Meanwhile....
As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, “administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.” [1] There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the “the all administrative university,” noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere. [2]
A number of colleges and universities are drawing more and more upon adjunct and nontenured faculty — whose ranks now constitute 1 million out of 1.5 million faculty — many of whom occupy the status of indentured servants who are overworked, lack benefits, receive little or no administrative support and are paid salaries that increasingly qualify them for food stamps. [3] Many students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a subaltern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values and largely treated as consumers for whom education has become little more than a service. Too many students are buried under huge debts that have become a major source of celebration by the collection industry because it allows them to cash in on the misfortune and hardships of an army of indebted students....Moyers & Co.
Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation
Henry Giroux | Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and distinguished visiting scholar at Ryerson University, both in Canada
8 comments:
This is imo the WORST development in all of this.... rsp,
New shocking data from OECD for Greece
The destructive impact of the neoliberal dictatorship
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/03/new-shocking-data-from-oecd-for-greece.html
We really are moving backward as a society, and regressing into a crude commercial barbarism.
The central error of all neoliberal thought is that a society is something that just happens and emerges naturally as people pursue their economic self interest and personal happiness. But that's completely false. A society is something that has to be built. Educational institutions, moral codes and mores, cultural excellence: all of these things have to be built deliberately by enlightened people and then maintained with vigilance and vigor in the face of the forces of individual egotism and avarice.
We've lived through a period in which many millions of Americans have been infantilized by a depraved and grossly ignorant consumer culture, and where masses of our semi-adult citizens go through life in a state of perpetual adolescence and willful emotional denial of the realities and challenges of human social life of Earth.
What I see is the cost of education climbing out of sight for many without taking on onerous debt levels and getting to sit in very large classrooms to hear tenured professors lecturing in the upper division with contact being mostly with untenured and adjuncts. The bulk of the tuition increase isn't going toward improving education but rather to plant and managers.
Productivity increases mean more output for less input. Fine when that is from technological innovation, but ed has not been particularly affected by tech innovation other than digitizing a great deal of it.
The future of education is digitized knowledge sources with distance contact with actual educators to round it out. Nothing wrong with that approach if it works as well or better (how to know this holistically?).
Such a approach is very inexpensive to deliver and doesn't require much management either. The cost of education should therefore drop exponentially. That is not happening. In fact, the cost is increasing pretty steeply.
If the whole purpose of university was getting an education, it seems the straightforward solution is to either build a new one, or invigorate an existing small school, and run it properly. Do not worry about research, just teach undergrads. Let the profs write popular books that might give the place more exposure.
Cambridge was founded by some guys getting mad and marching off into a swap ("the fens", which sounds more romantic). All the fancy buildings only showed up after centuries of Royal support.
But it seems that universities are more about getting into a tribal network to advance your career. In which case, you end up with the current situation - the university is just a brand that needs to be managed. As long as the primary purpose of a university is not teaching and contemplation, what you are seeing now is what you should epect.
"The cost of education should therefore drop exponentially. That is not happening. In fact, the cost is increasing pretty steeply."
Like third party payers in healthcare, federal subsidies to higher education only makes it possible to pay professors and related administration staff higher compensation. Government should stop subsidizing student loans. Professor tenure should be ditched. The $1 trillion student loan bubble is the next BIG SHORT. Tuitions will collapse as people realize they can learn as much from web based education at a cost of $1,000 as they can from paying $40K-$50K at your average university.
The rising cost of education has nothing to do with government intervention. The book "The Two Income Trap" explains the economic dynamics: the extra income provided by having the two family members working was used to bid up the cost of things associated with raising children - housing and education.
People believe that it is necessary to have a good university degree to get any job - including being a barista. They are therefore willing to pay practically anything for education. Administrators have seen this demand, and cranked up spending in response. This is the free market in action.
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