Turtle v. Rabbit

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There’s a kind of race going on in Higher Education, between that swift proprietary rabbit and the slow public turtles. So far the race has been to the swift, but no one should write off the slower public universities. In the first stage of the race the public institutions stumbled badly, in part becuase they are big bumbling animals and in part over feats about the effectiveness of online education. It’s the economy, stupid.

Depending on your point of view online education has either proven itself or simply proven that it won’t go away. Either way, the old ‘under-served markets’ and ‘economies of scale’ arguments really starts to make sense in a time of shrinking budgets. The potential for growth in online education in the California system alone is enormous (“California Dreaming: Remaking Online Learning at the U. of California“). The race may get interesting.

The key, though, is going to the competition over teachers in higher education. If the system continues to reflexively rely on graduate students and adjuncts as cheap labor, the expanded role of online education will just be more of the same. The new online system, just as the old, requires well paid teachers with secure jobs. It can’t become another “race to the bottom.”

Posted in: Writing

Speaking Greek

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Just the other day came news that the University of Illinois had hired a new president at a new, higher salary of $620,000, $170,000 more than his predecessor. Somehow this escaped the attention of the right-populist crowd now scrambling to find ways to criticize the Obama administration for the malfeasance of British Petroleum. In fact, it hardly seemed to merit much comment at all, despite Illinois’ ongoing budget crunch. It’s just business as usual.

In the midst of economic crisis, the wealthy always find ways to better themselves, even in so-called service professions. The other side of that coin is that the rest of us have to pay the bills and when there are a lot of big bills then suddenly lots of things that we took for granted become much too expensive. It’s in that spirit that I read a recent piece in the New York Times suggesting that maybe we don’t need that many college graduates (Plan B: Skip College.) It’s a hint that Greek style austerity measures might be coming to a town near you.

The problem is those costly liberal arts based undergraduate degrees. Do we need to put students through all that when all we want is more nurses to take care of us as we grow old? Interesting, the writers quote business people who emphasize the need for the sorts of people skills the liberal arts teaches so well. You can’t help but wonder if the real problem is that we’ve decimated the arts curriculum in the public schools and minimized learning, like writing, that isn’t easily quantified.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Disposable Teachers

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Certain ideas make my skin crawl. High on the list is this notion that teachers are the main problem in U.S. public education. Inevitably, this leads to a corollary skin crawler: the idea that the problem with these bad teachers is that you can’t fire them, and the solution is to eliminate tenure protections.

It’s particularly galling to see NPR, dreaming its liberal dream of being fair and balanced, promoting the idea so uncritically (“Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?”). Everyone rails against lawyers, but you’ll never see an NPR story called, “Is Legal Tenure Still Necessary?” The end of tenure is a long standing dream of the right wing, now largely successful in higher education.

The roots of the attacks on tenure have little or nothing to do with teaching effectiveness. There are lots of ways to improve schools that have proven much more effective than making teachers easier to fire. The roots of this idea are economic, a part of a systemic drive to make all workers more disposable by creating what’s often called a “flexible” work force.

Imagine, in this year of big budget crunches, if administrators could get rid of all of those pesky and expensive teachers with thirty years’ experience. You could hire two new teachers for the price of one; no doubt your health care expenses would go down too, as you dump employees more likely to be ill and to use the doctor. And, of course, if you could destroy the teachers unions too…

Posted in: Writing

Concentration, Contemplation

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I’m going to start a conference paper today– really, I will!– that focuses on the need for a stronger critique of consumerism in the study of computers and writing, in part to avoid a potential backlash against new communication technologies, and in part becuase without that sort of criticism our field risks intellectual and social irresponsibility. The backlash, as a recent Washington Post piece illustrates (“More colleges, professors shutting down laptops and other digital distractions”), continues to gain momentum.

In the liberal arts, a certain segment of the academy always believed that these new technologies are alienating, if not anathema to the traditional transformative goals of higher education. In computers and writing, we’ve long argued that this was both wrong and misguided. Wrong because few tools short of the atom bomb are wrong in and of themselves; what matters is what you do with them. Misguided becuase English Studies seems less relevant every year. If we miss the boat on the web, we risk becoming irrelevant.

There’s a certain irony to the complaint that notebooks are a distraction in a large lecture hall. What isn’t a distraction in a large lecture hall? But there’s also a certain amount of common sense, particularly as the third and fourth generation devices make it increasingly possible not just to Tweet, but to catch up on those Project Runway episodes you missed. I have no doubt that many students simply don’t have the self-discipline to focus. Professors can make their lectures more engaging, too, but that’s a very limited solution.

I think that we are going to see a long period of backpedaling on technology in the classroom, at least when it comes to internet access and laptops. The first won’t be difficult to shut down, although it will never be perfect; the second seems nearly impossible. I suppose, though, that schools could begin to insist that students take notes by hand. The question, of course, is whether or not the older technology can successfully counter the twitchy mindset of modern consumerism or the chronic lack of respect, in the U.S., for both education and teachers.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing