MUST SEE DOC: Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt & Reform America’s Public Universities

If you work in higher ed and think the only problems we face are fluctuating budgets, this is a must see.

Just as some wealthy individuals, corporations, and hedge funds are trying to remake K-12 public education to divert tax dollars into their own pockets with for profit charter schools, education management companies, repetitive standardized testing, and common core curriculum designed to maximize profits for textbook and testing companies while demonizing teachers and trying to break their unions is in the earlier stages of coming after colleges and universities.

Besides trashing K-12 public education, this corporate driven reform movement is not only driving teachers out of the profession, but dramatically reducing enrollment in education majors--so there aren't enough new teachers to replace those leaving.

If these "reforms" get very far in higher ed, the results could be even more chaotic and dramatic because of the large majority of part time faculty. K-12 teachers might put up with the crap a bit longer because of decent pay and full benefits.

That is not the case for college faculty members who have to patch together a couple of part time jobs to make a living (and still don't get family medical benefits even then).

As someone who started in K-12 and moved to higher ed, I had to make a choice between economic security but little control over what I taught if I stayed in K-12 or economic insecurity but academic freedom if I moved to higher ed. I know people who did the same for the same reasons.

What will happen if most college and university faculty are treated like crap economically AND academically?
Also, an ironic twist on this topic is the supposed superiority of the private sector in getting things done in K-12. In higher ed, whether you go to a public college, a private non-profit, or a private for profit college, you're classes will be taught by the same people.

One of my community college colleagues also teaches the same courses at a fairly well-known private school nearby and I asked him what he does differently for those students. He just laughed and said, "Nothing. They just pay more for it."

If private contractors get involved in delivering public education, taxpayers will pay the same or more, but get less so the contractors can skim a profit.

ARTICLE ON HUFFINGTON POST

another way to BOYCOTT standardized testing & corporate driven education reform

In the face of corporate and sports boycotts, Indiana's governor has scrambled to amend their "Religious Freedom" law that is really intended to allow businesses to refuse to serve the LGBT community, and Arkansas's Republican governor has just announced he will boycott a similar bill when it comes to his desk.

This is no small concession for Republicans.  Distaste for gays and appeals to the religious right are how they drive their base of voters to the polls, especially when their other policies of endless war and free rein to corporate criminals isn't playing so well.

Public school educators are faced with an ongoing assault on our freedom to teach our students based on our training and experience and are instead being handed a script written by hedge fund managers that conveniently requires that we teach and test and grade using materials that they have invested in and will profit from.  And when the test results are declared a sign of failure, rather than investing more tax dollars in lower student-teacher ratios, social workers, and other programs to make the school a success, those same hedge fund managers demand the school be closed and replaced with a for-profit charter school or turned over to a for profit education management company that they will also profit from.

Needless to say, decent pay and job security for teachers would cut into those profits, so we must be reduced to the equivalent of tour guides, mindlessly parroting the script they write for us, rather than thinking on our feet and tailoring our lessons to what works and doesn't with a particular group of students.

Educators are resisting by refusing to administer the tests, and encouraging parents to opt their children out of the tests, but this recent fiasco in Indiana and Arkansas shows we have another, probably even more powerful tool at our disposal: boycott.

Where teachers and administrators have any say in the buying of textbooks, software, and testing materials, they should block the purchase of those sold by backers of the corporate take over of public education.  If they can't get around the testing requirements, then fight for open source materials developed by teachers themselves that won't give our tax dollars to those trying to privatize our schools.

While K-12 teachers and administrators might have limited flexibility in these matters, they have a potential ally that has almost unlimited flexibility with choice of materials: colleges and universities, especially those with teachers prep programs.

Many of those schools of education that train future teachers have seem a dramatic drop in enrollment because students can see the assault on teachers in the mainstream media and deciding not to dedicate their lives to getting a public beating.

Those who teach future teachers and those students who want to be teachers without being Wall Street's whipping boy might be very eager to take action to save their profession.

Likewise, professors and college instructors in other departments might be surprisingly easy to persuade to join in for a number of reasons:

1. They know their students are being directly screwed by overpriced textbooks that are randomly rearranged and amended every year or two just enough that students can't use an old edition for their classes.
   
   Many instructors already rely on their own handouts and materials available freely online to do without commercial textbooks.  This would simple be an incentive for more to do so.


2. Professors and administrators are increasingly aware that the same investor class that wants to divert tax dollars from K-12 education to their own pockets have their eye on public higher education too, and are devising metrics of failure and even trying to close colleges the way they have K-12 schools.
   
   The hedge fund managers, their foundation, and astroturf citizens groups are even trying to drive the same stake into the heart of higher ed that they've already driven into K-12: common core.


3. Professors don't want to teach at a McCollege any more than K-12 teachers want to teach at a McSchool.


4. The concepts of boycott and divestment are hardly alien to college campuses.  In the 80's,  college students demanded their schools divest from and boycott apartheid South Africa, and today they are demanding divestment from fossil fuels--and getting it.
   
   And while not all will agree with cause, many are calling for a boycott of and divestment from Israel because of their dealings with Palestinians.  It's unsettled the Israeli government enough that they have publicly responded to the movement.

If K-12 and higher ed teachers and administrators realize they face a common enemy they could unite, stop buying these companies products, demand that their retirement funds and school based foundations divest from them, and give our kids back the chance to get a decent public education WITHOUT Wall Street calling the shots AND taking a skim off our tax dollars spend on education.

Pearson, the company at the heart of Common Core, would be a good place to start.

even conservative magazine calls student loans a SCAM

In a review of a book on student loans, the conservative National Review pointed out that the system is rigged to benefit lenders more than students and remarkably recommends a solution that I'm pretty sure I first heard from Howard Dean.

Ironically, this is not just a problem for students, but for too many higher education faculty who get in debt up to their eyeballs to get the degrees required to do their jobs only to find that they don't make enough to pay back those loans or at times even have income every month.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Lenders of First Resort
More and more, student lending is becoming a rigged game.

By Robert VerBruggen


But there is a very important story in this book: Collinge, who is himself buried in defaulted debt, explores the alliances that student-loan companies have established with universities and the government. By sharing profits with schools in exchange for preferential treatment, the industry’s biggest players have shielded themselves from free-market competition; and through intense government lobbying, the industry has secured exemptions from laws that apply to other forms of lending. No matter how wrongheaded his analysis, Collinge’s facts should evoke cringes from Americans of all political stripes.

Schools’ relationships with the major lenders will come as a shock to many — especially those who’ve taken advice from purportedly neutral university employees. Through “school as lender” programs, lenders can essentially give schools a cut of the profits in return for financial-aid officials’ steering borrowers their way. (Technically, the school makes the loan, and then the lender buys the debt at a premium.) Lenders often sweeten the deal by offering officials lavish parties and trips. Sometimes, lenders have even run financial-aid call centers on universities’ behalf, with lenders’ employees claiming to represent the schools.

***

Today it’s a fully private entity, but Sallie and other big lenders have used their size and sway on Capitol Hill to their great benefit. For example, while there have long been limits on bankruptcy protection for student loans (some worry that it’s tempting to file for bankruptcy right after graduating), the student-loan industry managed to eliminate bankruptcy protection in 2005. No matter how long it’s been since you took out the loan, and no matter the size to which the debt has ballooned, you typically cannot discharge a student loan in bankruptcy. One can argue that bankruptcy laws in general should be stronger than they are, but it’s hard to make the case that student loans should be treated so differently from every other form of debt.


***

Many other foolish ideas have been adopted. According to federal law, a borrower can only consolidate his student loans once; then he’s stuck with that lender, even if a different lender is willing to pay off the loan and accept a lower interest rate. Also, to punish those who don’t pay their debts fast enough, collectors can have borrowers’ professional licenses taken away. Obviously, without being able to practice in the field for which they borrowed money to train, there’s little hope of these folks’ digging their way out of debt.

***

There are plenty of better ideas for rejiggering the way we pay for college. One is for students to give up a percentage of their income after graduation, instead of making traditional tuition and loan payments. Not only would this go easy on folks who have money troubles (no income, no payments due), it would take the burden off parents and the government. It would also provide schools with a very explicit way to compete on price: With loans, grants, and parental dollars out of the way, a student would have to ask himself if it was really worth X percent of his income to go with college A instead of college B...

***

FULL TEXT

To find out more & take action, go to Student Loan Justice.

What's it like to be higher ed adjunct faculty? Tell your story

For decades, higher education has been aping the personnel practices of corporate America and relying more and more on part time, temporary, and non-tenure track faculty, especially to teach the course required for graduation.

While this is great for administrators to free up money in their budget for other things, it can wreck havoc on the lives of those who didn't expect to get rich teaching but did expect to be able to pay their rent and student loan payments every month and know that they'd continue to have a job if they were doing it relatively well.

Various groups have been working on changing this at the state level, and adjuncts and contingent faculty are finally starting to come together at a national level in groups like the New Majority Faculty, which I am a part of.

To help us figure out which things to focus on changing, WE NEED YOUR STORIES.

You can post them as text in the comments of this article or if you are feeling more multimedia, as a video reply to this youtube thread.

Tell us what has happened to you as an adjunct, non-tenure track, part time, temporary (usually all of the above) faculty member in higher education, both on the job and in your personal life as a consequence of having a job.

For example, I told my own story here, and the story of an instructor who resorted to going through the trash for pop cans to make ends meet. I have known instructors who still lived with their parents into their fifties and others who have had marriages unravel because their income didn't live up to their spouse's expectations for someone with their education level.

On the professional front, a friend of mine set up a PACE program for his college, then when the time came to give someone a full-time tenure track job to run it, they hired someone from outside the school (who promptly asked my friend how to do his job since he had padded his resume). Just recently, this instructor was fired from his community college after eighteen years of service, most likely because he was vice president of the part time faculty union.

Your stories will not only help us figure out what to fight for but give us powerful evidence to present to legislators and groups that work on higher education issues that using Walmart labor practices does real harm to real people.

If you wish to remain anonymous, that's fine, though the more specific the details, the more useful your story will be, for example, say what state you are in, whether you are at a two-year or four-year college or research university, public or private, what discipline you teach in, your qualifications to teach, and how long you've been doing it. Any information you don't want to include is okay though.

Post written stories

Post video stories

Lack of tenure track jobs will drive future scientists out of US universities

A Princeton department chair gets it: treating faculty like toilet paper might seem to make economic sense in the short term, but in the long term it will kill our higher education system.

I would go further than he does and say that lack of tenure track positions for those who choose to focus on TEACHING future scientists (and businessmen, teachers, and political leaders) is already killing them personally.

If someone chooses to teach or be an academic, they don't expect to get rich, but they do expect to be able to pay back their student loans, get health insurance, and support a family.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Nation needs recovery plan for science faculty jobs

By David Spergel
chair of the department of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University

February 28th, 2009

Even if the economy were to recover over the next one to two years, the academic job market for the next few years is likely to be bleak. It will probably take several years for university finances to recover. Even more significantly, the collapse of the stock market has led many faculty members to defer retirement plans. Many professors in their late 60s and early 70s who were planning to retire in the next two to three years have decided to stay on and work for an additional few years so that they can recover some of their market losses.

While this choice makes a great deal of sense for each individual, it will likely have tragic side effects. If all of the faculty members who were planning on retiring at age 67 defer retirement to 72, then universities will not be able to hire any new faculty for the next five years! (This claim rests on the assumption that universities are not likely to rapidly grow their faculty size during an economic downturn and early in the recovery.) When the current cohort of 67-year-olds and the current cohort of 62-year-olds retire over the next five to 10 years, this wave of retirements may create a job bump; however, the next several years will be a difficult time for any scholar seeking a faculty position.

***

The lack of tenure-track jobs in the United States will likely lead many of our best young U.S.-trained scientists and engineers to seek faculty positions in Europe and Asia, or to abandon their scientific careers. Many of our promising young Ph.D.s are foreign-born scientists who will likely return to their home countries. Most other advanced nations have mandatory retirement ages at their universities and do not have retirement pensions connected to the stock market.

FULL TEXT (includes his solution)

New Majority Faculty collecting stories from part time, contingent, and other non-tenure track higher ed faculty

There's a new NATIONAL group for adjuncts, part timers, contingent faculty, and whatever else colleges and universities call the instructors who do most of the teaching but get few of benefits like job security, equal pay, and often not even health insurance.

They want to hear your story about being an adjunct, and start to figure out what we can do together to change things.

You can post on Youtube, in response to this this video:

(click pic to see flick)

Here's sort of what they're looking for (sound track and other production optional):