Show Me the Money

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It’s fundraiser week on my local Public Radio Station (WILL) and so I am feeling characteristically crabby about public life and services. It might be worse this year, since I discovered the wonders of BBC 3 and 4, and Canadian Public Broadcasting, all available without begging or commercials or the passive aggressive guilt tripping attitude typical of National Public Radio.

I value NPR, of course (I’ve been listening to it daily for almost 30 years) but it galls me that a radio station in the wealthiest country in the world, affiliated with a rich university, needs to ask for money from its listeners. We seem to suffer from a permanent lack of imagination when it comes to public services. A simple 1% sales tax on MP3 players would probably fund NPR once and for all.

I just read a piece about so-called “idea incubators” that are becoming more and more common at some universities (“The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus”). It’s not uncommon, of course, for public money to be transformed via a university into private wealth. What’s crazy, though, especially given the ongoing collapse of government financing, is that the universities never seem to get a cut.

If an idea is commercialized, it’s certainly true that the local community can benefit from the new jobs as well as the investment of capital. But if the universities retained a small share of the ownership of the products developed then the investment could pay real dividends. If all of this money was put into a single national fund, we could use it to make education more affordable for everyone.

Posted in: Economics, Writing

The Coming (Girl) Robot Apocalypse

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The idea that all women hate technology is wrong-headed, of course. There are a lot of women in this big world and there isn’t much that you can say that applies to all of them. And the best computer person I ever met was a woman named Tanya, back in graduate school. But there’s is something going on having to do with gender and technology. We tend to assign entire areas of tools to one gender or the other and mixing that up can cause a lot of confusion.

My family used to have a lot of trouble buying me Christmas presents, not because I was picky, but because I tended to cross those gender lines. I love cooking, so you could buy me pots and pans and cookbooks. (Inside cooking, too, not just grilling!) I also like to build things– I am putting in a deck this week– so you could also buy me tools. Some technologies seem to lie in-between: I’d love to have a digital cooking thermometer so I can see exactly when my steak is medium rare.

Some are less feminine than just intellectual and so less than masculine: a red flashlight that helps me see when I am using my telescope. And some are just geeky technology loving fun: the super all in one programmable remote control that I got from my mom a few years ago. The latter might be the most relevant to the ongoing struggle to get young girls to love technology (Camp designed to win girls over to technology). I am not at all sure, though, why people feel so powerfully compelled to stick to one particular gender area.

I had doll when I was a kid– I still have him, his name is Boy Boy– so maybe I was accidentally corrupted, but I have a hard time understanding why so many women (at least my age, in the United States) dislike technology. I’ve had women friends of all sorts, but the rarest seems to be engineers and computer scientists. Pardon my Freud, or maybe Darwin, but I am begging to think that this must have something to do with mating rituals. Do men reject women who love technology? Maybe there should be camp to teach men that geeky women are sexy.

Posted in: Writing

Working Masculinity

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It’s long been obvious that my classes are dominated by young women. Since I teach writing, I often ask my students about their reasons for coming to school and about their families. It’s common to find young women who plan on becoming teachers (or nurses); often, these young women have a boyfriend or husband who isn’t in college and works in a local plant or as a carpenter or a plumber.

This new pattern has become a part of the lore of university teaching and now a piece in the Atlantic (“The End of Men“) confirms the existence of a long term trend, too. Hana Rosin, the author, would like to make the case that this represents a change in centuries old pattern of gender in the west. I find that longer term argument less persuasive, but the article is still worth reading.

There’s no doubt about the patriarchy, of course, but it can be difficult to look past the rigid gender roles that took root in the Victorian era. It’s hard to know just what the roles of men and women were in, say, medieval Europe. Is a priest or a poet a strongly masculine role? I think gender has always been looser than some public discourse suggests. Mick Jagger is, after all, an icon of masculinity.

Still, something does seem to be happening among my younger brothers, at least as indicated by the numbers Rosin sites as well as my own experiences. The anti-intellectualism of U.S. culture, often colored by machismo, has taken on a decidedly chauvinistic– and self destructive– flavor. The more or less organic development of capitalism is away from physical work and towards mental work. So there’s a reactionary element involved and a resistance to modernity.

I am not sure why this anti-intellectualism and anti-modernity is so appealing to young men, although I remember what it felt like. None of the men in my large, extended family, was attracted to college. (Even the women saw it strictly as a necessity.) We all wanted to work with our hands, and to be outside; we wanted the visceral, immediate contact with the physical world you cannot get in an office.

I hear a self-preservationist note in the statistics, a sense that these young men are resisting a kind of alienation that they believe has a feminine cast. It’s a misguided notion. Intellectual work can be as immediately, physically satisfying as putting up Sheetrock. Effective teaching can have a legitimate paternal or a maternal cast. The larger question, then, isn’t about gender as much as it is about the meaning of work.

Posted in: Professional, Writing

Competition and Education

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Competition is one of those magical thinking words that economic conservatives evoke whenever they don’t have a solution to a problem. In education, this little bit of alchemical cognition brought us the idea of the charter school as the solution to class inequity– oh, wait, I meant “the poorly performing public schools.” I think, though, that in a narrow sense the proprietary education industry could really benefit from increased competition– within regulatory limits.

The first limit– and it should be a limit that applies to all higher education– is a cap on student debt. (Here’s an NPR piece on the clearly misguided efforts to stop this reform.) Commercial media, as well as NPR, makes this problem seem unique to proprietary education but in fact this has been a social blight for at least twenty years. I doubt that the legislation will go as far as I would like it to go, but at the very least we should accept the principle. We can make it tougher next.

I think the proprietary education industry has fooled itself into believing that it needs the current student loan system to survive. We do need the moral credibility– crucial in education– that supporting the limit would provide. I have a feeling, though, that the industry won’t wake up until it faces real competition in the form of large-scale non-profit online education. We see ourselves as the hare, but as a piece from Philadelphia suggests, the turtle is moving steadily and slowly forward ($500K grant marked for cyber learning in Beaver, Allegheny counties).

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing