From John McCain’s acceptance speech, the line that stuck out for me
was, “Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.”
He went on to explain that for him that meant offering parents and
students a choice among public, private and charter schools. That
choice, of course, only has meaning if parents and students have a
variety of schools from which to choose and the financial ability to buy
into their schools of choice. More broadly, while the GOP presidential
candidate is right about education’s central significance in the new
century, his simplistic solution hardly scratches the surface.
In many major cities, high school graduation rates hover around 50%. In
a few they dip below the .500 mark. This dismal fact ensures the
perpetuation of what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, which is to
say, the ragged or rabble lower class. And this, in its turn, ensures
perpetuation of the drug wars, gang wars and random killings that
characterize our inner cities.
Meanwhile out in the land of suburban sprawl, teen obesity, drug and
alcohol abuse, and the random shootings that periodically plague our
schools all suggest that affluence alone does not ensure successful
students. Taken in this context, the issue of education expands to
include family issues, such as divorce rates.
Labor policy, likewise, must be included in the mix. One of the great
ironies of our new century is that, while millionaire professional
athletes have strong labor unions, workers on the bottom rungs of our
economy are often as exploited as their 19th century counterparts. Labor
organizations, such as the Service Employees International Union, have a
hard time organizing these folks, given the lopsided way in which our
National Labor Relations Act is interpreted by the federal courts and
bureaucrats. Union prevention and union busting are only another cost of
doing business for many major corporations, which also outsource what
were once the better-paying positions to Asian and Latin American
sweatshops.
Immigration policy also must be addressed in any comprehensive approach
to American education. The Supreme Court has said that the children of
illegal aliens are entitled to attend public schools. The law remains
unsettled as to whether or not such students are also entitled to attend
public colleges and universities and, if so, whether they are also
entitled to in-state residents’ tuition breaks.
More broadly, are immigrants filling jobs that Americans don’t want to
do? Or are Americans declining those jobs because of the low wages, lack
of benefits, and miserable working conditions? The use of immigrant
labor, legal and illegal, at the bottom of the economic barrel
perpetuates the conditions that make these jobs unattractive to anyone
but immigrant and migrant workers.
Last but not least is the rising cost of a college education. Too many
of our young people are graduating with “mortgages” on their diplomas.
Inefficiencies plague the higher education industry. Despite being the
only major sector of the economy that can call on its past customers —-
its alumni—to continue supporting its operations, and despite
substantial gifts and grants from donors and foundations, higher
education’s tuition rates continue to outpace inflation significantly.
Thus, the proliferation of large student-loan debts.
Yes, Sen. McCain (and Sen. Obama), “Education IS the civil rights issue
of the 2ist century.” And it is a complex issue, entangled with
equally complex and challenging issues of family, labor, and immigration
policy.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2008
But there is a role that public education cannot fill.
Recall the Supreme Court's Garcetti case in which the Supremes said that, when a public employee speaks in his official capacity, and not as a private citizen, the First Amendment does not protect him. Observe the attacks in Wisconsin and elsewhere on public-employee unions and professors' tenure. Public higher education simply can not be entrusted with freedom of speech, academic freedom and the search for truth.
Nor can we any longer rely on the media, which have shifted from investigative journalism and objective truth telling to corporate hype and infotainment.
Only private higher education offers any hope of serving as the citadels of truth finding and telling. This, too, is a position I have been espousing for a very long time:
- Title:
- The role of higher education in the 21st century: collaborator or counterweight? By: Castagnera, James Ottavio, Change, 00091383, September/October 2001, Vol. 33, Issue 5
- Database:
- Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
HTML Full Text
The Role of Higher Education in the 21st Century
Collaborator or Counterweight?
The
December 8, 2000, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reported
that an article in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy,
in which the authors had criticized the alleged behavior of Boise
Cascade Corporation toward workers in its Mexican facilities, was
withdrawn by the University of Denver after the corporation threatened a
disparagement and defamation lawsuit.
The
report is reminiscent of earlier articles in The Chronicle and
elsewhere concerning "slap suits" against academics whose scholarship is
critical of corporate interests, and other forms of corporate
retaliation against universities that have taken stands against selling
sweatshop goods. As the University of Denver's acquiescence suggests,
higher education's response to such corporate challenges to age-old
principles of academic freedom and social justice has been uneven at
best.
The
21st century is no time tot faint-heartedness in higher education.
Rather, this should be a time when we champion free speech and social
justice, even at the risk of our own prosperity. No one else can do it.
In
1967, John Kenneth Galbraith, in The New Industrial State, postulated a
three-legged stool on which the well-being of American society rested:
Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor. These legs kept one another
in check, a sort of socio-political supplementation to the political
checks and balances outlined in the Constitution. Galbraith's thesis was
correct in its fundamental features. But by the 1990s, Robert Reich--in
many ways Galbraith's intellectual successor at Harvard--would express
his concern in The Work of Nations about the failure of that balance,
due to the shift from a manufacturing to a services economy and the
decline of organized labor.
When
Galbraith was writing, in the 1950s and 1960s, labor represented one in
three American workers, and a typical American CEO took home 40 times
the salary of the worker on the shop floor--a sum that, when reduced by
our steeply graduated income tax, amounted to only 12 times the worker's
wages. By 1988, the number of unionized workers in the private sector
had fallen to one in 10, and CEOs were enjoying 70 times more after-tax
income than average workers.
In
this brave new world, Reich concluded, the information manipulators--in
his terms the "symbolic analysts"--are the dominant subspecies. Indeed,
this is true even within the labor movement: The most prominent
private-sector unions in America are those representing professional
athletes and entertainers. Whatever happened to Cezar Chavez? Today's
big name on the border is NAFTA.
Let
me suggest that higher education should aim at filling the vacuum left
by Big Labor in Galbraith's construct of The New Industrial State. Its
capacity to serve as a countervailing force will rest on one or more of
the following features of the contemporary university:
• Vastly increasing endowments, as we see developing at the Ivies and universities of analogous high quality and prestige;
•
Expanding geographic reach via multiple campuses--for example, Penn
State's 1997 upgrade of 14 of its regional campuses from two- to
four-year colleges;
•
Direct competition with the for-profits, such as the University of
Phoenix, in the distance-education market, which is being more or less
successfully attempted by some large universities and systems; and
•
Consortia of small colleges, and/or small-college affiliations with a
larger (possibly "hub") institutions, a strategy being pursued, for
instance, by a group of small Catholic colleges in eastern Pennsylvania.
This
suggestion and list of features, of course, conjure memories of the
critique of the "megaversity" that emerged from such works as C. Wright
Mills's The Power Elite. Admittedly, "mega" is a part of what higher
education must be if it is to be a co-equal member of the triumvirate
upon which 21st-century American society will rest. The small,
independent college will not be able to play this role except where it
is unusually well endowed or affiliated with a major religion or
consortium.
If
higher education is to perform the crucial task I have proposed for it
in 21st-century America, it must take a page from the history of
organized labor in the unions' heyday. Like Big Labor at its zenith,
higher education needs to become adept at shifting from the right foot
of collaboration with Big Business and Big Government to the left foot
of confrontation. It must do this even at the price of lost corporate
and government support, and even in the teeth of threatened litigation,
when the issue is academic freedom or social justice.
Indeed,
many public university systems are striving to build their alumni
support and endowments so as to gain a measure of independence from the
strings attached to government purses. And many church-affiliated
institutions, especially Catholic universities, are returning to their
religious roots and for the first time in a long while are publicly
celebrating--even marketing--their moral and doctrinal orientations.
What
of the prospects of success for higher education in the
sometimes-confrontational posture I am proposing? In his sweeping survey
in Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto says that the monasteries that survived the Dark Ages
triumphed only by being needed. They also survived by being distinct
from government and the marketplace. The more that colleges and
universities morph to match their for-profit competition, the more they
incapacitate themselves to act as a counterweight to those other
powerful forces.
In
a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's
Arthur Levine listed nine "inevitable changes" that colleges and
universities experience in the coming decades, such as competing with
"more numerous and diverse" providers of higher education. But the more
readily they accept Levine's nine changes as "inevitable" and
collaborate in their coming about without carefully considering the
merit of each--followed by a conscious decision to accept or oppose
it--the less they will be able to function as free agents influencing
American society.
As
David Halberstam observed in The Next Century, America is more than
ever an "entertainment-driven society." A felling example is the
contrast between the media coverage of the Vietnam War and the coverage
of the Gulf War some two decades later. Stanley Karnow wrote of the 1968
Tet offensive, "After years of viewing the war on television, Americans
at home had become accustomed to a familiar pattern of images....The
screen often portrayed human agony in scenes of the wounded and dying on
both sides....[M]ostly it transmitted the grueling reality of the
struggle...punctuated periodically by moments of horror."
By
contrast, the Gulf War was quick, high-tech, and portrayed on American
television as if it were a video game. Satellite photos were combined
with simulations to feed American viewers sanitized images, depicting no
more real blood and pain than a quick game of "Space Invaders."
Thus,
barbarism passed beyond the merely banal to the visually alluring. The
film industry has responded to, and in turn reinforced, its audience's
fascination with the visually unusual and compelling. From George
Lucas's breakthrough Star Wars films of the 1970s and 1980s to The
Perfect Storm last year, special effects--and, increasingly,
computer-generated visuals--are at the heart of most blockbuster hits.
If it can be imagined, it can be depicted.
This
power is potentially hazardous. Severo Ornstein, writing in the journal
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out, "Today
the art of simulation has developed to the point that it has become
necessary to identify television simulations as artificial, so we won't
think we are seeing the real thing....When employed for political
purposes, illusion becomes diabolical and deception becomes downright
dangerous."
If
higher education must differentiate itself from business and government
in order to serve as a counterweight to them, one of the fundamental
ways it must do so is in adhering to a strict code of truth-seeking and
truth-telling. Even if particular institutions of higher learning are
unwilling to take unpopular stands on controversial issues, they must
share consensus on this code or run the risk of abrogating their claims
to being genuine educational institutions. Are we not entitled to expect
a higher level of integrity from our universities than we anticipate
when we turn on our TVs?
This
expectation of integrity means that when universities use the power of
technology to lie as governments and businesses do, it seems more
scandalous. Witness the University of Wisconsin's embarrassment when it
was "exposed" in a Chronicle article on Nov. 24, 2000:
The
cover of its new admissions brochure displayed a photograph of happy
U.W. students attending a football game at their home stadium--a
photograph that turned out to have been doctored. The original picture
contained no black faces, but U.W. officials had desperately wanted
their admissions materials to reflect a diverse student body. So, using
photo-design software, the director of university publications and the
director of undergraduate admissions simply asked their staff to add
one.
Coming
now full circle, let us consider in greater depth the University of
Denver's decision to withdraw an article previously published in one of
its law reviews, when faced with a major corporation's threat to sue.
Let us begin by agreeing, if we can, that the remedy for bad speech is
more speech. And let us assume--purely for argument's sake--that the
censored article is inaccurate, or even that it is defamatory. What
ought the university to have done, or offered to do, in the face of
Boise Cascade's threatened legal action? Let us compare what it did do
to what Cornell University did when faced with a similar situation.
In
1998, Professor Kate L. Bronfenbrenner of Cornell's School of
Industrial Relations was sued by Beverly Enterprises, Inc., one of the
nation's largest nursing home chains. Beverly accused the professor of
lying about the company's labor relations record to members of Congress
and in her published scholarship. Bronfenbrenner reportedly told
Democratic Congressmen at a town hall meeting that Beverly had a
"long-established record of egregious labor-law violations in the
context of union-organizing campaigns." The corporation sued her for
defamation. Cornell hired attorneys and successfully defended the suit
on its faculty member's behalf.
