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.

I’ve long wanted to write about the notion of individual instruction, which I think is a harmful myth, a kind of nostalgia for something that never existed. It’s a scary thing to examine, though, simply because so many teachers hold this myth so close to their pedagogical hearts. This week provides an interesting case in point, in the form of a blog entry by Margate Soltan at Inside Higher Ed’s “University Diaries” (“Professormatronic“). Once agin the impersonal culprit is technology.

In this case, the idea of individual instruction arises from a discussion of a student complaint that professors no longer write on papers by hand. It’s very tempting to simply repeat Derrida’s famous deconstruction of the individuality of the signature, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. I would like to know if the student had experienced this “personal” handwriting before, or if this was simply an idea he or she had about handwriting. My guess is that there are lots of people out there who remember the sharp sting of red ink.

I don’t have any complaints about the idea that students benefit from feeling that they have their professor’s full attention, at least briefly. If you ask a question, well, you want a good answer. I can’t see much practical differance between a professor and student pouring over a written paper, or a student and profesor pouring over a paper on the laptop. Much of this piece, though, seems to sentimentalize the technology of a few decades ago. (See this piece on the myths of online education, too.)

Ironically, the technology bemoaned by Soltan is attractive exactly becuase it’s a tool that many feel (perhaps naively) counters the alienation of U.S. culture by facilitating authentic connections. The myth of individual instruction wrongly sugests to students that because all people are unique, their learning is unique. Learning is social though, not individual; we share more than we differ. That should be a source of strength. Human relationships are the root cause of any alienation, educational or otherwise, not technology.

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?

“I think the state of reading and writing will be *different* in ten years as a result of the Internet. Languages evolve, and established practices for writing evolve; when books were hand-lettered by scribes, they were written very differently than they are now, but it’s hard to make a case that the practice got “worse.” The Internet and associated publishing tools — blogs, Twitter, and the like — may have an accelerating effect on those changes; the art of reading, writing, and rendering knowledge is likely to evolve more quickly than it has in the past, and there are some who would argue that that is a bad thing. I think it will be different; not better, not worse, but not the same.” – Rachel Smith, vice president, New Media Consortium

The Future of the Internet, Part 2: A review of responses to a tension pair about the impact of the internet on reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge.

This idea that literacy will be “different” but not necessarily bad fascinates me for several reasons. The traditional analogy is to the transition from oral to written culture. From the (theoretical) point of view of oral culture, the shift to the printed page was an enormous loss of individual memory, in particular. No one needed to memorize thousands of lines of poetry anymore. From our point of view, it was a huge gain in collective memory. Knowledge would not be lost with the individual. It’s a net win.

Similarly, the idea is that while there will be some loss in the transition from traditional to digital media, the losses will be compensated by the gains. I am not quite sure I buy this argument. Those scribes noted by Smith originally wrote without punctuation, standardized spelling, or capitalization, for example. It’s not just a neutral difference; those standards make both reading and writing more efficient, and so better. If change can result in a net win, it can result in a loss, too.

Predicting the future is never a winning game, but this “difference” argument seems profoundly divorced from contemporary history. “Literacy” is not a fixed concept, it’s a set of skills that persist, among other things, becuase they have real economic efficacy. “Literacy” is a form of cultural capital. In early stages of industrialization, for example, workers don’t need to be literate. Workers might resist by becoming literate on their own, as it were, but capitalist culture won’t encourage it. Not yet.

In later stages of industrialization such as our own, the future is still not quite clear. Many technologies– from icons, to international street signs, to new media– suggest that literacy may no longer be defined in terms of reading and writing per se. (Print could become a form of resistance, too.) Maybe the new literacy will minimize knowledge, in other words. Perhaps only a minority will retain the traditional literacy skills that underwrite power.

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.