analyzing where the university is in the classroom? -- it's a start

Reading Inside Higher Education I am struck by the amount of (wilful?) denial about the mess that higher edu and edu in general are in. A good beginning might be to have all undergraduates read something about the current crisis of the university. My bias and I think the bias of many academics is to try to "protect the kids" from the awful truth. But I think this is a mistake. The whole point of the university is to exercise critical thinking, and what better way to start than with a critique of the institution we are in?

Stanley Aronowitz's book THE KNOWLEDGE FACTORY is short and quite easy to understand. What if all undergrads had to read it? I plan on implementing this in my classes -- all of them -- next year.

I think it will be uncomfortable, but that may well be productive.

The grad school racket

It’s like this: see . . . You tell the kids they gotta get a Master's degree, see… and then you tell them they got to get a PhD… and then they got to publish. . . and then they got to go to conferences. see.. and then if they DON’T get a job you tell them that they just didn’t try hard enough and you quick lose their address and you go after the next bunch of kids, and you tell them, it’s like this: see . . .

This is a copy of my comment on INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION, referring to an MLA report on tenure

THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER

The MLA is composed of very smart people, making a sincere attempt to deal with the dysfunction and bias that plague academic hirings, promotion, and tenure. But as both Stanley Aronowitz, and the late Bill Readings have noted in their substantive books, the problem is bigger than tenure procedures and starts earlier.

Both Aronowitz and Readings write about the corporate university, where students are processed like so many "widgets" (Theda Shapiro's term). In such an environment, faculty are becoming increasinlgly positioned as "seasonal workers" (Aronowitz's term), and so tenure is in fact disappearing as academics are separated into workers and a much smaller cadre of "managers". If you think about it, this is indeed happening at many colleges and universities.

This state of affairs places grad students and recent PHD's in the position of being almost like migrant workers, and THIS, I would argue is a problem that departments and graduate programs need to look at very seriously. What can be the intellectual and ethical justification, for recruiting people to work as our assistants, all the while training for them for jobs that do not exist?

Should we downsize voluntarily and/or should we radically rethink what the Masters and Doctorate degrees signify?

How can we educate those who want to pursue higher degrees, and at the same time be honest with these students about their "professional" future?

And finally, how can we rethink and resist the corporatization of the university from within it? These are, in my estimation, some of the questions we need to be asking.

thy life's a miracle

In the middle of these commentaries about the ruin of edu, I want to comment very briefly on the death of a Beverly Hills High Junior on December 3rd 2006. The male student, so the story goes, got into a car with a very drunk, older male driver in order to look after two female sophmores, who wanted the driver to purchase them alcohol. All of them were inebriated to begin with, and this young man's gallantry had, to say the least, a catastrophic outcome. It is at this point unknown which, if either, of the young women survived, nor do i know whether the driver lived or not.

I will dispense with the usual cautions against taking drugs and operating machinery.

I hope that whoever reads this will think twice and three times about the value of their own lives -- which is, to put it mildly, considerable. In the end all debates are futile if you aren't alive to engage in them, and I hope you'll stick around to be a part of the fray. Being a young person is actually dreadfully difficult (this is Robert Gross' observation), much more difficult, i think, than being an older person. And yet, your charge as a young person is to survive into adulthood, so that you can bring your vitality, your uncertainy, and even your suffering into the realms of work, politics, love, art, and of course education.

Do remember, not only do you need to live, but more importantly, we, the older ones, we need you. I have felt this many times as a teacher and I continue to feel it as a writer and as a parent and as an older person with much younger friends. Young people are actually crucial to the world -- not in the sense of being "the future" or the "hope" or whatever -- but in the sense of who you are right NOW, with all your questions, and discomfort, and your incredible aliveness.

i'm sorry you do not have an educational community or set of communities that serves you better. But in the end, still, you need to live. Everything else is ultimately negotiatable.

So please stick around, and take care of yourself so that you can live as long as humanly possible.