Notes towards a political ontology

On “trickling down” and the intrinsic value of education

Notes towards a political ontology

Thanks for the posts. I’ll start with Phil’s question, on whether education is a public good or a private good? I think that first we have to ask ourselves in what kind of society will this public or private good be inserted. High modernity did in fact view education as a public good, whereby a recalcitrant population could be turned into a compliant workforce that could serve the needs of industrial bourgeois society. One only needs to think of the techniques we learn at school: timekeeping, discipline (mental and physical), fitness, a system of rewards and punishments, respect for authority, deference, love of country, etc. Anyone who fails in these requirements is usually classed as someone who is unruly, and has ‘behavior’ problems. Yet, there was another side to this coin. Education was also designed to teach a sensibility (e.g. appreciation of the arts for their own sake). That is, one went to school and university to be educated and cultivated (acquiring an education to be able to perform one’s role as a citizen). One could develop an ethos. The culture wars (cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield) in fact emerge from this contradiction. While on one side bourgeois society had to ‘train’ the future workforce for compliance, it could not prevent the educating side from creating individuals who would question the very basis on the society. Nor could it prevent this “trickle down” effect (cf. Phil’s post on Domina), where this cultivation was passed down from generation to generation. Consequently, the activists of the sixties, those who would question the very basis of modernist interpretations, are themselves very much the product of modernist education (see Sheldon Wolin ‘Elitism and the Rage against Postmodernism’ in The Presence of the Past). However, the backlash started quite quickly with the 1975 publication of the Trilateral Commission report, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. The crisis of democracy meant according to the authors, too much democracy in society, and the failure of schools and universities to indoctrinate the young. It’s almost worth quoting at length:

At the present time, a significant challenge comes from the intellectuals and related groups who assert their disgust with the corruption, materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the subservience of democratic government to "monopoly capitalism." The development of an "adversary culture" among intellectuals has affected students, scholars, and the media […] In some measure, the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. In an age of widespread secondary school and university education, the pervasiveness of the mass media, and the displacement of manual labor by clerical and professional employees, this development constitutes a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.

These “adversary culture” refers exactly to the social movements that emerged in many parts of the world post WW2 (though the Trilateral Commission is mainly concerned with the US, Europe and Japan). The crisis of democracy had to be countered by the gradual defunding of education, or rather their reorganization because of the inherent contradiction in the modernist project. The culture wars were basically an outgrowth of the elites’ hatred of democracy (starting with Plato). The crisis of democracy was not only about an adversarial culture among intellectuals, but also, the fact that this adversarial culture was translated into concrete demands from women and ethnic and sexual minorities for a more just society, which inevitably destabilized the old power arrangements. It took until the late 80s/early 90s for this to be coined as ‘culture wars’ (incidentally just as the new social movements lost its momentum and identity politics became entrenched) and for the gains to be reversed. Yet the ideology was laid out very early on.

Sorry for going on at length, but back to Phil’s question. So, into what kind of society do we want this public good to be inserted? Are we going to go back to the modernist project; public education for all in a capitalist society (albeit a tamed capitalism)? Or are we going to try to reimagine public education while we are reimagining our own societies?

Change versus transformation

One ongoing sub-category of our project should be related to the political community we want to see and how the university that we want will reflect that. What is needed is an organic relationship between the community and the university rather than a feeder of technocrats for a neoliberal society. By organic, I don’t mean that a narrow relationship whereby the university will reflect the needs of the political community in its economic, cultural and social needs. This is given. But also, that the university will remain a site of critique for society, operating as a subversive institution. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

One of the key things, that I have been trying to argue is that going back to the modernist project, with education as a public good is not going to work. As I argued above, the contradictions that emerge out of the public project probably sets it on course to become a target for neolibralization. This is because of the democratic deficit at the heart of public education. The modernist project is still too much centered around the idea of control, discipline and authoritarianism (different to authority, but that is another debate). Hence, our task is to create a space where democracy can flourish. To quote from the preamble of the IWW, “we are creating the new society within the shell of the old one.” As it is now, the modern university is but a shell of its old self. It has been gutted and transformed into a technocratic institution that responds to economic and military needs of the state and corporations. Yet, to make changes, we need institutions. Here we see the key mistake of the sixties where they thought they could do without institutions (a nihilistic tendency however well-intentioned it is). The second strategy was encapsulated in the rhetoric of “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. Those who followed that line, sought to build alternative institutions outside the whole system; communes, social centers, etc. These alternative institutions sought to create the utopia that they had imagined right here on the margins of society. This is what Foucault called ‘heterotopias’, or existing utopias. We can call this strategy ‘resistance’. On the other hand, to have substantive changes in society, we need a different strategy. Call it ‘transformation’. This involves creating subjects and institutions who reflect the type of society that they want but within the old society. We can’t go to the margins again, nor can we just kick down everything we have, no matter how rotten they are. We need to start building from the floor down and move up.

Vision as a political ontology

The question then centers around vision. What will the new society look like, and what will the new university that we seek to build look like? How is it to be arranged? For, example, Phil’s point about the size of classrooms, group work, all these practical issues have to be debated democratically and included as part of the vision of the future. These things matter considerably if we want to create a new type of institution. Also, what type of class architecture do we set up; are we going to continue with the traditional lecture setup with the professor as the dispenser of knowledge from the front of the class, or are we to have a more open approach? What type of decision-making processes will we have? Are we going to continue with the managerial approach where a few people do all the interesting work, while the rest execute? How is the curriculum to be designed, what kind of deliberative space can we create so that the curriculum can be debated, contested, and open? It is not only a question of course design, but the whole issue of pedagogy must be factored in. How has pedagogy suffered under neoliberalism, and what type of pedagogy can we see for the future? It is in that sense that we need to have vision as our political ontology. For let us not beat about the bush, because all this is a political project, just like neoliberalization. But, before anything else, two caveats. Firstly, this vision cannot be elaborated as a blueprint that can be used ad infinitum, but it should be one that is always open to debate and questioning. Secondly, we need to start somewhere. Nothing in terms of transformation is happening in the UC system (well at least in UCI and from what I can gather from meetings), where the strategy towards budget cuts revolves around resistance. As such, we are in a good position to start envisioning our project.

Some reading ideas:

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, Something from Henry Giroux on pedagogy, Christine E. Sleeter, Peter McLaren ’s Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference

more thoughts on the course, materials and practical concerns

Okay my last post for the day, I promise! The remainder of my discussion with Prof. Domina was spent on the question "In what direction would you take this course, and what would you like to see on the syllabus?"

Some practical points for an undergrad course:
- a 'project based course' can work well, but clearly define the project from the beginning
- there are plenty of students at UCI in the education minor, so it could appeal to many of them
- for undergrads, about an hour of reading per class is good
- group work could be good for this course, allowing students to divide up and pursue different aspects of the project
- no more than 40 students

Some reading ideas:
- Clark Kerr: 'The Uses of the University: The Godkin Lectures on the Essentials of Free Government and the Duties of the Citizen'- (http://www.amazon.com/Uses-University-Lectures-Essentials-Government/dp/0674005325/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256324447&sr=8-1)- the father of the UC masterplan gave this as a lecture series, looks really promising
- Nicolas Lemann: 'The Big Test: Secret History of the American Meritocracy'- (http://www.amazon.com/Big-Test-History-American-Meritocracy/dp/0374527512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256324660&sr=1-1)- includes a treatment of the 1996 battle over California's anti-affirmative action Proposition 209
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis: 'Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life' (http://www.amazon.com/Schooling-Capitalist-America-Educational-Contradictions/dp/0465097189/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256324854&sr=1-1)- a seminal text covering precisely what we are talking about

one more thing: on globalization and education

I forgot to add one very interesting point from my conversation with Prof. Domina. I asked him about the common rhetoric (we are all familiar with it) that furthers the image of the university as an innovation factory (very evident here: http://www.dailycal.org/article/106932/a_call_to_stop_university_fee_increases). In this link, we see gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom saying things that we probably would like to hear from our candidates: stop fee increases, lets put a high value on higher education, etc. But it is phrased in terms like "more workforce development specific coursework and investments in job placement....Jobs in the 21st century economy will require employees to have expertise in engineering, applied sciences and math. College is the ideal venue for instilling these skills in tomorrow's workforce."
So we see higher education getting valued, but only in free-market terms. That is, only in terms of enhancing our competiveness in the global market place. Prof. Domina made the interesting point that in China, the complete opposite rhetoric is in fact in place. There, they are worried that they are producing legions of "yes men" who are unable to engage in critical thinking and analytic skills. An interesting topic for our course may be to consider the effects of a globalized market place on higher education, what sorts of rhetorics or ideals it creates, and how they could end up conflicting or complimenting each other. If the humanities can help shape this rhetoric, it may make people think more favorably of the 'intrinsic value' of higher education. On the other hand, were we to try to "sell it" in this manner, we would essentially be buying into the neoliberal terms for the immediate pragmatic purpose of getting our funding.

notes from a meeting with a Prof. in the Education dept.

I just finished meeting with Prof. Thurston Domina in the Dept. of Education. Last week he participated in a teach-in sponsored by “Defend UCI” (http://defenduci.blogspot.com/), which I attended. His work focuses on how higher education policy can produce and/or mitigate social inequalities. What follows are my notes from the meeting, including my questions and his responses (as accurately as I can portray them from memory).

- At the teach-in, Prof. Domina talked about how higher education policy “trickles down” and “trickles out.” I asked him to explain this further. First he explained how we can understand higher education as a significant “sorting mechanism.” Some of his earlier research focused on the “consequences of degree attainment,” especially intergenerational consequences. Based on a study of a program that allowed poor women to attend CUNY (poor=women who otherwise would never have attended without a program to create and fund the opportunity), Domina found that getting a BA created significant effects related to the future income of the participants. More interestingly, however (in my view), were the intergenerational effects. Basically, these women raised their children differently. They spoke to them differently, disciplined them differently, and in general treated them differently. Also, these children were themselves much more likely to attend college, (this is the “trickling down”).

- Another big point of emphasis was on how higher education plays a big role in high school education. Changes in college access dramatically change high school life for people. Basically, kids make a decision early on “I need to go to college if I’m going to have any success in life,” and their subsequent decisions and goals are all derived from this in some way. This is how higher ed. policy “trickles out.”

- This lead to discussion of what he called “educational segregation.” In the 1940s and 50s, about 5% of adults in the US had a BA, and it was pretty evenly distributed across the country (i.e., most towns had their doctor, a few lawyers, a few teachers). Now, about 25% have a BA, but the distribution is completely lopsided. As you can probably guess, major coastal cities and areas like the Research Triangle in NC have about a 50% concentration, whereas most of the middle of the country is still under 10% (I found this hard to believe, but he was clear on this). Once again, a “trickling out.”

- This discussion of varied concentration brought up some interesting terms, namely what he considered the basic idea that “concentrations” of “human capital” increases “productivity.” When I pressed him on these terms, he said something to the effect of “There’s nothing wrong with leftist critiques of such terms, and I see the need for people to be out there doing that; but, I’m a sociologist, and in my field I am comfortable with these terms.” He went on to say how economists’ descriptions of higher education are very accurate. (cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield).

- This lead me to ask the question: “Does thinking in these economic terms force us to think of “human capital” and “productivity” as having its value insofar as it produces “material capital,” i.e. if we start thinking of the university as a “concentration of human capital” that creates “productivity,” then aren’t we on a slippery slope to concluding that the only sort of “productivity” that we are after is quantifiable, calculable, (and so maybe not necessarily, but certainly sufficiently) MATERIAL productivity? (once again, cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield). Another rephrasing of my question: must higher education policy be a “spoke in the wheel” of a certain economic or political policy? Can we promote higher education as ‘intrinsically’ good and still be free market capitalists? He balked a little bit at my question, but started off by getting back to some empirical info: namely, that the expansion of higher education in the US had significant egalitarian effects. Yes, its true that this lined the pockets of the rich, but it is a “false choice” to consider it as essential to one political/economic system or another. “Higher education policy can have an ambiguous position.” REALLY? CAN IT? I understand the pragmatists view that “hey maybe we can say that the university has been sucked into free market policy, but one could argue against this as well; the fact is that it still helps a lot of people, so lets just focus on counting how much ‘help’ it has created,” but this just sounds downright defeatist.

- He did go on to talk a lot about Prop. 13, which I won’t get into too much since Taylor’s post on Martin and taxation pretty much covers everything we discussed.

- My next question for him was about his thoughts on the “hybridization of the university,” namely, how will this “trickle down and out?” He said that faculty have largely bought into the idea that research is the most important function of the university. Hybridization has turned the university into a research factory. His view is that the most important function of the university is providing a quality undergraduate degree, that the emphasis should be on teaching. He concluded, somewhat disheartened, that perhaps the future of the university will be a separation of the research and teaching functions. (This does not bode well in my opinion since we are already seeing a marked increase in undergraduate courses taught by temporary lecturers, who are paid pennies. A full scale separation of the research functions and teaching functions of the university would lead to a much lower quality undergraduate education, and a research institute geared entirely toward getting funding—essentially, a business).

