It seems like much attention these days is on the widely proclaimed declining state of American public education and the determined push to turn it into a for-profit business at the taxpayer's expense, while also breaking the power of teachers and their unions. K through 12 education is where much of the battle is taking place - but higher education is in trouble as well.
Digby picked up on an Ed Kilgore piece on the Great Recession budget cuts to public higher ed schools, and how they've not been restored. Both of them are referring to a commentary by Janet Napolitano, current president of the University of California system on the vital need to nurture our public higher ed schools.
Digby's take on situation:
Libertarian paradise here we come. Higher education will only be for those who can afford to pay huge sums or are willing to indenture themselves for decades. (And I'm sure the for-profit fly-by-nights will continue to sucker low income students into going into crippling debt.)
It sounds like perfect preparation for the new servant economy.
It's actually worse than that. More below the
Orange Omnilepticon.
First Principles
A fundamental essential for a functioning democracy is a citizenry informed with the knowledge to competently evaluate the world around them and the intellectual skills to use that knowledge to reach informed conclusions and act on them. In other words, people smart enough to know when they're being played. As Napolitano puts it:
This country’s public universities and colleges foster an active, thinking citizenry. They enhance public spirit. They educate—and more importantly, elevate—vast numbers of young people. These institutions are public goods, through and through, that benefit all of us, and not just the students who attend them.
The phrase "public goods" is a tell - because we are in the thrall of a determined effort to eliminate the very idea of such things from the public consciousness. Any place where such ideas are still being used is a place under threat. And it's not just the public universities.
Several years ago I attended a homecoming weekend at my Alma Mater, an old-line 'private' college. As part of the celebration of How Awesome The Old School Is, a spotlight was put on selected Best and Brightest members of the student body. One caught my attention. He was an idealist, an accomplished scholar, and one determined to be politically engaged. The highlight of his career to date was attending CPAC...
Yup - my old school, a supposedly liberal arts institution, was celebrating its role in turning out another foot soldier for the oligarchs, people determined to eliminate the very things such schools are supposed to nurture. And it's not hard to see how it happens. The ceremonies were taking place in a huge athletic center, right next to a huge football stadium complex - with donor names attached. The school had "followed the money" and the money was taking it right where it wanted it.
Once upon a time, a "liberal" education was considered an ideal - an education with a broad scope, including a wide range of subjects like the arts, history, science, philosophy, etc. etc. An individual with such an education might not have been suited to a particular job on graduation, but the idea was they would have enough internal resources to be able to rise to any challenge life would throw at them. Even those desiring a narrower focus were expected to have enough variation in their intellectual diet so they wouldn't be completely one-dimensional.
Now? The magic word is STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. Graduates of higher education are expected to come out ready to be slotted into the economy. They are optimized for the needs of the business community - and what they haven't been taught is as important as what they have. Their role is to be either dispensable employees - or if they're connected in the right ways and/or very lucky - the next generation of Owners. [UPDATE: Found the perfect horrible example right here.]
Even President Obama has bought into the idea that the only purpose of education is to prepare our children to become part of the economy.
The strength of the American economy is inextricably linked to the strength of America’s education system. Now more than ever, the American economy needs a workforce that is skilled, adaptable, creative, and equipped for success in the global marketplace.
America’s ability to compete begins each day, in classrooms across the nation—and President Obama knows we must comprehensively strengthen and reform our education system in order to be successful in a 21st century economy. The case for the link between the strength of American education and the strength of our economy is a simple one—and it is one that all Americans can agree on. Ensuring that every student in our country graduates from high school prepared for college and a successful career is central to rebuilding our economy and securing a brighter economic future for all Americans.
The man used to teach constitutional law, for C'thulu's sake! You could stick "
The business of America is business" on the end of that without skipping a beat. Conspicuously absent from that vision are such things as turning out future citizen-participants with the tools needed to make a better society: people armed with a knowledge of history, politics and a desire for social justice; people ready come together for the
common good or (just as important) stand in opposition to that which they have judged is wrong. They can do it because they have been educated with the inner resources to make those kinds of judgements and act on them responsibly and reasonably.
Or at least they used to; has anyone noticed how rare that has become lately? Lied into a war, complete with criminal incompetence and outright criminality at the highest levels, adoption of torture as policy, acquiescence to global surveillance, assassination by drone as policy, economic policies that kill jobs and enrich the 1%, the continuing assault on labor, the increasing threat from climate change... Where's the outrage? Where are the people in the streets? Where are the people in the voting booths? "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Why Are We In This Handbasket And Just Where Are We Going?
