That Was the Week That Was

As you know, the California Legislature --following negotiations with the Governor--passed the 2013-14 budget and follow up bills this weekend.  In the end there were few real surprises (although Jerry does possess a line item veto so stay tuned).  There were a few highlights concerning both the CSU and UC budgets that are worth noting.

1) Each segment will receive the proposed $250M conditional on foregoing tuition increases for the year.  In practice this condition means that the overall increase in higher education budgets will be somewhat less than $250M since a sizable portion is a buyout for the tuition.  But the State's contribution to the UC and CSU budgets are going up and students will receive some relief from the seemingly continuously increasing financial burdens of attending either of the segments.

2) Brown backed off on his demands that funding increases be tied to a series of mechanical metrics that he and his staff had proposed.  Both UC and CSU administrators and faculty spoke out against these metrics and their concerns were echoed by leaders in both the State Senate and Assembly.  That the Brown administration was attempting to increase burdens on Higher Education at a moment when the budget is--at best--backfilling several lost years of funding was not lost on the legislature.  As the LAT reported, Susan Bonilla, who Chairs the Assembly's budget oversight of Higher Education took the lead in questioning Brown's logic:

Bonilla said she was concerned that Brown's higher-education proposal was generated by number crunchers without enough input from educators. During an April hearing, she said the governor made it sound "like we're talking about a factory" rather than a university.
And universities are in a rebuilding phase, she said: "I don't think that's the time to say we're going to withhold your money."

 3) AB94, Speaker Perez's proposal to create a "Middle Class Scholarship Fund." passed both houses.  Perez's Bill will establish--starting in 2014--a fund through which California Residents students whose family incomes are less than $150,000 a year will be eligible for scholarships of up to 40% of their mandated tuition.  Certain restrictions--concerning GPA, application for other grants, percentage of total scholarship counting other grants, etc--will be put into place.  But the Bill recognizes that, despite the claims of the Segments to provide sufficient aid to ease the burden on lower and middle-class students, the State's turn to a higher tuition/higher aid model has placed tremendous burdens on the majority of students and their families.

These developments followed, of course, a less positive example of Sacramento politics: the passage of Senator Steinberg's SB520 by the Senate.  Despite the growing evidence that Coursera and Udacity do not, in fact, offer a smart option for public higher education, Steinberg has continued to offer one version after another of his effort to find ways to press universities to partner with for-profit ed-tech companies.  I have offered analyses of 520 and its ever changing contents here, here, and here.  As I have indicated throughout, SB520 is a bad idea, displaying a remarkable ignorance of the way higher education actually functions and serving more to provide the appearance of tackling the problem of access and achievement than to actually do something meaningful for access and achievement. 

But I want to make a different point here.

As bad a proposal as SB520 remains, it was much more destructive in its earlier forms.  Steinberg has been pushed to drop many of the worst elements of his bill and to lessen, if not eliminate, the more intrusive and onerous mechanisms to open up a new market for Silicon Valley venture capitalists.  And while it is clear that the Administrators of the 3 segments played a part in pushing back against Steinberg, it is worth stressing that faculty organizations applied continual and effective pressure against 520.  I am less knowledgeable about the faculty efforts in CSU and CCC but in UC, the Academic Senate, The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and The UC-American Federation of Teachers all organized against the Bill, met with legislators, wrote critiques, and in many cases testified against it (and Jerry's metrics proposals) in Sacramento.  Although they were not able to stop its passage in the Senate (where Steinberg dominates proceedings) they were able get significant changes. 

In addition, the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (the only FA with collective bargaining rights) was able to use its status to demand collective bargaining over any contract that UCSC sought to sign with Coursera.  Given that the administration had been proceeding with the contract negotiations with little, if any, faculty oversight this was a significant achievement.  

I do not want to overstate things here.   520 did pass out of the State Senate and administrators in both UC and CSU continue to pursue connections with Coursera and Udacity.   But the effect of the efforts of faculty organizations suggests that they are not as marginal as we sometimes fear.  Indeed, now is the time to build upon their success and deepen their effectiveness.  In the short term, 520 still has not passed the Assembly or been signed by the Governor--effective opposition may prevent it from becoming law.  More demands for oversight over contracts with online providers is a logical and necessary component of faculty commitment to the curriculum.   It is time to increase these efforts and increase the strength of these institutions.  They remain our best counter-balance to those who would redefine higher education.  Or at least they will be if we use them that way.

Teaching and Learning in the Corporate Surveillance State

As we learn more about how the United States’ government has been monitoring the phone calls and emails of its own citizens, we should ask what will happen when many of our classes are taught online.  We already know that Coursera tries to prevent student cheating by identifying each student’s keystroke pattern, but what should really concern us is the ability of administrators and outside agencies to simply drop in and record faculty and students’ exchanges.  In other words, once we place our classes online, we turn an essentially private situation into a public forum, and we simply do not know who can monitor our courses and our students.

This move from private conversation to public access has already occurred on a massive scale since Google, Facebook, and other web-based corporations are selling the personal data that we freely place online.  Following the logic of Michel Foucault, we can see how social control has been historically tied to confession.  First the Church controlled people through confession, then the police and the state, and now people freely choose to put their personal data online. This corporate effort to monetize personal information must be placed within the context of the post-9/11 war on terror where the government uses fear tactics to force high-tech companies to hand over their massive archives of data.

In terms of higher education, I recently asked a university official how faculty would be evaluated if they taught their courses online, and I was told that instead of using the usual in-class peer visit, a faculty member or administrator would be given access to watch the teacher online.  I then asked what would happen if most of the teaching happened through email or Skype, and I was informed that the evaluator would be able to access these interactions. 

