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Connect the Dots: Academic Labor Affects Student Success

(A humble rant.)

The decisions we make have unintended consequences that can define us for years to come. 

Certainly this is true for individuals, but it is no less a fact for institutions, and for higher education as a whole. If you try to talk to department chairs, deans, or others about faculty labor practices—the growing ranks of disposable adjuncts and part timers—you are likely to get a polite demurral. A meeting beckons, there are papers to grade, a cat box with someone's name on it. It's true that academic labor equity is a losing issue and has been for a long time. That's why many will write about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, or other national publications. But no one inside the Ivory Tower who has primary responsibility for executing these policies is much interested in talking about it. No one likes it, but no one -- even those at the highest levels of academia -- believes they have the power to change the situation.

It is also true that most of non-academic America has little sympathy for the overeducated and underemployed — the "PhDs on Food Stamps.” And I have to say, I get it. When I read of the legion of hapless, debt-ridden, struggling adjunct faculty part of me wants to react unsympathetically: Well, who the hell asked you to get a PhD in (Art History/Linguistics/Ethno-Botany)? Certainly no one put a gun to my head. But, if no one asked us to pursue higher education as a calling and career, we were indeed called. We believed in the primacy and necessity of higher education for economic, scientific, and cultural advancement, and for the health of democracy and the body politic. We wanted these things not for ourselves primarily, but to help others and our communities at large achieve them. When the necessary labor of teaching, learning, and service becomes economically untenable for contingent faculty (many of whom have PhDs, publications, teaching awards, fellowships, and excellent professional evaluations and references), when the system devolves into a race to the bottom to pay the New Faculty Majority, we begin (and will continue) to lose faith. Faith can persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary; but eventually, faith must also feel justified. And it is not just the graduate assistants—the talented mathematicians or philologists who abandon dreams of graduate study and a life of teaching, research, and service—who lose faith. The students, the public at large, and some of our policy makers are losing faith in higher education and its much vaunted value proposition.  The persistence of inequitable labor practices in teaching and learning in institutions whose other policies and rules have made them test-beds for some of the greatest advances in affirmative action, gender equity, and social responsibility can no longer be overlooked as a minor contradiction.

Questions of Policy

When you can wrangle a response to the question, "how did we get here?" you get two answers. It's been this way for going on thirty years or more. And it wasn't deliberate — it wasn't a "policy."  It was an accidental juggernaut or a series of crisis responses. I think it's time to recognize that the de-professionalization of teaching resulted from deliberate policy choices. A policy is a repeated set of administrative actions that bring about a consistent result.  We have to conclude that the present academic labor crisis is not a crisis at all, but the result of long term policy decisions. It may not be a system anyone wished for.  It may be the result of decisions made long ago, before anyone knew how they would play out. Nevertheless, contingent faculty do most of the teaching, for inequitable pay, and under difficult working conditions,  and very few are willing to stick their necks out to try and change that fact.

Should faculty labor policy change? I don't know of any person or organization who claims that things are as they should be, and nothing needs to change. What is lacking is institutional will.
Why should it change?

• Labor equity is a simple question of fairness — equal pay for equal work.  
• The steady de-professionalization of teaching means that fewer and fewer faculty are tenure related. This leads to an erosion of faculty claims to governance and legitimacy when the majority have no role in faculty governing bodies, no meaningful roles for departmental service, and no say in hiring and retention. The de-professionalization of teaching means that fewer and fewer faculty take on administrative duties.
• A two tier, or multi-tier labor system creates tension and ill-will within departments.
• The current non-system of adjunct labor is inefficient. The need to find, hire, retain, and ultimately discharge so many faculty in short time leaves department chairs scrambling mere days before a term begins to find qualified people to teach crucial classes in the major or general education curriculum.

This is not a Manichean struggle between good and evil. It's a question of policy and priorities. And faculty labor equity is not now and has not been (with notable exceptions) a priority for most state-affiliated institutions of higher education.

The Current Focus on Student Success

If faculty labor conditions do not create the need for action and forceful rhetoric among senior administrators and faculty, factors commonly gathered under the rubric of "Student Success” provide a stark contrast.  Institutions have, motivated  either by self-study or external scrutiny, looked to the conditions that affect student graduation rates.  What helps them graduate with a bachelor's degree within six years? What teaching practices and support programs help them to get through the classes that have high attrition and failure rates? Institutional researchers look at many descriptors—transfer status, age, whether a student is a first-generation college student. And now more and more are examining the faculty status of those who teach the classes, and what interactions in class and outside of class students have with tenure related faculty and adjunct and part time faculty. There is a growing consensus that time spent in consultation with a professor outside the classroom (informally, in office hours, after or before class) is an important predictor of student success. Who has the time and resources—like a private office, like regular and predictable employment year to year at one institution—to initiate and respond to such interactions with students? Faculty on the tenure track, or those with tenure.

And most importantly, there is a growing body of research that shows that over-reliance on adjunct teaching negatively affects student persistence and success. Among the findings:

• Freeway fliers cannot spend time outside class with students, one of the main predictors of student success. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, adjuncts spend less than half the amount of time outside class with students than do tenure related faculty.
• Adjuncts often lack access to basic resources, like an office, a phone, a place to meet with students.
• The current “system” of adjunct hiring, of fill-in professors, causes gross inefficiencies in administration.  
• An over-reliance on adjunct labor also leads to discontinuities of service and class offerings.  Adjunct faculty are less likely to be able to form the long term mentorship relationships that help students through a long uphill climb from first time freshman, or returning student, to college graduate.

Major studies are now being completed on this link between faculty labor and student completion rates, and finally some are asking—how can we organize faculty labor to better serve students, rather than ourselves?

What can be done? When we survey the de-professionalization of college teaching and its effects on student persistence and success, several alternatives present themselves.

• Doing nothing will lead to a further erosion of confidence in higher education,  a further erosion of the tenure system,  a further erosion of faculty claims to self governance, further erosion of our graduation rates,  more students taking longer to get degrees, more debt, and more doubt about the legitimacy of higher education’s claims for its economic and social necessity.
• Commit to regularizing faculty in core liberal arts disciplines: math, science, humanities — those who teach for a living. Set goals and targets; make these part of the performance based budgeting criteria and accountability standards that are in vogue today. Institutions need to commit to making the regularization of contingent faculty in disciplines where the faculty in question are not professionals working in some field such as law or business, and who teach as a way of making extra money or giving something back to the field.
• Create state- and system-level policies that support adjunct faculty. The University of Maryland System created system policies on the hiring, retention, and resource support for adjuncts. The system board and leadership of the University of Maryland made this a priority not out of sympathy for part time faculty with no benefits, but out of their sense of obligation to the students.
• Graduate programs need to rethink their admissions policies, and grad students need to prepare themselves for careers other than teaching.
• Adjuncts need to organize and be prepared to work as partners with their tenure-related colleagues and administrators.
• Contingent faculty need meaningful roles in shared institutional and departmental governance.
• Accreditation bodies are starting to and need further to look at faculty labor conditions impacting on student outcomes. Labor practices should become one of the standard metrics of accreditation.

We have very little time to make the necessary changes. If we continue as we are, we will be a few (and fewer) tenure-related faculty, and the rest of us will be academic piece workers. And tenure will be the province of the current and passing generation of professors, to be reminisced over as some halcyon period—the mid to late twentieth century. The twentieth century is over and will soon be a fading memory. It is time to create a new and equitable system of faculty labor that supports student success above all. When all faculty are supported with regular and predictable teaching duties with equitable pay, students will reap the benefits.
 

Beowulf (2007) and Millennial Masculinity

An orphaned work. Occasionally, my medievalist past intrudes upon the present. Like today, when I heard that the British Library was putting images of Cotton Nero A.x online - best day of the week. This essay was a super-condensed version of a prefatory chapter for a book that will likely not be written, as it would require archival research in Germany and elsewhere (hey, if you want to fund it, I'll gladly listen to offers). So this essay was intended for Filmstory.org - a great web project that I recommend to all. But they decided not to use it. It's probably for medievalists and people who care about how we read Beowulf (if we read it all). It's too short to fully develop an argument (the editors wanted 1500 words or fewer), but it will fill some space here until I have something more appropriate to put in its place. Personally, I think it's never a bad time to poke holes in myths that have outlived their utility: that Beowulf is a simple-minded story about heroes and monsters, when men were men and women were women (unless they were monsters). 

Beowulf, Beowulf (2007), and Millennial Masculinity

If there's such a thing as Man Lit, this is it: a plot-driven, action-brimming, hero-of-heroes story line, man vs. monster, battle to the death—just the thing to get your blood flowing and make you feel a little like a rampaging medieval Viking.¹ 

Jack Murnighan aptly describes Beowulf's status as pop culture artifact in his drive-by tour of fifty works of canonical literature. Along with other medieval texts such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Murnighan surveys Beowulf and pronounces it "the most macho" of all English texts. Murnighan’s emphasis on an uncomplicated medieval masculinity that is the ancestor of its evidently diminished post-modern counterpart reaches for that apparently uncomplicated spectation, if not outright celebration, of violence (“man vs. monster, battle to the death”) that forms the core aesthetic vision of films such as 300, and the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf. (Curiously, Murnaghan makes no mention of the women of the poem, apart from Grendel's mother, who are politically and socially crucial to the story.) 

The investment of Beowulf with machismo is not new; it is reflected in many of the critical commonplaces that have obtained about the poem since at least the 19th century. As well, scholarly research and criticism on Old English literature often discusses the warrior ethos, the lord and thegn, the centrality (and necessity) of war and violence. Beowulf as celebration of the fighting spirit is very much an artifact of Britain’s violent and defensive role in 20th century history. Between the two great wars, J.R.R. Tolkein pronounced it a work of art by an “Englishman” and subsequently wrested control of it from the grip of German-speaking philologists, thus making it safe for England to claim Beowulf as its foundational literary document.² So the current idea that Beowulf is somehow literature for guys is a post-modern sequel to its long history of being a viewfinder for backward-looking constructions of national identity.

Despite being imbricated in English nationalism and identity, Beowulf (the poem) has been problematical source material for cinema and has suffered a comically low reputation in the late 20th century.³ Now, however, Beowulf is the only medieval English text that can boast several major feature films, an untold number of graphic novels, a video game, and an opera (all between 2000 and 2010), to say nothing of the new translations that appear every year. And all this is all the more curious, as the medieval text is a largely compulsory (read—or not—and promptly forgotten after the test) part of American curriculum simply because it is old. So, why the renewal of interest in the 2000s and why another major Hollywood film? And what does the 2007 film adaptation have to say about our own need for, and lack of, moral certainty in the calculated use of violence? We can only speculate, but it seems to be true that Beowulf’s stock rises in times of war. Post-9/11, and in the midst of a decade of war, English literature’s most macho text seems to resonate more with American audiences than any time in the last half-century.

The 2007 Beowulf film adaptation by Robert Zimeckis (co-written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) has only a glancing relationship to the poem (in terms of action and plot), but in its ham-handed campy way, it accesses some of the important questions raised by the poem: where do we look for the origins of the violence, feud, and fratricide that plague us—and does knowing those points of origin make us any wiser? What is the difference between heroism and monstrosity if they are only positions on the same continuum? If heroes and monsters are not born but made by narration (Beowulf by the stories of Breca and his own narration; Grendel by the Northern mythologies and stories of giants and floods),⁴ then when is it time to rethink our investment in heroism and confront our own monstrosity? Unexpectedly, perhaps, Beowulf (2007) forces a reappraisal of the original text’s accretion of mythologies of gender surrounding masculinity, femininity, and the ways that the “monstrous” is created within grey areas surrounding gender and heroism.

In this supposedly most macho of all source material, the filmmakers take a number of thematic risks and plot liberties that paradoxically (but not subtly) push to the surface the Old English poem’s subtexts of gender, sexuality, and identity. Beowulf (2007) takes perhaps the least erotic of all medieval epics and infuses it with digitally enhanced sexual brio in the character of Grendel’s mother, acted and voiced by Angelina Jolie. Mom’s ferocious maternal attachment to her misunderstood son is certainly present in the original—as in the Old English text, she kicks the most ass in taking revenge for Grendel, and her violence is all the more understandable and sympathetic because it is maternal, not monstrous. Indeed, what kind of mother would she be if she did not take revenge? The semi-mythical world of Beowulf, as we are constantly reminded in the poem and its surrounding critical discourses—including this 2007 adaptation, is one of violent feuds, where the death of kinsmen must be avenged.

