Category Archives: education

The Cost of Tenure

Posted on by under education, the polis

Being a young teacher who is lucky enough to have full-time work but not fortunate enough to be on the tenure track, I occasionally romanticize the material existences of the actual institutionally certified professors I know. Not the adjuncts; not even the lucky lecturers; no, the real professors who have tenure or who can maybe get tenure someday. Those folks. They must have houses to themselves and own their Priuses outright. Right?

Right?

Oh dammit. No, reports Katherine Harris, at least not if you teach at a public university. Her poignant, pragmatic essay is worth reading. Still, as Doc Sportello would say, Bummer.

Strange Bedfellows

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

As Ryan has pointed out, it’s hard for us to not comment a lot about the state of higher education because we both have a vested interest in seeing it not completely destroy itself. It’s a topic that makes for strange bedfellows and challenges the political categories we all too easily apply to ourselves and others. For instance, Bob Samuels is the president of UC-AFT (the union that represents non-tenured faculty in the University of California system), while Alan Jacobs teaches at Baylor University and writes for The American Conservative. By conventional metrics, one is a progressive and one is a traditionalist Christian conservative, but both have written a lot about how the push toward eliminating small classes in favor of MOOCs is a terrible idea for students. Both Samuels and Jacobs are educational conservationists. These aren’t people opposed to making meaningful changes to the way universities are run (everyone but administrators admit that administrative bloat must be reversed), but rather people who want to conserve what higher education does best:  introducing students to new ideas and people through lectures, personal instruction, debates, and meaningful face-to-face social interaction. Having to share space with someone and their ideas is a really powerful thing. As anyone who reads internet comment boards knows, the web specializes in letting us (and training us to) talk past one another because the other person isn’t actually there to respond. This is one of the reasons why segregation, whether written into the law, de facto, by choice, or via technology is so awful: it prevents us from doing the messy work of having to argue with others, defend our own positions, and think on the fly. There is no lag-time in real life, and no substitute for having to look someone in the eye and treat him as a real, valid human being, even as he says things that challenge your sense of how the world works. That’s an education, and the kind that will benefit one in almost any career.

Similarly, the folks running down traditional educational models and/or pimping MOOCmania are also an eclectic bunch. From Ivy League-educated “libertarians,” to the virtuous conservative Bill Bennett, to the mostly Democratic mandarins of Silicon Valley, the crew trying to tell us how traditional models of education are outdated is hard to pin down politically. So, to borrow a term from one of our favorites here at TRG, Evgeny Morozov, these folks can best be understood as “solutionists.” They see a problem (and as Ryan and I have made clear, there are tons of problems in higher ed that have nothing to do with MOOCs), and their first instinct is to blow things up. They also love blaming professors, as if professors run universities (or even university systems) anymore. There are reformers who aren’t “solutionists,” like Vance Fried, and while I don’t agree with some of his ideas (consolidating all of the humanities into one major is dumb, and he seemingly thinks teaching 5 writing-intensive classes is the same as teaching 5 sections of algebra), I at least get the sense that he understands that education is about much more than the transmission of information. People of good faith can disagree about how to fix things, but they must sincerely be interested in fixing things in order for the conversations to be productive.

The latest smart take from the “hey, maybe we should be a bit more critical of MOOCs and the people who are pushing them” camp comes from Scott L. Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College. His basic thesis is so simple and obvious that I am amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me:

The corporate world recognizes the virtues of proximity in its own human resource management. Witness, for example, Yahoo’s recent decision to eliminate telecommuting and require employees to be present in the office. CEO Marissa Mayer’s memo reads as a mini-manifesto for close learning:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Why do boards of directors still go through the effort of convening in person? Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.

Newstok’s entire piece is worth reading, as is Alan Jacobs’ response, wherein he reminds us to spend less time listening to the solutionists, and more time observing them:

If physical presence is as important in education as the technologists’s actions say it is, then perhaps their energies are misapplied. Instead of looking for ways to eliminate or bypass brick-and-mortar schools — and, not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so — maybe they should bend their considerable intellectual powers to the more challenging, less destructive, and far more meaningful challenge of making college education more affordable for everyone who can truly benefit from it.

And lest you think that conservationists are simply trying to prop up traditional learning models in order to line their own pockets, and are therefore no different from the Silicon Valley folks trying to tear these models down, keep this in mind: 75% of people teaching at American universities aren’t tenure-track, will never make salaries comparable to what people in the tech sector make at mid-career, and could actually probably make a lot more money by jumping on the MOOC train now.

Boooo MOOCs

Posted on by under education, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

When a culture endlessly suggests to its children that the humanities are frivolous and effeminate, and when that culture looks the other way while institutions conceived in the Enlightenment ruthlessly downsize the support given to people who safeguard and pass along humanity’s intellectual traditions, you end up with an economy-strangling clusterfuck distinguished by “not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.”