One reason why most professors have not thought about how the use of online courses could  affect academic freedom is that so far, most of the faculty teaching online have been non-tenure-track faculty with little if any academic freedom.  However, with the great push to move more classes online, the risk of losing academic freedom will affect everyone. 

In terms of students, these same risks apply.  Many of the online providers argue that the strength of their new teaching technologies are derived from the ability of the teacher and/or provider to monitor the students’ progress.  For example, one technique that is used is to time how long a student looks at a particular page or document.  This information is then fed into an algorithm that examines how well the student performs on a particular set of tasks.  This tracking and monitoring of students is often called an experiment, yet I know of no company that has been required to have students sign off on being human subjects of a scientific experiment.  Moreover, many of these companies are already working with online ad companies and vendors to sell student data and information collected by algorithmic search engines.

While high-tech education providers often state that their ultimate goal is to provide better access to high-quality instruction, this admirable rhetoric often shields us from seeing a whole set of dangerous unintended consequences.  As companies feed on our personal information and the government spies on our personal communications, we must question the future of total information awareness.           

New Waypoints in the MOOC Debate, Part II: Lowering Revenue Expectations

In Part I, I described MOOCs as a symptom of the absence of educational ambition among politicians. Since then, the MOOC situation on the ground has been shifting day by day.  It's been driven by major deal announcements and by the first real studies of neo-MOOC learning patterns. It will likely be driven in the weeks to come by the revelation of the National Security Administrations's Prism program to use companies like Google to gather in secret all communications metadata on pretty much everybody.  I'll address the first of these issues in this post.

In May, Udacity and Coursera described what were at first greeted as landmark partnerships with major universities.  The press take on the Coursera contracts with "ten public institutions" was that

Under the new deals, Coursera is recasting itself as a platform for credit-bearing courses that would be offered to students enrolled at multiple campuses within a public-university system.

 The cognoscenti's view was that Coursera had "jumped the shark":

Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead.

. . . Coursera has simply never had a coherent plan to generate revenue.  Oh sure, it had a bunch of ideas about how to do it, which were outlined in this leaked MOU with the University of Michigan, but few seem to have panned out.  The only thing we’ve heard from Coursera is that their idea for charging people for certificates of completion netted $220,000 in Q1 of this year.  Given that Coursera’s annual burn rate seems to be in the neighbourhood of $10M (that’s on top of their partners spending $50K/course to place it on the Coursera platform), this is peanuts. 

In the UK, Martin Weller announced that "You Can Stop Worrying about MOOCs Now." Noting Coursera's intention to explore "MOOC based learning on campus," he asked,

what does that even mean? That's blended learning, or e-learning, and again, not exactly new.  If you take the MOO out of MOOC you're left with just a C, and no-one's that interested in just a C. This follows on the back of Georgia Tech's not free, online Masters MOOC, which looks awfully like a not very well supported elearning course.

Back in the edu-consultancy world, University Ventures described the Udacity-Georgia Tech deal as a case study for Bad Judgment magazine:

The first instance of bad judgment is the University’s announcement that it will be hiring only eight new instructors to teach as many as 10,000 new students and may rely in part on peer grading. The “massive” component of the masters degree stems from its origin: a meeting between the Georgia Tech Dean and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity. As one of the three horsemen of the MOOC movement, Udacity is banking on “massive” despite the fact that the more Udacity tailors its approach to approximate existing online programs (with instructors and interaction, as with its partnership with San Jose State), the more it seems to gain traction. 

The reality is that (1) instruction and interaction are critical to successful student outcomes and (2) the cost of instruction and interaction is not what makes higher education unaffordable.

There have been a group of us, including for example Bob Samuels, that has been making these same two points for quite some time.  Last week, I wrote a couple thousand words about the Udacity-Georgia Tech budget projections that I'm hoping CHE will get around to publishing sometime soon.  Suffice to say that major cost savings cannot be the rationale for the Georgia Tech arrangement. In the ramp-up period, terribly high per-MOOC costs could be justified by mass enrollments, but unfortunately from the VC point of view the masses take these courses for free. These production costs also collide with increasing awareness of large faculty time inputs: Duke's Dan Ariely and Cathy Davidson report 150 hours of their time per hour of "actual MOOC."  Prof. Davidson's phrase in a subsequent post is "insanely labor intensive"  -- in exchange for a $10,000 stipend that she spent entirely on assistants. Many MOOC watchers are now concluding, as she does, that MOOCs do not have a way of making up for massive public funding cuts.

Unfortunately, the idea of exponential cost savings based on zero marginal cost per additional student, as Coursera's Daphne Koller promised, has never been credible. As we exit the marketing phase and start looking at real cost performance, this news will move up the administrative and political food chain.

We need to get back to fixing huge budget shortfalls before we lose another couple of budget years. The spring's new cost discussions have been a help.

Is Climate Change A Hoax?

By Jorge Mariscal (UCSD)

During the same week that the President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, & Inclusion met in Oakland, a meeting where “community” representatives presented out-going UC President Mark Yudof with an award for “his commitment to our issues,” the UC Associated Students issued a statement that lamented the hostile environment across the UC system.

The “Resolution Recognizing and Condemning the Acts ofAnti-Black Racism and Racial Prejudices at the University of California Irvineand San Diego, while Affirming Support for the Black Student Unions at UCI andUCSD” begins with a sentiment few on the President’s Climate Council wanted to hear:  “Whereas, instances of Anti-Black racism are common on all UC campuses, yet [the] administration continues to not adequately address these incidences and carry out adequate measures against those who enact anti-Black rhetoric and actions.”

The irony was clear to anyone who was paying attention.  The Climate Council had come into being in 2010 shortly after UC San Diego was shaken by a series of events known as the “Cookout/noose” episode.  Now, three years later, awards were being handed out at the Council’s final meeting just days after viral videos captured members of the UC Irvine chapter of the Lambda Theta Delta fraternity cavorting in Blackface.  Things had come full circle and nothing of substance had changed.

The mission of the original Council was “to identify, evaluate, and share best practices in order to ensure a welcoming, inclusive, and nurturing environment across UC’s ten campuses.”  Local councils were mandated for each campus. They developed randomly according to existing campus structures.  Some were effective; some were a complete waste of time because they recycled existing approaches that were ineffectual. The system-wide Council began on a positive note with guest speakers such as Sylvia Hurtado from UCLA explaining to Council members the close connection between diversity and campus climate. 

It wasn’t long, however, before the attention of the system-wide Council was diverted away from the recent traumatic events.  Former Provost Larry Pitts announced that he did not want the climate Council to be a diversity council (guess he missed Hurtado’s presentation).  Council members then learned that the next meeting would not be held at UCOP offices. Instead we would meet in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance where we would take a tour of the exhibits.

Clearly, the Council’s business had been caught up in a hazy notion of tolerance that more often than not, as Wendy Brown has taught us, “iterates the normalcy of the powerful [and] regulates the presence of the Other.”  (Regulating Aversion, 8) The hard work of trying to understand campus climate on the ground would not be encouraged.  The outright hostility some student groups had recently experienced and still had to cope with on a daily basis on UC campuses was washed away in a flood of feel-good “can’t we all get along” liberalism.

Through the efforts of a small group of Council members, an attempt was made to tackle real issues.  With the support of Dean Chris Edley, working groups were formed on faculty diversity, the status of LGBT communities, and other pressing issues.  Working group members dedicated dozens of pro-bono hours preparing reports that, as is most often the case, were submitted, circulated through Senate circles, commented upon, and filed away for the edification of some future scholar.  Minor recommendations were accepted at some campuses, but overall the Council’s impact was minimal.  The climate had not changed.

Just five days after President Yudof received his commendation on May 2, a Black student at UC Irvine reached into her bag and found a note that read, “Go back 2 Africa slave.”  UCI administrators reacted with appropriate horror and “we will not tolerate such behavior” pronouncements.  Racism and sexism on UC campuses seemed to be caught in a never-ending loop of the film Ground Hog Day.

No one, not even the students who wrote the AS resolution, would argue that administrators have the power to stop racist or even garden-variety stupidity.  But clearly something has to change.  What can be done?  No “climate” or “diversity” commission can hope to improve that situation until faculty members are educated about what their women and minority students experience outside of the classroom and lab.  No student will be dissuaded from staging a racist and sexist “cookout” until campus demographics include more students, faculty, and administrators from historically underrepresented communities.  No campus will make progress on any equity issue without strong and fearless advocacy emanating from the top of the administrative chain.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting of more than a dozen departmental representatives who had been asked to poll their colleagues about “diversity” issues.  The most repeated comment was “We don’t know what diversity means.” The psych and anthro folks offered arcane definitions from within their disciplines; one engineer laughed and asked if a candidate who grew up with five sisters could list that fact as part of his contributions to diversity.  No one in the room seemed to know that there is an elaborate scholarly bibliography about what diversity means in higher education, how it affects the campus environment, and how it can function to either impede or improve student academic success. 

In order to avoid a heated debate, the “diversity officers” who ran the meeting declined to clarify their language.  No one pointed out that until diversity and equity are understood in an historical frame that reminds us that for decades specific groups were excluded from higher education we will continue to have pointless meetings like this one.  In the meantime, random incidents of racism, sexism, and homophobia will break out periodically, temperatures will rise across the UC system, and climate change will continue to be a hoax perpetrated by the keepers of the status quo.

The Zombie Bill: SB520 Passes out of the Senate

Senator Steinberg’s SB520 passed out of the senate by a 28-0 vote - with 11 Democrats deciding not to vote.  While many legislators clearly do not like the content of the bill, no one wants to kill the pet project of one of the most powerful politicians in the state. Meanwhile, the bill has been modified several times, but even in its emptied-out form, it still seeks to incentivize faculty and campuses to create courses that can be shared between all segments of higher education, and it leaves the door open for private-public partnerships.

In the brief debate (go to the 3:06:00 mark) over the bill, one can hear all of the standard rhetorical moves that dominate the current conversation regarding high-tech solutions to various social problems.  Senator Steinberg begins his defense of the SB520 by stressing that online education is not a magic bullet that will solve all of the problems caused by years of state budget cuts to higher education; however, he quickly changes direction when he quotes two newspaper articles touting Coursera’s recent deal with several state higher education systems.  In pointing to this latest development, he stresses that California cannot be left behind in this new race to improve access and affordability through distance education.
      

This notion that we cannot be left behind in this high-tech race is a reoccurring theme heard throughout the public and political debate.  The idea here is that even if the costs and effects of digital education are still unknown, we must do it because others are doing it.  According to this group psychology, we must follow the crowd and ignore our own doubts and questions.  For instance, even though some professors feel that this move to online courses will reduce the number of faculty positions, Steinberg assures the faculty that this is not the intention of the bill, yet, it is important to point out that in the context of social psychology, individual intentions do not matter.  In fact, one of the first senators to speak in support of the bill, Wyland, intoned that we must realize that there is not going to be money to hire more professors, and so the only way to improve access is to do it online.

From Wyland’s Republican perspective, the downsizing of faculty is a given, and all public functions will have to do more with less.  This fatalistic logic is inherent to the promoters of high-tech solutions:  from their perspective, resistance is futile, and we cannot stop the “natural” progress of technological and economic change.  Of course, Wyland and the other Republicans who all voted with Steinberg show the bipartisan nature of this high-tech rhetoric: the Republican desire to shrink big government and privatize public institutions has joined hands with the Democratic need to be associated with progress and private-public joint ventures.

The Democrats and Republicans are also able to join together because they both embrace the false rhetoric of student-centered digital education.  While it is clear why the libertarian Right would like to turn higher education into a private affair pursued by private individuals preferably in the privacy of their own homes, it is less clear why the Democrats have taken the libertarian student-centered bait. However, Senator’s Torrez’s remarks shed some light on the issue. She argues that the only way she was able to graduate and get her degree from the national labor college was due to the fact that she could take all of her classes online.  The first thing to point out here is that the “liberal” national labor college has recently sold off its campus and is now entirely online. Thus, in the great tradition of Clintonian triangulation, a school dedicated to labor issues promotes a labor-destroying system; meanwhile students are celebrated as their futures are de-funded.

Whether it is intentional or not, the real driving force behind online education is the further dismantling of the teaching profession and the marketization of public institutions.       

 

Is There Only One Right Answer?: A Challenge to the Teaching of Math and Science in Higher Ed

Many current promoters of MOOCs and other distance education models argue that higher education can be taught in a much more efficient way in fields like computer science, math, biology, and chemistry. According to high-tech educators, the main reason why these important disciplines can be streamlined is that there is only one right answer to questions and tests, and so a computer can easily grade these courses.  On a most basic level, they claim that 2+2 will always equal 4, and thus, there is no need for creativity, critical thinking, or interactive discussions.

The problem with this logic is that it removes the STEM disciplines from any social, personal, or ethical context.  In other words, students learn that math and science are impersonal, value-free fields founded on established, unchallengeable truths.  While it is clear that students do need to learn basic formulas and concepts, all knowledge needs to be seen in its social and historical contexts.  In fact, not only do we want students to think critically about the information they learn inside and outside of their classes, but we also need to train scientists and engineers to be innovative and creative.  Moreover, with the increasing importance of issues like alternative energy, cloning, stem cell therapy, and climate change, science and math should be approached with ethical concerns front and center. 

Purveyors of MOOCs like to say that online classes will not be any worse than the large lecture classes that dominate the undergraduate curriculum, and they have a point when they make this argument; however, we do not need a race to the bottom: what we need is to re-commit universities and colleges to spending resources on undergraduate instruction.  Whether our goal is to compete in the global high-tech economy or train future citizens and responsible adults, higher education cannot be focused on simply transmitting and testing simplified facts and calculations.  In fact, it is surprising that many of the most ardent promoters of MOOCs are themselves innovative computer scientists who think outside of the established box.

While China sends its students to American universities in order to build a creative class, it is ironic that the U.S. is seeking to dumb down its own curriculum. As I often tell my students, it is rare in life that you are confronted with one right answer or a simple multiple-choice test.  Reality is far too complex for the reductive model of education that is often tied to MOOCs and a reductive vision of the STEM disciplines. 

Steinberg Strikes Back

In response to all of the push-back he has received Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his attempt to appear to champion the interests of California's college students.  His latest iteration lightens the direct hand of legislative intrusion into curriculum without solving any of the underlying problems that continue to beset his vision.  Moreover, his continued acceptance of the rhetoric of for-profit online providers blinds him to the real costs of his proposals and to engaging in a serious consideration of alternative ways of improving access in higher education.

Still, Steinberg is proposing significant changes to SB520 and it is important to recognize them.

1) Steinberg has moved from putting into place a structured "framework" to drive the segments into relation with online providers to creating a system of "grant programs" for intensifying reliance on online programs and providers.  You will recall that in April he sought to establish "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."  Now, according to his latest amendments, he has shifted to legislating "incentive grant programs" (one in each segement) to help "faculty and individual campuses within the UC, CSU, and CCC systems to provide students increased opportunities to take strategically selected lower division courses online."

With this change, Steinberg has shifted his rhetoric from creating the "California Online Student Access Platform" to creating the "California Online Student Access Incentive Grant programs."  Under his new proposal, the state will provide funding to faculty for the purpose of increasing the numbers of lower-division online courses that will allegedly move students move more quickly either within a segment or between segments.  The heads of the Systems, "in consultation" with their Senates of course, will disburse incentive grants to individual faculty or groups of faculty. 

2) Despite changing his approach from the stick to the carrot, Steinberg is actually increasing the demands placed on the system.  Whereas in April he had required the segments "jointly" to identify up to 50 courses that served as important bottlenecks for students, he is now instructing "each segment" to identify up to 20 "high-demand lower division courses" and for up to 15 of those courses provide "incentive grants" to faculty to encourage them to enter into "15 appropriate partnerships" either within the segments or with "online course technology providers" to "significantly increase online options for matriculated students and high school pupils for the fall terms of the 2014-15 academic year."

3) Although Steinberg continues to insist that all courses created with incentive grant funding be put in the California Virtual Campus, he has softened his language on the State's direct claim to online intellectual property.   Whereas in April he declared that "the state shall retain all appropriate rights to intellectual property it creates or develops in the implementation of this section" he is now placing the question of intellectual property back within the systems themselves by insisting that "intellectual property created or developed by a segment in the implementation of this act shall be owned and managed by that segment according to its existing policies pursuant to applicable provisions of this code." 

These are clearly genuine changes in his approach.  But the question remains whether they can overcome the fundamental flaws of his earlier version?  And do they truly point out a way to an educationally desirable solution to the genuine problems of access?  The answer to both questions is no.

For one thing, as much as Steinberg may wish not to confront it, his proposals do entail a decision to spend money in one way rather than another.  None of this will be free and the funds spend through the incentive grants and the platform is money that could be spent elsewhere (say on faculty).  As the Senate Appropriations Committee Staff Analysis of Steinberg's April Version indicated, these costs are considerable.  The Staff pointed out that the CCC estimated initial course creation costs from $50,000 to $100,000 with costs higher at CSU and UC, considerable staff time and costs "to develop and approve them." Each year the costs of providing the accompanying services and administering the courses could range into the millions (although the Staff was analyzing the costs of the Online Platform its elimination will not get rid of the costs but simply transfer them directly onto the Segments).  To make the system work through the California Virtual Campus, the staff predicted that there would be the need for a common Learning Management System for the CCC alone would be $13M in the first year and over $7M in each subsequent year.  If the other systems are involved the costs would be much greater.  Steinberg is proposing to impose upon the three segments millions of dollars of new costs.  Even if the State does provide funding for these costs that money could be spent in other less speculative ways.  Far more likely is that the Segments will be driven into partnerships with online providers so as to share the upfront costs of meeting Steinberg's timetable.

These costs lead to the another problem of Steinberg's (revised) framework: the relationship between faculty intellectual property and venture capital.   Steinberg's devices to assure that neither public funding nor faculty intellectual property are diverted to "any private aspect" of alliances with for-profit online providers are weak tea indeed.  In concrete terms they do not exist.  Once placed within the California Virtual Campus it is difficult to see how faculty will retain any control over the use of their course materials or the marketing and distribution of the courses.  Steinberg's concern, understandably,  is to ensure that no student matriculated in any of the three segments or a California High School not be denied course credit for one of his online courses.  He is not concerned to control the reuse of the materials beyond the CVC without permission of faculty.  In fact there is no limitation placed on that at all.  Moreover, as anyone familiar with the debates going on within UC over defining intellectual property rights in UC sponsored online courses can attest, the property interests of the segments and those of the faculty are not necessarily aligned.

Nor is there any means set up to assure that no public funds are spent on private interests.  Should the segments enter into partnerships with the online providers, they will likely contract out services and use public funds to pay for them.  Despite the rhetoric of social justice, venture capital will demand a profitable return on its investments.  Moreover, as the for-profit MOOC providers have demonstrated, their business is information and they claim that the information they gather on students is their property.  I see no way around the notion that public funds will indeed be diverted to "private aspects" of the partnerships.

Ultimately, the drive to push through SB520 is a drive to avoid a serious discussion about reinvesting in California's educational system.  Pursuing the will o' wisp of technophilia allows the Legislature (and the Governor in his own way) to appear to be solving problems of their own making without engaging in a serious public debate over the future educational needs of the state (from K-16).  They won't overcome the pressing educational challenges facing California.

An Existing Just Model for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

By Bob Samuels, UCLA and editor of Changing Universities.

People in higher education now know that over 70% of the faculty are working outside of the tenure system.  It has also been documented that most of these “contingent” faculty members earn less than fast food workers, and they have no job protections or benefits.  What needs to be articulated is how to resolve these issues, and fortunately, the labor conditions at the University of California can serve as an existing model for academic justice for non-tenure-track teachers. 

In the UC system, lecturers represented by UC-AFT (University Council of the American Federation of Teachers) have a clear pathway to job security with relatively high pay and full benefits (including pensions).  These teachers also at times have a strong role in departmental governance and curricular development and have their academic freedom protected.  Although, there is still plenty of room for improvement, at one of the largest   public university system in the country, activism and organization have led to a model that should and can be replicated throughout the United States. 

In 2012, the average annual salary for the over 3,000 UC non-tenure-track faculty was $62,000 with an average full course load of six courses on semester campuses.  This means that the per course pay was over $10,000, while the national average appears to be around $3,000.  Moreover, unlike most other faculty working outside of the tenure system, UC lecturers who work more than 50% time have full medical, dental, and vision care, and they participate in a defined benefits pension plan. 

This model of labor justice is protected by a very detailed contract, which protects many of the faculty against job insecurity.  Similar to the traditional tenure-track career path, non-tenure-track faculty in the UC system go up for a comprehensive review in their sixth year of teaching, and if they are deemed excellent, they are given a continuing appointment, which means that they can only be let go for just cause or a proven lack of instructional need.

A key aspect to the contract regulating these faculty members is that it recognizes the diverse employment needs of contingent faculty members.  Except for benefits, all rights and salary policies apply to all faculty members regardless if they teach a single course or a full load.  By basing compensation on a percentage appointment, the university is able to cater to its particular needs, while the union is able to provide for a just and fair wage and work level.  While a third of these teachers work full time, another third teach only one or two courses a year. 

The reason why this type of appointment system is so important is that one of the biggest obstacles to treating non-tenure-track faculty in a fair and equitable way is that there are many different employment contexts for these types of positions, and some part-time faculty members do not want to be full time.  In fact, in the UC system, the majority of the lecturers working less than 50% may have other jobs inside and outside of the university.  Some of these lecturers are fully employed lawyers, doctors, and artists who only teach one or two courses a year.  These professionals help to bring expertise to particular programs, and the union has recognized the need to allow the university the ability to employ these people without giving them benefits or requiring them to do departmental service.  However, the union also has to  constantly fight cost-cutting administrators who circumvent the contract and try to exploit non-tenure-track faculty by paying them as little as possible.  

While the UC-AFT contract provides a clear pathway to job security, only a third of the current employees have passed their six-year reviews.  It is also the case that many lecturers only teach once in a while, so they never reach their sixth year.  Furthermore, since lecturers have to go through a thorough review to gain continuing appointments, many leave or are not rehired before their sixth year.

Since our contract does allow for a wide variety of employment situations, university administrators cannot say that they need non-tenure-track faculty to provide administrative flexibility.  Moreover, due to the high level of turnover in the first six years, departments are able to adjust to real changes in enrollment and instructional needs.  However, the union contract prohibits departments from not rehiring lecturers simply to prevent them from gaining continuing appointments or to replace them with less expensive lecturers.

Another vital aspect of this contract is that it stops departments from using student evaluations as the main criteria for judging lecturers. This means that departments have to develop robust methods of assessment, which are centered on the peer review of instruction and professional development. In fact, lecturers are required to show their knowledge of their field, and they are able to apply for professional development funding to stay current.    Furthermore, lecturers are often given course credit and pay for doing extensive departmental or university service.  For example, many of the UC writing programs are staffed by full-time lecturers who teach most of the courses and do most of the administration.  While the full-time maximum course load is nine courses for the campuses on the quarter system, a course load of eight courses is considered a 100% appointment for teachers of writing and languages.  The contract also provides a method for faculty to petition for course credit for non-required duties, such as proctoring exams and external outreach.

It should be pointed out that the UC-AFT contract is very detailed and defensive because it has been developed in response to the many different ways administrators have tried to go against the intent and language of the regulations.  Thus, an effective grievance process has been required to stop departments from trying to prevent lecturers from gaining continuing appointments.  We also have had many cases where departments have not followed their own policies when they review lecturers, and therefore it has been important to closely monitor and enforce the contract.

In fact, during the fiscal crisis of 2008-9, some campuses did try to lay off many lecturers with continuing appointments.  Through political activism and difficult grievance work, we were able to save virtually all of these jobs.  For instance after UCLA issued one-year layoff notices to almost all of the continuing appointments, our union worked with students and other concerned faculty groups to protest against the potential loss of hundreds of classes and a rapid expansion of class size.  We also met with many university officials to show them that lecturers were teaching a majority of the required undergraduate courses, and there was no one else qualified to teach these needed classes. 

Since lecturers play such a central role in undergraduate instruction, we have been able to use our contract to protect the funding and quality of undergraduate education in the UC system.  Part of this work has required us going to the state legislature and pushing for audits on workload and campus funding.  One of the results of these audits was that the university has completely changed how it funds the campuses and what it does with student tuition and state funding.  Amazingly, until we helped to reveal the truth, parents sending their kids to UCSB did not know that their tuition was actually being sent to the central Office of the President where it was then being redistributed to the wealthier campuses.  In 2012, partially as a result of the state audit we initiated, the system moved to a structure where the ten UC campuses keep all of their tuition funding.

One of our challenges has been to get the university to provide a more transparent budget.  Like many other universities and colleges, the UC engages in many different types of hidden cross-subsidizations.  Undergraduate tuition is often used for graduate education, and instructional funds find their way into research budgets.  In order to correct this situation, we have lobbied hard in Sacramento for increased budget transparency because we know that the defunding of undergraduate budgets not only hurts lecturers, but it also downgrades the quality of undergraduate instruction.

One of the keys to our success is a recognition that research professors are often focused on graduate and professional education, while the bulk of the undergraduate classes are handled by non-tenure-track faculty.  Although, some may say that we have helped to institutionalized a two-tier system, we would respond that we have made the current system much more fair and just as we have also protected undergraduate education from unstable funding. 

Having a union with required membership fees and a connection to a statewide and national organization has allowed us the opportunity to challenge our administration on a whole host of issues ranging from online education to pension funding.  We have also worked with a coalition of the different unions within the university to fight administrative growth, salary inequities, and benefit reductions.  In other words, politics and organization infuse everything we do. 

 

State and Local Online Initiatives Converge

There is new California Senate budget language for online education funding for the UC system:  “Of the funds appropriated in Schedule (1), $10,000,000 is provided to increase the number of courses available to undergraduate students enrolled at the University of California (UC) through the use of technology, specifically those courses that have the highest demand, fill quickly, and are prerequisites for many different degrees. Priority will be given to developing courses that can serve greater numbers of students while providing equal or better learning experiences. The university shall ensure that the courses selected for this purpose are articulated across all UC campuses offering undergraduate degree programs and shall additionally ensure that students enrolling and successfully completing these courses are granted degree applicable cross-campus transfer credit. The university will shall use these funds to enable make these courses to be available to all university undergraduate students systemwide, regardless of the campus where they are enrolled. The university should shall charge UC-matriculated students the same tuition for these courses that it charges them for regular academic year state-subsidized courses. Prior to the expenditures of these funds, the University shall submit a detailed expenditure plan for approval by the Department of Finance. The Director of Finance shall provide notification in writing of any approval granted under this section, not less than 30 days prior to the effective date of that approval, to the chairperson of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, or not later than whatever lesser amount of time prior to that effective date the Chairperson of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, or his or her designee, may in each instance determine. By March 1, 2014, the University shall submit a report detailing the use of these funds and any outcomes that may be attributed to their use. The report shall include the university’s proposal for use of these funds in 2014-15.”

This new language aligns with UC’s new online Initiative (ILTI), except it requires the new online courses to be applicable for degree transfer credit at all UC campuses.  While the UC proposal only requires new courses to be transferable at two campuses, the state wants these classes to be system-wide.  Since ILTI is reliant on the governor’s funding, it appears that the initial call for proposals will have to be rethought, and this brings up the very difficult problem of system-wide courses. One unresolved issue is whether any of these transferable courses will give major or GE credit and who will decide on this issue. 

