Test Post from hibbee.com

Test Post from hibbee.com http://louiside.blogspot.com

Making the Pell Grant Memorable

In a new policy brief just released by the Scholars Strategy Network at Harvard University, I make the case that the emotional meanings of financial aid can and should be enhanced to promote student success.  Sociologists and psychologists have long known that money has social value and that this can be increased through social connections.  The creators of the GI Bill understood this and took advantage of it by ensuring all recipients understood where funding for that program came from and what it meant. The same must now be done for the federal Pell Grant.  In fact, it could be done for all grant programs.  Governors, mayors, legislators, and yes, presidents, should get involved in conveying a strong, supportive message to the millions of needy yet promising students struggling every day to make it through college.

PS. Just got the following response on Twitter.

@saragoldrickrab TRUTH. as #Pell Recipient, I had no idea why I received 3K for my education.. just thankful w. no one to thank
— Dan S. (@destatter) August 7, 2012

Wisconsin Needs to Educate, Not Incarcerate

Yet another policy brief highlights what realists know:  Wisconsin policymakers are presiding over poor policy decisions that threaten to undermine taxpayers' decades-long investment in the state's human capital.

Far from saving our children from lifetimes of debt, those on the neoliberal Left and the conservative Right advocating for either "freeing" state universities from the limitations of state funding in pursuit of market models, or diminishing state spending in a time of austerity, are accomplishing the same goal:  driving up the costs of college attendance and reducing the overall educational attainment of our state's workers.

Forty years ago our grandparents elected officials who invested $14 per $1000 of personal income in higher education.  Today, we elect jokers who put in just $5.  What happened?

Figure courtesy of Tom Mortenson, Postsecondary Education Opportunity

Let's admit it: we aren't leaders anymore, we're laggards. Yes, Wisconsin pays taxes, but we throw away far too much of it on other things.  According to Figure 4 in the new report I referenced above, we rank 32nd thanks to the policy choice displayed above-- relative to per capita income, we are outspent by the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia, not to mention our neighbors Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

Where is that money going instead? One simple word answers the question: corrections.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, we fought a War on Drugs, and drugs won-- but heck, we are still throwing our money at the problem.  Legacy spending, you might call it.   Over the last 10 years, spending on corrections went up 9%, while spending on k12 dropped by 6% and spending on higher education dropped 20%. Right, because clearly the goal of Wisconsin taxpayers is not to help educate our children, but rather to lock 'em up and shut 'em up.

For those who manage to avoid prison and get into college, instead of investing in their future, Wisconsin taxpayers seem to want their families to foot the bill. How's that working for us? Well, enrollment in our public institutions is lagging behind those in other states.  We have experienced far slower growth in fall enrollment as measured over both 5-year and 10-year periods, compared to the national average (see Table 6 here). Perhaps most startling is how little enrollment in our 2-year colleges has changed-- there was practically no change at all in enrollment there over the last 5 years (0.6%) while the national average was 16.7%! Perhaps not coincidentally, during that time, tuition and fees at the 2-years (already higher than the national average 5 years ago) rose by 20%.

I have to admit being persistently perplexed at how other parents throughout Wisconsin can sit idly by while we pour money intended for our kids into pits of despair like the state's correctional facilities.  It is far more cost-effective to educate rather than incarcerate.  It's time to make our policymakers do right by the limited dollars we have. Let's re-instate a real early release plan, and rollback the ridiculous "truth in sentencing" guidelines that lengthened parole time, greatly increasing the likelihood of being returned to prison. As UW-Madison expert Walter Dickey notes, there are numerous hidden costs to incarceration, and as state we simply can't afford to be in the corrections business.   

The best solution is to treat education as the crime-fighting technique it really is.  Providing young people with truly viable opportunities later in life gives them something to really aim for, helping keep them off the streets and on the job.  A recent UW-Madison graduate, economist Ben Cowan, finds that a $1,000 reduction in tuition and fees at two-year colleges is associated with a 26% decline in the number of sexual partners an adolescent has, and a 23% decline in number of days in the past month he used marijuana.  Policies that support affordable higher education may simultaneously support reductions in the costs of incarceration, in a virtuous cycle that is win-win for all.

This is pure common sense and we all know it.  It's simply time we demand that our "leaders" catch up.

“Big-Time Football and Big-Time Scandals”: What History Can Tell Us About the Future of College Sports and the NCAA

This is a GUEST POST by Nick Strohl, a doctoral student in History and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had the pleasure of engaging Nick in my higher education policy class last semester, where he was a complete star. His areas of study include the history of education, American intellectual and cultural history, and higher education. His current research focus is the history of American higher education during the interwar years.

Much of this post centers on discussion of these two recent books:

Taylor Branch, 2011, TheCartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA. 

Brian M. Ingrassia, 2012, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliancewith Big-Time Football. 

If you look closely at images of the recently-removed Joe Paterno statue outside of Beaver Stadium on the Penn State campus, you can make out the familiar Nike Swoosh on the uniforms of the four anonymous players who follow their iconic coach. Although Nike, led by one of Paterno’s most ardent supporters over the years, Phil Knight, has removed the Paterno name from the childcare center at its company headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, the corporate logo enshrined as part of this statue would be forever tied to the fate of that monument. While the Paterno statue was not intended to memorialize commercialism in college sports, it might as well have, for the lucrative enterprise that is big-time college football is what gave Paterno the power and prestige that we now know he—and his former assistant Jerry Sandusky—abused.

However, as two recent books on the history of college football make clear, the commercialism of college sports—not to mention the rise of the entrepreneurial, professional coach—long predates the influence of companies like Nike or even the influence of wealthy alumni boosters who want to see their alma mater succeed on the field. Indeed, as the Penn State saga has shown us, big-time football scandals—and yes, despite the protestations of the late Paterno and others, the Sandusky case is very much a football scandal—are also university scandals. And the problems of big-time college sports, including fair treatment of athletes and students, are not just the problems of university athletic departments or the NCAA: they are problems endemic to American higher education.

*******

In The Rise of Gridiron University, Brian M. Ingrassia, an Assistant Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State, examines the rise of “big-time” college football from the first game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869 to the development what might be called its “love-hate relationship” with the American university by the 1930s. Ingrassia makes the case that the rise of big-time football cannot be understood apart from the rise of the modern university; more provocatively, however, he shows that the rise of the modern university cannot be understood apart from the rise of big-time football. As he explains through a juxtaposition of Stanford University’s opening convocation in October 1891 and the first football game between would-be rivals Stanford and the University of California the following spring (the latter event, by the way, drew more spectators than the former), the intellectual project that is the modern research university and the popular culture spectacle that is big-time college football are “sides of the same coin” (p. 3).

Ingrassia’s use of the term “big-time” to describe college football at the turn of the twentieth century is a deliberate reference to another popular culture spectacle of the period: vaudeville shows. Vaudeville companies, Ingrassia explains, were “dubbed either big-time or small-time, depending on how far they traveled, the size of the cities or theaters where they performed, and the number of tickets they sold. Like the most famous vaudeville outfits, big-time football programs, by definition, attracted the most media attention, drew the largest number of paying spectators, and charged the highest ticket prices” (p. 5). To be sure, football was not the only sport played at American colleges in the late nineteenth century, but it was by far the most popular and the most lucrative. Despite some misgivings, however, many university leaders, as well as leading faculty, were optimistic about the place of big-time football in the university. It would not be until the 1920s that “the stereotypical ivory tower intellectual—alienated from the public and critical of popular sport—was born” (p. 3).

