Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy: “Wrote a Song for Everyone”
Pyrrhic Victory
It might be surprising, at least to some, to find that as someone who teaches in the proprietary education system, I am generally in favor of more regulations. And while it’s theoretically possible to imagine regulations that go too far and kill the goose that laid the golden egg, that seems unlikely in the extreme in the current political climate. It looks like a loose-loose situation.
In fact, the recent election debacle suggests that the already weak regulations may be weakened even further. I don’t think this is a victory for anyone. On the other hand, I think writers like Allen Singer go too far when they try to paint the for-profit sector with the charter school brush. He also seems to ignore the abuses in the so-called not for profit sector, further undermining his case.
It seems bizarre, for example, to complain about the student debt problem without also mentioning that student debt is a chronic, deeply destructive problem in all of higher education. Clearly the rules about recruitment need to be tightened so that students are not fooled about what they are getting into when they try to get a degree from a proprietary school.
Just as clearly the so-called non profits’ marketing programs deserve further scrutiny. The large football and basketball programs are essentially multti-million dollar corporations run in part on public money. Why should any school that gets federal money– for profit or otherwise– be allowed to waste millions of dollars in administrative salaries, either for coaches or for presidents?
The proposed regulations leave out a wide variety of other issues that need attention in every sector of the higher education system. What about the ratio of full-time to part-time professors and academic freedom of speech? None of these things are mentioned either in Singer’s piece or in the proposed regulations. Neither political party seems willing to add real teeth to the rules.
The Common Application
Given our nominal democratic ideals of ever-expanding college access, we ought to be a more and more reason-based society. As the recent elections shows, nothing could be farther from the truth. I think one good reason that our politics have become so profoundly anti-intellectual– often counter-factual if not paranoid– is that our higher education system is so focused on what a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article called “institutional self-interest.”
It’s the all too visible hand of the market. Decades of attacks on federal funding in general, and on higher education in particular, have helped to produce a hyper-competitive administrative culture bent on a cutting costs by shrinking full time employment and increasing revenues through expanded marketing. Whatever the drawback of the traditional liberal arts system, and there were many, it at least promoted the ideal of substantive learning.
Mass-marketing can’t focus on the personally transformative, difficult work of learning. It promotes the “college lifestyle”– a sentimentalized image more directed at parents than students. Perhaps this baby-boomer nostalgia is inescapable. The real damage is deeper: the undermining of full time employment and resulting loss of academic freedom of speech. If we don’t promote challenging thinking, we don’t get it, especially in elections.
Property is Theft: Come on In
In the academic job market, dominated on the one hand by adjuncts and casual labor, and on the other by a shrinking pool of tenure and tenure track professors, publicity matters. We all need to hear much more public discussion of the over-use of adjuncts and casual labor; when it hits the evening network news, we’ll know we are on our way. And that tiny group of full time professors need publicity to earn their way into the star system that passes for job security.
So I am never surprised when I read a story (“Play It Again, Professor”) about a professor pulling a publicity stunt. (It’d be interesting to know more about the logistics: did Marcus Boon notify the Chronicle beforehand to ensure he got his story?) On the other hand, I have to give Boon some credit becuase his stunt– reading from books other than his own at a book reading– does have a point. I am not sure how Boon would make the point, but the Chronicle makes it seem pretty wishy-washy post-modern academic.
It’s not. The idea of copyright, and the subsequent maturation of individual authorship, arose–among other things– out of a need to make sure that authors got paid for their work. It’s become completely naturalized, of course, and as a result many if not most people cannot imagine a world with any other kind of intellectual property right. That’s why the idea of a creative commons license is both so important and so difficult for so many to fathom. I don’t think, though, that it changes what we teach students.
Whatever it’s connections to bourgeois property– it’s certainly analogous to it– intellectual property is a lesson that we teach students in order to teach them a kind of social responsibility. We use citations becuase it’s a way of demonstrating mutual respect, even if at times it’s honored more in the breach, as when Dylan risks our ire by claiming personal authorship when he draws from the collective pool. These are all issues that are bound to generate some ‘future shock’ and I not sure this sort of stunt does much to address that issue.