higher ed in massachusetts report card

massachusetts gets As in four categories: preparation (how well students are prepared for college), participation (how many people are able to go to college), completion (how many students who enter college complete their degree) and benefits (how well do colleges contribute to the state). it scores an F in affordability.

some hedges are in order about the A's: when income and race are factored in, there are some concerning trends. the report card notes that the gap in participation between majority and minority students is widening, and that low-income students perform exceptionally poorly on math tests, compared to their peers in other states. it also notes that fewer students are completing high school on schedule, which is no doubt income- and race-stratified, thanks to the MCAS test.

a more detailed report can be read here. studies with more of a focus on the accessibility of higher education to underrepresented minorities can be found here.

the social mission of higher education

i wrote this for the november 2004 issue of the graduate voice.

uri

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The Social Mission of Higher Education

We are used to thinking of the missions of higher education as being teaching and research, and indeed this is the view that is usually promoted by university administrators, politicians and business leaders. But from the perspective of poor and working people – the large majority of us – there is an important mission that’s not usually mentioned: the social mission of promoting greater equality. In this article I will briefly try to show why we should consider this mission central to our concerns.

The social mission

It is established that a strong positive correlation exists between educational level and income in the United States. According to the RAND corporation’s report “Breaking the Social Contract”, educational level is the single most important factor in determining income level in the United States. Comparative studies have shown that countries that have achieved relatively high levels of social equality have done it in large part thanks to an accessible higher education system. Increasingly, a college degree is the necessary level of education to qualify for middle-income jobs.

This suggests an important social mission for public higher education: promoting economic and social equality. At times, universities in the United States have served these functions. For example, millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of 1944, in which the federal government covered tuition and most expenses for war veterans going to college. This undoubtedly played a significant role in pulling many people into higher income levels. If social and economic equality are important social goals, then the accessibility of higher education to low income individuals is a crucial necessity.

The fact that universities have a social mission does not mean that they don’t also have other missions, such as research excellence, education and training. The argument is not that universities should be turned into welfare centers. The point is that as a result of the way that higher education institutions are currently structured, qualified students are unable to get a college education, to the detriment of themselves, their communities and society in general. Higher education institutions in general need to be more open to qualified students. And public land grant universities like UMass have an extra responsibility to prioritize the social mission. Our state has its Harvards and MITs, where cutting-edge research in the humanities, pure and applied sciences are supported. If UMass is restructured in an attempt to be a more mediocre version of these schools, we would lose a very valuable potential tool for social equalization.

Free higher education: Affordable

Can higher education be made accessible to every qualified individual who desires it? In a country with the wealth of the United States, the answer is an undoubted, unequivocal yes. The cases of free higher education that we can point to as precedents – the GI Bill, the CUNY system in New York City that provided free education for city residents, the free tuition in European countries and elsewhere – have all been implemented by governments with far fewer resources than our current federal government commands. All of these precedents have been strong successes.

The annual cost of tuition and fees for all students currently in colleges or universities is estimated at $25 billion. In terms of federal expenditures, this is paltry. It is a fraction of the portion of the Bush tax cut that went to the wealthiest 1% of the population. To look at it another way, it is a fraction of the differential between the US military budget and the combined military budgets of the next ten highest spenders.

The issue is one of priorities. An accessible college education is clearly not a priority for the current Republican administration, nor for any Republican or Democratic administration in the recallable past or the foreseeable future. As is often the case with bipartisan priorities, we can see a class dynamic at play: while working and poor people would love to see free higher education, as surely as we would love to see free health care, the wealthiest Americans do not want such a system, so the issue is off the political map.

Accessible higher education: A human right

Besides being a progressive idea, accessible higher education is recognized as a human right by the world’s highest authorities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” (Article 26). International conventions such as the Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) and the Declaration of the World Conference on Higher Education (1998) reaffirm this right, and accessibility is enshrined as one of the basic principles of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The corporatization of UMass

Decisions concerning the accessibility of education belong most naturally at the federal level, secondarily at the state level, which is the level of government where decisions about the funding of universities actually take place. But making higher education accessible is the responsibility of the individual university as well. The decisions that are made by a university's board of trustees and administrative officers can have a significant impact on whether low-income people can get into the university, and if so, whether they can survive it.

Here at UMass Amherst, the main players are the Board of Trustees, President Wilson and his staff, and the administration of UMass Amherst, headed by Chancellor Lombardi. The Board of Trustees is the ultimate decision-making body of the university, and is largely drawn from the world of corporate executives and corporate-friendly bureaucrats. President Wilson is as much an entrepreneur as an academic, if not more so.

