[On Monday, October 24, the Unit for Criticism hosted “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University,” a lecture by Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The below contribution is from Robert Mejia. The event was the third and final celebrating the Unit for Criticism’s thirtieth anniversary.]
Christopher Newfield’s "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University"
Written By Robert Mejia (Institute for Communications Research)
Though familiarity may make our walks across the quad appear to be regular and mundane, we must remember that the discourses involved in sustaining a campus like the University of Illinois are anything but. I can recall my first experience of the quad, looking over it from the Illini Union Hotel and thinking, "here is a real college." Even though the space is hardly free from the excluding effects of class and race, the relatively free flow of bodies and the spontaneous interactions that emerge as a result is symbolic of the democratic promise of a public university. And so it was fitting that Christopher Newfield described his own morning walk through the quad when he began his October 24 lecture, "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University"—the last of the Unit for Criticism’s three 30th birthday celebratory events.
Those of us familiar with the campus know that the quad is often a crowded walkway fraught with various charitable and not-so-charitable organizations vying for our attention, or at least spare change. In this regard, the quad again functions as a physical manifestation of the state's disinvestment from the University. As Newfield noted, though public investment in education has declined since the 1960s, enrollment at research institutions like the University of Illinois and the University of California has quadrupled over that same period.
Public divestment from higher education poses an ongoing threat to the ability of public universities to uphold the promise of a democratic society. However fraught the promise may be, the public university system is a more accessible site for intellectual development and the maturation of social responsibility than private alternatives. Public research universities, for instance, reach over twice the number of students as private research universities and at only half the cost per student. If we are to continue to believe that public access to education is the cornerstone of a democratic society, then public interests cannot be left to private entities.
And yet, this is precisely what is happening. Universities, according to Newfield, are caught within the "death spiral" of an "innovation conspiracy." The conspiracy does not indict innovation itself, but rather the pretense that innovation is antithetical to collective modes of existence and vice versa—particularly the assumption that bureaucratic institutions like government and the research university resist innovation. Newfield's ideas on the individualist character of innovation are modeled on the legacy of Joseph Schumpeter. He notes that even though universities invest millions of dollars in innovation—wired and wireless campuses, for example—the notion that innovation must be foisted on them by outside entrepreneurial forces persists.
The key steps of Newfield's "cycle of decline" show how loss of public funding leads to privately funded initiatives that, while often good in themselves, do not serve the core educational mission—even though the result of sustaining them is typically increased tuition. As the public finds itself paying more for less, the result is a new cycle of public defunding.
To elaborate just one point in the cycle, universities raise tuition for multiple reasons one of which was the subject of Newfield's 2009 article in the journal Profession. The scenario Newfield describes is one in which universities lack the support to cover the overhead of grants. At the University of California, for example, the difference between net research funds and the total costs of research is a gap of 720 million dollars. (Grant recipients who hand over money for overheads to the university do not always realize that these overheads are insufficient to cover costs.) These uncovered costs must be covered from state funds or, failing that, student fees and tuition. This occurs at the same time that state funding is declining and private fundraising cannot be used for core operations. The examples of rising tuition Newfield cited showed increase of as much as 400% in the last two decades, compared to 250% for healthcare costs.
Though the solution is complex, Newfield suggested that a good starting point is transparency. Budget transparency is a crucial part of the picture, but it is not the only one. Another goal is to rearticulate education as a public good—an idea Newfield believes enjoys public support despite the increasing privatization of public education through high tuition and, thus, decreased access. In a less predictable light, Newfield urges teachers to make educational labor (their own and that of their students’) more transparent. This includes teaching as well as research. As Newfield drew a picture of pedagogy as a kind of professional craft, using the example of his own teaching and advice in a teaching abroad program, I was reminded again of the Illinois campus. At various spots along the engineering and main quads, placards can be found documenting the social contribution made from individuals and/or departments, such as Wilbur Schramm’s contribution to the establishment of NPR and PBS, or John Bardeen’s contribution to the invention of the transistor. These placards, as we know, are not enough.
How does one enact Newfield’s recommendation that we make our pedagogical practices visible? He argues that this can begin with the simple practice of documenting the learning process that transpires within the community of a public university. In the teaching abroad program in France, Newfield asked each student a question to help him or her formulate a research goal. Most students, he reported, had never been asked to describe the kind of research that might appeal to them—much less to create a research project springing out of these interests. When students are encouraged to think of themselves as scholars, and not as students taking one more step toward their ticket to a profession, the potential for making the collective gains of education visible becomes apparent. Teaching (and research) should be practiced as a form of education labor guided by a craft ethos. The benefits of education can be articulated beyond the acquisition of career credentials: as laying the foundations for a more democratic society.
Read more
[The next in our series on the condition of higher education comes from outside the University of Illinois. Joseph Childers, a scholar of Victorian literature, is professor of English and Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California Riverside]
Written by Joseph Childers (English/Dean of the Graduate Division, University of California Riverside)
Give California credit; it has a habit of being out in front of the crowd. For example, in 1978 it passed Proposition 13, the third rail of California politics, which capped property taxes in the state and mandated that attempts to raise any state monies through taxation (including income taxes) require a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses. Not content with destabilizing the revenues for a wide variety of social services, the people of California decided that it was unconscionable to allow any race or gender based preference in connection with the expenditure of state funds (including scholarships and fellowships at colleges and universities). As a result, in 1996 Ward Connerly’s hideous progeny, Proposition 209, emerged fully grown from the mind of its father, effectively gutting affirmative action in the state.
With such a track record, it should come as no surprise that California also led the way in this new, fun trend of furloughs. Facing enormous—and growing—deficits, Governor Schwarzenegger implemented them for state employees in early 2009. Though my institution, the University of California, is state funded, we are not state employees per se. Thus we escaped the furlough wave until October of 2009, when the UC Office of the President (UCOP) rolled out a complex, tiered plan for reducing the number of hours (and pay) for the faculty and staff on each of its ten campuses. In all fairness, the University had few choices. The state had failed to live up to its “compact” with the University, in essence shorting the institution approximately $900 million dollars. In the UC system, just as with windfalls, deficits are shared. On my own campus, we went from $12 million to $51 million in red ink over the course of the summer.
Despite my snide remarks about the furlough trend, I have to admit that from my perspective as an administrator, there is a great deal about the furlough program that makes sense. On my campus it allows us to recapture some of the cash that we simply do not have. Also, it means we don’t have to lay off large numbers of staff, adjuncts, and, potentially, non-tenured faculty. And while almost everyone is getting less money in his or her paycheck, because this is not a pay cut, it does not affect retirement contributions by the system, which, in California, are based on one’s published salary. Salaries remain intact (even though hours worked and take-home pay is reduced) for most of the 170,000 faculty and staff system wide and retirement benefits are secure.
In terms of paying the bills, the furlough program seems like one of the most benign of a very unsavory set of options. Pragmatically, however, it has not exactly been Solomon’s solution. Though staff and faculty are logging fewer hours, the amount of work that needs to be done has not decreased. So we must work harder to get it done in a shorter amount of time. Or, as is often the case, some things just don’t get done, which undermines the quality of the educational experience we provide. Also, unlike in the Cal State system, which is also using furloughs, University of California faculty may not take furlough time on teaching days. Instruction is job one. Broadly speaking, the distinction between the Cal States and the UCs in the educational “master plan” of California is that the UCs are the research institutions; they are the campuses that can award doctorates and where advancement through the faculty ranks is founded on the quality of one’s research. But if a faculty member is required to meet his or her instructional obligations, when does one take “furlough time” except by reducing the amount of time spent on research? Cutting out service, or even office hours, just isn’t enough. As a result, faculty, at least, don’t really take furloughs, and everyone realizes that though our retirements might be protected, what we have is a paycut: the same work for less pay.
For me, the implications of this are far-reaching. First, in a state that already undervalues education and believes that professors are grossly overpaid, furloughs as they are functioning in the UCs bolster the belief that the state has been spending too much on its universities. If students are getting taught and research is being completed for less, why in the world should the state invest more money in education?
Second, we should remember that faculty as well as a great number of vital university staff are task-driven. For these employees the issue is not about putting in a good day’s work—even a shortened day or a day less during the week. The issue is getting through the pile of work on one’s literal or virtual desktop. Regardless of whether that task is completed today or next week, it must be finished if a student is going to get his fellowship disbursement, or a class is going to be taught, or a paper is going to be graded. Nor can these tasks be ignored. As a result, disbursements get made; classes get taught; papers get graded. After all, it is not the students who created this economic mess, and most feel that it is not exactly politic, let alone ethical, to ask them for more money for fees and then deliver less attention and fewer services.
Yet in being “good citizens” of the university and continuing to meet our obligations, UC faculty are devaluing our own labor and participating in the ease by which that labor is exploited. This is not the space to begin a discussion of cognitive capitalism and the status of “immaterial” versus moveable and non-moveable products or commodities. Suffice it to say that the surplus value of what we are providing—education—is increasing. This increase is not because the intrinsic value of that education has risen (though it might have), but because in being compensated less for our labor, the gap between that compensation and the value of our product has grown.
Finally, although I don’t want to be cast as a Romantic or become overly attached to a labor theory of value, from what I’ve observed, most university faculty do not view their work as “just a job.” In fact, it is in part because faculty have such a full and complex connection to their vocation that so many are willing to continue to do it with the same commitment and less pay during these difficult economic times. Nonetheless, furloughs continually remind us that we do indeed exchange our work for wages. And when our remuneration declines, we run the risk of becoming increasingly estranged from our labor, a condition that poses dire consequences for the quality of both teaching and research.
The consensus among faculty and administrators in the University of California system is that when we make it through this recession, our way of doing business will be changed forever. What we may well find is that, like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, we will rely on higher fees for our in-state students and, increasingly, on out of state students and their non-resident tuition to pay our bills. This means that we will no longer be able to guarantee admission to the top 12.5% of California high school graduates. Campuses like mine and UC Santa Barbara, which pride themselves on being the school of choice for so many low-income and first-generation students, will have to limit accessibility. Not only will fewer California students be allowed in, the increased costs will make it prohibitive for a great number to attend.
In light of the failure—or the inability—of our state governments to fund adequately that which is most necessary for a progressive society, it seems to me that the furlough issue in Illinois and in California might have been handled a great deal more effectively. A political moment, at least in my state, has come and gone when we might have highlighted the consequences of inadequately funding higher education and yet still have met the needs of our students. True, some efforts were made along these lines, but I don’t believe that we can rely on teach-ins and demonstrations, the tactics of a different generation, to have the same effects as they did forty years ago.
The President of the University of California has made it known that we can not continue to do the job of the University with a work force that must take 10 to 20 days of unpaid leave each year. Next year everyone expects the furlough program will be mothballed. Until then we are just postponing the inevitable: lay-offs, consolidating programs, closing others. We already see this happening in the U.K.
Read more
top
[On Monday, October 24, the Unit for Criticism hosted “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University,” a lecture by Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The below contribution is from Robert Mejia. The event was the third and final celebrating the Unit for Criticism’s thirtieth anniversary.]
To elaborate just one point in the cycle, universities raise tuition for multiple reasons one of which was the subject of Newfield's 2009 article in the journal Profession. The scenario Newfield describes is one in which universities lack the support to cover the overhead of grants. At the University of California, for example, the difference between net research funds and the total costs of research is a gap of 720 million dollars. (Grant recipients who hand over money for overheads to the university do not always realize that these overheads are insufficient to cover costs.) These uncovered costs must be covered from state funds or, failing that, student fees and tuition. This occurs at the same time that state funding is declining and private fundraising cannot be used for core operations. The examples of rising tuition Newfield cited showed increase of as much as 400% in the last two decades, compared to 250% for healthcare costs.
