Tuesday, May 14, 2019

A Teacher’s Tale Entitled ‘’What I did on my Summer Vacation.” As an UPDATE on “Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP”

 
~by David Aiken~
Diogenes, by Zanchi

 Setting the record straighter: An UPDATE on “Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP(useful for moments of dis- and mis-information).
·      No! The suspension of the policy of co-governance at UCR was not done to protect the confidentiality of a few teachers or staff; but rather to impose a new non-liberal orientation to studies at the institution.
·      No! The Reorientation at UCR was not made to improve or enhance an LAS program; but rather to dismantle one.
·      No! The notion of ‘liberal’ in Liberal Arts and Science does not mean being able to choose whatever courses you want to take, or to create your own program. Even a cursory web-search definition of LAS always yields approximately this: “… liberal arts means that the courses you take will be in general [= liberal] areas of study such as philosophy, mathematics, literature, art history, or languages, rather than in applied or specialized [= non-liberal] fields.”

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Let us play a little memory game—one that all American school-teachers used to do with their students at the start of Fall classes, when All & Sundry are fresh and rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a summer of adventures and travel, rest and play. Our teachers used to ask us kids to write a short essay about what we did on our summer vacation. That was then, for children.

For teachers, on the other hand, summer is a time for getting away from the endless bureaucratic administrivia that goes along Part & Parcel with the profession of teaching. Summer vacation is a time for the teacher to re-source himself emotionally; to be able to plunge quietly back into her subject and to breathe the exhilarating intellectual air of ‘thinking’—about her research; about how to rediscover, and then to pick up again the thread of her thinking and writing from the summer before; about the quiet that accompanies the thinking life in general, time for sustained reflection unperturbed by the floodwaters of meetings and colleagues, students and papers and grades, and forms needing to be filled out, signed, and sent out along their various and diverse ways into the blackhole of the institutional administrative labyrinth.

This year, summer vacation will be a time of special nostalgia for those of us who teach at our imaginary LAS university. We will remember the massive institutional changes that were introduced to our community mere weeks before the end of a long semester, administrative decisions announced just in time to join forces with, and to be dissipated by, the barrage of papers and exams and deadlines and extensions, and end-of-semester meetings, that swamp us all during this period.
Administrative announcements of institutional change and dissolution made precisely at semester’s end in order to dilute, it might almost seem deliberately, the very possibility of response by those upon whom those changes were thrust… changes to lives and livelihoods, programs and academic orientations. Changes that were conceived in the hush-hush shadows that linger ominously behind closed doors and gag-orders, and birthed by circumventing institutional principles and policies of co-governance; changes that were never openly and democratically proposed, and therefore went unchallenged by the community of the concerned; changes that were never brought up for public debate or approval, or rejection.

So, this summer, as we go about our away-time occupations, we teachers will have new opportunities, right from the get-go, to enter into the nostalgia of ‘what I did on my summer vacation’. We will be able to quietly reminisce about the ‘done-deal’ of massive institutional changes to an LAS program, which was dropped in our laps just as we were shutting off the lights, locking our doors, and preparing to get into our cars, all packed up in anticipation of driving off into the sun for summer fun and adventure, and, yes, even for the prospect of the teacher’s summertime of non-administrative other-ness and away-ness.
Some of our teachers will have nostalgia for their jobs—having been openly informed by administration, mere weeks before the end of the semester, that their contracts were being reduced or terminated. Those concerned, especially in the area of foreign languages, will of course also have heard publicly from administrators that as academic subjects go, their classes are of little or no interest to (non-liberal) academic or university programs in general. So, these teachers will have the long summer to process and deal with their newly discovered intellectual and university unworthiness, and to gird themselves up to begin their search for new lives and meanings.
Otherwise, all the other humanities types will have several months of vacation isolation to think their way to some new protective emotional strategy, having discovered the hard way that their public worth to the institution is not intellectual, but rather only as an economic resource which is poised to be cannibalized and consumed, depending upon time and place, in order that the rest of the institution, represented by disciplines more scientific, or at least more immediately useful in the short-term, might survive.

