Ouch! Interesting read
https://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university…
How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps
A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public
education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race
between education and catastrophe.’ I think he got it right. Nothing is more important to
the future of the United States and the world than the breadth and effectiveness of
education, especially of higher education. I say especially higher education, but not
because pre- school, elementary, and secondary education are less important. Success at
every level of education obviously depends on what has gone before. But for better or
worse, the quality of postsecondary education and research affects the quality and
effectiveness of education at every level.”
In the last few years, conversations have been growing like gathering storm clouds about
the ways in which our universities are failing. There is talk about the poor educational
outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan
debt. Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports
coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty. There are now
movements to control tuition, to forgive student debt, to create more powerful
“assessment” tools, to offer “free” university materials online, to combat adjunct faculty
exploitation. But each of these movements focuses on a narrow aspect of a much wider
problem, and no amount of “fix” for these aspects individually will address the real
reason that universities in America are dying.
To explain my perspective here, I need to go back in time. Let’s go back to post World War
II, 1950s when the GI bill, and the affordability – and sometimes free access – to
universities created an upsurge of college students across the country. This surge
continued through the ’60s, when universities were the very heart of intense public
discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times.
It was during this time, too, when colleges had a thriving professoriate, and when
students were given access to a variety of subject areas, and the possibility of broad
learning. The Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were
exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions,
foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late
fifties into the sixties — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in
popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the
environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where
did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual,
and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the 60s?
The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on
our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.
I suspect that, given the opportunity, those groups would have liked nothing more than to
shut down the universities. Destroy them outright. But a country claiming to have
democratic values can’t just shut down its universities. That would reveal something about
that country which would not support the image they are determined to portray – that of a
country of freedom, justice, opportunity for all. So, how do you kill the universities of
the country without showing your hand? As a child growing up during the Cold War, I was
taught that the communist countries in the first half of the 20th Century put their
scholars, intellectuals and artists into prison camps, called “re-education camps”. What
I’ve come to realize as an adult is that American corporatism despises those same
individuals as much as we were told communism did. But instead of doing anything so
obvious as throwing them into prison, here those same people are thrown into dire poverty.
The outcome is the same. Desperate poverty controls and ultimately breaks people as
effectively as prison…..and some research says that it works even MORE powerfully.
So: here is the recipe for killing universities, and you tell ME if what I’m describing
isn’t exactly what is at the root of all the problems of our country’s system of higher
education. (Because what I’m saying has more recently been applied to K-12 public
education as well.)
First, you defund public higher education.
Anna Victoria, writing in Pluck Magazine, discusses this issue in a review of Christopher
Newfield’s book, Unmaking the Public University: “In 1971, Lewis Powell (before assuming
his post as a Supreme Court Justice) authored a memo, now known as the Powell Memorandum,
and sent it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The title of the memo was “Attack on the
American Free Enterprise System,” and in it he called on corporate America to take an
increased role in shaping politics, law, and education in the United States.” How would
they do that? One, by increased lobbying and pressure on legislators to change their
priorities. “Funding for public universities comes from, as the term suggests, the state
and federal government. Yet starting in the early 1980s, shifting state priorities forced
public universities to increasingly rely on other sources of revenue. For example, in the
University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a
percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a
loss of more than 1/3 of its public funding. But why this shift in priorities? U.C.
Berkeley English professor, Christopher Newfield, in his new book Unmaking the Public
University posits that conservative elites have worked to de-fund higher education
explicitly because of its function in creating a more empowered, democratic, and
multiracial middle class. His theory is one that blames explicit cultural concern, not
financial woes, for the current decreases in funding. He cites the fact that California
public universities were forced to reject 300,000 applicants because of lack of funding.
Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for de-funding of
public education is racial, pro-corporate, and anti-protest in nature.
Again, from Victoria: “(The) ultimate objective, as outlined in the (Lewis Powell) memo,
was to purge respectable institutions such as the media, arts, sciences, as well as
college campus themselves of left-wing thoughts. At the time, college campuses were seen
as “springboards for dissent,” as Newfield terms it, and were therefore viewed as publicly
funded sources of opposition to the interests of the establishment. While it is impossible
to know the extent to which this memo influenced the conservative political strategy over
the coming decades, it is extraordinary to see how far the principles outlined in his memo
have been adopted.”
Under the guise of many “conflicts”, such as budget struggles, or quotas, de-funding was
consistently the result. This funding argument also was used to re-shape the kind of
course offerings and curriculum focus found on campuses. Victoria writes, “Attacks on
humanities curriculums, political correctness, and affirmative action shifted the
conversation on public universities to the right, creating a climate of skepticism around
state funded schools. State budget debates became platforms for conservatives to argue why
certain disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, minority studies, language,
and gender studies should be de-funded…” on one hand, through the argument that they were
not offering students the “practical” skills needed for the job market — which was a
powerful way to increase emphasis on what now is seen as vocational focus rather than
actual higher education, and to de-value those very courses that trained and expanded the
mind, developed a more complete human being, a more actively intelligent person and
involved citizen. Another argument used to attack the humanities was “…their so-called
promotion of anti-establishment sentiment. Gradually, these arguments translated into
real- and often deep- cuts into the budgets of state university systems,” especially in
those most undesirable areas that the establishment found to run counter to their ability
to control the population’s thoughts and behavior. The idea of “manufactured consent”
should be talked about here – because if you remove the classes and the disciplines that
are the strongest in their ability to develop higher level intellectual rigor, the result
is a more easily manipulated citizenry, less capable of deep interrogation and
investigation of the establishment “message”.
Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a
surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is
because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At
latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom
are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most
often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they
have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often
completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many
of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million
American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no
benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind,
too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of
six figure student loan debt on their backs.
There was recently an article talking about the long-term mental and physical destruction
caused when people are faced with poverty and “job insecurity” — precarious employment, or
“under-employment”. The article says that, in just the few short years since our 2008
economic collapse, the medical problems of this group have increased exponentially. This
has been the horrible state of insecurity that America’s college professors have
experienced now for thirty years. It can destroy you — breaking down your physical and
emotional health. As an example: the average yearly starting salary of a university
professor at Temple University in 1975 was just under $10,000 a year, with full benefits –
health, retirement, and educational benefits (their family’s could attend college for
free.) And guess what? Average pay for Temple’s faculty is STILL about the same — because
adjuncts now make up the majority of faculty, and earn between $8,000 to $14,000 a year
(depending on how many courses they are assigned each semester – there is NO guarantee of
continued employment) — but unlike the full-time professors of 1975, these adjunct jobs
come with NO benefits, no health care, no retirement, no educational benefits, no offices.
How many other professions report salaries that have remained at 1975 levels?
This is how you break the evil, wicked, leftist academic class in America — you turn them
into low-wage members of the precariat – that growing number of American workers whose
employment is consistently precarious. All around the country, our undergraduates are
being taught by faculty living at or near the poverty line, who have little to no say in
the way classes are being taught, the number of students in a class, or how curriculum is
being designed. They often have no offices in which to meet their students, no
professional staff support, no professional development support. One million of our
college professors are struggling to continue offering the best they can in the face of
this wasteland of deteriorated professional support, while living the very worst kind of
economic insecurity. Unlike those communist countries, which sometimes executed their
intellectuals, here we are being killed off by lack of healthcare, by stress-related
illness like heart-attacks or strokes. While we’re at it, let’s add suicide to that list
of killers — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about
adjunct faculty suicide in the past.
Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the
university.
This new class takes control of much of the university’s functioning, including funding
allocation, curriculum design, course offerings. If you are old enough to remember when
medicine was forever changed by the appearance of the ‘HMO’ model of managed medicine, you
will have an idea of what has happened to academia. If you are not old enough – let me
tell you that Once Upon a Time, doctors ran hospitals, doctors made decisions on what
treatment their patients needed. In the 1970s, during the infamous Nixon Administration,
HMOs were an idea sold to the American public, said to help reign in medical costs. But
once Nixon secured passage of the HMO Act in 1973, the organizations went quickly from
operating on a non-profit organization model, focused on high quality health care for
controlled costs, to being for-profit organizations, with lots of corporate money funding
them – and suddenly the idea of high-quality health care was sacrificed in favor of
profits – which meant taking in higher and higher premiums and offering less and less
service, more denied claims, more limitations placed on doctors, who became a “managed
profession”. You see the state of healthcare in this country, and how disastrous it is.
