Two main problems confront me in making this presentation: the limitation of time and the hindrance of my personality.  I will try to keep an eye on both.  I am still at the stage of shoveling this stuff out of the stable and into the garden, so I need your forbearance and a couple extra shovels.

The general topic is change and community consciousness.  Which changes and how much of them are good?  Which are not?  What rates of change are good or not?  What are their costs?  Where do they take us?  What do they do to our community?  Why do we conceptualize these changes as having a direction (i.e., going somewhere) or actually being the vehicle (train metaphor) that takes us there?  Both Cornerstones and WASC are instruments for change.  Change is the subject of our self-study report.  The public is aware of some of these changes, but either approves uncritically or switches the dial when the discussion gets complicated.  A few commentators are commendably awake and concerned (Doonesbury cartoon).

I don’t know that I can add a lot to your knowledge of the principles and history of Cornerstones, since Marv has done a thorough job of informing us, along with Nancy Harkey in her critical paper and other writers and speakers.  The Academic Senate and other units of the campus who participated in the discussions leading to the Response to the Implementation Plan promulgated in December have identified all of the problems associated with the Plan.  I am developing some expertise in WASC as a result of my current assignment, but I came to it as a lamb to the slaughter and had only the vaguest idea of what it was all about up till last Spring.  But I will try to connect WASC’s agenda with that of Cornerstones.

Remember that any critical remarks I make herein are not directed to persons and do not constitute an attack on anyone’s chosen endeavors or ways of making a living.  I consider my role to be that of conscientious objector.  I object to the industrialization of education, higher education in particular, and to the privatization of the public sector.  I do not want to be a learning manager for an education management organization.  My role is also that of advocate for collective and democratic process, for community life, for cultural heterogeneity, social diversity, and economic parity.  As a scholar, I think it is important to place events into a wide comparative perspective and to engage the discourse through which we discuss them before attempting to arrive at an understanding.  That is what I am trying to do in this presentation.  It is clear that not every problem requires the same solution.  While we may have problems in public higher education, inter-penetration with private interests may not be the answer.  As Mikhail Gorbachev pointed out in his last pre-perestroika speech before the U.N., internationalization does not necessarily imply that everything has to be organized on the global level.  Some things can remain local or regional.

An Imperial Analogy

What the English saw when they came to “New England” or “the Gold Coast” or “Aboriginal Australia”:

- acephalous, decentralized communities,
- “anyone can say he’s a chief, but that doesn’t mean anyone will listen to him,”
- not a great deal of economic specialization, no concept of labor or wage,
- exchange relations (trade, marriage, etc.) based on relationship, status, and goods, not profit,
- unmanaged, unsupervised, diverse ways of doing things,
- activity prescribed by ritual and custom, not contract and policing,
- mystical attachment to place, environment.

Vernacular life looks like a mess to imperialists, so they diagnose problems, with which therefore “they” “need” “our” help.  In this situation, there are many obstacles to development, but these can be removed.  Even after the colonists seem to have gone home, the development industry continues, because these and new needs can always be identified and addressed by new interventions.  Never mind that the principal beneficiaries of the development business have always been the people who make careers of it, the corporations whose trade profiles are swollen by it, and the elites who capitalize on the investment opportunities it creates, not the local populations.

Remember Michael Milliken, the junk bond king?  According to an L.A. Times article not too long ago, he spent some of his time in prison looking for new worlds to conquer.  He took a look at the public educational system, as have many other privateers, and saw

- no one making a profit (but they could, and should be),
- disorganized, diverse, and informal ways of doing things,
- no maximization of resource use,
- no definition of product or market,
- no single locus of decision-making authority or ownership.

In the university, especially, there are many obstacles to development, such as

- independent workers (faculty), who are neither policed nor sanctioned,
- irrational production processes,
- rootedness in place (if you move it like a factory, you get a different effect, but maybe you don’t have to have a localized production facility at all!); in fact, what we are doing is (a) moving the faculty around, (b) packaging what we do for extension, and (c) having pieces manufactured elsewhere, the same pattern produced by GATT and NAFTA,
- maximization of relationship, status or !wisdom! instead of profit,
- native thought categories (e.g., research, plan, fact, knowledge … ) that are not the same as their technocratic equivalents.

In the process of colonizing a public institution (or a private but non-corporate one such as health care used to be), the corporate sector must co-opt and then strengthen the state bureaucracy then in place, or otherwise cause it to serve new ends, just as the imperial administration had to corrupt and arm the chiefs so they could rule their people on their behalf.  Our needs have been diagnosed, and the educational needs of the people, the chiefs are being rounded up, and disciplined, managed, productive activity can begin.

Since outcomes, planning, and competencies are in the core jargon of the development project, we cannot avoid drawing an analogy between our situation and that of a third world country.  We even find the same metaphors in use.  My Togolese friend in the development project I worked on liked to say the global economy was a fast train, and if his people didn’t get on it, they’d be left behind.  In other words, there’s only one direction, one way to get there, and no other options.

Some Views of Change

“Is change guided by any human principle?” someone from Cal Poly asked at one of our focus groups last year.  Some people seem to think all change is good, some that it is all bad.  If there’s too much of it, too fast, and it was someone else’s idea, then we tend to think it’s bad.  If we’re comfortable with the status quo, we don’t want it to change.  If we’re uncomfortable with the status quo, then we do.  In our current setting, resistors to some kinds of change are frequently portrayed as Luddites, technophobes, or bigots, depending on the kind of change.  Technological change is presented as all of a piece, all the same kind of thing.  People will often use the example of the introduction of the radio in an earlier day as something that was feared.  The public thought it portended the doom of social intercourse, and of course it did no such thing.  Therefore, ipso facto, we have nothing to fear from biotechnology, computerized communications, reproductive technology, chemical-intensive agriculture, any technology.  They are all the radio.

In fact, technology refers to a huge and disparate set of tools, techniques, and rules for use.  The alphabet is a technology that has had enormous consequences for civilization.  Likewise, the saddle or the Barbie.  None of them is culturally, environmentally, or socially neutral.  They all are created and deployed within specific socio-economic parameters, as well, that influence their distribution and impact.  We ought to understand all of these characteristics of any particular educational technology before we make decisions about it.  We mustn’t simply cry, “This is great fun,” or “Let’s jump on the train before we’re left at the station.”

Resistance to change is natural.  Some of us have idealized our youth, and continue to like the music (for instance) we liked when young, whether it was Duke Ellington, Dionne Warwick, or Devo, and dislike what our kids like.  Once formed, tastes and attitudes are difficult to change, although social pressure, rewards, experience, and philosophical convictions sometimes cause this.  Another factor is what Margaret Mead referred to as the pre-figurative vs. post-figurative society.  In a pre-figurative (traditional) society, the skills, values, and knowledge of older members continue to have importance and the persons themselves to be useful in the community.  In a post-figurative (modern) society, older people’s experience and abilities are rendered irrelevant by rapid technological and social change.  They themselves are disrespected unless they are wealthy.  Levi-Strauss calls this contrast “cold” versus “hot” systems of thought.  The ideal would be something like a co-figurative society, in which everybody was learning together with no sacrifice of persons whose capabilities fell out of date.

We activists who find a lot wrong with the world often think social change is an unalloyed good.  However, when it gets confused with social engineering, it becomes more autocratic or prescriptive, which we don’t like.  A good example is the Soviet experiment of scientific socialism.  The goal of reforming the feudal structure of society and distributing wealth and ownership more equally was an admirable one.  But the means employed were coercive and undemocratic, administered through an omnipotent centralized bureaucracy that defended itself with a bewildering array of ersatz sociology and political propaganda presented as realism.  It was neither socialism nor science.  The critical issue is, “When is it okay to tell other people how to live or do their work?”  I might think it is okay to tell the white supremacists in San Bernardino what to do, and to have the state back that up with force of law and arms.  But I might think it is not okay to tell someone how to teach a class.  Is there a difference?  Is it just a matter of opinion?  Is there a way to tell when we’re acting as agents of social change and when we’re being social engineers?  How do we distinguish between a desirable evolution of the organization of work and an evolutionist depiction of a corporate power grab parading as educational quality programming?

