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.
Your library card will do you little good these days. Public library's are chronically underfunded and most books, periodicals, or films worth reading are censored. For example, try renting "Closet Land" sometime--anywhere.
Most of the most important libraries will be sequestered by wealthy, private individuals. Hope you and/or your offspring get access to them.
It's no coincidence that underfunded public libraries coincide with woefully under performing public school systems. Ignorant masses are more pliable masses.
I finished undergrad in 1992, and it was already turning into a corporate free-for-all. I'm not sure the learning for learning's sake was ever really that strong, especially at exclusive, private places.
Sera: " True learning happens when we teach ourselves." Agreed, but at a university a good learner can be benefited by the advantages of academia. Surely you have done well, but the question is would you have been even better if you had pursued your studies at higher institutions?
Universities help but progress depends on the student. There is the case of one St. George W. that performed the miracle of getting degrees from Yale and Harvard but left them being the same dumb young man, as always, and later caused great damage to the world. On the other hand, we had a very intelligent American of humble origin that succeeded in life without having to be the son of a president. He was Thomas Alba Edison who received no formal education and yet with his inventions improved our world.
I lament, like Mr. Hedges in this report, that corporations have invaded our public education and created an environment of gross inequality among their members. They also have pressured the leaders of the universities to push the neoliberal teaching of egonomics (professor David Korten's term) and to depreciate the study of the liberal arts that provide the wisdom required in these days and, worst of all, to modify the criteria for obtaining tenure from excellency to compliance. In my opinion, universities need to be truly universal where the students of the different disciplines can learn without censorship or imposed ideologies, otherwise, we would be graduating limited intellectual eunuchs.
"And seek for truth in the groves of academe" Horace.
From the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, classical liberalism, the foundation of western civilization, requires an outbred gene pool. Historically, most human gene pools are inbred due to cousin marriage and "clannish" social forms. Thus, western civilization is W.E.I.R.D. (Henrich @ Harvard)
The "left" is now captured by neo-communism, neo-marxism and postmodern-corporate luxury-digital-gnosticism (the "woke" grifter-industrial-complex), all of which is an ILLIBERAL and totalitarian class war by oligarchs on the working classes and the Yeomanry (middle class property and business owners). See Joel Kotkin on Neo-Feudalism.
Also see Ehrenreich on the PMC, the professional-managerial class.
1992, Ross Perot. Giant Sucking Sound.
Also see Jordan Hall (and Nassim Taleb) on the technological disruption of FRAGILE legacy hierarchies of curated expertise (the "Blue Church").
Also see: the CRISIS OF MEANING (crisis of archetypes) that underlies the failure of modern rationalism and high-social-trust social institutions.
The failed policies of Reaganomics which include, deregulation, free trade, trickle down theory, and importing cheap labor immigrants legal and illegal are what have destroyed the American middle class.
The left have always opposed all of those. The left wanted, zero population growth, regulated capitalism (a maximum wage), alternative energy, rational thought, very little toxins in the environment, and a decent standard of living for all, not just a few narcissistic psychopath sadists. The left has been marginalized by big money infiltrating the political process and seizing control of the Democrat party. Now the right who failed policies have cost us over 50 trillion dollars the last 60 years, wants to make them dictators?
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.
Oh yes, my gosh, I could tell stories I heard from Dartmouth but I won't as they are long. These Deans definitely don't do much and barely work in most cases.
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.
No "capitalism" is involved. That would require an actual market and competition. Public education is a corporatist STATE CARTEL.
The leftist pro-labor guy that wrote "How The University Works" some years ago pointed out that academic labor unions caved in back in the 1980s/90s to the corporatists. There was an important Supreme Court case about an academic labor issue (i don't remember the details), and the academic labor unions had to make a choice: stand for principle, "faculty governance" (internal democracy) OR sell out for more pay for TENURED FACULTY that had grants and/or seniority.
Guess what academic labor did? Yep, they SOLD OUT and gave up "faculty governance".
That threw open the door for the huge growth of top-down administrators, usually with sociopathic personality traits, that were incentivized by the system to keep grasping for more power, money, staffs, and political "territory" (frequently while stabbing each other in the back and cynically exploiting "woke" politics to climb their admin career ladders).
That was the point at which grad students began to have to survive brutal competition for the few remaining jobs, which usually only led to adjunct positions. Serious mental illnesses became prevalent. Large scale SSRI "addiction" developed, followed by horrible SSRI withdrawal and brain dysfunction.
Most higher education institutions became hellscapes, and the academic labor unions can't and won't do SH1T about those real problems.
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.
I do not think comparisons such as what a poet can teach compared to what a doctor can teach should be done on the basis of $ worth. Learning has value but should it be/can it be monetized? It is true that in our current system, everything (and I mean everything) is measured and then given a worth in $. But should it be? I am not sure why this struck me but it did. We keep viewing everything as though it is for sale or will give a return on investment. Seems like the $ market is controlling everything including our thinking. There may indeed be too many (counting) administrators but I think that glut of administrators is a natural result of a structure built on counting and $. I think education, like housing and food and healthcare needs to be protected from the total control of the market. We need to look at the structure that forces us to start ranking humans: Poets; doctors; lawyers; farmers and on and on. That is what markets do.
The brutal reality is that people that want to teach poetry need to have some other source of income to live at a basic, decent level (not be a "starving artist"). They need to be married to a high earner, or someone that is independently wealthy, or inherit a significant amount of money or property, or have a side gig or something like that.
Historically, public education, especially K-12, was able to limit costs by hiring young unmarried women who eventually aged out when they got married and had their own children. Then they were replaced by other young women that couldn't easily find better jobs. The education system had a good pool of low wage labor, some of which were very smart women that didn't have many other career choices besides teaching, nursing, etc.
Now, women continue working after getting married and having children, and many school districts pay lavish salaries to affluent teachers (mostly women) that were able to get graduate degrees, by mid and late career.
I know of a suburban K-12 school district in a relatively affordable mid-sized city in northern california (not the bay area, not LA region) that pays senior teachers with grad degrees $90,000/year, with awesome retirement, medical, etc. Some schools in affluent neighborhoods, where parents DEMAND the "best" teachers have parking lots that are half full of luxury SUVs that the well paid senior teachers with graduate degrees drove to work.
The starving poetry teacher (an adjunct?) in New Jersey made distinct education and career choices that have consequences.
Even with a 14% raise, the low-wage adjunct poetry teacher still isn't going to raise themselves out of poverty. If the strike gets them medical benefits that could be a greater improvement, which is a good idea (especially if faux "diversity" jobs, grifter positions, are eliminated to cover the costs).
A number of cliches come to mind reading this. However, suffice to say that yours is the reactionary argument of the socialist egalitarian. While I agree that in a market economy some positions/careers are over-valued and under-valued with respect to society benefits, the same is true in any regime. The pursuit of perfection in this case is the enemy of the good. A market based system of paying people for job skills based on market supply and demand is severely flawed except compared to every other system.
My two sons are artistic right-brained. They will generally lead lives less economically successful than the children of our friends owning strong nerdy left dominate brains. However, my sons did figure out that they have to have marketable job skills to make a reasonable living, and pursue their art as a side hustle. And maybe one day their art skills will sustain their economic lives. But they are good with the side hustle.
bloated admin in higher education just needs to be (mostly) burned to the ground, it is corrupt neo-communism that is impossible to reform.
you are correct that these labor-activist appeals are garbled and nonsensical, undermining the credibility of the appeal, I have seen many of the same kind of nonsense, mixing facts and emotional-subjective victim narratives, for decades.
"teachers' unions" are pustules of "woke" nonsense.
"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."
Frank Lee
True. But it only makes sense in the fact that there nothing to constrain debt spending (similar to continual unpaid, credit card spending) at the Federal Government level. This is why a federal balanced budget amendment is vital to being on the Congressional agenda and passed as soon as possible. This debt spending trickles down to universities in large amounts. Just as the oligarch class have purchased government officials (with tax money, mind you), so too have they purchased large universities (with tax money). If we outlawed tax money to be secured by Universities under the auspicious of dubious grants and subsidies, then the bloated salaries and staffs of university administrators would NOT continue to grow either. Personally, if a University wants to exist on the income terms of their tuition and private endowments, then I couldn't care less how they operate-- or what they pay anyone on their staff. It's always your choice to work for them; or to go to school there. But, again,, when tax money is being used to prop up these obscenities (such as outlined by Chris), that should be outlawed immediately. Its up to the taxpayer to demand that of their representatives. If they continue to ignore the responsibility to demand that accountability, then there is no purpose in complaining about it. Unfortunately, this is all Chris does in his article. Striking is NOT demanding tax payer accountability. It just plays into the private institution hoax these universities are foisting upon the taxpayer. If you really think about it, then I believe you have to come to the conclusion that it reinforces and perpetuates these obscene practices.