Given this type of leadership, along with the inherently conservative nature of bureaucracies, it is not surprising that the concerns of these decision makers are largely the same as the corporate agenda for higher education, which includes innovative research that will result in marketable products and skilled graduates suitable for work in our advanced economy. The social mission of the university is not part of their agenda. In fact, it hampers their agenda, since all else being equal, it's cheaper and easier to produce the research and workers that the corporations want if the raw materials are well-educated students from middle- and upper-income families, and not students from poor areas who went to substandard high schools, if they attended high school at all.

Chancellor Lombardi comes from a bit of a different place - he is an administrator with an academic background. Along with President Wilson, he was hired in order to implement some specific sorts of changes at UMass, namely to consolidate its transformation from an institution that has had some success in implementing its land grant mission - a social mission - into a top-notch research school – an academic mission. The chancellor has for years been involved with initiatives to measure performance - meaning performance in terms of academic and research missions, not social missions - of higher education institutions. His plans for UMass Amherst have been stated clearly and repeatedly, and can be found online in the Executive Summary of the Amherst Campus Strategic Plan.

The chancellor’s priority is to turn this campus into one of the top centers of research in the country. As he readily acknowledges, this requires money, and money that is spent in pursuit of this mission is money that's not being spent on things like health care, child care, student support services, wages for workers, and other expenditures more in keeping with the ideal of an accessible university. It's also money that's extracted from students through higher tuition, service fees and housing costs. This means driving up the cost of a UMass education, pulling it further out of the reach of low-income people. Though not necessarily driven by it, this approach fits well with the corporate agenda for education, and it undermines the goal of social equality.

Tuition and debt up, access down

The corporatization of education at UMass is indicative of a more general trend. The results across the country and the world are worrisome: tuition at public institutions is climbing steadily, in some places skyrocketing. Meanwhile, the traditional way of paying for an education – Pell grants and other non-merit-based grants, are covering less and less of the cost of an education, and are being replaced by loans. As a result, many qualified students are not able to attend college.

Adolph Reed’s article “Majoring in Debt” (The Progressive, Jan. 2004) cites a report by the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which finds that “by the end of this decade as many as 4.4 million college-qualified high school graduates will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and two million will not go to college at all because they can't afford it.” The same article reports that for the majority of students at four-year public institutions who graduate with debt, the average debt load is $17,000. Undoubtedly this figure will continue to rise. Other students avoid this fate by working long hours outside of school, delaying their graduation or dropping out altogether.

The picture at UMass

At UMass, the result of these trends, together with the state’s slashing of our budget, has been the elimination or scaling back of many services. To mention just a few, we have lost our on-campus pre-school program and our foreign language resource center.
Many of our other programs, including academic departments and all sorts of support services, have sustained cuts at different levels. UMass used to have a highly-regarded ALANA advising program, but as a result of restructuring, many students have been switched over to advising through their academic programs, an unpopular move among the students who have been affected. And tuition and fees continue to climb.

The way forward

The corporatization of UMass is part of the war against the working class and the poor that is happening nationwide and worldwide. It goes hand in hand with Bush’s dismantling of the progressive taxation system, Clinton’s welfare reform, the attacks on unions, and the replacement of social programs with the prison system, which now has more young African Americans “enrolled” than colleges and universities do. The fight against the corporatization at UMass is part of the fight for people’s rights more generally.

We need to keep in mind and to articulate the social role of higher education. We cannot accept the administration’s emphasis on research and teaching excellence as a cover for the dismantling of the accessible university. While supporting high-quality teaching and research, we must demand that the university meet its obligations as a social and economic institution and as a community of human beings. To relent, to allow UMass to degenerate until it is a mere knowledge factory, would be to surrender to the corporate agenda. If we don’t identify with corporate interests, we must fight them at all levels, including at UMass.

report on april 21 walkout/boycott

a report with photos on last week's walkout/boycott, by umass labor center graduate student and former graduate voice editor bryan pfeifer, can be viewed here.

What apathy? Students rise up across nation

marc rodriguez wrote this. i'm posting it without permission.

uri

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"Right next door to the apathy that is almost universal on U.S. campuses, there has been an amazing revival of student activism unseen for decades in Québec. Yet almost no U.S. students will know anything about it because of a virtually complete black-out in mainstream U.S. media--and very little coverage even on U.S. alternative and left-wing sites. Perhaps that doesn't matter, since most U.S. students seem perfectly content with the status quo. . ."

-Tom Reeves, "Lessons for US Radicals: Students Rise Again in Quebec," 4/15/05,
http://www.counterpunch.org/reeves04152005.html


Amidst continuing anti-military-recruitment work
(http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/145294/index.php), students and allies recently stepped up their struggles for justice on campuses across the U.S., focusing on, but not limited to, issues of fair treatment and compensation for the essential work done by staff and graduate student employees at institutions of higher education, as well as around questions of who has and doesn't have access to these institutions.

Here at UMass/Amherst a coalition of undergraduate and graduate students (represented, respectively, by Take Back UMass [www.takebackumass.com] and the Graduate Employees Organization/UAW [www.geouaw.org]) succeeded in virtually shutting down the campus on Thursday the 21st with a massive class boycott and one-day graduate employee walkout which saw huge pickets of graduate employees and allies as well as a barbeque and outdoor teach-in attended by 1,000 people at its peak.

A loud and boisterous "Critical (U)Mass" bike ride through the campus lifted the spirits and increased the visibility of picketers. Tours of prospective students and their parents were followed by loudly chanting and sign-waving protestors. As the day progressed and the realization of how dead and empty the campus was came over more and more people, the intensity and sense of victory on the picket lines increased. Picketers looked at each other and tried to say "we're winning" in voices that had become barely audible due to the constant chanting and yelling.

Speakers at the teach-in included several leaders and activists from Take Back Umass and GEO, in addition to UMass faculty and professors, author Barbara Ehrenreich, and striking graduate employees from Yale. A message of support from activist-scholar Howard Zinn was read out by a student.

UMass students made it clear that they would not accept the authoritarian, corporatist restructuring proposal being promoted by the chancellor (http://www.takebackumass.com/documents/lombardi-brochure2.pdf), and that cuts to real wages and benefits and the blatantly political and opportunistic targeting of queer union members (http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~geo/gp/barg/barg-latest.html) would not be tolerated.

An amazing day and demonstration of unity and power was pulled off with relatively little time yet an awe-inspiring amount of hard work spent on organizing.

In the days leading up to the 21st, grads and undergrads fliered and talked with their fellow students, phone banked, held teach-ins during classes in lecture halls, dropped banners, chalked the campus, won pledges of support from literally hundreds of faculty members, and in general succeeded in getting a progressive, pro-union and pro-diversity message out to thousands upon
thousands of students who chose either to stay home or attend the teach-ins rather than show up to class on Thursday. Folks who walked through classroom buildings during the day's activities found them to be near empty.

What follows is only a quick roundup of some recent actions across the country (and beyond)... for an excellent write-up on the actions at UMass and their overall political, national and international context (as well as some great photos), see "Student-workers, unions and community a potent force: Spring rebellions show signs of a growing movement" by Bryan G. Pfeifer, available at: http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/35553/index.php.

-Marc R., GEO; student, UMass Labor Center

>>>

The aforementioned Quebec student strike, involving 230,000 students:
"Québec Students Strike, Occupy, Blockade": http://dominionpaper.ca/canadian_news/2005/03/28/quebec_stu.html


"Campuses With a Cause: Diverse issues inspire students":
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/04/18/diverse_issues_inspire_students/
The Boston Globe takes note of actions across Massachusetts in support of educational access and university employees, including a forum held at UMass/Amherst on the Free Higher Education Campaign (http://www.freehighered.org/).


Protestors at UC Santa Cruz, creating a "tent city" April 18-22 to demonstrate against and symbolize the "displacement of higher education..." and "unjust budget priorities that manifest at our campus, including massive student fee increases and unlivable wages for campus workers," were met with brutal police repression but vowed to continue the encampment anyway:

"It's Our University: Tent University Santa Cruz":
http://ucsc.tentstate.com/

"Tent University Santa Cruz, April 18-22: Claiming UCSC As Our Own":
http://santacruz.indymedia.org/feature/display/17074/index.php

"Tent University Outrage: A Photo Editorial":
http://santacruz.indymedia.org/newswire/display/17462/index.php



The AFL-CIO reports "Student Fight for Workers’ Rights Spreads Nationwide":
http://www.aflcio.org/yourjobeconomy/ns04152005.cfm

...as does the Washington Post, "Students' Clout Helping Workers -- and Unions: Colleges Are Bright Spot For Labor Organizing":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35521-2005Apr7?language=printer


Why the strike at Yale and Columbia?
“Bush’s Labor Board Denies Graduate Employees of Rights as Workers”:
http://www.aflcio.org/aboutunions/voiceatwork/ns07162004.cfm


“Yale, Columbia, UMass Amherst grad students fight back: Strikes, walkouts,
boycotts mark week of April 18-22” By Bryan G. Pfeifer:
http://wmass.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4650/index.php


Graduate Student Employees United at Columbia:
http://www.2110uaw.org/gseu/

Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale:
http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/



What has become clear to many in the Graduate Employee movement and the overall educational acces movement is the context of exclusion and increasing corporatization of the university. In essence, students in these struggles are fighting for a democratic vision of the university where all are able to attend and fully develop as people regardless of race or economic class. On the other side is a corporate vision in which the university exists to train the future technicians and middle managers of American capitalism, with the university itself serving as a profit-making institution.

This context is clearly explained by GESO President Mary Reynolds in her piece “University's future at stake on picket lines,” where she writes, “We are striking because American universities, like Yale, are run more and more like corporations, with less control by those who do the teaching and research and more focus on the bottom line. We are striking because our university administrations look to shift their teaching and research to people like us -- graduate teachers, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct instructors -- who are a cheap and flexible source of labor…”:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=29352


Updates from the Coalition of Graduate Employee unions:
http://coalitionofgraduateemployeeunions.blogspot.com/

Send a message to Bush and the presidents of Yale and Columbia:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=47


Last but certainly not least, April 22nd also marked the anniversary of the 1969 Open Admissions student strike by the black and Puerto Rican students of New York’s City College, and a ceremony was held at “rememberance rock,” where a plaque marks the spot of one of the buildings that was taken over during the strike. Struggles such as those of the CUNY students in 1969 paved the way for us today and continue to be an inspiration as we continue to struggle and organize for a free and democratic university…

“The Politics of Race and Class at CUNY”:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/6353/chrislnr.htm

“memories of the events of May-June 1969 at City College”:
http://theword.hunter.cuny.edu/archive/vol44/aboutcuny/april3.html

230,000 college students on strike in quebec

ever wonder why canadians are so much better off than we are in this country? well, because they fight for it.

it's amazing that this can happen a few hundred miles from here and yet nobody here has heard of it.

academic integrity and sponsored research

a blog of interest. thanks to tom taaffe for pointing it out.

clarification concerning this blog

contrary to some information out there, this blog does not have official GSS status, although it is controlled by the current president of GSS. i post stuff on here that i wouldn't post in an official blog. it's linked to the GSS web page because it's much easier to get announcements out on a blog than on a web page.

review of gargano, m., "a study to determine whether or not the principles of sportsmanship and ethical conduct can coexist with the competing...

as some of y'all know, our charmingly incompetent vice chancellor of student affairs, mike gargano, wrote his ed.d. dissertation at george washington university. i downloaded his dissertation from proquest digital dissertations, and it's the best 30 bucks i've ever spent. if you like non-sequiturs, bad writing, and errors of punctuation and grammar, you'll love gargano's dissertation. to see what i mean, check out the free 24-page preview of his dissertation here.

for example: read the title - this should take about half a minute. then go to page 18 of the pdf file (the dissertation's page 16) and read the last sentence of the first paragraph, and then the first sentence of the second paragraph. then on page 22 (the dissertation's page 20), look at the last sentence above the heading "methodology". it's like he learned a sentence and just keeps repeating it over and over.

hannah arendt, in her book eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, mentions that adolf eichmann, who was extraordinarily inarticulate, had a collection of stock phrases which he found "elating" and would repeat again and again because of the impact they had on him. maybe this is what's at work here. or maybe he's just plagiarizing himself - i hear this can happen in very dumb people.

final version: umass community action plan

this is the final version of a document i posted a draft of earlier.

board of higher ed rejects law school

the massachusetts board of higher education has rejected umass's plan to develop the only public law school in the state.

i've been a little skeptical myself, but i note that the yes voters in the 8-3 vote included the union rep and the student rep, while the no voters came mostly from the corporate world.

in separate state higher education news: here's a good editorial from the republican about the higher ed task force's report.

global rich list

this week's WHISC ("what's happening in south college" - the linguistics department's e-newsletter) reveals a couple of notable facts.

first, the umass graduate program in linguistics has maintained its #1 national ranking, according to the national research council.

second, i am in the top 12% of income earners, worldwide. in fact, i am the 662,781,372th richest person in the world. so i'm told, with great authority, by the global rich test. i'm gonna go myself some champagne to celebrate.