Syndicate and Hague

I was at a meeting this week in which someone brought up an article they read and which I cannot find despite many google attempts, so I’ll try to capture the gist of the comment.

So I was reading this article about the writer’s child starting college. And he wanted to know why we couldn’t get online modules created by professors at Harvard and MIT and Yale - let’s have the best of each world! Some faculty are already selling their courses to University of Phoenix!

Not too subtly implied in this is that we should do it too. I want to preface all of this by saying that I think that we should create things that can serve classroom purposes and that could be worthwhile to a larger market…

However, and this is a big “however,” I don’t think we’re creating education. I’ve been thinking about why that comment caused me so much discomfort and annoyance, and it just popped into my head this morning. You can already get information from the best of Harvard, Yale, etc. in things called “books.”

In essence, some of what we are talking about when we talk about open courseware or about selling online modules is a shiny, interactive, computer-based book. It is a form of instructional media.

Does this mean that our shiny, interactive, computer-based book is not worthwhile? Absolutely not! However, those who consider this as something to replace the need for smart faculty or that the interactions students have with faculty and each other isn’t worthwhile are missing an essential component of what happens during education.

And this is in terms of both access to power and in terms of the relationships formed.

Let’s talk about access to power, since I think everyone can reflect on the relationships they formed with friends and faculty during school.

When I graduated from my undergrad, I moved to NYC and started working at NYU Law shortly after that. During those years, I discovered how much access students there have to the most powerful and influential people in the country and world - whether those people are alums or the faculty or world leaders.

The thing I learned is this: you do not get clerkships for being smart; you do not get a job because your grades were good. You get opportunities based on who you know and who knows you, and that is one very big reason to go to top tier schools. Now, this isn’t to say that the NYU Law students weren’t smart, but rather that I am positive there were equally smart people all over the country without the kind of access the NYU Law students had. They were smart + connected. A huge deal.

It took me quite a while to understand that in my own life. Being smart didn’t matter nearly as much as being in the right place at the right time, having the right connections, or making new connections easily.

All of this is as much a part of education as coursework.

I really wish I had been able to think through to the “media is media” point during the meeting, because that would have underscored some of the points I was trying to make. None of what we’re talking about is wrong or bad or unnecessary, but education in general is different from a learning object/media of any sort.

(Just to note: I think most people understand this, but I also think it’s good to say this stuff out loud to help gel the ideas…)

I’ve been feeling disheartened lately. In the news and in life, it seems that online learning has become the mythical goose who laid the golden eggs in the eyes of a funding-starved public higher education system.

You remember what they did to the goose, right? And how that turned out?

One of the reasons I went back to school to get my PhD is because I very uncynically believe that education is transformational on many levels. I decided that if I cared at all about our students and the future of higher ed as we incorporate and rely on technology more, I had to gather the expertise and research experience to gain a voice in the discussion.

I love technology and the ways it provides us to collaborate and talk and experience life in ways that we may not otherwise be able to; I love teaching and being there with my students as they work through difficult issues or texts or problems with their writing; and I truly believe we owe it to all the people in the state to provide students with an exceptional education.

All of this being said, I am old enough and have been around enough work environments that I am cautious in my optimism and hope. It’s an experience that I don’t think people who go straight through school get - the experience of getting your hope and optimism beaten out of you and having to rediscover the source of it in yourself and know that everything is cyclical, everything is tidal, and you can create change by finding new pathways for the change you want to create.

A writer on a political blog I have an affinity for is leaving today for a new job at a different blog, where I assume he will continue to be astute and funny and asinine in no particular order. And he said on his departing post:

If I was “cynical,” meaning, if I didn’t believe that government was important or capable of or needing to play a critical role in American life, I wouldn’t be able to type this blog all day. Who would ever want to read and write about apocalyptic, depressing horror tales hour after hour for years if they thought things didn’t matter, or that they didn’t *have* to be better?

This is the kind of thinking I return to in trying times. It is a kind of personal masochism to get so distressed over something you literally have no control over, but all of this matters. In the blog’s case, it’s about politics; in my case, it’s about education. Even though sometimes I feel like I come from a different planet, I’m not going to stop making the case that the students and their learning experiences are not to be ignored and that we focus only on revenue generation at our peril.

Online education isn’t a gold-filled goose. It’s just a bird.

