I've come to an understanding that academic institutions are corrupt. Many of our basic educational foundations have been built on false narratives to suit the United States' "seamless" narrative. In this instance, 'seamless' is merely a coined term in place of the bumps that the U.S. is guilty of on many accounts. It's unclear to me how long we've come to uncover the truths behind what this country has been hiding from us, but what is clear is the undeniable reality that we must be proactive in spreading the truth if we want to change what's going on. Markow (2011) says "Why Davis chose to ignore this issue in its public communications about damages caused by the Occupy students, while Berkeley ignored any such damages and responded to the need for lower costs of education remains a mystery." And indeed it remains a mystery that an institution would opt to ignore the issue and put focus on the damage reflects the U.S.'s take on its own history. By ignoring the issue rather than fixing it, we're only augmenting the problem and that's the biggest issue with education because it has no longer become a necessity to the eyes of the administration and the state - it's a business.
As an English major in a predominantly STEM school, a conversation I found myself having a conversation with a friend on whether I chose the right school. I was fretting over whether the English program here would help me compared to my second choice in San Francisco. But what he told me in response really threw me off, he told me, "Well, the state expects more the sciences than the humanities. They'll invest more in bio than English." Unsurprisingly, he's a science major. What struck me the most was that this is something he genuinely believes in, that the humanities has nothing else to offer this state. Yet the very foundations of his education is based on learning how to read and write. Hearing that did get me thinking about the functioning of universities now. Millennials pay thousands of dollars in tuition for a degree that's supposed to pay us back, but many people come from differing socioeconomic backgrounds that effect whether they'll be paying student loans and the money they put in to receive gets given right back to where it starts. It's a never ending cycle that we sign ourselves off to.
Silence is our greatest crime next to committing it, so when I read Joy (2010)'s piece on how she spoke out against the embezzlement, I felt a sense of justice because many people acknowledge injustices and go on their merry days. This corporatization of the university needs to be stopped. This idea of Newfield (2006)'s implication that the university is much like politics in the sense that the college-educated are the "middle class" in the hierarchy of the world is our reminder that education is politics, and maybe it's inescapable... I guess instead of running from the headache that is politics, we just need to understand it - that's what I took from the texts. Perhaps not fear it like DeBoer (2015)'s eponymous title, but rather hone in on ethics to create an understanding like Joy (2014).
Here we can see just how much our tuition keeps climbing, but we never truly understand why - at least I'm actually not quite that sure, but it's something like this that makes a huge difference because we can't keep blinding following the conveyor belt. Uebersax (2012)
Sources:
DeBoer, F. (2015). Why we should fear University, Inc. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html
Joy, A. B. (2014). Ethics and "Breaking Bad": Developing and practicing ethical skills. Compliance & Ethics Professional. Retrieved from http://www.amyblockjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/scce-cep-2014-05-Block-Joy.pdf
Joy, A. B. (2010). Police. In A. Rinzler (Ed.), Whistleblower (pp. 1-9). Bay Tree Publishing.
Markow, A. (2011). A tale of two campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to occupy movements. IVN. Retrieved from https://ivn.us/2011/12/19/a-tale-of-two-campuses-berkeley-and-davis-respond-to-occupy-movements/
Newfield, C. (2006). Introduction. Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class (pp. 1-15). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Uebersax, J. (2012). [Graphic data of the California Public University tuition and fees increases]. caledreform.org. Retrieved from https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/inflation-adjusted-tuition-fees-in-the-uc-and-calstate-systems-from-1965-to-2011/
Questions:
In what ways can we educate people about the politics of education? And, how can we combat this corporatization of education?
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