and confidence with words, many times I felt words were playing “Hide and Seek” with me. Can you imagine how difficult it is for children who don’t have the same experience or comfort with words? The ideas are right there in front of the children, but they can’t find the words to express them. It’s like the “Where’s Waldo Game?” Waldo is hidden in plain sight. Let’s play “Where’s Waldo” with the dead leaf mantis in the following picture.

Can you find the bug? Somewhere in this picture is a Dead leaf mantis (Deroplatys desiccata). The picture was taken at Bugworld in the Bristol Zoo, Bristol, England. If this mantis is alarmed it lies motionless on the rainforest floor, disappearing among the real dead leaves. It eats other animals up to the size of small lizards. From the island of Madagascar, Africa. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Arpingstone. This applies worldwide.

Having gone through my trials, I can empathize with children who must be completely bewildered when confronted with what must seem like nonsense to them. For the past eight years, it has been a constant, uphill battle for me to attempt to do the things that were second nature to me prior to the TBI’s. Even putting together these simple essays has been an exhausting task. At times, it has been an almost overwhelming chore. I have to visualize my thoughts. I must then translate those pictures into appropriate words and coherent sentences. The images that I intersperse in my posts represent the starting points of where I begin my thinking. Since I am retired, living on a fixed income, my drawing ability leaves much to be desired, I must find public domain or royalty free pictures which mirror the figures that I am seeing in my mind. I must then struggle to translate those images into words.

Where did our classrooms and education go astray? If we want to measure a child’s creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving I propose we go back and watch children play. The first picture that comes to my mind is the baby in a medical insurance television advertisement that rolls over from his back to his stomach. The baby then reaches for and grabs a soft, cloth ball. The baby then plays with the ball, feeling it, squeezing it and trying to taste it. The baby has no words to describe what he is doing. No words are spoken about what the baby is doing, but curiosity is clearly visible in the baby’s eyes and actions.

Give a one-year-old child a few crayons and the back of a paper placemat in a restaurant and watch creativity and imagination come to the fore. Give five-year-old children a new toy like a little red wagon and watch them play out interactive stories. Give six-year-old children a set of Legos and watch them build houses and monsters. Give seven-year-old children jigsaw puzzles and watch them develop problem-solving skills. In most of these situations, words are seldom to be found.

The artist was 1 year 10 months when this was drawn. Soft crayon on paper. Uploaded by the child’s parent. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Since our society has dictated that our culture is passed along from generation to generation via the media of books and verbal stories, I realize that language, words, and verbal thinking must eventually come into play in education. However, I do not believe we must necessarily equate the mental characteristics of creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving with verbal thinking and verbal proficiency. I would argue that I am not alone in this position.

For more than 200 hundred years, the New York City Harbor was the first port of call for people and goods entering the United States on the east coast. It didn’t matter whether it was a military or civilian ship. It didn’t matter whether it was driven by wind or steam. It didn’t matter whether it was large or small. It headed for New York City first. For almost 1500 years, words have been the first port of call in the generation of ideas.

New York City Harbor from the Brooklyn Bridge 1893. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image is in public domain because it was published prior to 1923.

In a number of areas outside of education, words are not the first port of call for the devotees of certain pursuits. Additionally, there have been a few brave individuals in areas dominated by words that have taken the very courageous step of coming out of the shadows and admitting that they are visual thinkers. In my next post in this series, Education’s Big Lie, Part III: Visual Thinkers in the Spotlight, I highlight a number of these individuals.

February 16, 2017 By B. Baylis 2 Comments

Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction

I don’t know how to say it any clearer. I have come to the shocking conclusion that the enterprise of American education is doing society a huge disservice by propagating and perpetuating a big lie. Please do not misinterpret what I am attempting to say in this essay. I am firmly convinced that education is immensely valuable. Paraphrasing a credit card commercial campaign, it is “priceless.” For more than 65 years, my life has revolved around faith, education, and family. I am fully committed to the concept of an appropriate education for everyone. However, I am also very certain that education, as it is currently conceived and generally defined, doesn’t and can’t serve everyone equally well. To paraphrase a television commercial for a particular internet service, “Education that doesn’t serve everyone, doesn’t serve anyone.” The simplest statement of Education’s Big Lie is Procrustes’s aphorism “one size fits all.”

Caricature from 19th century German satirical magazine “Berliner Wespen” (Berlin Wasps) – Title: Procrustes. Caption: Bismarck: As I see, Lady Liberty is somewhat too large – we want to change this immediately to her contention. (He chops away her legs.) – Inscription on bed: Socialist Law. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; in Public Domain

By “one size fits all” I am surprisingly not referring to either standardized testing or the Common Core. Both of these educational fads have their good and bad points. I will explicate my views on each of them in later posts. For this post, I return to a fuller statement of my understanding of the Big Lie plaguing the American educational enterprise. The reality to which I am referring is that the American educational enterprise has pigeon-holed the mental characteristics of creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving primarily if not exclusively to the verbal region of the human brain. The Big Lie equates these characteristics with one’s facility with words. Many if not most of the instruments used to measure these mental characteristics are primarily verbally based. To improve their abilities in the areas delineated above, students are instructed to read, write, and speak more.

So many books, so little time! Illustration courtesy of Presenter Media

If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again! Draft; after draft! Illustration courtesy of Presenter Media

Why? Why did the teacher call on me? I don’t know the answer! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

This solution may work for many and possibly the majority of students. However, the problem with this remedy is that for a significant number of students words are more like enemies than friends. Words are at the crux of my argument against education. Ideas are considered the coin of the realm in education. For centuries in education, we have been indoctrinated to believe that ideas are formulated almost exclusively through words. After ideas are formed, we must then use words to express those ideas, either in written or oral form. We are taught that to think properly we must use a process that is based in and undergirded by the use of words. This process is commonly known as verbal thinking. I grew up with that mindset. In this mindset, words are the cornerstone upon which we build our ideas.

Ideas are built upon a foundation of words, phrases, and sentences. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

This was the way I was taught. It is the way most of our American society has been taught for hundreds of years. I am going out on a limb now and say that this is not the only way we think or must think. It took two traumatic brain incidents (TBI’s) in 2009 to convince me that there are other ways to think. The first TBI was the implosion of a benign meningioma due to the explosion of the artery which was feeding it. This TBI left me with a mild case of aphasia. As a verbal thinker, I found it difficult to think when I couldn’t find my beloved words.

The second TBI was a series of four tonic-clonic seizures within 30 minutes that left me in a coma for three days. When I woke up, I knew immediately something was different. I found myself no longer going directly to words to make sense of what was going on around me. I saw pictures. At first, I wasn’t certain what had happened. As I reflected on what was happening, I remember several articles that I had read that were written by stroke survivors. I was having the same experiences that they had encountered. I had become a visual thinker.

After 60 years of being a poster child for verbal thinking, words were now my second thought language, Although I was thinking in terms of pictures, I found that it was necessary for me to use words to communicate my ideas. This was extremely frustrating at times. I attempted to describe my feelings in a 2010 blog posting entitled Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs.

Sometimes corraling words can be harder than herding cats. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Where am I going with this argument? For centuries in educational circles, words have been king.

I am WORD! I have the final say. You must listen to me! Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

A recent Google+ posting The Importance of Imagination by Elaine Roberts, a former colleague, induced me to write this series of posts. In her posting, Roberts described a situation that led her to an epiphany and two points of clarity. The situation grew out of an attempt by a teacher to test or evaluate the creativity of a class of sixth graders. This teachers’ attempt was not a standardized test. It was a writing assignment. Most educators would label this assignment as an authentic assessment instrument. The teacher gave the children the following set of instructions:

Okay. Students, your assignment is very simple. Just write me a story about anything. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What do I imagine some of the students heard? “Blah, Blah, Blah!”

Blah, Blah,Blah. I don’t understand what this teacher wants us to do. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Even though they had previously been given a template to use in writing stories, what were the first thoughts of some students about constructing a story? I think they probably drew a blank.

“The teacher wants us to write a story. What am I going to do? How can I write a story? I don’t know what to write about.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Taking literary license with this scenario, what did I imagine this student wanted to turn into the teacher? Simply, a blank piece of paper.

How can I write anything, if I don’t know what I should be writing about? Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What do I think the teacher’s response to a blank piece of paper woul be? Most likely, he would have said to himself, “What is wrong with this student? The wiring in his head must be all tangled up.” Now the shoe is on the other foot. The teacher doesn’t know what the student is trying to say.

“What’s up with this mixed up student? The instructions were so easy. How could not understand them? How could you turn in a blank piece of paper?” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

With respect to the spread of the Big Lie, I readily admit that my hands are not entirely clean. Prior to 2009, as I noted above, I could have been considered a poster child for verbal thinking and verbal learning. In all of my recollections of my earliest childhood, I was constantly immersed in books and words. At the age of five, I won a Sunday School contest for being the first primary student (Grades K through 6) during the new church year to recite 100 selected verses by memory.

Yipee! I did it. I was the first to recite all 100 verses by memory.

As an academic professional, I made my living off words. Even as a mathematician, my training, and education were dominated by words. As an instructor, I constantly fed my students words.

“Okay class, who can explain Zorn’s Lemma and what is it’s relationship to the Well-Ordering Principle?” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

As an administrator, I used words to defend positions and try to persuade colleagues to follow my lead.

Colleagues, I know the message I bring to you today at this faculty meeting will not be pleasant to hear. I want you to know that it is hard for me to have to deliver it to you. However, we are facing a huge budget deficit. I have two proposed solutions. Neither of them will be without pain. But I am bringing them to you today, to get your reactions and suggestions.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

With what I have written so far, I should probably call it quits for this first post in this series. If I haven’t done enough to damage my image and credibility within the higher education community, I invite you to stay tuned for additional posts. Although it has been difficult at times, I have learned that we can think without words. In fact, I have subtitled Part II of the series Education’s Big Lie, “We Can Think without Words.” Even though we give lip service to the idea that “A picture is worth a thousand words”, in much of today’s world, particularly those parts of it touching the education enterprise, the most difficult aspect of working with thoughts and ideas is trying to communicate them without words.

April 15, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

We’re Back in Business, Part II

As promised Higher Ed By Baylis LLC (HEBB) is officially back in business. This post is a continuation of Today is April 11! This is no April Fools’ joke. We’re Back in Business. So I begin this post with the third and fourth announcements which I had planned to make.

The above picture of a store front with a Grand Reopening sign is only symbolic. HEBB doesn’t yet have a physical building. However, we are in the process of building a new viable, and vital business entity. I have placed emphasis on several words and concepts in the preceding sentence.The emphasis is on the word we. From January 2013, the official beginning of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, By Baylis was the only investor and only operating consultant. My loving, loyal and responsible wife of 47 years, had access to all records of the HEBB, including the finances. I took this prudent step in case something happened to me, since twice in 2009, I entered a hospital as a member of the ABB (All But Bagged) Club. What does “All But Bagged” mean? The best description I can give probably came from the doctor that greeted Elaine when she got to the hospital when I first experienced the exploding artery, imploding tumor, and what looked liked a stroke. The doctor truly thought that I would leave the hospital in a body bag. When Elaine was introduced to the attending doctor, the doctor told her to call the family together. Elaine asked for an explanation. The doctor said, “If he survives the operation, he’ll never be the same.”

The first significant change is that HEBB will very soon officially be a “we” It will no longer be just By Baylis. Over the past several years, as I talked with potential clients about their needs, it became obvious that the needs and the potential solution to these clients’ problems were well beyond the capabilities of one individual. To remedy this deficiency, quoting the Lennon and McCartney song title, I have called for “a little help from my friends“. I have been in discussion with a number of former colleagues and the friends that I have built up over my 40 years of experience in the world of higher education. Out of those discussions, I am pleased to announce that almost a dozen highly qualified, experienced consultants and coaches, have agreed to work with me. There are several possibilities concerning the final cooperative arrangements. In some cases, the individuals may actually join HEBB and become principals. In other situations, HEBB and some consulting/coaching practices may form an alliance and work together cooperatively.

The above discussions are ongoing because they involve intricate legal negotiations. As soon as individual arrangements are finalized, we will make those announcements. I know I am pleased with the caliber of my current, potential partners. I am very confident that potential clients will find the collection of experts that emerges from these discussions to be a powerful force, which can easily and economically help them identify their watershed decisions and find practical and feasible answers to those organizational, world-changing questions.

It is not yet clear what form the final entity will take when it emerges from the above mentioned discussions. I guarantee that the final entity will share the dream that lead to the founding of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC. It was a dream of resilient, welcoming, wise, listening, flexible, entrepreneurial organizations that had a strong sense of integrity, honesty, confidence, determination, and quality. For Christian colleges, this meant they had to have a central anchor of Christ. Emanating from the proposition and relational truth expressed in Christ, were cultures of learning, scholarship, engagement, hospitality, evidence, excellence and worship. A culture is a group of people who have a foundational set of values, beliefs and principles. These people generally or habitually behave in a manner consistent with their values and have developed a collective knowledge base that has grown out of their beliefs and actions. A culture is who the people are, what they know, and how they typically behave. I expressed my dream of 21st Century Christian University in the following diagram that appeared in the 2006 Winter edition of the Cornerstone magazine:

courtesy of By Baylis and Cornerstone University

Returning to a discussion of the words emphasized in opening paragraph of this fourth announcement, some of you may be asking the question, “Don’t the terms viable and vital mean the same thing?” In one sense, they both carry the connotation of being alive. However, in another sense, they mean something very different. I am using the term viable in the sense of being capable of success or continuing effectiveness. I see HEBB as having a good probability of being successful. It can easily be very effective. I am using the term vital in its sense of having remarkable energy, liveliness, or force of personality. I foresee HEBB as a force with which to be reckoned in the coaching and consulting world. The team which we are assembling will be second to none. They will all be recognized as experts in their fields and masters of their trades. It is very important to note the plural designation on the words field and trade. HEBB will be a one-stop shop for organizations seeking help. In the educational arena, we are assembling a team that can cover the waterfront of accreditation, accountability, admissions and recruiting, advancement and fund raising, alumni relations, athletics, curriculum development and management, educational law, facility planning and management, finance, information technology, human resources and professional development, leadership development and succession, planning (including strategic, operational, tactical and master planning), regulatory compliance, and student development. HEBB will be able to work with and help any institution, whether public or private, at any educational level including primary, secondary, or higher education. Do you get the feeling of why I am excited to be back in business? Although the emphasis to this point has been with educational entitities, I foresee in the near future extending the vision of HEBB to service Christian and non-profit public service ministries, since there are many similarities in mission and operations with educational institutions.

If you are an individual who would be interested in joining HEBB as a principal or you represent a coaching/consulting practice that would be interested in collaborating in an alliance with HEBB, I would be very interested in talking with you. Please leave a comment in the reply box with your name, area(s) of expertise, an email address, a phone number, and the best time to contact you. Since I have the protocols set so that I must approve any comments before they appear, your contact information will not be shared with anyone.

The fourth and final announcement in these two blog posts relates to the HEBB website which you can find by clicking here: HEBB. For almost 18 months the website has been effectively shut down. With the reopening of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, that’s about to change. The website is going to experience extensive remodeling to reflect the changes in HEBB.

The first change you will see is a new welcome page which will introduce people to Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, its mission, vision and core values. There will be a staff page that will introduce people to the HEBB team, a brief bio and their areas of focus. There will be a blog page with links to the blogs written by our people. There will be page of introduction to HEBB services for institutional clients. There will also be a page of introduction to services for individual and family clients. There will be a page of resources available to the general public. There will be a page of the cost of various HEBB services. These changes should be in place by the end of April.

April 13, 2016 By B. Baylis 2 Comments

The Value of the Liberal Arts to the University

I have invited a friend and former colleague, Erik Benson, to offer the first guest post on By’s Musings. I first met Erik when I hired him at Cornerstone University in 2005. I was immediately impressed with this history instructor who brought history to life in the classroom and in the field. Less than one year later when I started CELT, the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Cornerstone University, he was an obvious choice to be part of the faculty leadership group. He has continued to impress students and colleagues at CU, where in 2013, he was voted “Professor of the Year.” He is currently Associate Professor of History, at CU, and Principal of ipsative, a company focusing on educational consulting and faculty development. If you would like to find out more about ipsative, please visit their website at ipsative.

This post grew out of a challenge that I set before Erik. Since I have been working on a project attempting to represent the many cultures that come together to form a university, I asked him to describe the ideal culture of history within the university setting. He eagerly took the challenge and expanded it to set history within the broader category of humanities and the liberal arts. This is the Erik that I knew at Cornerstone University. At least once a month, he would come by my office near the close of the day, stand in the open doorway, and ask, “Do you have a minute?” I almost always said, “Yes”, even though I know that the minute would end up more like an hour. Erik always had challenging questions about higher education in general and our university in particular. Together, we were working toward solutions for the tough, intractable problems facing higher education and our students. Some of those discussions are among my most memorable memories of my days at CU.

Without further ado, here is Erik’s post.

For what it’s worth: the value of the liberal arts to the university.

The last year has seen a seemingly endless stream of controversies in higher education. Among these were proposals to channel more government aid to students studying in “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields, at the expense of those studying in the liberal arts. In Kentucky, the governor recently suggested that students studying “French literature” should not receive any state financial aid.

Debt, jobs, and basements…
The arguments are pretty straightforward. STEM fields are more promising in terms of jobs for graduates, and there is an unmet demand in the US for people trained in these fields. Amidst public concerns about escalating college costs and the resulting student debt, governments ought to insure that they fund fields best suited to meet the needs of both employers and graduates.
There is a certain logic to this. The public concern about tuition and student debt is undeniable. Furthermore, evidence abounds that there is indeed a demand for workers in STEM fields that promise large salaries upon graduation. (In fact, there is high demand for workers in skilled trades that do not require a college degree at all. A Michigan factory owner recently told me recently that he cannot hire enough skilled tradespeople, even though he actively recruits throughout the US and abroad.) In turn, the numbers are less promising for those graduating with liberal arts degrees. The anecdote of the humanities graduate moving back into the parents’ basement has become popular lore. In sum, the desire to channel students toward STEM majors seems a perfectly reasonable response.

Not so fast…
Yet in fact this response is ill-considered. For one thing, it is based on the premise that US colleges are churning out a slew of (unemployed) liberal arts majors. As Fareed Zakaria notes in his book, In Defense of a Liberal Education, between 1971 and 2012, the number of graduates with degrees in English fell from 7.6 to 3.0 percent; the number of business graduates rose from 13.7 to 20.5 percent. Only one-third of all degrees were in fields that could be classified as “liberal arts,” and this number was matched by business and health majors alone. In short, the stories of hordes of unemployed liberal arts graduates living in their parents’ basements are exaggerated.
Beyond this dubious premise, the fact is that the liberal arts approach in American higher education has served students well. Zakaria contrasts it with European higher education systems, in which students are channeled into specific vocations well before they reach college age; those that go to college are few, and they receive a rather narrowly focused training in a field. In the US, college education has historically been more “general” in focus due to being in a dynamic, changing economy and society. In short, the liberal arts have prepared American graduates to be more responsive and flexible in a changing world.
Zakaria points to a real strength of the American liberal arts education, as both anecdotal and statistical evidence attests. Numerous studies reveal that graduates with liberal arts degrees actually have fiscally rewarding careers. One such study, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014, found that while liberal arts graduates initially lagged behind professional and pre-professional peers in salaries, over time they caught up and passed them. The study noted that this was due in no small part to graduate degrees earned by liberal arts majors, which enhanced their earning ability. (Interestingly, even in pre-professional and professional fields, a comparable percentage had a graduate degree, suggesting they too received an earnings boost from this.) Still, only the most short-sighted of people would argue a degree outside the liberal arts is a better financial bet; in fact, considering the investment a college education entails, one ought to be considering long-term earnings forecasts rather than merely the entry-level job, which seems to be the focus of the moment.

