Going to Graduate School in Ethnomusicology -- 2018 update

       Since 2015 when I first wrote this entry for anyone contemplating graduate school in ethnomusicology, I’ve heard from dozens of people with questions about their particular situations, and I’ve tried to answer as best I could. But what I wrote was meant as a general statement for prospective students—pros and cons, along with some advice. In the three years that have passed, I have not changed my mind, but I have learned a few things about my audience. So let me write a few things that I overlooked or didn’t emphasize enough in my earlier entries first, and then condense and update some of the things I wrote three years ago.

     Several people emailed me saying that they wanted to combine a life of musical performance with a life also spent thinking about it. I had written that this is difficult to do because there is not enough time in graduate school to maintain professional musical performance ability, let alone a career, while learning what is required in order to become a scholar, learn the theories and methods of ethnomusicology and related fields, and complete the dissertation (which requires research and a book-length piece of writing). Unless one already is a gifted, world-class performer I would say that this is impossible, but for the musician of truly outstanding talent it is possible, particularly if one's dissertation research centers on one’s native musical tradition. But only a tiny percentage of ethnomusicologists are this gifted, talented, and accomplished. 

     Several people wrote asking whether I thought that the academic job market for PhDs would continue to worsen, or if I thought that the market would go in cycles, poor now but better at some future date. The sage Yogi Berra is supposed to have told his ballclub that predictions are difficult, especially about the future. His team had finished in last place and some thought the team had nowhere to go but up; but in fact they could—and did—remain in the cellar. Anyone entering a PhD program now would want to know what the job prospects will be 6-10 years from now when they start looking for a position. I don’t think that the job market will change for the better until and unless some of the reasons why it’s been increasingly poor change; and I don’t foresee that happening anytime within the next ten years. The graduate schools still produce many more ethnomusicologists with PhDs every year than there are decent academic jobs for them. Only if they cut back the size of their programs, or if fewer people make it all the way through to the PhD, or both, will the supply become more in line with the demand—if the demand for ethnomusicology professors stays roughly the same. But will it? 

     Probably not. On one hand, for the past forty-five years the number of colleges and universities with ethnomusicologists on their faculties has increased. The typical top and second-tier college now has one ethnomusicologist, while similar universities have at least one—more if they offer graduate degrees involving ethnomusicology. It’s not unusual to find them at third-tier colleges and universities either. But on the other hand, the typical academic job available for ethnomusicologists, as for other professors, now is a part-time or adjunct job, with low pay, no benefits, and no job security. Forty-five years ago, even twenty-five, the typical academic job was a full-time, tenure-track position, with better pay, full healthcare and retirement benefits, and the promise of lifetime job security if one earned tenure. What now? I don’t think that the number of institutions hiring ethnomusicologists will grow at the same pace as in the past 45 years, while I do think that the percentage of part-time and adjunct positions will continue to increase, simply because hiring adjuncts and part-timers, or full-time lecturers (also with lower salaries and without job security) enables a college to distribute its resources more flexibly elsewhere, whether in facilities, athletics, student support systems, or in shrinking the number of faculty teaching unpopular majors and expanding in those areas where there is more student demand. It also puts more money into the pot for student scholarships, and helps the institution offset reductions in financial appropriations from state government and gifts from private donors in an uncertain economy. 

    As I wrote earlier, the chief motivation for graduate school in ethnomusicology (as in the other arts, humanities, and social sciences) today ought to be a love of learning and a desire to spend several years learning and mastering a body of knowledge. But what then? The graduates, if they don’t get jobs as professors, can, with luck, become public ethnomusicologists—that is, put their knowledge and skills to work for the public good, employed by NGOs, or client organizations (private corporations) involved with music. Or they may become what is known as an “independent scholar,” doing their research and writing in their spare time for the love of it while employed in some tangentially related, or completely unrelated job—like the classic case of the actor who drives a cab (or these days, an Uber)—and hoping that they may some day be able to find a position that encourages their scholarship.

     Overall, a bleak picture. But if one is absolutely determined to go to graduate school in ethnomusicology, what then should one do? Apply only to the graduate programs most suitable for your particular interests, with the professors whose work you most admire. Once in the program, work diligently towards an understanding of ethnomusicology, its history, its theories, methods, techniques. Support the work of your professors and fellow graduate students and they will support yours. Take your time to find an original problem to work on for the PhD, one that you will love working on (because you are going to be with it for a long time) and one that has both narrow appeal to specialists yet will also interest most every ethnomusicologist and a portion of the general public as well. Read as much as you can in related fields such as anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, philosophy, literary theory, and so on that bear on the original problem you’re working on. Talk with scholars in these fields. Borrow ideas (but always credit the source) for inspiration, but do original work. Be generous in acknowledging the work of others; learn the art of critique through suggesting how this or that argument could be better, rather than by tearing it apart or, worse, attacking the person along with the argument. But don’t make a habit of giving props to others at all times, or your praise will become meaningless or even suspect. Be reasonable. Try not to be cynical, even though at times it will be hard not to be. There is more that can be said; indeed, books have been written on navigating one’s way through graduate school, including establishing and maintaining relationships with dissertation advisers, and so on; but that’s enough for here, and now.

     Finally, the annual rankings of the national universities have been updated once again on the US News and World Report website. Those with PhD programs in ethnomusicology are the only ones relevant to this discussion. Find out all you can about the graduate ethnomusicology programs in advance. Read the Society for Ethnomusicology’s guide to programs in ethnomusicology, available on their website—even though some entries are outdated. Look for those with PhD programs. Read each ethnomusicology PhD program’s self-descriptions on their university’s websites. (Some of them name the degree as one in ethnomusicology, some say music, some say musicology, some in various combinations.) When you find a program that seems interesting, look at the kind of research that students and professors in the program are doing. Read some of the professors' writing and see if it excites you. Narrow the list down to the four graduate programs that interest you the most. Visit the programs if you can afford to do so; consider it a good investment. Speak with the professors and graduate students to learn what it is like to be there. Some lower-ranked universities have programs and professors that are more suitable for particular students on account of their special strengths and emphases within the field of ethnomusicology, because these strengths and emphases match up well with what the student wants to study. Among the top twenty ranked universities, nine have PhD programs in ethnomusicology. Some excellent programs also exist at lower-tier universities: for example, Virginia and Michigan (tied at 27), NYU and the University of California at Santa Barbara (tied at 30), Illinois (46), Washington (59), Florida State and Pittsburgh (tied at 70), SUNY at Stony Brook (80), and Indiana (89). 

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.

Going to Graduate School in Ethnomusicology?

[Updated Sept. 2017]    
   Daniel Drezner, a Tufts professor of political science, has been writing opinion pieces in the Washington Post and elsewhere offering advice to students who seek college and university teaching careers. Professors traditionally have sustained higher education (and themselves) by reproducing their kind through professional training in graduate school, leading to the PhD degree. More broadly, music education (formal and informal) sustains music cultures from one generation to the next. Today, as I’ve remarked here before, higher education (and the professoriate), as it has existed in the US for more than a hundred years, is in jeopardy. What else should undergraduate students who’d like to become ethnomusicology professors know about the future of that profession and their chances of being a part of it? I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s see what Drezner has to say. Like ethnomusicology, political science (despite having the word science in its name) falls outside of the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math)  getting the most support in educational institutions these days. The non-STEM subjects aren’t as popular as they once were, not because students don't like them, but because the public believes they’re not cost-effective career preparation. In other words, students graduating with high loan debt (as so many do today) are thought best served by specializing in STEM subjects because they're more likely to get a well-paying job. It's easy to make fun of the non-STEM major who winds up repeating "Would you like that for here, or to go?"--but back in the day the argument ran that a liberal arts major was best prepared as a citizen and human being for leadership or for professional school afterward. Today that argument is no longer as effective as it once was, though it's no less true.
    In 2012 Drezner wrote a column advising would-be graduate students in political science how to tailor their preparation, applications, and behavior toward getting into the school of their choice. Evidently at that time, he must have thought a PhD was a wise choice. But his most recent columns suggest that no one should enter graduate school in political science unless (a) they’re accepted to the top graduate programs (he does not name them), because otherwise they’ll never get hired as a professor after they graduate; and (b) their primary motivation is to learn, and they won’t be too disappointed if they can never find a full-time job as a political science professor anyway. The job market for political science PhDs hasn’t suddenly soured in the last three years. It was just as sour three, ten, twenty years ago. But Drezner now seems to be discouraging those he once encouraged. At least he’s not giving them false hope. He should know: in 2006 he was fired after having been denied tenure at the University of Chicago. But he landed on his feet and accepted a tenured position at Tufts, where he is now a full professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as well as a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor for the Washington Post.
    Thirty years earlier I was certain that I would be denied tenure. Although my PhD was in American studies and my specialization was in ethnomusicology, I had the MA in English and elected to join an English department. My first fulltime teaching job began in 1971 in a tenure-track position at Tufts, Drezner’s current university. I was teaching American literature and folklore and, after a couple of years, on released time from English I also was teaching an ethnomusicology course in the music department. Although my dissertation was published by a respectable university press, I thought my interests were peripheral to the mission of both departments. Then to my great good fortune I won a year's fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a second book project. This was a rare honor, and it came during the year of my tenure review. I realized that even if Tufts denied me, that honor would help me obtain a good academic position elsewhere. But in 1977 Tufts decided to award me tenure in a joint appointment as associate professor of English and associate professor of music. Now half my teaching load would be in each department, while I could pursue my research interests in both fields.
    In 1979 after my NEH fellowship leave I returned to Tufts and was made Director of Graduate Studies in English. Up for debate soon afterwards, not at my initiative, was whether as a faculty we should continue our Ph.D. program in English literature. The job market for English professors had become difficult, tenure even more so. Our PhD graduates were not getting the multiple offers or good jobs they had been getting five years earlier; in fact, some were getting none at all, and the future looked bad as the economy took a turn for the worse. Colleges and universities, expanding in the 1960s and hiring more and more faculty, had reversed course. Was it ethically responsible for us to continue the degree? Some said no; but others argued it would be unethical to stop it because that would cheapen the degree for those who already held it. No one doubted that we had a good program; but it was not at the same level as Harvard’s and Yale’s—we didn’t have the resources, and Tufts didn’t have the reputation. We met several times to discuss the question and after a few months we voted. If I recall right, there was one more vote in favor of keeping the program than for eliminating it. Predictably, those in favor took it as a vote to continue, while those opposed took it as a vote of no-confidence and argued that we should therefore drop the program. But majority ruled, the program continued, and over the years fewer and fewer graduates received academic jobs in English. At about that time, I started telling prospective applicants not to apply unless they understood that their job prospects would be uncertain. It was a disclaimer similar to Drezner’s advice today. And now Drezner repeats it, from the same university platform, but the difference is that it’s 35 years later; and also, of course, that he’s directing it into the public sphere. And on this platform I do the same.
    I guess that the job market in political science in 1980 wasn't significantly better than it was in English. I suppose it’s the same today, if not worse on account of the proliferation of adjuncts. When I moved to Brown in 1986 to direct their PhD program in ethnomusicology, though, my responsibilities were both greater and different. For the next 27 years I supervised dozens of doctoral dissertations, advised dozens of Ph.D. students, and in addition to teaching large undergraduate lecture courses and some smaller ones, I regularly taught one graduate seminar each semester, rotating topics that included the history of ethnomusicological thought, music and cultural policy, ethnographic film, fieldwork theory and methods, and others. Now I was wholly in a music department and I was concerned about the future of music studies and the prospects for PhD graduates in ethnomusicology. Like English and political science, music was experiencing contraction rather than growth in one college and university after another, but I was in a subfield (ethnomusicology) that was expanding, however gradually, in a zero-sum game. In short, the fortunes of certain subfields can improve even while the field as a whole is in decline. In the 1980s and 1990s humanistic anthropology was in the ascendance, but today the pendulum is moving back toward scientific anthropology. Ethnomusicology has been able to profit from cultural trends that some other fields have not: pluralism and diversity, for one, and the rising popularity of world music for another. Today, with many years of hindsight, I understand that although there were better and worse periods for jobs in ethnomusicology during the past 40 years, overall the number of ethnomusicology professorships greatly increased during that period, while other positions in music decreased. Last year saw more ethnomusicology job openings than usual; this year may be worse. Still, the supply today well exceeds the demand for college and university professors of ethnomusicology. Additionally, the proportion of tenure-track job openings has declined, while universities now hire a higher percentage of part-time and adjunct professors.
    How would I advise today’s student looking to obtain a doctoral degree in ethnomusicology? I still believe that anyone wishing to enter graduate school must first consider the pleasures of mastering a body of knowledge, technique, and application, as an end in itself. How much of a reward would that mastery be, apart from a good academic job (or any academic job at all)? Would it be a joy to spend most of your time learning and satisfying your intellectual curiosities, or a lot of work doing enormous amounts of reading, writing long papers, and toiling on projects large and small, some for the benefit of the musical communities where you've been doing your fieldwork? Does making a contribution to the storehouse of knowledge and theories about people making music all over the world excite you? Does applied ethnomusicology appeal to your sense of social responsibility? Tenure-track faculty positions open up each year even now, but I estimate there are five times as many qualified ethnomusicologists looking as there are positions for them. And many more apply who are not qualified. Outside of colleges and universities, positions for ethnomusicologists do exist: in museums, in other non-profit organizations, NGOs, arts councils, and the like; but most of these should require only the MA, not the PhD. It’s possible, also, to take that mastery and work in the music industry, or as an author and journalist. Graduate work in ethnomusicology may be combined with a degree in library science in order to prepare for a career as a music archivist. One may become an entrepreneur in the world music field, making films and producing recordings, though of course an ethnomusicology degree is not a prerequisite. I’m not aware of any MA programs in ethnomusicology tailored for these public and private sector jobs outside of academia, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in five or ten years a few enterprising universities established them.
    Drezner writes that to have any chance at an academic career in political science today, it’s necessary to go to a top-tier university for graduate work. About twenty US universities meet this criterion, he says. These would for the most part correspond to the top twenty in the US News and World Report's annual overall rankings of research universities. Brown is ranked 14th there; Tufts is 29th. But while most of those top twenty US universities have PhD programs in political science, only nine of them have a doctoral program with a specialization in ethnomusicology. Some excellent ethnomusicology PhD programs exist at lower-tier research universities: for example, at UCLA (ranked 21st), Michigan (ranked 28th), NYU (ranked 30th), California--Santa Barbara (ranked 37th), Illinois (ranked 52nd), Washington (ranked 56th), Texas (also 56th), Pittsburgh (ranked 68th), Florida State (ranked 81st), and Indiana (ranked 90th).
     Instead of choosing a graduate program in ethnomusicology on the basis of the university’s reputation, then, it’s best for applicants to read widely in ethnomusicology to find the professors they want to work with. Then apply not necessarily to the universities with the best overall reputations, but where those professors teach, planning to study with them. In my view, an ethnomusicologist with a Ph.D. from Florida State does not have a significant disadvantage on the academic job market compared with a student from, say, Columbia (one of the top-tier universities). Still, those I named plus those in the top 20 US universities overall make nearly 20 doctoral programs in ethnomusicology, and taken together they're graduating more PhDs each year than there are academic jobs, while the previous years' graduates who remain un- or under-employed also are still looking. It's harder for them to find a tenure-track academic job than to find a publisher for their dissertation. The reverse was true in the 20th century.
     To conclude, one bit of miscellaneous advice: sometimes, musicians having a hard time making ends meet think a graduate degree in ethnomusicology will provide a day job for their musical career. I believe they should think again, because graduate work is so time-consuming it doesn’t leave enough time to sustain a musical career, let alone to keep performance skills at a high enough level even to have one.
       

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.