An MLA Agenda: Too Little Too Late

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In many places, laudable efforts to professionalize institutional policies and practices for faculty members off the tenure track have established an intermediate tier consisting of full-time contingent faculty members who hold renewable multiyear contracts. While these faculty members have more job security than part-time or short-term instructors, they are still far more vulnerable to cutbacks than colleagues on the tenure track, typically have heavier teaching loads than their tenure-track counterparts, and usually play limited roles in student advising and curriculum planning. Compared with the opportunities for professional development and institutional advancement of tenure-track faculty members, theirs are scant; their lot is to live with the frustration and resentment inherent in second-class academic citizenship.

MLA Newsletter, Summer 2009, “An Agenda for These Times,” Catherine Porter

I have to say my profession, especially my professional organizations, drive me a little batty. Everything seems laced with a bit of irritating class bias. I love the people who love technology and who incorporate it into their classrooms, but they are also too often uncritically consumerist. I enjoy the conventions (well, mostly) but they seem utterly disconnected from economic reality. Everything is priced for the tenured-expense-account-professors.

Notwithstanding the fantasies of the hard-right, academia is shockingly conservative, loath to accept even the most minor change. Porter calls tenured faculty “a discomfited elite, caught up in awkward relationships with their less-privileged colleagues.” That’s great to hear but it would have been even better to hear it a decade ago, when graduate students (yours truly among them) first began to sound the alarm.

A cynic might see the establishment of the Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit as a kind of sudden realization on the part of this elite that they may well have killed the goose that laid the golden egg of their discomfited privileges. Honestly, I am not sure how to judge it, although there must surely be some goose killing paranoia in the mix somewhere. Maybe, though, we might see this as the long-slumbering beast slowly awakening.

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Happiness and Socialism

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According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries…

Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The United States did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.

Lauren Sherman, Yahoo Travel

This is one of those pieces that I almost didn’t read because I thought I already knew the answer. I read it anyway and in fact I did already know the answer. This is one of those perennial stories that seems to pop up every year. It turns out that sharply reducing poverty and unemployment and providing good public health care and long vacations makes people happy. Who knew?

Actually, it just reminds me once again of that endless right-wing complaint about “socialism.” This is a kind of code that market ideologues use. In essence, the idea is that the government can never match the efficiency of the “free market.” It also has a little taste of fear mongering tossed into the mix, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only implied.

So “socialism” doesn’t really signify some sort of reasonable desire to restrain the power of government. In fact, the just the opposite. They complain about socialism exactly because only the state has the power to institutionalize the restraints that keep the “bloody hands” of capitalism in check. Apparently, even happiness is not a persuasive outcome for these folks.

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What We Talk About (When We Don’t Want to Talk About Class)

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For years, parents, students, and taxpayers have lamented the spiraling cost of higher education — with too little effect. Between 1982 and 2007, college tuition and fees increased 439 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the median family income only rose 147 percent. Pleas by ACTA and others to cut costs fell on mostly deaf ears.

The recession is now compelling at least some universities to cut back on all the pricy extras that drive up cost and shift the focus back to the fundamental purpose of their institutions: education. In January, ACTA praised the Pennsylvania State Board of Education for approving a proposal to create a “low cost, no frills” bachelor degree. Now comes news of a similar degree at Southern New Hampshire University — a “low-cost airline equivalent,” according to its president — and plans to create a new affordable state university in Arizona with no football team or research programs.

ACTA’s Must Reads, Posted by David Azerrad on May 07, 2009

The ACTA is reliably reactionary, much more interested in the academic trains running on time than in education generally or employment issues. Antonio Gramsci himself would rise up out of his grave if they mentioned the exploitation of graduate students or the commercialization of education.

Yet their concerns are, as the theorists used to say, symptomatic of the anxieties and concerns of our nominal rulers. I am not sure if they represent a cadre of the technical elite or of the financial elite or both but they are ideally positioned to judge the temperature of our ongoing cold (class) war.

So it’s fascinating that they are concerned with the increasing scarcity of the cultural capital represented by traditional liberal arts colleges. I don ‘t think you can attribute this to bourgeois sentimentality. The more bloated these increasingly boutique universities become, the better the chance of some sort of backlash.

The rhetoric of education in the U.S. is democratic; everyone can work hard and get the education of their choice. In fact, only 1/3 of us have college degrees; the percentage who have gone to these elite colleges is much smaller. Yet these schools play a disproportionately important role in our educational self-image.

If these schools become even more inaccessible, and the mass market schools follow by continuing to raise tuition and fees, the U.S. might seem too obviously undemocratic and class ridden. We can’t talk about that, though, can we? So we talk about ‘budget schools’ that might siphon off a bit of that class tension.

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