Education, Extraction, Austerity Rioting

I've now interrupted two series of posts, one on funding and the other on the California state audit.  I gave Pt 2 of the audit report on KCSB's No Alibi's on Wednesday. Barring more interruptions I'll post this material about the apparent racial pattern of differential campus funding this weekend.  The differential funding is a huge story in itself.

I normally read almost as much about finance as I do about higher ed, and the last two weeks have been unbelievably awful for the former. Enormous uncertainty is exhausting everyone and obviously blocks coherent medium-term decisions. Outright anger is just as common, as displayed in Dylan Raitgan's MSNBC meltdown on the theme, "the United States of America is being extracted."  The sense is that some irreversible taking of resources is going on, and the leadership is not stopping it.  There is also the feeling that the leadership is in fact actually helping it -- helping the looting on a gigantic scale.

That's the noir suspicion running through the anger at Obama from various directions.  It is also the feeling on both sides of the actual looting that took place in the UK this week, where anger at police violence turned into a kind of poverty riot conducted by teenage boys.  By the time the Prime Minister David Cameron returned from Tuscany to declare police water cannoning to be an Olympic sport in time for next year's London games, commentators were as sickened by the disavowals of the connection between austerity and criminality as they were by the criminality itself.  The conservative Daily Telegraph's lead commentator, Peter Oborne, denounced the "moral decay" at the top of British society, railed against elite hypocrisy and double standards, and concluded thus:

The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

I would say that Britain and the US need an end to austerity and deprivation.  This is particularly true around education, where Cameron's government has in less than a year planned for an 80% cut in the university teaching grant, overseen an immediate tripling of fees, and in effect replaced most public investment in university education with the American mix of family money and student loans.  One can never make a one-step causal argument from a government report to rioting, but the Cameron extraction of the university system was clear and deliberate, and the entrenched poverty in world cities like London and Los Angeles is equally clear. Politicians often hope the consequences of bad decisions will appear too late to be traced back to their bit of political engineering, but Cameron was not so lucky.

The national political systems in the US, UK, and France-- the ones I watch pretty carefully -- are simply unwilling to accept any functional solution that would cost their most powerful constituencies.   Dozens of op-eds every day call on leaders to build up schools, roads, parks, labs, universities, pools, and job training centers rather than letting them fall apart, for the obvious reason that these would help restart everybody's economy.   I don't think Tea Partiers or Tories actually believe that austerity will get things going again.  Jerry Brown can't actually believe this. And yet Brown and the rest are passionately committed to an austerity strategy that is bound to fail in advance.

Theirs is partly a momentum play -- the Right is comfortable with anti-government austerity language--but more to the point, austerity mints money for the rich portion of the political Right, given the piles of money they make loaning society money rather than being taxed to help pay for it up front.  It is also now rational for the top 1% and 0.1% not to want to invest in anybody's new economy, since they don't make their money on domestic production anymore, whether it's automobiles or solar panels or anything else.  The truly rich put their money to work at higher returns on their capital in Brazil, China, Malaysia, Russia, etc etc., where foreign direct investment entails zero social overhead.  They can see perfectly well that restarting the US or the UK will require big upfront costs and then a whole bunch of ongoing investment and payroll commitments down the road, plus new political power for the green economy lovers and fans of community health clinics and all that other irritating and expensive middle-class stuff, and if public investment and everything that comes with it like public teachers and public sector unions is shown to work economically, which it would be, then you have the New Deal coalition back again, regular people voting left rather than right, and that  would be the end of the antiegalitarian phase of capitalism we've had for thirty years-- the Right is right about that.

Public education has been thrown into the doghouse so it can't play a leadership role in reviving public investment. K-12 is now subject to every kind of manipulation other than actually meaningful increases in public funding, particularly charter schools that give public funding to private parties with very mixed results. Educational results are only part of the point. The rest of it is to show that public investment in anything doesn't work, so regular people can't call for it confidently.

In the past, public universities have been immune to these attacks. One reason is that they are represented by some of the most intensely selective and prestigious institutions on the planet -- places like Harvard and Cambridge that produce society's deciders, as George W. Bush would say.  Another reason is that they are associated far more than K-12 with private interests -- with wealth-producing technology and wealth-preserving medical services -- that is, services that preserve the capacity to enjoy one's wealth.  The influence of the medical centers over UC policy is just one instance of the importance of this association of universities with wealth and technology.  Certainly public university officials are doing everything they can to maintain this association-- even if it forces them to soften their pitch for public funding.

It seems clear, however, that the pitch for the innovation economy isn't working for public universities like it used to. Plutocratic money is mostly abroad, and salary money mostly isn' t in innovation -- only 6% of US jobs are "STEM" jobs associated with technology.

