writinginthewild.com

Over the last forty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the instructional staff at US colleges and universities. Increasingly, institutions of higher education have hired faculty members who are not on the tenure-track and, in large part, are hired in part-time positions (see app. for more detailed data on these trends). In 1970 faculty members in part-time positions represented only 22.0% of all faculty members teaching in US colleges and universities; in 2007 they represented 48.7%. Of faculty members who are full time, well over a third do not have access to tenure. When graduate teaching assistants are included in the calculations, barely one quarter of the instructional staff are full-time and have access to tenure. The shift toward a more contingent workforce is occurring at all types of institutions in both the public and private sectors.

Coalition on the Academic Workforce, “One Faculty Serving All Students.”

This is a nice summary of what is arguably the most important set of facts about U.S.education at the university level. It’s presence in a mainstream organization’s report, sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, among others, isn’t exactly new, but it does represent the fruits of a decades long struggle led by graduate students, starting just as the internet began to take off in the early 1990s. It’s their voices hidden between these lines.

It’s also a remarkably soft take on the sorts of policies that have led to this mess. Noting that the recession is likely to accelerate these trends, the reports says that universities respond in one of two ways: “Some institutions increase their hiring of contingent faculty members to cover enrollment growth. Others reduce the number, resulting in increased class size and workload for full-time faculty members.” Surprisingly, what follows isn’t a critique or a list of better money saving alternatives.

Instead, the report writers launch into a defense of part-time teachers, as if the issue wasn’t the ongoing destruction of an independent academia, but the “‘dissing of the part timers.” Never mind academic freedom of speech, or tenure, or even the quality of instruction, the problem is respect! I suppose I shouldn’t be so cynical; this is certainly a step in the right direction. But its tentativeness is only going to feed the suspicion, hinted at recently in the MLA Newsletter, that not everyone wants change.

Respect is necessary and welcome, but it’s not even a starting point for the change that needs to happen. Here’s three things they could do immediately. The CAW needs to call for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act and for the end of university policies, such as hiring union busting firms, designed to prevent teachers from organizing. The CAW needs to call for policies that would either freeze or cut the salaries of the highest paid people, not teachers, at universities under financial duress. That’s respect with teeth.

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 haven’t written much about my favorite right-wing professional organization in while (American Council of Trustees and Alumni), but I feel compelled to comment on what seems to me to be a classic case of what my mom would call “the pot calling the kettle black.” The ACTA is one of those organizations that tires to create a smokescreen of reason behind which they can hide their interest in promoting a very narrow agenda supporting the current administrative status qua.

Or, rather, they support what might be called the ‘traditional or reactionary wing’ of the current status qua. So it’s fascinating to hear their support for a critic who bemoans, “Out of control tuition inflation … watered-down educational product that fails to teach graduates the skills they need… excessive hand holding — with grade inflation, deteriorating degree requirements, a growing number of non-academic degrees being offered and ever-increasing student services…”

Whatever we think about these issues, isn’t it the very policies of the members of the ACTA that have created these problems? Are we to suppose that ACTA members have labored long and hard at trustee and administrative meetings to resist tuition increases? Have ACTA members fought the ‘consumer’ model of education that has created a culture in which education is a service and grades an entitlement? Have they fought against the use of student evaluations in teacher assessment?

Anyone who’s worked in U.S. higher education has heard the mantra: colleges should be run as efficiently as a business. (We’re assuming they don’t mean a business like Lehman Brothers, of course.) Business are flexible and adaptive and they efficiently contain costs. What that actually means in practice, of course, is that the system has become two tiered: on top, a shrinking pool of tenured faculty, beneath them, a growing base of adjunct with little job security.

The recent reports suggesting that the public doesn’t trust colleges (Public Agenda survey finds deep skepticism) are unsurprising and ironic. Unsurprising, becuase this has been their (conservative, administrative) calling card for a few decades, and ironic because the public sees these business values as the problem, not the solution. I haven’t read the full report yet (it’s here) but the media focus on the public perception that college ought to be cheaper only scratches the surface of the problem.

It’s hard to disagree with the general sentiment reported in the survey. The “business” model has meant, among other things, enormous salaries for administrators and bloated athletic budgets rationalized as marketing campaigns. The business model goes farther than that, though, it also defines students as consumers and their educations as services. It’s greatly expanded the use of student evaluations as measures of so-called teaching effectiveness, too.

The business model mistrusts faculty and shared governance. It sees tenure as inflexible, and promotes the myth that a tenured teacher cannot be fired, and that tenure protects the incompetent. It mistrusts academic freedom of speech. The academic business model is anti-union, and invests heavily in union busting and prevention. It’s a model that hardly makes sense, even in a business. Reform can’t happen unless the model is dropped.

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.