Unraveling the U.S. Middle Class

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Interest rates on student loans, including on popular federal programs like the unsubsidized Stafford (now nearly 7 percent) and Parent Plus (8.5 percent), are running several percentage points higher than the rates on secured loans, like home equity lines of credit.

“The difference of rates between secured and unsecured loans is higher than I have ever seen,” said Scott White, director of counseling services at Westfield High School in New Jersey. “This is one further impediment to access to post-secondary education for all but the well-to-do.”

Judy Campbell, Brennan’s guidance counselor at Hollywood High School, where three of every four students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, suggested that his family was “not poor enough for need-based aid and not rich enough to write a check.”

When asked over dinner whether she felt guilty that Brennan had taken so much upon himself, his mother, Caryn, began to cry. “We didn’t expect to end up in this situation,” she said.

Goal Is College. Hurdle Is Finding Financial Aid, New York Times, JACQUES STEINBERG, April 30, 2009

Americans take the middle class society of the last half-century for granted, assuming that if “the economy” is prosperous then “most of us” will be prosperous. It’s not surprising, since “most of us” have never known any other culture /economy (unless you are older than 60 or even 70) and few have been overseas.

In fact, there is no real reason why the U.S. economy can’t become something else. We could become a society permanently and sharply split between cultural and financial haves and have not’s, with little in-between. As long as we buy into Reagan’s first principal (“government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem”) this is the risk we take.

Markets, left to themselves, will concentrate the wealth of a society in smaller and smaller groups. The ideals of a democracy make it clear that this concentration of wealth is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst. So we need the government (among others) to counter this concentration.

There are all sorts of ways to do this, from the income tax (minus the loop holes that make it so regressive) to inheritance taxes to educational funding. The conservative focus on Regan’s aphorism, then, has only ensured that the United States has become progressively less democratic.

Cheap, accessible education is not a luxury to be set aside until the economic crisis is over. A recession will shift capital in all sorts of ways but it will not prevent the ongoing concentration of wealth and power. If we don’t drive down the cost of education, and make more (non-loan) money available for students, Obama’s election won’t mean a thing.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional

Life and Tenure Among the Social Darwinians

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1. Striving for tenure at a university is like gambling in a casino; the house sets the rules and controls the odds. From a university’s point of view, the granting of tenure is an enormous commitment. If one assumes that a newly tenured professor will work at the university for 30 years with an average salary and benefits of $100,000, granting tenure is a $3 million commitment, a substantial obligation for any institution to assume. Therefore, to protect the institution, university tenure guidelines include phrases stating that the granting of tenure shall occur when it is in the best interest of the university. Tenure is based on the university’s needs, not the achievements of those seeking tenure, and the university sets the rules and controls the odds. Changing budgets and administrations vary the standards for those receiving tenure over time, making comparisons with earlier cases potentially dangerous to current tenure candidates.

What I Wish I’d Known About Tenure, March 27, 2009, Leslie M. Phinney

Irony is one of the most difficult concepts for students. It’s not that they don’t have a sense of irony, it’s that they use the term in a very broad, sweeping fashion, almost as if it were synonymous with anything unusual and funny or humorous. Irony, though, is more specific; it always involves a kind of reversal of meaning.

When I read this piece on tenure I kept thinking that I was reading an ironic description. This is the way things are, Phinney implies, but it’s the opposite of the way things should be. I am fairly certain I am wrong. There is no irony in this text, and certainly it does not see anything it describes as unusual or funny.

This is a ‘realpolitik‘ depiction that tries to present the ‘hard truths’ that, it assumes, few young academics are willing to face. It’s accurate and, in the end, a little silly in the way it asserts what it calls the ‘institutional’ needs, as if that were a distinct ‘interest group’ separate from students, faculty, and staff.

It all sounds clean-cut and simple, like a character from a 50s sit-com. The truth peeks out from behind the rationality when Phinney admits that “the majority of those beginning tenure-track positions will end up in the gray or middle zone, and the outcome will depend on local departmental and university conditions.”

What Phinney doesn’t say is that the ambiguity or ‘gray area’ isn’t resolved ethically, as a matter of right and wrong, but as a kind of aggressive psycho-pathology. Typically, she defines it as “integration into the department.” Ask anyone who’s been through it; it’s a much nastier thing.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional, Union

Ignore That White Elephant, It’s Just the Textbook Industry

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Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

The Wired Campus, March 19, 2009

I don’t want to imply in any way that I think this is a bad idea. On the contrary, I think that this kind of this project and others, such as the Writing Spaces composition textbook initiative, are fundamental to the future of education in a democratic culture. They represent yet another moment in the ongoing triumph of the collective, open knowledge process.

What fascinates me about these sorts of projects is the timidity of their rhetoric. Perhaps this is simply the natural humility of some parts of academic culture, or perhaps it’s a hesitancy born out of a kind of Utopian burn out. After all, about every six months something or other– some technology, I should say– comes along claiming to be revolutionary.

Alongside this timidity seems to be an unwillingness to directly challenge the powers-that-really-be in academia, such as the textbook publishers. Of course, these sorts of project are pretty obviously ringing the death-knell for those $300 chemistry textbooks now haunting our campuses. But these projects don’t try to justify themselves in that fashion.

I guess we shouldn’t complain too much if this anti-corporate push never quite takes on an anti-corporate rhetoric; it may well be the best way to fly under the radar, as it were. One day the textbook publishers will wake up to find that collaboratively authored, profession-wide textbooks have completely taken their place. Another major loss for the old property regime.

Posted in: Professional, Writing

Wikipedia Wins Again!

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And what has been surprising in students’ attitudes toward Wikipedia? Though my evidence is anecdotal, in the years of teaching with Wikipedia I have found almost no difference in the range of opinions about Wikipedia held by student writers and those held by their – mostly – older teachers. I find that roughly the same proportion of people have concerns about reliability, open access, and information literacy among students and faculty, just as I find roughly the same number of enthusiastic adopters among teachers and students. But when I query reluctant students about how and where they formed their negative opinions about Wikipedia, they usually point to a classroom environment where they were penalized for using it as a source. They almost never have had an experience which encouraged them to move from simply using Wikipedia to writing for it. As we move from seeing Wikipedia as only a resource to an online intellectual community, students are more than ready to accompany us.

Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?, March 12, 2009, Robert E. Cummings

The case against Wikipedia, like too many things in academia, is more than a little specious, often dependent on a kind of willful ignorance. I knew a professor once who hated Wikipedia so much that he learned to post to it, just so that he could put in false information.

He’d then give his students a simple research task, knowing that most would go to Wikipedia and get the false information he had planted. When they told him what they had found, he’d go, “A HA! You went to Wikipedia didn’t you!” He had nothing to teach, just “don’t use Wikipedia.”

Cummings presents a clear outline of why this sort of thing– besides the ethical implications– represents a wasted opportunity in several directions. Most importantly, it misses a chance to teach students about writing, the production of knowledge, and audiences, among other things.

It also misses the opportunity to continue to develop Wikipedia as both an source of knowledge and a community of writers and knowledge builders. I think some students might find this process so compelling they would become committed Wikipedians. That’s a social good in itself.

I think, though, that Cummings (and the rest of us technology and writing lovers) have to go further than developing arguments in favor of new writing forms. We need an entire range of critical judgments that would allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I think someone like Cummings should write a piece called, “Why I Don’t Have Students Compose Videos in First Year Writing,” or “Why I Don’t Think Twitter is Appropriate in Advanced Composition.” We don’t have to agree on every point, of course, but we need the debate if we are ever going to defeat the Luddites.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing