February 13, 2020

Dear Chancellor Larive and Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Kletzer,

We, the California Scholars for Academic Freedom,* a group of over two hundred scholars throughout California, write with grave concern about the Google form “Notification of Class and Section Disruption” sent on February 7, 2020 to UCSC undergraduates in relation to the graduate student strike demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA).  This form asks students to surveil and report on conversations occurring in the course of instruction.  It sets a dangerous precedent of surveillance that undermines the core principles of academic freedom.

The university produces knowledge and practice critical to the operations of a democracy. The ideal of academic freedom is at the core of the university in a democratic society. 

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education in a free society. Its definition includes such items as what are called ‘the four essential freedoms’ of a university, to determine, on academic grounds, who will teach, what they may teach, how they teach and who may study.

Academic freedom requires that faculty and students can participate in intellectual debate free of any censorship or retaliation. Central to academic freedom is that the political, religious, or philosophical beliefs of others, including politicians, administrators and members of the public shall not be imposed on students or faculty. 

California Scholars for Academic Freedom call on you rescind the link to the Google form and refuse to use any data collected through that mechanism as the grounds for disciplinary measures against faculty and students.

On behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom,

Susan Slyomovics

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

ssly@anthro.ucla.edu

Walid Afifi

University of California - Santa Barbara

Professor, Dept of Communication

Director, Center for Middle East Studies

Craig Reinarman

Professor Emeritus of Sociology & Legal Studies

Rachel Carson College 338

University of California

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

831-459-2617

Sondra Hale, Professor Emerita

Anthropology and Gender Studies, UCLA. sonhale@ucla.edu

                                          

This is the first section of the talk I'll give at Disquantified: Higher Education in the Age of Metrics,  May 16th, 1 pm, Loma Peloma at UCSB.  We're headed towards conceptual and policy fixes for the widespread misuse of metrics and for the sidelining of qualitative knowledge.

There’s no intrinsic conflict between language and the numerical. But we do have a profoundly embedded cultural misinterpretation of their relation.

This year brings the 60th anniversary of CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture.  Unfortunately, it still reflects the public understanding of the divisions of human knowledge.  Speaking in 1959, Sir Charles classed scientists as people with the future in their bones, and “literary intellectuals” as “natural Luddites,” people who are too focused on the price of progress to make any progress themselves.  This idea of literary intellectuals as critics rather than creatives carries on today.  Some of us have tried to get rid of the label – via the critique of critique for example—but so far this has reinforced it. 

In higher education, it would seem that we would have solved this two-culture division long ago. Liberal arts education is all about general learning and creating competencies in multiple domains.  Literacy and numeracy would seem naturally to go together. Every humanities major would, in a normal world, graduate with the ability to use basic numerical techniques.  French majors would know Stata or r for statistics, or the basics of Python or Java. Why not, since the world isn’t divided into two cultures such that we live in only in one of them?  Similarly, every science major could interpret complex language and have competency in at least one foreign language.   In many European countries, a version of these “two culture” competences are assumed to be the outcome of a high school diploma.  In the US, the full term has always been “liberal arts and sciences.”

There’s another Sputnik-era assumption to remember.  Liberal arts education was to be available at every type of college or university across the country.  This is a basic principle of Morrill Act land-grant legislation.  Full arts, sciences, and applied curricula  would not be limited to flagships: if you lived in central Wisconsin and couldn’t afford to move to Madison—or didn’t want to—you could get a generally equivalent  quality of liberal education at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.  You could study biology in order to apply to medical school like your Madison counterparts. And you could at the same time become proficient in German or Spanish or Arabic, depending on your interests.  You could flip it around and study Arabic to join the foreign service while learning biology to better understand how the world fits together.  Having linguistic mobility and scientific competency were to be hallmarks of the educated person in the modern post-war world. And that is to say nothing of the many practical but nonmonetary benefits of having, say, physicians who speak a second language, and negotiators who understand ecology.  There was a powerful egalitarian assumption in the US university system—education quality would be spread widely in the student population, to reflect the wide distribution of human intelligence, and society’s complex needs.

This egalitarian assumption was largely honoured in the breach. That began to change through social and political pressures that came from outside universities and inspired students and some faculty within them.  I’m referring to the Black civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, for starters. Liberal arts and sciences learned that they either connect to and study sociocultural and political movements or they do not correctly prepare students to live in their world as it actually is.  Isolated liberal arts, including historical study,  also produce flawed research.  So public universities were to avoid two false dualisms: the false dualism between numerical and language/ image-based forms of knowledge, and the false dualism between academic and social knowledge (or between “validated” and “standpoint” knowledge).  If universities couldn’t (or shouldn’t) integrate social groups, they could (and should) integrate heterogeneous knowledges across their multiplicity.

Two-cultures university education isn’t a luxury. It’s more like the base model of a degree to which people devote an entire four years of their lives – or five or six.  If a country wants to be a leading knowledge society, as the US claims it is, it needs in principle to create mass quantities of creative workers, people who also have intellectual autonomy and are capable of both conceptual and political movement.  I think of these as the elements that allow a graduate of any liberal arts or science major to start, pursue, and successfully complete a knowledge project.  My basic list has 14 steps.  (Slide mercifully omitted)

I’d propose this as a non-numerical framework for analyzing college educational quality.

A country that is serious about language and the numerical, would identify monetary but especially the nonmonetary or intellectual benefits that it wants from its colleges and universities, and then funds and structure those colleges accordingly.

So how are we doing with this?  Right now, not well . . . .

by Eva Cherniavsky, Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Washington at Seattle

Earlier this year, the Seattle Times ran an excellent piece on the decline of the humanities at the University of Washington (UW) and nationwide. Katherine Long, a veteran education reporter, got crucial elements of this topic absolutely right. Her piece began, “You won’t find a single expert on the history of the American Revolution or the Civil War at the University of Washington anymore.”  She goes on to make an unusual connection: cutting the humanities hurts student learning and the university’s budget.

To its credit, Long’s article carefully observes both the intellectual and economic consequences of shrinking humanities departments. She notes that, historically, the humanities have effectively taught large numbers of students at relatively low cost, generating credit hours and revenue that was used to subsidize teaching and research in the high-cost STEM fields.  (There, as we know, faculty routinely require not only higher salaries, but laboratories, professional staff to run them, and students to work in them.  Thus a single STEM faculty hire can easily run into the millions.)  Shrinking humanities enrollments (indeed, more broadly, the shrinkage in what is now openly referred to at UW as the “non-STEM” fields) thus seriously exacerbates the budgetary crisis produced by the decades-long withdrawal of public funding.

On the other hand, Long frames the humanities’ intellectual contributions in highly conventional terms: “Academics worry that the nation would be impoverished—both culturally and intellectually—if only an elite few understand the arc of American history, know how to find meaning in poetry, or can discuss the ideas of the great philosophers.”  This kind of formulation narrowly aligns the humanities with cultural tradition, and thereby, no doubt unwittingly, reproduces precisely the argument for its irrelevance as a relatively arcane body of knowledge that should perhaps be archived but that does not require ongoing forms of study and engagement.

Instead, we might readily substitute a more robust and informed articulation of the value of culture-focused fields. We could talk, for example, about the importance of fields that think power, identity, and rhetoric at a moment of simmering civil war, or we might emphasize that an understanding of modernity and the historical emergence of modern democratic forms is vital at a moment where democratic governance appears in crisis.  The absence of this deeper understanding of humanities knowledge has contributed to the humanities apparent decline.

The day of its publication, Long’s article circulated on the UW-AAUP list server.  The discussion that ensued moved between posts that asserted the regrettable inevitability of humanities decline, given plummeting student demand, and others that sought to make the case for the non-STEM fields, though largely based on asserting the value of non-STEM knowledge to technological and scientific endeavors (e.g. how the insights of anthropology are important to the development of artificial intelligence).

It’s worth noting that this was a relatively short-lived, low-energy discussion, especially when compared, for example, to the bounty of thoughtful posts on another recent topic, ownership of on-line course content.  But there is a relatively straightforward institutional/legal fix to the latter problem (demand faculty ownership of course content), which, moreover, also affects faculty in high-value STEM fields.   The fate of the non-STEM fields, by contrast, appears already given – a ‘fact’ to be explicated, rather than a policy to be contested.

The debate reproduced one of the major shortcomings of the Seattle Times article: discussing “student demand” as a cause, rather than effect. It assumed, in other words, that students’ choice of majors is based on their autonomous determination of their best interest, and thus sits outside the purview of what the institution directs and regulates.   This conviction resurfaced a few weeks later in another UW-AAUP list server thread, this time in response to a faculty member reporting that several of her non-STEM students were asking for references so they could transfer to other universities, an aspiration which (she noted) they all attributed to the oppressively STEM-focused culture of UW.  The discussion which followed this post consisted largely of testimonials; faculty cited conversations with students to suggest how deeply they appreciated both the humanities curriculum and a humanities pedagogy historically centered on smaller, intensive, discussion-focused classes. Someone needs to gather these stories and convey them to the administration, several posters suggested – as though, confronted with the documentary evidence of actual student preference, the university would rethink its distribution of resources.

Seriously?  It seems to me that anyone who considers this for more than ten minutes has to recognize that “student demand” is a construct: it is the product of a pervasive, cross-institutional pedagogy in social and educational value in which students are immersed from (at least) primary school onward.  If students are demanding STEM in record numbers, this is a because they have been systematically invited to embrace a number of interlocking beliefs: that

1. STEM fields matter to the welfare and future of human societies more than other fields -- that social problems respond best to technocratic solutions; 
2. college is a course of career training; 
3. college is an investment that ought to be maximized in order to yield the highest possible return in the form of lifelong higher income;
4. STEM fields represent areas of continuing high-growth, recession-proof employment. 

“Student demand” is a fact insofar as it reproduces these assumptions, which are already endemic to the privatized, market-driven university.  Other forms of “student demand” (for example, demands for a more racially and ethnically diverse faculty that better reflects regional and national demographics) are routinely ignored.

The university is by no means the only social institution to promulgate these neoliberal assumptions, but it is among the most important.  Certainly, the notion that the university is merely changing to “respond” to STEM-focused student demand is absurd, since the university, increasingly beholden to private philanthropy (vastly skewed toward STEM initiatives) and increasingly reliant on tuition dollars (and the model of education as investment that normalizes rising tuition costs)  has been a key purveyor of these views.

The absurdity of the “student demand” rationale becomes apparent, as well, as soon as we recall that the starving of the humanities (and other non-STEM fields) began long before the number of majors began to plummet. The humanities, but also many of the social sciences, have been bleeding tenure lines, compelled to rely on lecturers (who are not defined as researchers) and, worse still, part-time lecturers for decades, since long before the 2008 recession or the rise in STEM enrollments.  The story of the humanities begins with the rule of austerity, not with declining demand.

I would also argue that the withdrawal of resources from humanities fields has hampered to a greater or lesser extent the ability of their faculty to build the kind of cutting edge programs and curricula that can most successfully compete for student interest.  This has certainly been true in my own English department, where retirements have vastly outpaced hires.  Several years of an outright hiring freeze, followed by the acquisition of a single line when we made a compelling curricular case for three or four, have made it virtually impossible to reflect at the curricular level many of the most important and compelling developments in the field. And again, this is happening during years when majors were at an all-time high.

In short, the humanities and allied fields are not “dying” a “natural” (market-determined) death, but have been systematically murdered – starved of resources and plundered of the credit hours they generate.

Here we come to the final missing piece in this “decline of the humanities” story:  the relatively lower earnings of non-STEM majors.  This is invoked as one of the reasons for shifting “student demand.” But as Chris Newfield has shown, it is not that the skills these graduates bring are not valued in the marketplace, but rather that their possessors are perceived as interchangeable and thus easily replaceable. There is no need for higher pay when there is always someone else to fill the job (Unmaking the Public University, chapter 8). 

But what happens when years of downsizing non-STEM graduates means that the glut vanishes – when employers have to compete for workers proficient in, say, critical analysis, writing, or multi-cultural literacy?  It will not be possible simply to reboot the myriad departments that are now being cut to the bone – and beyond.  The damage being done is irreversible.  PhDs in the field are increasingly moving into community college positions or alt-ac careers, even as humanities graduate programs across the country are slashing ever further the number of students admitted. There will be no way back from this devastation when market demand picks up.

The idea of a university organized around market (mislabeled “student”) demand is radically unsustainable.  It is unsustainable because, in shrinking the humanities, the university cannibalizes its own budgetary life support (as Long's article makes vivid).  But it is, unsustainable, too, because one cannot simply eviscerate and then resurrect departments and programs according to the inevitably shifting and fundamentally short-term calculations of the market.

In this moment, the resistance to the increasing privatization of the public university has taken the form of the demand for free tuition. This demand is fundamental to any effort at reclaiming public higher education.  But it is not a sufficient demand.  It must be linked to a broader recognition that market forces cannot organize the university – and that if this model becomes fully and finally entrenched, what we will have is not a university at all, but a high-priced career training center for the elite.

If this is permitted to occur, I predict we will lose both the battle for free tuition and the battle for the “non-STEM” fields.  The fate of the humanities is profoundly linked to the fate of public higher education.

You never know exactly where contradictory visions of higher ed are going to have an edifying head-on collision.  There was one last week in New Britain, Connecticut, where I had gone to speak at the annual meeting on shared  governance and student success of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system. It was organized by the wonderful program committee in the photo at left (photo thanks to Wanda Warshauer).

The overriding issue was the CSCU president's proposed consolidation of the state's community colleges into one college (with three regions, three presidents, twelve campus "CEOs" etc), a plan that continues to roil the system in spite of having been critiqued last year by the regional accreditor.  Meanwhile, in the morning, I called for a massive expansion of higher ed's social benefits, which I said would involve state buyouts of tuition and the funding of many more tenure-track instructors as well as more widely distributed research.   At lunch, Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT), of the first-year congressional cohort that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, gave an excellent twelve-minute summation of the social power of education.  The question is, she said, were your students "important enough to you for you to stand in intercession until they could stand on their own" (11" here).  How do we free education from its current policy shackles? This is one of the great questions of our time.