Given how much TGR has covered the decay of American higher education (hey, it’s the sector we know best), this sounds like something Dan or I would say. But since it isn’t, the quote is probably from some idealistic niche publication, like n+1 or the New Yorker. Maybe even Slate. Yeah? The kind of outlet that gets links on Arts & Letters Daily.

But no. It’s Business Insider. Turns out that some corporate managers are terrified by the applications they’re getting from the current labor pool. Turns out they’re desperate for art-history romantics and inveterate readers.

If you are a liberal pro-marketeer like me, as opposed to someone in favor of anti-market corporate oligarchy, you’ve shivered while surveying the road map adopted by American university regents over the past few decades:

1. Cut funding for undergraduate education. In other words, spend less on giving your students (who pay more in tuition every year) access to classes that have been lovingly curated by experts who are intensely dedicated to the education of those students.

2. Build a gym or a stadium or something.

3. Cut funding for undergraduate education.

4. Stock up on administrators.

5. Cut more funding.

6. Keep cutting. Exploit or invent a crisis if you have to.

7. Realize that enough members of the public are slowly getting wise to the fact that this shitshow doesn’t actually teach kids to be rational, creative adults who can participate in a mature democracy. Schedule some press conferences, preferably with rich people who work in Silicon Valley/have given TED talks/are the governor of California.

8. Announce frantic, heavily funded effort to have private companies fix things because the public sector is so poor and dumb and inefficient. Emphasize gigantic online “classes.”

9. Hope that people, even those in a position to send their kids out to get four-year degrees, are too busy fighting to keep their health insurance to care about the solution not being a solution.

One of the grimmer ironies of the past decade is that the decay of American higher education, and in particular the decline of its commitment to humanism and the core sciences (i.e., the liberal arts), has moved a number of professors to write excellent books, articles, and blogs about said collapse. For example, there’s Chris Newfield’s  Unmaking the Public University; Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors; Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island; Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works; Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty; and Bob Samuels’s “Changing Universities” blog, which focuses on California and has for years tirelessly mapped the dangers of joining “the Republican desire to shrink big government and privatize public institutions . . . with the Democratic need to be associated with progress and private-public joint ventures.”

On that note, from The Awl back in January, here is Maria Bustillos with a fitting title: “Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea for the Future of College.” The depressing takeaway:

Now California state universities are set to begin enrolling students in MOOCs for credit. Earlier this month, the president of San Jose State University, Mo Qayoumi, announced that his institution will commence a pilot program: 300 students will receive course credit for online classes in remedial algebra, college algebra and statistics. Qayoumi was joined at the press conference by California Governor Jerry Brown and Sebastian Thrun, the controversial ex-Stanford prof and co-founder of Udacity, which will supply classes for the program at the cost of $150 per customer, er, student.

“This is the single cheapest way in the country to earn college credit,” Thrun “quipped.”

It’s not quite free, as early MOOC proponents began by promising. It is worth mentioning, too, that Udacity is a venture-funded startup, that classes will be supervised not by tenured profs but by Udacity employees, and that Thrun declined to tell the Times how much public money his company will be raking in for this pilot—or what more may have been promised should the pilot prove “successful.”

Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?

A more recent post here on TGR deals with how this pilot program turned out.

And take funding back to prior levels? I feel like the cop in that scene from The Big Lebowski where the Dude goes to retrieve his car from the impound lot. Leads!

Can You Fly, Higher Ed?

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, sports

We’ve written a lot in this space about both higher education and sports, but there’s a great new article up at the Chronicle that brings the two together in a pretty unexpected way. No, I am not talking about the amazing story of Ohio State President and football booster extraordinaire Gordon Gee’s rapid fall from semi-respectability. Any chump who spends $64,000 of public funds on bow ties (and bow-tie-related goodies) deserves this kind of humiliation. Pieces that highlight the arrogance and corruption of athletic departments at many of America’s top universities (usually aided by college administrators with alumni dollar signs for irises) are a dime a gross. What’s less talked about is how the academic division of labor at most universities tends to replicate itself in athletic departments.

Meet Elwyn McRoy, the visiting adjunct lecturer of college basketball coaches. After I read Brad Wolverton’s account of McRoy’s journey up to this point, I realized that I hadn’t thought much about all those guys on the sidelines or benches who aren’t head coaches. Like the thousands of freshly minted (or long since chewed up) PhD’s who wander the country lusting after the tenure that they’ll never get, coaches without high-level connections drift back and forth across the country, and sometimes across the globe, chasing a ring that only appears to be made of brass. More often than not it’s thin air. The few that get lucky and latch onto the right coattails at the right time might become head coaches, but even this is tenuous, as small schools that have no business demanding that their teams compete with the big boys think that they are just the right coaching staff away from being the next Gonzaga basketball or Boise State football. And so most coaches just drift.

Like a lot of adjuncts, McRoy gets tastes of success, even the big time, that keep him coming back for more when it’s probably in his best interest (to say nothing of the best interest of his family) to give up the ghost. I won’t recap Wolverton’s whole piece because I think you should read it for yourself. I do have to quibble with one thing he writes though:

The NCAA limits Division I programs to three assistant coaches, which means that there are roughly 1,000 positions at the top level. Few professions have such a scarcity of jobs, and with so little staying power.

The rest of higher education is hardly so volatile. The history department doesn’t turn over every two years, nor do librarians. Even presidents, whose positions are some of the most transient, usually get five or 10 years to prove themselves.

A guy writing a piece in the Chronicle should know that the rest of higher education is this volatile. His own publication reports that 70% of the people teaching at American universities could be in different positions next year. While some schools treat their non-tenure-track faculty better than others do (I’ve been lucky to work at such places), the fact remains that there are thousands of Elwyn McRoy’s who teach math, composition, French, and physics. A lot of them do it at five schools at a time (if they’re lucky to find that many gigs), not knowing if any of those schools will rehire them at the end of the term. And most of their students have no idea that the people standing in front of them aren’t well compensated members of academia every bit a part of their campuses as department chairs. So while I completely sympathize with McRoy, and wish him luck at his latest gig, his story should make us think about what can be done to fix all facets of higher education before it races off the cliff it’s rapidly approaching.

From the Department of No Shit

Posted on by under education

As every teacher you have ever gotten to know has almost certainly told you, it turns out that administrative and managerial bloat is waaaay more of a problem than the extremely popular myth that holding small classes with real professors talking to actual students is “Just Too Expensive, what with the Internet Revolution and all.” The author is kind of a prick at the end, managing to (sort of) still blame profs for the situation, but this is worth a read. Two minutes.

The Economist: You’ll always feel sophisticated reading it, whether they’re offering sensible higher-ed policy advice or claiming that invading Iraq is a good idea.

How To Destroy a Culture

Posted on by under education

Ryan and I talk (and write) all the time about the sorry state of education in America, and I second his take on the idiocy of the “tenured radicals” narrative constantly being pushed by alleged conservatives. Are there some bad professors? Yes. Are there some bad leftist professors? Absolutely. Are there some who get protected by tenure? Yes.

Now, the movement conservative response to this is to eliminate job security for professors altogether, and nothing encapsulates this moronic position better than the yet-to-be-built Florida Polytechnic University. Check out this gem of a quote from the school’s vice president of academic affairs:

“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli…. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”

As the always interesting (and classical conservative) Alan Jacobs remarks:

“Right! They’ll only have to worry about whether they’ll be rehired at the end of their contract or not. Totally different.”

Having universities staffed by rotating casts of grad students and adjuncts is the ultimate technocratic fantasy. If Florida Governor Rick Scott actually cared at all about giving students a quality undergraduate education, he’d develop a specific tenure/job security system that rewarded excellence in teaching and publishing things that people might read (like a sweet blog, for instance). The falseness of modern movement conservatism really shines through though when you realize that “reformers” like Scott don’t even think about the importance of universities having stable faculties or institutional memories. They just want to create degree mills that give people the “skills” to “win the future” (I cringe when Obama says things like this. He knows better.)

If you want to get really depressed about this subject, I invite you to watch the following video. The world of F(P)U is already here to a certain extent, and people like Rick Scott are winning in their fight against the “tenured radicals.” And we’ll all end up poorer and dumber for it.

Fake Conservatism and the American University

Posted on by under education, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Griping about how “tenured radicals” destroyed academia’s commitment to the humanist tradition is quite a tradition among pundits who consider themselves Conservative Intellectuals. As the general narrative goes, US colleges and universities were awesome until the 1960s, when left-wingers took the wheel and ruined everything, such that now our children are forced to study post-colonial queer Marxist avant-garde TV culture instead of the Great Books. The New Criterion is one of the coaling stations for this point of view. Now, to their credit, TNC publishes work by William Logan, one of the last good poetry critics in America. But to their discredit, they also publish appallingly stupid bullshit like this:

Academia is still a protected oasis—you can gauge just how protected by checking the astonishing price tag—but its signature purpose is no longer to pursue the scholarly life, to preserve and transmit to the next generation the riches of our cultural inheritance. On the contrary, colleges and universities have increasingly been subjugated to a leftist ideological agenda bent on dismantling that tradition. Anyone who speaks of “the riches of our cultural inheritance” would be shouted down as a reactionary whose views were not worth listening to. . . . They find willing accomplices in college administrators whose chief ambition is not to uphold standards of accomplishment and conduct but to appear ostentatiously enlightened.

