College Myths

\ Leave a Comment \ by

There’s a nice, if (as it says) rambling post over at the Progressive Historian that mentions a myth connected to college sports. I followed that link over the a piece about the so-called “Flute Factor.” Doug Flutie was a football player at Boston College in the 1980s. I don’t know Flutie from fruit but his spectacular work on the filed supposedly led to jumps in admissions at the school.

Administrators have since used this idea of the “Flutie” effect to justify the often enormous expenditure on athletics, particularly football. The piece explains that while a small percentage of admissions’ growth might be attributed to football, the surge in student enrollment was the result of several years of concerted effort on the part of the college. I’ve long been fascinated by the almost obsessive attachment many academics and administrators seem to have to the games played by their students.

I was on a university governing body once and in the middle of yet another budget crunch we had appointed a special committee to investigate why the athletic program was using almost a million dollars of academic money to keep itself afloat. After several weeks the committee returned, not with an explanation of how they might return the money to its proper use, but with a request for a budget increase! They didn’t have enough money for the long bus trips they had to take to compete.

A handful of us were more than a little shocked, but the majority (mostly administration types) were not. (It was mostly administration types because the administration had long ago tweaked the rules to ensure that professors could not actually govern the university, but that’s another story.) It’s a not so subtle reflection of anti-intellectualism, I think, in several senses. Administrators simply cannot image marketing their school without athletics, for one thing.

It goes beyond that, too, and includes a kind of sentimentalizing of student life. No one looks back on those long nights of trying to pass organic chemistry, or the first desperate attempt at an English paper. Supposedly, what we remember are things like football games. Parents and alumni, then, aren’t impressed by, say, academic publications or research. They want a winning team. It’s a viscous circle. College promote the idea of athletics, then they say they need athletics to promote the college.

Posted in: Writing

Too Much Democracy

\ Leave a Comment \ by

I have to say that sometimes market-obsessed conservatives fascinate me with their strange subtleties. Here’s Neal McCluskey, writing recently in Forbes (“SRFA Stinks“) about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). “SAFRA would direct $47 billion to Pell grants and require that grant amounts rise annually at the rate of inflation-plus-one-point,” Mc Cluskey notes.

“SAFRA would send about $9.5 billion to community colleges; $2.5 billion would go toward improving facilities,” he says, “and the remainder toward grants intended to push schools to improve their program-completion and job-placement rates.” And “$8 billion is slated to go to early-childhood education and $4 billion to repairing and modernizing not just public college buildings, but elementary and secondary schools as well.”

What could more conservative than promoting education, that bastion of boot-strapping American individualism? It’s a very commonsensical kind of proposal: if you get rid of the middle-men, that is, the banks who “process” student loans, you can take the administrative savings and use it to expand educational opportunities. It shifts money from one place– the banks– to another, more useful place– students and schools.

Eventually the banks will get their money– this will not change the regressive nature of the economy. If we had a “pay as you go” rule, this bill would pass muster. So why does McCluskey object? Here’s where the subtly really kicks in. First, he says, can they really save all that money by taking out the middle-men? “The cost of quintupling the volume of direct lending is, at best,” he says, “tough to predict, and bureaucracies have a strong, inherent tendency to grow.”

The health care debate has taught us that government administration– with its civil service salaries and economies of scale– is often a cheaper alternative. So that’s not a strong argument. I don’t find the “another government take over” line persuasive, either, and even McCluskey seems hard pressed to lament the loss of other, “non-government lenders.” McCluskey also seems to think that the capital markets are less competitive when one of the competitors is the government. That doesn’t make much sense either.

No, I think the real reasons have nothing to do with these faux-economic ideals. “This is especially troubling,” McCluskey laments, “because too many people are pursuing degrees.” In other words, to his way of thinking, college is already too accessible. We’re letting the rabble into the temple, and it’s costing us. “About a third of college students take at least one remedial course, only 56% graduate within six years and 29% of Americans have bachelor’s degrees even though only a quarter of American jobs require them.”

I wonder what he calls “remedial”– writing classes? Doesn’t that say more about the public school system? It’s odd and sad that we still don’t have a majority of citizens with a college degree. Isn’t that good reason to expand access? Why can’t everyone have a college degree, if they want one? What would be the harm? Maybe we would create some sort of critical, educated tipping point and people would read these sorts of arguments and just laugh.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Literary Studies Concedes Defeat

\ 1 Comment \ by

Perhaps they, the youngest generation, can labor with their teachers in putting together the house that has forfeited its sense of order. If they do, they can graduate with the knowledge that they possess something: a fundamental awareness of how a certain powerful literature was created over time, how its parts fit together, and how the process of creation has been renewed and changed through the centuries …

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

American Scholar, Autumn 2009,The Decline of the English Department, William H. Chase

Literary Studies folks have long lamented the possibility that their field seemed to be settling into the same sort of steady-state irrelevance as, say, the study of classics or linguistics. (By irrelevance, of course, they mean to undergraduate education). What’s unique about Chase, at least as far as I know, is that he concedes that the battle is lost.

In my upcoming book, A Taste for Language, I argue that this is exactly the wrong strategy. I won’t repeat that argument here, but I will say that what I find fascinating about this piece is the way it assumes that the sole source of academic power lies in the discursive powers of the academic. Since literary studies cannot persuade, it cannot succeed.

In one way, of course, that’s only common sense. Certainly English Studies (both composition and literary studies cadres) need to find some way to make their continued existence more than simply palatable. More precisely, Literary Studies, as Chase notes, seems difficult, if not impossible to justify, as an investment of time and energy. Composition has no such problem.

But this idea of persuasion– in texts as much as in committees and the public at large– too often hides as much as it reveals. What it hides is that there are other forms of power, specifically, the power that results from organizing. If people worried about the fate of English Studies were suddenly organized into unions, the whole picture would change.

Social systems and economies are complex systems, but the changes in the university system (and the economy at large) are not random. They serve certain specific interests. Generally, the changes in Detroit, just as much as changes in the higher education classroom, tend to favor markets over people. These changes were never inevitable, and they can be reversed.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing

The Future of Class is Here

\ Leave a Comment \ by

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need …

At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model…

It Is Us, by AndrewMc, 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM, Progressive Historian

College professors don’t like to talk about it but class cuts both ways. On the one hand, a college degree is one of the most basic ways we determine who goes where economically. The United States is a big, complicated social system, but in essence the message is simple: get an education or stay relatively poor and powerless the rest of your life.

At one point, of course, a certain percentage of the working class or poor could side-step this devil’s bargain by getting a job at a unionized work site. Setting aside the potential loss of power represented by the (missing) cultural capital of a college degree, this was a relatively good ideal. As Tecumseh said, “A single twig breaks but the bundle of twigs is strong.”

Outside of the public school system, and a few colleges, there are few of these union jobs left. Too often, now, though, even a good education ensures very little economic security, even among those long thought fully insulated from the vicissitudes of the labor market. Professors are a case in point. For most of the last fifty or sixty years they naively counted on the power of a single twig.

That individualist strategy stopped working at some point in the 1980s or so. The recession cuts in both directions, not just limiting the aspirations of students but also limiting the aspirations of college professors. Capital, as a vulgar Marxist might say, loves a contraction because it can use the opportunity to pursue all sorts of agendas that would be impossible in a functioning economy.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing