In recent weeks, supporters of Prime Minister Modi's government have increased attacks (both physical and verbal) against secular institutions of higher education in India--particularly in response to protests against the passage of a new citizenship law that is discriminatory against Muslims.  You can find a first person account at Academe and further coverage here.

In January, the Executive Council of the MLA issued a statement in protest of the violence against students and teachers.   You can find the link here.  I am also posting the Statement itself:

In January 2020, the Executive Council approved the following statement.

We condemn the physical assaults on students and teachers in India, most recently at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia University, and Aligarh Muslim University, and the continued violence against students and members of the press, the opposition, and the public, who exercise their rights of assembly and dissent in opposing the national Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). These protests question new steps that allow state discrimination against citizens purely on the basis of religion and thus contravene India's own constitutional commitment to secularism. The Indian government is advancing Hindutva (the idea that Hindus are united in a Hindu nation-state that privileges Hindus) while legitimizing discrimination against other denominations, fanning polarizing rhetoric in public discourse, and setting the stage for confrontation and violence that plays out on campuses and affects academic life. The CAA establishes expedited pathways to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian (but not Muslim) refugees. It also excludes a range of refugees from Myanmar, Bhutan, China, and Sri Lanka. The act, which represents an escalation of Hindu nationalism, simultaneously and exclusively casts "Muslim" states as perpetrators of violence against minorities and does not recognize Muslim groups as victims of state violence on a par with those of other religions seeking asylum and, ultimately, citizenship. The Indian government has responded to protests against the act with unprecedented violence on campuses and in the public sphere and routinely criminalizes the assembly of five or more people in order to sanction its brutality in suppressing the protests.

We urge India, a signatory and drafting member of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, to consider the declaration's basic tenets, which the passing and implementation of CAA appear to violate (in particular, articles 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 18, 19, 20 [1]).  We urge the government to honor the rights of assembly and dissent, to protect academic freedom, to protect teachers and students in its educational institutions against violence on campus, and to create stable conditions for open dialogue on any proposed changes in the university and on state policy, citizenship, immigration, and assembly. We urge the government to take immediate action to penalize the perpetrators of violence against students. We urge the government to give ownership of, and jurisdiction over, university curricula, research, and institutional positions to the faculty and to safeguard the basic rights of students and faculty members to pursue their educational goals without suffering violence, poverty, and the loss of life. We condemn, unequivocally, and call for the immediate cessation of sanctioned violence on campus in India and the assault on the democratic principles of equality, freedom, and the right to espouse viewpoints without fear of reprisal. 

Chris here: Because U.S. academia is so decentralized and stratified, few new regimes have a national scope and can be hard to see coming.  The opposite is the case in the U.K., where the influence of Westminster can be felt at the same time on campuses across all four constituent countries, with the partial exception of Scotland.  External assessment increasingly defines and drives peer review in British universities.  In the hope of getting more U.S. academics thinking about the effects of external assessment. we're cross posting this piece from the UK's Sociological Review.  It offers a primer on the Research Excellence Framework and argues that it has had a negative impact on the depth and ambition of research in sociology--and by analogy, in other fields.

by Les Back, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College London.

Twenty years ago public sociology was something you did in your spare time. Even writing for newspapers or magazines was thought of as an extra-curricula and extra mural pursuit. That all changed as a result of the debate stimulated by Michael Burawoy’s influential Presidential address to the American Sociological Association address in 2004 that called for a public sociology. Burawoy’s spirited appeal to revive sociology’s public mission licensed a wide range of productive arguments and unruly activities. I have always held the view that intellectual life is nothing if it is not addressed to a wider public.

More recently, and significantly in the UK, the emergence of the ‘impact agenda’ in British universities has forced academic researchers to evidence our influence on society and ultimately to justify our worth. In austere times universities are required to show that they are worth their salt. Indeed, this was legislated by the Treasury as part of the spending review in order to secure continued investment in university research. It is embarrassing to remember that some of us - at least initially - thought that ‘impact’ promised the possibility of institutional recognition for public sociology. Might the emphasis on relevance and engagement create a ‘public agora’ for sociological ideas of the kind described by Helga Nowotny and her colleagues?

Another President, this time of the British Sociological Association, had a very different view. John Holmwood warned in 2011 that it was “naïve” to think that the turn to impact would lead to an enhanced public sociology. Rather, he suggested in contrast that UK research would likely be “diverted into a pathway to mediocrity."  Surely not, I felt when I first read this piece: John, you are being overly pessimistic! How right he has been proved to be.

Academic research in the UK is evaluated and scored by periodic reviews of the research of every sociology department. This has taken different forms and the latest version is called the Research Excellence Framework. Sociologists are required to nominate four publication for review by a panel of senior academics within each field. Impact was institutionalized in the recent REF2014.  20% of the scores were measured through ‘impact case studies.’

The impact case studies were required to narrate and evidence the detail of the impact that the underpinning research had on society and they either focused on individual staff members or clusters of academics. These impact case studies were scored by ‘practitioners’ working in applied areas that were added to the overall judgment of the REF panel. In case readers need to be reminded, HEFCE defined public value of impact along the following lines:

Impact includes, but is not limited to, an effect on, change or benefit to:

• the activity, attitude, awareness, behaviour, capacity, opportunity, performance, policy, practice, process or understanding

• of an audience, beneficiary, community, constituency, organisation or individuals

• in any geographic location whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. 

Also, the number of impact case studies required for each unit of assessment varied according to the number of staff submitted for the assessment. Small submissions of up to 15 members of staff required just two case studies, while large submission of over 35 members of staff required five cases studies.

It seems clear that impact is here to stay. At present it is likely to increase to 25% of the grade for each unit of assessment in the next REF2020. A whole infrastructure is emerging to assess the assessment, where consultants act as ‘Impact Tsars’ and offer advice and software designers are developing digital tools to trace and matriculate the public imprint of our research endeavors.

The shame of the Research Excellence Framework is it secrecy: all the data on the process of the decision-making was destroyed. There is no mechanism for appealing or questioning these judgments. While the list of panel members is public, the specific reviewers are anonymous and therefore individual department's sociologists do not know who is judging them and whether or not they are qualified (see Derek Sayer's analysis). The level of feedback is insubstantial, while the results have profound consequences for each unit of assessment in terms of their income and academic reputation.

In large part the "impact agenda" has licensed an arrogant, self-crediting, boastful and narrow disciplinary version of sociology in public. This is impact through "big research stars" that are scripted – probably by the editors of the impact case studies rather than themselves – as impact "super heroes" advising cabinet ministers and giving evidence to parliamentary select committees. This version of public intervention is by definition narrowly concerned with evidencing its own claims. It is aligned with providing a kind of reformist “empirical intelligence” that nudges at the edges of policy and political influence. Reviewing the 96 REF2014 impact case for sociology, 80% of them can be categorised in this way.

That isn’t the whole story and 20% of those impact case studies entered showed radical ambition. What was inspiring in the best of the impact case studies is how they also point towards a different kind of model of public engagement by challenging campus sexism though collaboration with Students Unions or creating archives of political activism. In the most appealing and compelling cases, clusters of scholars worked together to try and shift the public agenda through evidence and critical enquiry that challenged conventional thinking be it around race and segregation or casual forms of class stigma and hatred. These examples offer an alternative way to think about how to hold to a public commitment within the current climate.

In 1967 Howard S Becker wrote an influential essay called ‘Whose Side Are We On?”. This essay is often understood simplistically as a sociological call to simply to align with the underdog. It is important to note that Becker’s argument is critical of sentimentality that also can be blinding while posing in colours of radicalism. Rather, Becker says it is not possible for a sociologists to stand outside the issue of value and values: “the question is not whether we should take sides, since we inevitably will, but rather whose side we are on."

For all of our radical affections and promises, a close look at the public portrayals of sociology in REF2014 show the ‘impact agenda’ to be tinkering with minor reforms. In the final analysis, this agenda puts us on the side of the political elite, Ministers of State, Job Centre Managers, Immigration Officers and the apparatchiks of prevailing government policy. Bluntly, it puts us on the side of the powerful.

Is that version of sociology worth its salt? Is this a compromise too far for the discipline? Some will say, “well this is ‘just a neo-liberal game” and this “isn’t all of sociology.” They are right. Not every sociologist in Britain has to write an impact case study--yet. They might also console themselves with the idea that this is just a language game: we need to play and not take it too seriously. I would suggest that these patterns amount to more than that. The ‘impact agenda’ is coming to constitute our self-understanding, guide our decisions around job appointments, and I would go further to suggest it limits the public ambition of our discourse. Remember that next time someone says: “I think that might make a really good impact case study.” This preoccupation is acting as a filter for our sociological attention.

It is a reminder to those of us who feel that sociology has or had radical potential that ‘the public’ is not necessarily populated by incipient transformative forces and potentials. Burawoy’s conception was limited by leftist assumptions regarding the radical potential of civil society. What we are seeing is something much closer to Antonio Gramsci’s characterization of ‘organic intellectuals’ who are tied to the interests of institutions and a narrow set of functions that are “organisational and connective”. Edward Said, commenting on Gramsci’s prescience, wrote that, as a result, “organic intellectuals are always on the move, on the make”. This is reminiscent of today’s “impact agenda” and the opportunistic way we have been steered to think about sociology in public, where the bottom line becomes “can I make this into a impact case study?” We are required – by our institutional commitments and responsibilities – to be on the move and on the make.

Today sociology’s radical ambition is being dwarfed by a conservative and timid version of the discipline. This is what we are seeing in the Research Excellence Framework, which itself produces an academic performance of self that is in keeping with its own definition of public value. There are other ways to think of public sociology that return us to Buroway’s intervention of more than a decade ago. His vision of sociology in public might be usefully supplemented with the educational ethos that is steeped in the tradition of extra-mural studies led by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall and out of which cultural studies emerged.  This was a communal vision of higher learning or what the Worker’s Education Association called a collective highway.


A sociology with and for the public, is, I would argue, one that is humble, collective, dialogic, inventive, artful and trans-disciplinary.  Here sociological ideas can offer a navigation device or a compass and a way of attending to what is before us but also to determine our direction of travel. That would be a future sociology worth its salt.  But it is not one supported by the REF assessment system.

Labour had a bad night in the UK's parliamentary elections, but it was not a victory for the Conservatives' core policy of permanent public sector austerity.  Scotland gave the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) 56 of 59 Scottish seats in Parliament, a gain of 50 overnight, thus declaring independence without leaving the union. The SNP is among other things dead set against London austerity, as you can hear in Mhairi Black's speech celebrating her victory over Scottish Labour lion Douglas Alexander, one of the architects of Labour's failed national campaign. Scotland punished Labour for aligning with the Tories against the independence referendum.  The UK punished Labour for aligning with the Tories for austerity, finding their Austerity Lite brand a muddled non-alternative to Cameron and Osborne.

On higher ed, Labour's Ed Miliband had promised to roll back one part of the Conservative university revolution (if you're playing catch-up, one primer is my LARB review of Andrew McGettigan's important book) by reducing the fee cap back from 9000 to 6000 pounds per year. But they were not clear about how the gap would be filled or how and above all why universities should be funded in a non-Tory manner.

There has been talk of raising the fee cap to 11,500 pounds, also based on no actual funding model or meaningful principles of the university's private and public benefits.  That may now come to pass, with even higher fees than that discussed for Oxford and Cambridge.  There is no mandate in these results for even higher fees, and the Liberal Democrat coalition MP most responsible for enabling the fee hike, Vince Cable, lost his seat last night.  But voters are returning a Conservative party to power whose budget assumptions will force massive cuts onto unprotected government sectors, including remaining direct university funding, the student loans and grants budget, and also research, which has so far been protected.

We've seen this movie before.  One explanation for this repeated ending is that the Democrats & Labour are also now neoliberals, basically wet Tories, so why not vote for the real thing?  The base stays home unless it has a meaningful anti-austerity, pro-labor alternative, as they did in Scotland's SNP, in which case they turn out to vote passionately for anti-neoliberalism (read Richard Seymour today and predicting Labour defeat last year).

I see Dem/Labour neoliberalism more as an effect than a cause -- as an effect of their intellectual weakness more than of strong conversion to market Thatcherism.    Even though they mostly don't think the corporate and financial world produces good social outcomes, and even though voters always identify them with the public sector, Dems & Labour have for over thirty years been moving towards their opposition and away from their base.  Some of this is cowardice, intimidation, and greed, an obvious desire to stop fighting and join the wealthy and successful upper end of society, but much of it is intellectual confusion about the public sector's nonmarket benefits. After decades of head blows from the Friedman-Hayek-Mt Perelin army of market warriors, the Anglo-American center left can no longer explain, much passionately advocate, the great social processes they used to build in the 20th century.  They consent to self-belittling terms like "safety net" to describe public goods.  They have been the Great Enablers of the Republican marketization of society without appearing to voter as the movement's leaders and winners but as its reluctant gofers.  They also haven't led a new visionary embrace of  public goods that are both essential to progress and in fact popular with most people.  Mr. Miliband managed neither to break with nor continue this New Labour tradition, expanding the vacuum in public good explanations on which labor depends.

The University is a target character in this endless drama of center-left abdication.  In imposing their public funding cuts and tripled fee cap, Cameron's Tories simply negated the nonmarket private benefits and the social benefits of having universities.  The tragedy of that easy victory was how unnecessary it was on neoclassical economic grounds.  Mainstream economists have shown that the private market value of university is only about one-third of the university's total value to society.  I'm referring in particular to the comprehensive work of Walter W. McMahon, who identifies a total of six types of benefits - private market benefits, private nonmarket benefits, and social benefits, with each of these having direct and indirect forms.   Policy discourse in the US and UK  has focused on the university wage premium while treating all indirect, nonmarket, and social value as nebulous secondary effects, thus trivializing everything from better individual health to an increased aggregate capacity for scientific invention, the rule of law, artistic expression, and pretty much everything else about daily life that people like.

Trivializing society has of course been a highly successful core project of the political Right.   That doesn't change the possibility of showing  that most of the total value of education is collective, based on network effects (I'm smarter because my neighbor is smarter and also because an unknown Scottish villager became smarter 30 years ago, with endless ripples outward and everywhere).  All these spillovers, externalities and indirect effects through multiple variables, though they seem beyond the grasp of current political rationality, are the deep sources of real progress.  And yet we don't need to assert this as a quasi-Hegelian or anti-neoliberal abstraction: Prof. McMahon calculated that nonmarket private benefits plus social benefits (of indirect as well as direct types) form 2/3rd of a quantifiable total of educational benefits (244 et passim).  I'm not saying that quantification captures the main value of  higher education, just that Democrat and Labour policy people never use existing mainline research to counter a privatization strategy that reduces total university benefits by grossly exaggerating the private market piece.

The same goes for all the talk of the knowledge economy. Here's a concept that the Left could try harder to redefine for the sake of a just and egalitarian society--the "cognitive capitalism" folks can't do all the work by themselves.  It's also badly done by the center and Right.  The Tory government supposedly cares about human capital, and yet it has let research funding stay flat or fall in real terms, has found no money for moonshots at major challenges where the UK might lead, and had cut the enrollment funding that expands access outside the upper reaches of society that already have it. In the UK, public funding for instruction, the "teaching grant,"  has fallen from 22 percent to "less than 9 % of total university income."  I'm quoting a report recent posted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), "The sustainability of learning and teaching in higher education in England," which concluded rather bluntly that with the Tories there isn't any.

When the report's authors adjusted budget figures to "cover the long-run or full economic costs of activities," it found a deficit of 3.8 percent of the sectors expenditures in 2012-13 (p 17).  Many UK university leaders had supported the Conservative funding changes because of the obvious cash-flow attraction of tripling fees virtually overnight, after decades of what Stefan Collini has called expansion on the cheap, in which per-student funding actually declined.  This report shows just how temporary that victory was.  It rejects the idea that the sector can grow its way out of this annual deficit. This is because its mode of growth is what is causing the deficit in the first place.

I've called this the "price of privatization," and this HEFCE report is a catalog of its various forms. Competing for overseas students and research grants will increase costs of operation "with limited scope to control this"; higher fees will create higher student expectations for both learning and faculty attention and thus raise costs; less prominent universities, rather than focusing on quality educational services for their type of students with stable teaching grants, will compete and fail to increase their revenues; universities will respond to incentives both to overbuild facilities and skim on maintaining them; universities will respond to incentives to underinvest in their workforce.  The report also confirms that UK research loses the typical university about 25 pence on the pound (these are similar to U.S. indirect cost shortfalls, as I've often noted), which means that universities must invest in research for the sake of their market position, which they cant afford unless they cut corners in areas where they already underinvest.

Clearly the university sector was stronger and of more value to society when it stood apart from commercial markets. But Labour lacked the theory (and not just the will) to make the public goods case for continuing this.  This allowed Conservatives to use claims of solvency and customer service to pry open the sector for the sake of business.  And it will allow them, in their victory, to expand the effects of privatization that the Manchester Capitalism group traced to the decades-old Conservative party project--underinvesting in infrastructure, squeezing suppliers, including their own professors (e.g. Warwick's TeachHigher), and "confusion marketing" to the global student body.  The HEFCE report confirms that the Tories have already driven average UK graduate debt to £44,000.  They will be tempted to solve fiscal problems of their own making by raising fees even further.

It's possible that a party that hadn''t sold higher ed to giant vendors while multiplying student debt would attract voters as the SNP did.  I doubt it.  The university hasn't created a public base of support for what it really does, which isn't job training and direct wage maximization.  We do have a huge, diffuse constellation of supporters and fans of higher education, but they exist in one-on-one conversations, in personal experiences on campuses, in moments of insight and in memories of change. The way we go about it, the process of abstracting that into a mass politics, damages the experience and makes it harder to vote for.

I was thinking about this while listening to the first segment of an Ira Glass show called "The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind."  Something much like the Labour rout happened in California in 2008, when a gay marriage ban that everyone thought would lose wound up winning instead.  A consultant was called in, who had the bright idea of doing something they never do, which is going back to the neighborhoods where they "got crushed" and talking to people about why they voted against gay marriage.

They at first thought they'd talk to people about values and principles, and try to flip them by appealing to the golden rule and so on--although research shows people flipped like this almost always flip back in a matter of days.  Gradually they found something that worked much better. That was talking to people about themselves, without a script, letting one thing lead to another, and becoming as personal and as concrete as possible.  The recordings of a couple of the conversations are amazing.  And they quite often actually changed people's minds. Even more amazingly, they didn't change their minds back.  (Some of the research is here.)  The canvasser had to be concrete, and personal, and also had to be the kind of person who was affected by the decision.  If the subject was gay marriage, the canvasser had to be gay, and disclose this.  The moment of change may have happened when the voter could think, "how I vote makes a difference in this person's life."

The canvassers took these results to political consultants.  They had no interest. "These can't scale. We can't afford to do this.  We don't have fifty thousand people to talk personally to five hundred thousand voters."  No kidding--we can't afford it. And yet we have no choice but to do it.  People hate how politicians (don't) talk to them--the familiar slogans but more importantly the generic impersonality. Mr. Miliband went down because he was one of them--he's no different, so why bother?  Political parties will have to organize face to face and door to door--like the SNP--if they want to win.  And the same is true of universities.  We need to do with the public what we do in class, which is the personal effort to change people's minds.
 

Marina Warner has a fascinating essay in the latest London Review of Books. Seeking to explain why she resigned from her position at the University of Essex, Warner describes a rapid collapse of the University's traditions of scholarly openness and institutional democracy under the pressure of the Coalition government's new funding model and (lack of) scholarly commitments. As she reveals, the tentacles of the new audit technocracy are infiltrating the University by means of the faculty review process.

Describing a meeting presided over by the Vice-Chancellor Anthony Forster, Warner describes a situation that may sound all too familiar:

At the meeting, Forster was galvanising the deputy vice-chancellor, and his leadership style was making a colleague’s chin wobble in her eagerness to meet his requests. Others round the table hung their heads, staring sullenly at their laptops. The Senate had just approved new criteria for promotion. Most of the candidates under review had written their submissions before the new criteria were drawn up, yet these were invoked as reasons for rejection. As in Kafka’s famous fable, the rules were being (re‑)made just for you and me. I had been led to think we were convened to discuss cases for promotion, but it seemed to me we were being asked to restructure by the back door. Why these particular individuals should be for the chop wasn’t clear from their records. Cuts, no doubt, were the underlying cause, though they weren’t discussed as such. At one point Forster remarked aloud but to nobody in particular: ‘These REF stars – they don’t earn their keep.’

In England, as you probably know, academics have been subject for many years to a two-step system of accountability.  Individuals have been asked to provide proof not only that they are producing things but of their impact on society and on their fields.  It has led to a Kafkaesque system of evaluation and surveillance (with manifold levels of arbitrary categories masquerading as hard, quantitatively defined accomplishments) to force individuals, departments, and higher education institutions to prove their worth.  Without certain scores you receive little or no research funding.

But with the Coalition government's attempts to force a new market structure on Higher Education (considered as a consumer good) there is a new level of managerial intrusion at work.  For the government has cut direct funding for Universities and raised student fees (and loans) while effectively forcing universities to try to recruit international students to make good the shortfalls in funding.  As Warner's story of her personnel meeting makes clear, the upshot of this is that while academics are still being subject to the system of research surveillance, or in this case subject to a new system that they had not been prepared for, the demands for scholarship were increasingly irrelevant for the funding of the university or for the allocation of resources within the university:

At that stage, everyone in the university was still obsessively focused on meeting the demands of this year’s REF. By the end of 2013, all the evidence had been gathered, and the inventory of our publications fought over, recast and finally sent off to be assessed by panels of peers. Everyone in academia had come to learn that the REF is the currency of value. A scholar whose works are left out of the tally is marked for assisted dying. So I thought Forster’s remark odd at the time, but let it go. It is now widely known – but I did not know it then – that the rankings of research, even if much improved, will bring universities less money this time round than last. So the tactics to bring in money are changing. Students, especially foreign students who pay higher fees, offer a glittering solution.

In this new system scholarly activity was only worthwhile as a symptom of consumer desirability.  In England, you still needed to manage your REF profile--but only while you did more and more teaching to more and more students.  And it is the managers, not the faculty, who decide if you are desirable enough.

Warner began her account by describing the visit of a friend from California who noticed that the library (from the 1960s) had been built in the style of the "new brutalism" (Think of most old UC or CSU buildings). But as Warner herself notes, "new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning."  Although it has happened with ruthless ideological will in England, it is not an alien story to the US.  Indeed, what has happened over the last few years under David Cameron is really just a fast-forward version of what has been going on in the US more slowly and in less centralized fashion.  We are in the midst of our own new brutalism.  Although not as centrally directed we have been witnessing it for years: the recent intrusions by governing boards at the Universities of Illinois, Kansas, and Virginia; the shuttering of small language departments; the dramatic rise in tuition at public universities; increasing student/faculty ratios; ever growing reliance on adjuncts; cuts in Federal support for scholarly research; and our own, albeit less developed, auditing system.  In England, the transition occurred with such speed as to catch most people off-guard (despite the efforts of individuals like Stefan Collini, Andrew McGettigan, or the Campaign for the Public University).  But we have no excuse.This is the time to master the details to be able to oppose the systems being put into place on campuses across the country.

It's been a big week--and month--for the afterlife of online higher ed.  After sponsoring or forcing the adoption of online programs over the course of 2012 and 2013, college presidents now admit that at least the MOOC version won't fix budgetary or educational issues. At the Berkeley Online Summit I attended earlier this month, the chancellor of UC Berkeley and the president of Stanford described online as a supplement to hands-on instructor involvement and as good for specific student populations. Elsewhere, UC President Janet Napolitano chimed in with the same message--if online is done well, "it doesn't save all that much money."  Quelle surprise!  There are no savings! The LAT's Michael Hiltzik asked, "Are you listening, Gov. Brown?"

This year the conventional wisdom is that online is here to stay as a non revolutionary complement to teaching rather than as a disruptive replacement--much like course management software, additional videos, study groups, and required texts.  As John Scott reported here last Sunday, the most interesting online practitioners now see its value as controlled by the social practices in which it is embedded. Leading online designers like Anne Balsamo and her FemTechNet alliance, or Robert Lue of HarvardX, reject the MOOC broadcast model of passive education that seemed to solve the public university's "cost disease" only one year ago.

Online continues to function well as a means for private firms to access public funding. This was the mechanism behind the Udacity-San José State-style partnerships we've covered here, and that produced major pushback from the UC Academic Senate and the SJSU Philosophy department, among others. At the online summit, I asked Ellen Junn, then SJSU's provost, whether they had identified the budgetary savings expected from online conversions like the Udacity-SJSU partnership of the kind she continues to advocate. In that case, she replied, we didn't know.  All of the costs were paid by Udacity.  

Nobody batted an eye at this stunning admission.  To me it meant that for at least some of these major deals university officials didn't actually run the numbers on the cost savings to verify net savings of the kind assumed by policy heavyweights like Gov. Jerry Brown--the online providers ran the pilot service like a K-Mart blue light special, selling it for nearly free. The apparent absence of financial due diligence on the part of administrative or Regental / Trustee advocates is not only irresponsible--I would certainly not give my own money to these folks to invest--but is an epistemological crisis with which we still haven't come to terms.

Last June I analyzed the Udacity-Georgia Tech contracts that Inside Higher Ed reporter Ry Rivard got through a public records act request.  I found no MOOC cost savings.  I assumed that more financial data would appear and more reports would analyze them. Perhaps they would be written by certified accountants or by the business consultants that have their noses in every other aspect of university affairs.  No such luck: I haven't been able to find another such analysis, or to get better data myself.

The news this week reminded me why. In Florida, Jeff Schweers at the Gainsville Sun tried to find out how much University of Florida Online paid to a division of Pearson LLC, the giant publishing and education corporation headquartered in the UK. He was rebuffed.  