Complicating matters is the continuing battle over SB520.  The bill is being amended again, and this time it will be a strictly voluntary incentive grant system.  In other words, similar to ILTI, it will ask faculty to develop online courses, but they need to be available for transfer credit in all three segments.  Like the governor’s proposal, SB520 could represent a backdoor elimination of shared governance, campus autonomy, and the power of individual faculty senates and departments to accept or reject outside courses.   

Standing back, we see how the governor’s budget proposal, SB520, and the UC’s own online program are converging.  While UC thinks that it can control the process and make sure that each campus has control over its curriculum, the state is pushing for a radical restructuring of the system. Moreover, since no one has figured out how revenue will be shared between the campuses and who will pay for a student on one campus to take a course on another campus, this top-down imposition of shared online courses may cause major havoc in California’s higher education segments.  

When Tenure-Track Faculty Take on the Problem of Adjunctification

by Jennifer Ruth, Portland State University

I am part of an unofficial group of tenured faculty at a state institution that relies on many non-tenure-track faculty, but we are not the tenured faculty Ivan Evans refers to in his piece “When the Adjunct Faculty are the Tenure-track’s Untouchables.”

When we went on the market, getting a tenure-track job already meant you were the one person standing in the rubble-strewn city of your profession. There was no denying the corpses. At the very least, we understood that luck played a bigger role in our fate than merit had. We hadn’t earned something so much as been spared something else—namely, the miserable life of the freeway flyer. And we drew the obvious conclusion from this, the survivor’s-guilt conclusion: we would prove worthy of these tenure-track jobs only if we dedicated ourselves to creating more of them for others. We would fight the neoliberal adjunctifcation of the professoriate in the name of our no less talented but less fortunate friends.

And so we did. Before we were tenured, we began working together on our campus to overcome the defeatism pervasive at the time – the defeatism that said, the erosion of tenure is bigger than us, it’s bigger than academia, it’s the post-70s outsourcing economy. To fight it would be to drown ourselves trying to swim upstream. For months, every other week, three of us would invite a new handful of people we considered influential on campus to have drinks– tenured faculty and chairs, people who were positioned to do something about the problem. It’s not that we were excluding non-tenure-track faculty – far from being our untouchables, they were our friends with whom we had coffees, lunches, dinners; with whose kids our kids shared playdates—but rather we took seriously what some of them were saying, which was You guys have the power, and thus the responsibility, to reverse this trend. We don’t.

The work of the group we formed exceeded our expectations. Here’s a few of the things we did:

1) We introduced two motions into faculty senate: the first motion establishing a committee to rethink the Senate so that it could exercise a stronger voice in shared governance with administration; the second motion to shift our percentage of tenure-line to off-tenure-line instruction to 70/30 in 5 years. The first motion passed; the second was tabled.

2) We lobbied the administration to redefine about 20 jobs that were originally advertised as non-tenure-track to tenure-track.

3) One of our group, who was chair of her department, organized chairs-only meetings for chairs to strategize on the issue (all the meetings heretofore had been in the Dean’s presence).

4) We showed graphs at Faculty Senate meetings that demonstrated the magnitude of the problem. We drew what we called a “line of shame” through one such graph, with those departments that had grown the most through off-tenure-line labor falling below the line and those that had resisted the temptation above the line.

And when we got tenure, we stepped up our game by assuming positions in our departments. As department chair and directors of programs, those of us in the English department  created two new tenure lines and converted a fixed-term position when someone retired into a tenure-track position. Within two years, we had three new tenure lines that were not simply replacing retiring tenure-track faculty. During a period of budget cuts when retirement-replacement searches in other departments were being cancelled (and the lost SCH surely made up through contingent labor), we made sure that we never lost a search. In other words, we lost no ground. Instead, we made practical and considerable advances. 

How?

1) The Director of Literary Studies Amy Greenstadt re-arranged classes so that we had fewer that were under-enrolled, buying us cultural capital with the Dean.

2) I refused to sign some adjunct contracts and made it clear that we wanted to help the College meet its SCH (student credit hour) goals but not by adding any more adjuncts or full-time, non-tenure-track faculty – only by adding tenure-track faculty.

3) We encouraged, cajoled—and in one case, brought in a lawyer to convince—a few of our faculty who had gotten sweetheart deals over the years to give up these deals and return to the course-loads the rest of us carried.

Over a period of two years, through careful scheduling and fewer course releases, we increased our SCH by 2% while using fewer adjuncts. We also improved our graduate programs by offering more grad-only small classes. We made sure the Dean knew all these things so that he understood that we were accountable, that if he provided us the resources to hire tenure track faculty those resources would not be squandered.

I remember sitting in the office of the chair of the philosophy department and crowing about a success. We had received permission from the Dean to make two tenure-track hires rather than one out of an already-progressing search. It had been a dramatic couple of weeks. My office staff had helped me develop graphs and tables, and my directors and I had composed arguments and timelines (lines per SCH, budget numbers, hiring trends over the years, etc.), all of which I presented to the Dean and his staff.

I thought I had a fail-safe case for new tenure lines to accommodate the growth in the student body we’d experienced over the years. When I finished, the dean said, “We’re not giving you any more tenure lines.” I don’t remember what I said or did, but I do remember that the dean’s secretary called me later that day and said, “That grand exit was a little over the top.”

Over the next week or so, I wondered if she was right. But when Amy, the Director of Literary Studies, gave me something more specific to propose– a way to turn one replacement tenure-track search into two lines, saving money on the search—I knocked on the Dean’s door. He agreed that if we continued to work with the college on its initiatives and were careful budget-wise, he’d work with us towards our goal. Telling the philosophy chair about it that day, I suddenly felt silly. All that drama for one line! One miniscule drop in the national bucket! Was I foolish to get so worked up over something so relatively small? The philosophy chair said, “It’s not small to the person who gets the job you guys created.” Right, I thought.


A few people made the connection between the work we were doing and the amazing new colleagues walking our halls but many did not. The new hires themselves were coming in the right way and, thus, were rightly feeling obliged to nobody.

We could with confidence claim a whole army of new enemies, however. Weirdly enough, none of these enemies were administrators. Administrators knew we were trying to improve our department and, even when we aggravated the hell out of them, most of them had the grace to acknowledge that what we were doing was only what we in fact should be doing.

No, the people who now disliked us were some of the people who’d once been our closest friends: those people whose sweetheart deals no longer existed; the tenure-track faculty whose under-enrolled classes were now fully enrolled so they had 35 papers to grade instead of 20; the man whose program relied on adjuncts and so was always, if only temporarily, imperiled by my resistance to signing adjunct contracts; full-time, non-tenure-track faculty who understandably felt that my commitment to growing tenure lines implicitly jeopardized their job security (it didn’t but it’s easy to imagine how they’d feel it might); non-tenure-track faculty serving on Faculty Senate (at our institution, non-tenure-track faculty are involved in governance) during the year we introduced the “line of shame”; tenure-track faculty who had joined the profession to—god forbid—write books and teach, not to take on the Sisyphean task of rebuilding the profession, but who felt a little guilty about this. Many of these people hated our guts.

In the beginning what we were doing felt good. We were listening to our non-tenure-track colleagues and we understood what it meant for them to be without academic freedom, without job security. We were not quislings! We were on the side of the righteous!

But after a while, as the political skirmishes got uglier, our reasons for why we were doing what we were doing began to change. We began to care less about the terrible circumstances of our non-tenure-track colleagues. We began to care less about doing “the right thing” by the next generation. By the end we were fighting for the quality of our own jobs. It sucks when non-tenure-track people feel threatened when you feel you have proven your commitment to them, it sucks to have tenure-track people mad at you when you won’t create a non-tenure-track job for their spouse, it sucks to sit in a meeting in which a non-tenure-track faculty member openly uses his or her job security as a reason for making a curricular change to our major requirements instead of citing reasons intrinsic to the discipline or our pedagogical goals.

By the end, we just wanted to sit in a room of peers (fellow tenured faculty) and apprentice-peers (tenure-track) with whom we could debate ideas and feel like we were all on a reasonably even playing field. If we won an argument, we knew it was because we’d actually made sense not because someone felt subtly coerced. If we all fought bitterly about the curricular area of our next hire, nobody afterwards could claim that they were scared we’d retaliate against them for disagreeing with us by not rehiring them the next quarter. We could call each other all kinds of names for being so benighted as to think we needed a modernist when we obviously needed a medievalist but we couldn’t call each other “neoliberal managers” or pull out the trump card of “retaliation” when our feelings got hurt.

In his history of academic freedom in America The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand writes, “Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial.” The tenure system is an elaborate construction. The hiring process is ridiculously strenuous but that’s what keeps it from being a system based on patronage. By the time you get your job and then achieve tenure—after interviewing, having many people read your work and references, giving a job talk in front of a dept., undergoing evaluations by committees and external reviewers—you feel legitimate. Even when you know chance played a big part, you nonetheless don’t feel you owe your luck to any particular person. That’s often not the case when hiring off the tenure-track. When we hire off the tenure track, we create complex networks of obligation; we create potential fiefdoms. At the very least, we make our world more vulnerable to corruption: I protect your job security, you vote for me. I give your girlfriend these adjunct sections, you feel indebted to me. Hiring on the tenure track has its opportunities for patronage, of course, but there are more steps, more bureaucracy, more people involved at every stage. As a result, the kind of direct-unmediated power of boss-employee is diffused in a way that it isn’t with off-track hiring.

By the time we’d finished our terms as chair and directors, we were fighting because we’d come to understand how valuable the tenure system is for the culture in which we wanted to work. We didn’t want to work within a new old boy’s club, where people got jobs because of who they knew or whose back they scratched. We wanted to work with people who could say “no” to us when they disagreed with us without then feeling resentfully defensive with us. We wanted to work with people who could say what they really thought without worrying that someone else’s job security might be indirectly affected by their opinions. We wanted the preciousness of a world different from most workplaces, a world of peers who make decisions together and argue with one another in the context of academic freedom.

I sympathize with Ivan Evans’s despair. The lack of collective will among TTF in what is a struggle that affects us all is deeply frustrating. But what if we got a better handle on the multiple variables involved? The national statistics are the outcome of numerous interactions between non-tenure-track faculty, tenure-track faculty, chairs, deans, and provosts. If we don’t want the future that inertia is busy building or even if we want to protect the vestiges of academic freedom we have left, TTF are going to have to grapple honestly with the compromised culture that has already developed with non-tenure-track hiring as well as with the financial problems administrators face--at least at institutions like my own which rely almost entirely on tuition and have lost state support over the years.

We don’t deserve to all be adjunctifed—if only because universities without academic freedom translates to a less free society—but I worry that we are more likely to be if we let the few sadistic professors and knife-twisting administrators distract us from the much more difficult, because more intimate and more ethically complex, politics of painstakingly changing what is in many places now our status quo.