Charles Reed has talked a great deal about change, or transformation, especially in connection with something he calls “culture”.  He has said we have to change the institutional culture; that we should “develop a culture of quality” to provide excellence in education (Chico newspaper article handout); that we have to change the culture of California “to move to a year-round operation” (CSU Academic Senator interview with Harold Goldwhite).  Goldwhite himself says in that same pandering interview, “That’s going to change some of the culture of the academy,” in response to some of the Chancellor’s points about how faculty have to become more involved managers.  WASC is full of the “culture of evidence”.  I find these usages of the term “culture” slipshod and disingenuous.  Bureaucratic convenience, social engineering, and political re-organization cloak themselves behind these shibboleths of culture.

The Corporate Model

It’s been very obvious for years that we aspire to corporate standards of organization and production.  The legislatures and other governing bodies that belong to big business have thoroughly brainwashed the public and us into thinking that the corporate mode of production is a great success.  As in all social science, this kind of evaluation depends on what you look at and how you measure it.  In terms of producing big wealth for a few individuals, then corporate capitalism is great.  In terms of contributions to social health, environmental sustainability, democratic process, cultural heterogeneity, personal safety and happiness, spiritual richness, and community consciousness, corporations are a disaster.  Even our much-vaunted “economic” health, if measured in terms of starving kids, labor policy, access to health care, the disparity of income between the lowest and the highest, nutritional value of the typical diet, pollution, and so on, is not much to brag about.  If we applied the outcomes model to the assessment of this kind of enterprise, instead of only to its bottom line, we’d think it needed some of its own medicine: training, better management information, self-study.

Yet we emulate them.  We talk about productivity, packaging and marketing.  We have more administrators than ever, and more managing to do.  Bureaucratic self-justification (unconscious, of course) requires the generation of programs and tasks: shadow work for some non-bureaucrats.  (See my earlier screed on shadow work, if you want more information on it.)  Students are now consumers, clients, or customers, depending on exactly which service is being provided them.  We have to forget what happens to real consumers on the outside of the academy: we are routinely lied to, over-charged, over-fed, sickened, and otherwise disappointed by the products and their purveyors.  Shopping has acquired the status of an addictive behavior requiring 12-step programs.  Consumers are mostly poorer from having to buy all this stuff and their lives are impoverished by the time spent in shopping malls.  Yet we choose this as the model relationship for education?  In fact, according to such authorities as the Baldridge Report cited by WASC and many other educational organizations, the academy is sadly inadequate as a business enterprise (Baldridge Report handout).  Even though we have engendered many of the appurtenances of the corporation (an elaborate hierarchy of managers, platoons of professional consultants and PR flacks and satellite organizations sprouting from our flanks, insecurity and stress derived from working at the will of others instead of in the search for learning, the competition ethic dominant over social interest and cooperation, sycophantic and asymmetrical rather than reciprocal or complementary inter-personal relations), we are still way behind in production and its measurement.

As David Noble pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the university is also the site of increasing commercial consumption, as well as the object of consumption.  Soon it will be indistinguishable from Wal-Mart.  I understand that our enterprising partnerships with sellers of inedible grease in indestructible containers may indeed be driven by customer satisfaction in addition to desperation on our part and greed on theirs, but it’s hard to take this explanation with equanimity when our bookstore has no books for sale other than texts.  Are there no customers for books?  And are our high-minded calls for excellence to be applied only to the industry of faculty, not to the food, material goods, and physical environment of the university?

It looks like some of the other techniques of industry have also been exported to the university.  The de-stabilization of the compensation system for salaried workers, continual contract problems, the freezing of the pay scale, the inflation of workload, the mystification of advancement standards, the privileging of select workers, the recruitment of workers into new lower management cadres, the prescriptive engagement of workers in technocratic research, and the continual attack on workers are familiar to labor organizers as tried-and-true union busting tactics.  They are all in use in our situation.  The faculty (now a producer, content-provider, or manager) is the native whose culture must be changed to obtain the necessary kind of work.  We are under surveillance and we are objects of compulsory development.  As Frantz Fanon points out in “The Wretched of the Earth,” “The condition of native is a nervous condition.”

The Political Context

We are witnessing a concerted attack on the academy from both left and right, mostly the political right.  Such reactionary moralists as Bill Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza think universities are all think tanks for socialism, feminism, and other perspectives they don’t like; they want us to go back to the canon, teach traditional values, admit we don’t believe in anything.  They think contemporary literary criticism, for example, is just so much moral relativism, and that diversity programs are a sop to minorities that waste resources and pervert history.  Liberal and progressive critics like Jonathan Kozol or Neil Postman find glaring inequities and injustices in the educational system, glib or thoughtless use of language, and mindless regimentation.  It seems our school system is a way of taking relatively minor differences between individuals (their academic performance or classroom behavior) and institutionalizing them into career prospects that mirror the social structure.  I think it is mainly the critics on the right who have knowingly or unknowingly fed the colonization of schools by private interests.  This has been gradually accepted as desirable only because the public has been convinced by our so-called leaders that schools and universities are failing to deliver what somebody says they are supposed to deliver.

The assault on education is concurrent with the growth of profit and privatization (corporatization), with the deprivation of public funding for it (and re-direction to other “industries”, such as corrections), with a widespread and growing socio-economic inequality in the population, and with the growth of educational administration, in numbers and power.  This concurrence is no coincidence.  Accountability has become the watchword.  Its actual meaning is obscure, however, because it is not clear for what we should be held accountable, nor to whom.  Is there a causal framework hidden here?  Has the school system, including its terminal parts, produced a semi-literate, semi-ignorant populace where there was none before?  Are not the children of the elite literate and well-informed, if not necessarily well-behaved or well-intentioned?  If we spent similar sums on the education of all children, would we not get the same result?  Who can, in any event, guarantee writing capability, facility with numbers, acquaintance with world affairs, or any specified “competence”?  School alone cannot do it.  The cause of the ignorance of the population, which, so far as I can see, only emboldens our rulers and makes us better shoppers, is not the schools.  It is the value system of society at fault.  Must we be held accountable for the failure of public institutions?  Who says they have failed?  They have done a great job of making us into TV watchers, junk food eaters, passive non-participants in the political process, and consumers.  The schools are at the forefront of this great success.  Is accountability causality? a standard of productivity? or just more policing?

We know “they” who attack the educational system from the accountability  perspective don’t really care about knowledge or about children, because if they did, they’d:

1. tell everybody to turn off their TVs, (though Bennett, to give him some credit, describes TV as having a sewer backed up in your living room),
2. increase the education budget by 60% instead of that devoted to the prison-industrial complex,
3. be more worried about the importance placed on money in general, and in particular get the corporations out of the classroom,
4. be more concerned with the one out of four children who go to bed hungry every night in this country.

It is rather galling to hear discussions of traditional family values or the failure of education coming from people who never utter a word of complaint at the battery of violent, sexualized, standardized, repetitive, materialistic advertising and programming coming out of their media.  They do not see any contradiction in this oversight, because selling and consumption are sacrosanct.  We can’t criticize anything having to do with marketing or the economy.

Cornerstones

This plan (Marv called it the Decagon) is not an isolated expression of these trends, although it was initiated as a pilot project.  The ten Principles, as you have seen (overhead), are needs-based, assessment-oriented, and motivated by productivity, growth, and accountability.  To implement them calls for a great deal of management, discipline, and re-distribution of power … up.  Among other things, the Plan will:

- regulate the flow (number, rate, and identity) of students (customers) through the production or service line,
- regulate workers (number, rate, identity, relations, and rewards),

and offer the same guarantee that all automated or industrial production offers: quantity plus quality at low cost.  But it has the same negative externalities as all industrial production in a free-market system (unfettered capitalism), which include dependency, homogenization, inflationary growth, stress, heightened controls, impoverishment of human relations, and inequality of opportunity and resources.  Can inhumane management values co-exist with this program?  You bet.  They may be implicit in the student consumer ideology itself.  Though the management apparatus for higher education now demands increasing compartmentalization and specialization within the administrative structure and distances people in different categories, it doesn’t produce a predictable division of labor or diversification of tasks.  At the faculty level, all the functions of administration (fund-raising, reporting, recruitment, assessment, budgeting, planning, counseling, community outreach, program review, search, etc.) are replicated in each worker, along with the traditional occupations of learning new things, passing them on, communicating with students, academic practice.

