Won’t Get Fooled Again

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In terms of what strategies colleges and universities could use to do bring students more in line with what employers are looking for, Humphreys said, “[employers] want a ‘both-and’ picture; they want higher education institutions to bring students to an even higher level of ability…. They also want [higher education] to ensure that every college graduate, no matter what their major is, achieves much higher levels of evidence-based reasoning, research skills and complex problem-solving skills [along with] ethical decision-making.”

‘More Than a Major’ Zack Budryk

I’ve been an English teacher long enough to remember a time when ‘finding a job’ wasn’t necessarily the first priority in college. Plenty of people went to college seeking specific jobs, of course, but the liberal arts model dominated. My Dad, who was an accountant and studied “Commerce” at L.S.U. in the late 1940s’, used to say that you went to college to get educated; once you were well-educated, you could easily get a job.

His degree included English classes as, in effect, a kind of second major. Over the three last decades or so (every sort of loss seems to start in 1980 with the election of Reagan) the once broad notion of vocation, centered on the professions, has become more and more narrow. It’s no coincidence that this has happened alongside a huge increase in the cost of higher education and ongoing attacks on the federal government.

The right hates class mobility– the servants get restless– and it will not abide the notion of a government with a social agenda and the funds to back it up. Cheap college and a progressive government, after all, brought us the 1960s’. We can let that happen again. We’ve now reached a point where the tail wags the dog: if you go to college to get a job, then the college has to change everything to make that happen.

Even more, college will be assessed by that vocational criteria and little else. It’s a prescription for servitude, not surprisingly, to the masters of the marketplace. And it has created an entire profession– the college professor– where a majority of people are no longer fully professionals; adjuncts paid piecemeal by the student or the course, no benefits. As the recession drags on, perhaps our masters are starting to reconsider.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional, Writing

Boys and the Second Amendment

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There are two stories floating out there in the media-sphere that should be connected but are not, for reasons that I don’t fully understand. First is the open-secret videos of Mike Rice bullying young players at Rutgers. I call it an open-secret video because I don’t think it’s a secret that coaches often act this way. We had a coach in Junior High, his name was Johnson, I think, who was infamous for throwing things at us when he was unhappy.

This is the sort of thing that young boys quickly come to see as more or less normal. I think we ought to be thinking about this open-secret as we watch the ongoing debate over gun safety. Or, rather, as we watch a small minority of (mostly) white (mostly) men, funded by the gun industry, successfully derail yet another attempt to create reasonable legislation that might prevent the sort of mass killing that happened in Newtown last November.

The NRA is a bully of a lobby group, forcing its freakish agenda on all of us and Adam Lanza was surely pushed around, like all of us were. Unlike most of us, he needed medical help he never got. (Keep shrinking the government and the Adams of the world will never have help.) The gun lobby people, and the hyper-competitive, angry coaches are all part of a violent culture that sees violence as a part of the everyday routines of life.

Capitalism, red in tooth and claw. You wear the gun on your belt when you go to the store; if those boys won’t perform, scream and toss something at them until they do. We were all raised this way and now the coaches are teaching the boys these same lessons and the NRA is showing us what an entire society organized around violence and guns would look like. Every man and boy for himself and everyone armed and ready to fire.

Posted in: Writing

Market Dreams

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The market, to paraphrase James Joyce, is a nightmare from which we have yet to awaken. In California– harbinger of things to come, as they say– yet another legislator is arguing that the market is the solution to what ails the Higher Education system.

SB520, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Steinberg, proposes to “solve” the problem of over-enrolled gateway courses at California’s public universities and community colleges by requiring them to grant “full academic credit” for “comparable” courses completed on new for-profit online platforms (such as Coursera and Udacity) and existing for-profit schools (such as Kaplan and Straighterline).

“Online ED is not a Magic Cure for What Ails California’s Colleges” Robert Meister

Amazingly, the law sets no limits on price and apparently establishes no accreditation system for these courses. This is the same two-pronged approach that has worked so well in the public schools: first, deprive the public schools of money and use the resulting problems as evidence that the public schools are not working; two, create a wide open unregulated market that can sell for private profit what was once a public right.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional