Slowing Down

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It’s too rarely noted that whatever the benefits of new communication technologies like the internet they are also implicated in an overall speed up of work. Thanks to the web, and cell phones, and the like, we all work harder and more efficiently. Unfortunately, this increase in productivity has not been accompanied by a proportional increase in our salaries. I love computers perhaps a little more than the next guy, but so far these tools have favored capital more than labor. A proposed regulatory slow down in online education could help.

In my field, computers and writing, this speed-up is perhaps most dramatically reflected in the 5.5 week session. On the other hand, these short sessions are one of the important ways that the for-profit schools meet working students half-way. As Stan Jones and others have noted, those long academic semesters are ideal only for someone in their early 20s who can afford the time away from work. (Or someone wealthy enough to stop work for 4 years.) I think, though, that our current strategy still benefits capital over (working) students.

I think it’s time that we in the computers and writing field– all of us who love these new communication technologies– begin to recognize the various ways that these same technologies have been used to reduce rather than enhance the quality of our lives. A slow down– resisting the temptation to do everything as efficiently as possible, and fighting to shift some of the financial and social benefits of new technologies away from big-capital– would be a welcome change. Instead of trying to make learning faster, we ought to be trying to find ways to give people the time they need to become educated.

Posted in: Writing

Pot, Meet Kettle

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I have to start out with a kind of disclaimer: Marc Bousquet is a friend of mine and he wrote a positive review of my book (it’s on the cover). Even if he hadn’t, though, I think I would still welcome his recent commentary, “Fix Nonprofit Higher Ed First,” for its refreshing reality-based argument about for-profit and non-profit higher education. The for-profit make a too convenient target.

Personally, I think that for rhetorical reasons he overstates the ills of the for-profits (where I work); not all schools are the same, and we do some things just as well as the non-profits. But he’s right to make the obvious point that the non-profit sector is much larger, and so much guiltier. Too often the focus on the non-profits works as a smoke screen for some ugly practices.

In any case, all of higher education needs labor and regulatory reform, not simply the for-profit sector. I’ve certain witnessed my share of what Bousquet calls “slapdash, harebrained systems of hiring and evaluation by administrators.” And it seems obvious that in a democratic society so heavily dependent on technology that higher education should be free. It’s just common sense.

Posted in: Writing

The Key Word is Stick

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Every year, it seems, we move just a tiny little bit closer to imposing the terrible ideas to colleges and universities that have been so disastrous in our public schools. We’ve spent three decades or so pretending that standarized tests, in particular, are the best way to improve education. The focus on so-called assessment allows us to ignore the radical class inequities that continue to undermine public education. It’s much easier to test than to redistribute money.

We don’t stop at testing. In K-12 we demoralize teachers and break unions by privatizing schools via charters and voucher programs. Similarly, in universities teachers have been demoralized mostly by the almost complete destruction of the profession in favor of using casual labor and adjuncts. We seem no more willing to address the root problems of higher education than we are wiling to address the inequities which continue to undermine the entire project of public education.

That’s why it’s so depressing to hear more about the Obama administration‘s use of the idea of accountability and assessment to try to shape the development of higher education. Assessment is one of those ideas or words that sound so reasonable, even scientific, but it’s largely a myth when it comes to education. (See this piece for a great example of the myth of assessment and accountability.) Or, rather, the myth is the idea that an education can be “measured” in an objective fashion like, say, average summer temperature.

In Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, a kind of hybrid of sociobiology and mathematics can essentially predict the future. That was the great dream of mid-20th century science. It’s failed again and again. Perhaps most famously, the science of intelligence (if that’s the word) developed first an ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ test (deeply rooted in racist assumptions) and then a standardized test that was designed to predict the future performance of students at college.

More than seventy years of research has shown that the standardized test simply cannot do what it was designed to do. What’s worse, the often well-intentioned desire to “prove” that a person is educated, or intelligent, has time and time again become both a distraction from real problems as well as a stick used to beat up on teachers. Imagine if the Obama administration tied federal higher education grants to administrative efficiency or to full to part time employment ratios…

Posted in: Union, Writing

What the Market Will Ruin Next

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The list of libertarian market ideology ruins is long: health care, the banking system, public schools, airlines, the public universities, energy. You don’t have to be a nostalgic dreamer to realize that we would be much better off if we had gotten a national health care system as a part of the New Deal, or that we would not be facing the death of a thousand fees each time we take a trip back home if we had rational airline regulations, or that democratic education would be better served by a system of tenured professors and school teachers. The irrationality of private markets needs a public counterweight.

Yet the religion of the market marches on unabated, now perhaps exemplified in Texas governor Perry’s ongoing attempts to use the same destructive market ideology on the Texas university system. Perry’s been at it for a decade, and in the 1990s lots of us worked to organize state workers and graduate students in order to try to stop then Governor Bush from selling off everything he found in state government for pennies on the dollar. The rigidity of these ideas is one thing, but worse still is that they still seem to sell so well to the very public they are designed to rob. Maybe Marx is less helpful in this context than P.T. Barnum.

Posted in: Writing