Let's go in the order of the day.  At 9 am, my lecture argued that higher ed is undermining itself by focusing on only the most familiar fraction of its value, individual wage benefits.  Policy discourse leaves most of the story blank.

What's missing are the "external" or public pecuniary / monetary benefits (upper right quadrant), and all the non-pecuniary or non-market benefits, which are themselves more than half the total.  The focus on job training and wages by major is miseducating the public about what integrative higher learning really does.

The next hour featured a student panel that proved the point about non-monetary effects. Five students of varying ages described their non-traditional journeys to graduation over the kind of obstacles that our anti-social public policies have made all too common. The family of one speaker, who'd wanted to be a computer engineer, lost home and work in the 2008 crash when he was in the 7th grade.  The family spent years living in by-the-week motels as they went from city to city and state to state looking for permanent jobs. Meanwhile, their son never attended formal school again, until a GED program and various CSCU instructors helped him back into the system.

On the same panel a 53- year-old single mother said that after years of working she went back because "I got tired of other people controlling my livelihood. I knew that I could do more, be more.  I wanted to help people, and knew that I could be of greater help."

Three other speakers related their own struggles for education. The common issue: higher ed is about knowledge, capability, personal development.  It addresses a large and varying set of non-monetary issues.  Better pay plays an accepted but minor part, and on this panel was not central enough to mention.

I noted that none of these working-class students at working-class colleges mentioned that pecuniary metric du jour, upward mobility.  They focused on  Bildung, a word nobody used. It is mass Bildung: arguably the core higher ed goal is Bildung for all.

This brought us to Rep. Jahana Hayes. Her pre-Congress career was as a teacher, one who started as a teenage mom and then as a community college student who worked three jobs before graduating from Southern Connecticut State College, who then taught for years before becoming Connecticut Teacher of the Year and then 2016 National Teacher of the Year,  after which she ran for Congress, thinking it was a test run to prepare the ground for somebody else to run and win in 2020.

Her talk was anchored in a deep personal sense of the power of teachers to negate their students' self-worth with dismissive talk or treatment--or to make it possible for them to fully inhabit the world.  I came from a place, she said, where we were told in a range of ways you are nothing, your community is bad, your people have no value.  She said,

I have to remind people at every turn: nobody chooses to struggle. . . Our responsibility as leaders, as the adults, as the community is to hold people up until they can stand on their own, and then send them off so they can pull someone behind them. . . That's what happened in my life, when people stepped in. . . .

She said,

Everything I learned about school, I learned at school.  We have so many people who touch down on campuses like this, and for the first time have real conversations, with fidelity, about controlling the narrative about their education.  Just because they're not having those conversations at home doesn't mean their families don't care about them. Maybe it means, just maybe, that they don't have the ability or the capacity to control those conversations. 

I grew up in a family where my grandmother could not have been more loving, could not have been more giving, could not have been more invested in my success.  But she didn't know how to translate that level of investment, that level of commitment, that love she had for me, into a conversation that was academic. So as a teacher, I always stood on the premise that it's not kids' responsibility to learn different, it's my responsibility to teach different. And I think that if we always lead with that--that everybody has value, that everybody has a gift, that everybody gets to be here, and should have access,

and then she paused because she was on the verge of tears. So was I.  The whole room started to applaud.

She said,

it's amazing how raw this is for me, because. . . there were so many people, when I was a high school dropout, or I was a teenage mom, or I was a community college student, who had just given up on me and written me off. And I tell you, we can't write people off.  We can't decide that they're done. What we have to do is figure out how to put them back on track, and get them in the pipeline, and on the road to success and that road is going to look different for everybody.  There are different ways of doing and being.

And once you are graced with--when I started this journey I did it because I was the beneficiary of so much undeserved grace. Now I have a responsibility--I have a responsibility to use my voice, to use my platform, to use my experiences, to use my struggle, to help insure that somebody, even if it's one person, does not have to endure the same things. To help change hearts and minds, so that the people on the other side, who have already made up their minds, they have an opinion about who certain groups are, what certain groups do, how certain groups feel--about how people act--to help them change that opinion. . . .

In a conference the other day . . . I had to remind people that I was a SNAP beneficiary--not because I didn't want to work, but because I was underemployed, working three jobs, going to college full time. So  when you think about someone receiving SNAP benefits, I hope that you now begin to think that that person can become a Congresswoman. There are so many people in this room, there are so many people on this campus, there are so many people in this community, who are in the journey.

Jahana Hayes would not deny education as job benefits, even as that was subsumed by education as a journey whose supreme value she had proved.  I was struck by her fully democratized idea of value--"everybody has a gift"--that cannot be dealt with through standardization, which is, as an administrative reflex, itself bound up with marginalization.  Thus we get to her principle of "teach different." And that is essentially what every talk I heard all day was doing.

In the afternoon, I went to the panel on "Creating a Family-Friendly Campus," with presentations about basic issues like easily accessible lactation rooms and free child care by Meredith Sinclair, State Senator Beth Bye, and Fiona Pearson, who previewed arguments from her forthcoming book, Back in School. 

There was also Laura McCarthy's presentation on transition programs for what are sometimes called at-risk students.  The programs initially had low retention and completion rates. The instructors did a reoganization based on their immersive experience, and these rates got much better.  Here are some principles:

Free -- hmm, interesting idea. In conjunction with the others, which are all Hayes Principles. Mass Bildung.

Here's what we the instructional masses looks like--with Wanda again playing Waldo, and CCSU president Toro on the left.

And there was also the look on Jahana Hayes's face when I said, "at some point we'll be needing you back in education." 

"I do miss it," she laughed.

I said she showed why her crew could change the frame in Congress: they could end the hollowing out of social structures precisely by invoking the capabilities of absolutely everyone.  It's the Great Refusal of racist and related social stigmas on which neoliberalism depends.

At the end of the day, the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Board of Regents had a session on the issue overhanging the day--the president's CC consolidation.  It seems to have started with the claim that the consolidation could save tens of millions of dollars on a half-billion or so of a system operating budget.  It led, however, with the motto of "Students First," arguing that consolidation would allow simple student access to multiple campuses.  I mentioned above that the regional accreditor seriously challenged the proposal last year, but it is back in retooled form, with a simultaneous plan to conform all 12 campuses' curricula to a Guided Pathways template.

My own limited reading on the issue didn't explain what problem they have to which the solution is consolidation + Guided Pathways.  One good newspaper overview is here.  A faculty petition with concise opposing arguments is here.  The systemwide update document is here, where a slide summary starts on p 39; a key slide at 47 claims the system must be consolidated to solve a student registration process with 35 separate steps.  (One faculty member told me the slide is "ridiculous"; another said, "even if the 35 steps are real, students to whom it would apply constituted 1.12 percent of the student body in Fall 2018" . . . with an average of 1.3 percent.)

The consolidation uses the faculty's language of "student success," but otherwise is a managerial initiative that seemed unrelated to the educational issues we were discussing.  It felt to me like a legacy project.  The system president who's championing the plan, Mark E. Ojakian, was the previous governor's Chief of Staff when, in 2011, he was assigned to create the current CSCU system by pushing the community colleges into a common structure with the four-year campuses. No one had much good to say about the results then--nor could anyone point me to evidence of financial savings.  That same governor later appointed Ojakian to be the president of the system he'd created, and now he's back for a second rearrangement of the arms and legs of his creature.

