John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the philanthrocaptalist makeover of Tulsa University. A tale of our times.
Surely we can agree with The Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbiel, who says that the faculty and administration “disagree bitterly … about whether that transformation will be good or bad for the university.”
Krehbiel provides plenty of space for the case made by T.U. President Gerry Clancy and the city’s philanthropists. Its supporters cite economic challenges, as well an opportunity for new revenue from courses that include cyber and health sciences. They claim that the plan is “not etched in stone,” and that it can evolve as the faculty weighs in.
Even so, Kreibiel reports, “a large number of students and alumni are furious about not only the plan itself but the manner in which it was developed … The Arts and Sciences faculty voted 89-4 not to implement True Commitment.” He also cites the participation of EAB, an education consulting firm. EAB’s role is unknown, but such secrecy is likely to be one reason why Krehbiel closed with a faculty member’s words, “I don’t think anyone is really optimistic.”
To get really pessimistic, read Jacob Howland’ articles in the Nation and City Journal magazines. He acknowledges the role of local philanthropies, especially the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), in “early-childhood education, delivering health care to indigent families, and making Tulsa more vibrant and economically robust.”
GKFF spent $350 million on Tulsa’s new Gathering Place, the largest private gift to a public park in US history. The foundation has invested more than $100 million in the Tulsa Arts District since 2009. It is the major funder of early-childhood education in the state, and has spent more than $20 million in Tulsa alone on Educare early-childhood education centers.
But Howland suggests that the GKFF has overreached:
It has also pursued a strategy of populating city boards and commissions. In 2017, GKFF staff members headed the Tulsa school board and the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, and had seats on the Economic Development Commission, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust, and the Tulsa City Council. For the past two years, a Bank of Oklahoma executive has chaired the board of directors of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Howland concludes, “the True Commitment restructuring were all part of Kaiser’s plan to gain control of the university.” And he argues that “TU’s administration has employed smashmouth tactics in dealing with faculty opposition to True Commitment.”
I’ve long admired the great job Tulsa edu-philanthropists have done in early education, “two generation” family supports, and criminal justice reform, and I’ve often asked GFKK leaders why they have also supported their opposite – the data-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms that have failed so badly in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). I’ve repeatedly urged an open and balanced, evidence-driven public discussion of the TPS, which is led by the notorious teacher- and union-basher, Deborah Gist.
I was then saddened when the GKFF even joined with the Bloomberg and Walton foundations in funding “portfolio management” directors to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools,” and “in the future, implement ‘new school models resulting from incubation efforts of the district.’” I was later stunned to learn that Stacy Schusterman donated almost $200,000 to California union-busting, teacher-bashing campaigns.
I would now urge Tulsa philanthropists to follow the links cited by journalists and educators and see if the EAB consultants have evidence to support the policies they promote, and then ask whether the values EAB proclaims are worthy of universities in our democracy.
Nowhere on the EAB website, is there any evidence that it’s approach is beneficial to students or society. EAB’s sales pitch certainly doesn’t sound like it has an appropriate role to play in higher education. On the contrary, its claim to fame is being the “brand police.” But how would its “integrated brand strategy” be able to coexist with the founding principles of universities, and their commitment to the clash of ideas? How could a commitment to academic freedom coexist with EAB brand “that all departments, schools, and colleges were onboard with.”
Its blog proclaims:
At EAB we have an ongoing fascination with organizational charts. (Really, we do.) Org charts can tell a story about a university’s strategy, its priorities, and how it gets things done. And when positions start moving on an org chart, we take notice. The latest example: The rise of the strategic marketing and communications (marcom) leader.
The most advanced marcom departments are strategic marketing partners and get involved in everything from institutional branding to admissions to fundraising. And to make sure that there’s a single source of marketing and advertising truth, they function like an in-house ad agency—their clients are departments, colleges, and offices around campus.
But universities aren’t a corporation where everyone is supposed to be on the same page in the search for a single “marketing and advertising truth.” To take one example, tenure protects the clash of ideas. But, EAB’s approach to “‘what you measure matters’” is a “mentality” that “sparks some ambivalence in academia to put it lightly.” So, how do you reconcile the scholarly and the business advertising mentalities? EAB’s response to tenure is:
One solution is to adopt academic metrics that also capture research effort. These metrics can include:
• The number of proposals or papers submitted
• The dollar amount of proposals
• Proportion of funding from different sources
• Benchmarks for the success rates of proposals and papers
Finally, I have enjoyed many conversations with Tulsa philanthropy leaders at events where they assembled talented professors from the O.U. and O.S.U. medical schools. Even though we disagreed on corporate school reform, I’m sure we would share our respect for those medical professionals who are battling the opioid epidemic. We would likely agree that privatization was a major contributor to the deaths of thousands of people in Oklahoma and across the nation.
I hope that philanthropists, who I am confident will contribute to the battle against opioid addiction, will ask a basic question. How many Oklahomans would still be alive and well if it was university medical professors who educated doctors about painkillers, as opposed to the drug companies’ sales reps who would misrepresent medical science in the name of “so-called unbranded promotion?” In times like these, should we not rally behind the principles which drive our universities’ search for knowledge, as opposed to something called “brand equity,” “integrated brand strategy” or whatever profit-seeking consultants spin?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“It is the major funder of early-childhood education in the state, and has spent more than $20 million in Tulsa alone on Educare early-childhood education centers.”
Take a gander at Educare’s website: https://www.educareschools.org/our-approach/
I’m seeing an awful lot of carefully worded vague platitudes about “science” and “research” and “empowering” kids to “do their best work” (work?! infants, toddlers and preschoolers? work???) and a lot more about “data”, but I’m not seeing word one about play or nurturing or other such like things. I’d bet my eyeball they’re involved in some kind of “pay for success” venture.
When you find “charities” and “philanthropists” “overreaching” in one area, it’s generally safe to bet that their “good works” in other areas are scams too. It’s not about generosity, it’s about control. I’d be willing to bet their “gift” to the public park and their “investment” in the arts come with a lot of unpleasant side effects too.
There are a slew of carefully crafted promotions that target the young, tech-savvy crowd that prove your point. The park, the Dylan Museum, and other “gifts” to the city were calculated investments designed to attract a certain type of person to Tulsa. It is all about control, and making Tulsa – recently designated as a TechHire city – an engine to feed the big data, e-commerce, predictive analytics beast.
Yes, thank you. After I posted I looked up the park and started to wonder if I was being too cynical. It does look like a nice place. But, yes, it is definitely targeted to a certain demographic to create a certain image and, as you say, “attract a certain type of person to Tulsa”.
The Board Chair of CAEP is Karen Gallagher, Dean of the ed department at USC (a scandal ridden university). Repeatedly, Gallagher was requested by an outsider to include her Fellowship in the Gates-funded Pahara Institute in her bio at the university site, which she has finally done. Pahara was founded by the same person who founded or/co-founded New Schools Venture Fund, TFA and Bellwether. Both the AFT and NEA have Board seats which suggests they approved of Gallagher as chair.
CAEP’s board chair, Gallagher, was in Kansas (Koch country) before USC. Fordham Institute has long had a huge footprint in Ohio education policy. Gallagher was also involved in an education improvement project in Ohio. I don’t know what her suggestions were or how much of her work was implemented.
The Ohio situation today is Ohioans have been fleeced out of hundreds of millions by charter schools. The taxpayers are forced to pay an estimated $50,000,000 to $130,000,000 to vouchers which provide no better outcomes. (Fordham, to its dismay, paid for the Figlio study that proved that result.)
Given Ohio’s national reputation as an education grifters’ paradise, if I had been attached to the state’s education policy in any context, I would omit it from my resume.
Great line: Ohio, the Education Grifters’ Paradise.
I think then Memphis is their Mecca.
Diane True Commitment to WHAT . . . ? But this post should be labeled: “The Cancer Grows Internationally.”
I recently wrote a response to an article (see below) in “Inside Higher Education.” The article is quite well-written but questions the ” The Subordination of Private to Public Universities in Panama” that is written into their Constitution. My response and the link are below these snips from your post here:
“But Howland suggests that the GKFF has overreached: It has also pursued a strategy of populating city boards and commissions. . . . Howland concludes, the True Commitment restructuring were all part of Kaiser’s plan to gain control of the university.’ And he argues that ‘TU’s administration has employed smashmouth tactics in dealing with faculty opposition to True Commitment.’ . . . Nowhere on the EAB website, is there any evidence that it’s approach is beneficial to students or society. . . . How could a commitment to academic freedom coexist with EAB brand ‘that all departments, schools, and colleges were onboard with.’”
My edited response/CBK:
“The point in either public or private institutions is to watch out for the big and well-organized donors who bypass their own tax payments, and the institutions that protect democracy, to covertly use their wealth to buy power and to promote their personal agendas. . . . they also take the labels “private” and “autonomous” to cover for their arbitrary influence to (1) develop their own curricula and, over the long-term, (2) to eliminate curricula that doesn’t match their agenda. (Examples: the Koch Brothers, Gates, the Waltons)
“Privatization need not, but too-easily can strike at the core of an open-education in a democratic commonwealth environment, where all questions are okay-to-raise. With private and corporate interests in charge, students can raise questions, EXCEPT when they are about the owners’ or corporations’ products, methods, political, social, and/or religious agenda, etc. (That’s why private companies and corporations abhor and commonly lobby against unions, and why they want to kill the free press–anyone who raises questions against their personal agenda.
“Public universities are not immune to corruption. And privatization need not breed it; however, privacy tends to breed a nefarious underground much easier by providing a hiding place for well-heeled but bad actors; and then to adopt Orwellian methods: to use the good language of public/democratic intentions as propaganda for destroying the vibrancy of democracies in their slow and methodical way.”
THE ARTICLE in Inside Higher Ed:
“The Subordination of Private to Public Universities in Panama. By assigning public universities the responsibility of supervising private universities, Panama’s constitution assumes that public universities are intrinsically better than private universities and that public universities have the capacity to undertake this supervisory function appropriately. By Ivan Pacheco/September 4, 2019
“Panama’s private universities are subordinated to public universities. According to Article 99 of the Constitution “the Official University of the State shall supervise the degrees of private universities officially approved, to guarantee the degrees they use, and shall revalidate those of foreign universities in the cases established by law.” This formula was introduced in 1972 and it has already survived four Constitutional reforms. . . . Normative Review.” CBK
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/subordination-private-public-universities-panama
Interesting topic. Is Inside Higher Ed known for a privatization slant? I note on wiki “Quad Partners has a controlling interest in the publication.” QP’s website says they’re a private equity firm seeking investment opportunities with education businesses.
