. . . and the gnashing of teeph.

Music: The Echelon Effect: Seasons ¼ (2011)

While I am on the topic of the educational apocalypse in Texas, a one-two punch in leading national educational policy pulse-reading rags came out in the New York Times and Inside Higher Ed (and, of course, Jamie pointed us to the damning critique of educational administrators in The Nation last week). Many of the problems in higher education that these pieces discuss have been discussed for years. I can only assume these issues are getting more popular attention because of spectacular state budget slashing (For example, formula One racing is getting 25 million a year from Texas taxpayers, while the senate and house dither over whether they cut the university budget by 16% or 20% percent). The basic exigency here is simply that few if any educated adults think that education is bad. Cutting education budgets is akin to Sophie's choice or self-amputation, so it makes sense that we are seeing more and more popular assessments of higher education. Call it a public hand-wringing of national import.

I think we can also make the case that these popular stories are part of a larger mourning process. Some of the authors disagree about whether there was a "golden age" of education (I'm inclined to agree with those who say there never was a "good time"), but they are united in their melancholy tones and admissions: the university has been corporatized. It's done. The way the work of mourning gets done, however, is interesting.

The Times Op-Ed "Your So-Called Education" argues that public education has been dumbed-down, and this is the result of a shift from an apprentice to a factory model (my analogy, not theirs). Students are reading and writing less in their classes, and outcome assessment is geared toward customer service. Because students feel more empowered and because educational faculty and administrators have increasingly less authority over the classroom, the implication is that, before long, all universities will operate like the University of Phoenix.

To improve the poor quality of a college education, the authors argue, we need to re-empower administrators and instructors. Resources aside, empowering both requires educators to rely less on teaching evaluations, which they argue create "perverse" incentives to dumb-down content and inflate grades. Give power back to the faculty, and learn to assess in ways that are geared toward education, not satisfaction.

This suggestion seems to me both correct and naive. The ideology of neoliberalism, you'll recall, functions by reducing all value to the number, all quality to calculation. This is, of course, at odds with teaching, which often trucks in affect and bodily intangibles (such as the role, for example, of excitement or curiosity about ideas). Now, the authors of the op-ed are right in calling for a change in how we assess---that, say, relying more on peer reviews of teaching and less on student satisfaction surveys better captures curiosity and excitement (presumably in narrative). But this, seems to me, is impossible to enact when states are everywhere imposing new measures of accountability that do precisely the opposite. Here in Texas, for example, the push is reduce the state-sanctioned value of every professor in terms of the number of students s/he teaches (see the story here). In fact, word on the beat is that the A&M chancellor resigned last week because of this assessment fiasco (apparently his attempt to weight professor ratings by accommodating more complex measures was met with disapproval). The assessment of faculty is no longer a simple, self-directed matter; it is political factor and will continue to remain so unless we public university employees push for what may be inevitable privatization (which Penn State is apparently doing).

Inside Higher Ed's piece, "In For Nasty Weather: Life for College Professors is No Longer What it Once Was," is much more pessimistic. This peace focuses on the job or role of the professor and how it has changed over the last thirty years or so. The author does an excellent job explaining the systemic problem of higher education, rightfully detailing how neoliberalism is the ideology behind it and showing multiple strands of causality: the rise of adjuncts and the general decline of the tenured professoriate; the increasingly pervasive, cultural suspicion of "academic elites"; the replacement of a model of expertise with the service model; and "brain drain." This essay advances an interesting counterpart to the NYT op-ed: if the quality of education is growing poorer because it's being "dumbed-down" in the service of the market, then the professoriate is, well, we're "dumbing-down" too. The suggestion is that our most brilliant and gifted young minds are simply choosing to not become an educator because they are, well, because they are smart. The result is an army of adjuncts apparently too dumb to realize they are being explointed.

Now, there are all sorts of problems with the implications of this essay (who doesn't know an adjunct who is brilliant and awesome?), but in general I think the author catches the complexity of the situation.

I must move on to grading, which is a part of my job that, I confess, I would be thrilled to outsource! I have two reactions to these and related essays. First: they don't discuss why those of us who are educators are educators. We like it. There is something addictive about research, about ideas, and about getting students excited about learning. Somehow this "magical" part of our job doesn't get discussed. If the question asked by some of these pulse-readers is, "why would anyone in their right-mind go into education?" the answer has something to do with words like "passion" or "romantic" or "addiction." Neoliberalism has colonized the academy like the bodysnatcher aliens, to be sure, but have we become interchangeable clones? No. So while I agree with the apocalyptic mood, I wish these essays also admitted there is a little joy in this chosen profession.

Second: these essays, and others like them over the years, annoy me because they ignore service-course driven fields, like communication or rhetoric and composition. They begin from assumptions that are not true of most fields that were born in the land-grant university era. I find just about every assertion about faculty---that they can't be bothered to teach ugrads, or that they have no face time with ugrads, or that we teach irrelevant stuff, etc.----patently false when communication studies is taken into account.

It may be helpful for this national dialogue for someone from communication studies and/or composition studies to craft a short essay targeted to NYT or IHE that singles out communication studies as a "style" of education or what have you that is uniquely poised to meet some of our contemporary challenges. I'm not saying how we do it is perfect, but I do think our land grant based origins creates a completely different attitude toward students that our field has had from its inception. I need to think more through it, but in the three departments I've been a member of, I have simply never had the sense that we are not in regular contact with ugrads; quite the opposite. Nor is my department (or college) overrun with adjuncts.

What do we do, then, that's so different from departments of anthropology or physics? And how can we recommend that up? I couldn't take the lead on such a piece because I am ignorant of most administrative issues in higher ed; but I'd be willing to help.