We Need UC Uncut

What the state really needs is UC Uncut  - not UC down another $500 million next year on top of previous rounds of similar cuts.  For the twenty years that I have been in the system, UC has steadily squeezed undergraduate instruction, with the effect of herding students into huge lectures and relying on the testing of passively acquired knowledge because it couldn't or wouldn't spend its resources on the small-scale forms of active learning in the tutorials and seminars that the world associates with US higher education because that kind of active learning-to-create happens at Harvard and Reed and Occidental and Stanford.  UC's nominal student-faculty ratio of 17:1 or 20.7:1 or whatever it is in a given chopping-block year has meant in actual practice offering one seminar of 20.7:1 to each major over the course of four years. What students are largely getting instead are 35-student courses that now have 70-80 students in them, 400 person lectures with 1 TA for every 100 students instead of for 50 or 25, and the near total absence of individual mentoring by a regular faculty member.

This latter is a special tragedy for a public university that does not take its students exclusively from the ranks of the top few percent of test takers on the international scale. 
Most UC campuses are comprised of up to nearly 1/3 of Pell-eligible students from families with incomes of less than $45,000 a year (UCLA's 30% is triple the Ivy League norm) . Most of the rest of the student body is broadly middle-class, from California public high schools that no longer have courses for special interests in math or art or music or journalism, no longer have courses for the cultivation of the specific genius of people who will create the next economies and the next cultures.  The broad mass of public university students did not get piano lessons and one-on-one tutoring in Spanish and Mandarin, they have not had four years of shop plus mechanical and architectural drawing.  That is what we have public education for - to get everyone to the level where their interests and visions deserve to be. These students have enormous intelligence and energy, and yet we are neglecting them. We are not doing this willingly. We have no choice. We do not have the people and time and infrastructure to bring everyone on line in the global economy and world culture able to do all that they can do.

 I say this on the basis of direct experience. Over the past three years, I have met several times one-on-one with each of over 350 students from nine UC campuses. These are students who have studied in France through UC's Education Abroad Program.  My goal has been to orient them to a different university system, but also to help them develop an individual academic project. Our students are brilliant at checking the boxes of their requirements as required courses get added and subtracted.  They need to be, since signing up for classes means hitting a moving and shrinking target.  These students generally know what their overall topic of interest is. They are also as a group completely inspiring, the most multilingual, international, multiracial, spontaneously democratic, and transformationally-oriented generation I have seen.

But what about the individual academic project that expresses their specific interests and their unique profile? What about the individual project that would allow them to write a statement of purpose to get into grad school or stand out among the 480 other applicants for an internship at UNESCO, or to apply for a job that will develop their talents?  In about three-quarters of the cases, I am the first senior faculty member with whom these students have every had a sustained conversation.  I  estimate that 90% have had no faculty advising on their course of study. They are increasingly unable to get the more focused and advanced courses that would allow them to develop a true expertise in something before they graduate.  Because finding these courses is now so hard, they have no incentive to develop an individual and special program of study that depends on them.

The bitter irony is that this system of deindividualized education is less functional than ever before.  Large public universities took on the obligation of mass quality -- high quality for mass enrollments -- at a time when corporate America would hire intelligent but generically-trained college grads by the hundreds of thousands. They staffed their gigantic multidivisional organizations, which John Kenneth Galbraith called the "technostructure."  These jobs required varying ratios of conformity and creativity, and UC graduates were its prototypical members: bright, cooperative, motivated, possessed of strong foundations for further specialist training through their college combination of a specific major laid on top of general education.

But the technostructure for which State U was preparing its masses of intelligent students has largely disappeared. Since the 1990s, the corporate world has been applying 'knowledge management" to its workforce under various names. The goal of this practice is to find niche geniuses that invent new products which directly impact the bottom line, on whom the company will lavish great working conditions and pay, while squeezing the positions and pay of the broader white-collar workforce, those millions of smart graduates who nonetheless are not "unique" (see Thomas A. Stewart or my Unmaking chapter 8).  For this among other reasons, elite universities are individualizing undergraduate study even more than they already have.  As just one simple example, several years ago M.I.T. "replaced the traditional large introductory [physics]  lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning."  In doing so, M.I.T. reduced the course's failure rate by 50%.

UC is headed in the opposite direction, towards massification and deindividuation.  Lack of financial resources is the number 1 reason why.

We need UC Uncut, and CSU Uncut, and the community colleges uncut.  Accepting the $500 million cut, as UC officials appear to have done, betrays our responsbility to the current generation of California students.

Across the Freeway from the MLA: Notes on the Counter-conference

. . . actually more like tweets, organized around themes not presentations and slighting all sorts of good stuff from a full Merrifield amphitheatre at Loyola Law School:

• The country has so many problems that need solving and yet many of us are having to spend all our time fighting for a decent wage and benefits.  We have to do it, we have to make sure they respect our profession. But with everything else that needs doing in the country this is such a waste! (Maria Maisto).
• The public money for higher education isn't coming back, no matter how much we protest (AAUP president Cary Nelson).  I pressed him on this, given the fact that the student fee-hike protests of November 2009 are probably what kept Arnold Schwarzenegger from continuing cuts in the following year.  Cary said yes but it's not springing new money, and won't. It's a waste of time to go to the statehouse.
• Federalize public higher education.  Cary said this would cost $60 billion, a drop in the defense bucket.  Argue it on fundamental principles: higher education is a fundamental right, it should be free, it should create no debt. . .
• The new dominant faculty feeling is Fear.  "Fear now dominates the academic world.  Amazingly it has conquered arrogance as the main faculty emotion."  
• Faculty have become dormant and passive again.  They are forfeiting the chance to make alliances with staff and students, and the window is in danger of closing (Joshua Clover).
• New Faculty Majority.  Fear is there, but can and is often overcome.  We need to educate the public on the reality of contingent labor, and have been doing this (Maria Maisto).  On unemployment in Ohio one can make more money than teaching 3 courses as contingent faculty.
• Grad student majorities: it's a fractured profession, where most grads can't aspire to the financial or professional conditions of their professors.  In this context the most important educational experiences were often, in grad school, not the most important professional experiences. (Annie McClanahan).  A kind of deprofessionalization needs to take place. This may overlap with an ongoing activism focused not only on unionization and labor conditions but on democratization. This means in many cases actually struggling against national unions which have often on campus been undemocratic and top down (Annie McClanahan). 
• Grad students are the future of the profession.  If their issues aren't addressed, the profession will resemble the condition of being a graduate student (Jasper Bernes)
• Management: given unequal power and unilateralism in so many university administrations today, progress requires "the credible threat of disruption" (Joe Berry).  Strikes are a tactic, and have to be part of a continuous process of tactical innovation, as they were in U of Illinois battles for tuition remission security among other things (Kerry Pimblott). The only thing that has made lasting differences in working conditions for most university employees has been union contracts (Bob Samuels).
• Organizing as an educational practice: both are produced by enormous amounts of labor, both are collective collaborative activities and both produce people who have agency and who can organize all sorts of new things including further campaigns (Pimblott).
• Progress.  Contingent labor has in places been successfully organized. People are feeling that now.  It seems like a movement. In five years things will be significantly different in a positive sense (Maisto).

By my count all but one of the speakers teach at public universities, and that was certainly true of the audience, many of whom were from state and community colleges around the country.  Jeff Williams provided the great service of giving a name to what many of us have been doing on the research side. Comparing it to Critical Legal Studies, he called it Critical University Studies (CUS).  This is one new discipline which was invented and is overwhelming practiced by faculty from public universities.


Thanks all for your excellent work and for a very promising afternoon. To be continued . . .

