July 5, 2016--Alison Bernstein

Alison Bernstein, my prodigious colleague and friend died last week. Below is a note I sent to her daughters--

Dear Emma & Julia

Here's a story about your mother from nearly 50 years ago.

It was 1969 or so and I was working at Staten Island Community College in the backwaters of higher education. The backwaters because in, traditional higher education terms, in status terms, it was doubly-challenged: it was a community college and located on very conservative Staten Island. In effect--nowhere and nothing special.

But, the president of SICC (SICK, students dubbed it), William Birenbaum, was an inspired and inspiring educator totally devoted to the purported mission of urban community colleges--for the disenfranchised to make access to a quality education welcoming and effective. 

On Staten Island, the local leadership saw the college as a version of a trade school where the male students should take business courses and the women study to be either nurses or secretaries--the college's two most popular programs.

Bill rounded up a crew of progressive educators to help him, as he put it, break some windows to enable new, more egalitarian ideas flourish. As you might imagine he was not a favorite of the Staten Island Italian Club who effectively ran the island. But Bill, if nothing else, was ambitious and persistent. So he hired "Flash" (a former dock worker and union organizer), a bunch of Vietnam veterans, one or two scholar-activists (Stanley Aronowitz and Colin Greer), diversity activists Joe Harris and Ernesto Loperena, me, and the very young Alison, a newly-minted Vassar graduate.

How did Bill find his unlikely way to Alison? How did she make her unlikely way to him and godforsaken Staten Island?

While at Vassar, Alison was involved in pressing the administration to place students on the board of trustees. She and her coconspirators wanted it to be 50-50, with 50 percent student members, but they settled for one seat, which Alsion of course occupied.

Alison being Alison, she immediately took the lead to establish a national organization for student trustees. In that era of social protest many colleges were adding students to their boards.

And with such an organization in place, again Alison being Alison, she organized a national conference of student trustees. To the second or third annual conference--during Alison's senior year--she invited Bill Birenbaum to be the keynote speaker.

He accepted in less than a heartbeat and showed up in Chicago, or wherever, roaring drunk. (We later learned we would find him in that condition by 4:30 every afternoon.)

Even when high, perhaps especially when inebriated, Bill was brilliant. In his speech, as he would put it, he did his thing. And after he was done--I wasn't there but heard he was at top of his game--he invited Alison and the rest of the organization's executive leadership to go out for drinks.

He carried on for hours over many glasses of Dewar's, his favorite. 

He was especially attracted to Alison (I feel certain in more ways than one.) Well past midnight, when all but Bill and Alison remained standing. Literally. To her he said something like the following--

"You say you want to participate in making a revolution. I respect that. In fact, I endorse it. But you can't do it at Vassar. That place is for rich kids. For the over-privileged, like you, who want to play at bringing about radical change. If you want to make a revolution in education there's no better place to do so than at two-year colleges. At mine. That's where the action in. So, if you're serious, it's time for you to shit or get off the pot."

"I want to, I want to," Alison said with her heart pounding in her chest.

"In that case, with you graduating soon, if you really are serious, which I doubt, I will hire you to be a secial presidential assistant and from that position you will be able to find things to do to help bring about social change."

"I'll be there," Alison said.

Bill said, "I will hold an office for you only until July 1st."

And the rest is history.

Not mentioned thus far in any of the many notes and testimonies or the president of the Ford Foundation's otherwise fine tribute, is Alsion's work with community colleges. 

After her time at SICC, when at the Fund For the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (also insufficiently mentioned), Alison began a nearly 30-year deep involvement with community colleges. First from her position at FIPSE in the Department of Education and later during her two assignments at the Ford Foundation. 

With the support and encouragement of Susan Berresford, The Urban Community College Transfer Opportunity Program, which Alison conceptualized and ran, was mold breaking. Thousands of students who didn't have a friend in philanthropy, benefitted mightily by the work that Alison pioneered, advocated, and protected. It wasn't sexy like a lot of other philanthropic work, but it made a measurable difference in the lives of many.

Back in 1969, she showed up at SICC before July 1st and got off that metaphorical pot. From then on, for decades she lived and thrived and inspired.

That was a magical time of great accomplishment.

I loved her very much.
In more ways than one.

Steven

September 17, 2013--The Walmartization of Higher Education

Tenure as we know it is a relatively new thing.

In the 19th century, professors served at the pleasure of trustees and university presidents. And they could be terminated with little cause. Major donors could and at times did pressure university administrators to fire certain individuals or prohibit the hiring of others, mainly those they felt would interfere with the religious principles of the institution.

Courts rarely intervened in dismissals; but, nonetheless, a de facto tenure system existed and professors, if they did not get far out of doctrinal line, could expect to have their jobs for life.

During the early years of the 20th century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a quasi faculty union, began to pressure colleges and universities to adopt practices that provided lifetime employment protection for senior professors.

The AAUP contended that this was necessary to shield faculty from being dismissed for their views--political as well as religious. Though there were relatively few cases of these kinds of firings, it proved to be a potent argument; and so by the 1950s virtually all institutions of higher learning implemented a tenure system that assured continuous employment after, typically, a seven-year probationary period.

During the McCarthy era, when there were indeed witch hunts to root out alleged Marxists and communists, many, under the protection of tenure, were able to claim that their private views--and even those they articulated in class--were an expression of "academic freedom." Though there were situations where colleges caved into pressure, for the most part few tenured professors, even during that dark period, were dismissed. Many felt intimidated, but very few were purged.

In more recent years, in some quarters, tenure has come under attack. For a number of reasons--

First, it can be used to protect incompetents. After receiving tenure, professors are for all intents and purposes free not to keep up with their disciplines, teach from yellowing notes, and spend little time outside the classroom with students. At even prestigious institutions many tenured faculty are rarely on campus--teaching two to three days a week--do little meaningful research, and shun committee assignments and other collegial and campus citizenship responsibilities. Tenure makes them effectively untouchable, even unsupervisable.

Tenure also makes it difficult for institutions to flexibly deploy resources into new fields and disciplines and makes it almost impossible to phase out departments where enrollments, because of market forces, have shrunk dramatically.

To invest in more programs in computer science, it may be necessary to phase out courses in classical languages; to build capacity in molecular biology, it may be necessary to scale back offerings in biochemistry. With tenured classicists and traditionally-trained biologists, institutions are locked into rigid academic structures which, if they cannot be reformed, place severe limits on an institution's ability to keep up with the times or break new intellectual ground.

And the AAUP and faculty unions claim that without tenure colleges would dangerously reduce the number of expensive full-timers and replace them with much-lower-cost part-time adjuncts. As a result, it is asserted, teaching quality will decline.

This is half true--

Many places in fact have dramatically shifted teaching responsibilities to adjuncts. It is not unusual for at least half of all freshman and sophomore courses to be taught by graduate assistants and part-timers. Cost savings are indeed considerable. But, and this is significant, there is growing evidence that adjunct faculty are more effective in the classroom than tenured faculty.

For example, the New York Times recently cited a study which showed that part-time faculty are more effective in the classroom than full-timers.

The study was based on data from more than 15,000 students at Northwestern University. The results revealed that there was "strong and consistent evidence that Northwestern faculty outside the tenure system outperform tenure track/tenured professors in introductory undergraduate classrooms."

This appeared to be true in almost all subject areas and was especially evident for "average and less-qualified students." These conclusion were based primarily on how likely students were to take additional courses in the discipline and comparisons about the grades students received in subsequent courses. Again, in most instances, students taught by adjuncts reported that they had richer experiences and performed better than those taught by tenured faculty.

Rather than face the challenges this and similar studies have exposed, the AAUP attempted to change the subject. Anita Levy, a senior program officer at the association, said:

My worry is that a study like this can be used to justify hiring more contingent faculty who won't have due-process protection or job security and might not even have offices. It's part of the just-in-time, Walmartization of higher education.

A few points--

Adjunct faculty do have due-process. If they feel they have been dealt with illegally they in fact have recourse to legal remedies. In addition, why should they or any ineffective faculty member have "job security"? And just having private offices does not guarantee that faculty members will set aside more than two hours a week for office hours or use them appropriately.

August 27, 2013--Trump You

Is it any surprise that The Donald is likely involved in a fraudulent "education" enterprise--Trump University, if you can believe it.

But then he is most famous for putting his name on everything from a line of tacky men's clothing to numerous gilded hotels and gambling casinos, golf courses, TV reality shows, and of course cheesy housing and office towers. So why not on a "university"? Especially one that is as much a scam as most of his other ventures.

The New York Attorney General is charging that Trump U is a version of an educational ponzi scheme and is seeking $40 million in restitution for thousands who it is claimed were defrauded by Trump's false claims. In response, eloquent as ever, Trump yesterday called AG Eric Schneiderman a "light weight." Clearly not something anyone would think about calling the ever-inflating Donald.

It is alleged that potential students were drawn into the scheme by first offering access to a free seminar in real estate investing and then from that into a $1,495 (not $1,500) three-day "seminar" which was in fact an "upsell" to increasingly expensive "Trump Elite" packages that could cost up to $35,000 per course and which promised at least some access to Trump himself. 

But of course, as in other classic bait-and-switch scams, things did not turn out as promised. In this case, if students wanted to see Trump rather than finding him in the seminar room, they had to watch "The Apprentice" or check him out on Fox News when he was ranting about Barack Obama's college transcript and birth certificate.

In the spirit of fair-and-balanced, I should note that education scams are sadly not that unusual. There are too many examples of even legitimate institutions of higher learning engaging in shoddy and corrupt practices--like Trump, in order to make money.

My personal favorite occurred in the 1970s when Touro College in New York City bought four nursing homes from Dr. Eugene Hollander, Touro board chair, for $29 million and then leased them back to him to enable him to raise his Medicaid rates so that he could cover the cost of his lease and pay Touro at least an additional $100,000 a year while making a fortune for himself. (Hollander pleaeded guilty to Medicaid fraud, was put on probation for five years, and fined $1.0 million.)

Perhaps flush from its profitable nursing home experience, also in the 1970s, also seeking to make as much money as possible to support its expansion plans, Touro enrolled as adult students hundreds of low-income elderly people, some of whom could not read or write English, in its adult-education programs. Investigators asserted that the programs had been established primarily to help students obtain federal Pell as well as NY State Tuition Assistance Grants so they could pay Touro's tuition. Needless to say, the college, scamming, did not provide anything resembling classes in the nursing homes in which its "students" resided.

My actual favorite higher education scam was an only-slightly facetious program under consideration at a unnamed university well known for its adult degree offerings. 

Under pressure from the host institution to collect as much tuition and fees as possible and spend as little as possible on underpaid part-time faculty, the adult division came up with a number of innovative courses that met at numerous off-campus locations at day and evening hours seven days a week. 

Though it was a thriving enterprise, the adult division came under pressure to provide more-and-more income to feed the overhead of the rest of the university. So much so and so relentlessly that staff proposed a program that would bring in considerable  income but require no expenditures--that it would be an all-profit venture--The Special Degree Program for the Previously Living.

The staff enjoyed the macabre process of developing the curriculum (there were, for example, no political correctness problems with literature courses devoted exclusively to DWMs--dead white males) and writing promotional copy ("learning that lasts an eternity"); but the central administration who at first misread the euphemistic name of the proposed program gave it careful consideration before getting the joke. 

On the other hand, they redoubled their efforts to pressure the dean of the adult division to consider devising programs for the elderly who, because of their low-income status, would be eligible for Pell Grants and  . . .