Tech Mecca

I understand that simple writing “THIS” may represent one of the symptoms of the decline of substantive rhetoric in this country. But, I have yet to read a more perfect dissection of the current administrations short-sightedness when it come to higher education. So…

THIS! 

Yes, it certainly does. What the hell does “THIS!” mean? Like, “Hear, hear” or “Amen” except that it doesn’t carry any meaning at all. Interesting.

Good list of what a real education policy should be.  Although you could have just said education, as opposed to mindless demgoguery, and saved space.  It is truly amazing that so many on the right keep calling this warmed-over Bush administration socialist.

I usually agree with you, Claire, especially when you go after the Big O in the Mostly-White House.

But on this one, I have to call shenanigans. I agree with you that sports get too much attention and public universities need to be a priority for states and the federal government, provided that they do not become Berkeley or Michigan, charging private-university prices

But —-

Tuitions are too high and that’s the problem. Colleges, especially private ones that hide behind their status as “non-profits” (which is absurd), cannot cry foul when they are told to rein in the bill they pass on to students, especially if people expect taxpayers to fork over cash on account.

We can debate many reasons for the unreasonably high tuitions, but the government cannot go in and micromanage each college, so the simplest way to mandate change from the top is to do, essentially, what Obama has started to do:

–Say NO! to colleges that charge exorbitant tuition. That means Harvard, that means the New School, and that means for-profit colleges that milk students for online degrees. If anything, Obama does not go far enough. He should say (1) such schools cannot use federal grants OR federally backed student loans of any kind to pass students through the bursar’s shibboleths, (2) such schools are ineligible for ALL federal or state research grants, and (3) such schools will lose their non-profit status and their endowments will be taxed.

–Say NO! to colleges that have a certain percentage of their employees on temporary contracts. We will need adjuncts here and there but this is a serious crisis now, with 70% of courses taught by people who don’t have the time or institutional support to offer good instruction to students. Why is this happening? I’ll tell you why: Colleges have pillowy foo-foo tracks for “tenure-track” scholars who get to teach 15 students a semester, go on sabbatical, and act like divas to their colleagues and students. Those people soak up huge amounts of money without adding to instruction for the country’s masses, especially at the schools that not coincidentally have skyrocketing tuition. The taxpayers did NOT get their money’s worth, and that has got to change. I wrote a book on literary conservatism while teaching 4 classes and 140 students per semester, drawn from the middle and working classes; the taxpayers DID get their money’s worth from me. This system has to change, and we have to stop pointing fingers elsewhere. Time to face the music ourselves.

–Say NO! to elitism. Schools that do not offer educational services to underprepared or academically challenged students, due to restrictive admissions policies, should NOT be getting any federal money or state money of ANY kind. Why should the taxpayers’ money go to Harvard in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, research grants, and federally backed loans, so that Harvard can say, “thank you,” and then refuse to do anything about educating the taxpayers’ children. No, it is not enough to say that you’re going to endow a Platonic elite at Harvard with benevolence to help America’s children one day. If a college’s business is to form an elite and exclude people who might slow down the indoctrination process for the elite 1%, then that college has to do so ON ITS OWN F*CKING FUNDS!

–Say NO! to colleges that engage in problematic practices of admissions, tenure, or promotion. Insider trading, no-bid contracts, and monopolies have been outlawed for basic reasons of practicality and fairness — those reasons fly in the face of the way colleges pick their students, tenure faculty, and promote people. If you are running an institution at odds with the public mission of the United States, do it with your own money.

Is this heavy-handed? Yes! But you say you’re sick of non-educators lecturing us who who teach — Guess what! I am sick of educators lecturing each other about how big, bad, people in the world outside are abusing us. We are a corrupt field full of rapacious inefficient elitists, all with a heavy price tag and a serious attitude problem. 

I welcome the severe scrutiny and the pressure to change. Change was Obama’s slogan — let’s change. Or did you expect everybody but us to change?