…at least not for institutions and ways of life.  Elegies of people I can get behind.  Especially one of my favorite Larry Levis poems.  Oh hell, let’s interrupt what is going to be a bit of a rant by posting the poem.

Boy in Video Arcade

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it,
Or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched in.

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.
He’s the only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.

I see the pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum on the floor.

I like the close-up, the detail. I like the pointlessness of it,
And the way he hasn’t imagined an ending to all this yet,

The boy never bothering to look up as the sun comes out
In the late morning, because Big Deal, the mist evaporating & rising.

So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy.

I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness,

The beauty parlors, the palm reader’s unlighted sign, the mulberry trees
Fading out before the billboard of the chiropractor.

The lake of fire’s just an oil speck.

I don’t see anything at the end of it, & I suppose that is what is wrong with me,
Among the other things. And it’s slow work, because of all the gauzy light,

It’s hard to pick out anything.

And now I want to talk about this poem. Dammit. Okay, I’m giving myself one paragraph of the troubles and then we’re talking poetry.

Apparently, there’s some consultant running around the University saying student engagement isn’t important in online learning, it’s about maximizing class sizes and delivering content. What this means for faculty, I think that’s a topic to be taken up by someone else with more knowledge of how they’re feeling in all this. But for me, it brings up issues of dominance; a basic tenet of what the U is to serve and what it means to be educated and to get an education. And it downright frightens me that there are people who would go into a university and tell them that student engagement wasn’t important.

You know what I would do if I found out my program wasn’t concerned with its students?

Quit. We’re all worth more than that. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

So let’s see how that pans out, but I’m going to try to talk about the problems and philosophies underlying that as the weeks go on. Frankly, it makes me nervous for online education because they see it as a cash cow - more students, teacherless classess - we’re living the dream. Or some administrator’s dream. Sadly, it isn’t a student or teacher dream, but that is for another time.

Ah, but Larry Levis.

He makes me happy. I like that he ruminates on what it means to be alive by focusing on the bored boy, the sullen boy, the careless boy - and that the meaninglessness with which he conducts his life is situated in beauty he chooses not to see. And it is what it is - it doesn’t matter to him, but the beauty exists and the banal exists and this is what life is. A subtle moment doing something innocuous and mundane.

I’m not a believer in heaven or hell, which upsets some people. I think of it much differently. I am fond of going to visit my grandmother’s grave and driving by everyone else’s - her parents and brother and uncle; my grandfather and his grandfather and half-brother and step mothers; the Tracys - his aunt and uncle who raised my grandfather; and the oldest part of my Irish family here - Patrick and Elizabeth, who came over in 1845 for a reason I don’t know about and probably won’t ever.

Despite this fondness that makes me visit the spot where her ashes are, I still think she’s dead and done and everything about her that was uniquely and completely her is gone. What I figure is that the way in which we live on after we die is in the impacts we make. I’m not quite sure how this became about my grandmother, but sometimes I think about her hope for us, her faith in our education carrying us through life and making us more thoughtful, better people…and I worry. I worry that even though I believe so passionately and fiercely that postsecondary education can do wonders for your perspectives and critical thought development; I worry that others with more power than I have don’t have a remotely similar philosophy. Call it greed, call it “diminishing funding,” but there are philosophies being bandied about that I literally thought would be laughed out of the room. Things I’m going to talk about this week: the idea of a profit model for courses, “maximum seats” in an online course, media and team development on courses, feminist pedagogy, and general discomfort with the divide between administration and the people actually doing the work and research on what works.

I try to hold myself to standards that my grandmother set - be good, be nice, be smart, and don’t let anyone tell you what to do - because only you know what that is. That’s probably what’s living on in this moment, her message that we have the power to speak, and to speak well. I hope I achieve that most of the time.

Man. She was so great. You all really missed out not knowing her. I cannot believe it has been over eight years since I’ve gotten to talk to her.

Here is where I ramble on about my academic struggles. Just a warning.

As most of you who know me IRL know, I’m doing the PhD thing with a peculiar blend of program areas: Learning Technologies (education + technology in its myriad incarnations) and Culture & Teaching. I continue to be pretty bullheaded about the importance of merging the two, but this creates an almost constant sense of intellectual tension for me that I suppose is healthy and (in the long term) beneficial.

