Category Archives: Writing

Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much broader demographic. Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid….

I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”

“Revolution Hits the Universities,” Thosm L. Friedman

I am fascinated by this juxtaposition; one from the first section of the article and the second from the last section. First, the reality of MOOC’s (so-called massive online open courses), which set up fantastically wild expectations– a hundred thousand students take a course online!– and then completely fail to meet them in any real fashion.

Never mind that those certificates and so on that will supposedly make it all worthwhile may well price any but the wealthy out of the system, just as the old system did. Then we have the last section which sets aside all the ongoing problems and dreams– once again– of the revolution in human potential that is– it must be!– just around the corner.

I love the technology too, but this is crazy talk. After all, higher education in the U.S. is hardly thriving; it’s rooted in a system of labor exploitation– little pay, no benefits, or job security for most teachers– that would have made Harry Bennett blush. Those sorts of problems, though, just are not sexy enough to get you an article in the New York Times.

Reinvigorating a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively to sacrifice the future to the past.

“The Collective Turn,” David Brooks

I sometimes see David Brook as the “reasonable conservative,” if only because he rarely if ever sounds like his wacky-right comrades. He doesn’t seem to associate Israel with the coming apocalypse and he doesn’t have any strange ideas about what makes a rape legitimate or not or how the state should force women to bear the children of their abusers. He might think these things, of course, but if he does he keeps them out of print.

If Obama’s nascent liberalism is real and if it pushes the conservative nuts further into obscurity, Brooks would be a good model for conservatism in retreat. In effect, his stripped down conservatism only has one last idea: we cannot allow ordinary people to take a larger share of the huge profits of American capitalism less we kill the goose that laid our golden egg. If we do, we become “European” and stagnant.

Yet the last three decades of corporate tax policy has led to an unprecedented gap between rich and poor on the one hand and huge corporate reserves of cash on the other. It’s not simply capitalism that concentrates wealth, though, its government policy as well, and whatever government policy can do it can undo as well. That’s the real anxiety behind Brook’s calm demeanor and his implicit call for a new conservatism.

Boston — Michael Bérubé’s address at this year’s Modern Language Association convention was one of a handful of times that I felt some real solidarity in the profession against the exploitation of the majority of our students and colleagues…

So hearing Bérubé as the president of the MLA call out higher education for more than 40 years of exploitation was a watershed moment for me, and, I am sure, many others in that packed ballroom: the first time I remember seeing an MLA president receive a standing ovation. I kept thinking of Jesse Jackson crying during Barack Obama’s presidential acceptance speech in 2008.

“What if the Adjuncts Shrugged?” William Pannapacker

I have to acknowledge this as a real watershed moment. Michael Bérubé’s MLA presidency and now this speech shows that the graduate student labor movement has gone from fighting the MLA to taking it over. I was around for some of that (here’s a piece I wrote about our efforts in 1998) although I was also never as fully enthusiastic about it as some of my friends and colleagues. Professional organizations have very limited powers.

In many ways, it seemed then– and now– that the MLA is largely a venue for the minority of guilty-minded tenured professors to bemoan the labor exploitation of the majority of their colleagues and then go home to their SUV’s and giant houses and job security and cats named Trotsky. I don’t want to appear as cynical as that might sound, but while I admire Bérubé and Neslon and the like, they swam in a vast sea of academic indifference.

That indifference, as the article says, has ment that most of us who were in graduate school in the 1990’s ended up outside of the tenure system without job security or much pay or health insurance. Bérubé’s speech suggests how far we have come, but as the article also points out the victory will have little practical effect. The MLA is finally on the right side of history, but it cannot provide the organizations we need to re-make higher education.