In 2005, “March of the Penguins,” Luc Jacquet’s documentary about a year in the life of emperor penguins, became a surprise cultural phenomenon. The film, which grossed $77 million in the U.S., captures the epic sacrifices these birds make to protect their eggs: trekking 70 miles over ice to mate, then fasting for four months in total darkness while enduring Arctic temperatures of minus 80 degrees. Audience members were entranced by the film’s central “love story” — even if, some argued, it wasn’t entirely accurate.
But Bernd Heinrich, a renowned naturalist and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Vermont, argues in his eye-opening new book, “The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy,” there’s little reason to suspect birds don’t fall in love just like we do. Love, Heinrich writes, is an adaptive feeling that many animals share, one that causes them to act irrationally for the sake of reproduction. He suggests monogamy among birds evolved in a similar way, as a sexual strategy for rearing young in demanding environments.
Drawing heavily on personal observations and evolutionary biology, Heinrich, the author of 14 previous nonfiction books, sheds light on a wide array of subjects, from the prevalence of lesbian albatross in Hawaii to the peculiar dynamics of bird sex. And though he admits birds may love one another, we shouldn’t necessarily look to them for ideal “family values.” Australian malleefowl, he writes, bury their children in mounds of rotting vegetation and leave them for dead.
Salon spoke with Heinrich over the phone about our misplaced admiration for penguins, bird promiscuity, and how, exactly, birds actually have sex.
Can penguins really feel love?
When I talk about penguins experiencing love, I’m talking about mechanisms that we have for attachment, for reproduction. And I don’t think that’s anthropomorphizing at all. It’s not any more of a generalization than saying the muscles of a bird act the same way in moving a limb as they do for us. Of course, attachment is going to be very different between species, just as it is between individual humans.
But when I wrote as much in my Op-Ed on “March of the Penguins” for the New York Times, many readers rejected the idea of love as a chemically induced state of mind that many animals share. One reader seemed threatened by the idea that humans might not be special, that they might be just another animal. He felt love was an exalted feeling that only humans can have. Yet most biologists simply look at a trait’s functional aspects: what it does, what it’s for, why it evolved. We’re interested in the differences, of course, but also in the things we all have in common.
Why do you think “March of the Penguins” was such a hit?
Because people recognized aspects of our own behavior in them, for one. But I think it’s a mistake to see them as archetypes of virtue, as many viewers did, because by that measure you’d have to hold up others as archetypes of evil. The male bird of paradise, for example, will mate with anything that comes along every few minutes. So if you hold up a penguin as something to emulate, then why not a bird of paradise? It’s not that penguins are nicer or better than birds of paradise — they’re just penguins. As humans, we tend to impose a moral framework on animal behavior, as we do on our own. We value that which doesn’t put a burden on society. But birds don’t have morals in the sense of emotional pressures to act in a certain way. They are what they do, and do what they are.
We have this idea that many birds, like swans, for example, are these ideals of monogamy. Is this true?
Monogamy among birds is mostly social monogamy, in that they will pair off, but they won’t necessarily be sexually monogamous. Some of them are, of course, but most try not to be, as there are certain advantages to being not monogamous. Monogamy is often forced upon birds because of certain conditions. Mates might be scarce, say, and it’s safer to have a mate around. Or a female needs a mate to keep the offspring alive, to make sure all the courting and mating and nesting hasn’t been a big waste. It takes a lot of resources and help to raise baby birds — so the parents have to have a lot of investment. Social monogamy works for food and protection, especially in the case of geese or birds of prey.
So no, most birds are not monogamous. But monogamy is relative. It differs not only between species but within species as well, and often according to gender. Male birds of paradise are extremely promiscuous, whereas the females are extremely picky. They may only mate once in a breeding cycle, while a male will mate with hundreds of females and at any time. But then there are precocious birds, like ducks and quail, whose females manage to do all the feeding themselves, so a male isn’t really required.
So are birds more biologically inclined to have sex with multiple partners than to be monogamous?
Well, you have to talk about individual species. With most birds, the couples break up after the breeding cycle and often re-pair at the next breeding cycle. But that may only be a consequence of them coming back to the same nest site. If somebody else shows up, they’ll mate with them instead. And some birds are not at all polyamorous. Ravens, for example, stay in pairs year round. That’s unusual.
Right now, in Vermont, I see lots of geese that didn’t get to breed, but they remain in pairs. They may not be all over each other, but they’re definitely together. I’ve seen them pair up a year or so before they even start to nest and then stay together year after year, unless something happens to the mate.
How do birds actually have sex?
In most birds sex consists of a couple seconds of cloacal contact [the cloaca is an opening on both male and female birds' posteriors]. During the act itself, the female will hold her tail aside, and the male bird will sort of bend over backwards while balancing himself on her back. Some birds have penises — like ducks, ostriches and ravens — and other have an intermittent organ that acts like a penis, though it’s embryologically derived from something else. For about 97 percent of the year, most birds are not having sex with each other. But again, with birds of paradise, if females keep arriving that window might be extended for months. And in the tropics, the breeding season is extended.
Some birds even sneak their eggs into the nests of others. That doesn’t sound terribly virtuous.
Cuckoos specialize in that kind of thing, to relieve themselves of the burden of raising a baby. It’s the equivalent of leaving a child on someone else’s doorstep. The hosts try to resist it, of course, since there’s no advantage to them to raise somebody else’s young, especially if it’s going to be very hungry and bigger than their own. Thus, it takes teamwork to get that egg in there.
Cuckoos will even put their eggs into the nests of different species. But the hosts’ maternal instinct is so great that they’ll raise anything in their nest, believing it to be their baby. The word “cuckold,” after all, comes from cuckoo, from their habit of both laying their eggs in other birds’ nests and copulating with females who already have mates. In essence, cuckoos simply dupe other birds into raising their young for them.
What do you think is the biggest mystery about birds that we haven’t solved yet?
Well, we understand a lot about migration, and some of the physiology that’s involved. We know they navigate by the stars and by landmarks and the sun, and use magnetic orientation. But we still don’t know how they can find the pinpoint on the globe, how they can return to the same hedge in New England after flying down to Central America. The accuracy is pretty uncanny. A lot of their behavior is inscribed on their genes. Birds in particular have very specific behavior as to how and where the nest is built, the ecology of where they live, how they catch food — all of it is somehow inscribed on their genes. How you get from a series of base pairs on the DNA to what kind of worm or fly a bird is going to eat is a huge mystery.
In the past few months, the perennial controversy over psychiatric drug use has been growing considerably more heated. A January study showed a negligible difference between antidepressants and placebos in treating all but the severest cases of depression. The study became the subject of a Newsweek cover story, and the value of psychiatric drugs has recently been debated in the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times and Salon. Many doctors and patients fiercely defend psychiatric drugs and their ability to improve lives. But others claim their popularity is a warning sign of a dangerously over-medicated culture.
The timing of Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” a comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States, couldn’t be better. An acclaimed mental health journalist and winner of a George Polk Award for his reporting on the psychiatric field, Whitaker draws on 50 years of literature and in-person interviews with patients to answer a simple question: If “wonder drugs” like Prozac are really helping people, why has the number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketed from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today?
“Anatomy of an Epidemic” is the first book to investigate the long-term outcomes of patients treated with psychiatric drugs, and Whitaker finds that, overall, the drugs may be doing more harm than good. Adhering to studies published in prominent medical journals, he argues that, over time, patients with schizophrenia do better off medication than on it. Children who take stimulants for ADHD, he writes, are more likely to suffer from mania and bipolar disorder than those who go unmedicated. Intended to challenge the conventional wisdom about psychiatric drugs, “Anatomy” is sure to provoke a hot-tempered response, especially from those inside the psychiatric community.
Salon spoke with Robert Whitaker over the phone about the reasons behind the pharmaceutical revolution, how “anxiety” became rebranded as “depression,” and what he thinks psychiatrists are hiding from the American public.
Psychiatric drug use is a notoriously tough subject for writers, because of all the contradictory research. Why wade into it?