For myself, at least part of my summer vacation will be spent reminiscing nostalgically about what was once a worthy and worthwhile career. And in my nostalgia I can well imagine that I might consider, even if only just for the odd moment, that I am somehow become an extremely amateur ‘crisis actor’ who gets the sudden and unexpected opportunity to turn player in his own little personal drama—a drama of life’s endgame where an unsuspecting senior gets put out to pasture, thereby losing his sense of productivity, usefulness, etc., etc., etc. The role of a lifetime.
In my summer reverie, the tragic action of my little drama would begin where the administration announces publicly, repeatedly, in several venues to different bodies, that This Teacher will be retired in due course. ‘It is the law’; ‘it is mandatory’, they will say, ‘so of course we must obey’. They, of course, will color themselves as simple servants of the law, and the narrative as comedy—‘here retirement is a reward, not a punishment, like it is in your country’. But the unsuspecting and unwary victim nonetheless experiences the public announcement as tragedy. Because the tragic victim thought, foolishly as it turns out, that This Teacher was already in negotiations with our administrators to remain teaching for ‘a while longer yet’. And then the institutional curtain drops upon my reverie, and our philosophical duffus cum crisis actor is met with lusty guffaws and rancorous applause by administrators and onlookers alike.
And yet it will still certainly continue to seem to my obviously aging memory (but fortunately my wife’s memory is sterling on the subject…), that This Teacher was recruited and hired out of a country with no mandatory retirement, with the promise of post-retirement teaching at our LAS university, should This Teacher wish for it. But, silly day-dreaming me!
And all this talk about retirement when the Dutch state has been continually retarding that moment legislatively, and, in fact, “no longer sets a fixed age for retirement.” In fact, the Netherlands has been accelerating the implementation of their non-age of retirement, explaining that “acceleration is necessary due to continued budget deficits and a strong increase in the social security cost.” Obviously, then, there is active legislative encouragement for workers in the Dutch system to work beyond retirement, so that it can continue to pay for itself and its various good, but very expensive programs of social maintenance!
Our imaginary LAS university must not have gotten that memo.

One consolation in my summer nostalgia, I suppose, will be to know that after being openly shown the road out of the institution by fiat of retirement, our imaginary LAS university has only publicly (but never privately and/or confidentially) offered This Teacher the possibility of applying for his old job back—'as one in the field of all the other possible candidates’. But with the town crier’s additional caveat: “Hear ye, hear ye, all ye who pass by: ‘Dependent on the candidate pool, This Teacher may perhaps be permitted back to teach, but only as part-time faculty’.”

I wonder whatever happened to the principle of confidentiality at our imaginary LAS university? Elsewhere, I have known confidentiality about matters of Human Resources to be Law; but at this troubling imaginary place it is obviously just a Pleasant Possibility, a passing afterthought really.
Maybe I just dreamed it in the haze of the tsunami that is the end-of-my-semester… but it seems like just yesterday I heard our administrators pay lip service to confidentiality and gag-orders in order to justify skirting open institutional debate concerning their new project of reorientation. Did I really recently just imagine or mis-hear administrators making very impassioned public defense of confidentiality and gag-orders? It may be entirely possible, given the institutional opinion of my advanced age and obvious dotage—for which reasons they are clearly right to want to put me out to pasture next year. But it certainly seemed to my senior brain that the Management Team of our imaginary LAS university was making the case that these restrictive and gagging ‘means’ were necessary for them to impose all their new changes in program orientation and institutional structure…

My summer-time reverie presents a funny kind of Looking-glass inversion, does it not? A contemporary version of Alice’s journey into a Looking-glass Wonderland… minus the Wonder. And minus Alice, of course.

The imaginary Management Team of our imaginary LAS university applies and even compounds confidentiality where and when subjects and topics, such as institutional reorientation and re-structure, are supposed to be open to public democratic debate. At least according to institutional policy.
Then they just pleasantly and quite conversationally forget about confidentiality when it comes to addressing, very personally, very publicly, and very often, the topic of This Teacher’s retirement.

The little memory game learned from my childhood teachers was intended both to remind us of the value of ‘being entirely away’ in the summer, and of the importance of returning ‘ready to take on the world’ at summer’s end. When we all, teacher, staff and student, return to the reality that will mark the start of Fall classes at our imaginary LAS university, when the adult versions of All & Sundry are fresh and rested and ready to return to the fray of another school year after a summer of adventures and travel, rest and play, reverie and reflection. Perhaps we will then be ready to take on the challenges of injustice and dis- and mis-information, right here on our very own door-step.
And, in hoping against hope, would it not also be comedically wonderful, invigorating in fact, to discover at our Fall return that over the summer some surprising changes had been made to our current cast of players and characters. So that, renewed and unexpectedly supported, we could move forward in defense of Liberal Arts and Sciences; so that we could all learn as a life lesson that honesty and democratic openness can, actually and truly, trump the shadowy world of the closed society… right here on our very own door-step.

Further reading:

Further reading on retirement in Holland:

Sunday, May 5, 2019

A Philosophical Fable Entitled ‘Follow the money’



~by David Aiken~

 
Diogenes with his lantern
Let us play a little imagination game—just to pretend for an instant, for the blink of an eye really, that we have all been called to be the guardians of a Liberal Arts & Sciences college. Let us equally pretend, in this playful reminiscence, that every time financial pressure has been visited upon the hallowed halls of our imaginary LAS faculty, i.e., when some big bill or another comes due, it has fallen to the LAS teachers and their classes and programs to pay that bill. With their jobs; with their classes; with their programs; with their livelihoods.
It could be an interesting by-the-way kind of reflection, just in passing, that the jobs, classes and programs that are cut or reduced to reimburse the various come-due and past-due notices, seem to come from the Liberal Arts & Sciences – e.g., theater, film, languages, general anthropology, general sociology. And so the powers-that-be are still able to invite us, over and over and over again, with a funereal shake of the head but a sigh of relief, to yet greet the news that jobs and classes and programs in disciplines related to science and technology, those that are obviously important because they are immediately useful and productive, are protected when the bill collectors descend upon the flailing institution. Softly muttered, the phrase, ‘silver lining in the dark cloud’ can be heard twittering around and about.

And yet the common denominator, the thread linking all of our institutional crises, does not seem to be due to any particular failing in the LAS teachers or their model of LAS classes and programs, which are regularly sacrificed in order to pay the bills for the whole faculty. Rather, it seems that Ariadne’s desperate thread leads us inexorably back into a labyrinthine and very secretive black-hole in the world of finances and management of institutional funds, funds initially entrusted to the institution and replenished through the years, that LAS might thrive in this place.
The institutional crises that have historically undermined our imaginary LAS establishment, inevitably suggest that the philosophizing fabulist needs to ‘Follow the money’.

