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Americans are most sentimental about two things: children and small towns. You’d think, then, that we’d protect them as carefully as the French protect baguettes and cheese. Not even close. Our education system is a shambles, we don’t have universal health care, even for children, and we long ago destroyed the agricultural system that underwrote the iconic Midwestern small town. Who needs enemies when we’ve got sentimentality like this?

In online education, which is so far a largely adult realm, this sentimentality revolves– encrusts?– the idea of community, symbolically linked to that small-town ideal in which everyone knows their neighbor and everyone looks out for one another. Crime rates are low, teenagers don’t have sex, the church is full on Sundays, mom’s in the kitchen and dad’s at work. What’s missing from these ideas of online community, in other words, is the real world, full of conflict and contention and change.

What’s fascinating, then, about Computer World’s report on the Career Education Corporation’s award winning Virtual Campus (“Online learning meets online community”) is it’s emphasis on the physical infrastructure rather than the relationships among people. I suppose that this might simply reflect the natural bias of the source, but I think the danger of sentimentality is very real, maybe especially in online education, which has an uphill battle to fight against dehumanization.

The central trope here is the idea of student experience, usually described in an active voice: “The resulting Virtual Campus lets students attend … visit … meet … access … and participate…” It’s always interesting the way these descriptions minimize the role of teachers and staff; there’s no parallel paragraph on what the software allows them to do. If this is a community, it’s one in which the servants are expected to be as invisible as they are efficient.

I’m more than a little hesitant to write about the shootings at Alabama. It sounds like an incident that we can use as an occasion to talk about the horrors of the current academic status system, which too often licenses the worst sorts of pettiness and nepotism. My sense, though, is that while tenure is involved, the real story at Alabama is the more familiar tale of our cultural embrace of violence, our cowardly gun control laws, and especially our terrible mental health care system.

It makes us look bad enough, in other words, even without thinking about tenure. (In any case, “The Trouble with Tenure” gives it a good shot.) Still, I could not help but think about this incident, and about tenure, when I was reading about something that on the surface is totally unrelated: the emerging “Free Culture” movement, which recently held it’s first conference in Washington, D.C. It’s not as media-sexy as Tea Bagging, but in the long run Free Culture is much more important.

The students complain that their promotion of “free software and open standards, open access scholarship, open educational resources, network neutrality, and university patent policy” faces ambivalence on the part of some professors. I think that to a student, a tenured professor at a large research school or a small literal arts college, seems privileged beyond all imagining. They teach a few classes, and write a few articles (on a subject of their choice), get paid well, and can’t be fired.

In fact, most don’t have tenure, are not on the so-called tenure track, don’t have time to write much of anything, have too many students, and don’t get paid well. With certain exceptions, the ever-shrinking groups of privileged professors (as the tenure story reminds us)– are more and more interested in protecting their own material and social interests. It’s not surprising that students would find some professors ambivalent about the political risks– and material losses– of Free Culture.

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”-Margaret Thatcher.

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable and they are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation or they will bankrupt us.

Health Care Reform, by John Mackey, August 14, 2009

I am not sure what to think about John Mackey, health-food billionaire, starting his piece with a quote from Margaret Thatcher. Either he is utterly ignorant of Thatcher’s violent regime or he means to call up an image of her reactionary politics, a kind of mindless mean-spiritedness, as the guiding spirit of his vision of the future. Who needs enemies if this is our friend?

I remember Mackey’s Whole Foods Market from its earliest days in Austin, Texas. Mackey’s genius, if you want to call it that, was to privatize the ideas of the local food cooperatives. The best known of these coops was Wheatsville Coop. (It still exists.) What Mackey did was to remove the democratic structures of these coops and replace them with individual greed.

Even more cleverly, he used the dietary philosophy of the coops as a kind of combination smoke-screen/ rationalization for this personal aggrandizement. He wasn’t just getting rich, he was helping to build a better world. Mackey was and is a master of this sort of new age euphemism. Like Wal-Mart, he doesn’t hire ‘employees’ he hires ‘team members.’ He gets rich; ‘team members don’t need unions.’

Mackey rehearses all of his long-standing themes here, too, especially the notion that government should just get out of the way and let the health care industry fix itself. He also repeats the myths of shortages and long lines supposedly attributable to socialized medicine. I think anyone interested in education ought to pay close attention to this kind of argument.

It’s not just a good teaching moment for talking about the way market ideas become market fanaticism, and the way market fanatics often feel the need to falsify information in order to defend the indefensible. It’s also an good example of the arguments we will surely see as we try to defend the public school system against continued privatization. It’s just not funny anymore.

The Chicago Tribune has reported that trustees and administrators at the University of Illinois are at the center of a scandal regarding the admission of politically-connected students who were less qualified than the general pool of applicants. After the newspaper ran an investigative piece several weeks ago that sparked outrage, Governor Pat Quinn created an independent Admissions Review Commission to investigate allegations of preferential treatment.

Examination is surely in order. As ACTA has long argued, trustees must be more than just fundraisers, boosters, or rubber stamps. Board service is an honor, and it is also a responsibility. As ACTA noted in its guidebook for governors, it is vital that governors “appoint thoughtful, active trustees” who have “a clear sense of their responsibilities to the public.” Trustees do not serve for the benefit of friends or special constituencies; they are stewards of the public interest — appointed to safeguard the academic and financial integrity of the university — for the benefit of the entire community.

ACTA’s Must Reads, Posted by Heather Lakemacher on July 02, 2009

I probably shouldn’t pick on the ACTA so much, but since I did wonder out loud recently how they would respond to the ongoing ‘class scandal’ here in Illinois I thought a comment was justified. Their acknowledgment of the problem is remarkably non-committal and perhaps inevitably bland. This neutrality is curious, given the ACTA’s promotion of high moral and political standards.

I’d think that they would decry this sort of corruption as another example of how the American system of meritocracy and a-political education has been undermined by special interests. They certainly never pull any punches when it comes to what they see as the abuses of diversity and the “special interests” of the professors. Affirmative action, is not so bad, I guess, if it’s for the powerful.

I think this timidity, too, represents what might be called the Obama-effect, a not-so-buried fear rippling through the culture of the powerful, an anxiety that “business as usual” might be a little more disrupted than they hoped. The trustee system is certainly a prime candidate for populist change, especially if it becomes more visible. How can they make this look good?

Is the ACTA, and other like minded folks, wondering if these hearings risk pulling on a thread that might unravel the assumptions that allowed business people (aka Capital) to take over the governance of public universities? It wasn’t always that way, of course, and it’’s easy to imagine a more progressive trustees model rooted in community service and academic-self governance.

America’s unionized private workforce has declined by approximately 27 percent since 1958. This, according to McMahon, has been a sign that unions have failed to respond to workers and market forces.

“(Small businesses) have to be nimble and flexible in their costs,” McMahon said. “Labor unions have not figured out a way to deal with that.”

He added that this reduction has led to a retirement and pension crisis for labor organizations.

“If you understand the Social Security problem, then you understand their problem,” McMahon said.

Union rep: card check vote imminent, BRUCE SIWY, Daily American Staff Writer

When I spend a little time looking around for relatively reasonable criticism of the Employee Free Choice Act, I have a hard time finding anything of substance. This piece, from a small paper in Pennsylvania, at least tries to set out somethi8ng resembling a debate. The E.F.C.A. is both so important and so simple, though, that critics can’t quite get a handle on it.

I certainly don’t meant to imply that the right’s rhetoric is based in an ideal of informed debate! But on certain issues like the current climate change bill they do at least make some effort at argument. I’d say that their arguments fall apart on closer examination, but at least they go through the motions.

E.F.C.A., however, generates the same cynicism and manipulation that surround the debates over terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein has nukes that can hit the U.S. in 45 minutes; the terrorists have a plan to kill thousands of people tomorrow and only by torturing them can be stop the plot; E.F.C.A. is the end of the world as we know it.