Well said! Colleges and Universities are becoming service organs/apparatuses of Federal bureaucracy. Adios academic freedom!

Remember, as George Soros says, “he brings people with him.”

Seriously, Jephthah, the Ivies are comprised of eight schools.  Total. There are over 6600 Title IV institutions in the US and eight Ivy league schools: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84  

Harvard isn’t the problem.  Being elite schools, their high tuition gives students their school’s pick of available faculty and a good track to good jobs and a high-end network.  People who pay a lot to go to ivies get a lot in return.  Tenure isn’t the problem either.  Abandoning the tenure system would cause more problems than it solves by giving too much power to administrators who don’t care about educational quality and by creating an environment of grade inflation for job preservation.  I would support pay caps for upper administration at schools that receive federal financial aid.

If you’ve ever supervised theses you’d know that while the number of students decreases the workload remains the same.  You need to read what all of your advisees are reading to be able to evaluate them.  You need to read sometimes multiple drafts of documents that may be a couple hundred pages long.  One thesis that’s 120 pages long is five students’ worth of writing in a writing-intensive class and a lot more reading.  One thesis that’s 200 pages long is ten students’ worth of writing.

Plus, stepping out of the humanities, research professors generate revenue with patents and with research grants.  You’re pointing the fingers in all the wrong directions.  You need to point to overpaid administrators, multimillion dollar salaries for presidents of for profits, to states cutting education budgets… to keep what in their place?

Spot on! One addition: A real education policy would have talk show hosts who know about education so they could stop the Secretary from rambling FAST

Arne Duncan is a faux Democrat who has never been an educator nor holds any advanced degree.  He became CEO of CPS because he knew the “right people.”  He’s an elitist from the Chicago Lab Schools whose best friend is Michele Obama’s brother.  During his tenure as CEO of CPS, he did nothing to lessen the black-white achievement gap.  It is actually larger today.  However, he did create a “clout list”, so Chicago elites like Penny Pritzker could get their kids into the best public schools.  He ran CPS with the idea that schools should be run like businesses.  He closed over 100 schools in Chicago!

Because lord knows we need to woo the independents — ops, I meant corporate donors.

O good god. Your proposals would eliminate virtually ALL scientific research in this nation and kill the economy. This is the dumbest suggestion I have read in a long time.

At the state level elections and budget outcomes tend to be very clearly related unlike the federal level where even the majority never really can rule.
Even at Rutgers, one of the worst run sports depts, the losses from sports are only a tiny fraction of their budget so to suggest they are having a material impact is a lie. Like many state U’s Rutgers has a problem with basic state funding. It is also not allowed to control tuition nor add high paying out of staters. That is the real Rutgers problem. All the rest is marginal. I’m sure RU wishes it were that simple.
At most R-1 schools the faculty averages just 2 classes per term compared with 4 at many regional and average quality private U’s. That standard is set by the rich schools and the flagships have to ape that policy or risk losing their stars. Problem is all the non stars get the same deal. It is an area for the most bang for the buck in cutting costs without much real harm. Harvard is not hiring the 25th best prof from the Illinois English Dept. Maybe they could even then afford to pay adjuncts a little more money.

Yes, TR!. Cutting funds to education, without any understanding of what is producing the problems our students face, will only insure that you produce higher degrees of non-learning with greater efficiency.

I teach at an R-1 (actually, at a liberal arts college nested within an R-1, possibly the most labor-intensive combination of all) and I “only” teach two courses a week.  Yet I work a minimum of 60 hours a week and literally never take a day off during the fall and spring.  (I do take weekends off in summer.)  Why?  Because in addition to “merely” teaching those two classes (which require a minimum of 3-4 hours in prep time for every hour in the classroom, plus hours of grading on a regular basis) I am doing the following:
– advising undergraduate and MA theses, and doctoral dissertations (=endless reading, commenting, meeting, and re-reading)
– supervising independent study courses
– supervising a TA (if I were in a less obscure field, I’d have to do more of this)
– writing endless letters of recommendation
– collaborating in the administration of two interdisciplinary programs
– administering a foreign language proficiency exam for graduate students in my dept.
– participating in the admissions process for our MA and PhD programs — approx. 30 hours of reading and reviewing that have to be shoehorned into the first two weeks of every spring semester
– serving as academic adviser to freshmen, sophomores, and majors in my field
– serving as graduate career adviser in my department, a task which involves reviewing and helping candidates to revise their cover letters, CVs, syllabi, and grant proposals; setting up and participating in mock interviews and mock job talks; and meeting with them individually to help with interview preparation — several hours a week between October and March
– serving on two college committees, which between them meet weekly
– applying for grants, which make more work for me but bring money and prestige to the institution
– organizing and hosting events of interest to the campus and local community
– serving on the executive councils of one local and two national organizations in my field, which entails helping to organize one local and two national conferences
– filling out endless paperwork to (a) create new courses in response to innovations in the field or changes in student demand, (b) get my courses approved for this or that requirement, or (c) conform them to various constantly-changing “assessment” rubrics imposed from outside the institution
– writing articles, book reviews, and attempting to get work done on my next book
– attempting to keep a vague eye on trends in Higher Ed by skimming the Chronicle headlines each morning over my first cup of coffee (just to explain why I am here instead of off doing all the above).

With the exception of reading the Chronicle (and possibly serving on the national orgs’ boards, to which I was elected by the membership), all of the above is expected of me in my job; the above are the basic requirements of my contract.

Then there’s the stuff that’s not required, but that makes me a better scholar and teacher, and prepares me to do more interesting and useful research: learning an additional foreign language, travelling to the countries I study, participating in faculty seminars, reading colleagues’ work-in-progress, participating in cultural programming. 

So quit it with the “only 2 courses a semester” crap.  Ideally, ALL faculty would be teaching “only” 2 courses (which would give them time to prepare more richly for those courses, take more time over grading, and get to know their students better) and would also be doing some portion of the tasks outlined above — which would in turn lighten MY load to the point where I might be able to work only 50 hours a week and take at least one weekend day off (or, say, have time during the week to exercise, make love with my spouse, etc.).  Unfortunately, the labor in academia has been divided in this soul-destroying way that has EVERYONE (with the possible exception of a handful of celebrities) working way too hard for salaries that range from mildly comical (mine) to outright criminal (those of many off-ladder and adjunct faculty).  But the solution is NOT to make me teach more courses on top of doing all the above, without changing anything else.

Yes, the real problem is the destruction of public universities.  THere is nothing wrong with elite schools that offer an exceptional education, and which mostly have need-blind admissions policies.  The problem is that there are not more of them and that they are only able to educate so few.  This is not a situation where the Universities (except the for-profit ones) are to blame.  It is a problem of this country’s priorities and where the money actually goes.

Enjoyed the concept and agree with much of it, but the lack of attention to the learner and the learning process is problematic. “Education” carries an agenda that is often opposed to actual learning.

Right, MChag.  I’m 100% behind what Obama is doing now because he wants to rectify the real nonsense that’s going on: abuses by for-profit institutions that lead to lower budgets for public institutions.  Public money needs to go first to public institutions, especially community colleges.  

So, none of those activities could either be eliminated, done by somebody else paid less to do admin functions, or have some of the useless effort removed such as “needless paperwork”. Sounds like much of that is make work creted by tradition and of little real value to the main fundtions. Do letters of rec really do anything and are they really needed? How much influence do they really have in decisions?
BTW I attended an R-1 school and the place was generally very empty by 4PM and not that many folks were around on weekends either–and forget Fridays. Now much of that work can be done at home or might be in other venues. But maybe some of it just needs to be eliminated. Life will go on.
 But here’s a new flash–many people in professions and in the salaried level private sector work 50-60 hours a week. 40 hours is for low level staffers and those who have topped out and are waiting to retire.
And summers and breaks off–not ever. Most are lucky to get to take the 2-3 weeks/year they are supposed to have.

