Impromptu Commencement Address

Introduction

I attended my daughter's college graduation the other day. It was an absolute mob scene ... thousands in the audience and, by my (very rough) count, at least a thousand students. One of the new grads gave a great commencement address. Imagine how nerve-racking it would be to face an audience that large. With that in mind, I daydreamed about the speech I would make if given only twenty minutes to prepare. Here’s that speech.

Impromptu commencement address

Greetings, Math, Life, & Physical Sciences class of 2023, and congratulations!

[Wait for raucous applause or the silent thud of this mundane opener having utterly failed.]

You are all outstanding students, or you wouldn’t be here today. Take a moment to look back on all you have accomplished here, as a student.

Now take a moment to stare, right in the face, a fact that has probably been nagging at you to a growing extent lately: your life role as a great student ends today. It ends here, on the Commencement Green. After today, you have to go do something completely different: try to become an adult. A functioning adult. A working adult.

(Quick aside to those of you going right into graduate school: sorry, but I have no advice for you. I gather grad school is much less fun than undergrad but maybe that’s just a rumor.)

Isn’t it perverse that when you totally had your act together as a student, to the point of actually completing a degree four years in the making, you have to now go tackle something else—i.e., getting a real job—that you don’t really know how to do?

I know, total buzz-kill, right? But with your degree in hand and all that learning under your belt, along with your youthful vitality, you are well poised for this opportunity whether you realize it or not. Consider me, up on this stage, called up just twenty minutes ago to give this speech, without so much as some hastily written notes on a torn-up piece of notebook paper. I could have turned this down, but then I’d lose an incredible opportunity to have an amazing story to tell later, about the time I got booed off the stage at a university commencement address, or, possibly, the time I managed not to get booed off the stage when giving an impromptu commencement address. I would never pass up such an opportunity. And when you are handed similarly outsized opportunities, for which you feel equally unsuited, you should also take them. You won’t do any worse than I’m doing, I’m sure.

It’s true that in your next phase of life, you will be hired by, and work with, a bunch of professionals with way more experience than you. But you have something they don’t: the boundless, perhaps panicked, energy of the fresh recruit. Many of the professionals are also faking it, in our ever-changing careers, because we’ve been intentionally job-hopping in hopes of greater opportunity, or have been buffeted around by the winds of fate, so just like you, we’re flopping around in jobs we’re not necessarily perfect for. And many of us are tiring out. My generation, for all its bluster, is more than ready to hand you the baton. If most of us are loathe to admit this, that’s just out of habit, and envy, and the inevitable rise of curmudgeonry. You’re going to do fine, and anyway most of us aren’t paying much attention anymore, and soon enough we’ll be gone.

My first thought as I mounted this stage today was, “Wow. Look at this crush of people. This is insane.” My own graduation ceremony, though at a larger university, seemed much smaller. I don’t remember parking problems, and none of the audience had to stand on the grass so far from the stage they couldn’t tell their kid from Adam. It’s tempting for me to believe what you’ve all been telling yourselves and your parents: that everything has gotten so much harder these days; that there’s so much more competition now; that back in your parents’ day they were practically giving away college degrees; jobs were much easier to find; and blah blah blah.

[Wait for applause or maybe mostly silence, or the generalized murmur of people who have tuned out completely and are chattering away amongst themselves, and/or one or more people yelling things like “Get off the stage!”]

Well, it’s all false. Unemployment in this country is at its lowest level since 1969. You will all get jobs, if you’re not lame. And don’t ever forget that the teeming masses going up against you include a lot of lame-os: the same kind of lame-os you beat out to gain admission to this great university. And also a lot of lame-os from even more prestigious universities. I have interviewed many dozens of lame-os over the years and been incredulous at how hard it is to find a good candidate to hire. Then when somebody like you comes along I’m like, Aaaaaaah, thank goodness, a great candidate. So just don’t be lame, and you can write your own ticket.

It’s been over thirty years since I was in your shoes, sweating in my weird, unbreathable polyester cap and gown, waiting for my big moment to walk the stage. The commencement address was given by a bestselling author who, since she was addressing English majors, gave us permission to be fired from our first corporate job. Of course I’d been told for years by all kinds of people that as a liberal arts grad I would never get a job, and now it was time to go prove the naysayers wrong, or prove them right. But I found that speech very liberating. [Pause for possible chuckle.] When I set out to get a job, I was entering the famous economic recession of the early 1990s. I should have been shitting bricks. I’d done nothing, outside of school, to prepare for the workforce: no internships, no rubbing elbows with anyone influential, no summer programs, and with a degree everyone assured me was worthless. But nobody told me about the recession, and I was in the habit of ignoring liberal arts deniers, so I immediately got hired. And so will you.

By the way, your job may not have much to do with your degree. I read a New York Times article recently saying that fewer than 20 percent of life sciences and physical sciences grads end up working in their field. But that’s fine. With your great education you’ll find a cool job in an exciting realm. The field that I have worked in for over 25 years now did not yet exist when I was a senior in college.

How about this statement I’ve been hearing lately and seeing in the news and on t-shirts: “The future is female”? Another myth? Actually, as far as I can tell, this one is true. Look around you at your fellow grads. A majority are young women, it appears … looks to me like about three quarters female. The official enrollment stat I heard was 60% female … did a bunch of your brethren drop out? Or did they skip this ceremony? Whatever the case, we hear it a lot: males in America are becoming an anachronism.

