Our most frequent contributor provides his perspective on the Support Staff strike:

The question of the Support Staff strike is not difficult. The position of professors has been systematically undermined by the build-up of part-time positions, so now something like two-thirds of teaching is done by non-full-time faculty, all working on-the-cheap without benefits and job security. The position of support staff is similar, with more and more jobs (e.g., security, cleaning) being contracted out to non-union people who are working on-the-cheap with few benefits and job security.

Even if we were not both unionized employees (and in the same union at that), we’d have every reason to do what we can to help them out.  The fact that they’re our sisters and brothers in OPSEU seals the deal.

As for management, it will say anything it can to undermine workers. Look at ex-President Miner’s statements about how we were all underworked and overpaid during our strike! Of course, it’s always possible to get around the money issue by saying that the capital budget for expansion doesn’t affect the operating budget for wages, but that’s a lot of codswallop too.

Although I have no access to the mind of management nor to the tactics of the Government of Dalton McPhussbudget, I can look at history. I joined the picket lines in the last Support Staff strike in 1979 and I’ve participated in all of our strikes ever since. What have I learned?

1. Management will keep college personnel out for two to three weeks;
2. The provincial government will legislate people back to work;
3. Arbitration will impose a settlement and (Hey Presto!) management will find the money for a modest pay raise – largely from the savings gained by not paying people for two or three weeks.

Unless something strange is happening, the entire affair has been scripted, choreographed and orchestrated. In an election year, it may be the same thing only more so!

So, what would Jack do? He’d have supported Support … and found some time to campaign for Andrea Horwath too.

As I said in my last post, there seems to be an almost inevitable tendency in the media to report on academic labour conflicts in ways that associate unions primarily with strikes, rather than the work that they perform happily for the vast, vast majority of the time.

One “macro” way to address this might be to recast strikes in terms of their socio-political significance, i.e., in relation to larger social phenomena.  The other — “micro” — way would be to place attention on the stories of individual workers, rather than merely talking about “the union” as a monolithic entity that somehow exists outside of the individuals who comprise its membership.

So, in the spirit of that latter approach, I wanted to pass along two messages that I received from support staff workers.  I thank them for sharing their stories with us:

I have been a member of the support staff for more than 30 years.
I work as a student advisor, logging at least 10 extra hours every week (with NO extra pay) just to keep up with the volume of inquiries from students, faculty and administrators — trying to make sure folks get the info they need in a timely fashion. Most of my fellow support staff are hard-working, dedicated, kind and diligent workers, much like you describe: smiling, professional and helpful, pitching in to help wherever and whenever needed.

I have 4 college diplomas and certificates.  Updating my education and remaining current  is essential to what I do.  I pride myself on being a college graduate and only wish the council of regents would recognize the value of those educated at the institutes we work in   Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

I love what I do, otherwise I would not have stayed in the field. However, there is a time for the college administrators to show their respect for support staff, and the time is now.

BTW, everyone who comes to my office gets a piece of chocolate!

And the second…

As one of those “Why don’t you get a job?” strikers, here are some of my comments from the other side of the cardboard OPSEU sign………….

I started my work supporting post-secondary students 15 years ago as an EA graduate and was considered “casual part time”, meaning that I was to work no more than 24 hours weekly, with no benefits and no guarantee that a job would be there for me at the beginning of each new semester, yet I still stayed in that job, to give support to our students. There was an amazing reward each and every semester from students who found that, with our helpful support, they could in fact be successful, when so many others had told them that they would not achieve success at the post-secondary level.

As a widow trying to raise a son on limited wages, I knew that post-secondary sector was where I wanted to work, and when a full-time position was posted at our college for a Learning Facilitator, in the Learning Support Services area of my college, I jumped at the chance to have job stability, decent benefits and the ability to show my young son that his Momma can rise above life’s challenges and provide for him.

Work ethic I have, my love of what I do is obvious, and when I was asked as part of the collective group to stand up for present and future jobs at our college, I readily agreed.  If I don’t do this for our future young people, who will? Certainly not the people who drive by giving us the insulting hand sign as we are trying to get our information out to the community. Certainly not the people who yell out of their truck windows as they speed by…”Why don’t you get a job?” 

Why are some people so misinformed and polarized in their anger with us for doing what we believe is the “right thing”?   This is our challenge… to keep the lines of communication open to inform those care enough to learn.

My immediate hope is “the powers that be” see that coming back to the table to resolve the outstanding issues is the productive way to demonstrate to our young people that issues can be discussed, modified and subsequently resolved in a timely and mature manner.

Okay, well, this post was originally going to be entitled: “Why I Hate the Way that Newspapers Treat Academic Workers’ Labour Negotiations”.

Actually, to be honest, it was actually going to be devoted to calling out a single journalist for deliberately obfuscating the context for the current support-staff strike (which I have discussed in this previous post).  I had all my sanctimonious denunciations lined up, but then I took the time to actually learn about the specific journalist in question.

And actually, she seems like a pretty cool person.  I think that I’d like her, if I knew her.  And, no less importantly, I don’t know how much of her finished article is the result of an editor’s intervention.

So I realized that it’s not really about her or any single journalist, and what follows is really about the way that the reportage of academic labour issues in current newspapers seems to be inevitably biased, and how we as workers will have to work pretty hard to change the lens through which the media automatically, reflexively view and represent labour struggles in the education sector.

So here are the first paragraphs of the article, from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, on Sept. 2:

College classes not expected to be disrupted by strike

WATERLOO REGION — When Rori Brown first learned about the support-staff strike at Conestoga College, she thought, “Not again.”

“Luckily for me, I got everything done before the strike except my OSAP,” the third-year accounting student said Friday.

Brown lives in Waterloo, so she got her parking pass, registration and most of her books out of the way in August, before support staff at Conestoga College walked off the job Thursday. They are among more than 8,000 support staff represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union on strike across the province.

This is the fifth time staff at provincial colleges have walked off the job since 1984. The last strike, by teaching staff in 2006, saw classes cancelled for three weeks. In 2010, the colleges narrowly avoided another faculty strike.

Okay, so what’s the problem here?  Well, let’s break it down: The story chooses to start with human drama — namely the character of the threatened student, cast in the role as “innocent pawn” or “stake” in a clash of wills between strikers and management.

Now, I can respect that choice, although I do recognize that it tends to cast the strikers in a worse light than management, simply because they’re the ones who become the agents of the labour stoppage.

But that’s not really my problem.  My problem is that the article chooses to begin with the words attributed to the innocent bystander in the first paragraph: “Not again”.  Now the dynamic shifts.  Automatically, before introducing a single fact or contextual detail about the struggle, we have the image of the innocent, who gives us the understanding that she has been repeatedly victimized by labour strife at her college.

We are led — as a consequence of the author’s and/or editor’s choices — to believe that the student’s educational experience has been plagued by repeated occasions when her education has been disrupted by workers on strike.

And the contextualizing evidence given to support that student’s (and now, the reader’s) impression is:

This is the fifth time staff at provincial colleges have walked off the job since 1984. The last strike, by teaching staff in 2006, saw classes cancelled for three weeks.

This is the fifth system-wide strike at provincial colleges in . . . 27 years.  An average of one strike every five-and-a-half years.   Moreover, it is the first strike to affect Conestoga in the last five-and-a-half years.

In fact, if these numbers are to be believed, it is somewhat improbable that a third-year accounting student could respond to a strike at Conestoga with the thought “Not again”, unless that student were seriously misguided.

But seriously misguiding, I believe, is the inevitable effect of newspaper articles like this one.

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that this is the first strike by college support staff in 32 years.  Rather, the article magnifies the frequency of strike-actions by mentioning that, “In 2010, the colleges narrowly avoided another faculty strike”, thus conflating “near misses” with actual events.  The fact that there has been no strike in over five years is rendered less important than the fact that there was almost a strike 18 months ago.

(One of the risks of this journalistic approach, in my opinion, is to increase the likelihood of strikes.  Why?  Because if the media and the public remember only the workers’ threat to strike, rather than their ultimate choices not to do so, then unions have to live with the bad press regardless of whether or not they actually go on strike.  Consequently, unions have less to lose by actually going on strike, since they’ll get no credit from popular opinion — nor from newspaper articles in the K-W area — for choosing not to.)

The rest of the article (linked here) carries on with the typical things that I expect to hear: The strikers’ work being recognized exclusively in terms of what’s disrupted in their absence, and the college president calling strikers unreasonable, rather than asserting the value of their work.  And what’s missing, predictably, is any discussion of the two sides position, with any analysis of the strikers’ demands in relation to — as the Conestoga president puts it — “macroeconomic circumstances” (one of which includes, as I have said before, the dwindling of Ontario’s middle class).

And again, what I want to stress is not that this article represents a particularly egregious example of poor coverage of an academic labour dispute.  It is utterly typical, and utterly depressing in its typicality.  Because of the framing narrative and contextual detail that a journalist (even a potentially-sympathetic one) and editor chose to include, the support-staff strike is presented as  a commonplace occurrence that plagues the educational experience of Ontario’s college’s students, when in reality it has never occurred before in the lifetime of either the journalist or the student she interviewed.

And there’s no way that we can say that that serves to present the case objectively, or with respect to its particularity.  It’s a distortion of the situation, and it needs to be addressed as such.  Because it’s the kind of distortion that results from lazy journalism: From a journalist’s or editor’s unconscious belief that one event can be simply treated as an indistinct moment in a larger pattern (i.e., unions striking again, ’cause that’s what unions do… .  Cue victimized student…).

And what we need to do is recognize and announce the degree to which these unconscious journalistic choices result in an anti-worker bias, which is communicated to readers as objective fact.

The solution is definitely not the godawful “strikers say/ but management says” reporting of contradictory claims, with no concern for actual truth.  Interestingly, this article escapes that dynamic by presenting only the management’s side, and doesn’t even try to address the reasons why the union is on strike — not a single union member’s words are included.  Presumably, the author or editor felt that it went without saying.  And frankly, where newspapers are concerned, most labour issues do indeed go without being said.

But maybe one solution to this pattern of distortion is to try inspire journalists to treat a strike as something new, something specific to a particular time and place, and to the specific factors thereof.  Perhaps we actually need to invite journalists — and more importantly editors, who determine the length of articles –  to think more about the “macroeconomic circumstances” (like, say, the underfunding of postsecondary education in Ontario, or the increase of temporary workers in the province) and the role of workers within them.

Just like my opinion about the journalist and her article changed when I tried to learn about her as an individual, so might newspapers change their tune if they tried to understand strikes as specific, particular events, and strikers as individuals with their own particular needs and motivations.

Journalists like narratives, and I can’t blame them.  I love stories, too.  Stories help us to understand the world, absorb knowledge, and to ascribe meaning to events.  So, if I have to complain about journalists or editors, I guess that I’ll complain that they’re choosing the wrong stories: They see an instance of labour conflict only as an episode in a larger story of more labour conflict (with its dramatis personae of antagonists and victims).  We need to encourage them instead to see that instance as an episode in a larger story of the trends that confront our economy and society, and of our collective values and vision for our province.

And maybe, if we accomplish that, we can turn what seems to be a simple moment of opposition and conflict into an opportunity to foster discussion and community.

Yesterday, I posted “Some Musings on the Support Staff Strike” — feel free to check it out, if you haven’t done so already.

Well, I don’t think anything I’ve every written has garnered so many responses so quickly, and I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of them, and thank everybody who took the time to write in:

From St. Lawrence College:

Beautifully said – Thank you!

From Georgian College:

As a support staff member it is refreshing to read this. I have given my heart and soul to mentoring students and do not regret a day of this. It is very difficult to be out on strike. I appreciate you validating our contribution to education and the economic growth of our communities.

From a family member:

As a parent of one of those support workers, I can attest to the fact that they do their jobs happily. They certainly did not want to strike and it is sad that the media almost always makes it about money, when in fact it has more to do with job security. Is a secure job with a living wage and decent benefits not part of why students attend college in the first place??

From a retired prof in St. Catherines

As a retired prof, I know what these folks mean to the system and how their efforts, more often than not, go unnoticed and unrewarded.  They need support from students, profs and the general public during this strike…. God knows, they will never receive it from administrators or the fuzzy-headed media that write on these issues.

And lastly, from a support staff worker at St. Clair College – a sentiment that manages to warm and break my heart, simultaneously:

This was the most rewarding comment I have ever heard in all the 32 yrs I have worked at the college………..thank you so much….

To repeat my original point — whatever you may think about a worker’s control over their own schedule, whatever you may think about the difference between 1.5% and 2% in wage increases, the work that college support staff do is important and worthy of recognition and respect.  And offering that respect doesn’t bind anybody to a political agenda; it simply affirms the value of the people who live and work beside us.

As ever, feel free to send your thoughts to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

Welcome back!

Probably no week of the year holds more promise for me than this one.  It’s the week when I think most about goals — my students’ and my own, where they overlap and where they diverge.  And that, of course, entails thinking about standards.

So, in that spirit, I wanted to pass along the following infographic [located at http://www.mastersdegree.net/grade-inflation/] about grading trends over the last 50 years.   Some of my own thoughts appear afterwards:

Now, admittedly, the infographic is based upon research in U.S. universities, some of which (discussed in greater detail here) has methodology that is open to question.  However, I think that it’s worth at least considering whether the trends identified do indeed apply to our own classes and institutions.

There are of course many factors affecting post-secondary education in Ontario that could promote such grade inflation.  Certainly the chronic reliance on contract faculty* could result in an ever-rising number of professors who worry that rigorous grading could have a negative effect upon their own continued employment.  Alternately, rising classroom sizes could place a pressure on faculty to employ (or, in Ontario Colleges, for managers to stipulate) simpler forms of evaluation.**

But I suspect that the answer lies in something a bit less nefarious: In the pursuit of such laudable goals as increased transparency and accountability, professors have increased the importance of easily-quantifiable criteria that fit neatly within grading rubrics, at the expense of more nebulous, qualitative criteria like ‘originality’ or ‘critical thinking’.

Certainly doing so makes the process of grading simpler — and it has the added benefit of reducing academic appeals — but I suspect that the approach ends up prioritizing task completion at the expense of genuine thought.

I will leave it to others to discuss the long-term effects of such priorities upon students as they graduate and enter into the workforce.   (Feel free to send any thoughts on the topic to me at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.)

But I will share one thing that I do believe firmly: If we as professors believe that our job is to train our students for future success, we need to bear in mind that — in their lives as workers and citizens — our students will never encounter the phrase “solve for x”.

*  Table 3 of this Statistics Canada report indicates that 8% of Canadian jobs are in the educational field, but that sector accounts for 15% of the temporary jobs in Canada and 22% of the contract jobs.  [Hat tip to CAAT-S for providing this statistic -- I wish you all good luck with your contract negotiations]

**  This earlier post summarizes the findings of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations’ survey of faculty members, on their perception of changes in the education provided by their schools, during the period from 2005 to 2008.  69.6% percent of respondents claimed that budget cuts had caused class sizes in their department to increase throughout that time, and 31.5% of respondents indicated an increased use of multiple-choice tests.

Today’s post is devoted to reposting an Inside Higher Ed article on a new book by the University of Chicago Press, on the results of the College Learning Assessment test, a standardized test delivered to 2,300 undergraduates (before and after years of postsecondary study) at 24 four-year universities in the U.S.  Here, Klein (2009) clarifies that the College Learning Assessment tests “the critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing skills of college and university students”. 

Obviously there are clear differences between four-year U.S. universities and Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, and the findings of the study may certainly differ from your own perceptions of your students’ learning.  Please  share your own experiences to corroborate or contract the author’s claims at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com (anonymity will be preserved).  I’ll provide some of my own reactions in a following post:

“Academically Adrift”

by Scott Jaschik

Inside Higher Ed., January 18, 2011

If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press.

The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations — and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other “higher level” skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging:

• 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college.
• 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” over four years of college.
• Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later — but that’s the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven’t experienced any college learning.