Of course, the film’s major deviation from the plot and the “heroic ethos” of the text would appear to be Beowulf’s liaison with the aggrieved mother, impregnating her to give her another son in exchange for kingship and heroic status, and his subsequent deception about his dispatching of her. So in the poem they fight, not the other thing, right? Yes, but as Dana Oswald points out, the text deliberately shows their battle in somewhat sexualized terms, noting that as they fight Beowulf “falls on his back, while Grendel’s mother sits astride him, having pulled her short sword” (‘Ofsæt þa þone selegyst/ ond hyre seax geteah. . .’).⁵ This passage, having caused scholars a bit of embarrassment in the past, often finds its translation neutered. The fury of the battle between Boeowulf and Grendel's mother in the poem is of a greater intensity and degree than the struggle between Beowulf and Grendel, and Beowulf (2007) exaggerates that erotic subtext and elevates it to text—in this case, visual.

The final sequence of the poem and film, in which Beowulf must rescue his tribe (the Geats) from a marauding dragon, is, only connected in the poem to the sequence of events concerning Grendel by a short transitional passage that basically says that fifty years have passed and Beowulf is now king of the Geats through an unlikely series of events (he was not in line to inherit the throne initially). The film’s major adjustment to the Grendel/Mother story (Beowulf’s impregnation of the mother) leads to its other major shift: the dragon that menaces Geatland is in fact her child and Beowulf’s child. This connection between Beowulf and the dragon clumsily literalizes the nagging subtextual doubt the poem raises about the value and unintended consequences of violence-driven heroism. The dragon awakened in the poem is guardian of a war-hoard of treasure and a single cup of that treasure has been stolen by a greedy or desperate servant. Beowulf, now aged, decides to tackle the dragon alone rather than with a retinue of soldiers; it is a fatal mistake.

Beowulf has been a hero so long, he does not know how to lead or follow when necessary. No longer superhuman, his fate is foreordained. Now sitting ducks, the Geats foretell their own demise not by monsters, but by neighboring tribes who have been at bay, waiting for the moment when Beowulf (who has no heir in the poem) would die, and leave the Geats hero-less. Although Beowulf was a great hero, the poem leaves no doubt as to the Geats’ ultimate doom and Beowulf’s lack of foresight and vision in the difference between leadership and heroism. The film’s attempt to dramatize the unexpected wages and unexamined bases of heroism -- just as the poem did -- make it more than a violent video game spectacle based on a thousand year old poem. In making literal Beowulf's own investment in creating a mythology of heroism, the film sends a clear message about the need for collective action -- leadership and collaboration-- rather than go-it-alone macho heroism. 

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[1] Jack Murnighan, Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (New York: Three Rivers, 2009) 58.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkein, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), 245–95. The essay has been anthologized many times and is available online as well.

[3] Annie Hall (1977): “Just don’t take any class where they make you read Beowulf” (writer and director: Woody Allen).

[4] Jeffery J. Cohen. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: U Minnesota, 1999). 

[5] Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2009) 95.

DH without the D, e-learning with a silent 'e'

I admit it: I grow old; the bottoms of my trousers are indeed rolled (except when cycling in my man-pris, when I am merely middle aged and embarassing). I describe myself (depending on the audience) as an erstwhile technologist, digital humanist, and e-learning specialist. And because I remember doing 'humanities computing' as a graduate student, before the advent of DH, I know that Digital humanities is not new, although it may be the It Girl of the MLA. Digital humanities is a response to the old split between quantitative and qualitative knowledge. The classical form of this split is the association of the algorithm with control, and narrative with openness, creativity, and human development (see Braman, "Tactical Memory"). DH is one way of bridging that gap and creating a productive nexus between the two. 

I spent a little while reading around in a curiously embodied and ponderous volume, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2012). (Was there no debate about whether to publish digital only?) It contains many fine essays, posts, and research by people I know and know of, and respect. My initial response to the still-vexed question of "what is DH?" is very much along the lines of Kathleen Fitzpatrick (who without meaning to has shaped my thinking in ways I am still only realizing myself), that it is just the "humanities, done digitally" (13). And that in itself is no small thing, because the humanities - done on vellum, paper, punch card, or network - are no small thing. I also noted with curiosity a piece in the same volume by Jamie "Skye" Bianco, who adduces several telling quotations by DHers who contend that cultural studies are "worthless" and critical theory never achieved anything (96). If cultural studies are worthless, why bring the power of technology to bear upon it? If critical theory never achieved anything, it's because its practitioners never tried to achieve anything with it. Theory changes the way people think, their assumptions, and their values. People must do things because of these changes, or not. Saying that theory never achieved anything is like saying that technology never achieved anything. It's true. People achieve things (or fail to). 

It is wondrous to note the vitality and creativity of this field, now it has been constituted, described - and let's be frank - funded as one. But what it is is the creation of humanistic learning for a networked audience. That is, the humanities as always already public. So the digital humanities can burst the bubble of a liberal arts college. Digital humanities means that any institution with network resources can create new knowlede - not just research universities (but that may change). 

Digital humanities enables what Franco Moretti long ago called distant reading, and a kind of real-time collaborative close reading. These modes of analysis were always possible before (CommentPress is basically extra-monastic marginal commentary. Just a little bit faster). They just took a lot longer. It is both quantitative, and hyper-qualitative. But perhaps the hyper-qualitative will become the merely qualitative in short order. 

My concern is that when we label anything "e" or "digital" – we are creating rhetorical space for those inside and outside academia to respond with retrenchment or deliberate misunderstanding. When you say e-this or digital that you are creating the rhetorical space for haters and know nothings to say "harrumph." Or for finance and administration officials to see dollar signs everywhere. Or for uncritical techno boosters to say oooh and aaah. Perhaps the triumphalist tone of some DH rhetoric is warranted, and resistance is futile. 

For digital humanities to change humanities for the better it must engage the public  and be open to public critique not just academic critique. And so perhaps it needs the "digital" appellation for a bit longer.  

When we are at last freed from the desktop, laptop, and the isolation of the office, we will do digital humanities without the self-consciously digital, and e-learning with a silent "e"—a post-digital humanism where everyone is Steve Austin (and therefore no one is) and the Borg is a bad dream to be avoided. Hope I'll be around at least to see it. 

 Caveat lector: if this essay rambles or seems disjointed, blame Siri, as it was composted on the eye flow. No wait. Blame organic master. Siri never makes my steaks.

Notes: researching the material and social value of the humanities

Who is researching the material and social value of the Humanities, especially literature? Simon Gikandi asks "what work does literature perform" (PMLA 127.1, Jan. 2012) which is the same way I pose the question to students: not 'what does the text mean' but 'what is it doing?' 

By talking about social value, I do not want to fall back on arguments about the "canon," "great books," or "eternal truths." These have been generally ineffectual, and they do not take account of the humanities as they are currently constituted. 

Christopher Newfield (Unmaking the Public University) notes that opponents of the public university and those who see no value in humanities research at public u's think this way because they say that the humanities just stir up peoples emotions, they are polemical, they fetishize identity politics, and encourage left-leaning rabble rousing on the public dime, and contribute nothing to the essential activities of STEM and increasing the GDP. This argument is wrong on its face, but what if we were to engage with public distrust and suspicion of the humanities by pointing out the positive material and social value of the humanities: this could be as simple-minded as pointing to (and quantifying) the multibillion dollar Shakespeare/Austen industrial-complex; the immense and continuing value of the public domain as a resource for value creation; the fact that Steve Jobs could not have been Steve Jobs without taking calligraphy, literature, and design at Reed, etc. A simple economic argument for the value of the humanities seems to be where the conversation is stuck at the moment (and the humanities -- the basis for all original university curricula -- are being challenged, questioned, and actively diminished by powerful people within the academy like never before), and unless we engage at this level, we are not likely to be able to move the discussion forward. 