Now, there are some fairly traditional paths to follow in narratively exploring, in seeking out adequate translations for, these financial and managerial crises that have been plaguing our imaginary LAS educational institution. Narrative options allow authors to weave tales that are plausible for a viewing audience. So, we will develop our little philosophical fable along the two traditional and entirely predictable narrative lines of Tragedy and Comedy.
First, the tragic narrative of the Life & Times of our LAS college, with perhaps a high tragycall twist. This would have to include the wanton destruction of jobs, laying waste to real people and lives; the dismantling of LAS classes and programs; and very tragically indeed, the willful destruction, especially for students in quest of a vision for life, of the possibilities associated with the enormous variety of life-visions that are consistently born out of LAS models of education. Sadness, loss of livelihood, loss of vision, depression, youthful potential hindered or wasted, expense incurred, etc.—all the hallmarks of the tragic narrative, which leaves everyone exhausted and completely depleted.
The high tragycall twist, of course, which would be the totally depressing bombshell in this narrative, is if it were in fact to be demonstrable that the LAS ideas our institution is trying to ‘sell’ are simply not saleable to the world, that there really is no intellectual market for such LAS programs; and this could perhaps, or not, also be aggravated by repeatedly inadequate marketing presentations of the product to potential student-buyers and interested parent-investors.
But while this question of marketing competence could be a minor plot twist to introduce perhaps at some point, it is not a realistic narrative addition. Because it so happens that most thinking citizens are aware that academic studies world-wide actually show that LAS programs are in fact very desirable, demonstrated by indications that investment world-wide remains consistent and robust in such educational programs. And it is because this information is so painfully ubiquitous, much like the educational equivalent of Melville’s Moby Dick—"the ubiquitous white whale” of American literature, that a different data-driven narrative development suggests itself, one that, instead of moving our fablelike drama along the tortuous paths of tragic development, suggests that we should instead lend a comedic evolution to our little philosophical moral tale

So, faithful to the more realistic goal of telling the happy tale, of lending comedic twists and turns to the narrative of our imaginary LAS college: Our philosophical fable remains centered around an LAS-place that is historically plagued by crisis after crisis. And yet, adding confusion to frustration, thereby creating narrative tension, it is also obvious to All & Sundry that these institutional crises are not educational in nature. Because those involved in this tale of our LAS community—students, teachers, parents, et al, choose to be associated with us by commitment to precisely the educational ideals of LAS.
Rather, the stream of continual crises that beset our beleaguered LAS place, seem always to be financial and managerial crises. And because this retelling of our fable is comedic—plot oblige, we would be permitted to imagine that the educational community would get to remain intact, this time and in this telling. And we could well imagine, instead, a different destiny for those to whom the financial and the managerial well-being of our imaginary LAS program have been long entrusted, the ‘guardians of the funds’ in our imaginary narrative. For the long history of crises that have continued to shake and define the institution, makes it more than obvious that these ‘guardians’ have not been very faithful stewards of their charge. Or is it just that they have been distracted by other interests, which could have kept them from discharging well their managerial and fiduciary trust toward our imaginary LAS college? (This could inspire another minor plot twist, eventually… perhaps.)
In the outworking of this comedy about our LAS college, then, it would be the turn of such as these to pay, with their jobs and their livelihoods, the bill that is even now coming due. And in the high moment of comedic realization, the viewer would discover that, for once, he is watching a dramatic tale where teachers would no longer have to pay with their lives and livelihoods for misdeeds of finance and management.
You’ve just got to love a Hollywood-style happy ending!

The movies have long popularized the catch-phrase that acts as the title of our little play, and which comes from the fact that plots almost always unfold when the players ‘Follow the money’.  How very tedious it would have been to always hear from Hollywood: ‘Follow the LAS teacher’.

Further reading:
·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_4833.html (from 03 May 2019); but especially the TED-talk video-clip argument, with Eric Berridge, for the marriage between LAS & STEM. This suggests a desirable outcome, entirely different from a wholesale destruction of programs and lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2XPF6rQ6fs&fbclid=IwAR25yNzl5JsrQi-yC_mhKkvm3RJZe8aq8ImHX3Buvy78M2waKFO7mT2BxhI

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Question of Self- and Co-Governance in Open Society_Ways and Means


 
Following up on the question of
“Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP”