“How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much,” write the authors, Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. For many undergraduates, they write, “drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent.”

The research findings at the core of the book are also being released today by their sponsor, the Social Science Research Council. (Esther Cho of the council is a co-author on that paper.)

The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor. They review data from student surveys to show, for example, that 32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don’t take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester. Further, the authors note that students spend, on average, only about 12-14 hours a week studying, and that much of this time is studying in groups.

The research then goes on to find a direct relationship between rigor and gains in learning:

• Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge — while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
• Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
• Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.
• Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or losses in learning.
• Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

In section after section of the book and the research report, the authors focus on pushing students to work harder and worrying less about students’ non-academic experiences. “[E]ducational practices associated with academic rigor improved student performance, while collegiate experiences associated with social engagement did not,” the authors write.

In an interview, Arum said that the problems outlined in the book should be viewed as a moral challenge to higher education. Students who struggle to pay for college and emerge into a tough job market have a right to know that they have learned something, he said. “You can’t have a democratic society when the elite — the college-educated kids — don’t have these abilities to think critically,” he said.

The book rejects the idea of federal mandates on testing or the curriculum, suggesting that such requirements rarely work. And the book acknowledges that many college educators and students don’t yet see a crisis, given that students can enroll, earn good grades for four years, and graduate — very much enjoying themselves in the process. But in an era when “the world has become unforgiving” to those who don’t work hard or know how to think, Arum said that this may be a time to consider real change.

The culture of college needs to evolve, particularly with regard to “perverse institutional incentives” that reward colleges for enrolling and retaining students rather than for educating them. “It’s a problem when higher education is driven by a student client model and institutions are chasing after bodies,” he said.

The analysis in the book stresses that there is significant variation within institutions, not just among institutions, with students in some academic programs regularly outperforming others at the same campuses. Arum said this suggests that institutions can improve student learning by making sure that there is some consistency across disciplines in the rigor of requirements. “You need an internal culture that values learning,” he said. “You have to have departments agree that they aren’t handing out easy grades.”

Further, he said that colleges need to shift attention away from measures of “social engagement” (everything that’s not academic) and toward academic engagement, even if some of those measures of non-academic engagement help keep students engaged and enrolled. “It’s a question of what outcome you want,” he said. “If the outcome is student retention and student satisfaction, then engagement is a great strategy. If, however, you want to improve learning and enhance the academic substance of what you are up to, it is not necessarily a good strategy.”

(If this sounds like a swipe at the National Survey of Student Engagement, Arum said it shouldn’t be taken that way. He praises NSSE for asking questions that focus on the student experience, and says that many of NSSE’s findings on the minimalist levels of academic work and studying are consistent with his own. Rather, he faults college administrators for paying little attention to those findings and more on NSSE measures of non-academic satisfaction.)

Arum acknowledged that the tough economy may be acting against reform, given that many professors report that increases in class size and course loads are leading them to cut down on the ambition of student assignments simply to keep up with grading. With fewer full-time positions, professors at many institutions “are overwhelmed,” he said. But Arum challenged faculty members to be creative in finding ways to assign more writing and reading to students.

Distribution of the book is just starting, but there are signs it could generate buzz. The Social Science Research Council will host a panel this week in Washington featuring experts on assessment and higher education, with representatives from leading think tanks and foundations. The book will also be discussed at next week’s meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs of AAC&U, said that she viewed the book as “devastating” in its critique of higher education. Faculty members and administrators (not to mention students and parents) should be alarmed by how little learning the authors found to be taking place. She also said that the findings should give pause to those anxious to push students through and award more degrees — without perhaps giving enough attention to what happens during a college education.

“In the race to completion, there is this assumption that a credit is a credit is a credit, and when you get to the magic number of credits, you will have learned what you need to learn,” she said. What this book shows, Humphreys added, is that “you can accumulate an awful lot of credits and not learn anything.”

