New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Abusive Uses of Big Data, College Admissions edition

Per an investigative report in the Washington Post, growing numbers of colleges are using cookies and other website tracking devices to profile potential students and selectively recruit, including sometimes by income level (there’s a long discussion of how Mississippi State appears to be doing this).  And of course they do so by spending lots of scarce money on for-profit consulting companies which then do the data analytics work to try to guess who is likely to apply, attend, etc.  Some of the worst offenders appear to be schools facing declining enrollments and/or state funds, which therefore have to recruit paying students particularly aggressively.

Along the way, they’re using all the tricks in the big data company playbook.  For example, Capture Higher Ed does the following for its clients:

“Each visitor to the university site gets a cookie, which sends Capture information including that person’s Internet protocol address, the type of computer and browser they are using, what time of day they visited the site and which pages within the site they clicked on …. Every time that person returns to the site, Capture learns more information about them, such as their interest in athletics or the amount of time they spend on financial aid pages, according to promotional videos on the company’s website.  Initially, the cookies identify each visitor by the IP address, a unique code associated with a computer’s Internet connection, but Capture also offers software tools to match the cookie data with people’s real identities, according to the company’s promotional videos. Colleges do this by sending marketing emails to thousands of prospective students, inviting them to click on a hyperlink inside the message for more information about a particular topic, according to the videos.  When a student clicks on the link, Capture learns which email address is associated with which IP address, connecting the student’s real identity to the college’s snapshot of the student’s Web browsing history, Capture executives said in one of the videos”

And many of them seem to have the same arrogant entitlement about their data collection that the big data companies do: when asked about students who might not want to be tracked, the CIO at SUNY Buffalo State College replied that “You have a choice of not interacting at all.”

I wonder how many scholarships they could fund with the money that they funnel into those private consultants?

On the Police Shooting in Charlotte, and being Ordered to Remove a Post

For those who haven’t been following the news, there was a police shooting in Charlotte the night before last.  The facts of the case are still being investigated: the police claim that the black man who was shot had a gun; his family says he had a book.  I’m not sure the distinction matters, as North Carolina is an open carry state, so “he had a gun” isn’t obviously relevant.  There were violent protests both last night and the night before.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the following statement on the Ethics Center’s webpage (including the italicized portion marking it as my own).  I woke up this morning to an email ordering me to take it down, and to call my dean.  I am not going to die on this hill, so I removed the post.  But we live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

I reproduce the statement in its exact form below, in case someone may find it useful. Systemic violence against people of color is worse than the loss of our universities - including public ones, as I was sternly informed UNC Charlotte is - as places of intellectual engagement.  But the latter is not trivial or insignificant, as the steady collapse of meaningful public discourse is a disaster for any viable understanding of democracy.

UPDATE (9/22): There is dashcam footage of the shooting, which the CMPD has.  The family has seen the video, and wants it made public.  Earlier in the day, the CMPD chief had declared that the video would not be made public, because "The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun."  Unless this is a misstatement (but this is the exact quote I have seen, in several sources), this means that the CMPD Chief has essentially refused to release the video on the grounds that it does not clearly exonerate his officer.  Someone please show me how I am misreading this statement!   In any event, there are already too many issues to discuss here, but the national conversation has to include discussion about what to do with video footage of shootings.  North Carolina has passed a law that generally suppresses the public availability of that video.  It takes effect Oct. 1.  I do not know what the legal situation with the footage is now, but the conflict between the CMPD Chief and the family on whether the video should be released is important.

Why Faculty Lock-Outs Are Irresponsible And Inappropriate

By: Samir Chopra

In response to my previous post making note of the lock-out of faculty at Long Island University (LIU), a Facebook friend wrote on my page:

So, I don’t understand. What makes university professors any different than people who work any other job? If you don’t like the pay, or don’t like the working conditions, simply go somewhere else. An employeer prohibiting someone from coming into their workplace who doesn’t agree to the terms of their employment is immenently fair. I’m sure the employeer (whatever, whoever, and for whatever industry) has made a calculated position to turn away their employees because they weren’t worth the compensation they demanded. The employees may not feel that way, and maybe they can come to an agreement, but maybe not and both sides go their own merry way.

Because students are people, not products; because education is not a commodity. That’s the short answer, and it should be enough. But let’s look a little closer.

Mount St. Mary's, Metrics, and Perverse Incentives

by Ed Kazarian

As I remarked on Facebook yesterday, there is a lot of spectacular mendacity involved in the current crisis at Mount Saint Mary's Unviersity.  As of yesterday, the University's provost has been forced to resign, and two faculty members have been summarily fired, one a tenured associate professor of philosophy and another an untenured professor of law.  The justification for these firings, where available, made explicit reference to violating a "duty of loyalty," which adds to the already overwhelming impression that they come in retaliation for the exposure of the university president's plan to cull incoming students deemed likely to leave school without completing their first year before the school was required to report enrollment data to the federal government.* As a whole, the case is outrageous—and one hopes that these firings will be reversed, that the president and any board members who engineered them will be forced to resign, and that the principles of academic freedom, tenure, and the university's contractual obligations to its employees and its pedagogical obligations to its students that have been abrogated in the whole mess will be restored, reaffirmed, and strengthened. (Anyone who hasn't should consider signing the petition begun by John Schwenkler, located here.)

But while our attention is held by outrage over what is happening to these faculty and the cavalier attitude toward students reflected in the plan, we run the risk of overlooking the way that this case is an instance of a much more general problem. With the rise of various forms of quantitative assessment protocols (many of which, in practice, have been implemented ad hoc, and not always by folks with the training or expertise to produce reliable social science), we have also gotten a substantial increase in pressure to improve performance on such metrics, and thus to improve one's position on the rankings that are inevitably derived from them—rankings which have very real consequences for institutions, both in terms of their ability to recruit students (and their tuition) and in terms of other funding flows, like federal student aid money. 

On Throwing Contingent Faculty Under the Bus (again)

Several folks in last night's Republican presidential debate, including Marco Rubio, apparently decided to use philosophy as a foil for some of their typically ridiculous claims about education. In response, lots of people are citing an average salary for people working as professional philosophers — sometimes attributed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — north of 70k, much more than 'welders.'

I would like to take this opportunity to ask folks to think about what they're doing.  I am, and the rest of you should be, extremely dubious of statistics saying folks working as academic philosophers are making $70k on average. There is, to be blunt, no way such numbers —if they are being correctly reported — are being arrived at without massively undercounting continent faculty working at multiple schools, all technically 'part time,' and almost surely making 'welder' salaries or less. None.

At very least, let's not gleefully paper over the economic reality of many members of the profession just to score points against grandstanding right wing politicians. That would be to continue one of the worst patterns of the current academy, namely that of throwing many of us, and the most vulnerable of us, under the bus in order to reinforce the narrative that there isn't a problem with the economics of our profession — a position which is flatly wrong and only serves the interests of the most privileged subset of professional academics.

What it takes to succeed in academia

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

I’ve just been promoted to (junior)* full professor in Groningen, and while I’m still duly enjoying the accompanying feeling of achievement and recognition, it got me thinking about how I got here. It does not take much to conclude that, while I've worked incredibly hard for this, I was also *extremely* lucky. I know countless  people who work just as hard as I do (or more), and who are as good as I am at what they do (or better), and yet do not get similar professional recognition. It takes an incredible amount of luck and, yes, privilege, for things to work out. So let me comment on two kinds of luck that may play a role in one’s professional development. 

The first kind is simply the luck to have been dealt rather generous cards in life. While I am a woman in a male-dominated field, and while I had to overcome hurdles related to coming from the ‘periphery’ of academic action (originally from Brazil, and then developing my career in the Netherlands, which is ok but frankly not Top of the Pops), for the rest I’ve been extremely privileged. My parents were both academics (my mother still is), so in terms of academic support at home I was particularly well served. For a number of reasons, I also never had to worry about economical hardship and financial stability, and thus I could choose the risk of an academic career without having to worry whether one day I’d have no food on my plate. And, last but not least, I am white, not differently abled, cis, and I fit reasonably well within certain stereotypical standards of beauty.

Let me refer to this kind of luck as privilege-luck, and it is still a matter of luck because I might just as well have been born in different circumstances, and things might have been very different. One way in which privilege-luck manifests itself very conspicuously is with the so-called ‘pedigree’ phenomenon; depending on where you go to school (both undergraduate and graduate), your career will develop in very different ways. But we all know very well that the school you end up going to is almost entirely determined by the kind of socio-economical background you can fall back on.

