Category Archives: education

Mr. Jefferson’s Rotunda

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This photo heads a piece that’s been in the news for a few days. It shows the columns of the historic Rotunda at the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson, with the word greed spray-painted on them. University officials have painted over the letters and hired an expensive PR firm to help Rector Helen Dragas and the board members who supported her star-chamber ouster of UVA’s President, Teresa Sullivan, weather the storm of criticism that has engulfed them. A Google search just now unearthed over 1500 news articles and opinion pieces about the matter.

Today’s Washington Post carries a fine piece by Valerie Strauss about UVA’s present horror. Strauss quite rightly points out that the removal of President Sullivan “reflect[s] the way school reform at all levels has been carried out in recent years in some important ways.” Strauss’s painstaking comparison of events reported to have taken place at UVA and the now familiar scenario of “reform” that continues to be imposed on educational institutions of all sorts by venal legislative bodies and corporate boards and abusive, tyrannical administrators is telling, as is her point that the UVA board’s appointment of “Carl P. Zeithaml, dean of U-Va.’s highly regarded McIntire School of Commerce” should be taken very seriously as an indication of the direction Rector Dragas wishes to chart at Charlottesville.

At the center of the modern school reform movement is the philosophy that public schools should be treated not as civic institutions but rather as corporate entities. That the interim leader is Zeithaml, whose speciality is in the field of “strategic management” speaks volumes about the direction the board wants the school to go.

I take Strauss’s analysis a step further, for it seems to me that the emerging philosophy of higher education on display at many of our nation’s flagship universities regards these institutions as mere brands to be bought and sold like companies ripe for takeover. It’s a sad affair when a corporate vandal is able to leverage the purchase of an American institution like Anheuser Busch here in St. Louis, deplete its workforce, destroy its corporate culture, destabilize its philanthropy, and generally turn what was a sustainable enterprise and something of a model of corporate good citizenship into a mere profit center, only because, as he declared when he came to town, corporate vandal Carlos Brito wanted the Anheuser Busch brand. That’s a sad affair. But when the same logic is applied to a great public treasure such as the University of Virginia, that’s criminal. And of course school reform is being pursued according to a similar logic, taking us back to the discredited idea of the factory school.

Strauss points out as well that “education reform” has been a goal of “the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators,” who have “worked in secret for years to promote privatization and corporate interests in education and other areas of American society.” The corruption of university research by corporate money is an open scandal. It’s now common practice for the giants of corporate chemistry to produce “studies” favorable to their own marketing strategies and seek vulnerable faculty to sign their names as researchers. And undergraduate education is going the way of the public school. Faculties are being scapegoated just as public school teachers are. Mindless sets of “assessment” instruments are being imposed on them and upon their students by entities outside education who now find themselves able to demand “accountability” from them. Academic tenure is being undermined in all venues, but of course tenure has never protected faculty from the most egregious actions of administrators and boards of directors.

Thomas Jefferson regarded the founding of The University of Virginia as one of his highest achievements, second only to the composition of The Declaration of Independence. It is hard to imagine that Jefferson would approve what is presently happening in the shadow of his Rotunda.

holiday surprises

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As protesters are everywhere being evicted from parks and other public spaces by representatives of officialdom, I’m reminded of a cynical technique we recognize at a university with which I am familiar as the holiday surprise. When the university administration does something to which there is sure to be “principled” opposition, the action is announced on the eve of a holiday.

Now is the perfect season for the series of evictions that is taking place around the country. People’s minds are preoccupied with holiday matters, with shopping and the festivities that go with whatever holidays they may be celebrating. Nobody wants to give much attention to politics, particularly not to its grittier aspects. Thus, public opposition to the use of force against peaceful protesters is rendered less likely by the press of holiday cheer.

The death of a friend and colleague surprised us on Thanksgiving day. He was Donald G. Brennan, former dean of SLU’s graduate college and of the College of Arts and Sciences as well. Don was much loved. He had served Saint Louis University as a dean for more than twenty years, and it isn’t true as his obituary claims that he stepped down at the end of his career in order to return to teaching. He did return to teaching; that much is true. But the graduate college that should have borne his name no longer exists; albeit one suspects that it will soon be reconstituted with a new dean whose popularity will not threaten a university president whom students call Il duce.

At Don’s funeral the college church was packed with better than a thousand souls to celebrate his life. The line the evening before at the visitation had stretched all the way down the aisle and out the church doors for four hours as people came to pay their respects.

Don represented Saint Louis University at its best. He was in every way a Christian gentleman and a serious lover of the academy in which he had come up. His career had been distinguished and honorable. It’s good that such an outpouring of affection and respect as came to him in death should solidify public remembrance of his life.

In downtown Saint Louis, in Keiner Plaza where the Occupy protesters were evicted last week, a Christmas tree now stands festooned with lights and other stuff. What message that tree symbolizes, given its history, is another of the many ironies of this season of holiday surprises.

UNT contemplates at-will policy

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I’m distresed today to learn that my former employer, the University of North Texas, is planning to implement an employment at-will policy with respect to staff. Some staff members at UNT (and others in the community around the university judging from the comments attached to this report from the Denton Record-Chronicle) are understandably disturbed and have publicly wondered what problem the new policy is intended to address.

My guess is that there is no problem. The new policy is being promulgated by Chancellor Lee Jackson, a Rick Perry appointee, who recently fired former university president, Gretchen Bataille. My guess is also that UNT is following the same style of corporate consolidation that is transforming many American institutions of higher learning. But the goal at UNT, which I still affectionately think of as North Texas, seems not merely to entail transfer of power from the traditional entities of academic governance into the hands of administrators and their corporate cronies in the profit-making world.

I’m thinking that the agenda at North Texas, as at other Texas state institutions of higher learning (though this is not happening without dissent), is to politicize the university system, to redefine educational objectives in favor of producing docile workers (who will likely vote Republican) rather than critical citizens, and to redefine university research agendas to support economic development and the business interests of wealthy corporations. It’s too bad. I used to love North Texas. Now, I suppose my employer of twenty-five plus years will become as remote to me as my Alma Mater, Southern Methodist University, which renamed the building I lived in as a freshman Clements Hall, in honor of a man who (however much he may have represented the Dallas business elite) did SMU a great deal of harm, though he’s now dead.

More recently, SMU has solicited and won the opportunity to house the George W. Bush Presidential library and its partisan think tank, over strong but poorly organized protests from faculty, staff and student groups, as well as Methodist ministers, and local interest groups.

I remember a number of conversations years back with the late A. C. Greene, who was a UNT faculty member for some years in the 1980s and 90s, in which A. C. expressed the conviction that UNT should form stronger alliances with Dallas business, establish a Dallas presence, and perhaps eventually move to the city. All of these things have now taken place, though UNT’s main campus remains in Denton; but I can’t imagine A. C., whose roots were in the same West Texas town as mine, countenancing UNT’s present top-down reorganization strategy, any more than I can imagine Willis Tate, who was SMU president when I was a student, tearing his shirt for George W. Bush.