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How to Join the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (and Why You Want To)

May 18, 2011, 3:00 pm

By Jason B. Jones

Take Class Action logo

Yesterday saw the kickoff of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a joint project of many, many groups in higher education, spearheaded by the California Faculty Association and Lillian Taiz. (See coverage at the Chronicle and InsideHigherEd.com.) The campaign has a couple of broad goals: guaranteeing access to affordable, quality higher education, and including the voices of faculty, students, and other stakeholders in budgetary discussions about higher education.

Faced with a systematic assault on public funding for higher education, the Campaign notes that those cuts fall most directly on low-income and first-time college attendees, and that the past several decades worth of cuts (see Aaron Bady on this) are creating a system that sets aside a real education for those privileged few able to afford it (and the unpaid internships and courses/semesters abroad and everything else), with the rest of America offered an education that, thanks to ever-increasing demands for accountability and transparency, begins more and more to resemble workplace readiness training. (Which isn’t to say accountability is bad! It’s not! But who gets to decide what counts as “being accountable.”)

What’s terrific about the Campaign is that it is focusing precisely on this issue of access, and also taking on some of the most deeply rooted evils in American higher education–namely the exploitation of contingent appointments. As Maria Maisto, the president of the New Faculty Majority, announced, there will be a event in January around contingency in American higher education. Also represented were students (in the form of the US Students Association) and the Council for Opportunity in Education.

The Campaign supports 7 principles:

  • Higher education should be inclusive, “available to and affordable for all who can benefit from and want a college education.”
  • The curriculum should be “broad and diverse.”
  • Quality education requires a quality faculty, with secure working conditions and institutional support.
  • Technology should be used to expand opportunity and maintain quality.
  • Higher education should pursue “real efficiencies” and avoid “false dichotomies.”
  • There needs to be substantial public investment.
  • Quality education cannot be “measured by a standardized, simplistic set of metrics.”

As you consider your summer plans, then, I want to encourage you to join the Campaign. If the discussion about higher education in this country is going to change, if we are going to move beyond normalizing scarcity and accepting university budgets where a third–or less!–of the budget is spent on the core academic mission, then many, many voices and hands will be needed. (To be clear, I in no way speak for the campaign; I just think it’s awesome.) Membership is free.

You can watch the kickoff press conference here. (Embedding not supported.)

What would you like to see faculty organize around? Let us know in comments!

The image is the logo from another California Faculty Association-spearheaded event, the “Take Class Action” days in April. Download it yourself here.

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  • tbdiscovery

    I disagree with the dictum that higher education requires a huge public investment. Regulations and politics are destroying public institutions. There is a huge separation between what faculty deem as utopia and what makes economic sense. Also, “secure working conditions” is bringing us right back to the beginning of the argument. Academic freedom is a necessity, but tenure is becoming less and less of an option. We can no longer expect the lay public to just accept HE as it is. Sure, assessment is pertinent, but who will measure it? And who will explain the measurements to the general public? And by “broad and diverse curriculum,” are you including diversity of faculty along the political spectrum?

    We’re spinning.

  • gu555s

    In Pennsylvania, the governor has proposed a 54% cut in public higher education funding.  In my system, PASSHE (see passhe.edu–not Penn State), we rely on the state for about 1/3 of our funding (Penn State gets 8%).   Cuts last year at our school dropped our two-term writing requirement to one term.  How is that a “dictum”?  We buy our own toner cartridges.  We crowd students in classrooms up to fire code limits.  What few adjuncts we had are gone, which means fewer sections, so students who can’t get their classes to graduate on time–which means more loans, more frustration.  What will happen next year, I don’t know.  I am not living a “dictum.”  It’s not politics, or regulations.  It’s funding, and the unwillingness of a governor to add a 1% severance tax onto an enormously profitable natural gas boom in our state.  Instead, he’d rather cut education jobs.  PASSHE could, if you like, raise tuition by 30% or more to make up for it.  But that won’t happen–nor should it.

    You’re spinning.  Some of us are starting to scream.

  • wilkenslibrary

    When our state university and college systems were established, it was understood that supporting higher ed was part of promoting the general welfare (see the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution).  Every year, states slash higher ed budgets and require more “accountability.”  There’s nothing wrong with taxpayers being interested in what happens on our campuses, but the lack of funding and consequent over-reliance on contingent faculty are threatening the quality of much of higher ed in this country.  If a college degree, and the intellectual development it represents, are to mean anything, and are to be available to more than just an elite, there must be public support for the principles enunciated in the Campaign.

    Betsy Smith/Adjunct Professor of ESL/Cape Cod Community College

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Just a friendly editorial reminder about comments: please stick to answering the question asked by the post above. “What would you like to see faculty organize around?”

    Thanks!

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

    I expect that we are likely to disagree about tenure. But the phrase “secure working conditions” is about something more important: it’s about the abuse of contingent appointments.

    When the vast majority of your faculty are splitting time among multiple jobs or institutions, they’re not available to work on curriculum, to do all the various committee work that has to be done, to advise students, or to organize co-curricular activities.  That’s a real loss! 

  • tbdiscovery

    If you feel that tuition should not be raised along the PASSHE system (I’m in PA), then what are the other options? Would you like a pay cut? Are you willing to form alliances with businesses or would you view commercialization as a threat to your autonomy?

    If changes have to be made, and the government cuts back on funding, then you have to be willing to make hard decisions or scream while buying toner. PASSHE should be doing everything it can to privatize – including seeking other sources of funding. Where are the alumni?

    To get back on point, I’d like to see faculty rally around determining other sources of funding and stop relying on the government.

  • tbdiscovery

    It depends on the situation. Adjuncts are generally paid low wages, but we also know that many individuals are willing to fill the role when an adjunct quits. It’s akin to what CraigsList has done to the graphic design industry. With each new economically unnecessary PhD, faculty become more of a marginal commodity. Either way, the reality is that general public does not, and will not, feel sorry for the working conditions of faculty.

    We can’t tell laid off manufacturing employees to retrain when we aren’t willing to make adjustments to the same difficult economic conditions, which include an abundance of individuals willing to work as auxiliaries, adjuncts, senior instructors, and so forth.

  • tbdiscovery

    I’m not sure how you can expect such a politically charged post to revolve around that single question. I know that you want for us to remain on topic, but the post encourages involvement in something that I feel is sending the wrong message. That seems worthy of discussion.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Luckily, ProfHacker is not the only forum in existence for discussing the merits of this campaign. However, this post was not published in order to spur a debate in the comments section over whether or not it’s worthwhile to join the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. Rather, it was published to explain the launch of the campaign and to invite readers to share their ideas: “What would you like to see faculty organize around?”

    If you’d rather not participate in such a conversation, that is–of course–fine.

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

    That only addresses the “what happens in class” part.  My point was actually different: There is a ton of student-related work on campus that needs to be done by faculty who are on campus enough to do it. 

    No one doubts that you can make college cheaper by systematically devaluing faculty–the questions are, first, whether you can still have it be good–or even better, and second, whether it would still be recognizable as higher education.

    And even more to the point: If only about a third of expenses at many public schools go to the core academic mission, then I suspect that there are *other* places on campus to find cost savings. That’s one of the points of the campaign: as long as administrators and their highly-paid consultants are the ones driving discussions about budget, then we’re not going to get to the heart of the problem. 

    Since you’ve expressed concern about ideological diversity: Even the Goldwater Institute correctly identifies administrative bloat as a key cost driver (see: http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941. Hiring adjuncts at exploitative wages won’t solve that.

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

     I will say, flatly, that I continue to mean what I said in the post: “many voices” should join the campaign. I’m under no illusion that all those voices would agree, nor do I think that such agreement would be desirable.

    Having faculty organize to think about alternate sources to public funding sounds like a fine idea–for one thing, I would be likelier to trust such funding when it’s overseen by faculty than when it’s drummed up by administrators.

  • ellenchaffee

    I’d like to see faculty organize around academic innovation. We have hugely diverse new students, incredible advancements in technologies, and demonstrable success at improving quality and student/faculty satisfaction while decreasing cost (cf. National Center on Academic Transformation),  While the pressures have never been greater, neither have the promising alternatives. “Customized learning” was an intriguing concept a decade ago. It is possible now. But the only way to get there is to provide teaching/learning R&D time and resources to willing faculty, institution by institution with cross-pollination among them. The narrative to society and legislators would be entirely different and would, I expect, generate much more support.

  • 11891758

    EBSCO already has the cross searching ability between its periodical databases and its eBooks formerly known as Netlibrary.  University press books would be an appropriate part of EBSCOs eBooks since they have numerous scholarly articles in their databases.

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