Fear and Trembling: Nov. 6 and Public Higher Ed.

A deep existential dread pervades many of my colleagues in education as Nov. 6 approaches. And it is not just because we are in California with its problematic Prop 30, which would be the coup de grâce to public education if it fails. This election could signify the closing of opportunity for any significant pragmatic action to protect what remains of public higher education across the country. The outcomes on Nov. 6 could be a further blow to unions, who despite faults, have worked hard to protect workers rights in the face of a relentless onslaught of big money, and reactionary legislation to gut them.

And I can be counted as one educator in this election season disappointed by the lack of debate on the state of defunded public higher education across the nation and the instability for young educated adults in the new lackluster economy. I can see the impact of a dramatically changed economic reality on my students since the fiscal collapse of 2008: seniors about to graduate troubled by their chances on a job market that provides no career stability or upward mobility. One of my students, a talented software programmer in the gaming field, works from contract to contract asking for a permanent position at each job with no result. Or there is the mature student, a biology major in my capstone course, who has survived rising tuition costs in the CSU with a “good job” at Starbucks and may have to stay since jobs in her area of expertise are scare; or her partner also in the science business who does get highly paid contracts, but they are all short-term and he worries constantly about the next short-term job. This is an age of contingency for all workers, blue or white-collar, and my students wonder whether they will ever have the economic security to even start a family or own a house. The American Dream feels very fragile to my graduating students in California in an age of business opportunism eager to exploit contingent labor. This is a global trend , of course, pitting young educated adults against each other in the hunt for more stable jobs.

Is it the same across the states? Just last month many of us received the following message from the American Association of University Professors (AAAUP) explaining the seriousness of union busting in Michigan:

Dear AAUP Members:

In attacks on working families similar to those we saw in Wisconsin and Ohio, the Michigan legislature and governor have decimated collective bargaining rights in the state. In Michigan, this has been done not in one omnibus bill but with an onslaught of individual bills, railroaded through committees with the arrogant attitude, “your voice doesn’t matter.”

Fearing this pattern might continue though the next legislative session, and possibly lead to a so-called right-to-work state, the labor movement has initiated a ballot campaign to amend the Michigan constitution. The proposed amendment would protect the basic right to negotiate for fair wages and benefits with an employer.

Our friends and colleagues in Wisconsin and Ohio stood their ground and fought back with the power of collective action reminiscent of the 1930’s. It is now Michigan’s turn to carry the movement forward.

As we have seen over the past couple of years, corporate special interests have amassed staggering resources to use in their attempt to destroy collective bargaining rights. We therefore appeal to our AAUP colleagues from across the country to join us in preserving the labor/management relationship that has been so successful in creating the American middle class.

Our colleagues in Michigan need your help. To see how you can help, please visit the Michigan AAUP conference website (http://www.miaaup.org/).

Rudy Fichtenbaum President, AAUP

In California, funded by super PACS (including Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers).we have Prop 32 on the Nov. 6 ballot that would make political action close to impossible for unions here. May we shake off the dread and act to make sure this doesn’t happen as we inspire our colleagues to become politically engaged by getting out the vote this week. This is all hands on deck!

In his recent blog .”…Same as the Old Boss” (below) Bill Lyne provides a case study of the ongoing privatization of public higher ed in Washington State:

In a move that would make Dick Cheney proud, Education Secretary Arne “Aren’t I cool because I play basketball with the president” Duncan recently convened a secret meeting of higher education bosses to help him figure out how to do to higher ed what he has done to K-12. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, the meeting included top officials from prominent MOOCs, other players in online learning, veteran experts on course redesign, college administrators, people from powerful foundations, leaders of several of the major higher education associations, technology vendors, and for-profit college representatives.

“Few actual faculty members were invited to the meeting,” reported IHE. “And no high-profile faculty advocates attended.” In the doth protest too much portion of the program, “education Department officials repeatedly said during the meeting that they recognize the leadership role faculty must take in any teaching and learning developments.”

Yeah, well if you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

In related news here in Washington, Governor Gregoire has now made her appointments to the Student Achievement Council, a longtime state bureaucrat with zero education experience is now running our community college system, and Rob McKenna thinks college professors are blowhards who should be turned into temp workers.

For those who haven’t been reading the fine print, the Student Achievement Council almost exactly fills the footprint left by the recently deposed Higher Education Coordinating Board. Scott White is probably rolling over in his grave after the bill he introduced to scrap the bloated and ineffectual HEC Board has only produced a lot of wasted time and money to replicate the HEC with the SAC.

The governor’s appointments to the SAC all seem like fine people, but while the names have changed, the lineup overall is distressingly familiar. A bunch of lawyers and managers and a token student (who will, depending on her willingness to go along, either be co-opted or marginalized), none of whom bears much resemblance to an actual educator. As with every other task force, board, council, and committee appointed to ride herd on public higher education, there is no faculty member, no one who does the work of education, no one who knows from daily classroom experience what student achievement might actually mean.

For the past thirty years, U.S. public education has been going to way of U.S. health care. Like health care, education is something that should be a right that has been inexorably turned into a commodity as a public good has been made more and more available for private profit. The funding model has shifted from taxation to debt (much to the delight of the financial industry), eroding both the accessibility and quality of college. Real educators generally object to this shift, which is why the new appointees to the SAC were chosen precisely because they are managers and not educators. Kind of the same way that the people chosen to run health care are always managers and not doctors.

As public higher ed was eviscerated over the past four years, the HEC board stood by and didn’t raise a fuss, choosing instead to do endless tuition studies and produce lots of charts with pretty blue arrows. It’s a pretty safe bet that the new SAC can be counted on to be just as acquiescent.

Meanwhile, just down the street at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Olympia perennial Marty Brown has been named Executive Director. When last we saw Mr. Brown, he was throwing a fit to any reporter who would listen about the faculty contract at Western Washington University. Despite the fact that Western professors’ salaries, adjusted for cost of living, ranked in the bottom fifteen percent in the country, Mr. Brown felt it was “a mistake” for the Western trustees to negotiate a contract with the faculty that included small raises.

This disdain for faculty, along with his complete lack of experience as an educator, should help Mr. Brown fit right in at the SBCTC, where hundreds of well-paid managerial employees with benefits oversee a system that is well on its way to becoming a sweatshop. At some of Washington’s community colleges, up to 80% of the faculty are badly paid part-time itinerant workers with no benefits. As SBCTC Director, Mr. Brown will have access to study after study that shows what a difference well-qualified permanent faculty can make. He will also have the expertise of thousands of professors readily available. The smart money is on his taking advantage of neither, instead continuing to rely on the squads of non-classroom consultants and “experts” who will continue to peddle the notion that doing more with less has no effect on a student’s education.

Alas, these also seem to be Rob McKenna’s confidantes. Mr. McKenna has made education the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign and he certainly gets it right when he talks about how he wants to increase funding for higher education. And he consistently recognizes the damage done by years of cuts to higher ed.

But when he gets down to specifics, it becomes clear that the Attorney General has drunk the managerial Kool-Aid. In a higher ed speech at WWU’s Munro Institute this summer, Mr. McKenna cogently made the case about higher ed funding, but then moved into the trickier areas of instruction and teaching. After a few banal remarks about online learning and “blended courses,” he launched into this observation about the nature of teaching:

“We’ve got to move from a model where you always have a teacher or a professor who is, as someone put it, the ‘Sage on the Stage’ to where you’ve got a professor or a teacher who’s the ‘guide by your side.’ This is a phrase that I learned from Sam Smith at Western Governor’s University (WGU), I thought it was pretty striking.”

What seems novel and striking to Attorney General McKenna is actually pretty old and tired. “Sage on the stage” and “guide by your side” have been around since at least the early 1990s and have been co-opted by the for-profit education movement as a way to demonize professors as pompous windbags and convince prospective student customers that a badly paid unqualified pal on the other end of a digital connection is better than a genuinely qualified instructor. (The irony worth noting here is that almost every time some self-styled education expert trots out the sage-on-the-stage insult, he or she is usually speaking from a stage to a passive audience, just as Rob McKenna was at the Munro Institute.) It’s no surprise that McKenna picked this up from Sam Smith, the lobbyist for WGU, where they have no faculty, just “course mentors.”

McKenna’s lack of connection to real educators becomes even clearer when we take a look at his higher education position paper. Buried near the end is a proposal to eliminate tenure, a move that would guarantee Washington’s universities would never again be able to recruit high quality faculty.

Chris Gregoire, Marty Brown, and Rob McKenna are doing nothing to improve the quality of higher education, but they can take solace in the fact that they are right in step with Arne Duncan. Though they all come from different points on the ideological compass, they all firmly agree that major policy and funding decisions about higher education are best made without any actual educators in the room.

When the Duncan cabal got down to their business of identifying the obstacles to their brave new world of McEd, the things they pointed to were financial aid rules, pesky accreditors demanding some sort of accountability, and the “faculty culture” created by those nasty professors who stayed in school into their thirties and took jobs paying much less than they could have made as business people or lawyers, just because they don’t really care about students.

Given their mania for efficiency, it’s probably a good thing that Arne’s army kept the professors out of the room. They would have just muddled things with questions about massive disinvestment, the difference between real education for responsible citizens and job training for docile employees, and why everybody in the room was sending their kids to real colleges while claiming that the MOOCs were good enough for everyone not in their tax bracket.

The NFL Referee lockout demonstrated once again that nobody protects quality, integrity, and safety like organized, professional practitioners and that bosses, no matter what manner of pious bullshit they may publicly spew, are mostly interested in squeezing workers as hard as they can. The bosses who have now focused on higher education are determined to make sure that today’s children get tomorrow’s education equivalent of replacement refs.

(permission to repost granted by the author)

Occupy Student Debt Campaign: April 25 is 1T Day

Posted: April 7, 2012 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: education reform, Occupy Movement, politics, public higher education, state budget, teacher unions | Tags: 1T Day, student debt | 1 Comment

Guest blogger Ann Larson is a graduate of the English doctoral program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She blogs about education and politics at annlarson.org. She is an organizer of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign.

Occupy Student Debt Campaign: April 25 is 1T Day

On April 25, 2012, total student debt is due to surpass one trillion dollars. This staggering figure, which is higher than credit card debt, is a burden endured by millions of American families. Two-thirds of public college students leave school with debt, an average of $24,000 per student. Jeffrey Williams has called student debt a form of indenture because many students must labor for decades, often their entire lives, to pay for the right to an education. This wasn’t always the case. The City University of New York and the University of California were free or low cost for much of the 20^th century. Many countries around the world fund public higher education. The US should rejoin that list.

What has happened to the US system of college financing?

We all know that the price of college has skyrocketed in recent years. Tuition has risen 400% since the 1980s, twice the rate of inflation. Certainly, this is partly the result of reduced state funding. But the story is also more complex. The high cost of college and the consequent debt burdens of American families are the result of a collusion between lenders (ie, banks) and the federal government which guarantees student loans against default. As Bob Meister and Nate Brown have shown, public colleges are public in name only, since high-paid administrators often manage them like businesses, pledging students’ tuition dollars to Wall Street to improve their institution’s bond rating in capital markets.

Students who can’t find jobs in this recession to pay back their loans (an increasingly likely prospect) are simply cogs in the machinery of capital accumulation, as their colleges become sites for generating profit for the one percent. Debtors can have their wages garnished and, as the Washington Post recently reported, it is not uncommon for retired people to be harassed by collectors about loans they took out decades before.

What can we do?

Young people are told from an early age that a college degree is a minimum requirement for a middle-class standard of living, and as such students have no choice but to become debtors if they want to earn a living wage. Occupy Wall Street has finally given students, families, and educators a platform for resisting this debt and for rethinking the financing of public higher education.

On 1T Day —April 25, 2012—students, educators, and activists from around the country will be participating in a national day of action against student debt. In Union Square, in NYC, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign is staging a mock jubilee, a write-off of all student debt. The jubilee will be followed by a celebratory march, as we take our lives – and our educational institutions – back from Wall Street.

There will also be solidarity events at locations around the country. We invite others to join us. One-T Day events include everything from mock jubilees to teach-ins on student debt in classrooms and public squares. If you’re a teacher, you might talk about student debt with your students on April 25. If you’re a student, you might organize a forum for students to discuss what high debt burdens mean for them.

The goal of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and the many other groups that have endorsed this national action, is to change the conversation about student debt. Our message is clear: education should be a right and a public good, not a source of debt or profit.

Outsmarting the Matrix: Transforming the Privatization Trend in Public Higher Ed.

Posted: March 25, 2012 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: AAUP, California Faculty Association, culture wars, education reform, NEA, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: access and equity, Arnie Duncan, Bill Gates, CFHE, CSU Board of Trustees, Lumina Foundation, WASC | 1 Comment

Outsmarting the Matrix: Transforming the Privatization Trend in Public Higher Ed

Teri Shaffer Yamada, Prof. of Asian Studies, CSU Long Beach

Student march on the capitol — Sacramento, CA — in support of public higher education (March 4, 2012)

There is a window of opportunity for constructive change over the next six months during the build-up to the November national election. But this change requires engaged faculty working together in innovative ways. And it requires a new strategy eschewing a “university business as usual” mentality. That reality is gone: there is no business as usual at the public university.

So our current moment in history demands we organize around commonalities and develop different forms of more effective action. If we act strategically, we have an opportunity to alter the privatization momentum that threatens the survival of meaningful public education for the 99%.

We could start by unabashedly embracing and valorizing the greatness of “our values.” We transform and enrich the lives of our students because we care (1). We live in a media culture that foregrounds violence and cruelty, where selfless concern isn’t typically newsworthy unless it is driven by anger or hyperbole. Yet everyday kindness happens and without it we would be much diminished. And our “story” is compelling across ideological lines simply because we base it on shared values of “American democracy”: opportunity for all. Framed in the context of education, it is access to quality instruction that develops an educated demos. In turn, our students provide the citizen power to run a government and economic system that reflects the needs and talents of the 99%. That may sound quaint, but imagine the outcomes if our current Hobbesian trajectory of consolidating power remains unchecked.

So what defines this matrix? We are now confronted with a mirror reality of the dismantling of K-12 public education. We have been out-organized and out- financed as reflected in Steven Brills’ reportage “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” from the New York Times (May 17, 2010):

….Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. They have been building in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in school districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp; and the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein could be considered the patron saints of the network.

This is the matrix: a network of well-placed and well-funded powerful individuals with shared values, who can impact state and federal agencies and legislators through influential friends or lobbyists, media and foundation access, and sponsored think-tank publications. We have allowed this to happen: “power abhors a vacuum.”

We can begin by changing our approach. We can shift to “motivated reasoning” as we seek to change hearts and minds (2). And we can message our values based upon the target audience.

As we learn from the impressive successes of the for-profit education matrix, we recognize the importance of shared values. It forms the foundational connectivity of the network of relationships required to establish a power base. Thoughtful leadership throughout a wide network is necessary to accomplish the change we do believe in: re-democratizing public education. Several important meetings will take place under the auspices of AAUP, NEA and CFHE over the next few months (3). What is an effective strategy these three can develop together and communicate to the grassroots to deflect further damage to public higher ed? Can we move quickly enough?

One possibility for promoting change is to emulate the strategy of ALEC. We could start by developing one piece of legislation that most faculty unions could promote to their state legislators. The California Faculty Association (CFA) worked for several years to pass a transparency bill so that the public could have access to the financial records of the “for-profit” side of the California State University system. CFA is currently sponsoring a bill to democratize the CSU Board of Trustees as part of an action plan published in its recent white paper “For-Profit Higher Education & the CSU: A Cautionary Tale” . Are other faculty unions sponsoring bills? What is the most beneficial bill we could introduce in a range of states to protect public higher ed? What is the most “elegant” strategic plan at the federal level? The “outcomes-assessment” obsessed federal Department of Education often disappoints but there may be some leverage there as well.

There are also global trends we need to consider: the ubiquitous embrace of “common core standards,” including our own Department of Education. This trend has filtered down to the accreditation commissions in the United States.

The Lumina Foundation has funded a pilot program on “degree qualifications” at the college level—common outcomes for AA, BA, MA degrees across the United States— through the Western Association of Colleges and Universities (WASC). The first set of “volunteer” institutions will be reporting in April on their progress in implementing and assessing the Lumina “degree qualification profile.”

Beyond the new trend to measure graduation and retention rates, we can be restructured internally through changed accreditation standards that demand we measure “value-added degrees” through common-core standards assessments or track the type of jobs our graduates acquire after leaving the institution. The for-profit higher ed sector is being nudged in this direction to make it more accountable to the federal government for its voracious consumption of public funds through PELL grants and military initiatives that fund education. Some for-profit providers can fund their entire operation through these two sources alone. Their lobbyists insist that public higher ed be subjected to the same assessments.

Every faculty member should pay attention to new directives imposed by their institutional accreditation agency. If the end result is a diminished capacity to offer a wide range of degrees since programs must justify their existence through proof of job placement as an outcome, we may become a different kind of vocational training institution that has lost the soul of a liberal arts education.

Be sure to track the forthcoming reports on the 2012 Bologna Ministerial Conference on the GlobalHigherEd blog. There will be further discussion there on common international standards which would impact us nationally.

EXCERPT FROM GlobalHigherEd The European Higher Education Area: Retrospect and Prospect (Posted: 22 Mar 2012 07:24 PM PDT)

First, the 2012 Bologna Ministerial Conference:is expected to bring together 47 European Higher Education Area ministerial delegations, the European Commission, as well as the Bologna Process consultative members and Bologna Follow-Up Group partners. The meeting will be an opportunity to take stock of progress of the Bologna Process and set out the key policy issues for the future. The EHEA ministers will jointly adopt the Bucharest Ministerial Communiqué, committing to further the Bologna goals until 2020.

Second, The 2012 Bologna Policy Forum:organised in conjunction with the Ministerial Conference is aimed to intensify policy dialogue and cooperation with partners across the world. The theme of the third Bologna Policy forum is “Beyond the Bologna process: Creating and connecting national, regional and global higher education spaces”. The Policy forum has four sub-themes, which will be addressed during the parallel sessions, namely: “Global academic mobility: Incentives and barriers, balances and imbalances”; “Global and regional approaches to quality enhancement of Higher Education”; “Public responsibility for and of HE within national and regional context”; “The contribution of Higher Education reforms to enhancing graduate employability”. This year’s edition of the Bologna Policy Forum will be finalised with the adoption of the 2012 Bologna Policy Forum Statement.

Notes:

1) Those of us who participated in the feminist philosophy movement of the 1980s know this as the “ethics of care.” See “Ethics of Care” in “Online Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy.” March 24, 2012.

2) See Dan Kahan’s definition based upon “motivated cognition” which refers to “the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal” in “What Is Motivated Reasoning and How Does It Work?” See also a great video clip with a discussion of this concept “Dan Kahan — The Great Ideological Asymmetry Debate.” Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollar Professor Law and Professor of Psychology at the Yale Law School. His research focuses on “cultural cognition” (how social and political group affiliations affect our views of contested areas of ‘reality’) and motivated reasoning.

3) CFHE (Campaign for the Future of Higher Education) is having its Third National Gathering in Ann Arbor on May 18, 2012, hosted by the Michigan Conference AAUP. Contact CFHE.conference@gmail.com for further information. Registration is free.

References:

California Faculty Association. “For-Profit Higher Education & the CSU: A Cautionary Tale” March 19, 2012

Brills, Steve. The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand. New York Times. May 17, 2010.

Kahan, Dan. “What is Motivated Reasoning and How Does it Work?” May 4, 2011.

———. “Dan Kahan- The Great Ideological Asymmetry Debate” February 13, 2012.

Lederman, Doug. “What’s ‘Good Enough’?” Inside Higher Ed. April 14, 2011.

———. “What Degrees Should Mean.” Inside Higher Ed. January 25, 2011.

Lumina Foundation. “The Degree Qualifications Profile: Defining degrees: A new direction for American higher education to be tested and developed in partnership with faculty, students, leaders and stakeholders.”

Selling Water By the River: Reflections on AAUP and NEA’s national leadership strategy

Posted: February 19, 2012 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: AAUP, NEA, Online education, public education, public higher education, state budget, teacher unions | Tags: adjunct faculty, Arnie Duncan, education, public higher education, SUNY, UUP, Western Governors University, WGU | 4 Comments

Earl Warren Japanese Garden, CSU Long Beach

Selling Water By the River: Reflections on AAUP and NEA’s national leadership strategy

Teri Yamada, Professor of Asian Studies, CSU Long Beach

In our current gilded age where all politics is business, we educators yearn for ethical leaders to admire. Under assault in the trenches, our faculty unions are undermined at the local level, often by both political parties who are using this bad economy to privatize public education. It is depressing as we fight the good fight against multibillionaires. Therefore, we can at least hope that our national education associations will have our backs, effectively lobbying for us at both the federal and state levels to stop this wildcat privatization. As associations who represent us, we expect NEA (National Education Association) and AAUP (American Association of University Professors) to model the highest standards of ethical conduct and leadership as we struggle daily on our campuses to organize against faculty apathy, and as we lobby our state legislatures to act responsibly for the public good. In our local fights for equity and access to public higher education for every qualified student in our respective states, in our struggle to maintain quality education and academic freedom, in our efforts to preserve secure jobs with benefits, we need help! We need effective ethical help.

Our expectation of ethical and effective leadership holds true for both AAUP and NEA. Both serve the public higher education sector as our national representatives to the media and the Department of Education in Washington D.C. How our AAUP and NEA leaders comport themselves, what they say to the media, to Arnie Duncan and President Obama, reflects back on the entire higher education sector. It is time for some self-reflection.

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education commentary, former AAUP general secretary Gary Rhoades made a number of points about leadership and the difficult questions that AAUP must face if it is to survive as a respected and effective association. The challenges are great. But we all will be diminished if AAUP is unable or unwilling to embrace constructive criticism and prove by its actions that transformation is possible. The United University Professions (SUNY), have demonstrated the consequences of unresponsiveness by their February vote to end affiliation with AAUP after twelve years of relationship, citing a number of complaints including poor communication and lack of responsiveness.

NEA has also challenged patience. Several years ago, NEA decided to establish or form a relationship with a proprietary affiliate called the NEA Academy (1) . This Academy’s purpose it to serve as a portal to “online professional development products,” which means it provides a link to other providers’ online courses for teacher continuing education and Master’s Degrees. Claiming to have a Content Quality and Review Board, the NEA Academy has published its Requirements for Inclusion in its products list. These requirements include such standards as “content that aligns with NEA policy.” One of the top three providers for NEA Academy’s courses is Western Governors University (WGU)

NEA stipulates that its vision is “a great public school for every student” and that its mission is “to advocate for education professionals.” It promotes public education as a core value: “We believe public education is the cornerstone of our republic. Public education provides individuals with the skills to be involved, informed and engaged in our representative democracy.” The question then is why does NEA embrace Western Governors University, a private, anti-faculty union provider of online courses? How does this fit with NEA’s mission to advocate for “education professionals” when WGU is an institution that eschews teacher-based instruction; it has no teachers. Why do this when so many excellent public universities and community colleges across the nation have online programs of the highest quality which adhere to the philosophy that teachers form the core of education? Shouldn’t educators also deserve “a great public school” for their continuing education?

When our national associations fail to serve us well —as we battle on the ground to protect faculty jobs and save collective bargaining, to preserve adjunct positions with benefits and job security, to ensure quality control over curriculum, to save public education and academic freedom—we must wonder whom AAUP and NEA are serving.

Notes:

(1) This relationship needs further clarification. NEA Academy charges a course fee for its portal services.

References

Rhoades, Gary. “Forget Executives the AAUP Should Turn to Grass-Roots Leaders” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 January 2012.

Schmidt, Peter. “AAUP Loses Major Affiliate at SUNY” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 February 2012.

2/19/12

DISCLAIMER: Restructuring Public Hi Ed is curated solely by me. All editorial decisions as to what is posted are based upon my interest and concern about restructuring in the public higher education sector. These blog posts should in no way reflect upon any other person or organization since this is a “personal blog.” Please send your blog posts and comments on restructuring in public higher education for consideration to me at teri.yamada@gmail.com.

Western Governors University (WGU) Is in Your State: Deconstructing the Academy

Posted: January 22, 2012 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: academic labor, AFT, education reform, Online education, public education, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: culture wars, lumina foundation for education, public education system, stephen ehrmann, Western Governors University, WGU | Leave a comment

M4 Rally, CSU Long Beach

Western Governors University (WGU) Is in Your State: Deconstructing the Academy

Teri Yamada, Professor of Asian Studies, CSU Long Beach

In our cultural echo chamber of deception, as Joseph Goebbels said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” The media has served business well in the production of panic over America’s imminent fall in the global economy. We are told that our decline in global competitiveness is due to the failure of “traditional public education.”

For the past several years, the Lumina Foundation for Education has been calling for the United States to increase higher education attainment rates — the proportion of the population that holds a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential — to 60 percent by the year 2025. This call — known as “Lumina’s Big Goal” — has been embraced by many others. Foundations, state governments, national higher education associations, and President Obama have all issued their own call for increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials.

Their way to meet this goal is to alter the “unchanging public education system” through disruptive technology and privatization. In this mythic death and rebirth struggle, we must rid ourselves of the ossified, brick-and-mortar educational institutions and embrace the redemptive and disruptive online learning platforms of virtual education. Stephen Ehrmann refers to this phenomenon as “the rapture of technology” (1).

The big money behind rapture technology ensures the effectiveness of its propaganda. Public discourse on education has been remolded to focus on the cause of its “failure” defined as teachers and their unions. And remedies are offered in the form of privatization through vouchers and charters, online delivery, and school funding tied to the measurable outcomes of retention and graduation rates.

The result is contested cultural space over the meaning and value of education. For example, the Lumina Foundation promotes its definition:

“Quality in higher education must be defined in terms of student outcomes, particularly learning outcomes, and not by inputs or institutional characteristics. The value of degrees and credentials…rests on the skills and knowledge they represent.” (2 )

Compare this reductive utilitarianism to the “affinity philosophy of learning” embedded in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s cutting edge digital media and learning initiative ;

“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community (creative) and economic life (3 ).

Both Lumina and MacArthur advocate a shift from an instructor-centered model of education to a student-centered learning model; but MacArthur’s frame does not erase “teachers” from education although it does reshape their role as instructors. The Lumina value of reductive utilitarianism is the basis for the WGU model of learning. The goal of this learning is to demonstrate competency over a specific vocational skill set defined by measurable outcomes.

WGU began in 1995 when several governors of western states decided to create a virtual university to confer “competency-based” degrees. They had the following concerns (4):

To accommodate access of rural students, the governors wanted delivery of cost-effective education at any place, any time;
The rising cost of education combined with population growth would surpass the capacity of the brick-and-mortar institutions; there would be no more money to build new campuses;
State colleges were not producing enough skilled graduates, and the graduates they were producing had uneven skill sets. So a competency-based degree, certified by a third party, seemed to make sense “in an employment climate where it is commonplace to question what it means to have a degree” (5); they had corporate support for this plan;
The governors felt their state colleges had been unresponsive to these problems so the governors decided to shake things up, “to foster innovation in higher education institutions.”

The governors embraced a competency-based, online delivery model that required re-conceptualizing the function of “traditional” faculty in higher education. This re-conceptualization is called “unbundling”: the splitting off into distinct functions of a faculty role and assigning each function to a distinct human agent or technology.

Unbundling enables virtual universities to control costs by increasing “instructor productivity” (6). Research and university service are removed from the role of “faculty.” Academic advising is not recognized in this world-view as part of a faculty’s role in the university. The remaining component —instruction —is further unbundled to the following five distinct activities:

Designing the course;
Developing the course through the selection of instructional methods and course materials;
Delivery;
Mediating a student’s learning process (such as identifying learning styles);
Assessing levels of competence.

These five activities are then assigned to technology or separate agents. In this way, the traditional understanding of “faculty” is deconstructed. WGU does not offer instruction directly but brokers “learning opportunities” through various technologies. Advisers (mentors/monitors) assist students in choosing the “learning opportunity” to achieve a certain goal. Those who design the courses and programs belong to WGU Program Councils consisting of faculty members and industry specialists. WGU agents are all contract laborers; there is no tenure. So we are left to contemplate Jerry Farber’s concerns, expressed in 1998:

If you take the new developments in educational and communications technology, lift them up on a millennial wave of technological enthusiasm, integrate them into the competency-based/outcomes movement in education which has persisted in one form or another since the 1970s or earlier, and put them in the service of corporate interests, which are moving toward a de facto takeover of higher education, you come up with a rough approximation of what appears to be happening in a great many colleges and universities at the turn of the century (7 ).

ACTION PLAN : Check to see if there is a stealth bill to establish WGU as an “official branch” in your state. We recently discovered one in California. If so, consider educating your elected representatives now.

Ask your legislators how the “competency based” instruction of WGU will impact your state’s public university systems? What is the cost-benefit analysis? How many jobs will be lost to out-of-state WGU employees? The low cost of WGU tuition— its main selling point to “customers” —is politically attractive to state legislators since it undercuts for-profit providers who voraciously consume federal and state grant money and are difficult to regulate. One can argue that our legislators should be investing in state community colleges, which offer even lower-cost vocational training programs, many with online components and a richer learning experience.

Ask your legislators to explain WGU’s lack of transparency and accountability. WGU refuses to release official accreditation reports. It is impossible to assess their “success” in terms of graduation and retention rates until they release longitudinal studies of yearly cohorts for each program. Currently they refuse to provide this data on the basis they are a “private non-profit.”

For fun, watch Aimee Shreck’s cartoon “We Don’t Have Teachers at WGU!” Bill Lyne of United Faculty of Washington provided the “real conversation” for this media moment.

Notes:

(1) AFT, “Teaming Up With Technology,” p. 19.

(2) Both Farber and Johnstone discuss these.

(3) This is a quote from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven J. Tepper in Jenkin’s “Confronting the Challenges…” a MacArthur Foundation report, p. 61.

(4) These concerns are found in both Farber and Johnstone.

(5) Paulson, 124.

(6) See Paulson for this explanation. Note that there are other models of disruptive unbundling, for example University of Phoenix.

(7) Farber, 809-10.

References:

AFT. “Teaming Up with Technology: How Unions Can Harness the Technology Revolution on Campus.” Report of the Task Force on Technology in Higher Education. January 1996.

Farber, Jerry. “The Third Circle: On Education and Distance Learning.” Sociological Perspectives. 41.4 (1998): 797-814.

Jenkins, Henry et al. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” Occasional Paper on Digital Media and Learning. MacArthur Foundation.

Johnstone, Douglas. “A Competency Alternative: Western Governors University.” Change. 37.4 (July-Aug 2005): 24-33.

Paulson, Karen. “Reconfiguring Faculty Roles for Virtual Settings.” The Journal of Higher Education. 73.1 (Jan-Feb, 2002): 123-140.

Nov. 17 CFA Strike: “Enough is Enough!” at CSU DH

Posted: November 18, 2011 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: California Faculty Association, knowledge workers, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: Charles Reed, CSU Board of Trustees, CSU Online, Mandatory Early Start | 3 Comments

Blog report by Teri Yamada

“Enough is Enough!” Reporting on the CFA Nov. 17 Strike at CSU DH

The California Faculty Association, union friends, and concerned students successfully shut down two CSU campuses today with the clear message “Enough is Enough!” The flawed management of the CSU needs some careful scrutiny as executives get bonuses and students get tuition increases. Chancellor Reed, who professed to the media this week that no faculty would participate in the strike actions at CSU Dominguez Hills and CSU East Bay, was in for a big surprise today as hundreds of strikers picketed the entrances to two campuses. This is the day after the CSU Board of Trustees voted to raise student tuition fees again — this time 9%— even before the California legislature cut the CSU budget.

Today’s message —Enough is enough— reflects more than anger at Chancellor Reed’s refusal to grant a quarter percent raise out of a $4.5 billion CSU state budget. It is anger at being called ‘greedy and irresponsible’ by executives who give themselves significant bonuses, equity increases and raises rather than support courses for students and the faculty who teach them. It is time for CSU management to get its priorities straight. Enough is enough!

Since becoming the head of the CSU in 1998, Chancellor Reed has overseen an increase in student tuition of over 263%. In fact, since 1998 (adjusting for inflation) student fees have increased 106% while faculty salaries have fallen 10%. Meanwhile, administrators have enjoyed a 23% pay increase. One egregious example of management’s misplaced priorities is the recent $100,000 bonus given to the new San Diego State president on the same day the CSU Board of Trustees voted to increase student tuition by 12%. In fact, the CSU spent $75 million less on faculty pay last year than in 2007 due to layoffs—while the student-faculty ratio continues to increase.

So enough is enough! Selfish management priorities are costing Californians access to quality public higher education. Buildings are crumbling, technology infrastructure in the classroom needs updating, faculty need support to improve their courses and to maintain their expertise, students need mentoring. Instead, the Chancellor uses his Executive Order power, without any state legislative oversight, to enact new and expensive programs with questionable efficacy. Mandatory Early Start, for example, is a new program that requires all entering freshman who need remedial education courses to take a 1-unit summer course before they can ‘start’ in fall 2012. This is an example of an absurd waste of taxpayer money. Another new plan, CSU Online, may set up a new corporation to sell the ‘CSU brand’ to foreign students and the military, funneling needed resources away from campuses to a virtual CSU. And the Chancellor just hired yet another administrator, this time for the new CSU Online initiative, at a time when costly experimental programs siphon money from courses that students need to graduate.

These facts and others have led members of the California Faculty Association to vote 93% in favor of going on strike. We are not going to stand for continued disrespect and erosion of our rights and the quality of the CSU. Faculty, librarians, counselors and coaches — their knowledge and dedication to students —are the value in the CSU, not new experimental programs of dubious merit or expensive executives. The question now is will our elected representatives in Sacramento and the good citizens of California decide to exercise some oversight over a Chancellor who has failed the CSU.

Power Grab in the California Community College System

Posted: November 10, 2011 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: California Community Colleges, education reform, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: CCA, CTA, student success | 1 Comment

Guest Blogger Ron Norton Reel is president of the Community College Association (CCA), the higher education affiliate of the California Teachers Association (CTA) and a national affiliate of NEA. He is a tireless advocate for CCA and the community college system. Reel’s report on Chancellor Jack Scott’s proposed consolidation of personal power over the California Community Colleges, the largest higher education system in the U.S., reflects a pattern we see across California’s higher public education sector and the rest of the country. This is the cynical use of “student success,” “flexibility,” “efficiency,” “accountability” or “operational needs” to consolidate power over public higher education policy at the highest level of corporate administration.

Power Grab in the California Community College System

The California Community College Chancellor’s Office spent the last year convening a task force to examine how student success might be improved within the 112 colleges comprising the entire statewide system. In October, they published their results and are currently providing forums throughout the state soliciting comments, recommendations, and any other feedback from selected audiences. The Community College Association, CCA, had a presentation by the Chancellor himself, Dr. Jack Scott, and immediate past president of the Statewide Academic Senate, Jane Patton. We found not only these initial eight (8) overriding concerns with the content of the 22 recommendations outlined in their publication dated October 201, but proposed 42 responses, and 14 data collection inquiries.

1. It appears that the Board of Governors (BOG) would become an overriding agency with similar powers and directive capability similar to those of the University of California Regents.

2. The recommendations outline a program that if initiated, would place the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office with similar powers that the California State University Chancellor’s Office maintains, as it would relate to the 112 community colleges within the system. The CSU system has one collective bargaining contract. The California community colleges have at least 72 different collective bargaining contracts. Both faculty and students are not supportive of the outcomes that have been secured with the CSU Chancellor’s Office.

3. If the 22 recommendations were to be finalized, Prop 98 funds would be redistributed in a manner inconsistent with current law and damaging for students. Funding decision mandates would be taken away from faculty and students and replaced by those exclusively decided by the BOG, Local administration, and the Chancellor’s Office.

4. A program designed to provide additional power to both the BOG and the Chancellor’s Office would take autonomy away from the local districts and their Boards of Trustees. This would be a fundamental shift away from the Master Plan for Higher Education in California. This would significantly alter the California Community College Mission Statement and it would betray the concept of local control.

