WHY IS TESTING STUDENTS AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY SUCH A BIG DEAL?

Harry Targ

The Lafayette Journal and Courier published a guest editorial on February 3, 2015 headlined “Faculty, Stop Stalling on Purdue Testing” co-authored by Andrew Kelly and Frederick Hess.” The two authors work for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Kelly is the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform established in 2013 by AEI. The article asserts that the faculty have let a proposed test of “critical thinking” prepared by the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus “….languish in the faculty’s university senate.”

The opinion piece follows on a flurry of articles in the Lafayette, Indiana  newspaper where Purdue University is located. A lengthy article started on page one about testing for “critical thinking” at Purdue University on Sunday, January 25, 2015 headlined, “Test of Wills, Who Will Give In?” Two days later, after discussion of the issue at the scheduled meeting of the University Senate the paper published another story, also on page one, with the headline “Daniels, Faculty Civil in Meeting.” Daniels refers to former governor Mitch Daniels who is the sitting president of the university.

The articles and the solicited opinion piece from AEI refer to a disagreement some Purdue University faculty were having with a decision reached by President Mitch Daniels, and the Board of Trustees about tests to be given incoming and graduating students measuring critical thinking, reasoning, and the ability to communicate. Presumably these skills could be defined and measured to determine whether a four-year college experience was effective.

At the University Senate meeting the President of the Senate Professor Patty Hart presented a useful summary of what some Purdue faculty and educators elsewhere viewed as problematic about the project and the particular test (the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus) the Board of Trustees was imposing on the university. She identified areas of concern some faculty had about the planned measurement of the impacts of four years of study. These included the lack of clarity about the objectives motivating the exercise, the validity of measurement tools, who among entering students would be the sample and why, and what groups the students would be compared with-students from other universities, young people not attending university, or some other population, and most importantly, how was critical thinking being defined.

Purdue President Daniels, defending the tests, pointed out that an often quoted research project found that 36 percent of students examined demonstrated no change in critical thinking after four years of college study. Other studies, he said, indicated that high percentages of employers were dissatisfied with newly hired students’ skills in reasoning and communication. Despite questions raised by these studies in higher education publications, Daniels said that he and the Board of Trustees were ready to proceed to discover what impacts the four-year Purdue college experience had on young people, or to put it another way, whether college mattered. 

The debate at Purdue University and at many other universities is real, even if not reaching the hyperbolic level of conflict suggested by the local paper. Faculty have concerns about lack of clarity on what is being evaluated, testing costs (ultimately paid by taxpayers, tuition, and faculty and staff salaries), time consumed in taking tests, and profits accrued to corporations in the education business. Three critical additional issues stand out.

First, the debate at Purdue University is about measuring “critical thinking.” There is little discussion of what critical thinking means. Some would suggest appropriately that critical thinking involves developing the capacity to reflect upon the knowledge that is being received. Students should be encouraged to carefully evaluate what they are being taught, even materials found in lectures and textbooks. 

For some educators the ability to decide whether to accept or to challenge received wisdom, using intellectual rigor and evidence, is the essence of critical thinking. And challenge requires a rich and diversified knowledge base. Such a conception of critical thinking might not be reducible to metrics. Testing responses in writing and especially with multiple choice tests may be too narrow to address the fundamental intellectual tools that make up critical thinking.

Second, critical thinking requires historical knowledge, philosophical insights, an aesthetic sensibility, the ability to relate knowledge to human behavior, and a sense of the interconnections between scientific and humanistic world views. The development of a rich tapestry of knowledge and sensitivity to the natural world, society, and culture is very difficult to achieve but it should be the goal of higher education. This high standard may not be easily reducible to measurement of progress.

Finally, and connected to the first and second criteria, the critical thinking that animates the testing programs being imposed on students and faculty at Purdue University is based upon a market model of education. Defenders of the new evaluations refer often to the displeasure of employers with their new college graduate employees. The references to these primary “stakeholders,” driving the demand for tests one assumes, are employers who want the university to produce graduates who can perform particular scientific and technical cognitive and communication tasks. These tasks are important but do not necessarily rise to the level of critical thinking. 

In sum, the establishment of metrics to measure critical thinking may not capture the essence of higher education and this is what has raised concerns of many educators at Purdue University and elsewhere. But the disagreements should not be reduced, as they were in the local newspaper to trivialities about the “test of wills” between the faculty and the President of the university. Nor should the reasoned debates by educators on campus be trumped by conservative Washington think tank advocates claiming that the faculty are “dragging their heels.”

As President Daniels wrote to the faculty in his 2015 New Year message “… our land-grant assignment, and frankly that of any institution claiming to deliver ‘higher education,’ is not limited to the teaching that produces scientific or technical expertise. Our task calls us to produce citizens, men and women who are able to think reflectively and creatively not only at the workplace but also to thrive in those other domains of well-being measured so interestingly by the Gallup-Purdue Index.”

In the long run, the stakes are about what the academic community and society see as the goals of higher education. And that is a discussion that is worth having, allowing for full participation by those most immediately involved in the educational process: faculty and students.

MIKE GOLD AND "JEWS WITHOUT MONEY"

Harry Targ

Jews Without Money, Mike Gold's 1930 novel was perhaps his most literary work. A somewhat fictionalized account of a little boy growing up in the Jewish section of the Lower East Side in New York around the turn of the century, the novel became a model for the "proletarian literature" for which Gold was a central advocate. While not the first, Jews Without Money preceded numerous novels that portrayed the lives, pleasures and struggles, of the U.S. working class. Many would be more "political" in that they pointed the reader more directly than Gold would in the direction of joining the Socialist movement.

The power of Gold's work was its vivid portrait of the difficulties of immigrants to adjust to the “new world” and the efforts of their children to establish themselves in ways that conform to the demands of the new place, rather than the world of their fathers and mothers. Gold described the survival strategies of the immigrants and the quest for new lives of their children through one year in the life of a Jewish boy-the year divided into spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Several interconnected themes are examined through the eyes of the boy. First, Gold describes the teeming tenements-overcrowded housing units, roaming crowds on the major streets, peddlers and pushcarts everywhere, horses slogging across the streets amidst the people, the markets, the kids running to and fro, and garbage strewn across the sidewalks after being thrown from five story walkup apartment buildings.

Second, along with the immediate and extended families of immigrants, thousands  of children making their ways through the packed streets, Orthodox Jews, and men and women coming and going from 12 and 14 hour work days, Gold's narrator points out that the neighborhood was always a major red light district. Young women, compelled to prostitution by economic destitution, hang out along the major thoroughfares looking for business. The kids tease the young prostitutes without fully understanding what the prostitutes were doing. Many compassionate souls empathetic with their plight, like Mike Gold, befriend the prostitutes.

Third, Gold's description of the injustices of the capitalist system permeate the volume, but usually in an oblique way. Remembering the ubiquity of bedbugs reminds Gold of poverty, the root cause of these obnoxious creatures. "Did God make bedbugs? One steaming hot night I couldn't sleep for the bedbugs. They have a peculiar nauseating smell of their own; it is the smell of poverty...Bedbugs are what people mean when they say: Poverty. There are enough pleasant superficial liars writing in America. I will write a truthful book of Poverty: I will mention bedbugs."[1]

Fourth, poverty related to crime. Prostitution was institutionalized and controlled by pimps. The Jewish tenements had its collection of petty gangsters who engaged in theft, physical intimidation, protection rackets, and other activities characteristic of an emerging system of organized criminality. This system of criminality was also a system of sexual exploitation and violence against women. The children of Jewish immigrants were represented in all of these activities but for Gold the explanation for their participation had more to do with America's avaricious capitalism and exploitation than anything in the Jewish tradition. "Ku Klux moralizers say the gangster system is not American. They say it was brought here by `low-class' European immigrants. What nonsense! There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. The Jews there were a timid bookish lot. The Jews have done no killing since Jerusalem fell. That's why the Christians have called us the `peculiar people.' But it is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill."[2]

Fifth, Gold's portrait of the Lower East Side is a portrait of hopeful, bewildered, and increasingly disenchanted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who find a new world vastly different from their expectations. Most of them strive to maintain their roots-in religion, in communal folkways, and in economic sustenance derived from the use of craft-based working skills learned in Europe. Tenements had dense concentrations of individual ethnic groups; in relative proximity to the Jewish neighborhood were Italians, Slavic peoples, Irish, Chinese people, and coming and going nomadic populations. While the Lower East Side was heterogeneous in its representation of various immigrant populations, it was relatively homogeneous within its individual neighborhoods. Consequently, the children of immigrants began to develop a territorial sensibility which led to border disputes and fights between gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. Each block was a separate nation, Gold reports.