In 1998, I was writing a series for the Boston Globe on abuse of psychiatric patients in research settings. I came across the World Health Organization’s outcomes study for schizophrenia patients, and found that outcomes were better for poor countries of the world — like India, Colombia, Nigeria — than for the rich countries. And I was startled to find that only a small percentage of patients in those countries were medicated. I also discovered that the number of people on disability for mental illness in this country has tripled over the last 20 years.
If our psychiatric drugs are effective at preventing mental illness, I thought, why are we getting so many people unable to work? I felt we needed to look at long-term outcomes and ask: What does the evidence show? Are we improving long-term outcomes or not?
But you claim in the book that psychiatrists have long known that these drugs can cause harm.
In the late 1970s, Jonathan Cole — the father of American psychopharmacology — wrote a paper called “Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?” that signaled that antipsychotics weren’t the lifesaving drugs that people had hoped. In it, he reviewed all of the long-term harm the drugs could cause and observed that studies had shown that at least 50 percent of all schizophrenia patients could fare well without the drugs. He wrote, “Every schizophrenic outpatient maintained on antipsychotic medication should have the benefit of an adequate trial without drugs.” This would save many from the dangers of tardive dyskinesia — involuntary body movements — as well as the financial and social burdens of prolonged drug therapy. The title of the paper poignantly sums up the awful long-term paradox.
Why didn’t this change people’s minds about psychiatric drugs?
Psychiatry essentially shut off any further public discussion of this sort. And there’s a reason for this. In the 1970s, psychiatry felt that it was in a fight for its survival. Its two prominent classes of drugs — antipsychotics, and benzodiazepines like Valium — were coming to be seen as problematic and even harmful, and sales of these drugs declined. At the same time, there’d been an explosion in the number of counselors and psychologists offering other forms of non-drug therapy.
Psychiatry saw itself in competition for patients with these other therapists, and in the late 1970s, the field realized that its advantage in the marketplace was its prescribing powers. Thus the field consciously sought to tell a public story that would support the use of its medications, and embraced the “medical model” of psychiatric disorders. This took off with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980, which introduced many new classes of “treatable” disorders.
In a recent New Yorker article, Louis Menand suggested that anxiety drugs were rebranded as antidepressants in the ’80s, because anxiety drugs had acquired a bad name. Is that really true?
Depression and anxiety are pretty closely linked. Before benzodiapenes came out, the discomfort that younger people and working people felt was seen as anxiety, by and large. Depression was seen as less common, a disease among the middle-aged and older. It was this deep thing, where people are putting their heads in their hands and can’t move. But when the benzodiazepines were proven to be addictive and harmful, the pharmaceutical companies said, in essence, “We have this market of people who feel discomfort in their lives, which we used to call anxiety. If we can rebrand it as depression, then we can bring a new antidepressant to market.” It was a reconceptualization of discomfort, and it opened up the giant market for antidepressants as we see today.
And yet many studies have shown that antidepressants can treat depression, especially in severe cases.
In severe cases, you do see that people benefit from antidepressants, and that shows up consistently. But you still have to raise the question, even in that severe group: What happens to those medicated patients in the long term, compared to what happened in previous times? One thing that surprised me, looking at the epidemiological literature from the pre-antidepressant era, is that even severely depressed, hospitalized patients could with time expect to get well, and most did. Today, however, there’s a high incidence of patients on long-term drug therapy that become chronically ill.
What about stimulants used to treat ADHD. How effective are they?
These stimulants alter behavior in a way that teachers can appreciate. They subdue finger-tapping and disruptive symptoms. But in the 1990s, the National Institute of Mental Health started looking to see if things like Ritalin were benefiting kids with ADHD, and to this day they have no evidence that this drug treatment improves long-term functioning in any domain — the ADHD symptoms, lower delinquency rates, better performance at school, et cetera. Then the NIMH studied whether these drugs provide a long-term benefit, and they found that after three years, being on medication is actually a marker of deterioration. Some patients’ growth has been stunted, their ADHD symptoms have worsened. William Pelham, from the State University of New York at Buffalo and one of the principal investigators in that study, said, “We need to confess to parents that we’ve found no benefit.” None. And we think that with drugs, the benefits should outweigh the risks.
What’s so risky about Ritalin?
