Category Archives: culture

Gone to Texas

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In a few days my beloved and I will travel to Texas together to be on hand for the 57th reunion of my high-school graduating class. I look forward to the journey partly as an escape from troubling strife at Saint Louis University, where the sway of a too powerful administration is being forcefully challenged on campus. I look forward to the journey into a past I share with old friends as well. Here is an essay about aspects of that past that come to mind at the beginning of most school years.

The first of it is mostly the concluding section of an essay entitled “The Ultimate West” that was published in Pembroke Magazine in 1993. My grandfather was from an old-time east Texas family. There’s a little township, now a suburb of Marshall, named Scottsville, for his people. My father went to the Philippines in August 1941, as a medical officer with what was called the Two Hundredth Coast Artillery from New Mexico, and never returned. My Texas home town, though I was born in Albuquerque and have always wanted to return there, is Abilene, Texas, almost in the geographic center of the state, but part of the region known as West Texas. The essay contains a section on ruined wild dogs who, according to John Graves,1 have moved into the niche in the food chain left by wolves who were systematically slaughtered in an earlier time.

‘What do I know?’ asks the skeptic, Montaigne, a question hardly heard today outside ideological disputes. As another school year opens, the seventieth for me since my early chlidhood, I ask myself again what I may have learned in all those years that is worth passing on. What I know best is a certain restlessness, which I believe to be fairly common in my generation, though less common than heart disease and ulcers. Perhaps I am spared these latter maladies by being muddle-headed and unsure of myself. Perhaps I lack character, but I can’t help feeling that my confusion is in some part the confusion of my age. Forty-odd years ago I missed seeing a planetary conjunction which was billed in the media as the truth about the Star of Bethlehem. But I and my family watched humans walk on the moon that year, on our black and white TV set in Durham, North Carolina.

In Texas, the easy certainties have always come from family, land, and religion. Habits arising from those easy certainties have broadened into the larger society amongst our timely and untimely adventures—there’s not much difference between old-time pious land grabbing and what we now call American exceptionalism—so that non-Texans take the Bushes and Rick Perry to be typical of the breed. But the frontier is gone, and though what remains of Texas chic still colors the old frontier myths with purple nostalgia, western imagery is a dead metaphor, dead as western movies. Today’s cowboys get shot out of the skies over Pakistan, or own sports franchises, or wage idiosyncratic campaigns for national office. Cowboying and land-grabbing have by and large failed us Americans as a nation, but the drama of the old-time land grabbers is still being played out in our political life as a kind of rear guard resistance to the present.

To be a West Texan is to have credit for a college course which might be called GREAT FRONTIER I as one’s birthright – the history of the Indian wars, the Alamo, the Spanish conquest and colonization of Cibola. This is particularly true for me, since I am half a New Mexican. But GREAT FRONTIER II, the history of the self-willed gallantry of Dixie, with its yankee and Elizabethan roots, is a story I can tell from family memory. Texas voted for secession 46,129 to 14,697 over Sam Houston’s opposition. Great great Granddaddy “Colonel” W. T. (Buck) Scott, with 104 slaves at the time, was in the vanguard of secessionists.2

On the other hand, Robert E. Lee was Commandant of ill-fated Camp Cooper, not far from Abilene, in the 1850’s, and I never knew it until I read it in A. C. Greene’s A Personal Country. We weren’t fighting the war of northern aggression in my family. Granddaddy was a Roosevelt Democrat and a union man. He loved to tell stories about his family and the old times, but he had put the south behind him in some crucial way, I think, when he came west in 1926.

My old friend, the late A. C. Greene, once wrote that every man has a village in his heart.3 He and I happen to share the same village, Abilene, Texas; though my Abilene is different from A. C.’s, haunted by different ghosts, and neither exists any longer. This memoir of mine recalls a past with which my own life and blood are continuous—in that village to be sure, but also in the wider story of an engrafted past I did not experience myself. I know that story first and chiefly not from books, but in the rise and fall of my grandfather’s voice.

As I sift my village memories, I know them to begin my sense of belonging, at least partly, to the culture of civilized things. One of the loveliest memories of all comes from a Christmas party given by Miss Nancy Craig Lasley, Abilene’s piano teacher. To be sure there were others who taught the keyboard in my village, but Miss Lasley was the chief, just as the Clack sisters and Selma Bishop were schoolmarms to the generations at Abilene High. This particular party was one of the last times Miss Lasley lit candles on her Christmas tree, around 1953. After music and punch and cookies, we students and guests and firemen—there had to be a fire truck handy—were allowed to take the candles from the tree and keep them. I still have mine, somewhere, with its little German silver holder. That’s my village, Mozart sonatas at Christmas in an old house on Grape Street, when Grape Street still had brick paving. I should like my memoir to end there, but it doesn’t.

In the continuing city that surrounds my village, there remains a great fund of uncivilized energy, and more, something far more fearful. I think my ancestors slaughtered the southwestern wolves because of the ruined dog in themselves. Great great Grandaddy W. T. shot Robert Potter, I was always told.4 As the originator of the crime of Potterism and an original of the expression ‘Gone to Texas,’ Potter may have needed killing, but where does the good fight end and something else take over? Potter himself might have asked the question.5 At some point even righteous anger becomes gratuitous. ‘What’s the matter with you Texans?’ I remember being asked after Charles Whitman shot sixteen people from the library tower at the University in Austin. ‘What’s the matter with you Greeks?’ cry Aeschylus and the tragedians. We reply that blind Homer long ago invoked the rage of doomed Achilles as the ground of poetry.

These days I sometimes find myself humming the old prophetic hymns I remember from Sunday evenings, when we let our hair down and recalled the claims of the historic church militant. “Doubt and fear and things of earth/in vain to me are calling./ None of these shall move me . . . !” Ten thousand years in the promised land, the greed, the visionary idealism, the tenacity, the dogmatism, the bravado that tells you to suck it up when somebody dies: “Methinks I see a strong and puissant nation,” but let that go. The old west may be the shine on God’s backside—or only a media event.

When I was a student at SMU, a friend’s father died back in Abilene. My friend called to tell me about it and when the funeral was, and to ask me to come and help him with his mother, who was pretty bad off. He asked me too, to bring him his car, which he had left with me the week before. I drove my friend’s car the 180 miles from Dallas to Abilene in under three hours, flat out ninety miles an hour most of the way. A semi almost ran me down near Ranger, driving on the wrong side of the road. I swerved into the ditch and kept on trucking, as the saying goes.

I don’t remember very much about the funeral, or consoling my friend’s mother, but I remember the ride in that 300 horsepower 1953 Olds Rocket 88 with a fourspeed hydramatic and power steering – my God, I remember that ride!

Notes

1See Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, New York: 1982.
2See William Thomas Scott, The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, 1999; And Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865, Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
3In A Personal Country, New York, 1969.
4Who actually shot potter is problematic, but it likely wasn’t W. T. Scott. With respect to my grandfather’s stories I think he told us what he had heard, but that he had heard about his grandfather at least one story that might have been told of his maternal great-grandfather. W. T. and many of his kin came to Texas in the entourage of Wm. Pinckney Rose, ‘Old Rose,’ the ‘Lion of the Lakes,’ at a time when the country south of Caddo Lake was still part of a no man’s land along the Sabine River. W. T. had married one of Old Rose’s daughters and named one of his sons Preston Rose Scott, after Old Rose’s famous son. Old Rose may or may not have been the leader of a band of Regulators, and Robert Potter may or may not have been a Moderator, Regulators and Moderators being rival vigilante groups. But Old Rose and Potter seem to have fallen out over a piece of land, though the story of their enmity has all the earmarks of a family feud, the two having been born within sixteen miles of each other. Old Rose had been born in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1787, Potter, down the road in Brassfield township in 1799. It was in Granville County, around Oxford, where Potter’s exploits became legendary in 1831, though by that time, of course, Old Rose was in Mississippi. In her memoir, Harriet Ames Potter names John Washington Scott, one of W. T.’s brothers, as the actual killer of her lover, says Scott did the shooting while Rose held a gun on her. Apparently, J. W. Scott, like W. T., had also married one of Old Rose’s daughters. The official indictment, to which Ms. Ames swore (ultimately dismissed on grounds of “informality”), names Old Rose, Preston Rose, J. W. Scott, and some nine others. Potter was shot on March 2, 1842. Harriet Ames’s memoir, “The History of Harriet A. Ames during the early days of Texas, [written by herself in New Orleans at the age of 83]” has never been published. Elith Hamilton Kirkland notes that the memoir was “discovered” in 1936 “among Harriet’s relatives,” and that copies of it have circulated privately ever since. A copy is housed in the Library Archives of the University of Texas at Austin. I have relied on extracts quoted by Ernest G. Fischer for details from the memoir, as well as for some details of Potter’s life. See Love Is a Wild Assault, Fredericksburg, TX, 1959, and Fischer’s Robert Potter: Founder of the Texas Navy, Gretna, LA, 1976.
5About Potter, see this and this. On August 28, 1831 Potter, then a member of the United States House of Representatives from Oxford, North Carolina, attacked his wife’s cousin and another man he suspected of improper relations with his wife and castrated them both. He served six months in jail and paid a fine of $2000 for his crime. His wife eventually divorced him. He was reelected to a term in the North Carolina House of Commons, where had served before serving int he U. S. Congress, but was ultimately expelled from that body. In 1835, Potter migrated to Texas, where he continued his flamboyant life. My Old friend, the late sam Ragan who grew up in Oxford, NC, told me once that Potter had been convicted of misdemeanor assault because North Carolina at the time had no specific law under which to try him. After the fact the state passed such a law, and the crime of Potterism became illegal in North Carolina.

