Tramp the Dirt Down

\ Leave a Comment \ by

When England was the whore of the world
Margeret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as
the black tarmacadam
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isn’t
haunted by every tiny detail
‘Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands
all she thought of was betrayal…

“Tramp the Dirt Down,” Elvis Costello

We like to tell this story in the U.S., about how Ronald Reagan saved us from ourselves, taught us to be proud again, etc. I heard the same story this morning on the news, this time from a Brit who’d stayed up all night for a glimpse of Margaret Thatcher’s coffin. Her funeral is a great piece of theater, and all of our war criminals lined up to salute her, from Kissinger to Cheney. Thatcher and Reagan were both masters at hiding policy behind theatrics.

That one voice, though, isn’t the entire story; lots of Brits are literally turning their backs on the funeral, protesting one of the leaders most responsible for the policies that both led into the word-wide recession and that continue to prevent a full recovery, from destroying labor unions to deregulating financial markets, to cutting taxes for the rich and services for the poor. The first step at ending what Thatcher/Reagan began is closing down the theater.

Posted in: Economics, Writing

Keeping it Real

\ Leave a Comment \ by

“Language is very important, and we need to be very careful about the language we use,” said Kevin Hovland, a senior director with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “How do we reframe the conversation about technology not so much as a threat but as an opportunity, at the same time recognizing that there are real threat elements, and that those concerns are legitimate vis-à-vis the changes of higher education and faculty roles in that?”

“Reframing the Conversation,” Carl Straumsheim

This is the sort of thing that drives me batty. The Republicans have become a reactionary, hateful party, so they decide that they need to “speak differently.” They don’t need to become less hateful and reactionary, they just need to find a way to talk about hateful, reactionary ideas in a way that appeals to more people. They are not really clueless racists, they just sound like it. See Ran Paul’s recent speech at Howard University.

This plain speaking thing always has limits. It’s fine to talk about unmaking the university and resistance to technology and the like but it is not proper to summarize our recent history as the dismantling of a profession by an administrative culture more interested in mimicking what they feel are ‘best-practices’ in business (never mind that these practices crashed the world economy). That, it seems, cannot be unmade.

Cathy Trower of Harvard, the writer notes, wants “to end the divisiveness between faculty on and off the tenure track.” I suspect that there is so much talk about technological change because it lends itself to a kind of naturalization. Technology changes the way the weather changes; there’s no person or group to blame. Mentioning he real historical agents–administrators and their administrative policies–that’s being divisive.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing

Won’t Get Fooled Again

\ Leave a Comment \ by

In terms of what strategies colleges and universities could use to do bring students more in line with what employers are looking for, Humphreys said, “[employers] want a ‘both-and’ picture; they want higher education institutions to bring students to an even higher level of ability…. They also want [higher education] to ensure that every college graduate, no matter what their major is, achieves much higher levels of evidence-based reasoning, research skills and complex problem-solving skills [along with] ethical decision-making.”

‘More Than a Major’ Zack Budryk

I’ve been an English teacher long enough to remember a time when ‘finding a job’ wasn’t necessarily the first priority in college. Plenty of people went to college seeking specific jobs, of course, but the liberal arts model dominated. My Dad, who was an accountant and studied “Commerce” at L.S.U. in the late 1940s’, used to say that you went to college to get educated; once you were well-educated, you could easily get a job.

His degree included English classes as, in effect, a kind of second major. Over the three last decades or so (every sort of loss seems to start in 1980 with the election of Reagan) the once broad notion of vocation, centered on the professions, has become more and more narrow. It’s no coincidence that this has happened alongside a huge increase in the cost of higher education and ongoing attacks on the federal government.

The right hates class mobility– the servants get restless– and it will not abide the notion of a government with a social agenda and the funds to back it up. Cheap college and a progressive government, after all, brought us the 1960s’. We can let that happen again. We’ve now reached a point where the tail wags the dog: if you go to college to get a job, then the college has to change everything to make that happen.

Even more, college will be assessed by that vocational criteria and little else. It’s a prescription for servitude, not surprisingly, to the masters of the marketplace. And it has created an entire profession– the college professor– where a majority of people are no longer fully professionals; adjuncts paid piecemeal by the student or the course, no benefits. As the recession drags on, perhaps our masters are starting to reconsider.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional, Writing

Market Dreams

\ Leave a Comment \ by

The market, to paraphrase James Joyce, is a nightmare from which we have yet to awaken. In California– harbinger of things to come, as they say– yet another legislator is arguing that the market is the solution to what ails the Higher Education system.

SB520, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Steinberg, proposes to “solve” the problem of over-enrolled gateway courses at California’s public universities and community colleges by requiring them to grant “full academic credit” for “comparable” courses completed on new for-profit online platforms (such as Coursera and Udacity) and existing for-profit schools (such as Kaplan and Straighterline).

“Online ED is not a Magic Cure for What Ails California’s Colleges” Robert Meister

Amazingly, the law sets no limits on price and apparently establishes no accreditation system for these courses. This is the same two-pronged approach that has worked so well in the public schools: first, deprive the public schools of money and use the resulting problems as evidence that the public schools are not working; two, create a wide open unregulated market that can sell for private profit what was once a public right.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional