Troubled Times for Public Higher Education
Hanley, Larry
Gaduate students go on strike atYale. The California Board of Regents strikes down affirmative action in the University of California system. Massive student marches clog lower Manhattan. Each...
...The money spent to test what students haven't learned is siphoned out of budgets for teachers, instructional support, and program development...
...The graduate student strike last fall at Yale centered on exactly this job crisis...
...q i SPRING • 1996 • 69...
...Still, although conservatives have so far bested the liberal-left in defining and exploiting such anxieties, proponents of the "minimal" state may find more than they bargained for in the politics of higher education...
...One of the least remarked features of the struggle over higher education in New York last spring was the multiracial character of its participants...
...Financial aid—federal and state—has failed to keep pace with these increases, and more students than ever before are working full- or part-time and attending college on a part-time basis...
...Major decisions about education and learning are now often couched in terms like "efficiency," "productivity," and "outcomes...
...Although they pull apart at one level, public and private colleges and universities are intimately yoked at another: the academic labor market...
...Each of these incidents—and many others— testifies to a deep and wrenching, if largely uncoordinated, effort to restructure higher education in the United States, especially public higher education...
...In North Carolina, Democratic governor James Hunt's budget included a fifty million dollar cut to universities and colleges...
...That these different pressures—budget cuts, tuition hikes, academic labor, and "corporatized" administration—have come to bear on public colleges and universities is no surprise...
...These conditions will continue to make colleges and universities a contentious public sphere...
...What this crisis means for students is an accelerating stratification of higher education...
...Striving to build an "elite" within the public system, senior colleges are beginning to view two-year colleges not as stepping-stones but as dumping grounds for those students who might lower "standards...
...Those who can't will end up in a public system that features larger class sizes, skimpier instructional resources, crumbling infrastructure, and shrinking faculties...
...Within public higher education, as colleges SPRING • 1996 • 67 Two-Tier Education and universities struggle to cut costs and refurbish their image in the eyes of legislators, they routinely drop the task of "remediation" onto the laps of their underpaid and overworked colleagues in junior and community colleges...
...Over the past two decades, the growth of administrative personnel in higher education has far outstripped both faculty and enrollment growth...
...Tuition has risen significantly, in some cases by double digit percentages over the decade, at almost all public universities and colleges...
...Second, public education in America has historically played a key, valued role in mediating the conflict between democracy and capitalism, between the belief in equality and the realities of an inequitable economic system...
...As theYale strikers perceived, the new job market is disrupting an old "apprentice" model of graduate study and replacing it with a system of part-time, temporary, seasonal labor increasingly familiar to both blue-collar workers and the managerial work force...
...Colin Powell, City College of New York '58, is only one recent, much celebrated example...
...As governors across the country repeat the mantra of low-tax, low-regulation, businessfriendly policies, and as federal and local governments shed their social welfare responsibilities, they are simultaneously shifting the costs of higher education to private citizens...
...Fees at the University of California, for example, have risen 134 percent since 1990-1991...
...Graduate schools continue to turn out Ph.D.s , young scholars traditionally absorbed by public higher education...
...At a moment when the post-New Deal compact among workers, corporations, and the state is disintegrating, these changes speak to a fundamental disruption in the social reproduction of labor, expertise, and status...
...It is difficult to underestimate the visceral nature of this fear over the prospect that one's children are being denied their right to a better future...
...Student and union-organized lobbying trips to Albany often brought together white students from upstate suburbs with black and Latino students from the cities...
...If we reframe the battle for public higher education as a defense of equality, opportunity, and mobility, we might clearly and forcefully elaborate the value of common, collective goods in the face of the right's hunger to privatize and individualize all social decisions...
...The quality of education is judged by success in spreading resources as thinly as possible...
...In New York City, white ethnics, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and African-Americans from working-class and middle-class neighborhoods across the five boroughs marched and chanted (and were sometimes arrested) together because they had found solidarity in a common experience and against a common enemy...
...With rising tuition, students will pay more for less...
...Institutions once considered state-supported now speak of themselves as "state-affiliated...
...A history department that can cram forty-five students into a first-year class on Western Civilization is more valuable than the department that struggles to keep enrollment in its classes down to twenty-five...
...Matthew Arnold's vision of an educated, cultured elite replaces Dewey's vision of democratic education as the de facto reality...
...for the same time period, fees rose 103 percent for the Cal State system and over 300 percent at the state's community colleges...
...This despite the fact that "bonehead" English and math continue to be standard offerings at most elite universities and colleges...
...For these students, many of them older and more experienced than traditional students, self-interest and common interest often blend in ways that encompass—without necessarily obliterating— differences of race and class...
...Finally, public colleges and universities remain one of the few places where people from different classes and races come together on a daily, intimate basis...
...As supply outstrips demand, higher education increasingly relies on, and routinely exploits, this cheaper adjunct labor...
...This hopeful marriage of science and labor is now boiling down to mere vocationalism...
...In the cauldron of seething middle-class dreams, ambitions, and fears called California, Pete Wilson recently moved on from anti-immigrant Proposition 187 to a successful attack on the University of California's affirmative action policies...
...While the two campaigns were linked by common motifs of race and resentment, the easy transition from one to the other depended on Wilson's shift from the general specter of the "brown" masses to a more specifically white middle-class anxiety about mobility, status, and affluence...
...In the same vein, driven by the bureaucrat's need to quantify and classify, public colleges and universities pour millions into "outcome" measures like proficiency, assessment, and skills tests...
...While humanities, the arts, and the ideal of the "cultivated" citizen are reserved for elite, private institutions, public universities and colleges— which are increasingly blacker and browner— subsist by becoming efficient pipelines into the lower reaches of the information economy...
...Though we still have much work to do, over the course of the 1980s the number of Latinos andAfrican-Americans in college increased at a faster rate than white Americans...
...In 1994, recently elected Republican governors in Virginia, Wisconsin, and NewYork all pressed for— and largely won—significant reductions in higher education spending...
...First, for all the right-wing mythology that surrounds the welfare state (megalomaniacal beltway bureaucrats, welfare queens, foxholes stuffed with queer soldiers, and so on) public higher education represents one extremely visible place where social democratic values and policies have worked...
...Politically speaking, public higher education may prove even more important to hopes for a liberal-left response to the right...
...In many states, this year's funding levels still haven't caught up to the recessionary years of 1989 and 1990...
...In one recent national survey, 73 percent of respondents believed that four-year colleges in their states were doing a good job...
...Those with the resources to attend private institutions with high tuitions and large endowments will continue to do so...
...A multiracial, cross-class constituency for the welfare state, and even perhaps for progressive social change, can be organized if it is built from shared social realities like these, not from merely symbolic issues and ideological "discourses...
...While neoconservative critics bemoan the university's takeover by "tenured radicals," Marcuse's "totally administered society" rises like a phoenix out of the ashes of the academy...
...In the suburban family of the nineties, parents subject to corporate "downsizing" worry that their children will lose the chance for an increasingly elusive middle-class security to "state-coddled" 68 • DISSENT Two-Tier Education men and women of color...
...As in so many areas of national life, we are becoming too Victorian...
...In this era of heightened middle-class anxiety, forces on the right are already busy...
...As the American Council on Education recently noted, 58 percent of public higher education institutions report an increase in the share of costs paid by students and parents...
...Public higher education, unlike some other components of the welfare state, enjoys broad approval...
...Although some professors are beginning to describe themselves as the "last generation" of tenured academics, there is at least one expanding job pool in higher education...
...Since its birth in the land grant universities of the nineteenth century, public higher education has been intimately—often uncomfortably—tied to practical, applied, and technical knowledge...
...The demonization of political correctness, identity politics, and multiculturalism has depended on the right's ability to exploit the frictions inherent in this increasing diversity...
...Yet, entry-level fulltime, tenure track jobs are drying up...
...Most American families boast at least one—often more—almunus or alumna of a public college or university...
...Throughout the 1980s as college enrollment rose, federal funds for higher education shrank Straining to meet their rising share of public university and college funding, state capitals finally threw in the towel in the early 1990s...
...New York's governor, George Pataki, fought for an unprecedented 30 percent cut to higher education...
...As in health care, transportation, housing, and social welfare, the new politics and economics of higher education belong to the campaign— sponsored by Republicans and Democrats alike—to privatize the public sector...
...Tuition has begun to replace state monies as the chief source of higher education funding...
...We need to look at things differently...
...From within this group has emerged the outline of a "corporate" model of higher education...
...But public higher education is also one place where we can challenge the right's program of defunding the welfare state—where we can clearly draw the differences between the right's values and policies and our own more democratic, egalitarian values and ideals...
...More blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians are finding their lives entangled in common institutions, and hence tied to a common fate...
...The future doesn't look much rosier: the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that half of the administrators at institutions of public higher education expect more budget cuts this year...
...Analysts of higher education talk of a "looming crisis" of cost and affordability, but this is often just another way of avoiding the more explicitly political issue of access to higher education and social mobility...
...According to the American Association of University Professors, parttimers now represent 43 percent of all faculty members in higher education...
...At all levels, public higher education is in a state of deep and protracted change...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