In
the wake of Beverly Enterprises, Inc. vs. Bronfenbrenner, faculty
around the country were understandably concerned that "slap suits" would
become more common. At Rider University, the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) came to the negotiating table in summer
1999 with a proposal aimed at ensuring that the university would defend
any faculty member who was named in any such "slap suit." The
university, to its credit, agreed to a new provision in the collective
bargaining agreement that will provide such protection, and then
obtained the appropriate insurance to cover any such claims.
In
short, my contention--which I hope is shared by the great majority of
my readers--is that a university must do at a minimum two things to
think of itself as a real university: seek the truth and defend those
who try to tell the truth under the institution's auspices. Absent a
strict adherence to these two baseline principles, an institution ceases
to be a university, no matter how many sports teams it fields, how many
academic programs it offers, or how many campus amenities its students
enjoy. The institution may be an information purveyor or a training
school or a research center, but it has forfeited the right to call
itself a university.
Now
comes the hard part, where I expect that many of my readers and I will
part company. For I argue that the two baseline principles outlined
above are only that: credentials that qualify an institution to call
itself a university. But while a labor union must fairly and vigorously
represent its members, a great union will also put its resources at risk
in order to organize unrepresented workers. A great university likewise
will reach out and actively oppose injustice.
This
is not the view of most universities today. Just as many unions have
long since circled their wagons, emphasizing preservation of existing
power bases over the organization of new constituencies, so too have
many--perhaps most--universities taken the path of cautious
conservatism. Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, former president of Notre
Dame University, wrote in the February 2 issue of The Chronicle,
When
I was a college president, I often spoke out on national issues, even
when they didn't pertain to academic life. Yet nowadays, I don't find
many college presidents commenting on such issues on the front page of
The New York Times or in any of the country's other major news outlets.
Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the
press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional
amendment for the 18-year-olds' vote, but I wonder whether we hear them
taking stands on similar topics now.
Father
Hesburgh cites a recent American Council on Education (ACE) report,
which concluded, "[T]he vast majority of Americans rarely hear college
presidents comment on issues of national importance, and when they do,
they believe institutional needs rather than those of the students or
the wider community drive such comments." He offers several reasons why
this has happened. Among them is "that presidents must play an
ever-larger role in raising money for their institutions--and often from
supporters who have strong views on what presidents should or shouldn't
say to the press."
Today
colleges feel free to draw their CEOs from the ranks of development
officers, a practice that to my knowledge was almost unheard of even two
decades ago. In current searches for college presidents, it seems that
the absence of the initials "PhD" after the candidate's name is not
necessarily an impediment if the fund-raising record is substantial.
Our
students, too, have for the most part been quiet since the tumultuous
late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s witnessed a rush to law and
business schools for JDs and MBAs, then on to the M&A (merger and
acquisition) practices of the nation's big accounting, law, and
investment banking firms. During the latter half of the 1990s,
undergraduates couldn't wait--and sometimes didn't--to establish their
own dot-com business ventures.
But
as the last decade of the last century of the old millennium came to a
close, there were stirrings in at least some of our student bodies.
Students at universities across the country became energized--at least
temporarily--by the anti-sweatshop movement. Initial corporate responses
to these new stirrings of student unrest included withdrawals of sports
sponsorships. But these punitive reactions were rapidly replaced by the
formation of the Fair Labor Association, an anti-sweatshop consortium
consisting of such major manufacturers as Nike and Reebok and some 140
institutions of higher learning.
The
Fair Labor Association may be compared by critics to the company unions
that proliferated in the early part of the 20th century, before they
were outlawed by the 1936 passage of the National Labor Relations Act.
The Worker Rights Consortium, a more militant anti-sweatshop
organization, operates independently, and--perhaps not surprisingly--has
come under fire from corporate members of the Fair Labor Association.
Said a Nike spokesman of the consortium recently, "It's just parachuting
into a country, conducting a few interviews, and writing a report in a
few days. Thorough monitoring involves culling through records, matching
up pay stubs, getting a sense of the local practices and culture. There
is a lot more involved in auditing and monitoring than what that report
represents."
The
important point for my purposes here is not whether the Fair Labor
Association or the Worker Rights Consortium has got it right about any
particular allegation of sweatshop abuses. What matters here is that the
two groups appear to be engaged in dialogue and debate about the truth
behind such labor-abuse accusations. This is precisely the sort of
conversation that is denied to higher education's constituencies when a
corporation threatens to sue or to withdraw sponsorship and the targeted
institution bows to the threat.
Slowly
but surely, however, at least some of America's several thousand
institutions of higher education are manifesting a willingness to use
their virtual global reach to identify and help address the inequities
that proliferate beyond their campus boundaries.
The
record to date suggests that such initiatives are not nearly as risky
as some may fear. Just as American companies in the 1940s and 1950s
reached accommodations with organized labor because they needed the
workers represented by those unions, so too does the quick creation of
the Fair Labor Association suggest a recognition among apparel
manufacturers like Nike and Reebok that they need big-time college
athletics. By extension, corporations need our graduates, our
scientists, our consultants--in short, our knowledge. Knowledge is
capital. As such, it affords us leverage.
Does
higher education possess the collective will to exercise that leverage?
I do not know. But let me suggest that many big issues of our times cry
out for us to demonstrate that will. Father Hesburgh points to
affirmative action and "developing education programs that seek to
improve the status of women--especially in Asia, South America, and
Africa, where many are second-class citizens"--as issues he would
address, were he still a university CEO. Women's rights, affirmative
action, and the anti-sweatshop movement can all be characterized as
battles in a global struggle to end the exploitation of human beings.
Environmentalism, community outreach, and health research are related
issues on which higher education could also speak out.
A
key question in my view is, How will higher education use its global
reach and knowledge capital, particularly as those have been enhanced by
communication technology, in the 21st century?
To
date, the discourse has been a self-referential one, centered on the
displacement of traditional classroom teaching by distance learning. To
borrow the words of the ACE report, it has focused on "institutional
needs rather than those of...the wider community." Much less discussed
is the potential for the Internet to make American higher education a
force for fair play and human dignity in the international arena. Global
reach brings with it global responsibilities. Knowledge is not only
capital--it is power. Whether that power will be focused upon the narrow
concerns of individual institutions or combined for the good of "the
wider community" is a defining choice for higher education.
•
Basinger, Julianne. "500 Academics Sign Petition Protesting Lawsuit
Against Cornell U. Professor," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March
20, 1998, p. A14.
• Clegg, Roger. "Photographs and Fraud Over Race," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 24, 2000, p. B17.
•
Ebo, Bosah. "War as Popular Culture: The Gulf Conflict and the
Technology of Illusionary Entertainment," Journal of American Culture,
Fall 1995, pp. 19-20.
• Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, New York: Scribner, 1995, pp. 56-59.
• Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967, pp. 262-282.
• Halberstam, David. The Next Century, William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1991, p. 104.
•
Hesburgh, Theodore M. "Where Are College Presidents' Voices on
Important Public Issues?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2,
2001, p. B20.
• Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History, New York: The Viking Press, 1983, p. 523.
• Levine, Arthur E. "The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2000, p. B10.
• Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
•
Monaghan, Peter, "A Journal Article is Expunged and Its Authors Cry
Foul," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2000, p. A14.
•
Ornstein, Severo M. "Simulation and Dissimulation," Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, Summer 1989, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 1
• Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
•
Van Der Werf, Martin. "Labor Violations Found at Factory Used for
College Apparel," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2001,
p. A20.
~~~~~~~~
By James Ottavio Castagnera
