Dear Jim,

I am guessing that you have found David K's letter rather mystifying.
Perhaps you are feeling like the adolescent at the dance who cannot
understand why he just got slapped. "How does one seduce the sciences?" he
wonders. 

However, maybe the schism is not so much between the sciences and humanities
as between "talent based" disciplines and "generalist" ones. The
mathematically based sciences share a lot with areas like music, painting
and foreign languages. While these are not epistemologically connected there
are strong pedagogical parallels. Imagine that SIU had a large College of
Foreign Languages. Hundreds of students take their major in CoFL hoping for
highly lucrative jobs as Foreign Novel Readers. Then some bureaucrat
recruits several of their better students for PBL. The FL College find outs 
that these students will not be taking Basic Latin Grammar 101-102-103, 
nor will they be taking French, German or Spanish. If fact after a year and 
a half of PBL they will have forgotten much of what they learned in high school
and will have to start with remedial courses. They will never graduate in 
anything close to four years. How do you think the CoFL would react? (Or, 
for that matter their allies, the Grammar Department over in the College of 
Linguistics.)

Mathematics, and disciplines based largely on it, are like FLs in that
instruction is tedious, sequential and requires some degree of talent or
affinity. The balance between the need to cover the basics, which can bore
even good students, and need get to the rich and diverse applications, is
one that has been debated in the mathematics' community for many decades:
ever since onset of mass education. If we seem closed to a "new" idea it may
be because we have heard it before. We are not dolts; we have thought hard
about these issues.

I studied at Va. Tech. (undergrad) and U. of TX at Austin (Ph.D.) and taught
at the later and Northwestern before coming to SIU. The problems SIU, and
most non-elite, non-flagship universities, are having have occupied much of
my thoughts since. Given that traditional teaching methods work reasonably
well for a genetically similar cohort, I do not see pedagogy as the major
culprit. (This is not to say pedagogical issues should not be explored and
experimented with; improvements are possible and welcome.) What then are the
major obstacles blocking our students from succeeding? 

1) Our students work, often 20 or 30 hours a week. For majors like engineering 
this is not feasible. Students take semesters off to work. This is deadly for 
highly sequential fields. Student workers are often prohibited from studying 
on the job!

2) Our students went to crapy high schools. We do not have placement tests.
We do not enforce our admission standards. We do not enforce our prerequisites.
Community College transfer students do not even have to take the ACT. Who 
knows what they learned? In this chaos students take courses they are not 
ready for and they fail. Over and over. 

3)  Our students do not respect us learned persons. And why should they?
They see a society where shit sells for big bucks. Rock stars, actors,
athletes, and the basest elements of corporate capitalism dominate their
culture. To them SIU is a business that wants their money. Their job, is to
get a "degree", because for reasons beyond their understanding, one needs a
"degree" to get a "good job." But, like good shoppers, they strive to expend
as little capital (work/effort/thought) as possible. 

The variable we have the most control over is 2. All students, freshman and
transfer, should take a placement test. If they are not ready for University
level courses they can be referred to Logan. (At UT the local CC taught
remedial courses at night on the UT campus.)  Advisors should be honest and
help them plan out a 6 year program of study rather than pretend people who
cannot do algebra are going to be engineers in 4 years.  

Could we get a $140,000 grant to implement a placement test and to upgrade 
our computers so that placement criteria and prerequisites are enforced?

We need to be doing everything we can to get money for those of our students
who are trying hard to learn. Students are not impressed by us helping them
move into the dorms; they need to see faculty and administrators out in the
political arena fighting for them. Instead we fight each other. We need new
leadership: from the BOT to the Faculty Senate. 
  
If the students come to respect us, they will take a closer look at the
values we represent. And, if we do a better job helping the students we have
now, better students will be more inclined to come here. 

Mike Sullivan