The Repo-Man Comes to Campus

I finally caught the latest Frontline program, “College Inc,” on PBS late last night (no need to troll your local PBS station though–you can watch it online here).  It certainly makes for some interesting viewing.  Here’s the summary from Frontline:

Even in lean times, the $400 billion business of higher education is booming. Nowhere is this more true than in one of the fastest-growing — and most controversial — sectors of the industry: for-profit colleges and universities that cater to non-traditional students, often confer degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture billions of federal financial aid dollars.

In the meantime, have a look at this rather dispiriting article I found in Barron’s, “Leveraging Up to Learn” (below the fold).  Some of the links below are pdfs of charts/tables. The most important, in my view, is the one labeled “Giving It the Old College Try.”

Tough Shit Justice, or Changing the World

Marx’s famous pronunciation, 11th thesis on Feuerbach – Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern – [Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it] – makes me wonder (and always did) whether philosophers should be trying to change the world as philosophers or if they should abandon their futile efforts to explain the world (or leave it to scientists) and do something else (that else hopefully would be directed at changing the world).

Coercive Accountibility

I just got a hold of Gaye Tuchman’s Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University and came across this passage:

..the “audit society” enables “coercive accountability” carried out in the guise of transparency, trust and public service.  As an organizational order, the audit society is dedicated to encouraging organizations (including governments) and their members to measure their aspirations, fears, and accomplishments against the hopes, worries and activities of peers and competitors and to accept that those measurements have consequences.  It entails both forced and voluntary surveillance, as individuals and organizations audit themselves and subject themselves to audit by others.  Of course, to do so, they must make both their organizations and themselves audible.  That is, they must transform both their organizations and themselves into entities that can be defined, delineated and measured.  That transformation and coercive accountibility associated with both an audit society and its culture helps to constitute an accountability regime--a politics of surveillance, control and market management disguising itself as the value-neutral and scientific administration of individuals and organizations (12).

It’s like she’s been following me around at work.

Post-Academics

On Being Postacademic: Kenneth Mostern (excerpt h/t I Cite)

The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed. The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. ..

High Tuition? Subsidize with Pornography!

This made me chuckle:

To Grove City College, John Gechter was a bright young student majoring in molecular biology. But to his online audience, he was Vincent DeSalvo, a baby-faced rising star in the gay pornography industry. Both worlds unexpectedly crashed into each other two weeks ago after his online persona was discovered at GCC.

…

GCC officials have decided to indefinitely suspend Gechter for one year for his activities, pending his decision to appeal to the provost. Gechter began his career in gay pornography late in his sophomore year, two years ago. During that time, Gechter successfully kept Vincent DeSalvo a secret from his life at GCC. No one knew about his off-campus job, not even his roommate at the Colonial Apartment complex.  That ended the night of April 23 when the first e-mail revealing his online identity was sent out. By the next morning, at least two-thirds of the student population had received the e-mail. So did school administration.

Read the whole article here, but one has to wonder if he was involved with hetero porn instead of gay porn the college would have made such a stink.  Still though, a bit of an institutional intrusion upon the student for off campus er..activities.

So you want to be a Professor?

Somehow I missed it, but this is an interesting article from the WSJ, “So you Want to Be A Professor.”  Along with Mark Taylor’s pretentious Op-ed from the NY Times last week (for a spirited reaction see here), it kind of rubbed me the wrong way.  For instance:

On some recent doctoral program cuts at Emory and Columbia:

But graduates students also act as teaching assistants, doing a great deal of time-consuming classroom work (and grading) that professors themselves are thus not compelled to do. In all sorts of courses, especially in their freshman and sophomore years, undergraduates may find themselves being instructed more often by a 25-year-old doctoral candidate than by the university’s full-time faculty members, who, of course, already have their doctorates (and one or two books to their credit, too). It is an odd, upside-down arrangement, but it has an economic logic: By providing cheap labor, graduate students save college administrations millions of dollars each year in salary costs.

So why the cuts? Well, the calculations work out differently for different schools. For instance, universities in lower tiers might not have to do as much because they can get away with having a higher percentage of classes taught by graduate students. But some of the schools making doctoral cuts this year gave compassion as their reason. Catherine R. Stimson, the dean of Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, was quoted in Inside Higher Ed: Given the state of the academic job market, she asked, referring to would-be doctoral candidates: “Is it fair to bring them in?”

Future of the Book.

I’m not really buying it yet, all that talk of e-books and Kindle and stuff, but the author makes some interesting observations: 

Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned. As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.

If so, if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?

My usual concern with Kindle is, for example, that in order to read my multiple PDFs I will need to upload them to Amazon.com and then convert them – “for a small fee” – into Kindle format, which is not my thing (paying for stuff, you know, especially if you already own it). I think once there’s a cheap and unattached device out there, I would certainly consider buying it, although I doubt that it would replace the actual books. I think in the future, if you buy a new book, it should come with a small disk with a searchable PDF of the book which will eliminate the need for indexes (and graduate students everywhere will be doing something else for their professors). 

Anyone has a Kindle out there and wants to share the experience?

Toscano’s Politics of Abstraction.

Infinite Thought posts a talk by Alberto Toscano (with pictures that illuminate the inner secret meaning) here. I’d say there’s plenty in that talk that’s worth discussing. Just to give you an idea: 

This figure of philosophical anticipation, initially framed in terms of actuality striving toward thought, and later enveloped and surpassed in the knowledge of capitalism’s tendencies, has important consequences, I want to argue, for our very idea of communism. The specificity of communism stems from its intrinsic and specific temporality, from the fact that, while never simply non- or anti-philosophical, it is an idea that contains within it, inextricably, a tension towards realisation, transition, revolution. I now want to briefly draw the consequences of this argument in terms of four interlinked dimensions of the notion of communism which challenge the philosophical sufficiency or autonomy of the concept: equality, revolution, power, and knowledge. You will note that in some manner these are dimensions which philosophy sometimes defines by contrast with the vicissitudes of communist politics and its associated critique of political economy. Thus, economic equality is sometimes treated as the counterpart to equality as a philosophical principle or axiom; power, especially state power, is regarded as a dimension external to philosophical questioning about communism; knowledge is juxtaposed to truth and revolution is regarded as an at best enigmatic and at worst obsolete model of emancipatory change. 

My favorite part of the post is, however, this awesome photo (is that a Bentley or a Jaguar?):

Communism Conference: Ideas meet Reality?

Here’s an  interesting article about the Communism Conference in London this weekend from The Socialist Worker by Alex Callinicos, “Slavoj Zizek’s Ideas need to link with reality.”  I’ve pasted the full text below.  Callinicos raises some interesting questions about some contradictions revolving around the relationship between theory and practice and the 100 pound entrance fee, ahem.

Nearly a thousand people will be attending a conference this weekend on “The Idea of Communism” in central London.  In itself, this isn’t a big deal. Left wing conferences take place regularly in central London. The Socialist Workers Party’s annual Marxism event attracts several thousand participants every summer.

There are two things that are different about this particular conference. The first is that it isn’t being organised by a political organisation or journal, but by Birkbeck College’s Institute for the Humanities. Secondly, the conference is attracting an unusual amount of media attention. The Financial Times devoted a full page of its weekend edition to an interview with the director of the Institute for the Humanities, Slavoj Zizek, headlined “The modest Marxist”.

It is presumably Zizek, one of the most dazzling figures on the intellectual left, who has succeeded in attracting as speakers at the conference some of the best known continental philosophers – notably Alain Badiou, Toni Negri and Giorgio Agamben, along with, among others, Terry Eagleton and Peter Hallward. The emphasis indeed seems to be on philosophy. “From Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher,” the conference publicity declares.

The Secret lives of Philosophy Profs…

An amusing article from The Philosophers Magazine, not having to do with those sexy shiny new toilets (unfortunately), but amusing nonetheless. Really, it’s a window into my ego driven, out of control RegisPhilbin-like-id, completely narcissistic soul:

Having read the repudiations of wealth in Plato, the Epicureans, and Augustine; having read about moderation and restraint in Cicero, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein; and having accepted the low pay rates of the academy, philosophers ought to be, I concluded, the sort of people whose contempt for money and status would be matched only by the purity and passion of their engagement with reasoning, theorising, contemplation, and speculation. Alas.

Instead, I’ve found that the secret lives of philosophers are more often than not pre-occupied with status and acquisition. What one might call “positioning” conversations that, back in the day, had been largely confined to the dolorous waiting area for job candidates at American Philosophical Association meetings, now seem commonplace at conferences, receptions, lectures, and wherever philosophers gather. Like debutantes at the ball, philosophers now often spend much of their time dropping names, gossiping, promoting their connections, hawking their publications, passing out business cards and polishing their self-promotional web sites. Having rarely heard the phrase “Research Institution” during the first decade or so of my life in the profession, and then among only administrators, I now encounter it at nearly every professional meeting I attend. It seems to trip off the tongues of younger faculty, in particular, as easily as remarks about the football standings.