Category Archives: Writing

Rebuilding Academia

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 9, 2010
Every year the Chronicle of Higher Education seems more attention to give the issues around academic employment, especially the use of contingent and non-tenure track faculty ("Adjuncts Gather to Discuss Tactics in Campaign for Equity"). It reminds me of the slow 30 year slog it took for global climate change to reach a place in mainstream media. Mainstream education media has taken a similar slow path to putting the our labor issues on its agenda. Tenure isn't coming back, but we could build a better system if we were given the tools. Unfortunately, it might take another decade or more to get our government, even our now liberal administration and congress, to begin to raise alarms about the...
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Schooling Proprietary Education

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 4, 2010
I continue to watch the ongoing news about my industry-- proprietary education, this week via the New America Foundation's education bolg-- and I continue to be alarmed, not because the proposed reforms are so untenable-- the reforms are probably weaker than they need to be-- but because the industry continues to undermine its own credibility by being so alarmist ("Taking a Page from the Tea Party'). There's nothing specific about the for-profit sector's resistance to stricter regulation; it seems to be a common theme in every area of the U.S. economy. Perhaps I can be accused of wishful thinking, but it seems to me that the era of wildly unregulated capitalism is coming to a loud, complaining, reckless stop....
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Clearing the Mist

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 28, 2010
I just saw the movie The Mist (actually, one of those really good B horror movies that hasn't gotten enough notice) so maybe that metaphor is just on my mind. But that's the metaphor that popped into my head when I read about the new regulations for the for-profit education sector (where I teach). I am mostly talking about the 'truth in advertising' requirements that would force schools to put all sorts of information in a prominent place on their websites ("Splitting the Difference on Gainful Employment"). It's a good idea but I wonder too if it's naive, in the short run. After all, despite the nearly half-century of dire warnings (more dire than debt) on cigarettes,...
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Thinking Small

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 26, 2010
The entire modern history of higher education in the U.S. is littered with various people-- inevitably but not always crediting themselves with liberal intentions-- wringing their hands over the difficulties of class mobility. No matter the context, the basic idea is always the same: not everyone wants to go to college, so why should we make them? It's an appeal to our sacred values of individuality. We are all unique, we should all be the masters of our own destiny. Chris Meyer's recent piece in Education Week (The Inadvertent Bigotry of Inappropriate Expectations) has all of the right elements: the liberal credentialing ("As someone who founded and ran a college-prep enrichment program for at-risk secondary school students...") and the...
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A Tepid Democracy

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 19, 2010
Academics are notoriously hateful about university committees; that bad attitude might be one of the best explanations for the ongoing destruction of full time employment and tenure. In essence, the powerful (and increasingly rarefied) tenured full professors are can pursue their individual interests and let the least experienced try to run the university. It's a great way to make sure that the administration is always better prepared to deal with problems. I enjoyed Sufka's call for attention to service, although I think that his rhetoric is interestingly tepid, as if he were afraid to stir up the ant pile ("Serving the University: Better Mentors for Young Professors Would Help"). He ignores a more profound problem, too. I keep wondering...
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Only Kidding

By Ray Watkins | Published: July 14, 2010
Ever since the Terminator movies (or, if you are old enough, Colossus: The Forbin Project, the movie from 1970) the Robot Apocalypse has been a running gag in geek circles. Paranoia is great fun sometimes. So Robert Wright's piece, "Building a Giant Brain" fits into a familiar comedic sub-genre (meme, as the kids say). The Internet is a giant brain, we are just cogs, uh, neurons, ha, ha, ha. I don't mind the joke but I think the meme's getting more than a little anemic. It's also familiar from Dorris Lessing's science fiction (although she favored something more organic perhaps) and, especially, from H.G. Wells' Time Machine. Wells and Lessing, though, seemed to have an...
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