~by David Aiken~

The 1st of May, May Day, was created an official federal holiday in the United States in the early 1890s, after just about 10 years of being knocked around in the various state fora in debate. The idea, as ideas sometimes do, gained impetus and took hold, eventually becoming a recognized public holiday all over the world, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, from Argentina to Venezuela, from Bahrain to Vietnam, from the countries of the Eastern Block to Oceania. The idea that won the day almost 130 years ago was simple enough –that Workers were a disregarded lot.
It is the world’s workers who actually create the wealth for the wealthy; it is the world’s workers who have created the world that has grown up around us, and that we all use every day everywhere at every level. From garbage cans to toilets, from physical buildings to the edifices of classroom ideas. And—the simple audaciousness of the idea astounds and amazes— it seemed appropriate and good to the Powers-That-Be nearly 130 years ago that there should be a very deliberate public reminder to celebrate the workers of the world. Per our Wiki source:
1 May was chosen to be International Workers' Day to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. In that year beginning on 1 May, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday. On 4 May, the police acted to disperse a public assembly in support of the strike when an unidentified person threw a bomb. The police responded by firing on the workers. The event lead to the death of eight and injury of sixty police officers as well as an unknown number of civilian killed or wounded. Hundreds of labour leaders and sympathizers were later rounded-up and four were executed by hanging, after a trial that was seen as a miscarriage of justice. The following day on 5 May in Milwaukee Wisconsin, the state militia fired on a crowd of strikers killing seven, including a schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his yard.

Ideas, such as the one that inspired May Day, seem to take root more readily in soils where public debate thrives, with all of the roiling messiness and awkwardness that attends when the public gets involved in just about everything. At University College Roosevelt, right now, today, the idea on the table, indeed the chopping block, is an educational vision, a dream really, of a broad and traditional faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences. That dream, because it is old, older at least—which is certainly implied by the idea of ‘traditional’, is today being forced to yield the field to a different academic agenda, one that is fueled by financial arguments.
And yet this change does not have to represent a depressing step backward in educational philosophy, really, if the debate surrounding the adoption of this ‘different vision’ actually reflects the interests and engagements of the greater UCR community.

Unfortunately, though, the ideas behind this change did not get to have their day in the court of public opinion & debate in the UCR community.

§ Self-governance at University College Roosevelt.
It is difficult to know where, exactly, to begin in the critical assessment of an educational institution that continues to publicly defend imposing confidentiality on the supposedly open processes of democratic co-governance. Especially on questions so central to its educational core and vision.
It is a natural and stimulating good, in Open Society, that we should get caught up in the earnestness of representing our own thinking and our own convictions about the essential philosophical questions that concern the academic institution where we work or study; whether the debate is about the traditional role of Foreign Languages in Liberal Arts & Sciences, with the very real possibility that the co-governing community might decide in open deliberation to redesign for their own purposes, and even to part from that tradition, or whether the question in the public forum is to deliberate and determine whether a particular institution might even wish to abandon its commitment to the LA&S tradition. These are weighty matters indeed; and discussions are heated.
            So, how are we to respond, how to act, when an educational institution, whose public reputation has been erected on the foundations of democratic processes, elects to liquidate an established core element of the Liberal Arts & Sciences tradition, and where the political will of the institution seems to be to abandon their educational mission and orientation?
The question, frankly, is academic. Because while the humanities philosopher may be opposed to such radical changes in educational mission, and the social science philosopher in favor, at the end of the day both points of view are in matter of fact arguable in models of higher education.
The question is academic, because in democracy we understand the idea of trying to seek out the will of the unified many, even when that will might not agree with our own personal point of view—for is this not a foundational tension in the idea of self- and co-governance? And, at the end of yet another day, we can school ourselves to learn to live with opinions and directions that may differ from our own, as long as we remain persuaded that such decisions were arrived at fairly, that the openness, the integrity of the deliberating processes of the many has remained inviolate.

