Monthly Archives: February 2011

A long time ago (well, not really so long at all) leftists loved to use the language of the old communism as a kind of shock rhetoric. Most of us in the progressive community weren’t really working class or proletarian any more, with certain exceptions, but we just loved that Marxist vocabulary. I still love the word proletarian and I love the art that the feeling it represented often inspired.

I don’t think of things in such severe binary opposites anymore, although I do still believe that the tension (dialectic) between capital and labor is the driving force behind any capitalist economy, including command economies like China. In just about every important way I am middle class. Yet, culturally, I retain important traces of my dad’s working class childhood.

Over the last 30 years though, this rhetoric has steadily become reality as the ongoing redistribution of wealth from working and middle class people to the rich has gained momentum. It’s not a myth; even so-called progressive tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the wealthy. Now that we are in full deficit hunting season, the calls for more redistribution is reaching a fever pitch.

The Obama administration support for unions is tepid at best (“Role for Teachers Is Seen in Solving Schools’ Crises“) but unions are the only institution that might get back our wealth. Capital is organized; if labor isn’t, the redistribution continues. The right wants to make collective bargaining in the public schools illegal again. If that happens, we are very close to being real proletarians.

When I was a kid and I tried to get one of my three sisters’ in trouble, usually by complaining about something that I had just done myself, my mom would always say, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black!” I have to say that whenever I read about the for profit education industry, where I work, that’s my first reaction each time. Pot, meet kettle.

I shouldn’t complain about investigative journalism, of course, and a piece like, “On For-Profit College Boards, Knowledgeable Insiders” ought to help to keep management and the administration honest. Sunshine, as the cliche goes, is the best disinfectant. On the other hand, the tone of the piece is a little too breathless and shocked, as if these practices were a surprise or innovative.

OMG! There’s a revolving door between industry and the government agencies that regulate them! Academia likes to think that it can keep its hands clean by burying its head in the sand. So the trustee system, long dominated by corporate power, is only rarely discussed. The for-profit sector is only responding as the higher education system has always responded to the threat of regulation.

This sort of investigative journalism should be extended into a broader exploration of the way education works in the U..S. I’d like to see the Chronicle investigate how traditional schools have used their own revolving doors to avoid regulations that would curb the use of contingent labor or that would slow down inflation in tuition or control administrative salaries or…