When my humanities
classes had occasion to discuss the Transatlantic Slave Trade, I often used the
disturbing segment from Stephen Spielberg’s filmAmistad depicting the Middle Passage to illustrate the concepts we were
studying. While US textbooks often back away from the horrors of a slave trade
that brought between 11 and 20 million human beings from Africa to the Americas
(a current Texas
high school text refers
to them merely as “workers”), Spielberg, as he did in Schindler’s List,
makes the horror of the historical event at hand unavoidable.
My goal in using that
segment was less to teach the historical facts of the immediate case history as
to allow students to get an experiential taste of the slave trade itself and
the way it dehumanized slaves and slavers alike. Based on a true story, the
film’s African protagonist, Cinqué, is responsible for a bloody mutiny on a
Spanish slave ship and taken into US custody when the ship strays into US
territorial waters. Faced with a question of whether the Africans are
wrongfully enslaved or property of their Spanish slavers, the US Supreme
eventually declares the slaves to be legally free.
In preparation for the
trial, Cinqué is asked to recount the story of his brutal capture and
deportation to Cuba. That story begins in his village in Africa where he is
ensnared by Africans from a nearby village, sold to the Portuguese slave
traders and loaded into the hold of the Tecora bound for a new
continent.
My students often
questioned why Africans would have helped Europeans enslave fellow Africans.
That reason is not fully revealed until the end of the film. The Portuguese,
with their superior weaponry and military force, had cut a Devil’s Bargain with
their African collaborators: Either assist us in taking the next
village into captivity or your own village and family will be enslaved.
At the film’s end,
Cinqué, having won his freedom in the US courts, returns to Africa. What he
finds there is shocking. The remainder of his own family and village been taken
away. But, so, too, are all the remaining Africans of the region including those
who had cut the Devil’s Bargain with the Portuguese. In the end, even their
collaboration had not saved them from the fate they had helped the Portuguese
impose on the others.
The New Higher Ed
Normal?”
I hadn’t thought about
all that for quite a while until last week. It was brought to mind by a blog
essay at the online
journal Inside Higher Education entitled “Is Understaffing the
New EdTech Normal?” Dartmouth educational technology (edtech) advocate Joshua
Kim relates conversations with edtech workers at “a diverse set of institutions”
this way:
These conversations
often end up at the same place. Everyone seems to be worried about
understaffing. Everyone says that nowadays it is normal for 2 people to do jobs
that normally took 3 people to accomplish. Everyone says that the amount of
work has grown much faster than headcount. Everyone says that demands are
higher than ever before, but budgets for hiring full-time permanent
professionals have never been tighter. Is this the reality that you live
in? Is your departments (sic) too thinly staffed for the work that you
need to do?
In actuality, this is
a very familiar conversation. It’s also hardly a recent concern. I’ve been
hearing this pattern of conversation that Kim reports now happening in edtech
departments for a long time:
· understaffed departments trying to keep their
heads above water
· workers with their own job duties plus part or
all of one or more coworker’s duties when they leave and are not replaced
· ever increasing demand for services with a
staff that has not kept pace
· budget cuts that include increasing part-time
job lines while full-time lines (with benefits) decrease
Kim goes on to note
that this pattern is occurring among workers who are “working amazingly
hard and efficiently to compensate for the lack of depth and redundancy” and
remain “commit[ed] to offer world-class service.” But their efforts face the
“twin whims of legislators and stock markets” and come in the face of
“worrie[s] about burning people out… that folks will not be able to spend time
in preparing for what is coming next, as everyone is too busy managing the
daily onslaught of tasks…”
Kim concludes with
this question: “Is edtech (and other department) understaffing the new higher
ed normal?”
A Taste of Their Own
Disruptive Medicine
I have to confess to a
bit of malicious glee in reading those comments. These are the exact same
comments that academics have been making at colleges and universities across
the country for the past two decades. We have seen our budgets cut, our staffs
shrink, our job duties expanded along with our class sizes, particularly those
of us in the humanities and social sciences. We have seen dedicated educators
committed to offering world class service to their students (and in the case of
public colleges and universities, the public they serve) burn out and walk
away. And we have been told that this was the “new normal” with which we must
come to terms as a condition of ongoing employment.