What is the basis for the late paragraph about “educators” being “lectured by politicians” here?  None of the policies quoted and discussed in the piece appear to target underperforming _educators_ in the guise of increasing “efficiency.”  To find savings in the institution doesn’t necessarily mean cuts or any other onus-placing at the front lines.  Much like health care reform was not aimed at scapegoating doctors, this reform effort does not seem to be aimed at scapegoating professors.  In health care, there are insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers driving costs up.  In education, likewise, unscrupulous loan companies and bloated administrations have a lot to do with it.  And presumably that’s where a responsible, data-driven education reform effort would lead.

Why would you presume this?  Every savings so far has been made on the backs of students, faculty and staff. Obama has not indicated that he is in the least aware of this.

It was the opponents of health care reform, this time and in the Clinton era, who habitually suggested that any control of health care costs would harm honest, hardworking doctors. Through that misdirection, insurance companies and medical device manufacturers hid their lust for lucre behind kindly father-figures in white coats. Not all attempts to control medical costs take money out of doctors’ pockets or violate their professional integrity; similarly, not all attempts to control education costs take money out of professors’ pockets or violate our professional integrity. We should be vigilant and on our guards, to be sure. I’m just not yet convinced I see the same reasons for alarm stated near the end of the piece.

While fundamentally a good summary of the problem with Obama’s education policy and the continual obstination by the government to ever address the real problems in higher education, I am shocked that such a supposedly well informed blogger would refer to Obama’s educational policies as neoliberalism.  I am no defender of the new left in this moment but he is actually acting under the influence of the free market supporters who would apply principles of corporate management to all levels of education.  These policies actually enjoy bipartisan support and is most definitely no tthe brain child of the left but of fiscal conservatives.  Just saying. 

got the complaints…what was your solution again???

It has been normal policy nationwide for politicians to blame universities for costs, lack of jobs, lazy professors and worthless research.  All you have to do is read the papers.  Governor Scott of Florida even went so far as to travel around the state making statements like “who needs more anthropologists.”  They want to turn all Universities into community colleges and the outcome measurements are the jobs that don’t exist. Most of course know nothing about higher education or the way professors work, which is much more than they do.  I have to ask, where have you been?  THis has been on the national stage for years.

Neoliberalism does not belong to one party or the other: it is common ground. It has a range of adherents who call themselves Progressive ( and are in many ways) but are certainly not conservative, the President being one. Market-driven approaches to governance and public life began to be implemented under Jimmy Carter and continued through the Clinton administration: some of the great links between Republican and Democratic administrations have been NAFTA, welfare “reform”, and school privatization.

Thought you would never ask.

A federal education policy should be guided by the following principles.

First of all, the amount of federally funded student aid available to a student should be indexed to the flagship state university in the state where the student is a resident. Students may of course use this aid to attend private universities, online education or whatever. Currently though, we are operating a national voucher system which supports private education at the expense of public education. Also, there is simply too much money available. Student aid in higher education has become like aid to Africa. It’s hurting the local institutions, corrupting the process

Secondly, federal student aid would be available for students attending any state university as long as the state is supporting their universities up to a measurable standard. Currently, state legislators are abandoning this duty, the rationale largely being that the universities can set higher tuituion which will be paid for by an increase in federally funded student aid awarded per student.

Thirdly, stop trying to encourage everyone to go to college. Michael Lind has said it better than I ever could in the following Salon article which I would encourage everyone to read.

http://www.salon.com/2010/08/03/myth_upper_middle_class/singleton/

Otherwise, please see TR’s original post.

…and I actually agree with everything you said, especially your last point – not everyone should go to college!

Thanks for the background. I agree, why not be proud to be a gray lady, if you have lived long enough you should enjoy some respect.