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While the world struggles with a pandemic, there has been considerable focus by the right on their manufactured culture war. One aspect of manufacturing this war is using hyperbole and lies to make up a problem where none exists. Two recent examples of this include the right’s outrage around  Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. The right claimed that Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head have been cancelled by the left.

As I noted in earlier essays, Dr. Seuss’ books have not been banned. While the right’s narrative around Dr. Seuss implied that popular books such as the Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham had been cancelled,  the reality is that Dr. Seuss’ estate chose to stop publishing six books because they  contain illustrations that “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” These books seem to have been relatively poor sellers and most people seem to be unfamiliar with them.

Politicians and pundits on the right generally did not focus on these six books, choosing instead to mislead the public by implying that all Dr. Seuss books had been cancelled or that at least very popular books had been cancelled. For example, Ted Cruz sold signed (by him) copies of Green Eggs and Ham and raised $125,000. He claimed that this was strike back against cancel culture. While Cruz has a history with that book, it is not one of the six books that the estate decided to stop selling.

There are good reasons to avoid using the six books: some of them do have racist content and the right would not look particularly good to the public if they explicitly defended racist content. To use an analogy, this would be like a company deciding to stop producing a product that has been show to be harmful and having some people “defend” the company by focusing on their good products and ignoring the harmful one.

However, the right’s base presumably gets the message: the right has not rushed to battle censorship in general, such as efforts to get books removed from libraries. Instead, they focus primarily on defending what most would see as racist and sexist content.

There are also good reasons to use the popular books in their examples: censoring Green Eggs and Ham would be absurd and by lying that the left wants to ban such books, they mislead their base into believing that “the left” is crazy and out of control. To use an analogy, consider Coca Cola’s decision to stop manufacturing Tab. Imagine a group decided to make this into an issue, but realized that most people did not care about Tab and that Tab sales were very weak. So instead of raging about Tab, they advanced the narrative that Coca Cola had been cancelled and held up cans of Coke and Diet Coke, implying that these sodas had been “cancelled” despite the obvious fact that they are readily available. Imagine Ted Cruz selling signed cans of Coke, claiming that he will use the money to strike back against cancel culture. If anyone believed these lies, they would think the Coke cancellers were crazy. The same thing is occurring with Dr. Seuss: the estate stopped publishing their text equivalents of Tab, but they are still selling their Coke and Diet Coke books.

As I have argued before at length, when companies change their product lines it is typically because they think doing so will maintain or increase their profits. If the left had the power to control companies, they would certainly use that power in more meaningful ways: they would force companies to improve wages, benefits and working conditions. As such, the idea that the out-of-control left is abusing hapless companies is absurd. Now, onto branding.

Hasbro recently decided to change the Mr. Potato Head brand to Potato Head. Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head are still available and sold under those names. The company did make the statement that “Hasbro is making sure all feel welcome in the Potato Head world by officially dropping the Mr. from the Mr. Potato Head brand name and logo to promote gender equality and inclusion.” As of this writing, there is no evidence that Hasbro was subject to coercion or forced to make this decision.

Some on the right claimed that Mr. Potato Head had been cancelled, but they were generally not clear about exactly what they meant. Some seem to have meant that Mr. Potato Head would no longer be manufactured, which was not true. Others might have simply been angry at what Hasbro did: change the brand from “Mr. Potato Head” to “Potato Head” while maintaining the Mr. and Mrs. versions of the toys. On the face of it, this seems to be a silly fight: a toy company slightly changed the brand name for a toy line while retaining the toys. A deeper look reveals that it is, in fact, a silly fight.

From a political standpoint, this was a clever move: by misleading their base about the facts, they generated outrage against “the left” and distracted them away from the fact that the Republicans seem to have little in the way of policies or interest in engaging with meaningful problems. They also do not need to do anything: there is no problem to solve, no results to achieve. There is just an opportunity for unfounded outrage that will feed the base until they can find a situation suitable for manufacturing pointless outrage.

Corporations changing their products and brands does not appear to create any meaningful problems—they are simply changing to maximize their profits. Consumer tastes and values change over time and that is what is happening now. As it has always happened—there is nothing sinister going on in these cases, no problem to solve, no need of state action. The right is simply manufacturing a problem where none currently exists, other than the “problem” that consumers change over time.

 

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With the Democrats just barely controlling the House, they passed a bill aimed at granting D.C. statehood. This bill now goes to the Senate where it will, one assumes, be filibustered. This matter raises the question of whether D.C. should become a state.

From a pragmatic standpoint, Republicans generally oppose D.C. statehood because making D.C. a state would almost certainly result in two Democratic senators and some Democratic House members. Democrats generally support statehood for these same reasons. Whatever objections the Republicans raise against D.C. statehood must be considered in the context of 1889 and 1890. During this time, the Republican party adopted a pro big business stance that cost them the popular majority. In response, they used their control of Congress to add six new states—a strategy that has paid off to this day. Modern Republicans can, of course, say that they were not involved in that process—they merely continue to benefit from it. They could even condemn the political strategy used back then, since doing so comes at no risk and no cost to them today. To use an analogy, it would be like a family that made its fortune using questionable methods while condemning the same methods today—while keeping a tight grip on their fortune. It would, of course, be a fallacy to conclude that their condemnation must be wrong because they benefited from the same behavior in the past—but one can certainly question the sincerity of the condemnation. But should D.C. become a state?

One of the main tactics used by Republicans to argue against D.C. statehood is to claim that the Democrats have bad motives: they want to use the political advantages they would gain to bring about their “socialist utopia.” On the one hand, this can be seen as a Wicked Motivation fallacy. This is a type of ad hominem (or genetic fallacy) in which a claim is rejected because the person or group making the claim is alleged to have a wicked motive. The form looks like this:

 

Premise 1: Person or Group A makes claim C.

Premise 2: A has wicked motives.

Conclusion: C is false.

 

This is a fallacy because motivations do not prove or disprove a claim. It is reasonable to consider motives when assessing credibility or morality, but that is distinct from determining whether a claim is true. For example this is clearly bad logic:

 

Premise 1: Bill says that police should not murder citizens.