5. There is no consistent and dedicated enforcement mechanism established to make the recommendations feasible.

6. There is no clear source identified for the substantial increase in funding which would be needed to implement these recommendations. There is a hope that the legislators would provide additional funding, but in these hard economic times, it seems nearly impossible.

7. A highly volatile definition of “student success” as defined by this group does not meet the same definition that many within the community colleges believe to be the most acceptable.

8. A temporary economic downturn has allowed for a response that significantly changes the role or core mission of the community college by losing community services and lifelong learning.

To view our entire response to the task force recommendations, visit our website cca4me.org.

Real post date: Nov. 27, 2011.

“The Momentum is Gaining: Enough Is Enough!”

Posted: November 10, 2011 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: California Faculty Association, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: 99%, Gary Rhoades, OWS, SB 5, Tea Party | 4 Comments

Guest blogger Gary Rhoades is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, for which he served as director from 1997-2008. Recently, he served as general secretary of the AAUP. Rhoades’ scholarship focuses on the restructuring of higher education institutions and of professions in the academy, evidenced in his books, “Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor” (SUNY 1998), and “Academic Capitalism and the New Economy” (with Sheila Slaughter, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Currently he also serves as director of the CFHE Think Tank.

“The Momentum is Gaining: Enough Is Enough!”

On November 9, I walked an information picket line at California State University East Bay ( CSUEB) in support of the California Faculty Association’s fight to defend public higher education. “Enough is enough” is the rallying cry for faculty in a system whose management–despite fact finders’ discoveries–refuses to face the facts, honor the contract, and allocate salary monies to faculty. Enough is enough in a system that, despite dramatic increases in class size and profound challenges in remediation and graduation rates, continues to reduce the share of instructional expenditures, now at 35%. Enough is enough in a system in which, despite tens of thousands of students being turned away and thousands of others for whom affordable higher education has slipped away, the chancellor identifies alleged low executive compensation as a key problem. That is Wall Street thinking: satiate the insatiable 1% at the public trough and starve the 99%, while blaming public employees for the system’s problems. Enough is enough.

The momentum is gaining. On November 8, in a landslide, the people of Ohio also said enough is enough. They voted to repeal SB 5. They voted overwhelmingly to reject the initiative of Governor Kasich, a former Lehman Brothers executive who helped the state pension fund lose hundreds of millions of dollars (invested in Lehman Brothers) and yet who blamed public employees for the state’s economic woes (after passing tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy). The people of Ohio voted to repeal a bill that gutted, and for full-time faculty eliminated, longstanding rights to collectively bargain. They voted in support of public employees.

SB 5 is part of a national assault on working people. In state after state, Tea Party governors and legislators have sought to eliminate collective bargaining for public employees. In statement after statement, public employees are denigrated and union workers are demonized, though they are the people who save, nurture, and teach us.

In Ohio, a broad coalition was formed of blue and white collar, public and private sector unions, of community groups, of grandmothers and students, and more, under the umbrella, We are Ohio. It formed to reverse the assault on public employees and public institutions. It formed in support of the idea that teachers and firefighters, first responders and professors, police and nurses, and other public employees are key to our future. And the coalition, We are Ohio, won. By a mile. By working together.

So it is on the information picket line at the East Bay campus. Students called out support, schoolteachers walked with signs calling for a fair contract, and teamsters honked their truck horns in solidarity with professors. The 99% are seeing they have common cause, and they are speaking out in support of one another.

“We are all Badgers!” was the rallying cry in Wisconsin’s battle over public employees’ collective bargaining rights. The response to the assault led to the recall of two state senators, and now to a recall drive on Governor Walker. The tens of thousands of people in Wisconsin who took to the streets and the Democratic legislators who took to neighboring states gave strength to their compatriots in Ohio and beyond.

So, now, as the rallying cry “We are ALL Ohio!” takes hold, the staggeringly successful struggle of this broad coalition is giving hope to and strengthening the resolve of public employees across the country. It is possible, together, to reverse the tide. To those whose political platform is to eliminate the civil rights of workers, women, same sex couples, immigrants, and the voting rights of citizens, to those who wish to eliminate the advances of the 20^th century that have strengthened our country, it is possible to not just say, enough is enough, but to successfully challenge and change public policy.

Step by step, day by day, battle by battle, the momentum is building. Not only in these state struggles but also in the (inter)national OccupyWallStreet (OWS) movement that is creating space and foregrounding the dramatically sharpened, inequitable, and unhealthy stratification in our society in ways that have reshaped public discourse and public policy proposals. OWS has tapped into and catalyzed a powerful national sentiment that is repainting our social and political landscape. It has helped rekindle a sense that not just resistance but also change is possible. It has fed on the hunger for and fostered the momentum for a social movement to change our country’s path.

The momentum, and sense of being part of something larger, was evident in the information picket line on Loop Drive into the CSU East Bay campus, where California professors under fire took heart from the victory in Ohio and the sense of a growing pushback. It was evident in the energy of an event that is a precursor to a November 17 strike on two California State University campuses. It was evident in professors’ understanding that this is a first step in fostering political pressure on administration to honor the contract and bargain in good faith. Enough is enough.

The CFA’s choice of East Bay and Dominguez Hills as the sites for November 17 action is significant. These are two of the campuses with the most diverse student bodies in the system. They represent the historic mission of the CSU as the people’s university, the university of the 99%. They also represent the best future and hope for the state and the country in which the growth demographics of 18-21 year-olds are lower income students, students of color and immigrants. And yet in another shameful statement of misplaced priorities, these two campuses are among the most underfunded in the system.

Enough is enough. As the California Faculty Association continues its battle to ensure that the CSU be driven more by a commitment to the people who educate and who are the 99%, than by a continued catering to the desires of the 1%, we are all the CFA. The momentum is building. It is time for us all to support our colleagues in California and to help continue and build the momentum nationally to change our course from the policies of recent decades that further stratify our society and that favor and further enrich the 1%. It is time for us all to demand that we support and invest in our future, in the public institutions and public employees who serve and who are the 99%.

