Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election

June 23, 2011 13 Comments

Whether Obama retains the White House in 2012 or a Republican wins, nothing much will change. The evidence is overwhelming.

It no longer matters who sits in the Presidential seat or in Congress — unless, of course, the Republican is Newt Gingrich, the extremely nasty former Speaker of the House who wrote a doctoral dissertation excusing the brutal colonization of the Congo, or the absolute dizzy opportunist, Michele Bachmann , who is convinced that CO2 is a natural byproduct of nature.

But even if the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin were to win, all candidates will succumb to the law of the land: the state and the corporation are the main sponsors and coordinators of an “unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalitarian tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries — political, moral, intellectual, and economic — but whose nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself,” says Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The Kock Brothers’ exertion is a perfect example. Thus, all candidates — in the White House and Congress — must adhere to the demands of this imbalance of power that invents and disseminates “a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasure while accepting political passivity,” argues Wolin.

We live in less democratic times; we wallow in a “collective identity” that is imperial rather than republican. The consequence is that we interiorize an artificial vision of civilization created by the political coming- of – age of corporate power and its concomitant myth making apparatus.

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation.

Let’s take a look under the hood at the engine that runs the inversion of power in our current ideological state apparatus.

The top 5 contributors to the 2010 campaign committee of Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, are:

  • Comcast Corp, who actively lobbied “net neutrality” legislation, FCC programming issues, and general telecommunications issues. In 2010, Comcast focused its lobbying efforts on a getting a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal approved by the federal government. People and political action committees associated with Comcast Corp. together generally favor Democrats when it comes to political campaign contributions. The monopolization of expression.
  • McGuire, Woods, et al –recently represented BVT Institutional Investments in the sale of 10 shopping centers located in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The $130 million transaction was one of the country’s largest retail real estate transactions of 2011 and marks the conclusion of McGuireWoods’ representation of BVT in connection with its U.S. Retail Income Fund VIII portfolio & in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the whistle blower provisions in Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) do not protect employee leaks to the media. Rather, the statute’s plain language protects only disclosures made to federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, Congress and employee supervisors. McGuireWoods, defending Boeing, moved for summary judgment on the grounds, among others, that SOX does not protect complaints and disclosures to the media. The District Court agreed and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
  • Dominion Resources — Electrical Utilities, Gas and Electric
  • Goldman Sachs — we know who they are, all the way to their involvement in the Obama administration and their creation of financial instruments that lead to the recession, the demise of the American economy
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield, through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association proved to be particularly active lobbying Congress during the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010. It has also lobbied Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.

The next 15 contributors to the Cantor camp follow the same pattern — KKR & Co, which sees itself as the leading global alternative asset manager, Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance, McKesson Corporation, pharmaceuticals and health products, and so on. We get the picture: insurance companies, lawyers, financial firms — banks too big to fail — tobacco (Altria Group, the world’s largest), pharmaceuticals. Representative Eric Cantor has reported a total of 2,849 contributions ($200 or more) totaling $3,057,540 in the current cycle.

Who is Cantor listening to? Cantor is an example of the “tendencies of our system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin.

Let’s look at another leading figure, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, elected to represent the Eight Congressional District of Ohio for an 11th term in November 2010, raised $9,796,947. His five leading contributors are AT&T, Murray Energy, First Energy Corp, American Financial Group and the Boehner for Speaker Committe. The top industries contributing to the Boehner effort are: Retired, Securities & Investment, Insurance, Electrical and Health Professionals.

Boehner’s portfolio is just about identical to Cantor’s. Major international companies have their hold on the two top leading Republican leaders. The tragedy we are currently living is that we seem unaware of the deeper consequences of these relationships. “We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia,” Wolin tells us. “Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today succeeds change. The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation.” If we take a look out our front doors, take a walk down the block, in our cities and in our villages, we can taste “undercut consolidation.” It’s everywhere — city and state workers, public institutions, the NBA, the NFL; neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are; hope is on a tightrope, the future bleak.

The Democrats don’t fair much better. The top Democratic donors are ActBlue (composite of many, many small, grassroots donations), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Union, Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, EMILY’s List (composite of many, many small grassroots donations), Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, National Assn of Letter Carriers, Ironworkers Union, United Auto Workers, United Transportation Union, American Postal Workers Union, UNITE HERE, AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. This suggests that unions are the primary donors.

But a closer look tells a different story. Let’s take Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of The US Senate. In the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, his re-election committee raised $24,815,104. The top 5 contributors were MGM Resorts International, Weitz & Luxunberg, mesothelioma and asbestos lawyers, Girardi & Keese, trial lawyers, Simmons Cooper LLC, also specializing in mesothelioma and Harrah’s Entertainment, hotels, resorts and casinos.

The top 5 industries contributing to the Reid campaign are lawyers, Securities & Investment, Lobbyists ($1,052,801 total!), Real Estate and Health Professionals. Reid is a carbon copy of Cantor and Boehner — so what, in fact, is the difference,  unions under attack because we need change?

In American’s Future After an Obama Victory, which I wrote in 2008 during the presidential campaign, before turning to Wolin, I was already suggesting that the Obama Administration was going to be challenged forcefully by the extremes in our culture. The last 3 years give us plenty of evidence. Obama has followed, even energized Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan (think drones), education and healthcare (think privatization and insurance lobbyists), energy and, sadly, race.

Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fund-raising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.

The top supporters of Barack Obama were the University of California ($1,591,395), Goldman Sachs ($994,795; note the connections to his staff: Summers [World Bank, President of Harvard that nearly bankrupted the endowment], Rubin [spent 26 years at Goldman], and Paulsen [former CEO of Goldman], all of whom influenced Geithner [worked for Kissinger, IMF Director of Policy Development and Review Dept, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York]), Harvard University ($854,747), Microsoft Corp ($833,617), Google Inc ($803,436).

This list of contributors to Obama continues unabated — and all other contenders pale by comparison: Citigroup (who laundered Mexican cartel money), JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner (Patrick Leahy, another top Democrat, was Time Warner’s largest recipient, 2009-10, $61,400). Of the top 20 contributors to the Obama effort, 4 are universities, and the rest fall in step with the ongoing search, by the corporation, for opportunism (which is not to suggest that the new corporate university is not after the same). “Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what is exploitable, and soon (following a trajectory since WW II), that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human well-being,” says Wolin. “Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.”

This is where we find ourselves today — in the name of change we are unchanging in the face of an uncompromising corporate will. The corporation owns the House and the Senate. These folks, our elected officials, are spokespersons for the corporate elite. If we wonder why CEO’s make so much money, this is why. If we want to know why education is being dismantled and privatized, benefitting the upper classes, this is why. The dissolution of collective action is here, too. The privatization of schools. And the increasing gap between the wealthy few, the middle class and the poor is here. Our forgotten communities, Newark’s South Ward, the South Bronx, Compton, others — it’s all right here in this negotiation between corporations and our officials.

And since we’re now on the verge of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, private security firms are smiling. Is this the world we want? It’s already just about out of our hands.

Though I’m speaking to deaf ears, knowing full well that I write to no one, as I speak, the NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.  How is that not inverted totalitarianism?  What about us, the people of Vermont?

The tragic story is that this inversion of power is happening while citizens go on with their lives not conscious of the consequences.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, education, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Education Revolution = A Revolution in Our Communities

March 7, 2011 Leave a comment

In February of 2010, Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at TED, said that, “Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find doing very easy… It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense.” Sir Robinson then goes on to say that, “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. At the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence…Human flourishing,” he says, “is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process and you cannot predict the outcome of human development…It’s not about scaling a new solution, it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.” Sir Ken Robinson is not calling for change, rather he’s calling for revolution — an Education Revolution.

All evidence in the US suggests that, in practice, Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of “separate but equal” – meaning, the acceptance of a dual system of education – is more appealing to the dominant class.

A “separate but equal” education system restricts access to social mobility; it strengthens a hierarchical socioeconomic system controlled by few. The gains of the Civil Rights Movement are long forgotten in education.  Privileged African Americans along with white Americans have given up the struggle for integration, receiving undeniable benefits from private academies.  “Separate but equal” has become a rationale for a dual system in American society – the privileged succeed and the underprivileged must find what works, though always one step behind.  We then call attention to the infrequent victories coming out of challenged communities, but we never  bring up the obvious: the lack of adherence to Brown v the Board of Education.

Our schools mirror our communities. Without changes to our communities, without emphasis on the family, however we define family, there can be no change in Education. Thus, we need an Education Revolution that begins with a revolution in our communities, particularly in the most impoverished.

In our tendency to sacrifice a large  swatch of our population primarily along racial lines — and class lines, too, especially when we speak of environmental racism — recent scientific research in genetics point to factors contributing to disease and behavioral disorders among minorities, especially African Americans.

Christopher W. Kuzawa and Elizabeth Sweet, from the Department of Anthropology, Northwester Univeristy, Evanston, Illinois, in their article “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health,” suggest that, “There is extensive evidence for a social origin to prematurity and low birth weight in African Americans, reflecting pathways such as the effects of discrimination on maternal stress physiology … [T] here is now a strong rationale to consider developmental and epigenetic mechanisms as links between early life environmental factors like maternal stress during pregnancy and adult race-based health disparities in diseases like hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart disease.”

Knowing what we now know, are we slowly killing certain populations in the US, namely African Americans and poor communities because we fail to see the benefits of integration? And when we realize that close to 1 in 3 Black men are in US prisons, does this not beg us to conclude that this approach to community destruction is systematic?  How do we narrow the achievement gap?

Randy L. Jirtle, Department of Radiology Oncology, Duke University Medical Center, Durnham, North Carolina, and Michael K. Skinner, Center for Reproductive Biology, School of Molecular Biosciences, Washington State University, Pullman, in “Environmental Epigenomics and Disease Susceptibility” say that, “Epidemiological evidence increasingly suggests that environmental exposures early in development have a role in susceptibility to disease in later life. In addition, some of these environmental effects seem to be passed on through subsequent generations.”

We exist in two Americas divided by access to opportunity. These harsh divisions eliminate the benefits of diversity. Scott E. Page, in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, says that, “Diversity and ability complement one another: the better the individual fruits, the better the fruit basket, and the better the other fruit, the better the apple … We should encourage people to think differently … These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.” ( see Scott E. Page’s lecture)

If the answer is diversity, why are our communities segregated, our schools separate and unequal? The answer is simple: education focused on enlightenment is dangerous. An enlightened citizen questions, challenges the status quo, and seeks alternatives. Education, today, is not about change, rather it’s about ensuring that we maintain the systems of production — supply and demand; power is thus balanced, meaning that a vertical society is maintained — some succeed and live well, others sustain those lives, and hopelessly aspire to something better through state lotteries and get rich quick schemes, such as those that lead to the mortgage crisis that affected mostly people of color and helped bring our economy to its knees. But we’ve not learned and the distance between the haves and the have nots is increasing.

As bell hooks says, in Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” To educate — and to be educated — is the “practice of freedom.” Since this is so, then closing down some classrooms, eliminating teachers , and destroying unions that support and protect them, ensure that we live in a divided country. And if we look at who benefits from this division, we see that only those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder benefit. In poor communities, families are destroyed, first and foremost, because this keeps the prison industrial complex healthy and an informed citizenry poor. We’ve not moved far from the psychology of racism that comes from slavery.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, global health, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment, the University Tagged with , , ,

Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter, Wisconsin and the Uncanny Tyranny of Inverted Totalitarianism

February 27, 2011 2 Comments

What do Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin have in common? Each is a sign — a result, if you will — of the large scale cohabitation between the corporation and the state.

Anthony, Jeter and Wisconsin are metaphors for a culture that welcomes change and private pleasure, while accepting political passivity that is a consequence of how power is invented and disseminated, primarily through the corporate-government alliance that, by its very nature, challenges boundaries and limits — even the limits of resources.

Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin are the reification of a managed democracy — the specter of inverted totalitarianism, as defined by Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc. (2008):**

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power. (also see here)

This relationship — corporate power and government — is obsessed with “control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin. It is therefore natural that, given these changes that mean to displace “existing beliefs, practices, and expectations,” there will be those who will try to strike a blow against totalitarianism. These loud outcries, muffled by popular media — the voice and most vital instrument of the corporate state — are signs of a new age dominated not by national pride, but by branding and accounting practices, tools usually conforming to vituperative ideologies.

Our metaphor is the athlete’s body. In its limitations — duress and age, much like our own — its value is set and owned. The athlete’s body is his or her body of work, much like a teacher’s is or a pipe fitter’s or a government employee’s. But the athlete’s body inhabits another domain: it is a canvas for our fantasies, made more grandiose by media’s hyper-narrative that concentrates solely on the surface structure. “Who owns this body, this body of work?” asks David Shields in Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. As we fantasize and watch athletes perform, we are blind to the location of the athlete in our culture; we thus fail to see how far removed we our from our fantasies, yet we persist and acquiesce to the domination of media, sports and the corporation over our collective identity. This is how hope begins to whither.

The plight of Carmelo Anthony and Derek Jeter’s recent scolding, by Yankee co-owner Hank Steinbrenner, for being too busy building mansions rather than thinking about a World Series victory, sets the tone for our condition: collective bargaining is dead, or nearly so, thus athletes — union workers everywhere — have to find alternative ways to increase their value and protection; and in Jeter’s case, you’ll be returned to your place in the world if you style too loudly. At relatively high socioeconomic standings athletes are routinely humiliated and disciplined into positions of servitude — and if further challenges occur, the rules of the game are changed, as NBA Commissioner David Stern is doing by re-examining this new “dominance” by teams that can afford the highest payrolls in a league that perpetually losses money.  The NBA Commissioner and the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey are interchangeable proxies for the corporate state demanding a high degree of control over labor, as well as control over government policies that may be leveled against the corporation’s need to expand by any means necessary.

Inverted totalitarianism suggests that some corporations will dominate, others will not. So controlling labor is essential. Commissioner Stern faces this challenge. Players will build coalitions — the Heat, for instance, the Celtics, now the Knicks — and compel change from within, thus altering how the system functions. But the primary facility of a predatory corporate system is its ability to adjust, moving and changing to switch one piece of a limited pie for another. This is what we’re witnessing in sports writ large; it’s what we’re witnessing in states, such as Wisconsin and New Jersey . It’s a throwback to the plantation model.

The black athlete — and all professional athletes for that matter — is located in a culture that has yet to dispel the horror of slavery. The consequences of slavery still linger. As Wolin suggests, “…that close to a century after women won the vote, their equality remains contested; or that after nearly two centuries during which public schools became a reality, education is now being increasingly privatized.” In other words, while the public yearns for change, not much has changed. Athletes may earn 40 Million Dollars, as the title of William C. Rhodan’s seminal study suggests, but they are still slaves, their identities governed by a plantation model. And when athletes —  union workers — gain some success, the rules are changed, once again ensuring that corporate power comes of age.

The black athlete that “threw punches we couldn’t throw,” writes Rhodan, “won races we couldn’t run,” represented “time-worn responsibility,” always “representing”, and our sense that, nationally, we were moving away from identity politics; however, upon closer examination, we come to realize nothing has changed. Salaries are high, living styles far better, judging from Derek Jeter’s 30, 875 square foot compound in the Davis Island section of Tampa, but corporate power has increased its dominance over a citizen’s inalienable rights, from the NBA to the NFL to Wisconsin. It’s an all out attack on labor and collective bargaining rights because resources are limited and the corporation can only stay alive by shifting its means, not creating something new and different that may challenge the status quo.

In the United States, we’re shutting down — unless we bring back the  Civil Rights Movement. Citizens are asleep, even unconscious, lulled into a deep slumber — and indifference — by the likes of the Koch brothers, representing the largest bloc of oil and gas donors, exceeding even Exxon Mobil in donations to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and politicians’ service to corporate dominance, best expressed by President Obama’s silence about Wisconsin (the community activist President never went to Wisconsin to show solidarity with working people), even with all his talk about human rights and change.

It’s an incredible world we have here — confusing, bifurcated and  moving towards hopelessness, which occurs when education is gutted, dismantled and given to the elite so as to ensure continued corporate domination. Schools across the country, from kindergarten to the University, are being turned into clones of the corporate system, as suggested early on by Bill Readings in University in Ruins (1998), one of the first intellectuals to chronicle this shift in mission and perspective, and brought to a new interpretation by Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion (2009), and now in his The Death of the Liberal Class (2010).

It’s an incredible world we have because, given the lessons of history, we are moving away from wisdom; rather, we are moving towards despair and annihilation and nothing short of a full out Civil Rights Movement can turn this around, otherwise, we will continue to experience rising food prices, rising fuel prices, poverty and disenfranchisement, war and violence as resources, controlled by very few hands, shrink.

Hedges is right:

The most ominous cultural divide lies between those who chase after these manufactured illusions, and those who are able to puncture the illusion and confront reality. More than the divide of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.

And since he is right, dead on, the only way to change this is to join Carmelo Anthony, and the like, and form coalitions, only these have to be formed, not with those that can slam dunk, rather they must be formed among us, the citizenry — the suffering in Wisconsin, Egypt and Libya, Newark, New Jersey, and the South Bronx. And we must form a new and collective Civil Rights Movement that takes as its cause enlightenment and the pursuit of wisdom because, after all, it’s the only path available to us that leads us to freedom with responsibility. Those that govern, it is obvious, are totally irresponsible and the evidence is indisputable — the mindless are leading the blind.

Pascal said that “Those who indulge in perversion tell those who are living normal lives that it is they who are deviating from what is natural. They think they are following a natural life themselves. They are like people on a ship who think it is those on shore who are moving away.” But we are moving away — from each other; and power is ever more concentrated. A new and invigorated Civil Rights Movement concentrated on challenging the stranglehold coming-of-age of corporate power has on our reality is our only way out.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, baseball, Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, sport in America, the University

The Uncanny Convocation in an Upside Down World

September 12, 2010 Leave a comment

In the past few weeks thousands of young first year college students gathered for convocations across the US — the beginning of a new academic year. A convocation is a calling forth to assembly by summons. It’s a long standing tradition inherited from the culture we fought against, Great Britain. In Hymn, ‘O Day of Rest, Wordsworth writes, “To holy convocations The silver trumpet calls.” This past week students marched quietly and obediently into sanctuaries of learning because they’ve heard the call from higher education: come forth to your future — here is your future. In the Church of England, a convocation is a provincial synod or assembly of the clergy, constituted by statue and called together to deliberate on ecclesiastical matters. Despite faculty regalia (very Harry Potter — no wonder Quidditch is played on some of our campuses!), and the convocation usually taking form in hallowed ground in colleges and universities, in the secular world, first years are called forth to deliberate matters of conscious, moral matters that can be questioned in the disciplines. First years are called forth by the faculty, the representatives of knowledge, the bearers, we like to think, of wisdom; we call forth young minds eager to confront the ideas that have created our civilization, to learn.

But to what exactly are we calling first year college students?

In Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha C. Nussbaum suggests that in our pursuits — and allegiance to traditions and their concomitant ideals — “we seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex.” We have failed here. We are thus calling forth our first years to a world that defines human relationships, Nussbaum contends, as being “of mere use and manipulation,” rather than comprised of “faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships.”

Two provocative New Yorker covers show the confusing world our knowledge making has created for our first years. We are calling our first years to Barry Blitt’s August 30 cover, “Pause,” and Peter de Sève’s “Beasts of Burden,” September 13.

Pause

Pause by Barry Blitt

Beasts of Burden

Beasts of Burden by Peter de Sève

In Blitt we find a relaxed middle aged man, his slight paunch of satisfaction and complacency, staring at a vast ocean and murky sky, a world that’s wide and foreboding, aiming a remote control to pause it — or to change it. Peter de Sève gives us a city street, in the foreground a child bent over from the heavy backpack, pulling a donkey that is likewise burdened by all the belongings of her master; across the street, kids carry books as they hurry to school. Access and social mobility separated by a street — Main Street — where we find promise and hope on one side, the hopeless “beasts of burden” on the other.

Socrates advised that the citizens of The Republic should be educated and assigned by merit to three classes: rulers, auxiliaries, and craftsmen. This is the world we’ve defined for our first years. But Socrates, unable to devise a logical argument for this social construction of power, fabricates a method, and tells Glaucon:

I will speak, although I really know not how to look in your face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction … They [the citizens] are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth…

Glaucon, in his reply, utters a prophesy: “Not in the present generation; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their son’s sons, and posterity after them.”

Indeed, “Pause” and “Beasts of Burden” share in their conviction that we’re living proof of Gloucon’s prophecy. Blitt and de Sève point to a society “addicted to ideologies — a civilization tightly held at this moment in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism,” says John Ralston Saul in The Unconscious Civilization. “The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy,” says Saul. “The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.”

In Blitt’s “Pause,” man is tragically convinced that he can “pause” the rate of change — be it climate change, political change, a change in how we perceive justice. In this cover cartoon, Blitt’s middle aged man still sees himself as the center of the world, now holding forth with a technology he falsely believes can save us. Our students have been raised with this conviction — technology can solve everything. De Séve shows us how blind we are, unable to see suffering at the hands of a vituperative, vertical socioeconomic system that relegates positions we can’t get out of, so we justify these with even more ideals — they must be lazy, if they only worked as hard as we do. What can I do to change this? our young minds wonder, succumbing to the wild and negative distributions of power. In both cartoons we see a society that scorns knowledge. “To know — that is, to have knowledge — is to instinctively understand the relationship between what you know and what you do,” says Saul. In Blitt and de Sève, knowledge is totally absent — gone, lost. We, the faculty, have lost our wisdom and we’re about to impart this sense of loss to our students.

These past few weeks, we called forth our first year college students to a world confused, upside down. Then we ask our new students to step into our classrooms where our wisdom will show that we have enabled a harrowing world to emerge from our regalia and our ceremonies, our traditions. In the September 4th Economist, in “Decline by degree,” Schumpeter, wonders whether America’s universities will go the way of its car companies. The American “luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals … America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go by way of GM.”

So while our young minds struggle to understand just how perverse the world we’ve created really is, they also must confront the notion that colleges and universities have been constructing a decorous world of illusion that cannot go on, if for no other reason than how we’ve been going to school and what we have been turning out as our future leaders have given us the world we now inhabit. We can’t “pause” this world — and in it, there is no Main Street, we are all “beasts of burdens” separated only by degrees.

Welcome to your first year!

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Socio-Economic insecurity, technology and education, the University

The Uncanny Decline

July 28, 2010 1 Comment

It’s uncanny, but one quick view of the headlines can make anyone’s head spin — Afghanistan is a chaotic shambles, a fog, Wall Street gains, Main Street loses, education is heading in the wrong directions (NY just reported record low test scores) and many schools opting out of the dubiously title Race to the Top.

What else?

WikiLeaks, the Russians want more biotech corn, an 88 year old former Nazi is charged with the mass murder of Jews, health insurance is in disarray–everywhere–and states want Fed help, no energy legislation, muscle flexing — South Korea and the US began their largest joint war games, Sunday, which includes a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and North Korea threatens retaliation.

And less we forget, Sheryl Sharrod’s story — the bogus notion that we’re somehow in a post-race America, whisked in by Obama’s magic carpet ride.

No one can make this up! This is who we are.

It’s no wonder we want to put our heads in the sand — or into a tall Vodka! There are no jobs and Americans continue to suffer. There is no future, and Americans are worried sick. There is no leadership, and congress continues to bicker, schoolyard kids arguing for who gets to control the swings, each side trying to bully the other. A great example being set by our alleged leaders.

We are definitely and assuredly spiraling downward.

The first to make us aware was Paul Kennedy, in his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987!). Readers balked, but, nevertheless, were glued to his chapter, “The United States: The Problem of Number One in Relative Decline”:

the United States … cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the ‘number one’ position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of ever-shifting patterns of global production.

Of course, the United States has not been able to adjust to the “ever-shifting patterns of global production.” This is obvious. As Kennedy points out, the “decision-making structure that permits a proper grand strategy to be carried out” has to be robust. It’s not, we know this now too. Why? Because, historically, the United States has relied heavily on the mechanisms of “piracy” and protectionism in its development, ensuring the world view of the United States as a predator. It’s not by chance that the single most problematic piece of military hardware is the predator drone.

What we are experiencing in this global paradigm shift is a crisis in Education, writ large. That is, we are having problems synthesizing information, siphoning through the wreckage that is mass media induced information, communication, and, most importantly, we are having great difficulty analyzing and putting into practice our historical antecedents. We forget them, toss these out. We are therefore in a global crisis of knowledge, lead by the United States — we shun it. I mean, let’s be real, Sarah Palin is a character that can sway people, even perhaps elections and she doesn’t even know Geography, for God’s sake. How can we blame children for not succeeding in school when someone such as Palin can become a mouth piece for democracy (lower case) and our political system?

In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges, says that, “The multiple failures that beset the country from out mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of our institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite.” Elite institutions do only a “mediocre job of teaching students to question and think”; their focus, instead, is “on creating hordes of competent systems managers.” All creativity vanishes and hierarchies with clear parameters and highly rewarded specialists blossom. “It destroys, the search for a common good,” says Hedges. In this world, we want TV wrestling and pornography, a reality based on illusion and the notion that consumption is an inner compulsion. The corporation has won.

In 1995, John Ralston Saul already saw this, too, in his The Unconscious Civilization: “What is more contemptible than a civilization that scorns knowledge of itself.” Saul told us that, “The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.” Historically, then, we have shifted from an American culture of production to a culture of consumption; with it, our values and philosophy — community, self-reliance, equal rights and justice — have vanished and we find ourselves in a new a quite harrowing world that embraces, as Saul says, a dominant ideology: corporatism — junk culture and junk politics.

Where do we go from here?

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – AM)

June 6, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

Day 4
10:30-noon
Magnolia 2/ Hotel Level 2

Special Feature Presentation

“Hip-Hop and the Politics, Hip-Hop and Race“
Bakari Kitwana –Public Intellectual, assisting what academics are doing; runs “Rap Sessions”, www.rapsessions.org, and organization trying to go back to “old school” – scholars, activists, artists that travel the country

(Note: an interesting conversation about the intersection of hip-hop culture and attempts to engage youth politically.   Hip-hop – non mainstream, not what we hear on the airwaves – provides avenues for engagement, ways of talking to youth.  Kitwana’s RapSessions are interesting too because these bring together artists, journalists and rap performers.)

Intro

•    works with hip-hop artists and scholars, a way of changing the equation
•    showed clips first, then an interview

Q & A

Q.: Is hip-hop relevant?  Commercial hip-hop only pushes people to be sexually active.

BK:  Yes, because nothing else has evolved that is not totally controlled by “some” aspect of the mainstream. Hip-hop could be a random way of communicating with each other.  Chuck D said that hip-hop is Black America’s CNN.  Globally, hip-hop is being used creatively.

Q.: Why do white kids love hip-hop?  It’s said that 80% of all hip-hop is bought by white kids — what is their responsibility?

BK: It’s never been documented that 80% is the number.  No one really knows.  Currently, there’s a rise of hip-hop activism on college campuses. I see it. I visit many campuses year ’round; they’re usurping political action committees. This is a multiracial movement.  Hip-hop exists as a political vanguard right now.

Q: The National Hip-Hop Convention, how did it come about?

BK: It started when students began working and protesting against apartheid in South Africa.  That’s the era of the Third World Press and the advent of Henry Louis Gates and I knew that I knew more, much more about hip-hop then Gates could ever.  It was also the era of Dan Quayle and his “American Values” campaign.  When I went to The Source, I began working and writing on closer relations between artists and politics.  I wanted — we wanted — to bring a closer relationship and political awareness to the new generation through hip-hop.  This was the beginning of an idea about convening a national convention.  At first, no one thought the idea good — but then things changed and we sat around a table — journalists, political activists, muscians, and the idea gained traction.

Q.: How is hip-hop used for political activism?

BK: the actual political organizing of youth happened around the Kerry run for presidents and it evolved, 2004-06.  The crux of my new book is about this so I went and interviewed young political organizers to see how this is done and where we might go from here. The problem now is that you have a Black man in office and young people might say, “What now?”  The time is crucial now and we only have a small window to keep  young people’s heads in the game.  The questions now are — “where are young people today?” and “how do we keep them engaged?

We have to turn to people like Mattie Weiss and Adolph L. Reed, Jr (see his: Is Obama Rewriting his Resume?)

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 3-PM-2)

June 4, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

2:45-4:15 (Baltimore 5/Convention Center, Level 2)
75-Minute Concurrent Session
“Social Justice Pedagogy Across the Curriculum”

Curricular/Pedagogical Models

Lee Anne Bell, PhD, Professor, Director of the Education Program, Barnard College, Columbia University – New York, New York  lbell@barnard.edu

Glen David Kueker, PhD, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, DePauw University—Greencastle, Indiana gkuecker@depauw.edu

Kamakshi Murti, PhD, Professor of German, Emerita, Middlebury College – Middlebury, Vermont  kmurti@middlebury.edu

Rob Root, PhD, Associate Professor, Mathematics Department, Lafayette College—Easton, Pennsylvania robroot@lafayette.edu

Kathleen Skubikowski, PhD, Associate Professor of English, and Assistant Dean for Instruction, Middlebury College – Middlebury, Vermont   skubikow@middlebury.edu

Catharine Wright, Lecturer in Writing, Acting Associate Director of Writing, Middlebury College—Middlebury, Vermont  cwwright@middlebury.edu

Kennedy Mugo, Student, Political Science, Middlebury College

Intro

•    Kathy: 3rd time coming together, 2005-06, supported by Mellon Foundation; produce collection of essays, second meeting; third time NCRE 23
•    Premise: social just classrooms need socially just academies; faculty are more willing to take pedagogical risks; social justice ed is the responsibility of faculty across the curriculum
•    Social justice education must move beyond a few faculty; has to be thought of a shared endeavor across constituency
•    Institutions have been challenged before; 1970s, writing across the curriculum asked faculty to step out of comfort field; digital technology challenge that has transformed the classroom, committing to spread IT across disciplines
•    Many liberal arts institutions are challenged by developing social justice work
•    We’re being asked to question our courses, perspectives, etc; a call to re-examine our own assumptions, making ourselves objects of inquiry
•    Sharing personal histories and disciplines

Talk

•    (Kamakshi): deliberative dialog –enable people to talk about difficult subjects
•    involves reading and thinking together; how to address and take action
•    humanities teacher has a challenge to bring this forth
•    general framework: identify an issue that is of common concern: discover other people’s interests, group in clusters, research, interviewing citizens, recognize tensions, list actions and test; convene community forums
•    (Kueker): conflict analysis began early in career; 2000, involved in Ecuador as an activist, then drawn to academic questions and writing about social movements – lead to an intersection of activism and academic work; 2006, writing about human rights and mining; firewall between activist work and academic work, following letters of protest from mining company; created an organization, non-profit: what happens when activist work runs into conflict with private goals and needs? What do we talk about when we speak about a socially just institution?
•    (Root): loose working group of mathematicians working since 2006 making the connection btwn social justice and mathematics; at least 3 points of contact btwn mathematics and social justice: (1) mathematical theory of social interaction (evolutionary game theory) – how is it we behave in cooperative ways? How do we get to a society that is fair and socially just?  We all care about motive; (2) mathematics as a tool to delineate and understand and work for social justice, such as theories of voting – could we create a voting system that eliminates vote splitting? Wealth and income inequality, seeing the trends, along with scarce resources; (3) using mathematics to rest equitable treatment that insists on competition and self-reliance – we need to first understand what we deserve? – math as social justice
•    for instance, looking at sustainability; or looking, in stats,  at wealth distribution inequality, which has been going on for 30 years; debt and access to credit to use these to understand interest payments
•   (Catharine): slaughter and conquest in standard English, bell hooks; what do we do not to hear the sound of slaughter in students’ writings and in our own; we can vary assignments – citizen scholar; balance emotional and cognitive, personal and academic; using the language of the senses, from all parts of our being; we can learn the language of scholarship, but include our emotional side; studying and observing and taking in our feelings as we study; social justice writing balances reason and emotion; varied writing assignments – formal, informal; how do we validate an informal paper?;  we can also assign personal papers
•    any faculty can read and re-educate; we tend to teach writing as it was taught to us
•   (Bell): artists and teachers and undergraduate to teach about race and racism in the arts; notion of story when interviewing gatekeepers in higher ed (several hundred interviews); people often told stories to get across a point: how can we use stories to get at social justice?; model on a white board: starts with “counter storytelling community”(informed by critical race theory) – how do we challenge stock stories that are told in mainstream curriculum?; “concealed stories” are not hidden, but suppressed and provide a lens for critiquing stock stories; “resistance stories,” that are in our lore about people who have challenged racism and have much to learn from; “emerging transforming stories” – emerge from a historical and social grounding, they have roots that we need to understand and connect to our history and are transforming – all this (hopefully) lead to change or new stock stories; used to frame a course on student teaching – used to look at stock stories about “white privileged” students going into the city to teach; also used to think about curriculum being used in classrooms
•    (Mugo): perspective as poli sci major; braindrain: a better education is always sought elsewhere, not in Kenya; class examples (1) intro to poli philosophy – “learning about our history” – she didn’t look at Mugo; switched off immediately; (2) international political economy: all data from the American political view (Middlebury from one perspective); (3) economics – learned models, concluding that models have not worked in the past because they were based on western economy; African economic development is not a part of the discourse; point of view is created by dominant class; students are not armed to empower the oppressed people: what’s the use of education if the educated can helped the oppressed?  Let’s all fit into the white man’s model; has come to learn what it is to be ‘invisible’

Filed under composition and rhetoric, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day3-PM)

June 4, 2010 4 Comments

NCORE

NCORE

NOTE: this is a very important topic, handled with grace and professionalism! Excellent, informative session.

1:15-2:30 (National Harbor 4/Convention Center, Level 2)
75-Minute Concurrent Session
“Toward a Male Student Imperative in Higher Education: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Revealed”

T. Elon Delancy II, PhD, Assistant Professor, Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, The University of Oklahoma – Norman, Oklahoma  tedancy@ou.edu

James Earl Davis, PhD, Professor, College of Education, Temple University – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  jdavis21@temple.edu

Lorenzo L. Esters, EdD, Vice President, Office for Access and the Advancement of Public Black Universities, Association of Public Land-Grant Universities –Washington, DC  lesters@aplu.org

Terrell L. Strayhorn, PhD, Associate Professor and Special Assistant to the Provost; and Director, Center for Higher Education Research & Policy (CHERP), University of Tennessee – Knoxville, Tennessee  strayhorn@utk.edu

Intro

•    Scholars, researchers, leaders – discuss the American Male and higher education; get behind the hype, talk about research (what do we know); how does race and ethnicity inform the hype

Talk

•    (Esters/Presenter): Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the oldest organization in the US
•    American Male Imperative: raise retention of males –hispanic, Af AM, Native Americans
•    Obama has challenged all Americans to push higher ed to be leaders by 2020; APLGU, raise tertiary attainment of the 25-34 year old pop from 41% to 55% by 2025
•    8.7 more degrees
•    If we did nothing else, from current state, we can achieve this goal
•    Getting to 55% by 2025: need to look at particularly populations? Current state: 24-35 = 41.06%; males: 36.11% (decrease) females have increased, but there are more males in the US population btwn 24-35, but in higher ed, the reverse is true in higher ed 1 male = 1.4 females
•    Greater percentage of foreign males is greater than female
•    US. Dept of Ed, national center for education studies (source) – good data here
•    How does the US compare: we rank 20 in enrollment; projection for 2018: male 41% – female 59%
•    Why is this important: impacts competitive knowledge base of workforce; creates economic difficulties and social disparities
•    Key Questions: how might public and research U’s best promote success; is there a need for further research to optimize learning?; what measures are appropriate to monitor performance; what roles might public research U’s help transfers from community colleges where more minorities are enrolled?; what are the interventions necessary?; what impact do demography and preparation have on male/female retention
•    (Davis/Presenter) : (1) larger picture about gender gaps, drawing on the larger earlier picture; (2) smaller study Davis completed that connect to a larger issue of engagement, particularly black men; (3) institutional based practices and how we socialize organize activities in institutions
•    potential loss in skill sets; gaps create economic and social disparity; economic reinvestments in communities
•    Ambivalence to Focus on Men: history of male privilege in higher ed; fear of slowing progress made on women; limited resources – where do the come from?; displaced attention to the needs of the population
•    College Men Paradox: the “problem” of African American, Latino, and Indigenous males in higher ed: Paradox: the progress we’ve made, increased attention, and the paradox diverts attention away from problems of college men generally – retention and graduation problems; fix the problem and growing imbalance btwn gender
•    What do we know? 47% high school grad rates; 10.4% male undergraduates; 30.5% are athletes; over 65% fail to graduate within 6 years (similar data about Latino males)
•    Transition through higher education: a pipeline issue/framework
•    Socialization at the Intersection of Race and Gender: boys receive different social rewards for pronounced masculine behaviors (Adler, Klass and Adler 1991); Elementary school teachers report unique concerns that inhibit boys’ learning potential and development (Stipek, 2004); Early socialization experiences may be more rigid for Black boys; quickly understand the social rewards with exhibiting hegemonic masculine behavior (Lasan, et al, 2000); adultification of Black boys
•    Engagement in College: well-rehearsed gender roles by time of college enrollment (Connell, 1996; Reese 2004); masculine sub-culture places academics at lower position than more acceptable social alternatives (Harper, 2008); adopt gender-specific beliefs regarding study habits and social activities
•    What’s manly on campus?: Czopp and Lasane, 1998: not being concerned about academic performance; academically organized and studious are less masculine and less socially attractive than disorganized and less conscientious male students
•    Tension btwn important academic activities and more traditional masculine behaviors (Skelton, 2002); beliefs and behaviors are inconsistent with norms of academic engagement (Davis, 2006); masculine scripts and performance to show detachment, invulnerability and indifference (Major & Billison, 1992; Young, 2003)
•    Transition to Higher Ed: Increase high school completion rates; Alternative high school experiences – Second Chance High Schools, for instance
•    College Choice: 2 yr vs 4 years, minority serving institutions, cost and debt
•    Men in College: academic: lower gpa, high level of probation, disengagement around activities, especially in campus leadership, decline in important programming, such as study abroad; higher level of engagement around athletics, drugs, drinking, fraternities
•    Higher Ed Outcomes: constructed as behaviors because this leaves room for intervention
•    Mastery Competitiveness – why has traditional behavior not translated to academics?  Vs Antisocial Competitiveness – taking credit for other people’s work; Hypermasculinity – exaggerated, stereotypically masculine, risk seeking behavior
•    Higher level of masculinity, lower levels of positive engagement; men on Black campuses tend to express more anti social, hypermasculine behavior (this is also supported by Black females); normative pressure to adjust to normative masculinity
•    Intervention: gender know-how, particularly for Black men; who is responsible for Masculine pedagogy?
•    Teaching and learning: can pedagogy be male sensitive?; lecture, direct instruction; group work, peer; multi media; Need to promote diverse teaching experiences; need to highlight themes attractive to males; creating men’s spaces on campus; leadership development; more residential opportunities
•    (Dancy/Presenter): theory, research and the latest implications for policy and practice in the literature
•    gender gaps exist across student’s racial groups: trends point to increase research
•    white men dominate college and university leadership, particularly at the presidential level; historically, Am higher ed has sought to preserve white male interests
•    Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory: 4 systems – roles, norms, and rules
•    Identity: Bandura’s Social Learning, Eagly’s Social Role Theory, Intersdisciplinary and Double-consciousness – the “but” condition, “American but oppressed”
•    Heteronormativity (Rich, 1994)—systemic pressure is placed on people to form heterosexual relationships; heternormativity as marginalizing women, LGBT, and other groups of men students (Dancy, in press; Dilley, 2002; Rhoads, 1994) – shaping “the closet”
•    How might policy and practice need to change and evolve in higher ed?
•    Identify spaces where men of all races may more readily befriend women; men students can use women’s and gender affairs offices and centers – befriend rather than objectify; break across the stigmas, encouraging men to see the welfare provided by these programs and centers
•    Create in-class and out of class opportunities to learn about their own diverse narratives; disrupt norms and behaviors that threaten gender relations – conversations about “male” crimes, must involve conversations about gender issues
•    Counseling, tutoring or related educational programs are not signs of weakness – recruit men’s groups and advisors to participate; include narratives of men’s culture and men’s narratives
•    Establishing talks across race; make sure we’re not culturally taxing one group
•    Mentoring programs are essential – men’s sessions and workshops; hiring and promoting practices must not privilege men of any race over women counterparts
•    Women participate in how men are defined
•    Men understand diversity through friendships, shaping their world view; research needed on identity intersections (www.aplu.org — source for articles)
•    (Strayhorn/Encapsulating) General comments: reflect on the data: what is the ultimate goal of higher education? Are we envisioning a place that promotes academic success, where college men are free to be themselves and are encouraged to do so? Are we willing to transform the system overall; policies and programs that force men to engage; disruption of current policies so we can better define a successful student; the role that women play, particularly men of color: consistent evidence that college women want a masculine male, who prescribes to male hegemonic behavior (traditional) – how can we foster alternatives to the norm; what’s the problem? Who is responsible?  We all have to work with the problem that men face.
•    Book source (two presenters have chapters here): Managing Diversity: (Re)Visioning Equity On College Campuses. New York: Peter Lang (2010)

Filed under cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University Tagged with ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE ( Day 3 -AM)

June 3, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

10:30-11:45 (National Harbor 7/Convention Center, Level 3)
Afternoon Conference Pleneray Session
“Diverse Learning Environments: A New Assessment and Plan of Action to Transform the Campus Climate”

Note: this was a very important topic, delivered poorly; the absence of Sylvia Hurtado hurt, big time.  Cynthia Alvarez began the talk while Chelsea Wann went to make more copies of the ppt to hand out (could have gotten emails and sent it).  Anyway, Alvarez speaks very low so it was difficult to hear – except that all she did was to read, line by line, each ppt frame, more often then not, looking at the screen to her right (our left) in the front of the room.  Wann followed the same technique, which tells me they were clearly nervous and, though they know the work, didn’t take the next step: learn how to present the work in a creative, passionate way to best illustrate the important thinking that’s gone on behind the development of their research model and the subsequent outcomes.  In all, this presentation was a disappointment.  I went to the presentation because, at Middlebury, we should perhaps be thinking along these line – researching, assessing and evaluating how diversity functions and why (why it’s important).

Research/Assessment/Evaluation

Cynthia Lua Alvarez, Research Analyst, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California  — cynalva@ucla.edu

Sylvia Hurtado, PhD, Professor and Director, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California – shurtado@gseis.ucla.edu

Chelsea Guillermo Wann, Research Analyst, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California –  cguillermo@ucla.edu

Intro

•    Absent from presentation, Sylvia Hurtado, PhD – bummer! (the leader)
•    Somewhat confusing beginning, Wann and Alvarez explaining that they don’t have enough materials to hand out, but there is material on the web (to be given at the end of the talk)
•    Project funded by the Ford Foundation
•    Creating a diversity institute (future)
Talk
•    A continuation of a presentation done in NCORE, 22, in San Diego
•    Purpose, goals & features of project; developing the DLE Conceptual Framework; Diverse Learning Environments Survey; Action plan
•    Purpose and Goals: develop awareness about diversity, student learning, and student success; asses undergraduate skills for work and citizenship in a pluralistic society; increase retention; create conditions for realizing the benefits of diversity
•    Research: diverse learning environments survey – will be launched nationality in a couple of years; campus case studies of 8 institutions – west and mid west (colleges, private and public and community colleges); National Retention Study (Clearinghouse) – about to be launched
•    Proud of work because they’re being able to quantify affects of diversity
•    Practice: Institute for the Critical Analysis of Quantitative Data – over summer; Diversity Research Institute, also summer work – anyone in the audience can attend
•    Developing the Diverse Learning Environment Conceptual Framework: habits of Mind/Skills for Lifelong Learning; Competencies for a Multicultural World – diverse democracy project; Achievement and Retention – differences in meanings btwn 2 and 4 year institutions
•    Foundational Frameworks: Institutional Adaptations to Student Diversity (Richardson and Skinner 1990); Campus Climate and Diversity (Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Perdersen and Allen (98-99) and Milem, Chang and Antonio (2005); Student/Institution Engagement Model (Nora, Barlow and Crisp- 2005); Dynamics of Multicultural Teaching and Learning (Marchesani & Adams, 1992, and adaptation of Jackson, 1988) –different climate dynamics have an impact on the classroom, a very intricate intersection
•    DLE Conceptual Framework: this is a box image on the screen that I can’t duplicate, but hopefully find; long and the short: students experience the campus in various, complex ways –historical, structural, institution, psychological, organizational, behavioral; also demographics and pre-dispositions, external influences, outcomes, habits of mid/skills for lifelong learning, competencies for a multicultural world, retention and achievement (at this point, one of the presenters returned to the talk with paper copies of the ppt presentation_
•    Unveiling the DLE Instrument: integrated assessment of climate, diversity, practice, and outcomes; inclusive of diverse social identities; modules targeting specific topics; longitudinal when linked with other student data (e.g. registrar data)
•    DLE Survery Components: core survey; Modules: classroom climate; transition into the major; intergroup relations; community college students’ transfer; transitional experiences for transfer students at 4 year institutions
•    Resources and Questions:
Higher Education Research Institute: http://www.heri.ucla

Diverse Lerning Environments Project: http://heri.ucla.edu/dle

Email: dleproject@gseis.ucla.edu
Phone: 310-267-5930

Filed under education, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day1-PM 2)

June 3, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

5-5:45 (Potomac Ballroom A and B/Convention Center, Level 2)
Afternoon Conference Pleneray Session
“Teach the Children, Free the Land: The Political Economy of Public Education”

Mari J. Matsuda, J.D., Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawi’i—Mãnoa, Hawai’i ( pioneer in critical race theory; top, most influential Asian Americans)

Intro

•    Loves coming to the conference – she can tell it’s NCORE.  It is a convention of people who are dedicated to the heart and spirit of the country, rich in its diversity. It’s not a convention in Arizona
•    Currently working on a book on the state of public education – history, economy, race and subordination and class
•    3 worlds: (1) greed is good: plow orchards and build macmansions to people that can’t afford them; bail out too big to fail ponzi schemes that are too large to fail, the $ coming from the workers; experts say that this is not suppose to happened; (2) greed is good lite: a modest national health care system, leaving all intact –pharmaceutical, hospitals, etc; business as usual; give cash for clunkers; what you can pull together for yourself will be yours – up and down and malaise: (3) just beyond our grasp: expected to work hard, but the market does not make rules, we do it under the Constitution and build a democracy – we choose how to regulate markets; we will impose reasonable regulations on the food industry; we will propose reasonable regulations on oil and coal so that they can’t kill our oceans and our land.
•    Topic: if we could take hold of our government, we can start investing in our needs – education, health care, homes, etc., everything that’s as important as militarism. This place is imperative, because our nation’s survival dependents on an educated citizen that can build our future.
•    We’re losing minority enrollment because of the economy.  As a critical race theorist, I ask what race has to do with it and I consider all forms of subordination intersecting in our schools.
•    No more orchestra, no glee club, no more play – it’s all gone from public schools.
•    What happened?

Talk

•    In DC, in public schools, mouse feces in closets, no heat, so students have to learn to write and ware mittens
•    To avoid social problems (critical race theory) is to place them on the shoulders of a disenfranchised group
•    Reagan cut social investments using images of poor, homeless people of color, although most recepients were white
•    What does it mean when we say, “They just can’t learn?”  We have to keep “our” students from “their” students
•    Most schools are “black”—black teachers, black students, etc. – all coding, encompassing all ethnic groups of color
•    Derek Bell – when people say urban, we mean “black”; it happens at the uncoscious levels: “We can’t just throw money at the problem because it will be waste.  The problem is waste and inefficiency.”
•    The presuption that they will fail is racist—they don’t have what it takes to succeed
•    No form of subordination is without cause: everyone can read, write and succed
•    Where is the interconnection of forms of subordination that cause this
•    Gender is less obvious: look for gender where it’s hard to see: we swim in the objectification of women. Where is gender of subordination in education?
•    Second wave feminists were involved in practice, though what they asked for became theory, one such area is public vs private, so women originally entered the public in private sphere jobs
•    Ideology of separate spheres carried over, after the second wave
•    Post New Deal Era marked a sharp decline in women wages – short paying women and unfunding schools; we have decreased the total amount of money put into the infrastructure
•    Broken systems generate costs, inefficiencies generate costs – it sends a message to students, which is education is not important.  Feminist take: education of children is woman’s work; in the middle class, women still pick up the work. Women are doing the job that the state is suppose to do.
•    Well endowed private schools do spend money on infrastructure, things are fixed
•    Poar New Deal generation have the same sense of entitlement, but now the parents have to pick up the slack: what will it take to stop accomadating and resisting all efforts to divest the public sector
•    In deep economic era, there is no public outcry at the abuse of the working class
•    Capital will make consessions to the worker if it has no choice; it responds with just enough to quiet it down
•    During the last depression, people did fight back – people marched, 20,000 strong, on to capital hill (unemployed veterans of WW1, run out by tanks and Army personal on horseback) – this image gave us the New Deal (note: we never hear this narrative)
•    Three decades later, poor women, stood up demanding demanding for their children
•    Power concedes to the demands of the poor; we have models of multiracial divesting and as educators we need to retrieve them
•    Now we see public education as expendable: the country belongs to us and we have the power to make the country strong
•    We need a new deal for education
•    DuBois: a deep hunger for learning among those we consider the outcasts
•    We have protoypes of multiracial, small schools that work
•    We know what works; it’s not a mystery, so it’s proof that we are making a deliberate choice to have urban schools fail. Charters, etc., words that supplant the kind of integration that’s needed
•    We have become unknowing survilists in terms of education; we’re taking on education as a personal problem.  But people must be called back to the table to re-do what we’ve left behind
•    Every child is our own – feed, teach, shelter, embrace every child with the love human beings are entitled. This is when we’ll see peace.  An investment has to be made – and it’s a big investment
(note: we do make this investment, but it separates those that can afford it from those that can’t; standardization is what we do when we’re aiming low)

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, jonathan kozol, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, technology and education, the University

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