Why Is The University Still White?

Readers of New APPS may recall Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman as the author of a powerful piece last March in Times Higher Education that drew attention to the discipline of philosophy’s overall, systemic failure to critically engage its own Whiteness.  And now, DailyNous draws our attention to a piece in The Independent, itself sourced (again) from Times Higher Education, in which Coleman announces that he will lose his position at University College London—along with the chance of that position becoming permanent—as a result of the rejection of a proposed MA in Critical Race Studies, which he had been hired specifically to develop over the past year.  

 

One important consequence of Coleman's THE piece, which is now illustrated by his current plight, is to connect the problems that are specific to the disciplinary constitution of philosophy to a set of structural and systemic factors, present throughout the academy, constraining Black scholars’ ability to engage critically with material that is of importance to them, including Whiteness and White Supremacy. These factors remain operative despite the at least rhetorical—and at times much more substantive and sincere—welcome given to these scholars and their work, especially under the sign of diversity.  And because they do, not only has representative diversity remained problematic but also the more fundamental distribution of power and privilege centered around Whiteness has remained substantially intact. 

Good News from Macedonia

Readers may recall that last December we co-hosted an open letter in opposition to a draconian law that had been instituted in Macedonia, substantially abridging the autonomy the country's universities (more info here).  The letter ended up with more than 100 signatures, of which more than 50 came through New APPS. 

A little while ago, I received an email update about the situation from Katerina Kolozova, Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Sociology at University American College-Skopje.  The news is good: the law has been suspended and, negotiations have begun between the government and the 'Student Plenums' that have been organizing against the law.  

Professor Kolozova writes:  

Dear friends, Thank you so much for supporting us! And it hasn't been in vain. The plenums have won today: the law on higher education against which we have protested for months, against which we have been occupying universities, writing legal analyses we had no place to present except the social media, combating the Government propaganda through arguments presented on our blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the law which practically killed the university autonomy has been abolished. The Parliament voted a three year moratorium two weeks ago, and today the negotiations between the ministries and the plenums kicked off based on a concept proposed by the Plenums. 

Thank you again for your signatures of support. They helped incredibly! 

I would like to congratulate all the organizers, especially those on the ground who have worked for months to prevent this law from taking effect, but also those who have been working internationally to support them. And I would like to echo Professor Kolozova's thanks to all who signed on here and elsewhere in support of the campaign. 

 

Today is a good day.

Meritocracies, Rankings, Curricula: A Personal Take On Academic Philosophy

By: Samir Chopra

Some six years ago, shortly after I had been appointed to its faculty, the philosophy department at the CUNY Graduate Center began revising its long-standing curriculum; part of its expressed motivation for doing so was to bring its curriculum into line with those of "leading" and "top-ranked" programs. As part of this process, it invited feedback from its faculty members. As a former graduate of the Graduate Center's Ph.D program, I thought I was well-placed to offer some hopefully useful feedback on its curriculum, and so, I wrote to the faculty mailing list, doing just that. Some of the issues raised in my email are, I think, still relevant to academic philosophy. Not everybody agreed with its contents; some of my cohort didn't, but in any case, perhaps this might provoke some discussion.

Here, reproduced almost verbatim, is that email:

U Oregon and the Academic Labor System

Over at DailyNous, we read that the University of Oregon has sent a letter to international graduate students warning them that they would face deportation if they were to join a strike being undertaken against the university by the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF). 

Several things should be said about this.

1) The threat appears to be credible. As I understand matters on the basis of conversations with folks who have had hiring responsibilities that frequently involved graduate students on the type of visa that is likely involved here, all the university would have to do is report to Homeland Security that the students are no longer complying with the conditions of their visas. 

2) The above highlights the extent to which international graduate student labor is an extreme form of the sort of captive, precarious labor provided by un-unionized graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) more generally—and the importance of which once led Marc Bosquet, in one of his seminal pieces on the academic labor system, to characterize actually granted PhDs as "the waste product of graduate education." Because international graduate students typically have no legal option but to work for their university employers, they represent possibly the perfect form of GTA labor. 

3) Graduate Teaching Assistant unions—which may cover more than TAs narrowly so called, also including graduate students teaching as adjunct faculty, etc.*—represent a threat to this academic labor system. I'll say a little more about this third point, and draw some general conclusions, in what follows.

[In the mean time, I encourage folks to consider adding their names to the open letter that John Protevi is hosting on his blog, calling on the University of Oregon to abandon its current tactics against the union and to grant them the very reasonable benefits they are demanding.]

The Collège International de Philosophie is in Danger of Being Closed

Many readers of this blog will be aware of the remarkable institution known as the Collège International de Philosophie, based in Paris and supported by the French government since 1983.  During its more than 30-year existence, the Collège has offered an extraordinary range of very high-quality free and public programs in France and around the world. It is, as such, one of the world's foremost institutions dedicated to public philosophy.  

Sadly, the Collège now stands days away from being forced to close because the funds to support its operations have not been paid. As is detailed here, the Collège has been the subject of a number of discussions concerning its maintenance since 2012, which led to its association with the new Université Paris Lumières in 2013. This administrative association was supposed to provide a sustainable home for the Collège; but the 240,000 Euros that form the Collège's annual operating budget have been withheld by the ministry responsible for the UPL and its associated elements—leaving the institution days away from bankruptcy.

There is a petition circulating where people can offer support for the Collège—below the fold you can find, with his permission, Gabriel Rockhill's translation of the original French text (which also details the situation that the Collège is facing, and its accomplishments and history, a bit further than my remarks above).

Privacy Research and Academic Freedom

by Gordon Hull

To the long list of rich entities trying to generate academic research that supports their business model, add (maybe) Google.  This piece in ProPublica discovered that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society had promised not to use any Google money to fund privacy research, after research done at Stanford led to a substantial fine for Google.  The article was immediately followed by a lot of backpedaling and denials on everyone’s part (there’s an update on top), and it’s unclear at this point exactly what’s happening.  The Stanford Center has also been the source of a lot of very good work on the Internet over the years.

That said, the blurring of boundaries between corporations and the academy has been going on for some time, and Stanford has always been at its epicenter.  I suppose it’s encouraging that folks at least felt the need to deny the allegations

Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

By Leigh M. Johnson

How we ought to understand the terms "civility" and "collegiality" and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it's practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide for you links to the most representative here.)  Of course, the efficient cause of civility/collegiality debates' meteoric rise to prominence is the controversy surrounding Dr. Steven Salaita's firing (or de-hiring, depending on your read of the situation) by the University of Illinois only a month ago, but there are a host of longstanding, deeply contentious and previously seething-just-below-the-surface agendas that have been given just enough air now by the Salaita case to fan their smoldering duff into a blazing fire.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll just note here at the start that I articulated my concerns about (and opposition to) policing norms of civility/collegiality or otherwise instituting "codes" to enforce such norms some months ago (March 2014) in a piece I co-authored with Edward Kazarian on this blog here (and reproduced on the NewAPPS site) entitled "Please do NOT revise your tone."  My concern was then, as it remains still today, that instituting or policing norms of civility/collegiality is far more likely to protect objectionable behavior/speech by those who already possess the power to avoid sanction and, more importantly, is likely to further disempower those in vulnerable professional positions by effectively providing a back-door manner of sanctioning what may be their otherwise legitimately critical behaviors/speech.  I'm particularly sympathetic to the recent piece "Civility is for Suckers" in Salon by David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford) who retraces the case-history of civility and free speech and concludes, rightly in my view, that "civility is in the eye of the powerful."

Salaita, Academics and Social Media

Mark Graber (Law and Government, Maryland) has an interesting post up on the Salaita case and academic culture over at Balkinization.  Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me, as I haven't seen this particular point made before:

Each year, more and more pressure seems to be put on faculty to spend less time on traditional forms of publishing and rely more on social media in which significant incentives often exist for vulgar, juvenile, and insulting speech (I’ve never been told I should be especially careful to avoid such temptations).  Take a look at the website of many law schools and other academic institutions.  Many strongly suggest that the way to gain fame and respect at the institution is through the social media or other outlets where eight second soundbites are norm and footnotes forbidden.  More and more of my friends who do traditional, lots of footnotes, scholarship complain that they have fewer and fewer friends (if any) in the administration and they are becoming the first to be asked about buyouts.  In short, Salaita strikes me as doing exactly what a great many professors are now doing to get ahead in our professions.  Having pressured us to get on the social media, the administrators at our universities can hardly complain if we adopt the conventions of the social media rather than what I think are the better norms of academic discourse.

In other words, and in a perverse sense, Salaita is being unhired for doing precisely what new academic norms and academic institutional imperatives of "relevance" encourage.

ACA Rules Defining U.S. Part-Time College Instructor Workload Issued

[Update: I didn't realize that these rules (and the story) are acutally seveal months old when I posted this. That said, we haven't as far as I know discussed them here, so I'll leave the post up to facilitate that.]

There has been talk for some time suggesting that the Affordable Care Act might have the effect of forcing colleges and universities in the United States to start providing health-care to many, or even all of their part time instructors.  For some, this has seemed like a very promising possibility, since it might alter (perhaps radically) the fiscal calculus that has tilted in favor of ever-increasing use part-time instructors at most American institutions.  

Corresponding to this, there have also been fears among those working as traditional, half-time adjuncts and even more those working those who had full or nearly full time contingent contracts that their courses would be cut or their positions eliminated.  Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we all want adjunctification to end; but if the effect of destabilization were simply to force all adjunct positions to be maximally precarious, that would, at least in the short term, be movement in exactly the wrong direction. 

Accordingly, people have been waiting anxiously for the Obama administration to issue their rules for calculating how many 'hours' part-time instructors are actually working for the purposes of determining their eligibility for ACA.  

They're out.  And the best short characterization of them that I can think of is that the administration has imposed a set of rules that effectively neutralize any possibility that ACA will significantly affect the way universities use adjunct labor.  Details and a few remarks below

Bad news for academia in Europe

A Portuguese colleague (who has good reasons to remain anonymous) has brought to our attention some very important and worrisome recent events/developments pertaining to research funding in Portugal and Europe, which are described below. Academics in Europe (and also outside Europe) wil do well to pay close attention to these developments.

UPDATE: Perhaps my original phrasing was ambiguous, so to be clear: I am not the author of the post below, rather it is a guest post by the Portuguese colleague in question.

============================

This post serves as a warning, and a plea for help, to academics around Europe.

Tuition and the Privatization of College Education

Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts.  In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst.  Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors, insatiable student demand for gymnasiums, etc.) don’t make any sense, at least not on their own.  His concluding point, though, seems vitally important.  Here’s a good-sized chunk of text (with significant ellipses); I’ll follow with a couple of additional thoughts:

Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Ed (again)

Back in March, I wrote a long piece about the effects of institutional debt on the current, destructive trends in U.S. Higher Education.  In the same vein, there's a new article by Michelle Chen up at The Nation discussing a new report by the Debt and Society group called Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of Financing U.S. Higher Education. 

The report concerns the ways in which debt manifests itself throughout the system, and how these various forms are tied to one another—thus the titlte of Chen's piece "Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It." But Chen is right to highlight the institutional debt side of the equation, which has been overlooked despite the fact that it appears to be a structural driver for other forms of debt and institutional disinvestment in education, etc. She also emphasizes the degree to which one of the most pernicious consequenes of rising debt: the degree to which it makes even public institutions essentially subservient bond ratings agencies.

In the long run, however, these amenities often don’t pay off in terms of revenue for the schools, which grow increasingly beholden to bond investors. Those financiers, in turn, often favor not the highest-quality schools but rather “the safest prospects for investment.” Because of market pressures, the researchers warn, “bond markets can reward behaviors that generate greater revenue but are at odds with the goals of public higher education.” In other words, do you want your university’s future budget projections dictated by a Moody’s rating?

Or, as I've been arguing for awhile, rising institutional debt is what is making 'revenue at any cost' into a management imperative that trumps all others and essentially stripping institutional leaders of the freedom to make management decisions on the basis considerations like their institutions' primary missions, the best interests of their faculty, staff and students, etc.  I urge folks to read the whole piece.

