I am a wannabe English teacher.

Today’s post by me is once again at an entirely different blog than this one.

Online education is an inferior good.

Going to college at the University of Phoenix and its ilk costs three to four times as much as at a typical state university. Shouldn’t it be significantly cheaper?

Think about it: The faculty are all part-time, hence cheaper. The start-up costs of their software were paid years ago. There’s no campus to upkeep. There’s no football team to subsidize. Nevertheless, students at these places pay more for a substantially inferior education. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

[Come to think of it, why don't actual campuses with online arms discount tuition for online courses? If they want students to go into these courses that require less overhead, wouldn't that be the logical way to get them to take them?]

I suspect my answer to the original question depends upon who the target audience is. People who have an option to attend a bricks and mortar campus generally do so. The people who go to these online places do so as a last resort. That’s why the drop-out rates are so high. This makes online education an inferior good in the economic sense. Here’s Wikipedia (which I needed to refresh my mind of the definition of that term):

In consumer theory, an inferior good is a good that decreases in demand when consumer income rises, unlike normal goods, for which the opposite is observed.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t some online courses somewhere that are taught well (perhaps even better than their face-to-face equivalents), but give all but the laziest students a choice between online and face-to-face I’m guessing they’ll take the one with real contact, otherwise they wouldn’t enroll in a real college to begin with.

So why hasn’t the online education industry tried to do to higher education what Walmart did to Mom and Pop or what the Internet has done to daily newspapers?: Discount the product and steal our customers? Is it because the industry is run by greedheads? Maybe.

But perhaps it’s because they know they can’t. To discount their product would be an admission that their education isn’t worth as much as a traditional higher education, which would then send the whole house of cards tumbling down.

Extended metaphor of the day.

I just finished Linda Gordon’s prize-winning biography of the photographer Dorothea Lange. It’s very good. I think here subtitle, “A Life Beyond Limits” is actually a reference to this metaphor from the book’s introduction:

“Neither photography nor history simply reports facts. Historians and photographers choose what to include and exclude in the pictures they shape, frame their subjects so as to reveal, emphasize, relate, or separate different elements, and use interpretive techniques to do this. Some will argue, of course, that historians and documentarists have no business promoting their opinions, but that argument rests on the false assumption that it is possible to avoid doing so. History and documentary photography necessarily proceed from a point of view shaped by social position, politics, religious conviction, and the thousands of other factors that mold every human being.

This does not mean that it is appropriate for historians or documentarists to shape their creations as they please, regardless of the evidence. They must try to limit their own biases and must never manipulate evidence or select only the evidence that supports their perspective. When using examples to make a larger point, historians and photographic documentarists must look for the representative, the paradigmatic rather than the exceptional. Yet they must highlight what is most significant and remove detail that impedes the clarity of the main point; if they did not, no one would read a history book and photographs would be incomprehensible.”

Now apply that metaphor to one of Lange’s long-suppressed images of Japanese internment during World War II depicted above. Useful, isn’t it?

Academic freedom? You don’t have any freedoms that they’re bound to respect.

Obviously, the big academic news of the today is the Wisconsin Republican Party’s desire to read Bill Cronon’s e-mail. I’ve been in an archive all day, otherwise I would have written about it sooner than this. If you still haven’t seen the story yet, Josh Marshall’s summary of the story is a very good one (complete with historiographic references) and all relevant links.

If anything though, the Republicans’ response to all the outrage over what they’re trying to do to Cronon is even more disturbing than the original request:

“[I]t is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner.”

[emphasis added]

Professors are public officials? Really? I guess I better go out and abuse my numerous powers now before I get thrown out of office.

Seriously though, I’ve never seen a better comment to explain why professors are under attack these days since it clearly demonstrates that our New Tea Party Overlords are simply incapable of distinguishing between a public employee and a public charge. They think they have a right to see everything Cronon does all day because their taxes pay his salary. Furthermore, there is no difference in their mind between a professor and a public school teacher. They’d like to get the government out of education entirely if they could as we all have a disturbing tendency to vote for Democrats.