On second thought…
Why liberal arts degrees offer such long-term earning possibilities is an interesting question. The answer seems to lie in what Zakaria points out—they better prepare one for a changing environment. Vocationally focused educations prepare one for a specific job or career track that can be lucrative at the entry level, but may limit one’s advancement possibilities over time. (Put simply, one might be trained to press certain buttons, but that likely will not lead to workplace advancement.) Worse, as technological and business advances change the workplace, jobs and entire career tracks can come and go. As Thomas Friedman points out in The Earth is Flat, many programming jobs in the US have easily been outsourced to Asia, and won’t be coming back any time soon in light of the cost differentials. This is why many who train in narrowly tailored fields have found it necessary to return to college later in life—their education did not prepare them for the change. Lest we think we can anticipate much of this change, consider how many jobs and fields exist today that educators and politicians could not even fathom 20 years ago. As a senior vice president at the Association of American Colleges and Universities admitted, “We are not good at predicting what jobs are going to be required in five years and 10 years down the road.” It is simply not a reasonable expectation.
My wife’s career experience attests to many of the above points. A graduate of a liberal arts college with a major in history and international studies, she went on to earn an M.A. in Mass Communication. She since has worked in both higher education and marketing, and currently has a thriving business in content strategy and writing. Her mass communication degree offered her hands-on experience in the then-emerging field of web design and development, which cued her into the new forms of media. That said, a significant portion of the technical knowledge she gained is now outdated because of the rapid advances in the last decade. She actually points to her B.A. as being more valuable and foundational for her career. Her studies in history and global culture ingrained in her a broader, more strategic perspective. She also credits them for making her a good writer, which is her “bread and butter” today. Finally, they made her more self-aware and confident, all of which led her to easily transition between jobs and career tracks without need of returning to school. In short, she epitomizes what Zakaria says about the liberals arts—it made her responsive and adaptable in a changing world.

Making the case…
While studies exist of the earning power of the liberal arts, and many faculty can cite numerous anecdotes of successful graduates, there has been a general failure to “sell” this to politicians and the public. Many in “liberal arts” fields lack an interest in informing potential students, their parents, and the public at large the career possibilities (or even proudly resist the idea). Too often, the “case” consists of rather ethereal assertions about the value of the liberal arts, the “life of the mind,” and avoiding vocational obsession, none of which are wrong, but which are not applicable for many considering college, with its expense and commitment. In short, we need to do a better job making the case.
In my case, I have occasion to meet with prospective students and parents who visit our campus. I emphasize that the study of history offers them much in terms of “life of the mind,” but also in terms of career preparation. In addition to citing studies on earnings (which many do not know), I explain specifically what history offers to them—highly transferable skills in research, critical thinking, and communication which will be proven useful over time in a constantly changing job market. I point out that these not only work for someone who might pursue a traditional career in the field (e.g. academia), but also someone working in marketing or government. I encourage them to think of how they might pair the study of history with a major or minor in another field, such as business. I even encourage students in other majors (such as business) to meet credit requirements with an applicable history course; I’ve had a number of graduates tell me this turned out to be one of the most useful things they did in college. In short, I can show them the practical benefits of their study—and they usually come to see the value.
Ultimately, in considering the issue of financing higher education and the liberal arts, the real consideration ought not be mere cost, but value. People will pay more for something they believe is worth it; they are bothered when they feel they have paid for something that is not worth it. We in academics need to make a better case for the value of the liberal arts to students.

References:
Patricia Cohen, “A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding,” New York Times (22 February 2016), B1.

Thomas Friedman, The Earth is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2006).

Beckie Supiano, “How Liberal-Arts Majors Fare over the Long Haul,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 January 2014). http://chronicle.com/article/How-Liberal-Arts-Majors-Fare/144133 (Accessed 1 March 2016).

Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education (W.W. Norton and Co., 2015).