Well, during this same time, there was a similar kind of development — something akin to
the HMO — let’s call it an “EMO”, Educational Management Organization, began to take hold
in American academia. From the 1970s until today, as the number of full-time faculty jobs
continued to shrink, the number of full-time administrative jobs began to explode. As
faculty was deprofessionalized and casualized, reduced to teaching as migrant contract
workers, administrative jobs now offered good, solid salaries, benefits, offices, prestige
and power. In 2012, administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the
country. And just as disastrous as the HMO was to the practice of medicine in America, so
is the EMO model disastrous to the practice of academia in America, and to the quality of
our students’ education. Benjamin Ginsburg writes about this in great detail in his book
The Fall of the Faculty.
I’d like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts –
which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but
to hire adjuncts, as a “cost saving measure” in an increasingly defunded university. What
they don’t say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not
saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power.
The money wasn’t saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries,
coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a
redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore
away from the students’ education itself — and into these administrative and executive
salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of “consultants”, PR and marketing firms,
law firms. We have to add here, too, that president salaries went from being, in the
1970s, around $25K to 30K, to being in the hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of dollars –
salary, delayed compensation, discretionary funds, free homes, or generous housing
allowances, cars and drivers, memberships to expensive country clubs.
Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money
To further control and dominate how the university is ‘used” -a flood of corporate money
results in changing the value and mission of the university from a place where an educated
citizenry is seen as a social good, where intellect and reasoning is developed and
heightened for the value of the individual and for society, to a place of vocational
training, focused on profit. Corporate culture hijacked the narrative – university was no
longer attended for the development of your mind. It was where you went so you could get a
“good job”. Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring
was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history.
Anna Victoria writes, on Corporate Culture: “Many universities have relied on private
sector methods of revenue generation such as the formation of private corporations,
patents, increased marketing strategies, corporate partnerships, campus rentals, and
for-profit e-learning enterprises. To cut costs, public universities have employed
non-state employee service contractors and have streamlined their financial operations.”
So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money
floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before,
humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of
ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form
partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only
the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research. Corporations donate to
departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to
deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research.
Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one
example, corporations who don’t like “climate change” warnings will donate money and
control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs.
OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research. This
is especially dangerous when pharmaceutical companies take control of university labs to
test efficacy or safety and then push approval through the governmental agencies. Another
example is in economics departments — and movies like “The Inside Job” have done a great
job of showing how Wall Street has bought off high-profile economists from Harvard, or
Yale, or Stanford, or MIT, to talk about the state of the stock market and the country’s
financial stability. Papers were being presented and published that were blatantly false,
by well-respected economists who were on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch.
Academia should not be the whore of corporatism, but that’s what it has become. Academia
once celebrated itself as an independent institution. Academia is a culture, one that
offers a long-standing worldview which values on-going, rigorous intellectual, emotional,
psychological, creative development of the individual citizen. It respects and values the
contributions of the scholar, the intellectual, to society. It treasures the promise of
each student, and strives to offer the fullest possible support to the development of that
promise. It does this not only for the good of the scholar and the student, but for the
social good. Like medicine, academia existed for the social good. Neither should be a
purely for-profit endeavor. And yet, in both the case of the HMO and the EMO, we have been
taken over by an alien for-profit culture, our sovereignty over our own profession, our
own institutions, stripped from us.
A corporate model, where profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2)
charging continually higher pricers for their “services” is what now controls our colleges
. Faculty is being squeezed from one end and our students are being squeezed from the
other.
Step Five – Destroy the Students
While claiming to offer them hope of a better life, our corporatized universities are
ruining the lives of our students. This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you
dumb down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really
learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to
withstand “tests” and “exams”, to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our
students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and
advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses
and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a
large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are
administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid,
part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial
kitchen of a fast food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.
The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest
students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt free. Younger
people may not know that for much of the 20th Century many universities in the U.S. were
free – including the CA state system – you could establish residency in six months and go
to Berkeley for free, or at very low cost. When I was an undergraduate student in the mid
to late 1970s, tuition at Temple University was around $700 a year. Today, tuition is
nearly $15,000 a year. Tuitions have increased, using CA as an example again, over 2000%
since the 1970s. 2000%! This is the most directly dangerous situation for our students:
pulling them into crippling debt that will follow them to the grave.
Another dangerous aspect of what is happening can be found in the shady partnership that
has formed between the lending institutions and the Financial Aid Departments of
universities. This is an unholy alliance. I have had students in my classes who work for
Financial Aid. They tell me that they are trained to say NOT “This is what you need to
borrow,” but to say “This is what you can get,” and to always entice the student with the
highest possible number. There have been plenty of kick-back scandals between colleges and
lenders — and I’m sure there is plenty undiscovered shady business going on. So, tuition
costs are out of control because of administrative, executive and coach salaries, and the
loan numbers keep growing, risking a life of indebtedness for most of our students.
Further, there is absolutely no incentive on the part of this corporatized university to
care.
The propaganda machine here has been powerful. Students, through the belief of their
parents, their K-12 teachers, their high school counselors, are convinced by constant
repetition that they HAVE to go to college to have a promising, middle class life, they
are convinced that this tuition debt is “worth it” — and learn too late that it will
indenture them. Let’s be clear: this is not the fault of the parents, or K-12 teachers or
counselors. This is an intentional message that has been repeated year in and year out
that aims to convince us all about the essential quality of a college education.
So, there you have it.
Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of
the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been
hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be
impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive
courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt,
only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. The only people
immediately benefitting inside this system are the administrative class – whores to the
corporatized colonizers, earning money in this system in order to oversee this travesty.
But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: The real winners, the only people
truly benefitting from the big-picture meltdown of the American university are those
people who, in the 1960s, saw those vibrant college campuses as a threat to their
established power. They are the same people now working feverishly to dismantle other
social structures, everything from Medicare and Social Security to the Post Office.
Looking at this wreckage of American academia, we have to acknowledge: They have won.
BUT these are victors who will never declare victory — because the carefully-maintained
capitalist illusion of the “university education” still benefits them. Never, ever, admit
that the university is dead. No, no. Quite the opposite. Instead, continue to insist that
the university is the ONLY way to gain a successful, middle class life. Say that the
university is mandatory for happiness in adulthood. All the while, maintain this low-wage
precariate class of edu-migrants, continually mis-educate and indebt in the students to
ensure their docility, pimp the institution out to corporate interests. It’s a win-win for
those right wingers – they’ve crippled those in the country who would push back against
them, and have so carefully and cleverly hijacked the educational institutions that they
can now be turned into part of the neoliberal/neocon machinery, further benefitting the
right-wing agenda.
So now what?
This ruination has taken about a generation. Will we be able to undo this damage? Can we
force refunding of our public educational system? Can we professionalize faculty, drive
out the administrative glut and corporate hijackers? Can we provide free or low-cost
tuition and high-quality education to our students in a way that does NOT focus only on
job training, but on high-level personal and intellectual development? I believe we can.
But only if we understand this as a big picture issue, and refuse to allow those in
government, or those corporate-owned media mouthpieces to divide and conquer us further.
This ruinous rampage is part of the much larger attack on progressive values, on the
institutions of social good. The battle isn’t only to reclaim the professoriate, to wipe
out student debt, to raise educational outcomes — although each of those goals deserve to
be fought for. But we will win a Pyrrhic victory at best unless we understand the nature
of the larger war, and fight back in a much, much bigger way to reclaim the country’s
values for the betterment of our citizens.
I am eager to hear from those of you who have been involved in this battle, or are about
to enter it. We have a big job ahead of us, and are facing a very powerful foe in a kind
of David and Goliath battle. I’m open to hearing ideas about how to build a much, much
better slingshot.
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