Raise The Social Wage Too

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Deespite impressively increasing usage, across the entire City of New York only eight libraries currently offer Sunday service and nearly 30% of our libraries are closed on Saturdays. In fact, New York City’s libraries already rank well behind Columbus, Ohio; San Antonio, Texas; Toronto; Chicago; and Detroit in average hours per week.

Every day our doors are closed is a day New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds miss out: children are deprived of story time, students can’t borrow books, jobseekers lose access to computers and the internet, and immigrants can’t attend English classes. Our libraries should be accessible for everyone. The rising demand shows our amazing potential to reach even more New Yorkers if we had the necessary funding to offer additional hours every week. As the CUF report states, “No other institution in New York serves so many different people in so many different ways.”

“NYPL President Testifies On Proposed City Budget Cuts” Press Release

The ongoing Republican assault on the federal government– their determined, decades old effort to disable it or shrink it down to meaninglessness– has a not-so-hidden effect: it impoverishes all of us. We used to have a post office system that was accessible and delivered mail six days a week; every year the post office has to cut services and cut hours. We used to have public libraries but more and more they too face cuts and closures.

The myth, of course, is that new technologies make old institutions obsolete. In fact, libraries are more important than ever and, as the New York example suggests, more popular than ever. The mail should be a public service. We cannot allow the right-wing to use the recession and their austerity programs and market myths to make us all collectively poorer. We need to fight for our libraries and our post offices in the same way we fight for our public schools.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics

Topsy Turvy Teaching

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New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning’s access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from — and may in fact be hurt by — digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.

“Who Benefits From Online Ed?” Doug Lederman

One of the first things I learned about college is that the academic pecking order is upside down. It’s especially dramatic in an English department, where the students who need the most work and help– the college freshman– tend to get the lowest paid teachers, that is, adjuncts and graduate students. The students who need the least help– junior and senior English majors– get the best paid, most experienced tenured professors.

Traditionally, English professors (each a literary specialist) taught freshman, if they did at all, only as a part of a kind of hazing ritual. Once you earned tenure you got the small classes with the (self-selected, experienced) best students. This has changed as Rhetoric and Composition nears a kind of numerical equality with Literary Studies. The more Rhetoric and Composition matures, however, the further it seems to go from those freshman.

Online education has tended to duplicate these patterns in curious ways, by focusing on those very students who seem least likely to do well in an online setting. Here, as elsewhere in academia, those students who most need the sorts of help you can only get in the traditional classroom– and in small classes– seem to be the main target audience for online education. And online education has even fewer full-time tenured professors.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Professional, Writing

Prisons and Schools

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A growing number of lawmakers are indicating they are open to considering new gun control measures in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Newtown, Conn. But while much of the national debate has focused on limiting access to guns, others are suggesting that schools should arm themselves to defend against attacks.

“Amid Calls For Gun Control, Some Push For Weapons At School,” Wade Goodman

I was grew up, or came into some sort of consciousness, just as the collective rebellions of the 1960’s dissolved into the chaos of individual self-expression. In the early 1970’s my suburban schools were slowly but surely transformed into institutions more like prisons, complete with an almost total lack of social services and armed guards with trained dogs stalking the hallways. This was justified, it was said, by the search for drugs.

This happened over the course of a few years, from around 7th grade or so to around 10th grade. At that point I quit high school to go to a technical school and become a photographer. That school, Houston Technical Institute, although it was in the inner city in Houston, enjoyed a special status that somehow allowed it to escape from the usual constraints of the emerging police state in the public schools.

All of this only grew worse as more and more small-town school districts combined into large consolidated schools in the name of saving money. Meanwhile, of course, the Reagan revolution grew, making a national health care system, much less a national health care system with mental health parity, nearly impossible. Standardized testing drained education of life wherever they were used, and they are used a lot.

So here we are, three or more decades into Reagan’s American Morning. Guns we can get in a heartbeat, medical care not so much. So what’s on offer as the current right-wing leaders fight over the budget? More cuts. Ironically, and perhaps not surprisingly, it’s those rebellious youth of the 1960’s, now nearing retirement, that are their main targets. The right will chase them right to their graves, dragging the rest of us along for the ride.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional

Totally Romney, Dude

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To emphasize the importance of limiting student debt, Chattanooga is in the second year of its “Live Like a Student” campaign, a universitywide approach to financial literacy. The key is making the ideas of living within one’s means and borrowing only what one needs an integrated part of undergraduate and graduate education, not just “a random drop-in process,” Ainsworth said.

“We have banners and posters all over campus to advertise this,” he said, in addition to “emphasis months,” when bankers and other financial experts visit campus and speak to students about interest rates, scholarships, investments and other topics. Business students also have signed on to become peer financial counselors, and financial literacy has been incorporated into university orientation days for students and parents.

“Living Cheap Enough?” Colleen Flaherty

I am going to coin a new term: a Romney (after our former beloved candidate). A Romney is a person so out of touch that it’s either funny or shocking or some disturbing combination. These administrators now suddenly concerned with student debt are total Romneys. I am not sure how they missed it but graduate student debt has been a very public issue for at least 15 years. Not that these Romenys listen to graduate students much.

When I was a graduate student in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s, I taught writing classes to earn my way. My wages were so low that I was eligible for government food assistance. (We couldn’t actually get our food help, though, because a special provision made students ineligible.) As if this weren’t enough, I had to pay tuition as well, since at that time there were no tuition waivers. We were taking classes, too, but in essence we paid for our jobs.

We were experts in living on almost nothing, we rarely took vacations, and we ate a lot of rice and beans. Unless you had parents– or a spouse– who could support you, debt was inescapable. It was especially bad in the second half of your Ph.D., when you were required to fly to conferences all over the country. There was little money for these trips either. Some people used student loans for that, but I used credit cards. It took years to pay them off.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional, Writing