Honest and Empty
“There will always be some leaders who choose to manage for the short term … particularly when they hold the highly liquid equity stakes that the leadership of private-sector institutions sometimes receive as part of their compensation. This isn’t a theoretical issue; it has happened.”
Andrew Rossen, quoted in ‘Change.edu’ and the Problem With For-Profits by Robert M. Shireman
I work in the proprietary sector, and I think that Rossen is correct. You cannot offer huge salaries and bonuses for short=term profitability and expect executives and managers to think long-term. In such a situation, as Shireman rightly points out, “The temptations to do ill are unrelenting.” Interestingly, Shireman calls Rosen’s ideas both “refreshingly honest” and “empty.” It’s hard to disagree.
What I don’t like about Shireman, though, and other critics of the for-profit sector, is that they do not go far enough. This is a systemic problem of neoliberalism’s relentless market religion. It’s certainly true that our sector of the education system needs strong regulation. At this point in history, though, it should be obvious that the entire system, profit or not, needs similar reforms.
“Our working conditions are student’s learning conditions”
I often fell like a curmudgeon, trolling around and finding stories about things like the crazy Hench-woman, Lisa Troyer, who resigned after it was suspect– and then more or less demonstrated– that she had sent anonymous email in an attempt to manipulate the faculty governing process. A recent UI Faculty Senate resolution called Troyer’s actions part of ’”a broad pattern of surveillance and intrusion into legitimate faculty governance deliberations” (“UI senate unanimous in criticism of Hogan“).
That’s bourgeois professor speak for “systemic corruption.” As an anecdote for cynicism, then, I try to do some reading about positive things, trends that seem to be moving education in a good direction. I liked “The Time is Now: Report from the New Faculty Majority Summit” for its wonderfully strident call for action. I wish the author would focus more or organizing and less on lobbying and accreditation but I cannot disagree with Bessette‘s call to begin to make university labor exploitation more publicly visible.
Also reassuring is that certain segments of the university system– the small liberal arts colleges–seem to be reinventing “an institutional history of activism” for social justice (“Social Justice Revival“). There’s no doubt that this trend has a lot to do with the fierce competition for students, a competition sharpened by recession, but it’s still a welcome trend. What we need, of course, is a movement that would put these pieces together. A just labor policy ought to be the start of any social justice program at any university.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.