The picket lines should be forming outside government officials and representatives offices, not university doorsteps.
yep. the labor movement (such as it is) got in bed with Clintons-Obama-Biden who got in bed with neoliberalism/corporatism and they ABORTED "progressive" (or any) actual reforms.
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.
You're right. Striking at the doorsteps of private and public Universities is a "garbled" practice and the contradictions can always be sensationalized and "endless". Chis falls into this pit, face first, in his article...and his actions as a striking teacher on campus (the suit doesn't help his message either). It reinforces a garbled message between the mix of public and private funding and is, IMO, barking up the wrong tree. Pointless. Tack taxpayer funding out of University funding.
To take the issue further, I believe we, as a nation and society, need to decide (urgently) where we stand on public education. If we believe K-12 should be public for all, then why not University? Drawing this strange line between grade school and college public funding is arbitrary and ridiculous. It has lead to the "garbled" message we have delivered to ourselves for decades. Corporations have moved in on this indecisiveness and now rule the roost for their own benefit, not the taxpayer. Personally, I believe that all education should be private. Taxpayers should get a tax credit for each child of school age until age 18. If they want to spend it on education for their children, then that is their choice. If they don't, then they can keep more of their wages earned and reap what they sow. This will, in my opinion, result in a collapse of corrupt teachers unions and the most "equity" imaginable. What is going on today as far as public education is a scam and illusion.
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!
Obama's spending plans suffered when Republicans in Congress wouldn't go along.
Obama needed a revenue stream to replace the tax increases he dreamed of.
The student load system provided an alternative revenue stream.
I hope the Obama supporters that were ignorant of his corruption wake up to their own ridiculous choices/mistakes, but that is unlikely.
Obama's "Dear Colleague" (Title IX) letter was an enormous boost to the WOKE-GRIFTER-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX that now infects higher education like a social cancer.
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.
Your library card will do you little good these days. Public library's are chronically underfunded and most books, periodicals, or films worth reading are censored. For example, try renting "Closet Land" sometime--anywhere.
Most of the most important libraries will be sequestered by wealthy, private individuals. Hope you and/or your offspring get access to them.
It's no coincidence that underfunded public libraries coincide with woefully under performing public school systems. Ignorant masses are more pliable masses.
I finished undergrad in 1992, and it was already turning into a corporate free-for-all. I'm not sure the learning for learning's sake was ever really that strong, especially at exclusive, private places.
Sera: " True learning happens when we teach ourselves." Agreed, but at a university a good learner can be benefited by the advantages of academia. Surely you have done well, but the question is would you have been even better if you had pursued your studies at higher institutions?
Universities help but progress depends on the student. There is the case of one St. George W. that performed the miracle of getting degrees from Yale and Harvard but left them being the same dumb young man, as always, and later caused great damage to the world. On the other hand, we had a very intelligent American of humble origin that succeeded in life without having to be the son of a president. He was Thomas Alba Edison who received no formal education and yet with his inventions improved our world.
I lament, like Mr. Hedges in this report, that corporations have invaded our public education and created an environment of gross inequality among their members. They also have pressured the leaders of the universities to push the neoliberal teaching of egonomics (professor David Korten's term) and to depreciate the study of the liberal arts that provide the wisdom required in these days and, worst of all, to modify the criteria for obtaining tenure from excellency to compliance. In my opinion, universities need to be truly universal where the students of the different disciplines can learn without censorship or imposed ideologies, otherwise, we would be graduating limited intellectual eunuchs.
"And seek for truth in the groves of academe" Horace.
From the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, classical liberalism, the foundation of western civilization, requires an outbred gene pool. Historically, most human gene pools are inbred due to cousin marriage and "clannish" social forms. Thus, western civilization is W.E.I.R.D. (Henrich @ Harvard)
The "left" is now captured by neo-communism, neo-marxism and postmodern-corporate luxury-digital-gnosticism (the "woke" grifter-industrial-complex), all of which is an ILLIBERAL and totalitarian class war by oligarchs on the working classes and the Yeomanry (middle class property and business owners). See Joel Kotkin on Neo-Feudalism.
Also see Ehrenreich on the PMC, the professional-managerial class.
1992, Ross Perot. Giant Sucking Sound.
Also see Jordan Hall (and Nassim Taleb) on the technological disruption of FRAGILE legacy hierarchies of curated expertise (the "Blue Church").
Also see: the CRISIS OF MEANING (crisis of archetypes) that underlies the failure of modern rationalism and high-social-trust social institutions.
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
and
https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality
The failed policies of Reaganomics which include, deregulation, free trade, trickle down theory, and importing cheap labor immigrants legal and illegal are what have destroyed the American middle class.
The left have always opposed all of those. The left wanted, zero population growth, regulated capitalism (a maximum wage), alternative energy, rational thought, very little toxins in the environment, and a decent standard of living for all, not just a few narcissistic psychopath sadists. The left has been marginalized by big money infiltrating the political process and seizing control of the Democrat party. Now the right who failed policies have cost us over 50 trillion dollars the last 60 years, wants to make them dictators?
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.
These dean jobs are sinecures. Big salaries to show up for a few meetings, if that much.
Oh yes, my gosh, I could tell stories I heard from Dartmouth but I won't as they are long. These Deans definitely don't do much and barely work in most cases.
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.
No "capitalism" is involved. That would require an actual market and competition. Public education is a corporatist STATE CARTEL.
The leftist pro-labor guy that wrote "How The University Works" some years ago pointed out that academic labor unions caved in back in the 1980s/90s to the corporatists. There was an important Supreme Court case about an academic labor issue (i don't remember the details), and the academic labor unions had to make a choice: stand for principle, "faculty governance" (internal democracy) OR sell out for more pay for TENURED FACULTY that had grants and/or seniority.
Guess what academic labor did? Yep, they SOLD OUT and gave up "faculty governance".
That threw open the door for the huge growth of top-down administrators, usually with sociopathic personality traits, that were incentivized by the system to keep grasping for more power, money, staffs, and political "territory" (frequently while stabbing each other in the back and cynically exploiting "woke" politics to climb their admin career ladders).
That was the point at which grad students began to have to survive brutal competition for the few remaining jobs, which usually only led to adjunct positions. Serious mental illnesses became prevalent. Large scale SSRI "addiction" developed, followed by horrible SSRI withdrawal and brain dysfunction.
Most higher education institutions became hellscapes, and the academic labor unions can't and won't do SH1T about those real problems.
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.
The corporate-state requires that "education" be "indoctrination".
The indoctrination GRIFT now wears the mask of fake "social justice", WOKEISM.
MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN
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.
I do not think comparisons such as what a poet can teach compared to what a doctor can teach should be done on the basis of $ worth. Learning has value but should it be/can it be monetized? It is true that in our current system, everything (and I mean everything) is measured and then given a worth in $. But should it be? I am not sure why this struck me but it did. We keep viewing everything as though it is for sale or will give a return on investment. Seems like the $ market is controlling everything including our thinking. There may indeed be too many (counting) administrators but I think that glut of administrators is a natural result of a structure built on counting and $. I think education, like housing and food and healthcare needs to be protected from the total control of the market. We need to look at the structure that forces us to start ranking humans: Poets; doctors; lawyers; farmers and on and on. That is what markets do.
The brutal reality is that people that want to teach poetry need to have some other source of income to live at a basic, decent level (not be a "starving artist"). They need to be married to a high earner, or someone that is independently wealthy, or inherit a significant amount of money or property, or have a side gig or something like that.
Historically, public education, especially K-12, was able to limit costs by hiring young unmarried women who eventually aged out when they got married and had their own children. Then they were replaced by other young women that couldn't easily find better jobs. The education system had a good pool of low wage labor, some of which were very smart women that didn't have many other career choices besides teaching, nursing, etc.
Now, women continue working after getting married and having children, and many school districts pay lavish salaries to affluent teachers (mostly women) that were able to get graduate degrees, by mid and late career.
I know of a suburban K-12 school district in a relatively affordable mid-sized city in northern california (not the bay area, not LA region) that pays senior teachers with grad degrees $90,000/year, with awesome retirement, medical, etc. Some schools in affluent neighborhoods, where parents DEMAND the "best" teachers have parking lots that are half full of luxury SUVs that the well paid senior teachers with graduate degrees drove to work.
The starving poetry teacher (an adjunct?) in New Jersey made distinct education and career choices that have consequences.
Even with a 14% raise, the low-wage adjunct poetry teacher still isn't going to raise themselves out of poverty. If the strike gets them medical benefits that could be a greater improvement, which is a good idea (especially if faux "diversity" jobs, grifter positions, are eliminated to cover the costs).
A number of cliches come to mind reading this. However, suffice to say that yours is the reactionary argument of the socialist egalitarian. While I agree that in a market economy some positions/careers are over-valued and under-valued with respect to society benefits, the same is true in any regime. The pursuit of perfection in this case is the enemy of the good. A market based system of paying people for job skills based on market supply and demand is severely flawed except compared to every other system.
My two sons are artistic right-brained. They will generally lead lives less economically successful than the children of our friends owning strong nerdy left dominate brains. However, my sons did figure out that they have to have marketable job skills to make a reasonable living, and pursue their art as a side hustle. And maybe one day their art skills will sustain their economic lives. But they are good with the side hustle.
bloated admin in higher education just needs to be (mostly) burned to the ground, it is corrupt neo-communism that is impossible to reform.
you are correct that these labor-activist appeals are garbled and nonsensical, undermining the credibility of the appeal, I have seen many of the same kind of nonsense, mixing facts and emotional-subjective victim narratives, for decades.
"teachers' unions" are pustules of "woke" nonsense.
"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."
Frank Lee
True. But it only makes sense in the fact that there nothing to constrain debt spending (similar to continual unpaid, credit card spending) at the Federal Government level. This is why a federal balanced budget amendment is vital to being on the Congressional agenda and passed as soon as possible. This debt spending trickles down to universities in large amounts. Just as the oligarch class have purchased government officials (with tax money, mind you), so too have they purchased large universities (with tax money). If we outlawed tax money to be secured by Universities under the auspicious of dubious grants and subsidies, then the bloated salaries and staffs of university administrators would NOT continue to grow either. Personally, if a University wants to exist on the income terms of their tuition and private endowments, then I couldn't care less how they operate-- or what they pay anyone on their staff. It's always your choice to work for them; or to go to school there. But, again,, when tax money is being used to prop up these obscenities (such as outlined by Chris), that should be outlawed immediately. Its up to the taxpayer to demand that of their representatives. If they continue to ignore the responsibility to demand that accountability, then there is no purpose in complaining about it. Unfortunately, this is all Chris does in his article. Striking is NOT demanding tax payer accountability. It just plays into the private institution hoax these universities are foisting upon the taxpayer. If you really think about it, then I believe you have to come to the conclusion that it reinforces and perpetuates these obscene practices.
The picket lines should be forming outside government officials and representatives offices, not university doorsteps.
yep. the labor movement (such as it is) got in bed with Clintons-Obama-Biden who got in bed with neoliberalism/corporatism and they ABORTED "progressive" (or any) actual reforms.
ridiculous partisan tribalism
endless "woke" GRIFTS
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.
You're right. Striking at the doorsteps of private and public Universities is a "garbled" practice and the contradictions can always be sensationalized and "endless". Chis falls into this pit, face first, in his article...and his actions as a striking teacher on campus (the suit doesn't help his message either). It reinforces a garbled message between the mix of public and private funding and is, IMO, barking up the wrong tree. Pointless. Tack taxpayer funding out of University funding.
To take the issue further, I believe we, as a nation and society, need to decide (urgently) where we stand on public education. If we believe K-12 should be public for all, then why not University? Drawing this strange line between grade school and college public funding is arbitrary and ridiculous. It has lead to the "garbled" message we have delivered to ourselves for decades. Corporations have moved in on this indecisiveness and now rule the roost for their own benefit, not the taxpayer. Personally, I believe that all education should be private. Taxpayers should get a tax credit for each child of school age until age 18. If they want to spend it on education for their children, then that is their choice. If they don't, then they can keep more of their wages earned and reap what they sow. This will, in my opinion, result in a collapse of corrupt teachers unions and the most "equity" imaginable. What is going on today as far as public education is a scam and illusion.
correction: Rutgers is a public university
the strike was just suspended:
https://www.trentonian.com/2023/04/15/rutgers-university-unions-announce-deal-to-end-strike-classes-to-resume/
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.
Meanwhile there are a dozen DEI admins making $150,000/year.
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!
Obama's spending plans suffered when Republicans in Congress wouldn't go along.
Obama needed a revenue stream to replace the tax increases he dreamed of.
The student load system provided an alternative revenue stream.
I hope the Obama supporters that were ignorant of his corruption wake up to their own ridiculous choices/mistakes, but that is unlikely.
Obama's "Dear Colleague" (Title IX) letter was an enormous boost to the WOKE-GRIFTER-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX that now infects higher education like a social cancer.
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!