What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?
(With Thanks to my friend Anne, and her story about Piccolo.)
Brave Combo – The Hokey Pokey
Meet the New Boss
As nonprofit colleges have moved into online education, most have tapped technology vendors to help them do it. The study said these “online enablers,” such as Embanet/Compass, Bisk, Deltak, Academic Partnerships and Pearson, help colleges do much of the heavy lifting that for-profits do themselves, like course development, IT support and even generating “leads” among prospective students. That support industry will only expand, the study predicted.
“Brand New Online Heavies,” Paul Fain
I have to say that after my experiences with the for-profits over the last few years the ongoing rise of the nonprofit schools seems like very good news. Non-profits, at least in theory, should have fewer administrative costs (no $5 million executives, for example) and so more able to put an online education within reach of working people and other non-traditional students. It won’t be cheap– not until some other part of the higher education economic model breaks– but it could be affordable.
The trends outlined in this article made my heart sink. At some point, I think the ratio of full to part-time faculty, and maybe faculty salary, is going to play an important role in what the article calls (in an unfortunate bit of corporate jargon) “brand appeal.” That won’t happen soon. Meanwhile, the non-profits seem to be trying to get ahead of the game by repeating the worst mistakes of the for-profits, especially by out-sourcing so many services instead of developing them in-house. We need more in-sourcing.
It would be a slower process, but a truly innovative school could integrate faculty development and pedagogy into their plans for growth. Most universities have programs in the computer sciences. Why not use these programs, building from available open source software and technology, to develop your systems, from IT to course management to support? In fact, everything that you need in a university could be grown from the bottom up, grounded in education not grafted on to it.
Administrative Ostriches
British academics refer to the current season of top-down austerity as “the cuts,” but in the U.S., we might speak of lingchi, “death by a thousand cuts.” Faculty lines slashed, programs eliminated, course seats lowered, graduate student aid reduced, the decentralized U.S. higher education system has struggled to maintain quality across the disciplines. Humanities programs, in particular, have appeared threatened.
Yet, in this same time we are in the first phase of a digital revolution in higher education…
“Humanities in the Digital Age,” Alan Liu and William G. Thomas III
Stereotypes are ugly but I can’t help but wonder what it is about administrators that makes so many of them oblivious to recent history. Consider the list of problems compiled by Liu and Thomas, both experienced department chairs from major universities. In one sense, their list is correct, at least as long as it’s limited to the last 4 years and the Great Recession. In a more important sense, it’s profoundly short-sighted.
What missing from the list is the white elephant in the academic room: the transformation of the labor market in higher education and the ongoing shift away from full-time employment for professors. Liu and Williams seem to suggest that the problems of the last 4 years are unrelated to the problems of the last 30, and their proposed strategies say nothing about labor policy. Their solution isn’t about people, it’s about technology.
Imagine an alternative universe in which faculty respond to cost-cutting pressures by eliminating thousands of administrative jobs and replacing them with part-time workers without pensions or benefits. In this universe, I am certain that Liu and Williams would have a different perspective on the strategies we need to “maintain quality across the disciplines.” We can’t deal with the technology until we deal with the people.
Carving Out a Separate State
Confronted with a strong majority of adjunct faculty demanding union representation, the administration at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh is claiming the school’s faith should make it exempt from unionization.
The Catholic university argues that a Labor Board election would be impermissible government intervention in a religious institution. Its claims echo the fight over the Affordable Care Act’s birth control stipulations. Conservatives and Catholic institutions have attacked the law because it guarantees that health insurance plans are required to provide birth control at no out-of-pocket cost to women.
“Duquesne Claims Religious Exemption to Escape Faculty Union,” Joshua Zelesnick
This is a very strange story that I think deserves more attention than it is getting. It’s difficult to understand exactly what Duquesne is trying to do by making this very odd appeal to the National Labor Relations Board. There’s nothing unusual about unions at the university; the administration apparently more or less happily coexists with four other unions.
So why is this union any different? There are a lot of universities, of course, who want to avoid an adjunct union because, they argue, a contract reduces administrative flexibility. Most people who watch these things– and are honest about it– know that administrations don’t like unionizing adjuncts mostly because it is or could be so much more costly.
Organized adjuncts ask for higher wages and benefits and before you know it they are just as expensive as full-time faculty. I think something else is going on too. I think that the Catholic church– and no doubt other churches as well– believe that the time is ripe for them to begin to try to flex their muscles and gain some independence from the state.
I doubt any good anti-labor lawyer is going to place a long-term bet based on what seems to be the increasingly less likely chance of a Republican sweep in the coming election. My guess is that the church wants to set up a legal challenge in the Supreme Court — a religious “Citizens United” ruling that could vastly expand their power.