American universities are appendages of the corporate state. Educators are increasingly poorly paid, denied benefits and job security while senior administrators pay themselves obscene salaries.
Another important article on a critical gear in the corporate machine. I know it’s important because the urge to hide under the bed just keeps getting stronger. The prison complex takes one section of our society, while the takeover of our minds through the erosion of education takes another, though far more stealthily. The 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” took this issue on directly and so cleverly. It may be too late to save the universities. I grew up in shadow of UC Berkeley. As a child I dreamed of going there. But by the ninth grade I understood what its real role was in society and left formal schools forever.
“A university education is a wonderful thing provided that you remember nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde.
I fooled them. I let them have their stifling academy. True learning happens when we teach ourselves. We’ll keep our freedom so long as we retain our curiosity, and our library cards.
Chris, you have so eloquently explained what I have seen happen over the past 50 years since I graduated from college in 1969. Although I did not want to go further in my higher education, I know friends who did. I saw higher education get more & more expensive, with the state, NY in this case, stop spending less & less to help out. I had a Regents Scholarship, which paid for my tuition for 4 years, at the cost of $400 per year. That's laughable now! A state school costs about $10 grand per year now for tuition! I kept wondering where all the money was going. Now I know.
I watched Democracy Now the other day interview one of the few tenured professors from Rutgers talk about the strike at the college. I hope that you win!
My daughter did a economics paper on the rise of the administrative bureaucracy at Dartmouth. I am sure the results would apply to other universities. Over the previous two decades, tuition increased much faster than inflation. The endowment swelled. The total budget also grew considerably. However the salaries of the teaching staff remained flat as did their numbers. What did grow massively ( doubled if I recall) was the number of university administrative personnel including all sorts of highly paid deans. Deans of this and that and every politcally correct and trendy thing, all making 100,000 a year or more.
e.pierce your writing is odd. I agree that Clinton, Obama, Biden ruled like Neo Cons, and were disappointing to say the least. But did you expect the "left" to get in bed with Reagan's anti union moral majority and expect more fair play? All your criticism is directed at Unions, Teachers, Public Education and Social Safety Nets. The structure of the Universities goes back to the Gilded Age when the robber barons commandeered them to get control of huge tracts of Indigenous tribal land that were ceded to the Universities. Most of the boards of control were Chamber of Commerce members, industrialists, lumber, coal, oil, rail, iron ore and mine barons. We are now in the Second Robber Baron era, unless more people "wake up" Orwell's boot on a human face will be on everyone's face "woke" or "un-woke"!
When Market fundamentalism is extended into all aspects of our lives, and everything is commodified and priced, and everything becomes profit or loss, this is the inevitable result. It has been at least 50 years in the making. When a football coach earns an outrageous salary because he or she brings in more cash than a professor in the Humanities, something is terribly wrong. When tuition is sky-high and most classes are taught by low-paid adjuncts, something is also terribly wrong. It's the Market mentality, and it has even seeped into K12 education where administrators who are rarely face-to-face with students are paid twice or three times what a classroom teacher earns. Unregulated capitalism destroys everything sooner or later.
Absolutely crucial issue. Education should be classified as a RIGHT. All universities and the state should aim to offer that education for near FREE for those who desire it.
As University become more and more like corporations except that, rather than profit, their primary purpose is to increase the size of their endowments, they should be treated as such and lose their non-profit status. Taxing endowments would enable government to redeploy their assets towards paying teachers and providing scholarships to disadvantaged students
I am disappointed. This is a valid and important topic and needs to be reported and discussed, but the use of extreme cases of compensation difference destroys the credibility of the argument.
Really, comparing top-level medical dean positions with a part-time teacher of poetry? And the athletic coach compensation debate is old hat... those teams tend to return value in excess of their costs for these schools. They are a business concern outside of the business of academics and should not be lumped together.
This piece would have been so much stronger had there not been a reach for sensationalistic comparisons, and instead the data had just reported the compensation of the full-time administrative staff vs the full-time tenured academic staff. I live in a university town and know that the administrative pay exceeds the academic pay significantly. But the other key topic of discussion should be the bloat of administrative positions. The ratio of administrative employees to students, and the ratio of administrative employees to academic employees has skyrocketed over the years. It makes sense just like it makes sense that the federal government keeps expanding the number of employees. There are no controls nor disincentives for constraining the growth. Existing administrators build their bureaucracies without much challenge. Budgets need to be inflated every year to justify the ask for more.
The fix requires a change to the controls and incentives. However, it seems that one party in our two party political system is completely resistant to those changes as the large number of employees in the education system feeds its campaigns.
Hi Chris great article. Your writing reminded me of Upton Sinclair's book The Goose Step, so I am re-reading it. If one could time travel I would love to see both of you talking, your both cut from the same cloth. He explains the "education" he received in the Gilded Age. His naiveite at the beginning and his going out in the world as "educated". He writes "One question I asked myself was all that deficiency accidental, or was it deliberate? Was it merely the ignorance of those who taught me, or was there some reason why they did not teach me all that they knew? I have come to understand that the latter is the case. Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist. To establish this thesis is the purpose of "the Goosestep". Like you he was ostracized by learned academics as you were denied your clergy status. There are thousands of quotes both cutting and humorous, I forgot how well he put them to words and have been laughing at the hypocrisy that we live under. If you haven't read it hopefully you will it is a really good read and worth the time to re-read it, maybe some day you will use some of Upton's quotes in one of your books. Thanks Jim.
The statement by Chris Hedges really stands out to me.That they are grinding us into the dirt.Also the statement that she gets the students out of their knowledge bubble.A lightbulb goes off in their head.
I have seen these kinds of "leftist" labor activist appeals for decades and find them bizarre and garbled.
The corrupt corporate university is a machine that generates "woke" REGIME PROPAGANDA.
No one is ever going to care about poetry teachers that can't pay their bills.
The talented writer and ESL teacher didn't need an obscenely expensive degree from a private university.
The flood of weird contradictions is endless.
Student and their families, and alumni, should simply boycott these corrupt pustules of REGIME PROPAGANDA until they die from lack of funding and public interest.
BLOATED, CORRUPT, LYING, FRAUDULENT ADMINISTRATION IS PERVASIVE IN HIGHER EDUCATION, INCLUDING AT INEXPENSIVE PUBLIC COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES THAT PROMOTE INSANE CULTURAL LEFTISM AND THE WOKE-GRIFTER-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX.
"Teachers' Unions" are (mostly) a big part of the CORRUPT GRIFT.
I taught a class as a PhD student after my advisor retired. I calculated that I made about minimum wage teaching the class, and that's while inheriting all my advisor's course materials. If I had had to create the course materials... forget it.
1.7 trillion dollars for College is disrespectful disgrace for wanting to go to a college,it’s because the 1 percent of the Elete are controlled for keeping you in predatory loans for LIFE! Welcome to America we will rip you off from the beginning to the end of it even gets payed! Choose your words wisely! Screw you to Biden! You should have left with your son Hunter for your disgrace of a senile man! (P.S) you should have left when you robbed everybody in 1993 with Bernie Sanders,for the private Prison (95 percent),and your downfall is your son and his havoc with China in 2000! Your a disgrace stain for our dead democracy! Co-Op is one direction you should think about. Oh wait you’re the POTUS idiot!
As I understand it, Chris, things are not so different in Australia - clearly we take our lead in this country from the way things are done in the U.S. It's a tragedy - student debt, poorly paid/part-time teachers - lots of PR from the well-remunerated Chancellor/Vice-Chancellors etc... Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell at the University of Sydney in 2019 published The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It's Time for Radical Change. It is a blueprint for both understanding the proper process, exposing the darker sides (as elucidated by adjunct Prof. Chris Hedges) and appropriately moving on into the future. Let me add here that Raewyn Connell's father was the Professor of the Education Faculty when I did my Teacher Training at Sydney in 1970. He donated a sizeable part of his salary from some months on Sabbatical that year to fund the payment of teachers in secondary schools who were our supervisor/mentors. It was an experimental foundation course - the Teacher Development Project (Program). This is the background to Raewyn Connell's integrity!
Another important article on a critical gear in the corporate machine. I know it’s important because the urge to hide under the bed just keeps getting stronger. The prison complex takes one section of our society, while the takeover of our minds through the erosion of education takes another, though far more stealthily. The 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” took this issue on directly and so cleverly. It may be too late to save the universities. I grew up in shadow of UC Berkeley. As a child I dreamed of going there. But by the ninth grade I understood what its real role was in society and left formal schools forever.
“A university education is a wonderful thing provided that you remember nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde.
I fooled them. I let them have their stifling academy. True learning happens when we teach ourselves. We’ll keep our freedom so long as we retain our curiosity, and our library cards.
And so long as we can keep reading Chris Hedges.
Chris, you have so eloquently explained what I have seen happen over the past 50 years since I graduated from college in 1969. Although I did not want to go further in my higher education, I know friends who did. I saw higher education get more & more expensive, with the state, NY in this case, stop spending less & less to help out. I had a Regents Scholarship, which paid for my tuition for 4 years, at the cost of $400 per year. That's laughable now! A state school costs about $10 grand per year now for tuition! I kept wondering where all the money was going. Now I know.
I watched Democracy Now the other day interview one of the few tenured professors from Rutgers talk about the strike at the college. I hope that you win!
Keep in mind that Woke does nothing to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
Instead, it boils down to a demand for more diverse oppressors.
My daughter did a economics paper on the rise of the administrative bureaucracy at Dartmouth. I am sure the results would apply to other universities. Over the previous two decades, tuition increased much faster than inflation. The endowment swelled. The total budget also grew considerably. However the salaries of the teaching staff remained flat as did their numbers. What did grow massively ( doubled if I recall) was the number of university administrative personnel including all sorts of highly paid deans. Deans of this and that and every politcally correct and trendy thing, all making 100,000 a year or more.
e.pierce your writing is odd. I agree that Clinton, Obama, Biden ruled like Neo Cons, and were disappointing to say the least. But did you expect the "left" to get in bed with Reagan's anti union moral majority and expect more fair play? All your criticism is directed at Unions, Teachers, Public Education and Social Safety Nets. The structure of the Universities goes back to the Gilded Age when the robber barons commandeered them to get control of huge tracts of Indigenous tribal land that were ceded to the Universities. Most of the boards of control were Chamber of Commerce members, industrialists, lumber, coal, oil, rail, iron ore and mine barons. We are now in the Second Robber Baron era, unless more people "wake up" Orwell's boot on a human face will be on everyone's face "woke" or "un-woke"!
When Market fundamentalism is extended into all aspects of our lives, and everything is commodified and priced, and everything becomes profit or loss, this is the inevitable result. It has been at least 50 years in the making. When a football coach earns an outrageous salary because he or she brings in more cash than a professor in the Humanities, something is terribly wrong. When tuition is sky-high and most classes are taught by low-paid adjuncts, something is also terribly wrong. It's the Market mentality, and it has even seeped into K12 education where administrators who are rarely face-to-face with students are paid twice or three times what a classroom teacher earns. Unregulated capitalism destroys everything sooner or later.
Absolutely crucial issue. Education should be classified as a RIGHT. All universities and the state should aim to offer that education for near FREE for those who desire it.
As University become more and more like corporations except that, rather than profit, their primary purpose is to increase the size of their endowments, they should be treated as such and lose their non-profit status. Taxing endowments would enable government to redeploy their assets towards paying teachers and providing scholarships to disadvantaged students
I am disappointed. This is a valid and important topic and needs to be reported and discussed, but the use of extreme cases of compensation difference destroys the credibility of the argument.
Really, comparing top-level medical dean positions with a part-time teacher of poetry? And the athletic coach compensation debate is old hat... those teams tend to return value in excess of their costs for these schools. They are a business concern outside of the business of academics and should not be lumped together.
This piece would have been so much stronger had there not been a reach for sensationalistic comparisons, and instead the data had just reported the compensation of the full-time administrative staff vs the full-time tenured academic staff. I live in a university town and know that the administrative pay exceeds the academic pay significantly. But the other key topic of discussion should be the bloat of administrative positions. The ratio of administrative employees to students, and the ratio of administrative employees to academic employees has skyrocketed over the years. It makes sense just like it makes sense that the federal government keeps expanding the number of employees. There are no controls nor disincentives for constraining the growth. Existing administrators build their bureaucracies without much challenge. Budgets need to be inflated every year to justify the ask for more.
