Chris here, introducing a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value.  His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  

Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF," Prof. Barkawi writes, "completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other's work in terms of whether this or that book or article is 'three star' or 'four star'."

Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing resources needed for academic work, but as the continuous monitoring and non-expert assessment of research and teaching that winds up justifying resource restriction and permanent reorganization.  Shifting audit to management, he argues, undermines "the entire point of university research," which "is conversation and contestation over what is true and right. In the natural sciences, as in the social sciences and humanities, one person's truth is another person's tosh, and valid knowledge emerges from the clash of many different perspectives." This complex, internally regulated, expertize-driven debate is being in large part replaced by audit mechanisms. "Meanwhile," Prof. Barkawi concludes, "all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers."

Prof. Evans extends this remark about adjucts below.

I strongly agree with Tarkawi's conclusion that faculty are far more complicit in the sacking of public higher education than we are prepared to acknowledge. One of the best indexes of this is the arrogance that ladder-rank faculty display towards adjunct/part-time faculty/"lecturers" in our own departments. As with the caste system, there are so many categories for them, all of which serve the purpose of the Brahmins in the Academic Senate.  

We--and here am I tempted to specifically include you [on the list] alongside myself in this condemnation, but won't  because there's always a small chance that some of you/us are exempt from these generalizations--in fact appear to take some pride in treating adjuncts as an inferior caste. It is the norm for adjuncts to be excluded from faculty meetings and to be deprived of any say in the management of departments. Instead of resisting the "adjunctification" of the professoriat by incorporating these colleagues--because they are colleagues--into the university and our respective departments, we tolerate them as useful proof of our Brahmin status. They are our untouchables. 

And we treat them accordingly. 

I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.

Truth is that ladder-rank faculty are growing old and we are not prepared to pick this important fight with our administrations or UCOP. We are edging towards retirement, counting our beans in our pension funds, and just holding on until we escape amidst encircling doom. Safe in retirement, many of us will tut-tut and speak of the halcyon days when ladder rank faculty were little gods with real rights. 

I am much more apprised of the unflattering assessment that adjuncts/non-tenure track/contingent faculty have of ladder-rank faculty because several of them sit on the Steering Committee of the CA-AAUP. I have become acutely aware of, and grown very ashamed of, the way ladder-ranks treat the nameless Other. As Stuart Hall summarized an analogous arrogance back in the '80s, it's "The West versus the rest". 

Consider this: One adjunct on the Steering Committee teaches 6-9 courses per quarter at a bewildering array of campuses in the Bay Area. I do not have a good enough grasp of the geography of that region to understand exactly why: 

• she hits the road at 5:30 am to make her first class;  
• teachers non-stop from 8am - 5 pm (including travel time as she whizzes at breakneck speed from one campus to another) 
• takes her first and only break from 5-7pm 
• teaches again from 7-9pm 
• holds her office hour from 9-10pm (yes, that's PM) 
• checks in at a $49 /night motel on Highway 101 (in a town called Gilroy); and
• repeats this schedule three times per week.

On a "good day", she remains in the Berkeley area where she resides and teaches at 2-3 colleges. No contract, no benefits, no representation in the Senate. At the beginning of the Winter quarter, she was informed that one course had just been re-assigned to another adjunct "who needs the course more." Just like that, income that she is so vitally dependent on, and in fact cannot survive without, was taken away--by email, without prior notification and for a reason that is as inscrutable as it is uncontestable. 

Re-read this list again to grasp the full dimensions of what I can only call its horror. It is unspeakably appalling. And I am ashamed that our preponderant collective interest in matters such as SB 520, MOOCs, etc. is: "what's in it for the ladder ranks?" "How dare they strip away our rights", etc

This is the price others pay to keep us ladder ranks in clover. The results of my still informal survey at UCSD leave no doubt that  ladder ranks would club adjuncts into oblivion rather than be amalgamated with them. The arrogance, and fear of being lumped together with the Untouchable Other remains and perhaps increases even as the once-venerable ladder rank category shrinks with each passing year.

In fact, it is best to not mention a category of fellow workers and colleagues--humans and good people all--who now account for 76% of the academic workforce.

Absent a UC faculty union with real teeth, I cannot see faculty mounting anything close to meaningful opposition to the gutting of UC. What would make a difference is an alliance of faculty, regardless of rank, at all three levels of the Master Plan. (Yes, there are other two other levels). But that will not happen, mostly because UC faculty are aghast at the idea of rubbing shoulders with the Untouchables both amongst them and those who labor in recondite places without darkening the views from Sather Gate or scenic La Jolla.

I now feel that we shall deserve what we get.

There are two ways to read the important document, “Academic Performance Indicators at the University of California.”  I’ll call them Jekyll and Hyde.

Jekyll

This report is a breakthrough for the administrative recognition of faculty labor.  Among other things, it notes that:

·      Contrary to nationwide claims that faculty have shifted out of teaching, UC faculty teach 13% more student credit hours (SCH) today than twenty years ago, with most of that increase coming since 2005-06.

·      Budget cuts mean that student-faculty ratio increased 17.5% in the past twenty years, and is slated to increase another 7.7%, for a 25% increase overall.