I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post this week on this question of the fate of the innovation economy after the debt ceiling debacle.  Innovation has really been sputtering along under Obama - the Sputnik call didn't do much for most people, since there's no Soviet empire behind it to scare anyone into spending.  The climate emergency has been muffled even within the Obama administration by his support for oil -  extraction again -- and for nuclear.  The question for most people is not where is the innovation economy, but where are the innovation jobs.

Public universities could reposition themselves by having an answer to this last question.  They need to tie their own activities to job creation, but not exclusively through technology and medical services, but through social and cultural knowledge sadly lacking in so much public policy, and through the care and nurturing of working-class and middle-class people that are going increasingly to waste whether in Tottenham or Ivry-sur-Seine or Richmond California. Public universities will need to come out  only in favor of the public sector as the source of personal development -- employability but also creativity and imagination -- for the entire population and not just for the tech focused end of their current constituency. 

I was thinking about this as yet another Carnavale report on the cash value of a B.A. was overshadowed by the news that Rihanna's hair bill comes to more than $22,000 per week.  Rihanna's has her noted stylist, Ursula Stephens, on a $3200 per day retainer, meaning that Stephens earns in a day what most adjunct professors make for teaching a semester course.  It's one more thing to get furious about, and yet I end up with the thought that the energy and craziness captured by popular music would be a better guide for designing the next university than the official policy debates.

Recentering Academic Development

Over the past two weeks academia has been buried in a blizzard of reports, which is a symptom of the current pandemic of concern about the state of U.S. higher education.  These reports include

• the Education Trust's Priced Out, about the extent to which rising tuition and funding cuts are hurting low-income students
• a dull but worthy report from UVa's Miller Center calling for a stronger focus on degree completion
• an analysis by the Richard Vedder shop of UT-Austin's recent data dump on faculty productivity, arguing that higher ed's funding problems can be fixed by getting rid of a large number of the least productive faculty
• the widely discussed "What's It Worth?" report from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce that correlated differentials in wages with college majors.  It turns out that engineering majors make more than studio artists! Lower wages also unsurprisingly correlate with "womens' work" and with professions that care for and develop people rather than manage money and commodities. Though the study was reviewed in some quarters as a sign that correct market incentives would force students out of their 'fluffy majors" and toward gainful employment, Patt Morrison's disussion with the report's lead author, Anthony Carnevale, and the comments on her web page, suggest instead (1) a backlash against the injustice of the labor market and (2)  defenses of those non-technological majors that are directed at forming cultural, social, and historical knowledge, solving social problems, developing personal capabilities, and helping the individual student understand his or her future possibilities in society.

Which brings us to the real star of the show, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska's book Academically Adrift, which was widely reviewed a few months ago.
Many reviews hooked it into the current trend of bashing colleges to justify massive, absurd cuts in their public funding. Their study does suggest that students aren't learning enough in college.  But their real story is much more powerful than that. They replace stock metrics like degree attainment with specific academic development goals, and measure how well students are doing at mastering these. 

Today the Los Angeles Times published their useful crib of their book.  There you can read the following elements:

• outcomes are faltering because "many students were not being appropriately challenged," i.e. were not being given enough work. 
• the main reason is that universities have strayed from the core mission of instruction (I would add research which they do not). "Many institutions favor priorities that can be boasted about in alumni magazines and admission brochures or that can help boost their scores in college rankings." 
• this amounts to a major paradigm shift in which "Colleges have abandoned responsibility for shaping students' academic development and instead have come to embrace a service model that caters to satisfying students' expressed desires."
• the correlative is the replacement of academic-instructional with non-academic professional staff, or in other words the administrative bloat that has increased pessimism and cynicism about higher education's priorities among faculty and voters alike.

There's a vicious cycle here, in which senior managers saw alumni and donors willing to pay for a range of expensive services, benefits, celebrations, atomospherics, and derivative products (e.g. high-end medical services) but not for instruction or basic reserach, so they moved university resources very logically towards the service model for students and donors-businesspeople-politicians alike, which increased the quality advantage of those services over that of the core mission, while also requiring the increased hiring of non-academic administrators.

Much of the public is no longer willing to pay for the service-university, where so much of that service is clearly going not to their children or grandchildren or neighbors children but to the usual suspects at the top of a society whose growing inequality has led to their own economic decline.  It could be an entirely different story for the development-university, one centered on the academic development of all of its students, undergrad and grad, through teaching and research alike.

We need to take a chance that a broad majority would pay for that, and offer it to them.

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.