Category Archives: Writing

Stephen Colbert’s notion of truthiness, coined 6 or so years ago, still effectively describes the rhetoric of the current crop of Republicans. The phenomena may have grown much deeper roots than I thought, too. It’s bad enough when a publicity seeking television star, having taken on the false trappings of a presidential campaign, first fabricated and then defended a profoundly “truthy” version of Paul Revere’s famous ride. The ring wing lack of respect for history, to put it mildly, is reflected in their public education policies as much in their public pronouncements.

That’s fairly superficial, and not too unlike what salespeople of all sorts have always done when speaking extemporaneously. It’s also an important characteristic of Reagan-era Republican practice. The Gipper was known to mix up movie plots and reality. It might be a mistake or it might be more purposeful. It’s probably impossible to tell, particularly when the speaker is Sarah Palin, who seems unable to admit to her own mistakes, no matter how obvious.

What is clear is that the practice is becoming more acceptable. Palin’s supporters did not simply argue, as they always do, that she was being quoted “out of context” or maligned in some way. This time they decided to take history into their own hands and alter Wikipedia, in hopes of showing that, well, Sarah Palin was being maligned. More disturbingly, a recent survey shows that the ongoing Republican attacks on the public schools have undermined the teaching of history. That’s the fertile ground for Republican truthiness.

I work at a for-profit online college, and I worry about the future of our industry and my job, but I refuse to swallow the same old conservative Kool Aid that says that government can do nothing right and that the private market is always and everywhere the best choice. What’s hurting the industry now more than anything is its ongoing resistance to common sense regulations. We don’t produce a commodity, of course, we produce a particular kind of service, and service industries thrive only when they are properly regulated.

I guess that a few libertarian economists would argue that, say, we can have a medical industry without rigorous government regulation, but I doubt any one but the true believers would agree. The question is not whether there are regulations, the question is whether we get effective regulations that we can use to build a solid foundation for our educational capital. I think Daniel J. Solove’s call for transparency and privacy protection, for example, (“Gainful Employment: A Privacy Black Hole?“) makes a lot of sense in this context.

The argument over our industry, however, is littered with conservative banality that has never made any logical, much less economic sense. In “Democrat Discrimination in Education” for example, Kevin Jackson and Joe Wurzelbacher make all sorts of absurd claims that won’t help anyone, from the silly and hyperbolic “Democrats have declared all-out war on for-profit education” to the utterly nonsensical: “proprietary colleges are the direct competitor to public-sector education.” The “direct” competition is within the system. We work at the margins.

I think that it’s a shame that the for-profit sector has wasted so much and effort trying to defeat regulations and those Republicans (nearly 300 apparently, according to “For-Profit Colleges Win Major Concessions in Final ‘Gainful Employment’ Rule“) who are trying prevent regulation are wildly out of touch. Our industry needs strong regulations if it is ever going to mature into a legitimate part of higher education. If we are going to promise employment, then I think it makes sense that employment is the measure of our success.

As the Department of Education‘s announcements says, “These regulations are designed to ramp up over the next four years, giving colleges time to reform while protecting students and their families from exploitative programs.” This begs the question: can the for-profit sector both meet these regulations and keep up their commitment to the general education requirements demanded by the accreditation institutions? I think non-profits programs as well as for profits schools, as well as the industries they serve, need to discuss this issue directly.

A narrowly defined vocational curriculum focused on a single job is “So Last Century“) “Today’s students,” Kathy Davis writes, “are good test takers but poor lack the workplace essentials… [including] people skills (especially in diverse global contexts), communication skills, collaborative skills, analytical skills, networking skills…” . If this is true, then I think vocational programs– indeed all higher education– needs to be certain that the notions of vocation and skill in their curricula, and reflected in the regulations, embrace the liberal arts.