However, the news wasn’t all bad. The article reported on a 7 year study that aimed to identify best-practices to reduce the number of dropouts and the number of years to completion of the doctoral degree.  Many of the 20 universities participating in this study are close to my heart: University of Michigan, University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, and Michigan State University. More great news is that this is only one of a few studies of this nature that aim to reduce PhD attrition rates.

In glancing at the recommendations made in this article, I can see that a few of them are not currently feasible. Most notably, “increasing financial support” comes to mind.  The article cites  the success of the University of Michigan’s Rackham Engineering Awards program in graduate retention.  My understanding is that engineering doctoral students already have a higher retention rate than many other programs. Additionally, it is much easier for universities to scare up the funds to support such programs as engineering and biomedical sciences.

Where is the extra funding for anthropology and education programs going to come from? Funding for anthropology programs appears to be quite dismal and has been for some time. However, this comes at a time when more and more business and marketing companies are realizing the potential benefits of having anthropologists on staff.  Applied anthropology appears to be getting recognition in may other fields but the funding behind the programs is just not there. A comment made to the article was posted by a student in a social sciences/humanities program at one of the universities participating in the study. That individual told of how funding was cut while he/she was in the middle of studies and had to find full-time work in order to support themselves. Balancing 40 hours a week at work and doctoral studies in social sciences (that often require or strongly urge studies/research abroad) is often too  much for students.

Another recommendation is to improve student support during research and dissertation work. This one seems obvious, but I have experienced programs in which the faculty are so busy with their own research and full-time teaching commitments that it appears keeping up with all their advisees is too much.  I am not sure exactly how to make sure the advisors have more time to spend with students but it appears to be working at Ohio State and Marquette universities.

At the bottom of this article is a section for comments from readers. An interesting post is from Dean at a graduate school who stated that administrators are caught in a catch-22 because they are asked to fill a certain number of spots for their programs to remain viable. Oftentimes this leads to admitting students who are not fully prepared for doctoral studies or not ideal candidates for the job market thereafter. How are graduate programs to deal with this conundrum?

Although I applaud the study for addressing these problems in graduate schools I am curious to see what universities and which programs in those universities are actually able to make these necessary changes. Many of these recommendations seem obvious, but there are many reasons those recommendations are not currently being addressed in many universities. I only hope I can make it through my own doctoral studies  that begin in the Fall!

Please read more about it here.

The Bluegrass Community and Technical College Faculty Conference on February 27, 2010 was a rare instance in which I felt like I had learned something very valuable from a conference. This conference was not just a bunch of faculty reading their recent research but was instead directed toward improving our teaching. Most of the sessions were about teaching online, which is something many community college faculty members across the country are being ‘voluntold’ to do. There can be quite a bit of apprehension about teaching online for the first time. Even once you have been doing it for a while, you soon realize how much work is involved in keeping up with the latest technology and online pedagogy.

At the risk of sounding like I am promoting one individual speaker, Dr. Jeff Butterfield from Eastern Kentucky University really stood out from the crowd at this conference. His exhuberant presentation style was engaging but, more importantly, his learning lessons were invaluable to my current online teaching dilemma. He presented on how to increase the instructor’s presence in an online class with some very helpful take-aways that I can’t wait to implement. I find it very rare that a conference will leave me so inspired to try new things (with exact instructions on how to do it!). I look forward to getting to re-design my online courses this summer to include these new techniques. I also look forward to next year’s BCTC Faculty Conference. It was well worth the hour and a half hour drive!

I am a firm believer that it is always a good thing to educate the general public about anthropology.  However, articles written in popular magazines sometimes need to be fact-checked in the anthropological literature.  I am impressed with the recent (December 2009) National Geographic article on the Hadza of Tanzania.

The Pros

The author seems to have done his due diligence on researching the group as well as framing his narrative as just that – his experience with the band.  There are not many broad statements about the whole cultural group and those that are made appear to be validated (see “Why the Hadza are Still Hunter-Gatherers” for an anthropological ethnography of the Hadza).  For example, the author states that the Hadza seem to have a “minimalistic” religion with no concept of an afterlife. It was also stated that the Hadzane language does not appear to be related to any other with only a handful of individuals in the world who are bilingual in both Hadzane and English.

My favorite ethnographies are ones where the authors are able to make astute observations while at the same time able to interject their own feelings about their experiences.  The best part of this brief, but informative, article is the hunting scene that is described throughout. This article reads like a novel in that it keeps returning to suspenseful scenes of a baboon hunt in which the author is absolutely terrified. The author is also able to portray some of the daily life of the Hadza, such as the quarrels that occur between spouses and band members.

The Cons

My only gripes about this article are the continuous references to the “ancient” lifeways of the Hadza and the rather maudlin statements made as the author is leaving the group. First, there are a few references to how little their foraging lifestyle has changed over the last 10,000 years. He states that anthropologists hate to make statements like that and releases a single caveat that we cannot really think of them in those terms, but then returns to making these statements about their “unchanged existence”.
Secondly, the author admits he was only in the field for 2 weeks during the relatively pleasant dry season but waxes poetic about how his short time with the group had changed him to the core. They “altered his perception of the world” and made him “feel calmer, more attuned to the moment”.  He goes on to state that his “time with the Hadza made [him] happier” and that he wished to prolong the reign of the hunter-gatherer. Although this seems like the sort of portrayal of emotion that I should enjoy, it  was just a little cliche for my taste.

Final Thoughts

Otherwise, I was very pleased with this account of the Hadza. I believe it was written in a way that would reach many of its readers and get them to think a little more about this small cultural group, the effects of globalization, and anthropology in general.