Newman’s Cloister

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It’s always good to see an end of the year piece in the Chronicle (“The Crisis of the Public University” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes) acknowledging the ongoing realities of higher education as well as its current crises.  Scheper-Hughes offers a succinct outline of  recent history and its impact on the public university system with one glaring and telling exception: she underplays the complacency of tenured and tenure track faculty.

It’s one thing to support the Occupy movement and to decry the invasion of consumerism into the university and the rising costs of education and expanding student debt. That’s the sort of thing you might expect, especially in California.  We can only hope that this sort of resistance spreads elsewhere in the United States. It’s also a very safe place for full time faculty since it doesn’t address their own status.

Full-time faculty are in no way super privileged; most of them are clearly not doing well.  Tenure has been weakened and salaries nearly frozen for much of the last decade. But the entire system, as it has evolved over the last three decades, finances the shrinking numbers of full-time positions though an expansion of part-time positions.  As long as that cloister remains in place, nothing else can change.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Juxtaposition and Critical Thinking

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Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability.

“Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable“– Kenneth Rogoff

Mike Konczal assembles some striking quotes from Federal Reserve transcripts showing how obsessed the monetary overlords are with keeping wages down. I won’t recycle any of the quotes—check out his post for the full flavor.

“The Fed and the Class Struggle” — Doug Henwood

Here’s an juxtaposition that might be used to teach critical thinking. The contrast between these two ways of seeing the economy isn’t simply a matter of right and wrong, yes and no, or even “subject positions,” although that certainly has a role.  Rogoff is an academic at Harvard and a former IMF economist.  It’s in his self-interest to support capitalism, of course, since he has so much riding on it.  He’s no apologist though and he’s in a bleak mood. Henwood’s successful too, but far outside the academic charmed circle.

What’s interesting is that Rogoff seems at a loss for words when it comes to the crisis undergoing capitalism. The most generous forms, he says, without any explanation, are “unsustainable.” Reading Henwood next to Rogoff gives us a sense of the reality behind the assertion.  No market is going to create what Rogoff calls “a better balance between equality and efficiency.”  Once we pull back the curtain, it’s the political struggle over resources–aka the class struggle– that lies at the hear our current problems and our hope of any solution.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Language, Online Places

The Department of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black

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It’s always interesting when educators or administrators get up on their high horse and begin complaining that academia needs to “re-tool for the 21st century” (to cite the cliché). It’s interesting because if you succeed at a university and get tenure it is, in some sense, because you help the institution keep up the status quo. It’s an unavoidable contradiction, to use the Marxist term.

That’s on reason that I find most of the criticism about my industry unpersuasive: the system of exploitation created in the public sector of higher education  is far more extensive and long-lived than what the for-profits have created. There’s not a non-profit problem here and a for profit problem there; there’s a labor and an education problem throughout. The non-profits are tossing rocks in glass houses.

There’s a decadence problem rotting away at the ruling caste everywhere, from boot heel to toe. The Reagan era has produced a remarkable shift in resources, as Juan Cole points out effectively, away from public education and towards prisons.  Since the Great Depression, and especially since WWII, the consensus was that education was a palliative that would prevent the sort of unrest that could end capitalism.

It would also support the U.S. nationalist agenda in the Cold War, as well as provide the creative muscle needed to keep the economic machine running smoothly. In the last 30 years, though, this consensus has been replaced by a much nastier vision rooted in what Cole rightfully calls a gulag, The capitalist minority isn’t bound by nation anymore; long live nihilism, human capital is dead.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

How Corrupt is Corrupt

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There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful ( Marion Brady, “When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids“).

The economist Doug Henwood has long contended that the problem with the U.S. economy now isn’t just the ordinary cyclical ills of capitalism but a deeper malaise rooted in a decadent ruling class. It’s decadent in the specific sense that it no longer understands what it needs to do to keep capitalism running beyond the next quarter’s profits. Short term thinking has become paradigmatic and self-defeating.

It sounds like that might be good news. If the  current ruling class collapses, then maybe some other sector of capital, more amenable to reason, might fill the power vacuum. We all hope that we are reaching the end of another gilded age, and that as Obama would seem to suggest, witnessing the birth of a new progressive politics that will re-boot the thinking of our rulers and allow us to get at least some of our money back.

No one’s talking revolution; it’s all about undoing the worst damages of the Regan era market religion so that capitalism can resume its formerly dynamic march towards the future. I don’t mean to be cynical but this sort of hope only goes so far. Still, I think the hope is real, particularly when mainstream educators like Brady are using this sort of language.  She sounds like Henwood. The emperor looks more naked all the time.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Writing