Category Archives: Writing

The Conservative complaint about liberal bias in everything from the media to academia is so long standing it borders on empty cliche. A new study, however, deeply rooted in the ironic enterprise of looking for bias in a biased fashion, has found yet another liberal bastion: the relatively new custom of having all freshman read the same book as a part of orientation (“What Freshman Will Read” The original study summarized in the article is here).

Some of the conclusions of the study are silly. They complain that there are too few classics and the classics used, Huckleberry Finn and The Communist Manifesto among them, are not substantive. I think both Marx and Twain, opposites if there ever were opposites, must be rolling in their graves. Even sillier, the authors don’t seem to realize that many of these programs are coupled with visiting lectures by the authors.

Schools use contemporary books becuase it is so much harder to get dead people to come for to campus. What always fascinates me, though, is the way these sorts of studies try to create a kind of black and white, liberal and conservative, picture of the intellectual world. Twain deals with race; that’s a liberal book. Approaching the Q’uran isn’t critical enough about fundamentalist religious violence; that’s a liberal book as well.

Every book is liberal and conservative in different and often contradictory ways; it might make sense to talk about liberal or conservative readings that seem to dominate different campuses or classes, but that would be complicated and unlikely to produce headlines for the conservative media the study is designed to feed. Even more interesting is the complaint about too many books on racism and too many on multiculturalism.

We need more white supremacy and mono-culturalism, apparently. It’s not easy defining the opposite of liberalism. The study complains about books on Africa; that bias can only be corrected by books on Europe. It complains about too many books on global warming, which it apparently sees as a more of a liberal issue than a scientific fact or set of facts. I can’t help but wonder if they would also complain about evolution, if that were a reading trend one year…

The news about private or proprietary online education, continues to sound dire. Bloomburg reports this week that Steven Eisman, an expert in short selling, believes that private education is the next best candidate for a speculative bubble burst. The primary reason, Eisman says, is pending legislation that would strictly limit the amount of debt students at private institutions can take on to pay for their education (“Eisman of ‘Big Short’ Says Sell Education Stocks (Update2)”).

I think that Eisman may be right; the legislation is long over due. (I may well loose my job if it passes and my school cuts full time positions in response to its perceived loss of profitability.) I have to say, though, that I have a lot of colleagues who seem to have created what amounts to an essentialist definition of the public schools rooted in a rejection of the private model. On the one side, the proprietary schools are profit oriented; on the other, the public schools are service oriented.

Like most absolute distinctions, this one falls apart once you tug at a few of the looser threads. I keep thinking about that giant mulit-million dollar football stadium at my Alma Mata, the University of Texas at Austin, lined with luxury booths so beloved by politicians and power-tie types everywhere. It’s a hugely over priced advertising program, designed as much as anything to help line the pockets of powerful administrators. Is that a public service? Orwell would be proud.

The new president of the University of Illinois was recently granted a huge salary increase, even as the school is squeezed under the largest budge deficit in Illinois history. The logic, of course, is that they cannot get a president of “his caliber” without that level of compensation. In other words, this sort of profit-motive is typical in the public system. It’s also common for public school students to have enormous debt, although perhaps they default less because of their class advantages.

Since I work at a for profit university I often feel a little twinge of guilt reading about some of the abuses in my industry. This recent NPR piece (“For-Profit Colleges Flexible But Expensive“) is no exception. As always, NPR makes a complex issue look simple. I realize that NPR, like all U.S. news outlets, love cheap-to-produce stories. It makes things seem much too simple sometimes, though.

I don’t mean to suggest that the private online higher education industry has no problems; far from it. I think we should shift to a not-for-profit status, perhaps if necessary through regulations so stringent that for profit status is untenable. I have yet to hear of any other solution that can solve the problems that arise from treating the student as a customer and education as a commodity.

I am willing to listen to other possible solutions, though, and I am certain that there are for profit schools that have minimized these problems. My historical guess is that if the industry doesn’t start aggressively dealing with these problems, the not-for profit status is nearly inevitable. All of that said, the NPR piece has a lot of problems that, as I said, seem to arise from poor research.

First of all, the University of Phoenix may or may not be the worse offender but it should not be held up as the exemplary model. Phoenix is exemplary of the ‘made from scratch’ model, but there are other models too. My school, for example, is a kind of spin off from an already existing institution or set of institutions. Reporters need to start making distinctions.

I have seen lots of horror stories about online education, but very little actual research into the efficacy of the different models. Again, this would mean going beyond Phoenix, which is only one system or model, and into the classrooms to see what is or is not done well. I also think that the discussion of costs is very distorted, becuase the comparison is to the community colleges.

If you are going to make that comparison, then you need to be able to talk carefully about the education these students receive. Again, it’s a distortion to focus solely on Phoenix. I’d like to see the cost of higher education reduced as well, but I don’t think you help that cause by lumping all schools into the same basket and by trivializing the benefits of 24 hour access for working people.

Why not title the piece, “Traditional Education Cheap But Rigid”? Again, this is in no way to minimize problems. But it is important to note that the for profits did not arise in a vacuum. They arose, in part, due to a higher education system that was ignoring the needs of a lot of people. In the long run, the for profits need strict regulation; meanwhile lots of us are trying to teach our students.