For one, a significant percentage — between 10 and 25 percent — of kids prescribed medication for ADHD will have a manic episode or psychotic episode and deteriorate in such a way that they’re diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A similar study in 2000 on pediatric bipolar disorder reported that 84 percent of the children treated for bipolar illness — at the Luci Bini Mood Disorders Clinic in New York — had been previously exposed to psychiatric medications. The author, Gianni Faeda, wrote, “Strikingly, in fewer than 10 percent of the cases was diagnosis of bipolar disorder considered initially.” The reality is that until children were medicated with stimulants and antidepressants, you didn’t see juvenile bipolar mania.
But if these studies are so groundbreaking, why have they gone unreported in the media?
Because the NIMH didn’t announce it. Just as they didn’t announce the 2007 outcome study for schizophrenia patients. In that study, the recovery rate was 40 percent for those off meds, but only 5 percent for those on meds. I checked all the NIMH press releases for 2007, and found no release on this study. I found no announcement of it in any American Psychiatric Association publication or textbook. Not a single newspaper published an account of the study. And that’s because the psychiatric establishment — the NIMH, the APA, even the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy organization — did not put out any press release about it or try to alert the media in any way.
Are you suggesting that psychiatrists are beholden to pharmaceutical companies?
Not exactly, although most of the leading academic psychiatrists act as consultants, advisors and speakers for them. The problem is that psychiatry, starting in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III, decided to tell the public that psychiatric disorders were biological ailments, and that its drugs were safe and effective treatments for those ailments. If it suddenly announces to the public that a long-term NIMH-funded study found that the 15-year recovery rate for schizophrenia patients was 40 percent for those off meds and 5 percent for those on meds, then that story begins to fall apart. By not reporting the results, psychiatry maintains the image of its drugs in the public mind, and the value of psychiatrists in today’s therapy marketplace.
So do you think psychiatric drugs should be used at all?
I think they should be used in a selective, cautious manner. It should be understood that they’re not fixing any chemical imbalances. And honestly, they should be used on a short-term basis. But beyond this, I think we should look at programs that are getting very good results. This is what I love about Keropudas Hospital’s program in Finland. They have 20 years of great results treating newly psychotic patients. They see if patients can get better without the use of meds, and if they can’t, then they try them. It’s a best-use model, not a no-use or anti-med model. It fits with our studies done in the 1970s that found if you use this model, you get better outcomes, and a good number of people get better and go on with their lives.
According to Bill McKibben, the respected environmentalist and author of the pioneering “End of Nature,” the planet Earth, as we know it, is already dead. Over a million square miles of the Arctic ice cap have melted, the oceans have risen and warmed, and the tropics have expanded 2 degrees north and south. Global warming has caused such pervasive and irreversible changes, he argues, that we now live on a new planet with a new set of environmental and climatic realities — and, as such, it deserves a new name: Goodbye, Earth. Hello, “Eaarth.”
McKibben’s hair-raising new book, “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet,” is a scrupulous and impassioned account of the severely compromised globe on which we now live. He lays out the myriad ways in which climate change has remade our world, but he also goes much further, chronicling its current and future human toll. He explains how droughts in Australia helped precipitate the 2008 food crisis and put 40 million people at risk of hunger, and how the rapidly melting glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas may soon threaten the water supply of billions. Our only hope of survival, McKibben suggests, is a reversion to small-scale, local ways of life. “We simply can’t live on the new earth as if it were the old earth,” he writes. “We’ve foreclosed that option.”
Salon spoke with McKibben over the phone about the meaning of “Eaarth,” our grim future, and what Tom Friedman got wrong about global warming.
What is “Eaarth”?
The meaning behind the title is that we really have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But it’s substantially different. There’s 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than there was 50 years ago, much less ice at the top of the Earth, et cetera. Calling it “Eaarth,” an admittedly weird word, is a way of calling people’s attention to the fact that the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago.
What’s the biggest observable difference?
The most visible change is what’s happening to ice around the world. But probably the most important is what’s happening to liquid water. Warm air holds a lot more water vapor than cold, so you get a lot more evaporation in dry areas, and hence more drought. Even easier to measure, and more troubling, is the fact that what goes up must come down, and what’s coming down are these intense precipitation events.
In the book, I describe the rainfalls in my small town in Vermont — record floods that cut us off from the rest of the world. But that’s happening around the world almost every day now. The 100-year storm comes three times a decade in a lot of places. Stuff like that is sobering, not only because it demonstrates how out of balance things are, but also because the consequences of a world run amuck are not to be taken lightly.
What consequences are we talking about?
India, for example, is constructing this massive wall to protect it from Bangladesh. Not because it represents a military threat, but because there’s 150 or 160 million people there who are increasingly squeezed by a rising ocean. As best we can tell, the failure of the monsoon across Africa is climatically related, and that’s clearly played a big role in what’s been happening in the wars in Sudan and Somalia. It’s not that there’s an out-and-out war about climate change; it’s that all the stresses that already plague the planet get harder and harder to deal with. If you’re already short of water, say, now you’re shorter.
Forty-four percent of Americans still don’t believe global warming is manmade. What’s the best way to convince them?
Most accounts terrifically underplay what’s actually going on already. But in my life as an organizer, we’ve been very successful without trying to scare people. Last fall, my organization 350.org organized 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”
And people were organizing around a pretty obscure scientific data point, a parts-per-million concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The lesson we took is that people are capable of understanding the science. It’s not harder than understanding that if your cholesterol gets too high, you’re going to have a heart attack. If the doctor says your cholesterol is too high, your first instinct isn’t to demand a rundown of how the lipid system works. You say, “OK, what do we do?”
At Copenhagen, we managed to get 117 nations to sign on to the 350-parts-per-million target, which NASA believes to be the safe percentage. They were the wrong 117 nations, of course. But in 18 months, with little money, we’ve had some real effects.
Then why was Copenhagen such a failure?
Simple: The countries that are most powerful and most addicted to fossil fuel aren’t ready to come to terms with it. You can’t really have an AA meeting while everyone’s still in denial. In each of the last three years, Exxon Mobil made more than any company in the history of money. That may give them enough political power to keep the U.S. in denial for years to come.
Thomas Friedman and others recommend a technologically advanced “green growth” project — big windmills throughout the Midwest, solar arrays in the Arizona desert, hybrid cars — to kick our addiction to fossil fuel. Won’t that work?
We eventually run into limits to further growth on the planet. All the things Tom Friedman would like to do are good things. They just cost an immense amount of money and an immense amount of resources. We can do some of them. We’d be very smart to think less about grand, continent-spanning schemes, and wise to think more about localized and somewhat humble versions of these same things. Nuclear power plants, for example, are off-the-charts expensive, because they’re highly centralized and dangerous. They’re the engineering example of too big to fail. By contrast, if the solar panel on my roof fails, I have to fix it, but it doesn’t destroy the electric grid, or release dangerous solar particles into the atmosphere.
Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic advisor, said that “putting limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” Is he wrong?
He’s wrong, but for an interesting reason. Economists, and many of us to some extent, have come to believe that the economy is more real than the physical world. Think about the incredible regard we have for the economy. “It’s healing,” we say. “It’s going through a rough patch.” We talk about it like it’s our aging mother. Whereas with the Earth, we say, “Oh well, it’s going through its natural cycles, don’t worry.” Which is slightly crazy, because clearly the economy is a subset of the natural world, not the other way around. We lavish intense worry and affection and brainpower on the economy, but not so much on the environment. Summers is the perfect exemplar of that attitude: an incredibly smart guy whose context is so narrow it ends up making him very dumb indeed.
So what’s the best way to proceed?
First we need to reach an agreement capping our carbon emissions, and then help finance the developing world to skip the fossil fuel step and develop in different ways. Places like South Africa and Bangladesh haven’t yet gone through the development cycle that makes them rich, and they’re being told, “That’s not on offer anymore.” At the moment, solar panels are more expensive than coal and will be for a while. Still, we’re going to have to provide these countries with a better alternative, and the resources to follow it, if we want to act in a way that could be described as moral.
