On Thursday, college students throughout California especially, but also around the U.S., protested higher tuitions and costs, and cuts in their education that are sending many institutions of higher education into crisis--including Humboldt State University here in Arcata. So it's not surprising that at least here in the Eureka demo, students were joined by faculty and staff, as departments and entire programs are being weakened and eliminated.

The politics of this is fascinating, and educational. Universities and their students are being characterized as fighting for funds that would otherwise go to the poor and sick, whereas the real priorities being served are wealthy non-taxpayers, mega-corporations and the banks, that are currently mounting a so far successful effort to prevent the U.S. Senate from passing into law what the House has already passed--reforms that would strip the banks of their profitable control of student loans, and would ease the financial burden of students and their schools.

Here's the SF Chronicle story from which this photo comes, and another at the L.A. Times. Neither talks much about the underlying issues. No one much does.

Update: We'll see if this really happens, but at the moment, the legislation to take back control of student loans from the banks is part of the Senate healthcare bill, so if it passes Sunday, this will be law as well.

to the point

This short essay in the Nation by educator and activist Deborah Meier is the best summary of issues and opportunities in the truly tragic plight of pre-college education in America we've seen this year:

No Politician Left Behind

The Back to School Issue
by Phineas Dash

Colleges are killing themselves. They are killing their students by treating them as "customers," selling them frills and momentary thrills, and teaching them all the wrong lessons about the world as well as almost nothing about acquiring and using knowledge. They are killing their faculty members with cost-cutting and the imposition of business bureaucracy standards, so that the faculty is sandwiched in between the manufactured meetings, budgets, and absurd rules of the corporate-minded administration, and the me-first, the customer is always right, entertain me or get a bad evaluation (i.e. fired) blackmail of students.

The system is now firmly established as another process in the manufacturing of ignorance. Ignorant people are pliable people, gullible and easily manipulated. As workers, you can scare them and trick them into dutifully giving their all, giving everything they've got-their time, talent, energy and faith--for peanuts. As customers, you can sell them anything.

The college machine holds young people hostage with huge loan payments so they'll be cooperative workers. That takes care of those young dissenters. The college machine is yet another part of the process that turns people into worker/consumers, and the citizenry into niche markets.

The cynicism behind even the best that colleges offer is stunning. Student writers, visual and theatre artists, for example, get individual attention, they get productions and shows and the use of often superior facilities. The vast majority of them will never have it so good ever again. They will not find theatre organizations or editors who will fawn over their every word or gesture, once they've stopped paying for that kind of attention.

The college education I got didn't prepare me for the real world of work, but it never really pretended to. Colleges today pretend they are practical places but that's massive denial, when it isn't just plain cynical. They aren't insisting that students learn skills they'll need even if that is a painful process. The business model demands that the customer be happy at the moment of purchase, and that's when the bargain ends. Responsible adults should know from their own lives that the popular teachers weren't necessarily the ones who taught them what turned out to be most important. In fact the most important skills and ideas sink in so deep that you probably won't even remember how you learned them, or who you learned them from.

As a student, I agitated for student evaluations of teachers. It never dawned on me that administrators and faculties would abrogate their responsibilities by making student evaluations the gospel on teaching effectiveness. But that's what they've done, and that's why grades are fundamentally dishonest now, everyone knows this, and the system is corrupt from top to bottom.