President Samuel L. Stanley’s strategic initiative, Project 50 Forward, aims to position Stony Brook University as one of the top 20 public research universities in the country. The steering committee for this project will imminently implement shared service centers, meaning that the administrative staff will be removed from their home departments and localized into a general pool that services the building instead of its students. Not only do the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that this corporate strategy rarely, if ever, saves as much money as it costs to implement, but such a process is plagued with transitional woes that put a stop to efficient work. Ultimately, shared service centers result in a loss of services to the students.

In a year where student tuition and fees are rising and will continue to rise over the next academic year, Stony Brook University is proposing a plan that will drastically alter the support, services and specialized advising available to its students. Please sign the following petition and help stop the shared services centers at Stony Brook University.

So I signed a petition to Samuel Stanley, President, Axel Drees, Acting Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Nancy Squires, Interim Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and SBU Against Shared Service Centers, Organizer, which says:

“Despite the significant enrollment, fee and tuition income that the University will realize in the coming academic years, the Steering Committee for President Stanley’s Project 50 Forward initiative has proposed a dramatic change that is likely to mire administrative productivity at its most sensitive and valuable point: department-level student services. Shared Service Centers is a corporate process much better known for its failures than its successes, and often costs more to implement than what is saved (see links below). Under this plan, pushed by the corporate business consulting firm Bain & Company – who do not list education among their areas of expertise – departments will no longer have specialized administrators that can advise its students in these areas. Instead, buildings will have a single service center to handle general administrative issues for all departments.
This pooling will result in a loss of specialized student support. The people who are largely responsible for fostering a sense of belonging amongst the students of each department, who are sources of essential institutional memory, that help students navigate varying departmental policies, who offer physical gathering spaces that have been the locus of academic and cultural development will be taken out of their context of expertise. These, and many other services that do not fit into the math of abstract business models developed by Bain’s staff members, who have a limited experience with academic life, will be lost.
As summer wraps up, students will once again be able to seek advice and feedback from their only remaining mentors: faculty. That is, if they can manage to coordinate their schedules with the posted office hours of the faculty, and as long as they do not have a question about the requirements of their major or questions about enrollment procedures. Right now, if students, graduate or undergraduate, need expert support about their major, their enrollment, their eligibility for courses, course offerings, graduation, or even generalized resources, they refer to the administrative staff who offer a personal touch and specific departmental expertise. With these experts removed from their home departments and dispersed into a general pool, students will no longer have access to specialized administrators that can advise them in these areas. Their academic ‘home’ will no longer exist. Rather, buildings will have a localized service center that handles general administrative issues for all departments. In this difficult economic environment, with many students facing tuition increases measuring in the thousands of dollars for the coming years, support is being reduced.
Parents are being asked to pay more for worse service in their children’s education. Our academic leadership is being misinformed about the benefits of this cookie-cutter corporate approach.
Please sign this petition and let President Stanley, Provost Squires and Dean Drees know that this shared services model is in direct opposition to the second critical mission of Project 50 Forward, ‘Academic Greatness.’ Academic greatness cannot be achieved by students who do not feel connected to their department, who receive sub-optimal, anonymous academic advising, and who cannot rely on consistent support from expert department administrative staff.”

Morale Dips, Student Anger Mounts:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/17/california2
“Shared Services and Unmitigated Disaster”:
http://www.roblucas.com.au/news/default.asp?action=article&ID=525
“Shared services are progressing across government but reported savings to date are relatively small….”:
http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0708/improving_corporate_functions.aspx?alreadysearchfor=yes
“MPs condemn DfT shared-services failure”
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/systems-management/2008/12/16/mps-condemn-dft-shared-services-failure-39578367/
Bain and Company Corporate web site.
http://www.bain.com/

Will you sign the petition too? Click here to add your name:

http://signon.org/sign/put-students-first-stop?source=s.fwd&r_by=525380

Thanks!

Many countries are holding demonstrations in support for Chilean students; NYC should not be missing!

Please bring banners, flags, signs, and the like, and invite your friends and colleagues to Times Square this MONDAY, August 8, from 7.30 pm onwards.

Given the new budget cuts in the U.S., students here in NYC should be supporting this cause. If you want to help organizing, please follow this link.

TIME: MONDAY, AUGUST 8 – 7.30 pm-9.00 pm

LOCATION: TIMES SQUARE, NYC (BROADWAY & W 43rd St.)

NOTE: There is a slight chance that the time and place be moved; if that is the case, the organizers will notify you through Facebook.

Yesterday (June 7) Oxford became the first ever English University to pass a motion of no confidence in a Government Minister. Congregation, the University’s Governing Body, passed the resolution of no confidence in the policies of the minister for higher education by 283 votes to 5.

Yesterday’s meeting sent a resounding message that Oxford academics, like the majority of students, are hugely concerned by the direction of higher education policy in this country. They do not believe that trebling fees will improve social mobility. They do not believe that the Government has a clearly thought-out plan for reform. They do not believe that the language of the market has any place in a University.

The debate on the future of higher education has only just begun, and yesterday was a clear sign that Oxford will be at the forefront of that debate. OUSU has teamed up with a number of academics to launch a project aimed at helping to articulate how we understand the student-teacher relationship in the 21st century. Look out for more details soon, and make sure Oxford students have their say on the future of Universities in this country.

Best wishes,

David Barclay
President
Oxford University Student Union www.twitter.com/DTBarclay

Academics at Oxford University today passed a vote of no confidence in Universities Minister David Willetts.

Almost 300 dons backed the motion following a debate in which the Coalition Government’s reforms were derided as “reckless, incoherent and incompetent”.

There were cheers inside the University’s Sheldonian Theatre as the results were announced, with 283 in favour and five against.

The motion calls on Oxford’s council to “communicate to government that Oxford University has no confidence in the policies of the minister for higher education.”

It is the first time a vote of no confidence in a minister has been passed by an English university, and follows a no-confidence vote taken recently by the Royal College of Nursing in Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s management of NHS reforms.

Proposing today’s motion, Professor Robert Gildea said: “We are under attack from government policies that are reckless, incoherent and incompetent.”

He warned that moves to introduce “off quota” places, outside the current cap, and announcements like that by a group of academics led by A C Grayling to set up a new private humanities university, risk introducing a “two track” admissions system.

“It’s red carpet entry for the rich and even more competition for everyone else.”

He told Congregation that some academics may have concerns about Mr Willetts being named in the resolution.

But he added: “This minister has been central to promoting these policies, outspoken in defending them and responsible for delivering them.

“That’s why, in this unprecedented way, we are calling him to account.”

Professor Margaret MacMillan, warden of St Antony’s College accused the Government of “making policies on the fly, trying something and when that doesn’t work, trying something else.”

And she raised concerns that the university will be forced to bring in more higher-paying foreign students, saying she doesn’t want Oxford to “end up as a finishing school for rich students from around the world.”

“We want the best students, not just the most affluent,” she added.

David Barclay, president of Oxford University’s Student Union (OUSU) told dons: “I speak for a generation of humanities students who may never get to use the new facilities they desperately need because the capital fund has dried up, all the public funding for building has been slashed and our fundraising is focused on bursaries and fee waivers.

“I speak for a generation of brilliant minds who may never become graduate students or academics because the mountain of debt required to get through undergraduate life creates an impossible pressure to start paying it off.

“I speak for a generation of disadvantaged students who may never even come to Oxford, deterred by the extraordinary leap in fee level and by the parents for whom £27,000 is more than they earn in a year.

“I speak for all these people and today I need you to speak for them too.

“Because today you have a platform to pass judgment publicly on the damage that is being done to higher education across the country.”

Want to know how to solve the problem of ever-increasing college costs? A lot of people have answers. One of the Very Serious People who can give you one is the economist Richard Vedder, professor at Ohio University, Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. In a recently issued report Vedder and two researchers use data provided by the University of Texas system, which includes nine universities, to argue that the state “could move towards making college more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching”—and, more remarkably still, do so “without importantly reducing outside research funding or productivity.”

Vedder’s report is being publicized by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a “non-profit, non-partisan research institute” that seeks “to promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation,” where the ubiquitous Vedder is a Senior Research Fellow. The Foundation has become known for the acerbic (and sometimes ill-informed) critiques of higher education in Texas put forth by one of its directors, Jeff Sandefer. But Vedder’s report is of more than local interest—as is clear from the discussions it has provoked across the blogosphere and beyond.

From coast to coast, great public universities are under attack as expensive luxuries that the nation can no longer afford to support. Governors and state legislators are withdrawing state funds from universities that they continue to regulate. Critics outside and inside the academy denounce professors for doing too much research, teaching too few students, receiving too much pay and offering unwelcome expertise on ideas ranging from climate change to the causes of the Civil War. Meanwhile tuition and other costs continue to rise, and promising students from poor families are reluctant to commit themselves to expensive institutions. In this climate of crisis, ideologues with simple, radical ideas about how to lower costs will attract an audience eager for a solution, especially one that does not include the words “taxes” or “public responsibility.”

Using data on the University of Texas at Austin from a spreadsheet that gives information on salaries and teaching responsibilities for the entire system, Vedder and his colleagues arrived at some striking conclusions. It turns out that just 20 percent of the faculty whose work they analyzed—some 840 out of 4,200—account for nearly 60 percent of the total number of “student credit hours” taught at the university. Student credit hours are calculated as the number of credits awarded for a course multiplied by the number of enrolled students; on average, each of these remarkably productive faculty members teaches 896 student credit hours and 318 students each year. Yet these engaged and effective teachers are also effective researchers—as Vedder argues by pointing out that they bring in 18 percent of the university’s outside income from government and foundation grants. By contrast, the bottom 20 percent carry only 5 percent of student credit hours and attract only 13 percent of the research grant funds.

To Vedder, these data immediately suggest a remedy for rising college costs: “If all faculty were as productive as the top 20 percent of faculty at teaching (that is, each faculty member taught, on average, 896 student credit hours), then the University would require a faculty only 34 percent its present size. This could potentially save up to $323 million in total loaded costs for faculty.” Even more modest changes, though, could result in substantial savings. If the whole faculty became 25 percent as productive as the top quintile, “the University could save roughly $77 million by consolidating its total faculty by releasing 852 faculty.” The remaining staff could handle all of the necessary teaching and continue to do research. Joy in the morning: “moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching” will save us by making mass layoffs possible.

At first sight, the analysis seems to hold water. But as soon as you begin to pull on the strands, it turns out to be fragile gossamer and falls apart. At the center stands an untenable assumption: faculty productivity can be measured by the number of students in the seats and by the amount of outside research funds generated. If this notion weren’t so dangerous it would be merely absurd. Is the university’s “product” the hours its students spend in class or the quantity and quality of student learning? Surely it is the latter. Big lectures can be amazingly effective tools for introducing material and spreading enthusiasm for a subject—but they can also be staggeringly soporific. Students often learn more in small classes, whether a group of forty all known to the instructor, or an intensive seminar of ten or fifteen.

It’s not just tweedy fuddy-duddies who believe that small classes are vital to the mission of the American university. Another recent study questions how much students are learning in American higher education. A substantial proportion of students—especially those in the large majors, such as business, education, and communication—show no measurable improvement in thinking or writing in their first two years of college. But those who study core liberal arts subjects with teachers whom they get to know—as students do in small liberal arts colleges, the bastions of small classes and faculty who would rank low on Professor Vedder’s productivity scale—actually do learn. Historically, the University of Texas has been notable for its ability to create rich liberal arts environments in the midst of a great public university. Its internationally renowned Classics program depends on relatively small upper level courses to maintain its quality, in part because of the language requirements for such instruction. Surely Professor Vedder values the teaching of the bedrock of Western Civilization, even if it is “inefficient.”

The university’s Arabic Flagship Program, one of five in the country designed “to create the next generation of global professionals,” offers “[s]tudent-centered classes, a high teacher-to-student ratio, and more contact hours than most other programs”—exactly what students need to become proficient in a foreign language and culture—and exactly the sort of teaching that would register as unproductive by Vedder’s measures. A measure of productivity that exalts class size over all other factors may work for some fields (who is teaching Macroeconomics this year?), but it’s useless for assessing the productivity of faculty in an intensive teaching program.

Equally questionable is the facile assumption—perhaps natural to an economist accustomed to the clarity of monetary calculations—that outside grants adequately measure research achievement. Few historians or other humanists—even the most productive scholars—bring their universities large sums of research money. Grants in these fields are usually made to individuals rather than to the institution, and they do not appear on spreadsheets. Prizes, given for completed work, often tell the observer far more about research quality than grants—given for work not yet done—can possibly do. But they don’t show up on spreadsheets either. And if they did, few of them would impress Professor Vedder. Scholarly societies award the princely sum of $1,000 to the best book in a given field. Even a Guggenheim Fellowship or a Pulitzer would be budget dust on a balance sheet in the sciences.

Even if the data Vedder et al. use are accurate—and some have found multiple flaws in them—they and the analysis they sustain are far too crude to tell us what happens in teaching at a single great university, or to serve as the basis for major decisions about educational policy. Everything about the university, from teaching loads to libraries, should be examined. Many practices should probably change. But three principles should stand: the quality of research is measured by the result, not by the amount of money spent to achieve it; what students learn is more important than the efficiency of the delivery of information; and one size will never, never fit all.

Continuing with a tradition of direct action even in the face of grave repression, the 70,000+ educators and other members of the Sección 22 teachers’ movement in Oaxaca, Mexico, met as an assembly and voted to strike on Saturday, May 21. On Monday, following marches that converged from 4 locations, the educational workers occupied the Zocalo (main square) of the state capital and have established rotating blockades at several government buildings and corporate businesses.

The members of the Seccion 22 will continue with the blockades and occupations until they are satisfied by the response of the government to their demands. These demands include a rejection of a US-style educational law (the Alliance for the Quality of Education, or the ACE) that would further entrench standardized tests and curriculum and introduce yearly contracts instead of tenure. The Oaxacan educational workers (which include psychologists, janitors, security guards, administrators, among others) are the last to maintain resistance to this law on a national level. The teachers also demand the return of their comrade, Carlos René Roman Salazar, a teacher who has gone missing since mid-April. They also want more funds for technology, an expanded free meal program for students in schools and salary increases.

The mainstream press in Oaxaca, dominated by the interests of the elites, focus on the salary demands of the educational workers and claim that strikes and occupations are antiquated tactics unbefitting of professional state employees. On the contrary, the democratic direct actions of the Seccion 22 are the reason why the state and its allies fear their power and go to such great lengths to discredit their movement. It is also why teachers in Oaxaca have a much greater voice in how schools are run than educational workers in other states.

The newspapers that represent the voice of the rich in Oaxaca also predict economic turmoil due to a disruption in the flow of tourism and commerce that is caused by the blockades. The members of the Seccion 22 respond that their occupation of the Zocalo and the blocks that surround it actually boost the economy by supporting an influx of street vendors and other members of the informal sector.

It is a sight to behold. Thousands of educational workers camped out under tarps and in tents in places that previously were tidy, docile public spaces. Banners that announce their region and demands and women cooking food on comals. It is a maze of bodies and plastic and one has to duck to not crash into the ropes that hold up the shelters.

Oaxaca now has a new governor, Gabino Cue, that for the first time in 80 years of “democracy” is not a member of the PRI political party. The members of the Seccion 22 hope that this means that their strike will be resolved within a week instead of the 6 months of work stoppage and numerous murders and acts of repression that led to the barricades and “Oaxaca Commune” of 2006. In the days that come, we will see just how willing the federal and state governments are to acquiesce to the demands for social justice and allow the educational workers to return to their schools and to their commitment to the students, families and communities.

At the heart of the Browne Report and the government’s higher education policy is a simple notion allegedly grounded in economics: that the introduction of market forces into the higher education sector will simultaneously drive up standards and drive down prices. The confidence displayed by ministers in predicting these effects would be more reassuring if it were not at odds with the evidence that precisely the opposite is happening. The list of universities committed to charging something near the £9000 upper limit of fees is steadily lengthening, contrary to what Vince Cable has repeatedly told them is in their rational economic interest. And with regard to standards, the American company that owns BPP University College – which David Willetts granted university status only last year – recently lost its appeal in the US Supreme Court after being found guilty of defrauding its shareholders and is under investigation by the US Higher Learning Commission for deceiving students about the career value of its degrees. Since one of the justifications for funding university teaching primarily through tuition fees was to open up the English university sector to the beneficial influence of private providers, this news throws further doubt on the wisdom of government policy.

Whenever university standards are talked about, the basis for comparison is taken to be the annual THE-QS World University Rankings.[*] Every year since 2004, these tables have appeared under some variation of the headline ‘US Universities Dominate World Rankings.’ And every year the picture has been more or less the same: on average, US universities have occupied 13 of the top 20 positions, while British universities have occupied four. US universities outnumber their UK rivals further down the league table too, and no other country remotely challenges America’s effortless supremacy.

It isn’t difficult to see how these tables have helped push government policy towards its current infatuation with markets. All but one of the 13 American universities which have routinely topped the tables are private institutions, and those inclined to neoliberal ways of thinking are unlikely to see this as a coincidence. If the global supremacy of US private universities is the product of their exposure to competitive markets, then the sooner such markets are introduced into UK, the sooner we can begin to watch their magic ‘driving up standards’. The government’s zeal to marketise UK higher education, to emulate American universities and to invite US corporations to set up private universities in Britain are all of a piece. Because the dominance by US universities of the upper end of these tables is thought to be so absolute, their role in informing the political consensus underlying government policy is rarely discussed.

“Wherever a small and strictly limited supply of a highly desirable commodity – such as places at Harvard – is introduced into a genuinely open market, the wealthiest cohort in society will drive its price up to levels only they can afford”

Yet all those journalists and politicians who have leaped so nimbly from league tables to university policy have apparently overlooked the fact that the US is larger than the UK: its population of 311 million is five times the UK population of 62 million. Already, the American three-to-one lead in the World University Rankings looks far less impressive. In fact, over the past seven years, the UK has had more top 20 universities per head of population (one per 15.5 million) than the US (one per 23.9 million). And since the UK institutions in the top 20 are on average slightly larger (20,500 students) than the US ones (17,300 students), almost twice the proportion of the UK population has been studying at top 20 universities (1 in 756, compared with 1 in 1383). In economic terms, the two countries differ by an even larger margin: US GDP (at $14.658 trillion) is 6.5 times larger than UK GDP (at $2.247 trillion). For the past seven years, the UK has been maintaining fully twice as many top 20 universities as the US for each unit of financial resource.

No less important, Americans spend a far higher proportion of their national wealth on higher education than the British. According to the OECD, the UK spends 1.3 per cent of GDP on tertiary education, precisely the EU average. The US, on the other hand, spends 3.1 per cent, far more than any other country in the world. So America not only has 6.5 times the UK’s financial resources, it also spends 2.4 times as much of those resources on tertiary education. That adds up to more than 15 times as much investment in higher education in the US than in the UK. And yet, according to these world rankings, that 15-fold investment nets barely a three-fold return in educational excellence. The UK has somehow managed to maintain top-ranked universities for only about a fifth of the US price.

The top ten or 20 places typically grab all the attention. What happens when we consider all 200? No summary of the mean rankings of the top 200 universities over the past seven years is available, but we can examine the data in the THE rankings for 2010-11. In the top 50 places, US outnumber UK universities by five to one. In the second tier (places 51-100), American universities begin to lose their edge, and the proportion drops to three to one. In the bottom half of the table (places 101-200), the number of places held by both countries is much reduced, as universities from other countries crowd onto the table, but the significant point is that here the US and UK universities are virtually at level pegging. UK universities are distributed fairly uniformly throughout the table, which suggests that there is a smooth and gradual transition from the top tier of universities to the next level down, and so on. The US university system, by contrast, appears to concentrate a hugely disproportionate share of resources in a small group of very wealthy and exclusive private institutions.

If anyone thinks the lower reaches of the table are inconsequential because only the top 100 universities in the world really matter, they should think again. According to Unesco, there are 5758 recognised higher education institutions in the US, about 1600 of which grant four-year degrees. So the 72 US universities in the top 200 represent fewer than 5 per cent of those offering four-year degrees. The US university system overall appears to offer poor value for money: none of the funding, public or private, pouring into 95 per cent of the higher education institutions in America makes any impact at all on the world university rankings. By comparison, the 29 UK universities in the top 200 represent nearly a fifth of the 165 listed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. So British universities appear, on average, to be almost four times better at breaking into the global top 200 than their American counterparts.

An even less flattering picture emerges if a few necessary corrections are factored into the data. If we first adjust the figures by head of population, the UK is a match for the best of the US from the start: according to the most recent data, the two countries have virtually the same number of top 50 universities per capita. But as we move from the top 50 to the bottom 50, the UK opens up a commanding lead: there are four times as many universities per capita in the bottom half of the table (101-200) in the UK as in the US. If we further adjust for the ratio of GDP between the two countries (6.5 to 1), the data show that the UK makes better use of its smaller per capita resources in every tier of the rankings. And if we factor in that the US invests more than twice as much of its GDP in higher education as the UK, even in the top tier, where the strength of the American system is concentrated, UK investment in higher education seems to be yielding almost three times the return. In the bottom half of the table, British universities appear to be offering a staggering 12 times better value for money.

“Market forces are the reason American private universities have become so expensive, but why does all the extra money pouring into US universities generate such a poor return in the rankings? Evidently, a large fraction of this funding is being invested in something other than academic excellence”

The data which appear, at first glance, to demonstrate the great strength of the US university system are revealed, on even the most rudimentary analysis, to demonstrate nothing of the kind. Measure for measure, US universities are manifestly not the ‘best of the best’. If value for money is the most important consideration, especially in an age of austerity, the American model might well be the last one that Britain should be emulating.

This analysis has serious implications for government policy. There is no evidence here that private sector competition drives up academic standards, but there is clear evidence that market competition drives up prices, since academic excellence apparently costs much more in the US than the UK. Why is this? It isn’t in fact difficult to see why the introduction of market pricing into a small cohort of elite universities will drive prices up, not down. Wherever a small and strictly limited supply of a highly desirable commodity – such as places at Harvard – is introduced into a genuinely open market, the wealthiest cohort in society will drive its price up to levels only they can afford. This is essentially what has been happening at the upper levels of the US university league since the income gap began to open up in the 1980s. For several decades, tuition fees have been rising at double, triple and even quadruple the rate of cost-of-living inflation, first at the most exclusive universities, and then throughout the private sector, so that there are now more than a hundred private colleges and universities in the US charging students at least $50,000 annually for fees, room and board.

One might think this a peculiarly American phenomenon – an offshoot, perhaps, of some particularly ‘advanced’ form of consumer culture – but in fact the logic at work becomes even clearer in the context of the smaller education market in England. The introduction of competition drives down prices only in markets for commodities that can be readily produced. If a firm is producing things inefficiently, or skimming off too much profit, it can be undercut by more efficient methods of production or leaner business models. But there are some things which cannot be readily produced, and ancient universities are an excellent example. Oxford and Cambridge have a 600-year head start on their English rivals. Many of the advantages they enjoy are the product of their long histories: their architectural settings, their libraries and archives; their unique systems of tutorial teaching, collegiate organisation and self-government; and the academic prestige accumulated by two dozen generations of scholars, philosophers, scientists, poets and prime ministers. Their competitors cannot produce these things at any price, much less one that undercuts theirs. And because the ‘student experience’ they offer is one that many find uniquely attractive, they could, if freed from the constraints of government legislation, charge as high a price for this experience as the market would bear, without the risk of being undercut by anyone but each other.

So, imagine what would happen in England if the fee cap were removed, a real market introduced, and universities allowed to pursue their own economic interests without regard for anything else – i.e. act even more ‘rationally’ than Vince Cable thinks they should. Oxford and Cambridge would jack up their tuition fees dramatically, first of all to recoup the roughly £8000 of their own resources they currently invest in educating each student every year on top of what they receive through fees, government grants and research income. Rich parents would relish the opportunity to drive fees even higher, beyond the reach of less wealthy parents of more able children. The hyperinflation in Oxbridge fees would provide headroom for every other university in England to start increasing its fees; some, with lucrative professional degrees to offer, would raise them to levels above those of an Oxbridge arts degree. Further down the English academic league table, the rate of fee inflation would gradually fall until, somewhere near the bottom, universities would be competing on price within the £6000-£9000 band, as ministers intended all along.

Market forces are the reason American private universities have become so expensive, but why does all the extra money pouring into US universities generate such a poor return in the rankings? Evidently, a large fraction of this funding is being invested in something other than academic excellence. This haemorrhage of funds has not gone unnoticed by American university leaders, who have traced the source of the leak to another aspect of market-driven academic culture which the government plans to start importing from America: the ‘student experience’.

Jonathan Cole, former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia, wrote in the Huffington Post last year that in addition to fee inflation, a major contributor to the increased cost of higher education in America stems from the

perverse assumption that students are ‘customers’, that the customer is always right, and what he or she demands must be purchased. Money is well-spent on psychological counselling, but the number of offices that focus on student activities, athletics and athletic facilities, summer job placement and outsourced dining services, to say nothing of the dormitory rooms and suites that only the Four Seasons can match, leads to an expansion of administrators and increased cost of administration.

If Cole is correct, then the marketisation of the higher education sector stimulates not one but two separate developments which run directly counter to government expectations. On the one hand, genuine market competition between elite universities drives up average tuition fees across the sector. On the other, the marketing of the ‘student experience’ places an ever increasing portion of university budgets in the hands of student ‘customers’. The first of these mechanisms drives up price, while the second drives down academic value for money, since the inflated fees are squandered on luxuries. To judge from the American experience, comfortable accommodation, a rich programme of social events and state of the art athletic facilities are what most 18-year-olds want when they choose their ‘student experience’; and when student choice becomes the engine for driving up standards, these are the standards that are going to be driven up.

What’s worse is that British government ministers, on visiting a beautifully manicured US campus for the first time, respond in the same way as American teenagers. Familiar as they are with the shoddy physical condition of even the best English universities, they cannot help but be impressed by the quality of the facilities offered by rich American institutions. What they forget is that the dilapidated state of so many English university buildings is the product, not of a lack of academic competitiveness, but of deliberate government policy these last 20 years. By holding university income firmly down, raising student numbers and prioritising research through the RAE, they have attempted to push up academic performance at the expense of teaching and the maintenance of existing buildings, not to mention the construction of new ones.

“Market competition in the United States has driven up tuition fees in the private universities and thereby sucked out the resources needed to sustain good public universities, while diverting a hugely wasteful share of these resources from academic priorities to improving the ‘student experience’ and debasing academic credentials through market-driven grade inflation”

Might markets have the beneficial side effect of driving up academic standards? Much depends on the measure you use; but the academic standard that markets are most likely to drive up is the one that matters most to high-fee-paying students: marks. Way back when, the average mark in the US was supposed to be a C. Nowadays, the more expensive the university, the higher the average mark, with the average in private universities now an A-minus. Why is grade inflation so closely correlated with fee inflation? The reason can easily be guessed. If you’ve attended one of America’s hundred costliest colleges or universities and paid upwards of $200,000 for a four-year degree, then it had better be a good one. Ignore this demand and an institution’s levels of ‘student satisfaction’ will plummet, as will the number of wealthy people willing to invest in its degrees. Fortunately, these private universities are not required to employ external examiners to even up standards across the system, so there is nothing to prevent them meeting the student-led demand for higher and higher grades. Thus the net effect of introducing market forces driven by student demand is, yet again, precisely the opposite of what ministers intend: the value of academic credentials is debased across the system.

But might free-market competition drive up levels of actual academic achievement as well as grades? Not according to the World University Rankings. The only place in the world where private universities compete with one another and with a far larger group of public universities is the United States, and the US data clearly indicate that this competition drives the quality of public universities down, not up. Consider the top 20 institutions in the aggregated THE-QS rankings for the past seven years. Moving down the table, past all those famous Ivy League names, one finally comes to a solitary American public university, the University of Michigan, in 20th place, just below the best public universities in Canada (joint 17th) and Switzerland (19th), and below the Australian National University in Canberra (14th). Canada’s population and economy are about a tenth the size of its neighbour’s, so the data suggest that the Canadian public university sector narrowly outperforms the American on a tenth of the assets. Switzerland manages to pip the US despite having a GDP ¹/₃₀th and a population ¹/₄₀th the size. And the Australians somehow managed to beat the American public university sector in this seven-year period with only ¹/₁₄th the people and ¹/₁₂th the money. As for the UK, with only a single small private university until recently, it contributes all four of the best public universities: their mean rank positions are second, joint third, seventh and 12th. If we factor back in the five-fold difference in population, UK citizens have 20 times more opportunity to study at first-class public universities than their American cousins.

Another interesting pattern emerges if we examine the geographical distribution across the United States of the top 100 universities in the THE rankings for 2010-11. The wealthiest private universities at the top of the league table – including the whole of the Ivy League – are concentrated on the northeastern seaboard of the United States, from Massachusetts in the north to North Carolina in the south. If proximity to the energising influence of private universities drives up standards, as Willetts seemed to imply, we would expect to find the great public universities clustered in this same area. But the opposite is the case: the more distance between them and the rich private universities, it seems, the higher their level of achievement. Overwhelmingly, the best-represented state university system is California’s, with two universities in the top ten and a total of nine in the top 100. This seems impressive, but we should bear in mind that California’s GDP is almost as large as that of the UK, which boasts 14 public universities in the top 100. A striking contrast is provided by New York, California’s economic and intellectual counterweight. One might imagine it would benefit from market competition with Columbia, Cornell, NYU and the Ivy League institutions to its north and south, yet although New York State’s economy is fully half the size of the UK’s, its top-ranked public university – the State University of New York at Stony Brook – slots in at a humble 78 in the global rankings. Of the 14 other US public universities in the top 100, ten are located in southern, midwestern and western states that don’t have large private universities: Michigan (joint 15th), Washington (23rd), Georgia Tech (27th), Wisconsin-Madison (joint 43rd), Minnesota (52nd), Ohio State (66th), Colorado-Boulder (67th), Virginia (72nd), Utah (joint 83rd) and Arizona (joint 95th).

Thus, once again, the empirical data directly contradict current government assumptions. The great private universities in the US do not provide the competition needed to energise lethargic public institutions. Instead, they hoover up a hugely disproportionate share of the resources in the system, thereby impoverishing their neighbours. They have the money to build the best labs, stock the best libraries and buy up the most high-profile professors. Their facilities attract the best and the wealthiest students, cornering the market in social as well as intellectual prestige. They drain the area around them of all the resources needed to sustain good public universities. Most of the public universities that break into the top 100 operate as far away from the Ivy League as America’s vast landmass allows. Outside the top 100, American performance falls sharply to a low level.

The natural interpretation of the World University Rankings flies in the face of the key assumption underpinning current British government policy. Market competition in the United States has driven up tuition fees in the private universities and thereby sucked out the resources needed to sustain good public universities, while diverting a hugely wasteful share of these resources from academic priorities to improving the ‘student experience’ and debasing academic credentials through market-driven grade inflation. The partially privatised university system in the United States is not ‘the best of the best’. In terms of value for money, the British system is far better, and probably the best in the world. Willetts should follow the example of the health secretary, take advantage of a ‘natural break in the legislative process’, and go back to the drawing board.

_______

[*] From 2004 to 2009, the Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds jointly produced the THE-QS World University Rankings. In 2010, the THE adopted a new methodology and published its rankings separately. My data for 2004-10 is taken from the aggregated THE-QS rankings for 2004-2009 and the QS rankings for 2010, which were all compiled according to the same methodology. My data for 2010-11 is based on the THE World University Rankings.

I was a presenter during the Defining the Future of Public Higher Education Conference. I want to again thank the kinds folks that invited me to participate and the organizers.

I just watched Ralph Nader’s presentation. I don’t think he and Rachel Tillman are saying different things. I think he is laying out some of specific tenets of her broader call.

From his speech at Stony Brook I made note of the educational solutions Nader put forth as potential new models of education:

A focus on citizenship skills/practical citizen experience

A focus on ethics

These seemed to be the two overarching themes of where education may play a role in change for a host of other issues from student debt to health care to contracts, etc. Nader cites these two focuses as the pillars for education in a healthy democracy.

Nader also advised people (by which he, in this speech, means “Americans”), to get involved civically, and he listed the places where they can do that. These places ran from neighborhood and community to region to state to nation to world.

Here is where my thinking has, over the last two years, begun to change radically (for me), with respect to place, and, I will say a few reasons why I think what I have come up with is important.

My civic-mindedness led me to a mostly (20-year at this point) career in education and social issues. I have worked at most of the levels that Nader names: locally, nationally, and even internationally. However, I want to put forth a caveat on my “local” work. Though at one time I worked in NYC, Los Angeles, and abroad, I did not commit long-term to those communities.

My sense of self as an American and even my privilege as an American means that I am mobile. If I don’t like the situation where I am and I have the cash or contacts to go somewhere else, I can. This is a strength of being in the US—if I find the small town where I am from intolerant or I can’t find work where I am—I can leave. I am not tied to the land or to a landlord. I can even move to another country if I have the resources to.

This is in direct contrast to students or people protesting or organizing in many other countries. Wherever they are is where they are. Leaving is not easy, and if they could, where would they go? Furthermore, there may be no cultural incentive to go. Family is not just their nuclear unit, but their extended family, or maybe even their town.

Many students in higher education in other countries attend institutions of higher education in their own communities. In the US, this is often not the case. It is especially not the case for many working class students, because often no colleges or universities are located in their communities. Thus, students from out-of-town may work for gains for students on campus, and they may, for a while, go out into the “local” community to work while they are in college. However, four years later, often students are gone not only from the university, but also from the community that surrounds the university.

Further, being mobile is an accepted facet of life for many Americans once they get into the larger world of work. We go where we find a job, and our “community” and our identity is tied in with that job, or with our nuclear family, because, really, we are not committed long-term to the place where we are; economics may encourage us to move. Our job may re-locate us, or, our place of business may leave the US entirely, leaving us to find work outside of our community.

I came to Stony Brook as a Ph.D. student last August to begin to learn about the role of technology and education in communities in economic decline, like the urban Appalachian town I am originally from. However, in my time of reflection, I have learned that for me, the commitment I am looking to make is in the region with which I am most concerned.

This is not an easy decision. I am doing this at the end of 20+ years of living outside the region of my birth. Along the way, I could have also chosen to commit long-term to any of the other places I lived, but I didn’t.

The re-commitment to the region where I am from is also due to good fortune, in that I am able to pick up my graduate studies at Virginia Tech, and, through luck, my husband gets to re-start the land stewardship/farm project he began in North Carolina in the 1990s. Whereas his focus is on local food production and local manufacturing of products, mine is mostly on local education and technologies to strengthen democracy and self-determination in local communities.

Unlike previous decisions in our lives about place, this time my husband and I are talking about sticking with where we are moving for the long-term, for the long haul. Here are some reasons for this, for us:

•            Community is the #1 factor in democratic movements. Last fall I spent a lot of time reading through the academic literature on what makes people decide to participate in civic life and in protests. I looked at MMI (mobile phone, mobile web, and internet) and its role in protests in S. Korea, Ukraine, and even in Iran. It was not MMI that brought people to protest; it was the fact that the people coming to protest had been encouraged to do so by a friend or a family member. MMI only facilitated easier and faster communication among close, long-term community members. Ralph Nader in his speech mentioned the protestors in Greensboro, NC at the lunch counter. Malcolm Gladwell did a great article on them and on that in the New Yorker (last fall) that focused on the necessity of the close relationship those young men had. They were close friends. They had built trust. They had common roots before they had an extraordinary place in history.

•            Rootlessness breeds disconnectedness from people and places. If I make no long-term stake in the people or place around me then the people around me have no reason to make a long-term stake in me. However, as human beings we are programmed for connection and affiliation. Thus, if I am rootless, I will be connected to the things that I can take with me that go with me anywhere: my phone, the web, my computer, chain stores, celebrities (pop culture), my car, my money, my brands, what’s on TV, etc. Maybe my nuclear family (children and spouse). If I am lucky then I might be connected to an ideology or to ideals. However, with time, I have learned that for me an ideology and ideals only get me so far without rooting them in real people in real time or in a real place. It seems only to make most sense for that to be a long-term commitment.

•            Stuff. We (my husband and I) are tired of not having more control over where the stuff in our lives comes from and how it was made.  In our society, it is difficult not to be a consumer, but we are trying to figure out how to personally be less destructive forces as consumers.  We are starting with our immediate selves and our immediate environments: our food, our clothes, our sources of energy, the soil from which life comes, how we treat each other and the people around us. Again, we are very fortunate to be able to move to a place that allows us more control over the stuff of our lives. We want to depend less on far-away sources or someone else’s specialized know-how for our stuff. At the same time, we want to share our resources and our know-how with our community, over its many generations (those current and those future).

Thus, there are many important reasons (community, close relationships, furthering democracy, creating connection with people and place rather than stuff or even noble ideas, our patterns as consumers of stuff) linked to why we feel the need to get really focused on the local in our lives.

So, to both Rachel’s and Ralph’s points, what would an educational philosophy be if it focused on the ethics and the civic participation that Nader pointed out, but if much of the focus really were local? Not that foreign aid and foreign policy are not important. I am also not advocating isolationism. However, what if the first main focus in education were the sustainability and resilience of the local (people and place)? How would that change education from K – higher ed? How would that change not only communities of learners, but also communities?

Some people are doing some of this through place-based learning. I thought their principles were worth a look with respect to this conversation. Their focus is on place-based learning as a means through which to teach stewardship of the environment, but I think that a lot of what is listed here also comes into play around civic participation, and, is worth considering or re-thinking with respect to higher ed.

Promise of Place

http://www.promiseofplace.org/what_is_pbe/principles_of_place_based_education

I look forward to more discussion, and, to being your colleague based out of the mid-South.

Crystal Allene Cook
Doctoral Student, Science and Technology Studies
crystalacook@vt.edu

What Do We Need to Know, discussion group:

http://www.facebook.com/ – !/home.php?sk=group_200116696678939&ap=1

http://www.whatdoweneedtoknow.com

www.weareallfarmers.org

News from the FMPR (Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico).
Help to break the media blockade by passing this on to your contacts.

***

Saludos maestros,

Sintonicen el programa Voces del Salón denunciando el esquema que pretenden realizar con nuestro Sistema de Retiro.

Proponen:
— Aumentar la aportación del empleado en el Sistema de Retiro
— NO aprobar préstamos personales
— Reducir el porciento de la pensión
— Aumentar la edad de jubilación del maestro

Entérate de ésta y otras situaciones a través del programa Voces del Salón:

Denuncias de la Escuela Libre de Música e intentos de destruir nuestro Sistema de Retiro de Maestros: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14478403

Situación en las escuelas del país: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14479605

Aprovechamos la oportunidad para invitarlos a unirse al grupo de Voces del Salón en facebook. A las 8:30 pm todos los miércoles se abrirá el chat y los miembros podrán discutir el programa del día. Pidan entrada al grupo en:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_204700496237529

¡Pásenlo!
¡Mantenernos unidos para luchar!

Uncle Ralph Can Still Light a Fire

By Najib Aminy (The Stony Brook Press, Vol. 32 | Issue 11 | April 1, 2011, pp. 6-7)

The three hours Ralph Nader spent one evening in mid-March at Stony Brook University encapsulated his life-long fight—his call for justice, one that continues to drive him at 77 years old.

Clutching the sides of the podium, Nader, a long-time consumer advocate and three-time (technically four) presidential candidate, gave an impassioned lecture targeted at invigorating the young audience that sat before him

He ran as a write-in candidate in 1996, placing more importance on representing the thousands displeased with America’s two-party system than winning the race.

Just days before Nader returned to the campus he last visited in 1974, the former Green Party frontrunner made headlines after calling for the impeachment of his 2008 opponent, President Barack Obama.

“He has done almost everything Bush has done that is unconstitutional, illegal under U.S. law and illegal under international law,” said Nader, referring to Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars and the practice of rendition, blocking lawsuits with a state secrets claim, and continuing illegal surveillance and indefinite detention. “If there was a big cry to impeach Bush and Cheney and Obama’s doing the same thing, why are we giving him a pass?”

His calls for Obama’s impeachment mimic those he made during the presidency of George W. Bush—the president he is often criticized for having inadvertently helped win.

Bush tallied 543 more votes than his Democratic opponent, then Vice President Al Gore, in Florida, which controversially etched “43” and “W” together in the history books. This came after weeks of legal dispute and a conservative Supreme Court ruling that favored Bush over the legality of recounting Florida’s votes. That’s history, but the claims that Nader stole votes from Gore and cost him the election are still very much alive.

“He’s the reason why George W. Bush became president and he takes no responsibility for that,” said Dr. Jeffrey Segal, Chair of the Stony Brook Political Science department. “And the amount of damage he has done to this country is inordinate.”

Many books have been written on Nader’s role in the 2000 election as a presidential candidate, as the emerging third-party, and as the spoiler of democratic goals. The more than 97,000 votes Nader received not only earned him third place in Florida, but awarded him the first place prize of being the political scapegoat for Gore’s loss.

“At least 40 percent of Nader voters in the key state of Florida would have voted for Bush, as opposed to Gore, had they turned out in a Nader-less election,” wrote professors Michael C. Herron and Jeffrey B. Lewis in their study, Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency? “The other 60 percent did indeed spoil the 2000 presidential election for Gore but only because of highly idiosyncratic circumstances, namely, Florida’s extreme closeness.”

There is also a very different argument—it was Al Gore who cost Al Gore his presidency. Gore’s campaign failed to win both his home state of Tennessee and that of his boss, President Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas. Winning Tennessee would have earned Gore enough electoral votes and changed his address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Additionally, much can be argued about how aggressive Gore was in legally fighting for additional recount votes, and how it affected the results.

“By the way, I do think that Al Gore cost me the election, especially in Florida,”  Nader said rather defiantly before members of the National Press Club the day after the election. “And that’s a far greater concern than whether I was suppose to help elect Al Gore.”

Yet, much of what Nader spoke about was nothing new, a combination of recycled speeches he drafted throughout his years of campaigning.

He expressed concern over the corporate wrangling of American politics, the need for energy reform, and his coined view of the current form of American democracy—“a two party dictatorship.”

For an audience that mostly consisted of a generation that was once too young to remember or acknowledge Nader’s role in American politics, the lecture themes of youth activism, government accountability and a call for civic education are topics largely untouched by today’s politicians.

Despite how cliché it is to draw comparisons between what the CEO of Wal-Mart makes an hour in comparison to the entry-level worker, Nader covered the current extinction of the middle-class stemming from the current economic climate that looms upon graduating students. (For the record, Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke makes more than$16,000 per hour, which is $3,000 more than the annual salary of many Wal-Mart employees who are paid minimum wage.)

“We are living in a decaying society where the few will control the many…where the few will seize the gains that are generated by the sweat of the many,” Nader said.

Following his lecture, Nader fielded questions and encouraged student groups to make their plugs. Amongst the countless number of pitches and audience appreciation, one student challenged Nader.

“President Obama raised a lot of money from people who associate with all the causes that you spoke about tonight,” asked one student, referring to Nader’s message but lack of awareness. His question focused on how progress could be achieved without the ability to reach the masses.

The question struck a chord.

“You know who could have made this campaign a success—not a winning one, but one that could’ve broken through—several million college students, who [instead] followed their parents and grandparents, if they voted at all, who voted for the least worst candidate,” said Nader. “The college students were very disappointing. No one has done more with and for college students in the history of the country running for president then I have.”

And while it’s near impossible to relate the conditions of the youth in Middle East to the problems that face most college students here in America, the difference is that large youth movements pushed for reform, whereas in the U.S., that has not happened since the 1960’s.

The closest thing to a recent influential youth movement, Nader mentioned, were the thousands of youth protestors in Wisconsin fighting against the issue of state union workers losing their right to collective bargaining.

The funding of higher education, both public and private, is amongst the forefront of troubles placed against the youth of America. Rallies and protests have taken place from coast to coast, from schools like UC Berkley where a 40 percent raise in tuition has passed, to protests that haven taken place at Stony Brook, where the administration favors a hike in tuition to balance budget woes.

Nader repeated what he told thousands of supporters in Madison Square Garden in 2000, telling the few hundred students at Stony Brook that the current youth generation was tasked with a great burden—the handling of their future.

“Yours is the last generation that has so much to gain and so little to lose in gaining it. It’s your generation that now has to put your shoulder to the arm of justice and build on your predecessors.”

When asked about entering the 2012 Presidential race, Nader said he would not be running, though he hopes that someone will continue to carry the progressive banner.

He was a bit more assertive when describing the flurry of support he often receives in the beginning of his campaigns and the endurance of that support. “I was also tired of people encouraging me, saying ‘Run, run, run, we’ll vote for you,’ and then getting cold feet and voting for the democrats,” Nader said.

This will be the first time in 16 years that Nader will not make a challenge for the White House. And while there are other emerging third parties that pundits can speculate about playing the spoiler—the Tea Party in particular—Nader’s absence from this election leaves a new generation of voters without one of the youth movement’s biggest advocates on the ballot.

“The biggest problem of your generation is a lack of an estimate of your own significance and power,” said Nader. “You’ve grown up powerless, you’ve grown up with your gadgets in your hands, you’ve grown up in trivial personal environments and you’ve grown-up being educated in trade schools just to get a job.”

Ralph Nader continued, “It’s really remarkable how undeveloped students are. Of course they don’t have much experience because they’re young, but they have access to all kinds of information that challenges the power structure and they don’t seem to absorb it in terms of changing their own routines and their own sense of what needs to be done for your own future in this country and this world.”