Exholt left a comment on my last post that I thought warranted further discussion:
Hate to be cynical, but most parents of undergrads and the undergrads themselves I’ve met in college, the workplace, and in grad school tend to not care or be willing to understand what education in the sense that you and I are thinking about. Most don’t really care from my experience and the few that do are confused and thrown off by the academic environment which is often alien to anything they experienced unless they were academics themselves or were MA/MS PhD students in non pre-professional programs. Heck, even my lawyer uncle has admitted the only reason he could understand some of what I’ve experienced was the fact he was a PhD candidate before he bailed for law school due to being fed up with a toxic departmental environment.
As Bitter Scribe has alluded, the vast majority only care about paying the tuition to get that piece of paper with the B.A./B.S. label on it with a perfect transcript to match so these undergrads can parlay them into some sort of a lucrative/prestigious job/grad school. This tendency is especially bad at many top-tier research universities where the priority of most undergrads from what I’ve seen is to land that highly lucrative job like ibanking/finance/business or to gain admission to topflight MBA/Law programs.
So long as one manages to graduate with a decently high GPA whether gotten through one’s own hard work, browbeating Profs/TAs, or in extreme cases…cheating…few parents will be overly concerned. Unfortunately, this trend was already underway when I was an undergrad and has only gotten worse after I graduated from what I’ve heard from current Profs and TAs.
I didn’t want to admit it at first, but exholt raises a good point. Sure, I’ve met parents and students who aren’t happy with the way things are – in fact, one of my current students is enrolled at a university, but is taking classes at my community college because she doesn’t want to be taught by a grad student. (I didn’t have the heart to tell her that many community college instructors are also grad students.) The fact that US News and World Report publishes the numbers of classes taught by TAs and lecturers indicates that it’s of at least some concern. But… I’ve also read that students routinely report high satisfaction with their classes. I think part of this is due to simple ignorance – many students don’t realize that part-time positions exist – but if the degree is the only thing that matters, then it makes sense that they don’t care if the actual education is substandard.
So I started thinking about this pervasive idea of degrees as market items and academia as a capitalist system. And I wondered – what if we used this market mentality to our advantage? A huge part of advertising is convincing people they need something they didn’t know they needed. You show people a picture of a TV and tell them they’re not going to be happy until they get it. Well, here’s a compelling narrative we can use to convince middle-class parents that they need real professors teaching their students: If your child is taught by overworked, underpaid instructors and grad students, then the job training s/he gets won’t be as good. Employers know which schools aren’t giving their students good job training. If your child isn’t taught by professors, then your child won’t get the best job!
Is it oversimplifying the matter? Yeah, to an extent. But it’d get people’s attention. If we think like advertisers, then it becomes clear that this situation isn’t going to be a crisis until we make it a crisis.
Now, there are logistical problems, obviously. This would need to be combined with aggressive union action to have any lasting effect. Furthermore, by “we” I mean “people with money to create ad campaigns,” which certainly doesn’t include me. And, most importantly, it only barely begins to address the oppression going on within academia.
But there’s a deeper problem, too. The idea of pandering to selfishness and consumerism makes me very, very uneasy – not only because it’s unethical, but because it can easily backfire. I just started reading Righteous Indignation, a collection of Jewish social justice essays, and this passage really affected me:
In contrast to the Republicans and the Religious Right, the Democrats and progressive nonprofits generally ceded the morality debate and promoted their social justice and environmental policies from a practical and personal standpoint. For example, on economic justice issues, one heard messages such as, “Democrats will create policies that will ensure better wages for American workers. You want better wages, don’t you? And, even if you are happy with your wages, poverty breeds violence! Our policies will make your streets safer!”
Whether it was the lack of a moral language or the fear of sounding uncritically religious, progressive leaders did not sufficiently articulate social justice issues as moral issues. They shied away from talking about the values at stake (Klein 35).
Of course, this has been said before, often on this very blog. But it’s a problem we need to keep at the forefront of our movements. I’ve heard conservatives say flat-out that children without health care should be allowed to die, because survival of the fittest is the American Way. (I work in a very Republican city.) How can we create a national climate in which anyone would be ashamed to make such a monstrous declaration? Would a strategy like the one above hinder that effort?
But perhaps it varies from issue to issue. People stop listening when you try to explain how their lives would actually get better if other people’s wages were increased, because the details are complicated and there’s no obvious connection. Perhaps it’s easier to reach them when they can see that they’re not getting what they paid for.
Perhaps PR logic can be used to win the battles that warrant it.
But then, that creates the potential for broader goals to be put on the back burner in favor of quick fixes – a mistake that social justice movements have already made over and over again.
But then then, won’t we always have to wrestle with large populations of unsympathetic and self-absorbed people? Mightn’t it be best to be ready with a variety of strategies? Can we appeal to people’s self-interest while simultaneously shifting the national climate toward compassion and social responsibility? I don’t know. By employing such a tactic in order to gain a fair wage for myself and my colleagues, am I just helping to solidify the current power structure?
This is all off the top of my head, of course. What are your thoughts? What other issues (either ethical or practical) do you see with such a strategy? Can it work?
In any case, enough with the depressing adjunct stuff already, jeez. Sometime over the next couple of days I’m going to write about WALL-E and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Rovers. Blast off to ADVENTURE!