Some of my other e-mail correspondence since 10-11-95
E-Mail Messages that I consider important are preceded by a rule:
If you feel that you would like to contact any of these individuals, please check with me, and I will write to them in your behalf.
From dlschule@email.unc.edu Tue Oct 17 08:14:05 1995
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 08:13:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Schulenberg
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To: David Fenton
Subject: NRC reports
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Dear Mr. Fenton,
Many thanks for your interesting report on the NRC report, which I've
read from your web page (and also for letting the amslist know about
this). Having gotten my Ph.D. at Stony Brook, I know for a fact that
only 10 or so Ph.D.'s have ever been awarded there, so the figure of 71
reported to the NRC must be another instance of sloppy reporting or
fabrication.
Best,
David Schulenberg
Dept. of Music
Univ. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
dlschule@email.unc.edu
voice: (919) 933-8633
From james_bennighof@baylor.edu Tue Oct 17 09:53:31 1995
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From: james bennighof
Subject: (no subject)
To: dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
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Organization: Baylor University
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I've skimmed some of your report--very interesting! I don't have time
to read it all carefully right now. One apparent typo--shouldn't the
last column in Table 2 be headed "Actual Ratio" rather than "Reported
Ratio"?
--Jim Bennighof
james_bennighof@baylor.edu
From dlschule@email.unc.edu Wed Oct 18 07:45:01 1995
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Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 07:44:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Schulenberg
X-Sender: dlschule@login0.isis.unc.edu
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC reports
In-Reply-To:
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You asked with regard to Stony Brook's reported number of "doctorates":
> Do you think it could include _all_ doctoral degrees awarde from
> 1987-1992? The form does not actually say "Ph.D." but "doctorates. Could
> it be a reasonable misinterpretation?
I suppose it's within the realm of possibility; doctoral programs of all
types began only in 1978, the year I arrived, and with doctorates first
awarded around 1982 this would make for an average of about 5 a
year--which seems high to me, but perhaps within the realm of
possibility. In any case, even when one counts Ph.D.'s in composition I
don't believe Stony Brook has awarded more than a dozen or so.
My most charitable guess as to how this sort of result would turn up is
that the survey form was filled out by some staff person who didn't read
or understand the instructions, but I'm just guessing. I can't imagine
Richard Kramer, Sarah Fuller, or any of the other musicology faculty
deliberately misrepresenting the department, but I remember some pretty
stupid, careless people working in the office.
In any case, when one considers the large amount of paperwork that faculty
members have to handle these days--particularly department chairs and
directors of graduate studies--it is easy to imagine complicated survey
forms being filled out quickly and hastily or farmed out to student or
staff help. Most musicology faculty don't have adequate support staffs,
and in large departments or schools of music such a survey might well have
been handled by some quasi-literate administrator without any faculty
member, let alone a research faculty member, being aware of it or its
importance.
Yours,
David Schulenberg
Dept. of Music
Univ. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
dlschule@email.unc.edu
voice: (919) 933-8633
From dlschule@email.unc.edu Thu Oct 19 01:26:24 1995
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From: David Schulenberg
X-Sender: dlschule@login1.isis.unc.edu
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC reports
In-Reply-To:
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Why not give Richard Kramer a call? He's a dean now, but he would have
been dept. chair, I think, when the survey was done. I'm afraid I don't
have his NYC number, but the department is 516-632-7330.
From elizschw@acs.bu.edu Tue Oct 24 17:56:51 1995
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 17:51:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Elizabeth Schwartz
Subject: Timeaters
To: "David W. Fenton"
In-Reply-To:
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The particular job I have is a temporary one, and as in most temp jobs
they never have enough work for me, so I am happy to find something as
diverting as the web.
Can't believe the NRC (what does the R stand for if not research, which
is to say good thorough research?) was stunned by the idea they should
actually check their data before posting it. What does that say about
the state of research in this country?
BTW, did my clarification of my first post on censorship make sense to
you, or do you still disagree with my premise?
Elizabeth Schwartz
elizschw@acs.bu.edu
From MEREDITH@sjsuvm1.sjsu.edu Tue Oct 24 18:33:49 1995
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 15:29:02 PDT
From: Bill Meredith
Subject: Re: NRC report
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU
Cc: amslist@ucdavis.edu, Bill Meredith
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 24 Oct 1995 17:35:34 -0400 (EDT)
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Thanks to David Fenton for all the work on the ratings. His report verifies in
gory detail that the system is even worse than I feared. On the one hand, I was
sort of cheered that music historians were so bad about returning the surveys,
since MAYBE one reason was their realization that the survey was problematic.
On the other hand, it just sounds like one more sorry aspect to a rating system
that some administrators take seriously. David, have you had any luck persuad-
ing them to improve the methodology? I assume that's the point of your labors?
Cheers, Bill Meredith, San Jose State University
From owner-amslist@ucdavis.edu Tue Oct 24 20:53:36 1995
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 19:39:38 -0500
Reply-To: "Vivian Ramalingam"
Sender: owner-amslist@ucdavis.edu
From: "Vivian Ramalingam"
To: amslist@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Re: NRC report
X-Listprocessor-Version: 7.2 -- ListProcessor by CREN
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Thanks to David Fenton for his meticulous and fascinating analysis. Some of the
ancillary criteria mentioned in the original prospectus sent to the evaluators,
such as number of faculty publications, number of post-docs, and the quality of
the work produced by the advanced students, are normally the best indicators of
the quality of a program in the sciences. Is one book worth as much as a bunch
of articles? Do many, or any, musicology programs have post-docs, as is common
in the sciences?
Note also that some faculties do not specifically designate personnel for the
musicology program ONLY or the DMA program ONLY; when I was at Illinois,
musicology faculty also taught courses intended for EdD's and DMA's. Similarly,
advanced undergrads were admitted to the "period" courses, along with the grads.
No mention of this intermingling of levels of study is to be found in the
criteria selected by the survey.
As for such intangibles as "accessibility of the faculty" and "quality of
advisement", how could outside evaluators possibly know this?
The inevitable conclusion is that the NRC considered only those factors that
could be expressed as quantities, whether or not they made any sense when
expressed in this way, and whether or not the responses given could not possibly
be anything other than hearsay.
A most peculiar way to set up a "pecking order" with such far-reaching
consequences!
-- Vivian R.
Vivian S. Ramalingam vivian@me.umn.edu
(612) 636 - 1042
From MEREDITH@sjsuvm1.sjsu.edu Tue Oct 24 22:17:45 1995
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 19:15:21 PDT
From: Bill Meredith
Subject: Re: NRC report
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 24 Oct 1995 20:57:25 -0400 (EDT)
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Ah that's your plan. I approve. I did look at yur http site today and even down
loaded the amslist messages, which took, as you warn us, a long time. My first
message came through fine, but the second one couldn't link up right and it sub
stituted Chris Reynolds' last message for mine. You may wish to check it and
see if the problem is on your end. ** I think you have illuminated serious pro-
blems which MUST be addressed in the future. Cheers, Bill Meredith
From rlph@uhura.cc.rochester.edu Wed Oct 25 00:41:45 1995
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From: Ralph Locke
Message-Id: <199510250441.AAA11864@uhura.cc.rochester.edu>
Subject: Re: Eastman's place in the NRC ratings
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU (David W. Fenton)
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 00:41:38 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: jthy@aol.com
In-Reply-To: from "David W. Fenton" at Oct 24, 95 05:42:45 pm
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Dear David Fenton:
Thanks for your inquiry about the Eastman data used by the NRC. I am
passing the message, and your helpful summary of your long report,
to Jurgen Thym, the Chair of Musicology. Perhaps he can help you.
Ralph Locke
rlph@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
>
> A colleague of mine has shown my Eastman's September newsletter in which
> Eastman's ranking by the NRC is trumpeted at length.
>
> In my study of the NRC report, I have been unable to reconcile Eastman's
> reported faculty of 50 with the numbers of faculty who specialize in
> fields in which the Ph.D. is awarded.
>
> I have also thought that the numbers of graduate students intending to get
> the Ph.D. and Ph.D.'s awarded from 1986-92 were out of wack (119
> graduate students, 137 Ph.D.'s!).
>
> Any comments?
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
>
From brauner@csd.uwm.edu Wed Oct 25 00:43:27 1995
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 23:43:14 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mitchell P Brauner
To: "David W. Fenton"
Cc: Vivian Ramalingam , amslist@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
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The discussion of the NRC report is not dead in the outer world as of
yet. The latest issue of the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ has a
follow up article. It also seems as if some schools opted out of the
survey and some simply never returned their forms. Perhaps David Fenton,
if you have not already done so, send your evaluation to some agency
where it will be read by a large and wide audience. Too many will not
pick it up on WWW.
Mitchell Brauner
From MMORSE@VM1.YorkU.CA Wed Oct 25 09:40:40 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 95 09:40:26 EDT
From: Michael
Subject: Re: NRC report
To: David
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 24 Oct 1995 17:35:34 -0400 (EDT)
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Dear David,
Congratulations and thanks for your painstaking enterprise. We can never
be reminded too often how flimsy an instrument the statistic really is.
I urge you to publish your findings in some fashion. Again, thanks!
Cheers,
Michael
From RKRAMER@ccmail.sunysb.edu Wed Oct 25 09:59:40 1995
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id <01HWUQ9EZVNKA23OOK@ccmail.sunysb.edu> for dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu; Wed,
25 Oct 1995 09:59:40 -0500 (EST)
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 09:59:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Richard A Kramer
Subject: Re: Stony Brook in the NRC Report
To: dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
Message-Id: <01HWUQ9FN4YAA23OOK@ccmail.sunysb.edu>
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State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5475
Richard A Kramer
Dean, Humanities & Fine Arts
Arts & Sciences
516 632-6992
25-Oct-1995 09:54am EDT
FROM: RKRAMER
TO: Remote Addressee ( _dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu )
Subject: RE: Stony Brook in the NRC Report
Dear Mr. Fenton:
Thanks for your note, which, I must say, rather took be aback. Of
course, we'll investigate. Clearly what happened is that someone included all
doctoral degrees in Music--not simply the Ph. D. I do not have the NRC
guidelines at hand, and so do not know how, precisely, they define the
categories of doctoral research, and whether they discriminate among the kinds
of doctoral degrees offered in Music.
I should be most interested to see your evaluation. I'm not sure that
I can pull it out of the web, and was wondering if you could forward it to me.
No, I don't subscribe to the AMSList.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Kramer, Dean, Humanities & Fine Arts
From vivian@meserv.me.umn.edu Wed Oct 25 10:24:02 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 09:23:57 -0500
Message-Id: <199510251423.JAA10469@meserv.me.umn.edu>
From: "Vivian Ramalingam"
Reply-To: "Vivian Ramalingam"
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU
Subject: Re: NRC report
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Perhaps David Fenton,
> > if you have not already done so, send your evaluation to some agency
> > where it will be read by a large and wide audience. Too many will not
> > pick it up on WWW.
>
> Suggestions?
Offer it as an article to the Chronicle of Higher Education, for one thing. I
think their offices are in Washington, DC. Check a copy for the address and
phone number.
-- Vivian
Vivian S. Ramalingam vivian@me.umn.edu
(612) 636 - 1042
From roger@silvertone.Princeton.EDU Wed Oct 25 10:34:05 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 95 10:34:02 -0400
From: "Roger Lustig"
Message-Id: <9510251434.AA10332@silvertone.Princeton.EDU>
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU
Subject: Re: NRC report
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Hi!
Regarding these silly NRC surveys, check with Serge Lang of the
Yale Math department. Back in 1979 he bent my ear over lunch
one day, regarding the sloppy methodology of just such a report,
and the fact that nobody in the media picked up on it.
Best,
Roger
From eburns@polaris.net Wed Oct 25 20:18:56 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 20:17:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ellen Burns
X-Sender: eburns@nexus
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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Please accept kudos and thanks for the report you've prepared. In
addition to "hearing" the AMS response to the study, I've also heard
mucho, mucho gnashing of teeth from the Modern Languages department here
at FSU (my husband is a Spanish prof). That report has really caused quite
a bit of grief for many.
The soothing balm for all this (for me) has been your attention to detail
and effort in preparing your report: the voice of reason to calm an
emotional storm. Similarly, it would seem to me that a hardcopy venue for
your report would be a service to the discipline. It would, at the very
least, give others in the discipline a look at the (questionable?)
background of those numbers. I would wonder if the _Chronicle_ accepts
articles of this nature. If not, or in addition, perhaps the AMS
newsletter or some equivalent forum that reaches a large number of readers
would give those in music pause.
I would hope that search chairs considering candidates for positions and
students deciding on programs for graduate study might not rely with
complete confidence on the numbers after seeing your report. Numbers can
be so very seducing...
Whether you take the trouble to get it in print or no, you've made a
significant contribution to the field... Just think, even without
finding at least one Italian sixth!! Who would have thought it??
Chordially,
Ellen Burns
eburns@polaris.net
From eburns@polaris.net Wed Oct 25 22:17:34 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 22:16:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ellen Burns
X-Sender: eburns@nexus
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: GULP/was NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
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> Well, I'm currently trying to interest the New York Times in a followup
> article. I'll also be contacting the _Chronicle_ via E-Mail tomorrow to
> see if they have any interest.
>
> Additionally, I'll be contacting Phillip Gossett via E-Mail to ask if the
> Society has an interest in pursuing some kind of dialogue with the NRC
> about correctly designing the study the _next_ time around. I would think
> any number of learned societies would be interested, given the obvious
> short shrift the Humanities got.
YES! YES! YES! YES!
> My major concern about going into actual _print_ is that, as of yet, no
> one has independently verified my numbers from the CMS _Directory_. I
> would feel _extremely_ uncomfortable sending this out for publication
> until someone else has gone through and exposed my counting errors.
I'm about to leave for a two-week trip to Spain (playing recitals and
giving a paper), so I would have volunteered (what! that word, again!!)
to lend a hand. If it is something that can wait, I'd be happy to cozy
up to the CMS directory to help assure you that gnomes did not creep into
your report. In former lives, I've been a librarian and an academic
administrator, so I appreciate careful number crunching.
> Well, I'm much more concerned about the impact on the budgets of
> departments whose standing has fallen since the 1982 report (like my own)
> -- administrators waving that report in the air and demanding to know
> why they should continue to allocate all that money for expensive faculty if
> you can't do any better in these beauty contests, etc., etc.
You're quite right about that, I was a bit myopic. These types of reports
seem to be generating much more harm than good. What, I wonder, would
better function in their place? While NASM accredits music programs as a
whole, I wonder if a classification scheme (by subdiscipline) wouldn't
serve as well. Such a scheme--III, II, I--might be assigned according to
size, budget, library collection, faculty publications, faculty-student
ratio, placement percentages, etc., but by subdiscipline. A music
department might then "be" a class II in theory, but class I in education,
performance, and therapy. In this way, departments could see which areas
they might want to develop, and those that they can tout.
The best case scenario, of course, is not relying on these types of
reports. But, like budget cuts and taxes, I doubt they can be dismissed.
> Thanks for the support.
You're more than welcome.... ita missa est, or it is a mess (?).
Chordially,
Ellen
eburns@polaris.net
From brauner@csd.uwm.edu Thu Oct 26 00:15:23 1995
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Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 23:15:18 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mitchell P Brauner
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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I was thinking that you might send it to the Chronicle itself or the
NYTImes or some other place where, if published, it would gain some
general scrutiny. Clearly, the importance to the academic community at
large is great, but I fear that only the musically inclined would see it
on the web (I may be wrong about that, but I for one don't have web
access yet--though that could change any day now).
Mitchell Brauner
From owner-amslist@ucdavis.edu Thu Oct 26 16:20:50 1995
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From: "Philip A. Todd"
To: Professional students
Subject: David Fenton's analysis
X-Mailer: MailBook 95.01.000
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Many thanks to David Fenton for his searing, bone-crunching levelling of
the silly rating system of schools of music recently discussed here...
And then people wonder why some of us have taken to blowing off steam by
posting Gonzo trivia and other so-called "unworthy" threads of investigation..
After David Fenton's manifesto, I doubt anyone has the lack of shame or
public-relations face it will take to criticize any endeavor in our field as
being "unworthy" or "less than academic" or "of substandard research"... when
some completely worthless collection of capricious, indefensible data is used
to "rate" schools of music into some kind of pecking order... what a joke !!!
From jdbellm@bentley.UnivNorthCo.EDU Thu Oct 26 16:46:58 1995
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 13:49:46 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jonathan D Bellman
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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If I may weigh in, I am one of the as-yet Web-challenged, and so was only
able to read and enjoy your boildown for the AMS list.
Bravo. Yes it is important, yes it ought to be more publically
trumpeted, and yes it ought to be rammed down certain throats sideways.
Jonathan
Jonathan Bellman
Assistant Professor, Music History
Associate Editor, *The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning*
University of Northern Colorado
(970) 351-2151
jdbellm@bentley.univnorthco.edu
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Thu Oct 26 23:34:42 1995
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 23:34:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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There may be ways to (mis)interpret data and to (in)accurately report
data. For example, you mention that Wesleyan counted its
ethnomusicologists and Indiana did not. Was not this a survey of the
music departments? Does Indiana have ethnomusicologists in its music
department? If Indiana has its ethnomusicologists in the Folklore,
Anthropology, and African American Studies programs, why should the
institution count them in the music department? Wesleyan's
ethnomusicologists, as you noted, are part of its music department. I
think that this may be a case representative of not just one point that
you make here, but a great many of them.
On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> Since interest in the National Research Council's ratings of
> "Doctorate-Research" programs seems to have waned, and few seem to have
> been able to read my report, I've decided to post to the list the most
> significant finding of my investigation.
>
> The NRC study was conducted in two parts. The main point was its survey to
> collect ratings. However, previous to that, with the assistance of the
> institutions involved, the NRC had collected information about the
> programs to be rated.
>
> The way this worked was that the NRC determined which programs at which
> schools met its criteria for inclusion, then the NRC wrote to the
> president of each institution asking that an "Institutional Coordinator"
> ("IC") be appointed to collect faculty lists and numbers of students, etc.
>
> The ICs had to turn in their data by Dec. 24, 1992. The information they
> submitted was used by the NRC to prepare its questionnaires. In each
> field, a minimum of 200 individuals were chosen (from the same faculty
> lists submitted by the ICs) as potential survey respondents and sent a
> questionnaire. The NRC set a minimum of 100 valid responses for each
> field.
>
> Each survey respondent received a listing of faculty for each of 50
> programs randomly selected from all the programs being rated (in Music,
> there were 65). Respondents were asked to rate these 50 programs according
> to two main criteria, generally referred to by the authors of the study as
> "Quality" and "Effectiveness."
>
> In regard to "Quality," respondents were asked to ". . .consider only the
> scholarly competence and achievements of the faculty. . . ." For
> "Effectiveness of Program in Educating Research Scholars/Scientists,"
> respondents were asked to consider
>
> . . .the accessibility of the faculty, the curricula, the instructional
> and research facilities, the quality of graduate students, the
> performance of graduates, the clarity of stated program objectives
> and expectations, the appropriateness of program requirements and
> timetables, the adequacy of graduate advising and mentorship, the
> commitment of the program in assuring access and promoting success of
> students historically underrepresented in graduate education, the
> quality of associated personnel (post-doctorates, research scientists,
> et. al.) and other factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the
> research-doctorate program. (App. F, p. 124)
>
> This is a stunning request, I would think, given how difficult it would be
> for any single individual to have familiarity of this depth with any
> significant number of the 50 programs being evaluated.
>
> Each respondent was given a sheet listing the faculty and the number of
> Ph.D.'s awarded 1986-92 along with the six questions designed to elicit
> the ratings for "Quality" and "Effectiveness." Thus, the faculty list must
> have been the chief information the survey respondents had as the basis
> for making their decisions about rating the fifty programs. It seems
> unlikely to me that many individuals would have been sufficiently familiar
> to have rated fifty programs without an actual reminder of who teaches
> there, so I would suspect that most respondents relied heavily on the
> list in choosing how to rank most of the fifty programs they were asked to
> evaluate. (In fact, the NRC's report identifies Music as one of only a
> handful of fields in which a followup survey was necessary because of a
> low rate of return -- the final rate of return was 42%, the lowest in the
> Humanities, and far below the range of comparable fields.)
>
> All of this sounds like a fairly reasonable way of conducting this kind of
> survey, once you have decided that it is worth doing in the first place.
> It would all seem perfectly reasonable, if the faculty lists submitted by
> the ICs were correct. Unfortunately, the numbers of faculty members
> reported for Music programs (clearly derived from the IC faculty lists)
> just don't make any sense at all. Everyone I know in the field who has
> seen these numbers (see my Table 1, below) immediately remarks on the fact
> that Indiana University reports only *6* faculty members, while music
> schools of comparable size report much larger numbers:
>
> Michigan 22
> Eastman 50
> Illinois 74
>
> So, I pulled out the College Music Society _Directory_ and started
> counting. Table 1 presents some of my results.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Table 1: Significant Discrepancies in Numbers of Faculty Reported
>
> 1 2 3 4 5 6
> Mus. Compo- Other Adjuncts,
> Institution Reported Actual Ed. sition Faculty Etc.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> University of Rochester 50 23 4 7 56 33
> University of Illinois 74 20 10 -- 47 6
> SUNY-Stony Brook 32 12 -- 0 6 17
> U. Texas, Austin 21 17 7 *3 46 10
> Indiana University 6 16+ 7 **5 103 14
> U. North Texas 83 18 10 3 51 12
> Northwestern 35 19 7 -- 34 47
> U. California, San Diego 24 19 -- *1 0 7
> Florida State 47 20 13 **1 40 7
> Ohio State 50 14 15 *2 27 26
> University of Washington 28 13 -- -- 23 47
> University of Cincinnati 22 13 -- *1 80 40
> U. Maryland, College Park 45 14 4 -- 26 11
> USC 7 15 -- -- 41 73
> Temple 38 11 6 -- 26 63
> Wesleyan University 10 5 -- -- 1 11
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Notes on numbers of Actual Faculty (column 2)
> - Counted fields are limited to Theory & Analysis (_Directory_ code 15),
> History & Literature (20), Musicology (21), Ethnomusicology (22), Western
> Hemisphere (55), History of Jazz (56a) and Systematic Musicology (59)
>
> Notes on Composition Faculty (column 4)
> - "0" means the Ph.D. program has no faculty who are not already counted
> in column 2 under another specialization (most often Theory)
> - "--" means no Ph.D. program in composition (may have a D.M.A. or D.Mus.)
> _and_ no composition faculty not already counted in column 2
>
> For composers _not_ counted in column 2:
> "*" indicates D.M.A.
> "**" indicates the D.Mus.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The NRC explicitly limited their report to Ph.D.'s, so D.M.A. faculty
> should not have been included in the faculty lists. Likewise, it seems
> from my contacts with the NRC and from reading their report, that the NRC
> intended to exclude Music Education. I tried to count only those fields
> which truly engage in research as their principle focus. The numbers show
> quite clearly that the NRC relied on data from the ICs that was, if not
> inaccurate, certainly not consistent from program to program. Illinois
> obviously reported its whole faculty, while Indiana reported only its
> Music History/Musicology faculty. Michigan reported the appropriate
> fields, while Eastman reported some middle-ground number that I am unable
> to reconcile with the stated scope of the report. Temple reported most of
> its faculty even though its only Ph.D. program (Mus. Ed.) has only six
> faculty.
>
> These numbers (let alone the programs they represent) are simply not
> comparable. A program like Wesleyan's surely cannot be ranked in
> comparison to Indiana, particularly since the Indiana list omits faculty
> teaching in the very area in which Wesleyan exclusively specializes
> (Ethnomusicology). How then could any survey respondent rate these
> programs if the faculty lists are so inaccurate and inconsistent?
>
> This is the heart of the matter -- the very data that were the basis for
> the survey are inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistently reported. At
> first, this led me to believe that the NRC must not have clearly
> instructed the ICs on what information they were supposed to have
> collected. However, upon examination of the NRC's full report, which
> includes copies of all the data collection forms, it is clear that the
> instructions were unambiguous. Therefore, there are only two possible
> conclusions:
>
> 1. Some of the "Institutional Coordinators" were incompetent, or
> 2. Some institutions deliberately misrepresented their faculty.
>
> Neither of these alternatives is very pleasant, and both lead to the
> necessity of discarding the rankings derived from the survey because of
> the unsoundness of the very foundation of the survey, the inaccurate data
> collected by the ICs.
>
> My critique goes into much more detail on this issue and many others, all
> of which tend to impeach the reliability of the NRC's survey in almost all
> respects. Rather than go further here, I will repeat that my full report
> is available for viewing from my Worldwide Web page (URL at the bottom of
> my signature), and, for those without Web access, upon request I can send
> a Windows offline HTML viewer and my report files. I am still trying to
> see if NYU has a public FTP site to which I can upload the data. If I
> succeed in that, I will let everyone know.
>
> If you see any errors in my Table above, please let me know -- I could
> have miscounted. In fact, I would be very pleased if someone with access
> to my full report would volunteer to check _all_ my counts from the CMS
> _Directory_. I've checked and double-checked, but it's a pretty tedious
> task, and I'm fallible.
>
> No one should consider any of my criticisms of the NRC report as negative
> comments about any of the institutions involved -- the NRC is responsible
> for the errors in their report, not the rated institutions.
>
> I am also still interested in hearing from anyone who participated in the
> survey, either in preparing the faculty lists, or in filling out the
> ratings survey itself. At present, no one at all has come forward to admit
> that they participated, which makes me quite suspicious of exactly who
> was chosen to fill out the survey in the first place.
>
> All comments, suggestions, corrections, complaints, rants and encouragement
> welcome!
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Thu Oct 26 23:37:18 1995
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 23:37:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
X-Status:
There is (in)accurate data and (mis)readings of them. This example, I'm
afraid, may be representative of a great many points that you make.
Wesleyan's ethnomusicologists are employed by the music department. Why
should Indiana count ethnomusioclogists in a survey of music departments
when the ethnomusicologists are employed by the Anthropology, Folklore,
and African-American Studies departments?
On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> Since interest in the National Research Council's ratings of
> "Doctorate-Research" programs seems to have waned, and few seem to have
> been able to read my report, I've decided to post to the list the most
> significant finding of my investigation.
>
> The NRC study was conducted in two parts. The main point was its survey to
> collect ratings. However, previous to that, with the assistance of the
> institutions involved, the NRC had collected information about the
> programs to be rated.
>
> The way this worked was that the NRC determined which programs at which
> schools met its criteria for inclusion, then the NRC wrote to the
> president of each institution asking that an "Institutional Coordinator"
> ("IC") be appointed to collect faculty lists and numbers of students, etc.
>
> The ICs had to turn in their data by Dec. 24, 1992. The information they
> submitted was used by the NRC to prepare its questionnaires. In each
> field, a minimum of 200 individuals were chosen (from the same faculty
> lists submitted by the ICs) as potential survey respondents and sent a
> questionnaire. The NRC set a minimum of 100 valid responses for each
> field.
