As 'privatization' expands, the public sphere erodes

previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 13 December 2015


Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-party series of essays about free speech on college campuses.

Two other forces have brought us to the point where students feel threatened on ISU’s and other campuses by “street preachers” and “unsafe” in the face of passionate disagreements and potential objectionable Halloween costumes. And they are related. The first is the incredible narrowing of the “public” as well as the tarnishing and demeaning of all things public.


“Private” is good, while “public” is bad. What public institution is held up with pride in the United States anymore? Certainly not democratic government or our courts. Even the military is forced to increasingly privatize. Public education once used to be held up, but not anymore with those who are entrusted with our public institutions working effectively to undermine them. Public lands are constantly under fire to be privatized. National, state and municipal Parks’ budgets are cut and cut until they are no longer truly public because to stay in operation they have to charge user fees and then “privatized.”


Who doesn’t love Disney World? But you don’t have freedom of speech there. Try wearing a provocative piece of legible clothing without a Disney trademark. Go to a town square, and you can start talking loud about the mayor if you want, except there are no people anymore in the town square, they are at the mall. So, go to the mall and start on about the mayor being a crook; you will be escorted out. Public might as well be “pubic” in today’s America. Facebook isn’t public, not only can people “block’ you but Facebook can violate your constitutional rights by shutting you out, except it’s not your constitutional right, you have to play by Facebook’s rules and that is their right as (private) property owners. Even the Livefyre commenting feature on the Tribune-Star’s website where this essay appears has “rules” about speech.


As we de-public our democracy, we create fewer and fewer spaces where those cherished rights can be exercised. You don’t have rights to free speech in the workplace (unless you work for the government, oh right, not even there, ask the Terre Haute police officer about his political statements contrary to the current administration’s favor). You don’t have rights to free speech in a private home at the dinner table. As a culture we might emphasize it, but it mostly only works when people are relatively equal. Your boss or your mom aren’t going to respect your mouthiness as free speech, its back-talking or insubordination and you get grounded or fired for it.


Most of those corporate sponsored SEC football schools, like Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Tennessee, and Texas A&M, are all government schools established as Land Grant Universities by the Federal Government following the Civil War to specifically further the industrialization of the country, but today, they are more like private schools because the states are getting out of the public anything business (even prisons as they are rapidly being privatized). And with that privatization comes the inevitable treating students as “customers.” And customers are treated well are they not?


I mean, if an employee is treated shabbily by a boss, we hardly care. Just look at the waning public support for unions. But if a customer is treated poorly by a business, it’s known and in some cases, some treatment is considered illegal, such as refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, or refusing to serve a customer with the wrong religion or skin color. Public institutions treat people shabbily, like the IRS, while our universities recruit students as though they are heading off to a private resort and given the debt that so many students carry even in public (government) colleges. No wonder they feel the right to exclude offensive individuals from their “private” space, especially the obnoxious and biased press.


No, it’s not the “pussification” of America nor is it the” progressivism” of higher ed or the continued insensitivity of the dwindling white power structure of academia, it’s the systematic devaluation of and shrinkage of the “public” in our society. Free speech only ever existed in the public sphere which once was ubiquitous, especially with such incredible institutions as education and a press that served the public. But today, public is an insult and everyone unquestioningly assumes the superiority of “private.”

The result is a loss of social space to exercise free speech or to have a free press. Besides, the “press” is so vilified today. For some, it’s the press that is the “enemy.” Mizzou students formed a ring around protesters to protect them from the intrusive eye of the press. Later some of them will be the legislators who pass laws that make it a crime for journalists to take pictures of factory farms to show the public the conditions of the animals that become bacon and hamburgers. As our “public” rights erode, “private” rights expand.

Is America's Most Overrated Product the Bachelor's Degree

Yes, claims Marty Nemko, a former career counselor, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Ouch!

I don's disagree with the author. He goes on:

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

The author goes on to eviscerate what colleges and universities are doing. Nothing really new here; yup, teaching is not really rewarded; in fact, it is detrimental. The author goes on to suggest what all colleges should be required to report. I don't disagree at all. But, I do take exception to a couple of things.

He seems to have special enmity for the large state universities. They were founded as "research" schools, especially in agriculture and engineering. It is part of their mission to do research that benefits society. I'm not suggesting that they actually do this, but it is wrong to suggest that their original goals should be held against them today.

Mr. Nemko also doesn't say a thing about the overall lack of motivation on the part of today's students. Sure, as he notes, many are highly motivated and bright, but many are bright have great test scores, and just underachieve all over the place. is that really the fault of the universities? This is a cultural problem. Universities and colleges are not high schools.

Now, I don't blame Mr. Nemko for not being the most well read and I'm sure he thinks he has "discovered" something here, but "credentialism" has been a phenomenon noted by sociologists for some time. Much of today's situation with higher ed can be attributed to the GI Bill. by making it so easy for so many to attend college after WWII, and the public schools really expanded and the growth in human capital really created a vibrant middle class, ..., most of these would be viewed as good things, but it also created the requirement of a college degree for scores of jobs that had not before needed one, and one could argue, do police and correctional officers need college degrees? What evidence is there that college grads make better officers? is there any? how would one measure that anyway?

College is still needed for doctor's lawyers, the professions, teaching, and other ocupations which have managed to use the state to close boundaries on the occupation, like teaching, social working, and financial consultants.

Credentialism works really well for business and many public service organzations. Arguably you get better educated folks, overqualified, for the same price.

Of course, credentialism may benefit colleges because they are the providers of the credential, but corporations that make a degree an absolute requirement, regardless of whether their is specialized knowledge involved, are as much to blame. the trnucating of corporate ladders from the bottom to the top, with the requirement to have a college degree.

And the requirement of a college degree has been a real boon to the maintenance of the class structure. When it is not just academic achievement or motivation that is operative, the cost is what I am referring to, then as long as it is the more priviliged groups that have the access, then it helps to reduce competition from lower status groups who dont have the same access.

But now, that access is almost universal, though remarkably expensive, but with easy financiing, there are increasing people who question whether a college degree is worth it; I find this especially interesting as white males, especially, are abandoning college.

I do agree with the author, too many unqualified people go to college; too many graduate from college having learned nothing because they were not at college to learn. But the phenomenon is not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of the colleges and universities.

Obscuring social class by blaming colleges

Yesterday I blogged about a common tactic of some to blame colleges and universities for being anti-military and blaming college students for being ignorant of things military. I provided an example of such a statement. I alerted the author that I had commented on his blog here. You can read his comment on yesterday's blog.

In short, I stated that it is not the colleges, but rather the class background of the students (hence of the parents) that is creating the anti-military actions or the ignorance among the students.

Today, I asked my mostly freshman class, there were 100 in attendance today, the following: I asked them to raise their hand if any of the following were true: 1) they were either currently in the military, had been in the military, or were planning to join upon graduation; 2) whether they had any relatives who were currently serving in the military; or 3) any of their friends (not acquintances) were currenlty serving in the military.

88 of them raised their hands.

The fact is the military and this war falls disproportionately on the backs of the lower, working and middle classes. This is a fact that many on the right do not want to discuss much less even acknowledge. And too many on the left act as though those in the military have the options that the upper class do.

For what it matters, my father, his brother, and my cousin all served in the military. My uncle, and cousin were both lifers. My father in law served during Korea and my wife's cousin recently retired, a major, from the Air Force.