Reporting from UMass, Boston: Campaign for the Future of Higher Education

Posted: November 6, 2011 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: AAUP, AFT, education reform, NEA, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: access and equity, APSCUF, Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, PHENOM, UMass | 1 Comment

Blog report by Teri Yamada from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Nov. 4-6. Special thanks to UMass Profs. John Hess and Heike Schotton , political science student Daniel Finn, and PHENOM’s Ferd Wulkan for taking the lead in organizing this event.

The second national gathering of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) is taking place at UMass in a warm and welcoming Boston this weekend. Over seventy participants from 18 states are meeting to continue the discussion on the future of higher education that began in Los Angeles on January 11, 2011. Representatives from the initial L.A. gathering ultimately ratified seven guiding principles “Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century.” These focus on access, equity, affordability, and quality as core principles in CHFE’s effort to maintain public higher education as a right for everyone in the United States.

The UMass gathering is structured around a series of workshops and discussions that address issues facing a national grassroots movement with the intent to preserve public higher education. These include the importance of overcoming challenges to unity and solidarity by strengthening ties among college sectors, between adjunct and tenure-line professors, students and faculty. One workshop explores how to engage the media about the real crisis in higher education: a political issue regarding public policy priorities.

The meeting began on Friday evening with opening remarks, including information from students associated with Occupy Boston, who encouraged the development of stronger student-faculty alliances across the nation. Some participants also gave short reports on current concerns and trends in privatization occurring in their state and campus system. A similar pattern emerges across the United States: restructuring through disinvestment, sharp tuition increases, and the undermining of collective bargaining agreements. This pattern of restructuring reveals the intent to eradicate faculty governance as power is consolidated at the top management level of public colleges and universities. New York is currently on the list of extreme examples illustrating this privatization trend, although faculty in many states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Oregon, to name a few—are facing a range of challenges around restructuring. Prof. Gary Rhoades (ASU) encouraged the participants to re-imagine public higher education according to their values.

The highlight of Saturday morning was the launch of CHFE’s Think Tank under the direction of Rhoades and an advisory panel. This think tank is established to support sound public policy on issues in higher education while developing research that will serve as the basis for constructive change. Three reports are imminent: “100s Not Served: Who’s Not Going Back to Community College;” “Who Is Professor Staff And How Can S/he Teach So Many Classes?”; Misplaced Priorities: Refocusing Resources on the Core Academic Mission.” These inaugural reports will provide a counter-narrative to the current national framing of privatization as the sole choice for public higher education. They will foreground the flaws in the current rhetoric of student success in new management’s “efficiency” agenda to graduate large numbers of students as quickly as possible while downsizing faculty and weakening quality. The report by Maria Maisto, Esther Merves and other scholars associated with the New Faculty Majority— “Who Is Professor Staff And How Can S/he Teach So Many Classes?” —will examine the serious issue of contingent faculty work life, including a lack of academic rights and job security, factors that also undermine student success.

The event will conclude on Sunday with a discussion on the future direction of CFHE.

Online Disruption, Privatization of Public Higher Ed

Posted: October 30, 2011 | Author: Teri Yamada | Filed under: academic labor, Online education, public higher education, teacher unions | Tags: APC, CSU Online, UC-AFT | Leave a comment

Guest blogger Steve Teixeira serves on the Executive Board of Academic Professionals of California, representing professional staff in academic support services of the California State University. Email contact: steixeira@apc1002.org.

Online Disruption, Privatization of Public Higher Ed

A battle’s brewing over online courses in public universities. In October, the University of California lecturer’s union (UC-AFT) won the right to bargain over the impact of online instruction. But UC spokesperson Dianne Klein assured the press that to stop any online program, the union would have to endure “mediation, fact-finding, and, if necessary, a university mandate and potentially a union strike”.

“Online education has proliferated, from community colleges to… M.I.T.”, wrote Bill Keller in the New York Times October 3^rd. He asked if it could improve education, or just save money. But a third possibility is that online instruction masks a campaign to increase the corporate privatization of public universities.

The California Faculty Association in the California State University system is also negotiating to protect teaching standards in online courses. CSU’s managers first proposed online instruction to help entering students with so-called “remedial” skills in math or English. Then, they required all 20,000 remedial students to take summer “Early Start”, much of it online. But when the “CSU Online” goals were presented, they included much more than just remedial courses.

The quality of the university is at risk here. When Cal State Bakersfield laid off some remedial math faculty and replaced them with an online system in 2009, student failures rose to almost 40%, from just 25% the year before. Only when faculty were allowed to re-design the online course did student performance improve. “We’re not getting what we’re promised and what we’re paying for,” student leader Vanessa Rojas told the local press.

In addition to issues of educational quality, there is concern that online instruction is a screen for injecting private companies into public universities. At first, CSU Online’s goals stated that “A business partner for CSU Online might be needed” — but then the job announcement for its Executive Director position required applicants to have “Experience in higher education and experience working for/with for-profit agencies”. Is it paranoid to worry about that?

Not if you study the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis’ report Making it Happen: Increasing College, which urges that California government create a new higher education planning board to openly link public and private institutions (both non-profit and for-profit). The Board would oversee enrollment shifts from public community colleges, CSU, and UC to private institutions, and allow students at private companies to receive Cal Grant financial aid. Other goals would be to “outsource” remedial courses and online instruction to “private institutions”. Which is exactly the path already being pursued by CSU and UC leadership.

As America’s economy evolves from one based on millions of jobs in heavy industry to one based on global hi-tech, capital is sniffing around public services like education to see what it can shift into and privatize. They are counting on government officials to help them, even though this has proven to be bad for students as well as employees. That’s why Bob Samuels, UC-AFT president, says “We are not standing in the way of progress, but we are trying to block the downsizing of academic jobs and the degrading of instructional quality”.

The battle to defend public education can be won if these faculty and staff can come together with the thousands of students who are exposing corporate abuses in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. After all, they’re really fighting the same enemy.

Posted Oct 30, 2011

Editor’s Note:

Also, see today’s (Sun. Oct. 30) S F Chron article:

“CSU rolling out online undergraduate program”

And a YouTube clip on how online courses need “faculty” to be most meaningful (honest!).

“Human Factors in Online Learning with Doug Hersh”

RESTRUCTURING Public Hi Ed

Defining 'quality' 21st century public higher education…

Fear and Trembling: Nov. 6 and Public Higher Ed.