Mean Mr. Market.

Why does everyone seem to think I’m anti-capitalist these days? Robert Bromber made that assumption last week. So did Jeremy on Friday. Believe it or not, I am not a socialist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And for the 600th time, I’m not a Luddite either.* I simply think there are some places where market forces should not reign supreme and one of those places is higher education.

The problem with unregulated capitalism is that the people who benefit from it simply don’t know when enough is enough. Here’s Nicolaus Mills in Dissent:

Running a corporatized college or university is not easy. The professor who takes time out from teaching and research to devote him- or herself to administration for a few years increasingly is an anachronism. A new, permanent administrative class now dominates higher education. At the top are the college and university presidents who earn a million dollars or more a year and serve on numerous corporate boards (Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, earned a reported $1.38 million in a single year from her multiple directorships). Thirty-six private college and university presidents, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, fall into the million-dollars-a-year category, and many more are close behind.

Seriously, what makes Gordon Gee worth $2.14 million dollars/year? I know Ohio State is a big place. I’ll buy $500,000 or maybe even a million, but $2.14 million? Think of the faculty half that sum could pay for! Think of the tech they could buy!

Students aren’t the only ones paying for salaries like that or the less-bloated salaries of lower profile unnecessary administrators. Faculty are too. Here’s Mills again:

[W]hen colleges and universities think of economizing, their target is all too often those who are already their most vulnerable employees—part-time faculty and service workers. The administrators who run our leading colleges and universities are unwilling, the record shows, to downsize themselves. In the 1970s, 67 percent of faculty were tenured or on a tenure track. Today that figure is down to 30 percent, and for those who run higher education such a low number is ideal. Whether they are adjuncts or teaching assistants (TAs), those without the claim to permanent jobs cost less and are easy to get rid of in a period of contraction.

This isn’t news to people who pay attention to higher education labor issues. However, I don’t think most people understand that outsourcing a campus’ technological endeavors to private companies has the same effect. As my friend Jonathan Poritz has suggested, why do we need Facebook Blackboard when there’s plenty of free LMSs out there that campuses can run with minimal costs for continuing support?

Similarly, why does the University of Michigan have to hire Coursera to run its MOOCs when there are plenty of people on that campus who could set up systems designed to benefit the faculty there? Instead, they agreed to a contract where the company’s sources of revenue hasn’t even been identified yet! In the meantime, the governor there cut enough money from the budget in 2011 to spark protests and I doubt the Coursera revenue will make up for that loss anytime soon.

I’m not asking for a lot on behalf of faculty – A living wage, some job stability, at least some control over higher education’s technological future. As a trade unionist, I believe that labor and management can sit down together and work out their differences in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. However, once you invite Mean Mr. Market to your party and give him the freedom to trash the place, it’s going to be really hard to ever get him to leave.

* Pretty soon I’ll be blogging about the new internet-based, professor-centered pedagogical venture that I’ll be editing, as soon as my publisher is ready to go public.

Out of grad school, money spent. See no future, pay no rent.

I blame Phil Hill for getting me to read this rant by Mark Cuban:

Its far too easy to borrow money for college. Did you know that there is more outstanding debt for student loans than there is for Auto Loans or Credit Card loans ? Thats right. The 37mm holders of student loans have more debt than the 175mm or so credit card owners in this country and more than the all of the debt on cars in this country. While the average student loan debt is about 23k. The median is close to $12,500. And growing. Past 1 TRILLION DOLLARS.

We freak out about the Trillions of dollars in debt our country faces. What about the TRILLION DOLLARs plus in debt college kids are facing ?

The point of the numbers is that getting a student loan is easy. Too easy.

That’s, of course, easy for him to say. He doesn’t need a student loan anymore. The effect of tightening those loans wouldn’t just be catastrophic for American universities. It would cut off all hopes of upward mobility for tens of thousands of young people in this country.

Worse yet, aside from loan money going to for-profit no-diploma mills, it wouldn’t be warranted. Graduating in debt with poor job prospects is obviously a risk. If you don’t believe that, then look at the results of this survey coming out of Rutgers. Yet for most college graduates, that risk will still pay off over the course of a lifetime.

However, I defy you to say the same thing about getting a Ph.D. in the humanities. As I’ve explained elsewhere, about 75% of academic jobs are now part-time workers on limited-term contracts. There is virtually no private sector for a humanities Ph.D. So do the math. The vast majority of new doctorates will end up as adjuncts (if they get jobs in academia at all) because that’s all that will be available for them. Adjunct wages aren’t worth the considerable investment in time and money that a Ph.D. program requires.

Look for a non-academic job, you say? When you’re done, you might actually be less employable than when you started. [After all, they think you only give them your funny papers.]

Therefore, how can anyone possibly tell anybody that they should pay or (worse yet) borrow money in order to get any graduate degree in the humanities in this environment unless they have 1) a job already (like a secondary school teacher looking for a raise) or 2) a totally different path to employment to fall back upon?

Nowhere to go is no excuse.

“But if you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.”

“People are all over this idea lately,”

writes Paul Graham about the idea of replacing universities with technological utopias of an undetermined nature:

“I think they’re onto something. I’m reluctant to suggest that an institution that’s been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money.”

It’s certainly easy to do the same things that universities do for a lot less money, but will technology necessarily make academia better? Ultimately, I’m not sure it matters anymore. The people who control politics and higher education in America are going to impose radical restructuring on academia not because they want to do it better, but because they want to do it cheaper. Whether the changes they institute in the name of cost-cutting prove better or worse for education in the end is completely irrelevant to their goals.

More importantly, they and ed tech industry that wants their business don’t care who they hurt in the process of making their fantasy the new reality. This piece includes a term coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter that gets at this mindset well:

[C]oming up with new educational models is hard to do if you’re already working pretty hard teaching the existing program. But there’s no stopping this sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” and I’d hate to be working for the educational equivalent of Polaroid — a brilliant and innovative company that proved unable to adapt to a rapidly changing technological frontier.

Creative destruction is still destruction, and you can’t fight destruction with resignation. You fight creative destruction by putting forward a different set of values – a set of values that emphasizes learning over destruction for its own sake. I don’t like the idea of giving up without a fight, particularly when it’s my job that’s potentially on the chopping block.

This guy who I quoted the other day suggests that:

If you’ve got Amazon as an analogue for these massively open courses, there is still a model where people actually go into bookstores because sometimes they want to touch, or they like hanging out, or there’s other value offered by that. What it means is that the university needs to rethink what it’s doing, how it’s doing it.

I say if you play their game by their rules, then you’ve already lost. After all, they’re the ones carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. If we carry them too, we won’t make it with anyone either.

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me…?”

As a matter of fact, I do take requests. This one‘s for you, Phil:

The Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring a competition: the goal is for somebody on the Kaggle platform to get as close as possible to predicting the already marked grade of 23,000 high school student essays.

Perhaps this should worry me, but taken by itself it doesn’t because this will never work. Grading essays, as anyone who’s ever done it knows, is highly subjective (but by no means arbitrary) work. Give a lot of “A”s in a row, and you’ll be harder on the next batch. Give a lot of “F”s and you’ll look for “A”s. My friend Brett used to say that he knew it was time to stop grading for a while when he started growling at the papers. While some people might call this a bad thing, I’d call it “dealing with human beings.” Strangely enough, most people write for human beings in the real world rather than for algorithms.

I find this much more common story of teaching on autopilot a lot more scary:

I was assigned a textbook course in American history. Composition was not a prerequisite, and the course was steered by two multiple-choice exams provided by the textbook’s publisher. Area Tech had adopted state-approved standards for the subject, and these were guaranteed to be met by the text, which was written by a well-affiliated professor, published by a major New York house, and retailed to my students at 60 federally subsidized dollars each. It contained some decent maps, but it was scattered, bland, and thoroughly tiresome. It was designed so that any literate adult could be slotted in to teach it. By our second class of going over its chapters, the students, a healthy mix of ages, races, and cultural backgrounds, enjoyed it no more than I did.

Plug any literate adult into the role of designated grader and professors with my qualifications become completely unnecessary. How can this situation ever exist (the naive might ask themselves)? Because the powers that be no longer care what the quality of higher education is like for most people anymore. That, of course, is the scariest story of all.

Think I’m exaggerating? You may have seen this one yesterday. Here’s Rick Santorum, on college and college professors:

“There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor… That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said. “I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

An algorithm would be Rick Santorum’s dream college professor, at least at non-Christian schools. No taxpayer dollars for high-priced, elitist labor. No brainwashing. In fact, no thinking whatsoever. No wonder Rick Santorum loves those for-profit colleges.