The core of my tension is this: as a front-end developer type and tech geek who finds no small amount of joy in embedding myself in the tools and flow of the online community, I’m concerned with creation and application. If I’m not making, I’m not learning; if I’m not learning, I’m already behind. I think this is elemental to those of us who create online designs, presences, websites, environments, applications, etc. We are doers and constructors. The attitudes and perspectives that fuel this type of person inevitably pour over into how they think about and what they focus on in research. The kind of action-oriented passion that drives the LT program is what drew me to it - especially after a year of reading about research done on mediocre projects, I cannot tell you what a relief it is that I wound up choosing a program in which the faculty create brilliantly designed applications for education.

But I’m not only focused on design/application creation. I’m also a writer whose primary fascination is the deconstruction of the political complexities that underlie our daily existences and our systemic structures. This also means I have a particular fascination with how what we build reinscribes modes of power or how (and for whom) the space is defined. This is why I needed the CAT program in tandem with LT. That sort of work is hardly ever done in the world of education + technology.

The problem/issue that arises with this disconnect is that most of the people who are studying technology and the digital sphere from what I would call an “outsider’s perspective” study this area from an “outdated perspective.” In this, I’m classifying people who do not create/do as “outsiders” and alleging that their separation from development results in a lack of understanding of what our technology is moving towards and therefore their studies and research are retrospective rather than current.

Does this make sense? Or am I getting to hung up in my own mental space?

What I worry about is that the middle ground that I want to exist - doing and deconstructing - doesn’t really exist. I worry that I will inevitably fall into one camp or the other and lose something as a result.

Anyway, I could go on, but we have an out of town visitor who just arrived - so that’s enough of that!

For those of you who missed the rally, or want to forward this on, or use the arguments, I’m pasting the text of my speech from this afternoon’s rally below.

I want to start by saying that though the administration often frames dissent like this as us hating the University, they’re wrong. We love the University. I am a graduate of the English department, and when I moved back here from New York I made an effort to get a job at the University of Minnesota. Our faculty and students are wonderful, and it was actually my job here at the University that inspired me to go back to school and work on my PhD.

Everyone has made fantastic arguments about the encouraging the culture of learning at the University and this being a big part of who we are and why we are here, but I’m going to focus on those of us whose degrees or coursework directly pertain to our jobs.

First of all, I will hammer home the fact that this is a pay cut. Not only is it a pay cut, but it is one of the only cuts in our compensation that will almost exclusively affect low- and middle-wage employees.

Whether it’s the first degree or PhD, the people who take these courses are people for whom education will improve their professional lives. Senior-level employees and faculty members, who for the most part make much more than the rest of us, will not feel this cut personally. And I want to thank those faculty and senior employees who support us and know that cutting the Regents scholarship is the wrong thing to do.

Let’s talk about what kind of pay cut this is.

If you are working on your first bachelors degree, taking one four credit course at a time each spring, summer, and fall, you will be paying approximately $390 per year. An employee working towards their first degree makes less money, so based on a salary of $25,000 per year, that is a 1.5% pay cut.

Let’s say you have a Bachelor’s degree and let’s be generous and say you make $37,000 per year. At the 25% rate, taking a spring, summer and fall undergraduate course will cost you about $950 – about a 2.5% pay cut.

Taking a graduate course each semester at $37,000 per year will cost you about $1,900 – about a 5% pay cut.

Who is being asked to sacrifice? Who is taking the pay cut?

I am a technology professional in the civil service/bargaining unit here at the University. I am also a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction. Part of my focus is on Learning Technologies. My PhD program directly benefits my boss and my department and my school. I am not unique. The University of Minnesota staff in my courses bring inspiration and new knowledge back to our departments so that we create improve the output of the University.

This pay cut effectively renders the education that is part of our compensation package unaffordable. It will lead to decreased inspiration, innovation, and that will affect the strategic positioning of the University and the quality we currently provide.

This pay cut will affect staff recruitment and retention. Once the economy recovers, the University of Minnesota’s ability to recruit talented staff will decrease, as will our ability to retain staff. Other schools offer dependent and spousal tuition support at varying levels, we offer none. Decreasing a part of our compensation that doesn’t stand up to what other schools currently offer is misguided.

This pay cut is not about the myth of 10% annual increase: the Regents Scholarship increases in cost on average 10% a year. So does tuition. The program itself isn’t getting too expensive, tuition is.

Using short-term tax incentives to market a pay cut that affects long-term policy decisions is fraudulent. Destroying the Regents Scholarship and justifying it with temporary tax incentives that only a small part of our population can even use is disingenuous at best.

The Regents Scholarship didn’t become a perk until the administration wanted to decimate it. Prior to that, it was part of the compensation package that HR reminds us of on an annual basis.

This is a pay cut.

We are better employees because of our classes. We have new ideas, fresh ideas, current ideas. We make the University a better place, we make the education better, and we keep morale strong.

I was already a little twisted over the article that ran in the Star Tribune about U of MN’s president Bob Bruininks this weekend. Then I looked at my student account for the coming school year and nearly had a heart attack. Tuition went up $353/semester ($706 a year) for graduate students, making annual tuition alone over $10,000 per year. Tuition for undergraduates went up to $550/year and is pushing $10,000 per year.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but the sticker shock of my upcoming degree combined with an uncomfortably cheerleading Strib article and the sadness I have looking at my undergraduate alma mater (and employer and place where I’m getting my PhD) become further and further out of reach for average Minnesotans is pretty profound.

The article was already sour to me when it stated that “Bruininks also would not back down when clerical workers walked off the job a year ago, and the strike fell apart.” Summing up what happened last year in those few words that favored the administration was inaccurate at best. The pay scales at the University as we strive ever further towards that “top three” designation are, as in corporate America, increasingly skewed. Faculty in certain schools make incredible salaries. Whether or not the salaries are deserved/necessary is a point of ambivalence for me–I see both the pros and cons–but to essentially put the workers at the University “in their place” while lavishing senior administrators and plenty of faculty with six figure incomes and assorted perks is, in my opinion, simply immoral.

Anyone who works in academia long enough knows that the quest for “top three” status isn’t about the University’s undergraduate education. It’s about securing grants, having top notch graduate programs, doing groundbreaking research…and all of those are good things, in my opinion. However, there is that pesky reality that we are also supposed to educate thousands of new undergraduate students every year.

The naive undergrads who commented on the Strib article think this quest for glory has been done for them, but that’s just not in evidence. We still rely heavily on graduate students and adjuncts to handle undergraduate courses and I don’t see that changing.

As for the idea that the U should be an elite institution and the people who cannot get in (nevermind that the article didn’t exactly address students who can get in, but cannot see how to finance such a hefty price tag), I’m again ambivalent. If you want the U to be the “pinnacle” of public university education in Minnesota, I’m not necessarily opposed to that. But we’d better damn well get our priorities straight. The U can be a fantastic school and an affordable school, if we decide that it should be.

While I whine a bit about the amount I’m going to have to put in for my graduate degree, I’m not actually very broken up about graduate tuition rates. Graduate school is nice, it certainly gets you places a BA/BS doesn’t, it tends to bump your pay up, but it’s just not necessary that masses of Minnesotans get masters degrees and PhDs.

However, pinnacle or not, the kids of Minnesota should have access to the U. They shouldn’t be priced out of an education here. The people of this state have a vested interest in an educated workforce and our student populations should have affordable access to everything from the community colleges to the state universities to the University. It’s really that simple.

I’ve developed a new morbid addiction. The Ron Paul Survival Report is an awesome site that is essentially devoted to showing what is wrong with Ron Paul. The blogger is thorough as hell. Every time I’ve checked his sources to make sure he was accurate (I try to vet the people I quote, you know), he’s been right on.

Most recently, Ron Paul is doing another one of his “money bombs” on MLK day. Ignoring his history of racist statements and affiliations, the general philosophies of extreme free market economics he espouses (which disenfranchise the vast majority of us), and the plethora of white supremacists who have flocked to his campaign (seriously)…RP is reinforcing his status as racist by actually speaking at Bob Jones University tonight at 5 p.m. It’s currently on his website (I checked).

So. Do you folks know about Bob Jones University? Well…let me enlighten you. Back in 2000, candidate George Bush spoke at Bob Jones, which set of a firestorm even from some of the most ridiculously conservative folks around (Bill Kristol, I’m looking at you). Why? From the Salon.com archives.

The school refused to admit any African-American students until 1971. From 1971 to 1975, most unmarried African-American applicants were denied admission, presumably to prevent interracial dating. After 1975, the school — under court order — began admitting unmarried African-American students, though according to the U.S. government, it rejected “any applicant known to be a partner in an interracial marriage.”

After the 1975 court order, Bob Jones administrators established rules requiring expulsion for any student who married or dated outside his or her race or belonged to an organization that advocated or encouraged others to marry or date outside his or her race.

In 2000, this was still the policy. After the controversy stirred up by Bush’s visit, they subsequently dropped the policy. In 2000. Eight years ago.

Now, you could argue: “But they changed the policy!” Despite the fact that I think that’s crap, I still think a candidate (or anyone) should not speak somewhere that is this misogynistic. From the Bob Jones website:

Dress Code for Women

Classroom/general dress consists of a dress or top and skirt; however, pants may be worn for some recreational activities. Shorts may never be worn outside the residence halls and fitness center.

Pants

• Loose-fitting pants may be worn between women’s residence halls, for athletic events, and to homes in the area.
• Loose-fitting jeans may be worn in and between women’s residence halls and when participating in activities where the durability of the fabric is important, such as skiing and ice-skating.
• Low-riders are not permitted.
• Shorts may be worn only inside the residence halls and fitness center

Other

• Combat boots, hiking boots or shoes that give this appearance are not permitted. Leather sandals, including those with a strap between the toes, will be permitted at times when women are not required to wear hose. Flip flops made of rubber, plastic, etc., are not permitted in public.
• Hairstyles should be neat, orderly, and feminine. Avoid cutting-edge fads and cuts so short that they take on a masculine look.

For some added hilariousness:

Abercrombie & Fitch and its subsidiary Hollister have shown an unusual degree of antagonism to the name of Christ and an unusual display of wickedness in their promotions. In protest, we will not allow articles displaying their logos to be worn, carried, or displayed (even if covered or masked in some way).

Anyway, so, whatever. I’m not worried that RP is going to win the Republican nomination, much less the general election, but I do feel concerned that a certain segment of people respond to his rhetoric. It’s isolationist, self-interested, and generally loathsome. Anyone who believes we shouldn’t be funding public education is setting up a situation in which the poor remain poor and the rich get richer. From his website:

The federal government has no constitutional authority to fund or control schools. I want to abolish the unconstitutional, wasteful Department of Education and return its functions to the states. By removing the federal subsidies that inflate costs, schools can be funded by local taxes, and parents and teachers can directly decide how best to allocate the resources.

Yeah. Um. Hello? If schooling is funded by local taxes, poor areas will not have competitive schools. I see no way in which this doesn’t disproportionately (moreso than now) advantage people who already have money and power. If your local tax base is small, where is money coming from to fund education?

Here’s the thing. This whole “personal liberty”/”I know what’s best to do with my money”/”personal responsibility” argument is just one thing: extreme selfishness. We live in a society, which is like being part of a household. A household has expenses. Let’s say we each need to put in 50% of our incomes so that we can pay our bills and improve things. Great. I’m a contributing member of the household. I’m willing to do what I need to in order for this to be a good place to live.

Now here comes along someone who says “This is ridiculous! Why should I put in 50% of my hard-earned money? You don’t do things right. You waste money on things I don’t think we should bother with. Let’s just leave it up to each individual to pay for each thing as it comes.”

You’d never live with someone like that unless you are a fool. You’d think they were supremely selfish and wonder how they expected to be part of a household when they obviously placed no value on it.

Anyway.

The images below are from the Ron Paul Chalk Flickr set. They make me laugh about us.

If you’d have asked me even six months ago, I would have hemmed and hawed and said “I don’t know what I’d even do it in.” But the last six months of my life have been, well, eventful. Things have been happening so quickly and I’ve been forced to make decisions and trust my instincts.

It’s been a practice in knowing what to toss off and what to embrace and how to risk the comfort of the known for possibility.

This morning, I got my official acceptance letter from the University of Minnesota. Starting in the fall of 2008, I am officially a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction.

I already feel tired. And super excited. And terrified. My mind is flipping between enthusiasm, fear for my time, fear of being poor…but there’s no time for that. I always land on my feet.

Let’s do this.