Students first?

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Yesterday’s email brought a message that featured the smiling face of Bill Cosby asking me to join Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization. I deleted the email without responding, but today I’m having second thoughts.

As the Chicago teacher strike continued and the scapegoating of teachers was ramped up in the mainstream media, I decided I should say a bit more about why I do not support Rhee’s effort and others like it. Now that the strike has been suspended, I think it is even more important that those of us who still believe in American public education speak out.

First of all, Rhee, herself. Her tenure as chancellor of the DC schools was a colossal failure. Now she has reinvented herself as a consultant and media darling who earns big bucks for speaking to various echo chambers around the country. Michelle Rhee is to the politics of education what Sarah Palin is to politics generally. She has repeatedly falsified her record in promoting herself, recently in Great Britain.

Rhee’s organization is one of a network of well-funded efforts to undermine public schools. Some of these organizations make no secret of their ties to moneyed interests intent on replacing public schools with for-profit charters. With PR that is long on slogans, these interests have nothing of value to offer in the way of real help to struggling schools, historically abandoned by successive waves of flight from the nation’s cities.

What they do have to offer is a program of privatization. A test of their ideas is now underway in Michigan. Behind it is the educational equivalent of corporate predation with its ethic of “creative destruction.” The Obama administration has based its “Race to the Top” program on this dubious program, and this in spite of a strong protest from the National Academy of Sciences. Race to the Top appears to be failing in Tennessee, the program’s signature client.

I take Students First as the most recently organized and perhaps most visible effort to privatize public schools. It identifies teachers’ unions as the cause of blight in urban school systems because teachers’ unions are its most serious opponents in the public sphere. Moreover, it should not escape notice that the school privatization cabal shares a strategic methodology with the American Legislative Exchange Council. Just as ALEC has “written” the legislation for many states who have enacted voter suppression laws, so the Teacher Advancement Project and the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (and now Students First) have “written” programs to suppress and marginalize teachers.

None of this is to say that there are not good charter schools, though for-profit charter schools have a sorry history. Nor is this to say that there are not fine private schools among us. One of the strengths of American education has always been its mix of public and private efforts. What is new in our time is flight from public education that began with attempts to escape integration, continued with the establishment of Christian and country day schools and has now eventuated in the home schooling and charter school movements. And what is most distressing about this recent experience is the normalization of antipathy to public education.

Higher education is implicated in this trend. Correct me if I’m wrong. It has been fashionable, and continues to be so, among college and university educators, to denigrate public education at least since the 1950s. It is an article of faith amongst university educators outside colleges of education that professional programs in education are substandard and inferior. It is this complex of prejudices that has created the hegemony of English departments in colleges and universities, and it is a canard. I told a story about an education prof in my last post that was prejudicial. That prof, who believed that administrators made teachers good, did not represent the norm. More representative was another prof, with whom I was privileged to work for many years, whose curiosity, intellect, and spiritual insight endeared him to a generation of graduate students at the University of North Texas, and to me.

I also mentioned Roosevelt High School in St. Louis in my last post. Any liberal who supports Michelle Rhee’s program should spend some time at Roosevelt or at Vashon High School in North St. Louis. The idea that the problems these schools face can be solved by firing a few high-priced veteran teachers and replacing them with cheap substitutes is hogwash. Liberals might wish, as well, to examine the history of Imagine for profit charters in St. Louis, currently being closed amid reports of poor performance and financial impropriety. And nobody, liberal or otherwise, should be surprised by the corruption of Imagine schools or of schools like them in other cities. The for profit charter system is yet another corporate scheme to transfer public monies into private-sector coffers. It’s a scam like the publishing scams that have bloated the cost of textbooks and scholarly journals and are now coopting online education.

