Danny Crichton

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

It is always in the days leading up to the end of the quarter that I am reminded of how powerful grades are as a motivator at Stanford. When the quarter begins, there are notably interesting conversations on a range of intellectual topics as students engage in new classes and explore new ideas. But by the end of the quarter, those conversations are hard, if not impossible, to find (case in point: I was eating with a table of eight for 30 minutes last week before someone finally said anything. And it was a request for a napkin).

It is also around this time of the quarter that I attempt (always unsuccessfully) to reconcile grading with the fundamental nature of education. A liberal education is about exploring different subjects, engaging with the knowledge of the human legacy and experimenting with varied ideas. Yet, how can one explore when there is always that looming grade just 10 weeks away? How can one experiment with new ideas and have intellectual conversations when there is a midterm a week (in addition to the usual load of problem sets and essays)?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first real intellectual stimulation here at Stanford has been writing an honors thesis - an opportunity to explore a topic without that looming grade in the background. For the first time, I have been able to chart my own course, take a different direction for a little while and still manage to gain an enormous amount of knowledge about a host of different topics.

This process of writing a thesis has made me particularly angry at how Stanford has slowly changed its grading to become

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a lament of a bizarre trend in American civil society - as institutions have become less elitist and more open, the trust that people place in these institutions has decreased. He certainly does not want to hearken back to the discrimination of the past, but his rose-colored view of the past is in need of strong skepticism.

Institutions today are more open and transparent than ever before. There has been a democratization of investigative tools - cameras are cheap, connections to others are quick and gatekeepers that used to screen this information are no longer in power. We know more information about more things than humanity has ever previously experienced. Even the National Enquirer is writing possibly Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative pieces.

Yet as this information has increased dramatically, our ability to adapt our standards to the deluge has not caught up. We still expect our politicians to be pure, and we are outraged over the abuse of public funds. We distrust the mainstream media, but then proceed to believe a blogger with little more than a computer and an opinion. But has anything really changed? Is our world really more corrupt and less trustworthy, or are we experiencing a classic problem in statistics - we are beginning to detect what has always been in existence.

There are voluminous examples of scandals throughout the years, so we cannot claim that the good people of the past were entirely pure. I doubt people are sleeping with their staffs more than in the past or stealing money in more significant amounts (inflation-adjusted of course, for both sex and

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

The liberal arts have not had a strong few decades considering the steep decline of the humanities major and the concomitant rise of business degrees. However, recent and thought-provoking discussions on the value of the liberal arts in business curriculums have rekindled an age-old debate on the value of education: is it about learning to think or learning to do?

This divide in education is at the heart of the so-called 'techie' versus 'fuzzy' divide here at Stanford. Engineers build bridges, write software programs and design processors. They are doers, not thinkers. Those in the humanities and social science ponder deep thoughts, write papers elucidating these thoughts and then go to lunch to talk about Keats or Hume. They are thinkers, not doers.

For such sophisticated consumers of information, Stanford students appear to have bought into this stereotype and have agreed to this core divide. That is unfortunate, because I fervently believe that this divide does not exist at all. Having spent time on both sides (I consider myself a 'tezzy,' which is fortunate because the alternative combination is unprintable), I can state that both the social science and humanities students and the engineers are thinkers and doers.

The social sciences focus on devising a science of humanity, with the ability to predict actions and explain phenomenon. They generate hypotheses, collect data and determine theories that provide predictive power. In this way, they devise solutions to problems, such as how to distribute resources fairly. The same action mentality exists in the humanities. History pieces together evidence from the past to explain our world and to provide better information about our current

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

We Stanford students are so overcome with the Busyness, I wonder how we get anything done at all.

It is an epidemic, far more insidious than the Piglet flu. Once one person is infected, the entire social network around that person seems to come down with the same strain. Looking at population infection rates, the Busyness takes a few weeks to reach critical mass, generally about four to five weeks into a quarter. Once it strikes, social lives are crushed, tensions rise, and Facebook encounters increased web traffic (this one did not make any sense, but the Busyness strikes in odd ways).

The sad part is I am apparently infected with it. So are you. The Busyness seems to have grown particularly virulent this year. The economic shocks of the past year have lowered immunity levels, and there is no vaccine in the works. Even Vaden may not be able to stop this latest affliction.

I am providing this information as a public service announcement. They (third-person conspiratorially plural) do not want you to know about it. Imagine the fear and panic that would sweep through the student body if students knew that a terrible scourge was being transmitting. I thought long and hard about the consequences of revealing this information, but the Busyness itself pretty much prevents any sort of panic from transpiring. People are just too busy to respond to the Busyness.

The most important element in reducing infection rates of the Busyness is identifying possible carriers. My admittedly anecdotal research indicates that one of the most correlated factors is location. Where does a person spend the bulk of their time?

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

I cried a little when I read this story.

The New York Times ran an article last week titled, "As School Exit Tests Prove Tough, States Ease Standards," in which the reporter notes the typical cycles in exit exam difficulty. When exit exams are first released, they legitimately cover the knowledge expected of a high school graduate. As poor test scores roll in, legislatures quickly work to ease the difficulty of the test to ensure high graduation rates.

This trend is certainly nothing new. What particularly struck me was this paragraph: "Critics of Arkansas's [exit exam] system say it fails to show true math proficiency because students have only to score 24 out of 100 to pass the test and those who fail will be granted two additional chances to take the test. After that, they can take a computerized tutorial that is followed by a test." Our standard for graduating seniors is less than one in four correct on content from Algebra I.

Where are the politicians and education leaders when the discussion of a knowledge-based economy comes up? Economists, labor leaders and corporate heads have all identified the most significant paradigm shift in centuries. Education is not just a hobby for the bourgeoisie, it is a prerequisite for every single citizen of this country to find a basic job to put food on the table.

We need to radically reconsider our notions of what an education is if we are to thrive, nay, survive in the 21st century. We have lowered our expectations, lowered our bars and lowered our standards to the point where the goal

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Roman, Byzantine, British. These are among the great empires of European history, the groups that influenced the development of entire centuries of human existence. Despite all of their glories and riches, they eventually receded from prominence, their power waning in a long struggle against decline. The question of this decade, and indeed so far this century, is a simple one: Will America be added to that list of former powers?

Ask that question to an American today and the response will likely be yes, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. The zeitgeist of the past two years has been clear they say, and their response has been equally strong and focused. The Tea Party movement is a direct consequence of that belief in America's decline, a demand to look in the rearview mirror to the 50s, 80s and 90s and search for the soul of a nation that was once ebullient and prosperous.

Who is to blame them? The future seems to be a tremendously frustrating and depressing venture. The economy I see is undergoing creative destruction, but the emphasis so far has tilted heavily toward destruction. Entire industries have been forced aside, while nascent industries have failed to take hold. It is not a pretty sight.

In the past, graduating college meant entering a world of opportunity and growth. The humanities were flourishing, science and technology were seeing tremendous growth, the social sciences were experiencing fundamental advances and businesses the world over were experiencing flush profits. American dynamism was exhilarating.

Today, few members of my generation will stay with one employer throughout their lifetimes. In lieu of stable employment and some semblance

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Introspection is an important trait, but how can one write an obituary for the past decade? The typical lament that comes with eulogizing the end of something dear tends to be positive, but really, the first decade of the new millennium was a real loser in the span of American history.

So instead of looking backwards at the hellish morass we just left behind, I am going to take the opportunity to play Miss Cleo and identify the top ten news stories of the coming decade. Events abound - a couple more presidential elections, another season of American Idol, the end of the world perhaps. The true stories of change in the coming decade are going to be subtler, but far more important.

In higher education, the tuition bubble of the past two decades will crash, beginning a second wave of realignments across universities. In the process, the core mission of universities will become more specialized as unpopular programs and tenure lines are cut. Long term, a renaissance of higher education is in order, focusing on more interdisciplinary skills and higher standards.

Students entering universities will be better prepared than their predecessors due to the new K-12 Core Standards currently close to implementation. As teachers begin to teach math and science skills again in American public schools, the country will note a general improvement in international test scores and an influx of new STEM majors in universities.

Those STEM majors will continue developing automated systems that replace humans in more and more industries. First it was the cashiers at Wal-Mart, but soon it will be your local lawyer. The bread and butter cases

Originally published in the Stanford Daily as part of a column series known as Adventures in Academia that explored issues related to the Stanford University community.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing from Bruce Alberts, former head of the National Academy of Sciences and the current editor of the journal Science, discuss science education and his own path in graduate school.

After years of arduous work, he became the first person in his department's history at Harvard to fail a dissertation defense. For most, their careers would be finished. Over the course of the next year, however, he found new mentors and new meaning in his work, and Alberts managed to earn his doctorate and eventually discover many of the proteins behind DNA replication. Today, his textbook is the "bible" of the field.

It is a wonderful success story, but few students fail at the dissertation stage. They abandon science when they are in grade school or when they take their first introductory university class. They leave before anyone knew they were there in the first place. How many students abandon the sciences like Alberts, but never had a mentor to bring them back?

Allow me to speak from experience. I came to Stanford with two potential majors checked on the new student adviser sheet - biology and political science. I have managed to cover those areas well, but something changed over the past two years.

I started taking political science classes when I arrived at Stanford, but by winter quarter, I had rekindled my interests in the life sciences. I had no idea that it was already too late - chemistry is only offered once a year. While it did not help that my adviser was a political science professor, I had no one to blame