I spoke to him briefly at the start of the day: he was pleasant but uninvolved, and disappeared quickly (unlike the chair of the Board of Regents, who stuck around and chatted with me and various attendees).  The consolidation was not developed in consultation with faculty and staff on the campuses.  Hence the head-on collision between unrelated models of problems and solutions coming from frontline people on the one hand and a politically-wired system office on the other.  The results are predictable: demoralization and confusion, and a low chance of meaningful results.

It also seems like an example of the sort of pragmatism that finds its problems under the proverbial lamppost, and so ignores the bigger problems in the shadows.  It doesn't actually seem pragmatic to me.  So I used my talk to insist that debates in higher ed today were not between realism and idealism, but between two kinds of realism.  The dominant one is a realpolitik, whose opening move is always to cast its opposition as well-intentioned but naive about real-world rules.  But what this move is really trying to forestall is actualy a competing realism.  I called this "public realism" (still fussing with terrminology).  Public realism is much more ambitious than realpolitik, wanting among other things adequate funding for all of higher ed's nonpecuniary effects, which means high quality instruction and research at what are now thousands of underfunded open access institutions much like the ones Ojakian wants to consolidate.

Consolidation is a realpolitik distraction from the real issue, which is that Connecticut, though the No. 1 richest state by our preferred funding metric of personal income, has cut its funding for its CCs by nearly 12 percent just in the last four years.  The longer trend is dismal: though Connecticut appropriations are above national averages, they are still 19 percent below their 2008 levels, while tuition is 41 percent higher.  Here's the SHEEO wave chart for CT:

A group of faculty described this root problem in an editorial that should be read in full:

In an historical context, the apparent fiscal crisis that precipitated the [Board of Regents’] Students First plan grew out of years of declining levels of state support for higher education that became especially acute in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 economic crisis. The state’s eroding budgetary condition imposed fiscal austerity on the system that simultaneously resulted in increases in students’ costs/debts and cutbacks in student services and opportunities.  Full time professors were replaced by adjuncts; retiring academic advisors were not replaced; hours of operation were reduced.

Educational quality declines when capacity declines: it's realpolitik's own idealism to think otherwise.  

The Connecticut system's related root problem is that it's not affordable.  From the California vantage, Connecticut charges very high tuition for community college- over $4400 a year.  (True, it is half the tuition charged by community college in New York State, but I'm sure we can agree that $10,000 a year for first-rung local college is insane.)

Ojakian might thus have been expected to focus on two things as president: lowering tuition and raising state allocations in wealthy Connecticut.   (He could also have taken care of student bureaucratic hassles the old-fashioned way, by quietly instituting a common application form, which I'm told by faculty and students was promised when he formed the system back in 2011.) But these two issuse are not the leadership's focus.  The day's last session was dominated by faculty distress at a process that they feel is headed in the wrong direction in part because they have been excluded from it.

I'd said that we had been avoiding the effort to fund public colleges as public goods, which had meant the path of "multiple revenue streams" (aka privatization).  The key point is that none of these have  worked out as promised. I counted 12 types.


 There are exceptions to the rules in the "reality" column, but I believe these are the general rules.  Most relevant to consoidation is the second item from the last: I mentioned UCPath as a disaster that emerges from a type top-down standardization that blocks local efficiencies and if anything increases costs while making everyone's job harder. Decentralization is often more efficient than consolidation: UC Berkeley's failed Operation Excellence is UC's Exhibit A (see Section 3 for a 2016 update).

There are some things we can do to avoid these mistakes.  A simple one is policy rooted in history and evidence. Can you show that your last reorg saved a lot of money? Do you have an example of positive top-down curricular standardization?  If not, do you have a detailed plan that convinces the people actually doing the education? If you have none of these things, talk to people all over the system and try out something else.

Another is telling the truth about the damage these public-private hybrid models have already done.  It's the old Step 1 beginning: first admit you have a problem.  We have a national higher ed realpolitik, that failed.  Frontline faculty and staff have faced this. Top level admin should do the same.

The third thing we can do is a full reframing of higher ed along public good lines.  Virtually everyone I heard speak that day, from Jahana Hayes on out, already sees the transformation that would come from that.

By Vineeta Singh, Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow, Omohundro Institute, College of William & Mary.

This is the second in a series of talks from the MLA panel, "Race and Critical University Studies." The first was "Insurgent Genealogies."

In 2015, the University of Virginia’s “President’s Commission on Slavery and the University” established a multi-institution consortium of “Universities Studying Slavery,” (USS) to allow historians to collaborate on research and share best practices for attempts at reconciling institutional histories and institutional values.

In the last three years, the consortium has grown to include 38 universities in the U.S., Canada, and Britain. It is primarily an historical rather than literary or even interdisciplinary intellectual community.  It is located squarely in the South, where the institutional reluctance and incapacity to address the already hypervisible histories of slavery and white supremacy more broadly have molded a very different “crisis consensus” than at the University of California and similar schools. Because of these divergent evolutions, USS work gives Critical University Studies other ways of approaching the presentism, exceptionalism, and focus on amelioration that CUS work is frequently charged with. 

After finishing an Ethnic Studies dissertation studying the history of U.S. higher education as it reflects and intensifies the conditions of racial capitalism, I recently began a postdoctoral fellowship with The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation. This is the College of William & Mary’s initiative to study the university’s history with racial violence and to “rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” In learning with the Lemon team and other members of the USS Consortium, I have come to regard the practical and creative work of students, scholars, and activists working with such initiatives as a model for how to do a critical study of American higher education. The work is allowing us to address the color line as a central driving force in the history of U.S. higher education. It looks toward an immanent reconcilability of studies of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education with “critical studies about the casualization of academic labor, the privatization of the public university, and the uncertain future of U.S. higher education,” as Heather Steffen put it in the proposal for this panel.

The conflict between the study of CUS and of race might be boiled down to the hope, on the one hand, that the public research university is fundamentally a progressive good, whose expanding reach has or will index the growth of values consonant with social justice, potentially including the dismantling of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy etc.; and, on the other hand, the conviction that since the U.S. nation-state is a guarantor of white supremacist capitalism, its system of higher education, functions like all state apparatuses is a house where “only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

In my research and in my work with the Lemon Project I have joined a generation of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies scholars and historians who are attempting to work through this disconnect. Like the first generation of identity knowledge workers who brought identity knowledges into some kind of institutional relationship with the academy, our labors represent a kind of reconciliation--not the end of an antagonism, but its continuation by other means. Creating new, uncomfortable, and generative proximites, this reconciliation work has less to do with the affective labor of creating friendly relations and more to do with the institutional work of creating a shared political community for the perpetrators andi targets of crimes against humanity. Or better yet, for knowledge producers, it is akin to the accounting practice of ensuring that two sets of records are in agreement.

In general, universities have tried to reckon with their racist pasts through enrollment, historical study, memorialization, and of course reconciliation. Among the most inspiring successes are enrollment initiatives tailored for black students.  For example, Rutgers and Georgetown are seeking to build recruitment relationships with descendant communities.  Rutgers University’s Scarlet and Black Project’s historical study puts anti-black and settler violences squarely in the center of university history rather than, as in the past, seeing them as appendages or amendments to a history of great white men and families. 

Some universities are also engaged in countercommemoration, in which they rename campus landmarks after the enslaved laborers who built them, or after black historical figures associated with campus space. This helps black students and other students of color see themselves not just as descendants of the disfranchised but as inheritors of radical traditions of resistance and study.

Notably, the Brown [University] Steering Committee was a direct result of a reparations debate. The same year Ruth Simmons became Brown’s president, conservative author David Horowitz published a full-page ad in student newspapers across the country including the Brown Daily Herald titled “Ten Ideas Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.” When the paper’s editors refused to print a retraction or relinquish the money the paper received for the ad (as student activists recommended), protestors “stole an entire day’s press run of the paper” (pages 58- 59). The steering committee’s final report notes that the “stolen” papers were actually returned, but also that the story of the “theft” appeared in newspapers across the country, casting the university as a poor defendant of “the free exchange of ideas” (ibid.) The following year, when a class-action lawsuit was brought against a cohort of private corporations built on profits from the slave trade, including FleetBoston bank, founded by the same family of brothers who endowed Brown University, and when think pieces like Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree’s New York Times essay warned institutions like Brown, Yale, and Harvard to brace for a series of similar suits, Brown’s president Simmons convened the steering committee, in their words,“not [to] determine whether or how Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor… to forge a consensus on the reparations question. Its object, rather, was ‘to provide factual information and critical perspectives to deepen understanding’ and enrich debate on an issue that had aroused great public passion but little constructive public dialogue.” 

The most visible of this work, however, is the focus on eliciting an official university apology—ostensibly, although evidently not always, as a prelude to a commitment to material investments; administratively, of course, the investment is in rehabilitating the image of the institution.

Although the USS consortium’s name implies a focus on the pre-1865 period, in practice its associated initiatives have used the hypervisibility of the slavery conversation to bring attention to racial formation, racial capitalism, and racialized violence more broadly.

The initiatives frequently cite Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of the afterlives of African chattel slavery to trigger a momentary removal of the veils of commodity fetishism and fiduciary responsibility, the justification used by, for instance, Jesuit priests selling 272 enslaved Americans to keep Georgetown University’s doors open in 1838.  They ask, as the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation at Georgetown does, how this historical “lack of moral imagination—the inability to see black human beings as deserving of equal dignity” persists in the present and in planning for the future.

By addressing the long history of the U.S. university as a crucial site in the creation and consolidation of American racial capitalism, such work overcomes the bias alleged to be at the heart of current CUS work. Partnering and collaborating with USS schools and scholars would help CUS practitioners do the same.

In doing so, Lemon-style initiatives also move against the tendency to treat the university as an exceptional site. The undergraduate class syllabi such initiatives inform connect the university’s slaveholding to its role in fomenting and maintaining Jim Crow segregation laws and norms off campus.

At William & Mary, student activists have further connected these conversations to the university’s ongoing use of prison labor. Their work underscores the continuity between African chattel slavery and contemporary mass incarceration and residential, educational, and occupational segregation, as well as workers’ rights and health inequity, as much on campus as off. In leveraging a crisis to create a coalition, such initiatives, mostly born of student, faculty, and community organizing, are another iteration of the kind of coalitional labor that has historically animated the fields of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latinx, and Gender Studies. And they are a coalition that easily makes common cause with CUS’s wider concerns.

Amelioration, the desire to manage the effects of a crisis, rather than confronting its root causes, is important to the institutions sanctioning such initiatives. As they try to tidy up unsightly and embarrassing student protests into at least surveilable, if not exactly manageable initiatives, the frequent use of the appellation “project” (instead of center or institute) in their titles indexes an uneasy triangular relationship among an administration’s desire to be absolved of past wrongdoings, historians’ attempts to “narrow the range of permissible lies” an institution can tell about its own past, and the institution’s inability to reckon with the scale of the oppression in which it has been complicit (page 173).

Yet the persistence of the scholars tasked with these efforts of memory, repentance, reconciliation, healing, and redress, speaks to their personal and collective investments in making possible another university. They also provide an intellectual community for people like Professor Hilary Green, an historian working at the University of Alabama, who single-handedly researched, designed, and implemented an alternate campus tour highlighting the presence of enslaved laborers and craftsmen on campus. Green has personally given her Hallowed Grounds tour to over three thousand visitors and students, and last year, along with earning tenure, received funds to hire student workers to expand its reach.

Green’s work is, frankly, a personal inspiration, and a model of the kind of reconciliation I envision for students of CUS and racial capitalism: it begins with a confrontational practice that forces students and visitors to recognize the racial violence embedded in the campus landscape.  Rather than waiting for institutional or disciplinary approval, Green has been reconciling the institution’s accounts with local common senses about the predatory relationship between the academy and communities of color. She is now also able to use university resources to further her transformative work.

This is also a core tenet of the interdisciplinary identity knowledge formations: to refuse the positioning of racial violence as an aberration in the history of the United States or of capitalism, and to place it at the center of these narratives. One effect is that the narratives have to re-articulate their own objects.  Another is that the rest of the campus so-called community builds “racial stamina”—the capacity to engage in meaningful dialogue about systemic racism.

In situating racial violence as a constitutive element of institutional histories, such projects keep the campus in a generative state of crisis.  This creates the possibility to answer the call for imaginative scholarly coalitional work..  I’m thinking in particular of Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things, which shifts our focus away from grand revolutionary narratives (or even the heroic model of grant-writing templates) and towards “the small things” that can enact critical forms of community—forms that make minoritized subjects agents rather than silent objects of knowledge.

by Danica Savonick, Asst Professor of English, SUNY Courtland

Chris here: this is the first in a series of papers delivered at an MLA Convention panel called "Race and Critical University Studies," organized by Heather Steffen and me and held on 5 January 2019.  Prof. Savonick gets at a key motive behind the panel when she says below, "Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries." We are interested in helping CUS contribute to the continuation and extension of these critiques and practices.

*** 
 My remarks today are drawn from my current manuscript project, Insurgent Knowledge, which analyzes the literary and pedagogical praxis of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich. I’ll give a brief overview of the project and highlight one key example, then suggest some ways that this work might help us think about this panel’s question: how can critical university studies approach issues of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education?

While Lorde, Jordan, Bambara, and Rich are most often studied for their literature, my project positions them as theorists of feminist and antiracist pedagogy. In 1968, at the height of the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and protests against the Vietnam War (and the same year that Paulo Freire was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed) these authors were teaching down the hall from one another at Harlem’s City College, in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and later during Open Admissions. Like the majority of educators today, they were not teaching wealthy or even middle-class students at elite universities with ample resources. Rather, they were teaching working class students of color in the nation’s first state-mandated educational opportunity program.

As educators, these authors drew on their poetic sensibilities to develop student-centered, collaborative, and consciousness-raising pedagogies that transformed their classrooms into sites of social change. They challenged students to make crucial decisions about the structure of their courses; to conduct original local research on poverty, housing, food, and education; to write and publish literature and to become teachers in their classrooms and leaders in their communities. These pedagogies were designed to navigate and contest the privatization of knowledge and power that has come to dominate educational practice, and I hope this research will help us to continue that work today.

Given this panel’s focus on race, I want to say a little more to contexualize their educational activism amidst the racial politics surrounding CUNY in the late 1960s. Since its inception, City College has been understood as a barometer for educational democracy in the U.S. While the school had a historical mandate to educate “the children of the whole people” and had long boasted of being the “Harvard of the Proletariat,” it was not until 1965 that the SEEK program was established to address the fact that the college’s student body did not reflect the diversity of the surrounding Black and Puerto Rican Harlem community. SEEK recruited “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students and prepared them to matriculate at City College through remedial coursework.

Five years later, the college implemented a far more controversial Open Admissions policy, which expanded SEEK’s commitment to equity and access throughout the CUNY system. As Roderick Ferguson shows, the initiative was met with vehement opposition and the widespread racist belief that this influx of students of color would dilute the quality of education. Mainstream media and journalism pathologized these students as “deprived, disadvantaged, former or current drug addicts, unwed mothers, ghetto residents, fatherless[ds3],” “untrained monkeys, and lions caged in a zoo[ds4].” [CJN5][ds6]And much of this dehumanizing rhetoric came from within the CUNY professoriate, especially in the humanities. Open Admissions, according to the chair of the City College English Department, is “how you kill a college.”

At a time when faculty were accusing these democratizing initiatives of killing higher education and lowering academic standards, a number of eminent writers were lining up at the door to teach in these classrooms. These teacher-poets, along with figures like Addison Gayle, Barbara Christian, David Henderson, and Mina Shaughnessy, understood that many of these students came from underfunded schools that were left out of the city’s Progressive era education reforms. They understood that students’ unpreparedness was the product of racist institutions, discrimination, underemployment, and poverty, and not individual deficiencies. Together they
formed an insurrectionary pedagogical milieu committed to the success of working class students, first-generation students, and students of color.

At this point, I am overwhelmed by the number of stories I want to tell you. I want to tell you how Bambara was tasked with teaching a remedial summer writing course that would prepare students to assimilate into the existing curriculum, but instead she challenged them to design their own course and equipped them with the tools to reinvent the university. I want to tell you about how Lorde assigned daily journals and collaborative projects to teach students to locate their lives in relation to long histories of institutional injustice. I want to tell you about Rich’s insistence that her university did not need a new, highly exclusive MFA program but desperately needed to offer a master’s in creative teaching in order to address the nation’s devastating conditions of educational inequality.

But in the interest of time, I will focus on just one example: the praxis of publishing student writing. While these anthologies may be familiar to scholars of African American literature and women’s studies, today, I want to focus on the little-discussed fact that all of these relatively well known anthologies included student writing.

In fact, much of the writing in these collections emerged from the courses Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara taught at Tougaloo College, City College, Rutgers Livingston, and in less formal spaces, like weekend writing workshops. Instead of submitting writing solely to be read by the instructor, they organized their courses around the production of texts that could circulate in the world beyond the classroom.

For example, The Voice of the Children is a poetry collection authored entirely by students in Jordan’s weekend writing workshops and published in 1970.

In this collection, the young authors, ranging in age from twelve to fourteen, address the offensive and inaccurate stereotypes of illiterate “ghetto” children of color that were circulating in mainstream media in the late 1960s. Journalists regularly described these children as “silent creatures…[who] didn’t know the names of things, didn’t know that things had names, didn’t even know their own names.”

And yet, in just the first few pages of The Voice of the Children the young authors respond to prompts such as “what would you do if you were president?” with trenchant critiques of ghetto stereotypes, settler colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and patriarchy, made all the more powerful when we consider that their average age was thirteen. In the opening prose poem, fourteen-year-old Vanessa Howard theorizes the power of stereotypes to reduce the complexity of individuals:

Nine out of ten times when a person hears the word ‘ghetto’ they think of Black people first of all...Ghetto has become a definition meaning Black, garbage, slum areas... I think they put all Black people in a box marked ‘ghetto’ which leaves them having no identity.  They should let Black people be seen for themselves, not as one reflection on all.

By teaching her students that they were authors with important things to say, Jordan directly challenged the ways mainstream media pathologized working class students of color as deprived, disadvantaged, unruly bodies in need of discipline.

I read these anthologies as the enactment of a social justice pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. In contrast to the top-down construction of traditional anthologies, which are typically produced for but not by students in the classroom, Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara acted on a conviction that authorship — the power to move people through language — is widely distributed despite racist and patriarchal institutions that privilege the voices of a narrow, white male elite. The authors they worked with were low-income, women with families to support, people of color, and often students (some as young as 9) and the editorial labor that went into these collections ranged from convincing publishers that these authors had something important to say to convincing the authors themselves.

As educator-editors, they put in countless uncompensated hours corresponding with publishers, negotiating contracts, and organizing publicity events. They did so because they understood the multifaceted impact these anthologies could make in people’s lives. These publications helped students understand the power of their voices and share survival strategies across the partitioning walls of classrooms and institutions. They addressed the racism of both the literary publishing industry and academia and called out to collectives of readers who had previously been ignored by publishers.

These anthologies were part of a grassroots movement for pedagogical, cultural, and social change that emerged not from top-down decisions by school boards, but led by writers and teachers embedded in city classrooms, who witnessed the pernicious gaps among existing curricula, the abundance of Black poetry, and the experiences of students’ lives. In doing so, they drew on a long history of Black self-publishing, which was central to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. And it was from these experiences of trying to publish their and their students’ writing that Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press was born.

Publishing student writing would become a central component of Jordan’s pedagogy for years to come, most notably in her Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley in the 1990s, where she trained hundreds of students to write, publish, and perform their poetry and to become educators who would go out into community centers, homeless shelters, K-12 schools, and churches to teach others to write and publish poetry. Taking advantage of campus resources, Jordan insisted in students’ involvement not just in the co-creation of their classroom, but in the publication process: editing, proofing, binding, budgeting, distribution, and marketing. Reflecting on a course that concluded with a collaboratively-authored anthology, Jordan notes that “the class was producing its own literature: A literature reflecting the ideas and dreams and memories of the actual young Americans at work” (“Merit Review”).

But anthologies are just one example of the collaborative, project-based, multimodal and public pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. Rather than dictating the forms their final projects should take, Bambara often asked students to find or invent a form that would best tell the story of their learning and share these lessons with a public audience beyond the classroom. “Do not write term papers for me,” Bambara told students, “Make sure they are useful for somebody else as well,” suggesting forms such as a collaborative annotated bibliography, performance art, a short story (for radio or TV), a magazine, puppet theater, a street theater performance, a slide show, or a picture book.

The one requirement was that it “can be shared with others.” Some examples of Jordan’s collaborative projects include a “Wrath Rally” and letter writing campaign against poverty in Biafra, organized by students in her Upward Bound Class, dramatic radio productions on children’s welfare and racial justice in South Central Los Angeles, and A Revolutionary Blueprint, a collection of reading lists, syllabi, poetry, and activities that turned the lessons of Poetry for the People into a “how to guide” for others interested in democratizing poetry. Through these assignments, these teacher-poets taught students that their voices, stories, and actions mattered for social change; in short, that each student, in Jordan’s words, “has much to teach America."

As educators, we are accustomed to thinking about how our courses can be useful to students, but these teacher-poets urge us to consider how classrooms can also become useful to the world beyond its walls. Through this pedagogy, they taught students an activist way of being in the world, in which we do not sit idly by, but confront our complicity in, and therefore our abilities to address, problems in society. They believed that everyone has something to contribute to the production of a more just, equitable, and pleasurable world, and that classrooms were one site for discovering what that might entail. Often, this took the form of getting better poems and better books into the hands of readers who needed them. Through these assignments, they showed students their collective social power that neoliberal institutions cover over: how our learning, knowledge, writing, research, and art provide opportunities to fight for change.

In a moment when conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan were demonizing activist students and calling art education an “intellectual luxury,” these teacher-poets were part of a groundswell pedagogical movement of educators who understood an education in language as a crucial skill for navigating and transforming the world. Best articulated by Audre Lorde, the study of language and literature —  in community college, Open Admissions, and remedial writing classrooms; in community centers; in weekend workshops; and around the kitchen table —  was never understood as a “luxury,” but as a way of improving “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives” (36[CJN7][ds8]), a necessary undertaking for those rendered vulnerable by the social order.

What emerges from this genealogy is a humanistic praxis that is continually responsive to material conditions of inequality, what I am calling “the indispensable humanities.” The indispensable humanities interrogate how resources are unevenly distributed along embodied axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the roles that language, literature, education, and culture play in perpetuating and altering these conditions.

By way of a conclusion, I want to offer some provisional hypotheses/answers to this panel’s question.

1. Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries. And so, a worthwhile project for critical university studies might be to locate our work within an insurgent genealogy that includes not only these-teacher poets but also figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Mary Church Terrell, Septima Clark, Ericka Huggins, and Barbara Christian. In doing so, we might better understand our contemporary moment as the product of much longer and ongoing struggles for educational justice.

 

 2. Recent work in critical university studies has built on the legacy of these figures, analyzing how higher education often reproduces the conditions of inequality it claims to challenge, especially through longstanding violence against people of color. While these teacher-poets were, in Moten and Harney’s terms, “in but not of” the university, they also acknowledged how higher education remains one of the most viable paths towards the modest comforts of a middle-class life, especially for students from working-class backgrounds, and how absconding can be too risky for those without an economic security net. Instead, they used their knowledge of their complicity within unjust institutions to hold institutions accountable, redistribute educational resources, and make them more responsive to diverse communities.

3. With my research, I aim to position these teacher-poets as leaders of pedagogical, institutional, and social change, whose work points to the importance of fighting on all of these different fronts: from the page, to the classroom, to the streets. In our current moment, one in which racism operates more insidiously (for instance, as Sara Ahmed shows, through the proliferation of diversity discourses), I’m interested in how these educators taught students both to navigate conditions of structural inequality and to imagine and build better alternatives. In particular, their work reminds us that many contemporary student-centered pedagogies emerged in relation to the critiques of power issued by the feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperial social movements of the late 1960s. Their work demonstrates how our pedagogies can contribute to larger struggles for social justice, even from within conservative, hostile, neoliberal institutions (what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “counter-poetic” pedagogy). My aim is not necessarily to say that contemporary educators should do these exact things (although I’ve had a lot of fun trying) but to make available different ways of thinking about our classrooms as sites of social change, especially in relation to Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and other movements for social justice.

And so I’ll leave you with June Jordan’s question: “how will the American university teach otherwise?”

Since Flash Comics writers discovered the existence of Earth-Two in 1961, readers have been tracking unexpected divergences between the paired planets that exist in parallel dimensions.  The Earths have generated divergent histories with more or less the same people. This makes it easy to study the effects of variable reactions to structural forces like culture, law, and economic policy, since backward leaders and our unfortunate "human nature" reign on both worlds-- as on the other Earths DC Comics has discovered since.

There's one other thing:  Earth-One is considered a Silver Age and Earth-Two a Golden Age planet.  The terms derived initially from the age of comics in which their lead superheros evolved, but came to be applied to the quality of the planets themselves.  Life is better on Earth-Two: less impoverished, less tyrannical, less hypermasculine in leadership styles, and less inclined towards multiple gun deaths.  Some believe that the lower, Silver Age status of our Earth-One results from its lower cultural intelligence.  This inclines it to manage social relations with fixed procedures and peer communications with programming.

How do the Earths compare on major university trends?

1. Both Earths experienced our old friend permausterity that we've discussed before.  In 2015, a small uptick in state appropriations left outlays nearly 20 percent below their pre-recession levels (summary page 8). Meanwhile, the historic backfill for state cuts, student tuition hikes, became politically untenable, as UC President Janet Napolitano found out when she couldn't get even a piece of her 5% a year for 5 years through Sacramento. A second solution, ed-tech, was to step into the breach with massive savings through technological efficiency at the same level of quality.  That fix failed completely, though many politicians continued to flog it.

The upshot for 2016 is that real funds for the educational core will stay flat or fall as a share of overall expenditures, even as the student share of public college expenditures has grown from 1/2 to nearly 2/3rds of the total.  So Earth-One's 2016 default will be sagging public college quality as these institutions and their less-privileged students fall further behind the instructional and research trends set by the wealthy private universities, which in 2015 were richer and more exclusive than ever.

Stratification between public and private will be echoed by more of the same within public systems. The public flagships will stay afloat while the more vulnerable campuses drift into whatever shallows will keep most decks above water. Nick Fleisher and Richard Grusin discussed cuts at the important Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, which educates a large urban population while dealing with unjustified reductions.  These diverging fates were intensified by a tradition of gross inequality in per-student funding across state systems: Sara Goldrick-Rab and Tammy Kolbe discussed the lopsided figures for the University of Wisconsin system.

E1 academic leaders no longer dream of fixing a problem that endangers the core purpose of public colleges, which is equal education.  E1 citizens didn't vote for the deterioration of quality of campuses serving the poorer and more remote parts of states while their tax dollars support the flagships that serve the most non-resident students, but that is what they are going to get. They face a renewed elitism of public college education, right when universal quality is more necessary than ever.

Humans are no less foolish on Earth-Two. But E2 has better communication from grassroots to the executive tiers, where for cultural reasons they care more about how C-suite decisions affect life in the trenches.  Thus E2 Napolitano started 2016 by telling her staff:

Stop bringing me these nickel solutions.  Stuff like UCOP Venture Capital may be good PR, but will generate a drop in the bucket if we're lucky. You realize it's not 1995 anymore?   Non-resident tuition is a band-aid--anyone can do the math.  I know UC students who couldn't get detailed paper feedback from the faculty we're not hiring even if we passed out handguns at every campus gate.  I don't want to see another Jerry budget with just 4% for us again. I need a 16% state funding increase each year for five years, starting now.  Tell Jerry "tuition is frozen forever" if he rebuilds state funding levels.  Make a list of exactly how all of the new money will go to the educational core--I mean 100%.  First explain what the hell UC "educational quality" is.  Call some actual UC instructors why don't you?  Tell Jerry we won't spend one new dime on executive comp.  We're going to announce a two-year freeze on executive hiring.  And please, start de-gunking the ridiculous bureaucratic processes around here.  Re-engineer something rather than just make campuses comply with more standardization.  And call those guys that say we can get 2001 low-tuition and good funding for another 30 bucks a year or whatever it is. Figure out how we can support it!