Where does that leave all of us liberal college professors? Foraging for food when we’re 64. You think the job market is bad now? Wait until we’re all replaced by an adjunct or a machine. I don’t know about you, but I have to scrimp and save as it is already.

“1, 2, 3, 4…Can I have a little more?”

Why do business professors generally make more money than history professors? The answer, trying to be fair about it, is that business professors have non-academic alternatives. That means that universities have to compete with marketers in order to hire a marketing professor, accounting firms to hire an accounting professor, etc. History professors…well I guess we have Plan B, which hasn’t really been worked out yet.

Yet this whole line of argument assumes that the academic labor market is, in fact, free: that there are a number of options out there for people seeking better employment, that they are well-informed of all those options and that they won’t be afraid to risk moving. But what if the academic labor market isn’t free after all? There’s an article in the new Harper’s (so new that it’s not even on the web site as I write this) about monopoly employers, who (if I remember my economics right) are actually monopsonists – One buyer of labor and many sellers. It mostly covers workers in the computer industry and the chicken industry, but a description of a free (labor) market there, provided as contrast, doesn’t apply much to academia either.

I’ll take each trait one at a time:

“Most important is an equality between the seller and the buyer, achieved by ensuring that that there are many buyers as well as sellers.

The deliberate restructuring of demand has eliminated that possibility.

Second is transparency. Everyone sees the quantity and the quality of the product on offer, and the price at which each deal is done.

Those of us in state schools can usually find out everyone else’s salary without too much trouble. But do you know their courseload? Do you know their perks? Are you rude enough to ask?

A third characteristic is a tendency to deliver egalitarian outcomes.

I probably make about $35,000/year less than the average business professor at my university and I have a higher courseload. But then again, tell that to our adjuncts.

Adjunct faculty in the humanities make less than well-supported graduate students at most universities, yet they carry most of the teaching load in many places. And don’t tell me that’s because they don’t do research, because today’s adjunct faculty are just as capable of putting out books as anyone who’s lucky enough to have the time to write when not teaching just two or three classes each semester.

A free labor market would create something akin to equal pay for equal work. Since academia is nothing like it, there must be some reason why the academic labor market isn’t free. The New Faculty Majority blog posts this part of an article on art that suggests a parallel to academia:

Classical economic models assume that suppliers don’t have any particular emotional attachment to what they’re supplying; all they really want to do is to make money. As a result, if they’re not making money, they’ll exit the industry, leaving more to go around for everyone else. As we see from Kirk Lynn’s contribution to the discussion, however, many artists (especially artist-entrepreneurs) have far too much passion for their work to consider exiting solely for financial reasons. The result of this lack of exit is a surfeit of fantastic art that few aside from its creators have time to take in.

Perhaps then they exploit us (to differing degrees) because we care. Since you’ll take less to do the work which you find meaning in and enjoy, then we’ll pay you less. I know we’re always free to quit, but what do you do if you actually believe in what you’re doing and want to try to make academia better? I guess we could all try to become Blue Meanies administrators, but what if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror each morning?

You could always start a blog! Or maybe not. This is from Reason #76 over at a blog that you really should be reading already:

Why? Why are academics—of all people—afraid of writing (and speaking) honestly about their profession? Why do so many of those who do express themselves feel compelled to do so anonymously? The answer lies in the staggering power imbalance between academics and the people who employ them. That imbalance is so great because of the crippling realities of the academic job market. The consequences of offending your colleagues and superiors in any way can be dire, because until you have tenure (see Reason 71) your employment is insecure; you are easily replaced.

But if we just worked all together now…

“Get Back.”

Today I had to explain to my daughter that “Across the Universe” was not actually a Beatles movie and that this came first:

Frankly, I’m just glad she cares.

“War Is Over (If You Want It).”

Who knew that Yoko Ono has her own YouTube channel? Via Jon Weiner at The Nation:

“Nowhere Man” w/ Jeremy.

Paperback writers.

Little did I know you can see the cartoon Beatles on YouTube (via The Book Bench):

The new ringtone on my phone.

Too bad I only have the notes, not the recording: