Twitter, Educaton, and Planned Obsolescence

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Going forward, the impetus for organizing political change will emerge from regular citizens using the new communication tools to accomplish specific goals. Charismatic leaders will cease to perform the function that they have in the past. With such leaders removed from the equation, countless waves of change will compete and create unique actions, forming brief ad hoc social networking alliances and achieving very specific goals. The usual activist interventions, like feet-in-the street events planned by established coalitions, will continue to decline in influence.

It’s time the old Left began using Obama’s youth tools. In terms of process, the old Left has become conservative. The Obama Democrats, by using powerful democratizing youth tools, have in effect become the Left.

In a way similar to how Gorbachev was the transition to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Obama will be the transitional leader making possible the arrival of the new wave: highly integrated citizen involvement, organized anarchy, a global community of peers.

The Two Lefts, and a Tidal Wave of Change, Andrew Lehman

As someone who has been involved with the internet since it’s modern inception in the early 1990s this sort of Utopian sentiment sets off alarms for at least two reasons. First, despite it’s historical references it’s a remarkably a-historical analysis rooted a very common and very ill-advised technological determinism. One clue is the reference to the end of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev is the perfect Jeopardy-question of faux history, a Soviet leader widely enough known to be a legitimate part of a game show. It’s truthiness in historical analysis. This is the third or fourth wave of Utopian wish-fulfillment associated with the internet. Every time I hear it I remember that the Wright brothers were convinced that the airplane would make war impossible.

The second reason, is that, for good or ill, the very same political economy that brought us the pet rock has brought us Twitter and Face Book and all of the rest. This sort of analysis, in other words, cannot see the forest for the trees; it has little or no sense of historical perspective, and it doesn’t offer even rudimentary distinctions. It’s history without an inside.

Whatever position you take on Wikipedia, it comes from a very different impulse than, say, My Space, which is largely commercial. Apple Computer is a large corporation; Mozilla is not. These tensions are quietly tearing the wired world apart. In fact, I think the social momentum right now, despite Obama’s achievement (Dean’s innovations refined and focused) is more centrifugal than centripetal.

There is a kind of magical thinking that wants to find a way to instantly reverse the impact of thirty years of conservative destruction of the social commons. The funding and philosophy of the school system, to name only one example, has been fundamentally damaged. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s crumbling as we speak. Social networking will not replace this sort of community.

Our first historical task as progressive educators, I think, is to begin to separate out the technological chaff from the wheat; the effective tools from the latest fads, and start drawing firm lines, even as we acknowledge that they will need to be re-negotiated on a regular basis. Not everything that happens is good; not ever new tool is useful in the classroom.

Teaching critical thinking, in this context, should mean teaching students that commercial culture is by definition a push towards profit over people; that education seeks to expand humanized culture, the reign of people over things. It’s possible to use the master’s tools against the master, but it does not happen automatically or easily.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing

The Balance of Power: “Education in the Balance”

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Data from the two surveys show that between 1995 and 2005 the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in US postsecondary education remained almost unchanged, while the number of non-tenure-track faculty members, both full-time and part-time, increased dramatically. These data about changes in the number and especially the mix of full- and part-time, tenure-line (tenured and tenure-track) and non-tenure-line faculty appointments should be considered in relation to the growth in student enrollments in higher education that occurred over the same period. … We recommend that there be a regular survey and update on staffing practices in English and other modern language departments at least every ten years, so that changes in staffing patterns and the categories of faculty employment can be tracked and reported. Reports about the composition and characteristics of the faculty in English and other modern languages should also be developed from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) as further studies in the NSOPF series become available…

Between fall 1995 and fall 2005, student enrollments in degree-granting postsecondary institutions grew by more than 3,225,000 (22.6%), from 14,261,781 to 17,487,475 (Digest, table 175 and table 190)…

Given what is essentially zero population growth in the tenure-line faculty, increases in student enrollments are being accommodated by increases in the non-tenure-track faculty. Although across higher education, tenure lines have not been eliminated in favor of non-tenure-track positions, in the context of a student population and a non-tenure-track faculty that continue to increase, a tenure-line faculty that never grows becomes a diminished, and diminishing, segment of the faculty. As a result, tenure-line faculty members become an intellectual and educational resource rationed out in scarcer portions to an ever larger student body.

“Education in the Balance: A Report on the Academic Workforce in English“

In the 1990s Graduate Student Union activists, myself among them, made a lot of noise at the MLA each year, protesting the growing use of part-time and graduate student teachers in universities. Among other things, we convinced (forced) the MLA to gather a factual portrayal of employment in our field. We thought these numbers would convince many who just thought graduate students were bothersome kids.

Not surprisingly, each survey demonstrated that the activists were correct. Step by step, universities were de-skilling their workforce. As this report emphasizes, this is largely done by omission rather than commission. As the universities grow, in other words, new non-tenure track positions are created. In effect, the U.S. university system, long plauged by heirarchies of race and gender, has created a hierarchy on top of a hierarchy.

At the top are the tenure track professors with generous salaries and benefits, including, among other things, the ability to avoid teaching lower division courses. At the bottom of the top, as it were, are part-time faculty (many if not most without Ph.D.s) and graduate students. They still benefit from the facilities and they can, if they are graduate students and very fortunate, attempt to leverage their experiences into tenure track positions.

“In general,” the report concludes, “it appears that an MA or an MFA is accepted across all institutional sectors, four-year as well as two-year, as an appropriate degree qualification for teaching the lower division.” The emphasis here, of course, is on “lower division.” The conservative view is that there are too many Ph.D.’s out there for what is needed. As the report makes clear, the glut is created by administrations’ hiring practices.