WASC

WASC is the newest of six regional accrediting organizations serving the United States, its territories, and some American universities abroad.  It was formed in 1962.  Accreditation has been around for some 100 years in this country.  WASC is more a consortium than anything else, having a relatively small full-time, permanent headquarters staff and representatives on its member campuses, who together support the executive body.  Like other non-governmental organizations, it is heavily endowed by governmental and other governmentally-endowed foundations, NGOs, trusts, agencies, and institutes.  It has three commissions regulating the activities of schools, community and junior colleges, and undergraduate and graduate institutions.  We of course belong to the latter.

WASC’s emphases have changed over the past ten or so years from a simple compliance model to an assessment/accountability model.  As you can see from their own identification of the forces leading to this change of approach, (overhead “Changed Context for Accreditation”), they are now interested in such things as performance indicators, training, a greater leadership role of the college president, course delivery modalities, and so forth.  The new approach to self-study, one of the main elements of the accreditation exercise, insists that institutions conduct outcomes-based evaluations of themselves, along with supplying the data appropriate to comply with the Standards.  While this is to some degree liberating and stimulating, it involves a lot more work and cost.  It constitutes compliance with a more difficult and baffling requirement than ever before.

It is extremely challenging to find ways to critique some of the notions involved in Cornerstones and WASC without sounding like a jerk.  Who could be opposed to continual improvement, the ultimate espoused goal of self-study and the Decagon?  Who doesn’t like order and organization and efficiency?   When the planning cycle is represented as the integration of the various administrative activities that weigh us down into a smooth routine that yields excellence, who can say nay?  We are, after all, a seasonal, cyclical species, however linear our Occidental thought has come to be.  Of course, when closely examined, ideas such as continual improvement are insulting in the extreme when presented to people who are over-worked, under-paid, and cynical from years of being lied to.  When someone says, “We need to talk about the whole educational system,” it is impossible to disagree.  We do.  If the person saying this also states publicly that “a lot of the faculty teaching here think they should be at a more prestigious university” (i.e., they belong neither here nor there) or “about a third of the faculty should retire”, it is hard to believe that they are in fact talking about the whole educational system.  It is very sad for me to hear faculty echoing sentiments that more properly belong to the Deans’ or mid-level management culture – that there are a lot of “dead wood” and “faculty who should retire”.  It strikes me as normal that Deans would hold these opinions, since they are the chiefs encharged with patrolling the natives.  But when the natives start to think we should get rid of the elders or the deviants, God help us.  As for life-long learning, what academician would speak against it?  But this is market spread, occasioned by corporatization.  Don’t we want people to be literate and numerate so they will be able to learn on their own?  Where will our search for new markets, driven by the growth imperative, lead?  (overhead of dog reading)

In case you don’t understand me, I am not against improvement or assessment per se, although I do react with derision to (in my opinion) oxymorons like “assessment scholarship”, which I read about in an issue of “Assessment Update”.  This phrase was stated in a completely straight-faced, rather self-congratulatory manner, and it made me wonder if the world has nothing left for us to study? no literature? no social problems? no quasars or quarks?  I didn’t like the feeling that I was being asked to accept a bureaucratic exercise as philosophical inquiry or atom-smashing.  It is a perfect example of the creeping sameness that pervades all activity when everything is reduced to business to be managed.

Furthermore, I think the advocates of these changes, the assessment regimen, for instance, are mostly innocent of conscious collusion to reduce academics to a TQM break-out group.  I know that here is where the professional opportunities are for many of us.  The rewards are not in scholarly work, if any of us are still capable of it, nor even, really, in excellent teaching, if teaching refers to what you say as well as how you say it.  It is a shame that outstanding scholars like David Fite choose to go into administration.  I’d personally rather see him write a book about Melville than about re-engineering the curriculum.

Nor am I against technology as such.  I’d like a shot at operating one of these back hoes that get in my way as I try to cross campus.  I think computers are very cool.  I’m just against being told I have to do things “whether I like it or not” instead of “because they are good to do.”  I think we should keep the old people in the village.  I think wisdom is connection, in the sense of being able to connect different things or realms and being connected to other people.  I’ve known a few people who were wise in this sense, and some of them never set foot in a school, though they would have appreciated the opportunity.  This wisdom requires a community to foster it.  I don’t want ours to be torn apart.

Counting Crows have a line in one of their songs that I think fits in here at the end.

 She lies and says she’s in love with him.
 Can’t find a better man.

Maybe we should look for a better dance partner.