The Corporatization of University Libraries

The Chronicle recently published a piece discussing the effects of corporatization on academic libraries, which can have wide-ranging effects on undergraduate, graduate, and other scholarly research.

Why We Need Tenure

As a faculty member who is not eligible for and will never be eligible for tenure, I admit that I sometimes find it difficult to support a system that I can never enjoy. I can also admit that I have seen the tenure system abused: professors who are supposedly being protected for the purposes of academic freedom end up treating tenure instead as a shield against being fired for poor performance, teaching poorly (if they teach at all); lecturing about the same material the same way 20, 30, of 40 years later; nominally doing research, which sometimes means they go to conferences occasionally (if they go at all) while retreading old ground. I have also read the stories that suggest tenure is a myth anyway: if 70% of faculty are contingent as I am, that means 70% of faculty are not eligible for tenure, and that does not include the number of professors who are on the tenure track but have not yet received tenure; meanwhile, professors who do have tenure can be fired for causes that should be protected by tenure (e.g., espousing ideas or publishing research that criticizes institutions that provide funding to the school by which the professor is employed or that otherwise fly in the face of the establishment). Many of my friends who do not work in academia do not understand tenure since other professions do not have such a system in place, and it can be hard trying to explain why colleges and universities enjoy this privilege while other equally important institutions do not.


Nevertheless, tenure is an important system (ideal? goal?) that protects academic freedom and integrity. Cary Nelson, President of the AAUP, recently wrote an editorial in The Chronicle that argues why we must have tenure. Interestingly, Nelson targets the parents of college students in his article; given the amount of obscurity and controversy around tenure, his purpose is both to inform and to persuade.


I absolutely believe we need to reform the system, yes: let's extend eligibility to contingent faculty; let's compel universities to clarify their tenure requirements so that young faculty are not in the dark about how to achieve this coveted status; let's make sure that the requirements for receiving tenure are reasonable rather than Herculean; let's make sure abuse of tenure continues to be an anomaly rather than becoming a norm. But Nelson's reasons are valid. The comments on the article are also revealing about this controversial aspect of higher education. 

For-Profit Colleges

I watched this PBS documentary a couple weeks ago, and it made me really angry:


Frontline: college, inc.


There seems to be a fundamental problem with the idea of an institution whose supposed intention is to open up higher education to those who would not otherwise be able to have access to it but then charging them more than traditional non-profit universities so that lower-income students attending for-profit colleges will eventually be saddled with even more debt (tens of thousands of dollars of greater debt) than students attending public state universities and liberal arts colleges. Here's Stephen Colbert's note on the same issue:


Colbert University


The Colbert clip includes a quick interview with Andrew Hacker, one of the authors of the recent book Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do about It. I strongly recommend this book: it's a quick read, it convincingly presents in clear terms a lot of major issues contributing to the diminishing quality of higher education in a lot of universities today, and it offers some potential solutions. 


For the other side of the for-profit university debate, see this interview with a CEO of one of the online for-profit schools: "Online Learning and the World of For-Profit Education."

Student Excuses for Not Attending Class/Missing Assignments

A funny for you.
I once had a student miss 3/4 of a semester; he was conveniently gone during the period of the term when all his papers would have been due. His excuse: he was in jail. I did not ask why. He later withdrew from the class.

Is a College Degree Worth It?

Here are a couple recent articles on whether a college degree is worth achieving, especially given the current economic crisis and rising unemployment:


Brad Tuttle, "College By the Numbers": This basically runs down a lot of statistics in recent reports about higher education from around the Web.


"A College Degree Pays off--and Then Some: A Report": This provides a link to a College Board report that summarizes the various benefits of having a college education. The benefits are not simply economic (e.g., employability, salary) but also social (job satisfaction, marriage rates, involvement with children, health, voter participation, volunteerism). In a sense, this report suggests the ways in which having a higher education benefits not just the individual but also his/her family and community.

Entry-Level Jobs Going to Public State University Students

This somewhat brief article in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal suggests that entry-level jobs in large companies are going to students who have graduated from large state schools, such as Texas A&M and University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). I'm not sure how reliable the study is, and the comments on the article bring up some major problems with the reporting in the article. However, one might see that it makes sense that large recruiting companies would make it easier on themselves to recruit from large state schools: to use crude economic terms, public universities are going to provide greater supply to meet the corporate demand. But this article does raise the question of whether larger state schools really do train their students with the "practical skills" they need for entry-level jobs better than elite liberal arts schools or Ivy League universities. Are the educations received at state schools more "useful" or "utilitarian" than those received at smaller, private institutions?

The BP Oil Spill and Academic Freedom

In this much-discussed article, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), reflects on British Petroleum's hiring of university professors to conduct research with the intention of investigating, solving, and preventing a future oil spill like that in the Gulf. The researchers hired by BP are restricted by confidentiality agreements that seem out of order with academia's investment in academic freedom. The comments on this article reflect the controversy over this issue.

Research Universities and Corporate Funding

If one wonders about the pressure corporate ties to academic research can have, check out this link, which is a Huffington Post article about Toyota's relationship with Southern Illinois University. When one of SIU's professors, David Gilbert, conducted lab tests on Toyota vehicles to find out whether electronic flaws in the cars' computer systems might have been at fault for unintended acceleration, his findings did not please the automaker. When Toyota discovered that the professor was testifying before Congress in Washington, the company was quick to remind the university that "Toyota regularly contributed to the university – including a $100,000 check to the auto-tech program in late 2008 – and 'due to the outstanding reputation your automotive technology program has, we donate much more than money,' including cars." Although Professor Gilbert is protected by tenure for speaking out about his findings, apparently one of Toyota's marketing representatives who is also an SIU alum opined to the university chancellor, "'I believe he should not be an employee of our fine university.'" That use of the personal pronoun "our" seems problematic; granted, the Toyota sales rep is an alumnus of the school, but in some ways, his use of that inclusive pronoun also suggests a vaguely proprietary relationship between corporation and research institution, as if the automaker's financial and other contributions to the university meant that Toyota owned SIU (either literally or metaphorically). This is yet another example of the dangers posed by the corporatization of the university.

Diploma Mill Degrees and Tenure

Hmmm . . . would you prefer to earn less than $20K per year and have no job security but a legit degree, or would you prefer to earn $52,500 per year and have tenure but a sham degree?

'Diploma-mill' Ph.D.? No problem at Northeastern Illinois (CHICAGO SUN-TIMES)

Grade-Grubbing vs. Education

One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching is grading. I've had brilliant friends quit the academy or secondary-school teaching who cited grading--and all the emotional turmoil that seems to accompany it (elation and triumph but moreso frustration, anger, and disappointment--from both sides of the grading pen)--as one major reason they left the profession. Let's face it: no one really likes grades. Students of all caliber maintain almost a religious fear of their report cards (do we even call them that anymore?), citing parents, financial aid, participation in athletics, or their own personal standards as reasons for being obsessed with their marks on papers, tests, assignments, and courses. Most professors and teachers that I know think of them as those ridiculous letters or numbers we end up plugging into gradebooks and spreadsheets while wishing that we could just find a better way to assess our students' learning.


My own personal gripe is against students who spend so much time complaining about how their marks did not reflect their efforts. How might a teacher even go about assessing effort? Shall we use cameras to monitor students' every move as they complete homework, study for an exam, or compose an essay for class? Given the uproar over privacy in the scandal that recently took place in Pennsylvania about schools using Webcams to watch students in their homes, I doubt this is a workable policy. But even if instructors could watch every single one of their students (and this may mean 50 students or hundreds depending on class size and how many courses are taught per term) and somehow try to assess each one's effort (heart rate? blood pressure? stress level? concentration? time spent working/tearing out one's hair/beating one's head against a desk?), how would we compare? Should Student X, who spends 30 hours on a paper and worries constantly about the project but makes careless mistakes and doesn't meet the requirements of the assignment, receive a higher grade than Student Y, who spends 15 hours and is less stressed out but carefully meets all the expectations and polishes his or her work--just because X put "more effort" into it? This hardly seems fair, either.


Teachers can only assess the products placed before them, and if they're fair teachers, they will have already carefully explained the parameters of their assignments, either on the syllabus or in individual assignment instructions or both. Exams, I think, are a bit easier to deal with if they are multiple-choice, true/false, etc.: answers are usually right or wrong, and/or partial credit is available if a student shows competence at least a certain part of the way through a specific question. But for any kind of work involving writing or presentation, detailed grading rubrics--and evaluating work with a sense of integrity toward those stated standards--are essential in keeping an instructor as objective as possible while also clarifying for students the criteria for assessment.


Yet in my own experience (and this happens every semester), I find that even though I have long, detailed, explicit assignment descriptions and a long, detailed, explicit grading rubric that discusses how exactly I evaluate their work, students still will complain that their effort is not being taken into account or that I grade too hard or that my expectations are too high. What I don't understand about these complaints is the following:


1) If the syllabus and grading rubric are proffered on the first day of class and the student does not agree with the stated expectations, then why does he/she take the course? Why does the student not simply ask around or check out Rate My Professors and get into an easier class if he/she cares more about grades than the actual coursework?