There are differences between Ph.D. granting institutions and M.A. granting schools and so on. Nonetheless the pattern is consistent: “…the full-time positions are part of a larger argument about … a teaching faculty (largely off the tenure track and outside the tenure system, located in the lower division) and a research faculty (almost exclusively tenured or tenure-track and charged with the preparation of majors and graduate students).”

One layer down, in two-colleges, the trend is the same: no growth in tenure track Ph.D.s and more part-time and non-tenure track employment. The report may suggest that we’ve fought this trend to a standstill. Or, more cynically, that the privileged tenured professors are adept at protecting their positions but either uninterested or unskilled at stopping the (unfortunate) transformation of their field.

Posted in: Composition, Language, Writing

Hope, Shoes, and Inertia

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On all of this, the Bush administration has gone out of its way to lend a hand to Obama’s transition team and, in the process, help institutionalize the imperial transition itself. Like the new money arrangements pioneered in the 2008 elections, it surely will remain part of the political landscape for the foreseeable future. From such developments in our world, it seems, there’s never any turning back.

There’s nothing strange about all this, of course, if you’re already inside this system. It seems, in fact, too obvious to mention. After all, what president wouldn’t move into the political/governmental house he’s inheriting as efficiently and fully as possible?

The unprecedented size of this imperial pre-presidency, however, signals something else: that what is to come — quite aside from the specific policies adopted by a future Obama administration – will be yet another imperial presidency. (And, by the way, those who expect Congress to suddenly become the player it hasn’t been, wielding power long ceded, are as likely to be disappointed as those who expect a Hillary Clinton State Department renaissance under the budgetary shadow of the Pentagon.)

On January 20th, Barack Obama will be more prepared than any president in recent history to move in and, as everyone now likes to write, “hit the ground running.” But that ground — the bloated executive and the vast national security apparatus that goes with it (as well as the U.S. military garrisons that dot the planet), all further engorged by George W., Dick, and pals — is anything but fertile when it comes to “change.”

Tom Engelhardt, December 08, 2008

I have to admit that I almost– almost– felt sorry for our almost gone and not-to-be-missed president when I saw that shoe toss in Baghdad. He’s been reduced from the most powerful man on earth to a hapless, pathetic clown. It’s an almost too convenient metaphor for his legacy. Sabotage has a shoe-origin, too.

I imagine many people share the shoe tosser’s angry, frustrated exasperation. The thing about a presidency is that it has a certain inertia– it keeps going in the direction it been pushed for a long time, even after a decision to change course. That’s why so many of Obama’s fellow travelers have become so skeptical so quickly.

Given this imperial momentum, in other words, tossing a few shoes might well be a good choice. I am not sure, though, that I am ready to declare disappointment. For one thing, I want to keep my expectations reasonable. A president is just a president, not a revolution, and so there are limits to the sorts of change we can expect.

On the other hand, there’s a Nixon in China scenario here that I think is being ignored. It’s long been recognized that only Nixon could have gone to China; anyone else would have been called a communist sympathizer. We might optimistically hope for the same thing in the Obama administration.

Perhaps only Clinton– known for her Hawkish predilections– can credibly lead a State Department-focused foreign policy. Perhaps only Tom Dashel– as pragmatic as they come– could create a visionary transformation of health care. Perhaps this motley collection of Republicans and Washington insiders can make change work.

Posted in: Economics, Language

What a Class Barrier Looks Like

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Students who start California community colleges as first-time students hoping to get a certificate, a degree, or transfer to the four-year college sector have only small chances of success: approximately one in four degree seekers beginning community college in 1999-2000 completed their program in six years (Moore and Shulock, 2007, p. 7). And the prospects are worse for those who start in pre-collegiate courses. These students may not even get to the transfer-level courses in those fields, much less actually graduate or transfer. According to the Center for Student Success, “Only one-quarter of students initially enrolling in a reading fundamentals course in community college ever enroll in a transfer-level English class, and only 10 percent of students beginning in a basic math course ever enroll in a transferable math course” (2005, cited in Moore and Shulock, 2007, p. 12).

Indeed, most of our SPECC colleges cite a figure of around 10 percent who move successfully from the lowest level precollegiate course to a transfer level course. Beyond dimming students’ outlook for completion, the inability to successfully complete the most basic level courses also has tremendous implications for literacy and numeracy more generally. Although the SPECC campuses focused on pre-collegiate programs for this project, it is clear that all programs, including technical and vocational programs, benefit when their students are able to read well, communicate clearly in writing, and handle basic calculations.

Listening to Students About Learning, Andrea Conklin Bueschel

As the cliche goes, we don’t talk about class in the U.S. because we believe that everyone is equal. Or, at least, everyone is given an equal chance to succeed or fail on their own merits. It has never worked that way, of course, because all sorts of things can give you an advantage, big or small.

Our main conduit of opportunity, and so in many senses the source of the great fog obscuring our social and economic system, has long been post-secondary education. There’s nothing false in the idea; people with college degrees make much more money than people who don’t. It’s that simple.

What’s less obvious is the way that our post-secondary education system, with it’s complicated hierarchies and multiple points of entry, is also a barrier. The number cited in this California study are remarkable. As many as 90% of the students who enter community colleges never take transferable classes.

That’s only a measure of success insofar as we define success in terms of a four year degree. That may not be true in every case, of course. But it is still a good indication of the strength of a class barrier. What’s the solution, according to the authors? Listen to the teachers and students.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Language, Professional, Writing