So to the young women among you, congratulations. Your generation is finally challenging a tradition of self-entitled deadwood, at least in this great country. And to the young men out there, don’t feel too bad. Men have had a good run, probably better than they deserve. Be glad you’re part of a society where women are no longer kept down. And to be clear, nobody is keeping men down in this country … we have simply squandered our early, historical lead. The surge of women in universities and high-flying careers is what fairness looks like. There’s still more work to be done, like eliminating the wage gap, but this is real progress.

To the parents in the audience: a solid majority of you are evidently here to celebrate your daughters. Congratulations to you and to them. I speak from proud personal experience when I say daughters rock. And if you have a son walking the stage today, well done … you managed to help him avoid a video gaming addiction, or soul-destroying cynicism, or whatever other problems are keeping so many dudes from getting college degrees. You can also be glad for exceptionally high odds that your son will marry well. Today’s potential brides are educated, empowered, and selective, and your degree-holding son will have the chops to compete. And who knows, maybe he’ll be lucky enough to sire daughters one day.

But to all in the audience: please don’t run out and get a t-shirt that says “The future is female.” First of all, it’s in poor taste to rub it in. Meanwhile, the statement is kind of absurd. Just because woman have been held back in the past doesn’t mean they weren’t relevant all along. The human race would have gone extinct immediately without women. Meanwhile, we’ll obviously always need men, too. For one thing, somebody needs to fetch stuff from high shelves and clean out the cat box.

But enough on that subject. I have a greater topic to address. To all the students assembled here, I want to take a moment to remind you of something huge: you are the future.

[Pause to let that sink in, and/or for loud whooping and applause, or whatever else you get.]

Thank you to all those who bit their tongues and didn’t boo me off the stage for that hackneyed and fundamentally untrue platitude. Actually, you are not the future. The future does not exist, yet, and you will not actually be defining it as you go along. There are seven billion people here and your individual effect on the planet will most likely be a rounding error at best. Meanwhile, the planet will continue on unperturbed long after our species has gone extinct. Don’t focus on changing the world; just be honest and kind and earnest, and work hard to do right by your family and friends. And don’t ever forget to be grateful. As a university graduate in America you’ve already been dealt one of the best hands imaginable in life, so don’t be greedy or petty. Enjoy your successes but don’t obsess over them. Be proud of your achievement but don’t forget that the random luck of your life circumstance, and/or the striving and sacrifice of your parents, brought you most of the way here.

I have one more topic to address: there seems to be a tremendous amount of generalized anxiety swirling around these days. This is despite the world having steadily improved over the decades, with countless people transcending poverty in a largely unabated upward trend. Some of this modern anxiety is existential; some biochemical; some geopolitical; I’m no expert on all the causes. But as you prepare to enter the workforce, many of you may be worried about GPT-3, its ChatGPT utility, and other forms of artificial intelligence that promise to replace humans in an ever-increasing range of jobs. Well, I’ve messed about with modern AI a fair bit and am absolutely convinced it’s overrated. Some day perhaps we’ll laugh at today’s state of the art in AI, much as we laugh at 1950s artist’s renditions of what the 1990s would look like, with flying cars and robots everywhere. To prove my point, I asked ChatGPT to write a commencement address for me right before coming up here. If you think my speech has been insufferable, let me read you a (mercifully brief) excerpt from ChatGPT’s half-assed, vapid output:

As you leave the hallowed halls of this institution, know that you carry with you the hopes and dreams of generations past, present, and future. You are the torchbearers of progress, the champions of discovery, and the guardians of knowledge. Your calling is noble, your potential boundless.

Okay, now you can boo me off the stage. In fact, I want you to. I beg you too.

[Bow dramatically and wait for enthusiastic booing and/or applause and/or a smattering of polite clapping and/or or the generalized murmur of people who have tuned out completely and are chattering away amongst themselves.]

Further reading

Middle School “Graduation” Speech - From a Dad

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The Truth About Elite College Admissions

Introduction

About a year ago in these pages, I posed the question, “Is it harder to get into a top college now?” The answer I gave was essentially “No.” I cited a study by the New York Times, based on the applications of 800,000 students, which found that a well-qualified student has an 80% chance of getting into at least one of her top choices. I (rhetorically) demanded an apology from everybody who stressed out my daughter and her friends by painting a totally inaccurate doom-and-gloom picture.

Well, a year on, with my daughter’s application process complete, what was her outcome? Does my conclusion hold up empirically? In this post I share the shocking tale of how it played out. I was literally shocked. It turns out I’d been asking the wrong question all along.

The outcome, in a nutshell

In my last essay I predicted that all the Sturm und Drang would end up being unwarranted, as things would come out just fine. So was I right? Here’s how my daughter and her friends ended up faring.

My daughter’s friend N— applied to Cornell, the Naval Academy, West Point, MIT, and Berkeley. She was accepted by Cornell and Berkeley, turned down by MIT, and waitlisted and ultimately rejected by West Point. She was initially accepted by the Naval Academy, who subsequently revoked her acceptance based on a health problem closer in severity to a hangnail than an amputation.

My daughter’s friend C— was accepted by Oxford. I don’t remember who else accepted her, nor whether anybody rejected her, because it couldn’t possibly matter. I mean: Oxford.