Meanwhile, there are partnership programs cooperating quietly with public schools that actually do put students first. One of them is the network of urban debate leagues. I have a good deal of experience with the St. Louis Urban Debate league and have seen its results. I recently wrote about a St. Louis high school student who is a debater. Debate enhances the likelihood that students who participate will graduate from high school. Among key findings of a new study that will soon be reported in the Journal of Adolescence are these:

  • Among the highest risk students, 72% of debaters graduated as compared with 43% of non-debaters.
  • The level of participation in debate (number of rounds debated) is a strong predictor of high school completion. Students who debate more, are more likely to graduate.
  • All students who debated, including those at-risk, scored higher on the ACT and were more likely to achieve college readiness benchmarks in English, Reading and Science.

Public education needs more programs like the UDL to restore valuable and life-enhancing activities such as music, dance, and art, that have been axed from many school programs in favor of teaching the test. Public education doesn’t need lessons in neoliberal economics or more demagoguery from political hacks like Rahm Emanuel, who is only the most recent politician to promote himself by attacking schools. And public education especially doesn’t need Michelle Rhee and her organization.

Shame on Bill Cosby.

Another school year . . .

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At seventy-five I am still teaching school. My mind still works. I’ve not lost the ability to talk to young people, and I enjoy their company. The enterprise helps to keep me alive; and so I’ve begun another year in the classroom. I could recall a host of good memories, but today I’m thinking about another, one that’s not so good.

I recall hearing an education prof (who should have known better) make the following claim in a lunchtime conversation years ago: ‘There’s no such thing as a good teacher. If a teacher does a good job, it’s because an administrator made her a good teacher.’ Even bracketing the sexism, it’s hard to take such a claim seriously.

But the Chicago public school system, with the tacit support of the Obama administration, has already put into effect a clumsy—some would say mindless—system of teacher evaluation designed to deprofessionalize Chicago teachers and subject them to a Taylorist efficiency scheme in which their performance in their jobs is to be disproportionateloy evaluated on the basis of “student performance” (i.e. according to their students’ scores on standardized tests).

The problems with these tests are many, even with regard to college admissions, and the present use to which they are being put as more and more school systems are being subjected to neoliberal programs of “reform,” is unconscionable. Now the Chicago teachers have struck in the attempt to preserve what professional dignity they have left, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel attempts to use the standardized testing canard to deprofessionalize them still further.

I have been a school teacher for fifty years. Though most of my experience has been as a teacher in colleges and universities, I have also taught in elementary and secondary schools and community colleges. In my time I have seen much good teaching, and I have also seen bad. After fifty years I remain convinced that the only civilized way to establish and maintain standards in the teaching profession is through peer review. Peer review has its problems; it is sometimes self-interested and idiosyncratic, but it is a damn sight better than the sort of administrative dictatorship we are seeing in Chicago. And the irony is that many liberals, who ought to know better, support mindless, top-down management schemes in the public schools

We live in a time when workers of all sorts are being subjected to deprofessionalizing, indeed to dehumanizing “oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies,” as my friend Tim Burke has put it, as well as to demands for more and more economic concessions from workers. One consequence of this trend is that the wages and benefits of teachers and other public workers are now sometimes better than those in the private sector; and this has given rise to another canard. No less a pundit than David Brooks claimed just days ago that paying teachers’ salaries and benefits “is becoming a burden that [the private economy] can no longer carry,” having conveniently forgotten that teachers pay taxes like everyone else. Unscrupulous politicians like Scott Walker and careless pundits like Brooks are urging us to believe that support for public workers amounts to support for unearned privilege and excess.

It simply isn’t so. Teachers work hard, often against unspeakable odds and in terrible working conditions. More often than not they buy needed school supplies out of their own pockets. Many are denied Social Security and forced into substandard health care programs. It is true that some teachers still work only nine months of the year, but that is no longer the norm; moreover, a substantial part of the complex of reasons that teachers are on the defensive in today’s anti-union, anti-worker environment is that people dislike teachers. This point has been made forcefully by Corey Robin in a recent blog.

I remember being bullied on the school grounds, and teachers who encouraged the bullying. I remember teachers who were martinets or, worse yet, were bullies themselves; and I remember corporal punishment. I was a kid who loved school from the first grade (I missed kindergarten because of a series of accidents), but I hated junior high school because a crowd of thugs who were being kept in junior high until they were sixteen were allowed to terrorize bookish boys. If I had not been sent to high school in the ninth grade where I found myself back in the midst of civilization, the entire course of my life might have been different.

Still, much antipathy towards teachers would be better directed at schools themselves, towards the role schools play in the socialization of children. There’s an old teacher joke about a kid who flunked “standing in line.” School is where we learn to conform, sometimes to vicious regimes of bahavior. But Robin’s argument is that teachers are disliked because they are public servants and as such do not participate in the suburban “meritocracy.”

“Those who can’t do, teach” goes the old saw. But where that traditionally bespoke a suspicion of fancy ideas that didn’t produce anything concrete, in my fancy suburb, it meant something else. Teachers had opted out of the capitalist game; they weren’t in this world for money. There could be only one reason for that: they were losers. They were dimwitted, unambitious, complacent, unimaginative,
and risk-averse. . . . No one, we were sure, became a teacher because she loved history or literature and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. All of them simply had no other choice. How did we know that? Because they weren’t lawyers or doctors or “businessmen”—one of those words, even in the post-Madmen era, still spoken with veneration and awe.

There’s a good deal to be said for Robin’s argument, though I think it’s too simple. But there are a couple of other arguments, each also too simple in itself, that I believe have strong explanatory power with respect to where we are as a nation with regard to public education. First, when we abolished segregated schools we retained a system of funding based on local property taxes that has continued the disproportionate allocation of resources to affluent, suburban schools and left inner city schools impoverished.

Even within city school systems, resources flow disproportionately to schools that serve affluent, mostly white students and their parents. I live a couple of blocks from Roosevelt High School in St. Louis, once one of the finest public high schools in the nation, now a dump. Roosevelt is being starved for resources. But worse still, Roosevelt is the one school in the city which is not a magnet school, and the consequence is that its student population is disproportionately made up of young people who will never graduate.

Second, the end of segregated public schools ushered in an era which has seen a massive incursion of political demagoguery into public school affairs at almost every level. Ten years ago the St. Louis city school board was so polarized that city schools were in disarray. The system was full of serious corruption and fiduciary malfeasance. The schools ultimately lost accreditation and remain unaccredited. They were taken over by the state some years ago and are slowly improving.

But in the interim Mayor Francis Slay devised a scheme to rig a school board election and install a group of his cronies as members. This cabal hired a turnaround firm to run the St. Louis schools, an action that led directly to their loss of accreditation. People got wise and threw the mayor’s cronies off the school board. But tremendous damage had been done. It is an open secret that the St. Louis Mayor’s office promotes the creation of for-profit charter schools, despite the abysmal record of corruption and miseducation those schools have in this city.

Power hungry mayors like Rahm Emanuel, Francis Slay, and yes Michael Bloomberg, have no business running public school systems.

More about at-will

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In the aftermath of Labor Day I’m also thinking of my former staff colleagues at the University of North Texas who are now subject to an employment-at-will policy instituted last summer after a sham consultation period in which staff concerns were largely ignored. UNT President Lane Rawlins has claimed that the new policy contains “checks and balances” that “will protect employees from arbitrary and unwarranted actions,” but his own description of the policy belies his claim.

I wrote about this last year, before the policy went into effect. UNT (which I still think of with some affection as North Texas) is operating under a new corporate structure headed by a chancellor, Lee Jackson, who is a political appointee, a structure very like that at the University of Virginia which recently led to abuses of authority widely aired in the national press. (I wrote several blog posts about events at UVA. You can find them listed under “Recent Posts” in the sidebar.) Here is what Chancellor Jackson said about at-will employment at UNT when he first announced that the new policy was in the works.

I am revising our employment policies because I believe improvement is needed. With enhanced training and by working together, I believe we can place a higher priority on the quality of our workforce and support for employees.

This is bureaucratic doublespeak. UNT officials never explained to staff why the change was needed or what “improvement” was being sought. Indeed, if reports are true, the meetings that were held to allow for staff “input” were exercises in administrative stonewalling and more doublespeak.

Of course the real meaning of the change is that UNT is simply following suit. At-will policies are now in effect throughout the Texas system of higher education as that system bends to the determination of Republican governor Rick Perry “to re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability,” as reported in The Washington Post. The Post also reports that

Texas A&M University, ha[s] compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations.

Universities pay faculty members? What a novel idea! Nevertheless, at-will employment was once the norm in American law. A contemporary defense of the practice represents a nineteenth-century court’s view of the matter as follows:

May I not refuse to trade with any one? May I not forbid my family to trade with any one? May I not dismiss my domestic servant for dealing, or even visiting, when I forbid? And if my domestic, why not my farm-hand, or my mechanic, or teamster?

There is a gathering effort in our national life to reverse protections for workers and reintroduce older practices affirming master-slave relationships between those who labor and those who own or supervise. In the background of this one should recall how much of this country’s wealth was created by slave labor conscripted from Africa and Asia, as well as the history of repression of (and violence against) workers that accompanied the rise of the labor movement. To indicate how far we have gone towards reinstituting the practices of the bad old days, it is now claimed that worker’s rights enslave owners and managers.

Scarcity is the natural state of mankind. Abundance, on the other hand, only comes about after people have applied their labor to their natural surroundings. In other words, scarcity is held at bay only by productivity or “work.” Therefore to assert that a man’s sustenance—his freedom from scarcity—is a basic right necessarily implies that another man must be forced to provide it whether he wishes to or not. If he does not wish to, then the “individual freedom” of the first man can only be bought at the cost of some degree of freedom from the second, who must be coerced, by threat of force, to provide for the first. Indeed, this is tantamount to slavery.1

The incoherence of this argument is so clear as to need no comment, but it reflects the way in which the politics, say, of Paul Ryan appeals to some popular sentiment. On Labor Day, Eric Cantor tweeted: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Perhaps Cantor would defend his callous disregard for the history of Labor Day by reference to an ideological position such as this one:

Government efforts to hamper an employer’s freedom owe much of their intellectual foundation to the old Marxist assumption that employer and employee interests in a free market are opposed. But this is not true. Employers seek profits; when they find them, they bid laborers and other resources away from other employers. This promotes new opportunities, higher real wages, higher productivity, and improved living standards. Hampering labor markets may have emotional or voter appeal, but it is counterproductive and corrosive to genuine human freedom and prosperity.2

Free-market ideology is falsified by so much empirical evidence that its durability is surprising. Its grassroots appeal ro rugged individualism is not only incoherent but cruel as well. Ask public workers in Wisconsin who have recently lost collective bargaining rights as well as jobs, benefits, and wages. So far Scott Walker’s cynical appeals to greed and selfishness have succeeded in turning many private-sector union workers against public-sector workers and their unions.

That Walker’s scorched earth policies have not produced significant job growth should surprise nobody. Those policies were designed to produce short-term political gains for the Republican party—they were never designed to create jobs. And the at-will policies that have been forced on Texas universities have nothing to do with improving efficiency or productivity. I expect to see large-scale staff cuts in Texas higher education, which will be justified by economic exigency. Faculty rights will be next on the chopping block.

There’s a new Pew Research report entitled “The Future of Higher Education.” It’s a flawed report in some ways. But the guts of it, particularly the contributed statements of academic professionals, are often pretty striking. One of my colleagues at Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community, Bryan Alexander, describes a future for Higher Education that I think is likely as well. Bryan is a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. Here is what he says:

By 2020 we will see: 1) A split between teaching and research faculty. Teaching faculty will largely be part-time, ill-paid, and expected to do no research. Research professors will teach little (perhaps the occasional grad student) and focus on grant-funded research. 2) Distance learning will be normative. A majority of students have taken at least one online class by age 16. The default for learning is online at this point. 3) Number of college campuses will dwindle. Those that survive will emphasize: face-to-face experiences; campus grounds (beauty, history, charm); charismatic teachers; a sense of tradition (meaning mid-20th century, but aiming for an older time).

I don’t think this future will be achieved by 2020, but I think it’s a reasonable expectation, given present trends. The expansion of higher education that took place as the baby boomers went to college isn’t sustainable. On the other hand, the idea that universities should hasten towards this brave new world has the potential to create great economic dislocation and suffering, as well as a lot of silly and shallow academic programs. If Institutions like UNT and others that are following Rick Perry’s lead, continue on their present course of attempting to impose “reform” from the top down instead of following the more prudent example of Teresa Sullivan at The University of Virginia, they could wind up looking a lot like the State of Wisconsin, and like Wisconsin have nothing to show for it.

Notes

1Arthur Foulkes, “In Defense of Employment-at-Will,” Ludwig von Mises Institute.
2Ibid.