No Earth-One president would talk like that.  And yet it follows from two Earth-Two cultural practices: (1) open, reciprocal communication between execs and the least powerful of their institutional cultures--undergraduate education, disciplines without extramural income, low-income students; (2) the refusal to sacrifice weaker units for the sake of the strong.  E2 senior managers move from educational needs to  budget requests rather than the other way around, with the goal of quality for the whole.

2. Massive student protests against racism.  In 2015, both Earths saw large anti-racist protests sandwiched between, on the one hand, ongoing police killings of unarmed Black people followed by the non-indictments of key shooters, and on the other, the Supreme Court's triple-jeopardy reconsideration of affirmative action in the Fisher case (triple because the 2013 Fisher decision was already a retread of the 1990s Hopwood cases that were decided by Bollinger in 2003). Racism on campus (Missouri, Yale, Ithaca College, etc.) showed itself to rise from campuses failing to shelter students from the wider social regression.  E1 and E2 political leaders had tolerated or encouraged a boom in economic inequality and tolerated or encouraged the resegregation of the American school system. Meanwhile, the US college system also became Separate and Unequal: most new white students went to more selective, wealthier colleges while most new students of color went to less selective and poorer mass institutions.  Colleges continued the minoritization of students of color even as they formed pluralities or majorities of student bodies, and did not explain and demand strong race-conscious policies. They outsourced racial politics and social integration to their offices of student affairs, and on Earth-One and Earth-Two alike, didn't generally make students of color feel like they were first-class citizens on their own campuses.  Faced with intensive protests, E1 senior managers offered to listen better while rethinking some specific instances of their tradition of concealing their complicity with larger racist forces (like the presidency of Woodrow Wilson).   Structural changes stayed off the table. 

Meanwhile, on Earth-Two, a staffer in the University of Missouri Office of the President read a content analysis of anti-racist student demands across the country.  She saw that the most frequent were for more faculty of color, more student diversity, more courses on race, ethnicity, and sexuality theory, more institutional support for students of color, more diversity training, and better mechanisms for reporting, sanctioning, and preventing hate crimes.  Wow, the staffer thought, these are the demands of the 1980s! Why didn't we met these years ago?

In early 2016, she tracked down E2 Mizzou's substitute president and spoke as follows:

Look, our protesters are the children of the students who denounced the lack of faculty of color back in 1985.  Most of higher ed has spent the last thirty years screwing around.   University managers look like racist tools because they can't do much better than the right-wingers that run Congress and the Supreme Court.   Here is part of the speech I suggest you let me write: "I support racial equality of outcome, not just of opportunity.  The fact that society maintains racial disparity in everything--income, wealth, health, longevity, education, you name it--doesn't mean universities need to.  So as of today, my administration stands for equality of racial outcomes.  Now we need to figure out how to get that at Mizzou Earth-Two.  You've heard of the flipped classroom?  Mizzou will start with the flipped administration.  We'll put students in charge of designing the grievance processes and curricula that they prefer. Student affairs staffers and faculty will act as a support structure for advice and counsel.  Then students, faculty, staff, and senior managers will hold a series of quiet meetings and loud town halls--what do you all call them? General Assemblies?--in which we'll hash out the results democratically.  STudents won't decide on their own, but they will lead the process.  Another thing we're going to do.  My colleague, the new head of the Columbia flagship campus, will work with the Missouri system as a whole to equalize funding across this great system. We have a plan for a leveling up over a five year period.  Our goal is to fund the campuses with higher percentages of students of color at the same per-student level as the largely white flagship campus.  We need equitable funding for equitable racial outcomes, and Missouri is going to lead what I am sure is going to become a national trend."  

3. Admin's Autocracy Crisis: The newly-installed head of the University of Iowa, Bruce Harreld, drew new attention to himself by saying that professors who failed to prepare lessons should be shot. On Earth-One, faculty awareness of domineering Boards and weakened Senates had been growing throughout 2015. One piece called it Veblen's Nightmare.   In E1 Iowa, the main response was a librarian's eloquent repudiation of President Harreld's comments, which broke with the taboos of a faculty deference culture that had been helping administrators ignore or override faculty expertise even in core faculty arenas.   In an email to E1 Harreld, Lisa B. Gardinier explained,

There are many schools of pedagogy and, being a university, there are several, if not many, good ways to plan lessons, classes, and curriculum, and our academic freedom extends to teaching in the way we see fit to the content on which we are trusted to be experts, preferably with adequate support and opportunities for the development and improvement of our teaching skills throughout our career. Poor planning is an unfortunate waste of both the instructor’s and the students’ time and research but is not a capital or corporal offense, leading me to the second part of your comment.

For a university president to use the term “should be shot” so flippantly, and just a week after the most recent highly publicized mass shooting and in a tense atmosphere of racist law enforcement violence, is horrifying and unacceptable. For someone who claims to sideline his vision to that of the university community, to casually suggest potentially lethal punishment as consequences for failure to comply with a narrow perception of the correct way to fulfill one of our duties, is irresponsible and unprofessional. You may not have been kicked out since your appointment, but not for lack of trying, and nor is anyone is advocating for bodily harm to come of you or anyone complicit in your hire.

Earth-One greets Lisa Gardinier's open critique as an act of individual courage and candor.  Earth-Two, being more culturally evolved, sees it as an act of public witness in an institutional context, pointing toward collaborative emulation with a goal of social health.  Others take up the challenge of frankness, writing E2 Harreld with non-anonymous appraisals of his performance and its effect on their feelings about their institution and their work.  The E2 Academic Senate encourages public statements as expressions of an ethic of general participation in self-goverance.  Over a few weeks, as open exchange becomes the rule rather than the exception, flaming and trolling all but disappear, as their function of nuking the enemy becomes less attractive psychologically.  The same goes for retaliation and shunning, twin norming procedures whose coercive and negative effects become deceasingly acceptable as more people survive and even thrive on commentary.  Iowa becomes a model of open governance by generalized peer-review.  It becomes an experiment in combining stable and regularized structures with an ethics of disclosure.  Once someone names this the operative community, and E2 President Harreld enthusiastically joins in, the chair of the E2 Iowa Board of Regents responds.

When we hired Bruce, we were following the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) script that said we needed to take ownership of the university away from faculty, staff, and students.  We felt entitled to brush off the AAUP's rejection of our procedures, and rule through negative stereotypes of various university subgroups.  Now my earlier dismissal of faculty critiques as "embracing the status quo of the past" seems kind of dumb.  Since I'm too old to change, I'm announcing my resignation from the Board, so I can find a sphere where my kind of unilateral top-down decisionmaking still makes sense. Universities need every single person's full intelligence or they don't work.  I wish Iowa all the best.

These three examples from DC Comics archives show Earth-Two does better not by having special Jedi foresight and discipline but by having open institutional cultures.  Their universities are less managerial and more democratic, less autocratic and more proceduralist, less algorithmic and more widely informed.  Luckily, Earth-One can learn from the more advanced cultures of Earth-Two.

A belated and hopeful Happy New Year, whichever planet you're from.