On Saturday July 1, the day that Twitter melted down, one of the few tweets I actually got to read was by an unknown to me but clearly Republican tweeter, who said the following (some paraphrasing involved) in response to SCOTUS decision on affirmative action:
I don’t know what the problem is, American Universities can add as many freshman slots as they want. If they want diversity just enroll as many additional freshman as apply.
Upon reading this I wanted to reach through the internet and grab this person by the collar and shake them and scream at them: “you have NO idea what you are talking about.”
Some personal background needed here: I have been a student at a highly selective liberal arts college (undergraduate at Oberlin College, Ohio), at comprehensive community college (post-college self improvement at The College of San Mateo, California), at a flagship state university (Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of Kentucky), and have taught at a selective undergraduate campus of a major state university (Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown), a liberal arts four year branch of a flagship elite public institution (Associate Professor at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise), and at an open enrollment community college (Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College). So when I tell you that I have experienced American Higher Education inside/out I mean that I really do know it personally from nearly the top (okay I didn’t go to Harvard/Princeton/Yale) to the very bottom. I also happened to have hit Oberlin (early 1970’s), UK (late 1970’s), UP Johnstown (mid 1980’s), and UVA Wise (early 1990’s) during time periods when they were attempting to significantly expand the size of their student populations. I also experienced what happens when a community college has a shrinking population base and tries to sustain enrollments through distance learning and drastically cutting teaching staff.
So back to our anonymous, Republican tweeter, who cavalierly suggested “just expand enrollment.” Much depends upon what kind of education one wishes to provide whether or not expansion of enrollment is something that is relatively easy and fairly low cost to do, or extremely difficult and very high cost thing to accomplish. In the 21st century the manner in which higher education is delivered and experienced varies enormously depending upon the type of institution and the type of students involved. At elite colleges and universities such as Harvard or my own alma mater Oberlin, almost all undergraduate students are residential students who live apart from their families (most are unmarried, childless young people) in dormitories or rental housing near campus; classes are held in a single locality with all the students present along with the instructor (professor or teaching assistant) at the same time (referred to as synchronous and face-to-face). At community colleges and many public state universities the majority of undergraduates live in their own homes with their families (many are married, and a significant portion have children of their own); depending upon the institution and the subject matter some or even all of a student’s classes are held through the internet, with students logging in at their personal convenience (nights, weekends, whenever they have a spare moment), all communications are written or prerecorded audio/video (referred to as asynchronous distance learning).
The nature, quality and quantity of learning that takes place in small classrooms where students and faculty can sit face-to-face and talk freely about the ideas in things that everyone has read, is very different from that which takes place in huge lecture halls, from television screens, and especially in asynchronous internet programs. I am not saying that one is good and the other is bad. I am saying that they are DIFFERENT, and that from my experience with teaching in all the different modes that exist (including ten years of teaching predominantly on-line) that some kinds of learning can best happen through face-to-face through extended, live discussion. Other forms of learning can best happen through individuals working at their own pace independently, with automated feedback of a computer program.
I am also saying that this difference in educational mode between elite college and community colleges (two extreme ends of the continuum): 1) did not exist at all in the 1960’s and 1970’s, 2) is relatively new (a product of technological developments), 3) leads to very different learning out comes, and 4) difference between learning modes is getting more extreme. In the coming weeks I am going to take four points and expand on them in detail providing examples, and hopefully generating some feedback.
Moreover, all of this is tied to the inexorable expansion of rationalization from the workplace and government bureaucracy into education. Education is undergoing a process of rationalization, that is designed to sort people with their skills into positions within the capitalist workforce, because the rationalization of corporate business and government agencies requires different types of behaviors, information/knowledge and skills at different levels of the organization.
The purpose of rationalization is stability, calculability, and the continued making of profit or capital accumulation. In American society the legal and economic framework under which corporations exist, requires the top employees of the corporation (CEO, COO, CFO) to be leaders who are creative, adaptive, willing and able to seek out expert knowledge, understand trends, foresee disruptions, make contingency plans, react quickly to disruptions, but who are also risk adverse, and take into consideration the interest of shareholders who are the ultimate owners of the corporation* and customers who are the source of income. That means that below the very top of the organization there also need to be experts, scientists, technical specialists, analysts, that can sort through data, spot and plot trends, research new ideas and products. In other words, provide the sound knowledge base upon which the top leadership can draw for their decision-making.
As one moves downward through the levels of the capitalist corporation to the workers that create the product or service that is sold for income, the requirements of rationalization become very different. For stability, calculability and the continued making of profit, the workers need to do as they are told. They need to carry out tasks repetitively with precision, and with very little deviance. Since this is not something that humans are particularly good at doing, the demands of rationalization are usually satisfied by breaking tasks up into smaller and smaller parts (so that variation becomes more and more difficult) and whenever possible replacing the humans with machines (robots) that are just fine with unvarying repetitive tasks.
In American society today where higher education is primarily viewed as filling the needs of business and industry for workers, it is not surprising that differences in higher education develop, so that some approaches to education are viewed as essential for developing leadership, scientists, technical specialists and analysts who can engage in creative thinking, break through new barriers, look at events and see patterns, and develop abstract ideas, while others are viewed as essential for grounding workers in established facts, techniques and routines of working within corporate organizations.
But there’s a catch. In American society all of these people, regardless of their education, or their job are citizens. For the American republic to work, even with its representational democracy, all citizens need to understand the issues and problems facing our society. To do that all citizens should have a genuine knowledge of history, of how the political system really works, of science, etc. Our society is very complex and faces some serious challenges both now and in coming years. We are not properly educating most people to be good citizens. The growing division in the nature of higher education exacerbates the long standing problems of public school education (elementary and secondary). Currently in America, Republican led states are doing their best to reduce even further the educational preparedness of people to be good citizens in a pluralistic society.
We live in a time when obscenely rich people (mostly men) are egging on poorly educated people to purposely stunt and stultify the education of American children.
*As discussed in Billionaires and the attack on Rationalization… this can be thrown out of wack when a large corporation is owned soley by an idiosyncratic billionaire, who is not accountable to stockholders.