Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Daniel Souleles. This is the first post in a sequence called Strange Rumblings in the Meritocracy.

Yes, this title is clickbait. Please, allow me a few paragraphs to explain.

In my graduate program, particularly in the early stages, there was a lot of anxiety, impostor syndrome, and fear. All told, fear was probably at the root of things–fear of failure, fear of being found out, and perhaps, most basically, fear of being tossed out. Over the first two years of the program we would meet at the beginning and or end of each semester with the four professors who ran the program. Masters students and other departmental students called them “the four horseman.” And The ever-present concern in these meetings was that your number would finally be up. It helped matters not one bit that there was a healthy oral history in the department about all manner of ejection. Did you hear the one about the whole cohort that got asked to leave after summer field-work? The fields lay fallow that year, and there was but one survivor.

Suffice it to say, I felt tremendous relief when I made it through my first two

years and got the go-ahead to continue to doctoral exams. At this year-end meeting, I figured, too, this might be a good opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. I was wondering why on earth I had been admitted to the program. I hadn’t studied anthropology as an undergraduate, and had worked as a paralegal in the years prior. I had read a lot of anthropology and tried my best at writing samples and statements, but have increasingly come to the conclusion that my application was strange, and is not the stuff that good advice is made of. So, I asked one of the horsemen why they let me in. He looked puzzled, and paused, picked up my file (a real, honest-to-god manila file), leafed through, and said, “Oh, you did good on the GRE.” So a test of algebra II, trigonometry, and analogies got me into a doctoral program in anthropology. This test, at least in some people’s eyes, made me smart. Never mind that I had not demonstrated a whit of competence in my actual, chosen, field of study. The GRE said I was good people.

This brings us back to clickbait. If a test can make you smart, it can also

make you dumb. We have lots of assessments like this in the universities at

which we work. We rank people based on GPA and give honors accordingly.

We often have classes that have one or two make-or-break assessments–a term paper or

two, or a couple of exams. In our academic hiring processes we allow for the prestige

of a particular doctoral program or a particular fellowship, or a particular

well-placed (though perhaps unread) publication to speak for someone’s worth. More

generally, this type of meritocratic sorting becomes a justification for inequality. If

academic credentials are something we can get by dint of hard-work completely

under our own control, then whatever praise or scorn that comes with that work

is justified. Karen Ho (2009) writes about the way junior investment bankers are

seen as smart and qualified based on their elite educational pedigrees,

even without having even basic financial knowledge. I found something

similar in my work on private equity investors. Others have written about how merit

and worth is constructed via academic and scholastic credentials

(Hayes 2013, Khan 2012). It’s a big topic, but for now, I’d like to contrast meritocratic

sorting in class assignments, one-offs that feed into the merit-machine, to a more

iterative goal-oriented assessment, the dissertation (please, hold your laughter).

If meritocratic assessment speaks to your intrinsic worth, apprentice-style

assessment just speaks to how well you did on a particular piece of work, in

pursuit of a goal, nothing more. A decent example of an apprentice-style

assessment is the dissertation (at least in its ideal type). Yes, I can see

the groans and hear the eye-rolls from here. Bear with me. A dissertation, first and

foremost, has an obvious goal in and of itself–an original contribution to some

discipline. Its structure, such as it is, is obvious and more or less known to all

who pursue it. Moreover, people writing dissertations often go through revision,

after revision, after revision, until they get it right. It should not

be a once and done thing. Moreover, once someone has got it right, there is a defense,

which, again, in its idealized form, is a summative conversation about the

work. The defense happens when the committee is convinced you’ve made a contribution to scholarship, and serves to verify things. That’s it. It would be crazy to

suggest that you give it your best shot, turn something in,

sacrifice a Nuer Cow to Margaret Mead, and hope for the best. No,

of course you can’t redo the dissertation. How would we be able to tell who is

really good at anthropology?

This is the difference between meritocratic sorting and apprentice-style assessment.

Given that I have no interest in passing judgment on someone’s self-worth in the

context of a university anthropology course (that’s some hubris right there), and given

that I have no interest in sorting people into smart or dumb, I’ve made

numerous tweaks and changes to my courses over the years to bring them more in-line

with apprentice-style learning. So, like any good clickbait, this post will end in a

(short) list. Forgive me, Margaret-Mead-Cow-God. What follows are some of

the changes that are found across my syllabi.

1 The Ideas

Every syllabus is an argument. Often it illustrates the thesis or learning

objectives of the course. Sometimes a course plan just argues for the florid paragraph or two we write at the top of a syllabus. When I teach intro to cultural anthropology I want

students to understand basic ideas in anthropology (society, culture, etc.),

be able to read actual ethnographies, then based on those two things do

simple research projects. This type of schematic organization allows me to break the

course into thirds, and spend a month or so focusing on each area. Each subsequent

part of the course reinforces and uses what came before. This mode

of idea-sorting also gets away from the listicle style course. It’s

easy to make, say, an intro course that has a week or two on culture,

society, relativism, exchange, sex, gender, kinship, violence, economics, religion, and

so on. The course in this form becomes a kind of obnoxious cocktail party–lots of

zippy one-liners followed by a hangover in which you realize you don’t remember much

of what happened. Toss in some high-stakes exams and all bets are off.

Sometimes, though, lists are important or at least unavoidable. When I

teach kinship, it’s hard to avoid six or seven different theoretical approaches.

Still, even in that case, I subsume kinship theories to a third of the

course focused on basic ideas, then a third of the course on application

in ethnography (reading cases), and a third of the course seeing

how kinship knowledge from anthropology is used in cross-disciplinary spats

as well as contesting larger societal common knowledge.

The leitmotif with all this idea-talk is having a few expansive sections,

that match up with clear theses or goals, in which students have time to

play with and get to know ideas. Also if you teach any good ethnographies,

there is no need to fear missing something. They tend to bring in just

about everything the discipline does. Seriously. Just try to list all the

anthropological topics mentioned in Righteous Dopefiend. Death to the survey-course.

2 The Assignments

Assignments are the part of the course where students get to try out ideas that

they’ve never thought before. My courses tend to have five assignments–the first is a

daily reading response (250 words) and or periodic seminar management which is simply graded pass-fail (4/5 of responses or a good lively conversation usually passes). The last

assignment is a research-proposal or a paper (anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words).

The majority of the grade, 60 percent or so, comes from applied field-research assignments–interviews, observations, fiddling with social psych inventories, and so on.

Students gather their own data and compare what they’ve learned to course readings and

discussions. To take one small example, in a class on Business, Society, and Culture

(or, Who Gets Rich and Why) we spend a lot of time talking about theories of

alienation and the condition of wage labor. So, students do an exploratory

interview with someone about their job. They take notes, record, and ultimately write

a paper (around 1000 words) interpreting what they learned researching as it compares

to course material. The assignments reinforce course content. The finals doubly so, particularly if people elect to do a research proposal, and push their curiosity beyond the course’s syllabus.

3 The Grading

All the above is for naught if, like I and my colleagues before them, your students

carry “the fear” into your class. If they’re so afraid of screwing up that they won’t

take intellectual risks, then they will simply repeat what you say and what they

think you want to hear. So in addition to laying out a clear, detailed rubric by

which I will grade each assignment, and supplying thorough, explicit feedback

with each grade, I allow students to rewrite as many times as they would like.

I also let people rewrite a final in the following semester. I’ve even set up

a protocol with a cover sheet and an office hour meeting. This does two things–

it allows me to be completely honest with grading without fearing I’m ruining

someone’s life (remember this is not a judgment of who you are, just how

you did on an assignment), and it allows the students who want to experiment

and learn and stick with it space to do so. There is an ancillary benefit too,

some people get things right away, others take a lot of time to mull things over.

There’s space for both in this type of class.

A further note–I do not require participation in class; and I have no attendance

or late policy. Part of this is temperamental–I have no desire to be a disciplinarian,

or compel someone to do something they don’t want to do. I assume if a

student is not in class they have a good reason. I count not wanting to

be there as a good reason. And as to participation, some people are anxious

speaking in front of others, and don’t learn well under that sort of pressure.

I trust students to make that assessment on their own. And, perhaps

against considerable odds, I’ve never had much trouble getting discussion

going in class, and people generally seem comfortable working with me.

My classes change from semester to semester. Midway through my classes I give

an informal, anonymous, evaluation of the course to that point. I take time to debrief

with the class and see what is or isn’t working and what they would change.

This is how I came around to not offering exams and not cold calling. It turns out

I could teach just fine without those artifices, mostly as I realized I didn’t

want to perpetuate a system of winners and losers via my college classes.

TL;DR: Listen to your students; don’t coerce them; assess the assignment not

the person; and give people space to screw up and learn.

(NB: I’ve developed my classes through time at private and public, big and

small universities, all with different student bodies. Also,

I understand that many, perhaps the majority of my colleagues

labor under conditions not of their choosing in which this type

of experimentation with courses is impossible because they aren’t

paid enough and have no institutional support or time to devote to

their intellectual craft. Simply put, this is crap.)

Hayes, Christopher. 2013. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. New York: Broadway Books.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2012. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at the St Paul’s School. Princeton: Princeton University Press.