At the MLA: the View from 2020

Yesterday, I spoke on two of the panels for the Modern Language Association Convention's series, "The Academy in Hard Times."  The first was  Marilee Lindemann's panel, "New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Academic Crisis." Lindemann types for the excellent Roxie's World blog on academic crises and on culture, and spoke about the use of animation tools and of comedy in getting the word out . Rosemary Feal also spoke.  The executive director of the MLA and who, among many other achievements, has brought Twitter to the MLA and tweets as MLAConvention. Marc Bousquet was there, author of How the University Works and a consistently important voice on the economic and labor politics of the profession.  He also spoke about new tools for teaching and communicating to the wider world like Xtrannormal, reminding us that So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities? has been watched a million times, or 10 times the number of faculty and graduate students teaching in the US, UK, and Canada combined.

Also speaking was Brian Croxall, prominent tweeter and blogger at ProfHacker and on his own page. Having become nationally known more or less overnight for his explanation  -- Absent Presence --of why he couldn't afford to go the MLA convention in 2009 to deliver his paper.  Read the post for an excellent overview of the financial plight of a large percentage of jobmarket candidates. , Brian described the features of social networking that make it valuable, and at one point remarked that "Twitter was the best thing that ever happened to my career."  "Hard times" in the title means among other things the ongoingly terrible job market in English and foreign languages not to mention History, and the job market continues of course to have a monopoly on access to professional employment. But Brian's comment recalls that online publishing, blogging, and tweeting have destroyed the profession's monopoly over professional visibility.


During questions, an audience member asked a version of Jason B. Jones' blog question, "To what extent [are we social network activists] ironically complicit in worsening the working conditions of academics? Does encouraging work on productivity bespeak an ideology of scientific labor management?" (maybe it was Jason Jones who asked it).This prompted me to give them a one-person round of a applause and say that in fact in the last five years you have transformed the discussion about adjuncting, the job market, the content of the profession, professional passivity in relation to financial decisions, and a whole range of other issues.  Has the MLA been more transformed by insurgent views in the blogosphere than by the 1960s revolts that made the MLA more representative if its actual political spectrum than ever before? My guess is yes. Amidst the bleakness this is some very good news.  And the news is just beginning.

Next was the MLA's panel "The Academy in Hard Times."   Speaking besides myself were Barbara Bowen, head of the Professional Staff Congress, AFT Local 2334; Reed Way Dasenbrock, provost at the Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa; Monica F. Jacobe at Princeton Univ.; Gary Rhoades, American Assn. of Univ. Professors, and Richard Yarborough of the English Department at UCLA. I finally broke down and started using my Twitter account during the session to broadcast not only the good points but the covergence around several themes.  Reed and Gary discussed the structural subsidies that unfairly impoverish humanities disciplines while shortchanging undergraduates.  Barbara and Monica talked about the parallels between hard times inside and outside the academy, suggesting the relevance of our own efforts to change the economics and employement practices of the academy to the rest of the economy.  Michael Bérubé, the panel chair, noted that declining humanities enrollments is a complete myth, and documents it in his MLA blog entry.  Richard Yarborough used the ongoing crisis in African American underenrollment at UCLA to call for much more pointed attention to the racial dyanamic underlying the disinvestment in public higher education in California.  The decline in share of personal income going to higher ed in California is shocking (it's fallen by half in 20 years), and it coincides exactly with the shift in California's younger population to minority majority status.  Gary summarized this by saying universities are ignoring the fastest growing portions of their markets. In discussion, concerns about the anti-intellecualism of the general public and ongoing decline were met with impressively confident calls to do outreach to the huge number of people who care about educational quality, and who don't like workplace exploitation so much either.  Polls we've discussed here before suggest these people are in a large majority, and they can be more easily brought into the discussion by the kind of real-time communication now taking place at the MLA and on multiple blogs near year.

I argued on both panels that we need to play to win.  In the second, I travelled ahead in time 10 years to offer, "The View from 2020: How Universities Came Back." The piece shows how we learned in the 2000s that a broken American funding model for higher education sent higher ed into a devolutionary cycle, and then how, in the 2010s, three pivotal events turned the spinning wheel around.  I've posted the talk here, and will add the slides in between sessions later on.