The article’s thesis is a strawman. “By assigning public universities the responsibility of supervising private universities, Panama’s constitution assumes that public universities are intrinsically better than private universities and that public universities have the capacity to undertake this supervisory function appropriately.”
The “assumptions” are the author’s, & betray simplistic ideological credence in the superiority of free-market forces over govtl regulation. Panama’s constitution [& as he acknowledges, other LA nations’– (& most likely other nations’)– constitution simply provides for public oversight of accreditation. Obviously the intention is to develop “appropriate capacity to perform this supervisory function.” No doubt there are intl examples of success in such an undertaking, it is not something precluded by the author’s pro-private-biz prejudice.
This could be viewed as a phase in the history of a relatively young nation’s devpt: Panama separated from Colombia in 1903 [their 1st college was founded soon after]; higher-ed enrollment didn’t really take off until 1960’s-’80’s; their experience dictated the need for central oversight. I agree w/ Pacheco here: “Of course the private higher education institutions cannot operate without control or regulation but they must be allowed to participate as peers in the process of developing quality standards and developing national strategy for sustainable development.” That probably can be accomplished w/o a constitutional amendment.
When corporate deformers take over education, HORRORS abound in all kinds of ways .. corporate deformers raise tuition, get rid of good faculty, and pull down HUGE salaries. I saw this happen right before my own eyes. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Making of an Aristocratic Pecking Order
But first, they have to get rid of the U.S. Constitution so it has less meaning than a roll of toilet paper.
That why this is another “formula” to get rid of the people being part of the decision making through their votes and turning that city into an oligarchy ruled by a few people without the titles that come with royalty … until there is no more Constitutional Republic and then the 0.1 percent will elect a king or emperor, and “he” will decide who the Barons will be, the Viscounts, the Earls, the Marquesses, and the Dukes.
Lloyd Lofthouse “But first, they have to get rid of the U.S. Constitution so it has less meaning than a roll of toilet paper.” Don’t worry about it–Trump is doing that as we speak. CBK
I know Trump is doing his worst to subvert the U.S. Constitution and turn it into a meaningless document. And he is getting help from Moscow Mitch and most of the Republican Party, too.
And some of “their” recent language is designed to justify them shooting us.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=branding&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbranding%3B%2Cc0
Branding is big buisness and it is THE in-thing for higher education. And it is getting silly. The Ohio State University is in a dustup trying to secure the word THE as part of the official brand name of The Ohio State University,
Under its “True Commitment” Tulsa University is eliminating many degree programs in the arts, education and social sciences. For example, it is possible to get a bachelor’s degree in education, but the master’s program has been eliminated. This presumably will prepare students, not just for the 21st century. It will prepare them for the 22nd century as well! They must have a crystal ball to make that claim. For a full list of eliminated courses, you can use this link.https://utulsa.edu/truecommitment/reprioritizing-reallocating-resources/
Ten years ago, the Gates Foundation (“All your base belong to us.”) did a study that showed no correlation between K-12 teachers’ advanced degrees and scores on their students’ standardized tests, so the word went out to all Vichy swinish collaborators with Ed Deform that advanced degrees for teachers were worthless. Who needs educated teachers when you can just replace them with TFA robots with five weeks’ training or with depersonalized education software? The less training of teachers, the better, for they will be more compliant, more willing to do all test prep all the time.
Bob, many advanced degrees from Schools of Education ARE almost worthless, don’t you think? A MA in English or history on the other hand…
I’m not ready to dismiss EVERYTHING that is taught in Education Schools, Ponderosa, though there are certainly some complete frauds in them. But there are also some superb statisticians, some experts in child development, some cognitive psychologists of learning, some historians of education, some experts in education law, etc. These are all substantive fields of study.
My undergraduate methods prof from years ago, Vernon Smith, actually taught me a lot of news I could use. Practical stuff for the classroom.
I think Ponderosa was being sarcastic.
Linda – doubt it. Ponderosa has absolute contempt for anything other than back-to-basics “knowledge” based “teaching” (lecturing). S/he believes modern education to be a cesspool of horrid OMG progressive, constructivist education that is ruining our country.
In others words, educators should have less education.
Yes, that is pretty indicative of the overall quality of Ed Deform “Thought Leadership.”
This is what we get when the 1% decides curricula. We get to study what the oligarchs feel is important, not us. Teachers only need a bachelor’s degree because the business people will be administrators that will come in to crack the whip. BTW, True Commitment sounds like a cult.
“It will prepare them for the 22nd century as well!”
Interestingly, how many people alive today will make it to 2100, unless “they” the oligarchs are planning to clone their slaves to squeeze more blood out of us or keep us working matter how long we live? Image, a 115-year-old still slogging away at a cash register in a Wal-Mart because the oligarchs get what they want, no more social security, no more retirement programs, no more Medicare, no more unemployment, no more food stamps, no more section 8 housing — just slaves living in little rooms that only the oligarchs own because the working class can’t afford to buy their own place anymore for the poverty wages they will keep paying every worker until they drop dead.
Perhaps the Tulsa’s Education Department losing accreditation in 2017 was a factor in the decision to shut down the MA program in education. Undergraduates can still seek alternative forms of certification, but would an MA from an unaccredited program give a teacher a salary bump?
See https://artsandsciences.utulsa.edu/education/
I think it’s possible that the accreditation fiasco with TU’s education dept was actually related to the TruCom plan. The person who was in charge of the accreditation process is well-connected with the groups mentioned in this article. TU’s education dept had to be crippled in order to place more Teach for America teachers in Tulsa Public Schools classrooms.
Juliannne,
If you haven’t read the work at aWrenchintheGears.com you should.
The blog’s author exposes the richest 0.1%’s plan to solidify their control. The Stanford Social Innovation Review, the mouthpiece of villainthropists, confirms the blog’s contention. The Little Sis site pulls together in graphics the interrelated networks taking control of America.
What a perfect, billionaire “screw you” to democracy.
They set up a education grad school that has no faculty. Then, make sure, through their network, that its graduates get hired. They, then devise accreditation standards calling for data about successful employment following graduation. And, they delete requirements for faculty in the colleges that confer masters degrees. Billionaires stacking the deck to create winners and losers.
Linda That’s the playbook. The call is to ‘UN’- . . . as in George Mason’s student call to “unKoch my campus.” Un-Screw Our Educational Institutions.” CBK
“marketing and advertising truth”
This is a phrase up there with Senate Ethics Committee, the education of Donald Trump, and personalized education software
I can just see the ads now: new, fresher, long-lasting, all-natural credentials, now in the convenient six-course pack!
Reminds me of the old “shortest books ever written” jokes.
“President Gerry Clancy and the city’s philanthropists. Its supporters cite economic challenges, as well an opportunity for new revenue from courses that include cyber and health sciences. They claim that the plan is “not etched in stone,” and that it can evolve as the faculty weighs in.
”
Sounds similar to what hear at my university.
“To get really pessimistic, read Jacob Howland’ articles in the Nation and City Journal magazines. ”
Howland is truly a brave man for daring to critisize publicly his private university.
The lined EAB article by Rachel Tanner is a terrifingly uninformed (but typical in this genre) read. Here is the expanded version of the proposed tenure metric with its motivation
Over the past few years, the tech sector brought the concept of psychological safety out of management textbooks and into the popular consciousness. The idea behind psychological safety is that employees who feel safe at work—who know they can fail at something without adverse impact on their compensation or job safety—will take more risks and stretch in new directions, in small ways and big. Incentive structures that measure productivity only in terms of output, like the total value of grant money awarded, can undermine faculty members’ willingness to take risks.
One solution is to adopt academic metrics that also capture research effort. These metrics can include:
The number of proposals or papers submitted
The dollar amount of proposals
Proportion of funding from different sources
Benchmarks for the success rates of proposals and papers
One of the millions of questions is: How do the proposed metrics provide psychological safety?
The author identifies correctly an important motivation for tenure and academic work, namely the protection of academic freedom, and then her proposal shows a complete lack of understanding of academic work.
By the way, the teaching evaluation metics (VAM derivatives) used in K-12 have the same flaw: they tie the teachers’ hand, and make them break out in cold sweat.
Btw, EAB also works in K.12.
https://eab.com/about/
And I now see that EAB also does work at my university.
Dienne77, I looked at their video on educare’s front page.
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of these videos around, and they are all the same. This one got 800 views in 4 years, and the viewership of the others are similar. In other words, basically nobody watches these vids. I wonder how much they paid to the company to make the vid.
I know several universities, research institutions, hospitals, schools that create whole “communication/outreach” departments and offices which then make employees participate in such meaningless videos.
The Foundations of Bloomberg (self-identified as God) and Gates … “announce Tulsa to join new initiative…” 6-18-2019.
The Sacklers and Pharma meet Bloomberg and Gates carving their share of national assets. It’s what oligarchs do.
Tulsa, a case study for corporations looking to bring back the paternalistic company towns of yore:
1.Corporate money flows into void created by great recession, huge drop in oil&gas revenues, & state policy of corporate tax-cuts + austerity budgeting.
2.City now owes a big chunk of its “public goods” to the benificence of Kaiser: huge new park facility, thriving arts district, early-childhood education.
3.GKFF (Kaiser) uses that clout to go after Tulsa’s higher-ed anchor next, placing its people in key decision-making positions to grab control of its endowment. The plan: re-make the university into a sort of “Kaiser Institute”, replacing its institutional democracy w/ corporate-style top-down-mandated mission/ goals/ “brand.”
Company towns declined in the first part of the 20th C mainly as a result of increased national prosperity. The reappearance of corporate-run fiefdoms—like our galloping degree of income inequality—reveals that contrary to glowing stats, our pie has shrunk.
GKFF’s uni takeover seems a stupid move. Even the foundations established by our rapacious handful of Gilded Age scions were relatively hands-off in the running of the cultural institutions they benefited. Perhaps they had the foresight and humility to recognize that industry feeds off the innovative ideas bred in a rich cultural environment not of their design– and in free-thinking universities where “the clash of ideas” (academic freedom) is unlimited by ‘branding’ et al mundane biz concepts.