The fix requires a change to the controls and incentives. However, it seems that one party in our two party political system is completely resistant to those changes as the large number of employees in the education system feeds its campaigns.
Hi Chris great article. Your writing reminded me of Upton Sinclair's book The Goose Step, so I am re-reading it. If one could time travel I would love to see both of you talking, your both cut from the same cloth. He explains the "education" he received in the Gilded Age. His naiveite at the beginning and his going out in the world as "educated". He writes "One question I asked myself was all that deficiency accidental, or was it deliberate? Was it merely the ignorance of those who taught me, or was there some reason why they did not teach me all that they knew? I have come to understand that the latter is the case. Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist. To establish this thesis is the purpose of "the Goosestep". Like you he was ostracized by learned academics as you were denied your clergy status. There are thousands of quotes both cutting and humorous, I forgot how well he put them to words and have been laughing at the hypocrisy that we live under. If you haven't read it hopefully you will it is a really good read and worth the time to re-read it, maybe some day you will use some of Upton's quotes in one of your books. Thanks Jim.
The statement by Chris Hedges really stands out to me.That they are grinding us into the dirt.Also the statement that she gets the students out of their knowledge bubble.A lightbulb goes off in their head.
I have seen these kinds of "leftist" labor activist appeals for decades and find them bizarre and garbled.
The corrupt corporate university is a machine that generates "woke" REGIME PROPAGANDA.
No one is ever going to care about poetry teachers that can't pay their bills.
The talented writer and ESL teacher didn't need an obscenely expensive degree from a private university.
The flood of weird contradictions is endless.
Student and their families, and alumni, should simply boycott these corrupt pustules of REGIME PROPAGANDA until they die from lack of funding and public interest.
BLOATED, CORRUPT, LYING, FRAUDULENT ADMINISTRATION IS PERVASIVE IN HIGHER EDUCATION, INCLUDING AT INEXPENSIVE PUBLIC COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES THAT PROMOTE INSANE CULTURAL LEFTISM AND THE WOKE-GRIFTER-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX.
"Teachers' Unions" are (mostly) a big part of the CORRUPT GRIFT.
I taught a class as a PhD student after my advisor retired. I calculated that I made about minimum wage teaching the class, and that's while inheriting all my advisor's course materials. If I had had to create the course materials... forget it.
Another reason why our country is failing and is becoming second rate.
1.7 trillion dollars for College is disrespectful disgrace for wanting to go to a college,it’s because the 1 percent of the Elete are controlled for keeping you in predatory loans for LIFE! Welcome to America we will rip you off from the beginning to the end of it even gets payed! Choose your words wisely! Screw you to Biden! You should have left with your son Hunter for your disgrace of a senile man! (P.S) you should have left when you robbed everybody in 1993 with Bernie Sanders,for the private Prison (95 percent),and your downfall is your son and his havoc with China in 2000! Your a disgrace stain for our dead democracy! Co-Op is one direction you should think about. Oh wait you’re the POTUS idiot!
As I understand it, Chris, things are not so different in Australia - clearly we take our lead in this country from the way things are done in the U.S. It's a tragedy - student debt, poorly paid/part-time teachers - lots of PR from the well-remunerated Chancellor/Vice-Chancellors etc... Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell at the University of Sydney in 2019 published The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It's Time for Radical Change. It is a blueprint for both understanding the proper process, exposing the darker sides (as elucidated by adjunct Prof. Chris Hedges) and appropriately moving on into the future. Let me add here that Raewyn Connell's father was the Professor of the Education Faculty when I did my Teacher Training at Sydney in 1970. He donated a sizeable part of his salary from some months on Sabbatical that year to fund the payment of teachers in secondary schools who were our supervisor/mentors. It was an experimental foundation course - the Teacher Development Project (Program). This is the background to Raewyn Connell's integrity!