What is different
about this lamentation is that it comes from edtech staff members. For the past
two decades, edtech has been the fair haired boy at most universities and
colleges, charged with saving cash strapped state institutions money.
Online classes and
MOOCs burst onto the higher educational scene just after the turn of the 21st CE
with promises of “delivering” college courses to students now seen as
consumers. They were relieved of the obligation of ever having to attend
classes. In turn, universities were relieved of their obligations to find
lighted, climate controlled classroom space for the masses they had admitted in
a scramble to replace diminished public funding with tuition dollars and
student fees. Online sections could be as large as colleges chose and cheap
adjunct labor could be used to “deliver” the classes.
The onset of the
digital age in higher education was also heralded by no small amount of
self-aggrandizing hype from the edtech quarter. Under the guise of“disruptive
technology,” a
term invented by a Harvard business professor, edtech cheerleaders began to
predict the
demise of teaching altogether with flesh and blood instructors in classrooms
relegated to onsite edtech specialists whose primary job would be simply to
ensure the technology is running correctly.
What these purveyors
of hype failed to foresee was that the human users of these systems might well
not find them conducive to learning. The original MOOC (massive open online
course) proved quite sensational in providing access to viewers around the
world. But less than 2% of the “students” who signed up for classes offered by
MIT and Stanford actually completed the courses.
The same has been true
for online courses. While nearly one in three college students today are taking
at least one class online (often because it is the only means available to them
to complete their degree programs) the same ratio of students in those online
classes fails to complete their classes. The reasons cited by students range
from lack of self-discipline to meet class requirements to lack of human
interaction. Students often report from their experience of online courses that
they need the structure of regular class attendance with real live teachers and
classmates to thrive in a class.
The other main reason
that students fail to complete online courses has much to do with the hype used
to market the courses to student consumers. Online programs and classes are
often sold to would-be consumers under the rubric of convenience and comfort.
Taking classes in one’s pajamas from the convenience of one’s room is
the image regularly used by the mega-university where I once taught to market
its online courses. Such marketing takes its cues from for-profit degree
factories whose advertising consistently uses minimalist language: Just
six weeks, only two hours a week, etc. The use of minimalist selling
points has now crept into the ads for even respectable liberal arts colleges
and once venerable state universities.
What is effectively
communicated by such advertising is the sense that online courses simply won’t demand
much from the student. As such, students often schedule far more class hours
than they can possibly complete given the existing demands on their lives from
work and family obligations.
Not surprisingly, when
students find they are unable to meet the demands of the courses they have
taken - even when instructors have been careful to lay out the requirements of
the course up front and indicate the time needed to complete them – they
routinely blame instructors for assigning “excessive work” and creating
“unreasonable” course requirements. After all, “it’s just an online class.”
For too many students,
they discover too late that the courses they have taken really do have
requirements that really are going to require the investment of their time and
energy. They then become prime candidates for the 1/3 of the enrollment of each
online class on average who withdraws from the course or, having already
stopped visiting the class site out of frustration, miss the withdrawal
deadline and fail the course entirely. Bear in mind that for a student already
destined to be burdened by debt from student loans, this is debt incurred for
uncompleted courses.
It would seem the smug announcement of the
death of teaching by those hyping edtech, like Mark Twain’s famed obituary,
appears to have been incredibly premature.
That edtech
departments are now facing the same ever increasing demands coupled with ever
decreasing staffing, funding and support as academics is hardly surprising. In
an age of corporatized university managements, the goal of extracting ever more
work for ever less pay from an ever shrinking workforce is expectable. These
are the kind of corporate values that like bloodthirsty vampires have drained
the assets of highly productive corporate entities like Enron and offshored production stranding laid
off American workers like General
Motors, allin the pursuit of profit maximization.
The losers in all
those “disruptions” were the workers. Even edtech workers in higher education
who were more than happy to protect their own interests (if not to inflate
their own egos) in serving as agents of disruption while furthering the
interests of their corporate management are now discovering that corporate
values do not include loyalty to their own workers. Like Amistad’s
Cinqué returning to Africa, they are discovering departments decimated by the
same managers who promised to protect their interests - but only so long as
they coincided with those of management.
It is my nature…..
A parable which has
found expression in cultures from ancient Greece’s Aesop’s Fables to
Buddhist teachings to Native American wisdom tales involves a deadly scorpion
and another animal the scorpion is trying to convince to take him across a
river. The Aesop version is “The Scorpion and the Frog”:
A scorpion and a frog
meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across
on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The
scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."
The frog is satisfied,
and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog
feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown,
but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"
Replies the scorpion:
"It’s my nature..."
In a free market
fundamentalist culture such as our own, it should not be surprising when
institutions disrupted by corporate values turn on their own workers. It is, in
fact, their nature.
The bottom line profit
motivation of corporate universities begins with the defunding of higher
education at the state level. Less funding, less taxes. The corporate
university responds by cutting non-administrative costs and downsizing, first
in academic departments and then in staff. The institution seeks to recoup
funding losses through ongoing tuition increases which are visible but also
with less obvious increases in fees – now equal to or greater than tuition in
many places - for everything from parking to the technology fees assessed for
the online classes students may or may not have taken by choice. Finally,
the university sells its scholarly soul for the big bucks brought in by
research “grants” from corporate interests and the governmental agencies they
now dominate, all of which inevitably come with more than a few strings
attached.
Another expression of
corporate values comes from new spending priorities. Like corporations
everywhere, a primary focus of corporate management spending in higher
education has been the expansion of a highly paid managerial team even as
salaries for workers have stagnated or actually been cut. This mirrors the
growing wages gap between workers and management nationwide. While Americans
estimate that the CEOs make about 30 times what the average worker brings in,
in fact the ratio is 350 to 1 according to studies by the Harvard
Business School.
The president
of the university where I worked made $630K last year, the 22d highest
salary of university presidents in the country. The permanent lecturer my
department hired last year with Ph.D. in Philosophy in hand, scholarly
publications and teaching experience online and in-person was offered a mere
$40K annually renewable salary, $8,000 less than the starting salary for the
beginning teacher with a newly minted bachelor’s degree in hand at the
elementary school down the street.
Other spending
priorities at corporate universities include costly building projects, few of
them involving classrooms. Most provide additional managerial offices as well
as luxury dorms useful in marketing to out-of-state students with their
out-of-state tuition moneys. The remaining priorities focus on an increasingly
professionalized athletics program designed largely to entertain patrons other
than the students who largely avoid these events. Their classes are cancelled
and costly on-campus parking permits become void during weekday games.
Meanwhile, the new coach
at UCF will be paid
$1.7 million annually, almost three times the salary of the president.
Is Resistance Futile?
The question that is
raised in Joshua Kim’s blog essay is worth considering by all of us who value
higher education: Is this the new normal? That corporate
management has operated on corporate values of profit über alles, however
soulless that may be, is not a surprise. It is, as the scorpion reminds us, its
very nature.
But the question we
citizens - whose taxes fund public institutions and whose children are their
potential beneficiaries - must ask ourselves is whether these areour values.
Will we passively buy into a hegemony that would impose these values as normal, expectable
and inevitable without even questioning them? Must we, like those encountering
the Borg from Star Trek, simply accept that that any resistance is futile, that
we will be assimilated into a “new normal” that serves corporate interests
regardless of their impact on anyone else?
One of the defense
mechanisms that any status quo employs is the argument of
inevitability. The assertion of a “new normal” suggests this is not only the
way things are now but the only way they can be. But, if this
truly is a new normal, it becomes obvious that if things have changed before to
make the current status quo possible, they can certainly
change again. The question is not whether the public can reject corporate
values in higher education, it’s simply whether we are willing to insist that
it does.
The context of
Spielberg’s film was a chattel slavery being practiced throughout the world at
the time of the events on the Amistad. Slavery was the norm.
It was defended by appeals to G_d (its most fervent defenders made their cases
from church pulpits), nature (Aristotle himself had seen slavery as a natural
condition) and inevitability – this is the way things are, there’s nothing we
can do about it.
But after an extended,
bloody struggle, slavery was abolished. The religions that defended slavery
repented. Abolition became the new normal. What is clear here is that in
decision making about socially constructed institutions, the question is never
one of capacity, whether human beings can change the directions their society
has previously taken; rather, it is always one of volition: Do we
have the will to make those changes.
I and many others are
praying that the answer will be yes.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life
is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or
political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in
sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew
Scriptures)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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