On Taxes: Isaac Martin's The Permanent Tax Revolt

I think the story of taxes (esp. in California) is key to the story of the defunding of higher education (and esp. the University of California) for two reasons: 1) The inability/unwillingness of state governments to raise taxes + their desire to continue to cut taxes (esp. property taxes) = a powerful condition of possibility for budget crises that "make necessary" (create a felt condition of emergency and necessity that seems to justify) cuts in funding for higher education; and 2) the evolution of fiscal administration and attitudes towards taxation are also bound up with (and in some ways parallel) other social shifts that have made possible higher education's defunding. I'm going to talk primarily about the first of these, referring mostly to Isaac Martin's argument in his 2008 book The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics.

Martin's basic argument is this:
The tax revolt of the 1970s--which occurred all over the US (not just California, where it was perhaps strongest) and had broad-reaching effects (including becoming the key issue in US domestic politics ever since, guiding several Presidents' fiscal policy, etc.)--arose because a group of (primarily white, primarily working-class and middle-class) homeowners who had been protected by informal taxation enforcement were suddenly made subject to the potential full force of state property taxes. This was not an elite social movement, at least not at first and at least as we usually define elites. This tax policy was not decided in shuddered, cigar-filled rooms by bankers, politicians, and the social and economic elite. At the same time, those who supported the tax revolt were not poor either. Crucially, they were homeowners and they saw themselves as "average people."

What was odd about this tax revolt was that it was not a movement against a new tax or a raised tax or an excessive, excessively regressive or excessively progressive tax. It was against the property tax, the oldest tax in the US, a colonial-era tax. It was not particulary high in most states. Most importantly, the tax revolt came directly after a "good governance" movement, a series of reforms across multiple states to make taxation less arbitrary, more equally applied, more standardized. Martin argues that it was in fact this move to good governance that provoked the tax revolt, that the standarization of taxation actually increased certain taxpayers' vulnerability to market shifts and income shocks.

So what happened? Basically, homeowners before the standardization of taxation benefitted from a form of "social protection" from the market: informal tax privileges applied unevenly, arbitrarily, and usually politically--that is, in return for political support or favors. Tax collectors used to be elected officials, and they were more or less free to control the application of the official tax code in practice as they pleased. The key informal tax privilege applied to homeowners in certain districts consisted of what is called "fractional asssessment"--in which a tax collector would value a taxpayer's home at less than the actual market worth, thus allowing the taxpayer to pay less tax that he/she would if fully "exposed" to the market value of his/her home. The easiest way to do this was to just re-use the tax rolls of previous years, not adjusting the taxable value of a home to changes in the market value. This had the effect of decreasing taxes proportionally over time for those living in areas with increasing property values--usually those whose political support was sought by tax collectors--and increasing the proportional tax share of those living in areas with decreasing property values (i.e., the poor, disenfranchised, etc.).

Fractional assessment was an important social policy, encouraging, in effect, homeownership, which in turn acted as a private alternative to public social provision, especially during tough times, which homes could act as a kind of insurance for the owners. Martin estimates that fractional assessment saved homeowners some $39 billion in 1971, making it the largest "housing subsidy" at the time. As such, it generated, Martin says, an unknowing and informal constituency, creating an informal social entitlement.

When, beginning in the 1960s, states began to "modernize" property taxes by centralizing their levying, professionalizing tax collectors (making them appointed instead of elected officials, for instance), and standardizing property taxes across geographic areas and social classes, all of a sudden homeowners were forced to confront the full market value of their homes in terms of the taxes they had to pay on them. The reforms made the propety tax fairer, but the accumulated savings generated by ignoring steadily increasing property values in during tax collection were erased. And people got angry.

The result: broad-based anti-tax movements and eventually state referenda limiting property taxes, codifying and formalizing the informal tax privileges of the previous era. Prop 13 locked in a net growing tax privilege for anyone who held onto property for a long time, essentially creating large and growing tax break for business owners and the affluent. The more valuable a property became over time, the bigger the tax break would be. The problem was that referenda like Prop 13 in California made it essentially impossible (or at least unconstitutional) to raise property taxes as a way to generate state revenue. And this, I think, is a key part in the story of UC's defunding: Without a progessive property tax, the state has found it increasingly difficult to raise the revenue necessary to keep state public institutions adequately funded. Instead of increasing as the state's overall wealth as grown, tax revenues have stagnated or decreased.

Interestingly, Martin also says that government officials have mistaken the origins of the tax revolt, thinking that it was a response to big government or taxation in general, instead of being really about property tax privileges in particular. He identifies Prop 13 as the turning point, representing (ostensibly) a wide popular mandate to reduce taxes on everything and making it politically impossible to raise them, for any reason.

