What the Shift to Virtual Learning Could Mean for the Future of Higher Ed — Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava

Difficult to estimate now how this pandemic will change education other than to say some effects are highly likely. The digital revolution is now here of necessity and necessity is the mother of invention. Not only higher education is being effected but also primary and secondary. In addition, many are working at home for the first time. The obvious benefit is reduced transaction costs and less need for resources directed to physical plant, transportation, etc. So some change is inevitable and this can be looked at as a test case.

Harvard Business Review
What the Shift to Virtual Learning Could Mean for the Future of Higher EdVijay Govindarajan and
Anup SrivastavaVijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Anup Srivastava. Canada Research Chair in Accounting, Decision Making, and Capital Markets and Associate Professor at Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary

How to reform the economics Ph.D — Tyler Cowen

Along those lines, I have a modest proposal. Eliminate the economics Ph.D, period. Offer everyone three years of graduate economics education, and no more (with a clock reset allowed for pregnancy). Did Smith, Keynes, or Hayek have an economics Ph.D? This way, no one will assume you know what you are talking about, and the underlying message is that economics learning is lifelong.

Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek were philosophers, and Keynes was a mathematician. Karl Marx, who goes unmentioned even though he influenced the modern world as much as any other, if not more, was also a philosopher. 

All of them influenced economics and also changed the world more profoundly more than any academic economist.  Conversely, Kenneth Boulding was an economist. Dissatisfied with the direction of academic economics, he became a philosopher and co-founded general systems theory.

Ok, these were outliers. Economic training is needed to do the day to day, nitty gritty.

But just what kind of training and how much is needed to do work in economics, including work that is contributory to knowledge? How would that be measured? What are the criteria? Are there hidden assumptions?

Tyler Cowen makes some suggestions but shouldn't something as important as this be studied on the basis of data? And as he points out, it likely applies to other fields as well. Are we sticking to a traditional process in education out of habit even though it could be greatly improved upon, as well as reevaluated for current needs? Have we inadvertently sacralized convention?

Marginal Revolution
How to reform the economics Ph.D
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

A Market Correction in the Humanities—What Are You Going to Do with That? — Leigh Claire La Berge

The GI Bill marked a pivotal moment in higher education. But such a bill should be seen as more broadly reflective of the country’s Keynesian moment: roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in which art, public culture, and, yes, education, were funded directly by both state and federal governments. In the 1950s and ’60s, as Sharon Zukin notes, public expenditure in arts through universities “opened art as a second career for people who had not yet been integrated into the labor market” so much so that by the end of that decade “more than a million adults in America had identified their occupation as in some way connected with the creative arts.” [2]

Indeed, as millions more students and dollars entered colleges and universities, the number of colleges and universities increased. And as they expanded by population served and subject areas taught, universities became more radical places, particularly in relation to their own funding. Students in New York and Massachusetts began to demand wages for attending college — the “Wages for Students” campaign. From 1969 to 1975, after intense student and community protests and strikes, the City University of New York announced a program of “open admissions,” which included accessible and free remedial education, Spanish-language instruction, and a tuition-free university.

Of course, there were always dissenters from the Keynesian order, and they too laid their eyes on the expanding university. American neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman took note of this expansion. As Melinda Cooper laconically notes, they “began to suspect there was a connection between free and low tuition and the militancy of the student movement.” [3] The extension of their concerns into policy prescriptions — fewer grants, more loans — was aided by the coming contraction of the US economy. By the mid-1970s, the Keynesian curtain had begun to draw to a close. The reasons for its denouement were legion: the emerging productive output of a newly rebuilt Western Europe and Japan, the spending on and loss of the Vietnam War, the reaching of a limit of productive/consumptive capacity in many domestic industries, the rise of an offshore financial system and dollar market. By 1979, inflation topped out at 13 percent a year, and by the early ’80s this particular act was indeed over.…

Is the trend swinging so far in the direction of STEM, business & management, and trade school that the basis of liberal democracy is being threatened by insufficient appreciation of its intellectual roots and the debates from which it arose? Is culture based on consumerism becoming superficial? Is the digital age rendering classrooms, school buildings, libraries and campuses obsolescent? Are a new method, organon and curriculum needed to meet emergent opportunities and challenges?

In the big picture, "what's going" on can be summarized by being simplified into a binary model involving individual reproduction and social reproduction.

Individual reproduction normally takes care of itself through the attraction of the sexes, but presently reproduction rates are falling,  reversing a longstanding population trend. In some societies (nations) this is happening to the degree that some are becoming concerned about reproducing the society and culture,.

Social reproduction involves reproduction of the culture, which requires reproduction of the economy as the material life-support system of a society. This involves reproducing both capital, now chiefly technology, that depreciates over time and also labor, both physically (labor time) and with respect to capabilities (labor power).

In addition, the culture itself has to be reproduced to be maintained and improved to grow. This involves innovation.

Social reproduction involves transmitting knowledge and shill to the succeeding generations. This is based on "education" broadly speaking, from childhood upbringing to advanced higher eduction and lifelong learning.

Needs change from generation to generation as innovation results in adaptation to new conditions. In addition, changes in the mode of production lead to changes in era, in the broad sweep, from hinting-gathering, to agriculture, to industry and now toward digitization.

The need for knowledge and skill transmission changes according, although institutional change often lags change in conditions.

Are we at this point presently?

Los Angeles Review of Books
A Market Correction in the Humanities — What Are You Going to Do with That?
Leigh Claire La Berge | Associate Professor of English at BMCC CUNY

Jeff Charis-Carlson — UI finalist: A non-academic can run a university

The fourth finalist for the University of Iowa president told a sometimes hostile, standing-room-only crowd of UI community members Tuesday that they were right to question whether he had the experience necessary to lead the university.

“It’s a legitimate question,” J. Bruce Harreld said during his public forum in the Iowa Memorial Union.

But it’s equally legitimate, the former IBM executive continued, for the rest of the state to ask questions about whether they are getting enough return on their investment in the university.…

In addition to airing concerns about J. Bruce Harreld's personal business history, several University of Iowa questioners Tuesday noted they are more concerned at how his inclusion among the four finalists fits into a long-term trend they see among colleges, universities and their governing boards: Looking to the corporate sector to for leaders to turn around institutions of higher education.

Ed Wasserman, a professor of psychology, suggested in his question that providing a businessman with no university leadership experience was the equivalent of “giving the fox the key to henhouse” when it comes to transforming UI into a bottom-line business rather than an institution of higher learning.

Business leaders in Iowa, however, view Harreld’s inclusion among the finalists providing a needed contrast with the more academic finalists.

“The selection of Mr. Herrald was a pleasant and refreshing surprise,” said Elliott Smith, executive director of the Iowa Business Council. “His strong foundation of experience in the private sector dovetails nicely with roles in higher education. … It is vitally important for the U of I to be fearless and aggressive in this president selection process given the uber-competitive environment the school finds itself in today.”

Harreld’s candidacy also offers strong evidence that the 21-members of the UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee were listening actively to the concerns raised by the business community, said Ed Wallace, deputy director of Iowa Workforce Development.… 

University as firm gains ground.

Iowa City Press-Citizen
UI finalist: A non-academic can run a university
Jeff Charis-Carlson

Zaid Jilani — Bernie Sanders Campaign Calls Out Hillary's College Plan: 'Disappointment'

The difference between the two plans seems to be the difference between Sanders' democratic socialist worldview and Clinton's neoliberal one. For Sanders, college is a right, just like K-12 education, or police and fire services. You will get it, fully subsidized, because it is an essential. For the Clinton campaign, college is still a privilege, something you have to pay for and work for, even while you are a student. It's a consumer good. The competing plans are a microcosm of the two candidates' approach to policy.

AlterNet
Bernie Sanders Campaign Calls Out Hillary's College Plan: 'Disappointment'

Zaid Jilani

Noam Chomsky — The Death of American Universities

 As universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is being imposed by force.

Jacobin
The Death of American Universities
Noam Chomsky | Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Dorman — The Debate over Student Loans: The Issue Is Not the Issue

Once upon a time, when I was young, there was a two-tiered system in the US, with expensive private colleges and universities for those who could afford them and nearly-free public education for everyone else.  Then decisions were made.  The US has a mostly decentralized structure in which the provision and financing of public higher education occurs at the state level, but somehow, miraculously, every state in the union simultaneously began a process of shifting costs from taxpayers to students and their families.

I would dearly like to know who made these decisions and how they were disseminated to all the state-level boards, commissions and legislatures.  Here’s my uninformed speculation on why this happened:

Econospeak
The Debate over Student Loans: The Issue Is Not the Issue

Peter Dorman

Henry Giroux — Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation

The purpose of a liberal education is to educate individuals for living a good life in a good society. The fundamental questions that the ancient Greeks asked were, what is a good life, and what constitutes a good society.

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

Michael Staton — The Degree Is Doomed

Thank God. It's is a creativity killer. Academic credentialing grew out of the need to supply bureaucracies. Credentialing in the trades was through apprenticeship, a much more practical model. This doesn't apply only to higher education, either. John Dewey got this right in his model of progressive education as education for self-actualization and living a socially contributive life in an open society rather than as education for a job.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
The Degree Is Doomed
Michael Staton

Jordan Weissmann — Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free

And the grand total is… $62.6 billion...

Technically, you could say the additional cost of making college tuition free would be even cheaper than $62.6 billion. How come? Because most Pell Grant money is already spent at public colleges. In 2011 - 2012, state school students received $21.8 billion in grants. So, if you subtract that from the total needed to completely eliminate tuition, it the sum would be closer to $40 billion.

The Atlantic
Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free

Jordan Weissmann

What American Universities Can Learn From The Cooperative Mondragon University

Davydd Greenwood, an anthropologist at Cornell, puts it this way:

 What is being done now is to collapse education into vocational training, teaching into a fee-for-service form of employment, and research only as a profit generator. The faculty are being put on term contracts and administration is now a career with big salaries and great distance from the places where value is actually being produced. The overall result is the consolidation of a two class system: elite education for economic and political elites and vocational education for the masses.

There are better ways. Mondragon is one of them.

SolidarityEconomy.net
What American Universities Can Learn From The Cooperative Mondragon University
Editors

The Homeless Adjunct — How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps

• First, you defund public higher education.
• Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors
• Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university.
• Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money
• Step Five – Destroy the Students

The Homeless Adjunct
How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps

More neoliberalism at work.

Sarah Kendzior — Academia's Indentured Servants

Is your professor homeless? The dirty little secret of American universities.

On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors - an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.

Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.

No one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America's brightest PhDs - many of whom are authors of books and articles on labour, power, or injustice - accept such terrible conditions?

"Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces," speculates political scientist Steve Saidemen in a post titled " The Adjunct Mystery". In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning their goal - even if this means living, as Saidemen says, like "second-class citizens". (He later downgraded this to "third-class citizens".)

Alternet
Academia's Indentured Servants
Sarah Kendzior | Al Jazeera

This may also have some to do with the coming digitalization of education that does away for the need for human contact with teachers. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing in all cases, and there are ways that students can supplement their education in other ways. I am not a fan of classroom education, and welcome experiment. The existing system has outlived its time.