LY #133 FREE SCHOOL!

Senator Hass' Golden Retriever

While I'm thinking of the joys of being free OF school, Oregon State Senator Mark Hass (D-Beaverton) is spearheading the legislative effort to make community colleges free of tuition.

In an AP story by Steven Dubois printed in the March 19 issue of the Bend Bulletin, Senator Hass was quoted as saying, "I think everybody agrees that with a high school education by itself, there is no path to the middle class.  There is only one path, and it leads to poverty.  And poverty is very expensive."

(Well, the Taxpayer Association of Oregon might note that poverty is only expensive if liberals like Sen. Hass choose to vote to provide medical and other benefits for those who can't afford them.  But I digress.)

The free tuition movement is also a response to increasing college debt loads and America's declining ability to compete in the global skills race.  Will it work?  According to the article, Governor Kitzhaber "ordered" a state commission to examine the question.  According to my own Googling, however, State Bill 1524, voted on by both houses, actually "ordered" up the commission (with no "no" votes in the Senate and two Republican "no" votes in the house).

So who is the Higher Education Coordinating Commission that is charged with this research?  According to the state gov. website, it's a 14-member volunteer board "dedicated  to fostering and sustaining the best, most rewarding pathways to opportunity and success for all Oregonians through an accessible, affordable and coordinated network for educational achievement beyond a high school diploma." 
A quick look at the members of this volunteer group shows three people associated with community colleges:  Frank Goulard, math teacher and Charlene Gomez, both of Portland Community College, and Betty Duvall, who is either a dead confederate spy or former executive dean at PCC and more recently a director of the Community College Leadership Program for Oregon State University's School of Education.  The Oregonian had a story about the latter two last June.

The Oregon effort follows one that just this week passed both the house and senate in Tennessee. The Tennessee plan, originally proposed by Republican Governor William Haslam, draws on state lottery funds.  It has proven controversial in part because it's diverting funds from four year schools.  Democrat Steven Cohen is quoted in the Times Free Press as saying that  "the governor's 'promise' actually cuts funding from high-achieving students beginning four-year degree programs."

Could Representative Cohen's concerns arise from his association with organizations linked to faculty at these four-year schools?  Not that the $14,000 he got from Public Sector Unions is all that great a benefit.  He actually got a lot more money from business.  Nevertheless, it seems as though some Oregon unions are not happy about the suggestion that our state follow the South. 

Back in the AP story, "Patricia Schechter, a Portland State University professor active in the faculty union, worries that students will be induced into taking the community college route — 'arguably against their interests' — and about the effect on public universities, whose students won't get a tuition break."  

Hmmm.  Really?  How is it against student interests to save many thousands of dollars by getting their first two years free?  I think what she might mean is that it's not in the interests of members of the faculty union that more people go to community colleges than universities.  And why would that be?  Well, I don't know about PSU but I do know that in other universities, such as the one I attended back in the day, lower division courses, especially those meeting general education requirements like oral communication and writing, are often taught by graduate assistants.  And how is it in the interests of their students to be taught by people with little or no experience teaching?  

It's not.  But it is in the interest of full time tenure track faculty.  The  teaching assistants are often able to afford their graduate school largely because of their assistantships.  Thus the required courses  with their meagerly paid teachers provide support for the upper division and graduate courses taught by those full time tenure track professors who make up the membership of faculty unions.  Fewer graduate assistants might mean that senior faculty would be required to teach lower division again.   More students!  Not as interesting to teach!  Ouch!  So it's just not in the interest of university faculty to encourage lower division students to go to community colleges.


 

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/03/18/3332707/states-looking-at-0-community.html#storylink=cpy

  

#70 Creating Content is HARD!

Yeah, I guess you could read that either way.  CON-tent or con-TENT. 

I took the Thanksgiving Holiday off from this blog, though not necessarily from my classes.  I did do some work -- made a little video to say goodbye to my online classes, graded final assignments, dealt with whiny students, you know, the usual.  But, more to the point, I enjoyed time with friends and spouse and ate a lot of pie.

Enjoying my life is a high value for me.  When I did a values analysis a few months ago I rated "pleasure" well ahead of "status."  This may be one reason that I am a community college teacher.  Tonight I want to respond briefly to an article by Rob Jenkins in the November 12 Chronicle of Higher Education.  In "It's a Viable Career Path," Jenkins rails against graduate programs which take money from suckers, oops, I mean hard-working students without informing them about one of the major career avenues, community college teaching.   He goes on to celebrate the joys of working at a community college.

He notes that many university graduate program teachers are ill-informed about community colleges and see them as just a "pit-stop" in the race toward bigger and more status-filled job opportunities.  That wasn't the problem I faced.  Some folks at Utah were actually against their students getting CC jobs.  One of my professors expressed it in words to this effect:  When we spend so much time and effort on educating you, it's our investment.  That investment doesn't pay off if you go into community college teaching.  It's like we wasted our our time when we see you take that route.

In a way this makes sense.  At that time communication programs at the research universities were sometimes ranked with an algorithm that included how many articles those who had graduated from the programs published in any one year.  So, if a student went on to get a non-publishing job it DID have the power to lower the statistics for that particular department. 

I have no data to back up my belief, but I would imagine that the prejudice against CC teaching is still alive.  That's why I had to laugh at this rather Pollyannish comment about the silliness of thinking that any job outside of the research university would be thought a failure for a PhD.  "I'd like to think that, as professionals and as human beings, we've moved beyond those kinds of petty biases, especially in the face of a deepening job crisis in academe."  

I agreed with his comment, that "based on what I hear and read, the community-college environment appears to be far less stressful." For 18 of our 42 years together, my relational partner was a university professor so I got to see close up and personal what working at a small state research institution was like and the politics, even at such a minor institution, were brutal.  Not only that, but I have friends at universities and almost everything I hear about them convinces me that they are high stress environments.  There's a quote often miss-attributed to Henry Kissinger that "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." 

My experience at COCC has been that while we do have plenty of politics and conflicts, they are rarely vicious.  Not never.  Rarely.  Even as department chair, I faced very few really bad situations.  Of course, the ones I did face convinced me that I never wanted to do administration again.  So I didn't apply for the dean jobs that came up. 

And now, I never will. 

Boot Camp

Just finished my first full weekend of this spring's Redmond Public Speaking Bootcamp. My new way of teaching the course, with the small assignments, just didn't work this time. I need to reconstruct the workshop and make the various assignments more appropriate. I have to say I felt pretty stupid and very tired most of the day. I like the students in the class -- it's an interesting mix but mostly older. I haven't had such a non-traditional age class for more than 8 years. Like many community colleges around the country, we are seeing more traditional age students in our classes.

I'm thinking that I need to get my behind in gear and make samples of each of the small assignments and create my own full examples of the informative and persuasive speeches.

Also, you know, it gets harder to crank out the kind of energy I need for the weekend classes.