Accreditation versus education is an issue/situation that continues to germinate in our country today. Our future posterity is based solely on the whims and needs of corporate America, or so it seems.
Let’s take a look at the demise of our education system as seen by several Philadelphia college professors, shall we?
There is a lot of hope. “Something is going to change,” says Randy LoBasso of teacher Debra Leigh Scott. “We have reached a tipping point, we have lost consciousness!” She says that the ability to transmit knowledge is a very big thing to lose. Nobody seems to be able to understand the importance of what it means to lose the ability to correctly transmit knowledge to another, especially to a younger person, to students in particular. Is there a winner? Is there someone, something, some entity that will benefit from the death of education?
The American Association of University Professors, in a report, found that between 1975 and 2003, the number of permanent positions in higher education fell from 56.8% to 35.1%, according to LoBasso. About one million professors across the country have the skills to teach up to eleven classes per college semester at any number of schools. The (above) number of classes can seem like a huge workload: with the $3,000-per-class paycheck, could any teacher make ends meet? The decline of full-time professorships, since the 1970s, has slapped many teachers with a reality check.
The report goes on to point out the realization of students who have to resort to email exchanges between teacher and student. “Students have little or no personal access to faculty beyond the classroom,” says the professor interviewed. Says Scott: “The student learning under the tutelage of an overburdened professor may be in a worse situation: being taught by dedicated but debased professors who have no offices, who are hired semester by semester by today’s colleges and universities by salaries lower than the employees’ paychecks”. K-Mart or McDonald’s.
Professor Scott shares these sentiments based on the current report and the experience of a blog chronicling someone else’s work at various universities in the Greater Philadelphia area. “We are all being screwed over by corporate universities, where the needs of students and the value of faculty are minimized in the pursuit of profit, profit that benefits no one.
The Death of “Student-Faculty-Administration Relations at American University” (i.e., “Planned Disenfranchisement; Interdepartmental Communication Conspiracy: Failure or Simple Mistake?” Says Scott, August 18, 2007 , is based on casual workers and outsourcing, just like a US corporation The professor and an associate said they have found evidence of corporations moving in and taking over what is taught in college and university classrooms Lots of cutbacks Drastic and deep cuts in state educational grants and budgets have forced universities to rely more and more on corporate donations; they come with contingents… with strings. Corporate chain holders want research subjects for drug companies, making large donations that are tax deductible, then guide graduate students in conducting research ones at the request of said corporations. Students inadvertently become underpaid or unpaid labor on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies.
After graduating and being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (and according to the Financial Aid Organization’s Student Loan Debt Clock, about $88.2 billion is owed) they become frightened robots, slaves dutiful workers who can only find work with the same corporations that have financed the labs, buildings, and scholarships of the schools they attend.
The circumstances of this created culture in which “cheating and laziness” by both students and teachers have become the norm in recent years. It is also perpetuated by the outsourcing climate and its reliance on colleges and universities that make hiring and financial decisions. Today, online businesses that base their existence and continuance on writing student papers have become extremely industrialized players. These companies make millions upon thousands of dollars by cheating: they create so-called original essays based on specific instructions provided by other cheating student writing. A pseudonymous author stated in an ‘Inside Higher Education’ article: “You’d be surprised at the incompetence of students’ writing. I’ve seen the word ‘desperate’ misspelled every way you can imagine, and these students… They don’t write a compelling shopping list, yet they’re in grad school.”
Damn… and you thought I was bad at the high school level, huh?
In a separate interview, a college faculty member in Cleveland commented, “I have to believe the university system can be saved. I have kids, and I’m not going to sit idly by and watch their educational future disappear.” In other words, the dead raising the dead.
Experience gets you nowhere these days. Over the past twenty years, another college professor says that while working as a part-time English professor at various Philadelphia-area colleges, she found time to publish a book and provide editing, writing and corporate consulting services to business clients. She has even written plays, which were eventually produced. Although, when the market crashed in 2008, her resume was not enough. She lost her fancy suburban home and had to move into an apartment with strangers. She found an apartment listing site on the Internet. “I was like a lot of people, she says she, you think you’re going to find a full-time position, you really think it’s going to happen, then you realize it’s not going to happen…it’s a horrible day.”
Years ago as I reflect on this writing, as a struggling student at CCP, I had the opportunity to come across one of those part-timers who was assigned to teach English 101. I knew that as an overworked person, this teacher was stressed. . The teacher even made up and announced to the class that she had several run-ins with students of Color. She went on to say that the aforementioned group had threatened her. This particular teacher also demonstrated that she was conflicted, biased, and disillusioned based on her experiences with ethnic groups. This woman actually accused me of plagiarizing a paper I submitted for a writing assignment. Now, how does one plagiarize oneself? I submitted an English essay from a previous class, in which I received an ‘A’. I wrote the article for an assignment for another class at school: a business class. The document was based on an experience encountered during my tenure in the transportation industry. It was a good rehearsal, I must admit. Needless to say, I did not pass his English 101 course. I suffered the first, only and last ‘F’ in a series of A’s, B’s throughout my college career… because of racism! The complaints were, of course, filed in vain.
English compositions were always a strong point for me at school, from elementary to high school. In my opinion, we must go back to the basics of education at all levels, starting with kindergarten, or we will face an endless trend towards the educational graveyard and come last when compared to the educational world at large. .
Until next time…