The University of North Carolina at Wilmington hosted the UNC Board of Governors on Thursday and Friday of this week. The campus was lovely and welcoming. Of course, it also helps to have a gorgeous beach close by!
Now for the updates.
You have probably seen the press on UNC Football which was clearly why most of the television cameras were there. No need to report any more on that. We also heard reporting on programs that were not meeting NCAA requirements and the problems are being reduced -- which is good.
The presentation this month was on Reach-NC, the new network being developed to help put faculty research out there to the world. The Executive Committee saw the beta version presentation which was much the same this summer at our retreat. The Board seemed quite taken with the system and with how it could present us to the business world and function as a marketing tool.
Of course, the budget discussions are everywhere. While most of the real budget work will be at the next meeting in October, you are likely aware that the governor asked all state agencies to prepare for 5%, 10% and 15% cuts. The universities, however, were only asked for 5% and 10% scenarios. It is a hopeful sign that education will be a priority even in a budget crisis. But it is, of course, way too early to know.
The campuses are all doing their work now and budget priorities will be set in the next month. At the Assembly meeting next week, we will discuss if we want to have input on these priorities. The two big pieces that will concern us look to be the state health plan and retirement.
There is also considerable conversation over our licensing responsibilities for not-for-profits and how to handle this situation. That will also be a feature of next month's meeting.
Let me get you thinking on a couple of perennial issues: how to talk about tenure and what it means (not so much to faculty, but to the effective functioning of a university and thus to students), and how to talk effectively about faculty workload to people who are not insiders to the academic world and do not understand the range of faculty responsibilities and their value (again, with a focus on what our work means to students -- inside and outside of the classroom).
It is time to be creative, visionary, and problem solving.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
The End of Higher Ed as We Know It
This morning's Chronicle for Higher Education reports on a panel discussion this week at the American Political Science Association about what is happening in higher education today. If, indeed, we are experiencing a fundamental shift in the nature of our work and if our jobs are undergoing a permanent shift, Cary Nelson, quoted near the end, is right. Faculty need to be out working to make our case.
My experience, however, tells me that most faculty are passive. Until they feel a direct impact on their job, few people will act to say anything about their campus priorities or to take part in the work (and it is work) of shared governance. Faculty too often make excuses. As Mr. Nelson advocates, we need to be demanding our institutions account for the funding we have. But most years we leave it to administrators and claim powerlessness.
We need to take control again. We are the ones in the classrooms everyday. We are the ones who can speak directly to students about what education is, what is happening to their education, and why priorities need to change. We have the skills to get out there and write op ed pieces, talk directly to the public, and speak to our legislators. If we believe, really believe, that we have lost the way, what is holding us back?
September 2, 2010
Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists
By David Glenn
Washington
The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
"We've crossed a threshold," said Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "Higher education is no longer viewed as a public good in this country. As tuition at public universities becomes more expensive, middle-class parents say, 'I'll bite the bullet and pay this for four years, but I don't want to pay for it a second time with taxes.' And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."
The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.
During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.
"Complaining about the amount of external funding the university gets is a kind of amoral starting point," Mr. Nelson said. "The first question should be how your institution spends the money it already has."
His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.
"Without these boondoggles, they could pay contingent faculty more," he said. "They could hire more tenure-track faculty. If they weren't chasing these fantasy projects, there is a lot that could have been done to build the university's educational mission."
But Mr. Nelson did not take any of this as a reason to retreat. Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.
"Higher education needs to be reconceived as a public good and a human right," Mr. Nelson said. "The only battle worth fighting now is a battle over fundamentals, not crumbs."
My experience, however, tells me that most faculty are passive. Until they feel a direct impact on their job, few people will act to say anything about their campus priorities or to take part in the work (and it is work) of shared governance. Faculty too often make excuses. As Mr. Nelson advocates, we need to be demanding our institutions account for the funding we have. But most years we leave it to administrators and claim powerlessness.
We need to take control again. We are the ones in the classrooms everyday. We are the ones who can speak directly to students about what education is, what is happening to their education, and why priorities need to change. We have the skills to get out there and write op ed pieces, talk directly to the public, and speak to our legislators. If we believe, really believe, that we have lost the way, what is holding us back?
September 2, 2010
Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists
By David Glenn
Washington
The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
"We've crossed a threshold," said Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "Higher education is no longer viewed as a public good in this country. As tuition at public universities becomes more expensive, middle-class parents say, 'I'll bite the bullet and pay this for four years, but I don't want to pay for it a second time with taxes.' And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."
The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.
During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.
"Complaining about the amount of external funding the university gets is a kind of amoral starting point," Mr. Nelson said. "The first question should be how your institution spends the money it already has."
His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.
"Without these boondoggles, they could pay contingent faculty more," he said. "They could hire more tenure-track faculty. If they weren't chasing these fantasy projects, there is a lot that could have been done to build the university's educational mission."
But Mr. Nelson did not take any of this as a reason to retreat. Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.
"Higher education needs to be reconceived as a public good and a human right," Mr. Nelson said. "The only battle worth fighting now is a battle over fundamentals, not crumbs."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)