Something seemed fishy at U Florida by mid-March, when the press got wind of the sudden departure of UF Online's director, former ASU provost Elizabeth Capaldi Phillips, after only two months on the job. UF Online was much like what Gov. Brown wanted to set up in California. It got a $15 million start-up fund from the legislature, the promise of $20 million more over four years, and a requirement that it be a fully online program that could "offer the same academic level of coursework as the bricks-and-mortar institution at 75 percent of the cost to in-state students." Nearly half the students were to be non-residents, and were to pay four times the in-state rate for a fully online degree. Pearson was hired to, among other things, use its marketing prowess to recruit students who would be willing to pay high tuition to get a UF degree at home. How much was UF going to pay Pearson to turn a program with many obvious problems into a major success?  On March 21, Mr. Schweers reported, 

In response to a public records request from The Sun, the university this week released heavily redacted documents that blot out the amount of money UF will pay Pearson over the life of the 10-year contract — saying that information is a trade secret exempt from the public records law.

UF did admit that it had to pay Pearson cash up front: it just wouldn't say how much.  A week later, Mr. Schweers reported that through various documents he'd been able to show that UF would pay Pearson Embanet $186 million over the 11 year life of the contract.  The business plan sounds much like the Udacity-Georgia Tech deal. It involved very large growth projections to 13,000 students paying full in-state or non-resident tuition for an all-online program by 2018, with Pearson getting, in addition to its fee, $19 million of $43 million in projected revenues.  13,000 is the size of UF's first year class.

The revenue estimates are worth pondering. Even if Pearson fails, it will effectively pocket all of the state funding that was given to UF for online, and some internal UF money besides. Pearson is owed $186 million over time for getting involved, and the state provided $35 million.  Pearson will contractually absorb all of the state money and then be entitled to another $151 million of UF's internal funds.  (UF Associate Provost Andy McDonough says that Pearson will get $9.5 million in the first five years, but it is not clear whether or how this reflects the still partially redacted contract.)

If somehow the Pearson dragnet finds thousands of students to pay full tuition for an all-online program with the University of Florida name, UF is slated to gross $24 million in 2019, which is projected to rise to $48 million five years later.  In this best possible scenario, UF will get back its initial $151 million around ten years from now.  The University will thus be ready to earn its first net dollar in 2025.

This is a bad business deal, but that's not its point.  The point is for the University of Florida to function not as a university with a need for new revenues but as a pipeline for sending existing revenues somewhere else.  Taxpayer funds--the $35 million-- are funneled to the private corporation Pearson Embanet. Additional operating funds (tuition and state monies)--the $151 million--are also supposed to go to Pearson.  Pearson assumed that UF will conceal these terms from the public, since it had requested and been granted trade secret projection.  In exchange, Pearson seems to provide marketing, "proprietary digital content" and a range of other services that simply duplicate what any university already does ("admission and enrollment support," "providing on-demand student suppert," and so on).  Pearson's global brand is supposed to muscle this albatross into the air, but its exchange of non-essential services for guaranteed income qualifies as extraction rather than exchange.

Pearson has extensive operations in the UK, and has been involved in the UK's experiment in wholesale higher ed privatization.  This past week its failure was in the news again.  The universities minister David Willetts, architect of the tripled fee cap that was to replace the elimination of most public  teaching funding, admitted that the government is likely to be spending more on grants and loans to cover tripled tuition than it had been spending on direct outlays. The government will continue to need to make additional cuts in its higher ed budget--to maintenance grants for example-- in order to make up the shortfalls in the loan program.  Needless to say, students, academic staff, and a growing number of administrators are furious, and feeling tricked, and as usual uncertain of what to do.

The Guardian also reported that a former Willetts aide who is the new head of the Higher Education Policy Institute now agrees that the "government got its maths wrong." His solution is that student debtors start paying back sooner and from a lower income threshold.   Andrew McGettigan's analysis in The Great University Gamble has been tragically vindicated (Stefan Collini's review is here, and mine is here).   His government testimony is also borne out. Writing in The Guardian and on his blog, Critical Education, Dr. McGettigan has explained yet again that the higher ed budget is being hollowed out not just by the overall loan scheme but by the share going to new for-profit providers, whose claim on public money has risen 2100% since the government encouraged private companies to provide university services.

How do governments "get their maths wrong"? How do universities cut deals that due diligence would tell them will cost them money rather than net them new returns?  The most helpful explanation I found this week came from David Runciman's analysis of the habitual deal strategies of Richard Branson, Virgin CEO. Prof. Runciman notes,

Branson’s modus operandi is to identify and target industries that he claims are being run as monopolies. He presents himself as the man who introduces competition by shaking the industry up with his innovations. 

Reality, however, is rather different. For Mr. Branson doesn't want to end monopolies, but to exploit them.

He has made his fortune out of the regulated parts of the economy, which he has milked to extract government subsidies, tax breaks, licensing agreements and protected income streams. Transport works for Branson – trains as well as planes – because it rewards the person who gets the routes. How do you get the routes? By persuading government officials and industry regulators to give them to you. 

Pearson, Udacity, Coursera, and other private providers came to public universities touting a similar paradigm: universities are little more than holders of a government-sanction monopoly power--to grant degrees.  Say you want to innovate to improve and/or end the monopoly, and then keep the monopoly in place to capture as much of its revenues as you can.  The analogy to Virgin's bad train service (and many other failed enterprises) is strapped university instruction, which at public universities badly needs the scalable upgrade they have no money to build.

In all this, university managers get to play the role of earnest regulators who are in over their heads. They don't want to hurt their industry, but they lack historical leverage; just as important, they lack confidence in their own institutions and its social mission.  Prof. Runciman again:

In the absence of robust trade-union representation, Branson is much freer to strike deals at the top table of government and finance. He is able to spin his magic without having to worry too much what the people at the bottom think. One of the consequences of the demise of labour power has been that personal contact among the rich and powerful carries more clout. This is connected to the second trend that has worked in Branson’s favour: the progressive deregulation of finance and business since the late 1970s. There are still plenty of regulators, of course, often with increasingly complex and demanding responsibilities. But without the heavy artillery of robust social democratic states behind them, they have been put on the back foot. The new generation of regulators has turned out to be surprisingly easy to flatter and perhaps not so surprisingly easy to bully. Branson is skilled at both.

Sebastian Thrun at Udacity and Daphne Koller at Coursera functioned, in their own ways, as charismatic Branson monopoly-busting monopolists, criticizing the massification of higher learning so they could massify it even more.  They played university managers like Mr. Branson plays transportation regulators.   In this context, it's hardly surprising that private partnerships haven't fixed public university financial problems, since that is exactly what these partnerships are not meant to do.  Instead, private partnerships are meant to make the private provider money.  In general, university executives are eager to help. 

