Stanley Fish writes an influential and provocative blog on higher education for the New York Times. Recently he held forth on the extraordinary push in Texas to treat students as consumers, pointing out the difference between a college curriculum and a car dealership.
You can probably expect more of this kind of attention, as Texas implements HB 2504, which requires all higher education institutions to formulate plans to post faculty information, including student evaluations, online. For background on the Texas law, see this previous post.
Dr. Fish is a noted scholar and professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His blog appears in the NYT on Tuesdays. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and Duke University. He is the author of 11 books, most recently “Save the World On Your Own Time,” on higher education. “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama, will be published this year. He is, by all accounts, a prominent public intellectual.
A key passage from the blog:
More than occasionally in these columns I have mocked the pretensions of those faculty members who cry “academic freedom” at the slightest infringement of what they take to be their god-given liberty. But academic freedom does in fact have a meaning and a legitimate purpose: it protects faculty members from external constituencies intent on taking over the enterprise for mercenary or political reasons. The Texas “reform plan” is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous. And it all began with student evaluations, or, rather, with the mistake of taking them seriously. Since then, it’s been all downhill.
And:
Now an entire state is on the brink of implementing just that bite-sized style of teaching under the rubric of “customer satisfaction.” Texas, currently in a contest with Arizona and South Carolina for the title “most retrograde,” is signing on to a plan of “reform” generated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank dedicated to private property rights and limited government.
And:
A corollary proposal is to shift funding to the student-customers by giving them vouchers. “Instead of direct appropriations, every Texas high school graduate would get a set amount of state funds usable at any state university” (William Lutz, Lone Star Report, May 23, 2008). Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it.
Before reading the entire piece, available here, it is worth mentioning that Dr. Fish's article does not refer explicitly to community colleges.
A thought: Placing aside the ideological rhetoric inherent in these issues for a moment, a simple question is worth asking. If you were a promising researcher, scholar, or teacher from another state, would you want to move to Texas these days?
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