Mar 03 2010

Edu-Factory Web Journal: Zero Issue

Category: Journals — Bob Hanke @ 11:46 am

Journal Launch

The innaugural issue of the Edu-Factory Web Journal has been published. You can find the zero issue on the “double crisis” at  this address.

After more than three years of vigorous discussion, a collective book published in various languages and countless mobilizations all around the world, the edu-factory collective has decided to adopt a new instrument: a freely downloadable journal. Like all our projects, this journal isn’t simply another publication of experts but an active transnational laboratory founded on open, collective cooperation in both its contents as well as its editing and production process. It is an experiment born from the common production of shared knowledges, and resistance to exploitation inside and outside the universities. Moreover it is a step toward the goal of building up autonomous institutions. The journal has two sections: “occupations” and “anomalies”, which aim respectively to analyze transformations of the university and conflicts in knowledge production. The edu-factory journal has an editorial board,comprising critical scholars,students, and activists from all around the world, and it is open to free contributions.

Finally, by experimenting with forms of collective reading, and review, it aims to question the traditional peer review processes, and to open new spaces of thinking, learning and struggle within and against the hierarchies of the global knowledge and university market.

Introduction
Edu-factory collective
The Double Crisis: Living on the Borders

Occupations
Christopher Newfield, The Structure and Silence of Cognitariat
George Caffentzis, The World Bank and the Double Crisis of African Universities
Jon Solomon, Reappropriating the Neoliberal University for a New Putonghua (Common Language)
Stefano Harney, In the Business School
Ned Rossiter, The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour

Anomalies
Marc Bousquet, After Cultural Capitalism
Revista Multitud, The Double Crisis of the Chilean University
Pedro Barbosa Mendes, The Double Crisis of the University
Claudia Bernardi and Andrea Ghelfi, We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis, We Will Create Institutions of the Common!
Lina Dokuzoviæ and Eduard Freudmann, Squatting the Crisis. On the current protests in education and perspectives on radical change

Appendix
Uninomade, Nothing Will Never Be the Same. Ten Thesis on the Financial Crisis

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Jan 18 2010

TSoC&I Event: Labour Struggles in the Edu-factory

Category: Books and Articles,Discussion — Bob Hanke @ 12:01 pm

A Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry Event

In collaboration with Edu-factory and Autonomedia Labour Struggles in the Edu-factory: Discussion and book launch for Toward a Global Autonomous University, edited by the Edu-factory collective

Tuesday, January 26
7:30-9:30pm
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West (by Lansdowne Ave)

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Dec 03 2009

Students Shouldn’t Pay for Crisis

Category: Book Reviews,University Finance — Bob Hanke @ 3:13 pm

Underfunding shortchanges students
by Mark Langer, President of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations

(excerpted from the Toronto Star, Wednesday, December 2, 2009)

In the recently published book, Academic Transformation: The Forces Shaping Higher Education in Ontario, co-authored by Ian D. Clark, Greg Moran, Michael L. Skolnik and David Trick, the authors argue that the current model of university education in Ontario is “unsustainable.”

They conclude that our university system can only be sustained if we create a new model, with new universities that offer just undergraduate degrees and employ faculty who spend the majority of their time teaching, performing little or no original research. The book is thoughtful and well-written. But the conclusion it reaches, simply put, is wrong.

It’s not our university model that’s the problem in Ontario. It’s the funding, or more accurately, the lack of funding. For more than a century-and-a-half, Ontario has been a world leader in providing affordable public education to all, but it is abandoning that commitment.

The Ontario government’s per-student funding to universities has fallen since the 1970s from $6,500 to $4,200 (in current, inflation adjusted dollars), a full 35 per cent, more than a third. California, by way of comparison, invests twice as much as Ontario per student: $9,500.

The results are stark. Skyrocketing tuition, enormous classes, fewer courses, impoverished libraries, outdated labs and equipment, shabby facilities – and most troubling of all – the underpaying, undervaluing and sheer exploitation of a generation of new faculty who work on short-term contracts for poverty wages, with no benefits and no job security.

Faculty share the authors’ concerns about the state of higher education in Ontario and have been warning about its deteriorating quality for years. But the authors’ proposal is not about offering a better education, or even the same quality of education. They want us to offer a cheaper education by way of lower-paid, teaching-only faculty.

The authors assert that university teaching is not enriched by university professors conducting original research in addition to teaching. But their assertion is belied by another publication from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, the same body that commissioned Academic Transformation. This publication points to a number of empirical studies demonstrating that university teaching and university research are related. It also points out that there are a number of studies which demonstrate that students support this view.

University research and university teaching depend on one another. Mutually supportive, together they enrich the students’ classroom experience while enlivening faculty research. So, contrary to the authors’ assertions, their model is not going to offer our students a better quality education. It will not even provide the same quality of education. It will give students only a lower-cost education, a degree on the cheap.

We can’t do university education on the cheap and do it properly.

Where will the necessary funding come from? There are really only two sources of base funding for Ontario universities: tax dollars from the province or student fees. Consequently, there are only so many policy options available to the government.

It can continue to underfund universities and force students to make up university budget shortfalls. (Today’s students are paying 43 per cent of university operating budgets, up from 15 per cent in the 1980s.) Or it can provide lower-quality education by creating universities whose lower-paid faculty are not robustly engaged in original, teaching-enhancing, research.

Or it can increase public investment in our university system.

Ontario’s gross provincial product grew at almost twice the rate of inflation between 1983 and 2008, meaning our wealth almost doubled. But we have not invested in our public services. Quite the opposite: the Mike Harris government’s tax cuts – mostly favouring the well-off – are costing Ontario’s fiscal capacity $11 billion a year.

Ontario needs to offer our students – not to mention our families, our society, our communities and our economy – a high-quality, world-class, university education. We don’t need to make our university system “sustainable” by sacrificing the next generation of students and the next generation of faculty. We just need to invest in higher education in a way that recognizes its importance to our future. We can afford it.

In fact, given the uncertain times we live in and the challenges ahead, we can ill afford not to.

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Sep 01 2009

‘Top Five’ University Presidents Seek More Funding — for Their Own Universities

Category: News,University Finance — Bob Hanke @ 2:31 pm

Low Blow From `Top Five’ Universities

by James Turk, Executive Director of the CAUT (excerpted from the Toronto Star, September 1, 2009).

There is a fundamental crisis facing all of Canada’s universities and colleges today, and that crisis is chronic underfunding.

Most institutions understand this, as do students and their families, but the point seems to have been lost on the presidents of the so-called “top five” (Toronto, UBC, Alberta, McGill and Montreal).

Instead of demanding much-needed investment in post-secondary education and academic research as a whole – or a bigger pie – they want a bigger slice of the existing pie for themselves, at everyone else’s expense.

The real problem is obvious. In the early 1980s, the federal government contributed one-half of one penny of every dollar earned by the Canadian economy to post-secondary education. Now, the federal government contributes less than two-tenths of a penny. Just to bring us back to the funding levels of the early ’80s would require an additional investment of more than $4 billion per year.

But rather than calling for a solution to the real problem, the “top five” university presidents say they want a bigger share of existing research money and graduate student education, and that other universities should focus on undergraduate education. Only this, they argue, will help Canada raise the international standing of some of its universities.

A disturbing implication of their proposal, of course, is that undergraduate teaching is somehow a lesser activity, to be carried out in institutions without a serious focus on scholarly work and research.

University of Toronto president David Naylor says we need more “differentiation” among universities. He says we need to move away from what he calls the “Canadian way,” which he says has been to “open the peanut-butter jar and spread thinly and evenly.”

Nothing could be further from the truth – there is already significant differentiation among institutions. Resources may be spread thinly due to underfunding, but they are not spread evenly. Naylor’s university alone already gets about 15 per cent of all research funding in Canada. Together, the big five already get about 40 per cent of the total available funding, and award about 45 per cent of doctoral degrees.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

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Toronto Star Editorial:  Survival of the Biggest, September 2, 2009

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Last Call for Contributions to the CUPE U2 Chronicle No. 2.! The deadline to submit your digital content has been extended to Tuesday, September 8. Download the designer, graphically-enhanced Call for Contributions for details.

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May 14 2009

Recession Fallout and the New Salary Reinvestment Movement

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 3:54 pm
Universities start to feel pinch
Schools cancel courses, scrap teaching positions, even disconnect phones to reduce costs
By Louise Brown (excerpted from the Toronto Star, May 14, 2009).

The recession has cost the University of Toronto law school two dream hires; professors whose job interviews the school cancelled abruptly last month because of a $2.5 million shortfall in its endowments.

What makes it worse to Dean Mayo Moran is that one already has been snapped up by a U.S. school.

“They were two great Canadians; one a specialist in international development and the other in health –” Moran stops herself before saying too much about who they were, because of confidentiality and just a little embarrassment.

“It doesn’t matter how spectacular they were – and they were terrific – but we couldn’t justify hiring them,” said Moran, who is scrambling to cut costs without touching the $2 million in aid so many students use to help pay the $20,000 tuition.

And so, for the first time, the world-renowned faculty will run a deficit the university will have to cover.

It seems even the Ivory Tower, hailed as a refuge from the storms of the marketplace, is having to batten the hatches in this economy.

At York University, where all departments have been told to chop 3.5 per cent from their budgets for each of the next three years, law Dean Patrick Monahan has postponed a search for two new professors; one a leading scholar in human rights, and another to fill a retirement.

“It’s not something we like to do, but if you have to make 3.5 per cent in cuts over the next three years, it’s very challenging,” said Monahan, noting he may have to chop the number of courses offered to upper-year students.

The recession also has prompted York to scrap small niche “majors” such as Russian Studies (which drew only two new students this year), cancel one of two Canadian studies programs and a small cultural studies stream of fine arts.

On a less lofty plane, York has cut office cleaning from every day to twice a week, is urging staff to curb BlackBerry use and may consider getting rid of professors’ clunky old land lines that get used so little in the era of email.

To read the rest of this story, click here.

NYU Applauds John Sexton’s $1 Salary

(excerpted from Take Back NYU!, May 13, 2009)

Our preemptive congratulations to New York University’s John Sexton on his expected announcement that the president will take a symbolic salary in the amount of $1 per year until the current fiscal crisis in academia ends. As the largest private university in the world, this move will send a strong signal to the NYU community, as well as colleges and universities around the country. NYU is committed to do everything in its power to remain a vital institution in the intellectual life of New York City. This sacrifice demonstrates the university’s outstanding commitment to research, learning, and preparing the next generation of scholars and leaders.

“If we are to maintain both the extraordinary academic momentum of recent years and the financial stability of our University, we will have to be particularly nimble and creative, ” writes Sexton. This announcement serves as proof of the creativity, innovative thinking, and commitment to learning that has made NYU famous throughout the world.

This is not merely a symbolic action, and the president’s $850,000 contribution is only the most visible in a groundswell of material support to be shown by administrators and stewards of the institution. In response, Provosts, Vice Presidents and Deans are likewise expected to unanimously announce temporary salaries of $22,000 per year. This amount is equivalent to what the university’s estimated cost of room, board and transportation in calculating stipends to teaching assistant in the New York City area. In order that this move does not disrupt the vital business of our university, these administrators will retain their subsidized housing in Manhattan and work-related expense accounts.

To read more about the salary reinvestment movement, click here.

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