An Argument in Favor of Chaos and Suffering

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I’m the last person– give my history in the tenure system– to argue that tenure is fine just as it is. It is not. In my book, I argue that the current systems of ranks and tenure ought to be replaced with a strong union and a seniority system with teeth. We all ought to be able to work ourselves into positions of relative comfort and security, and I think this relative comfort and security ought to come earlier rather than later. That’s the greater good, in a nutshell.

A reformed academia begins with a reformed society that funds a national pension system as well as a national health care system. We won’t be able to get those things, of course, until we also imagine a reformed system of labor law that encouraged workplace democracy and bottom-up governance systems, aka unions. These are the issues that too many reformers simply don’t want to be a part of the picture when they discuss tenure reform. Those are the difficult issues.

Given the powerlessness of teachers in higher education, it’s easier to imagine ending tenure once and for all. That’s the tact of Naomi Schaefer Riley in “A Smart Way to End Tenure.” It’s classic right-wing economics because, at bottom, it argues that a system that promotes misery– what is always called “flexibility”– is somehow better for all of us. These ideas have already done immeasurable damage to the rest of the economy. Why do it all over again, just to see if it might work this time?

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Lots of Sound, Not So Much Fury

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I continue to struggle to try to understand what is really going on in the efforts to at least begin to regulate the for-profit sector in a reasonable way. We need strong regulations if we are going to be able get beyond the stereotype of being the used car salespeople of the higher education system. Too much of this energy seems misdirected. This sentence, for example, (from “Lawmakers hear conflicting reports on for-profit colleges“) sounds plausible even if you remove the word “for profit” : “…colleges may be using unethical recruitment practices and charging too much for degrees while failing to prepare students for jobs.”

I don’t think all schools use unethical recruiting methods, but recruiting abuses, in legacy admissions and sports, to name only two examples, are not uncommon in the public system. The promise of a job, often unsupported by any evidence, has long been a staple of higher education. The for-profits didn’t do anything new, they simply built on what the system had long accepted as common practice. No real regulatory agency is watching recruitment; the public schools can raise tuition as high as they want. No one’s watching that, either. Student debt has long been an endemic problem in a system so reliant on loans and not grants.

We need recruitment regulations that will cover all sorts of potential abuses in all schools, private to public, from athletic bribes, to high pressure sales techniques, to legacy admissions and the lack of diversity. We need a system of public subsidy– and a generous loan forgiveness program– to eliminate student debt. Schools that receive public money should not be able to waste so much of it on administrative salaries and expensive marketing programs. We need some sort of public discussion about the purposes of higher education and the limits of capitalism. No school should be able to promise the jobs that only public policy can deliver.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Stop Making Sense

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I think that the Chronicle of Higher Education is getting better… This week they’ve included a fascinating look (“How educated are state legislators?“) at the education levels of our elected officials in state legislatures. They are more educated than the public at large, not surprisingly, but perhaps surprisingly more than a quarter have no post-second education. Maybe it’s just state stereotypes but there’s some surprises.

Texas (86.2%) is more educated than Illinois (81.9%) and California is ahead of both (89.9%) but not that much more educated that Texas. Nebraska is up there with New York, Texas, California, and Virginia in the top five. The least educated is New Hampshire (53.4) which seems odd; the second lowest is Maine (58%), which has a lower percentage than Delaware (59.7), New Mexico (59.7%) and Arkansas (60.4%).

Democratic representatives seem to all support education, at least nominally but the Chronicle found both a Republican yahoo (“You go to college, you take a foreign language, and all these ridiculous diversity requirements…” and a reasonable Republican: “When costs go up, the rich can handle it and many poor students receive grants to cover their expenses,” she says. “But for middle-class families like my own, it makes a huge difference.”

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Bubbles and Cash Cows

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The trouble with metaphors is that they become habits and we keep using them well beyond the point that they are meaningful. I was reading, “”Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online,” and I thought: that technology-will-fix-eduction bubble is still not quite fully burst… Is it a slow motion bubble? What so striking about the piece is not that it’s so full of common sense, but that the writer, Rob Jenkins, seems so defensive about asserting common sense.

“We can’t teach everything online, nor should we try”? Who would argue with that? The fact that Jenkins feels compelled to defend this idea, even jokingly, is symptomatic of the problems– I’ve called it decadence– in U.S. higher education: common is heretical. There’s no shortage of people who are mature and skilled enough to succeed at online learning. As usual, administrations are focused on milking the cash cow, not education. The bubble is dead; long live the cash cow.

Posted in: Economics, Professional