Vanessa Vaile

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having gone from being a Young Turk into being an Old Fart

a product of the two realms: the classroom and the plaza. (I include in the “plaza,” a number of places, both on and off campus, including Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, meeting venues, demonstrations, ad hoc panels, and public debates.) I realize now how much I am indebted to both realms and to the American university

In the plaza (in the extended sense) I learned not only about politics—how to think politically and speak publicly

intellectual topics and subjects outside the curriculum of the classrooms

the university itself—its historic purposes and contested character

Kerr’s just-published Uses of the University made a number of claims about the institution that were widely celebrated—though not by students

There were no formal courses about the institution despite its long and rich history and despite it being the place we were all gathered, working together. The situation is the same, I think, today.

about things like the liberal arts and academic freedom

origins of the university in 12th century Bologna and Paris

Cardinal Newman, Robert Hutchins, and James B. Conant

that the Puritans established Harvard, the nation’s first higher education institution as early as 1636.

dissenting efforts, in union activities

expression and outgrowth of ideas about the university

the university which embodies them is an embattled figure in the public domain, besieged not just by state disinvestment in higher education but by institutional trends and theories within the universities themselves.

Defining the University

(1) its role with the liberal arts, (2) its political role, and (3) its character as a community.

students are exposed to humanities courses and ways of thinking while at college, and that the spirit of the liberal arts—creative, critical, and contextualizing—has extended to even the teaching of things like engineering, the sciences,

The Greeks and Romans saw the liberal arts as those skills that were necessary to make a person free.

the necessity of knowing beauty and being given the eyes with which to see it is about as good a statement of one aspect of the liberal arts approach as you’ll find.

university helps students develop their powers, helps them to develop “lives of rich significance.

C. Wright Mills noted in his writings on education, “is the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.”

this liberal arts culture sets the university off from the rest of the society.

Preserving it requires a certain autonomy from that society.

The liberal arts could not be jettisoned from the university and its autonomy lost without changing what the institution fundamentally is.

A second fundamental purpose of public higher education in America has been political.

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed that a key purpose of higher education was to help in the formation of a self-governing people

higher education was made tuition-free in California back in 1868

“A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the rights and liberties of the people

a main task of the state college system as the “democratization” of higher education.

C. Wright Mills summarized this larger point in the 1950s by saying that, “the prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was politics: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and judge of public affairs.”

The campus may be, in fact, one of the last training grounds left in the society for teaching students about real public life.

A third aspect of the university I’ve thought about in recent years is its historic character as a community.

And you need a community to maintain what I’ll call the knowledge commons, around which the university was historically built

A commons also entails aspects of a gift economy,

The University Besieged

theories and models are taken over largely from the world of business

commodifying activities in worlds that had previously lain outside the marketplace: hospitals and medical care, the arts, political campaigns

the university as a whole is not a business

Seeing the university in business terms, first and foremost, sidelines the liberal arts and reduces support

It was never the aim of the liberal arts to raise lifetime incomes

Second, this view of our tasks marginalizes public life and the training of citizens because it is not “relevant to prospective employers.”

And third, the new model tries to supplant the roles and relationships of a community by those of the corporation,

used to see the campus serving the economy indirectly

now see it as a direct site of capital accumulation

In a community genuinely dedicated, as a community, to higher education, no manager would accept tens of thousands of dollars of salary increases while the real salaries of those who fulfilled its core mission were being cut.

If our managers retained an allegiance to the universities’ real character and purposes, even the current budget cuts might have been weathered without a loss of morale and a decline in educational quality.

signs of the attempted redefinition of the university

new economic terms displace the older educational vocabulary.

reduce the faculty to the status of employees

new managers would just as soon get rid of academic customs like shared governance, academic autonomy, and, of course, tenure

Gulf Coast University in Florida (a campus without tenure) and announced “faculty culture must change,”

Those who promote a business model of higher education, finally, would wipe out the university’s autonomy and its character as a “sanctuary” or “island of difference”

part of the politics of privatization

Faculty Must Draw the Line

clash between two different visions of higher education and its functions

It was the first signs of the new mindset and model, I now see, that we ran up against on one campus in the ‘60s

ies:  How do we respond to what are ultimately political threats

How do we sustain a university-level education

I hope the stand will be against this new business and corporate model of education.

 

If it is not, we will help to work a profound inversion in the functions of the American university

But if it is to be contested, who is to do it?

As public educators we have to reeducate the larger public about the purposes of higher education,

we have remained indecisive about our public role and mostly silent. This silence needs to end. We need to become activist professionals, or we will cease to be professionals at all.

Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920

We are sharing it with the NFM Board and membership in the hope of eliciting further suggestions and support, and plan to submit it for official NFM endorsement according to the procedures set out in the NFM Bylaws.

The Program for Change will benefit contingent faculty to be sure.  But it will also benefit the whole of higher education and, most significantly, students and our collective future.   Higher education is key for achieving social mobility for the individual and growth and wellbeing for society.  

Indeed, the dysfunctional two-tiered system defies American ethical values related to fairness and equal pay for equal work and decency.

The Program for Change is a strategic plan that we feel is necessary to establish true and healthy normative standards that would revitalize the integrity of the post-secondary teaching profession over the next generation

both short-term and long-term goals but, mindful of the difficult nature of change, proposes accomplishing these goals through incremental steps

Program supports the use of any means available in addition to collective bargaining: negotiation with progressive administrations, legislative changes, informal direct action and protest, and/or court rulings.

identifies over thirty aspects of post-secondary work and suggests incremental improvements to each, usually over five-year time frames

it is not meant to be prescriptive or proscriptive

achievements depend on local conditions

normalization, by which we mean that after a faculty member has undergone a defined probationary period, he or she becomes a normal employee whose status is no longer probationary or contingent, with the attendant rights and protections that accompany non-probationary status

no-cost measures, such as establishment of a seniority system and seniority rights, a defined period of probation, fair evaluations subject to due process, protection of academic freedom provisions, and termination only for just cause with due process

measures that do involve costs, such as a single salary scale for all faculty, health insurance, paid leaves, compensatory rights if layoff or termination does occur, and opportunities for professional development

Normalization means raising the rights, salary, and job security of the bottom tier to a level of normal equity

egardless of the length and full-time or part-time status of the initial appointment that faculty start with probationary status or in a probationary phase

After successfully completing a fair and timely evaluation process, an individual faculty person will be converted to normal, regular, or non-probationary status regardless of their time-status

accrue further seniority on an equal basis with full-timers

layoff protection rights

transfer rights, severance, and/or recall rights

contingent faculty routinely suppress inclinations to exercise or claim what should be their right to academic freedom

lack of job security and appropriate pay often leads to the necessity of taking on multiple jobs, which can lead to having to compromise their commitment to their students, or an aversion to wider participation in the affairs of the institution or the community

unable or reluctant to speak their mind or join their union, fearing that doing so could cast them in a negative light and thus undermine their chances of future work assignments

Academic Freedom protection provisions for all faculty from first hire, regardless of their status

provisions protecting faculty members with the due process protection through of grievance rights and/or institutional process rights

unions and departments to democratically include all faculty members as full members

consequence of a perpetual probationary status and discounted pay for contingent faculty is the erosion of their ability to maintain their dedication to their teaching discipline and the reading, writing, and research that are phases of post-secondary teaching

such advances cannot usually be attained wholly-formed

does not threaten the institution of tenure or propose to replace it

that eventually tenure be delinked from salary and time-status

Program for Change identifies over 30 changes that can be immediately worked on, any one of which can have an immediate impact on the professional life of a non-tenured faculty

the most important of all relate to job security and seniority

require little to no funding or legislation

even the most benign proposals could likely encounter resistance from those asked to relinquish control

a force in keeping the issue at the forefront of local and national conversations about the future of higher education

Stakeholders will have to be accountable to their own mission: achieving a just and equitable workplace committed to providing students with the highest possible quality of education.

detailed action plan on over thirty aspects of employment

holistic vision of what an equitable workplace would look like

To the greatest extent possible, the Program relies on ending the distinctions between full-time and part-time employment and the resulting discrimination from those distinctions.

enforceable protections of academic freedom to all faculty

teachers and scholars, reunited into a single community

a vision for the labor movement that sees beyond the bargaining table. They understand that the lives and livelihoods of workers depend on addressing the climate crisis, and that now is our best — and possibly last — chance to build a more just and sustainable society.”

“We need a world that works, in every sense of that word. But it can’t work unless we pay attention to both what science demands and what regular people need.

What effect, if any, does debt have on our students' choices of majors and careers?

What role, if any, should scholarly associations play in responding

What can the MLA do to advance discussions of alternative career paths

reach out to the growing number of scholars who are working in "alt-ac," academic jobs that are off the tenure track

How can he encourage more non-tenure-track faculty members to join the MLA?

How can the MLA become more of an advocacy enterprise?

During his tenure at the MLA, he says he plans to accelerate the group's activism, particularly on behalf of the growing numbers of non-tenure-track faculty in humanities fields.

Scholarly associations "are not just about the networking, resources, and places to interview for jobs," he says. "They are also about literally addressing the declining working conditions of faculty across the board."

A liberal voice, he has frequently criticized corporate incursion into academe and articulated his strong views on his personal blog and in opinion essays

A public defender of the humanities during the culture wars of the 1990s

supported adjuncts and graduate students at Penn State by persuading administrators to adopt MLA recommendations for fair treatment of nontenure faculty

At Penn State he supported voting rights for nontenure faculty and helped create a nontenure-faculty review committee

supported graduate-student unionization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

By all those measures, he is more of an activist than many of his predecessors who have led the MLA. So what does Mr. Bérubé expect to get done at the MLA during his yearlong term?

four-point agenda

rising student debt

raise faculty consciousness about providing reasonable classroom accommodations for students with disabilities

deteriorating labor conditions of non-tenure-track faculty

These four areas are at the core of his presidential theme, which he calls "Avenues of Access."

adapt to changes to scholarly communications in the digital age

The most-urgent item on his agenda, he says, is the plight of non-tenure-track faculty, whose ranks continue to grow.

His goals are

make sure that non-tenure-track faculty have access to campus resources and professional development

meaningful role in their departments

job security and professional dignity for non-tenure-track faculty

Critics of the MLA, including an anonymous group of non-tenure-track faculty who used blogs and a Twitter feed to announce plans to "occupy" the MLA

"The MLA has guidelines and recommendations for standard wages for faculty, and we would love to simply implement them campus by campus, but we can't," he says. "It's true. We haven't done enough to get our recommendations and guidelines out there to the people who can implement them."

challenge for his leadership will be to move the MLA "beyond making recommendations to actual actions,"

"We can't negotiate labor contracts. We don't do investigations. We don't have the investigative staff and legal teams like the AAUP, but we can articulate what we think are ethical standards for the treatment of our members,"

There's no way that one scholarly organization alone can broadly improve non-tenure-track labor conditions, Mr. Bérubé says. That is something that has to be done through building alliances, which he plans to do, with organizations such as the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the New Faculty Majority, the AAUP, and accreditors. He hopes that his dual roles with the MLA and the AAUP will help.

Reducing time to degree, he says, would reduce student debt

how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty

tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.

The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,

why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting

why the filter bubble exists

Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments

Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments

Information development was slow

Knowledge is growing exponentially

Informal learning

Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks

continual process

Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking

Increased attention to knowledge management

processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology

where to find knowledge needed

complexities of defining learning

sources of knowledge

Content of knowledge

three epistemological traditions in relation to learning: Objectivism, Pragmatism, and Interpretivism

reality is external and is objective, and knowledge is gained through experiences.

reality is interpreted, and knowledge is negotiated through experience and thinking

reality is internal, and knowledge is constructed.

attainable (if not already innate) through either reasoning or experience

Behaviorism states that learning is largely unknowable

Observable behaviour

simple elements: specific stimuli and responses

behaviour change

Constructivism suggests that learners create knowledge as they attempt to understand their experiences

Limitations of Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism

Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned.

important questions are raised when established learning theories are seen through technology.

How are learning theories impacted when knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner?

when technology performs many of the cognitive operations previously performed by learners (information storage and retrieval).

How can we continue to stay current

impact of networks and complexity theories on learning?

impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process

recognition of interconnections

I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people

Chaos is a new reality for knowledge workers

the breakdown of predictability

“a cryptic form of order”

chaos states that the meaning exists – the learner's challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden

Networks, Small Worlds, Weak Ties

network can simply be defined as connections between entities

Computer networks, power grids, and social networks all function on the simple principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole. Alterations within the network have ripple effects on the whole.

nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world

Weak ties are links or bridges that allow short connections

small world networks are generally populated with people whose interests and knowledge are similar to ours

Connectivism

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.

process

decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired

diversity

process of connecting

may reside in non-human appliances

Decision-making is itself a learning process

incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality

Connectivism also addresses the challenges that many corporations face in knowledge management activities

Information flow within an organization is an important element in organizational effectiveness. In a knowledge economy, the flow of information is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity.

Social network analysis is an additional element in understanding learning models in a digital era.

hubs are well-connected people who are able to foster and maintain knowledge flow.

Their interdependence results in effective knowledge flow, enabling the personal understanding of the state of activities organizationally.

The value of pattern recognition and connecting our own “small worlds of knowledge”

John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few. The central premise is that connections created with unusual nodes supports and intensifies existing large effort activities.

This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.

management and marshalling of resources to achieve desired outcomes is a significant challenge

Most of the revolutionary ideas of today at one time existed as a fringe element

Media, news, information

Personal knowledge management

Design of learning environments

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.

Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.

We believe colleges and universities must exercise leadership

Campuses that address the climate challenge by reducing global warming emissions and by integrating sustainability into their curriculum will better serve their students and meet their social mandate to help create a thriving, ethical and civil society.

We further believe that colleges and universities that exert leadership in addressing

Accordingly, we commit our institutions to taking the following steps

Initiate the development of a comprehensive plan

create institutional structures to guide the development and implementation of the plan.

complete a comprehensive inventory

develop an institutional action plan

Initiate two or more of the following tangible actions

Make the action plan, inventory, and periodic progress reports publicly available

In recognition of the need to build support for this effort among college and university administrations across America, we will encourage other presidents to join this effort and become signatories to this commitment.