The Chronicle of Higher Ed has recycled an article from 2016 about how to talk about higher ed with those who are not initiated into its subtle and arcane rites.
From one perspective, you can now breathe a sigh of relief because you don’t have to spend any time thinking about how you can defend your calling against the nosy and presumptive questions asked by Aunt Thelma over Thanksgiving dinner.
From another perspective, the Cathedral doesn’t even care enough to update its propaganda two years later. Trust me, Aunt Thelma isn’t going to be asking about the “Trump chalkings” anytime soon.
This is why I’m taking the liberty of providing some new talking points, updated for 2018. These talking points may or may not reflect whatever updated, sanctioned rhetoric is currently used to talk about the academy. I call it like I see it, yo.
Why does college cost so much?
David Graeber can answer this one pretty well:
One thing it shows is that the whole “lean and mean” ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It’s not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies. […]
Health and education are equally hard hit: managers now feel they need to each have their little squadron of assistants, who often have nothing to do, so they end up making up new exotic forms of paperwork for the teachers, doctors, nurses… who thus have ever less time to actually teach or treat or care for anyone.
Other answers include: academics are taught a lot of things but not how to budget, athletics programs don’t actually pay the bills, and state funds are not going to keep a university afloat anyway.
What does the student-debt crisis mean? How much debt are students really in?
Graeber can take this one, too:
Well if you talk to young people fresh out of college, you don’t hear a lot of them saying, “Ah, the world lies open before me … what then would I best do?”
Sure, you heard that a lot in the 1970s, 80s, even 90s: “What do I really want?” Now, not so much. Most graduates are in a panic over how they’re going to pay their student loans and the real dilemma you hear is: “Can I get a job that will actually pay me enough to live on (let alone be able to have a family someday) that I wouldn’t be entirely ashamed of?”
Maaaaaaaaybe the scary stories about debt that is over $100k are just that, scary stories, but the reality for most of us is that student debt is a massive burden—we can’t discharge it through bankruptcy, it demands to be paid, and it eats up the small paychecks that we receive right out of college. For me personally, for a few years it was a choice between paying my debts and putting money in savings. Just because the majority of stories aren’t dRaMaTiC doesn’t mean they’re not shaping individual lives.
There was speculation that President-elect Donald J. Trump wouldn’t win white voters with college degrees, but he did. Why did that shift happen?
No one is asking this question in 2018. Let’s talk about Alexandra Occasio-Cortez instead.
What’s all this I’m hearing about trigger warnings and safe spaces?
I’m skipping this because frankly, it’s boring. Yes, it’s a trope that Millennials are sheltered delicate flowers who want to cry in dark corners and eat avocado toast all day instead of getting a Real Job ™. Yes, it’s true that many students are constitutionally ill-equipped to handle adversity.
But nobody is “shocked” to hear about safe spaces anymore.
Why is there so much attention on campuses to sexual assault?
Oh, I don’t know, why don’t you ask the people in power who got away with it for so long, like Avitell Ronnell or Larry Nassar?
Perhaps you’d prefer to talk to students who have been falsely accused of assault and denied due process?
Why aren’t college athletes paid?
Many of the problems that the university faces are caused by an identity crisis. The university is caught between two faces:
- the corporate entity promising new and better jobs for each and every one of its graduates, run by and for businesses
- the ivory tower where research is paramount and immediate application is secondary (so are students)
If you subscribe to view #1, of course athletes should get paid. If you subscribe to view #2, athletics don’t belong in a university setting and therefore the question is irrelevant. Until that question is resolved, don’t expect any real answers.
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