Feats of Strength I'd Like to See

On Festivus (see the whole story here),it's tempting to stress the importance of The Airing of the Grievances, but, because I've already done a fair amount of that on this blog, this year I'd like to emphasize the Feats of Strength. Here are some I'd like to see in the academic world, starting tonight under the Festivus Pole and extending into the New Year and beyond.

For Contingent Faculty Members:

• Be strong enough to juggle their many courses, long commutes, and economic insecurity just long enough for the the academic world to wake up and smell the gallons of coffee they're guzzling on the road.
• Be strong enough to continue to organize, protest, speak up, write, and whatever else it will take to get the word out and the world changed.
• Be strong enough to say no to anyone and everyone and catch up on sleep over whatever break they get.

For Full-Time, Tenured or Tenure-Track Faculty Members:

• Be strong enough to be kind to and inclusive of contingent faculty in their departments.
• Be strong enough to join in the organization of, protests for, and any other actions to help change academic labor conditions for those not as fortunate as them (us, that is. Us.).
• Be strong enough to support the needs of contingent faculty to their department chairs and other administrators.

For Campus Administrators:

• Be strong enough to recognize that the current system will eventually (or much sooner) destroy the system of higher education in America.
• Be strong enough to fight for better working conditions on your campus and beyond.
• Be strong enough to stand up for better working conditions to your boards, governors, funders, and whoever else is encouraging you to follow the business model - all the while knowing that the business model of treating you employees badly is bad business, as well as bad education policy.

For Politicians:

• Be strong enough to stand up for the importance of education, and back up that stand up with funding.
• Be strong enough to admit that you don't really care about the future of education if you refuse to provide restored funding.

For All:

• Be strong. It's going to be an interesting year at best.

Now, I'm off to put up my pole and cook the spaghetti dinner. I still got a lot of problems with (some of) you people, but I've decided to hope for the best. That is my Festivus Feat of Strength.

When your only tool is a spreadsheet . . .

 . . . every problem becomes a number. And this is exactly why expecting education to be run like a business and to treat students like customers is disastrous.

It might be remotely possible that not everything is quantifiable. Turning non-numeric things into statistics is forever pounding the square peg into the round hole. And we know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

School districts, colleges, and universities cut the things that don't make money: art, music, foreign languages . . .  But they ignore the (quantifiable) studies that say things like, students with a good background in music do better in math (take those numbers, you bean counters!).

We want our students to learn how to think critically, express themselves clearly in writing and speech, and reason scientifically and mathematically. And yet, we let core curriculum be eroded because the customer - the student - doesn't think that will matter in the real world.

And yet the student? The student came to us for an education. How is it possible that the student (the 18-year-old student) knows what will matter? That is the same student who orders a super-sized meal at the local fast food place because metabolism change is so far in the future.

This week, I discovered that half my students had never heard of Nelson Mandela. Just like not knowing that in ten years that unhappy meal will suddenly appear in their midsection, it's not their fault. They were never taught history - especially the ancient history of the 1970s and 80s - way before they were born.

When I ask them if they've seen Gone With the Wind, they say, No. It was made before we were born (So, weird that I've seen it, right? How old do they think I am?). But they have seen The Wizard of Oz and are amazed that those movies were made the same year. Before they were born. How can it matter?

These are the same students (and I love and respect them - they are so smart in ways I never was in college) whom we expect to choose the right things from the menu of the university. Colleges make more money offering courses, programs, and majors that purport to offer the fast track to a big money job. Who needs music, art, literature . . .  Let's just pack in all the calories we can at the lowest cost.

And this is exactly why the teaching profession is under attack. Just as the health insurance companies decided they knew more than doctors, bean counters have decided they know more about education than professors. Teaching is the new prostitution - a career to mock, to sneer at, to destroy.

Is it too late for me to become a stripper? Because at least in that profession, your pay is based on your performance. In teaching, your pay is based on your dedication and love and blah blah blah. Stuff that this culture has no tolerance for . . . Stuff that hasn't proven its worth in numbers - at least not in numbers that the bean counters are willing to look at.

Who's Got the Adjunct Blues?

According to a great song (and thanks to Matthew Ussia), we all do - professors, teachers, parents . . .  the only stakeholders (don't you just love how I've learned educational jargon?) not mentioned in the song are the administrators.

And that's because they're not blue at all. They're laughing all the way to the bank.

For now. But when we claim to be following the business model for education, it's a very specific business model based on short-term profit. So dedicating the budget to Taj Mahal*-style dorms makes sense - it brings in more customers, and they pay more for the privilege of living in the lap of luxury. Dedicating the budget to top-heavy administration makes sense, because, duh, it's the heavy administrators at the top who are setting the budget.

But dedicating the budget to education? To teachers, updated classrooms, better libraries? How would that appeal to the customer - the customer who is, by the way, an 18 year old. And, as every business person knows, the customer - at any age - is always right.

Here's a library story for any doubters out there: At a public university near and dear to my heart, the library steps were crumbling. Seems there was a spring or other source of water under them determined to bring them down. Did the university replace the sensible steps with new sensible steps, after solving the water problem? They did not. They constructed an elaborate marble staircase with the library name engraved on the wall.

Inside, the librarians were thinking, Really? When we keep asking for more books and data bases?

