critical non-thinking

The following would be entirely funny, if it weren't so appallingly real. An allegedly-astute colleague from the business school misinformed the newspaper-reading public with a staggering string of falsehoods and confusions. But it was great fodder for our logic and critical thinking classes, as one of my philosopher colleagues discovered:

Doubtless we've all been justifiably disheartened by the embarrassing illogic of our celebrated MTSU Chair of Excellence in Finance, Dr. Bill Ford, as reported in the DNJ last Sunday [and commented on in yesterday's letters section, and today's]. Nevertheless, I encourage you to take heart, for while the media are apparently prepared to publish poorly reasoned remarks as straightforward news, our students in Elementary Logic and Critical Thinking this term are not so easily fooled. To be sure, when I presented Sunday's article in class today, our discussion was both stimulating and delightful. Let me share with you a few of the more salient observations on offer.

Ford: "After a while you get fat and happy, when it's not a profit-oriented business." How long a while would that be, wondered one student. Then we asked: Does this remark imply that ideal organizations, whether driven by the lure of profit or not, should run sad and malnourished? Another student wanted to know, "What's profit got to do with efficiency, anyway?" Good question.

Ford said, "...we're forcing ourselves to be more efficient." That's well and good, of course, but for a seasoned economist to reason as though efficiency comes in bottomless buckets from which one can always draw more drafts is careless at least and downright deceptive at worst. After all, measures of efficiency are relational, like percentages and decibels, not absolute, like inches and light-years. So, naturally, we noted in class that one administration, say, A, is more efficient than another, B, just in case A achieves the very same benefits as B, while using less costly resources than B. As one of our majors said, "You don't improve efficiency by degrading your product." Exactly, because when benefits depreciate along with costs, there's no net gain in efficiency.

There's more too: Ford says, "...I can handle 98 as well as 44. We need to have bigger classes and fewer classes, and charge the students more...." Well, having just learned the ways of argumentum ad verecundiam, our logic students were quick to recognize firstly that academic economists are expert at neither university administration nor pedagogical theory, and secondly that generalizing from a single, atypical, anecdotal account (especially of performing a social practice as complex and multi-faceted as modern higher education) is both unlicensed in principle and incompetent in practice.

When Ford says, "We have to get rid of faculty and staff," most students immediately noticed the false dilemma hidden among his assumptions, to wit: that no other alternatives, singly or in combination, are adequate to meet the budget rescission, when in fact, there are numerous options, ranging from administrative furloughs and restrictions on administrative travel to pay-reductions on salaries over $100,000, or tuition increases along with increased lottery scholarship allotments, or capital campaigns as successful as this year's football team.

These students would, for the most part, make able social scientists; some of them will. I think, overall, we can be proud of them. Why, we might even consider the text of this news item as suitable for an exit exam in critical thinking. Since it's rather obviously on the public record, we'd not even have to change any names to protect the guilty. Seriously, though, there's something to celebrate in our work; the gift of sweet reason to our students, the swift and slow alike, is as precious an ornament as any they'll receive this year.

Speaking of which,

SEASON'S GREETINGS, to one and all