2) Why do students (or their parents) spend exorbitant amounts of money on a small, highly ranked, private liberal arts university if they do not want to fulfill or exceed the expectations an outsider would have given the school's reputation? Recently, I received one of the most wonderful emails I have ever read from a student, which included the following:


[Your class] is the most difficult I have had at Trinity so far and is the only class that has met the standard of academic rigor that I expect from an institution like Trinity. Thanks for challenging me and other students. It's refreshing to have a professor that truly challenges their students but is still available for guidance.


This is perhaps one of most complimentary comments a student could give me! This kind of positive feedback helps assuage my vast annoyance at and frustration with students who care more about their grades than their education because it proves that there are students out there who are in college for the right reasons--to learn content, to develop skills, to broaden their minds, to meet challenges, to grow as human beings, to prepare for life and career after school. The student who wrote this email represents the kind of student many of us teach for: the student who doesn't let grades be the purpose of classes but rather learning the material and gaining some understanding of the concepts in order to be able to apply them (mastery of which, by the way, would equal good grades, anyway).


Yet it saddens me that mine has apparently been "the only class" the student has taken at the university so far that met her expectations. I've received comments at least once a year from students who likewise complain that there needs to be more consistency among all the sections of the course I teach since it's much easier to make As in other instructors' classes. Now granted, I will say that this goes back to my earlier question: if what you care about is an easy A, then why not register more carefully for your classes? But this kind of complaint raises my hackles not so much at the students but rather at the instructors who do not care enough to maintain high expectations of their students. I once saw a professor write on a student paper, "This essay deserves a C, but I'm giving it a B." How can an assignment deserve one grade but receive another? What is the point of blatant grade inflation except to confuse students about standards for competence or excellence or to feed this overwhelming obsession with grades rather than education?


Perhaps it's an endless, unbreakable cycle, but nevertheless, I'll leave you with this document on "Interpreting Grades in College: A Guide for Students." It makes some excellent points, some of which I've touched upon here. But I fear that unless changes occur in attitude and expectation and integrity among both students and faculty, the cycle of grade-grubbing, grade inflation, and grade obsession will just continue.

Optimism; or, False Hope

Wow. This article from Inside Higher Ed just enraged me. Apparently, the bright hopes glimmering through the darkness of the current job market for academics lie in the author's pride in her graduate students. That's a lovely sentiment, but it's not particularly helpful, especially as the article seems to betray a large measure of naivete about what the situation really looks like for a large majority of academic jobseeksers (both those trying to find tenure-track positions as well as those who are searching beyond the ivory tower). It's easy for a tenured professor to make these sorts of overly optimistic comments that reveal no real reason for hope besides the idea that some unsuccessful jobseekers are able to be magnanimous in their attitudes toward classmates and colleagues who do manage to get jobs. Being impressed by others' generosity of spirit doesn't strike me as a real reason to celebrate. How about making significant changes in higher education, such as preparing graduate students for jobs outside of academia and addressing the adjunctification of the corporate university, instead of just spreading false hopes and good cheer in the face of utter bitterness and despair? I'm with Barbara Ehrenreich on this one.

Reforming Humanities Graduate Education/Humanities Careers

These are two recent articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education that discuss a wide range of issues dealing with graduate education in the humanities as well as job prospects and how we train (or rather, don't train) humanities graduate students for careers outside of academia.


"Forum: The Need for Reform in Graduate Humanities Education"
Interesting how you can tell the administrators (platitudes) from those who have a real investment in change (statistics, stories from the trenches).

Peter Conn, "We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities"
This article summarizes a lot of the issues related to the adjunctification of higher education in the U.S., such as the corporatization of the university, the popularity of for-profit educational organizations like the University of Phoenix, the resistance of full-time faculty to retirement (especially given the current economic market), the over-admission of graduate students to humanities programs, the attrition rate of those same programs, etc. Conn offers some reasonable proposals for reform that might help alleviate the atrocities of the job market, including responses to potential counterarguments.

University Graduates without Jobs

A story this morning on NPR's Morning Edition: "Finding a Job is Hard Even for the Most Educated." It's not about feeling sorry for those who have had the opportunity and means to attend institutions of higher education--no pity parties here. It's about being realistic about the relationship between higher education and job/career preparation and prospects--and many of us haven't been. And many more still aren't. And as I've discussed before, this syndrome (epidemic?) is in large part due to the way universities market the supposed necessity of a degree (not everyone truly needs to go to college or get a Master's degree), the way employers require unnecessary degrees (same but in terms of increasing one's skill or knowledge level), and the way students often possess inflated expectations of the value of a degree. No one party is to blame, but the factors causing the problem are all inextricably interrelated.