Towards the end of the his long post on the subject of their call for his e-mail, Cronon brings up the history of academic freedom in Wisconsin:

In fact, one of the most celebrated moments in the history of American academic freedom happened right here at the University of Wisconsin in 1894. In July of that year, a member of the UW Board of Regents named Oliver E. Wells wrote a letter to The Nation magazine entitled “The College Anarchist.” In it, he accused UW Professor Richard Ely, one of the nation’s leading economists, of being an anarchist and socialist for his work exploring the positive roles that labor unions could play in the American economy. Wells sought to have Ely fired from his UW faculty position, and this prompted the appointment of a special committee of the Board of Regents to investigate Wells’ allegations. The result was a report that ended with one of the most ringing endorsements of academic freedom ever made in the United States, now emblazoned on a bronze tablet by the front door of UW-Madison’s Bascom Hall:

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

Imagine any Board of Regents coming to the same conclusion today. At the very least, I think you have to agree that it would be a stretch.

That’s what so scary about this incident to me. Academic freedom doesn’t come from our a professor’s rights as a citizen: It comes from the good that academic freedom does for society at large, and is only protected by precedent. Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party doesn’t respect precedent. Heck, Glenn Beck thinks that the Progressives were dangerous radicals. “Serious” Republican elected officials argue that our ban on child labor is unconstitutional.

Is it any wonder then that they’d want to go after academic freedom? Today’s Republican Party doesn’t see it as having any value to for society at large. They don’t even see any value coming from state universities to society at large. They just see a lot of whiny liberals living on the public dole.

Bill Cronon’s scholarship has always been on the cutting edge. I’m afraid his perfectly justifiable, moderate politics just made it there too. Hopefully, this abuse of power is just appalling enough to elicit a mass response from academia and society alike.

Diane Chambers was ill-served by graduate school too.

Marc Bousquet read the same Stanley Fish piece that I did this morning, and while he is much less complimentary to Fish than I was, what I’m interested in is an argument that despite Bousquet’s caveat feels entirely new to me:

I’ve written about this many times before. Even in Wisconsin and Ohio, the police unions are more diverse than the faculty unions–because the extreme wage discount unfairly segments the academic workforce by race, class and gender. Only a small number of persons, disproportionately white, can afford the extreme economic irrationality of most forms of higher education teaching appointments. Defending irrational compensation schemes on the grounds that persons who start out on third base economically are “doing what they love” is really defending a system that denies everyone else a fair shot at doing something they love. The struggle to make academic compensation fair is a struggle to enormously enlarge the academic talent pool: way too many black and brown intellectuals are working at the DMV, fighting wars, and walking a beat instead of teaching at the state university. Too many teaching positions are filled by persons who can afford to work for the status compensation of saying “I work at the U.,” rather than the most qualified.

Every time someone with wealth, parental or spousal backing, and/or high household income brays about how they’d do the job for free, they put another brick in the wall in front of those who don’t have those advantages.

Of course, one of the reasons I might never have thought of this argument before is that I started on third base. Not just the cost of graduate school but the opportunity cost of graduate school was affordable to me because my parents paid for most of it. As much as I wish they were higher, I’ve been reaping the benefits of that decision ever since.

What bothers me about this point though is that I can’t get the image of Diane Chambers out of mind. You remember her, right? She was Sam Malone’s part-time girlfriend on Cheers and as I remember it a perpetual graduate student: Psychology, art history – you name it. I have this vague memory of her working at Cheers in the first place because her father wouldn’t pay her tuition anymore.

While my resemblance to Diane Chambers is hopefully minimal, my best friend in graduate school was much closer to that prototype since one of his ancestors invented Portland Cement. After many years of trying, he got one of those “We’ll give you the Ph.D. if you promise not to try to do anything with it” messages when he defended, and I’ve barely heard from him since. Rich people aren’t exactly served by a system that produces this kind of outcome either.

While I certainly support it in principle, opening up the job market to people of color and others who couldn’t afford a graduate education otherwise isn’t going to help anyone get work. In fact, it will just become harder to get a job in academia. Increased supply of labor when the demand stays the same means more people get wages that don’t support even a working class lifestyle.

If you’ve ever read anything Marc has wrote, you know he’s called many times for a restructuring of the academic labor market. Since administrations probably won’t do this voluntarily, unions can be very helpful here.

But what do we do in the meantime? I say keep everyone, rich and poor alike, out of graduate school by giving the best idea possibile of how bad the market really is. This goes not just for the humanities, but even law schools are saturated these days. If they go anyways and start whining, then it’s their own fault.

Nobody with an expensive graduate education should have to adjunct for a living. They should just go serve drinks immediately instead.

Professors gotta eat too.

Kudos to Stanley Fish for having the courage to change his mind:

In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say “had” because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.

When I think about the reasons (too honorific a word) for my previous posture I become embarrassed. They are by and large the reasons rehearsed and apparently approved by Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent op-ed piece “Why unions hurt higher education” (USA Today). The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats.

That article mentioned in Fish’s piece is a real piece of work:

But the unions could in turn make the environment more left-leaning. As historian KC Johnson wrote in an article on the perils of academic unions, “Since few academics enter the profession to become labor activists, those who gravitate toward union service are more likely to fall on the fringes of a professoriate that already is ideologically one-sided.”

What kills me about that line of thinking is that it’s based upon results rather than actions. Professors might turn out radical if you deny them adequate compensation and a voice. The same thing would presumably happen to the Sarah Palin Fan Club if you put them in a similar position. If you expect smart people to act contrary to their own self interest, you are bound to be disappointed.

The same is true with this argument:

The rise of adjunct labor is also an important reason that faculty have been increasingly open to organizing. With the job market in academia so competitive and positions so unstable, many professors have decided that if they can’t have tenure, they’ll take the security of a union instead. Of course, plenty of faculty members have both. And with that sort of belt-and-suspenders security you can expect that even the laziest, most incompetent or radical professor won’t get fired.

So tenure is a reason why we shouldn’t have unions and unions are a reason why we shouldn’t have tenure. What if we just want to do whatever it takes to help ourselves? I certainly hope they have a better argument available than “associating with factory workers isn’t becoming.”

By the way, “Think of the children!” probably isn’t going to work either.

Today is not my unbirthday.

So merry unbirthday to you (unless you’re William Shatner, who turns 80 today)!:

It’s labor song day at the Lapham’s Quarterly tumblr.

Since I can’t embed this, I’ll go with Billy Bragg:

I used to think that line about “herding cats” was funny.

This is a very nice post from Worst Professor Ever about the evil that is Blackboard. Yet where I want to start is this aside:

I’d noticed something about way admin talks about teachers. I heard a lot of ‘we make teachers do X’; ‘we have teachers do Y’ and, ‘the teachers experience online learning’ or ‘are exposed to web content’ (italics mine, obviously). I don’t think they know they’re doing it, but they treat teachers as dumb herd animals that need to be managed; meanwhile, as I already reported, they happily chirped the news about ‘how excited students were to be in charge of their education.’ No kidding.

I got into academia in part because I don’t want to be managed. It’s not like I’m my own boss, but I’m kind of like the boss of my classroom. I write “kind of” because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that even that is an illusion. If your administration says, “Blackboard it is,” then you have next to no choice in the matter. If they want to stop you from using WordPress because it’s outside of their direct control, then you have no choice in the matter. If they want you rub your stomach and pat your head three times before starting your lecture, you have no choice in the matter.

You can try to stay invisible (like the Cheshire Cat), but if the Queen says “Off with your head!!!,” then your head will go off. Tenure simply means they need to get a bigger axe to make your head roll, but with a little force of will they are still perfectly capable of making it happen. That’s why shaking your fist and screaming about your rights is mostly useless. Even tenured professors have virtually no rights that an administration is bound to respect.* Welcome to nonunion employment in America today. Just be happy they can’t ship your job to China.

This is why I’ve working on cultivating a reputation for principled reasonableness. If professors can explain to administrators what’s in it for them too, then maybe they might actually listen to us. Take Blackboard, for example. We have a contract with Blackboard. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about the system hates it. Therefore, a few of us are about to start training on Moodle, the open source alternative to Blackboard. When we’re comfortable enough with the program, we’ll work our way through the bureaucracy using the argument: “Switching to Moodle will save this university tens of thousands of dollars each year.” I have no idea whether this will work in the end, but with that argument in tow I think we have a fighting chance.

At the very least, I know I won’t get my head chopped off for making the suggestion.

* The exceptions would be if they want to fire you on the basis of your race, gender, age or (maybe) your religion. Even those cases are really, really hard to prove.

Does Jesus hate Adam Smith?

If Jesus loves free market capitalism, why would he hate unions? After all, aren’t unions simply a bunch of workers doing what the invisible hand says they’re supposed to do, namely bargain for higher wages? Shoot, even Ronald Reagan understood that free trade unions were at the forefront of the fight for freedom.

It’s funny that anyone who makes any claim to believe in rational markets expects working class people to irrationally submit to arbitrary authority at the expense of their own economic well being. But then again, why should I listen to anyone who wants to draw any direct parallels from slavery and apply them to today?