How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps
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 now 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 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.
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.)
First, you 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 1/3 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 de-fund 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 de-funding of public education is racial, pro-corporate, and anti-protest in
nature.
Again, from 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,
de-funding was consistently the result. This funding argument also was used to
re-shape 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 de-funded…” 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 de-value 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”.
Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and
continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
V.P. 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 thirty 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 family’s could attend college for free.) And guess
what? Average pay for Temple’s faculty is STILL about 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 — and readers of this blog will remember
that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past.
Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take 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 infamous Nixon Administration, HMOs were an
idea sold to the American public, said to help reign 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 health
care 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 Four: You 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, on Corporate Culture: “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 who don’t like “climate change” warnings
will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish
refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities 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 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.
Step Five – 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 CA as an example again, over 2000% since
the 1970s. 2000%! 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 to say NOT “This is what you need to borrow,” but to say “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. No, no. 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 in 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.
I am eager to hear from those of you who have been involved in this battle,
or are about to enter it. 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.
The Homeless Adjunct, 12/08/12