My daughter’s friend M— applied to Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley. She was accepted by MIT and by Berkeley (who offered her a full scholarship). She was waitlisted and ultimately rejected by Harvard, who declared that her nose wasn’t cute enough. (Okay, I made up that last bit. Who knows why they turned her down.)

My daughter, a mostly-A student, applied to Cornell, Vassar, Brown, Berkeley, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern, along with a bunch of safety schools. Her first choice was Northwestern, to which she applied early decision to improve her odds. Northwestern deferred her, which (according to her extensive research) gave her about a 50/50 chance of later being accepted. While waiting for their final verdict, she was rejected by Brown, UCLA, and Berkeley. She was waitlisted by Johns Hopkins (and as I write this, my daughter still doesn’t have their verdict.) Over time, she was accepted at all her safety schools, rejected by Northwestern, and rejected by Cornell, but—yes!—accepted by Vassar.

Pretty good outcome across these kids, eh? It certainly supports the Times study that predicted an 80% chance of a qualified student getting at least one of her top choices. I wish my essay could end here, but I haven’t gotten to the shocking part yet.

The real truth about college admissions

For a day or two, my daughter was on cloud nine about going to Vassar. She told all her friends, drooled over all the gorgeous campus photos on their website (“Look, Dad, every dorm has a grand piano in its common area!”), and read the student reviews (which weren’t actually as glowing as I’d expected, the main two complaints being some version of “everybody is too liberal” and “everybody is too spoiled”). We were a bit nervous about the cost, but my daughter had done her research on that. Vassar is famously generous with financial aid, she said, with the average student getting like $50K a year. Vassar was even singled out in a Malcolm Gladwell podcast as a school that makes good decisions with its endowment. My daughter was really confident we’d be able to afford her tuition.

Then we got an email from Vassar saying, essentially, “Great news: you don’t need any financial aid! You will be able to afford to attend without any help … so you’re not getting any.” That’s right, not a cent.

I thought there must be some mistake. The Bay Area where we live is notoriously expensive, and my family has only one income. Vassar costs $73,000 a year, not including books, supplies, personal expenses, or transportation. I seriously entertained the notion that a simple bureaucratic mistake had been made. I consulted the financial aid page of their website. (The first sentence reads, “You do not have to be wealthy or even well off to attend Vassar.” The boldface is theirs.) I checked out their Net Price Calculator and plugged in a bunch of numbers, including my non-spectacular salary.

Well, their email was no fluke. The calculator spat out the same financial aid number: $0.00. It turns out that when Vassar says they are “committed to meeting 100% of the demonstrated financial need” of students, what they mean is, if you absolutely don’t have any savings or significant income, they’ll give you money. But if you are anything like middle class, you’ll have plenty of fiscal resources to exhaust, so you don’t qualify for financial aid. Do you own a home? Good—get a second mortgage on it. Got a rental property? Sell it. Happily married? Get a divorce. Got a 401(k)? Cash it in: your desire to have a pleasant retirement one day is an extravagant luxury you can’t afford. To Vassar, “financial need” means you completely lack any resources to draw down.

Suddenly, I felt completely naïve. When a college can choose from thousands of qualified applicants, why wouldn’t they pick the ones whose parents are willing to foot the bill themselves? Certainly there are families out there so terrified of their kids washing up that they’ll make this sacrifice … surely more than enough such families to fill Vassars’ student ranks.

So it turns out my daughter was agonizing over the wrong question. Instead of worrying about what colleges would accept her, she should have been worrying about which ones we could afford. Or better yet, not worrying at all, as we live in California, which has world class public universities.

The aftermath

I had innocently believed that, once my daughter had finally heard back from all these places, we could finally move on—that the agony would be over. But this outcome was even worse than if she’d simply been rejected by all her “reach” schools. Now she had proven she deserved a top college, but wouldn’t get to go. Instead of faulting Vassar for rejecting her, my daughter turned her disappointment on her mom and me. She didn’t say anything mean or angry—she mainly asked versions of “Are you sure you can’t afford this?”—but she might as well have. The closest she came to a direct accusation of parental incompetence was, “Didn’t you guys do a 529 college savings plan?” I felt like replying, “No, it never occurred to us that you might need money for college one day. I guess we’re not very good parents.” (My actual reply was, “To answer your direct question, no. But it’s not because we didn’t plan ahead. It’s because the 529 is a stupid plan. We did save money for your college. But we didn’t sock away $300,000.”)

It dawned on me that it was no accident Vassar delivered the acceptance ahead of the financial aid notification. It was a terrorist tactic, no different than Kellogg’s hawking sugary cereal during Saturday morning cartoons. Vassar fills these kids’ heads with dreams of this elite college experience and then when they drop the bomb about zero financial aid, the parents become the problem.

I had my daughter write a nice letter appealing Vassar’s decision, citing our family’s single income, the cost of living in the Bay Area, and the second kid we’ll need to put through college. We sent it certified mail. Vassar never responded. They did, however, continue sending us glossy brochures of their beautiful campus.

So you know what? Fuck Vassar’s grand pianos. Fuck their reputation for generous aid. And fuck the conventional wisdom of “You just worry about getting in, we’ll take care of the cost.” That’s not practical … it’s a fantasy.