·      These increases occur on a base of a typical faculty workweek of 61.3 hours (6). 42% of that is spent on instruction (not 54.3% as stated in the report; h/t Charles Schwartz). If we assumed that salaries cover a forty-hour week, one third of faculty workload is performed as unpaid overtime. If faculty worked a forty-hour week, the university would lose a third of its faculty output.

The study on which UCOP bases the 61.3-hour workweek is almost thirty years old. It was conducted during what turned out to be the waning years of full-scale Master Plan funding.  Given subsequent increases in the student-faculty ratio and in SCHs taught per instructor, very crude arithmetic would get total faculty hours to something closer to 65 today, assuming (dubiously) that not too much of the additional student workload was passed on to TAs or computers.  

That fits with my experience and the anecdotal evidence. A normal faculty workweek is, for example, 5 ten-hour days per week (say 8am to 6 pm) plus another 6 hours on Saturday (perhaps 8 to 2, or all afternoon), plus another 10 hours per week via 2 hours Monday through Thursday evenings (e.g. of email), and at least a couple of hours on Sunday to get ready for the week.

That’s a routine week.  Grant deadlines, midterms and finals grading, membership on a search committee or grad admissions, problems with a course—these kinds of things can spike hours well beyond the 60+ norm.  Also, this is a typical professor, not a blue-chip PI of the type discussed in my post about the UCLA neuro-imaging lab, who must organize many simultaneous projects and a large staff, or a professor who throughout the academic year travels one to three times a month to lecture, as has been happening to me.

If you think about changes in research since the mid-1980s, current overall hours may be higher than 61. For example, grant acceptance rates have fallen below below 20% in many STEM fields and below 10% in others.  A PI needs to submit between 5 and 10 applications per grant received. There is more unfunded administrative reporting and compliance.  If we continued like this we could get the weekly average for a grant-active STEM professor, or a self-funded researcher in the humanities doing all research as an overload on while teaching 300-500 students a year, into 70 hours a week fairly quickly. 

The report also makes a good effort to tie UC research to instructional quality.

Ladder faculty research also provides an important foundation for the entire undergraduate curriculum. UC undergraduates learn not only the basics of a field but also the big questions, the latest findings, and the methods by which scholarship is carried out. Not as well known is the fact that an increasing number of undergraduates participate directly in research.  As of 2010-11, according to the 2012 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), 56 percent of seniors had done some kind of research or creative project with faculty and 54 percent had taken at least one student research course. These experiences help develop the critical thinking, communication, and problem solving skills, as well as domain-specific knowledge, that employers are looking for and that are useful across many different careers, many different life circumstances, and in all areas of citizenship.  (7)

This is a good starter description of the baseline “creativity learning” that public universities need to offer their students in the 21^st century.  Routine white-collar work is increasingly hard to find, and undergrad teaching needs an upgrade, not an austerity-driven, ongoing demotion. “Research learning” is a key to the upgrade.

Finally, UC faculty’s “degree productivity” is double that of private institutions in the Association of American of Universities (AAU), a high-end research group (Display 7). If you reduce education to crude accountability metrics, you get the same story that you do if you evaluate research content: UC faculty members are extremely productive. They are, if anything, over-productive.  And excessively self-exploiting.

Hyde

But there is a second way to read this report:  as a justification for turning UC into an undergraduate school, and a mid-level one at that.  

The first problem is UCOP’s time-honored claim that state funding cuts haven’t hurt quality.  The opening paragraph is a nice tribute to the extra efforts undertaken by UC faculty, staff, and students. But since all this has “enabled UC campuses to maintain excellence in the educational enterprise while reducing costs,” who’s to say the cuts were a problem?  And why not cut public funds even more? Won’t it just force faculty and students to become even more efficient?

To head off this interpretation, this Academic Performance report would need to offer some evaluation of UC educational quality, beyond output metrics like percentages who obtain degrees after X years of enrollment.  The higher ed world has made this shift from looking just at outputs to trying to assess learning. One milestone in this shift was the 2011 book, Academically Adrift, which used results from a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to estimate that after four years of college, over one third of college students show no gains in writing, complex reading, or critical thinking.  The culprit was a lack of rigor in many college programs, combined with a lack of student seriousness about their studies. (An often-omitted detail is that majors in the liberal arts and sciences did much better than this.) 

UCOP doesn’t try to show that UC degrees are at least as rigorous as before, but shows that they are even more numerous.  The report doesn’t even raise this issue of quality and rigor.  Anyone familiar with current issues of student learning will be disappointed by this quantitative approach—as will anyone who struggles in underfunded UC classrooms to offer rigor on a mass scale.

In addition, the section on graduation education is underdeveloped. The takeaway is that UC is average in doctoral productivity.  There is no argument here for the longstanding ambition of the younger campuses to increase their proportion of PhD students.  They are slated in the report to remain near the bottom of the AAU in this measure. UCOP should have mentioned that shrinking doctoral programs will hurt the research ecology and undergraduates at the same time, since grad students do much front-line teaching.  There’s no case made here for starting with average productivity and then investing in order to do new and special things with public university doctoral programs.

Having not asked the question of whether state cuts have undermined educational rigor at either the B.A. or Ph.D. level, the report ends with a series of efficiency strategies that could make B.A. degrees cheaper--and less rigorous.  The efficiencies are familiar: simplify (and reduce) B.A. requirements, use more online courses, and improve transferability (pp 21-22).   But the report has already shown that UC B.A.s are cheap enough, and in reality are probably now too cheap.   There are no big new savings to be had here, because UC has been squeezing undergraduates for over 20 years.

Finally, here’s the report’s vision of the future:

Projections of student enrollments and total faculty numbers, as described earlier, indicate that faculty will be asked to increase their instructional workload over the next few years.  They will expect to do so. Based on current projections, SCH per ladder faculty member should grow by approximately ten percent over the next five years. Though not calibrated in courses per year, additional hours would represent a further increase in teaching effort.

Having shown that UC faculty teach more than ever—on a 60+ hour week--the report says they will be asked to teach even more.  It suggests for some unknown reason that faculty expect this, when in fact every faculty member I know opposes it.

The text then goes on to suggest that “UC must maintain an environment in which it can recruit and retain such pre-eminent faculty,” for the bizarre reason that such faculty “will work far beyond a 40-hour work week and devote about half their UC work time, and about two-thirds of a 40-hour work week, to instructional activities and carry them out very well.”  So the stated point of a having the best faculty is that they are best at overworking themselves!  UCOP seems to accept permanent operational austerity, which implies that faculty wll spend more of their time on teaching but not be able to add much quality to the teaching they do.  

What Jekyll gives here, Hyde takes away.   The presentation of the report, and any follow-ups, should make the following points:

·      Budget cuts have hurt UC instructional quality (in spite of everyone’s heroic efforts)

·      Instructional quality depends on adequate per-student outlays, which, given the cap on tuition, means significant public funding restoration

·      The faculty’s professional responsibility is to increase rigor, not to water it down

·      Quality and rigor, not quantity and output, is the real service to the public mission today--in research and instruction alike.

That said, it's great to see the general campuses at the center of the Regents' agenda.

There’s been much local coverage of two principal investigators switching from UCLA to USC, and taking with them an estimated 85 people from UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI).  The Los Angeles Times has run two stories about it, one of which received over 120 reader comments, and the story was Larry Mantle’s lead on his Airtalk show at KPCC, where he had one of the two departing faculty members as his guest. 

But beyond a big win for the Trojans over the Bruins, why should the public care?

The basics are that USC courted and successfully lured LONI’s director, Arthur Toga, and one of its nine listed faculty, Paul Thompson, along with what Larry Gordon and Eryn Brown report in the Los Angeles Times as most of the lab’s academic staff. As is usually the case in this kind of move:

• The academic domain is in one or more superhot areas of research, in this case, the intersection of neuroscience and big data.
• The principals are said to be among the best in the world, and their presence expected to be “transformative,” in the term of the USC president.
• The scientists need a new building.
• No one on either side will explain the business deal or talk financial specifics.
• Everyone praises competition as normal and good for science.  Prof. Thompson told Larry Mantle that UCLA would recruit great new people to replace those who depart. 
• The quoted public university official states that the loss is not related to cuts to public funding.
• Everyone else thinks the departure is related to cuts in public funding.

The Times reporters directly contradicted the UCLA official by citing Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, who told them, "This is a major problem for public higher education.” Similarly, one of the Times readers wrote,

everytime a public institution competes with private, the public one will always lose. They public will always equate anything public with greedy government workers and will resent money going to support what they consider unproductive and unaccountable bureaucrats. The public does not distinguish between productive government ventures and those that are a drain on taxpayers.  (“awunganyi” May 10)

In a follow-up story, the chair of the UC Academic Senate, Robert Powell, said that the exit has “reinforced my fears that Sacramento is not paying enough attention to the research mission of UC.”

True, Sacramento doesn’t pay enough attention to UC research. But no one has spelled out the loss to the public in this move of an excellent neuro-imaging lab.  What is the loss here exactly?

There’s a hit to the UCLA brand.  Brand matters to fundraising, to personnel recruitment, and to grant writing.  It is widely assumed that the best people with the most job offers will chose to go to the richest and scientifically hottest place. UCLA has some repair work to do.

There’s a hit to the status of UC and of public universities in general. This is a loss to the image of public universities as being as good as the best.  More people than ever assume that even UC is reverting to the mean in which public means mediocre and private means the best. 

But both of these losses are fairly easy to dismiss.  Universities are now ranked like sports teams, and UCLA will focus on winning the next game.  UCLA apparently didn’t even take the field for this last one—Profs. Toga and Thompson didn’t ask the UCLA department chair to make a counteroffer.   Prof. Thompson was eloquent on Airtalk about the benefits to the discipline overall to have a concentrated facility with a great infrastructure, and promised ongoing synergy with colleagues doing related work at UCLA. Any damage to research seems temporary at worst.  USC may have made a strategic long-term decision to be great in this area and to do what it takes, thus doing more for neuro-imagery than UCLA wants to do. And UCLA had already done quite a bit.  I don’t know LONI’s equipment and infrastructure issues at UCLA, but the only publicized financial information was of the leaders’ salaries: over $1 million / year for Prof Toga, over $420,000 for Prof. Thompson. A good number of highly qualified people will line up for jobs like these.

Here we get to a deeper loss: public understanding of the costs of science. The public salary numbers are the only thing Californians know about the money behind this deal.  When a UCSD lab moved to Rice University two years ago, one of the departing scientists helpfully explained that UC was facing a “support gap” in future years that would reduce the science they could do there.  But usually, and in this case, all the relevant facts about science funding are kept behind a veil of silence. 

(In 2007, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust told a BusinessWeek reporter that public universities would have a hard time keeping up in research financing. She was publicly rebuked by the Big 10 presidents. Since then, virtually no family financial business has been mentioned outside the family.)

Part I of the missing storyline is this.  Public research universities can no longer fully support all the science grants their excellent faculty can get. I get stories about absurd shortages of photocopier cartridges and arguments about phone charges from labs at every campus in the system.  They seem to me to be frequent and annoying enough to threaten productivity and morale.

Public universities can’t fully support their grants because extramural funding doesn’t cover the full cost of research.  Labs burn money like a jet burns fuel, which is what they are supposed to do.  LONI spent $12 million a year, as a case in point.  This is peanuts for JP Morgan or the military, but a lot for a university.   As I’ve noted in various posts, universities have to add in on average 25 cents of their “internal funds” for every dollar in extramural grants.  Public universities just don’t have the internal funds to do this like they used to.   The economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman calculated that public university expenditures have fallen from 70 cents on the dollar spent by their private peers 30 years ago to about 50 cents today (p 237-38).

In addition, these labs need advanced facilities and in some cases equipment that they can’t charge to grants. USC will build LONI a new building, one that will support other research as well.  In the case two years ago of a UCSD lab that moved to Rice University, Rice was providing space in a building that had cost it (and Texas taxpayers) north of $140 million.  USC is likely to be doing something similar.

On Airtalk, Prof. Thompson said that they must get one-third of their funding from non-governmental sources.  This puts additional strain on a public university fundraising operation that is also trying to find money for graduate fellowships to replace cut state funds. USC undoubtedly told Toga-Thompson that in contrast to UCLA, USC would put LONI at the head of the fundraising line. They may have named likely seven- and eight-figure donors were the lab to move. But labs like LONI depend on what falls from those trees. USC also charges three times the tuition that UCLA does, which is another source of funds. LONI is a big stick with which to beat the fundraising tree. Large public universities can’t fund the same level of background infrastructure or full-court fundraising for each and every one of its special projects.

The next part involves this comment about how USC is entrepreneurial and UCLA is bureaucratic. When Larry Mantle asked about this (about 16:00), Prof Thompson replied that in fact, “he didn’t see any bureaucracy: at UCLA, which is a wonderful place and gave him his career. What USC did have was a team with the “vision and experience” to manage the logistics for a complex move of 100 people.  Here’s my translation:

• USC has a central administration on campus. UCLA has UCOP in Oakland.
• USC had a bigger bureaucracy to throw at one lab, not a smaller one.
• USC was planning a move that was going to happen. UCLA was managing a large research ecosystem. (LONI wouldn’t make UCLA Medicine’s list of 10 biggest problems to solve today until it was approached with an offer, which it wasn’t.)

My four conclusions are these:

1. UCLA’s core problem is a funding shortage, not surplus bureaucracy. (UCLA is the wealthiest UC campus, so things only get worse from there). 

2. Public universities need to tell the truth about research funding.  This will include the facts that science loses money, that some portion of undergraduate tuition funds offset research costs, and that most funding doesn’t “produce” anything in the near-term, except findings more research along with a great deal of useful failure.

3. Public universities need to explain why research like LONI’s should be to some large extent at public universities.  Why does it matter to the science, to the public impact, to the education of the next generation of scientists? Perhaps there is more openness and accountability at publics, and therefore more innovation. Perhaps scientists at public universities have a better feel for public needs and do more useful research.  Perhaps public universities uniquely have the necessary scale to train the thousands and millions of researchers in all fields to solve our ever-mounting problems.  We now need a new theory of public universities, before things get even worse.




4. Universities both private and public need to open up  discussion of spending priorities to their academic communities.  Given rising costs and shrinking revenues, choices have to be made. They  need to involve the faculty, from all disciplines, and students of all levels.  This is as true of USC as of UCLA, which has a poor record of consultation and can only buy a limited number of LONI-type labs with (in part) student tuition and non-STEM cross-subsidies.  Privates can now raise tuition only so much. Academic choices need to come from a bottom-up debate of a kind that higher ed has never had.

If we can’t do (1), show public efficiency (poorer but smarter, more research with less money, more degrees for each faculty member [page 16]), the public has no reason to support rebuilt public funding.

If we can’t do (2), tell the truth about funding, the public will keep thinking that science supports itself and doesn't need state money. Funding will stay flat or fall, and the public university research ecology will get gradually weaker. 

If we can’t do (3), say why public is often better than private, the public will be happy to see high-end science like neuro-imaging as done by the 1% for the 1%, and expect the 0.01% to pay for it with charitable donations.



If we can't do (4), achieve common understanding of resource choices, most public university students and faculty won't miss the LONIs as much as they should.

The ordeal of UC Davis's "Banker's Dozen" came to a practical end on Monday when they settled with the Yolo County District Attorney on reduced charges stemming from their protest of the connection between US Bank and UC Davis.  As you recall, 11 students and 1 professor had been charged with a range of misdemeanors that could have resulted in up to 11 years imprisonment.  The protesters had been engaged in civil disobedience on the sidewalks around the US Bank to draw attention to the connection between the bank and the University and to oppose increasing privatization of services.  In the settlement, all but one of the charges have been dropped (the last remains but will be dropped contingent on the protesters performing 80 hours of community service). The protesters have agreed to one "infraction." So, in effect a year's unnecessary prosecution will get the Dozen to do what they wanted to do in the first place: serve their community.

A statement from the Banker's Dozen can be found at Reclaim UC.

Cloudminder has a larger collection of links available here.

Corrected 5/9/13 to clarify charge issues.

May 7, 2013

An Open Letter to California State Legislators

Dear CA State Legislators,

As a parent and a UC professor, I feel compelled to urge you to reject the SB 520 bill being presented to you by Darrell Steinberg. Please fund the Community Colleges and the California State Universities and the University of California properly: that way you can help guarantee access to quality education. By mandating the use of on-line general education courses for public higher education, you put the entire system of public higher education at risk.

In education, there are no quick fixes: solutions such as SB 520 can cause long-lasting damage. Universities have been already been seriously weakened by years of budget cuts and administrative bloat. Real change, however, can only happen come through the implementation of ground-up reforms.

Our students need more interaction with real-life professors: they don’t need more screen time.  The Internet is an amazing resource for research and learning, but more screen time for young people is not a substitute for rich pedagogical experiences. Students need more contact with professors and their peers in an information saturated media ecology. They need quality experiences with on-line education as supplements not substitutes for real life classroom experience.

Although SB 520 has been amended to protect public funds from private exploitation, the provisions are weak at best. Case in point: California spends millions of dollars a year buying STAR tests from the ETS. A rampant assessment emphasis in public education has provided a windfall for secretive, privately run organizations like ETS. ,Next, week, my son - like millions of Californian schoolchildren - will be taking standardized tests that may or may not provide accurate assessments of his academic achievements and aptitudes.  Star testing was implemented as part of an accountability regime in K-12 education. It has produced mixed results in terms of actually improving the California public school system. Class sizes in public schools meanwhile have ballooned.

Technological solutions to social problems are dangerous panacea disguising the real cause of the problems we face – shrinking budgets for the University’s core mission of undergraduate education. Cynical administrative moves to disguise economic chicanery are not the solution.

As Diane Ravitch has written, “American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them.”  (222) 

SB 520 deplores the fact that so many of our students cannot get into courses to complete their degrees in a timely fashion. However, this is a problem that the three segments of public higher education in California do not have to the same extent. The UC faces that problem much less than the community colleges. Inversely, SB520 drives those in the UC, CSU, and the CCs who already developed their own hybrid technology-enhanced education into shot-gun marriages with for-profit providers, thus funneling public funds into private enterprise hands.. The present crisis is not some kind of natural disaster, like an earthquake. The crisis of access is entirely man-made!

Every undergraduate program on my campus has been cut to the bone: our core missions are compromised every day by budget cuts. Cal State, Community College and UC students represent a broad cross section of the population of  California. Our students don’t deserve access to on-line education approved or not by CA faculty. They don’t deserve a virtual University -- they deserve a real one. They need more access to professors, to content and to pedagogical situations that challenge and move them.

Please listen to the students. Time and again students across the state have insisted publicly that they neither need nor want more online education. Nor do they want state funds to go to for-profit and pseudo-not-for-profit vendors. Our students want a good education. Please leave it to those most engaged in public higher education to determine how technology-enhanced delivery can work to improve the classroom experience.

Please vote against SB 520. Please restore the UC, Cal State and Community College budgets so that we can continue to provide access to all of California’s college students.

Yours truly,

Catherine Liu

Professor, Film and Media Studies

Director, UC Irvine Humanities Collective

UC Irvine

Drawing: University of the Philippines, Visayas Cebú College, completion scheduled 2014.

Over the course of a week I'll discuss new perspectives on MOOCs  (massive, open, online courses)  from a conference, a survey, a student column, and a faculty letter.

By way of background, I note that we are entering a 4th phase in the sped-up lifecyle of the online debate.  In a year, MOOCs have gone from being (1), a niche service for underserved markets, to (2), a short-term fix for course supply problems in funding-starved public colleges, to (3), a replacement for current shortfalls and future growth in public university systems that makes restored funding unnecessary.

In the process, MOOCs have entangled themselves in the politics of higher education and the political economy of post-crisis capitalism.  They must now be held accountable both for the impact of their claims on public university budgets and for the social consequences of their educational outcomes.  

My sense is that the emerging 4th phase is going to undermine (3), for the good of students, faculty, and MOOCs that colleges can both maintain and use.  I'll come back to these issues in upcoming posts.

The Lawrence, Kansas Conference

I was thinking about MOOCs again last week at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutions, hosted this year by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas (#CHCI13).  (Sincere thanks to center director Victor Bailey, who proved that public universities are still capable of great productions.) They, the MOOCs, popped into my head at a panel ("Global Humanities and the State") comparing university trends in the European Union, South Africa, and Asia. 

South Africa is an important special case that I will omit here.  The European Union is also important for the wrong reasons: it is going nowhere fast in higher ed.  As one panelist explained, EU research policy "all begins in the 1950s, and you know what that was: S&T, S&T, and more S&T [science and technology], and then something good must come of it." 

The EU's overall research budgets are small, the increments uninspiring, the grand challenges overly general and banal, and the bias against social and cultural knowledge a sad tribute to the blindness of technocrats who continue to repress the actual history of Europe, in which progress has depended entirely on the active uptake of true social and cultural knowledge.  The humanities fields were entirely absent from the first six "framework programs," have been lumped together with social sciences in a small corner of the 7th framework, and are in a similar place in FP 8, "Horizon 2020," where society's role is largely equated with green energy. I simplify somewhat, but less than you might assume.

Humanists receive less money than scientists per grant, of course, but even so undergo a less than 10% success rate in the current Framework Program competition, or half the rate of the scientists.  Having to compete twice as hard leads in effect to humanists having to self-fund most of their research.  This is research that tries, among other things, to preserve and explain the human experience of the ages, knit Europe together across national and linguistic lines, resolve tensions over race and immigration, and curate tomorrow's masterworks of insight into the human condition--all on a shoestring, usually one dug out of the scholar's own sock drawer.

But the analysts of Europe didn't find any EU MOOCs claiming to solve funding issues. Neither did the survey of Asian universities, provided by Alan Kam Leung Chan, the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore. Prof. Chan treated us to news of a higher ed building boom like only retirement-age Americans can remember here.

China is the most famous case, having in ten years more than tripled the number of college graduates from 9 million to 30 million.  Since 1991, Singapore has added four universities to its previous two, and by 2020 will have a higher bachelors degree proportion than the US.  Indonesia has 30 public universities, and 2000 new private universities. The Philippines has 500 public universities and 1500 new privates. Vietnam has gone from 150 universities in 2000 to over 400 today, with 20 percent of those being private.

The scale refutes the number one economic premise of American MOOC development, which is that even rich countries can't afford great public universities anymore, so medium- and low-income countries shouldn't try.  In the North American mythology, less "developed" countries must teach their teeming masses on line, with low-cost American MOOC services endorsed by MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Penn.  And yet Asian countries are ignoring this Western wisdom. They have rejected its "build nothing" implications.

Obviously there are questions about quality in the midst of all this growth. But such questions are being asked by Asian policymakers, who appear not to be diverted by technology sales teams from their higher educational goals. 

Prof. Chan noted that Asian countries are engaged in debates over exactly the issues that for most U.S. policymakers have been pre-decided—whether and how bibliometrics and rankings should be used, how to deepen exposure to the humanities rather than marginalizing them, how exactly to teach Asian cultures in a global context, how to design differentiated educational pathways across every subject area, and how to teach not only for content mastery but for creative capability as a college outcome for every student.  Prof. Chan advocated a relentless focus on maintaining the highest quality standards in all programs. Without that, he noted, Asian countries' students won't be prepared for the world environment in which they will have to operate.  

Sitting in the audience, I was dismayed to realize yet again that In the U.S. we are having the opposite conversation, which is how to get public university services back to their inadequate level of the mid-2000s, while spending less money than we did then.

Afterwards I blurted out my question: "Why this higher ed torpor in Europe and North America, compared to the dynamism of Asia?" 

This got a few of us to laugh.  But none of us had a decent answer.

Last week offered more examples of Sacramento Politicians following the latest fashionable thinking on Higher Education.

For those of you who missed it, Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his SB520.  It tends to soften the language of command and the nature of the targets.  But its essential nature--to provide legitimacy for for-profit online providers while ignoring questions of curricular improvements--remain in place.  You can find the bill here.

Also last week the Governor's office released a framework for Higher Education funding that I suppose will be elaborated in his May Revise on the State Budget.  As you can see it pats the Governor on the back for promising to increase Higher Education funding back to where it was 6 years ago while imposing a tuition freeze and a series of quantitative metrics on the three higher ed segments.  It confuses price with cost and doesn't seem to realize that instructional costs have been reduced and the driver for tuition increases has been the reduction in state funding.  We have posted the framework here.

We will try to be back with fuller analysis when we can.  Bob Samuels does have analysis here while Dan Mitchell has some thoughts on the May Revise here.

By Celeste Langan

On Sunday, April 7, 2013, the Daily Californian ran a story with the headline, “Campus announces plans to construct new aquatics center.”  It’s unclear from the story just when this announcement might be said to have taken place, since a public hearing on the proposal was held in Berkeley on April 3.  Presumably at least those who organized the meeting knew of the proposal in advance.  Still, it’s fair to say that the proposal came as a complete surprise to most of the Daily Cal’s readership—that is to say, faculty, staff, and students.  An announcement has yet to appear in the Berkeleyan or on the UC Berkeley website.

We’re told by Intercollegiate Athletics that the proposed Aquatics Center, to be built on what’s currently a parking lot adjacent to the Tang Student Health Center, is an “extremely generous” proposal on the part of private donors (referred to as “Cal Aquatic Legends”), who have engaged to raise all necessary money.  We’re told that Berkeley’s pool facilities pale in comparison with Stanford’s, and that the pool facilities we have are too crowded.  Forced to share Spieker Pool with other students, faculty, and community members, the swimmers and divers who compete for Berkeley on an intercollegiate level can only practice at certain times, which limits their opportunity to elect certain major fields of study. 

Why should we look this gift horse in the mouth?

With the new Aquatics Center, intercollegiate athletes would no longer have to share.  We’re told that the proposed new facility would be for the exclusive use of intercollegiate athletes and certain illustrious alumni.  Thus the proposal is parallel in concept to the recently completed High Performance Athletic Center near Memorial Stadium and Memorial Grove.  When that project was first proposed, the Cal community was also promised that it would be funded entirely through private donations; in 2006, we were told that $90 million was “in the bank.”  We know now that only $29 million was raised through private donations.  Instead, the University is in debt for that facility alone (not counting Memorial Stadium) to the tune of $124 million.

It’s probably true that better facilities and resources aid performance.  But shouldn’t we be applying that principle first to the 99% of Berkeley students who are not intercollegiate athletes, and to the object of academic performance?  Instead, a valuable public resource (the land granted to the university to educate California’s citizens) would be diverted to serve the interests of only a few.  Even if the construction costs of the proposed Aquatics Center are entirely covered by private donations, the plans for the building effectively monopolize that space, excluding 99% of the Berkeley community from its usufruct.

Wherever we turn today, we read that the “bricks and mortar” university is no longer viable; that it’s too costly and denies access to high-quality education.  At Berkeley we’re all too familiar with the crumbling of bricks and mortar; after nearly every winter rainstorm one can find pieces of mortar or peeling paint, along with puddles, in some of the campus’ most historic buildings, including the hallways and locker rooms of Hearst Gymnasium, the poor but beautiful elder sister of the Spieker complex.  Faculty try to teach and conduct research in deteriorating classrooms and laboratories. Donors, we are told, have no interest in funding the repair of existing facilities, in upgrading and greening the heating and plumbing systems.  And the state’s declining support for the UC system makes even everyday maintenance a financial challenge.  To respond to these challenges, the administration tries to find ways to cut costs—diminished library hours, fewer books bought, class enrollments capped to accommodate available classroom space and diminished numbers of ladder-rank faculty.

In this context, it’s not just the prospect of turning a parking lot into an athletic facility that galls.  It’s the fact that the new facility will be for the exclusive use of a small number of intercollegiate athletes, some of whom already receive support in the form of athletic scholarships.  The rest of the student body, as well as the faculty and the community, will still have access to existing facilities.  But what’s to guarantee that “access” will actually be any more extensive?  Where is the plan to provide more hours for recreational swimming, to pay for the requisite lifeguards and staff? Will the “Aquatic Legends” continue to foot the bill for the new Center’s operating costs, or will the University now have to divert some of the funds dedicated to Spieker and Hearst (to say nothing of classroom maintenance) to pay for heat, light, and staff at the Aquatics Center? 

It’s true that the Aquatics Center is planned for a space that’s currently a parking lot—hardly an inspired use of precious space (unless one considers the disinvestment in public transportation, which makes it difficult for many students, faculty, and staff who live far from BART to get to campus except by car).  But it’s not as if the University has worked with Alameda County to improve bus service, or on its own to develop a shuttle service, despite the fact that available parking for faculty, staff, and students has been seriously diminished by recent UCB building projects.  Moreover, the Environmental Impact Report filed for the Aquatics Center acknowledges that the project “conflicts with the existing applicable land use plan” as laid out in both the 2020 Long Range Development Plan and the South Side Plan.

Consider what’s happening here.  It’s a perfect case of what’s called “the privatization of public resources.”  Often “privatization” is represented as a benefit, the assumption being that “private enterprise” operates more efficiently than public entities, which serve a larger constituency, and often conform to a greater number of regulations.  (Kind of like the difference between a car and a bus.) But we need to remember to ask who benefits from these supposed efficiencies.  In the case of the Aquatics Center, UC Berkeley would be ceding land use—granted by the state for the benefit of all Californians—to a tiny fraction of athletes.  Given past history, it is likely that students and taxpayers would end up financing a good portion of the costs. 

And what of the net psychic costs?  Although universities are imperfect institutions, traversed by all the economic, social, and cultural inequalities of their historical moment, they also have their utopian aspect:  the “oneness” implicit in the name; the sense that the accumulated resources of a university, intellectual and physical, are shared my all members of its community.  That’s why a university’s libraries, grounds, and buildings—its “bricks and mortar”—are still important, because they provide a space for the exchange of knowledge as a common good, and remind us that education is, at its best, a res publica, a public thing. 

We should therefore ask the Administration to halt planning/construction on the Aquatics Center until they demonstrate to the public and formally to the Senate that it is a) actually, truly fully paid for by donors, and b) that it is a good use of collective public University resources at the present time, given that it will be used by a small fraction of the UCB community for a nonacademic mission.

Senator Darrell Steinberg, after push back from higher education figures, has offered up an amended version of his Senate Bill 520.  Although it shifts authority for approving online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC)  to the administrations of the public higher education segments (in consultation with their Senates), it sharpens Steinberg's effort to compel the three segments to subsidize the growth of private online course providers.  Instead of addressing the long-standing underfunding of the three segments, Steinberg is seeking to compel California Higher Education to depend upon alliances with venture capital.

