October 16, 2012
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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 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 '50s into the '60s — 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.)
Step I: 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 a third 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 defund 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
defunding of public education is racial, pro-corporate and anti-protest
in nature.
Again, from Anna 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,
defunding was consistently the result. This funding argument also was
used to reshape 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 defunded…” 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 devalue
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.”
Step II:
Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a
surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s).
Vice-President
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 30 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 families could attend college for free). And guess
what? Average pay for Temple’s faculty is
stillabout 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.
Step III: Move in a managerial/administrative class that takes 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 Nixon administration, HMOs were an idea sold to the American public,
said to help rein 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
healthcare 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 IV: 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:
“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 that
don’t like climate change warnings will donate money and control
research at universities, which then publish refutations of global
warming proofs. Or, university 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 prices 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 V: 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
California as an example again, over 2000% since the '70s. 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 not to say “This is what you need to borrow,”
but instead, “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.
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 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.
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.