Really? For the past thirty years American schools have replaced full-time professorships with an army of graduate-student TAs and adjuncts, even as the number of richly compensated corporate managers (er, Administrators) balloons, even as those administrators suddenly push for outsourced online courses, even as more lucre goes to amenities like gyms and football stadiums, even as the humanities have experienced the worst of the unnecessary and devastating cuts in public funding for higher education (even though, pace current mythology, the humanities fund the STEM fields), TNC claims this? This? Has their entire editorial staff undergone some terrible brain trauma? That’s their argument? That deviously powerful liberal intellectuals have rendered themselves broke and powerless so as to become . . . even more powerful?

Wonder what those traitors think about how things stand? Speaking as a college lecturer, I can assure you that it is easy to slide through four years of school without reading a long novel or learning anything about Plato or Gettysburg. So they are probably pretty happy, right? Consider one prof’s take on the situation:

“Here’s what matters: These and other treatments of grand trends insist that higher education is one of the last revered Western institutions to be ‘de-churched’; that is, it is one of the last to have its ideological justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification and to become subject to serious state surveillance,” she writes. “Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.”

“Western institutions”? “The best in art”? Guiding young minds? Why, that sounds, uh, conservative. Unless you’re huffing glue, or not bothering to actually read what your supposed opponents are saying, TNC‘s pronouncements are tough to accept. Oops.

Granted, there are plenty of shrill leftist ideologues in academia, people who have proudly told me things like “I don’t teach white authors” (as if one couldn’t do Malcolm X and Henry Adams in the same course). But those people are not deans, regents, consultants, or chancellors. They aren’t running the show. Theirs is not, in fact, the dominant view of most of the American academics I’ve met. On the contrary, the majority of humanist scholars believe passionately in the idea of a Tradition of great texts and ideas. They might argue about who belongs to that tradition, but they are at heart Burkean conservatives, because they are committed to the crazy notion that thoughtful grown-ups should know something about literature, philosophy, history, and the arts (and math and science, for that matter).

Indeed, it is difficult to be an academic scholar without having a fundamentally conservative temperament. You might undertake a queer-feminist reading of Shakespeare or apply Edward Said’s theories to Impressionism, but you’re still writing about Shakespeare or Impressionism. Someone needs to remind TNC‘s hacks how much fucking training in the Western Tradition it takes to earn a PhD in the humanities, whatever one does with that education afterward.

The creepy corporatist mentality that has damaged American higher education so badly isn’t conservative in the true sense. Rather, it is a mode of Ayn Randian free-market fetishism that also contains a pronounced contempt for intellectual life, a contempt which emanates from the present-day Republican Party and its bleating lackeys. (As Andrew Sullivan has been arguing for years, the contemporary GOP is dominated by right-wing radicals, not actual conservatives, because actual conservatives don’t proudly reject science, deny gay citizens the right to marry their loved ones, attack long-standing institutions like Social Security, revile a private citizen’s right to make decisions about her own body, harbor imperialist fantasies, or try to stifle the will of the people.)

A blog post probably isn’t the best place to work this out, but in general I’m with Sullivan: ultimately, conservativism in the tradition of Burke is a framework for looking at the world, not a discrete collection of ideological convictions. It is a tool, not a dogma. Conservatism is about accepting the inevitability of change while managing and negotiating it within the context of a society’s cultural and political institutions. One can have progressive sympathies–like Barack Obama–and still be a philosophical conservative who constantly talks about things like fatherhood, marriage, and Enlightenment democracy (like Barack Obama).

Unfortunately, the word “conservative” is probably ruined in the United States, because most people with functional cerebral cortexes and a glancing familiarity with current events hear it and think of cheap-hearted thugs like George W. Bush and Ann Coulter. Maybe someday it will be reclaimed the way “liberal” is being reclaimed by young activists, but I doubt it. At the very least I’ll be moribund by the time it happens.

The dumbest thing about the supposedly pro-market worldview of the people who run our colleges and universities is that it licenses policies that hurt the free market. Just as the lack of a decent national health-care system stifles innovation because it discourages people from starting their own companies (ask a small-business owner how fun it is to purchase insurance on the open market), so too does gutting the budgets of universities, especially public ones, devastate the economy. It is difficult to invent, to innovate, to create, to re-imagine when you can’t get a decent education without taking out ruinous loans (if your broke-ass, standardized-test-riddled high school even prepared you for college in the first place).

And the band plays on. Stupid professors.