One fundamental change in the amended bill is its elimination of any role for COERC in the new online course system.  As I indicated in a previous post Steinberg had originally tied his push for online courses to his previous push for a system for producing digital textbooks.  This part of SB520 garnered the most vociferous push back because it removed authority over curricula from the Academic Senates at the three segments and struck most obviously at faculty authority.  In response to that push-back, SB520 now commands that the new California Student Access Platform "shall be developed and administered by the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments."  He has also added a clause that each online course must have "associated with it a faculty sponsor who is a member of the faculty of the University of California, the California State University, or the California Community Colleges" if it wants approval.  There remain ambiguities here, most especially concerning the respective authority granted to the administrations and senates of the Community Colleges, CSU, and UC.  But Steinberg has made that a problem for the segments rather than seeming to attack faculty authority directly.

Secondly, Steinberg has restricted access to the Online Platform, perhaps in response to the manifold questions that surround MOOCs and their educational value.  In the revised version, Steinberg now declares that the Platform will only serve students matriculated either at one of the three segments or at a California High School.   As before, the Platform is designed to focus on lower-division courses that have histories of over-enrollment.

But in modifying these sections of the Bill, Steinberg has only intensified its major implications.  Whatever Steinberg's motivations, the amended version of the Bill makes clear that the heart of the legislation is mandating that California Public Higher Education shift course creation to private providers and guarantee private online providers a market in credentials and an educational legitimacy that they have been unable to generate on their own. 

SB520 states as a principle that:

California could significantly benefit from a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework that increases partnerships between faculty and online course technology providers aimed at allowing students in strategically selected lower division areas to take online courses for credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems. 

 Indeed, the Platform itself:

shall solicit, develop, and promote appropriate partnerships between online course providers and faculty members of the University of California, California State University, and the California Community Colleges for the development and deployment of high-quality online options for strategically selected lower division courses.

And lest we miss the point, SB520 also commands that:

(2) (A) For each of the 50 courses identified under paragraph (1), solicit and promote appropriate partnerships between online course technology providers and faculty of the University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges which, by the fall term of the 2014–15 academic year, shall result in the availability of multiple high-quality online course options in which students may enroll in that term.

(B) An online course developed pursuant to this paragraph shall be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges.

Apparently, Senator Steinberg has sought to appease faculty opposition by shifting authority over the courses to the 3 segments and by insisting that each course be linked to a faculty "sponsor."  But these changes do nothing to the central effect of the Bill: to secure a subsidized market for for-profit online companies.

If this conclusion seems harsh, it is only necessary to look at Marty Block's alternative bill SB547.  I discussed Block's bill and its problems earlier, but one clear difference is that Block does not require public institutions of higher education to partner with for-profit online companies.  Steinberg's SB520 on the other hand, commands that partnering as its very essence.

It is not clear why Steinberg thinks that this is a good solution. Obviously, it allows the Legislature to avoid confronting their own role in underfunding higher education.  Perhaps his thinking has been shaped by the lobbying of people such as Sebastian Thrun (whose Udacity seems to be basing its future on precisely this sort of captured public market) or Steinberg's former colleague Dean Flores of 20 Million Minds.  Flores, who has been pushing online providers across the nation recently told Inside Higher Education that “I think every professor in the nation starts with, ‘I think online education is going to ruin higher education,’ " he said. "What I think every professor is saying is, ‘Online learning is going to significantly disrupt the way I’ve been doing things."

Higher Ed administrators and Senate leaders may think that the proposed changes are enough to make the bill palatable.  But this would be a mistake.  In its stripped down version, SB520 continues to forward an agenda of insufficient public funding and a desire to force public institutions to serve private interests.

The latest version of SB520 needs to be opposed.  But even more than that, Higher Education needs to do a far better job of explaining what actually goes on in campuses and systems and how universities and colleges in California actually work.  Or Steinberg's trojan horse will not be the last.

By Anonymous

Yesterday was the first day of the IU-system wide strike. "IU on Strike" reports that 15 picket teams were sent across the Bloomington campus to spread the strike – to dorms, workplaces, the major academic buildings, cafeterias, and bus stops. Teach-ins and alternate classes, organized by undergrads, grad students and faculty and open to all, were held in the heart of campus. More than 300 people left the starting point of the strike demo, snaking across campus, and were joined by more than 100 along the way. Many support staff (whose contracts include a no-strike clause) stood in the doorways of buildings to watch.

Later in the day, a group of 150 protested the Board of Trustees meeting which was held behind closed doors. Small numbers of people were allowed into the meetings, in groups of five. The vast majority of the protesters remained outside, chanting, sharing stories of debt, and making noise. The Board of Trustees meeting is traditionally open to the public.

"IU on Strike" assesses that hundreds of people participated in the movement for the first time. Many academic buildings were half-abandoned. Solidarity actions were also reported at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan, while statements were received from many more schools across the country.

The strikers declared the first day of the strike a success, in making it clear to the Trustees that the political costs for cutting public education have gone up, and laying the groundwork for the larger movement and disruption necessary to turn the university around. Strikers demands focus on reducing tuition and fees, stopping privatization, improving wages for workers, and issues of diversity.