Wreck and Salvage: Kafka
The University in Chains
Most of the players in this market are for-profit institutions that are problematic not only for the quality of education they offer but also for their aggressive support of education less as a public good than as a private initiative and saleable commodity, defined in this case through providing a service to the military in return for a considerable profit. And as this sector of higher education grows, it will not only become more privatized but also more instrumentalized, largely defined as a credentializing factory designed to serve the needs of the military, thus falling into the trap of confusing training with a broad-based education. Catering to the educational needs of the military makes it all the more difficult to offer educational programs that would challenge militarized notions of identity, knowledge, values, ideas, social relations, and visions.
Henry A. Giroux, Inside Higher Education, August 7
I couldn’t agree with Giroux more, in many senses, but I also feel his positions on the military and the university has a built in class bias. It’s really a sin of omission rather than commission. I think this impact of this militarized, credentializing factory education system is going to be blunted at the high status research institutions where Giroux has spent his career.
Or, rather, it will be blunted for the privileged professors who work at these institutions and for their equally privileged students. It will be most sharply
felt at the lower ends of the educational hierarchy, in the community colleges and the online schools. That won’t change until the privileges rooted in the educational hierarchy change.
People sign up in droves for online classes and community colleges because these ‘instrumentalized’ credentials are real capital that can be successfully invested. They sign up because they don’t have access to the liberals arts education system. Perhaps they have been told that they are not “college material,” because they did poorly on a standardized test. Or perhaps they are put off by the risks of the debt needed to get a degree.
There are alternatives, of course. Wealthy research institutions could, for example, create a system of cheap, online education, staffed by tenured professors and specifically designed to meet the needs of these students. They would provide instrumental capital as well as the liberal arts education championed by Giroux. That won’t happen until the privileged professors turn their attention to getting their own houses in order.
Broken Promises
Education, we are told, is about opportunity. It is about young people gaining the skills needed to get ahead in the new post-industrial economy. Whether Republican or Democrat, our political leaders tell us that schools are the way into a brighter future. But what if that future is determined, in fact, by how jobs get constructed and distributed in the new global economy. And if that means that more and more good jobs are fleeing the older industrial countries, then schools in those countries are not about opportunity but instead function as gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of rewards.
from College and social class: the broken promise of America
Cross Currents, Spring, 2006 by John Raines, Charles Brian McAdams
This is from a piece Raines and McAdams wrote last year; it’s a well-researched, passionate plea for change, although in all honesty they seem a little lost about what should be done. I do like their ideas about need-based funding and access, given the ongoing attacks on affirmative action and the apparent failures of ‘percent programs’ to diversify admissions either by class or race. And I certainly agree that we need to learn to ‘see’ class and to teach it in the classroom.
On the other hand, the writers never mention the class hierarchies and privileges built into their own (university) system, including the labor exploitation that underwrites the prominence of research institutions, in everything from low-paid staff to over use of adjuncts to over-paid administrators. Ironically, (tenured) professors themselves are becoming the “gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of [educational] rewards” in their own departments.
Most academics have this ‘outward gaze’ that seems to implicitly accept that what goes on where they work is less noteworthy than what goes on in other workplaces. The result is a focus on teaching about class rather than an attempt to directly challenge the class relationships they encounter and embody. It’s one thing to write papers that document inequity; it’s quite another to organize a card drive to create a faculty union.
I think its time the professors begin to clean up their own houses. In many senses, they are the ones who made the promise so famously broken. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey, for example, found that “112 presidents of traditional four-year public and private institutions, and systems, had compensation packages totaling at least $500,000,” an increase “in that level of compensation” of “53 percent.” Amazingly, even as funding for universities is shrinking, compensation for administrators is rising.
I continue to be astonished at the way academics who write about class seem to act or think as if they themselves are not participants in a system (or subsystem) of merit and class privileges that can and should be dismantled. This energy for reform needs to be turned inward, as it were, towards fully democratizing the University itself. Once the professors are organized (hopefully working with university staff and graduate students) then there might be a fighting chance at challenging the larger inequities Raines and McAdams lament.
Web 2.0 in Plain English
This is from Common Craft, another low-tech high-tech animation team; they have similar videos on RSS, and Wikis as well, among other things.