Adjunctification (again) and How (not) to Fix It (again)

There’s a new piece up at The Atlantic by Elizabeth Segran on the adjunct crisis in U.S. Higher Ed and the growing movement to contest the situation. The piece has a number of helpful aspects, including providing a summary of some of the most recent research on the effects of adjunctification on faculty, students, and the overall shape of the institution of U.S. Higher Education. Especially welcome is the recognition that, aside from its obvious economic consequences and its effects on student outcomes, faculty precarity has significantly eroded academic freedom, scholarly production, and done a great deal to compromise the university as an institution of learning and critical thought.  This makes it all the more disappointing that the solutions the author seems most inclined to accept would only improve the economic situation of contingent faculty while doing nothing to make them less precarious or offer more support for research and scholarship.

 

In what follows, I’ll explain the above in a bit more detail.

Revenue at Any Cost: Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Education

As Protevi likes to keep reminding everyone on Facebook, it's been awhile now since I first started arguing that we haven't been paying sufficient attention to the role of institutional debt as a driver of the increasingly alarming developments in U.S. universities, especially those in the public sector.  I've gestured in this direction before on NewAPPS, but the appearance of a new piece on the subject by Josh Freedman on Forbes.com provides a perfect opportunity to develop the point a bit more.  

Let me begin, then, by making a fairly bold claim. Taking the problem of institutional debt seriously makes it possible to provide a consistent account of many of the major problematic trends in U. S. higher education: rapidly accelerating tuition costs; significant declines in financial aid coverage; cuts to or elimination of low-enrollment departments and programs, experiments with mass-market distance learning and online education, and a general move toward 'Responsibility Centered Managment' (RCM) administrative models; dramatically increasing pressure on faculty at the level of compensation, workload, job security and working conditions; the outsourcing of many university functions to private contractors; building booms, especially those aimed at increasing campus amenities or leveraging university owned real estate for commercial purposes; and finally, continuing increases in administrative spending, especially in development offices and other areas concerned with financial management and business operations.

All of this, which may otherwise seem contradictory and difficult to make sense of, can consistently be referred back to the urgent pressure that rising institutional debt imposes upon university operations: the need to maintain a sufficiently robust revenue stream to satisfy credit rating agencies and thus keep borrowing costs, and the costs of servicing existing debt, from exploding. Freedman provides, especially in the later parts of his article, an excellent discussion of how this works. 

The "revenue shortfall" scam

The story is here. I think there are two things to note here: 

1: the threat to jobs of our colleagues: "The head of the University of Maine System said Friday that further state budget cuts could force the system to shed 95 jobs, on top of its plan to eliminate 165 in the next budget year."

2: the use of the seemingly neutral and technocratic term "revenue shortfall" here: "Page said the potential funding cut of nearly $10 million – part of an across-the-board spending reduction to cover a state revenue shortfall – could force the system to eliminate another 95 jobs in the year that starts July 1." 

The problem with the use of that term is that it hides deliberate decisions by Maine politicians to cut state taxes, thereby creating the "shortfall" that is then the pretext to gut the university. I'd say this is a perfect example of ideology, as the hidden ratchet effect of taking previous decisions as unquestionable baselines.

Carol Vance and Kim Hopper petition

Friend of the blog and brilliant neurofeminist researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young asks people to visit this petition site in support of her distinguished colleagues Carol Vance and Kim Hopper. That bell tolling you hear, where if you don't bring in 80% of your salary in grants, you're fired even after 25+ years of superb work? It's for you too, soon enough. 

You can't take it personally

Discussion on FB of this post at Leiter Reports about rejection led me to remark: 

I hesitate to say this, since I made it through the wars by dint of being married to the right person, but here goes. My wife likes to say "you can't take rejection personally; there are too many factors involved that have nothing to do with your qualifications. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally, for exactly the same reason."

Further reflections below the fold, taken from a talk on inclusivity in conference organizing (points which hold, mutatis mutandis, for hiring decisions) at the APA Eastern, 2013. (See also this post, on why we should change our frame away from "job market".)

The Effects of Ratings Systems

There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher Education Plan last year. Not surprisingly, the effect of this shift has disproportionately affected applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds — and while this is only one case,* it seems to neatly exemplify what many have feared will be the effect of the proposals. 