Researching social value would be challenging, I suspect, but not impossible. There must be a strong social reason for the proliferation of MFA programs in the last twenty years, not just "because people will pay for it." That doesn't explain the desire. There must be a strong social reason for the almost bottomless demand for courses in literature and the humanities in spite of the overwhelming apparent financial disincentives for obtaining a BA in English (much less a graduate degree). How does the  subjective encounter with literature become social response, either in or outside of the classroom? How do people understand literature as shaping values, and thus action, or choices? This would likely be qualitative research that asks that people find reasons for themselves for studying the humanities. "Easy A" or "it's all subjective" cannot be the whole picture. 

Granted that not everything measurable is valuable, and not everything that is of value can be measured, but I am interested in whatever metrics are availalble. 

Step 1: look for existing data sets that measure the long-term social and economic impacts of humanistic study and endeavor? NEA/NEH? 

 

Some questions about and implications of S 2098, The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act

This bill, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) would require all institutions that are defined as higher education entities under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to participate in a new national data system that tracks:

• rates of remedial enrollment
• "Other information determined necessary by the Secretary [of Education] to address alignment and adequate preparation for success in postsecondary education"
• data on individual wages and earnings after graduation "disaggregated by educational program, degree received, educational institution, employment sector, and State" (13).

In other words, this is going to be a huge data collection job for states and individual institutions; so much so that the Act provides for a transition plan to put the act in effect.

In the name of “transparency,” Wyden's bill seeks to collect data nationwide to correlate 'future earnings' with costs for pursuing a certain major at a given institution. This will, of course, impose a great burden, but perhaps a burden that institutions have earned with their zeal for increasing tuition. This bill seems to operate on two assumptions: that education is primarily about individual economic advancement and that when you go college you are purchasing a product, rather than engaging in a community of practice.

Whatever one thinks of the language of "outcomes" and "economic value," the continued slow ecnonomy coupled with rising education costs points to the need—especially at state colleges—for a more mindful approach to higher education on the part of all, including students. Exploring classes and majors, and learning for the sake of learning used to be a lot of fun when tuition was affordable. It still can be. But perhaps more than ever, students need to think strategically even when they are not ready to do so.

As I have noted the rising cost of tuition, the relatively high attrition rates in undergraduate education, and the number of students who delay graduation to avoid repaying student debt, I tell my own students who are majoring or thinking of majoring in English: there probably isn’t a high-paying job waiting for you on the other end of your BA. English and other liberal arts disciplines demand that you create your own career path, either with graduate study or certification in a profession, or by thinking of yourself as a kind of intellectual entrepreneur. Employers across the board say they value and see too little evidence of critical thinking, creativity, and clear writing and communication among today’s graduates (see Arum and Roska, Academically Adrift)—presumably, this is the skill set you will develop while studying in this discipline. You will have to use your training in English for something, but you will have to figure out what that something is.

Even if most students knew this before they heard it from me, this sermonette has not won me any teaching awards, as you might imagine. 

Wyden’s Bill converges with larger state and national trends on data gathering in higher education, to make it more accountable. The Oregon Education Investment Board and its achievement compacts, while avoiding the rhetoric of accountability, will track similar data on graduation, remediation, and will also set as policy goals increasing the number of STEM and health graduates.

This Act does not seek to change educational outcomes, but rather ensure "transparency" in pricing. I'm all for transparency. I still wonder if we need all these data collected to know that humanities BA's, on average, earn less than graduates in business and finance. But it raises an interesting question about the possibility of tiered pricing, an idea that has been recently floated and rejected (on a supply/demand basis) at Santa Monica College. Should majors that expect to earn more for their graduates cost more per credit hour?

Should we incentivize certain majors in the public or economic national interest, like CS, or nursing? If we are headed toward a new regime where either states or the federal government will use their power as partial funders or subsidizers to affect educational and institutional outcomes, shouldn't we be thinking of, perhaps, subsidizing tuition (either through scholarships or tuition remission) for students to study STEM or health professions?

Or should we perhaps have a single tuition schedule for the core curriculum, and then tier the prices for majors based on expected earnings? If you enter a relatively high risk/low reward field like creative writing, should you be paying the same tuition as a higher paying field/major like engineering?

In other words, if education is a product, and not a process, shouldn't the price reflect the expected performance of the product?

Caveat lector: all opinions expressed are those of the author. May contain trace amounts of sarcasm or satire. Not to be mistaken for actual policy research or analysis.