Universities may have a cost disease, but they now have a privatization disease that is even worse.  It confronts us with one or more of the following scenarios:

1. University, corporate, and political officials will reinvest in public universities--capping tuition and paying down student debt--once the economy really gets going again.
2. Corporate and political officials will block public reinvestment--as too expensive for them.  Their university counterparts will keep muddling through. They'll call for more public money (maybe 5-6% a year), "moderate" tuition increases (3-6% a year), while touting fundraising and efficiencies as they have for decades.
3. Corporate and political officials will block public reinvestment, and their university counterparts will try to "scale up" the New Sources of Revenue. These will provide net returns to universities and also net educational benefits.
4. Corporate and political officials will block public reinvestment, and their university counterparts will try to "scale up" the New Sources of Revenue.  Most or all of their value will go to the private providers, and university officials, desperate for deals and distant from education, will rely on wishful thinking rather than due diligence. 

I'm hoping for (1), most hearing (2), and expecting (4)--while finding counter-forces on a recent speaking trip that I'll talk about next time.

UPDATE 3/31. Over at e-Literate, Phil Hill has been writing about the UF Online contracts. In his post today, he rejects my reading of the Sun reports of the UF Online-Pearson contract when I say that "Pearson will contractually absorb all of the state money and then be entitled to another $151 million of UF's internal funds." Mr. Hill states that in fact "Pearson will only make 27%" of the state of Florida's $35 million in support for setting up UF Online, and that the rest of Pearson's $186 million will come from its share of online student tuition and fees.  He has also found the UF Online business plan, which he kindly sent to me, and he has updated his post with images of some of the spreadsheets and further discussion.

Here's what my first rapid pass through the business plan makes me think:

A. Phil Hill is right and I am wrong about the extent of Pearson's direct access to state funds. 27% of that $35 million, or $9.5 million, goes to Pearson up front, but the "Additional Fixed Fee" going to the coded entity "P3" ends in 2018 (p 84).  So strike from the record the calculations of the three paragraphs I identify above.

B. Do not strike from the record the framing commentary and conclusions. I was being too literal-minded about the transfer of publicly-funded value to the private sector.  A better way of thinking about it is that this value comes in at least two forms: direct transfers from public to private via a university intermediary, as with the $9.5 million; and foregone value of a public investment in a public entity, as with the remaining $176.5 million.  Were UF to build the same mandated online program in-house and achieve the same success, it would have that $176.5 million instead of Pearson, and it would be available to support UF's academic programs.  In the business plan, that revenue goes to Pearson for services that are not well articulated in the text. For UF, the "cumulative fund balance" over 11 years comes to $43.6 million (p 82), which I interpret to mean that UF's returns are about a quarter the size of those projected for Pearson.  UF is making less than $4 million a year on average for this large effort, even if it works: what would be its returns if it did "fully online" services itself? How does this compare to returns for something it already knows how to do--face-to-face teaching of the same number of additional students? Although I still need to go through these spreadsheets line by line, it still looks like UF got Bransonized.

C. "Where are the Savings?"   UF's costs increase by a factor of 10 over the contract period, while "total revenue" increases by a factor of 5. As I argued in the Georgia Tech-Udacity case, the private provider is supposed to offer economies of scale through technical expertise. Where are the economies for UF in exchange for foregone $176.5 million?  I don't see it in the spreadsheets, and missing economies helps explain why UF can gross less than Pearson even with a higher cut of tuition revenues.

There are other familiar issues--implausible enrollment growth, excessively cheap course production costs--and so on. I will have to defer these to next week when I return from a trip.

The best recent book about British higher education, Andrew McGettigan's The Great University Gamble,  was the subject of two long reviews last week. I wrote one of them, which appeared in the LA Review of Books under the title “The Counterreformation in Higher Education.”  The other, called “Sold Out,” was written by the eminent essayist and Cambridge literature professor Stefan Collini, and appeared in the London Review of Books.  The essays have US and UK audiences in mind, respectively.  I try to provide enough background on both UK universities and the Conservative government’s changes for non-British readers to see just how huge and irreversible the British changes have been—and how relevant that are to the U.S. If you don’t have time to read the reviews and this post, then stop reading here and cut to the reviews (LARB & LRB). 
 

There are two broad schools of thought in the Anglophone world about the permafrost austerity and the deep cuts that have been applied to public universities. One is that they reflect reform, and that the suffering is temporary, the pain transitional, and the outcome cost-effective improvement.  The other school of thought is that they produce decline, and that both quality and efficiency are being reduced by systemic cuts and related changes.  Drs. Collini, McGettigan and I are declinists, though also optimists in the narrow sense of thinking there is nothing inevitable or necessary about the changes that are harming public universities. 

Thus the work of the book and the reviews is to persuade the first school that changes like the Cameron government’s sudden 80% cuts in the UK university teaching budget are in fact both unnecessary and destructive—that the replacement income of tripled fees and other market-oriented measures create losses rather than gains.  Persuasion will be in the eye of the careful reader, and I hope the McGettigan book attracts quite a few. He shows that Tory talk was one thing and Tory deeds something else altogether. The Great University Gamble will be especially valued by anyone interested in what the broad concept of privatization really means in technical practice.  How you really do that is fully explained in the long-play version, with the nuance required to see the operating system behind Tory beliefs.

The declinists are in turn comprised of various groups.  One might be called the fatalists, who are deeply unhappy about what is happening to their universities but who don’t see intentionality or design, at least ones that could be blocked or redressed. Another are depressives, and this is a psychologically interesting position that I can’t go into here.  A third are anti-commercialists—not anti-commerce in a general sense but anti-commercialism, where commercialism is an ideology that deals with economic adversity, turbulence, injustice, and confusion by saying commercialize everything. 

Prof. Collini and I could be classed as opposing this master narrative, often called neoliberal, and as you read the two reviews you will see a shared sense that behind the assurances of efficient budgets and increased quality lies the goal of commercializing universities all the way down, norming their goals and practices to those of for-profit firms. 

Anyone writing from this position needs to master technical detail for the purpose of constructing arguments that will appeal both to allies and to opponents.  My own method in the LARB review is to use Dr. McGettigan’s formidable research to deduce government motive from government policy implementation, crossing off one declared goal after the other until we get to what is really going on. I also say a few things about why commercialization is bad, since the dominant school sees it as a liberating breeze that brings a vital glow to the excessively cloistered academic cheek. Even commercialization is not, as I see it, the final Conservative goal. But to see how this works you’d have to read through to Sections V and VI of the piece.  

My title alludes to my sense that those who say they favor reform are not rightly called reformers but counterreformers, and that they are not adapting ad hoc to a changing situation but aim at a full counterreformation, which I outline there. The main way today’s conventional wisdom deals with such arguments is to cast them as resistance to inevitable change, but even sympathetic skeptics about the declinist analysis reasonably ask, what do declinists favor? What are declinists for?

Fortunately, Stefan Collini has written an entire book called What Are Universities For? A complex answer lies therein.  One way to think about it in a policy context is as the a strong public good understanding of education. This is an economic discourse that is woefully underdeveloped if not falsified in standard economics. This abstract discourse of the public good—or common, or commonwealth—is embodied in Prof. Collini’s book as the limitless pursuit of human knowledge. 

This discussion emerges in his uncomfortable relationship to the humanism of Cardinal Newman, and I quote him (Prof. Collini) in part.

A better way to characterize the intellectual life of universities may be to say that the drive towards understanding can never accept an arbitrary stopping-point, and critique may always in principle reveal that any currently accepted stopping-point is ultimately arbitrary. Human understanding, when not chained to a particular instrumental task, is restless, always pushing onwards, though not in a single or fixed or entirely knowable direction, and there is no one moment along that journey where we can say in general or in the abstract that the degree of understanding being sought has passed from the useful to the useless. In other words, it is not the subject-matter itself that determines whether something is, at a particular moment, classed as ‘useful’ or ‘useless’. Almost any subject can fall under either description. Rather, it is a question of whether enquiry into that subject is being undertaken under the sign of limitlessness – that is to say, not just, as with the development of all knowledge, subject to the testing of hypotheses or the revision of errors, but where the open-ended quest for understanding has primacy over any application or intermediate outcome.

This is the tip of the iceberg of the impact of the university on public or common knowledge, where the university is one place devoted, in theory, but utterly, to maximizing the power of human thought to save us from ourselves.  Limitless knowledge is a central public stake in the contemporary battles for the university, and the book and these reviews are written in the knowledge that commercialism doesn’t have what it takes to support this work.

Chris here, introducing a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi's opinion piece, "The Neoliberal Assault on Academia," produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value.  His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  

Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF," Prof. Barkawi writes, "completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other's work in terms of whether this or that book or article is 'three star' or 'four star'."

Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing resources needed for academic work, but as the continuous monitoring and non-expert assessment of research and teaching that winds up justifying resource restriction and permanent reorganization.  Shifting audit to management, he argues, undermines "the entire point of university research," which "is conversation and contestation over what is true and right. In the natural sciences, as in the social sciences and humanities, one person's truth is another person's tosh, and valid knowledge emerges from the clash of many different perspectives." This complex, internally regulated, expertize-driven debate is being in large part replaced by audit mechanisms. "Meanwhile," Prof. Barkawi concludes, "all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers."

Prof. Evans extends this remark about adjucts below.

I strongly agree with Tarkawi's conclusion that faculty are far more complicit in the sacking of public higher education than we are prepared to acknowledge. One of the best indexes of this is the arrogance that ladder-rank faculty display towards adjunct/part-time faculty/"lecturers" in our own departments. As with the caste system, there are so many categories for them, all of which serve the purpose of the Brahmins in the Academic Senate.  

We--and here am I tempted to specifically include you [on the list] alongside myself in this condemnation, but won't  because there's always a small chance that some of you/us are exempt from these generalizations--in fact appear to take some pride in treating adjuncts as an inferior caste. It is the norm for adjuncts to be excluded from faculty meetings and to be deprived of any say in the management of departments. Instead of resisting the "adjunctification" of the professoriat by incorporating these colleagues--because they are colleagues--into the university and our respective departments, we tolerate them as useful proof of our Brahmin status. They are our untouchables. 

And we treat them accordingly. 

I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.

Truth is that ladder-rank faculty are growing old and we are not prepared to pick this important fight with our administrations or UCOP. We are edging towards retirement, counting our beans in our pension funds, and just holding on until we escape amidst encircling doom. Safe in retirement, many of us will tut-tut and speak of the halcyon days when ladder rank faculty were little gods with real rights. 

I am much more apprised of the unflattering assessment that adjuncts/non-tenure track/contingent faculty have of ladder-rank faculty because several of them sit on the Steering Committee of the CA-AAUP. I have become acutely aware of, and grown very ashamed of, the way ladder-ranks treat the nameless Other. As Stuart Hall summarized an analogous arrogance back in the '80s, it's "The West versus the rest". 

Consider this: One adjunct on the Steering Committee teaches 6-9 courses per quarter at a bewildering array of campuses in the Bay Area. I do not have a good enough grasp of the geography of that region to understand exactly why: 

• she hits the road at 5:30 am to make her first class;  
• teachers non-stop from 8am - 5 pm (including travel time as she whizzes at breakneck speed from one campus to another) 
• takes her first and only break from 5-7pm 
• teaches again from 7-9pm 
• holds her office hour from 9-10pm (yes, that's PM) 
• checks in at a $49 /night motel on Highway 101 (in a town called Gilroy); and
• repeats this schedule three times per week.

On a "good day", she remains in the Berkeley area where she resides and teaches at 2-3 colleges. No contract, no benefits, no representation in the Senate. At the beginning of the Winter quarter, she was informed that one course had just been re-assigned to another adjunct "who needs the course more." Just like that, income that she is so vitally dependent on, and in fact cannot survive without, was taken away--by email, without prior notification and for a reason that is as inscrutable as it is uncontestable. 

Re-read this list again to grasp the full dimensions of what I can only call its horror. It is unspeakably appalling. And I am ashamed that our preponderant collective interest in matters such as SB 520, MOOCs, etc. is: "what's in it for the ladder ranks?" "How dare they strip away our rights", etc

This is the price others pay to keep us ladder ranks in clover. The results of my still informal survey at UCSD leave no doubt that  ladder ranks would club adjuncts into oblivion rather than be amalgamated with them. The arrogance, and fear of being lumped together with the Untouchable Other remains and perhaps increases even as the once-venerable ladder rank category shrinks with each passing year.

In fact, it is best to not mention a category of fellow workers and colleagues--humans and good people all--who now account for 76% of the academic workforce.

Absent a UC faculty union with real teeth, I cannot see faculty mounting anything close to meaningful opposition to the gutting of UC. What would make a difference is an alliance of faculty, regardless of rank, at all three levels of the Master Plan. (Yes, there are other two other levels). But that will not happen, mostly because UC faculty are aghast at the idea of rubbing shoulders with the Untouchables both amongst them and those who labor in recondite places without darkening the views from Sather Gate or scenic La Jolla.

I now feel that we shall deserve what we get.

Drawing: University of the Philippines, Visayas Cebú College, completion scheduled 2014.

Over the course of a week I'll discuss new perspectives on MOOCs  (massive, open, online courses)  from a conference, a survey, a student column, and a faculty letter.

