Patriotism

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time. The centralization of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the workingman of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, “Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.”

Emma Goldman, “What Is Patriotism?” (1909)

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Bill Vaughan. “Brainy Quotes“

Patriotism is a tricky subject for the left in our age of far-right nuttiness.  I don’t think any of us would deny that we find patriotism– or perhaps we mean nationalism–a horrific and far too often rigid and violent set of notions and beliefs.  Yet criticism of patriotism can easily fall into Tea Party clichés about the evils of the Federal Government. We want to sound like Emma Goldman but we end up echoing Timothy McVeigh. That’s why I like the Bill Vaughan quote.

I lived overseas  long enough to feel the pull of being an expatriate but I came back to the United States because I love my culture and language and family. I might have felt differently if I had been better at learning another language and at internalizing another culture.  I do feel a certain love of country, though, with all of its contradictions, but its borders are ill-defined and porous. My country blurs into Canada and Mexico and across oceans.

The U.S. isn’t the best country in the world. I doubt we ever were. It’s getting worse, too, as we grow more sharply divided between rich and poor and as we continue to neglect the institutions and values– especially higher education and a national health care system– that would make us more developed as a people and more just.  We have a tendency to listen to charlatans, from Pet Rock salespeople to Sarah Palin.  That patriotism should be ignored.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional, Writing

Burning Platforms

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Hyperbole is great fun but it tends to distort our sense of time and scale.  A phrase like “burning platform” is no exception. (Here’s a quick definition of the term; the story sounds apocryphal.)  Higher education, some might say, is (or is on)  a burning platform in the middle of the sea and we– or it– have to decide between the certain death of staying on the platform or risk the only probable death of jumping off the platform into the cold water. It’s a simplistic parable but it has a certain appeal. May you live in interesting times.

In fact, short of the fall of the Soviet Union, change, even life or death change, can be remarkably slow. The Arab Spring is entering its 5th season. Here’s how the ACTA  (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) seeks to slow educational change to a crawl. The AC TA congratulates governor McDonnell for staying out of the controversy over the firing  and then rehiring of Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia (“Kudos Governor McDonnell“). It doesn’t criticize the Board of Trustees, whose power grab created the problem.

Instead, the ACTA wags its little reactionary finger at those who now seek  “a radical restructuring of the selection process to minimize the role of the governor and to enhance the role of specific groups, such as faculty or alumni.”  Let’s not go overboard; governance is not the problem: “The challenges besetting higher education,” it says, “are considerable: costs, quality and accountability.” That business-minded administrator point of view is hardly a creative leap of faith into the future.

If  Don Tapscott’s (among others) optimistic notion  is correct, the real paradigm shift suggested by the Virginia debacle is a incremental move towards a more transparent system in which no Board of Trustees (or administrator) can make sweeping institutional changes behind closed doors. We’re watching in a new way and it matters. (Tapscott outlines his idea in a TED video, here.)  The ACTA can’t see the toothpaste that Tapscott says cannot be put back into the tube: the slow but steady shift away from rigid, centralized power.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Uncategorized

Tortoise 1, Hare 0

\ Leave a Comment \ by

I’ve said before that the development of online education here in the U.S. (and so, perhaps, elsewhere) is a race between the very fast for-profit Hares and the very slow public Tortoises.   The Hare has seemed to be ahead over the last decade (with some help from its friends in high places) but eventually the Tortoise will win. (Unless, of course, the hare’s friends rig the game.) Slowly, one tiny step at a time, the public sector is developing its online education system. It’ll win eventually but its progress is agonizingly slow.

The Hare has suffered some real losses recently as the government begins to try to punish wrongdoing and to introduce some sort of regulatory sanity into higher education. Given the Tea Party shoot-yourself-in-the-foot gang now wagging the Republican dog, it’s been an unnecessarily slow process.  I think those guys would fight against food regulation even if their own grandmothers were dying from eating salmonella ridden dog food. Still, the for-profits seemed to have been slowed if not stopped.

Now, as it turns out, we have a scandal at the University of Virginia which seems to be a case of the Hare trying to sneak into the Tortoise’s territory. President Teresa A. Sullivan was fired– and then “reinstated”– because she has been Tortoise like (public good over private profit) in her development of an online program. It’s classic 21st century capitalism. First the online industry expands bubble-like on pubic money, then they destroy themselves out of greed, and finally they offer their services to the public as experts.

Posted in: Writing