Irony and Happenstance

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My students often use the term irony in a very loose, colloquial fashion that simply means funny or odd. What they really mean, most often, isn’t irony technically, it’s happenstance. Irony involves a kind of reversal. It’s ironic, for example, when an organization like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni praises President Obama’s critique of university spending.

The ACTA is nothing but supportive of top-down administrative control, and it’s administrators that have promoted the “spas” and “food courts” that they believe help promote their schools to parents and alumni. It’s administrators that have emphasized the academic star system that allows certain professors to avoid the classroom; it’s administrators that believe they need huge marketing budgets.

When will the ACTA criticize the profligate spending on athletics, especially football and basketball? When hell freezes over. On the other hand, Obama says nothing about the disastrous labor policies common in U.S. higher education, and he neglects to mention the administrative costs– many avoidable– that have helped drive up the costs of education. So perhaps this is just happenstance.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Obama and the Teachers

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Whenever I hear someone talking about the need to “get back to the basics” a little part of my brain answers, “Yes, that’s it! Let’s get back to the basics: class sizes need to be smaller and teachers need to be better paid!” That’s not what the phrase means, of course; usually, “the basics” mean simplifying education so that it can be easily measured on a standardized test. Most often, too, that means that writing disappears from the radar. Writing is harder to standardize.

Testing, to paraphrase William Gibson, is a consensual hallucination; if we believe in it, it takes on a semblance of reality. You can test reading comprehension on a test that can be easily mass-produced and administered. It’s nearly impossible to test writing skills that way. Even worse, and perhaps not surprisingly. these standardized tests are used to try to break the power of teachers (read: teachers’ unions) over the schools. It’s not just K-12, either.

Capitalism reflexivity believes in administrative rather than worker control. In the capitalist imagination, administrative control is flexible, rational, and efficient; worker control is rigid, irrational, and inefficient. In the name of the greater good, then, teachers must kept in check. It’s not surprising then, that, the Obama administration’s “Community College Summit” seems so completely out of touch with the realities of adjunct teaching.

This is about the capitalist agenda of administrative control, not learning. The New Faculty Majority is asking teachers to go to the White House blog and vote for posts that emphasize the concerns of adjunct and part-time teachers, which are the majority. it’s an interesting exercise and I hope that we can succeed in changing the administration’s views. That tricky business of power is not going to go away, though. Administrations are organized; we need to be too.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Gun School

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Even though it’s election season– and it’s a mid-term election that may well have dramatic consequences– and even though there have been several recent incidents of gun violence– the gun control debate seems to have completely disappeared. It’s another illustration of the sheer brutalizing stupidity of our current political culture. If we are not trying to stop the violence in our culture, what are we thinking as we prepare to vote?

There’s an apparently viable candidate for the Senate in Delaware who doesn’t “believe” in evolution, as if scientific fact were simply a mater of individual belief; a gunman shows up at my old university, swings an AK-40 around and then shoots himself; the most recent research indicates that we are now more deeply divided between rich and poor than ever before. How should these things shape our votes? Do they suggest an agenda?

I’d think that much of this suggests just how important it is to have an education system– from K-12 to graduate school– that actually teaches the importance of critical thinking. It’s the only defense against the sort of ignorance we see in O’Donnell and her ilk, as well as the absurd policies of the NRA that vilify any attempt to limit access to the most powerful weapons, and the historical short-sightedness that prevents us from really addressing inequity.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Class Works

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I have a very smart friend, Lisa, who once said that the best way to understand class is to think about it as where you sit on an airplane. In first class the seats are bigger, the food better, and the attendants more attentive. That’s assuming you can afford to get on the airplane at all; the bus is another world altogether. It’s also about how easily and conveniently you can get on the airplane and those special lounges at the airport. If you are very rich, of course, you have your own airplane and we’d never see you at the airport at all.

We don’t talk about class in the U.S. because we don’t have a vocabulary to talk about it and because we only get brief glimpses of the lives of people with money. Paris Hilton might be ridiculed as a party girl but she’s not reviled as too rich. Most of us don’t have our own planes, and relatively few of us can afford first class seats. If you look around a bit, though, you can learn some interesting things about privilege. Inside Higher Ed has a helpful piece this week, for example, that gives us a little peek into the hidden world of power.

As it turns out, (Legacy of Bias), the relatively well off get into college more easily. It shouldn’t be surprising– if we get on a plane we see material privilege–but it usually is. It goes against our American democratic grain to think that not everyone earns their way, just as we believe that economic failure is always a matter of individual rather than social responsibility. I wonder, though, how much research it will take before the facts of class in the United States become something like common sense.

Posted in: Economics, Professional