So I think Martin's book is a really interesting one for our purposes. It would be interesting to think about how the anti-tax movement emerged in opposition to good governance and progressive, democratizing reforms. Martin confirmed this trend in his talk on Tuesday. When it comes to taxation, people tend to act to protect their individual social and economic interests. Maybe not a ground-breaking conclusion, but one that puts Prop 13 and the fate of higher education in California in context.

Ideas for organizing that final project ...

I'm not sure what we all think about our end-of-the-term project, but I thought I would add a few things here to maybe get the conversation started. First of all, I'm skimming Chris Newfield's book, trying to get ideas for how to tell this story. The central questions seems to be these: How have the university as an institution and the educators, support staff, and students who populate it become (as they are today) viable targets for defunding, for budget-saving cuts? At what historical moment and under what conditions could the university not protect itself from such fiscal attacks? And how has it become more and more difficult to articulate the general social functions of higher-education outside of a market framework?

I've broken things down into a few components (maybe we could think about some of these as necessary conditions for the above questions) ... I apologize for the incomplete sentences/bullet points. I'm just trying to get my thoughts organized.

• The (original?) vision of the public research university: Universal access + high-quality teaching and research

(Newfield says that behind this was a goal of a "multiracial, worker-inclusive" middle-class that could challenge elites' control of society.)
What is the conception of "public" in this vision?

• Race and racial integration at UC

The racial integration of the university happens over the same time period as the beginning of its defunding. Coincidence?
Diversity/multiculturalism vs. a multiracial student body (Newfield argues these are different things and in fact a "diversity" agenda has effectively blocked the development of a multiracial populace connected by their common education

• Culture wars attack higher education: the "war on equality"

"[T]he culture wars were economic wars. They sought to reduce the economic claims of their target group--the growing college-educated majority--by discrediting the cultural framework that had been empowering that group. [...] The culture wars discredited the cultural conditions of the political and economic ascent of these college-educated, middle-class workers" (Newfield 6).

• A changing economy = a changing university

The university goes corporate (late 1970s/1980s onward?): the growing privatization/marketization of domains usually kept separate from a marketized institutional structure; or maybe this is best understood of purging or purifying the educational domain of its nonmarket components, and elevating the market to the general framework governing goals, administration, and individual behavior instead of market-like activity subsumed to different, overarching goals ...
(Newfield: changing meanings of "economic development" from "human development"--economy serves "human flourishing" to "human capital"--human skills and capacities and technologies serve "economic flourishing"; the university becomes a "privatizable knowledge factory" [9])
Turning the university into a corporation, many things (not all things--important to recognize the heterogeneity of the university and the people in/attached to it) on campus become driven by expectations for return on initial investment:

1. The rise of private research funding
2. Since when do professors rely on industry funding? A question: Is such reliance a response to a lack of internal/govt support for general kinds of research? Or is it part of what led to the movement towards marketization in the university? (Probably both ...)
3. Marketing the university: capturing market share by advertising on campus
4. Financialization of university endowments
5. University accounting procedures builds market principles into the justification for funding

"[S]ince the New University would be judged by its economic contribution, and since private enterprise drove the creation of economic value, there was no reason not to privatizethe university's core functions--that is, make them more responsive to market forces and business methods" (10).
It is important to question both of these initial assumptions: 1) that a university should be judged by "economic contribution" and 2) that only markets create (economic) value.

• On publics

What is the "public" the university is now, under this new socioeconomic framework, supposed to serve? How is this different from the public envisioned by the "public university" of the early 20th century?

• A history of budget crisis/crises

Maybe someone could take on the details of the budgets, so we can begin to understand the multiple state fiscal crises over the past 15-20 years and the state's response (each time taking a chunk out of higher education)

• The current budget crisis

An in-depth look at what has happened/is happening right now

• The alternative to budget cuts: TAXES

I'm writing a second post on this, based mainly on the work of Isaac Martin, so more to come. But the basic question is: How have taxes become a non-alternative--that is, how has it become such an impossibility to raise taxes to protect social institutions like higher education?

• The new University of California, our proposals

I have two, open to revision or addition:
1) Funding of the university should be made subordinate to educational needs and priorities, not vice versa (budgets should not dictate the limits of education); and
2) The university should enact in its operation the social and philosophical principles it teaches.

a good question

Should higher education be treated as a public good (as envisioned in the Master Plan for Higher Education) or should it be viewed as a private good to be paid for by its customers (students and their families) and voluntary private donors?