The Wombats: 1996
Higher Education at Ben Tre
Another end of the year piece– this time in the Washington Post (“Guest post: Eight thoughts on higher education in 2012,” Daniel de Vise)–decrying the state of Higher Education in the U.S. and calling for reform, if in a very vague fashion. The main point seems to be that “we” (meaning the administrators in control of universities) need to think differently. I don’t know how these guys avoiding saying “outside the box.”
In this piece– written from deep within the reality distortion field–everyone is doing their best, gosh darn, except that there are these “conditions” that seem to be causing so much trouble. We (those administrators again) can only raise tuition so far, for example, because, well, there’s a “practical ceiling”– e.g. people run out of money, especially when the few is growing so rich at the expense of the many.
In the optimistic view of Masters Clark and Eyring the university is experiencing the “short-term disruptions” of innovation. All will be well if we (administrators) embrace the “profitable opportunities” of online education. In other words, business focused models have nearly destroyed the traditional university so only business focused models can fix it. You have to burn the village to save it.
Newman’s Cloister
It’s always good to see an end of the year piece in the Chronicle (“The Crisis of the Public University” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes) acknowledging the ongoing realities of higher education as well as its current crises. Scheper-Hughes offers a succinct outline of recent history and its impact on the public university system with one glaring and telling exception: she underplays the complacency of tenured and tenure track faculty.
It’s one thing to support the Occupy movement and to decry the invasion of consumerism into the university and the rising costs of education and expanding student debt. That’s the sort of thing you might expect, especially in California. We can only hope that this sort of resistance spreads elsewhere in the United States. It’s also a very safe place for full time faculty since it doesn’t address their own status.
Full-time faculty are in no way super privileged; most of them are clearly not doing well. Tenure has been weakened and salaries nearly frozen for much of the last decade. But the entire system, as it has evolved over the last three decades, finances the shrinking numbers of full-time positions though an expansion of part-time positions. As long as that cloister remains in place, nothing else can change.
Humble Pie-30 Days In The Hole