Scott Walker's Assault on Sustainability

     In my last entry I suggested that anyone who wanted to become an ethnomusicologist should realize that the usual path to this profession, through graduate school and the Ph.D. degree leading to a career as a professor in a college or university, was harder now that it was a few decades ago. The doctoral programs are graduating more ethnomusicologists than there are professorships available for them. Some graduates seek careers elsewhere, in museums, arts organizations, as journalists, and so on, while others remain on board the academic vessel, in 2nd class cabins as adjunct (i.e., part-time) professors for low pay and few, if any, benefits such as subsidies toward health care, retirement, etc. I’ve written earlier about the trend among presidents and boards of trustees to run colleges and universities as corporate businesses, generating profits in certain areas such as fund-raising, so as to support other areas and compete for students, faculty, attractive facilities and, of course, administrators capable of generating income. The difficulties arising from running colleges as corporations stem ultimately from the divergence between business values and educational values. Whereas business values competition and efficiency, education values collaboration and the free play of ideas, which is inherently inefficient. Education is far more process-oriented, whereas business values emphasize results.
     If the current assault on the tenure system in higher education succeeds, then the prospect for aspiring college and university teachers takes a further turn for the worse, while US higher education's sustainability is further threatened. Now, security of the position and tenure’s guarantee that a professor’s teaching and research must be free from political interference is in jeopardy. Ten days ago, the news media carried stories on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attempts to do away with tenure at the state colleges and universities. Walker proposes to eliminate tenure and also some faculty decision-making authority regarding curriculum, research, and staffing. The idea behind it, say Walker and his Republican supporters, is to enable university administrators to “be more like a business and nimble in how they govern,” according to the US News & World Report.
    This change would enable administrators to hire faculty to teach this year’s fashionable subjects, and fire those whose offerings were no longer popular, as if math and history and physics and literature and engineering and music were marketplace products subject to the law of supply and demand. Competition in the educational marketplace, as in the business world generally, must be a good thing, they reason, as the best products will out-compete the others. The Wisconsin Board of Regents, most appointed by Gov. Walker, just recently approved many of his proposals, despite overwhelming opposition from faculty and students at Wisconsin colleges and universities.
     And if this change occurs in one state, Wisconsin, pressure will mount for others to take similar action in order to compete. The end of the tenure system and faculty authority concerning curricula, research, and staffing means the end of academic freedom—the rights of free speech granted to faculty—that enabled the growth of knowledge and its expression at the university without threat of faculty being fired for exercising that right. Professors without tenure could under this new regime be fired, and students expelled, for expressing minority views on such topics as climate change, labor unions, foreign policy, racial profiling, or the roundness of the earth. Although the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, it doesn’t guarantee the right not to be fired from a job as a professor unless that right is accompanied by the academic freedom that has been guaranteed in the US by tenure for at least a century.
    These efforts can be viewed within the larger trend toward turning the colleges and universities from collegially organized and governed institutions, where tenured professors were responsible to their colleagues and to the profession, into corporations organized and governed hierarchically, where the privileges of freedom of inquiry no longer operate. Of course, it isn’t only professors who suffer under these conditions. Teaching, research, knowledge and its application suffers as well under a regime of fear, as does public discourse. Professors fled Nazi Germany and Soviet countries in the last century—if they could get away—on account of political interference; academic freedom guaranteed in the US was, for them especially, an expression of the principles of freedom on which the US was founded. It is vital that not only professors and students but also the public at large vigorously oppose Gov. Walker’s efforts to politicize higher education.

Music Sustains People

     I’m writing from Minneapolis, where I traveled to take part in an event on music, sound, and climate change. A year and a half ago, Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn and I met to give a plenary “trialogue” on sound and sustainability at a conference in Nashville, and afterwards we were invited to do a reprise at the University of Minnesota. This is the event that came of it, in celebration of Earth Day, a week later than the actual day but nonetheless the time when it could be arranged for all. The event takes place later today, but I flew in from Maine two days ago, and had a chance to walk around the university yesterday.

Vincent Hall, Univ. of Minnesota, April, 2015

Much of its appearance has changed. The grand old buildings remain, including Northrup Auditorium, with its imposing Greek columns, and Vincent Hall, with its, where many of my classes were held. Much new modern architecture, quite out of keeping with the old, has been erected throughout the campus, forming blocks of high-rise steel and glass and concrete and granite, with massive faces and few windows, in some ways looking like vast parking garages, but reminding me most of the Soviet-era buildings I saw in Beijing five years ago. One of the professors planning the event, Mark Pedelty, confirmed that impression when we had supper in Dinkytown last night, calling it Stalinist. At that point I began to couple the architecture with the ubiquitous strategic planning that has been going on at colleges and universities over the past fifteen years or so, doubtless also reflecting their transformation from educational non-profit institutions run more or less at a loss, funded by philanthropists and state legislatures, into corporations run to break even, still dependent on donations but less and less so on government funding, while the expenses of maintaining them, pro-rated on a per-student basis, have increased enormously. I’ve blogged about this before; there’s no need to repeat it, except to say that even though I wasn’t surprised to see it at my graduate alma mater, my spirits did not rise as I’d hoped they would.
    In some ways it’s surprising that I’ve been back only once before, and that was around the early 1980s, when one of the professional societies I belong to met in a downtown Minneapolis hotel, and I managed to skip out for an afternoon visit. At that time the campus had not transformed so. Today, it seems much more a model of efficiency. Buses and light rail transport students who crowd the streets, making the sidewalks look like Manhattan during rush hour. The streets and roads of the campus itself are curved, well landscaped, and do not have the look of a city; yet on the outskirts the city is clearly there. Dinkytown has upgraded and yet it was still recognizable in shape. I could see the ghosts of old shops and restaurants like Valli Pizza, where our blues band performed weekends in the “Grotto Room” in the cellar. Of course, the Valli no longer was there.

But on Washington Ave. still stood Stub and Herbs [always missing the apostrophe], now a sports bar and tavern. Stub and Herbs, or Sturbs as we used to call it, was our favorite bar on the east bank of the river, and my old friend Cameron Nickels forever burned it into my memories by deciding he would have a fiddle recital there.
    Cameron, like me a graduate student in American studies but a year ahead of me, shared my love of music and rekindled my interest in old-time and bluegrass. He was a fine singer and guitarist, and joined me as an instructor in the Scholar Music Workshop (attached to the Scholar Coffeehouse), and later in the Mill City School of Folk Music. He decided, about 1968, that he was going to learn to play the fiddle. Aged 27 or so, starting from scratch on the violin is difficult even for an experienced musician with a good ear, which he was and he had. He set himself the goal of a public fiddle recital after six months, and he asked me and another friend, Charlie Angermeyer, to accompany him. We ran thru a set of old-time songs and tunes that Cameron had learned from old hillbilly 78s, some of them recycled by the New Lost City Ramblers. He felt that bluegrass fiddling was too difficult to learn in six months, but that old-time might be possible. It turned out to be possible, barely.
    Listening back to the recording he made of it, I realized that there’s a difference between what a musician hears while performing with others, and what the audience hears. I’m not talking about a need for monitor speakers so the band can hear itself coming through the PA system, if any, but rather a difference between listening while making music and listening back to it afterwards. Listening while making music, I was intent on playing what I had in mind to play, and constantly listening to what I was playing as feedback. Of course, I also heard what Cameron and Charlie were doing, and tried to keep time with them (and succeeded); but mostly I was listening to myself, partly because I had just learned the tunes and songs. If I had known them a long time, they’d have been second nature and I could have, and would have, listened more carefully to the others rather than mostly to myself blending with them.
    Listening back, of course, I heard myself as an accompanist, while the fiddle stood out—as it should have. Now I heard the marks of a beginning fiddler, the same kinds of issues that arose when a dozen years afterward I, too, started playing the fiddle. The fiddle’s timing wasn’t always where it should have been, sometimes a bit late and sometimes a bit early. Whereas in guitar and banjo repetitive motion can set up a regular pulse beat, on the fiddle the bowing motion usually doesn’t do so except for brief periods of shuffle rhythm lasting perhaps only a second or two. Besides rhythmic issues, playing in tune is another. Precise intonation is notoriously difficult on the violin or any of the stringed instruments that do not have frets; and when a musician used to playing a fretted instrument such as a guitar takes up an unfretted one, the results can be even more problematic because intonation has not been troublesome on the earlier instrument. Worse yet, a musician usually has a “head tune” in mind—that is, an ideal melody is heard silently in the brain while its approximation is executed on the instrument. A beginning fiddler tends to confuse the two, and hear the head tune as if it’s sounding aloud; or, the musician hears them both and they blend, the melody in the mind masking the problem of playing out of tune, so that it seems more in tune than it is. But listening back to a recording, a beginning fiddler is without that head tune in mind, and hears how far out of tune the playing was.
    Of course, I don’t mean to be critical of my friend here; my own struggles on the fiddle were just as difficult, if not more so. When I began fiddling, our cat would not stay in the same room. Soon he learned to leave as I started to open the violin case. I supposed that some high-frequency squeaks beyond my hearing range were painful for him. But after a couple of years of playing, the cat no longer left the room. I don’t think it was because he was becoming hard of hearing, but because I was no longer making painful sounds. I know that even after two years I was having trouble with accurate intonation, and that for anyone who starts late in life, it’s a continuing problem—one that diminishes but never leaves entirely. After warming up, intonation seems to get better—and no doubt it does, but I think that, also, the ear adjusts. Again, listening back to recordings—this time, my own—showed that to be true.
    All those memories came back with a rush as I recalled Cameron, Charlie, and me standing up in the front of a narrow, rectangular space, on a small stage, performing for family and friends at his fiddle recital about 45 years ago. I can visualize the others—Charlie with his uncombed, long hippie hair; Cameron’s neat as always, his body stretched to its full height as he tucked the fiddle under his chin and played short, sawing bow strokes and as we all sang, and played, not especially well, but competently enough for the occasion, considering. And it was a success in the sense that we got through it, and Cameron could say that he had his fiddle recital, and then—. Well, for whatever reasons, he continued to play the fiddle but only from time to time, never progressing far enough to his satisfaction, while his singing and guitar playing continued strong. After he moved to take up a teaching job at Madison College, later James Madison University, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he fell in with several music groups singing and playing old-time and bluegrass music over the years, spending many of them in bands with “Two-Gun” Terry (whose last name escapes me), a fine fiddler who was kind of a local legend. Possibly because his music was more involved with rehearsals and performances than jam sessions, Cameron didn’t play the fiddle as much—there were others who could do that better, and so he stayed with what he could do well. I am speculating some here, because I know he enjoyed a good jam session too; but perhaps he felt that even there, he didn’t want to play the fiddle very much, as it would impose some on the others.
    Cameron left the University of Minnesota and found a teaching job the year before I left to do the same. We’ve kept in touch over the years, seeing each other from time to time. He had a fine time as an English professor, somewhat of a curmudgeon in his community as I understand it, an early champion of women’s rights (unusual for a man at that time and place), and a specialist in the literature of humor. He wrote several essays for academic journals and published two books on the subject, one on New England humor and the other on Civil War humor. Now retired, he is still reading and writing—and enjoying music. I’ll tell him about this visit, and send him a picture of Stub and Herb’s. Music and sustainability isn’t only about how culture workers can partner with people in musical communities to achieve goals of sustaining the integrity of music cultures in the face of inevitable change. It is not only about how people may sustain music, but also about how music may sustain people.

Why universities are unsustainable

      I’ve written about the unsustainability of the contemporary college and university system on this blog before. What prompts another entry is the publicity attending the recent announcement that a vice-chancellor of the University of Maine received a $40K pay increase last year while simultaneously prescribing a cut of $36 million for the University of Maine systems. Needless to say, those protesting the cuts (chiefly to academic programs and academic faculty) suddenly had a cause célebre. This revelation dramatically highlights the root problem, as I see it: American colleges and universities are academic institutions no longer. They've become corporations.
    The administrator's boss defended the pay raise. The chancellor--top banana of the university--explained that other state universities paid these people 1/3 again as much as her $205,000 salary. (Does any faculty member at UMaine earn that much? I doubt it. Even at my instiution, Brown University, where faculty salaries are higher, very few do--and if so, then for the same reason: they'd command higher salaries elsewhere.) The University of Maine was in danger of losing her to another institution, he said. She was doing a good job; better pay her what she’s worth—so runs the argument, if by good job we mean balancing the budget on the backs of academics because  university administrators had failed miserably to convince the state legislature to make up the difference. The chancellor's argument assumes a corporate model. In such a model, the administrators who run the corporation are the executives, the faculty are labor, and the students are both consumers and product. Is the corporate model the best way to conceive of education?
    Certainly it has some advantages. As a corporation, a university is likely to run more efficiently. The focus is on turning out a successful product. Proliferation of administrators on the financial end of things means that universities are now run as businesses, with the goal of increasing income: from investments, from consumers (student tuition), from donors (wealthy alumni), from government (agency grants for research; legislative funding), etc. (Never mind that UMaine's lobbyists and fundraisers weren't persuasive enough; they need hire better ones. Of course they'll have to pay them more; which means even less money for academics, unless these fundraisers can do what all their predecessors failed at.) No doubt university income has increased overall, yet somehow the cost of getting it, keeping it, spending it and growing it is outpacing the income itself. For in order to get more science grants, schools have to spend money on high profile scientists who require state-of-the-art laboratories—which are enormously expensive and getting more so exponentially, like the cost of high-tech medical care. In order to get more money from donors, the students mustn’t only be educated; they must be kept happy, which means expensive support services including counseling, pleasant accommodations, excellent food and plenty of food choices, high grades, and positioning for a successful career. Colleges and universities have become like Lake Wobegon in that regard, where grade inflation—now the majority of grades are A’s, in case you don’t know—means all students now are “above average.” In order to get more money from investments, universities compete to hire the best financial managers, those who might otherwise be running hedge-funds for the super-rich, and whose salaries make the $205,000 of this vice-chancellor look like spare change.
    The business model becomes self-perpetuating in the sense that other schools are now regarded chiefly as competitors and only secondarily as cooperating allies in a larger educational ecosystem. And the schools themselves are run on competitive models. Granted, students had always competed for better grades, and now that competition is less keen. This is because students are now regarded both as consumers and product. Don't upset them with bad grades, don't flunk them out unless they're beyond saving. The competition now takes place in the labor market—that is, among faculty. Whereas until about 1970 the supply of and demand for full-time, tenured faculty was about equal, after 1970 in an effort to save money--this was when they began to be run like corporations--universities began hiring cheap labor (adjunct, part-time professors) and paying them by the course, thereby increasing productivity. An adjunct professor typically receives no fringe benefits such as retirement savings, subsidized medical care, decent office space (or any at all), and earns about 1/3 of the amount per course taught on average compared with a tenured professor. No wonder the percentage of adjunct professors in higher education has increased to the point where they now comprise more than half of the total faculty. In 1970 adjuncts made up only one-quarter, and that included many who wanted to work part-time. At today’s salaries, an adjunct faculty member who moonlights by teaching part-time at more than one institution and winds up with a full load of courses (equivalent to what a full-time professor teaches) earns about the same amount as a person who repairs bicycles, about $23,000 annually. Tenured professors cost their institutions at least three times that, and typically their productivity is lower in the sense that they teach fewer students. Never mind research productivity, or teaching effectiveness; it's all about per-unit cost.
    I’ve experienced this transition myself, having entered college in 1961 and begun full-time university teaching in a tenure-track position in 1971. By then the academic job market was beginning to contract. When I was evaluated for tenure six years later, the profession had already contracted so much that only 10% of those at my university were then receiving tenure; the rest were fired and had to look for jobs elsewhere. I was one of the lucky 10%. Among my friends in my graduating class holding the doctorate, about half were able eventually to get tenure and maintain the kinds of teaching careers that were common through the 1960s; the others were not. Later classes fared more poorly. Certainly, ebbs and flows in the economy and trends within academia have occasionally advantaged certain disciplines—ethnomusicology is one—but in general opportunities for university faculty have gotten gradually worse since 1970 and the profession is still contracting.
    Some dreamers hold up the old model of a collegial university, run largely by faculty on temporary leave from their academic positions, to return to them after serving time in administration, as an ideal to strive for once again. In that model, students were educated, not trained. Learning meant preparing to take one's place as a critical thinker and active citizen. Of course, that also prepared one for a career, not a McJob. A return to this educational model isn't likely, except at small institutions with targeted special-interest populations, such as Sterling College, which I wrote about here earlier. There are a few others like it. Instead, productivity will accelerate until even administrators price themselves out of the game. Distance learning via Internet courses is more efficient and costs far, far less than maintaining college and university campuses.
    The structure of higher education will change to accommodate this shift as soon as the consumers (students) are proved to be just as successful, if not happy, in their careers as a result of these MOOCs (massive on-line open courses), except that they won’t be open any more. Students still will have to pay for them. But many fewer professors and administrators will be needed. The professorial industry—and it will become one—will function in a way similar to the textbook industry, with a few widely-used market leader courses earning money for their institutions and authors, and several competitors attempting to break into the market. Students will remain in their homes, or perhaps in special buildings set aside for the purpose in their home communities, where they will sit at computer workstations or their equivalent in the next generation of distance-learning technology, which will include access to all kinds of resources to supplement course work—digital libraries, or whatever the next technology brings about. Of course, maintaining the technological network where all this will take place is immensely expensive, but the cost will be borne—as it is now—by government, the military, corporations, and ordinary citizens. Imagine how much money is being spent even now just so that most everyone can connect to the Internet: trillions of dollars. (Look at your own bill for Internet service, smartphone, tablet, cable, dsl, and so forth, and multiply that by the millions of population using them throughout the world.)
    That will be the new shape of higher education worldwide, for the trajectory of the corporate model, once in control, moves inexorably to increase productivity and decrease per-unit cost, while real costs (such as climate change, growing income inequality, and so on) are meant to be hidden. And they stay in hiding until exposed by ecological economics. Ironically, when this tranformation in higher education occurs, vice-chancellors such as the one at the University of Maine whose salary was raised significantly while her actions resulted in fired faculty and eliminated degree programs (and a few riffed administrators, be it said), will find themselves looking for a job somewhere else. Some will survive, but most won't.
    The old collegial model of the university was a participatory community, not a top-down corporate hierarchy. Musical communities will continue to provide participatory models, and ultimately these are more sustainable. Again, and perhaps ironically, it is the Internet that is helping to level the playing field. More on that in a later post.