When we recorded our first episode in November 2017, we
thought the natural place to start was assessing the state of the university as
a whole. As relatively new graduates joining the ranks of full-time faculty at
a wide variety of institutions with differing sorts of positions, we had
definite opinions about how the university was holding up against the political
and social environments of the early Trump administration.
Now, nearly two years later, it seems to me that the state
of the university is much the same as we left it in 2017. On one hand, it's disheartening
to see continued pressure put on higher educational institutions to corporatize
– arguing tacitly, and sometimes verbally, that the same employment and "customer retention" models that
work for Wal-Mart must work for your local community college. On one hand, the
fact that the current administration has not been able to do significant damage
to the university system during these two years is cause for some mild celebration.
Despite proposals to do so, the education budget has not been thoroughly decimated.
Financially, those who seem poised to suffer the most are college graduates who
are slowly but surely being frozen out of the loan forgiveness programs that
promised relief for those who worked in the public sector. Law students found
themselves on the receiving ends of rejections from the PSLF program, despite
meeting all published requirements. Of the first round of applicants to this
program, less than 3% of applicants received their loan forgiveness, despite
meeting all published requirements. Now, as it was last year, the program is on
the chopping block again. Its termination seems politically unpopular, so there’s
always hope that it will remain.
There are, however, cracks in the edifice that show the
weight of cultural shift we’ve undergone as a community these last three-ish
years. The issue over campus “free speech” is once again in the spotlight. The
president recently signed an executive order purportedly guaranteeing free
speech on college campuses, claiming simultaneously that conservative ideas and
speakers were routinely stifled at universities. (I’ll spare readers here the
old joke about indoctrination and syllabus-reading.) As a result, federal funds
to universities could potentially be denied if the Department of Education
feels that the university has stymied free speech by not allowing the likes of
Milo Yiannopoulous or Jordan Peterson to address students. This has continued
to foment distrust amongst the conservative community and university faculty
and staff, the former who still believe that universities are sites of “indoctrination.”
In truth, more often than not, it is student bodies, not administration or
faculty, who oppose these types of speakers. Although federal funding is a
significant portion of any university’s budget, we must not forget that the
most significant amount of funding comes from students who will be paying for
their educations for the length of a mortgage. Do they not deserve a say?
These developments aside, I can tell you as a teacher on the
front lines in a very conservative state that things are perhaps not as bleak
as they seem in the classroom. I teach introductory composition courses
frequently, and part of our curriculum is to adapt our required “campus read”
into our course structure so students will engage with it more earnestly. This
year, the selection is Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder: How Inequality
Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (2017). I teach in a boot-straps mentality
state. If I have it, it’s because I earned it. If you don’t have it, it’s
because you didn’t work hard enough/deserve it. While that mentality is
part-and-parcel of most conservative thinking, it is worth noting that many of
my students and their parents are extraordinarily hard workers in a state with the
10th highest rate of poverty in 2017. As they’ve entered college,
many of them doing so for that ephemeral promise of a “better life,” and the
costs are burdensome. They work hard for classes. Then they go home and work hard
at a minimum wage job and find time for homework in between. Although my university
is certainly one of the more affordable ones in the state, many will still
leave with close to $40,000 in debt if they are able to graduate in four years.
Our state legislature recently approved extending two years of funding,
typically only available to community college students, to university students
as well – so this will make a huge difference. Yet as we read through The Broken
Ladder and other texts exploring types of inequality, my students did not
seem the same to me as other students from conservative bastions where I had taught
before. While you still find a lot of vocal support for the current
administration, students are much more at ease admitting that they find the
system to be “rigged.” What used to be dismissed as complaining or a lack of ingenuity
is now a common parlance for the course. “I feel like it’s bad that they’re making
it so only rich people can afford to go to college or become doctors and
lawyers,” one student said. We talked about the systemic problems that might
arise in that kind of world. What does it mean to have a doctor who’s never tried
to buy groceries on $150 a month tell you that your eating choices are “unhealthy?”
What would it mean to have a lawyer who never had to financially struggle
represent you in a small claims dispute? What does it mean to have an upper-middle-class
teacher thrust into a public school in a high-poverty district with students
whose parents are at work all day and have no time to help with homework or
bake sales?
It can be depressing
to recognize that while the situation isn’t starkly worse in higher education
now, it seems as though we are all holding our fingers in the dam praying that things
don’t get worse. There’s a mighty institutional force on the other side
of that dam chipping away with budget cuts, administrators who have “bold ideas,” worshiping big data and assessment, and a general fear of the power a
university can wield in capable hands. But take it from me, although we find
ourselves in much the same predicament as we were two years ago, the situation
on the ground seems as if it there’s an awakening happening among young
college-going students. A lot of my colleagues who have been teaching for years
may not see it. Complaints still abound about entitlement, laziness, ignorance,
etc. Where I see significant progress, though, is that many of them show up to
college with a more progressive ideology than they’re perhaps comfortable
admitting. They know they’re coming into a rigged system. They’ve watched it
their whole lives. And they’re starting to figure out who rigged it. And they’re
starting to figure out that they need to fix it. And the state of the
university now is that we need to be the ones who stop griping about what they
don’t know and give them the tools to fix it – for all our sakes.
