Category: <span>Professional</span>

The Future of Class is Here

September 21, 2009 12:31 pm \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need …

At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model…

It Is Us, by AndrewMc, 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM, Progressive Historian

College professors don’t like to talk about it but class cuts both ways. On the one hand, a college degree is one of the most basic ways we determine who goes where economically. The United States is a big, complicated social system, but in essence the message is simple: get an education or stay relatively poor and powerless the rest of your life.

At one point, of course, a certain percentage of the working class or poor could side-step this devil’s bargain by getting a job at a unionized work site. Setting aside the potential loss of power represented by the (missing) cultural capital of a college degree, this was a relatively good ideal. As Tecumseh said, “A single twig breaks but the bundle of twigs is strong.”

Outside of the public school system, and a few colleges, there are few of these union jobs left. Too often, now, though, even a good education ensures very little economic security, even among those long thought fully insulated from the vicissitudes of the labor market. Professors are a case in point. For most of the last fifty or sixty years they naively counted on the power of a single twig.

That individualist strategy stopped working at some point in the 1980s or so. The recession cuts in both directions, not just limiting the aspirations of students but also limiting the aspirations of college professors. Capital, as a vulgar Marxist might say, loves a contraction because it can use the opportunity to pursue all sorts of agendas that would be impossible in a functioning economy.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Labor and Education

September 7, 2009 5:00 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

The AFL-CIO report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” shows that not only have young workers lost financial ground over the past 10 years—they have also lost some of their optimism.

* More than one in three young workers say they are currently living at home with their parents.
* 31 percent of young workers reports being uninsured, up from 24 percent without health insurance coverage 10 years ago.
* One-third of young workers cannot pay the bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.

Based on a nationwide survey of 1,156 people by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, “Young Workers” examines young workers’ economic standing, attitudes and hopes for the future. It also draws a comparison with findings from a similar 1999 AFL-CIO study, as well as with attitudes of workers older than 35.

Labor Day 2009

To many people, the labor movement is all about the bling. In education, this means better salaries for teachers, pensions, and health care. Labor Day, though, ought to be a reminder that the labor movement has never been so narrow and that even the seemingly narrow goals often have a wide ranging and unpredictable impact. A shorter work week creates the weekend, but it also creates the leisure time necessary for all sorts of political organizing and change.

In education, the labor movement represents an attempt to democratize knowledge in several senses. A strong union would correct the imbalance of power in which administrators can override teachers, employees, students, and parents. Administrators should administrate, not govern. The current imbalances won’t be addressed until the union movement extends from kindergarten to graduate school and beyond. As the AFL-CIO suggests, a strong union movement would ensure that education is widely available.

The reactionary mind says that “college education” isn’t for everyone. That may or may not be true. It is not up to us to decide who will benefit from an education. In a democracy we decide for ourselves. That’s why restricting educational access through testing or financing is undemocratic and dysfunctional. An educated culture would not eliminate jobs that were once only taken by the uneducated, either. It would transform those jobs in ways we can’t predict. That’s why Labor Day is important.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union, Writing

Nodding Like Stanley Fish

August 31, 2009 5:00 am \ 1 Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

August 24, 2009, 9:30 pm, What Should Colleges Teach?, Stanley Fish

I’ve been watching ACTA for a year or more simply because they are a very reliable guide to the reactionary academic mind. Increasingly, too, they are a great guide to the way conservative thinking is going undercover, attempting to hide its messages beneath a veneer of common sense thinking. The latest manifestation of the emerging agenda is www.whatwilltheylearn.com.

I am not sure I like “nodding along” with Stanley Fish, but I was. (I’m not surprised to find that he would feign surprise when he agrees with a very conservative organization.) I don’t agree with everything he says, of course. It’s not so easy to create a course that is “only about writing.” I am suspicious of a list of goals for a writing course that begins with “grammar.”

On other hand Fish seems to see the ACTA’s agenda pretty clearly. They use a modern sounding rhetoric focusing on creating and or maintaining communities when in fact the goal is to disrupt or even disband communities in the name of a restoration of what was supposed to be an American golden age. Pre-homosexuality, pre-feminist, pre-minority and so on.

American democracy matured, at least to some extent, and things got complicated and messy and the ACTA would like universities to take up the goal of making things simple again. I think Fish is also right when he suggests that ACTA’s not so hidden agenda is the autonomy of the university, particularly the academic freedom of individual professors.

Fish and the ACTA are exaggerating, of course. Most people who teach at colleges are not tenured professors and so do not have the sort of academic freedom that Fish seems to suggest is the norm. So Fish is being as nostalgic as the ACTA. Fish seems to see the ACTA as a vanguard instead of a gesture that seeks to consolidate goals already achieved.

What’s at stake here is not so much ‘general education’ as the leadership of U.S. education and the system of privileges accorded to the academic elite. Neither Fish nor the ACTA are much concerned that writing, for example, is by and large taught by adjuncts and graduate students. It’s not about the rest of us. They are fighting over the power of top-of-the-pyramid professors.

Posted in: Professional, War

The Apollo Aliance and That Vision Thing

August 10, 2009 5:00 am \ 2 Comments \ by Ray Watkins

Residents of Kankakee County, Illinois are ready for the new clean energy economy. Inspired by the calls for more green jobs during the 2008 presidential campaign, a local group of business, education, and government leaders is working to make green-collar jobs a reality in their region. They recognize the potential for green-collar jobs to transform the local economy while also benefitting the country and the environment. They also see investment in wind energy as the wave of Kankakee’s clean energy future.

Vision Energy’s $1 Billion Wind Bet in Illinois, April 21, 2009, Mac Lynch, Apollo News Service

I am really trying not to be Mr. Education-Politics Party-Pooper. These are horrible times for education, with cuts at all levels in every state. Much of that is due to the economic slowdown, although no doubt the right will not let this crisis pass without chipping away at educational autonomy in one way or the other. The real loss will access; tuition is like a tax without regulation.

We are on the verge of a real boom in education, once the economy recovers and the Obama administration gets past the health care debate. (I will avoid the obvious Dickens reference.) The highway robbery of the student loan system will probably end, releasing all sorts of money for education. The worst of the “No Child Behind” debacle is probably over, even if its effects remain.

There’s a close link between the Obama administrations’ economic stimulus package, the greening of energy, and the community colleges, too. It’s hard to complain about that, either. The community college system is probably one of the most accessible educational systems ever created. More of that is always good. But here’s where I start feeling that sharp pinch of liberal limitation.

It’s great that they are putting windmills up in Kankakee (about 2 hours north of here) and it makes sense that the community colleges would work together to try to provide the training. But it bugs me that they feel they have to do this in such a narrowly vocational way. Where’s the vision? The community colleges do much more than just train workers.

We need people who know how to work on windmills, but we also need windmill workers who have the critical and intellectual skills needed to accelerate the ongoing expansion and refinement of democracy here in the U.S. I don’t mean to disparage community college teachers. I bet they will add the critical thinking elements wherever they can. But it should be a part of the rhetoric, too.