So when the full-time professors are gone; when the contents of the library are gone, what's left? Nothing. Colleges and universities will be just one more set of boarded up big box stores.



*And, yes, I know the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum. Wonder how many of the college students living in those dorms knows that.

Broken Computer Charger Changes Everything

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my actual, real, true workload - the work I and other faculty do outside of the classroom. This week, a music professor from Allegheny College wrote a similar story in response to the great state of Pennsylvania's attack on the state university system. He also debunks the myth of the overpaid, underworked teacher - you can read it here.

Yesterday morning, the absolute truth of both of our essays hit home. When I woke up, I discovered that my laptop computer had not charged. It would not charge. It would not come on when it was plugged in.

I called Apple and they are sending me a new adapter, which should come tomorrow or Friday.

When I went home for dinner (before returning to school for rehearsal of the play I'm directing), I thought I'd do a little work, as I often do over dinner.

Oops. No computer.

This morning, over breakfast, I checked my school email on my phone.

I'm writing this during my office hours and realizing I'll probably have to stay in my office over the dinner hour because, again, no computer at home.

And out of my six-figure income (ha! not quite half that . . .), I pay for my computer, my internet service, my phone, and my phone service. And I could not do my job without those things.

Or without working over meals at home.

The Complicated Lives of Students in 2013

I received my undergraduate degree - a BA in English literature - in May of 1976. I was not a brilliant student. Duquesne University was too big and overwhelming for me. I was probably a student who would have benefitted from a year off between high school and college. I just wasn't ready.

I came from a low-income family. My father, a college graduate, had died when I was 15, and my experiences were more like those of first-generation college students. I had a horrible bout of depression my junior year, which caused me to get fired from my work study job - ironically, in the campus office that provided counseling.

But in spite of all that, I had a much simpler and easier time in college than my students do.

Because I encourage personal writing in my composition courses and I teach memoir writing, I probably know more about my students than most of my colleagues. I know which one was raped at 12, which one was beaten and locked in a closet by her father, which one's father came out as gay and left his family of six children and a bewildered wife.

My students are mostly first-generation college students. They are either very rural West Virginians or very urban inner-city athletes. The are from low socio-economic families and come unprepared from underperforming K-12 systems.

They are frequently from one parent homes, or raised by their grandparents. There is alcoholism, drug addiction, and jail in their backgrounds.

These are the students who deserve the best teachers, the most dedicated and knowledgable. They need programs like music and foreign language and ancient philosophies - the courses most frequently cut by public colleges and universities but remain a source of pride in elite universities.

Our approach to education at all levels is just wrong. Like corporations and individuals, for colleges, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. And there's nothing surer than this: The current system will increase the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor and head us for destruction or revolution.

Or both.

And the Bigger Problem

The use and abuse of contingent labor in academia didn't just happen; it is, perhaps, a symptom rather than the disease itself. Higher education is under attack from all sides, including from within. While Duquesne University is a private school, the labor conditions in public education are often worse. Steven Ward writes that this is no accident. While to an outsider, his words may sound paranoid, as someone who has worked in the field for 14 years, I have seen all of these things in play.

And don't get me started on the idea of free markets and college-as-business. Anyone who knows me knows how I suffered working in the for-profit education world. I watched from within as Goldman Sachs destroyed a formerly prestigious 90-year-old institution. The day its parent company took the stock public and Goldman Sachs bought the controlling interest, it was as if the lights had been suddenly turned off. Layoffs started and eventually included the librarians, the advisors, department chairs, faculty . . .  Even worse, we were constantly pressured to dumb down the curriculum and to pass failing students, while support services for our most needy students were being cut. After all, offering counseling services doesn't bring in profits, does it?

None of this is happening in a vacuum. There is an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, a fear of elitism, and a glorification of the average in our culture today. George W. Bush is proud of his C+ average at Yale. Highly educated and highly intelligent people have been stereotyped as helpless geeks who can't manage their own lives. In television, think about Ross from "Friends," the Crane brothers of "Frazier," and everyone but Penny in "The Big Bang Theory."

The next group to be glorified? Wildly successful dropouts, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who suddenly knows how to fix education - but that's a story for another day). Early in President Obama's first term, he visited a school and gave a fairly routine "stay in school" speech, and leaders in the Republican party demanded rebuttal time. To say what? Drop out? And that is exactly the message the conservative media landed on: no need to go to school! Certainly Glenn Beck is doing just fine with just a high school degree!

What this ignores, of course, is that in order to succeed without education beyond high school, you need to be incredibly driven or a genius. It helps to be both.

My students who are receiving that message are neither. They are first generation college students in a state that has slashed funding to higher education. Their fathers and grandfathers were farmers or coal miners. Now they believe that there is a future in oil and gas that doesn't require education. And the governor is just fine with that.

In the formerly great state of Pennsylvania, the governor has made no secret of his agenda to destroy public education, starting with preschool and not stopping until the PhD programs are gone.

Combine these state efforts with the high interest on student loans and dwindling resources such as Pell Grants. Tuition goes up, financial aid sources dry up, and students fear (and rightly so) living the rest of their lives under crushing student loan debt. What happens then? Higher education, once considered a great equalizer, the gateway to opportunity for all Americans, will revert to its roots: a place for rich white guys to revel in their privilege.

Sad.