Category Archives: Corporate University

by | October 8, 2012 · 12:35 pm

A recent post on the APSCUF-KUXchange by friend and colleague Amy Lynch-Biniek. In a nutshell, she describes how the current PASSHE proposals regarding adjunct faculty hurt our adjunct brothers and sisters, our students, our departments, and our system.

APSCUF-KU xchange

To borrow a turn of phrase, you can tell a lot about a college by the way it treats its adjuncts. If you read the PASSHE Negotiation Objectives recently distributed to KU faculty via email (referred to parenthetically in this post as “Letter”), you are likely angered and dismayed by most if not all of their positions. For a moment, I’d like you to consider the repercussions of one element of their attack on quality education, their proposed treatment of contingent faculty. And make no mistake: the use and treatment of these faculty does indeed affect and reflect the education the state makes available to students.

Before I came to Kutztown University, I had been an adjunct at several colleges, though “adjunct” became a ridiculous term when I was running the writing center, directing the theater production and teaching several classes at a single institution on three “part-time” contracts. One…

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Filed under APSCUF, Collective Bargaining, Contingent faculty, Contract Negotiations, Corporate University, Education reform, Kutztown University, Uncategorized

by | August 24, 2012 · 2:06 am

If this is the first you’re hearing of this, surprise!

I’m reposting an article from this morning’s (Thurs) Inside Higher Ed in full. And without further comment unless people want to discuss it. Click the link to the original if you want to follow all their internal links. Otherwise, happy reading!

Creditworthy in the Keystone State
August 23, 2012 – 3:00am

Pennsylvania’s regional public universities are gearing up to serve more adult students, and will use prior learning assessment and stackable credentials to help meet that anticipated demand.

Work force development is a priority for the 14 universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, in part because they are often the only public game in town. Many lack nearby community colleges, especially the universities in the state’s central and northern regions,  so the four-year system sports a healthy suite of associate degrees and one-year certificates, along with the standard fare of bachelor’s degrees.

“We offer the best of both worlds,” says Christopher Reber, executive dean of Clarion University’s Venango College campus.

Those academic programs attract large numbers of nontraditional students, for whom the potential to earn credits for their learning outside of the classroom can be a big draw. The system already does prior learning assessment, but plans to expand through a new partnership with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). System officials expect students will seek and receive credits for learning on the job, from technical training programs, in the military or from other sources, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), according to John Cavanaugh, the system’s chancellor.

“We’re going to open it up to any kind of prior learning that people are bringing,” Cavanaugh says. However, he stresses that by working with CAEL, the system will be able to ensure that it issues credits for college-level learning that matches up with the system’s academic course offerings. “You’re still going to have to demonstrate that you’ve got the learning before that translates to credit.”

The Pennsylvania system will be perhaps the largest public university partner to sign on to Learning Counts, CAEL’s portfolio-based prior-learning service, an official at the council says. Through Learning Counts, students fork over $500 for an online course on how to put together a portfolio that collects and describes their prior learning. For an additional fee of $250, faculty experts review those submissions and can issue recommendations worth up to 12 credits.

However, not all colleges accept prior-learning recommendations, even if they come from CAEL, which is generally considered to be an industry leader. So the council has enlisted over 100 partner institutions that have agreed to defer to Learning Counts and issue full credit for successful portfolios. The Pennsylvania system is joining that group, Cavanaugh says.

Credit for MOOCs?

One reason many colleges are skittish about granting credits for prior learning is because to do so is to acknowledge that the academy doesn’t have a lock on college-level learning. Some faculty members also view the process warily, arguing that it can be an academically suspect money grab and a weak substitute for college.

Prior learning could also threaten professors’ jobs.

“It changes who generates the credits,” says Steve Hicks, an English professor at Loch Haven University and president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, the system’s primary union. “Potentially there’s a job loss there.”

Hicks says that representatives from the faculty union met with system officials about Learning Counts and prior learning. While he says they were “concerned” about the plan, they have yet to take a position on it.

Cavanaugh and other administrators defend their approach, and say chief academic officers have been busy vetting how prior-learning credits will align with curriculums. Furthermore, Cavanaugh says the system has long granted credit to students who take College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests, which are administered by the College Board to measure college-level learning. So the portfolio approach isn’t such a stretch.

“The notion that this is credit for living is just not the case,” he says.

The system held lengthy discussions about whether it should grant credit for MOOCs, according to Cavanaugh. CAEL has predicted that many students will seek credit for MOOCs, and the council plans to include those courses in credit recommendations if students can demonstrate that they have received college-level learning. Eventually the system decided it was on board, as long as MOOC credit submissions receive the Learning Counts stamp.

“We fully expect to see people putting them in the portfolios,” says Cavanaugh.

Daniel Hurley praises the system’s plan to ramp up prior-learning assessment, and its proactive approach with new forms of online learning. Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, says the system and other regional publics can play a leading role in prior learning, in part because they enroll many students who might benefit from the process.

The system is also not alone in helping community colleges on work force development. Hurley says that 42 percent of the association’s members issue two-year degrees. “It’s really about meeting demand.”

Up the Ladder

It’s a long way from Edinboro University to the nearest community college — like two hours.

The university is close to Erie, where county leaders have pushed hard for a new two-year college. But that idea tanked last year, after a saga described in an Education Sector report. So the university decided it had to step up its technical job training options. This fall Edinboro will launch a new associate degree in applied technology.

But Edinboro’s evolving approach is more ambitious than just a few isolated academic offerings, says Julie E. Wollman, the university’s president. It is working with technical trade schools, most of them small for-profits with ties to local industries, to help students get credit for previously earned technical certificates when they enroll at Edinboro.

Sometimes students arrive at the university years after having attended a trade school.

“A lot of people get a certificate at one of those places and go right to a job,” Wollman says.

To advance in their careers, even jobs on the floor of a manufacturing plant, they often need the sort of training only a college can provide. Edinboro treats the prior learning students bring from their jobs and technical trade certificates as the core of their major, Wollman says. And they can earn up to 27 prior learning credits. Then the university offers students classes that help them bolster their communication, analytical, business and mathematics skills.

“What they’re bringing is the major,” she says. “What we’re really providing is the general education.”

An hour down the road, Clarion’s Venango campus has developed similar ways for students to enroll with credits from their work experience. And both institutions are designing their sub-baccalaureate credentials to be stackable, meaning students can complete a certificate or associate degree, leave to take a job, and then seamlessly return to continue working toward a bachelor degree.

Reber calls the approach a “ladder” of credentials. To create credit pathways at Clarion, his campus has collaborated with several technical institutions and employers, including the Precision Manufacturing Institute and FirstEnergy Corporation.

Clarion is also introducing online degree completion programs, including an associate in industrial technology and a bachelor’s in technology leadership. The online coursework is particularly handy for adult students who work full time. And it’s not surprising that students might prefer to keep their jobs and enroll online, rather than attending Clarion as traditional students. Some of the Venango campus’s employer partners pay a guaranteed $60,000 salary to associate-degree holders from the university, and will cover tuition for employees who finish their bachelor’s degree.

For Venango and Clarion, as well as for other universities in the system, one benefit of work place partnerships is a boost to enrollment. Located in Oil City, the campus is surrounded by an aging population, and adult workers are generally conscientious students.

“It’s a win-win,” Reber says.

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Filed under Access, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Collective Bargaining, Corporate University, deliverology, Education reform, Inside Higher Education, MOOCs, on-line schools, PASSHE, Program elimination, Retrenchment, shared governance

by | June 25, 2012 · 11:45 am

REBLOG: “New Socialist Man” (Gin and Tacos)

I didn’t write this post, but I wish I had. The author of Gin and Tacos is a political science faculty member (changing jobs to somewhere in Illinois after a long stint as a visiting prof at the University of Georgia and a difficult time on the market). He does just about the most astute critique of the ousting of University of Virginia President Sullivan I’ve seen yet.

Just a taste:

She refused to acknowledge that a university is a Business and should be run as such, and she refused to eliminate the Classics department from the school founded by Thomas Jefferson. Other reported philosophical differences included resistance to expanding pedagogically useless but phenomenally profitable “online degree” programs that amount to little more than for-profit scams servicing corporate clients and adult learners who need a rubber stamp in order to advance professionally. For years the Right has decried touchy-feely Multicultural studies displacing the real canon of Western thought – Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, and the like. Now it appears that the Business School and the Continuing Studies Online program are reflections of the true foundation of all Western thought – the Classics be damned.

Read the rest here….

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Filed under Corporate University, Higher Ed history, liberal arts, on-line schools, Program elimination, Sullivan, University of Virginia

by | June 7, 2012 · 2:03 pm

APSCUF-WCU President on Anti-Union Attacks in Education

APSCUF-WCU President Lisa Millhous published this guest column in today’s (June 7) West Chester Daily Local News.

She makes several crucial points, at the core of which is the point that, especially in PA, attacking teacher and other public unions is almost all a diversion from the Governor’s (and his allies’) agenda–selling off public K-16 education to whichever bidder contributes the most to their campaigns. Dr. Millhous doesn’t put the point quite so belligerently, of course, nor should she have!

If you have the stomach for it, feel free to engage the anti-union thugs who tend to populate Comments sections of newspapers and websites. Or, let them have their echo-chamber to themselves since there’s probably not much you can say that will sway them.

Either way, share this piece with anybody you think needs to understand what anti-teacher-union attacks are really about. It ain’t about teachers or students, folks.

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Filed under APSCUF, charter schools, Corporate University, Education reform, K-12 Education, PASSHE, Private higher education, Privatization, Public education, Public employee unions, public employees, Shock Doctrine, Teacher unions, Tom Corbett, Unions

by | May 2, 2012 · 12:08 pm

On Whether University Presidents Can Afford to Take Overtly Political Stances

Kevin Kiley in today’s (May 2) Inside Higher Ed considers the firing of LSU’s President Lombardi, ostensibly for taking stances that were politically contentious–opposing Gov. Bobby Jindhal’s budget-slashing and governance-shifting maneuvers, and so on.

There’s so much I’d like to say about why this is relevant to our current situation as faculty (and students and staff and managers) at WCU, but the article says most of it.

All I’ll add is this. If upper management isn’t going to defend us from attacks by idealogues whose purpose is to denigrate (or even kill) public higher education, or from the education reform [sic] cabal the major goal of which is to privatize and commercialize public education for their own profit, then we have to do it ourselves. The time to sit by and wait for our leadership to lead is over. 

I can understand why Inside Higher Ed wouldn’t make that argument for us.

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Filed under Access, Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, CFHE, Collective Bargaining, Corporate University, Education reform, Inside Higher Ed, PASSHE, Private higher education, shared governance, Tom Corbett

by | May 1, 2012 · 12:22 pm

A non-presidential post from Steve Hicks

Sometimes even the most official officers need to say things that they prefer not to have attached to their offices. [OK, I’m done with that riff!]

Since the state APSCUF blog has rules, particularly governing length of posts, I wanted to offer this forum to Steve to say some things that aren’t within that limit. So here ya go. You can read the original version here. Or here:

Over the past week plus “at APSCUF” (which is less of a place than a state of mind — sort of), quite a bit of time has been spent looking at PASSHE’s new system of performance funding, which goes into effect this fall.  New in this system is a series of optional choices for the universities.  One of those — under “Stewardship” — is “Instructional Productivity.”

(Digressive paragraph) Several times at this weekend’s APSCUF Legislative Assembly, faculty went to the microphone to tell us “that’s a horrible term, don’t use it.”   One speaker suggested, strongly, that we use “workload” instead, because “that’s what it is.”  The problem with all this argument about terminology is that it isn’t “our” (as in faculty or APSCUF’s) language, it is PASSHE’s language, codified in PASSHE documents, approved by PASSHE’s Board of Governors (in January 2011), and used in all the documents forwarded by the Dixon Center for universities to use in determining their performance indicators.  They will continue to use it, no matter what we call it.

(Back to central point) This discussion of instructional productivity, er workload, centers on numbers from the state system showing the average CalUP faculty member generates 758 credit hours per year.  That’s #1 in the system by almost 2 standard deviations — next is Slippery Rock at 652.  Cheyney is lowest at 469.  At Assembly our most knowledgeable person said that Carnegie II.A institutions have an average of 589 — which is East Stroudsburg’s average (they rank 9th in the system, telling you how well we do; our unweighted average is 599).

Should instructional productivity be a performance indicator?  Probably not.  But our best early analysis of the options to university managers is that this is one they will all pick.  It is one that is clearly attainable (many other options seem unattainable).

This morning on *CBS Sunday Morning* they had a piece on college costs.  They interviewed the president and a student from Sarah Lawrence, amongst others — the most expensive college in the country, according to the story — and both talked about how the personalized attention from faculty was the great attraction of the university.  The president said it wasn’t faculty salaries that drove their price so high, but the fact they had to hire LOTS of faculty to keep that small class experience.

The point was made on the Assembly floor that CAL no longer can claim that kind of experience.  758 represents an average of 21 students in EVERY class CAL offers.  Of course, that would mean that EVERY faculty member teaches 12 courses, that no one has any release time to run a program, chair a department, do research…which we know isn’t true.

It means that every student sits in a class with a lot of other students — not Sarah Lawrence.  What it IS like is Penn State — a comparison made on the floor as the 758 number is almost exactly what the behemoth university in State College has as their average, too.  Although we hate it, WE ARE PENN STATE!

This is where we are in public higher education in Pennsylvania, and the US, today.  In the *New York Times* today, Frank Bruni cites an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statement: Thirty years ago, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with the equivalent of at least a two-year degree; only Canada and Israel were close.  As of 2009, the U.S. lagged behind 14 other developed countries.”  We don’t generate the number of degrees we need to stay with, let alone ahead, of the rest of the world because we make higher education both unaffordable and inaccessible.

How?  By defunding higher ed, both in Pennsylvania and across the country.  Last year PASSHE took an 18% cut in funding from the state; we’ve been asked to give back 5% more this year; and for 12-13 the current proposal from the Governor is a 20% cut.  This is after what even the State Senate  Appropriations Committee has admitted has been at least a decade of defunding.  Tuitions have risen and PASSHE’s Board and then the universities have responded with higher tuition AND a cut in their needed expenditures (it’s known in budget-tuition talk around the System as “the Gap” — the difference between the income from tuition and state appropriation and the real cost to sustain the current apparatus — and it’s been over $20 million every year I’ve been state APSCUF president).  It’s a squeeze from both ends.

This squeeze leads to more “productivity,” which, yes, means more faculty workload.  There’s no one else to squeeze in an academic institution: there are only so many copiers, paperclips, and backroom workers.  The real business is students and faculty.  Though you’d be surprised how little of an institution’s budget is actually for that part of the business (one set of numbers makes it to be in the 20-30% range and declining annually).   Classes grow, faculty have more students, the way we teach changes.

Who wants to go to college to sit in a large class, or sit in their dorm on their laptop in “distance” learning, or go to college where no one connected to the university even acts like they want to know their name?  College education is a labor intensive exercise.  As the labor economist from George Washington University said, we haven’t found a way to make it anything but labor intensive.

It serves no one to be more productive at some point: even an English professor (like me) understands the rudiments of the law of diminishing returns.  There’s a reason that all the PASSHE institutions have long advertised themselves to students (who are either the consumers or the product in the productivity model — that one can’t tell says much about how well the model applies) as familiar, know-your-name, private school model institutions.  No one has ever said “we are and want to be like (Carnegie) research (i) institutions, with large lecture halls and grad students in front of smaller classes.”

Cal has reached the point of diminished returns.  PASSHE should be careful about walking the other 13 institutions in their footsteps, given their current financial state.

Our students deserve quality education.  They deserve personalized attention.  They deserve a real opportunity to become what they want to become, not the plumber or carpenter that is the Corbett Administration concentration (which is NOT what students who choose to go to college want to do).

Using instructional productivity to distribute dollars and to show who is performing best will not have a positive outcome.

We all deserve better.

— Steve

 For what it’s worth, I couldn’t agree more–except for one thing. While Steve is certainly correct that PASSHE uses the term instructional productivity to describe, um, whatever it’s describing by using a term that means nothing, I was one of the people on the floor of the Legislative Assembly cheering the call to reject the term as often and loudly as possible.
Of course, that might be why I’m not President of anything. And that might be for the best.
–Seth

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Filed under Access, Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget Cuts, CFHE, Collective Bargaining, Corporate University, deliverology, Education reform, Inside Higher Ed, Instructional Productivity, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Penn State University, Performance Funding, Privatization, Tom Corbett

by | February 3, 2012 · 1:07 pm

Start writing to President Obama and the DOE now

I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a good idea to raise tuition and make college unaffordable for students. However, President Obama’s announcement in the State of the Union the other week, and hearings happening in Senate committees already, suggest that the President doesn’t understand, or care about, the difference between tuition increases based on increasing costs, and increases based on collapsing state support. He needs to hear that message loud and clear.

Notice in this article from this morning’s (Feb 3) Inside Higher Education that nobody says a word about state support for public higher ed.

Senators Focus on Tuition Costs
February 3, 2012 – 3:00am

WASHINGTON — Members of the U.S. Senate’s education panel got a firsthand look Thursday at the president’s new higher education agenda, offering both bipartisan support and bipartisan expressions of concern.

At a hearing on college affordability before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, lawmakers from both parties expressed agreement with President Obama’s assertion that tuition growth must be curtailed to maintain access to higher education, suggesting that college pricing is likely to be an election-year priority. But Democrats and Republicans alike tried unsuccessfully to pry loose more details about the president’s plan, and picked apart some aspects already made clear.

Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter testified but divulged no secrets about Obama’s Race to the Top-esque proposal for higher education, which would pay institutions that find ways to control tuition growth and increase value for students in much the same way the government rewarded states that improved their K-12 curriculums. Kanter said more information about funding for Obama’s plan will be released with the president’s 2013 budget proposal on Feb. 13.

While consensus emerged that college tuition can’t continue to increase unabated, opinions varied about the proper role of the federal government in stunting that growth. Sen. Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, said the free market can help determine what tuition prices are sustainable.

“Higher education is a great example of how the market place works,” he said. When tuition gets too expensive, he said, “people choose to go somewhere else.” (The hearing also featured testimony from officials of traditional two-year and four-year colleges talking about their efforts at innovation, and from advocates for alternatives such as Western Governors University.)

While those open-market principles are important to remember, Burr said, Congress sometimes has an important function in addressing college issues. “Where it’s appropriate for us to have a role,” he said, “I hope we play it.”

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, pushed for brisk action and clarity about the more specific steps the administration wants legislators to take. She said students are essentially taking out a mortgage to pay for college and aren’t always seeing a return on that investment.

“They don’t know whether they’re going to have equity or an albatross of debt,” she said. “We can’t keep this going.”

Wyoming Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the committee’s senior Republican, said that efforts to expand grants for low-income students have failed to stop tuition growth and prove that legislation can accomplish only so much.

“If we’ve learned anything in recent years,” he said, “it’s that the government cannot solve this problem.”

But Obama says that government-supported reform is imperative. He introduced his agenda during last month’s State of the Union address, telling colleges they were “on notice” and that they risked losing taxpayer support if they couldn’t control their costs and increase their educational value.

Perhaps sensing a popular cause to champion with an election looming, senators in both parties seemed eager to continue discussions on how to hold down college prices.  Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, promised more discussion on the subject.

“This,” he said, ” is the first of many hearings.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/03/senate-help-committee-hears-college-affordability-testimony#ixzz1lK6xuXDu
Inside Higher Ed

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Barack Obama, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Corporate University, Education reform, Inside Higher Ed, PASSHE, Public education, Shock Doctrine

by | January 14, 2012 · 3:41 pm

Starting to think about strategy and tactics for the upcoming budget battle

As you should know by now, Governor Corbett has put in a request that PASSHE return about $20 million of our 2011-2012 budget allocation to the state. That’s on the heels, remember, of a 19% reduction in our budget already, and in spite of a sizeable rainy day fund that’s designed precisely to respond to situations like this one.

You should also know by now that the Governor’s next budget proposal address is scheduled for February 7. In it, we have no reason to believe he’ll do anything other than propose idiotically draconian budget cuts again for next year. Clearly he has no interest in the health or quality of public higher education in his state, even though his job mandates that he must. And just as clearly, nobody in the Office of the Chancellor or the on the Board of Governors seems inclined to fight with him about this anywhere near as avidly as the situation calls for. Their track record is terrible, so we shouldn’t expect much help from that direction. As long as we have an unsettled contract situation, anything the state does to butcher the budget strengthens PASSHE’s bargaining position (in their myopic calculus), so…

It’s clear, therefore, that just like last year, the brunt of beating back these budget attacks falls on the students, faculty, staff (thank heavens AFSCME is generally pretty well-organized!), and communities in which our universities operate. The people who actually depend on the success of the universities, that is, in the most direct and obvious ways have to be the ones who keep it from being devastated by any number of politicos who seem simply not to care what happens to it. As long as junket jobs exist, and as long as there’s a system that acts as a pawn in the chess game that seems to pass for budget and policy debates in the Commonwealth, they’re happy.

With all that said, although we have a lot of work to do over the next several months, I want to emphasize in the rest of this post one basic concept that I think needs to frame everything else we do. And that concept is, as I put it in a Facebook post to a KU student activist–

Remember who the opposition is: the Corbett Regime and their neo-liberal allies in the Chancellor’s Office. Not the people who disagree about whether it’s better to do civil disobedience or voter registration.

There are going to be actions of all kinds happening on our campuses over the next few months. Some of you will find some of them distasteful–either because they’re too aggressive or not aggressive enough; because they’re ‘paralyzing by analyzing’ or underinformed; because somebody didn’t coordinate with somebody else before scheduling two events at the same time. You get the idea.

But understand this. Every time you dismiss or attack somebody who’s on the same side you are because you don’t like their tactics, you’re making the Governor’s attacks work better. Unfortunately for sane people everywhere, Governor Corbett and his allies have easier pathways to make things happen than we do. They have convenient access to the channels of power that we don’t. We only make it worse for ourselves when we squabble and bicker with, rather than collaborate and encourage, our allies.

More to come, I’m sorry to have to say…

 

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Filed under Access, Advocacy, AFSCME, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Collective Bargaining, Communities, Contract Negotiations, Corporate University, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Privatization, Public education, Public employee unions, public employees, Shock Doctrine, Student activism, Tom Corbett, Tuition increase, West Chester University

by | September 4, 2011 · 2:06 pm

More on the debate about reframing the value of higher ed

Thanks to Mark Rimple (again!) for sending this piece to me for the blog.

From Friday’s Inside Higher Ed: Linda Grasso, an English Prof in the CUNY system, writes eloquently, or perhaps just prettily, about the need to reframe our arguments about the value of higher education, particularly the liberal arts. Her most elaborated evidence for her claim about the value of liberal arts education is an anecdote about a conversation she had on the subway who seemed to have been deeply effected by reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in a college English course.

Commenters on Grasso’s essay make several points about the limited value of the anecdote, on both epistemological and rhetorical grounds; I won’t duplicate them here, except to say that you should look at them. They’re very revealing, not only of the complex task we face as we fight to reclaim what public higher education is about in this country, but also of the internal dynamic that makes the fight that much more complicated. Not everybody that works at a public university supports the vision(s) that liberal arts faculty have.

If we can’t even agree among ourselves about what we’re doing here, it’s no wonder we struggle to convince external constituencies to pay for us to do it.

Let’s remember who our friends are.

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Filed under Access, Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Corporate University, Inside Higher Ed, liberal arts, PASSHE, Shock Doctrine

by | August 6, 2011 · 12:36 pm

Sociologist Michael Burawoy on a future for public higher ed

Thanks to friend and colleague Christine Monnier, a sociology prof at the College of Dupage, for bringing this piece to my attention by posting it on Google+.

Michael Burawoy is past president of the American Sociological Association and current president of the International Sociological Association. He’s a Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley.

This essay, titled Redefining the Public University: Developing an Analytical Framework posted in a series called Transformations of the Public Sphere by the Institute for Public Knowledge, quickly describes the current state of American public higher education. If you’re familiar with current thinking on the issue, you’ll recognize most of the claims he makes about commodification and corporatization, but it’s worth reading carefully. The meat (or tofu, or beans and cheese, for us vegetarians) of the essay in my opinion is his ‘alternative framework’ for understanding what public universities do, that is, a matrix of ‘Professional,’ ‘Policy,’ ‘Critical,’ and ‘Public’ knowledges we both help to create and are responsive to. You can read the explanations, but this table maps out the key terms and relations:

It’s an interesting read, and one that has some generative potential for us as we work to defend our system from the kind of evisceration it faces at the hands of organizations like the US Education Delivery Institute and similar voices of neoliberalism.

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Filed under Advocacy, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Corporate University, deliverology, Higher Ed history, Intellectual Property, PASSHE, Performance Funding, Private higher education, Public education, research, Retention, Retrenchment, Shock Doctrine, US Education Delivery Institute