As for the nuts-and-bolts engineering, over the long run, I’d recommend a combination of conservation; harnessing wind and sun, from both distant and nearby sources; and lifestyle changes. There’s no good reason the Jersey Turnpike should be crowded with cars, not in a dense area easily served by better transit. In the transition, we’ll be using a lot of natural gas to make electricity, would be my guess.
In the book you use Vermont, where you live, as an example of an environmentally forward-thinking state.
Vermont hasn’t gotten everything right. Its energy system isn’t very good. But it’s been ahead of the rest of the nation in experimenting with local food, for example, which is the easiest commodity to get back under control. Vermont is also important because of its political history (it declared its independence from New York in 1777 and was its own republic before becoming a state), and its ongoing campaigns against federal subsidies for big agriculture. Its attitude of self- determination is a reminder that small-scale activities — things like town meetings, farmers’ markets, composting — can work quite well.
But lately, in the U.S. as a whole, local and regional action has reached more than a level of experimentation. The number of farms across the country is growing for the first time in a century and a quarter, with 300,000 new farms this decade. The one business that boomed in the last two years was seeds — Burpee Seeds was up 40 percent or something. There’s an awful lot of land in American suburbs currently devoted to growing grass, often with lavish infusions of fertilizer and chemicals. Turn some of that energy and resources toward growing vegetables, and you’re getting somewhere.
Higher education in this country is in a state of crisis. Nearly nine out of 10 American high school seniors say they want to go to college. Yet almost half of U.S. college students drop out, outstanding student loan debt exceeds $730 billion, and tuition fees rose 248 percent between 1990 and 2008, more than any other major commodity or service.
As Anya Kamenetz suggests in “DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education,” these problems, and the fact that students and teachers are increasingly venturing beyond campus walls to gather and share information, spell trouble for the future of the conventional university. In her book, Kamenetz, the author of “Generation Debt” and a staff writer for Fast Company magazine, argues that a decentralized college experience — in which the least effective parts of college life are replaced by technology, social media and self-directed learning — can limit dropout rates and reverse the devastating cost spiral.
Kamenetz doesn’t advocate leaving the university behind, but she envisions a future where the 80 percent of American college students who attend non-selective schools (mainstream public universities and community colleges) create their own personalized course of study. Some American universities are already making classes available for free online, and using blogs, YouTube, Facebook and, yes, Twitter, to move toward this new model for higher education.
Salon recently spoke with Anya Kamenetz over the phone about the origins of our massive student loan debt, her own Yale education, and why we should look to England’s educational system for guidance.
Why did you decide to write a book about reforming higher education?
In 2005 I wrote “Generation Debt,” which is about the increase in student aid resulting from the growth of college classes. I noticed this underlying tendency to try to solve the problem by throwing more money at it. But it’s like healthcare: Despite the increase in basic costs, spending more and more money on it won’t make it more affordable for people. Then I started working at Fast Company, which operates at the intersection of innovation, policy and politics. I began investigating the area of higher education as an information industry that was possibly ripe for the kind of disruption we’ve seen in other information industries.
You argue for a movement toward something called “DIY U.” What is it?
I define it as the mentality that there’s another way to provide the benefits of higher education to the people who need it. It’s an idea that puts the learner at the center. Rather than the game being, “How do you get into the most exclusive institution possible?” the idea is that you as a learner are identifying your own goals and assembling experiences that will be the most valuable for you to achieve those goals.
How did college tuition costs get so out of control?
On a broad policy historical level, what we have now is an erosion from the high-water mark of the early 1970s. There was a short period of time — from the postwar era with the GI Bill to the early ’70s — [in which] there seemed to be unlimited rounds of investment from the federal government and the state into mass higher education. It was seen as good economic policy, from a national defense and security perspective, and with the Civil Rights Act, there were more and more people — women, minorities — who wanted access to opportunity. College seemed like a way to allow them to prove themselves instead of unleashing them on the job market.
Then the economy turned upside down. There was a political backlash against college students, fueled in large part by the campus unrest in the ’60s, and it was no longer so popular to support students. So states started withdrawing their support, and colleges started practicing cost shifting. States came down on colleges as being fat and happy and full of liberal professors, and colleges put the cost burden on families, and families took on more student loans. As a result, you get this credit bubble effect, similar to what happened recently with mortgages: There’s so much debt available, and so much free money for colleges, that parents and families become less sensitive to price increases, and there’s no political outcry at the state level.
As you write in the book, colleges can increase their tuition simply to appear more prestigious on the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Right. The problem is, we don’t really know what happens inside a college classroom. We have the SAT, which measures high school performance more or less, but there are no national standards for higher education. So the U.S. News & World Report rankings depend on exclusivity and spending. Colleges become more prestigious if they accept fewer students and spend more money on them, as opposed to raising their chances to succeed, improving their self-esteem, or making them more efficient.
But competency-based online schools like the Western Governors University, which awards degrees based on what students have learned, don’t have the same reputation as traditional schools like Amherst.
In the future, I don’t think it’ll go back to the old model, where colleges have this brand name that everyone respects. We still use college as shorthand for prestige, but eventually that should be just one marker among many. You’re not going to be applying for jobs on the strength of your WGU diploma — you’re going to have to rely more on your assessments in the field. But grads of WGU have found they can satisfy employers by showing them what they’ve done, more than where they’ve studied.
Though you attended Yale, a very traditional, very prestigious four-year university.
I was very good at traditional school and college, where I graduated with honors. All the time while absorbing literature and Russian, I was also learning the meta-skills of how to please my teachers and how to stay away from any classes that might be too challenging or outside my comfort zone. I made an attempt to design my own major around literature and psycholinguistics, but Yale threw up a lot of barriers to that.
My most relevant learning experiences took place outside the classroom, editing my student magazine and working as an intern at several different publications. Out in the real world I was challenged to the max, pulling far more all-nighters than I did for my papers. I was always a bookworm, so I had to develop new ways of dealing with people, whether sources, fellow writers or editors, and gathering information from being on the scene. I actually cut back on my class load my senior year so I could commute to New York three days a week to intern at the Village Voice, which is pretty rare among Ivy Leaguers. But it turned out great: I found great mentors there, and I was writing a column for the Voice just a couple years later.
Is there another country we should be modeling our higher education after?
There’s no perfect model. Every country in the world is grappling with the unprecedented demand for higher education. In the developing world, there are 10 or 20 times as many people who want a degree than there is capacity. The developed countries have the same problems as we do: The costs are going up, the institutions are somewhat calcified and insulated from the job market.
I did, however, keep coming across innovative approaches in England. The U.K. is very interesting since it has an economy and standard of living similar to ours, but until recently, they had a much smaller percentage of people going through higher education. Today, they have many more entrance points and a highly developed set of vocational programs. Up until the age of 25, you can access a variety of resources that set you up with apprenticeships and internships. England’s Open University, which goes back to the 1960s, when they had classes on television, is currently a leader in open courseware.
Does open courseware mean we’ll be getting rid of professors?
From the earliest days of the academy, it’s been an ideal to share knowledge openly — that scholars aren’t producing knowledge primarily for personal gain but to share it with the world. And it’s been a decade since MIT started their OpenCourseWare project, putting all their courses online for free. The biggest advocates of these changes tend to be humanities professors and graduate students fascinated by the implications of social media, by how people communicate in the media world. But it’s important to emphasize that these repositories are materials. It’s not that by using OpenCourseWare you’re replicating an MIT experience. You’re putting the raw material in someone’s hands so that, by working alongside peers or a teacher of some sort, you can absorb this knowledge. It’s the best possible use of the Web.
More and more people are applying to trade schools, where they can learn practical skills that won’t be offshored. Can students really learn these trades online?
This has been a big question for me, and my major answer is hybridization. Vocational schools are actually a good example of the hybrid model, because when you’re in the classroom you’re actually engaging with your hands. On WikiEducator, for example, they have a series of videos on chainsaw maintenance. But before you become a chainsaw maintainer, you probably want to find a real person who knows how to use a chainsaw. Offline and online aren’t isolated experiences.
A whole DIY movement — exemplified by sites like Boing Boing — comes from people going online to learn about something, going offline and trying it out, and then going back online to report what they did.