Now that I’ve seen the light, I really doubt other private universities would be more generous. I went ahead and tried out the Net Price Calculator for Northwestern, and of the $85,000 per year they charge, my daughter is eligible for financial aid in the amount of (you guessed it) $0.00. Thank God she didn’t get in.

My daughter will be enrolling at a UC campus that has great weather, gorgeous beaches, and is ranked top ten in the nation among public schools. If she hadn’t been accepted by Vassar, she’d probably be really excited.

The irony

It’s ironic that the essential unaffordability, for our family, of a private university caught my daughter off guard, given the exhaustive amount of research she did into the application process. I recently lamented here how the Internet gives us vastly more information than we need, and too much of the time we’re unable to resist devouring it. I griped specifically about how the trove of college-related websites hijacked my daughter’s attention: 

My daughter started her college application process like a year in advance. She combed the Internet for every scrap of information pertaining to every college she considered applying to. She maintained a master spreadsheet tracking them. She could quote massive amounts of statistics about each one: acceptance rate, average weighted GPA of students accepted, average SAT scores, national ranking, self-reported student satisfaction levels, lifestyle ratings, you name it. Tracking all this info was like a part time job.

With so much information available, it’s a pity my daughter missed the important step of researching affordability. If she’d started there, just think of all the hours she wouldn’t have spent writing personal essays or trawling college websites. Think of all that dread, all that anxiety, and ultimately all that heartache that she’d have avoided. As for myself, I didn’t need another reason to be cynical about big business in America, but I sure got one.

Chalk this up to a lesson learned the hard way. As Henry James pointed out, “We pay more for some kinds of knowledge than those particular kinds are worth.”

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From the Archives - Drama in Philosophy Class!

Introduction

When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, choosing classes was never easy. The most important requirement of a class was that it fit into my cycling schedule. A two-hour span between classes, followed by a one-hour class, was either a total waste of riding opportunity, or truancy waiting to happen. Beyond this, I tended to go with classes that looked interesting, or—better yet—easy. So when I came upon Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking, a class essentially about logic, I was really intrigued.

Right off the bat, I wondered if you can actually teach somebody how to think logically. I suspected that you couldn’t—that this was a kind of talent. I also felt like I kind of had this talent, since I was pretty good at math and at writing persuasive papers. Moreover, a childhood nickname my brothers gave me was “Logic Lad.” Believe me, my brothers were not given to ever saying anything nice to me, so this nickname must have been a grudging capitulation around an undeniable trait.

This confidence was tempered by (or perhaps a delusion brought about by) an insecurity, which was that I only thought I was a rational, logical person. To have such swagger and be woefully ignorant of my own inability to think critically was a frightening proposition. So, as a hedge against being an unknowing intellectual poser, I thought I better take this class in order to validate, or possibly bring about, my (supposed) capability to think critically.

Little did I realize, when signing up, how much drama this course would occasion. Read on for the torrid tale of our first midterm exam and its aftermath.

Drama in Philosophy Class – February 8, 1989

I had high hopes right from the beginning about Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking. The textbook is really cool. Verbal arguments are encoded with all these cool symbols, bridging the gap I always felt there must be between math and clearly written arguments. But I was kind of disappointed, right off, by the professor. She just didn’t strike me as the total braniac that I hoped she (and all my professors) would be.

How could I assess this so quickly, and who am I to declare such a thing? Well, it’s mainly due to her imprecise, unstructured delivery. She loves to ramble worthlessly during lecture, repeating herself continually in a monotonous, tiresome tone. Also, her grammar is pretty bad for a UC professor: “Does anyone else need a syllabi?” or “Another criteria we look at is…” or “While the price of gold really might have fell…”

I know grammar knowledge isn’t the same thing as intelligence, but still … I don’t think an Oxford professor would ever slip up like that. But beyond all this, my main problem with this professor is that her lectures dang near put me to sleep every time. (I know, I know … this could be me. I’ve slept through all kinds of classes, even ones I know would be interesting if I were only awake to hear them.)

But you know, the professor isn’t that bad, actually … she does impart some useful lessons. But the Teaching Assistant (T.A.) for the class bugs the hell out of me. He seems to have recently moved here from some Eastern Bloc country, which wouldn’t be a problem except that his poor grasp of English hinders his ability to clearly teach this subject, given the importance of clarity when dealing with tricky argument forms. For example, when teaching a syllogism, it’s really important not to say “In case he” instead of “In the case that he.” Consider this sentence: “In the case that he does not bring an umbrella, he will get wet.” No problem there, right? But if your T.A. says, “In case he brings an umbrella, he will get wet.” This has an entirely different meaning and makes our protagonist seem pretty deranged, wouldn’t you say? I tried to explain the difference but this T.A. absolutely could not follow me. His English skills were not up to the job. Usually after he talks for a while, everybody ends up shrugging at the futility of it all, and loses interest.

As with most T.A. discussion sections, much of the period is devoted to the Question & Answer session. There are two possible scenarios for how this goes. If the entire class is unprepared or asleep (or both), nobody will ask any questions and the T.A. will wait patiently for about ten minutes before becoming irritated. Then he quizzes the class, perhaps to try to snap us into attention. He doesn’t get any satisfactory answers, either because the students are actually clueless, or they’re toying with him (I can’t figure out which). After five or six students give unsatisfactory answers, I’ll try to end the stalemate with the correct answer. For example, if the question is, “What is a sound argument?” I will say, “It’s a valid argument that has true premises.” Then T.A. will shake his head and field five more wrong answers, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally he will announce the correct answer: “It’s an argument which has true premises and is valid.” How does he not recognize my answer as correct? Perhaps it’s his poor grasp of English … maybe he has memorized the correct answer by rote and thus requires the wording to be identical. Critical thinking indeed!

The other question and answer scenario is somewhat less common. Here, a student actually comes to class having read the material and attempted the homework, but is completely lost. Well, the T.A.’s job is to eliminate confusion, so the student has come to the right place. Or so he thinks! Invariably, the student gets nowhere. He will ask something like, “What is the difference between cogent and sound arguments?” and the T.A. will throw the question out to the class: “Anyone? Anyone?” After waiting for about five minutes for a response from another student, the T.A. will say, “Hasn’t anybody done the reading?” After another awkward pause, he lets the question die, hoping the student has given up hope. If the student repeats the question, the T.A. says, “Well, it’s in your textbook.” If the student still persists, then the T.A. says, “You’ll have to come to my office hours.” This last resort is brutally effective, as no student in the history of higher education has ever gone to a T.A.’s office hours.

But you know, the T.A. isn’t actually my main gripe with the class. After all, being surrounded by other students could lead to a stimulating discussion anyway, right? That’s the whole point of the small discussion sections. But I have yet to hear a single intelligent utterance from any of my classmates. Mostly I just hear a lot of whining. And after the midterm exam, they turned their bitching up to 11. In fact, our discussion section was so heated, it was almost like a student revolt.

Interestingly enough, we hadn’t even gotten our tests back, so the class wasn’t responding to poor grades, not exactly. But I think they highly suspected they’d augered in, based on two things: one, almost nobody finished the test (or even came close), and two, the professor had announced at the post-exam lecture that almost everybody crashed and burned. The median score was a 56%. So my classmates came to class armed with numerous reasons why the test was like, totally unfair. The T.A., arrogant  as ever, took a big risk at the beginning of the period by venturing that the students, not the test, were at fault. Instantly the jackleg spokesman for the students fired off a rebuttal: “Isn’t your argument fallacious?” Well, at least the guy had picked up a bit of the lingo.

The T.A. responded: “At my Thursday review section, before the exam, I asked how many people thought the class was easy. Almost everybody raised his hand. Then I asked how many people had done the review problems. Out of 48 students, four raised their hands. Out of that four, only one had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check his answers. If this is indicative of the whole class, we can conclude that the students did not study hard enough.”

 I have to admit, this makes some sense. But, this being a class on logic, he probably should have trod more carefully. For one thing, it’s not necessarily a given that his Thursday section was intellectually similar to ours. They might have all chosen that section (day and time) based on their athletic or party schedules, for all we know. Second, it’s possible that after his first boring question, a lot of the students lost interest and couldn’t be bothered to keep raising their hands.

Our class demanded a “recount.” I found this absurd. The T.A. hadn’t asked our section these questions, so he had counted nothing … how could he now “recount”? And if he asked our class the same questions now, what were we going to say? That we had also neglected to do the review problems? Yeah, right. Amazingly, the T.A. indulged this “recount,” and guess what? It turns out everybody in the class had done all the review problems and had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check our answers! Obviously the test was a gross miscarriage of justice! Of course all this was immaterial. It’s not the T.A.’s job to write the test, so if the test is unfair, that’s not his problem. Nor could he do anything about it.

This pointless debate went on and on, the class growing increasingly impassioned and the T.A. becoming increasingly flustered. I had no interest in the proceedings because, notwithstanding the median score, I felt pretty confident that, unless I was the most self-deluded person on the planet, I’d done fine. The test had seemed easy to me, almost eerily so, and I had finished early. I couldn’t get too worried about my grade because, if I had done poorly, the low grade would be the least of my worries. Being the most self-deluded person on the planet would be a deep, deep hole that I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to climb out of.

Feeling a strange combination of boredom and discomfort, I began doodling. Unfortunately I am a very poor doodler. I find my doodles tiresome and annoying and end up scribbling them out. So I got sick of that and picked up a flyer advertising a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Then I read a flyer about how I, too, could earn extra income at home doing telecommunications. Before long, I decided that the discussion had to be more interesting than the flyers. Tuning back in, I realized that there was actually an educational opportunity available to me here: I could listen for, and document, the all the logical fallacies committed by the students—proof of their unpreparedness, as these same fallacies were the very subject of the exam! So here they are, taken directly from my notes:

“We did fine on the homework. But when you put a gun to a guy’s head and tell him to recite the Constitution, he won’t be able to do it. Likewise, with our time restrictions, we couldn’t perform well on the test.” WEAK ANALOGY

“We couldn’t be expected to study that long. We got so many tests right now we just don’t got time for everything. If we spent all our time studying for this class, we’d, like, fail all our others! Besides, think of the stress we’re going through!” APPEAL TO PITY

“Exams are always too long. Like this History test I had we had basically fifty minutes to write three essays. And one of them was on material we hadn’t even covered! Soooo lame!” RED HERRING

“Look: 300 students did poorly. Four T.A.’s and one professor blame us for it. Obviously, you guys must be wrong.” ACCIDENT (general rule applied incorrectly to a specific case)

“Two of my friends didn’t even finish the test and neither did I. So don’t eee-ven try to tell me you gave us enough time!” HASTY GENERALIZATION

“I saw this one dude walking up to turn in the test, and he was just filling in random dots like crazy.” RED HERRING

Some of the arguments I wrote down, while not committing specific fallacies, seemed illogical anyway. See if you can pinpoint the weaknesses in the following arguments:

“In the categorical syllogism problems, the examples were too hard. I mean, what if we don’t know the difference between reptiles and mammals?”

“When you said ‘open book,’ you set a trap for us to fall into. That’s not fair!”

“We only had a minute for each [multiple choice] problem. Maybe we’re just not fast enough readers!”

“When you have that many problems in front of you, they just all start to melt together.”

“What if the ten percent of the class that did well were just a product of chance?”

“I got ahold of last year’s midterm and it was a lot shorter. How do you explain that?”

“I tried to calculate how much time we had for each problem, but it was hard because each section had its own numbering. By the time I figured it all out, I only had half an hour left and I didn’t finish!”

“It was totally bogus. I mean, they were all the kind where you have to, like, stop and think!”

“All the examples seemed like they were from poems.”

This last statement caused me to almost burst out laughing. That would have been unwise indeed … the whole class could have turned on me! From this point forward I was focused purely on not smirking or snorting … not only would I look like a dick, but I would actually be one. For once in my college career, I wished I couldn’t stay awake.

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London – Part Three

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Introduction

This post probably shouldn’t actually be called “London – Part Three” because it’s about our first venture beyond London. We traveled fifty miles from London and took a walking tour of two destinations in the borough of Oxford: the Cotswolds and Oxford University. [Note: this post is rated PG-13 for drug references and mild strong language.]



London Walks

We took the underground to Paddington Station and met up with a tour guide from London Walks, which is a walking tour company Erin had found on the Internet when planning our vacation. The idea of London Walks is this: you show up at a train station, give the tour guide a bunch of cash, and then (along with a bunch of other tourists) follow him around for a day. He takes care of all the transportation logistics (including discounted train tickets), shows you the best places, and gives witty lectures about them in a charming English accent.

This is much better than the alternative, which would be to pore over train schedules, take a train to the Oxford station, and then either do an endless death march toward the Cotswolds, wherever they are, and never get there, or rent a car and drive around lost, on the wrong side of the road, until you crash it into a tree. Even if we made it to the Cotswolds somehow, we wouldn’t know where to go or what to do, and our kids would start crying.

The downside of being in a tour group is that all humans are trained since birth to despise the idea of tour groups. In our minds, tourists are all fat and gauche, wearing “I’M WITH STUPID” or “Property of Alcatraz XXL” t-shirts and visiting wax museums and eating at restaurants that are usually “a place for ribs.” For tourists to gather together in a group only intensifies the stigma by bringing the cruise ship ethos to land.

Thus, if you actually join a tour group you have to either a) follow along ironically, silently condemning everybody around you and blaming some other person for your mandated participation in this disgraceful menagerie, or b) suck it up and admit that this really makes sense and better preserves your dignity than sitting by the side of the road crying about your ruined rental car, or fighting all day with your family about logistics. After five or ten seconds of deliberation, I decided to earnestly embrace the tour group concept, and I can now heartily recommend London Walks to anybody. (If you have teenage kids, who would die of shame if they willingly participated in such a thing, you might suggest that if anybody tries to tease them about it they can lie and say they dropped acid beforehand.)

The Cotswolds

What are the Cotswolds? Well, it’s a region of the UK near Oxford. (I’ll bet you never would have put that together.) “Cotswold” comes from the word “cot” meaning sheep and “wold” meaning rolling hill. This region used to be home to what was arguably the quintessential sustainable industry: sheep were raised here, their wool sheared, and the wool made into cloth using river-powered spinning wheels. For many years this industry made the region very important, and it thrived, and it had all kinds of train routes through it.

Then the industrial revolution came around, and coal-fired operations in urban centers lured the textile business away, and the sheep raising business followed it, and the industry dried up. About this time the railway was nationalized, and the routes into this region were all dismantled. I know this sounds like the kind of thing that only Americans would do, but remember, the English industrial revolution predated the existence of the U.S. That said, I’m sure that the bastards that ruined everything here were the same ones that subsequently left for the New World and founded our great nation.



Shed no tears for the Cotswolds, though, because as you can see, the area—being both gorgeous and close to London—is seeing something of a renaissance as rich Londoners buy up old cottages, fix them up, and come here on weekends for little getaways. This gentrification will is bound to spawn wonderful cinematic opportunities for Americans, along the lines of the weekend getaway scene in “Bridges Jones’s Diary,” that will positively sizzle on the silver screen. (Sibilance in this blog is brought to you by Dolby Laboratories, whose technologies can help out with the hissing sound should you read that last sentence aloud.)

To get to the Cotswolds, we took a coach. This is a whole lot better than saying “bus,” or (God forbid) “tour bus.” A chartered coach is a bit of a miracle, actually; you get on, sit around for awhile gazing blankly out the window, and then a miracle occurs and suddenly you’ve arrived at a place that you didn’t even know until now was your destination. As somebody who still takes wrong turns during the bike rides I’ve done for fifteen years, I really appreciated the simplicity. The downside is, I can’t provide a meaningless description of exactly where we went. Suffice to say, we walked around gorgeous places in the Cotswolds.

The Lovell manor house

Perhaps the highlight of our Cotswold walk was the manor house in the tiny village of Minster Lovell. Before I explain about the house, I feel a need to comment on the unfortunate reality of harmless English phrases sullied by American misuse. If you’re like me, the first thing you think of when you hear “manor house” is the low-end Safeway house brand of turkey you see around Thanksgiving. The Manor House turkey is usually alarmingly cheap, like twenty-five cents a pound, or even free sometimes if you spend more than $50 at the store (which is almost impossible not to do these days). This seems backwards: shouldn’t they be gouging us on this, since the Thanksgiving turkey is the centerpiece of the entire meal? And what awful animal husbandry practices did they undertake to get the price down this low?

Meanwhile, some British proper nouns strike me as more subtly maligned by the common American practice of contriving Old World place names to appropriate their impressive aura; for example, the underground station here called “Earl’s Court” makes me think of a trailer park on the outskirts of some down-and-out American town, while the station name “St. John’s Wood” sounds to me like a gated community in some California suburb.

Anyway, the manor house we looked at here, though in ruins now, is very impressive, as you can see. It was built in the 15th century by the Lovell family, who in addition to (obviously) being very wealthy were in good with the crown. This wasn’t always such a good thing in those days, though; the Lovells got into really hot water when the throne was overthrown (I propose a new “word, “overthrone,” to encapsulate both concepts, though it’s admittedly a little late for this) and had their property confiscated. (I think it was when Oliver Cromwell lead a revolution against King Charles I, but it’s been a few days since our tour and I can’t remember for sure and am too lazy to do any research.)

The house was eventually passed on to another rich family, who I think lived in it for a few generations, then passed it on another rich family, who did a bunch of renovations but never actually lived there. Their plans went awry due to a tragedy at a wedding there. The bride got involved in a game of hide and seek and was never found. Months passed, and she never turned up, and kidnapping was suspected, and finally the widower gave up. Understandably, he no longer wished to live in the house, and moved out. The moving crew, hoisting a large lead-lined box used for storing food, noticed that it seemed oddly heavy. Sure enough, they found the corpse of the bride in there; apparently she’d decided to hide there, and the lid fell on her head and knocked her out, and she suffocated. (Lindsay hated this story.)

The name of this village, Minster Lovell, gets its name from the little church very near to the ruins of the manor house. Here it is. This church is in fine shape, and services are still conducted here.

Other village attractions

Here’s a little three-bedroom cottage that was restored and sold recently, for the very reasonable price of £700,000 (about $1.14 million).



Everything in this village seems especially pretty and charming, even this bird:

It’s not a chicken. I can’t remember the name. It’s actually more closely related to a penguin. Okay, I made that up. If you know what this is called, post a comment or e-mail me (feedback@albertnet.us).

Here is the little family in front of a little cottage with a thatched roof. These roofs are made of straw, or (if you pay a little extra) reeds. Until recently, when a fire-retardant chemical coating was introduced, these roofs were a big fire risk so you couldn’t get homeowner’s insurance. Meanwhile, they are incredibly expensive to maintain; replacements are done one half of the roof at a time, because it takes six men two months just to do a half. I think the cost was like £15,000 (about $24,000) for the half-roof. So why would you have one? First, they look great, don’t they? Second, they really do work. Third, they last like forty to fifty years. Finally, due to zoning regulations you’re not allowed to get rid of a thatched roof if the house had one when you bought it.

Burford

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We had lunch in the nearby village of Burford. This is a great word. Say it a few times. Try to sound British: “BUUUUH-fuuuuud.” (I have no idea if this is a proper British pronunciation; perhaps you should try it on an English friend and see how hard he laughs.) I dreaded the prospect of rolling up in our coach to a restaurant with a giant parking lot specifically designed for tour buses, but in fact Burford is very pretty and authentic and quaint, if (inevitably) a bit touristy. We parked in a cul-de-sac and people walked to the restaurant of their choice. (This would never work in America, where we’re too fat to walk and too disorganized to make it back to the bus at the appointed time.)

Having no idea where to go in Burford, we ate at the restaurant recommended by our tour guide, Huffkins. It was a cute place … so cute, in fact, that I was wary of it. Though established in 1890, it was so polished I wondered if it were a chain. Checking the back of the glossy menu, I was reassured to learn that there are only two Huffkins locations, quite close to one another. I read the menu’s fairly predictable combination of life story, philosophy, and mission statement (“we enjoy preparing freshly made food using our wonderful local Cotswold suppliers,” etc.), and then was shocked to come across this disclaimer:


I love the English. If such a statement were ever to make it onto a menu in America, which of course it never would, some employee would sue for seditious libel and/or emotional trauma, and the place would be driven into bankruptcy, and some new law would be written prohibiting any such slander in the future and the big hotel college in Las Vegas would use the case as a cautionary tale and eventually all restaurant managers would all be castrated as a matter of course.

