A Communitarian Alternative to the Corporate Model

We need a commitment to deliberative democracy on our campuses.

By Jeff Mitchell

---

Although American higher education has arguably been the setting for a number of different culture wars, the one now being waged goes to the very heart and soul of the university as an institution. Like most wars, it has usually involved two opposing camps.

On one side of this conflict are the traditionalists, who see themselves as defending the hardwon faculty prerogatives of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance. On the other side are the modernizers, who believe that higher education should be run more like a business in order to meet the challenges of a new era. Although the modernizers have generally accepted the principle of academic freedom, some of them have called for the reform or even the abolition of tenure, and many of them are skeptical about the value of shared governance.

In this culture war, the traditionalists are often portrayed as academic Luddites who are keen on turning back the clock and maintaining their privileges despite the sea change that higher education has undergone since 1945. The traditionalists often respond by making their stand on the basis of academic freedom, arguing that the erosion of tenure and shared governance will create a slippery slope that will ultimately result in the loss of freedom in teaching and research. Although academic freedom is certainly linked to tenure and shared governance, I don’t think its preservation constitutes the best grounds for the traditionalists’ conception of the university. I hope to show that their case can be more effectively prosecuted by arguing for the adoption of a communitarian model of academic governance.

The Corporate Model

The group I’ve dubbed “the modernizers” is associated with the socalled corporate model of academic administration. According to this view, the collegial style of academic governance that emerged during the last century is no longer suited to the needs of the contemporary university. Since the end of World War II, there has been a steady and dramatic increase in the proportion of the population that goes to college and, through legislation such as the GI Bill, millions of taxpayer dollars have made their way into the nation’s colleges and universities. Proponents of the corporate approach argue that the marked growth in student bodies and school budgets has resulted in new challenges that can be most effectively met by adopting some of the methods of big business. The corporate model takes its name primarily from the management style associated with business, and its proponents hold that colleges and universities would benefit from being placed under the control of a managerial elite.

Supporters of the corporate model claim that it employs division of labor and managerial expertise to their best advantage. In order to achieve bureaucratic efficiency, its proponents favor a hierarchical chain of command and a “topdown” management style. Nonacademic areas of campus life are relegated to different administrative divisions. Faculty involvement in campus matters that are not strictly academic is viewed as, at best, inefficient and somewhat amateurish, and, at worst, as a major obstacle to progress. The corporate model construes academic freedom narrowly, allotting to faculty the role of expert knowledge worker. The selling points of the corporate approach are those of any wellrun bureaucracy, namely, efficiency, flexibility, rapid adaptability, and technical competence.

The faculty pendant to the corporate administrative style is academic careerism. Since publication is the key to advancement within academia, many professors are more than happy to abdicate a genuine role in governance in order to devote more time to research. The careerist tends to assume that teaching is limited to the classroom and office hours and that service to the institution is a nuisance best dealt with by perfunctory participation on a committee or in a student organization. More than a few observers of the academic scene have noted that the chronic shortage of teaching positions in many disciplines has probably served to exacerbate careerism in the professoriate. The graduate student who is initiated during his or her studies into the academic world of “publish or perish,” and who goes through the angst of a job hunt in fiercely competitive market, has, in effect, learned a practical lesson in careerism. To make matters worse, those who are fortunate enough to land a tenure-track teaching position can anticipate lengthy probationary period (five to six years is not unusual, even for schools that place little emphasis upon research), during which tenure candidates undergo continuous evaluation and are well advised to avoid offending anyone. Not surprisingly, the faculty member who finally achieves the holy grail of tenure often fails to be filled with the spirit of connectedness to colleagues and simply wants to be left alone. Between the perils of meeting various degree and job requirements and the pressures of competition on the academic job market, many professors arrive at tenure having enjoyed relatively few positive experiences of belonging to a professional community.

Deliberative Democracy

What the corporate model excludes— indeed, by its very nature must exclude—is any conception of campus community unified around the principles of deliberative democracy. The notion of such a community is certainly not new, and in fact various institutions and practices in American colleges and universities 50 long ago introduced democratic elements into campus life. Organizations and clubs, for example, are a fixed feature of most campuses and create platforms for group discussion and the expression of opinion. Student newspapers and governments are also present in most universities and colleges and are typically viewed as important opportunities for students to acquire and exercise civic virtues. For most college students, campus life still constitutes their first extended contact as adults with the adult world. The very prevalence of student organizations, newspapers, and governments testifies to a longstanding recognition that a significant share of civic and moral education takes place outside the classroom. Like the public schools, colleges and universities have traditionally aimed at providing students with the education necessary to make them not only good workers, but also good citizens. The fact that most institutions of higher education have maintained extensive general education programs provides some additional evidence that this civic mission has not been abandoned.

Among faculty, the most obvious democratic measures have been faculty senates and elected committees, which are familiar features on most campuses. However, the single most important factor promoting deliberative democracy in higher education has been tenure. Through tenure, faculty have acquired a degree of job security that is rare in the American workplace. Although it was instituted primarily to protect the free expressionof ideas in the classroom and free inquiry, tenure has also often afforded faculty enough job protection to risk open criticism of, and even opposition to, administrative decisions and policies. Such criticism is, of course, an indispensable part of deliberative democracy. Without the job security provided by tenure, faculty participationin representative bodies would be purely pro forma.

In the current culture war, it’s really the principle of shared governance that is at issue. As long as academic freedom is narrowly construed, it’s possible to imagine it surviving—if not exactly flourishing—under the corporate model of academic administration. After all, in the corporate view, faculty are experts who just need to be discouraged from overstepping the boundaries of their expertise. Since the corporate model acknowledges that teaching and research fall within the domain of faculty competence, it tacitly recognizes a faculty prerogative in these areas. While the price of academic freedom is eternal vigilance, in the day-to-day affairs of colleges and universities, disputes over campus policies are much more frequent than those that arise over direct violations of academic freedom. What cannot survive under the corporate approach is a campus culture of deliberative democracy. If the only justification for shared governance were academic freedom, then the principle of shared governance would indeed be on shaky ground. This, however, is not the case, because academic freedom itself is not a first principle, but is grounded upon a vision of the common good.

The Common Good

The most influential statement of academic freedom in the United States is the AAUP’s 1940 joint formulation of it, which implies that academic freedom is in the best interest of society since it safeguards the intellectual integrity of teaching, research, and scholarship. Colleges and universities exist for the sake of education and inquiry, and truth is the gold standard for both activities. Indeed, the pursuit and dissemination of truth constitute the moral capital of higher education and endow it with a Socratic office in society that tolerates a historically unprecedented degree of salesmanship, influence peddling, and entertainment in even its most vital functions. Truth, in short, is the communal good of the university.

Since the common end of the campus community is truth, deliberativedemocracy is particularly well suited as a method for decision making and consensus building in the college environment. The emphasis that this approach to democratic governance places on public discussion and reasoned debate promotes precisely those intellectualand moral virtues that professors seek to inculcate in their students, virtues that include honesty, openmindedness, impartiality, patience, and diligence. Through the process of deliberative democracy, students, professors, staff, and administrators all become both teachers and learners in cooperative inquiry. This model is communitarian because it conceives of the universityas a community based upon the pursuit of a common good. As I have argued, even the rights conferred upon faculty by the principle of academic freedom find their legitimation as means to the maintenanceof this common good.

The fact of the matter is that American academia is in need of moral renewal. All too often, faculty members and administrators insist upon the privileges accorded to them by their positions without giving equal weight to their professional responsibilities. Shared governance and the deliberative democracy it implies require a moral commitment from all parties involved in order to work. In many colleges and universities today, faculty senates pass motions that are simply ignored or brushed aside by their administrations, faculty committees exist primarily on paper, and governance is shared in name only. And yet any number of issues currently confronting higher education could benefit from campuswide discussions, such as the prevalence of cheating, the semiprofessionalization of intercollegiate athletics, and the secondclass status of adjuncts. For shared governance to becomea a reality, faculty must be willing to take a more active role in campus life, and administrators must be willing to relinquish some of their prestige and power.

Would deliberative procedures slow down institutional decision making compared with corporatestyle practices? Probably. But any additional time required would be time well spent. Applying the collective intellectual resources of the institution to problems would increase the likelihood of good choices being made. And including the different elements of the campus population in the decisionmaking process would nurture a genuine sense of belonging to a community. The very process of deliberative democracy has pedagogical value and so could be considered as an integral part of the school’s main mission. In addition, it’s worth observing that in the world of higher education, fortunately, few emergencies require immediate response, so most decisions confronting the academic community can be made with the benefit of discussion and study.

Some readers may object that I have played fast and loose with the term “community.” Granted, the communities constituted by universities and colleges differ in several respects from those represented by neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Nevertheless, as long as we bear these differences in mind, believe that the notion of a campus community is still quite meaningful. Along these same lines, it could be argued that the different roles of teacher and student create an inherent imbalance of power in the campus environment that would undermine any deliberative democracy. A complete response to this criticism would exceed the limits of this article, but I’ll simply note in passing that a commitment to democratic processes of decision making and consensus building does not commit one to wholly egalitarian distribution of authority. The communitarian alternative to the corporate model that I’m suggesting does not call for the abolition of distinctions of office, but rather for a careful readjustment of how those occupying different offices and roles in the university relate to one another.

At the beginning of this article, referred to those who support shared governance as “traditionalists,” but it should be clear by now that as far as restructuring the campus community on the basis of deliberative democracy is concerned, it’s not to the past that we must look. Although certain practices and institutions in higher education have brought democratic elements into campus life, truly deliberative procedures have hitherto been only incompletely realized. The communitarian approach is therefore not a model from the past, but rather one for the future.

Jeff Mitchell is professor of philosophy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Arkansas Tech University. His e-mail address is jmitchell@atu.edu.

Creative Writing Class as Crucible

We need to pay attention to student writing and emotional response in the post–Virginia Tech classroom.

By Monica Barron

---

I’ve been teaching writing and literature for more than twenty years now, many of those years at a public liberal arts university in Missouri. What changes every semester is who gets taught and how they learn what they learn. One semester there seemed to be a lot of writing about serial killers, rapists, slashers, and murderers—so much writing that I started a file and told a friend, if I end up dead, go to my office and get the file marked “suspects.” Some of the writing was simply the over-the-top work of young men who didn’t write very well (it wasn’t the women writing this stuff). Some of it wasn’t. That same semester, a man called and left a message on my home answering machine that said, “I’m gonna get you, get you, get you . . . out of the closet.”

I suspected that the messenger was a member of my creative writing class. I took the tape to the campus police, and the head of public safety told me to get Southwestern Bell to put a tap on my line for thirty days. I didn’t call Southwestern Bell, but I told my class about the message and that I had called Southwestern Bell; I got no more of those messages. But between the suspects file and the message, my traumas were getting excavated. Growing up in Detroit, I had had a steady diet of gristle—murder and rape—in the papers, on the TV, and on the streets. Coming out was gristly in its own way.

Even though I was freaked out, I kept trying to do the teacherly things. One-on-one conferences, for instance. JP was writing fiction about a serial killer. In exhaustive detail. In conference I asked, what are you trying to do to your audience? What effects are you going for?

He seemed to have no conception of audience. He wasn’t in a rhetorical situation as far as he was concerned. He claimed to want to be a cop, “maybe FBI,” wanted to try to understand the mind of a serial killer. He was taking a serial-killer course in the psychology department at the same time that he was taking creative writing.

But what about the reader? I pressed the point. If you are writing genre fiction . . . What’s that? he asked.

A type of fiction that has conventions, that has a following of readers who know the conventions. . . . I trailed off. He didn’t nod, oh yes, I know what you mean. Cliché time: my heart sank. I know the genre only cursorily. Growing up in Detroit was enough gristle for me, thank you. I have never aspired to write like Elmore Leonard. Listen, I said, if you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing a damn good job. You got to me, okay?

He got bug-eyed in a way that let me know he used the big eyes effectively and often, mostly on women. Okay, that’s all, I said. Now next assignment, could you show me a little range as a writer? Try something else? After he left I thought about the videotape of Ted Bundy with the Barbie doll at a frat party. Bundy had been trying to scare people, of course. We know now he was also premeditating. The creative writing teacher’s standard invocation—make me believe it’s real—became, for the rest of the term, something else, a whispered, “I sure hope you don’t really mean this.”

Community of Writers

Students from many different majors take creative writing classes. Many have already discovered the pleasure of putting words on the page. What I can help them learn are the difficulties that present themselves once words are on the page, how to attenuate the process of writing in order to examine how a literary representation was made and how to ponder the effects of that representation on any reader they might be lucky enough to have.

About those readers: students in these classes have a keen ability to recognize the age specific experience encoded in each other’s language on the page.
Closeness in age and similarity of experience drive the reading of each other’s work as much as or more than the words on the page. Students recognize the stories of the tribe and congratulate each other for retelling them so economically. Theirs are the authorized readings in class. Many use a one-draft process of composition.

But there’s another reader in the room: the teacher, who values the uncritical congratulatory discourse of the students because it marks the presence of human connection and regard in the learning community. But my reading comes from another place, one distant in age, training, and experience. From there I read the words on the page as well as the class. Reading the class I see the strain of class on those struggling to pay rising tuition;the strain of being an ethnic minority or an international student on a mostly white campus;the strain of being lesbian or gay when everyone is at least acting straight;the strains of gendered college experience, of parental apron strings fraying as they are stretched;and the strain of someone’s first big spiritual crisis. If I can see evidence of these strains in the students’texts, I can make teaching moments out of them by being the bearer of the unauthorized reading, the cheerleader for the unauthorized account of college life. The energy in the room changes. Perhaps not everyone is reading the text the same way. Or the world.

But if the students are persuaded to share my unauthorized way of reading the text and the class, will they be persuaded to take up the mostly unauthorized (by undergraduates) practice of revision? Here is the practice that will enable the unauthorized account of life to emerge. And once it does, perhaps the writer will find readers beyond the classroom.

For it isn’t just reading each other’s work that makes a classroom full of individuals a community of writers: it’s the willingness to recognize each other as writers as well. Such recognition is not based on a desire to pressure each other to write the same way, but rather on the student’s desire to live in a world peopled by writers and to be seen as one among them, heard as one among them, read as one among them. For always we write as situated writers who have growing affiliations with classmates, but who reveal in our writing our affinities with communities beyond the classroom, audiences we write to now, not someday.

So we are not simply trying to pass a few pleasant months learning the conventions of literary genres. If the only community under consideration were the classroom, then what of those who don’t seem to fit in? Wait for them to disappear, come in to argue about their grade, or reveal their disaffection in class? Far better for students to always be looking to that audience beyond the classroom: the one that reads the alternative newspaper on campus, goes to poetry slams, tries out for the Vagina Monologues or the Martin Luther King Day program. Classroom community can be constituted by learning material in common and recognizing each other’s desire to reach audiences beyond the classroom. As students advance in their study, what becomes important as well is their ability to produce a certain kind of sustained text; in so doing they become a certain kind of writer—lyric poet, satirist, novelist.

Virginia Tech Massacre

One April morning in Blacksburg, Virginia, a young man packed up his guns and went to school for the last time. He was done struggling to be part of any community of readers or writers. He was entering the community of killers. His fellow writers had noticed and remarked that he wasn’t simply retelling the stories of the tribe or trying to scare peers with overthetop, outofcontrol representations of experience; he himself was scary. His teachers were faced with a kind of reading they were unequipped to do: reading as diagnosis. By all accounts, they tried to get him a real diagnosis; he resisted. When he became unable to interact productively in any way with others, he was tutored individually.

We have a phrase to describe what eventually happened: he “went postal.” After he killed his first two victims, police mistakenly thought the murders were a result of a personal, domestic dispute. Later that morning they found that, targeting no particular classes or individuals, he managed to kill thirty people and wound others. I followed the coverage of the massacre and its aftermath in the New York Times, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on MSNBC. I’ve thought about it as I prepare to teach this fall. The Chronicle reported on new security measures at educational institutions, including cellphone warning systems and the capacity to lock all doors on a campus from a central site.

But all such measures presume this will happen again. Lynn Worsham, writing in Henry Giroux’s Beyond the Corporate University before the massacre at Virginia Tech, reminded me that we have all been schooled in the emotions we express. Sure, all social relations are pedagogical, and students already have an emotional makeup when they enter school. I’m aware in literature and creative writing classes of how many students seem unaware that the responses evoked by literature— by any art, really—are both intellectual and emotional. We should admit that what we teach, that how we teach, is bound to provoke some kind of emotional response. Every discipline from biology to creative writing in some way schools its students in emotions. Remember that the Virginia Tech shooter did not target those aware of his distress in the English department, the counseling center, or the public safety office; he targeted school.

Cell-phone warnings and more locks on doors are the responses administrators and public safety directors have offered us. Now as teachers, what’s our answer? I’m not sure that wholesale change in pedagogical practices can preempt violent manifestation of mental illness in a school. But let’s begin where we are, paying closer attention to the emotions evoked by the material we teach, by the classroom dynamics, by the work the students produce.

What would constitute paying closer attention to emotions? I will reveal more often to student writers how their work affects me emotionally. I admit that I sometimes just respond to a textual feature in their assignment and move on.

After Virginia Tech I want them to see my emotional intellectualresponse, to give them a sense of me as an audience as well as to attend to their desires for an audience beyond the classroom. will consider more fully what emotional effect the texts I choose might have on the class, watching and listening to determine what more might be going on emotionally in the group. And I will consider more fully the effects the students’ own writings are having on the group as whole. I don’t want to be diagnostician—although there are schools of literary response that do seek to diagnose. What I want is for my writing students to see my responses as those of a reader and lover of literature and as those of teacher, editor, and facilitator. Most of all, want my students to think constructively, as Seung HuiCho could not, of themselves as members of communities and as producers of work that evokes emotion in others, for better or for worse.

Monica Barron is professor of English at Truman State University and an editor of Feminist Teacher magazine.

How Do I Know If My Student Is Dangerous?

A psychiatric nurse explains when to refer a student for help.

By Ellen Gecker

---

As a nurse who has worked at several campus health centers, including, before last spring’s shootings, the health center at Virginia Tech, I know that more students than ever are entering college with diagnosed mental illness and are taking psychiatric medications. Very few of these students pose any threat to themselves or others. Only in extremely rare cases does mental illness lead to violence—and, of course, violence is not always a product of mental illness.

Although the Virginia Tech murders last spring probably made you consider your own vulnerability as a professor to campus violence, most of the time you are not in any danger, even if there are mentally ill students in your classroom. The stress of the college years can exacerbate the symptoms of mental illness, however. Because you may work directly with students for extended periods during such a stressful period in their lives, it is important to recognize signs of potential violence in troubled students and to be aware of the resources your campus offers for students who need help.

Warning Signs

Perhaps you have had a gut feeling about a student—something just didn’t seem right. Maybe it was the way a student looked at you—too long or glaring or angry. Maybe it was a nasty, sarcastic, or overly loud tone of voice. Or was it a couched threat you heard from a student, so subtle that you can’t claim you were actually threatened?

All of these behaviors are cues that there is something wrong. A student who acts in such ways might have barely suppressed anger, which in some cases can lead to violence. There may also be a sign of some degree of mental illness, which sometimes accompanies anger. It is important to emphasize, however, that most mentally ill people are not violent.

Your cues might even be more obvious. Perhaps the student walks in and out of the room and purposely slams the door, kicks the wall or desk, or curses loudly or yells racial slurs. Or perhaps, like the professor at Virginia Tech who was alarmed by the writings of the student who later murdered thirty-two people, you are concerned about the violence of a student’s written work. Sometimes people who have a propensity for anger or are mentally ill fantasize about violent scenes. Quite possibly these students don’t realize that readers will find their writings disturbing or abnormal—or they might write about violence to intimidate someone who they know is going to read their writing.

One fairly strong indication of mental illness is hearing voices. A student who walks down the hall alone talking or mumbling at length or sits in your class and mutters constantly may have a serious problem. (First, of course, make sure the student is not on a cell phone.) A person who is hearing voices may sometimes listen to them without talking—evidence of this includes laughing or smiling without cause or repeatedly looking at an open space as if someone were in that spot (it might even be up in the air). Hallucinations can be visual or tactile as well, but their most common form is auditory. Auditory hallucinations are generally a sign of mental illness, but they can also be caused by drugs or withdrawal from them.

The next sign of mental illness is delusional thinking. A student who is delusional will have created a fantasy and believe it to be real. For example, a student could believe that you said something that you never said. It might be that he believes you invited him to your home for dinner or that you promised him an A. Or he may think that he is president of the college and can do what he wants, including getting you fired. Often, these delusions are paranoid, with a strong fear component. A paranoid student, for example, might believe that everyone in the class is talking about or laughing at her.

There are more signs that may be present with mental illness, but remember that one or two signs alone do not necessarily mean a student is mentally ill. You have to look at the whole picture.

Other signs include

• a flat affect;
• unusual emotional reactions;
• inability to concentrate;
• poor memory;
• impatience or poor impulse control;
• childlike behavior;
• lack of interest in doing anything enjoyable or lack of hobbies;
• use of alcohol and illegal drugs as a method of self-medicating;
• heavy cigarette smoking;
• poor hygiene;
• difficulty conversing, with minimal or inappropriate responses to questions;
• social isolation;
• difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much;
• poor appetite.

Such signs may indicate that a student needs help.

What You Can Do

Okay, let’s say you see some signs that concern you and you want to engage a student to determine if he needs help. Probably the best thing you can do is ask the student some questions in a calm and caring but almost nonchalant manner, something like, “You seemed upset in class,” or “You seem preoccupied. How are you feeling?” If the student is comfortable speaking with you, he may let you know if he is having problems.

If the student is hearing voices, he may tell you something like,“It’s God telling me that I’m not praying enough,” or “They tell me that I’m bad,” or “I can’t figure out what they’re saying.” There is no cause for you to panic, but you do need to get the student help right away. This student may have stopped his anti-psychotic medications and his symptoms may get worse with each day that goes by. You should call the campus counseling center and make an appointment for him or walk him over to it. If the student indicates a desire to harm himself, you should send him by police or ambulance to an emergency room or psychiatric crisis center. He should not be left alone; while waiting for help to arrive, have another person stay with him as well. If the student gives any indication that he intends to harm others,get everyone away from him and call 911. Obviously, you and everyone around the student are at high risk in such a situation.What if the student tells you something that seems clearly delusional to you? You won’t be able to talk him out of it, so don’t try. Just say something like, “Oh, okay.” Then get him some help immediately.

Most mentally ill people are not dangerous or violent. Colleges and universities usually provide faculty members with lists of the resources available for students who are troubled. Don’t be shy about using those lists. Disturbed, isolated students can easily fall through the cracks, especially at large institutions; you may be the person who has the most regular contact with such an isolated student. Offering to help students get the assistance they need is never inappropriate. Showing students that you have noticed that they are having a hard time can be just the impetus they need to acknowledge their own difficulties and seek help.

The tragedy at Virginia Tech can help faculty members be a bit more alert—not just for students who might be violent, but also for any students whose behavior reveals that they aren’t able to cope with college or the world on their own.

This article does not constitute medical advice. If you are concerned about the mental health of a student, consult with qualified health professionals on your campus.

Ellen Gecker has worked in the health centers of both Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Philadelphia University. She has also been employed as a clinical specialist in psychiatry at a state psychiatric hospital and a private psychiatric unit. Currently she is an instructor of psychiatric nursing in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Fear Factor

There’s only one certainty here. This will happen again.

By Richard E. Miller

---

We all hope not at our schools. And when the news breaks, we will hope that no one we know was involved, that the shooter wasn’t moving among our friends and colleagues, wasn’t studying anything in our area, wasn’t anything like anyone we’ve ever known or been. It is sure to be a loner or set of loners, ostracized, picked on, at a moment of great stress—the end of the semester or the end of the year, with graduation or some equally significant transition looming on the horizon.Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, wasn’t a computer scientist, an engineer, a mathematician. Hewas an English major, a creative writer who handed in violent screeds, illicitly photographed women in hisclasses, tripped alarms wherever he sat and glowered.

Are these the details that should most concern us at this time?

On September 17, 2002, the Bush administration released The National Security Strategy of the United States. This document articulates the administration’s commitment to preemption in the newly declared global war on terror. President Bush opens with this declaration: “In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.” In the fifth section of the document, we come to learn that “action” in this new context means “proactive counterproliferation efforts” and “effective consequence management to respond to the effects of WMD use, whether by terrorists or hostile states.” This is governmental prose at its most elegant and nimble; this is language being evacuated of its power to signify right before our eyes.

This policy of preemptive retaliation didn’t originate in the Bush White House. We tend to forget that on August 20, 1988, Bill Clinton approved the launching of seventynine cruise missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in an effort to bring down Osama bin Laden. That the missiles didn’t find their target goes without saying. The missiles fired into Khartoum flattened a pharmaceutical plant with no military value, but this story never captured the nation’s attention. Monica Lewinsky’s dress, Ken Starr’s obsession: these details were scrupulously investigated instead.

In advance of the Bush administration’sofficial declaration of the government’s commitment to pre-emptive retaliation, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld bid viewers of CBS’s Face the Nation to imagine “a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It’s not three thousand; it’s tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” Then-national security adviser (now secretary of state) Condoleezza Rice informed viewers of CNN’s Late Edition that “the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And Vice President Cheney informed attendees at the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ 103rd National Convention that, “simply stated, Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

Fear bends everything it encounters into evidence supporting the absolute necessity of maintaining and nourishing the very state of being afraid. Fear is a narcotic.

Seung-Hui Cho was afraid, too.

---

What follows is common knowledge.

On October 16, 2002, President Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq Resolution of 2002. This resolution was passed in the House by a vote of 296–133 and in the Senate by a vote of 77–23, including affirmative votes by Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, and Kerry. All but the last have since become 2008 presidential candidates from the Democratic Party. Affirmative votes were also cast by Senators Brownback, McCain, and Thompson, all of whom are 2008presidential candidates from the Republican Party. This vote effectively gave President Bush the green light to proceed with plans for invading Iraq.

On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced. On May 1, 2003, President Bush appeared on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed off the coast of California, and declared, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Behind him, a banner reading Mission Accomplished responded to the ocean’s gentle breeze. More than four years later, fear’s intoxicating effects are everywhere in evidence.

Empowered by the USA Patriot Act, which the Senate approved 98–1 on October 25, 2001, and which was signed into law by President Bush the next day, the FBI has taken advantage of its new powers to obtain phone, Internet, and library records without notifying the target of an investigation or establishing, before any objective body, grounds for suspicion. Although this may, at first, seem an outrageous abuse of power, it is, in fact, simply a logical extension of the preemptiveretaliation doctrine. Here, the government seizes the right to preemptively investigate anyone who is now, or might someday be, opposed to the abolition of the nation’s civil liberties. For surely, who but someone with something to hide would object in these imperiled times to granting the government free access to one’s mail, one’s phone conversations, one’s library records.

In December 2005, then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales verified that the National Security Agency, under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was actively conducting warrantless wiretaps to “engage in surveillance of communications where one party is outside the United States, and where we have a reasonable basis to conclude that one of the parties of the communication is either a member of al Qaeda or affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Despite rising concern about the erosion of the right to privacy under the Patriot Act, Congress voted to renew a modified version of the act in March 2006. Senators Biden, Brownback, Clinton, Dodd, Kerry, McCain, and Obama all sided with the majority. (By this time, John Edwards and Fred Thompson were no longer members of the Senate.) After much seeming debate, Congress voted to expand the reach of warrantless wiretapping in August 2007 by a vote of 60–28. Now officially candidates for the presidency, Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Obama all voted with the minority. Senators Kerry and McCain did not vote.

Under the circumstances, feelings of frustration, betrayal, powerlessness, and despair aren’t uncommon.

---

In the classroom, life goes on much as it did before. There are a few students in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a few folks withfriends or relatives deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, but, for the most part, in the Age of the All-Volunteer Armed Forces, those who go don’t have a rich network of connections to the university, the House, or the Senate. To date, the only casualty to stay in the news for more than an evening or two lost his life in Afghanistan as a result, it turns out, of friendly fire. An investigation of the army cover-up of this event drags on.

The War is out there, somewhere, a vague and threatening presence, a point of reference in a mass of coursework, papers, and assignments. Much of this classwork makes anything from a nod to a deep bow in the direction of multiculturalism.

Is the government another culture? The military? Are the major political parties? And where exactly do the mentally ill fit in the multi-cultural curriculum? As we think, teach, and talk about cultural difference, what are we to do with those who, by dint of their biochemical makeup, their neurology, or both, find themselves in our classrooms but beyond the reach of our words? That we are not prepared for these encounters goes without saying; mental illness effloresces in many forms, including behavior that is idiosyncratic, extravagant, doggedly focused, actively, even obsessively, conventional, dictatorial, autocratic, or outright dangerous. All these behavior patterns occur among the neuro-normal as well.

There’s no question that Seung-Hui Cho stood out from the crowd,that he was a threatening, scary presence. Early on in his college career, efforts to use the legal system to restrain him were initiated; these faltered and then failed. Ignoring a court order that he receive mental health treatment as an out-patient, Cho returned to the safety of the university and sunk further into madness. As Christopher Flynn, director of the Cook Counseling Center to which Cho was referred, explained to the Washington Post in the aftermath of the massacre,“When a court gives a mandatory order that someone get out-patient treatment, that order is to the individual, not an agency.” In other words, it is up to the mentally ill individual to get himself to the outpatient facility and to make the court order known upon his arrival. If the patient never shows, no one’s the wiser.

Security National Advisory System’s threat level stuck at “elevated,” Seung-Hui Cho slipped through the gaps in the security net and on at least four separate occasions early in 2007 was able to purchase the firearms and munitions used in his assault.

Given this, one might say that we are living in a time where our civil liberties are shrinking and our ability to arm ourselves is increasing. This is the logic of fear working itself out at the level of practice.

---

The problems that confront us now outstrip the ability of any one person or organization or political party or nation to generate workable solutions. Indeed, today’s major problems all share the same outsized modifier: the global economy; global warming; global terror. As the Internet and the marketplace continue to commingle peoples, desires, conflicts, and opportunities, the frenetic pace of change accelerates, dragging in its wake an ever-increasing sense of impending doom. The markets will collapse. The damage to the environment is irreversible. We’re one border guard away from Armageddon.

In the rush to know the end of the story in everything from the War on Terror to the meaning of one’s life to the nation’s role in the global future, something crucial has been missed. Indeed, every time we relate our movement through time as a story, whether that story casts the main characters as “evildoers” or liberators, we ensure that the very essence of reality is hidden from view. The future is unknown; it is not out there waiting to happen or to be revealed or to be fulfilled; it is created by our actions in the current moment.

As an alternative to pre-emptive retaliation, which claims to know in advance what the future holds, those of us in the teaching professions have the option of committing ourselves to providing our students and colleagues with proactive training in the arts of remaining calm in times of calamitous change. This doesn’t mean making sure everyone knows what to do when the gunman is at the door; that’s a question for the folks in emergency-response training. Our job is to establish an environment that promotes reflection and to provide our students with multiple opportunities to experience mental acts that take them to the edge of the unknown. That is, before we have our students argue for or against a given position, we need to teach them the finer arts of deliberation, speculation, and meditation.The function of the humanities is to provide such instruction. Those of us who work in the humanities can do a much better job of fulfilling this role by committing ourselves to showing our students that there are ways to respond to the unknown other than lashing out in frustration. To counter the instinctive tendency to react to the unknown with pre-emptive judgments about others, we can illustrate the challenges and the opportunities that come from living in a multi-perspectival world. If we are to realize this goal, we will have to set aside the profession’s obsession with critique and devote ourselves, instead, to providing students with concrete opportunities to engage in the creative work of generating local, temporary solutions in an imperfect world.

It turns out that creating such opportunities is not so difficult. For the past couple of years, I’ve been offering courses in which I ask my students to “read in slow motion.” Instead of a curriculum packed with reading assignments, the students have worked slowly through an extended piece of nonfiction prose. Moving back and forth through the long essay, the students learn to focus, to follow the rise and fall of detail, to attend to the moment of the moment. And what happens next is all but inevitable: the act of reading in slow motion opens out onto a fresh world of connections and possibilities beyond the classroom walls. For this is what seeing the world through the eyes of another entails—a mixture of imagination, creativity, and the search for a deeper understanding.

If we are to offer an alternative to the violent options that are now always just a click away, then we’ve got to foster an equally powerful counter-experience—one that cultivates optimism and resourcefulness and resilience. Confronting the limits of one’s own understanding is a scary business, but this is the task that lies forever before all who are committed to the life of the mind. A tolerance for ambiguity, patience in the face of uncertainty, calm while the earth moves beneath one’s feet: these are the attributes of a mature mind, attributes that can be acquired through introspection and then expressed through action in the world we have, a world always just outside the reach of full understanding.

We cannot wait for better, more responsible leaders to emerge. And we shouldn’t expect the drumbeat for terror to diminish if there is a change in the party in power next year. These are the conditions in which we find ourselves. But these are the very conditions that the life of the mind should prepare us to confront, for surely the true value of education is realized in the moment that the illusion of predetermination is dispelled and the horizon of action appears.

Our future is now.

Richard E. Miller is chair of the English department and executive director of the Plangere Writing Center at Rutgers University. He is the coauthor, with Kurt Spellmeyer, of The New Humanities Reader, which seeks to foster the kind of open-ended questioning alluded to in his essay in this issue. His e-mail address isrichard.miller@rutgers.edu.

On Adjunct Labor and Community Colleges

They’re experienced, dedicated, and overworked, and they make up the majority of your colleagues at any given community college. Give them a place at the table, for the sake of the whole institution.

By Catherine Adamowicz

---

That semester, twenty years ago, I taught a total of four writing intensive courses at three different institutions—two expository writing courses at a two year college and two technical writing courses, one at a university and the other at a four year college. I had already been teaching at the college level for several years. My total gross salary was $5,500. I had no medical coverage.

I didn’t create any new assignments for my courses, all of which I’d taught before. I doubt that I even skimmed through one professional journal that semester. Having taught regularly for two years as an adjunct at one of those institutions, I could have been a valuable member of a committee, but I didn’t have time to sit on any. At the two year college, I was lucky to have had a seat in an office the few times that I could meet with students; neither the four year college nor the university provided meeting space. That semester was the first and last time that I taught at three different institutions, and I was exhausted and humiliated.

I try to remind myself about that semester when I work with the part-time faculty members at the community college in Massachusetts where I am now chair of the English department. Although I have escaped the adjunct trap, the patterns nationally show that more and more institutions are relying on contingent (full-time non-tenure track as well as part-time) labor to educate our students. In my own department, thirteen of us are full time; during any given semester, there are about sixty part-timers. (This kind of ratio is not uncommon at community colleges.)

During my past year as chair of the department, only a few part-time faculty attended our monthly meetings. Naturally, these part-timers are busy trying to put together a living wage and cannot spare the time for department meetings. Members of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education would do well to think about the implications of the fact that most of the teachers in my department are not able to attend the meetings where we have been formulating the “educational objectives” and “meaningful measures” that the commission would like to see in place. In the case of my department, approximately 20 percent of us will determine the objectives and measures for all of our students, including those of the 80 percent of the faculty who are part time. Not only will we not benefit from the experiences and ideas of the part-time majority, but it also will be difficult to communicate effectively to them the determinations made by us, the minority. Our part-time faculty have a modest adjunct center that includes several computers, but I daresay few are able to spend much time reading detailed emails.

It is ironic that discussion about shared objectives and measures was initiated in part to provide part-time faculty new to our institution with the type of information that could enable us all to work more cohesively and our students to achieve greater success. Of course, another reason for initiating this discussion was so that we could agree upon the same objectives and measures before the state foisted them upon us. In other words, we are being driven toward homogeneity. Gone are the days when faculty new to an institution could read course descriptions in a catalog, take a look at sample syllabi, and then prepare their classes based on their own creativity. That kind of autonomy was small compensation for a job for which they were rewarded so little, but it was at least an acknowledgment of their professional capacities.

Reliance on Part-Timers

Figures from a June 15, 2007, chart created by the researcher for our state union show that my college has 126 full-time faculty and professional staff members and 439 part-time faculty and professional staff members. Each full-time faculty member is required by contract to serve on one committee. The total number of committee seats to be filled, however, is more than the total number of full-time faculty. What happens, then, is that many full-time faculty sit on more than one committee, sometimes because assistant deans or other administrators have asked them to and usually because they do not want to lose shared governance. The need to take on additional committee service, along with a heavy teaching load (fifteen credits per semester), further undermines efforts to fulfill professional expectations and requirements of the teaching profession.

The relationship between the use of part-time faculty at community colleges and graduation rates— the focus of an article by Daniel Jacoby in the November–December 2006 issue of the Journal of Higher Education—is particularly relevant to those of us teaching at such colleges in Massachusetts because our state’s board of higher education has concluded that our graduation rates are too low. In the final report from the Task Force on Retention and Completion Rates at the Community Colleges, published in February 2007, the board lists as one of three goals the “improve[ment] [of] student success by increasing the graduation rate for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who complete within [the traditional graduation time].” Jacoby concludes that graduation rates at community colleges nationwide “decrease as the proportion of part-time faculty employed increases.” Indeed, one of the Massachusetts board’s recommendations for achieving the goal of increased graduation rates is to “increase full-time faculty.”

At first glance, the board’s report and Jacoby’s study may seem to suggest that the fault lies with the academic preparation of the part-time faculty, which, of course, would reflect badly on the profession as a whole. I suspect that more than a few full-time faculty members assume that they have better academic preparation than part-time faculty. But according to Jacoby, at community colleges only 20 percent of full-time faculty hold a PhD, and 10 percent of the part-time faculty do—the majority of community college faculty have the same credentials.

Jacoby suggests that the correlation between graduation rates and the number of part-time faculty may have to do with the very low wages for which those faculty work. At community colleges, the average part-time faculty salary ($9,782) is not quite a fifth of the average full-time faculty salary ($46,636). But those figures are based on part-time faculty teaching 7.3 hours per week for every 11 hours per week that full-time faculty teach. For about two thirds of the teaching load of full-time faculty, part-timers earn about one fifth the pay. As it is not possible for an individual, let alone a head of household, to live on $9,732 per year, part-time faculty today cobble together multiple part-time teaching positions, just as I did twenty years ago. And, just like me twenty years ago, most part-time faculty today probably have little time or energy to meet with students, create new materials through reflection on their teaching practices, or serve on committees.

Since most institutions make no commitment to future employment for contingent faculty and offer little money and no medical insurance during employment, why should these overworked, underpaid professionals have any loyalty to the institutions or the students? Why should they work on committees when they may not be working at the same institutions next semester or next year? As Jacoby puts it, the “part-time or ‘permatemp’ system provides few incentives to foster rich interactions between faculty and students, and thus undermines the campus learning climate.”

The Spellings Commission

The 2006 report from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U. S. Higher Education, made recommendations that most part-time faculty cannot follow. The report “urge[s] postsecondary institutions to make a commitment to embrace new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve student learning” and “finds that the results of scholarly research on teaching and learning are rarely translated into practice.” With the heavy teaching loads at institutions of higher education, particularly at community colleges, it is difficult for full-time faculty to find the time to “embrace new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies” or to keep current with “scholarly research,” never mind to “translate [it] into practice.” How could part-time faculty possibly do those things?

Two of the student learning assessments recommended by the report, the National Survey of Student Engagement and its sister, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, emphasize the importance of students meeting with faculty outside of class. Of course such meetings contribute to the retention and graduation of students— one on one interactions with faculty inspire individual students. But part-time faculty seldom have the time— or even the office space—to meet with students outside of class.

Reliance on part-time faculty also has implications for shared governance—another important topic that the Spellings Commission report does not clearly address. In 2003, the AAUP’s clear and strongly worded statement Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession emphasized the increased workload that results when there are not enough permanent faculty to participate in governance: “a diminishing number of full-time tenured and tenure track faculty must take on additional institutional responsibilities that are not typically shared with contingent faculty, including faculty governance and institutional support of various kinds.”

Sometimes, even when contingent faculty are encouraged by permanent faculty to participate in governance, they do not. At my community college, this past year we have been forming a faculty and professional staff senate, which includes both full and part-time faculty and professional staff. When it came time to vote on the drafted by laws, the majority of part-time faculty did not vote. Frustrating as it was for those of us hoping that part-timers would participate, we understood that they were probably discouraged from voting by the uncertainty of future employment at the college.

How does institutional reliance on part-time faculty affect the profession? According to the research and based on my experience, it decreases the ability of all faculty— both full and part time—to conduct research, apply research, determine the selections of texts and methods of teaching and testing in their own classrooms, and share in the governance of their institutions. It encourages full and part-time faculty to remain divided.

Catherine Adamowicz is associate professor of English at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island. For fiveyears, Adamowicz was coordinator of service learning and a teacher of writing and literature courses. Currently, she is chair of English and humanities and coordinator of elementary education as well as a teacher. Her e-mail address is cadamowi@bristol.mass.edu.

Bronx Cheers

Shared governance is worth celebrating at Bronx Community College.

By Frederick De Naples

---

At a time when, nationally, community colleges are increasing their reliance on contingent faculty, and nonacademics are increasingly attacking the tenure system, some community colleges—like Bronx Community College, City University of New York, where I teach—continue to follow the traditions of shared governance. The collective bargaining unit at CUNY that represents faculty and staff, the Professional Staff Congress, is both strong and involved in governance throughout the CUNY system. BCC, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, provides a working model that demonstrates the value of faculty participation in institutional governance.

Since its founding in 1957, BCC has included fulltime faculty throughout the governance structure. Over the years, college presidents have selected many deans and other administrators from longtime BCC faculty (as well as others from outside the institution). This practice has continued even in times of upheaval within the CUNY system, such as the start of open admissions in 1970, the fiscal crisis in the mid1970s, and the contentious chancellorship of Anne Reynolds in the mid 1990s.

At BCC, the major governing committees—the senate and the Personnel and Budget Committee (which makes recommendations for tenure and promotion, among other functions)—work as advisory bodies to the president of the college. Nothing in the governance structure of BCC prevents the president from acting autocratically; in almost no circumstances, however, has any BCC president done so.

Faculty are involved in almost all aspects of college governance. The tenure and promotion process passes through two facultyonly subcommittees of the Personnel and Budget Committee at the departmental and divisional levels before members of the administration are involved, and faculty remain as majority voters at two more committee levels before a final recommendation is made to the president. All curricular changes, new courses, or new degree programs must be approved by the Curriculum Committee (a subcommittee of the senate), which is made up of a faculty representative from each academic department as well as student representatives, a dean of academic affairs, and a representative from student development. As with the tenure and promotion committees, the majority of the votes are held by the faculty. The Curriculum Committee makes its recommendations to the senate, which is composed of departmental representatives (faculty), students, administrators, and fifteen at-large faculty members; the majority of votes, again, is in the hands of the fulltime faculty.

Governance Structure

The senate and the Personnel and Budget Committee structures were established shortly after BCC was founded, and these bodies have helped maintain a mutually supportive working relationship between the faculty and the administration. The governance structure ensures extensive fulltime faculty participation in the college’s major functions, providing the administration with a strong sense of the faculty’s views on curricular and personnel matters. The direction or motivation of many of the processes begins at the departmental level and, with increasingly broad input from faculty, moves toward the president. There are, of course, some top-down directives, but for the most part, the actions of the president are informed by and reflect the will of the majority of the full-time faculty.

Another important factor in the relationship between the faculty and the administration is the very low turnover in the administration: the college has had four presidents, each of whom has served for at least ten years, as well aslong-serving vice presidents and deans. The college has also been steadily replacing retirees with new full-time, tenure-track faculty. This commitment to maintaining, and in some departments increasing, the numbers of tenure-track faculty helps ensure that the faculty has a long-term interest in the college’s well-being.

What sets BCC apart from many other community colleges is the faculty participation—and leadership—at many levels throughout the college. The faculty role extends beyond matters of curriculum, tenure, and promotion. Faculty lead the major initiatives, such as the college’s general education and assessment projects, with minimal intrusions from deans. In addition to these academic projects, faculty members are involved in budget oversight for the college. The college’s senior vice president for administration and finance makes a monthly budget report to the college senate; members of the faculty also meet with the senior vice president and representatives from the budget office to discuss the college’s operating budget and shortand longterm spending plans in more detail.

A different group of faculty members meets with the senior vice president for administration and finance and the senior vice president for academic affairs to allocate the discretionary budgets for the individual academic departments. These budgets, as most community college chairpersons can attest, are minuscule, but the participation of faculty in overseeing the allocation process provides transparency and minimizes (though it does not entirely erase) suspicions that the administration is hiding funds.

Role of Chairs

BCC department chairpersons are faculty members elected to threeyear terms by the fulltime members of their department (with ultimate approval by the college president). Chairs oversee faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion within their departments and provide an influential link between the administration and the instructional staff. The chairs make up the majority of votes on the college’s Personnel and Budget Committee and participate directly in all tenure and promotion decisions. The CUNY administration seems to recognize the chairs’ vital position: administrators have made persistent demands during contract negations to remove chairs from the bargaining unit and make them a part of the administration. So far, the Professional Staff Congress has successfully resisted this demand, and the chairs remain members of both the faculty and the union.

Chairs at BCC—and throughout CUNY—serve as conduits: they communicate directly with the administration and deliver administrative policies and practices to the faculty. It is a unique position, with many obligations to the faculty and the administration alike. In their relationship with the administration, chairs represent the concerns of their faculty and disciplines as well as the academic profession. At BCC, the chairs have years of teaching experience—they understand firsthand the difficulty of teaching in crowded classrooms, working in cramped or shared offices, and juggling teaching loads and research time. At the same time, as departmental administrators, chairs develop understanding of the larger workings of the college, gaining perspectives more familiar to deans, provosts, and presidents. Straddling the line between faculty and administration, chairs can effectively influence both academic and administrative functions.

Were chairs to be excluded from the union and no longer recognized as faculty, the shift in the power structure would not be advantageous to either the administration or the faculty. Neither the union nor the administration has explained (or imagined) what the process for establishing a new chairperson would be, but there are some likely scenarios. Chairs who lose their faculty status would probably be expected to work for twelve months (faculty are on leave during June, July, and August), and their salaries and benefits would be determined and reviewed by the college president (by contract, faculty receive annual salary increases).

Though some faculty members might still wish to be chairs despite such conditions, chairs would more likely be drawn from outside academic departments and faculty ranks. Thus, if chairs were excluded from the bargaining unit, most departments would be run by nonteaching educators, some of whom would have little understanding of faculty members’ disciplines and less concern for faculty issues. The change in status would create in the administration a new layer of managers, reporting mainly to deans. The faculty would probably be isolated or insulated from the administration by the chair, who in turn would be a spokesperson for the administration, not an advocate for faculty. At a college like BCC, and most likely throughout the CUNY system, such a change would curtail the efficacy of the governance structure.

While chairs, whether members of the union and faculty or not, will make the needs of their departments a top priority, those who are a part of the administration may be less effective than unionized faculty chairs in securing more tenuretrack lines. Chairs who are faculty members are less susceptible to pressure from the administration to cut personnel costs by hiring parttime faculty and are more likely to focus their efforts on hiring fulltime faculty who will make important contributions to the department. Faculty chairs are more likely to run their departments autonomously, rather than as extensions of the administration.

Contingent Faculty

The hiring of contingent rather than tenure-track faculty is a threat to faculty governance throughout higher education but is acutely felt at community colleges. Full-time faculty who have the security of tenure are likely to have a vested interest in the governance of their colleges. A tenure-track position represents a commitment on the part of the college to support the professional development of the faculty member, and faculty members who achieve tenure (and promotion) have successfully become a part of the institutional culture. It is in the faculty member’s interest to participate in the life of the college.

Part- or full-time non-tenure-track faculty, on the other hand, do not experience the same level of institutional commitment and support; though they may wish to play a larger role, they have very little incentive to do so. When the majority of the faculty are contingent, the kind of shared governance that invigorates colleges like BCC would be very difficult to achieve. Community colleges do not have to be administration-driven, contingent-heavy institutions. At Bronx Community College, shared governance is a key value, and faculty, including chairs who are autonomous from the administration and who see themselves as part of the faculty, work hard to keep it that way.

Frederick De Naples is professor of English at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, where he has taught since 1996. He has chaired the English department since 2001. His e-mail address is frederick .denaples@bcc.cuny.edu.

Constructive Engagement With the Corporation

Here’s a way of working with business interests without selling your soul.

By David J. Siegel

---

Can academic values and traditions survive contact with the powerful forces of corporatization and commercialization? Do our alliances with industry accelerate an imminent takeover of higher education by the private sector, essentially offering distribution channels for business practices and culture? Are collaborative arrangements— whatever else they may promise— the thin edge of a wedge that will ultimately level the educational enterprise as we know it? These are among the questions confronting us as ties with industry proliferate and take on new forms. Indeed, the specter of corporate influence over higher education appears to loom larger than ever, inspiring a brisk trade in critiques of the arrangement. The impression left by many observers is that higher education is close to becoming a permanent subsidiary of Big Business, Inc.

Many of the gravest concerns that critics of corporate culture have about the consequences of academiccorporate relationships, however, are built on little more than illinformed speculation, fueled by a lack of direct engagement with the objects of our criticism, namely, corporations. The solution to our knowledge gap—and the key to our liberation from fears of “creeping corporatization”—may actually involve more connections with industry, not fewer. At the very least, closer connections might modernize our thinking about a sector of society that will undoubtedly figure more prominently in the future of postsecondary education.

The possibility of using partnerships to develop a more nuanced understanding of our corporate counterparts led me to spend over a year studying the dynamics of the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) Program in Business, a crosssector collaboration involving universities, companies, a federal government agency, and a nonprofit organization that coordinates the initiative. LEAD was established in 1980 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School by executives from McNeil Pharmaceutical to introduce talented underrepresented students (rising high school seniors) to business education and careers in business. Today, LEAD’s partners include twelve prominent universities, nearly forty multinational corporations, and the U.S. State Department.

Each year, the university partners host 370 students (selected from an applicant pool of more than 1,200) at threeto fourweek residential Summer Business Institutes, arranging corporate site visits so that students can get an inside look at the operations of Fortune 500 firms and explore career opportunities. Afterward, the program continues to track the students’ progress. LEAD reports that 65 percent of the program’s alumni are currently pursuing careers in business, and 50 percent of them have received or are pursuing a business degree from a “toptwentyfive” business school.

One of my objectives in undertaking a study of LEAD was to explore the extent to which corporate objectives dictate matters of academic policy and whether, in fact, universities are bending their activities to suit corporate preferences. What I discovered through extensive interviews and observations led me to reassess the threat that corporations supposedly pose for institutions of higher education. These findings may help others to reevaluate the claim that our connections to the private sector can have only ruinous consequences for academe.

Disequilibrium

Universities are often portrayed as occupying the weak side of a power imbalance in interactions with business partners, as if corporate priorities will always trump academic ones. In his 1963 book, Antiintellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the voice of the businessman “dominates the rooms in which the real decisions are made.” There is an abiding fear that universities will become the silent partners in alliances with business elites, because corporate patrons inevitably control the purse strings.

In LEAD, however, parties to the collaboration are professional coequals in virtually all aspects of program design, development, and delivery. All of them have a defined role to play, respect the expertise of the other parties, and work to benefit the students rather than to maximize organizational selfinterest. The university participants in my study—faculty and deans and other administrators—report that corporations are enhancing the learning experience, not diluting it. When different visions of the initiative arise on campuses, these disagreements tend to be settled with the students’ interests in mind. For example, new curricular ideas and innovations presented by business partners, far from being foisted upon reluctant university officials, are regularly discussed among the parties and judged according to their relevance, their fit within the instructional framework, and similar educational considerations.

More to the point, the university participants have no compunction about rejecting ideas that threaten to interfere with their autonomy. For example, after being offered a generous gift by a major institutional donor, LEAD ultimately declined on the grounds that the terms of the gift dictated decisions about curricular content and pedagogy better left to the faculty at each of LEAD’s member universities.

In any joint project, different motivations for involvement are likely to produce episodes of tension as partners pursue certain independent objectives on top of the official collective goals that hold the relationship together. Because the business element is often presumed to be culturally disposed to seize every advantage for itself, there is a prevailing worry that corporate representatives will request or require forms of involvement that exceed reasonable limits.

University respondents to my study, however, reported few instances in which companies had asked them to do something even remotely uncomfortable or inappropriate. The rare examples of breaches of protocol or etiquette involved companies overstepping recruitment boundaries, which respondents tended to see as a pardonable offense. After all, one of the benefits of corporate participation in LEAD is that firms are given an opportunity to build longterm relationships with students that may lead to summer internships or permanent employment. In their eagerness to capitalize on this benefit, corporate recruiters occasionally seek more interaction with students than universities are willing to grant.

Return on Investment

Many academics believe that corporations, uninterested in any value other than profit, compute a strict return on their investment in partnerships. This view leads to the corollary belief that companies will always want something immediate in return for their involvement and so will micromanage the relationship to secure what they want.

But in LEAD, corporate return on investment is decidedly longterm and multifaceted. Moreover, the corporations involved do not see universities as solely responsible for ensuring them a suitable return. Certainly, most corporate participants will compete to recruit LEAD alumni over time, and some multinationals have left the LEAD fold over the years because their low recruitment yields did not justify their monetary investment.

But other benefits enter the corporate calculus, even ones as indirect and difficult to measure as “doing good for society.” Corporate officers invariably see value from many different angles and are willing to take a broad view of the benefits. The lack of quid pro quo, in fact, is almost astonishing; one school that received a sixfigure contribution from a corporation was told that there was no expectation of any return.

Even the sales pitch for business is often played down. At a corporate site visit, an executive told the students, “If you have no interest in business courses, don’t take them.” The message was clear: this engagement was for student exposure and exploration, not corporate glorification. As if to underscore the point, the students were invited to ask frank questions of a panel, and they didn’t hesitate. The panelists fielded queries about child labor policies in overseas plants, how much the corporation donates each year, what it was like to be a woman or a minority group member at the firm, the worklife balance of employees, and what the manufacturing plants do with their waste.

Leveraging Collaborations

LEAD doesn’t necessarily represent all academicbusiness collaborations everywhere. There are a wide range of experiences—some good, some bad—in the vast and differentiated realm of interorganizational relationships. Yet LEAD’s example suggests that collaborations can provide spaces in which to challenge longheld assumptions, reset our thinking, and recognize areas of greater compatibility than we might have foretold. LEAD also points to several practical ideas for moving the dialogue on academiccorporate relationships to a higher plane, one that goes beyond “mine and thine” territorial interests.

For example, rather than imagine that we will dilute or destroy the integrity of the academic enterprise when we form alliances with business, we might take an approach that focuses on the public interest, asking what common good could come out of such collaboration. LEAD’s organizing principle, for example, is a commitment to help solve the social problem of minority underrepresentation in business. This commitment goes beyond the parochial selfinterest of any particular organization or sector. By recalibrating our dialogue to focus on the larger social purposes of collaboration, we may make real strides toward solving the most intractable problems of our times instead of falling back on protectionism.

And viewing other sectors or organizations as playing an integral “publiceducator” role may make the proposition of closer ties more palatable and meaningful. When we embrace the idea that our interconnectedness can fashion a seamless educational experience for students, we may be less likely to view corporate overtures as just another turf incursion. After all, there is no better way to expose students to what happens on a shop floor than by physically putting them there to experience it firsthand.

At the Mars snackfood plant in Chicago, for example, LEAD students spend a day getting to know the research and development and manufacturing functions of a candy maker. At IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, students’ own preconceived ideas of buttoneddown corporate culture are radically transformed when they spend time in an innovative business unit whose workers are developing new software and marketing strategies in a compressed time frame. And at General Mills in Minneapolis, groups of partnerships. The unevenness with which corporate relationships are developing inside universities means that whole segments of our campuses are disconnected from opportunities to learn about them. Those involved in collaborative activity could hold sessions to share insights, lessons, surprises, disappointments, and recommendations for building more effective and productive future engagements. Of course, we can’t let any such sessions become publicrelations campaigns for the cause of partnership or for particular companies; the express purpose should be to perform postmortems on partner students take the stage in a vast auditorium to present their new product plans to an inhouse panel of judges. Following each presentation, the judges ask pointed questions about advertising, promotions, pricing, and packaging.

These scenes repeat themselves throughout the network as the corporate executives and representatives involved in LEAD devote time and resources to educating a new generation of leaders. Program partners consistently acknowledge that the experience of LEAD students would be substantially diminished if corporate partners did not provide the important handson component— an invaluable chance for students to learn in context.

We can do a better job of reporting back to our colleagues the special understandings acquired through ships to capture potentially valuable procedural knowledge.

Collaboration as a Corrective

Naturally, my suggestions here will not address all misgivings about academiccorporate relationships. But I hope they help to fill an information gap. It is easy to develop antipathy and antagonism toward corporations when we maintain a safe distance from them. But closer acquaintance can reveal the folly of many of our most destructive assumptions, just as it often does in interpersonal relations. More—or at least more purposeful—interaction can help us realize that we (corporations and academic institutions alike) are more multidimensional than we are given credit for. Collaboration is one way to facilitate this awareness.

David J. Siegel is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. His e-mail address is siegeld@ecu.edu.

Being Online

They’re mixing face-to-face teaching, instructional TV, and online education at this community college.

By Sharon Joy Ng Hale

---

Online education is particularly well suited to the needs of community college students. Although community colleges have lower per-unit fees than four-year colleges and universities, many community college students still experience economic hardship. Even with fee waivers, students may have problems finding the money for textbooks, transportation, or day care. Community college students also often have family responsibilities that tie them to their homes. Online learning helps ease some of these problems by eliminating the need for students to be physically present on campus and by providing a more flexible format for achieving educational goals. Emphasizing online learning raises a series of potential problems for community colleges, but it can also offer many benefits. The Yuba Community College District in California has taken the lead in offering an online educational program to students. As a result, our faculty union has established provisions in our contract that ensure that the rights and working conditions of online faculty are preserved. Here is how our district is doing it.

Context

The changing demographics of the community college student population in California have presented challenges for educators. Half of all California community college students are between seventeen and twenty-two years of age, and two out of five are over twenty-five. Although the senior citizen population in the state is doubling, enrollment of older students is dropping. Forty percent of the state’s community college students are white, 30 percent are Latino, 15 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander, 8 percent are African American, and less than 5 percent are Native American. These numbers are expected to change in the coming years as a result of predicted growth in the Latino population.

Most community college students in California have a high school diploma, but a substantial number do not. Fifty percent drop out after the first year of college, and less than one-tenth earn an associate’s degree. Only about 25 percent of those who take transfer courses eventually transfer to a four-year college or university. Low rates of transfer and degree completion are especially problematic for Latinos, African Americans, older students, and students without a high school diploma.

The California community college system must develop strategies that address the needs of the state’s diverse and changing population. More than half of the state’s incoming community college students will need training in basic skills in math and English. Because community college programs are the largest provider of workforce training in the state, they must develop curricula that not only meet the transfer requirements of four-year colleges and universities, but also align with state and local workforce development needs. California is attempting to meet these needs in various ways that include an expanded use of online and hybrid distance education courses.

Yuba College, the only California community college whose faculty association is an affiliate of the AAUP and is part of the Collective Bargaining Congress, was one of the first community colleges in the state to start a program in online learning. Informed by the policies and standards outlined in AAUP Policy Documents and Reports and, especially, the 1999 Statement on Distance Education, Yuba has incorporated a strong online learning program within an existing distance education program known as distributive education.

Negotiators were able to add strong statements to the faculty union contract that protect faculty in such areas as intellectual property rights, working conditions, workload, and compensation. At Yuba, class size and contract load are limited, faculty are not required to teach online unless they desire to do so, and tenured faculty have first rights for developing and teaching distance education courses.

The distributive education program at Yuba has proven to be an important source of enrollments within the district and has simultaneously provided a viable way for faculty to reach many students who might not otherwise attend college. It has also allowed faculty to test their creativity by developing online curricula that effectively engage students without sacrificing quality.

Online Learning

Online students must be self-motivated, organized, and task-oriented to succeed. Those who are succeed at achieving the necessary curricular goals while also contributing positively to the online environment. Some instructors have commented that they get to know their online students better than they do those in the traditional classroom. Shy students who are often reluctant to speak out in a traditional classroom can excel in the virtual classroom because they feel more comfortable sharing their ideas online. Additionally, being online gives students the opportunity to reflect upon their answers before participating in discussions, which increases the likelihood that their comments will be focused and on target.

By offering classes that vary from the traditional eighteen-week format, Yuba gives students more choices for completing their educational goals. More than twenty-five courses are currently taught in a nine-week format through distributive education. This gives students who drop a course before the end of the first nine-week period an opportunity to complete the course in the same semester by enrolling in it again in the nine-week period that follows.

Other online courses are taught in alternative formats. For example, Yuba offers short, one-unit courses every six weeks throughout the semester. Some of these courses are offered two or three times each semester. There are also one-unit, six-week modules that, when combined, allow students to complete three units in a given subject in a more flexible format.

Online courses have grown phenomenally in the Yuba Community College District since their introduction in fall 2000. Eight online courses appeared in the class schedule that fall, but by fall 2006, eighty-four online courses were being offered. Enrollments,meanwhile, grew from 159 students to 2,519 students during those six years. By spring 2007, online enrollments had increased to3,114. As a result, overall full-time-equivalent student enrollment across the district has grown, and much of that growth is attributed to online class enrollments. This trend is expected to continue.

As distributive education courses and online learning grow, curricular challenges have come to the forefront. Overall attrition rates in online courses have steadily declined, falling from 35 percent in fall 2000 to about 24 percent in fall 2006. Retention rates for the same period have averaged about 52 percent. A subcommittee of the college’s curriculum committee is currently developing ways to evaluate online classes and compare attrition and retention rates with those in the traditional classroom. This subcommittee is also developing an evaluation process and criteria to measure the quality and effectiveness of online courses offered in the district.

The overall effectiveness of the district’s online program is also being considered. Evaluation standards are being developed by the subcommittee that will address the following questions:

• Does the necessary infrastructure (for example, bandwidth) exist to deliver the courses to the students? (This is important for instructors who want to use videos from the Internet.)
• Is there adequate training for faculty who want to teach on line? Is there adequate ongoing training for those who already teach online?
• Does the necessary support staff exist to assist faculty?
• Is the student help desk equipped to meet the needs of students en rolled in online courses?

As it forges ahead with the online program, Yuba is using innovative strategies to increase the types of distributive education classes being offered in the district. By combining different distributive education delivery modalities, instructors can offer more types of classes. In one model, traditional instructional TV lectures are being archived and then video streamed and managed online through WebCT. Most instructors choose to write their lectures and then upload them for students to read as part of the day’s lesson, but by combining these different modalities, instructors can have face-to-face students, online students, and an instructional TV audience enrolled in a single course. Interfacing the live lectures with the online environment also gives students the opportunity to see their teacher live and in action.

Labor Politics

How has online education changed the labor politics at Yuba College? What were the specific safeguards necessary to protect faculty who chose to teach online? Are tenured faculty being displaced by adjuncts in the online world? Yuba College has a strong faculty union that has attempted to address these issues. Overall, the union has been successful in safeguarding faculty rights.

A historical perspective regarding the development of contract provisions that addressed online learningis instructive. In the first contract that followed the implementation of online courses, faculty negotiators addressed the problem of class caps for online courses. Because classroom size doesn’t limit the number of students who can conceivably enroll in online courses, protections have been necessary to prevent exploitation of faculty. Additionally, without reasonable class caps, highe nrollments in online courses can have a negative impact on face-toface enrollments.

The resulting contract set class caps for online courses at thirty students. When student enrollments warranted increasing the class caps, faculty could choose to increase the original cap but were not required to do so. Increases in original class caps occurred in increments of twenty slots. A modest stipend accompanied these increases with an additional stipend for another added block of twenty slots. Any increases beyond forty slots, however, resulted in a limited capped stipend. The stipends represented an acknowledgment by the academy that those teaching distance education should be compensated equally for equal work.

By the next contract, however, Yuba College faculty voted to end the stipends for online professors who added twenty slot increments to their cap. The stipends for online faculty had created a feeling of inequity because no stipends were granted for faculty who added students to their in class courses. Although online instruction requires more work than traditional classes, the stipends were considered negotiable, and thus, with the current contract, those stipends ended. Without compensation for the additional work required to manage additional students in the online environment, some online faculty were reluctant to add more students above the cap.

Other provisions from the earlier contract continued. Our contract states that no faculty member is required to teach online. When one chooses to do so, only 40 percent of the normal workload can be online, although additional online courses can be taught for extra pay. At our college, this means that faculty members who teach online are still teaching at least nine units in the classroom.

There is little concern that adjuncts teaching online courses will replace tenured or fulltime faculty. Senior faculty are given the “first right of refusal” to develop and implement new online courses. The faculty member teaching the course maintains intellectual property rights over the material. Responsibility for course development remains with the faculty member just as it would in the classroom. Currently, class caps for online courses are still generally lower than face-to-face classes and are determined in a consultative process between the concerned faculty member and the supervising dean.

An emerging challenge facing faculty is the Yuba Community College District’s move toward becoming a multi-campus district. Currently, Yuba College is the only fully accredited campus in the district, but one of Yuba’s satellite campuses, Woodland Community College, will soon become an autonomous institution. The district must determine how to manage a distance education program across two campuses. Whatever curricular decisions the district makes, ensuring fair and equitable treatment for faculty who teach online will continue to be a priority for the faculty association.

Sharon Joy Ng Hale is a psychology professor at Woodland Community College in the Yuba Community College District in California. She is past president of the California AAUP conference, has served two terms as the District I representative on the AAUP’s governing Council, and was a Council executive committee member for two year