Big-time (and small-time) college football appealed to academics and intellectuals in the early 1900s for several reasons. Ambitious university presidents like the University of Chicago’s William Rainey Harper saw football as a way to generate publicity, or, in today’s language, to grow the brand of his new university. Psychologists touted the potential of football to teach discipline and morality, and to instill manly vigor in young men otherwise made soft by modern academic and professional work. Social scientists argued that football was not only beneficial for players and coaches, but for spectators as well. Economist and MIT President Francis Walker believed that “football would help students understand and succeed in the modern industrial order” (p. 95), while University of Chicago anthropologist and sociologist William I. Thomas argued that big-time football taught players and spectators alike about the “gaming instinct,’ an innate trait that had resulted from millennia of natural selection” (p. 100). Above all, for most academics and university leaders, football was seen as a way to demonstrate the utility of the modern university to the wider public: at its best, supporters like Thomas argued, it was a form of “university extension” or “public engagement” that bridged the gap between the highbrow culture of the research university and the lowbrow appeal of popular culture.

The crux of Ingrassia’s narrative, however, is that the university’s embrace of big-time football in the early 1900s was a kind of Faustian bargain from which it could not escape. Even the most ardent supports of football within the academy realized the incompatibility of popular sport with the intellectual mission of the university, yet they refused to do away with it completely. Instead, they gave big-time sports its own department—often the department of athletics or physical culture—and its own intellectual justification. Football coaches like Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg, “the nation’s first tenured professor of physical culture and athletics” (p. 117), were not only expected to produce winning teams, but to “teach” lessons in discipline and morals—a duty abdicated by the modern university professor who merely imparted specialized knowledge in his field. In the minds of early NCAA reformers, treating professional coaches like faculty members—instead of, apparently, hucksters and confidence men—was seen as a way to containprofessionalism and commercialism in college athletics, to “make college athletics safe for students, universities, and the public”(p. 66).

College football coaches took this notion—please excuse the metaphor—and ran with it. By the 1920s, entrepreneurial coaches had created for themselves lucrative personal brands based on the image of the “coach-as-educator.” Men like Princeton’s Bill Roper (Winning Football, 1920) and Penn’s John Heisman (Principles of Football, 1922) published popular manuals on the sport. Both men lauded football for its ability to teach discipline and self-control, but there was a catch: its benefits could only be achieved under the supervision of “trained experts” like themselves (p. 127). Other hallmarks of big-time football we know today became common: coaches jumped ship after only one year at a school for a big payday at a rival institution; some, like Heisman, negotiated contract packages which included a portion of gate receipts; and others, like Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, signed endorsement deals with companies like Studebaker and Wilson sporting goods. Further, as Ingrassia points out, the climate was already thick with hypocrisy. In 1925, when University of Illinois star player Harold “Red” Grange signed a professional contract with the Chicago Bears just after playing his final college game, his coach, Bob Zuppke, criticized the move. Despite signing with the Bears, Grange wanted to finish his degree at Illinois, but Zuppke would not let him, suggesting that he had tarnished his amateur status and the college game by deciding to go pro. As a college player, Grange had watched his coach, Zuppke, make a professional career out of football and reasoned, “what’s the difference if I make a living playing football?” (p. 135).

By the 1920s, then, big-time college football had, with the rise of massive concrete stadiums across the country, literally become cemented in the modern university. As a result of early university reformers’ efforts to capture the benefits of big-time football while minimizing its potential damages to the intellectual mission, the game became entrenched, both culturally and intellectually, as a part of university life. “In a modern academic landscape,” Ingrassia writes, “each department had to engage in a Darwin-like struggle for existence. Professors in the psychology department competed with experts in the sociology department for institutional resources, while research interests made them identify intellectually with psychology specialists in other universities, with whom they competed for academic prestige in their field. This was roughly analogous to the athletic department. The football team’s main job was to win games against other universities, not necessarily to uphold the research or teaching of the psychology or sociology departments”(p. 187). From that point forward, when faculty complained that big-time sports were distracting from the university mission, football coaches and athletics department leaders had a powerful rejoinder: winning games and generating revenue was what the university had asked them to do; they were competing for their share of prestige and resources like any other department of the university.

******

While The Rise of Gridiron University looks to the past to explain the “uneasy alliance” between big-time football and the modern university, The Cartel, a brisk, lively read from Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and historian Taylor Branch, forecasts the “imminent” decline of college athletics as we have come to know them. The focus of Branch’s argument—the weak spot, if you will, in the legal house of cards that is the NCAA—are those very notions of “amateurism” and the “student-athlete” made possible by the intellectual gymnastics of university football boosters a hundred years ago. Yet the specific term “student-athlete,” Branch points out, is a legal fiction artfully created by the NCAA in the post-World War II era to limit its liability for workers’-compensation claims and to protect an increasingly lucrative empire built on television revenue. Examining the status of several pending lawsuits against the NCAA, Branch predicts that this legal fiction will soon be exposed, and, once it is, that the NCAA as we know it will cease to exist.

As Branch explains, prior to the invention of the term “student-athlete,” it was generally unclear as to what rights college athletes possessed in their roles as either students or athletes. As both Branch and Ingrassia make clear, payments to college football players were common, if disguised or frowned upon, for much of the sport’s history in the first half of the twentieth century. A highly-publicized Carnegie Foundation report in 1929 on the problem of cheating and corruption in college sports found, “Of the 112 schools surveyed, eighty-one flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios. Fans ignored the uproar, and two-thirds of the colleges mentioned told the New York Timesthat they planned no changes.” In some cases, it was clear that football players viewed themselves as workers. “In 1939,” Branch writes, “freshmen players at the University of Pittsburgh went on strike because they were getting paid less than they their upperclassmen teammates.”

The legal conception of the “student-athlete” was meant to combat these very claims of college athletes as workers. “The term came into play in the 1950s,” Branch writes, “when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workers’-compensation death benefits.” The case prompted all sorts of new legal questions: “Did [Dennison’s] football scholarship make the fatal collision a ‘work-related’ accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits?” The NCAA member institutions all agreed that Dennison was not eligible for such benefits. The Supreme Court of Colorado concurred, noting that the college was “not in the football business,” and cases like Dennison’s would fall in the favor of the NCAA for the next several decades. When, in 1974, Texas Christian University running back Kent Waldrep became a paraplegic as a result of taking a hit in a game against Alabama, TCU stopped paying his medical bills after nine months. Waldrep’s case, however, did make a legal impact; in 1990, “the White House honored Waldrep’s team of legislative catalysts at the signing ceremony for the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

As Branch explains it, “the term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards or their peers; that they were students meant that they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athletebecame the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.”

As a journalist, Branch has a nose for hypocrisy and in several passages he lets the hypocrites speak for themselves. In a chapter on “Coaches and Scapegoats,” Branch describes the response of University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban to reports of professional agents contacting his players and hanging around practice. Saban said, “I hate to say this, but how are [these agents] any better than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None.” What Branch doesn’t add is that Saban has a compensation packagethat pays him more than $5 million a year, and that he’s worked his way to the top of the college football coaching ladder through positions at three other schools, as well as a short, but unsuccessful, stint with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins—a career, for the most part, built upon what Branch calls college players’ “willingness to perform what is effectively volunteer work.” Instead, Branch lets former Louisiana State University basketball coach Dale Brown put it more bluntly. Brown says, “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids. We’re the whoremasters.”

Despite the many egregious examples of coaches, universities, broadcast networks, and corporations making hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars based on the work scholarship athletes (not too mention many other instances of draconian NCAA penalties for players who, with no spending money of their own, have received a new suit to attend an awards show or plane tickets home to visit family), Branch’s ultimate goal is not to ensure that college athletes are paid for their performance. To be clear, he would be content with college athletes being paid—a position on which he admits he has evolved over the years. However, his primary concern, outlined in the final chapter, is that college athletes receive the same rights as any other college student, which includes having a voice in decisions that concern them. “The most basic reform,” Branch writes, “would treat the students as what they are—adults, with rights and reason of their own—and grant them a meaningful voice in NCAA deliberations.”

*****

The outcome of pending lawsuits against the NCAA (see, for example, O’Bannon v. the NCAA), as well as the potential for big-time football and basketball schools to negotiate their own television contracts—to “cut out the middleman,” in Branch’s words—may very well bring about the demise of the NCAA as forecasted by Branch. But, as both of these books demonstrate, the real and perceived problems of big-time college athletics are not ones that can be solved by NCAA reform alone. In the wake of the Freeh report, many have called for the NCAA to impose drastic sanctions on Penn State’s football program, and it appears the program will indeed be subject to what are being described as “corrective and punitive measures.”  

However, as Branch’s book, in particular, makes clear, the historical role of the NCAA has been as the enforcer of a dubious code of amateur competition that relieves big-time football programs from having to police one another. Prior to the Penn State case, the NCAA’s harshest penalties have been reserved for violations of this code: see, for example, the “death penalty” (an inelegant term for a program suspension) given the Southern Methodist University football program in the 1980s when it was discovered that players were receiving regular payments, or the bowl ban imposed on the University of Southern California when it was discovered that Heisman trophy winner Reggie Bush and his family received gifts from program boosters totaling several hundred thousand dollars. Thus, while the crimes committed at Penn State certainly fall under the category of a “football scandal,” these were not the type of incidents that the NCAA was designed to police. It has never been the NCAA’s role to ensure that, within universities, football programs and athletics departments did not become outsized forces, capable of bending students, tutors, deans, and administrators to their will. That sort of internal policing is the job of universities and their various constituencies.

True reform, then, lies at the feet of the institutions that support big-time athletics and which comprise the membership of the NCAA. As Branch notes, a good first step would be to give students athletes a voice in the NCAA; an even better step, in my view, would be to give students—athletes and otherwise—a meaningful voice in how their institutions manage big-time (or small-time) athletics. As Ingrassia’s book demonstrates, coaches and athletics directors in the 1920s based their claims to authority and expertise on their status as well-intentioned “adults” who would impart valuable lessons to immature college athletes. Yet, as Branch and the Penn State scandal remind us, even the supposedly untouchable icon that was Joe Paterno—whose personal motto was “success with honor”—is capable of moral weakness in the face of money, power, and prestige.

As in other areas of university life, decisions about the place of athletics, like other debates about the university’s mission related to teaching and research, must involve the entire community. At Penn State, Joe Paterno’s claim to supreme moral authority, made possible by the vast amounts of revenue and publicity his football program brought the university, meant that his players and coaches were allowed special privileges and were not subject to the rules and regulations of the wider university. Paterno also, as the Freeh report has made clear, contributed to a culture in which some of the least powerful members of the community—victims, their families, and the janitor who witnessed one of Sandusky’s criminal acts—were afraid to speak up, or were not taken seriously when they did so. The case of Jerry Sandusky may be a uniquely horrifying example of a criminal abuse of power, but it was one that was made possible by a football culture that valued self-preservation above the concerns of the university and the wider community.

Ultimately, then, the question of how harsh the NCAA punishes the Penn State football program is somewhat beside the point. Universities need to establish shared governance structures which include the voices of students, faculty, staff, and others on all matters, from athletics to academics, but perhaps most especially in the area of big-time athletics. Organizations like the NCAA may have a role to play in punishing bad behavior on and off the field, but ultimately colleges and universities themselves must be responsible for ensuring that the quest for revenue and prestige does not detract from the educational mission, nor does it demean the rights of the least powerful members of the university community.

You can reach Nick at nstrohl@wisc.edu

More on UW Online

Check out this morning's story from Inside Higher Ed for more information and questions. I'm told we can expect details from UW System soon, and I know many of us eagerly await them.

Wishy-Washy Thoughts on Gates

I'm no Diane Ravitch.  If I were, I'd use this blog to bravely state my concerns about the direction the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is heading with educational policy. I'd follow her lead and ask hard, pointed questions about the role that people with money play in driving major decisions in a democracy.

But I won't.  Because while I'm tenured, I am still fearful.  I have receiving more than $1 million in support from the Gates Foundation for my research on financial aid, and I am grateful for it-- and in need of much more.  That's the honest truth.  It's harder and harder to find funding for research these days, and while my salary doesn't depend on it, getting the work done does.

So I won't say all that Diane just did.  Yet I have to say something, and as I wrote recently, I always attempt to do so.

Her questions deserve answers.  And they should be asked of the higher education agenda as well.  Why the huge investment in Complete College America, an outfit that is pushing an end to college remediation unsupported by the work of top scholars like Tom Bailey?  Why the growing resistance to funding basic research in key areas where massive federal and state investments persist absent evidence of effectiveness? Why sink $20 million into performance-based scholarships, based on a single tiny randomized trial in one site?

I'm sure there are good answers out there.  It's not the first time I've asked these questions.  And perhaps unlike Diane, the time I've spent with the Foundation has imbued me with some confidence that there are very smart, well-meaning people inside the place-- people I like quite a bit.  There's also a lot of turnover, and the outfit is a bit gangly in some areas, kinda like a teenager.

Actually, that's exactly it. The Foundation is one heck of a powerful adolescent.  And maybe that's ok, as long as it recognizes its stage in life, and continues to seek expert advice and wisdom.  Adolescents are good at asking questions and not so great at listening. That's something to work on. Places like the William T. Grant Foundation are full-fledged adult foundations who make smart and highly effective investments daily.  I'd love for Gates's ed portfolio to seek advice and hear from them.  It'd make a world of difference.

Have I just torpedoed my own chances for future support?  Well, I guess only time will tell....

Getting Beyond Headlines

Data is powerful, and today's colleges and universities are learning that lesson the hard way.  As increasing amounts of information regarding their student outcomes become available, media outlets are taking advantage, running stories like this one, 11 Public Universities with the Worst Graduation Rates.  The clear intent is shame and disinvestment in public education, and it's working. One of my very talented and knowledgeable colleagues shared that story on Facebook, writing "Is there any way to understand these completion rates other than dismal?"

That's a good question. What I appreciate most about it is that it asks how we can understand it?  Not, "who is to blame?"  Too often that seems to be the goal of publishing numbers, as if the old adage about sunshine being a miracle cure would actually apply to problems involving human beings.

As I flipped through the slide show of the "11 Worst," looking at the often pretty campuses of those failing public universities, I was simultaneously struck by how normal they appear, and also how much like community colleges they really are. At Southern University of New Orleans, the average SAT score is 715, and that's after rejecting 52% of applicants. It's not much higher at Texas Southern (796) where they accept just 36% of students. Clearly there are plenty of students in these local areas seeking access without strong test abilities, which hardly makes them unqualified, but may mean they seek a 4-year degree rather than an associates.  Like community colleges, these universities are also incredibly diverse institutions-- for the most part, 50% or more of their students are on Pell--many times higher than at most publics.  But in three key ways, these "poor performers" are unlike their 2-year counterparts: (1) Their cost of attendance is much higher, (2) They mainly do not offer short-term degrees, so all success is measured relative to the BA, and (3) They are universities, not colleges, so most appear to be trying to do more than undergraduate teaching (i.e. also granting master's degrees).  If community colleges had those characteristics, I'd expect their completion rates to approximate those of these universities (take out all certificate and associates degree completions, raise costs, and throw in a large pool of students whose apparent degree ambitions are misaligned with their tested ability along with competition for resources from graduate education).

But wait, there's more. If you look beyond the headline, and wander over to College Insight for some more data, you'll also discover the real challenge these broad access universities face -- an utter lack of financial aid.  At Coppin State, just 5% of undergraduates have their demonstrated financial need met.  At Southern University in New Orleans, among full-time freshmen just 4% receive any state grants (compared to 48% statewide), and just 1% receive any institutional grants (compared to 23% statewide).  93% of students enrolled there are African-American (compared to 27% statewide), and many families appear to be turning down loans.  Something similar is happening at Cameron University, where the rate of loan-taking is half that of the statewide average.  Clearly, these institutions aren't forcing students to take on debt to finance institutional costs, as the for-profits are accused of doing. Isn't this a good thing? And yet, how do you succeed in college without enough money?

There you have it-- a much more complicated problem, too difficult for an easy headline. Yes, there are some harder-to-explain cases, like Kent State at East Liverpool, but overall even as they are faced with the condition of being dependent on public funding, these "poor performers" are serving large numbers of low-income students who apparently desire bachelor's degrees despite low tested abilities, have to charge tuition according to the inadequate state appropriations provided, and have little in the way of financial aid to offer other than loans, which are frequently declined.  And we are surprised when their outcomes don't look good?

If anything, it's we who ought to be ashamed.  State taxpayers have publicly supported the opening of these institutions and then starved them.  I'm all for 'no excuses' but that stance applies to institutions for whom being open is optional-– the for-profits.  Public institutions are democratic, we collectively create them to meet our needs, and we therefore hold collective responsibility for their success.

These are problems that should be fixed, and can be fixed because these are public institutions.  The troubled for-profits, we have far less say about (as we learned yesterday) and that's a shame, since far too many students wander into their traps without knowing that there's almost no public accountability for their behaviors.

Of course, I realize some people will view all of this as further evidence that the public system doesn't work, can't work, and that we ought to just shut these schools down and go home. To do so is to refute the naton's history, to forget the many revitalized public institutions that are succeeding now in ways they never did previously because of a renewed focus, commitment, and corresponding investment.  We have fabulous cities and public services in places that decades ago less optimistic people abandoned, while others stayed and fought for change.

The solutions for these public universities won't come from waving our hands about their bad outcomes, but from public outrage about the appalling trap we are creating for the people who work in these places and the students they educate.  We have not provided them with the conditions for success, which we increasingly reserve for public flagships.   Instead of shaking our heads in anger or disgust, we should get busy putting our priorities and investments in order, taking care of our public institutions so they can succeed in meeting our needs.

Renewing the Commitment

This piece is cross-posted from the Chronicle of Higher Education, where it originally appeared as part of a forum on higher education and inequality. I highly recommend reading the full set of posts contained on the COHE website.

In 1947 the historic Truman Commission called for national investments in higher education to promote democracy by enabling all people to earn college degrees. Subsequent expansion of community colleges, adult education, and federal aid occurred not in the name of economic stimulation but to reduce inequality and further active citizenship.

Those ambitions have been steadily corrupted. Today the Tea Party casts the college-educated as snobbish and fundamentally disconnected. Many four-year colleges and universities reinforce that perception by focusing on rankings and alumni satisfaction rather than affordability and national service. Educators speak about business objectives, maximizing revenue through models that charge high tuition and give high aid to needy students, and using a meritocracy narrative that denies the strong role played by a family's ability to pay. The results are stark: Among high-achieving students, just 44 percent of those whose families are in the bottom 25 percent of annual income attend college, compared with 80 percent of those whose families are in the top 25 percent.

In this new world, market-based solutions increase inequality by design. As David F. Labaree documented in Someone Has to Fail, credentialing has replaced learning, and as a result, many students are derided for being what the authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa dismiss as Academically Adrift.

The current model ensures that private returns in the form of high-paying jobs accrue only to some, and it justifies minimal public investment in education.

Corporations act as gatekeepers, insisting that only degrees from elite colleges matter, while refusing to pay higher taxes to adequately support public higher education. It is to their advantage: They benefit financially from the for-profit colleges that are filling a void they helped create. The reality is cruel: Many families now dream the same college dream families always have, but run in place in their efforts to achieve it. Heavy debt even drags some backwards.

Colleges and universities vigorously participate in this process. As they lose state support, public flagships turn inward rather than to their communities, focusing on the self-preservation and pursuit of prestige that led them astray. Private universities help their public counterparts fail by promoting idealistic standards of "quality" and practices (such as offering grants rather than loans) that the public institutions simply can't afford. Too many leaders of public universities make common cause with elite private colleges rather than with their public brethren.

Underneath it all resides a fear-driven backlash against educational and economic opportunities for people of color and the working class. Since the civil-rights movement, and especially during President Ronald Reagan's tenure, a focus on private rights and personal responsibilities has replaced concern for social welfare. Remarkably, Reagan convinced the nation that individuals should pay to achieve the American dream. No president since has managed to combat that narrative. In today's focus on paying for performance and metrics, we hear echoes of President Bill Clinton's efforts to reform welfare by telling poor mothers to work for it.

Such rhetoric is fundamentally un-American. As John Dewey reminded us, sustaining democracy requires that we collectively provide for all children what we want for our own children. Anything else simply isn't fair. The politics of austerity have resulted in a paucity of active citizens pursuing democratic ideals by maintaining and expanding public investments. In that climate, New York State stands out for bucking the trend and promoting public higher education with limited reliance on tuition. So, too, do the university presidents urging President Obama to put into effect maintenance-of-effort requirements—requiring states to finance public colleges at a minimum level—to renew the social compact on which our great higher-education system was built. They are bravely rejecting the claim that private markets hold the key to great public needs. In doing so, those leaders may help bring the country back together.

Wisconsin Supports UVA

The nation is waiting on the UVA Regents to do the right thing.  There is plenty of action afoot at UW-Madison to weigh in on these key issues of money and power, and you'll see more in the coming days. In the meantime, let's make this point loud and clear whenever and wherever possible.

‎"In solidarity with our colleagues at the University of Virginia, we affirm that a public institution of higher education is not a business."


Here are initial signatories-- please comment on this post to add your voice.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education, UW-Madison
David Ahrens, President, Wisconsin University Union
Charity Schmidt and Matt Reiter, Co-Presidents of the TAA
Seth Hoffmeister, President, United Council of Students
Beth Huang, Incoming Vice-President, United Council of Students
Sara Goldrick-Rab, Chair, UW-Madison Committee on Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions & Financial Aid

Reflections on Foundations, ALEC and Higher Ed Reform in Wisconsin

Last week, a fellow Madison blogger drew our attention to some potentially troubling relationships between a major higher education foundation, a DC-based consulting group, a conservative political organization, and a new initiative in the UW System.  Scott Wittkopf at Badger Democracy is playing a critical role in attending to the relationships among funders of higher education reform efforts, and political constituencies.  He has since mapped in greater depth the work of one foundation, Lumina, and another blog post is forthcoming.

Since I have established relationships with both Lumina and HCM Strategists, the consulting group in question, and have blogged (and hosted guest blogs) before on the large role that foundations are playing in pushing the higher ed reform agenda, I want to fully disclose as much as possible my role and assessment of this situation.

First, readers of this blog know my work as an expert on college student success, and as an outspoken champion for expanding college access to underserved populations. I am proud of the major role I played in the fight against the New Badger Partnership and other local efforts to prioritize institutional prestige over the needs of Wisconsin residents. I am constantly engaged in the struggle to ensure that public institutions of all types survive and thrive. At this point I have been active in Wisconsin research, policy, and activism circles for more than eight years. 

In my work I spending a lot of time interacting with the higher education reform movements nationally.  It is for this reason, over the last decade I have engaged with both Lumina and HCM many times. I am also very well-acquainted with the Gates education initiatives, having been both a grantee (to the tune of $1.2 million for the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study) and a consultant. Moreover, I participant frequently in the bipartisan higher education working group hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and funded by Gates.  

Why do I do these things, despite recent evidence that these places have ties to ALEC and others?

Good question, and one I'm thinking a lot about.  I think it is because at the heart of it, the main thrust of reform efforts to improve higher education are bipartisan. We on the Left and the Right share a desire to get colleges and universities (and state legislatures) focused on college completion rather than enrollment, and to make opportunities for all people more affordable.  

We diverge most often on the methodology-- what approach we think will work best.  Some people I work with really think innovation is encouraged by competition, while others (including myself) advocate for greater cooperation, and a strong faculty role.  But I have found over time that it is far better to be in active conversation with those I disagree with rather than limit myself only to relationships I am in alignment with because: 

• It makes me much more cognizant of what other points of view mean and how people argue their case 
• It helps me sharpen my own lenses and causes me to ask more relevant questions in my work
• Being around others with differing points of view doesn't change my fundamental principles or make me their pawn but rather helps me establish credibility on both sides of the aisle.  It is because of my continuous willingness to show up and engage-- to banter, to debate, and to speak freely--that both Democrats and Republicans now talk with me about higher education

So, yes, here's the truth: I have received substantial funding from both HCM Strategists and Gates. I talk with HCM partners Kristin Conklin and Terrell Halaska regularly, including about Wisconsin. Kristin is an old friend of my husband's, from when he worked at National Governors Association, before coming to work as Governor Doyle's education policy advisor.  And, I helped Wisconsin become a College Productivity Strategy Lab state.  I did this because Strategy Labs bring money that help us to get people informed on key issues, bring in speakers, and open doors to conversations with other leaders nationwide. The fact is that obviously Wisconsin has had a fair amount of academic and political transition and has not engaged much in the Strategy Labs since Lumina invited it to be part of it in 2010. There is no fee to join, just a commitment to try to improve system and state policies for students. 

Furthermore, despite my known feelings about the current Governor, I have engaged in conversations with his office about the UW online initiative.  To me this is the true fulfillment of the Wisconsin Idea: a government official asked me for input, and rather than put my partisan political feelings in the way, I provided honest, candid feedback and advice.  Given their reputation among education leaders in other states, I didn't want Western Governors University to come to Wisconsin, and I felt it very likely that Walker was already talking to them.  In these conversation I expressed concern about WGU and I suggested that another approach--- making it an in-house public UW initiative-- would be more effective.  The effort to advance an online program was not encouraged by HCM or supported by its technical assistance. The concepts in the program are advocated by organizations like CAEL and in place or under consideration in many states. As UW moves to implement its ideas, the lessons learned from states like Maryland's University College or through SUNY's Empire State college could be accessed through the Strategy Labs.

Yes, online competency-based instruction is now here.  I'm not taking credit or blame for it.  As I wrote recently, we shouldn't be quick to judge a pedagogical technique that has the potential to bring education to people who otherwise wouldn't get any college instruction at all.  Of course we don't want it to fully replace face-to-face instruction, nor should it be operated for profit or cause students to require large loans to afford it.  Of course it shouldn't displace faculty, or be privatized.  But online instruction is likely to be about as uneven in quality as face-to-face instruction, which let's admit it, is quite uneven.

Supporting a position that is also supported by a conservative group does not mean that's the driver of the position.  Not once has HCM or Lumina or Gates ever dictated to me what I should or must say about anything. I have always been my own voice.  I speak truth to power with solid data and a clear stance in favor of students, staff, and faculty.  I know it's hard to believe, but given my disposition and the fact that my core salary comes from UW-Madison, nothing, nothing could ever change that. Sure, I could easily forgo taking their money, but honestly it would make me less effective as a researcher, and less able to have a voice in ongoing policy debates.  I couldn't conduct my large-scale expensive research, couldn't train students to think critically about these issues by actively engaging in them, and couldn't participate in these foundation and policy meetings. In the end, my absence would perpetuate their groupthink.

The fact is that since 2008 Lumina has made many, many grants under the broad umbrella of "productivity." This includes grants to the National Research Council, Public Agenda, and the National Governors Association.  I wrote a paper with Doug Harris on productivity that was funded by HCM.  Through the writing, Doug can attest that I continually worried about that term and all it means, and I tried to make the paper reflect that (the latest version, now under review, finally does). Not once did a funder object, and in fact they brought me many places to speak my mind on the topic without censorship.

As for HCM, those consultants lead a state policy network and advocate changes consistent with Lumina's Four Steps.  To build understanding among state leaders, they bring peers together and give states access to experts. I have helped by writing op eds about financial aid in several states, where policymakers want to strengthen "student incentives," and I push for them to do it in the ways that most help the truly disadvantaged.  The fact that those op-eds are bipartisan (written with Mark Schneider, a Republican), seems to be part of why Wisconsin Republicans are willing to even speak with me.

Locals might also want to know that leaders of HCM Strategists were helpful in the fight against the New Badger Partnership, prodding thoughtful higher education leaders around the nation to weigh in with their opinions. These experts did not support Biddy Martin's plans, noting the very real consequences for access to the general public.  There's no way this was in service of Walker -- or ALEC's -- agenda.

Scott isn't alone in his concerns. Other researchers have examined the issues surrounding Lumina and reached similar conclusions. In a paper presented at AERA this spring, Cassie Hall and Scott Thomas (one of my mentors) noted that Lumina's approach was uncommonly activist, and focused on student success and productivity. I completely agree with that-- but would note that being pro-student success and pro-productivity is not inherently liberal or conservative.  The approach itself could go either way, but the fundamental stance is pro-student, rather than pro-institution-- a stance I firmly agree with and have written much about. As Hall and Thomas write, this stance is driven by "an increasing level of distrust that higher education institutions can successfully enact reforms that will result in meaningful changes to our postsecondary system.”  I think that's well-placed mistrust, given the tendency of most top-level higher education administrators to advance "institutional" interests over those of faculty, staff, or students.  To be clear, I firmly believe that educators, rather than legislators or foundations, should be charged with this work. But the problem is that boards of visitors and high-level administrators tend to alienate faculty and staff, disempower them, and even portray them as the source of inertia rather than the rightful agents of change.

Yes, I would much prefer to see Lumina and Gates, among others, embrace the talents of faculty in rethinking how we can best serve students.  I said this over and over again at a Gates Foundation convening last week.  Recent discussions about the governance crisis at UVA reveal that many professors there have, and are plenty happy to, teach online-- and had they been included in the conversation they would have found good solutions to the problems identified by Helen Dragas and the Board of Visitors.  The same thing could be said about last year's discussion about the NBP -- Biddy Martin and her team did not engage the faculty, staff, or students in the problem-solving needed to address UW-Madison's financial woes.  They went straight to Scott Walker, and embraced an agenda that has demonstrably been shaped by ALEC's desires. This reflects an unfortunate move over the last 20-30 years to portray faculty, staff, and students as naive, ill-equipped obstacles to change, and this I think is not a coincidence-- it is a move to disempower the most expensive part of colleges and universities: the full-time tenured labor. If Lumina, HCM, or anyone else were to support that approach, I'd be utterly opposed to it.

I also fully support and echo Hall and Thomas's concerns about the role these major foundations have played in limiting what is studied and how it is studied, given their small emphasis on peer review and high priority on strategic goals that often do not seem to align with research evidence. In other words, even having been funded by them, I am far from satisfied with their approach and as you can see I still feel confident that engaging in this type of critique will not result in my being deemed ineligible for their support. Recall that I helped bring Robin Rogers' wonderful critique of Gates to the public eye by first running it here before it was in the Washington Post.  For Gates to retaliate would be incredibly unwise, and they know it.  They don't ask me to give them a pass for their errors-- in fact at a recent Gates convening I tweeted openly of my discontent with some of their practices, and their program officers were open to that conversation. 

Perhaps the best way to wrap up this little tell-all is with a quote from Jamie Merisotis from Lumina: “All we can do is be transparent about what we’re trying to achieve and let people decide how we’ve done." While I might prefer to remove the word "all," I think this is basically right. We should hold foundations and public officials, including educational institutions, to full disclosure. In turn we have to consider all potential interpretations of the evidence we have.  And we must weigh their approaches against the alternatives.  In this case, I think the agenda is focused improvements in student success accomplished by increasing the incentives for colleges and universities to focus mainly on high-quality education, rather than competing for rankings driven by dollars spent and enrollment of elites.  That sounds good to me.  Yes, let's keep our eyes on ALEC.  Yes, let's always question and critique.  We must avoid privatization of public education-- and we want to educate people while growing and expanding the labor market so there are jobs waiting on the other end.  But the goal of expanding access to a high-quality education while driving down costs is a laudable one-- as long as the role of public democratic governance of that education is preserved.  Let's focus on that, and together find the best way forward.

Faulty Inside Higher Ed Survey Demonizes Faculty

This morning's Twitter feed was rife with news of a story from Inside Higher Ed directly relevant to the UVA fiasco. President Teresa Sullivan was reportedly canned for failing to push an agenda for online education at UVA, standing in the way of so-called "progress."  Is this because she catered too much to faculty, who are increasingly described as the main obstacle to reform?

It seems some people want you to believe yes-- the real problem isn't the rampant excitement over a fairly untested pedagogical approach to education, but the resistance of the educators.  So today IHE shares a new survey: Conflicted-Faculty and Online Education, 2012.  The story's lede reads: "Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education than are academic technology administrators."  Professors are described as lacking optimism, having a "bleak" view of the quality of online education.  The survey report wonders "why"-- rather than praising profs for their skepticism, something faculty are widely known and respected for.


So-- big finding, right?  WRONG.  This story doesn't belong in a respected publication like IHE.  Here's why:


The survey, conducted by a team known for its studies of distance learning, and including advertisements by online educators, obtained a 7.7% response rate among faculty, and a less than 10% response rate among administrators. 
Yes, you read that right. About 60,000 professors were surveyed and just 4,564 provided enough of an answer to be included in the study.  For real? This isn't nationally representative of anything. It's a horribly biased little subsample, and yet the RR isn't even mentioned in the reporting!

Moreover, look at the questions-- where'd they get the "fear vs. excitement" answers? Because they only provided those two options.  Gee, am I fearful or excited about a new untested pedagogy being pushed on me?  Well...neither. But I'm not stupid enough to jump on a bandwagon, so I will choose "fearful." By which I mean skeptical.

I have such respect for folks like Doug Lederman and his crew at IHE, that I am honestly shocked this is running in that publication at all. It shouldn't.


Take it down.


Update: I have already heard from Doug Lederman, and he will be adding the response rate to the text of the article and to the PDF of the study. He feels a low response rate is a non-issue here, doesn't imply selection bias, and it is an achievement to get 4,500 faculty to do any survey at all. Moreover, he does not agree that the study demonizes faculty.  We can agree to disagree on that. 

More on the Efforts to Marketize UW-Madison

A few months ago I wrote about the HR Design process at UW-Madison.  Some readers questioned the accuracy of my assertions.  We have new confirmatory information obtained via open records requests.  It seems the Huron Engagement has been expensive, indeed.   In the following memo, the Wisconsin University Union summarizes what we now know. It's a bit long, so I have underlined and bolded key points.


To: Interested campus employees
From: WUU
Date: June 20, 2012
RE: Memos from Huron Consulting Group

As you may know, Wisconsin University Union (WUU) has filed a series of open meeting and open requests to UW administration to gain access to information on the HR Design Project (the Project).  We initiated these requests because we believed that the effects of the Project will likely be far-reaching and long-term and that despite the administration’s attempt to project a gloss of participation and transparency to the process, it was fundamentally top-down and opaque.

When the administration finally complied with our request, we were disappointed, though not surprised, that most of the documents added little if anything to our knowledge base. For example, minutes of meetings described the topics under discussion but gave no account of the discussions themselves. The exception to this lack of transparency were memos from Huron Consulting Group (HCG) to the Project managers. These memos very briefly summarized the week’s events and posed concerns and questions on the future work of the Project.

For this reason, a month ago, we filed a new request for records specifying HCG memos to administration along with a request for their billings to the UW. After a month wait, we received the records this week.

The memos did not disclose a “smoking gun.” Instead, they confirmed much of what we know about the potential effects of the recommendations.  The following are excerpts of the HCG memos:

(5/3/2012) The work teams are proposing a “contemporary” but not radical approach to HR management at a research university. The model puts greater emphasis on performance and employee development and shifts the focus from internal equity to external competiveness.

The implied shifts for HR management implied (sic):
• Greater emphasis on data and analysis (over set rules)
• Greater reliance on the skills of managers/supervisors
• Ongoing development of central HR as a center of excellence

I (from the HCG staff member) don’t have a good sense of the project team’s appetite for this type/level of change. If this does turn out to be the direction you choose to go, substantial pieces of it will be phased in over time. Still, it represents a significant amount of change that will to be championed by OHR and supported through the application of potentially significant resources.


(5/10/12) Compensation, Performance Management and Workplace Flexibility all have suggestions related to boards or committees being involved in appeals of decisions that impact employees. Ongoing governance (small “g”) of HR functions and processes will be a topic that we need to address over the summer. This is an area where I expect that the campus community will want more specificity in the fall.

Understanding our resource requirements for the summer will evolve as our project plan evolves. At the same time, I would suggest that adding resources is an opportunity to start to build the long-term capabilities of OHR in areas such as compensation.

*****

These excerpts confirm a few of the central objections we have made in prior analyses:
• Salary equity will be abandoned in favor of labor market “competitiveness.”

• Compensation based on labor market analysis will require a substantial on-going investment to build capacity. It is difficult to estimate the cost for new HR staff members or more likely, consultants, to conduct wage and benefit analyses for hundreds of job titles.

• Supervisors and managers will have substantial new powers due to the major shift in compensation responsibility along with new discretionary authority in promotion, hiring, etc. This will require a major investment in training and, one would hope, oversight and supervision of the supervisors. What will be the safeguards against favoritism, discrimination and other adverse effects?

• HCG advises that, that because these new offices will be “substantial”, HR should build its new “empire” slowly and incrementally so as not to call attention to its long-term costs.

• Committees acknowledged that some form of dispute resolution methods will be necessary but have either not specified how this might occur or recommend that the dispute process be overseen by HR. The HCG seems to recognize that employees will likely want better answers.

Consultant Costs:
Billings to UW from HCG:
Nov. 2011: $32,751
Dec. 2011: $154,738
Jan. 2012: $61,714
Feb. 2012: $93,798
Mar. 2012: $89,976
Total:     $432,977

The Travesty at UVA-- Commentary from Judith Burstyn

Today I welcome guest blogger Judith Burstyn, professor of chemistry and former chair of the University Committee at UW-Madison.  She has a short commentary in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, and with her permission, I am printing the entirety of that piece here. Judith was a faculty leader in the battle over the New Badger Partnership, and remains a key player in the efforts to preserve shared governance on our campus. 


Apparently, at today’s University of Virginia, business values trump all. There is a troubling recent trend toward viewing all public institutions in market terms, where value is measured by dollars produced. In recent years, UW-Madison has felt this too, as some of our leaders focus on efficiency via new “flexibilities.” But universities are not businesses. The proper role of universities is the creation of knowledge for the public good, and education of the new generations of citizens and leaders for civil society. Business management approaches are ill suited to nurture the intellectual expansiveness that underlies great scholarship and deep learning. Reliance on narrow, industry-driven curricula simply won’t do. Great universities encompass a wide variety of disciplines, methods and perspectives, irrespective of the marketability of the knowledge they create. Nourishment of the young minds of our future leaders is invaluable to our country, and the University of Virginia and UW-Madison are shining examples of excellence in this regard. I worry that this excellence is at risk.

Without the human capital embodied in their faculty, universities have nothing to offer the students who enter their doors. Great scholars are in high demand, and competition to hire and retain them is fierce. As President Sullivan said yesterday, “At any great university, the equilibrium - the pull between the desire to stay and the inducements to leave - is delicate.” If faculty members feel unsupported in their scholarly pursuits at one institution, they will move to another where there is greater support. The best scholars are the ones with the greatest number of opportunities; therefore, maintaining an outstanding cadre of faculty is an ongoing challenge. Money, as salary or support for scholarship, is only one of many parameters that influence an individual’s decision to stay at an institution or leave it.  And perhaps some of those who threaten UVA know this—aiming to drive out many of the full-time faculty, creating the opportunity to replace them with bottom-line focused adjuncts.

It is far easier to lose stature as a great university than it is to gain it; wise university leaders understand this, and they bring change to their institutions through steady and deliberate engagement of faculty, staff and students. This was precisely the type of leadership that President Sullivan appeared to be providing. Meaningful participation by these stakeholders in institutional governance is a hallmark of universities that are the most productive in terms of scholarship, and where faculty are most likely to happily reside throughout their careers. The courageous opposition to President Sullivan’s dismissal by the University of Virginia faculty senate and its executive committee, and the student council and their leadership, speak of an institution where shared governance is valued and appreciated—if not respected by its Board of Visitors.

The unilateral decision to remove a sitting university president, in the midst of a summer weekend no less, is unprecedented. Despite objections to the firing of President Sullivan by faculty and student leadership, including a vote of no confidence in the board itself by the faculty senate, the board continued its takeover. Acting like a cabal of thieves, they met late into the night, emerging with an egregious decision to replace Sullivan, a sociologist of work, with an interim president: Carl Zeithaml, F.S. Cornell Professor in Free Enterprise and Dean of the McIntire School of Commerce. This action is inimical to their responsibility as the governing board of a university.  In the words of Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the prestigious Association of American Universities and former president of Cornell, “This is the most egregious case I have ever seen of mismanagement by a governing board.”

Last year UW-Madison engaged in many discussions about the creation of its own governing board. The actions at UVA leave great cause for concern. As University of Michigan professor Michael Bastedo has written, governing boards are increasingly embedded in money and politics, engaging in self-interested decision-making.  They tell us “it’s for your own good” in an attempt at moral seduction, and a desire to appear ethical.  Intelligent communities like those at UVA and UW-Madison do not buy this. And they shouldn’t, if they are to remain the excellent and public institutions we can all respect.

UW System's Online Endeavor

Today Governor Scott Walker (whom my son happily continues to call "RecallWalker") and the UW System announced a joint effort to provide competency-based online degree programs. The program will be initiated and led by UW Extension faculty and staff under Chancellor Ray Cross.

My feelings about Walker are well-known.  I have a hard time believing he has the best interests of UW System at heart.  That said, I don't think this was Walker's idea, and I don't think his interest in it means it's necessarily a bad idea. Here are a few reasons why:

1) Competency-based online instruction has been implemented all over the world. It aims to break the link between seat-time and credit in order to get students accessible, affordable degrees. Those are good objectives. Credit for sitting in a seat for a certain amount of time has never felt smart.

(2) The typical conservative approach to implementation is a clear effort to undermine full-time faculty --bring in an outside group reliant on adjuncts. In other states that is Western Governors University.  (Ok, slight modification-- WGU uses full-time contracted faculty. Not tenured. And not really faculty-- they don't instruct or grade, they "mentor" and coach.)  While he may have considered it, that's not what Walker's done here. Smart- because if he had, the faculty and academic staff would have been rightly up in arms -- me included. (Indeed, that's what's happening in California.)  Instead, this program is led by UW Extension faculty and staff.  That's good- Cross is smart, and I am betting he brought this idea with him, perhaps even discussing it in his job interview.

(3) The focus here isn't UW-Madison (despite some poor press tweets)-- it is aimed at folks on the margin of no credential or an online credential. That's the right demographic.

Now, here are the key questions and big things to keep an eye on:

• What will be the balance between industry and educators in crafting these programs?  If they are too specific, the programs will have little value over the long haul.
• Who will actually teach?  Will UW Extension put the resources in to ensure that full-time faculty add online teaching to their load, or segregate it to adjuncts?
• Good technology isn't free. Will Walker invest in helping UW Extension with the resources needed to ensure the platform for delivery is of high quality?
• Will some potential students perceive this as their ONLY option for higher ed in the state? Will this mean other opportunities will be constricted or narrowed? Will these programs serve as entry points to other blended or in-person forms of instruction?

One way to ensure quality is pushed higher is to encourage the kinds of students who now take in-person courses to try out these online classes, perhaps in summer, and have them react/respond with their demands.  They will help raise the bar and keep standards high. In other words, diverse online classes of learners, rather than segregated ones, will ensure the quality of instruction.

So no, this isn't a blanket endorsement of a Walker policy. I would like to know more about the evolution of this plan, and the role faculty played in it.  But from what I know, it has evolved with the input of UW Extension and UW System, and is explicitly run by them.  That, at least, is a step in the right direction. 

Edited 6/20 for the parenthetical on WGU's staffing model.

It's Time to Wake Up

The smoldering ashes of public higher education can be seen and smelled across the nation, as the once much-lauded, now much-decried University of Virginia goes up in flames.

Pardon my French, but it's about time everyone opened their eyes, ears, and mouth. This stuff stinks!

It's impossible to count how often during the past several years those of us residing at her sister public flagships have heard UVA held up as a model, a "best-practice" of public higher education for the 21st century.  Haven't you heard all about her wondrous break from state government that allowed her the "flexibility" and "innovative freedoms" to raise tuition while expanding affordability, thriving when the rest of us starved?  We at UW-Madison got an earful of it from ex-chancellor Biddy Martin during the fiasco known as the New Badger Partnership. And true believers abounded.

As I said then, that emperor has no clothes.  UVA hasn't been a true public university in some time. It is not a democratic institution where the voices of all constituencies are honored. It is not succeeding in expanding affordability with Access UVA, an ineffective sinkhole into which millions of dollars have been thrown.   It is not flourishing with strong academic programs and a great faculty retention rate.  It is not innovative, not independent, and not a model.  No, it is a rich man's campus, run by millionaires and political conservatives, who are driving agendas disconnected from the needs of educators and students. And those elites just got their way, evicting a president who appears to have stood up to their efforts at "strategic dynamism"-- e.g. the crappification of all that is good and meaningful, and worth investing in in public higher education.

The people governing UVA are like so many of the so-called "reformers" who think efficiency and flexibility are magical words, and who have conveniently but very wrongly diagnosed the challenges facing colleges and universities as residing in the "inmates" -- i.e. the faculty.  These boards and trustees have an unbelievably disrespectful attitude towards the teachers to whom they pay tens of thousands of dollars to educate their children in what they fondly call an "asylum."

The conservative agenda to defund public institutions at all possible levels has created this situation-- not the faculty.  Don't fool yourself -- those who advocate for "holding the line on college costs"  are not doing it for the good of the students but for the good of the corporations who seek to benefit from the rapid growth of the for-profit sector. It is nothing short of devastating that this agenda had confused the public from embracing a genuine affordability agenda, such as the one I support, that works with educators to find affordable approaches to high-quality education and a system of paying for it that maximizes the enrollment and success of students who will benefit most.

Institutional insiders-- high-level administrator types-- have too-easy embraced (sometimes unwittingly) the conservative agenda because they are paid handsomely to do it.  Heck, if they don't oblige quickly, it's clear they'll be fired! After a bit, they begin to enjoy drinking that kool-aid, since they are ensconced in fancy homes, taken to lovely meals, and sent on jaunts to Paris. It's far easier to embrace the business people than to labor in the trenches doing battle with state legislators who fear college's so-called liberalizing tendencies (what we call "being educated").   It's not surprising that the Board at UVA assumed Teresa Sullivan would go along with them.  It's pretty clear that Biddy Martin would've.   But they made a mistake, since as a sociologist Teresa has a knack for using her skills as an "outsider looking in" as well as an "insider looking out."  She's a sociologist of work and organizations and no doubt saw their scheme for what it was, refusing to play along. After all, she views the university as a "compact among generations," not a compact between business and politics.

She was ousted. Good for her.  Twenty minutes of good hard labor in public higher education is worth far more than decades of pandering to the likes of business school deans, Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker, and wealthy alumni.

Want to be a 'Sconnie, Teresa?  We'd love to talk.

ps. For more superb reading on the UVA drama, I recommend these astute commentaries:

Kris Olds-  a friend, a colleague, a genius
Dagblog -- this guy even uses the word 'neoliberalism'

Beware the New "Education Sector"

Over the years, Kevin Carey and I have had our tussles, most recently over whether some of his recent stances on education reform were too faithful to a business model, which I called "neoliberal."  But throughout it all, I have remained a fan of both Kevin and his shop, Education Sector, since both are known for asking hard, data-driven questions about whether higher education is meeting the needs of students from disadvantaged families.   So I am extremely disappointed to see that Education Sector has been hijacked by the conservative Right, and now clearly represents the interests of business elites, pushing free-market principles on all of education.  Kevin, to his credit, is getting the hell out of there, moving to the New America Foundation, accompanied by his talented colleagues Stephen Burd, Amy Laintinan, and Rachel Fishman.