Bethree5,
Do you know that the University of Tulsa is, and has always been, a private university?
Private or not, a university’s mission is never about executing corporate aganedas. EAP, on the other hand, is about transforming a university to serve corporations by doing research for them, and produce workers for them.
EAP is working for my university too, which is public.
Yes I did, & I consider access to private U ed untethered by corporate control a public good.
Tulsa will become as scary a corporate-owned town as Bentonville, Ark.
Yeah. I wonder who or what will protect the University.
I think the University of Tulsa is just trying to survive. It enrolls 4,400 students and offered 196 degree programs, or a degree program for every 23 students. Does that seem sensible? They also expect enrollment to decline in the coming years.
It has been offering undergraduate, MA, and PhD degrees in mathematics with what appears to be a 13 person department (that seems to be the permanent faculty with professorial rank). Do you think that is enough faculty to support those degree programs.
Why wouldn’t 13 permanent faculty be enough? The university with 4500 students has an over $1 billion in endowment and it has survival problems? And even if does have survival issues, why is corporatization the solution?
Btw, corporatization and privatization are always presented to be necessary after they convince the students, faculty, parents, survival is at stake.
Corporatization saves the day every time. Without it, we’d live in caves and be eating mud.
I did a little more digging and found the first destination reports.Here is a list of degree programs graduated three or fewer students in 2017-18. The number of graduates for the 2017-18 is given in parentheses.
BA
Arts Management (2)
Designed Area (2)
Elementary Education (3)
French (3)
German (1)
Philosophy (3)
Religion (1)
Russian Studies (1)
Theatere (1)
Women’s and Gender Studies (3)
Biosciences (1)
Computer Simulation and Gaming (1)
Engineering Physics (2)
Geophysics (3)
Information Technology (1)
MA
Anthropology (3)
English Language and Literature (1)
Master of Teaching Arts (1)
Doctor of Physiology (3)
Biochemistry (1)
Biological Sciences (3)
Cyber Security (1)
Geophysics (1)
Mathematics (2)
Physics (1)
Athletic Training (2)
Museum Science and Management (3)
PhD
Chemistry (3)
Computer Science (1)
Mathematics (1)
Mechanical Engineering (2)
Physics (1)
Some of these, of course, could be cobbled together across departments. Engineering Physics, for example is probably a set of courses that the engineering and physics departments would offer even if there was no Engineering Physics degree program. Others, however, require a significant level of resources be devoted to the degree program.
First Destination Report: https://35ht6t2ynx0p1ztf961h81r1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/First-Destination-Report-2017-2018.pdf
Who cares?
You are congenitally argumentative.
Yup, graduation rates are perfect indicators of the health of a university program, and hence they should decide between life and death for them. I hear this every day from our privatizing admins, so it must be true. Also, only those research are valuable which bring in cash to the university; the more $ a prof brings in, the better the quality of her research is.
Hopefully, you won’t argue with the above.
Mate Wierdl,
The University of Tulsa’s course catalog lists 47 undergraduate and 31 graduate courses in mathematics. Your university’s course catalog lists 87 undergraduate and 234 graduate courses in mathematics (I am counting topics courses with different numbers as different courses for both institutions). Both institutions offer undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in mathematics.
Would you recommend any of your undergraduate mathematics majors attend graduate school at the University of Tulsa?
Why do you argue with everyone all the time? Why are you so unpleasant?
TE,
The Tulsa Metro Area has a population of almost one million according to the 2015 US Census. Tulsa also has 15 institutions of higher education, including two private universities: the University of Tulsa, a school founded in 1894, and Oral Roberts University, a school founded by evangelist Oral Roberts in 1963.
Why are we talking about one private college when there are thirteen public ones in the Tulsa area?
For instance, Oklahoma State University houses three campuses in the city, the OSU Center for Health Sciences, the OSU College of Osteopathic Medicine, and OSU – Tulsa, accommodating upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. OSU-Tulsa has an advanced materials research facility and is home to the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers.
The OSU campus is spread over 200 acres (0.81 km2), just north of downtown Tulsa, in the historic Greenwood neighborhood. Tulsa facilities include traditional classrooms, distance-learning classrooms, computer labs, and a convention area.
It is obvious that most of the people that live in the Tulsa metro area that attend a college CHOOSE to attend state colleges and universities instead of private ones like little-old, shrinking Tulsa University.
Lloyd,
We are talking about the University of Tulsa because that is the subject of Dr. Ravitch’s post. If she had posted about OSU, we would be talking about OSU.
I do think that the trustees at the University of Tulsa keep OU and OSU in mind when making their decisions. The cost of attendance at the University of Tulsa is almost $60,000, while the cost of attendance at the University of Oklahoma is a bit over $26,000 for or in state students and $42,000 for out of state. Other state universities in Oklahoma cost less.
Your characterization of the University of Tulsa as “little-old, shrinking” is why the board is trying to change the institution. It is not because of any takeover by “philanthrocaptalist “.
I have two simple solutions that students and faculty at the University of Tulsa could take that would turn around the whole situation. Students could change their majors to the ones the administration wants to cut. There were 114 petroleum engineering majors who graduated from Tulsa. If half or more of them would switch to humanities majors, I have no doubt that would change the administration’s plans. Faculty could accept lower pay for the students and the good of the discipline. If it is really important to offer a German major to the one student a year who will major in German, faculty will make the sacrifice.
“I have two simple solutions that students and faculty at the University of Tulsa could take that would turn around the whole situation.”
We are all ears since your expertise in these matters is well established. I listen to such experts every day, and these experts achieved that this year we have 60 less tenured profs than last year. Their metrics have been improving, though, and they are solving all their problems. What else is important?
TE, I’m leaving this conversation. I do not care of the Private Sector University called the University of Tulsa closes its doors and never opens again. When people that can afford the pay for a private school of any kind, then let the market decided.
However, public schools of any kind are supported by the public and I think in the long run a much better choice than even Stanford, a private sector university, is.
No use arguing with TE. He always insists on the last word.
Mate Wierdl,
I said nothing about graduation rates. My figures where total numbers of graduates.
What is the minimum number of students required for you to offer an undergraduate course? A graduate course? Is it more than 1 or 2? It looks like the University of Tulsa has to offer many upper level undergraduate courses that enroll less than 5 students, many graduate courses that enroll a single student. That is simply not sustainable.
“I said nothing about graduation rates. ”
Pleeeease. Graduation rates, number of graduates—same thing when it comes to deciding the quality of an institution: they have nothing to do with it.
U of Tulsa is ranked 121 nationally. This number is not the reflection of a dying university—certainly not by the metrics used by the leaders and funders of the university.
What’s important is that the leaders of Tulsa Univ are destroying the very thing that makes a good university, and what makes a good university is not described by metrics.
Corporate reorganization is not doing good for any university. It results in profs leaving the university, or working for private firms to make money for the university, working on projects dictated by short term goals to satisfy metrics set by outsiders who have no idea about what makes good research or education. Furthermore, corporate reorganization always results in inflated administration since the corporatists believe in leadership, so they hire more and more “leaders”, pay them more and more, so that they can give vision to the faculty for what needs to be done.
Faculty don’t need leadership, since they are the experts in their fields, this is why they got their PhDs, and they know what to do. Their position is extremely similar to K-12 teachers’; K-12 education has been derailed exactly because amateur outsiders with huge egos try to manage teachers.
Teachers, profs do not work for corporations, do not work to improve the billionaires’ economy. They work for the public, contribute to the public good (even at selfrespecting private schools and colleges), and they are properly managed, judged, helped by their peers. They are not telling CEOs, economists, politicians what to do, and these, in turn, should stick to their own territory and field of expertise.
Dr. Ravitch,
The reason I post is that your blog is to important to simply be a conformation bias machine.
I posted here in the hope that some readers might consider the possibility that the trusties of the University of Tulsa were making changes to preserve the institution rather than any grand “philanthrocaptalist” conspiracy.
Let me suggest that you ask Dr. Johnson about her take on the University of Tulsa’s situation. See if she thinks it is a “philanthrocaptalist” conspiracy or an institution that is trying to change in order to survive another 100 years for the benefit of the citizens of Tulsa.
I don’t object to your posting here. I object to your constant negativity and your egotistical need to demonstrate that you are smarter than everyone else. Your tone is really objectionable. You never know how or when to say yes. You argue for the sake of argument.
Lloyd,
I am sorry that you now regret that your daughter attended Stanford. Do you think her life would be better if she had gone to Cal State SF?
TE, my daughter’s life and where she went to school is NONE of your “F”ing business.
By mentioning her, what you are doing is revealing your dark side where your inner Troll lives. You are clearly addicted to angering and bullying people and that is why you keep coming back to Diane’s blog. Like Trump, it is obvious that you think you are smarter and more clever than everyone else, a narcissist maybe, I think so?
Trump trolls people on Twitter. You troll people on Diane’s blog. Do you troll people on other blogs, too?
“Trolling is internet slang for a person who intentionally starts arguments or upsets others by posting inflammatory remarks. The sole purpose of trolling is angering people. It has been compared to flaming in cyberbullying. Plus, many people who troll think what they do is an “art”. They frequently hide behind a cloak of anonymity. The symbol for trolling is a black and white drawing of a face with a mischievous grin, which is symbolic of the expression someone is making while trolling victims.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/teen-angst/201401/trolling-or-cyberbullying-or-both
Other bloggers have told me they had to block TE.
I think TE is a troll but TE is more sophisticated in how he trolls. Most trolls are vulgar and lie. TE just cherry-picks the facts and probably doesn’t actually lie. Instead, his arguments are often based on half-truths. TE enjoys irritating people and getting them angry. I’d love to know if TE lives in the United States and what state. If I only had his IP address.
I think he is simply a libertarian. Libertarians have to twist truths since otherwise they’d have to be openly antidemocratic. His (or her) style is very close to Glenn Reynolds’ of Instapundit. These guys have their own publishers such as Encounter Broadside
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=encounter+broadside&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
A libertarian troll?
Yeah, the worst of trolls.
Lloyd,
The only reason regular readers of the blog know that your daughter attended Stanford is that you have mentioned it a number of times on this blog. When you said “public schools of any kind are supported by the public and I think in the long run a much better choice than even Stanford” I thought you had specific reasons to believe a generic public university would be a better choice for a student based on your daughter’s experience. Apparently not.
Orthodox posters here routinely ask other posters where their children attend school and where they and their relatives are employed. Are you saying that your fellow orthodox posters are revealing their dark side?
TE will take any excuse to argue. Argument is his oxygen.
MW,
I can have civil conversations with libertarians. but I don’t think they would accept me. I am closer to a classical liberal.
TE, Please provide your definition of what it means to be a classical liberal? And, do not ask me any questions embedded in your definition.
Lloyd,
I think my views are most consistent with the editorial policy of the publication The Economist. You might not have time to read the last 30 years of their publication, so let me list the three things that I believe that are inconsistent with what you think of as a libertarian.
First, as I have previously stated on the this blog, i think a single payer healthcare plan is going to be the only acceptable course for a moral society.
I also think that global warming is an existential threat, and advocate for a high tax on all activities that contribute to global warming. People in this, and all countries, should change their behavior to protect the planet.
As I hope you remember because we discussed this here on the blog, I am in favor of the government subsidizing employment. Taxing employment reduces employment just like taxing carbon emissions reduce carbon emissions.
Finally, with the single exception of an election between a pro choice republican and a pro life democrat, I have always voted for the democratic candidate. I do admit that valuing a women’s control over her own body is consistent with a libertarian view of the world, but it is also consistent with other views as well.
Mate Wierdl,
I do not believe the goal of a university is to have as many tenure stream faculty as possible, so I am not especially concerned with a drop in the number of tenured profs last year, though after over 30 years in the academy I do acknowledge that many faculty members believe that the university exists to benefit the faculty.
Teachers work for the students in front of them. If there are no students, the teachers would make a larger contribution to society doing something else.
“I am not especially concerned with a drop in the number of tenured profs last year, ”
Ah, good. Since you are not concerned, we can then all relax, since we see now that the tenure system was created for profs to enjoy collge life to the fullest and has nothing to do with students—similarly to the tenure system in K-12.
University of Tennessee’s libertarian prof Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) wrote a few books that cater to your belief system, hence there is no need to explain them further here.
Happy reading.
MW, the tenured system found in universities and four-year colleges is nothing like the due process job protection offered to K-12 public school teachers.
When a professor earns tenure, they sign a contract that offers a lot of protection for their job.
“On Due Process, Or What You Call Tenure
“For the purposes of this essay, I’m using the term “due process” in lieu of tenure because people like Whoopi Goldberg (and millions of others) confuse “tenure” for “job for life.” If that’s what we call “tenure,” then “due process” is more exact. More and more, what it means for K-12 educators and college professors is coming to a confluence.
As far as my contract is concerned, it’s not like, after my third year, I got a job for life. Due process just gives me a better chance at talking back.”
https://thejosevilson.com/due-process-call-tenure/
K-12 public school teachers have due process rights through the 14th Amendment, but the 14th Amendment has nothing to do with tenured college professors.
“The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment provides that a state may not ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ It applies to public elementary and secondary schools, as they are considered to be state actors. In 1954, the Supreme Court interpreted the Equal Protection Clause’s requirements in Brown v. Board of Education. In perhaps one of the most famous and important cases issued by the Court, it stated:
“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs…are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” …
https://www.concordlawschool.edu/blog/constitutional-law/14th-amendment-protects-rights-education/
The keyword in the previous quote is “public education”. Teachers that work in the private sector do not have the same protection and cannot fight back if they think they have been fired unfairly.
This is probably another reason behind the privatization of Public Education. Oligarchs like the Waltons and Gates, et al, cannot stand it when common workers can stand up to them and challenge their power. These oligarchs want total power helping explain why so many of the filthy, corrupt rich have funded a war against labor unions and the public sector where workers jobs have due process rights thanks to the 14th Amendment are under attack.
K-12 public school teachers do not have total job protection for life.
Due Process rights have limits.
Dismissal for Cause
A school must show cause in order to dismiss a teacher who has attained tenure status. Some state statutes provide a list of circumstances where a school may dismiss a teacher. These circumstances are similar to those in which a state agency may revoke a teacher’s certification. Some causes for dismissal include the following:
https://education.findlaw.com/teachers-rights/teachers-rights-tenure-and-dismissal.html
What’s common in both tenure system is that by protecting the teachers they serve the students’ interest as well. There is no honest teaching without job protection of the teacher. Otherwise the teacher may be forced to teach whatever the employer and Board would want her to teach.
Without that due process protection, teachers would, not could, be forced to change grades if a wealthy and/or powerful parent demanded it and the elected school board and administration feared the power of that parent.
MW,
I think the beginning of the end of tenure was the end of mandatory retirement. An increasing number of my tenured colleagues are now in their mid 80s. When my department makes a tenure track offer, we will need to convince the Dean that the university should hire someone who will likely work at the university until around 2077. That is an amazing commitment. Universities are hesitating to make that commitment.
The end of tenure also meant the rise of underpaid adjuncts and the erosion of academic freedom. Universities can pay the president $1 million while adjuncts earn $20,000 or less after spending years earning a doctorate. We live in a time of threats to science and to facts. Not the right time to abolish protection of academic freedom.
Exactly, Diane. If something doesn’t work perfectly, it can be adjusted, improved, but eliminating a fundamentally good system that has worked extremely well for a century (and much longer than that in other places) is irresponsible. Corporatists just want to get rid of the tenure system so that they can control the university and faculty—they do not like academic freedom one bit. They keep talking about the “expensive” faculty while admins are much more expensive and what they seek out to replace tenured profs is adjuncts who live at poverty level with their PhDs.
At many universities (such as mine), the staff outnumbers tenured profs 3:1. That’s what the students support: admins.
Diane Lost to TE’s thought is the funny idea that a person who has tenure is also someone who has a long-term commitment to movements in a specialized field, including their own contributions to it, and often in cross-field work; who has a long and deep history of what’s been happening in their own and others’ fields, including their constant and creative changes, and in the context of world events, and who has a working knowledge of pedagogy, not to mention student exposure to other age-sets.
Of course, some fall away from those qualified aspects of tenure, but “young and new” is rarely if ever endowed with a longer view that is essential for the smooth and creative transition of knowledge from generation to generation.
The more people do not understand those more remote but essential aspects of such long-term situations, the less they will value it . . . of course–it’s not within their horizon–they cannot understand what they have not experienced–not because they haven’t experienced it, but because they cannot imagine someone else might know something beyond their own ken.
It’s a narrowing of a viewpoint, a closing of the mind that, generally, can be equated to how someone like Gates can see that student scores don’t go up when a teacher gets a masters degree, or even an undergraduate degree, and takes from that: well, teachers getting a further education is not worthwhile. CBK
Did TE mention the fact that some aging university professors with tenure are also well known scientists, authors, et al. and the universities keep them on the payroll no matter how old they are because of the power those names have to attract students to those fields while those same aging tenured professors with name recognition often do not teach all or even any of their classes but use adjunct professors and graduate assistants to do the teaching for them?
Lloyd Lofthouse Yes, indeed. It used to be called a “brain trust.” However, we can look to the “think tanks” that have slowly “bled” that trust with their bells and whistles, and where the question of who funds such “tanks” comes up (rather than public monies), along with how funders select or deselect the issues they cover, tacitly or overtly on political grounds.
Here is a recent article in the “Non Profit Quarterly” that refers to the practice of donor control: CBK
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/donor-advised-funds-debate-intensifies-with-proposed-california-legislation/?utm_source=NPQ+Newsletters&utm_campaign=b0ef7fd085-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94063a1d17-b0ef7fd085-12886885&mc_cid=b0ef7fd085&mc_eid=cc73fe1cff
Lloyd,
You say “..that SOME aging university professors with tenure are also well known scientists, authors, et al.” What about the other aging university professors? In my experience, the most energetic of my aging professors do what Dr. Ravitch did: retire to write books and explore new interests. It is the others that are an issue for colleges and universities.
But that is not the real problem with the end of mandatory retirement. The problem is at the other end, the decision to hire. If you make it hard to fire a person, you make it hard to hire the person in the first place.
TE,
I never had tenure.
TE,
“Some 73 percent of all faculty positions are off the tenure track, according to a new analysis of federal data by the American Association of University Professors.”
“For the most part, these are insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom,” reads AAUP’s “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in U.S. Higher Ed.” The report is based on the most recent data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, from 2016.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup
So, I understand that TE wants to get rid of tenure so 100-percent of college/university professors work in jobs that are insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom. Is that correct, TE?
Instead of just one in four with some form of job protection, there will be no professor with job protection.
I forgot to provide the link to my quotes in the previous comment to TE.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup
Dr. Ravitch,
I do recall that both of us have spent our careers as adjunct faculty. My point, however, was that the faculty who are most likely to teach into their 80’s are the ones who do not have the energy to imagine a life outside the university.
Lloyd,
Just as no person, college, or university established tenure, no person, college, or university can get rid of tenure. Some of it is cultural. Colleges of arts and sciences are almost universal in offering their faculty tenure. Schools of medicine commonly do not.
My statement is a predication. I think it likely that “tenure” will evolve into something else as institutions find the tradition idea of “tenure” too risky. I think it likely that universities will continue to spend 6 years closely evaluating faculty work, then perhaps offer a faculty member a 35 year contract where the institution does very minimal supervision of the faculty members activities. After 35 years the institution will again take a close look and decide if it should still require students and their families to pay the salary of the faculty member. If the answer is no, the faculty member’s contract ends after 41 years of employment at the institution. If the answer is yes, a new contract is negotiated over mutually beneficial terms.
I don’t think this is disaster for education.
TE, why are you beating this topic after it is dead?
He can’t leave an argument.
Lloyd,
Because in your last post you asked “So, I understand that TE wants to get rid of tenure so 100-percent of college/university professors work in jobs that are insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom. Is that correct, TE?”
I thought it would not be polite to ignore your question.
BS, TE, a simple answer with 25 words or less would have been sufficient for you to “politely” state your “opinion”.
MW,
If you are concerned about the ratio of faculty to staff, let me humbly suggest that your faculty take over general advising to undeclared students, take over title 9 investigations, read admission essays, do psychological counseling for students and faculty, staff the placement office, schedule the classrooms, arrange your own travel, submit your own receipts from that travel, ensure you abide by all NSF and NIH requirements, and all the other duties that staff now perform. Faculty used to do all this. They could again and the institutions could fire many of the staff.