Hafdis Huld from Black Cab Sessions on Vimeo.
Educated Denial
All professors– especially if you’ve been teaching for a while– love to pontificate on learning and on higher education. I certainly can’t throw stones in that glass house. I am continually amazed, though, that so many avoid the white elephant: the almost total destruction of a secure employment system in U.S. Higher Education. It makes all of the professors’ ideas seem disingenuous.
Sometimes, as with Joel Shatzky’s piece in the Huffington Post, it’s only a question of not acknowledging reality ( “Educating for Democracy: What Makes Students Want to Learn?” ). Shatzky is also incorrect when he uses Bourdieu’s terminology (it’s embodied not social capital) and I think he makes the common mistake of reducing adult motivation to economics.
It’s important to understand education in economic terms. Students should be told that they will do much better financially if they graduate; that will surely motivate them. There are other motivations that are probably more important in late adolescence. Conformity and peer pressure come to mind, for example. What we need, more than anything, is a culture in which learning is cool.
In Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s “3 Negatives About How Colleges Are Behaving” the denial of reality is more glaring. Ms. O’Shaughnessy’s ideas are good, more or less, although I doubt educational quality can be “measured” quite as easily as she suggests, but her list leaves out university employment practices. Context is king: U.S. News and World Report isn’t exactly a labor friendly rag.
Rebuilding Academia
Every year the Chronicle of Higher Education seems more attention to give the issues around academic employment, especially the use of contingent and non-tenure track faculty (“Adjuncts Gather to Discuss Tactics in Campaign for Equity”). It reminds me of the slow 30 year slog it took for global climate change to reach a place in mainstream media. Mainstream education media has taken a similar slow path to putting the our labor issues on its agenda. Tenure isn’t coming back, but we could build a better system if we were given the tools.
Unfortunately, it might take another decade or more to get our government, even our now liberal administration and congress, to begin to raise alarms about the dissolution of the tenure system. The Chronicle’s reporting on the president’s speech about education reports only that he’s going to talk about initiatives to reform the student loan system (“President to Tout Achievements in Higher-Education Policy”). Those were great changes, but I wish he would also talk about the need to reform the labor laws to make union organizing easier.