UCR recently made public a document that argues that faculty, staff and student representatives were compelled to treat as confidential the deliberations that had taken place in closed quarters on these weighty questions of UCR’s mission and educational philosophy. “Council members are obliged to treat information confidentially whenever they can reasonably assume this is necessary. Information about persons always needs to be treated confidentially, unless indicated otherwise.”
The argument is interesting, because we are driven to conclude that there was either managerial incompetence in the way the meetings of our representatives were run, which is a disconcerting thought for the community to have about UCR leadership, or we must accept as an assumption of management that concerned UCR citizenry is incompetent to think through, together and openly, issues related to our mission and educational philosophy without necessarily getting into the private affairs of individual colleagues. Which is to conclude that the democratic ideal is a fool’s errand.
What would the Roosevelts have thought about that?
But then, why would UCR administrators discuss in the first place specific human resource issues in such an inappropriate venue as debates about general mission and educational orientation? Why would any administrator think that such a discussion reflects any sort of appropriate focus, or professionalism, or that it is ethically, or legally justifiable?
In the best of circumstances, it is challenging for all democratic venues to navigate the delicate tension between the personal ambition of leadership and the discovery of the will of the community. So, the response of UCR management to this situation has simply been not to deal with the challenge at all; instead, the management team chose to impose non-disclosure agreements on UCR faculty, staff and student representatives. All exchange of information between representatives and represented was shut down by administrative fiat.
When the UCR administration elected to pursue paths of secrecy and closed-door “discussions,” they created a de facto structure of tyranny—a tyranny of the few “representatives,” who were called upon to replace the open debate and participation of the many. The imposition of non-disclosure agreements on faculty, staff and student, flies absolutely and unequivocally in the face of any democratic governmental will or structure, and certainly contradicts the institution’s self-declared policy of institutional co-governance.
So, it is really not possible for individual committees and councils to discuss the value, for example, of having a philosophy track at UCR, without necessarily involving the specifics of the philosophy instructor? If so, then the idea itself of the public roundtable, where issues that concern the good of the people can be openly debated, is a wretched, dysfunctional lie.
What would the Roosevelts have thought about this Closed Process circumvention and co-option of co-governance at UCR or about the dismissal of LA&S? Certainly, the Roosevelts and their 4-Freedoms would have found the first to be problematic. As for the dismissal of LA&S, that would probably not have been very high on their list of desirable solutions, either. If one can extrapolate from the fact that Franklin was educated at Harvard College, the Liberal Arts & Sciences bastion of the America of that period, and that Eleanor was educated by “a noted feminist educator who sought to cultivate independent thinking in the young women in her charge,” and … learned to speak French fluently and gained self-confidence.”
If UCR management has its way, the young Eleanors of today will not speak French, or if they do, they will not learn it at UCR.

At this point in our finally public discussion at UCR, it seems certainly obvious, to me at least, that co-governance has been cheaply sacrificed; and this has led to a certain number of very specific and real consequences. So, let us judge the tree by its fruit.
Perhaps principal among the consequences, is the sacrifice of the sacred principles of Open Society, the principles of self- and co-governance, on the altar of some personal ambition by the interested few.
Among the consequences we are currently experiencing at UCR, is the economic demolition of the lives of those teaching faculty who have been terminated or who are in the process of being forcibly downsized.
And among the consequences, is the demolition of one example of a Liberal Arts & Sciences vision of education in the Netherlands, which has argued that in LA&S there is a greater good than just the material courses our students follow in the pursuit of some future employment, but which goes to the very heart of creating the good human in all of us who value democracy, and out of which will, eventually, hopefully, flow virtue and beauty as we create the future of our world.

Autocratic systems of government can be trusted because the vision of the ruler is worked out, predictably, in the rules and activities of the systems the ruler creates; and there is none of the messiness of Open governance. But in those places where the Open Society remains a value, it is not possible to have confidence in a type of management that pretexts a publicly democratic system of government, and which shows itself in point of fact to not be Open at all, but rather hidden behind closed doors. The employed can have No Confidence in this environment. So, let us judge the tree by its fruit.

The promise of the Open Society is the dream that a Brotherhood of Man is in fact possible; but it will only become a true possibility when each one of us learns to stand, back to back, and to dare together to speak truth to power.
For united we stand. Divided we fall
And if our backs should ever be against the wall
We'll be together, Together, you and I.

References: