PJ Harvey on The Andrew Marr Show (October 2, 2011)
Why the Right Hates Teachers
I was reading yet another piece about Republican efforts to demonize college professors– in this case, by targeting Labor Studies professors– and thinking about why the right-wing hates teachers so much (“Groups Investigating E-Mails of Professors in Michigan and Wisconsin Produce No Evidence of Wrongdoing“). Luckily, this particular witch hunt has so far failed to find anything that might be used to drum up the sorts of fear and anger that have made the right-wing so effective in recent years.
At one level, this is very straightforward hardball politics, similar to the ongoing efforts to restrict voter registration. If you can demonize government officials, you can by extension make it easier to destroy the last real bastion of organized labor. If you can destroy or undermine organized labor, you can undermine the democratic party and so retard social progress. Social progress, of course, is anathema to the right because it by definition shifts wealth away from the rich and powerful and to the rest of us.
It’s also a part of the right’s embrace of anti-intellectualism, which it confuses (perhaps deliberately) with populism. You can’t believe in global warming, or evolution because that would suggest support for the people “behind” these things, the intellectuals, that is, the scientists and teachers who develop and teach these ideas. That would mean support for the public schools and that would mean support for the public school unions. All of that reduces profits. It’s a Matryoshka doll of nested craziness.
Not That Different
When I was writing my dissertation one of my advisers, Dr. Syverson, used to gently tease me about my over-use of the word crisis. Academics, she said, always feel that academia is in crisis. It’s true, and yet I still believe that academia is nearing some sort of profound change, even if that change is less revolutionary than evolutionary. It’s a big sluggish set of institutions and nothing happens quickly.
What happened to the U.S. postal system is happening to education: the public monopoly is over, for good or worse. It was a bad idea to allow the fully unregulated growth of online private education. Too often, it allowed the industry to fall victim to it’s own worst instincts. Careful regulation might have slowed growth, but prevented a lot of problems. Now we have a lot of ground to make up.
As this slow-motion crisis unfolds, it’s interesting to see what sorts of ideas and models are held up as potential solutions. The most typical, as exemplified by Jeff Silengo, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is business (“Think Different? Not in Higher Ed“). Universities, Silengo says, ought to innovate like Apple. After nearly three or four decades of emulating business, this claim seems silly at best.
The Chronicle also posted an article this week on a very different model, used at Syracuse, rooted not in business but in public service. (“Syracuse’s Slide“). Even more interesting, this model– it’s not new as much as return to another tradition– is ignored by Silengo, even though it is discussed just a few clicks away. As the title suggests, universities should think differently, but not that differently.
ZOE MUTH “Mama Needs A Margarita”