The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

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I have some colleagues– all in the non-profit education business– who feel a little too smug about the for profit industry. It’s naive, of course, to think that the for-profit industry schools are, by and large, less ethical than the traditional universities, with their multimillion dollar athletic programs (essentially an advertising and recruitment expense as extravagant as any drug company) and two-tier employment system of a few tenured professors supported by the many non-tenured, par time teachers and graduate students. No sector can afford to throw stones in these glass houses.

The for profits, for example, are no more likely to put students into debt, according to Neal McCluskey (Politicians Are The Problem For Higher Ed). What’s unique about the for-profits is that they arose during the worse excesses of laissez-faire Regan style capitalism. If the traditional universities need reform and a tightening of regulations, particularly when it comes to labor policy, the for profits suggest an entirely new kind of consumer protection regulation. I think the for-profits, for example, should not be able to make extravagant claims for the employment prospects of graduates. Neither should the traditional universities.

McCluskey is correct about the high cost of tuition but I think he’s wrong to suggest that the problem is that education is oversold. Similarly, he sounds vague and unpersuasive when he blames “the politicians”– although I am certain our representatives have their share of the blame. The problem is that no one seems to be able to articulate a rationale for mass education in a post industrial economy. In fact, the more the middle class shrinks, and the poor, working class, and working poor expands, the harder it is to justify educational accessibility. Educational capital only has real revolutionary potential if it is widely available.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Cheater Pie

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At one level, the ongoing effort to stop cheating in college (To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery) is simply the ongoing effort to get relatively young adults to take their life seriously. In that sense,there’s nothing to worry about because most students eventually start taking their lives seriously. At some point, the game of college inevitably gets consequential.

The myth of the frat boy conning and cheating his way through college is just that, largely a myth. At another level, though, cheating is an inevitable by-product of mass education– or, at least, of the worse aspects of mass education. If a teacher gives the same generic assignment on Shakespeare every semester for twenty years (“Discuss the role of the Jester in…”) it’s easy to buy the paper.

Reasonable class sizes and workloads make this less likely, of course. As the article notes, too, in writing a lot of cheating– plagiarism– can be eliminated with a good explanation of how and when to cite your sources. It’s the multiple choice test that’s really at the heart of all of the anxiety about cheating, becuase it’s so technically simple. There’s no ambiguity about the answers.

I imagine that a lot of students at these high-stakes schools would be tempted to cheat even when they have a fairly good grasp of the material. At the top of the status pyramid seemingly incremental changes in grade point averages could– or could seem to–have all sorts of repercussions. It’s that pressure that makes cheating as American as apple pie- or steroids …

Posted in: Professional, Writing

Real Reform

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The pubic school system in the U.S. has long been the Afghanistan of the right wing: the place where all of their dreams of hegemony and empire are destroyed. In modern times, the right’s dislike, if not hatred of public education is certainly rooted in the Civil Rights movement, and in desegregation. But it has deeper roots as well.

How do you nurture an abiding hatred of the government when just about everyone has attended a government-run school? Even worse, the public schools have long been strongly unionized. So the right’s strategy has been to take (what they consider) their money elsewhere: to charter schools. It’s just white flight.

The Obama administration should have a clear cut education agenda: stop the attacks on teachers and strengthen the public schools through full funding. There’s no shortage of good ideas about how to improve the schools, either; my favorites are integrated environmental curricula, like the “Edible Schoolyard” project.

Instead, Obama keeps pushing Bush-era policies and not surprisingly teachers are getting nervous about the ongoing threat of massive layoffs (Teachers’ Union Shuns Obama Aides at Convention). Meanwhile Secretary of Education Duncan works the appeasement angle.

Duncan’s remarks are interesting. She sent the National Alliance of Charter Schools a speech, but didn’t appear in person, and she “challenges” them to do better, etc., implying what’s now become obvious: a charter is no magic panacea for anything; charters don’t do better, as a whole, than the public schools.

He political advice is telling. “I think building stronger relationships,” she says, “with CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, building better relationships with the leaders of the civil rights organizations…” In other words, your class and race roots are showing, and you’d better fix it.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

Working Masculinity

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It’s long been obvious that my classes are dominated by young women. Since I teach writing, I often ask my students about their reasons for coming to school and about their families. It’s common to find young women who plan on becoming teachers (or nurses); often, these young women have a boyfriend or husband who isn’t in college and works in a local plant or as a carpenter or a plumber.

This new pattern has become a part of the lore of university teaching and now a piece in the Atlantic (“The End of Men“) confirms the existence of a long term trend, too. Hana Rosin, the author, would like to make the case that this represents a change in centuries old pattern of gender in the west. I find that longer term argument less persuasive, but the article is still worth reading.

There’s no doubt about the patriarchy, of course, but it can be difficult to look past the rigid gender roles that took root in the Victorian era. It’s hard to know just what the roles of men and women were in, say, medieval Europe. Is a priest or a poet a strongly masculine role? I think gender has always been looser than some public discourse suggests. Mick Jagger is, after all, an icon of masculinity.

Still, something does seem to be happening among my younger brothers, at least as indicated by the numbers Rosin sites as well as my own experiences. The anti-intellectualism of U.S. culture, often colored by machismo, has taken on a decidedly chauvinistic– and self destructive– flavor. The more or less organic development of capitalism is away from physical work and towards mental work. So there’s a reactionary element involved and a resistance to modernity.

I am not sure why this anti-intellectualism and anti-modernity is so appealing to young men, although I remember what it felt like. None of the men in my large, extended family, was attracted to college. (Even the women saw it strictly as a necessity.) We all wanted to work with our hands, and to be outside; we wanted the visceral, immediate contact with the physical world you cannot get in an office.

I hear a self-preservationist note in the statistics, a sense that these young men are resisting a kind of alienation that they believe has a feminine cast. It’s a misguided notion. Intellectual work can be as immediately, physically satisfying as putting up Sheetrock. Effective teaching can have a legitimate paternal or a maternal cast. The larger question, then, isn’t about gender as much as it is about the meaning of work.

Posted in: Professional, Writing