>
> Each survey respondent received a listing of faculty for each of 50
> programs randomly selected from all the programs being rated (in Music,
> there were 65). Respondents were asked to rate these 50 programs according
> to two main criteria, generally referred to by the authors of the study as
> "Quality" and "Effectiveness."
>
> In regard to "Quality," respondents were asked to ". . .consider only the
> scholarly competence and achievements of the faculty. . . ." For
> "Effectiveness of Program in Educating Research Scholars/Scientists,"
> respondents were asked to consider
>
> . . .the accessibility of the faculty, the curricula, the instructional
> and research facilities, the quality of graduate students, the
> performance of graduates, the clarity of stated program objectives
> and expectations, the appropriateness of program requirements and
> timetables, the adequacy of graduate advising and mentorship, the
> commitment of the program in assuring access and promoting success of
> students historically underrepresented in graduate education, the
> quality of associated personnel (post-doctorates, research scientists,
> et. al.) and other factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the
> research-doctorate program. (App. F, p. 124)
>
> This is a stunning request, I would think, given how difficult it would be
> for any single individual to have familiarity of this depth with any
> significant number of the 50 programs being evaluated.
>
> Each respondent was given a sheet listing the faculty and the number of
> Ph.D.'s awarded 1986-92 along with the six questions designed to elicit
> the ratings for "Quality" and "Effectiveness." Thus, the faculty list must
> have been the chief information the survey respondents had as the basis
> for making their decisions about rating the fifty programs. It seems
> unlikely to me that many individuals would have been sufficiently familiar
> to have rated fifty programs without an actual reminder of who teaches
> there, so I would suspect that most respondents relied heavily on the
> list in choosing how to rank most of the fifty programs they were asked to
> evaluate. (In fact, the NRC's report identifies Music as one of only a
> handful of fields in which a followup survey was necessary because of a
> low rate of return -- the final rate of return was 42%, the lowest in the
> Humanities, and far below the range of comparable fields.)
>
> All of this sounds like a fairly reasonable way of conducting this kind of
> survey, once you have decided that it is worth doing in the first place.
> It would all seem perfectly reasonable, if the faculty lists submitted by
> the ICs were correct. Unfortunately, the numbers of faculty members
> reported for Music programs (clearly derived from the IC faculty lists)
> just don't make any sense at all. Everyone I know in the field who has
> seen these numbers (see my Table 1, below) immediately remarks on the fact
> that Indiana University reports only *6* faculty members, while music
> schools of comparable size report much larger numbers:
>
> Michigan 22
> Eastman 50
> Illinois 74
>
> So, I pulled out the College Music Society _Directory_ and started
> counting. Table 1 presents some of my results.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Table 1: Significant Discrepancies in Numbers of Faculty Reported
>
> 1 2 3 4 5 6
> Mus. Compo- Other Adjuncts,
> Institution Reported Actual Ed. sition Faculty Etc.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> University of Rochester 50 23 4 7 56 33
> University of Illinois 74 20 10 -- 47 6
> SUNY-Stony Brook 32 12 -- 0 6 17
> U. Texas, Austin 21 17 7 *3 46 10
> Indiana University 6 16+ 7 **5 103 14
> U. North Texas 83 18 10 3 51 12
> Northwestern 35 19 7 -- 34 47
> U. California, San Diego 24 19 -- *1 0 7
> Florida State 47 20 13 **1 40 7
> Ohio State 50 14 15 *2 27 26
> University of Washington 28 13 -- -- 23 47
> University of Cincinnati 22 13 -- *1 80 40
> U. Maryland, College Park 45 14 4 -- 26 11
> USC 7 15 -- -- 41 73
> Temple 38 11 6 -- 26 63
> Wesleyan University 10 5 -- -- 1 11
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Notes on numbers of Actual Faculty (column 2)
> - Counted fields are limited to Theory & Analysis (_Directory_ code 15),
> History & Literature (20), Musicology (21), Ethnomusicology (22), Western
> Hemisphere (55), History of Jazz (56a) and Systematic Musicology (59)
>
> Notes on Composition Faculty (column 4)
> - "0" means the Ph.D. program has no faculty who are not already counted
> in column 2 under another specialization (most often Theory)
> - "--" means no Ph.D. program in composition (may have a D.M.A. or D.Mus.)
> _and_ no composition faculty not already counted in column 2
>
> For composers _not_ counted in column 2:
> "*" indicates D.M.A.
> "**" indicates the D.Mus.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The NRC explicitly limited their report to Ph.D.'s, so D.M.A. faculty
> should not have been included in the faculty lists. Likewise, it seems
> from my contacts with the NRC and from reading their report, that the NRC
> intended to exclude Music Education. I tried to count only those fields
> which truly engage in research as their principle focus. The numbers show
> quite clearly that the NRC relied on data from the ICs that was, if not
> inaccurate, certainly not consistent from program to program. Illinois
> obviously reported its whole faculty, while Indiana reported only its
> Music History/Musicology faculty. Michigan reported the appropriate
> fields, while Eastman reported some middle-ground number that I am unable
> to reconcile with the stated scope of the report. Temple reported most of
> its faculty even though its only Ph.D. program (Mus. Ed.) has only six
> faculty.
>
> These numbers (let alone the programs they represent) are simply not
> comparable. A program like Wesleyan's surely cannot be ranked in
> comparison to Indiana, particularly since the Indiana list omits faculty
> teaching in the very area in which Wesleyan exclusively specializes
> (Ethnomusicology). How then could any survey respondent rate these
> programs if the faculty lists are so inaccurate and inconsistent?
>
> This is the heart of the matter -- the very data that were the basis for
> the survey are inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistently reported. At
> first, this led me to believe that the NRC must not have clearly
> instructed the ICs on what information they were supposed to have
> collected. However, upon examination of the NRC's full report, which
> includes copies of all the data collection forms, it is clear that the
> instructions were unambiguous. Therefore, there are only two possible
> conclusions:
>
> 1. Some of the "Institutional Coordinators" were incompetent, or
> 2. Some institutions deliberately misrepresented their faculty.
>
> Neither of these alternatives is very pleasant, and both lead to the
> necessity of discarding the rankings derived from the survey because of
> the unsoundness of the very foundation of the survey, the inaccurate data
> collected by the ICs.
>
> My critique goes into much more detail on this issue and many others, all
> of which tend to impeach the reliability of the NRC's survey in almost all
> respects. Rather than go further here, I will repeat that my full report
> is available for viewing from my Worldwide Web page (URL at the bottom of
> my signature), and, for those without Web access, upon request I can send
> a Windows offline HTML viewer and my report files. I am still trying to
> see if NYU has a public FTP site to which I can upload the data. If I
> succeed in that, I will let everyone know.
>
> If you see any errors in my Table above, please let me know -- I could
> have miscounted. In fact, I would be very pleased if someone with access
> to my full report would volunteer to check _all_ my counts from the CMS
> _Directory_. I've checked and double-checked, but it's a pretty tedious
> task, and I'm fallible.
>
> No one should consider any of my criticisms of the NRC report as negative
> comments about any of the institutions involved -- the NRC is responsible
> for the errors in their report, not the rated institutions.
>
> I am also still interested in hearing from anyone who participated in the
> survey, either in preparing the faculty lists, or in filling out the
> ratings survey itself. At present, no one at all has come forward to admit
> that they participated, which makes me quite suspicious of exactly who
> was chosen to fill out the survey in the first place.
>
> All comments, suggestions, corrections, complaints, rants and encouragement
> welcome!
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Thu Oct 26 23:45:25 1995
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id AA03243; Thu, 26 Oct 1995 23:45:24 -0400
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 23:45:18 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
X-Status: A
If you were to prepare a survey, could you describe your methodology and
the instruments that you would use for data-gathering? I think that
would make a great impression on the scholarly organizations.
On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Bill Meredith wrote:
>
> > Thanks to David Fenton for all the work on the ratings. His report verifies in
> > gory detail that the system is even worse than I feared. On the one hand, I was
> > sort of cheered that music historians were so bad about returning the surveys,
> > since MAYBE one reason was their realization that the survey was problematic.
> > On the other hand, it just sounds like one more sorry aspect to a rating system
> > that some administrators take seriously. David, have you had any luck persuad-
> > ing them to improve the methodology? I assume that's the point of your labors?
>
> Well, I was actually hoping (once all of you had looked at it and pointed
> out my errors) to get it more widely disseminated (SMT, SEM, CMS) in the
> hope that the professional scholarly organizations in our field might
> approach the NRC about the whole thing in order to insure that the next
> time around (if there _is_ a next time), it will be done better.
>
> At this stage, I was mostly hoping for feedback to improve the thing so
> that it was good enough for wider distribution.
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Thu Oct 26 23:53:09 1995
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 23:53:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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Please take a closer look at the NRC if you actually believe that its
interdisciplinary thrust is not balanced.
On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Vivian Ramalingam wrote:
>
> > Thanks to David Fenton for his meticulous and fascinating analysis. Some of the
> > ancillary criteria mentioned in the original prospectus sent to the evaluators,
> > such as number of faculty publications, number of post-docs, and the quality of
> > the work produced by the advanced students, are normally the best indicators of
> > the quality of a program in the sciences. Is one book worth as much as a bunch
> > of articles? Do many, or any, musicology programs have post-docs, as is common
> > in the sciences?
>
> The designers of the study recognized that Humanities programs are
> different than the sciences, and therefore used different criteria to
> evaluate the scholarly productivity of faculties. In the Sciences, they
> used that citation index whose name I forget. In the Humanities,
> recognizing that publication tends to be of a different nature (they
> specifically mention that scholars in the Humanities tend to write books
> that take several years each, while in the sciences, scholars tend to
> produce evenly-space flurries of small-scale articles), they collected
> data on "prestigious awards." They admitted that this was imperfect,
> because the results showed no strong pattern.
>
> As to post-docs in Musicology, one can get post-docs for research (my
> advisor had one), and Columbia also has a research/teaching post-doc. I'm
> not sure how common they are, though. I've certainly never encountered
> post-docs in graduate musicology programs, and certainly not to the degree
> that one would in the sciences.
>
> > Note also that some faculties do not specifically designate personnel for the
> > musicology program ONLY or the DMA program ONLY; when I was at Illinois,
> > musicology faculty also taught courses intended for EdD's and DMA's. Similarly,
> > advanced undergrads were admitted to the "period" courses, along with the grads.
> > No mention of this intermingling of levels of study is to be found in the
> > criteria selected by the survey.
>
> But the "Instructions for the faculty roster" are quite clear:
>
> Include those individuals who (a) are members of the regular
> academic faculty (typically holding the rank of assistant,
> associate, or full professor), _and_ (b) regularly teach doctoral
> students and/or serve on doctoral committees. . . ._Exclude_
> visiting faculty members or emeritus or adjunct faculty. . .
> unless they currently participate significantly in doctoral education.
>
> Since the scope of the study was Ph.D.'s only, rather than all doctoral
> degrees (made very clear in the same instructions), it seems to me that
> they were really looking for professors who advise Ph.D. dissertations.
> Even though the double-bass instructor may be teaching a Ph.D. candidate
> to play, that doesn't mean she should be counted according to the
> instructions above. And the fact that a Musicology professor may have not
> just graduate-level performers in her class, but even undergrads, is not
> really relevant, because the Musicological specialization is much more
> relevant than the majors of the students taught.
>
> This, of course, would make sense, because the point of the survey was to
> rate "doctoral-research" programs, not overall education. We could
> certainly quibble over the importance of the double-bass lessons in a
> Musicologist's education (and I don't mean to minimize it), but
> performance is quite clearly an _adjunct_ to the academic education
> (academic meaning Theory, History, etc.), and, though it may enhance the
> program, it is clearly not what the NRC was attempting to survey.
>
> In the end, it seems to me, what matters is the area of specialization,
> rather than _who_ one actually has in the classroom. That was the basis
> for my tally from the CMS _Directory_, and I think it is congruent with
> the intent of the NRC report's authors.
>
> And, really, it seems to me that the rating should have been not of
> "programs" (whole departments or schools of music), but of individual
> departments (at the large institutions, the Theory Dept., the Musicology
> Dept., the Ethno. Dept.; at an institution like NYU, that's one
> department), and of the students enrolled in degree programs in those
> specializations, and the faculty whose appointments are in those
> specializations.
>
> > As for such intangibles as "accessibility of the faculty" and "quality of
> > advisement", how could outside evaluators possibly know this?
> >
> > The inevitable conclusion is that the NRC considered only those factors that
> > could be expressed as quantities, whether or not they made any sense when
> > expressed in this way, and whether or not the responses given could not possibly
> > be anything other than hearsay.
>
> The NRC is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, so it's pretty
> clear where they're coming from. The greater familiarity of this
> organization with the way the Sciences are organized is a factor whose
> importance simply cannot be understated.
>
> Perhaps the ACLS or some other heavily Humanities-oriented
> organization should get involved here.
>
> > A most peculiar way to set up a "pecking order" with such far-reaching
> > consequences!
>
> I really don't think the people who prepared the report have a clue as
> to the degree to which admininstrators will wave this report at
> departments within their institutions, believing what an outside source
> tells them more than they will their own first-hand knowledge of these
> programs.
>
> It's truly frightening.
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
From brauner@csd.uwm.edu Thu Oct 26 23:53:14 1995
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Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 22:53:09 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mitchell P Brauner
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
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I would volunteer to check CMS but I couldn't guarantee when it would be
done. I have a heavy teaching load and am in the midst of mid-terms
right now. They have to be given and graded before I leave for NY next
Thursday.
Maybe the Times will give it some play.
Mitchell Brauner
From phgs@midway.uchicago.edu Fri Oct 27 09:24:12 1995
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Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 08:27:28 -0500
To: "David W. Fenton"
From: phgs@midway.uchicago.edu (Philip Gossett)
Subject: Re: National Research Council Report
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Dear David,
Busy isn't the word for it... But I have been following this discussion,
and your excellent work. Indeed, I called up your home page a week or so
again and read through some of the material you had accumulated. The data
about definition of faculty is devastating.
I too have grave doubts about the methodology and significance of many
aspects of the survey (despite, or perhaps even because of my own
Department's ranking). And, of course, even at the best these things tend
to be four to five years out of date.
The question, though, is whether the AMS as a Society should be taking a
position about the survey in any official way. I will raise the matter, at
least, with the Board during its meetings.
But I would urge you to put some of your material into print. One thing you
could do would be to write an "opinion" piece for the Chronicle of Higher
Education, which tends to print them on the back page or the first page of
their "B" section. It seems to me you have more than enough material to do
that. And if you do it in a way that avoids focusing on the ranking of any
particular school (and I think you have succeeded very well thus far), I
think your observations would be of great interest to the academic
community.
I hope you will take a moment in New York to introduce yourself. I'd enjoy
speaking with you.
All best wishes,
Philip
From jdbellm@bentley.UnivNorthCo.EDU Fri Oct 27 11:51:13 1995
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Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 08:44:45 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jonathan D Bellman
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
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And I am not Windows-friendly (or perhaps I should say that Windows is
not Bellman-friendly) yet. Thanks anyway.
Jonathan
Jonathan Bellman
Assistant Professor, Music History
Associate Editor, *The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning*
University of Northern Colorado
(970) 351-2151
jdbellm@bentley.univnorthco.edu
From phgs@midway.uchicago.edu Fri Oct 27 16:25:52 1995
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Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 15:29:04 -0500
To: "David W. Fenton"
From: phgs@midway.uchicago.edu (Philip Gossett)
Subject: Re: National Research Council Report
Status: RO
X-Status: A
Dear David,
Thanks for your further clarification.
You would be interested to know that many of these issues came up today in
a Task Force meeting here at Chicago. The Provost is trying to understand
something about faculty size in various programs, and an incautious social
scientist (!) tried to use those figures from the NRC report. We promptly
showed him why the data were unacceptable for that purpose.
I do recall that the decision as to which faculty to count fell to the
individual SCHOOLS. We included in our Linguistics Department, for example,
all those cross-listed in the field from other Departments. Thus, we show
something like 25 Linguists on the faculty. But the figure of actual
primary appointments in Linguistics is more like 10. For some purposes (the
quality of program, the attractiveness to graduate students), the 25 number
is probably right. For other purposes (size of faculty), it is absurd.
Talk to you more in New York.
All best wishes,
Philip
From taricani@u.washington.edu Sun Oct 29 01:28:04 1995
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Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 22:28:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: JoAnn Taricani
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC Report Correction
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
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Regarding the numbers at the University of Washington -- the College
Music Society directory is not a good source of information for our
faculty (I'm not included, although I'm an associate professor of music
history who has been here for twelve years -- go figure). We do have
more than 13 faculty directly involved in our PH.D. programs, all of whom
have Ph.D.s (We give Ph.Ds in music history, theory, composition,
ethnomusicology, systematic musicology [for a little longer], music
education.) We have 4 permanent and 1 impermanent (instructor) music
historians, all with Ph.D.s, 6 theorists/composers, all with Ph.D.s, 4
ethnomusicologists, all with PH.D.s, 4 music ed. specialists, all with
PH.D.s, and 2 systematic musicologists (with PH.D.s). I get 21 out of
this.
From RAPEN01@UKCC.UKY.EDU Sun Oct 29 19:18:54 1995
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Date: Sun, 29 Oct 95 19:16:07 EST
From: Ron Pen
Subject: The survey!
To: David
X-Mailer: MailBook 95.01.000
Message-Id: <951029.191857.EST.RAPEN01@ukcc.uky.edu>
Status: RO
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David, Many thanks for taking the time to attempt to set that survey in
perspective. Really amazing how a science-oriented institution could be
so remarkably "unscientific" Heresay, the basic methodology should be
akin to heresy for this august group. I will be happy to check and correct
our numbers at the University of Kentucky. They bear NO relation to what was
reported. part of the confusion is that we maintain a conservatory in addition
to the small theory and musicology divisions. Thank you again for your good
work on our behalf. Perhaps we shall have the chance to meet in the big
apple....Ron Pen, University of Kentucky
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Tue Oct 31 13:41:25 1995
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 13:41:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
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On that basis there should never again be ratings of any academic
programs (all disciplines). In fact, I am beginning to believe this
myself after learning that so many people take them much more seriously
than I ever could. Only recently have I found your web page and I do
promise to read it carefully.
Best regards,
Barbara
On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Barbara Hampton wrote:
>
> > There may be ways to (mis)interpret data and to (in)accurately report
> > data. For example, you mention that Wesleyan counted its
> > ethnomusicologists and Indiana did not. Was not this a survey of the
> > music departments? Does Indiana have ethnomusicologists in its music
> > department? If Indiana has its ethnomusicologists in the Folklore,
> > Anthropology, and African American Studies programs, why should the
> > institution count them in the music department? Wesleyan's
> > ethnomusicologists, as you noted, are part of its music department. I
> > think that this may be a case representative of not just one point that
> > you make here, but a great many of them.
>
> The report does not rate music departments, it rates doctorate granting
> programs. My point is that a rating system that puts Wesleyan's and
> Indiana's programs on a single scale simply can't mean much, because the
> two programs are not the same thing in the first place.
>
> You should read my whole report. There is no question that the _data_
> sent out to the survey respondents was inconsistent in what it
> represented. The NRC has implicitly acknowledged this in my
> correspondence with them.
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Tue Oct 31 14:00:27 1995
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 14:00:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Honestly, there is no perfect or even near-perfect survey of a large
population of anything. One of the major problems with surveys in urban
complex societies like the US is that people who receive the
questionnaire toss it in the wastebasket because they think that they are
too busy. Did you see the article in the 27 October 1995 Chronicle of
Higher Education where the co-chairman of the study said this, and several
potential respondents who had actually done so, only to be disappointed
about their own rankings, actually admitted it? How do personnel,
method, etc. solve such problems? Follow-up telephone calls? They don't
answer, they have travelled, they really don't think that it is important
and refuse to talk, they refer the questions to someone else......Try a
second letter? Try getting out there in the trenches and doing this kind
of work. People in the social sciences or in music disciplines that use
some of these tools (e.g. questionnaires) have, incidentally, lodged
few complaints for some very obvious reasons. With either greater
resources for follow-up or with a smaller population, there are ways to
build in tighter controls. I am not sure that the NRC could have closed all
the gaps given the conditions under which they had to operate. Having
said that, I do respect what you are doing and understand your points.
They are well taken.
In a friendly and positive spirit,
Barbara
On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Barbara Hampton wrote:
>
> > If you were to prepare a survey, could you describe your methodology and
> > the instruments that you would use for data-gathering? I think that
> > would make a great impression on the scholarly organizations.
>
> Well, I would certainly take quite a long time to design my study, and I
> would certainly call in experts in the field of statistics and opinion
> survey to help. If I was using a large body of data to conduct the
> survey, I would certainly do something to try to insure that the data
> were accurate.
>
> Of course, the National Research Council is an organization devoted to
> doing just these kinds of surveys and reports, so it seems even more
> surprising to me that it apparently did not occur to them to do all of
> these things.
>
> This isn't what I do all the time, so I would think I wouldn't be as good
> at it as the NRC. That this gaping hole in their methodology exists and
> is so obvious to someone in my position suggests that the NRC has either
> resource or personnel problems.
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
> P.S. I think the AMSList would be interested in your comments. Why don't
> you reply to them?
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Tue Oct 31 14:26:05 1995
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 14:26:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Come on, Professor Fenton, if my objective is to shoot down your report, I
would not be writing to you individually. It
is precisely because my statements can be misconstrued in such a way that
I have declined sending them to the list. A healthy critique in the
service of accuracy, not the rankings of ANY program, should produce, in
turn, a stronger NRC report. Perhaps the furor will generate more
cooperation among respondents and more resources for follow-up.
The survey is probably the most useful data-gathering tool for
studies of large populations, but among the least reliable, partly because
it is so expensive and time-consuming to build in controls.
On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Barbara Hampton wrote:
>
> > Please take a closer look at the NRC if you actually believe that its
> > interdisciplinary thrust is not balanced.
>
> Any suggestions as to where I would find that information?
>
> Or are you just trying to shoot down _my_ report so that CUNY doesn't
> have to recognize that their fourth-place standing really doesn't mean
> anything?
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Tue Oct 31 14:26:40 1995
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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 14:26:36 -0500 (EST)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
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The answer to your question is available directly from the NRC. Ask for
their annual report.
On Fri, 27 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Barbara Hampton wrote:
>
> > Please take a closer look at the NRC if you actually believe that its
> > interdisciplinary thrust is not balanced.
>
> Any suggestions as to where I would find that information?
>
> Or are you just trying to shoot down _my_ report so that CUNY doesn't
> have to recognize that their fourth-place standing really doesn't mean
> anything?
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
From bhampton@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu Wed Nov 1 00:04:17 1995
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Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 00:04:14 -0500 (EST)
From: Barbara Hampton
To: "David W. Fenton"
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: RO
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I have decided to bow out of this conversation because CUNY was brought
into it. My focus was on the nature of surveys, their strengths and
weaknesses, as research tools.
On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, David W. Fenton wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, Barbara Hampton wrote:
>
> > On that basis there should never again be ratings of any academic
> > programs (all disciplines). In fact, I am beginning to believe this
> > myself after learning that so many people take them much more seriously
> > than I ever could. Only recently have I found your web page and I do
> > promise to read it carefully.
>
> I am quite firmly of this opinion. I think it's great for CUNY that your
> dept. chair can go to the administration and use the rating to at least
> hold the line on budgets, if not get even more money. CUNY is fortunate
> to have had its programs recognized for their merit.
>
> The unfortunate flip side is that other administrators will use the
> report against departments that didn't do so well.
>
> The only ratings that I think would be meaningful would be ones that were
> very general in their rankings, or very focused in the kinds of programs
> being ranked (i.e., ranking musicology against musicology), and also very
> specific about the kinds of things being ranked.
>
> A simple faculty list just doesn't tell the whole story.
>
> I hope you didn't get the impression from my zealous criticism of the NRC
> that I thought the ratings were worth anything. My feeling is simply
> that, if you are going to rank them, you had better get it as right as
> is humanly possible. The NRC did not, it seems.
>
> Let me know what you think after you've read the whole thing.
>
> David W. Fenton
> New York University
> dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
> http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
>
>
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Date: Thu, 02 Nov 1995 18:45:25 -0500 (EST)
From: HAL
Subject: Re: Your page on USN&WR's ratings
To: dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU
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David,
I was clearing out some email and came upon the following letter. I
can't remember if I have replied to you or not so I am replying again.
I apologize for the lateness of this reply. (Too much work and a baby
on the way have made things CRAZY in my life right now)
I have note found anything that discusses false information in the
USNWR ratings. Of course if one looks at their methodology there is
lots of room for error or misinterpretation. Its a very subjective
method of rating the schools instead of objective.
Please feel free to link to my report or any of the reports that I
have created. They can be found within
http://137.238.50.66/geneseo/mba.html
If there is anything else I can do....don't hesitate to ask.
-hal
~*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^~
* Hal Kirkwood hkirk@uno.cc.geneseo.edu ^
^ Assistant Librarian *
* Fraser Library --------- Business/Computer Science/Math ^
* 1 College Circle *
^ SUNY Geneseo Geneseo, NY 14454 ^
* Work# 716/245-5334 Fax#716/245-5003 *
^ ^
* My opinions do not represent the university. *
^ ^
* WWW Pages: *
^ SUNY Geneseo Libraries Home Page ^
* http://137.238.50.66/ *
^ SUNY Geneseo Women's Steering Committee Home Page ^
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* http://www.crimson.com/fen/bus.html *
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************Your message*******************
> USNWR and Business Week have not been contacted. I have not received
> any static from USNWR or Business Week. To my knowledge neither
> publication has their own Web site.
I have been looking as well, but have not found one.
> I feel that what I have done is similar to creating a written report.
> I have not copied the text of the article. I have cited my sources.
> I have added value to the document for users and I am not receiving
> any monetary gain by using USNWR's rankings.
I would agree with you wholeheartedly. However, in a similar situation,
the NRC demanded that I get their permission to use their data (as well
as to link to their WWW site).
> I chose not to critique the USNWR rankings. Instead I simply compared
> it with another similar ranking (and several more are pending). Thus
> their information is intact; the reader must make their own decisions
> with the available information.
This was why I needed to present the NRC data -- that was the only way I
could establish the pattern of error I was alleging. I also included the
link to the original data in order to let the reader compare and make her
own decision.
> I hope this answers your questions and I hope you have success in your
> project. If there is anything else I can help you with do not
> hesitate to contact me.
My only question (and there's no reason why you would know the answer) --
I have read that it was found that the USNWR rankings were discovered to
be based on data falsified by some schools. Have you heard that?
Thanks very much for your reply. It is very helpful to me in deciding on
my course of action.
I would love to include a link to your report in my consideration of the
issue (holding up your report as an example of responsible use of
publicly available information), but I wouldn't want to attract any
unnecessary heat to your work. Will you permit me, or would you rather I
leave it unmentioned?
Thanks again.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
The following are messages that I sent out. Most are self-explanatory, since I quote the messages I am replying to.
Again, if you decide that you may want to speak to any of these individuals, let me make the initial contact for you.
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Fri Nov 10 14:48:08 1995
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:48:06 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: estelle jorgensen
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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On Fri, 10 Nov 1995, estelle jorgensen wrote:
> Chuck Schmidt has shared your response to the NRC report. I completed
> the survey and I am a music educator. So much for the NRC's exclusion
> of music education! Thanks for all your work in responding to the
> Survey. Is there any way your analysis can be published in the print
> media, i.e., through the College Music Society? Has it been brought to
> the attention of the NRC? Regards, Estelle Jorgensen
I am very pleased to hear that you have perused my report.
You are, in fact, the first person to have admitted that you filled out
the survey. Were you teaching at Indiana at the time? If so, it would
seem rather odd, since Indiana reported only its Musicology/Music History
faculty. Were you one of the survey respondents chosen by the NRC, rather
than from the lists submitted by the institutions?
Please, if you have the time, could you relate to me how you came to
fill out the survey and how you felt about filling it out?
I would like to see my report distributed more widely, whether in its
present form or in some kind of shorter form. The Chronicle of Higher
Education has not yet responded to my inquiry (I should write them
again), and the New York Times does not appear to be interested in
following up their initial article. I should probably write to CMS to see
if they would like to distribute it in some fashion (or, at least, write
about it).
I have in fact corresponded with a representative of the NRC, who threw
up his hands, saying "how could we have checked the results from 4,000
different programs?" When I suggested expert examination of the numbers
or sampling of, say, 5% for accuracy, I received no response.
Check out my web page to see the full details of this.
Please inform all of your colleagues at Indiana about the report. I would
appreciate much more feedback on the details.
Thank you very much for writing -- I look forward to your reply.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Tue Nov 14 10:50:44 1995
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 10:50:43 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: estelle jorgensen
Subject: Re: NRC report
In-Reply-To:
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On Tue, 14 Nov 1995, estelle jorgensen wrote:
> David: Thanks for your reply. I was teaching in the music education
> department at the time I completed the survey. I suspect that I may have
> been chosen by the NRC. I am listed on the Graduate Faculty of I.U.,
> with the musicologists and theorists. All are listed in the Music
> Department; there is no distinction between departments in that listing.
Though there may be no distinction on _that_ list, the NRC survey was
based exclusively (or, so they claim) on lists of faculty collected from
coordinators at each of the rated institutions. Indiana's institutional
coordinator apparently submitted a list of only six faculty (the
musicologists only, as far as I can tell). For the NRC to have chosen you
from another list, they would have to have gone outside their own
carefully defined guidelines for who was being rated and by whom.
I will be inquiring about this with the NRC. I will not mention your name,
however. On the other hand, I would expect that they could probably figure
out your identity if they wanted to. Do you have any objection to my
mentioning that you (without giving your name) are in the field of Music
Ed., that you teach (and taught then) at IU, and that you were asked to
fill out the survey? My point will be to see how they explain this
inconsistency.
I do not in any way mean to question your competency -- far from it! It is
only that one would assume that you, as a music educator, would not
necessarily be fully versed in the research of musicologists and music
theorists. You personally may very well be quite knowledgable of research
and scholars outside your field, but it doesn't seem to me that there
should be any reason whatsoever for individuals in your field to keep
track of what is going on in these other fields. It would seem unwise for
the NRC to choose individuals in your field to rate those in these other
fields.
Please let me know if you have any problem with my contacting the NRC (I
can always leave out the institutional affiliation, if that makes you
feel more comfortable). Also, I would be interested to know how you feel
about the sentiments I have expressed in my previous paragraph.
Thanks so much for you input.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Tue Nov 14 12:51:41 1995
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 12:51:39 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: estelle jorgensen
Subject: Re: NRC
In-Reply-To:
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On Tue, 14 Nov 1995, estelle jorgensen wrote:
> David: I have no problem with your contacting the NRC, although I would
> prefer not to be singled out seeing as I filled out the survey in good
> faith, knowing nothing of the fact that music educators were not
> included. (If they weren't, they should have been since they participate
> in research programs in music.) So, could you leave off mentioning the
> institutional affiliation for now? All this, of course, reveals the
> troubling nature of this survey and the implication that its results
> apply to assessments of scholarly programs in music, presumably including
> music education.
I couldn't agree with you more that any survey claiming to look at
doctoral research programs in music should by definition include Music
Education. You are absolutely right that, given the scope of the survey,
Music Ed. _should_ have been included.
I will omit your affiliation, but I will be certain to relay the gist of
your words, particularly in regard to the fact that you filled it out in
good faith (not to mention the obvious point that Mus.Ed. _should_ have
been included).
I wonder -- did you assume the survey was intended to include Mus.Ed.,
given that you were asked to fill it out? And, did you find that you had
to check the "not enough known" box for many of the programs? Do you
think that you rated the programs with full-scale Mus.Ed. programs known
to you based mostly on your knowledge of that program alone?
Boy! These are some thorny issues!
Thanks, again.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Tue Nov 14 17:13:36 1995
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 17:13:35 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: estelle jorgensen
Subject: Re: Continuing NRC comments
In-Reply-To:
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On Tue, 14 Nov 1995, estelle jorgensen wrote:
> On your last question: I assumed that the survey was intended to cover
> Ph.D programs in music. I checked "not enough known" on some responses,
> but seeing that I read fairly widely, I was aware of the contributions of
> the better published musicologists and theorists. I concluded that in a
> great many graduate research programs in music too few of the faculty
> are engaged in scholarship--that many are unproductive, and the greatest
> correspondence between faculty and research productivity is evident in
> some of the Ivy League schools (and others like them)--a fact we more or
> less know without the help of an NRC study of this sort.
Well, from the perspective of one _inside_ the discipline, this is not
entirely true. The faculties at Yale, and U. Chicago, to name two, have
very recently had great turnover in faculty, so that they are now almost
entirely junior faculty. CUNY is a program with 38 faculty, but they hold
joint appointments at the various campuses around the city, and only two
or three of them actually spend all their time (or even a significant
amount of their time) in the Graduate Center. Harvard is a problematic
program because of the personalities of its particular faculty members.
In my opinion, Columbia belongs nowhere near the top ten, and is certainly
not nearly as good a program as Cornell (which it ties for 11th place).
Columbia belongs well down in the 20s, as far as I'm concerned. I think it
ended up where it did just because it's Columbia University.
Of course, the NRC didn't ask me!
> I was not thinking of music education programs primarily when I filled
> out information on a particular school. I wondered, however, why there
> weren't more questions relating specifically to music education, music
> theory, history and the like. I hope this helps. Estelle
Well, music was not, of course, the focus of the survey -- there were 40
other disciplines. The problem, I think, is that they just didn't know
anything at all about how music programs work.
Thanks.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Wed Nov 15 15:29:52 1995
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 15:29:50 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: estelle jorgensen
Subject: Re: And...
In-Reply-To:
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On Wed, 15 Nov 1995, estelle jorgensen wrote:
> The point you note on high turnovers in some of the schools (particularly
> Yale and Chicago ) is true. I know the situation at Harvard, and I agree
> with your assessment of Columbia and Cornell. I was surprised to see
> Columbia rated in the top 10. I didn't rate it all that high! . . .
(Actually, it tied for 11th.)
> . . .I'm not
> all that familiar with the CUNY program. Indiana should have been higher
> than its rating, although I should mention that Indiana was not on the
> list of schools in the survey I received. I wondered at the time if I
> had been sent a selected list of schools. In fact, I very much wish that
> I had thought to photocopy the entire questionnaire so I could re-check
> my recollection on this point.
Each respondent was given only 50 of the 65 total. It really _is_ too bad
you didn't keep track of the schools you were asked to rate. I'd _love_
to have copies of the faculty lists. Of course, there's absolutely no
reason why you should have thought of such a thing.
> Also, a key point I don't remember is how old the lists of faculty were.
> This could explain why, for example, I failed to catch recent changes in
> some schools; and why, I expect, many others may have, too--especially if
> the sampling procedures were as loose as I think they must have been.
The lists of faculty were supposed to represent the faculty for the Fall
1992 semester. The survey was conducted in Spring 1993, so they _should_
have been pretty accurate. To be fair, the changes at U Chicago and Yale
mostly came after that.
I'm really convinced that, given the fact that you were being asked to
rate people outside your own area of specialization, most people were
pretty much flying blind when they filled out the survey. How could
_anyone_ really know that much about 50 different programs?
I can't thank you enough for your responses -- they have been extremely
helpful.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
From dwf4930@is2.NYU.EDU Fri Nov 17 18:46:35 1995
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 18:46:33 -0500 (EST)
From: "David W. Fenton"
To: Jane Clendinning
cc: dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
Subject: Re: Announcement of a Web site
In-Reply-To: <199511100321.WAA00704@cmr.fsu.edu>
Message-ID:
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On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, Jane Clendinning wrote:
> Please do send a post to the smt-list regarding the web site with more
> information. If you are not subscribed to smt-liat, send the post to me
> directly and I will send it out.
Thank you for the offer to post my announcement. The text follows.
If it is possible, could you set a CC: line so that response to this
message would also come to me and not just the SMTList? I'm sorry to ask
this, since I probably _should_ subscribe to the List, but I'm already
subscribed to so much that my mailbox is overflowing all the time. If
there really is no way to do that, then I guess you should subscribe me
(or tell me to send in my subscription request).
Thanks again for your help.
BEGIN POST
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On September 13, 1995, the New York Times published an article reporting
on a new survey that purported to rate "doctoral-research" programs in 41
different fields at universities across the country ("New Ranking of
Graduate Programs Serves Up Familiar Names and a Few Surprises").
In my corner of the universe, the rankings raised many eyebrows, not so
much for which programs were rated well, as for which programs were not
mentioned. So, I did some investigating, and looked into the specifics of
the report. Eventually, this resulted in a large site on the Worldwide Web
beneath my home page. I am writing to the SMTList to publicize this site
in order to try to generate comment (and, perhaps, action) on the subject.
The URL is: http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930/nrc_report/nrcintro.html.
I would very much appreciate feedback from anyone who reads it. I would
also like to hear from those who were asked to fill out the survey (so
far, only one such person has come to my attention, a disturbing fact in
itself).
What follows is an extended explanation intended to give the gist of my
report for those without Worldwide Web access. Should you desire more
information, please do not hesitate to contact me.
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The NRC study was conducted in two parts. The main point was its survey to
collect ratings. However, previous to that, with the assistance of the
institutions involved, the NRC had collected information about the
programs to be rated.
The way this worked was that the NRC determined which programs at which
schools met its criteria for inclusion, then the NRC wrote to the
president of each institution asking that an "Institutional Coordinator"
("IC") be appointed to collect faculty lists and numbers of students, etc.
The ICs had to turn in their data by Dec. 24, 1992. The information they
submitted was used by the NRC to prepare its questionnaires. In each
field, a minimum of 200 individuals were chosen (from the same faculty
lists submitted by the ICs) as potential survey respondents and sent a
questionnaire. The NRC set a minimum of 100 valid responses for each
field.
Each survey respondent received a listing of faculty for each of 50
programs randomly selected from all the programs being rated (in Music,
there were 65). Respondents were asked to rate these 50 programs according
to two main criteria, generally referred to by the authors of the study as
"Quality" and "Effectiveness."
In regards to "Quality," respondents were asked to ". . .consider only the
scholarly competence and achievements of the faculty. . . ." For
"Effectiveness of Program in Educating Research Scholars/Scientists,"
respondents were asked to consider
. . .the accessibility of the faculty, the curricula, the instructional
and research facilities, the quality of graduate students, the
performance of graduates, the clarity of stated program objectives
and expectations, the appropriateness of program requirements and
timetables, the adequacy of graduate advising and mentorship, the
commitment of the program in assuring access and promoting success of
students historically underrepresented in graduate education, the
quality of associated personnel (post-doctorates, research scientists,
et. al.) and other factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the
research-doctorate program. (App. F, p. 124)
This is a stunning request, I would think, given how difficult it would be
for any single individual to have familiarity of this depth with any
significant number of the 50 programs being evaluated.
Each respondent was given a sheet listing the faculty and the number of
Ph.D.'s awarded 1986-92 along with the six questions designed to elicit
the ratings for "Quality" and "Effectiveness." Thus, the faculty list must
have been the chief information the survey respondents had as the basis
for making their decisions about rating the fifty programs. It seems
unlikely to me that many individuals would have been sufficiently familiar
to have rated fifty programs without an actual reminder of who teaches
there, so I would suspect that most respondents relied heavily on the list
in choosing how to rank most of the fifty programs they were asked to
evaluate. (In fact, the NRC's report identifies Music as one of only a
handful of fields in which a followup survey was necessary because of a
low rate of return -- the final rate of return was 42%, the lowest in the
Humanities, and far below the range of comparable fields.)
All of this sounds like a fairly reasonable way of conducting this kind of
survey, once you have decided that it is worth doing in the first place.
It would all seem perfectly reasonable, if the faculty lists submitted by
the ICs were correct. Unfortunately, the numbers of faculty members
reported for Music programs (clearly derived from the IC faculty lists)
just don't make any sense at all. Everyone I know in the field who has
seen these numbers (see my Table 1, below) immediately remarks on the fact
that Indiana University reports only *6* faculty members, while music
schools of comparable size report much larger numbers:
Michigan 22
Eastman 50
Illinois 74
So, I pulled out the College Music Society _Directory_ and started
counting. Table 1 presents some of my results.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1: Significant Discrepancies in Numbers of Faculty Reported
1 2 3 4 5 6
Mus. Compo- Other Adjuncts,
Institution Reported Actual Ed. sition Faculty Etc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
University of Rochester 50 23 4 7 52 38
University of Illinois 74 21 10 -- 46 6
SUNY-Stony Brook 32 12 -- 0 6 17
U. Texas, Austin 21 16 7 *3 47 10
Indiana University 6 18+ 7 **6 100 14
U. North Texas 83 15 10 4 53 12
Northwestern 35 19 8 -- 32 48
U. California, San Diego 24 18 -- 1 1 7
Florida State 47 20 13 **2 39 7
Ohio State 50 14 15 *2 27 26
University of Washington 28 14 -- -- 21 47
University of Cincinnati 22 11 -- *1 81 41
U. Maryland, College Park 45 14 4 -- 25 12
USC 7 14 -- -- 44 71
Temple 38 11 6 *1 25 63
Wesleyan University 10 5 -- -- 1 11
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes on numbers of Actual Faculty (column 2)
- Counted fields are limited to Theory & Analysis (_Directory_ code 15),
History & Literature (20), Musicology (21), Ethnomusicology (22),
Western Hemisphere (55), History of Jazz (56a) and Systematic
Musicology (59)
Notes on Composition Faculty (column 4)
- "0" means the Ph.D. program has no faculty who are not already counted
in column 2 under another specialization (most often Theory)
- "--" means no Ph.D. program in composition (may have a D.M.A. or D.Mus.)
_and_ no composition faculty not already counted in column 2
For composers _not_ counted in column 2:
"*" indicates D.M.A.
"**" indicates the D.Mus.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The NRC explicitly limited their report to Ph.D.'s, so D.M.A. faculty
should not have been included in the faculty lists. Likewise, it seems
from my contacts with the NRC and from reading their report, that the NRC
intended to exclude Music Education (although at least one of the survey
respondents was a specialiste in Music Education). I tried to count only
those fields which truly engage in research as their principle focus. The
numbers show quite clearly that the NRC relied on data from the ICs that
was, if not inaccurate, certainly not consistent from program to program.
Illinois obviously reported its whole faculty, while Indiana reported only
its Music History/Musicology faculty. Michigan reported the expected
fields, while Eastman reported some middle-ground number that I am unable
to reconcile with the stated scope of the report. Temple reported most of
its faculty even though its only Ph.D. program (Mus. Ed.) has only six
faculty.
These numbers (let alone the programs they represent) are simply not
comparable. A program like Wesleyan's surely cannot be ranked in
comparison to Indiana, particularly since the Indiana list omits faculty
teaching in the very area in which Wesleyan exclusively specializes
(Ethnomusicology). How then could any survey respondent rate these
programs if the faculty lists are so inaccurate and inconsistent?
This is the heart of the matter -- the very data that were the basis for
the survey are inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistently reported. At
first, this led me to believe that the NRC must not have clearly
instructed the ICs on what information they were supposed to have
collected. However, upon examination of the NRC's full report, which
includes copies of all the data collection forms, it is clear that the
instructions were unambiguous. Therefore, there are only two possible
conclusions:
1. Some of the "Institutional Coordinators" were incompetent, or
2. Some institutions deliberately misrepresented their faculty.
Neither of these alternatives is very pleasant, and both lead to the
necessity of discarding the rankings derived from the survey because of
the unsoundness of the very foundation of the survey, the inaccurate data
collected by the ICs.
My report goes into much more detail on this issue and many others, all of
which tend to impeach the reliability of the NRC's survey in almost all
respects. Rather than go into further detail, I will repeat that my full
report is available for viewing from my Worldwide Web page (URL at the
bottom of my signature), and, for those without Web access, upon request I
can send a Windows offline HTML viewer and my report files.
If you see any errors in my Table above, please let me know -- I could
have miscounted. In fact, I would be very pleased if someone with access
to my full report would volunteer to check _all_ my counts from the CMS
_Directory_. I've checked, double-checked and triple-checked, but it's
pretty tedious.
No one should consider any of my criticisms of the NRC report as negative
comments about any of the institutions involved -- the NRC is responsible
for the errors in their report, not the rated institutions.
I am also still interested in hearing from anyone who participated in the
survey, either in preparing the faculty lists, or in filling out the
ratings survey itself. At present, no one at all has come forward to admit
that they participated, which makes me quite suspicious of exactly who was
chosen to fill out the survey in the first place.
All comments, suggestions, complaints, rants and encouragement welcome!
David W. Fenton
New York University
dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~dwf4930