By way of background, I note that we are entering a 4th phase in the sped-up lifecyle of the online debate.  In a year, MOOCs have gone from being (1), a niche service for underserved markets, to (2), a short-term fix for course supply problems in funding-starved public colleges, to (3), a replacement for current shortfalls and future growth in public university systems that makes restored funding unnecessary.

In the process, MOOCs have entangled themselves in the politics of higher education and the political economy of post-crisis capitalism.  They must now be held accountable both for the impact of their claims on public university budgets and for the social consequences of their educational outcomes.  

My sense is that the emerging 4th phase is going to undermine (3), for the good of students, faculty, and MOOCs that colleges can both maintain and use.  I'll come back to these issues in upcoming posts.

The Lawrence, Kansas Conference

I was thinking about MOOCs again last week at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutions, hosted this year by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas (#CHCI13).  (Sincere thanks to center director Victor Bailey, who proved that public universities are still capable of great productions.) They, the MOOCs, popped into my head at a panel ("Global Humanities and the State") comparing university trends in the European Union, South Africa, and Asia. 

South Africa is an important special case that I will omit here.  The European Union is also important for the wrong reasons: it is going nowhere fast in higher ed.  As one panelist explained, EU research policy "all begins in the 1950s, and you know what that was: S&T, S&T, and more S&T [science and technology], and then something good must come of it." 

The EU's overall research budgets are small, the increments uninspiring, the grand challenges overly general and banal, and the bias against social and cultural knowledge a sad tribute to the blindness of technocrats who continue to repress the actual history of Europe, in which progress has depended entirely on the active uptake of true social and cultural knowledge.  The humanities fields were entirely absent from the first six "framework programs," have been lumped together with social sciences in a small corner of the 7th framework, and are in a similar place in FP 8, "Horizon 2020," where society's role is largely equated with green energy. I simplify somewhat, but less than you might assume.

Humanists receive less money than scientists per grant, of course, but even so undergo a less than 10% success rate in the current Framework Program competition, or half the rate of the scientists.  Having to compete twice as hard leads in effect to humanists having to self-fund most of their research.  This is research that tries, among other things, to preserve and explain the human experience of the ages, knit Europe together across national and linguistic lines, resolve tensions over race and immigration, and curate tomorrow's masterworks of insight into the human condition--all on a shoestring, usually one dug out of the scholar's own sock drawer.

But the analysts of Europe didn't find any EU MOOCs claiming to solve funding issues. Neither did the survey of Asian universities, provided by Alan Kam Leung Chan, the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technology University in Singapore. Prof. Chan treated us to news of a higher ed building boom like only retirement-age Americans can remember here.

China is the most famous case, having in ten years more than tripled the number of college graduates from 9 million to 30 million.  Since 1991, Singapore has added four universities to its previous two, and by 2020 will have a higher bachelors degree proportion than the US.  Indonesia has 30 public universities, and 2000 new private universities. The Philippines has 500 public universities and 1500 new privates. Vietnam has gone from 150 universities in 2000 to over 400 today, with 20 percent of those being private.

The scale refutes the number one economic premise of American MOOC development, which is that even rich countries can't afford great public universities anymore, so medium- and low-income countries shouldn't try.  In the North American mythology, less "developed" countries must teach their teeming masses on line, with low-cost American MOOC services endorsed by MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Penn.  And yet Asian countries are ignoring this Western wisdom. They have rejected its "build nothing" implications.

Obviously there are questions about quality in the midst of all this growth. But such questions are being asked by Asian policymakers, who appear not to be diverted by technology sales teams from their higher educational goals. 

Prof. Chan noted that Asian countries are engaged in debates over exactly the issues that for most U.S. policymakers have been pre-decided—whether and how bibliometrics and rankings should be used, how to deepen exposure to the humanities rather than marginalizing them, how exactly to teach Asian cultures in a global context, how to design differentiated educational pathways across every subject area, and how to teach not only for content mastery but for creative capability as a college outcome for every student.  Prof. Chan advocated a relentless focus on maintaining the highest quality standards in all programs. Without that, he noted, Asian countries' students won't be prepared for the world environment in which they will have to operate.  

Sitting in the audience, I was dismayed to realize yet again that In the U.S. we are having the opposite conversation, which is how to get public university services back to their inadequate level of the mid-2000s, while spending less money than we did then.

Afterwards I blurted out my question: "Why this higher ed torpor in Europe and North America, compared to the dynamism of Asia?" 

This got a few of us to laugh.  But none of us had a decent answer.

Chris here.  Meanwhile in Portugal, the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling that the 2013 state budget contained 1.3 billion Euros of unconstitutional cuts to public employees, unemployed people, and pensioners.  In response, the Minister of Finance has frozen "non-basic" spending, which includes education. The photo was taken at a protest in March 2012. The sign reads, "If education were a bank, it would be rescued."

In response, the Rector of the Universidade de Lisboa, António Sampaio da Nóvoa, issued a statement condemning the "intolerable measures" and promising resistance. H/t to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who also provides the translation below.


"Closing the country does not resolve the country's problems"

1. In an order from the Minister of Finance, dated 8 April 2013, the Government decided to close the country and impede the functioning of public institutions: ministries, local administrative units, universities, etc. The order is a form of reaction against the Constitutional Tribunal's decision, as is explained early in the first sentence. The Government adopts the policy of "the worse, the better". In a restrictive and difficult situation, whoever has been trying to secure normal institutional functions feels tricked by this blind measure that is against the country's interests.

2. We all know that we are in the midst of an extremely grave crisis. But it is precisely such situations that require clarity in policies and direction - economizing as much as possible, but searching, to the extent possible, for ways that institutions continue to function without major disruptions. The Minister of Finance's order produces the opposite effect, hurling disruption and chaos with no practical result.

3. It is an unwise and unacceptable gesture, that doesn't resolve any problem and that seriously endangers the future of Portugal and its institutions. The Government uses the worst authority to suspend the State of Rights and install a State of exception. Taken literally, the Minister of Finance blocks the simplest expenses, no matter their purpose. Just three examples among thousands. We are forbidden to obtain ordinary things for our laboratories, food for our cafeterias, or paper for our students' diplomas. Is this the way Portugal's problems are solved?

4. In the case of the university, there are also important engagements involved -- particularly international and research projects that will be blocked, without any savings for the State, but with enormous damage on the institutional, scientific, and financial level.

At the University of Lisbon we will know how to rise to this occasion and resist intolerable measures that have neither compass nor destination, and are absurd. There is no worse policy than the policy of the worst.

Lisbon, 9 April, 2013
António Sampaio da Nóvoa
Rector, University of Lisbon