Within a few days the change at Education Sector will be complete.  The leadership includes several consultants to the Romney campaign and members of the Hoover Institution, such as John Chubb, Macke Raymond, and Bill Hansen, who seem to believe that markets have magical powers, and that educating students is akin to making hamburgers or sauerkraut. Worse yet, Hansen is a former Bush appointee who lobbies for the Apollo Group, and has worked against every effort to contain corruption in for-profit schools.  He was president of Scantron, of the "fill in the bubble" testing industry, and has worked to advance the cause of student loan providers. And his jobs have been described as things like "creating a new education line of business...and  integrating the education services activities throughout the company into a strategic product portfolio." Stephen Burd's long been on to this guy- he is trouble.

No doubt about it, these folks will use Education Sector to advance an agenda aimed at ensuring the federal government stops helping students afford college.  They'll start by telling us that college isn't really necessary, and that financial aid is ineffective-- but they'll also do nothing to ensure public higher education becomes free. Instead, they will push free-market solutions -- mainly online education-- for other peoples' children, while probably sending their own kids to elite private schools.

So next time you see a report from Education Sector, give it a second look.  Theirs are no longer "Charts You Can Trust."  They are acts of political manipulation pushed by the hard Right.

Consider yourself warned.

Updated at 11:16 am CST. Gee, Google is so much fun.

Seeding the Future of UW System

I spent this week on a Badger bus, traveling about 600 miles around Wisconsin with 39 colleagues from UW-Madison.  The Wisconsin Idea Seminar took our group to more than a dozen communities, from farms and factories that make wind, milk, sauerkraut and ships, to several schools and colleges, a prison, and even Lambeau Field.  It was an experience unlike any I’ve ever had, as I came to understand why the social compact between the University of Wisconsin and the state is so critical to our mutual survival. We are in the midst of an historic impasse, a time when the standoffs between Left and Right make it hard to imagine a future for UW System that isn't austere or privatized.  But what I learned on this trip is that we are failing to solve this problem because, as Kathy Cramer Walsh keeps telling us, we are not listening. 

So please, humor me. Let me tell you what I learned from these four vibrant women of the Menominee Nation.

Lisa Waukau

Paula Fernandez

Donna Powless

Karen Washinawatok 

 

It's an gross understatement to say that the tribe to which Lisa, Paula, Karen, and Donna belong has seen dark days. The Menominee, also known as the Wild Rice people, are the oldest continuous residents of Wisconsin and they once occupied and benefitted from over 10 million acres of land.  As Karen shared with us, the U.S. government took most of that land from them, often with force, and kidnapped their children, sending them to Indian Boarding Schools purportedly in an effort to "save them" through forced assimilation.  The government said it was "helping" by exerting non-Native norms of competition and individualism on people who valued, above all else, community and cooperation.  Then, in the early 1960s national "leaders" attempted to terminate the tribe, singling it out because of its progressive vision, and all land and assets were stripped from the Menominee people, leaving them in utter poverty. It wasn't until the mid-1970s when President Richard Nixon intervened to reverse termination, and allow the tribe to begin to attempt restoration-- a herculean task.

So the Menominee know quite a bit about being derided, misunderstood, defunded, ignored, belittled, and impoverished--far more so than we in UW System ever will. All but destroyed forty years ago, the Menominee tribe we met this week remains intensely under-resourced yet its people are not defeated.  Now occupying just 235,000 acres, far from the economic activities of Madison and Milwaukee, the number of people living on the reservation is small (under 5,000) but growing. The median age is just 27, compared to a statewide average of 36 -- the tribe is full of young people, most of whom cannot speak or understand the Menominee language. There are few employment opportunities, and the median family income is under $27,000 (for the state it's almost $44,000). About 1 out of every 2 children under 6 lives in poverty. 

This hardly seems like an environment in which you'd expect to see a growth in language and culture immersion programs and opportunities, and a vibrant, accessible and affordable college. But that's exactly what Menominee leaders have built.  Their success lies in an outright audacity of hope and willingness to question and rethink things that most of Wisconsin simply accepts as normal and takes for granted.  For example, when told that only a tiny minority among us possess a skill like speaking Menominee, most of us would say "well, then the language is dead."  We'd give up.  But not Paula: there are only nine Menominee fluent on the reservation now, yet every day she's helping people young and old strive to learn the language and keep it alive.  "Not possible" isn't an answer she'll accept.  As Lisa told us, "We do not cave in." Even when people chastise their children for it, as a white teacher recently did to Karen's niece.

The approach taken by nearly all of Wisconsin's universities and colleges is a highly individualistic one, emphasizing the future private value of higher education, encouraging students to act aggressively to corner the market on a lucrative major, prioritizing their own needs in a competitive world.  Not so at College of Menominee Nation, where more traditional values hold forth over those other urban industrial values. In her psychology classes, Donna emphasizes the group, fostering understanding and cooperation in the process of learning. In much of Wisconsin higher education, administrators distinguish between the deserving and undeserving-- at Madison we are rejecting more students than we admit.  The Menominee take the opposite approach, for as Lisa put it, "teachers have lightening in a bottle-- you never know who your students can become." The College knows that many students make decisions now--not in the future--as they live their living as a process of giving and sharing with family and friends in the here and now. So they are not asked to mortgage their future with student loans, and instead asked to be happy with strong communal learning environments that aren't fancy or high-tech, but are led by committed teachers rather than high-paid researchers. Donna practices patience with her students as they move through the challenges of higher education, focusing on achieving meaningful success with them, not merely sheepskin diplomas. She does not wait for them to show up to office hours but rather reaches out, practicing what the rest of higher education has sadly termed "intrusive" advising.

Real progress in UW System will come when we provide the space for people all over Wisconsin to tell us -- and show us -- what a relevant postsecondary education looks and feels like, and we stop, take note, rethink, and adjust accordingly.  As I learned this week, within the chaos of today's situation lies harmony, and within harmony, our heart.  The seeds for future growth lie not in ideas of our current leaders, but in those whom we have never really allowed to lead -- the regular folks around the state who milk the cows, process sauerkraut, run the family business, labor in the fields, teach in our schools, nanny for our children, and yes, live on our reservations. 

Without constant conversation with the people of Wisconsin, the research and teaching we do in our universities and colleges fails to achieve its full potential--it is incomplete, insufficiently creative, and quite possibly misinformed lacking the understandings and ideas that are earned by interacting with the daily experiences, perspectives, and values outside of the academy.  And, it fails to secure the respect of taxpayers, generating long-term consequences for UW's political support and funding, as well as for the citizens themselves, who lose access to the talents of academics capable of rethinking and finding answers to the questions that plague us.  Public higher education is beholden to the public, to the great benefit of those who fund it and those who work in it.

These days, when the government defunds our public institutions, passes laws to strip workers of their rights, and even attacks with tear gas and other weapons, too many among us simply throw up our hands and say "Let's face facts. This is the new normal. It's time to adapt." These are not the Americans you want to follow.  Instead, look to the Menominee and others like them who refuse to give up.  They say this: "If you need to ask a question, ask it. If you need to say something, say it. Always move forward, otherwise nothing will change."  Following their example of persistent questioning, what UW calls sifting and winnowing, we can together fight for a new, far more powerful existence for our kids.

Public education is facing the threat of termination as we speak.  It occupies and represents space and resources that others want to control.  Will people who believe in public education advocate for assimilation to a "new normal" of no resources, reliance on those whose values don't reflect our own, all in the name of pragmatism?  Or will they fight for restoration? Thankfully, our Wisconsin Idea Seminar with the people of Menominee Nation reminded me that optimism is not futile, naive, or unwise.  Far from it. It's what plants the seeds of our future.