According to this logic, the university must provide a ‘service’ in which the student ‘consumer’ can measure the value of their ‘investment’ in quantifiable terms: from the ‘quality’ of the education they receive as measured in RAE and QAA scores to the ‘real world’ financial pay-off they can look forward to in the long term. The value of education in this sense can be seen as a straightforward instrumental means toward the no less instrumentalized end of improving one’s chances in the labor market. Universities must accept the need for “reform” - that is, the re-orienting from their original purpose toward training and honing the ‘transferable’ skills required by the ‘knowledge economies’ of advanced capitalism.

I asked students—understanding of course that in reality life is a lot more complex than any three types—to pick which type they tended more towards, or pretend to pick one in any case.  Describe the type using Horney’s theory and then provide examples from their own lives that illustrate or elaborate upon the type.

About half the class was present on that cold and wet day, so I made them sit in a circle and asked each student present to say what type they thought they were and then discuss their example.  I was half listening—because I sort of try also to listen around the edges of what they are saying—and one guy said he was the moving toward type (seeking to please others and win their approval) but then (maybe I missed something) he went on about how people are such jerks and so stupid.  So I said, I was lost and that he sounded more like the Moving Against type who sees himself as super strong and everybody else as weak or possible stupid.

Later another student read a quotation from her paper.  I am not sure if it was this one but something like it:

            …he (the moving towards type) persuades himself that he likes everybody, that they are all nice and trustworthy, a fallacy that not only makes for heartbreaking disappointments but also adds to his general insecurity.

Bingo, I said, and tapped the student on the arm (he was sitting right next to me) who had said people were jerks.  So this is what you meant; since as a moving towards type you want to see others as nice like yourself, you frequently find yourself pissed off at people when it turns out they are not nice. As a moving towards you project your own values on others; you idealize them and when the veil slips away and you see the warts you see them as jerks, etc, not perhaps because they really are jerks but because they were not quite the people you thought they were.

Bingo!  I said.  There’s a whole paper there.  Abstractions and examples make it possible for the teacher, who doesn’t understand much, to understand something.  It’s like a process.

Bingo!

 Additionally as I previously noted, if a student has classes on MW this Winter Quarter 08 he or she will miss an additional two classes.

If then a student enrolls at the end of the second week and those two additional vacation days are thrown in the student can miss 6 of 20 courses (on a twice a week schedule) and still receive credit for the course.

Also here at UCSB the second and third weeks of the winter quarter are the weeks students, who must leave the dorms, head over to IV to sign leases for their housing for NEXT YEAR with the IV slumlords.  I hear students talking to each other over their cells about housing, trying to figure out both who they will live with next year and where. 

One student said he went out with three other guys and wanted to rent a place; the slumlords said, sure, but you will need to get your parents to co-sign, not just for you, their child, but for all the other people renting the place as well.  I have never heard of such a thing.  Is this legal?

The student shrugged.  It was just their way of getting rid of us till they found a group they liked the looks of better, he said.

And students in my Monday class—was that just yesterday—when I was beginning to feel sick and all lethargic—when I asked how they were doing honestly said they were wiped out because the first weekend of each quarter is a really big getting drunk weekend. 

So to summarize I am trying to teach something to students who are allowed back into their living area less than 24 hours before the actual start of classes.  During that first week, they must locate their classes, attend them, correct problems in scheduling, move back into their dorm rooms, and stand in long lines buying books.  The following week, especially if they are freshmen, they must go out to IV and try to find a place to live for the following year.  In the meantime, at least half of the students feel obligated via peer pressure to get drunk as skunks the first weekend of the quarter.

I do no feel this environment is particularly conducive to what I think of as education.

According to an article in the student newspaper student fees (officially UC students don’t pay “tuition”) went up 85% over the last six years.  And Lieutenant Governor Garamedi, as well as, Lillian Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, had the nuts to say the obvious; while students are paying more—all those undergraduates—they are getting less and less for their money.

That’s clear to me.  There are not enough teachers, back logs are building up all over campus; students can’t get the courses they need to complete their damn majors.

And at the same time they are trying to up the minimum number of units a student must take per quarter from 12 to 14.  And somewhere I read about a new rule that would penalize (probably by making them pay more) students who take less than 15 units a quarter.

So where’s all that money going.  To make up for previous budget cuts, one is told.  Oh, yea, while all over campus new buildings are going up like mushrooms, and they are proposing now to increase chancellor’s salaries by 33% over the next three years.

You’d think students would take a look at the situation and just say, NO!  Because they are getting royally screwed.

But they are just students.  They are here and then they are gone.  More and more, it seems they want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.  That suits the UC since they want to increase throughput, thus the increase in the number of units per quarter, and rules about penalizing students who go over the unit level necessary for graduation.

And of course the students’ parents want it over with too ASAP because of the debt piling up….

Going to the UC these days is way too much like a forced march through Siberia; all you want to do is survive.

No wonder then students sit in my class slacked jaw, glassy eyed and looking at me like my very existence was an imposition on their lives. No wonder I can’t engage them, or get them talking, or fired up over the importance of learning to write well, and, heck, the fun one might have doing it.  I need to stop feeling like a failure and realize I didn’t make this mess.  

Selectivity is virtually defined by institutional average SAT scores, and so the SAT remains the most powerful mechanism by which elite institutions create a pool of “credible” candidates. Examine the College Board’s annual data on the relationship between SAT performance and the class status of students’ parents, measured by family income and parent education levels. The data are astounding, showing that high school seniors with highly educated and affluent parents can expect to score hundreds of points higher than students from far more modest social and economic backgrounds. For example, the average SAT score of students whose families earn between $30,000 and $40,000 a year is 1436. That’s compared to the average of 1656 for students whose parents earn $100,000 or more — a 220-point difference.

This is the statement of a guy named Peter Sacks who recently published a book: Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.  He disputes the claim that the educational system, at least at this point in our sordid history, acts as a social economic equalizer.  By the way, Sacks praises the UC system for having moved away from a dependence on SATS.

Mostly her report focused on hearings in New York on the collusion between college and universities across the country and the major lenders, like B of A, and Citibank.  Seems that when a student goes to get a loan at the school, he or she is given a list, created by the school, of preferred lenders.  Lenders the school prefers for whatever reason.  Turns out the reasons have to do with outright kickbacks, payoffs, as well as free vacations to some exotic spot for the whole damn financial aid office.  So for these perks, the lender gets put on the preferred list, that sometimes has only two or three lenders listed, and as it turns out 90% of the time students pick one of the lenders on the list given to them by their school.  They make the mistake in other words of trusting the people at the college of their choice.

This is fairly disgusting. 

I really don’t know where to direct my anger.  At the fact, companies and colleges have systematically set about fleecing students, or the fact that student have to take out such huge loans at all. 

Now I have believed in the possibility of global warming since about 1978; recent stuff coming from international commissions seemed finally more or less to confirm that the claim is not utterly alarmist speculation.  In fact, the confirmation to me seemed complete and the predictions dire.  Not that I care really.  I will be dead if and when the shit hits the fan.  The predictions of global warming are not going to change my actions one iota; I am not going to go out and buy a boat or move further inland.  Screw that.  I am too tired.

My concern is more emotional.  As a teacher, as somebody working with the generation that might be around should the end of the world as we know it occur, whether or not these predictions are accurate or inaccurate does have some affect on the way I feel about teaching enterprise.  If the end of the world is at hand and the current generation of students is the one that will have to deal with it, then I feel the USA is pretty screwed.  I don’t think the current generation is up to the job at all.  They will collapse and the US will go to hell in a hand basket.

But if things are not going to be as bad as all that, then I can take a deep breath, relax a bit and not get all tensed up when students seem to want to defend their right to buy an SUV if they want to and that anybody who says they don’t have that right is like “anti-freedom” or something.  Of course I felt we were screwed well before my worst fears were apparently confirmed.  My work with students who wanted to be doctors, for example, lead me to the conclusion that I never ever wanted one of them to operate upon me.  Their lack of attention to detail was certainly going to cause a  lot of old people to pass on a bit prematurely from having been dosed up with incorrect meds by a generation of medical people all apparently plagued by ADD.

But now with the predictions more dire than ever and finding myself still dealing with students who believe it is the right of businesses to do any damn thing they want, I get more tense.  And I need that like a hole in the head.

I think there are about 6000 Starbucks world wide, and of course, now they look pretty much alike.  The founder was upset because when you went into one, since they had put in those new automated espresso makers, you couldn’t even smell the coffee anymore.  How the hell was a person to create a coffee house culture without the smell of coffee?  He shook up his investors for a while with this Hamletian torments, and then reassured everybody by saying he is going to have more Starbucks than MacDonald’s world wide.  He is aiming, I do believe, for 20,000 outlets.

The student giving the oral report when she is home hangs out in an “actual” coffee house.  She had pictures of it.  It looked warm and inviting.  The chairs she said did not match (a sure sign of a real coffee house) and they had one of those Italian coffee makers that has a big handle to pull down when you make the coffee, and all sorts of steam and other stuff shoots out.  She said that really she liked this old fashioned coffee house better than Starbucks.

Then another student, perhaps sensing a “criticism” of Starbucks, said something like he didn’t understand the problem since Starbucks was doing what Starbucks was supposed to be doing, which was looking like Starbucks and serving up Starbucks coffee.  Like what else could a Starbucks be but a Starbucks? 

I wonder if this is what Marcuse meant with his one-dimensional man, not the inability to be critical (god forbid) but the inability even to detach one’s self sufficiently from what is to begin to feel things might be other than they are or once were.

The founder of Starbucks must know that coffee house culture grew out of and was rooted in the long history of neighborhoods.  If they were all “unique” or “special” in some way that’s because there were neighborhoods, urban neighborhoods, with people all packed on top of each other and bumping into each other down at the coffee house.  But neighborhoods are dead and dying what with the creation of suburbia.  In recognition of this fact, Starbucks now has drive-thru’s.

How can a coffee house be a coffee house if you don’t even have to go inside?

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Above--Will's Coffee House--where Alexander Pope and other wits used to hang out.

Suicides a symptom of larger UC crisis

What’s the crisis exactly:

At UC Berkeley, 45% of students surveyed in 2004 said they had experienced an emotional problem in the previous 12 months that significantly affected their wellbeing or academic performance. Nearly 10% said they had seriously contemplated suicide.

At UC Santa Barbara a decade ago, an average of 21 students a quarter came to the counseling center to report they were experiencing an emotional crisis. Now, more than 200 students a quarter come for help, saying they are in a crisis.

So what’s the problem with the crisis.  Mental health services throughout the UC system are severely, not to say grotesquely underfunded, with little or no help on the horizon.

This is part, as I see it, of a larger pattern.  Undergraduates get the shaft.  The UC is a massive bureurcacy  research institution mostly interested in acquiring grant money from the military-industrial complex.  While footing a large portion of the bill, undergraduates are mostly a pain in the ass.

Buildings are going up all over the campus where I work, like goddamn mushrooms—millions and millions and millions of dollars spent—and they can’t find anywhere the few measly millions to hire some more counselors.

This is sickening and amounts to criminal behavior.

The lead blurb in a recent New Yorker was about the pressure on today’s students.  This must be an indirect response to the VT thing.  The article just irritated me.  First it starts off with some silly analogy about going to college being like going to a sleepover at somebody’s house and being served a tuna sandwich very much unlike the kind one’s mother makes.  Is there some sort of law these days saying one must write in some sort of cute or clever or downright silly way?

College is NOT like going to a sleepover.  Of course, what would I know?  I never went on a sleep over, and I would never turn my nose up at anybody’s tuna sandwich because I would be happy to have it.

But the New Yorker is very, very middle class.  This is evident in the author’s claim that college today is a meritocracy.  This is complete BS.  It might be a meritocracy for the upper middle class but that’s about it.

I found this in the Chronicle of Higher Education, hardly a radical leftist rag:

Colleges, once seen as beacons of egalitarian hope, are becoming bastions of
wealth and privilege that perpetuate inequality. The chance of a low-income
child obtaining a bachelor's degree has not budged in three decades: Just 6
percent of students from the lowest-income families earned a bachelor's
degree by age 24 in 1970, and in 2002 still only 6 percent did. Lower still
is that child's chance of attending one of America's top universities.

I have a lot more stuff on this, but I won’t bring it up.  Conclusion, so far, college is NOT like eating a strange tuna sandwich and it is NOT a meritocracy.

Aside from the fact that the basic premises of the irritatingly cute blurb are completely WRONG, I do give the author credit for thinking a very little about the plight of college students today.  He says they are full of anxiety because college is so competitive.  Well, maybe, but not where I come from.  If they are anxious, it’s because THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING.  Here they are going to classes, and usually going into considerable debt to it, because they have been indoctrinated into the idea that they must go to college since the year zero.

One interesting observation thought, if it’s true: “The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of of Teaching, which classifies institutions of S higher education, no longer uses the con­cept "liberal arts" in making its distinc­tions.”

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A student in one of my classes this quarter sent me the above, of disposables in the student ghetto of IV California. 

It’s a brave new world all right.  We have become a nation of wastrels.  But that’s the consumer culture for you.  I suppose we have to blame Bic that came out with those throw away pens and shavers and such.  I guess if you can buy a refrigerator for less than a 100 bucks and you can’t get it in your BMW you just leave it behind.  Why not?  What’s 20 bucks these days?  What’s a hundred bucks?

In other words, I guess this is not so much a commentary on “them students,” as it is on the consumer culture in which they have grown up.  It’s a throw away culture.  Not that I am immune to it, but I still have a bit of the waste not, want not ethic.  When I asked my students about waste not, want not—they hadn’t even heard of waste not, want not.  When I asked if they tried to use their “leftovers,” most thought I was crazy.  I mean I can’t stand to throw food out.  I have little plastic cartoons of extra rice stuck all over in my refrigerator.  I make sure I use the stuff.  I keep it around until I can or it starts to stink whichever comes first. But they just throw mounds of perfectly good food out….