Category: <span>Professional</span>

Class War

March 24, 2010 9:45 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

The Pell grant, once the cornerstone of student aid, has plummeted from covering seventy-two percent of the cost of college to just thirty-two, tuition increases have skyrocketed into the double-digits as states balance their budgets by slashing higher education funding, two-thirds of students are taking out mortgage-sized loans to pay for college, sending the average borrower nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in debt at graduation, and, as with the rest of America, students continue to struggle in one of the worst job markets on record.

Education is a Right: A Different Kind of March Madness

I keep thinking about the sort of rhetorical age or moment we are living through, and I have to say it often leaves me feeling disappointed and more than a little bitter, especially when it comes to public discourse. Even National Public Radio is declining so rapidly that I wonder if I might finally give up on it. NPR’s lack of ambition and creativity when it comes to funding has turned it into another commercial medium rather than a public medium. It’s not just commercials, it’s commercials with periodic episodes of whiny begging.

What really gets my goat, though, is the way so much of the media– NPR included– panders to the worst sort of right-wing nonsense. They just don’t seem to want to do the work to find legitimate conservative critics, I think, so they simply take the easy way out and allow the nuttiest of the right wing to use the public air ways to say almost anything. I keep wondering if these mainstream journalist types have lost all judgment or if they are simply so desperately afraid of loosing their audience and so their meal ticket that they will try anything.

Meanwhile, while they dutifully repeat the Republican claim that health care reform is apocalyptic, they miss stories that have real substance and importance. There’s the long list of attacks on higher education listed by Education is a Right, to start, and an even longer list of attacks on public education financing (including in my own town, Charleston, Illinois) and on the teaching of history, as represented by the right wing nuts in Texas. And, of course, they are not covering the students who want to resist, either. Omission is as bad as commission.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

The Cost of Class

March 22, 2010 8:34 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

College teachers, such as myself, are always telling our students that whatever else they get out of college, (and I hope they get a lot more) they can be confident that their investment of time and energy will underwrite a lifetime of relative economic prosperity. (Last night’s passage of the health reform bill may make an equally important contribution to the financial security of the middle class.) Doug Henwood’s recent costs and benefits analysis of education (“I’m borrowing my way through college…“) shows that this is still true.

Someone who doesn’t finish high school will on average earn only half as much as a high school graduate; if you earn a graduate degree, you can earn 2 to 3 times the income of a high school graduate. The caveat, and it’s a big caveat, is that students are leaving college with more and more debt. One reason is that college costs have risen dramatically, outpacing even medicine. And while there are grants available, the prohibitive costs have helped to ensure that class reproduction rather than class mobility is the new normal.

I see other limits to access in my classes, which are dominated by working class students; it’s particularly dramatic at the end of each session, when I’m thinking once more about the students who give up or, more mysteriously, sign up for the class but never show up, much less participate. There seems to be two main kinds of problems. One one side are students who don’t have the skills. Maybe they dropped out, or are non-native speakers, or just slipped through school without learning to write. They often mistrust teachers.

On the other side are students whose lives seem to be so chaotic and difficult that they can’t quite muster the discipline and focus. This is hard to judge accurately, of course; in any class there are always an alarming number of family deaths and catastrophes. (It’s more effective than “the dog ate my paper.”) But I know from my own family that too many of these stories are true and that if you don’t have much help (or money) to begin with, then every sort of problem is that much more draining and difficult and time consuming.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional, Writing

Against the Student Grain

March 15, 2010 5:00 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

As a part of my job as an online teacher I’m required to attend a yearly conference with my fellow full-time faculty and to participate in several online workshops each year. I enjoy it; it’s a chance to feel a bit more like a member of a department (not that I miss that too much!) and to think about what I love to do. Sometimes, though, it really makes me crabby and irritable, professionally and intellectually speaking. The problem has its roots in the rejection of the so-called sage on the stage.

Once upon a time, the legend goes, professors stood up at the front of the room, or lecture hall, and talked for the entire class. (I am sure that was, and is, still true, but I also think it’s partly a fairy tale.) Students had little say in their educations, much less a chance to tell the professor what they thought or how well they were learning. About four decades or so ago these students began to become teachers themselves and resolved to correct what they saw as an injustice rooted in bad teaching methods.

This student empowerment, as it came to be known, did a world of good insofar as it made professors pay more attention to their teaching. Of course, in the most elite institutions teaching is only rarely rewarded as well as research, if at all, but that’s a story for another day. On the other hand this empowerment helped to lay the basis for a consumerist model of education, particularly in the form of student evaluations, which too often become the main yardstick for teaching. It’s a boon for administrators but a disaster for teaching.

Too often, these evaluations were designed poorly and subject to all sorts of manipulation; they distort more than they reveal. Hopefully, their luster has begun to fade. More insidious and difficult to weed out is a kind of obsessison with positive feedback and affirmation. That’s what often drives me so batty about these conferences and workshops; it’s the Oprah school of pedagogy. “I tell students to visualize success,” one teacher said, “until they have their diplomas in hand.” It sounds harmless until you lokk closely.

I have a 40-something drill seargent in one of my classes for example; he’d probably (and rightly) take that as either nonsense or profoundly patronizing. This way of thinking turns students, even if they are young adults, into helpless, dysfunctional children, always in need of reassurance. Apparently, we can’t tell them that a successful education might be very difficult to achieve, that they might have to make sacrifices, or that there might be unexpected losses along with the gains. They’d melt like sugar in the rain.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing

Teeth for the C.A.W.

March 10, 2010 5:00 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Over the last forty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the instructional staff at US colleges and universities. Increasingly, institutions of higher education have hired faculty members who are not on the tenure-track and, in large part, are hired in part-time positions (see app. for more detailed data on these trends). In 1970 faculty members in part-time positions represented only 22.0% of all faculty members teaching in US colleges and universities; in 2007 they represented 48.7%. Of faculty members who are full time, well over a third do not have access to tenure. When graduate teaching assistants are included in the calculations, barely one quarter of the instructional staff are full-time and have access to tenure. The shift toward a more contingent workforce is occurring at all types of institutions in both the public and private sectors.

Coalition on the Academic Workforce, “One Faculty Serving All Students.”

This is a nice summary of what is arguably the most important set of facts about U.S.education at the university level. It’s presence in a mainstream organization’s report, sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, among others, isn’t exactly new, but it does represent the fruits of a decades long struggle led by graduate students, starting just as the internet began to take off in the early 1990s. It’s their voices hidden between these lines.

It’s also a remarkably soft take on the sorts of policies that have led to this mess. Noting that the recession is likely to accelerate these trends, the reports says that universities respond in one of two ways: “Some institutions increase their hiring of contingent faculty members to cover enrollment growth. Others reduce the number, resulting in increased class size and workload for full-time faculty members.” Surprisingly, what follows isn’t a critique or a list of better money saving alternatives.

Instead, the report writers launch into a defense of part-time teachers, as if the issue wasn’t the ongoing destruction of an independent academia, but the “‘dissing of the part timers.” Never mind academic freedom of speech, or tenure, or even the quality of instruction, the problem is respect! I suppose I shouldn’t be so cynical; this is certainly a step in the right direction. But its tentativeness is only going to feed the suspicion, hinted at recently in the MLA Newsletter, that not everyone wants change.

Respect is necessary and welcome, but it’s not even a starting point for the change that needs to happen. Here’s three things they could do immediately. The CAW needs to call for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act and for the end of university policies, such as hiring union busting firms, designed to prevent teachers from organizing. The CAW needs to call for policies that would either freeze or cut the salaries of the highest paid people, not teachers, at universities under financial duress. That’s respect with teeth.