Oxford

During our drive back to the Oxford for our campus tour, our guide talked a bit about the University. This interested me a lot, because I’ve for years I’ve associated Oxford University with a general sense of having let my mom down. During my teen years she often mentioned that she’d like me to be an “Oxford road scholar.” I had always pictured this as a young intellectual guy hitchhiking on some area highway, his backpack full of books. I had a vague sense that he wasn’t allowed to attend classes, but could sort of hang out in the area and do the assignments, sort of like a correspondence course. This didn’t seem that attractive to me, and (being less than resourceful), I never even investigated the matter. Eventually I became aware that it was “Rhodes Scholar,” and that they were looking for the likes of Bill Clinton, not just some directionless kid with decent grades. Still, I felt like I never even tried.

Thus, I was heartened on this trip to learn that the notion of me attending Oxford was far more doomed than my mom or I had even imagined. The undergraduate program is mainly built around the school system in England. If you’re a high school student and want to go to Oxford, you apply before you even take any general college entrance exams. The university then checks in with your current school, whose staff predicts how well you’ll do on the exams. If their prediction is lofty enough, Oxford has you in for an interview. If that goes well, you’re in, unless you end up botching the entrance exam. It’s a weird system, and its validity has been debated for decades.

As we drove through the town, I saw something remarkable out the window of the coach: a vintage Ford Country Squire parked in front of a very fancy hotel.

I really want to know what this car was doing there. What is it even doing in this country, when the government will pay you £2,000 (over $3,000) to trash a ten-year-old Toyota? And how did the guy get such a sweet parking spot, right out front? Fortunately, I’m of the generation that is resigned to the fact that Google cannot answer all our questions, that I’m not just a few keystrokes away from the solution to this strange riddle. I will just ponder the matter in vain, probably indefinitely.

Speaking of strange, and getting back to my original thread (you in the back there, wake up your neighbor), Oxford seems like an odd school in general. It was established in the 12th century as a way to educate devout Catholics. They learned Latin and Greek (to better understand ancient scripture) and then French, because the French duke William the Conqueror (also called, I kid you not, William the Bastard) became king and required all laws to be written in French. It was a very Catholic place until Henry VIII created the Church of England, at which point the University changed literally overnight into an Anglican institution.

Now, you’d think these presumably pious young men would behave themselves, but the University had all kinds of problems with its students raising hell in the town and being generally drunk and disorderly. Thus, Oxford created all these smaller colleges (today there are around forty) so that their tutors could keep an eye on them. Originally these were just living arrangements, with the tutor onsite like a den mother, but then they started teaching classes there as well, and now a student’s individual college is where he spends most of his time, though the year-end exams are given by the University.

Okay, enough blathering on. Here are some photos. This first one shows the Sheldonian Theatre, where they have the ceremonies in which students matriculate (i.e., are formally admitted to the university—to me, this is one of those stalagmite/stalactite words and I had to look it up) and graduate. It’s also used as a theater and for lectures and certain conferences. Also in the picture is our tour guide, Richard, whose red hat is pretty much the only thing that prevented my family, several times, from losing contact with the group.

This next photo is the Radcliffe Camera, which is a building, not a camera. (The word “camera,” as I’m sure any Oxford student could tell you, is from a Latin word for “room” or “chamber.”) Oxford students call this the “Rad Cam” for short, as if this makes them cool or something—as if they’re not complete eggheads. At UC Santa Barbara, there was a park that we all called Dog Shit Park, because it was. Nobody even knew the real name. That, my Oxford friends, is cool. Now, get back to your studies and stop wasting your time on this highly non-educational blog.

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This next photo is of where Bill Clinton lived when he was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. In fact, our tour guide informed us that this very building is where Clinton famously did not inhale. I can picture him in there, puffing on a fat spliff just to cleanse his palette, and then blowing out the smoke without it ever touching his lungs, so that he could study later, and be President one day.

There are gobs of gargoyles in Oxford, and I can see why: it’s the only place in England where we’ve been rained on so far. And in these gargoyles we once again see that irrepressible British humor asserting itself: as serious and stately as this university is, they couldn’t resist making gargoyles in the image of various Oxford dons. This one looks a lot like my first Latin instructor.

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Each college has its own chapel, and they’re very impressive. It’s hard to photograph stained glass windows; I did my best. Speaking of which, here’s another anecdote from our tour guide. During the English Civil War, Oxford supported the sitting king, Charles I, with the University serving as his home base. When this regime lost out, the new leader, Oliver Cromwell, punished Oxford for its loyalty to Charles by smashing out a whole bunch of its precious stained glass windows. Cromwell went on to become Chancellor of the University.

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Oxford is famous for its “dreaming spires.” I’m not exactly sure what this phrase means, but it doesn’t take an Oxford grad to know that spires are best viewed from above. Early in the tour our guide pointed out a great vantage point for photos, atop a tower in the Saint Mary the Virgin Church, which is this (look for the observation deck railing above the clock):

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When the official walking tour was over, we had forty minutes or so to wander on our own before being guided to the train station. While Erin and the kids checked out a bookstore, I headed over to the church to climb the tower. Here’s a closer view of the church.

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After paying a small fee, I headed up the tower. It’s funny: in two and a half years at UC Berkeley, I never did the climb up Sather Tower (aka the Campanile), but in one afternoon in Oxford I got around to doing this.

The view really is good. The observation deck winds around three of the faces of the tower so you can look out in three directions. I will let the reader decide for himself which are the dreaming spires in these photos. For that matter, you can work out for yourself what buildings are shown here, as I really have no idea.

Whether or not I report on any more of our London outings, watch for my report on English food. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.