The perversion of higher education didn't happen overnight or by random mischance. It's part and parcel of the nature of conservatism that it is suspicious of people "who know too much" and challenge authority. The ascendency of conservatism with the Reagan "Revolution" (actually a devolution in terms of the results) has seen a continuing assault on the idea of public interest in favor of private gain. A vast messaging machine of conservative media outlets, think tanks, astro-turf groups and more have engaged in attacking the very idea of a liberal education, to the point where triangulaters and centrists regurgitate their talking points. Higher education has been reduced to a mere job qualification, and attempting to put it to work outside that constraint is treated with suspicion and derision. Or as Charles P. Pierce puts in it the forward to Idiot America,
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the national DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
This didn't happen overnight. Like the apocryphal boiled frog, it has been happening by slow degrees. And so here we are.
Over at the Homeless Adjunct, there's a must-read piece laying out the road map: How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps.
...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 fifties into the sixties — 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.
emphasis added
Deborah Leigh Scott spells out the five steps that have turned higher education into a perverse corruption of itself - and the same principles are being applied to K-12 education as well. To summarize, here they are in order:
• First, you defund public higher education.
• Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
• Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university.
• Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money
• Step Five – Destroy the Students
Each step is spelled out in cogent detail. Read The Whole Thing. Here's highlights from each step:
...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.”
...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 — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past.
emphasis added - and "precariat" is one of the more apt words to come along in a while.
...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.
emphasis added Note: Does this sound like what's happening to K-12 public education too? It's not a coincidence.
...A corporate model, where profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2) charging continually higher pricers 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.
...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. ... 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....
emphasis added - again, sound like what's happening to K-12 education?
It's tempting to quote at length from the whole thing; Scott's conclusions at the end are a deadly indictment of what higher education has become. (And let's not get into the Bread and Circuses aspect of the fraud of 'amateur' college athletics programs and the money that circulates around that.)
The main point is that Higher Education like so much else in America has become a rigged game, and the usual suspects are in it up to their elbows, along with the enablers who've facilitated their depredations. People are starting to become aware of just how bad things have gotten - and notice is being taken. Lynn Stuart Parramore at Alternet has noted that the 1% are growing uneasy over the possible blowback from their stranglehold on America.
While police overreaction to the people of Ferguson, MO over the killing of Michael Brown has been framed in racial terms, it's not a stretch to wonder how much of that arsenal on display is intended to protect the 1% from the rest of us. The crushing of Occupy Wall Street by massive force certainly suggests it's not far from their thoughts. The one part of government that conservatives seem to have no problem with is a police force dedicated to protecting their property - and suppressing any threats to it. College campuses are no less a potential battle field than anywhere else.
Americans by and large regard higher education as a good thing in the abstract, a means to a better future and a broader world. The reality is that it is less so every day; instead it has become perverted into a tool for dumbing down our youth, suppressing dissent, ensuring 'compliance' with the will of the oligarchs, and ensnaring people into the precariat for life.
This is not the American Dream. This is the American Nightmare.
Addendum: While thinking about the further implications of Scott's article and the overall situation, I realized some other consequences of the defunding of public higher education. As public schools are forced to raise tuition and cut aid, it means private schools and for profit schools are that much more at liberty to raise their own tuition rates and cut their own aid programs, the better to support that EMO managerial class and profit margins. The student loan industry gets to rack up even more profits wherever students end up, so the financial sector has to be cheering this as well. The usual suspects, of course, support defunding in any case - but these groups stand to do even better from it.
Is it any wonder fewer male students are choosing higher education? No one seems to have come up with a convincing explanation for why women are now outnumbering men (and it's happening overseas as well), but I'm wondering if a couple of factors are at play.
1) Are men just concluding that the debt loads are too high to be worth the effort - especially with the kicker that now there's talk that graduate degrees are what is needed to get a really good job in an economy that's creating too few?
2) Are men more likely to consider entering the military as an alternative to college, because we're not caught up in war any more? (For the moment, at least.)
3) Are women making the calculation they need a college degree because A) there are now more men with only high school degrees competing for jobs, and B) they typically get paid less than men so the investment in a degree means they might stand a chance at getting underpaid at a higher rate?
It would be nice to have answers to this, beyond the usual crime/violence explanations among young males or the idea that the answer to discrimination and all the other obstacles faced by young men of color is simply good role models. Or maybe it has something to do with that inequality thing... (Click on the link for "Social Mobility and Education")
2:27 PM PT: UPDATE: All right - made the Community Spotlight. Thanks!