I've written before — and I plan to write more — about the effects of prestige races on the state of higher education in the U.S. Until now, these races have been fostered primarily by the proliferation of ranking systems (US News and World Report, etc.) as structuring elements of the enviornment in which institutions are operating.  It is not difficult to link competition for prestige to the sorts of spending and other institutional policy decisions that have led to rising costs of attendence and increased institutional debt loads** — all of which has also created pressure on institutions that traditionally serve less advantaged populations to abandon or de-emphasize those missions. The Obama proposals, as the article shows, seem to have already added to that pressure without even having been put into effect. 

*There are definitely reasons to think carefully about what type of institution is being disucssed here, which may not be typical of those doing the most to serve students from disadvantaged populations.

**See, for instance, this New York Times piece from 2012

Neoliberal economics and the devalued humanities

In his critique of Posner’s economic analysis of law, the late Ed Baker offers some remarks that might help us to understand current developments in educational policy.  Posner defends what we will now recognize as a number of the core commitments of neoliberal policy, in particular the fundamental efficiency of markets and the price mechanism for the optimal allocation of social goods.  The more people want something, the more they are willing to pay, and so goods get bought and sold (as they move from those who value them less – sellers – to those who value them more – buyers) until everyone is as happy as they can be, given constraints on resources. 

Unionizing all HE labor

This article in Dissent is a good call for action, focusing on the University of Illinois-Chicago strike last week.

However, one additional factor needs to be put into the equation: undergraduate student-workers, who do lots and lots of service and clerical work: checking books out of the library, answering phones in department offices, and on and on. Marc Bousquet estimates in How the University Works that UG student-workers are the largest labor component, by number, at some big public schools.

Should they be part of the bargaining unit, or should the bargaining unit negotiate their work conditions and limits to the number of them employed relative to full-time clerical workers, is a good question, but one or the other is needed I think.

University of Illinois-Chicago faculty to strike next week

Article in Jacobin here: 

On February 18, the tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who make up the University of Illinois-Chicago faculty union UICUF Local 6456 will walk out of the classroom and onto the picket line for a two-day strike. Barring a dramatic change-of-heart by university administrators at the bargaining table the weekend, it will be the first faculty strike at a major research university in a very long time....

Every entering UIC student takes at least one writing course; most take two. Not surprisingly, our writing courses are overwhelmingly taught by lecturers (i.e. non-tenure track faculty), on year-to-year contracts and paid a standard salary of $30,000. Furthermore, although the administration carries on endlessly about the importance of merit, they’re unwilling to mandate a promotion track for non-tenure track faculty, the whole point of which would be to reward merit....

The term “shared governance” is invoked to disguise this evisceration of power but what it mainly means is that faculty senates can “advise” the administration and the administration can then do whatever it wants. To call shared governance real governance is like saying your dog has an equal say in how your household is run because sometimes when he whines he gets fed.

One of our issues in this strike is to take back decision-making power over the issues that matter to us — curriculum, teaching conditions, the distribution of monies, and the like.  The administration is fighting ferociously to retain that power — since giving it up would in effect be returning it from management to workers.

Annals of obfuscation, volume 4501

This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of higher education at any institution would go up 30 to 40 percent potentially," he says. "The public's not going to accept that."

Notice the conflation of instructional labor costs and total costs (including admin salaries, fixed costs (building construction and upkeep, etc), which go to the bottom line of the school, and "cost" to "the public."

There's another equivocation there, between the public qua set of individual consumers (in which case we're talking about "price" to them -- tuition and fees) and public qua set of individual taxpayers. 

Why is this important? A public uni could recoup its increased labor costs by two means. 

Big Data and Big-Profit colleges

This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry.  These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation.  Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money.  An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a class, much less obtain a degree of any sort.  What they mainly obtain is student-loan debt.  The industry thus combines an incredibly brazen rent-seeking to protect their access to student financial aid with a basic finance-capital accumulation by dispossession: student loans are unforgiveable, even in bankruptcy, and so these students will forever be owing ever increasing amounts of money, which gets sent directly to Wall Street.

Invitation to post links to programs promoting philosophy in US high schools

Taking off from a Facebook discussion on US high school philosophy programs, I thought I would propose an open thread asking for comments and / or links to programs.

Here's a start, to PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), and to the APA's committee on Pre-College Teaching, and to their page "So you want to teach pre-college philosophy?"