The dismantling of higher education

[applegrove]

The dismantling of higher education

by Mark LeVine at al Jazeera

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/7/the-dismantling-of-higher-education.html

"SNIP...............


While researching a recent column for Al Jazeera America on the “killing of tenure” and what it means for the future of higher education, it became clear that the attempts by conservatives to dismantle the institution of tenure, highlighted by the Wisconsin legislature’s removal of previously statutory tenure protections, are only one component of a much wider array of threats to the profession of teaching and research.

For academics lucky enough to have tenure at an “R-1 research university” — one with “extensive” doctoral level graduate programs and support for faculty research as well as teaching — the erosion of traditional tenure protections is damaging because it threatens not only academic freedom but research and teaching that contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. GDP. The continued downtrend in funding for university research has paralleled and is tied to the erosion of tenure, academic freedom and shared governance more broadly. All these trends are tied to the corporatization of the university; that is, the increasingly privatized model of higher education which does away with shared governance and tenure in favor of centralized administration and contingent labor, puts profits and the bottom line ahead of the public good, and efficiency and “customer service” ahead of a well-rounded education that encourages critical inquiry and independent thought.

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The Walmartization of higher education is of course part and parcel of the larger McDonaldization of American society, which devalues broad skill sets and critical thinking in favor of consumer-driven “choice” and a cheap and controllable workforce. As anthropologist Sarah Kendzior asks in perhaps the most viewed article in the history of Al Jazeera English, what does it mean when education has gone from being the great path out of poverty to being “a way into it”?

The threats to academic freedom and shared governance posed by a system of largely contingent academic labor are obvious. If you’re treading water around the poverty line and have no guarantee of a job three months down the line, you are going to be very reluctant to teach any subject that might challenge students or the powers that be in your community, whether it’s science that is literally verboten to discuss — such as climate change in Wisconsin — “divisive” ethnic studies in Arizona or “anti-Semitic” Palestinian history almost anywhere.


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[Binkie The Clown]

1. Didn't you hear?

Any day now we will have computers that are as smart as humans, and THEY can do all the work. Then humans can evolve to a higher level: playing video games 24/7. So what use will we have for higher education anyway?

[daleanime]

2. K&R.....

[Octafish]

3. Crapadaemia

It is good for racking up a twice-mortgaged mansion in debt for someone trying to land their first job.

[a la izquierda]

5. Yep.

I'm looking to finish my first book and get out.

[LWolf]

7. I had this conversation with my son last night.

He's working on a 2nd masters. He's an adjunct at a local university, teaching freshman level and remedial courses. He's expecting his first child. When he finishes that 2nd masters next year, his final student debt load will be about double his brother's mortgage. He's looking at his repayment options, and forgiveness options, and THAT is going to dictate where he lives and what he does for a living for the foreseeable future.

[6chars]

4. it was fun while it lasted

really enjoyed the football games

[Igel]

6. A lot of those "verboten" science tidbits are of long-standing.

I've seen researchers picketed because they looked at the distribution of smooth and striated muscle tissue in ethnic groups in Africa. It's genetics, but "bad" genetics.

I've seen faculty whose rooms were invaded by protesters for daring to point out that the Southland's population growth, largely driven by immigration, was unsustainable. It was racist, it was anti-Latino. The assumption was the researcher would have assumed it was sustainable, I guess, if the immigration had been anglo.


The problem isn't having tenure revoked. That's the last step taken to date, in a small number of places. The problem is why they want to revoke tenure: No core curriculum, Burger-King menu selection for graduation requirements, shifting standards of what needs to be taught and fads that need to be catered to, the view that education is a job certification and not preparatory skills that make life better or prepare you for final preparation. In may cases there are too many PhDs or even MAs produced for a field, and far more BAs than the workforce could use--in days when there were job shortages in some fields, when "personal growth" =/= "income growth", when education wasn't supposed to narrowly tailor students for a career, this was great. Now ... Not so much. But that's driven by a focus on $ and the short-term by students and parents, and on the need for schools to justify their graduate programs by graduating students (and there being enough students who somehow think that if 1/100 of the PhDs get a job, surely they will be that 1).

America's worked hard for the last 30, 40 years to get to this point, with a lot of choices that ultimately led to this. We don't give credit to the guy doing the touch-up painting and the carpet layers in a new house for laying the foundation and installing the plumbing, wiring, and roofing, or blame them when those are bad.