AAC&U programs have in the past stressed the value of academic rigor and also of engagement of students outside the classroom. Humphreys said that she agreed with the book that some activities students enjoy may not add to their learning. But she said it was important not to view all engagement activities in the same way. It is important, she said, “not to lump together activities such as being in a fraternity or just hanging out with friends” with activities such as extracurricular activities that may in fact be quite educational and important, even if not linked to a specific course.

Students could benefit especially, she feels, from the point in the book about the variation among those at the same institution. “I don’t think we are doing well enough at helping them understand that choices matter,” she said. “Choices in the academic courses they take, how much they are working outside the classroom, how much they are studying, how much they are partying — that balance is important.”

This from a (former) partial-load faculty member, who demonstrates that we have to assert the value of what we do before we can expect our employers — or our real employers, the citizens of Ontario – to respect that value.

It’s me, the author of this post.  Wow, I was in good form that day, if I may say so myself!

In March 2010 my college made a “business” decision, effective May 1, 2010, to pay me %40 less to do the same work -  which would include continuing to develop my own courses, thanks very much. 

In May 2010, I made the decision to withhold my services.  What lives between my ears has value, and nobody can have it without my co-operation!  Fortunately for me, my husband’s excellent unionized industrial job (with all the bells and whistles) makes it possible for me to do so.  Thanks, honey!

Surprise!  In October 2010 my former school’s Dean called to ask if I would develop a new online general education course.  This course was on the books for two years, but remained undeveloped, for a January 2011 delivery!  Nothing like due diligence from management!

Having negotiated more money than I was offered, I took on the challenge – more for a personal mental adventure than to pay the mortgage.  Having finished creating the course, I have now — no surprise – been offered bottom dollar to “teach” the course in its Beta run, because it is already developed!!!!  Har de har har!

This at a time when my college has been in an absolute feeding frenzy of hiring new administrators – about one per month over the last six months, and two more announced in the last two weeks!

Administrate what? I ask.  Not higher education, just the “business” of it!

As we say up North, BUH-BYE LA!

Clearly, there are lessons here about the impact of online education on the conditions of our employment.  (Outsourcing, anyone?).  And maybe a lesson as well about the significance on one decent, unionized job (her husband’s) on an entire family’s long-term welfare.

What strikes me about reading this, however, is the realization that – while it may be easier and more effective for us to assert the value of our work collectively than individually — no collective stance  is viable until we develop and uphold individual convictions about the value of our work.

Feel feel to share yours at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

Another response to last week’s post on Prof. Richard Quinn’s disappointment, and the impact of class sizes upon student evaluation and academic quality:

Colleges cheat professors by treating education as a commodity and teachers as assembly-line workers, all the while using the language of “professionalism” to describe an alienating work environment.

Professors cheat students by caving in to college demands for speed-up in the production of transcripts (our stock-in-trade) with reduced concern for quality and a fetish for quanitification and “accountability.”

Students cheat themselves by trying to figure out the easiest way to get a high grade, regardless of whether any learning happens. (When ensconced in a corrupt culture, what could be more rational that to get in on the scam?)

As a result, our corporate political economy “warehouses” young people, chills their expectations, and ensures the creation of marginally productive workers, compliant consumers and passive citizens throughout. It’s a bad way to run a railway, and its a worse way to run an allegedly postsecondary education system.

As discussed previously, a 2010 survey of professors, counsellors, and libraries conducted by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations discussed recent trends in Universities, regarding class sizes (increasing) and full-time hiring (decreasing), and the impacts of both on educational quality.

I’m indebted to a professor who responded last week to confirm that these trends aren’t restricted to Universities, particularly the survey’s claim that ”a third of responding faculty admit that they were compelled to change the way that they teach”, as a consequence of increased student numbers:

This is something to which I also testify.  I have had no choice but to change, even excise assignments from my courses because I do not have enough time to mark them properly; my class sizes are just too big to accommodate more than a few assignments for each course.  Some assignments possess multiple choice sections precisely for the purposes of saving time.

Sure, it hurts my students in more ways than I can classify.  But I have to work with the limitations I have, rather than the illusion that such limitations do not exist or are temporary.  I have a feeling the situation is going to get worse, and I’m not sure if the rest of the cliché even applies.