South Carolina Upstate and Whether to Be a University

Yesterday I promised more contenders for the 4th Annual Curmie Award, presented to the individual or group who most embarrass the profession of education. At first I wasn’t sure whether this story qualifies or not. On the one hand, the real idiots of the piece are GOP state legislators who neither know nor care anything about education (insert boilerplate apology for redundancy here)—they can hardly embarrass a profession they don’t come close to representing. But those who capitulate to the hypocritical and anti-intellectual posturings of small-minded and censorial zealots: they are not without culpability. And so it is that the administration of the University of South Carolina Upstate is officially in the running for the [not so] coveted Curmie.

This is a multi-part story that begins with the university’s decision to assign Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio as the “Preface text” for incoming students. In other words, every Upstate freshman will read and discuss a single text. It’s a strategy that has been around for a long time—I participated in a variation on the theme when teaching at a small liberal arts college over 20 years ago.

The question, obviously, is what text—something canonical or something worthy but unknown? Something that will reaffirm students’ belief systems or something that will challenge them? Something everyone can agree on or something that will be applauded by many and despised by some? Upstate officials’ choice was a collection of personal stories from the Rainbow Radio program, which “has grown into a grassroots-driven community radio show that, since 2005, has offered diverse, accurate, and often unparalleled stories of gay and lesbian Southerners, their families and their friends.”

In making this choice, USCU opted for the latter path in each of the binaries described in the previous paragraph. Were they attracted in part by the potentially alluring naughtiness of assigning gay-themed reading matter at a state university in South Carolina? Perhaps. And so what? College is different from high school, and, done right, it challenges students to think critically and to respond objectively and professionally to material that may be utterly novel: any belief system that cannot withstand a little scrutiny is one best abandoned.

The response was a classic of symbolic petulance—a technique mastered by blue-state state legislators: Upstate and another public university, the College of Charleston, had their budgets cut in House committee by the precise amount spent on the book programs. In Upstate’s case, that totaled $17,142. One Garry Smith, a state representative, spearheaded the cuts, arguing that students ought to be able to opt out of having to read a book that is “purely promotion of a lifestyle with no academic debate.” Curmie hasn’t read the book (and he’s got 20 bucks that says Smith hasn’t, either), but I’m willing to posit the idea that the only thing being “promoted” is the idea that individuality isn’t such a bad thing. And I don’t recall being asked if I wanted to do the reading for any course I ever took.

The idea that the state legislature ought to be interfering in such matters is particularly laughable (or it would be, if the stakes weren’t so high) coming from the right, who are all about “small government” except when… well, they’re the government, and they get to tell other people what to do. And, as J. Bryan Lowder writes on the Slate site:

The trouble is, if your goal is to excise scary gay stuff, that route pretty quickly gets you to a place where Homer’s Iliad (one of the seminal texts of Western literature) would need to be cut—unless you want Achilles and Patroclus promoting their homoerotic lifestyle all over the seminar table. Smith and his ilk most assuredly don’t want that; and, based on their willingness to entertain this kind of embarrassing intellectual prudery, they apparently don’t want South Carolina college students to come out of the state system any wiser or more prepared for work in a diverse world than when they entered it.

One might also note that most of the classics of literature feature behavior outside the normative: Hamlet and Macbeth commit regicide, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are but two of many adulterers in “great books,” and Oedipus was a real motherf… you get the idea.

Moreover, as Terry Adams points out in one of the finest short essays Curmie has read in a long time (seriously, click the link and read the whole thing), conservatives’ new-found interest in government oversight is not merely hypocritical but deeply problematic:

If South Carolina's government can tell colleges what is and is not beyond the pale, if they can determine what is and is not appropriate on the subject of knowledge, if they can decide which manner of thinking is acceptable, if they can tell students when they are and are not ready to engage the significant issues of our time, what can we reasonably expect them not to control?

Anyway, the Upstate administration seems to have come through this brouhaha pretty well. They figured out a way to withstand the cuts, and they didn’t back down to the headline-seeking legislators.

A little later, they didn’t do so well. The university hosted and apparently sponsored a symposium called Bodies of Knowledge: New Normals, Old Normals, Future Normals in the LGBTQ Community. It appears to have been indistinguishable except in subject matter from virtually any other scholarly conference: a series of papers, a plenary session or two, some entertainment that may or may not be relevant to the conference’s disciplinary focus.

One of the events originally scheduled for the symposium was a one-woman play entitled How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less, which was to have been performed by performance artist Leigh Hendrix. The show’s website describes the play thus [note: the website expired a couple of days ago; I quote here from the article of Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Education]:

… a hilarious coming out story for queers and non-queers alike. Motivational speaker and expert lesbian Butchy McDyke deftly guides her captive audience in an exploration of self-discovery and first love, coming out, lesbian sex, queer politics, and a really important Reba McEntire song as they learn to confidently shout, 'I’m a big ‘ol dyke!' Writer and performer Leigh Hendrix weaves a story that is one part instructional seminar, one part personal story, and one part wacky performance art. At turns funny and poignant, silly and earnest, How To Be A Lesbian in 10 Days or Less is the perfect guide to gay for budding lesbians, no matter their sexual orientation!

All of which, of course, led state senator Mike Fair to come to the inevitable conclusion that “It's just not normal and then you glorify, or it seems to me, that the promotion at USC Upstate is a glorification of same-sex orientation…. That's not an explanation of ‘I was born this way.’ That's recruiting.” Yes, Mike Fair is transcendently stupid, even by Republican state legislator standards. That puts him about on a par with an over-ripe kumquat in the smarts department. Seriously… Butchy McDyke? That’s not a clue that there may be something a little sardonic about the play and its title?

Here’s Terry Adams again:

The title is ironic, as are the portions of the show that “teach” audience members how to be gay. But as is the case with most things deemed “political” in South Carolina, black and white are the only colors in our palette, and irony and humor are nowhere to be found. How daft can these people actually be? One cannot be taught to be gay. And if individuals claim that they were, then it’s highly likely they are charlatans. Being gay is not like adapting a core philosophy or set of principles. It is innate, and no more the product of choice or persuasion than our impulse to breath.

In other words, Fair and his brethren are utter idiots, so the university obviously did the only

“Butchy McDyke” responds to the cancellation

logical thing: they capitulated. Yes, really. Tammy E. Whaley, the university’s vice chancellor for communications sent forth this peculiar missive:

The title of ‘How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less,’ while deliberately provocative, is satirical in nature but has not been received as such. The controversy surrounding this performance has become a distraction to the educational mission of USC Upstate and the overall purpose of the Bodies of Knowledge symposium. As a result, we have canceled this segment of the symposium.

In another statement, she said:

So many people were interpreting her performance as an instructive session rather than the comical or satirical nature of the show. Elected officials and religious community members were thinking it was a class requirement verses [sic.] a symposium that was open to the campus and community.

Wait, what? I thought you were a university—you know, folks whose job it is to educate. Why on EARTH would you not take advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate that the play in question is indeed exactly what Hendrix says it is: “I’m not here to tell you what to do. No, I’m here to ask you who you are.” What possible reason is there to hand over a heckler’s veto to the likes of the dullard Fair and his equally misinformed allies?

Ah, but the Idiot Fair and his colleague Lee Bright (“We want to make sure that there isn't an attempt at indoctrination and that’s what it appears from the outside.”) actually voted against reappointing USCU trustees because of the scheduled production. So freaking what? Are you a university or the legislature’s lapdogs? Wait—don’t answer that. I’d rather not know. What I do want to know is how these two jackasses got named Fair and Bright, when it’s abundantly clear that neither is either.

In the aftermath, the university is trying to act as if it were… you know… a university. Chancellor Tom Moore issued a three-page official response to the kerfuffle, entitled “On Being a University.” He makes a number of salient points: that programming oriented towards the LGBTQ community is necessary, and that the two controversial elements—the book and the play—are “but two of thousands [of activities] that occur on our campus every year and it is their challenging and thought provoking nature that helps us to achieve that desired balance.” But he still weasels out of responsibility for closing down the How to Be a Lesbian performance. (Interestingly enough, there was a panel at the symposium entitled “How to Be Queer,” which seems to have gone ahead without incident. One wonders whether the problem with the play was its theatrical nature, its gender specificity, or its promise of fast results.)

Perhaps he’ll get away with it. Variations on the word “force” are all over the articles on the events in South Carolina: “State legislators force USC Upstate to cancel LGBT play,” that sort of thing. But I don’t see forcing. Those who think they have the right to dictate a university’s curriculum and activities are legion. The correct response to them, more often than not, is a monodigital salute and the word “no.” Fair, Bright, and the rest of the censorial ignoramuses who comprise the South Carolina legislature should, in the words of General Barker in one of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H, be given a high colonic and sent on a ten-mile hike.

Moore, Whaley, and their lot talk tough in the aftermath, but they were cravenness personified when it mattered. This game was long since over by the time they decided to prove that they’re vertebrates. That’s why they’re in Curmie contention.

These Truths Won't Set You Free.

There has been a spate of honesty from the right in the last few days—no, not anything really substantive, like an admission that tax breaks for millionaires don’t really create jobs, or that the only reason to support literally negative taxation on oil companies is that they’re really good campaign contributors.

But still, the revelation that Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea Party, really does want to destroy public education is pretty significant. So is the overt cynicism of Mitch McConnell, who really isn’t having a good week. McConnell has a habit—an annoying one, no doubt, to his brethren on the right—of saying out loud what most of us already know: that nothing is more important to him than getting control of the government back from the Democrats. That would include, of course, getting the economy going… because if that were to happen, President Obama might get the credit.

And, just as he burbled after the 2010 elections that the centerpiece of his legislative agenda would be to prevent the re-election of Mr. Obama, now he’s abdicating any role in the negotiations about raising the debt ceiling:

I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy. It didn't work in 1995. What will happen is the administration will send out notices to 80 million Social Security recipients and to military families and they will all start attacking members of Congress. That is not a useful place to take us. And the president will have the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for all this disruption.

If we go into default he will say Republicans are making the economy worse. And all of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. That is a very bad position going into an election. My first choice was to do something important for the country. But my second obligation is to my party and my conference to prevent them from being sucked into a horrible position politically that would allow the president, probably, to get reelected because we didn't handle this difficult situation correctly.

Senator McConnell is an ass, of course, but that’s not exactly a revelation. Nor is it exactly shocking that a politician—any politician of any political stripe—would choose policy decisions based on politics rather than on a good-faith consideration of the consequences. What’s different is that McConnell is so forthright in his utter disdain for anything that might actually help solve problems. His objective now is what it has been all along: to put a Republican in the White House. And the best way to do that is to make sure the economy doesn’t get better in the next 16 months.

Interestingly, the McConnell plan in all its crassness is despised by one and all. Democrats think it’s a trap; Republicans think it’s a surrender. What is universally accepted, however, is that it is all about politics and not even a little bit about policy.

Here’s Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

This is possibly the most juvenile, most buck passing, most transparently mendacious proposal I can recall from any party leader in recent memory. The bright idea here is to force Democrats to repeatedly vote to raise the debt ceiling during campaign season, and to repeatedly force Obama to lay out enormous budget cuts that have no purpose except to piss off interest groups. The whole thing is so patently, ridiculously political that it's breathtaking. It ought to be named the “Gratuitous Embarrassment of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party Act of 2011.”

OK, but that’s from the left, from a journal not likely to be favorable to Senator McConnell’s cause. What about the right? Well, R.M. of The Economist cites Drum approvingly, then adds:

The idea, from a Republican perspective, is to saddle the president with full responsibility for the unpopular move of raising the debt limit and back away from fomenting a new economic crisis (always a smart move). It was likely that the debt ceiling would be raised, but under [Mr.] McConnell's plan Republicans would be able to avoid casting an embarrassing vote to that effect. They could then vote against increasing the ceiling with the comfort of knowing it will rise anyway.

It is, in short, universally acknowledged that McConnell’s plan is cynical, just as GOP votes against TARP were cynical (or, to be fair, then-Senator Obama’s vote against increasing the debt ceiling was cynical). Politicians do that stuff, in between calling each other “the honorable” and “the gentlelady from…” and then describing them as Sharia-loving atheist communist Nazis ten minutes later. It’s McConnell’s blithe dismissal of anything but politics as a motive for apparently anything that’s troubling. Drum compares it to The Lord of the Flies, complete with shameless Machiavellianism and overtones of early adolescence. I think he’s being kind.

Note: I am not being facetious in the above sentence. Yes, McConnell is being crassly partisan, placing the fortunes of his party above those of his nation. Yes, he’s strutting his amorality like some sort of perverse talisman: the red state badge of honor, perhaps. And yes, he’s probably a lot smarter, politically, than he appears. But there’s more to it than that. He has also (skillfully? accidentally?) diverted attention away from anything that might prompt even the sloths in the mainstream media to talk about what’s really important in these deliberations: the virtually unchallenged assertion (by Speaker Boehner, among others) that Congressional Republicans are simply doing the will of the people.

Thankfully, there’s Nate Silver, now of the New York Times, to supply some cogent analysis. He points out that the various deals proposed by President Obama (who may not be a great President, but is pretty clearly the only grown-up in the room) range from about 17-25% tax increases (often achieved simply by closing loopholes rather than changing the marginal rate even a smidge). This puts Mr. Obama not merely in synch with, but to the right of, Republican voters. By contrast,

If we do take the Republicans’ no-new-taxes position literally, it isn’t surprising that the negotiations have broken down. Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent—a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.

And that’s the dirty secret away from which McConnell’s ploy was consciously intended to distract us: Congressional Republicans have no interest in doing what’s best for the country or even what the people want (which, obviously, isn’t necessarily the same thing). Their only real constituency is the big-money Wall Street cabal: not the American people, not the voters in their respective districts, not even the rank and file GOP base. We knew that, of course. But this reminder was a little more blatant than others.

A similar phenomenon is readily observable with respect to the Tea Party and public education. On the one hand, it’s not much of a surprise that a TP spokesperson would think that public schools ought to “go away”:

Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.

On the other hand, the proclamation does mark a sea change to the extent that anyone would be so brazen about it. Whether this openness is a function of hubris or naïveté, I’m not sure, but there is clearly no longer a felt need to disguise such a contempt for public education (I’d say for education in general, but they’re not admitting that… yet) that the rhetoric has shifted from “reform” to destruction.

James Kovalcin, a retired teacher interviewed by Bob Braun, the (Newark) Star-Ledger columnist linked above, suggests that the initial impetus for this antagonism came from the religious right’s anger at the removal of prayer from public schools; James Harris, head of the New Jersey NAACP, traces it all the way back to Brown v. Topeka in 1954. The more perspicacious among you might notice that neither of those rationales have anything to do with the Tea Party’s stated purpose. Which, frankly, makes them fairly likely to be accurate.

Certainly the opposition to public education of the right in general and of the Tea Party in particular is manifest. Part of the problem may be the kinds of social history mentioned above: please take note that the public schools themselves had nothing to do with ending either school prayer or segregation—they were simply the site where those battles were fought. The schools are responsible for having the audacity to teach actual science in science classes, for insisting that James Madison really is worth of study (and really did argue against “an alliance or coalition between Government and religion”), and for suggesting that slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War War between the States Struggle for Southern Autonomy. Oh, and a lot of teachers are in a union.

I happen to have a job at the nexus of two of the professions that everyone else thinks they could do better: theatre and education. Everybody’s a better actor (or director) than people who actually have to do it; everyone can home-school their kids better than certified teachers can. I have no doubt that there are those people who are quite competent to home-school their kids, and for whom doing so is an appropriate decision. I also have no doubt that the majority of students who are home-schooled are ignorant, socially inept, chauvinistic asses.

Of course, the voucher systems espoused as yet another litmus test of true Republicanism (although a sizeable percentage of them couldn’t tell you what a litmus test is, either literally or figuratively) purport to offer “choice.” They in fact offer state-subsidized religion (I seem to remember some document saying that was a bad idea…) or teaching by people hopelessly unqualified in intellect, training and temperament for the job at hand. Secular or non-sectarian private schools often offer an excellent education, but it comes at a price: well above the amount many families could afford on an ongoing basis, even after vouchers.

I have a good friend who is “head of school” at such an institution. There is no doubt that the education offered there is excellent, but even with considerable support from alumni and other donors, they still charge over $11,500 a year in tuition and fees (and that doesn’t count the cost of meeting the dress code). Financial aid is available, but “only rarely will awards exceed 50% of tuition.” In other words, even after a voucher ($3000 per student per year seems to be the standard sought by proponents) and maximum financial aid, a family with two kids would still be looking at an annual cost of $6000 or more.

The voucher plan would in fact make access to such stellar prep schools more affordable for some people, and that’s a good thing. But we also need to make two important points. First, not every private school is “better” than public education. Secondly, and more objectively, there are many students whose families simply can’t afford the cost. If you can afford a Civic and somebody offers you a Lamborghini for the price of a BMW, you’re still going to drive a Civic. These people, the most vulnerable in the society, need a thriving, excellent public school system: and every dollar that gets diverted from that system hurts not merely those students affected directly, but all of us.

Public education, good public education, is one of the irreplaceable stanchions which support a free society. The Tea Party either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care. That’s not news. Their admitting it is news, or ought to be. But the Democrats have been their traditional craven selves, no one in the Republican leadership is willing to differentiate themselves from the most pathetically ignorant elements of their party, and the media have, as usual, been deafeningly quiet.

Both of these stories are troubling, not because this or that political figure is a cynical charlatan, but because there no longer seems to be any shame associated with appearing to be so. This says more about us than about them. While it’s true that there is a certain refreshing quality to hearing any politician, especially a Republican, actually tell the truth, I almost wish they’d keep lying to us about some things: it would certainly make convincing myself of their sanity and their good intentions a little easier.

Anti-Democratic is Fine; Anti-democratic, Not So Much

The fact that the Republican Party doesn’t really believe its own rhetoric about “getting government off people’s backs” has been demonstrated too many times to truly be in doubt. The GOP wants to intercede in our sex lives, our private medical conversations, and our most harrowing end-of-life decisions. But until recently, most of their promotion of local control rang true.

True, there has been more than a little hypocrisy about the horrors of federal spending from Republican governors who quietly accepted billions of dollars of stimulus money, balanced their books because of it, and now are cursed by having received what they pretended to wish for: a significant curtailment of federal spending programs. But while GOP disingenuousness may be a little more qualitatively outrageous than normal, it is not quantitatively abnormal: politicians lie. Often.

Moreover, while there has certainly always been a smack of selectivity in the right’s much-touted belief that local governments are “closer to the people” than the feds are—funny how the presidency and Congress weren’t such bad places to invest with power when the GOP was in control—there was also an apparently sincere invocation of the libertarian spirit that is indeed part of the American psyche. The fact that such local control tended to manifest itself in resistance to, say, civil rights legislation may have been less than a coincidence, but that isn’t an inherent indictment of Republican motives: it would be unfair even for one as cynical as I to pretend to know with certainty that arguments purporting to be grounded in states’ rights or local control are in fact hypocritical.

That said, it is impossible—not merely problematic, impossible—to reconcile many recent actions of the GOP with any real interest in localized control of the political process. One of the first indications of a sea-change came in the form of the totally cynical, totally phony furor over the Park51 project. Apart from the protestors’ utter disregard for the U.S. Constitution, a document which to them takes on the attributes described in Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read,” there was the completely disingenuous citation of national polls opposing the construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which of course isn’t a mosque and isn’t even within sight of Ground Zero. As I pointed out in an August post, Manhattanites actually approved of the project; it was the folks in Gopher Gulch who didn’t like the idea. But you’d never have known that from listening to the right-wing media, or, frankly, the corporate media in general.

More interesting, to me at least, is what is going on in Texas, especially with respect to education. For some time there has been a mandated state curriculum, complete with assigned textbooks and high stakes standardized testing that structurally encourages teach-to-the-test strategies and memorization. But the new “standards” in social studies, rammed by a cabal of ideological storm-troopers through a state board of education whose arrogance is matched only by their ignorance, are a prime example of how not to conduct educational policy. The principal cause of the Civil War? Sectionalism (whatever the hell that is); slavery is third, behind states’ rights. See what I mean about arrogant and ignorant? And local school districts where people might actually care about real education are powerless to do their jobs in the face of state mandates to the contrary.

I’ve written about this at least twice before, in March and May of 2010. But let’s add on another layer. Governor Perry, in his State of the State address this year, euphemistically offered “to help school districts reduce their expenses in these tight budgetary times.” Translation: we’re unilaterally cutting your budgets. And that inevitably means firing teachers: in a good analysis by Peggy Fikac and Gary Scharrer of the Houston Chronicle, the authors point out that Texas schools could cut

every school superintendent, all principals and assistant principals, every school counselor, every librarian, every school nurse, all cafeteria workers, custodians and bus drivers—all 329,574 non-teacher jobs—and still not save the [mandated] $11.6 billion in public education cuts.

An AP article says that “Independent experts have estimated as many as a third of Texas school teachers could lose their jobs if lawmakers adopt the budget Republicans put forward with the support of Gov. Rick Perry.”

Perry, of course, wants to shift the blame for any layoffs to local school boards, while his proposed budget provides nearly $10 billion less in education funding than current formulas require. Given the fact that Texas is currently is well into the bottom third of states (as high as 36th or as low as 44th, depending on how you figure it) in terms of per pupil spending already, that’s not good news. The headline to an editorial in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram characterizes Perry’s assertion as originating in an “alternate reality.” But the fact remains that nothing that Perry could do budgetarily could have the huge negative impact that his short-sighted and pig-headed policies will in fact precipitate were it not for the fact that the state exercises enormous control over education funding, projected to be about 42%, down from over half just a couple of years ago.

Of course, the ratio of state to local funding is in large part the result of a complex balancing act between ensuring adequate educational opportunities for students in poorer districts on the one hand with allowing local municipalities to spend their locally-collected revenues on whatever projects they like, including, of course, education. My purpose here is not to argue that the state’s role ought to be greater or lesser than it is, but rather simply to note that real local control doesn’t exist—not in Texas, at any rate.

But, for once, the ultimate inanity by a politician isn’t committed by a Texan (I should probably downplay this, lest they get any ideas… and it is certainly true that in any normal week our own Louis Gohmert would be a strong contender for Most Embarrassing Politician of the Week). Even Wisconsin’s ample supply of miscreants on both sides of the aisle can’t compare.

No, this week the most awesome, stupendous, outrageous case of political hubris comes from the great state of Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder and the GOP-dominated legislature have colluded to expand the powers of appointed emergency financial managers (EMFs) to exercise a terrifying range of options, from voiding contracts to removing elected officials. EMFs would be appointed by the governor, and would not be answerable to local communities, only to the state legislature; even an amendment that would have limited their salaries to the $159K the governor himself makes failed after Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley broke a tie with a “no” vote.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that there are municipalities (and especially school systems) that have been mismanaged, but this is a colossal over-reach. Perhaps the stipulation that EMFs can only be appointed if other measures fail is sufficient to prevent abuse, but frankly, I doubt it. This certainly seems to be really frightening legislation. An unscrupulous governor and state legislature (as the incumbents sure as hell appear to be) could deny funds to struggling cities (this is, in fact, happening), force them into “financial martial law,” appoint the governor’s cronies at unlimited salaries (note that the rejected limit on EMF salaries was more than double the average income, including benefits, of those mercenary teachers that Fox News keeps yammering about), wipe out city councils, and basically turn Michigan into that socialist dystopia the GOP has been warning us about. All power, both political and economic, would then reside with the state.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, is brought to you from the party of local control. I understand that the Republicans are feeling their oats after considerable electoral success last November. But their unwillingness to adopt reasonable tax policies has left them with no possibility of intelligent or even ethical governance. Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power pales in comparison to Republican politicians, who are, needless to say, übermenschen only in their own minds. I try to stay clear of “slippery slope” arguments, but this power grab for the politically powerful and connected is more brazen and more audacious than anything any so-called “big government” Democrat has ever contemplated.

Last fall, Texas sued the US government because Rick Perry and his cronies used stimulus dollars earmarked for education on something else, and the feds don’t want to have them do it again, so they’re insisting that any future education funding be spent on, you know, education. As Representative Lloyd Doggett (D, Austin) says, “Federal aid to education should actually aid education in our local Texas schools. It is almost as if the Governor felt he was entitled to his own blank check federal bailout and now he has the lawsuit to prove it."

You see, according to the King of Texas wannabe, actually expecting a governor to obey the law represents an egregious manifestation of top-down interference. Ah, but you see that situation is about the bigger entity insisting that money it provides be used for its intended purpose. In Michigan, it’s about literally displacing the smaller government from above. That’s OK, you see, because… uh… the bigger government would be Republicans.

The Michigan bill has been described as an attack on unions. It no doubt is. But it is also an attack on teacher tenure, on anyone with government contracts, on the very notion of elected government. I have no problem with the Republicans being anti-Democratic, but this is actively anti-democratic. Capitalization matters.

The Fake "Controversy" over Class Size

Anyone who has paid any attention to the headlines of late knows that there will be a lot fewer jobs for teachers in the near-term future than in the present. That, in turn, means overcrowded classrooms and increased workload for the educators who do still have jobs. While it is perhaps a useful palliative to note, as Jon Stewart does, the utter insanity of what seems to have become the Fox News mantra on the subject (the national GOP was initially rather slow to respond to Rupert Murdoch’s marching orders on the topic, but they seem to be up to speed now), the reality is bleak indeed.

NBC reports, for example, that in order to comply with a state directive, “Detroit will have to close 70 of its 142 schools, shut down most bus service and eliminate individual school principals in favor of principals in charge of school ‘regions.’ An announcement is expected in April on how many hundreds of teachers would be laid off.” An AOL report says New York City alone is looking at about 4500 teacher layoffs; Texas may lose 100,000 school workers. Yes, you read that right, 100,000.

Part of the problem, of course, is that states were allowed to paper over real budget problems with federal stimulus dollars. Our own Rick Perry, for example, nothing if not mendacious, did a masterful job of howling about stimulus spending while covering up his own incompetence and cronyism with precisely those federal funds. But then, thanks in large part to all the Republican baying at the moon, the stimulus money ran out, and states had to do in reality what they’d been pretending to do: actually balance the books.

It used to be that both political parties believed in education. Their priorities in terms of what programs merited support or where resources might best be allocated might have been different, but there was no question that the nations’ schools and public colleges and universities were a high priority for politicians of every ideological ilk. No more. The GOP has decided that the way to finance the obscene tax breaks demanded by their corporate masters for the wealthiest among us is to demonize, well, whoever happens to be in the way. This week it’s educators. But don’t worry, cops and firemen and nurses and toll-booth agents and secretaries in the DA’s office, your time will come.

The situation is aggravated by the usual cadre of nonsensical pseudo-experts. If, in other words, those who would slash funding for education would at least acknowledge the inevitable results of their actions, we might actually have a conversation. Whatever happened to those clichés about “mortgaging the future” that used to be as much a part of the rhetoric of the right as of the left?

Perhaps what I believe to be sacrificing an entire generation at the altar of the greed of a cabal of their elders really is the only way to prevent a greater disaster. (Perhaps Tony Hayward will win the Lifetime Achievement Award from Greenpeace, too…) But if the Scott Walkers and Michael Bloombergs of the world are unwilling to recognize reality, then we are truly lost.

It is reasonable for intelligent people to disagree about, say, the merits of a seniority system for teachers’ job security. Rational folks understand that the most experienced teachers aren’t necessarily the best ones, and that more money can be saved by laying off higher-salaried personnel than younger, (even) lower-paid staff. But they also have no trouble envisioning a scenario whereby, in the absence of an objective system, a principal or superintendent, neither of whom have the slightest idea what really goes on in a classroom, might use budget-cutting as a means of getting rid of that 30-year veteran teacher who not only sees but points out the flaws in the latest harebrained scheme that some other educationist who has never taught a class convinced them to implement.

What isn’t, or, rather, didn’t use to be, up for discussion is whether having 60 kids in a 3rd grade classroom is tenable. It is not. Next question. But the lobbyists and the politicos who are willing to abandon even a reasonable pretense of caring for the common weal as long as they get their tax cut, their no-bid contract, or their bridge to nowhere—these vermin have found willing allies in charlatans, intellectual whores, arrogant ideologues, and other “education experts” who are willing to say anything for a price.

One such person is Eric Hanushek, a Senior Fellow in Education at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is, according to his short bio on that think-tank’s website, “best known for introducing rigorous economic analysis into educational policy deliberations.” It is at this point that people like me, people who have been in a classroom a few thousand times, roll their eyes skyward and sigh, “oh, one of those.” It’s not that fundamentally stupid right-wing arguments are any worse than fundamentally stupid left-wing arguments, but right now they’re far more likely to do significant quantitative and qualitative harm.

Anyway, faced not only with common sense but also with a host of actual studies including from the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project of Health and Education Research Operative Services (those folks do like their acronyms), which spans over two decades and 11,500 students, and which concludes that “there's statistically significant evidence that smaller classes contribute to better grades, fewer discipline problems and higher enrollment in college,” Hanushek sniffed that whereas

your child could get better teaching and more attention in a small class…. The problem is the teachers don't change their behavior very much when you change the class size by a few children…. The evidence is very clear that the most important aspect of schools is having an effective teacher. An ineffective teacher is not helped by having a small class.

Really, that’s his argument. To be fair, his remarks may have been taken out of context (the name of Rehema Ellis, the lead reporter on this story, is seldom seen in the same sentence as the phrase “competent journalist” except by means of contrast), but if that’s really the best he’s got, the boy just needs to be slapped. Hard. Repeatedly.

Of course small classes don’t help bad teachers. But large classes hurt good ones. Put me one on one in a course on quantum mechanics, and I’m no damned good to anybody. But in a course I’m qualified to teach, there’s always an optimum number of students. In a college-level course which involves experiential interaction or simply group discussion, there’s often a critical mass of ten or a dozen students. Even assuming a low-enrollment class in such an area would “make,” it wouldn’t operate effectively: a beginning acting class with three or four students won’t operate as well as one with twelve students, especially if one of the enrollees is significantly more or less talented than his/her classmates.

But the real problem, obviously, comes in the other direction. That same acting course functions well at 16; the 17th and every additional student after that decreases the learning experience for all. The specific number I cite is from my own experience with that course; what matters isn’t that it might be 14 for someone and 20 for someone else, it’s that such a number exists, in very real terms, for every teacher, and for any acting course it’s well short of the 27 a former colleague found in one of her sections a few years ago. More to the point, that number is already being exceeded in a significant majority of public school classes: and that’s before the new draconian measures kick in.

Equally importantly, even classes that are currently being taught “well” would improve considerably with fewer students. It would be great to teach theatre history as more of a seminar, with close readings and discussion of texts, but with an average class size of 35, that’s not going to happen. I’d like to increase the minimum length of the research papers at the end of those courses by 25-50%, but with over 500 pages of student papers (plus final exams) to grade at the end of the semester already, adding to my workload is just an impossibility. I suspect that every teacher at every level has a similar story to tell about class size.

For all this, the corporate media is remarkably, offensively, timid. The NBC article cited above actually claims that “Research into whether smaller classes actually improve academic performance is extensive but contradictory.” No, it freaking isn’t. Even jackasses like Hanushek can’t bring themselves to say that; the best they can muster is “inconclusive,” which is still pretty much of a stretch. Indeed, if there’s anything you can take to the bank about improving educational quality, it’s that classes need to be smaller than they are. So people like Hanushek present us with a serious problem, to the extent that anyone pays them any mind. But we’re not quite sure what that problem is. It all depends on whether they actually believe the… erm… equine feces they’re spewing out.

Teachers Unions and the Flight from Ambivalence

Teachers unions are much in the news of late. I confess to a profound initial ambivalence. On the one hand, the anecdotal evidence of incompetent teachers being retained largely due to union agitation is both compelling and troubling. I’d have to agree that in that particular area, the unions are more part of the problem than of the solution. But the problems faced by the American education system are hardly attributable to a single cause, and the situation is at least as bad, if not worse, in states and municipalities with no unionization at all.

First off, just as the Koch brothers may exercise far too much influence on elections in this country, they do so because the rest of us let them. We elected Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, who in turn nominated to the Supreme Court such corrupt idiots as Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who gave virtually unfettered power to their cronies in the Citizens United case. The Kochs and their ilk can now pour millions of dollars into the political process, and to do so anonymously! So can I, by the way; it’s just that $1 million checks from me aren’t likely to be honored.

And when the Democrats, hitherto champions of the little guy and transparency (in their rhetoric, at least, if not in their actions) had a chance to make a major campaign issue out of the situation, they punted. One speech by the President, and then back to cowering in the corner when the lazy and compliant corporate media—who, after all, were making mountains of money on those anonymously-funded and seldom honest campaign ads—didn’t immediately grant “traction” to the story. (Hey, the check cleared, why should they care about anything else, right?)

Similarly, it wouldn’t matter what outrageous things the unions demanded if the folks on the other side of the negotiating table—school boards, city councils, state legislatures—would show the ability draw themselves up on their hind legs and utter that most damning of indictments: “No.”

It is reasonable that teachers be paid better than soda jerks. (My first teaching job, at the college level, when I had an MA and an honors undergrad degree from an Ivy League school, worked out to less than minimum wage once you counted up all the time spent in prep, grading, advising, committee work, rehearsal, etc.) It is reasonable that teachers have protection against being fired by a principal who didn’t like the fact that the bumper sticker on their car supported the “wrong” candidate. (This actually happened, by the way, in a right-to-work state a couple of years ago. The courts upheld the dismissal and, legally, were right to do so.) It is reasonable for teachers to have a brief respite sometime during the school day when they’re not surrounded by 30 or 40 (or more) of somebody else’s misbehaving children. It is reasonable for a benefits package—insurance, a retirement plan, etc.—to be part of a teacher’s contract. All of these things are the product of negotiation, whether it is an individual or a union who is doing the negotiating.

So are things like sabbatical leaves, tenure procedures, and sick leave guidelines. And so are standards for dismissing “bad” teachers. If a school board or whoever is on that side of the negotiating table doesn’t like some provision in a union contract, negotiate a better deal. If the union threatens some sort of job action, let ‘em. If what you’re fighting for is the right to dismiss an incompetent teacher, you’ll win the rhetorical battle in the minds of the public, and the situation will be resolved fairly quickly.

But because the negotiators on the other side failed to do their jobs, unions have been demonized. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of procedures in place right now, procedures wanted by unions, that work against the common weal, both in the classroom and on the bottom line. It’s difficult to blame a union, however, for seeking to provide the best possible deal for its members. And the current furor about teachers' not paying into their own retirement systems is just silly, even on the rare chance that it’s technically true. What’s the practical difference between a). a salary of $40,000 a year with $4000 going into a retirement fund, $2000 paid by the state and $2000 by the worker, and b). a salary of $38,000 with a $4000 retirement contribution all paid by the state? Both cost the state $42,000; both give the employee $38K in pre-tax income. (I suppose there might be a small but extant difference in states with income taxes if salaries are taxed and benefits not, but surely this isn’t a significant issue, right?)

I have never been a member of a union; I’ve turned down the opportunity twice, and I’ve also resisted (but been tempted by) the Union-Lite American Association of University Professors. Because I perhaps arrogantly believe that I’m at least average at my job, I’d like to think that I might make out better with merit pay increases than with something across the board. But I also realize two things: merit pay can very easily go to those who are the most compliant to the administration (or who are good friends with someone on the Board of Regents, or who teach the “right” subject, or who go to the “right” church, or…), not necessarily the best people; and, especially in a field like theatre, merit pay militates against the cooperation and teamwork that ultimately make the whole operation run—the lighting designer should be my colleague, not my competitor for a couple hundred bucks in merit money.

But what is happening to union workers across the country right now is scary. In Wisconsin, the budget problems are real, but just as the recently-instituted corporate tax breaks are irrelevant to the current crisis (they don’t kick in until next year), so, too, the savings generated by cutting into the de facto wages of thousands of state employees won’t solve the problem, for precisely the same reason. The goal is—must be—just as the union leaders are telling us: to break the unions, who have, after all, long since agreed to wage and benefits concessions. The current battle is all about collective bargaining rights: nothing more, nothing less.

Cue the Ronald Reagan quotation about Solidarity: “one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.” Or cue the Ronald Reagan quotation about PATCO, declaring that union’s strike “a peril to national safety,” and then proceeding to have under-trained air traffic controllers installed at many of the country’s largest airports. That he got away with it doesn’t change the cold-blooded disregard for… erm… national safety just so he could earn some machismo points. Good thing about ol’ Ron, he could be pretty much counted on to have no core values that required any intellectual consistency: he could wrap himself in the flag as well as any man who ever lived, but the 21st-century conservatives who kneel at his graven image would be sore disappointed if they really had any sense of history.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, unions tend to endorse (and write checks to) Democrats, whereas business groups and corporations tend to back Republicans. Note: I know this is an over-simplification, but it is only that, as opposed to an untruth. And while if I were a union member I wouldn’t be thrilled that some of my dues were going to candidates I wouldn’t necessarily support, I can’t say that I’m jumping for joy that my cell phone company is supporting Rand Paul, either.

Of course, in states where there are no teachers unions, teachers are still the enemy, both underpaid and essentially despised. How dare that mere teacher give my little cherub a richly deserved failing grade that might keep him out of the big game? I’d better call the principal to get that bitch fired. [I am, by the way, becoming increasingly convinced that principals are, as a group, the single most craven and stupid group of people this side of the demolition derby.]

And no, we can’t possibly expect Billy Bob the oil trust baby to pay a few extra bucks in taxes. It’s those damned teachers (and cops, and nurses, and similar blights on society) who are destroying the state’s budget balance. Well, that and the fact that the federal stimulus money I screamed about (but took, in abundance) ran out. It’s all Obama’s fault. Well, his and the teachers’ who voted for him. They only work, like, 30 hours a week for 30 weeks, right? [For the record, because some people are stupider than skunk shit irony-challenged, I am fully aware of the absurdity of the foregoing.] The one thing everyone agrees on is that there are too few good teachers at every level. Gee, I wonder why…

I have a friend, also an educator, who is convinced that the real goal of Scott Walker and his ideological brethren isn’t to destroy teachers unions, but to destroy public education altogether. I really wish I could argue with him.

The State of the State of the State

Over at Ethics Alarms a couple of days ago, Jack Marshall excoriated those who took seriously and propagated as if true an obviously satirical story about Sarah Palin supposedly saying that she’d deport Christina Aguilera for botching the lyrics to the National Anthem at this year’s Super Bowl.

I agreed. Even by Palin’s standards, those comments were absurd. Any reasonable reader would at least be suspicious enough to notice that word “comedy” in both the headline kicker and the site’s URL. And condemning Ms. Palin for what she didn’t say is foolish at best and unethical at worst. But, as I said in a comment on the Ethics Alarms post, “[s]ometimes politicians (of all political stripes) say things that are stupid enough to seem to be satire.” And that, my friends, is the cue for Governor Rick Perry’s State of the State address.

OK, let’s just take as given that about all I share with the governor are a first name and a (current) home state. We’re not going to agree on much politically. That happens. And some of the comments below reflect a simple difference of political, economic, and pedagogical priorities. But some go beyond that, suggesting that Governor Perry is a). lying, b). dumber than dirt, or c). flat-out insane.

I cite in their entirety his comments on higher education, a topic I flatter myself that I know something about, having been a professional in that field for over thirty years. The indented block quotes are Mr. Perry's; the comments with “normal” margins, mine.

On the higher education front, we've experienced enrollment growth over the last two years higher than any time in Texas history. Our public institutions had 200,000 more students enrolled in 2010 than they did in 2008, so let's be sure those students and their families are getting the best value for their time and money.

So value wasn’t as important two years ago?

Change does not come easily or naturally to these big institutions, but it is critical to educational effectiveness and efficiency. Back in September of '09, I ordered a review of cost efficiencies at our universities as a way to make education more affordable.

One idea that emerged from that process is called "Outcomes-Based Funding" in which a significant percent of undergraduate funding, would be based on the number of degrees awarded. Texans deserve college graduation for their hard-earned tax dollars, not just college enrollment.

Well, the most obvious way to make education more affordable is to increase, not slash, state appropriations to educational institutions. That would reduce the amount of money universities would need to make from tuition, thereby lowering costs to students. This is not to say that there isn’t some streamlining that could in fact make the higher education more economical without reducing quality. There isn’t an intercollegiate athletics program in the state that breaks even, for example. (N.B.: the foregoing statement, while true, is intended purely as snark, not as a serious proposal, although the fact that I have to say this certainly indicates where the sacred cows are, and they’re not in classroom learning, the library, faculty salaries, the arts…) But with greatly reduced state funding, universities already need to cut muscle rather than fat just to break even, let alone reduce costs.

If there is an idea stupider than Outcomes-Based Funding, I haven’t heard it. What this proposal ultimately says is that we really don’t care if our workforce has any skills, as long as they have diplomas. While this provision might conceivably prompt admissions offices to enforce the standards they claim to uphold, which would certainly be a good thing, the pressure would be far greater on administrations to graduate students who, frankly, don’t deserve a degree. Inevitably, that pressure is transferred to faculty: “I know Johnny the History major said the American Revolution happened in 1941, but really, when you think of it in geological terms, he was actually pretty close. So give the lazy little moron a passing grade, or we’ll hire someone who will.” It’s a variation on the “everybody gets a ribbon” mentality that values self-worth over actual achievement. I always sort of thought of this particular manifestation of soft-headedness masquerading as soft-heartedness as more of a liberal failing than a conservative one. No, huh?

This kind of thinking is already far too prevalent. Texans do not “deserve college graduation for their hard-earned tax dollars.” They deserve college graduates who know something: about their major subject, about the world of ideas, about life in general. And students who actually earn a degree deserve to have it mean something. Ironically, of course, we are also in the age of assessment. I’m already spending literally dozens of hours a year—time that could otherwise be spent preparing for classes, working with my advisees, advancing my research, or (gasp!) reducing my work week below 55 or 60 hours—preparing essentially meaningless statistics to justify that which ought to require no justification. That I know of no one in my business who just does a Fox News and makes these numbers up is little short of a miracle.

In other words, especially for a university like the one where I work—not a flagship, in other words—we are structurally encouraged to reward mediocrity at every step of the process. It may be the admissions office who admitted the kid with an 11 ACT and a felony conviction (yes, I had a student not long ago who met both of those criteria), but it’s not their fault—or indeed the student’s—if the kid flunks out. It’s the faculty’s, at least in the parallel universe inhabited by Rick Perry. And here I was thinking the Republicans were the party of personal responsibility, and of “equal opportunity, not necessarily equal results.”

As families continue to struggle with the cost of higher education, I am renewing my call for a four-year tuition freeze, locking in tuition rates at or below the freshman level for four years.

Brilliant. “You have more students than ever before, and we’re cutting your state funding, so let’s also prevent you from raising funds virtually any other way.” No, I do not believe that throwing money at a problem necessarily solves it. But when streamlining the budget means classrooms are over-crowded, when the library can’t stay current with new publications, when faculty leave (or don’t come) because the salaries that are already miniscule compared to those of professionals in other fields with equivalent training and intellectual demands are cut—these are signals of calamity, not economy. I do, by the way, support the option of allowing universities to offer such pledges—as my doctoral institution does—as a recruiting tool. But, given his rhetoric on the health care bill, no one should understand better than Governor Perry the difference between allowing and requiring, or between that which is decided upon locally and that which is imposed by government.

As leaders like Senator Zaffirini search for more low-cost pathways to a degree, it's time for a bold, Texas-style solution to this challenge, that I'm sure the brightest minds in our universities can devise. Today, I'm challenging our institutions of higher education to develop bachelor's degrees that cost no more than $10,000, including textbooks.

OK, here’s where the governor needs to check in with the known universe, although I understand that the roaming charges for such a venture would add another couple of billion dollars onto the deficit his policies went a long way toward creating. These are the comments of someone who knows nothing about the cost of education, nothing about the ancillary benefits expected by students and parents (computer centers, free counseling services, infirmaries, etc.), and certainly nothing about the cost of textbooks. I don’t have specific numbers to back up my claim, but I strongly suspect it’s a very conservative estimate to suggest the average course has over $100 in textbooks; many (and I do mean many) cost three or four times that. Even this low-ball number, however, translates into over $4000 just in textbooks over the course of a baccalaureate degree.

And, NEWSFLASH: universities have virtually no control over the cost of books. True, we might be able to choose the terrible $80 book instead of the good $120 book, but quality really does matter, and books are expensive. I know of literally no one in my profession who doesn’t try valiantly to keep the textbook costs to students from being even more outrageous than they are: not merely comparison shopping for texts, but also, for example, using web-based sources like Google Books for texts that have entered the public domain. But while such strategies may work in some courses (I’ve done this twice already in Asian Theatre this spring, for example), it doesn’t work so well in, say, Physics, where a five-year-old textbook is already out of date.

If the proceeds went to the authors, that would be one thing. But the majority of that profit margin goes to Governor Perry’s friends in Big Business: the publishers, the transport companies, the chain bookstores. (Sidebar: my dissertation advisor co-wrote one of the standard textbooks in our field. He showed me his annual royalty check once: $141 and change. Somehow I suspect the publisher did a little better than that, or the book would never have been reprinted.) Curiously enough, however, there was no gubernatorial call for McGraw-Hill, UPS, or Barnes & Noble to cut their profit margins to help those poor, struggling Texas families be better able to afford a university education.

That leaves us with $6000 to cover tuition and fees for four years. The fees mount up, of course, because states across the country have figured out ways of financing big-ticket construction projects (both the student center and the rec center at my university, for example) on the backs of future students. Library fees are another common scam: the library doesn’t actually get all the income, and students enrolled in overseas programs are still expected to pay. Nice racket. Figuring $100 a semester, or $800 over four years, for unavoidable fees, often for things that should have already been paid for by the state, would be a conservative estimate.

So: $5200 for 120 credit hours. The current tuition structure for the University of Texas varies from college to college, but the cheapest, Communication, costs $4646 for a single long semester, or $37,168 for eight such semesters. Of course, if you happen to take five years’ worth of 12-hour loads instead of four years of 15-hour loads, it’ll run you $46,460. But let’s go with the lower figure. For the governor’s idea to come to fruition, there would need to be cuts totaling 86%! True, it wouldn’t hurt us as much: we’d only have to cut about 64%. Easy-peasy. Of course, this doesn’t factor in the reduced income from cuts in the state allocation.

In other words, Governor Perry is living in Cloudcuckooland (I’d be happy to explain the reference to him, as I suspect Aristophanes has never been on his reading list). True, this rhetoric is consistent in some respects with the inane “trickle down” economics Republican snake oil salesmen economists have been selling for 30 years: deficits created by lack of income aren’t really deficits (unless we can use them as an excuse to eliminate programs that help the 98% instead of the 2%, of course), tax cuts stimulate the economy (despite mountains of evidence that all they do is increase the wealth disparity), the only legitimate programs are those which can be quantified, unless a). there’s reams of evidence about, say, the economic value of the arts and we choose to ignore it, or b). we’re talking about religion Christianity Fundamentalist Protestantism.

But the degree of the inanity in this particular proposal dwarfs the merely logically insupportable and becomes a nightmarish dystopia in which no means yes, and where we have always been at war with Eastasia. (I’d be happy to explain that reference, too, Mr. Perry.) This proposal is beyond silly, beyond mere political posturing, because it could never happen.

Well, actually, it could. We could choose the kind of system that the UK supported quite well for generations until they decided to let the bankers and the war profiteers take over their country. We could, in other words, actually create a meritocracy, and put our (tax) money where our mouth (instead of our trigger-finger) is. But the idea that Rick Perry’s policies would take us in that direction is the stuff of hallucinogens, not satire. His suggestions make as much sense as decapitation as a weight-loss strategy.

Let's leverage web-based instruction, innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures to reach that goal. Imagine the potential impact on affordability and graduation rates, and the number of skilled workers it would send into our economy.

Ah, yes. Web-based instruction, this year’s pedagogical panacea. You know those assessment reports I complained about earlier? About the only thing they’ve actually shown us over the past however many years I’ve been doing the damned things is that students in web-based courses don’t do as well as those in face-to-face environments on either objective tests or response papers. And it’s not the instructor, who has taught (and taught well) in both structures.

Twenty years or so ago, before there was such a thing as the internet (or at least before the general population knew anything about it), the trend of the future was going to be distance learning. I remember going to a conference and hearing a particularly impassioned speaker tell us that “whether you like it or not, distance learning professionals are meeting in Detroit [or wherever it was] this very week to talk about ways of offering more courses through their programs.” I raised my hand and asked, “why do they have to meet?” I made both friends and enemies in that three seconds, but the point remains: even the distance learning people recognize the need for person-to-person, in-the-same-room interactions. And if it wasn’t Detroit, it was someplace similar, as opposed to Orlando or Las Vegas or Honolulu: they weren’t using their conference as an excuse for a resort vacation.

This is not to say that there aren’t uses for distance learning, for the web, and for technologies yet undiscovered. But the physical presence of the professor in the classroom is still going to be a required part of any educational system in which quality matters, not just in my field, but across the curriculum.

Speaking of skilled workers, we have a ready source of technical skills living among us that too often goes untapped. Countless Texas veterans receive top-level training in the military, but have a hard time getting credit for their knowledge and skills when they return to civilian life. We should support what one school calls "College Credit 4 Heroes."

With the support of Senator Van de Putte, the Texas Workforce Commission is working with Higher Education Coordinating Board and our community colleges on a plan to offer veterans credit for their skills & experience. The goal is to accelerate them into the Allied Health Occupations, which are critically needed across our state, and offer immense opportunity to these brave men and women.

Apart from the gag-inducing name of the program at whatever school that is, there’s actually some potential here. But, again, quality matters. I can certainly see that someone trained as a medic in the military might be able to transfer those skills into, say, a nursing career, and shouldn’t be expected to start at square one to do so. The same would hold true for a number of other military specialties in areas like supply, communications, and security. But there’s not a lot of call for missile-launchers in the private sector (I hope!), and smearing on camouflage grease for a night mission doesn’t mean you should get credit for a course in stage makeup. I’m skeptical of the idea of pushing veterans—or anyone else—into the health field if that’s not where they want to be: it could be bad for them and for their clients alike. But here, at least, is a proposal that isn’t freaking ridiculous on its face. Perhaps there is solace there.

To recap: diplomas = skills. Low graduation rates are the product of poor teaching, not possibly of lazy or stupid students who are actually being held to a standard of competence (I started to say “excellence,” but there are a whole lot of not excellent students getting degrees all the time). Cutting well over half of a student’s cost of education while at the same time slashing universities’ income (and hence their ability to make up the loss of tuition revenue) will actually improve the quality of higher education. Wow.

Regardless of how bad an undergraduate paper is, I try desperately to find a way to give it a passing grade. If I can look at myself in the mirror and swing a D-, I’m going to do it. That last point, about finding legitimate ways to recognize what veterans learned during their service? Not bad. But the speech was already irredeemable. F.