Monthly Archives: June 2012

I’ve said before that the development of online education here in the U.S. (and so, perhaps, elsewhere) is a race between the very fast for-profit Hares and the very slow public Tortoises.   The Hare has seemed to be ahead over the last decade (with some help from its friends in high places) but eventually the Tortoise will win. (Unless, of course, the hare’s friends rig the game.) Slowly, one tiny step at a time, the public sector is developing its online education system. It’ll win eventually but its progress is agonizingly slow.

The Hare has suffered some real losses recently as the government begins to try to punish wrongdoing and to introduce some sort of regulatory sanity into higher education. Given the Tea Party shoot-yourself-in-the-foot gang now wagging the Republican dog, it’s been an unnecessarily slow process.  I think those guys would fight against food regulation even if their own grandmothers were dying from eating salmonella ridden dog food. Still, the for-profits seemed to have been slowed if not stopped.

Now, as it turns out, we have a scandal at the University of Virginia which seems to be a case of the Hare trying to sneak into the Tortoise’s territory. President Teresa A. Sullivan was fired– and then “reinstated”– because she has been Tortoise like (public good over private profit) in her development of an online program. It’s classic 21st century capitalism. First the online industry expands bubble-like on pubic money, then they destroy themselves out of greed, and finally they offer their services to the public as experts.

This is going to be a very good week for teaching some very bitter historical ironies. A long, long time ago, and seemingly far far away, a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, trying to fight Hillary Clinton’s (now our Secretary of State) health care plan, came up with an idea: instead of a government-run health insurance system, we need a national individual mandate that would make it illegal not to have health care insurance. If you couldn’t afford it, the government would help.

It was a nutty idea but the right successfully defeated national health care in the U.S., (again) or perhaps the Democrats shot themselves in the foot and defeated their own bill, and the individual mandate remained Republican party dogma until President Obama decided to use it as a way to create a workable compromise with his opponents. It worked, at least to some extent, and at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is an individual mandate, now considered the work of the devil by the same right that created it.

Meanwhile President Bush packed the Supreme Court with a gaggle of ideologues– the ones who unleashed Citizens United. These ideologues will decide, this week, in a bizarrely twisted irony, if the individual mandate is constitutional.  (It didn’t seem to matter over the last 20 years). And, of course, at least one of the ideologues, Clarence Thomas, has direct personal links to the Heritage Foundation (his wife, Virginia Thomas, herself so ideological slouch, works for them, sort of, now and again).

This matters to everyone– every year without national health care is a year all but the super rich grow poorer– but it has a particular poignancy to those of us trying to make a living piecing together some sort of life by picking up online classes wherever we can.  The for-profit health care system makes this process horribly difficult (unless you have a spouse with a traditional job and benefits). Maybe the last historical irony is be that losing the mandate will be the fist step towards national health care.

There is a problem in unions, that in their very formation they were sectional organizations, that the essence of unions is that you’re defending a group of workers. You’re not actually thinking about the class as a whole, or about other dimensions of workers’ lives. On occasion, in spite of that sectionalism, you see the potential of workers because they go beyond it, as they did when they were mobilizing in Madison. But the problem is that the structure of unions, and their culture and their logic, takes them back to returning to being very instrumental. The problem with being sectional and just thinking about yourself is you also tend to think instrumentally. You look to your leaders as—you pay some insurance for being in the union, you give them some dues, and they’ll deliver. And the leaders think in terms of “well, we occasionally have to mobilize the workers but we shouldn’t exaggerate that or really open the door to mass mobilization, because we just want to mobilize them enough to make a deal.”

Sam Gindin, Interviewed by Doug Henwood

If I get lucky, the other people at the gym are like me and like to work out in a cool, dark room, listening to something interesting, in my case, on a Touch Pad. If I am less lucky, the weightlifters are clanging around on the free weights and listening to loud bad rock music– why can’t they ever be Jack White fans?– or this older man is milling around, hardly working out at all, and inexplicably listening to the View on one or more noisy televisions. Yesterday was a good day so I listened to Behind the News.

I know it’s a longish quote– and post– but Doug Henwood’s interview with Sam Gindin struck a nerve because I have had a lot of experience with union instrumentality. It’s why I don’t work at a traditional university. I spent several years slogging away in an English department and I did well. I had a book in the works (published a few years ago now) and published articles, I had a lot of friends, I won university-wide grants a few times, my student evaluations were consistently high. I did everything right.

In year four I agreed to develop a new course in Professional Writing; that was my mistake. Nothing else changed, but that course failed each time I taught it. I just could not get it to work.  That’s not uncommon with new courses, of course. Suddenly I had two classes that had horrible evaluations. I should have simply refused to teach it again until I had tenure but I was convinced that one or two bad classes could not wipe out my very strong record. After all, I had nearly 30 other sets of good to great evaluations. I was wrong.

A small group of English faculty– three or four people– decided that they had to get rid of me for reasons that they have never explained.  They had allies in the administration, too, but at bottom it was nothing more than the sort personal animosity that too often poisons academic culture. Colleagues on the university-wide tenure committee voted to give me tenure, again and again. More faculty sent in public letters of support than had voted on the committee that denied me tenure. I had a union and they hired a lawyer for me and sued the university.

In one way, I don’t want to complain about the union; these were people who supported me and provided resources in my defense without hesitation. On the other hand, the union’s approach was limited, just as Gindin suggests, by its instrumentality, that is, by its narrow focus on contract legalities. I thought my case had larger implications and that it said a lot about how the tenure system can break down and what we could to fix it. That larger, more public argument was never seriously considered.

We fought the university on contractual grounds, it went to arbitration, and I won a not-so generous settlement but lost my job. In effect, the administration can legally fire anyone it likes for more or less any reason it likes as long as it follows the correct administrative procedures. That’s all that the arbitration decided. The university doesn’t have to be fair, it just had to win the legal debate.  If I had to lose, then I would  have rather lost in a fight over something more important than a few key terms in a contract.