Sixth, Jews Without Money is about the little boy’s parents, a father and mother each a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America. Mike Gold’s young father starts his life in America with hope, with a zest for life, with the firm belief he would become an economic success in his adopted land. A wild youth, Gold's father left Rumania to find a new world of economic advancement within a secular culture. Father tells the children folk tales from the old country, and entertains neighborhood friends with these renditions from the past. His religious practices in the “new world” are more limited in keeping with the vision of assimilation into American culture. But Gold's father becomes an economic failure-cheated by business partners and hustled by Jewish Tammany Hall businessmen/politicians. Finally as house painter he falls ill (broken legs, permanent lung disease) and spends his last years as a despondent invalid.

Gold's mother, more traditional in religion, less hopeful about America, and more a pessimist about the future, counterbalances the excesses of the vision of the father. Gold's mother represents the "realist" perspective about immigrant possibilities in the new land.

Finally, the characters in the Gold novel are always grappling with their Jewish identity. At one point the author reports about the enduring puzzle about God. "My mother was very pious. Her face darkened solemnly and mysteriously when she talked about her God. Every one argued about God. Mendel Bum, and Fyfka the Miser, and my Aunt Lena, and Jake Wolf, the saloonkeeper, and the fat janitor woman, and Mrs. Ashkenazi, of the umbrella store, and Mottke Blinder, and Harry the Pimp-all were interested in God. It was an important subject. When I discovered this, it became important for me, too."[3]

Gold presents Jewish practitioners in an ambiguous light. He registers scorn for the bearded, physically repulsive, nasty Hebrew school teacher who makes a living off of the desires of Jewish parents to educate their children on the Torah. He presents a vignette about a Rabbi who is hired from Europe to lead a Chassidic synagogue. This rabbi extorts huge sums of scarce money from the community to buy a house in the suburbs and maintain a bloated salary. When this new rabbi gets a better financial offer from elsewhere, he precipitously announces his resignation.

However, Gold presents a few very pious Jews who are deeply committed to their traditions and their values.  Reb Samuel gives of his life and treasure to hire the distinguished rabbi from Europe only to have his dreams dashed by the rabbi's desertion. At some point in the telling of the story of the Chassidic Shul and the development of the Reb Samuel character, the Reb is quoted linking religious vision to politics which may ultimately be the vision that Gold carried with him to the world of class struggle. Reb Samuel is explaining Chassidic Judaism to the young Mike. “You must learn to do good deeds, for every good deed hastens the coming of the Messiah. You want Him to look like Buffalo Bill. I tell you. He will not look like Buffalo Bill, nor will He kill any one. He will come to save the world, not to destroy it, like the false Messiah of the Christians. First He will redeem the Jews, then the other nations. This is why we now must suffer more than the rest of humanity. This is why Chassidim rejoice in the midst of suffering. We Jews have been chosen; we are fortunate. Do you understand what I am teaching you my child?"[4]

In 1959, Gold wrote a series of articles in the Peoples World, the west coast newspaper of the Communist Party. They were reprinted and entitled "A Jewish Childhood in the New York slums."[5] These essays elaborated on the experiences of the Jewish tenements-on the attraction of youth to sports, the love of Yiddish Theatre, the admiration for Mark Twain, Jewish gangsters, more experiences of mother and father, and weakening ties to Jewish rituals. These reflections were an extension of rather than a revision of the original novel. Not much had changed in his thinking about those experiences, between the novel's publication and the issuance of the essays, even after 29 years of Communist politics 

Gold's political vision remained the same in 1959 as that expressed in the last lines of  Jews Without Money. For its author they express what it meant to be a Jewish man of the Left.

"A man on an East Side soap-box, one night, proclaimed that out of the despair, melancholy and helpless rage of millions, a world movement had been born to abolish poverty.

I listened to him.

O workers' Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.

O great Beginning!"[6]

(This is the second of three essays on Mike Gold to appear in Diary of a Heartland Radical).

---

    [1]Mike Gold, Jews Without Money, Avon, 1972, 47-48.

    [2]Gold, 23.

    [3]Gold 45.

    [4]Gold, 138.

    [5]In Michael Folsom, Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, International Publishers, New York, 1972, 292-319.

    [6]Gold, 224.

PETE SEEGER IS STILL WITH US

Harry Targ

(A presentation made at the Midwest Peace and Justice Summit, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 13, 2007)

Pete Seeger is a renowned folksinger and political activist who was born in New York on May 3, 1919 to musicologist Charles Seeger and classical musician Constance Seeger. He was exposed to the music of the rural South on tours with his parents. Seeger began to play the banjo as a teenager. After two-years of study at Harvard, Seeger began a lifetime career studying and singing the folk music of people from all over the world.

During his early years of exposure to and adaptation of what he regarded as people's music, Seeger was influenced by musicians who created an enduring genre of musical culture that would flower and grow in post-war America. These included Woody Guthrie, Hudie Leadbetter (Leadbelly), Lee Hayes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Aunt Molly Jackson, and the folk archivist Alan Lomax. Before embracing a career as a solo performer, Seeger organized and played with the Almanac Singers, during World War II, and the Weavers from 1948 until the 1960s. In later years, Seeger would perform with many folk artists and activists, including the Freedom Singers, civil rights activists, and Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie. Over the years Seeger has written hundreds of songs and performed them at over a thousand concerts.

After recording popular songs such as "On Top of Old Smoky" and "Good Night Irene", he and the Weavers were blacklisted in the 1950s for their leftwing connections. Seeger was called to testify before the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1955 and cited for contempt of Congress when he refused to answer their questions, on first amendment grounds, about his political beliefs. Seven years later, a Federal Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and a one-year sentence on a technicality.

For much of the 1960s Seeger was prohibited from performing on network television. In January, 1968, after much conflict between the CBS network and comedians Tommy and Dick Smothers, Seeger was allowed to sing his anti-Vietnam war song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" before a nationwide audience. With passion, Seeger chanted: "We are waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to push on."

While Seeger's music and politics has reflected virtually every progressive cause from the late 1930s until the present, his work was influenced by the variety of social movements current during different historical periods. In the late 1930s, as Seeger was learning his craft and experiencing rural life, he and Woody Guthrie performed songs about the working class and trade union organizing. Many performances were in solidarity with efforts to organize factory workers into the Congress of lndustrial Organizations (CIO). Seeger and his friends sang songs about anti-imperialism as well: for the democratic forces fighting fascism in Spain, and opposing war in Europe. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and World War II ensued, he and the rest of the folk left began singing songs in support of a popular front against fascism.

After the war, and for another 25 years, Seeger composed and sang songs opposing the Cold War, nuclear war, and later the Vietnam War. Visiting the South in the early sixties, he put his talent behind the southern freedom movement. He helped transform an old spiritual into the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome" and brought the Freedom Singers, young civil rights activists from the South, to folk concert audiences in the North in 1963. He exhorted his audiences to join the struggle for civil rights and he particularly applauded young people who, he said, had taken the lead in fighting for civil rights.

As sixties movements diversified, Seeger's music did as well. He began to sing songs about women's rights, “I'm Gonna Be An Engineer," and the environment, "Sailing Down This Golden River."

Seeger has written extensively over the years, for example in the folk magazine Sing Out, and in books about folk music and has been interviewed from time to time in magazines.

However, his political philosophy is best reflected in his music. Shaped by the Marxist lens and popular front politics characteristic of the era when he began performing, four key concepts inform his music.

First, his songs reflect historical context, the material conditions of peoples' lives, and the contradictory character of the lives of his subjects.

Second, much of his work revolves around class, race, and, more recently, gender. The folk genre as it evolved celebrated the lives of workers and down-and-out men and women who struggle in the face of economic and political adversity. Seeger took the admonition of his comrade Woody Guthrie seriously when Woody wrote that he hates songs that put people down and make them feel that they are no good.

Third, Seeger's music since the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s has been

informed by opposition to war and U.S. imperialism (although his lyrics might not use the word). "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?'' is one of many songs performed by Seeger that articulates the belief that war is futile and destructive of the human community. During the most recent phase of his career, his songs have conceptualized how a materialistic economy has made war on the environment.

Finally, much of Seeger's work offers an alternative vision of society that emphasizes simplicity, harmony between people and between people and nature, equality, and freedom from class exploitation, racism, and sexism. While his work sometimes emphasizes how economic and political systems and dogmatic ideologies threaten the human condition, he also sings about a better tomorrow; "It's Darkest Before the Dawn," and of course, Woody Guthrie's anthem, "This Land is Your Land."

Looking at the corpus of folk music in the twentieth century, particularly a folk music that links culture and politics, Pete Seeger perhaps is the most seminal artist/activist. He popularized rural southern music, working class music, the artistry of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and was the link in the chain between these figures and Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan of the 1960s.

(Pete Seeger died January 27, 2014).

Further Readings and References

Dunaway, David King, How Can I Keep From Singing, McGraw·Hill, 1983.

Seeger, Pete, The Incompleat Folksinger, Simon and Schuster, 1972.

Seeger, Pete and Bob Reiser, Carry It On! A History of Song and Picture of the Working Men

and Women of America, Simon and Schuster, 1985