Category Archives: higher education

November 19, 2011, 12:09 pm

On the Nature of Change in Higher Ed (Part III): Assessing the Costs

Students at UC-Berkeley marching on behalf of public education last week. Photo credit: Judith C. Brown.

We return to guest blogger, historian and former Zenith provost Judith C. Brown. Her full biography and Part I of this series, which asks us to think about what modern higher education is, and can be viewed here. Part II, where she addressed the larger economic context for higher education, can be viewed here. In this concluding post, she responds to the question: “What is to be done?”

Many who are impatient with the slow pace of change in higher education see the key to success in Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (2011). The authors’ main argument is that traditional colleges and (more…)

November 13, 2011, 4:55 pm

On the Nature of Change in Higher Ed (Part II): Education and the New Economy

By Claire Potter

We return to guest blogger, historian and former Zenith provost Judith C. Brown. Her full biography and Part I of this series can be viewed here. Brown ended the first section of her essay by reflecting: “in the early 19th century, it was in the relative ‘backwater’ of the German universities as well as in the newer universities of Europe, where imagination and flexibility with regard to change were able to flourish, that we see the beginnings of the modern research university.” She then asked: “Are we in that kind of turning point in American higher education?” The answer is yes.

American higher education is at a major turning point. We are in the midst of enormous social, political, economic, and technological changes that are part of big long-term shifts in the economic and political position of the U.S. in the world, shifts that began several decades ago. While the U.S….

November 9, 2011, 10:09 am

On the Nature of Change in Higher Ed (Part I): A Guest Post By Judith C. Brown

By Claire Potter

Lecturing in a Medieval University by Laurentius De Voltolina (14th Century). Courtesy of digitalliteracyproject.com.

Today’s guest blogger is Judith C. Brown, who has been a professor of history at Stanford, Rice, and Wesleyan universities. At Rice she also served as Dean of the School of Humanities and at Wesleyan as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. As a professor emerita at Wesleyan she continues to work on issues of higher education and of history.

Prompted by contemporary debates about the worth of a college education in today’s labor market, she decided to publish her reflections on the state of higher ed following Paul Krugman’s column “Inequality Trends in One Picture,” (New York Times, November 3 2011). Her essay will appear in Tenured Radical in three parts.

When…

October 24, 2011, 10:48 am

How Does Occupy Wall Street Speak To A Broken Education System? A Manifesto

By Claire Potter

Today’s lesson is: thanks to the absence of leadership from the political class; the failure to nurture an empowering dialogue between high school and college teachers that might have a broad impact on education policy; the domination of university Boards of Trustees by the 1%; and Wall Street’s destructive attempts to transform education into a tradable commodity, educators are increasingly drawn to the Occupy Wall Street movement. There could not be more chaos in the education world than there is now. It is a world in which school reform = a takeover of public schools by profit seekers, or by philanthropies that funnel tax-free corporate profits into shaping the world that corporations want. Hence, contemporary activism creates an unprecedented opportunity for progressive change in education. Let us observe the impact that Occupy Wall Street is having on national political culture…

September 24, 2011, 11:29 am

Forget the SATs. How Many Days Did Your Students Drink Last Week?

By Claire Potter

The beginning of the semester is always a time for reassessment, isn’t it? SAT scores, we hear, despite endless amounts of testing mandated by No Child Left Behind, have declined. Unsurprisingly, Daniel Luzer of the HuffPo thinks this is not a problem; William J. Bennett, former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, thinks this is a “wake-up call” about the failure of liberal education policy; and no one, as far as I can tell, has asked a college professor whether it matters. Why we think that test scores should get better and better, and when they don’t, an apocalypse of some kind looms, is such a quintessentially American scenario. While SAT’s do, to some extent, predict college performance; high school grades predict it better; and success in a demanding and creative school is even higher on the Radical list, my best criteria for student success is: drinking.

I don’t…

September 17, 2011, 1:46 pm

The Problem That Has No Name: Or, If Computers Are A Labor Saving Device, Why Am I Working A Double Shift?

By Claire Potter

"Danger, Will Robinson!"

This is the first in a series of posts that addresses labor conditions in the academy, and the potential problems attendant to replacing people with machines.

In case you have wondered where Tenured Radical has been in the past week, we have been getting our classes up and running. One of the things we have been thinking about, as we worked 14 hour days (probably a modest 6-8 on the weekends) during the first two weeks of school, is that we do not even work close to a 40-hour week during the term.

Do the math: at minimum, I would say that we are currently clocking a 90 hour week, which leaves us no time for blogging, reading, going over the copy edits for the new collection, going to the gym, or cooking those gourmet dinners that some of our friends like to post…

September 2, 2011, 11:50 am

Since 9/11: Did Phyllis Schlafly Win the Foreign Policy Debate?

By Claire Potter

As we approach the anniversary, I will do you the favor of not sharing my memories of 9/11 with you. I am sure that half a dozen people you saw at work this week have had almost exactly the same thing to say: that it was a dark and scary day ten years ago, that it was a clear blue sky in the east (just like today), that their lives took a turn in some critical way. Mine actually did take a dramatic, although not unpredictable, turn for the worse a year or so after 9/11, but the terrorists were local and not international. At the many memorial services and on the television specials, we will hear repeatedly that “everything” changed.

But how has it changed? One of the things that has struck me is that the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world is pretty much what Phyllis Schlafly outlined in her 1964 self-published blockbuster, A Choice Not An Echo. (more….

August 6, 2011, 11:41 am

Education Policy This Week: Edu-Traitors, Preventing Child Abuse Through Censorship, And Combat Soldiers In Class

By Claire Potter

Today we are taking note of smart people saying smart things that open a can of worms or two about education policy and its consequences.

At HASTAC, Duke’s Cathy Davidson confesses that she is an edu-traitor. “I argue that, right now, we are deforming the entire enterprise of education,” Davidson writes, “from preschool onward, by insisting it be measured implicitly by the standard of ‘will this help you get into college’? The result is the devaluation of myriad important ways of learning that are not, strictly speaking, ‘college material.’”

To put Davidson’s concept in practical terms, even before budgets are cut, aspects of the school day that used to be a valued part of the educational mission — art, music, recess, clubs, athletics — become “extras.” In politician-speak, these activities are “fat” or “pork,” which can and should be cut: those words are also a…

July 22, 2011, 12:09 pm

Why Are The Cajuns Ragin’? Or; How To Balance Budgets At The Expense Of Education

By Claire Potter

Think hard, then say bye-bye.

Ever wonder how to get rid of tenured faculty? Kill the whole department! Any fool knows that.

That’s what they are doing at the University of Louisiana, where the Cognitive Science PhD program (the only one in the state) is being shut down and two faculty will be cut loose by 2013. The program is, in administration-speak, a “low completer,” which means it is producing too few graduates to be continued. According to this local news story, “in a three year period it produced five graduates,” although by increasing the window to five years, the number of graduates rises to 10 graduates. When this was revealed it looked like the program would be saved. But no dice. (We wonder at Tenured Radical — how many graduates would have saved the program? 12? 15? And could…

July 16, 2011, 3:21 pm

B Is For Bourdieu; Or, Why A Selective School Doesn’t Grade Like A Community College

By Claire Potter

In our endless quest for intellectual excellence, we at Tenured Radical ask today: ”Why do college teachers give so many B’s?” This strikes us as a dramatically more novel and interesting question than the ongoing obsession about why college teachers give so many A’s. We were pushed to think about this after reading an article in The Deseret News, which notified us of the unsurprising fact that 43% of college grades are in the range of A, and fewer than 10% of grades are C or below. So why are critics so concerned about A’s when, in fact, B seems to be the giveaway grade, coming in at somewhere over 47% of all grades given?

Any of us who teach at any level nowadays know that C, D, and F are now the equivalent of “fail, fail minus, and geddaf*ckouddahere.” To lean sloppily on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, students at selective schools who receive these grades are be…