Premise 2: But Bill hates the police and just wants to signal his virtues to the other libs.

Conclusion: Police should murder citizens.

 

In the case of D.C. statehood, the wicked motives fallacy would look like this:

 

Premise 1: The Democrats claim D.C. should be a state.

Premise 2: The Democrats just want power so they can jam their socialist utopia down the throat of America.

Conclusion: D.C. should not be a state.

To be fair to the Republicans, they can also present their argument as a utilitarian moral argument. The gist of the argument would be that D.C. should not be a state because if it were a state, then the Democrats would be able to advance their polices and (Republicans claim) these policies would do more harm than good for those who matter. The Democrats’ obvious counter would be that their policies would do more good than harm for those who matter. Interestingly, both parties can be right about this. The Democrats’ policies would  be less beneficial to those who matter to the Republicans (themselves and the wealthy) while being more beneficial to those who matter to the Democrats (themselves and those who are not wealthy). Morally, I generally side with the Democrats over the Republicans. And also pragmatically, since I am not wealthy. But those who side with the Republicans will obviously find their moral case appealing: the Democrats plan to help the less well-off (and themselves) more than the Republicans would (a very low bar) and this would be wrong (from the Republican perspective). Laying aside the utilitarian arguments, there is the question of whether D.C. qualifies as a state. The easy answer is it does. The traditional requirements of statehood (established in 1953) are:

 

• The inhabitants of the proposed new state are imbued with and are sympathetic toward the principles of democracy as exemplified in the American Constitution.
• A majority of the electorate wish statehood.
• The proposed new state has sufficient population and resources to support state government and carry its share of the cost of Federal Government

 

These conditions have all been met. While some claim that D.C.’s population is too low to be a state, it has a population of 692,683 while Wyoming only has a population of 578,759. As such, if Wyoming has enough people to be a state, then so does D.C. Republicans could advance the argument that the people of D.C. fail to meet the first condition, but that would seem to require making untrue claims. So, I would not be surprised to see this argument made.

As noted above, the House has already passed the relevant bill. While the requirement for statehood is a simple majority, McConnel can (and surely will) use the filibuster to kill the bill. But should he?

From a selfish and pragmatic standpoint, the Republicans should oppose D.C. statehood: they are a (numerical) minority party and hold office disproportionately to the number of people they represent. This is enabled by a range of political strategies ranging from gerrymandering to voter suppression. This approach explicitly rejects the notion of majority rule and the idea that political legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed. That is, this rejects democracy. But what if you accept majority rule and the idea that legitimacy depends on consent?

As it now stands, the people of D.C. are not represented in Congress and thus are not able to provide their consent (via representative). D.C. does get electoral college votes, despite not being a state—but this system has its own anti-democratic and anti-majority rule issues. Since I consistently hold to the foundational principles of representative democracy, I believe that D.C. should be a state: it meets the requirements and to deny its citizens representation is undemocratic. Or perhaps “unrepresentative” is a better term.

It could be countered that the citizens of D.C. choose to live there and thus voluntarily forgo representation; but one could have made that argument for any state before it became a state: people elected to live in parts of the country that were not (yet) states. So, if this argument were good, then it would apply to all the (non-original) states—which is absurd.

At this point, the obvious attack on me is to point out that I have admitted that I favor the Democrats over the Republicans and hence I am operating based on wicked motives. That is, I just want the Democrats to win and I would be singing another tune if the Republicans wanted to make, for example, part of Florida or Texas into a new state.

My easy and obvious reply is that my motives are irrelevant to the truth of my claims and the quality of my logic. Also, as long as the Republican proposed states met the conditions that qualify D.C. for statehood, then I would be required to be consistent: they should also become states. This could, of course, lead to an absurd situation in which the political parties start carving up existing states in order to gain more senate seats and electoral college votes—this could be a relevant difference between creating a state out of a non-state and carving up existing states. That said, a solid case could be made for splitting up large population states to give the people slightly more proportional representation. For example, the tiny population of Wyoming gets the same number of senators as the hugely populated states of California, Texas and Florida. But that is a matter for another time.

In closing, D.C. does meet the requirements for statehood and its citizens are morally entitled to due representation in congress. As such, D.C. should be a state. The same reasoning applies to Puerto Rico, provided the citizens want it to become a state. And yes, I would have to accept North and South Texas, East and West Florida and so on if the Republicans wanted to start breaking up states in accord with the requirements of statehood.

 

 

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In epistemology, the problem of other minds is the challenge of proving that I know other beings have thoughts and feelings analogous to my own. One practical variation on this problem is knowing when someone is being honest: how do I know that their words match what they really believe? But the version I am concerned with here is the problem of racist minds. That is, how do I know when someone is a racist? Racism, like dishonesty, comes in degrees. Just as everyone is a bit dishonest, everyone is a bit racist. But a person should not be labeled a liar unless they are dishonest to a significant and meaningful degree. Likewise, for being a racist.  A person should not be labeled as a racist unless their racism is significant and meaningful. There is, of course, no exact boundary line that precisely defines when a person should be considered a liar or a racist. Fortunately, we can get by with imprecise standards and accept that there will be grey areas. To demand a precise line would, of course, fall into the classic line drawing fallacy.

It is important to be able to distinguish racists from people who merely seem racist. One reason is that an accusation of racism can have serious consequences and such claims should not be made lightly. Another reason is that racists should be exposed for what they are—a masquerading racist can be an effective recruiter and agent for racism. I am, of course, assuming that racism is bad. As such, what is needed are reliable tests for sorting out racists from non-racists.

The same need for a test arises in the classic problem of other minds. Descartes proposed a language-based test for other minds. Roughly put, if something uses true language, then it has a mind and thinks. Turing created his own variation on this test, one that is more famous than Descartes’ original test. In the case of testing for racism, it is assumed that people have minds—so that problem is bypassed (or ignored) for practical reasons.

It might be wondered why tests are needed. After all, many people assume that the only true racists are those who are blatantly racist: they burn crosses, have Swastika tattoos, and openly use language that is clearly racist. So, one might think, they are easy to spot. While these racists are easy to spot, there are racists who are far more subtle. In fact, coded racism has been a conscious strategy in the United States for decades. Lee Atwater presented this strategy in a famous interview:

 

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

 

This clearly presents the challenge of determining whether a person is racist or not: there are coded words and phrases used by racists that are not openly racist in their normal meaning. These code words have many uses. First, they allow a racist plausible deniability: they can claim to be using the word or phrase with its surface meaning. Second, it allows racists to recruit non-racists. People who are, for example, sincerely concerned about welfare fraud can be drawn into racism through that gateway. Third, it allows racists to signal each other while making the “normies” think the critics are crazy. As an illustration, when I have tried to explain various code phrases used by racists to “normies” they often think I am either making it all up or I am embracing a wacky conspiracy theory. So how does one pierce the veil and solve the problem of racist minds? While a complete guide would be project suitable for a book, here are two useful guides.

As noted above, there are numerous code words and phrases used by racists that have normal surface meanings. A recent example is the use of “China virus” by Trump and his fellows. On the face of it, this seems non-racist: they are just referencing where the virus comes from. As I have argued in earlier essays, this use of “China virus” by Trump is racist. It makes use of the well-worn racist trope of foreigners bringing disease and his followers certainly got the message: anti-Asian violence increased dramatically. But one might say, surely there are many people who use such words and phrases without racist intent. That is true and is exactly what helps give the racists cover. So how does one know when a person is using such words and phrases in a racist manner and when they are not? One easy test is to see how they react to being informed of the racist connotation of the word or phrase. For example, if someone is using “China virus” and it seems it might be racist, then one can inform them that it has racist implications and is used by racists against Asians. If the person persists in using the phrase or word despite being aware of its implications, then it is reasonable to consider that they are being racist. It might be objected that a non-racist might want to persist in using the term to “own the libs” or because they refuse to be “politically correct.” While this is a possible reply, it does reveal a lot about the person who makes that response.

To use an analogy, imagine someone who likes setting off fireworks in their backyard. They then learn that their neighbor has PTSD because they lost an arm, an eye, and friends to IEDs in Iraq and that the fireworks really bother her. If they persist in setting of the fireworks despite this knowledge, it would be reasonable to believe they are an ass. After all, a decent person would not do that—even if they believed they had the right to set off fireworks. Likewise, a person who persists in using words and phrases that are racist code in contexts where the code is racist would provide evidence they are a racist. Or an ass.

As the Atwater quote also notes, racism is often coded into policies and their justifications.  Migration provides a good example of this sort of coding. Only the most blatant racists would openly say that they want to keep non-whites out of the United States because they are white supremacists. As such, racists have adopted the approach of arguing for restrictions that focus on non-whites using reasons that are not openly racist. The stock reasons given are that migrants are coming here to commit crimes, that migrants are coming here to steal jobs, that migrants are coming here to steal social services and that migrants are bringing diseases. On the face of it, these are not racist reasons: the person making the argument for restricting immigration is advancing economic and safety concerns. It just happens that these restrictions target non-white migrants. So how does one distinguish between racists and non-racists who advance such arguments? After all, racists have worked hard to recruit non-racists into using their arguments and they can have considerable appeal. A sensible person would, after all, be concerned if migrants were committing crimes and stealing jobs.

In most cases where the racists advance coded arguments, they are also making untrue or misleading claims. These cases allow for an effective test. Using the migration example, the claims that migrants are stealing jobs, committing crimes and so on are either false or presented in a misleading manner. If a person is a non-racist and supports, for example, restrictions on migration because they believe these claims, then proving that these claims are false would change their mind. So, if Sally supports restrictions on migration because of her concerns that migrants are doing all those terrible things she is told they do but she learns that these claims are not true or greatly exaggerated, then her position should change. If Sally is a racist, then these are not her real reasons—so she will not change her mind and will persist in lying and exaggerating. As such, a good general test is to find cases where a person claims to believe something that is also coded racism and is also not supported by the truth. If the person is not a racist, they would be amendable to changing their views when the reasons they profess for accepting their views are disproven.

One counter is to point out that people can become very invested in beliefs and double-down in the face of disproof. Might there not be cases in which a non-racist simply refuses to accept disprove about, for example, claims about migrants? This is certainly possible, but one must wonder why they would be so committed to holding to a disproven view—it makes sense for a racist to do this since their belief is based on racism. But a non-racist would be irrational to do this—something that is, I admit, possible. As such, the test would not be able to reliably distinguish between racists and people with an irrational commitment to such views.

But, going back to the fireworks analogy, this would seem to be like a person who insists they are not an ass, they just refuse to believe that their neighbor is bothered by the fireworks—despite all the overwhelming evidence. This is logically possible, but the better explanation would be that they are, in fact, an ass.

 

 

 

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I am presenting at the University of Florida’s 5th Annual Assessment conference on 3/22/2021; I endeavored to work in as much philosophy as I could into the presentation. Now that I have this done, I can resume my usual scurrilous blogging.

Introduction

This brief introduction provides the context of the discussion to follow. My involvement with assessment at Florida A&M University began in 2004. I was assigned to the newly created General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) and participated, as a philosophy professor, in the assessment process for the Philosophy and Religion Unit. When I became the facilitator for the unit, I assumed the responsibility for completing its assessment tasks. Some years ago, I was appointed as a co-chair of GEAC and am now the chair. The Simplify, Automate, and Motivate (SAM) method was developed in the context of both roles: a professor who must wrangle information from unit colleagues to complete assessment forms and a committee chair who must wrangle information from university colleagues to complete assessment forms. While my position is hardly unique, being both a professor and something of an assessment administrator provides a useful perspective (or two) on earning faculty engagement with assessment.

The Challenge

One fundamental challenge of assessment is earning faculty buy-in for the process. Failure to achieve this can have a range of negative consequences. One area of negative consequences is in the realm of data. If faculty buy-in is not earned, they are more likely to provide incomplete assessment data or even no data at all. They are also more likely to provide low-quality data and might even provide fabricated data to simply get the process over with. De-motivated faculty will tend to provide garbage data and, as the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.

A second area of negative consequences is in closing the assessment loop. Even if faculty provide adequate data, without buy-in they are more likely to neglect the other parts of the process such as their improvement narratives, reflections, and (most importantly) applying these results to their classes. Because of this, earning quality faculty buy-in is part of the foundation of good assessment. Fortunately, there are ways to help earn the participation of faculty in the process and these include the SAM method. This involves Simplifying the assessment process, Automating the assessment process, and Motivating faculty. I will begin with Simplification.

 

Simplification

A complicated assessment process is analogous to the tax code or the Windows Registry. This is to say that it is problematic, convoluted, torturous, difficult, and inconsistent. Dealing with such a process often requires special knowledge of all its difficult ways. Even with such knowledge, errors are likely and there can be punitive aspects to such processes that have the potential to create adversarial relationships between faculty and assessment leadership. Complicated processes often have a random element as well—one can never be quite sure how the process will work this time around.

As a rule, people find complicated systems a deterrence to participation. They can be challenging to understand and typically impose an unnecessary cost in time and resources on those involved. As such, people generally try to minimize their involvement with such systems. Simplifying and streamlining the faculty aspects of assessment makes these aspects easier to understand and lowers the cost of participation. Doing this increases the likelihood that faculty will buy into and participate more willingly in the process. Effective simplification can also improve the quality of assessment by focusing faculty effort onto key areas of assessment so that their time and resources are used more effectively.

While merely reducing the size of something need not make it simpler, the process of simplification often has the virtue of reduction—which can also be beneficial. As an example, in 2018 Florida A&M University’s General Education Assessment Committee’s faculty data contribution guide was 13 pages long and the data collection forms were four pages long. The forms were also somewhat complicated, with numerous check boxes and many text boxes to be filled out—one faculty member said they reminded them of tax forms. That was a clear red flag—if you are being compared to the IRS, then you know the faculty are not happy with the process. While the detailed guide was retained after some modification (for those faculty who wanted such a guide) a short and simple video focused on the essentials was created to guide faculty through the process. While it will never go viral, it did prove more popular than the PDF guide. Which, admittedly, set a bar low enough to challenge the greatest master of limbo.

More importantly, the forms were simplified down to the essentials. This was done through a review process in which the committee carefully considered the distinction between essential and non-essential information. The online version of the forms allowed for even greater simplification since irrelevant questions would not appear to respondents, making the basic form simple—not like a tax form at all. This simplification has also helped improve faculty participation in the data collection process. Again, the original low levels of participation set a low bar.

While a systematic guide to simplification is beyond the scope of this work, philosophy does provide some excellent general principles for this process. Our good dead friend Aristotle provides a fine starting point for simplification: ask whether a specific part of something contributes in a positive way to that thing. If not, remove it, “For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.” In the case of parts that have a clear negative impact on the process, those should be the first removed. As such, the practical test of the importance of some aspect of a thing is to consider the consequences of its removal. When erring, it is better to err on the side of simplification—at least in terms of improving participations. Because of the nature of bureaucracy, it can almost always be improved by removing parts; so that is also a good general principle to follow. Faculty feedback can be helpful here—it is a good idea to ask faculty about the process and take serious suggestions about simplification seriously. While simpler is often better, simplification is not without its hazards.

There is always the risk of oversimplifying the assessment system or some aspect of it and this can have the negative consequence of making the assessment less useful. Consider, as an example, the above-mentioned forms used to collect General Education data. While a simplified form makes it quicker and easier for faculty to provide data, this comes at the cost of not gathering as much data as the original form. In the case of these forms, every item removed was data that was not gathered. For example, the earlier version of the form required faculty to include data about how many students met each score on the rubric rather than providing general competent/not competent data. As such, the simplified form does not collect information about the degrees of student performance. As would be suspected, faculty never request the detailed forms—though that is an option.

In terms of another general guide to what to keep and remove, Aristotle’s and Confucius’ advice should be taken when simplifying: one must find the mean between the two extremes. That is the mark of virtue. Using the form example, a well-designed data collection form is a balancing act between having a form robust enough to get the data that is needed and simple enough to not invite comparisons to tax forms. Ideally, the form should have the right questions, at the right time, for the right reasons and presented in the right way—to borrow and modify Aristotle’s notion of determining virtue.

A consequentialist approach also serves well here: each addition to the system of assessment should be assessed in terms of its costs and benefits. This evaluation should occur on both an individual level and in total. To illustrate, while each individual part taken in isolation might create more benefit than cost, the cost of the entire system could exceed its benefits. As an example, consider data collection forms once more. In general, having a relevant piece of information about student performance is more beneficial for assessment than not having that information. On this approach, almost any sensible data collection entry on a form would thus have more benefit than harm when assessed in isolation. But adding all these questions to a form would have an overall negative consequence: this mega-form would impose an absurd burden on faculty. While this form would, if completed properly, yield a bounty of information, faculty would be less inclined to complete it and not appreciate having to waste so much time on such a needlessly long form. Fellow philosophers will recognize this as the classic rule vs. act utilitarianism issue.

It should be noted that something can be sophisticated without being complicated.  Such a thing is like the original iPod Nano. It is consistent, straightforward and ‘user friendly’ while also being sophisticated and useful. Unlike the complicated system, interacting with such a system would not require special knowledge of its complicated ways. As such, a simplified system need not be simplistic—it could be quite sophisticated. One way to operate a sophisticated system with greater simplicity and ease is with automation.

 

Automation

As a matter of psychology, people are more likely to stick to a default inclusion when opting out requires effort. An excellent example of this is retirement savings: when employees are automatically enrolled in a retirement plan and must opt out, they enroll in the plan at a significantly higher rate than cases in which employees must opt it to the plan. This generalizes to most human behavior and can be used to increase faculty participation in assessment. While it might appear that I have forgotten about automation and taken up a new topic, the connection between defaults and automation will, I hope, be made clear shortly.

While making faculty participation in assessment the default and requiring them to opt out might result in more participation, the obvious problem is that it is generally much easier to opt out of assessment than participate. As such, merely making participation the default is likely to have no positive impact on participation and might cause some resentment on the part of faculty—they might dislike the assumption that they will do extra work. The fix is, of course, to make opting out require more effort than participating.

As a faculty member, I would never suggest making the method of opting out more burdensome than participating as a means of coercing participation. This would merely serve to annoy faculty and lower the quality of participation. As such, the better solution is to develop means of participation that come with minimal cost to the faculty—ideally so low that even an easy opt-out would be more work than participating.

One way of doing this is to have a default in which faculty agree to allow others to gather and assess data from their classes. But this still puts a burden on those who do the gathering and assessment, and these are often other faculty. As with almost any task, one obvious way to make it easier is to automate it as much as possible. As such, combining default participation with automated assessment can improve faculty participation. The default participation, properly handled, decreases the chances of faculty opting out and the automation lowers the cost of participation. In cases where no effort is required on the part of faculty, participation would probably be quite good.

While it might be tempting to make such effortless participation unavoidable, faculty must always be given a choice to opt out as a matter of ethics and practicality. In terms of ethics, professors are the moral custodians of their courses and its data and to force them to share the data would be morally problematic—with the obvious exception of final student grades being inputted into the grading system. There is also to practical concern that faculty could be put off by mandatory participation and this could impact the quality of their participation.

While some faculty will choose to opt out of participation, effective automation can reduce this number. One can, of course, have certain aspects of assessment that are default and others that require opting in—as a rule, the default participation should be for aspects of assessment that take no or minimal effort on the part of faculty. As an illustration, automated data gathering from classes could be set with participation as default while manually providing student papers as assessment artifacts should require opting in. Regardless of whether the default is participation or not, faculty should always be informed of an automated (or manual) retrieval of data from their classes. This is both a matter of ethics and professional courtesy.

In the process of discussing automating some aspects of assessment at Florida A&M University, faculty expressed reasonable concerns about people (or software) poking around inside their classes on the LMS. This was not because faculty had anything to hide (one hopes) but because of reasonable concerns about academic freedom, intrusions into privacy, and worries that such “poking about” might cause glitches or issues. As such, faculty should be informed about such matters and, obviously, such automation should be designed to avoid causing such problems. Addressing these concerns can go a long way towards earning buy-in.

Since effective automation of assessment reduces the effort required of faculty, increasing automation will tend to increase faculty participation even in areas of assessment that are not set with opting in as the default. Fortunately, there are low-cost ways to automate assessment using resources that are already available.

Many faculty already use of Canvas (and other Learning Management Systems) and these support the creation of certain assignments and their automatic scoring. Since such assignments can be easily imported, this allows for the creation and deployment of automated assessment instruments using the LMS. As an example, the Philosophy and Religion Unit at Florida A&M University developed an Argument Basics Assessment Instrument (ABAI) for conducting an automated pre and post assessment of student competence in key components of critical thinking. The data from this instrument is used both in the unit assessment and the General Education assessment of the Critical Thinking competency area. Collecting such pre and post data is essential to quality assessment and automation can make this easier.

Similar automated assessment instruments (AAI) can be created and deployed for a variety of purposes and these require minimal effort on the part of faculty. At most, they would need to import the instruments and collect the data from them. In some cases, the instruments could be pre-loaded into classes and the data collected without requiring faculty involvement.

Faculty participation can also be improved by creating quality automated instruments that are relevant to the classes they will be used in. That is, this allows one to offer faculty pre-written tests they might find appealing to use. Faculty can also create their own instruments, perhaps assisted by the assessment folks—such assistance can also earn faculty good-will and increase buy-in.

An example of minor automation is using an online form for data collection, as opposed to such methods as submitting data via files. Using a well-designed online form is generally easier than, for example, completing a PDF form and emailing it to those collecting the assessment data. The form can also reduce the workload of those collecting the data: they do not need to deal with files (or, worse, paper forms) and the data collection can be designed to do some of the work.

As an ideal, an automated system could extract assessment data from classes on the LMS and perform various relevant functions to create useful information. While obviously well within current technology, there is the obvious problem of securing the resources to create such a system. For most schools, a realistic option is establishing some degree of integration between the school’s LMS and whatever software it might be using for assessment purposes, such as Nuventive to make data collection and analysis easier. Florida A&M University is currently conducting a test of such an integration and it will expand after the pilot study. I, of course, will be among the first GENED Guinea pigs.

While Simplification and Automation lower the cost of participation (and Automation can yield some positive benefits for participation) there remains the challenge of Motivation.

 

Motivation

Faculty often have a negative view of assessment and this impacts their motivation. Even if the system of assessment is simplified and effectively automated, de-motivated faculty will tend to perform the bare minimum to avoid negative consequences. This will result in lower quality assessment and can lead to a spiral of ever-increasing demotivation. As such, the issue of motivation needs to be addressed.

While the specific causes can vary, there are some general factors that tend to negatively impact faculty perception of assessment. One is that assessment is often perceived as something imposed externally by the administration perhaps with little consideration given to legitimate faculty concerns and workloads. In many cases this can be the result of the difference between the roles of faculty and administrators. Faculty see themselves as educators and researchers who engage in administrative tasks out of necessity (or compulsion). They did not attend graduate school to learn to be administrators and correctly see their primary roles as educating, researching, and mentoring. As such, administrative tasks will be seen as being, at the very best, necessary evils. And most often as unnecessary evils that take time away from their primary role.

While administrators often come from the ranks of faculty, the role of an administrator is to administrate. Even though they might have once been educators, they generally no longer do that and hence generally do not have the same view of teaching, research, and mentoring as current faculty. For them, the administrative tasks are their main concerns—they are not seen as necessary evils, but as key parts of their job. Administrators are also often isolated from faculty. To illustrate, I have been on numerous committees where I had to explain to well-meaning administrators that faculty would generally not be available to do administrative work in the summer because most faculty are on nine-month contracts rather than being year-round employees. I have also had to explain, on many occasions, that faculty generally do not get any extra compensation for doing extra administrative work—many tasks that are paid work for administrators are unpaid labor for faculty. As such, many issues can arise simply because of the failure of faculty and administrators to understand each other’s situation. With good faith effort to understand the challenges and needs of faculty and administrators, many of these issues can be resolved and thus improve the quality of assessment.

Another factor is that assessment is often seen as a waste of resources because it is perceived as existing to create administrative positions or to generate data to appease the whims of bureaucrats or legislators. There is also the common perception that even if assessment is well-intentioned, it is useless. In discussing assessment with a fellow philosophy professor at another university, they made the impassioned point that professors have assessed their teaching performance since the time of Plato using the knowledge they gain from their profession. They added, with equal passion, that providing numbers to non-educators for cataloging and review has no value for improving the quality of their classes. One could, of course, go on cataloging problems; but it is more profitable to offer some solutions.

As a faculty member tasked with motivating other faculty to participate in assessment, I have found that a pragmatic appeal can be quite useful, if a bit blunt. Florida A&M University, like all state colleges and universities in Florida, is subject to performance-based funding. This process requires the collection of data and schools are rewarded and punished based on their assessed performance. As would be suspected, this allows for a pragmatic appeal to faculty. While it is somewhat hyperbolic, my stock line is that providing data (and using it to improve student performance) impacts their continued employment. This can be quite effective.

All accredited colleges and universities must, obviously enough, undergo the accreditation process. Assessment is, of course, a key part of this process. For example, GEAC is responsible for the relevant GENED assessment for this review process and representatives from the committee are called in to answer questions during the process. Because of the importance of assessment in this process, I can honestly tell faculty that their continued employment requires participation. These facts are presented in a pragmatic and factual manner—being a faculty member I know that threatening faculty would be counterproductive and unethical. But clearly and honestly presenting the stakes in such a factual manner can be a great motivator. Fortunately, there are also positive options for motivation.

One way to provide positive motivation is to address the faculty concern that assessment is useless to them. This can be done by showing faculty the value of the assessment process in the context of what faculty value: the quality of the education they provide to their students. Naturally, the assessment process must be useful to faculty—something that is not always the case. A key part of this is for those involved in assessment to have a clear role in this aspect of assessment. If this is something that faculty could do on their own and the role of the assessment personnel is to merely collect, catalog and report, then there would seem to be little meaningful value in having dedicated assessment: one could replace it with a database.

This is not to say that everyone in assessment must have this role—there are many roles in assessment. Most schools have committees involved with assessment that have faculty members, such as Florida A&M University’s GEAC and ILAC (Institutional Level Assessment Committee) and these committees can assist faculty in closing the loop. If faculty see the value for them in the assessment process, then they are more likely to engage in quality participation.

One might also note the fact that, traditionally, faculty could be motivated by appeals to what is good for students or the institution to do extra work without compensation. However, the ascendence of the business model has weakened these traditional motivating factors and, as a practical matter, motivation needs to be considered within the context of the reality of modern education being ever more shaped by the conception of university as business. Universities have consciously embraced this model, and often profess to see themselves more as brands and less as institutes of learning and research. Assessment itself was, of course, originally an intruder from the world of business.

In the context of the university as business model, the most obvious motivating factor is money (or release time from other tasks—which is also essentially money). If faculty were adequately compensated for assessment work, they would be more inclined to participate. In fact, with appealing compensation linked to performance, the quantity and quality of participation in assessment would improve dramatically. If the resources are available, this would almost certainly be the best solution to the motivation problem: compensate those working on assessment adequately and assessment will tend to improve.

Unfortunately, most universities lack either the resources or the desire to use resources in this manner. That is, while assessment is presented to faculty as being important, the opposite message is sent by the lack of resources provided for this allegedly important task. After all, institutions spend resources on what those in charge regard as valuable. Fortunately, there are motivators that are low or no cost. While these are also often used in business contexts, they are also commonly used in other cases where someone wants to motivate people but does not want to provide adequate compensation in actual resources. Or, less cynically, when people want to show their gratitude in non-financial ways.

During a recent GEAC meeting, the committee members discussed this matter and came up with some reasonable low to no cost solutions. The most obvious free motivator is a sincere expression of gratitude, perhaps at a meeting or event where such thanks would be appropriate. Faculty, like most people, often express the view that sometimes all they really want is to be appreciated in their efforts. This is, quite literally, the least that should be done for faculty.

One extremely low-cost motivator is the certificate of appreciation—this puts the expression of gratitude into a tangible and visible form. There is, however, the risk that over doing it with certificates can make them meaningless or even something of a joke.

Another low-cost motivator is a letter evidencing service. These are much in demand by faculty going up for tenure and promotion and provides a compensation that faculty value. In the case of GEAC, explicitly offering such letters for service has proven to be an effective recruiting tool. On the downside, they only work for faculty seeking tenure and promotion and, as one would suspect, some faculty depart the committee after earning tenure and promotion.

Digital badges have become quite popular; they seem to be modeled on achievements in video games and rely on a similar psychological mechanism. Some do, of course, represent skills and accomplishments and could be seen as icon or emoji versions of resume entries. Given the current popularity of badges, they can be worth considering as means of motivating faculty to participate in assessment. These could be created and distributed within the university—essentially digital icons performing the same role as certificates. There are also services that offer badge systems—although these often involve a subscription cost. Badges might, however, be something of a passing fad—or they might be like Pokémon—something that will endure, and people will want to catch them all. Yes, I have suggested creating Assessémons to incentivize faculty.

 

Conclusion

While it can be challenging to earn faculty buy-in, it is worth the effort in order to improve the quantity and quality of participation in assessment. While SAM is not a magic bullet, effectively Simplifying and Automating the assessment process can increase faculty participation by lowering its cost. Motivating faculty is even more critical since demotivated faculty will not use even a simplified and automated system willingly or well.

The senate has acquitted Trump, thus setting two precedents. One is that a president with adequate backing from the senate can engage in impeachable offenses in the last days of their term without consequences. While there are bad faith arguments that impeachment cannot occur when a politician is out of office, this ignores the established precedent for doing so and ignores the fact that impeachment is not solely about removal from office but can also result in a ban on holding office. The second is that a politician, with adequate backing from their party, can engage in insurrection and attempt to overthrow an election with no consequences. Both are dangerous to American democracy. Trump’s victory also impacts his followers by either reinforcing their false beliefs or encouraging their bad behavior (or both).

I recently finished teaching the ethical theory of St. Thomas Aquinas and this provided me with the inspiration to write more about Trump’s supporters. While this is not completely faithful to Aquinas’ view, people can go wrong because of two reasons. One is a failure of knowledge: they want to do good, but their beliefs are in error. The other is moral failure: they are aware they are doing wrong but do so anyway because of moral defects. A person can, of course, also have false beliefs while acting wrongly because of moral defects. As in past essays, I divide this failings into epistemic defects (errors of belief) and ethical defects (moral failures). One area where Trump’s supporters fail is in their moral assessment of Trump’s virtues.

It is normal for people to have biases in favor of those they like and see them as better than they are. In most cases, this bias stays within healthy and sane limits. For example, parents tend to see their children as better than they are, but usually this does not become delusional or pathological. Those who create images of people they like also tend to stylize and improve on the original—think of a drawing done for Valentine’s Day by a talented artist for their beloved. As such, it is normal for Trump’s supporters to be biased in his favor—to see him as better than he is. In some cases, they stay within the realms of normal hyperbole—but many seem to go far beyond that.

When asked why they support Trump, often after he has done something awful, his supporters will often praise his exceptional virtues: Trump is strong, successful, generous, honest, patriotic, and manly. Debates about moral theories and the virtues can be quite reasonable as can debates about how exceptional a person is. For example, a sane debate can be had about who is the best basketball player in history and one can compare great players such as Jordan and Kobe—this is because the claims of greatness are founded in fact. But what about in the case of Trump?

While we can certainly quibble over how to define virtues and rate them, they are generally well understood and can be assessed with a high degree of objectivity. For example, honesty is a matter of telling the truth and this can be assessed by examining how consistently someone says what they believe is true. As such, when Trump’s supporters speak of his honesty, they are making claims that are utterly false. Trump is an infamous liar. As another example, his supporters speak of his great strength and images of Trump as Rambo (and other manly figures) are quite popular with his followers. But these claims are patently untrue. Even adjusting for his age, Trump is not strong—he can barely handle a ramp. The Rambo image is especially ironic given that Trump had multiple chances to be Rambo for real by serving in Vietnam, but managed to avoid the draft by getting a doctor to diagnose him with bone spurs. This creates a logical problem for his supporters: if Trump is a strong manly Rambo, then he must have lied to avoid the draft. If he lied to avoid the draft, then he is not honest. Also, if he is a strong manly Rambo, then he would have fought in Vietnam—as John McCain did. A defender of Trump could take Trump’s view that people who sacrifice for the country are suckers and losers—but in what would Trump’s great strength and patriotism consist in on that view? As far as Trump’s moral strength, that is clearly absent—he melts like a dainty snowflake and loses control under the slightest criticism. His weakness of character is thus evident. One could, of course, grind on and on showing how Trump is nothing like what his devoted supporters claim—but that would simply prove again what is already evident and obvious.

In terms of why Trump’s devoted followers profess this view of him, there seem to be two options (getting back to Aquinas). One is that they have a failure of knowledge: they are believing what is obviously false. Given the vast gulf between the Trump envisioned by his most devoted followers (the Rambo Trump) and the reality there are some grounds for concern that they have moved beyond errors of logic and belief and into the realm of delusion. That is, they could not be helped by developing their critical faculties and revising their beliefs in the face of the available evidence—they require medical treatment to even reach a place where they can attempt to start engaging with reality. This level of delusion is something common in cults and authoritarian movements and some of Trump’s followers have reached those depths. But there is some hope for even these people—if their moral conscience is still working, then they can be rescued using the same methods that have been used to recover people from cults and authoritarian movements.

There are also Trump supporters who praise him but are aware that he is not what they say he is. That is, they are simply lying to appease him and his base. In this case, the failure is a moral one. There is still hope for these people—at least if they have some residue of a conscience left.

In addition to the false beliefs (or lies) about Trump there is also the big lie, that he won the election. Trump engaged in 62 lawsuits relating to the election and lost 61. In court, his lawyers never alleged fraud—they know that lying in court carries consequences. Republican officials also certified the results and made it clear that the election was run properly. One could go on and on about the lack of evidence for widespread fraud, grind through each lie on the part of Trump and his defenders and assesses the vast evidence in favor of a secure and accurate election. There is also the fact that Smartmatic and Dominion are suing over the damaging lies told about them. Since truth is an absolute defense against claims of slander or defamation, it is telling that even OAN and other far right “news” operations have quashed the election lies. They know that they would lose in court because their claims are both damaging and untrue. Naturally, one could spin a crazy conspiracy story about how the Democrats control all the courts and intimidated the right with their cancel powers. The problem, as I have argued before, is that to make the conspiracy theory work they must postulate a conspiracy so vast that if all those involved in it simply voted for Biden, then Biden would have won.

While it is reasonable to have concerns about election security and fairness, believing that the election was stolen would require rejecting a sea of evidence in favor of sources that lack credibility. This does explain how some of Trump’s supporters can be engaged in what is merely bad reasoning. A person who believes and relies solely on sources such as Fox, OAN, Trump and Republican politicians would be committing many errors of reasoning (such as falling victim to fallacious arguments from authority) but they need not have crossed over into the realm of delusion. After all, we all engage in bad reasoning and hold false beliefs and do so without suffering from psychological disorders.

While there is not an exact line demarking the boundary, a person can leave the realm of bad logic and false beliefs and enter the realm of psychological issues. Being a philosopher rather than a psychiatrist or psychologist, I have no expertise in those areas—but I can assess when a person has gone beyond the realm governed by philosophy (epistemology, logic, and critical thinking). To use a fictional example, imagine a student who is using fallacies in their paper and making untrue factual claims based on what they hear from a scam web site—that falls under philosophy. Now imagine a student who thinks their roommate is a lizard person Satanist who is directing Jewish space lasers with their psychic powers to destroy the evidence that proves voter fraud occurred. While their claims can be assessed using logic and critical thinking, they have clearly gone beyond merely bad logic and merely incorrect beliefs. Treatment of such conditions goes beyond philosophy and would require professional intervention of another sort.

Given that there are so many sources and (dishonest) authorities pushing Trump’s big lie, it seems likely that most of those who believe it are merely using bad logic and merely holding false beliefs. But there certainly can be those whose belief forming mechanisms are so deranged that they have legitimate psychological issues that take them outside of the concerns of philosophy and into the realm of mental health. This sort of assessment needs to be strictly confined to medical professionals—there is, after all, a terrible history of using charges of mental illness as a weapon. As such, I would never assert that any specific election denier is mentally ill.

There are obviously Trump supporters who know that Trump’s big lie is a big lie. “Liddle Marco” is an excellent example of this—he knows exactly what Trump is (he warned us about Trump when he ran against him) and exactly what Trump has done. And yet he supports Trump.  With some notable exceptions, the Republican members of Congress also fall into this category: they know Trump lost and yet choose to support his lie and his insurrection.  For those who believe that truth and democracy are good, these people are evil—they are lying and doing grave harm to American democracy. On a positive note, since they are not delusional in terms of the facts, it might be possible to make a moral appeal to them. But perhaps they have placed themselves beyond redemption—they will heed no calls to do what is right and will instead willing serve evil. There will be some rewards for their servitude, but there will also be costs. For example, “Liddle Marco” seems to be suffering from his choice to back the man who humiliated and degraded him. There are also rumors that Trump plans to replace “Liddle Marco” in the senate with his daughter Ivanka. While Ivanka would be worse than “Liddle Marco”, there would be cruel justice in having what he traded his soul for taken away by the man he sold it to. But shed no tears for “Liddle Marco.” He has made his demon bargain and the price must be paid.

 

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While about 80% of Americans accept the fact that Biden won the election, about half of  Republicans claim to believe the lie that Trump won. Trump seems to have exhausted the ability of Americans to be shocked by his fascist and authoritarian rejection of core American values, so his refusal to accept the results of the most secure election in American history is just another news burp. While the Republicans are split over Trump’s lies about the election, some top Republicans have decided that supporting Trump in corroding American democracy is a smart political play.

Fortunately for American democracy, our institutions and people have proven resilient the efforts to destroy a bedrock of the republic. Election officials across the country and across party lines have made it clear that the election was conducted safely and with integrity. Trump has responded by firing those he can fire and attacking those he cannot. While there were death threats against election officials before the election, these have increased dramatically since Trump lost. These threats are not only directed at top officials who are Democrats but also against Republicans who have chosen democracy over the will of Trump.

There is currently still no evidence of significant voter fraud. While Trump and his legal team have launched a storm of lawsuits, they have failed repeatedly in court. These efforts have been characterized by their sloppiness, which is often taken as evidence that Trump is not actually serious about his claims.  While the appearance or sanity of a lawyer is not relevant to the truth of their claims, Giuliani recently presented yet another perfect metaphor for Trump’s lies about the election: his hair dye ran down his face while he rambled about his favorite movie and advanced conspiracy theories.

While Trump’s efforts strike some as more examples of Trump’s incompetency and dishonesty, there does seem to be an underlying game plan. While Trump and top Republicans know there was no widespread voter fraud, they do have a slight chance of creating enough corrosion and confusion to allow a bold anti-democratic move. Trump can try to get the Republican state legislatures to give him the electoral votes he needs, thus stealing the election from the voters. Most experts think this is unlikely—but it is not impossible.  Trump and his fellows are also keeping up the fight so they can keep scamming money and to keep the base fired up for upcoming elections. Setting democracy on fire is thus a clever move for Trump in that he gains and other suffer the consequences. While the election results are likely to stand, there is the obvious question about future elections.

Trump has successfully created a devoted base who now have strong (yet utterly unfounded) doubts about the election system in the United States. 80-88% of Trump supporters (depending on the poll) claim they believe that Biden did not legitimately win, despite the utter lack of evidence. This is not surprising: Trump’s base is composed of people who have professed to believe his lies for at least four years—so it would be surprising if they did not claim to believe his current lies. Death threats are being made against election officials and these are presumably not coming primarily from Biden supporters. Trump’s unrelenting lies and hyperbole will probably also have the effect of tainting the views of some people who are not Trump supporters—they will feel that something was wrong, even if they are unsure of the truth of any specific claim. As such, one enduring consequences of Trump’s lies is that there is a group that now doubts the integrity of elections with a burning passion. Another enduring question is that the institution of voting has been corroded with these false allegations.

Trump and his fellows have also laid, by their incompetent efforts, the groundwork for competent attacks on future elections. Trump and his fellows are incompetent grifters but there are competent people who are committed to authoritarianism. Where Trump and Rudy make buffoonish efforts to destroy democracy for their own gain, these competent authoritarians can harness Trumpism and launch a far more effective attack on the institution of voting in the United States. As an illustration, Republicans have steadily suppressed voters through an effective campaign founded on the lie of voter fraud. The gutting of the Voter Rights Act was a major Republican coup and now that they control the Supreme Court, many states, and many lesser courts they are in an excellent position to enable their party to hold onto power even as support for Republicans and their views continue to decline significantly. With the groundwork laid in this election, the Republican candidate in 2024 (which could be Trump) will be in an excellent position to take power—even if they lose the popular vote by a landslide. While some are thrilled that Biden won, keep in mind that eight years of Obama-Biden set the stage for Trump in 2016. Trump has had 4 years to build a base that accepts his lies as reality and the Republicans have been working hard to ensure their minority rule—so 2024 could easily be the year that Trump returns to the White House. Or worse, a competent authoritarian.

 

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