The end is nigh

In the 2018-2019 annual report, when reflecting on my career, I noted that I had professionally achieved a lot more than what I thought was possible. I wondered about the years ahead.

I wrote in that report: “I suppose the decade ahead will simply unfold.”

The events since then have served as a wonderful reminder, yet again, that life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

I never imagined that 2020 would be dominated by COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Everything else, positive and negative experiences alike, fade into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

And I definitely did not imagine back in June 2019 that I will be served with a layoff notice in March 2021.

But, hey, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it.

The end of yet another academic year leaves me wondering, "what next?"

The last time that I felt clueless about the future was when I joined the engineering program, back in 1981.  All I knew was that I didn't want my professional life to be in engineering.  But I had no idea what exactly it was that I wanted to do either.

However, in that phase of life, I still had things to do until I figured out what came after.  I had classes to go to, exams to clear, and be a dickhead teenager.  And I did all that over four years.

Now, the unstructured 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the other hand, looms large.  There are only so many hours that a man can walk, or play bridge.

"I am sure others have told you this," the daughter prefaced before telling me what she wanted to tell me.  "You have another chapter in you.  I don't know what it is, but I am sure you will find out."

I will have to wait for that chapter to write itself.  After all, life is what happens when we are busily planning for it!

Mourning the death ... of liberal education

 (The following essay has been rejected by two publications.  So ... time to self-publish!)
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Through the past pandemic year, I, like many, have had several Zoom meetings—with students, colleagues, relatives, and my physician too.  However, I wish I hadn’t had a recent Zoom meeting in which the college dean informed me that I was being laid off from my job as Professor of Geography at Western Oregon University (WOU.)

The two-page layoff letter that arrived via email during the Zoom firing included this line: “Please note that your layoff is not disciplinary in nature and does not reflect on your performance.”  But that provides no consolation.

Geography is not the only program that is being phased out.  Philosophy and anthropology will also not be available as majors or minors from fall 2021.  Students will no longer have an option to minor in physics either.  Many other programs are also being right sized, as the university president’s plan puts it.  As a result, a few tenured faculty, including me, have been issued layoff notices, some tenure-track lines will not be filled, contracts for quite a few adjunct faculty will not be renewed, and academic programs are being curtailed.

The American higher education landscape had been rapidly changing even in those halcyon days before we became familiar with the word “coronavirus.”  During the pandemic year, the rate of change reached unprecedented levels, with the result that tenured full professors are being laid off and academic programs are being shut down at WOU.  

The fashion over the years across higher education, and at WOU too, has been to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and to gut anything that resembles traditional liberal education.  The logic has been that STEM graduates are more employable than are those who spent their college years studying subjects like geography, philosophy, and anthropology.  

This false impression persists despite the growing mountain of evidence that points to the value of liberal education for employment and also for our collective well-being.  The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is one of the many groups that routinely make this point very clear.  In a recent research report that is based on surveys of employers, the AACU points out that a “liberal education provides the knowledge and skills employers view as important  for career success.”

In the vast world of employment in which specialized professional credentials are not required, employability is about skills, and not about whether a student can solve a linear algebra problem.  The preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself, and the skills are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major.  A few years ago, WOU developed undergraduate learning outcomes that make clear what the core of an undergraduate education is about: Quantitative literacy; Written Communication; Inquiry and Analysis; Integrative Learning; Diversity and Global Learning.  These are the essential outcomes that employers repeatedly cite as being important.

Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes have only made it worse for liberal education.  For instance, in 2014, President Obama mocked art history as an undergraduate major.  Senator Marco Rubio, during his failed run in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, claimed that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.  Obama and Rubio were not the only leaders trash-talking liberal education and calling for vocational versions of higher education.  Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful.  The harsh sound bites quickly reverberated among the public and through the political world that determines funding for public universities like WOU.  Three years later, Rubio acknowledged the value of philosophy and philosophers.  Meanwhile, Obama sent a handwritten apology to a University of Texas art history professor regretting his glib remarks.   Their apologies were mere whispers that few heard.

All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called “liberal education,” but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  In India, we kids who were good in school were compelled to think only about two options—engineering or medicine.  Rare was an academically talented kid who fought against the system in order to study literature or history.  That’s how I ended up earning an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, even though my heart was never in it.

My intellectual world opened up when I came to the US for graduate schooling.  In 1987, I joined the urban planning program at the University of Southern California (USC) and, for the first time in my life, I had a formal and structured opportunity to study philosophy, political science, geography, and more.  It was liberal education on steroids!  I was in heaven.  I immediately fell in love with liberal education and latched on to it pretty strongly. 

When I accepted the employment offer from WOU, I told friends in California that the charming campus and the curriculum presented the university as a public version of a private liberal arts college.  In fact, for a while, WOU’s marketing materials included this tag line: "Steadily emerging as a leading public liberal arts institution.”  A few years later, that was replaced with "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education."  When I served as the Director of the university’s Honors Program, I was all too thrilled with providing college freshman what I wished I had in India—liberal education.

Over the recent years, WOU ceased to be a public version of a liberal arts college.  Programs that had the appearance of being professional and employable were increasingly favored over traditional disciplines.  The writing on the wall became clearer with each academic term that it was a liability for me to be associated with Geography.  I am, therefore, not at all surprised that I am being laid off.

The layoffs and program curtailment as a result of right sizing the university are evidence of the death of liberal education at WOU.    I mourn that death.   

No more sinecure unto death

Prosaic I am, yes.
But, I love the idea of poems.

Having a book of poems around is like having flowers on the table.

Like playing an old LP on a sunny afternoon.
Like having coffee with cheesecake.
Or better yet, having coffee with cheesecake while listening to an opera LP on a sunny afternoon in a room with a bunch of flowers in a vase.

But, prosaic I am.
Some of us are born that way.

Yet, from time to time, I seek out poems.
With my "indefinite tenure" having been revoked, 

I needed something to channel my emotions.

That's what poems are for.

Now you know why I seek out poems.

But, don't forget that prosaic I am.

With Tenure
by David Lehman

If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are unwritten with tenure,
under the microscope, sous rature
it turneth the scholar into a drone
decayed the pipe in his jacket's breast pocket.
Hamlet was not written with tenure,
nor were written Schubert's lieder
nor Manet's Olympia painted with tenure.
No man of genius rises by tenure
Nor woman (I see you smile).
Picasso came not by tenure
nor Charlie Parker;
Came not by tenure Wallace Stevens
Not by tenure Marcel Proust
Nor Turner by tenure
With tenure hath only the mediocre
a sinecure unto death. Unto death, I say!
WITH TENURE
Nature is constipated the sap doesn't flow
With tenure the classroom is empty
et in academia ego
the ketchup is stuck inside the bottle
the letter goes unanswered the bell doesn't ring.

Small talk returns

The sun is shining.  The air is warmer.  Vaccinations are well under way.

No surprise that the grocery store felt very lively.

The guy who has worked the produce aisles through the years that I have been shopping there waved out to me along with a loud HELLO!

After picking up everything that I had on my list, and more, I reached the checkout counter.

"I haven't seen you forever," Kathy said.

"How have you been?"

"Alive. Happy to have a job."

I nodded as I placed my groceries on the belt.  I wondered if I should tell her that I am alive, but that soon I will be out of a job.

Wendy came over to say hi.

"Hello, big boss."  Recently, she has had to take on supervisory responsibilities.

I decided that this was the moment.  Wendy has been a friend in a very unusual grocery store small-talk way for almost a decade.

"Want to hear some big news?" I asked them.

They both drew closer.

"I have been laid off.  No job after December."

In unison, they responded with "WHAT?"

"It is always the best teachers who are fired," said Kathy while shaking her head.

Wendy met my eyes, and perhaps she noticed that I didn't seem worried.  She quickly recovered to the humor road that is familiar to us.

"Want a cashier job here? We can start you at all of 7 dollars and 95 cents."

Before I could come up with a repartee, Kathy jumped in with, "come on, we can fast track him at 11.95"

I laughed.

"Have you had your shots?"

Kathy was all done.  Wendy has had her first.  "How about you?" she asked.

I told her that I was still waiting for my turn.

"Call up White Bird.  They'll take you in right away if you tell them you have been laid off."

I laughed again.

It has been a long time since I laughed at the grocery store checkout counter.  Life cannot be bad then.

Cry me a river!

When engaging in serious discussions, I can easily become highly focused.  Almost lawyerly sometimes.  

But I also watch out for how the other party responds.  If I sense that there is a deviation from the substance, if the responses are even mildly passive-aggressive, leave alone fully aggressive, then I lose any interest in discussions.  I lose interest in the person too.

However worthwhile the topic, I decide that the person is not worth my time and attention.   When the other person reveals their colors that I don't like, I simply leave.  After all, as the old fable conveys it, a scorpion will always be a scorpion, and to expect otherwise means that I am being a damn fool.  Life is too damn short and stressful as it is; why invite more scorpions!

Thus it was that a few months ago that I decided against pursuing the discussion when I wrote in the email: "Looks like this is taking a different turn ... Peace out!"

People who don't know me will, more often than not, conclude--especially in such instances--that I am always serious without any funny bone.  The real me, if people do get to know me, even if it is in the classroom where I am the instructor and they are students, is a person who loves humor.  Often the jokes might be funny only to me, yes, but, hey I enjoy them.

I grew up with humor all around me.  Classmates, cousins, some of the older relatives.  But, most of all, the magazines in Tamil and English that had plenty of jokes and cartoons.  Madan's cartoons were my favorite of them all. 

In one of his cartoons, a patient is at the pre-op stage, and he asks the surgeon whether he would be able to play the violin after the surgery.  To which the surgeon replies that he will, of course, be able to play the violin. Then the punchline: "Amazing, because I do not know how to play the violin."  

It doesn't take much to amuse me, yes. 

Laughter is also how we deal with stressful situations, though sometimes I do wonder if I will benefit from a big cry.  A cry that will require plenty of Kleenex boxes, and lots of water to rehydrate myself.  When my daughter was young, she once told me that everybody needs to have crying sessions.  In India, I have witnessed laugh exercises.  Maybe I would have joined in if they had crying exercises.

Anyway, if you see me having a good cry, make sure to congratulate me on having done it!  

The layoff has been a stressful situation, no doubt.  After I emailed my siblings about my layoff, my sister texted that she felt very bad about my layoff.  I reassured her that I am fine, and will be fine.

My brother called after reading my email.  

"Don't worry about me," I told him.

His response was instantaneous.  "Who said we were worried about you?"

We laughed. 

I think this is how most of us men deal with the unpleasantness in life, of which there is plenty.  I am often reminded of Lynn Redgrave who delivered with dripping sarcasm along with the character's accent in Gods and Monsters: 

Oh, men! Always pulling legs. Everything is comedy. Oh, how very amusing. How marvelously droll.

Every job has an expiration date

By firing me (and a few other faculty too,) the university's managers are essentially arguing that it would not make a difference to the university nor to the world.

I think otherwise.

Nor will they be able to convince me and the world that I was doing a "bullshit job," to use the phrase that the late anthropologist/commentator David Graeber coined in order to describe the modern economy.  Graeber, whom I have quoted a lot in this blog, defined a bullshit job as being so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing so.

My work was never pointless.

Of course, I have always mocked myself, like in this tweet from six years ago:

Sriram is a curator who uses straight-up bullshit to create enlightenment of learning in the fecund Willamette Valley http://t.co/e0DHvHrbUk

— Soon to be "a former professor" (@congoboy) March 21, 2015

I often mocked myself in the classroom too.  The jokes were about me--after all, they are the safest ones.  After one of those jokes in an Honors class many years ago, a student, Ermine, loudly said something that made quite an impact on me.  With a smile that seemed to suggest that he knew what I was doing, Ermine commented that I engaged in that kind of humor because I was super-confident about myself.

Guilty as charged!

A few years ago, a faculty colleague commented that I could very well be the university professor who is most known outside the university because of my commentaries in the newspapers.  Whether or not I was the most known, I certainly did receive emails from people I had never met.  They were responding to my commentaries in the papers.

Like this person who wrote on March 21, 2005:

Sir 

Thank you for your excellent guest opinion and for your work with students.  We fear for our country's future as it is more and more difficult to discern reality from make believe.  You are a bright light.

Of course, even a couple of university personnel wrote to me.

After having read that same commentary, a then dean at the university, Hilda R., emailed in March, 2005:

Nice Op Ed piece in the Statesman Journal recently, Sriram.  You help make WOU look great.

"You help make WOU look great."

I am now being laid off because the president and provost have decided that I don't help make WOU look great.

A year later, in September 2006, it was another dean at the university, Stephen S., who emailed me: "Sriram,  Nice editorial!  Keep up the campaign."

The campaign has been put to an end.

Perhaps you are thinking that I am providing old data, and I have been the cliched deadwood since.  Nope; I stopped counting the number, but I think I was getting closer to 200 newspaper commentaries.  Or, maybe it is past that number?

In April 2017, the executive director of the state's higher education commission surprised me with this email:

Dr. Khe, 

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated the column you submitted to Oregon Live. It is heartening to hear that the election has generated the type of student interest that you describe, and that you are at WOU helping respond to those questions, guide those discussions, and expose more Oregonians to the field of geography. Such important work. Thank you!

The president and provost have decided that I don't need to respond to students' questions and guide their discussions anymore--especially if they are in the field of geography.

There is one feedback from a reader whom I have never met that I carry around in my wallet.  A talisman of sorts.  It is from 2008.

I was fortunate to have had such a meaningful job for all these years.

Though I wish that the job had lasted a tad longer, it had to end sometime; after all, nothing goes on forever.

A former professor speaketh

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Think about that.

The person who articulated that for all of us? 

e.e. cummings.

I doubt that most of us are born with the courage to grow up to be who we really are.  Most of us are the cowardly lions of the Wizard of Oz.  Somewhere we have to pick up that courage.

Where?

Education.

In a real education, institutions and educators will emphasize “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”

I wish!

Increasingly, it does not work that way though.

Even we individuals apparently do not care to become better people.  We are most fascinated with those who have built "better mousetrap" who are also the ones who have made money from those mousetraps.  We are making it increasingly clear that a moneyed person is much more important and valuable than a better person.

Such an attitude gets reflected in education too.  In college, it is all about the better mousetrap.  College has stopped being the place where students gain the courage to find out who they really are and to then live that life with happiness and contentment.

Is it any wonder then why students are unhappy.  There is a growing body of evidence that students are unhappy.  And in the adult world, anxiety and angst seem to dominate over happiness and contentment.  Yet, we have a lot more educated population today than ever before.  The two sides of the ledger don't balance well.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Of course they are looking for meaning.  But, apparently most educators don't care.

Increasingly, we run into graduates feeling intense burnout only a few years into their "real" lives outside college.  They begin to wonder, and worry, if what they do is not fulfilling, then what?

If only we had equipped them with the ability to prepare for life with a meaning, that provided them with happiness that is intangible!

Oh well ... I tried to do the best that I could.  Now, the countdown to the end date has been set by my managers.  In a matter of months, I will be referred to as "a former professor."

Such is life!

Intellectual parochialism wins

In May 2018, which is nearly 3 years ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a rare joint statement on "increasingly threatened" disciplines and approaches.

They noted in that statement:

we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education--are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience.

Indeed!

Through my years in higher ed, and over the past almost 20 years at WOU, I have been fighting nothing but losing battles defending liberal education.  The war has now ended.

I worry that instead of broadening the reach of liberal education, universities like WOU are rapidly moving in the other direction of further limiting the horizons of less-privileged students. We seem to be well on our way to re-creating the huge divide that has always existed between the privileged few and the overwhelming rest--a divide that public higher education was designed to address.  

Students have always been shocked when I tell them, for instance, that Harvard does not even offer an undergraduate major in "criminal justice," which is one of our high enrollment programs.  They seemed genuinely puzzled about students majoring in English or philosophy at these expensive schools like Harvard.

Over the years, we have hyped up these high enrolling majors, and actively invested them, as if we know something that the privileged few do not.  Universities like WOU systematically, intentionally, and strategically create and market academic programs, often by vocationalizing it, even when the links to gainful employment are dubious, as this 2013 report shows, and there's nothing to convince me that things have changed. 

The academic environment at WOU is a contrast to how the privileged students are treated at the elite schools.  And even after they declare their majors, Stanford notes that "to avoid intellectual parochialism, a major program should not require a student to take more than about one-third of his or her courses from within a single department."  We, on the other hand, actively promote intellectual parochialism.

The joint statement concludes with this:

Higher education’s contributions to the common good and to the functioning of our democracy are severely compromised when universities eliminate and diminish the liberal arts.

The liberal arts will live on at the elite institutions.  But, democracy is not by the elite, for the elite.  The death of liberal education at the institutions that educate the masses does not bode well for the health of democracy :(

The day after

I am confident that I have contributed a few verses.  There remain a few more to contribute.

O Me! O Life!

By Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

So, what is college?

As I understand it, neither the state's elected officials nor my university have clearly articulated to the public what it means to be college educated, especially in the 21st century.  The looming layoff makes it evident that my understanding of what it means to be college educated is worlds away from what the university's managers think.

The following commentary was published in April 2015.
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What is Oregon’s definition of a college education?

I am delighted that Oregon’s Legislature is discussing higher education via the many bills that have been introduced.

There is urgency as well. College education is rapidly becoming a must-have for the young to be economically successful, though I am personally frustrated with the marginalization of vocational education. While a ninth-grade level education would have been good enough a century ago (hence, the tradition of celebrating high school graduation as an achievement in life), the worry now is that a person without a college degree might not even get an interview for an entry-level job.

Further, many students earn college credits from community colleges, for-profit institutions or colleges in other states, and we want to help them with putting all those credits to use toward a degree and not waste that investment. All these matter, especially when a typical college graduate exits the system with more than $20,000 in debt.

I understand, therefore, the legislators’ interest in making higher education more efficient. The bills being considered include accelerated college credits programs that begin even from the high school years, to making transferring credits across institutions easier, to funding that will be tied to outcomes.

However, these also have the potential to make the current situation even worse for a single reason that we do not seem to appreciate and recognize. Investing in, and growing, “intellectual capital” via higher education is not the same as patching together college credits gained from different institutions starting with the high school.

Such a patchwork would add up to a college diploma, yes. However, that piece of paper is not by itself any measure of the intellectual capital that is vital for a vibrant economy and democracy.

If lawmakers believe that higher education is merely a collection of college credits, then their efforts — and the resulting investment of taxpayer dollars — will be wasted. As Aristotle observed centuries ago, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. A mere collection of credits from different places, or even from the same institution, will only rarely add up to what it means to be college-educated.

If it is more than collection of credits, then what exactly is a college education?

Unfortunately, that is the discussion that is sorely lacking. “What does it mean to be college educated in the 21st century?” is a question that is neglected and increasingly, even discredited.

Higher education institutions in particular deserve to be blamed for not articulating a clear idea of what it means to be college educated. Colleges and universities, instead, typically offer a cafeteria menu-like format of classes to take toward graduation. It is such a checklist system that has also led lawmakers, and students and their families, to think of higher education as nothing but a crazy patchwork of credits.

On the other hand, a committed and sustained discussion on what it means to be college educated in the 21st century will lead to a clear definition of how we ought to prepare students for “a world of unscripted problems,” to borrow a phrase from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Now, if only the lawmakers can force us to think about that question!

Should I have gambled?

I rarely found students to be at fault.  I have even told them so.  The system is messed up, and is set up much to the disadvantage of students like the ones at my university, most of whom do not come from privileged backgrounds.

But then, I never followed up those talks with students by telling them that they should take my classes and major in the programs that my department offered!

The following commentary was published in August 2014.
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College: The million-dollar gamble

Will you be at ease with your 18-year-old gambling with a million dollars?

High school students are told that they need to go to college because of the difference of a million dollars in lifetime earnings that a college degree makes. While that figure itself is debatable, it means that we place enormous pressure on 18-year-old high school graduates to choose wisely.

Most of them do wisely allocate their time between classes and part-time work and the occasional toga party and graduate hoping to land that dream job that will start delivering the million dollar premium.

However, more and more college graduates are finding out that there are very few meaningful full-time employment opportunities. As the Economic Policy Institute noted, "the Class of 2014 will be the sixth consecutive graduating class to enter the labor market during a period of profound weakness."

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York echoed a very similar trend: By "historical standards, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have indeed been quite high since the onset of the Great Recession. Moreover, underemployment among recent graduates — a condition defined here as working in jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree — is also on the rise, part of a trend that began with the 2001 recession."

The unemployment and underemployment of college graduates is worsened by their debts. Inflation-adjusted average debt of the graduating classes has tripled in 20 years; the average Class of 2014 graduate owed about $33,000.

Such a context makes a high school graduate's college investment a risky bet towards that debatable million dollar differential.

It is not always the students' fault when they find themselves unemployed or underemployed after graduating. After all, one only needs to recall any number of movies from the past and be reminded that college students were all not scholars every waking moment either.

So, what happened?

The social contract has changed.

Even until a few years ago, it did not matter what students studied (their academic majors) as long as they were able to earn the diploma and demonstrate their abilities to prospective employers. Employers, in turn, knew well that they had to invest in the new hires and train them with respect to the content of the job as well as with soft skills like communication.

Now, employers are no longer eager to make that investment. Corporations have abandoned the commitment to invest in the young, firmly guided by an ideology that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Thus, students are rarely able to land valuable paid or even unpaid internships in corporations, and it is now up to the graduates to prove that they are competent with the content knowledge and job skills.

Which is why the risks associated with the million-dollar college bet appear to be heavily on the students themselves. Would it be too much to ask corporations not to always wear the blinders of short-term profits and to look at the longer term, too?

A guru with no followers will be unemployed, of course

I have often felt guilty that my salary depended on students and their families getting into debt.  To me, working at a university was never transactional.  I always felt a deep commitment to students.  Every once in a while, because of such sentiments, I have even talked with students about the precious dollars.

In the following commentary that was published in May 2011,  I even referred to those kinds of discussions that I have had with students.
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If only we were all aware of the cost of higher education and engaged in those discussions as much as we are painfully in sync with gas prices.

Every once in a while I point out to students that in the academic quarter system, it costs about $110 every week, per term, for each of the four-credit classes that I teach. A majority of that $110 is paid for by students through tuition and fees. Taxpayers chip in a significant amount as well.

Such an expensive investment is guided by a belief that college education is about future employment and economic productivity, but that's not entirely true. In fact, this linkage of higher education to economic performance is relatively new in human history.

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades. As one looks back to the days of gurukula in India or Plato's academy, it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing. Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

Thus, higher education wasn't an industry, either. Galileo pursued research on the cosmos because of his undying, and heretical, curiosity, not because he thought of it as a convenient opportunity to charge students fees that they could not afford.

But especially since the post-World War II years, there has been a transformation that's resulted in a twisted understanding that higher education is some sort of a credentialing service for young adults interested in joining the 21st-century equivalents of trade guilds.

The irony is that it doesn't require an undergraduate degree to complete the tasks in service-sector jobs. Yet we've managed to convince ourselves that a college diploma is a must-have for mere survival, let alone prosperity. Most students I talk to feel that they have no choice but to get a college diploma if they want to get any sort of job anymore. And that presents a horrible choice.

After spending $110 week after week for classes like mine, students graduate, typically, with about $20,000 in debt, only to realize the realities of employment. Despite all my full disclosures in the classroom, they are shocked to find that there really isn't a job waiting for them and that their diploma isn't necessarily the guaranteed route across the (un)employment gates. In fact, trade guilds often add and require their own training and certification.

At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries are colleges and universities that are, naturally, recording enrollment increases -- even in my classes in the summer. This enrollment growth then triggers the need for additional facilities, which necessitates a demand for more money from students and taxpayers.

Such a higher educational system cannot go on forever. As economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." I suspect that it will come to a crashing halt when students, and their families and taxpayers, begin to see the numbers flashing by really fast on their meters.

Maybe students and taxpayers will then demand a refund of the money they spent on my classes, eh?

A victim of the perfect storm

If my luck runs out and I end up unemployed, it won't be because of outsourcing.  It will be because faculty and administrative colleagues at my university couldn't be bothered with the warnings that I had been conveying to them over the years.  I have often referred to my own Cassandra's Curse--how much people have always dismissed my warnings--and I now face potential career-ending unemployment.

As I noted in that commentary on outsourcing, “If we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”

A slightly edited version of the following was published in February 2018:
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A perfect storm is brewing in the Oregon public policy environment. When that storm makes landfall, Oregon’s higher education system will be devastated beyond recognition. 

For years, it has been a struggle to fully fund the state’s public universities. But, it wasn’t always like this. Back in the early 1960s pictured in the movie “Animal House,” for instance, the government typically picked up two-thirds of the in-state tuition expenses, and non-tuition fees were minimal. There was no undue financial burden on students, who could easily manage to pay their share through part-time jobs during the school year and by working full-time in the summers. 

That model has been flipped. Now, taxpayer dollars pay for less than 10 percent of the research universities’ operations, and the regional universities—like Western Oregon University, where I teach—manage with a quarter of the operating expenses paid for by the state. Most of the rest comes from student tuition and fees, for which many students I know work full-time even when attending classes. 

This financing model will worsen when the next recession hits. 

While any recession is difficult to predict, it will arrive sooner than later. Economies go through a period of growth, followed by stagnation. Currently, the entire world is experiencing economic growth, after the disastrous Great Recession of 2008 that hit us particularly hard. Since the end of that recession in June 2009, we have had steady growth in the economy over the past nearly nine years. The average unemployment rate in the US is now at a low 4.1 percent, with 16 states having rates even lower than the average. 

However, growth rates cannot be sustained forever. The nature of business cycles makes investors jittery as we near the peak. This is what we are beginning to see expressed through the volatility in the stock market, when the Dow Jones Index dropped by more than thousand points, not once but twice in the same week. 

The coming recession will make state dollars scarce. When that happens, public higher educational institutions cannot even dream of balancing their books on the shoulders of students. Even now, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from Oregon’s public universities with more than $27,000 in debt—a financial burden that the partying students in “Animal House” did not have to worry about. To subject our students to even higher debt levels will be outright robbery. 

Further, because Oregonians, like all Americans, are having fewer kids, the current K-12 student population in Oregon will not translate to increasing numbers of native students at higher educational institutions. The potential decrease in student population will mean lower revenue from tuition and fees. All these will further complicate the coming budgetary battles at Salem, when the next recession comes. 

One way to bring in additional revenue is by admitting students from other countries. Foreign students pay much higher fees than our residents do, and they are eager to come to the United States for their undergraduate and graduate education. Recent estimates are that there are more than a million foreign students studying in the US, and they brought in more than $39 billion in revenue to colleges and universities.

Even locally, it was a healthy decade of increasing numbers of international students enrolled at the University of Oregon. But, as this paper reported on January 13th, “international student enrollment at the University of Oregon dropped for the second year in a row — representing a more than $6 million decrease in annual revenue.” 

But, the Trump administration is increasingly making it difficult for international students to come to the US. His xenophobic rhetoric, and the government’s denial of student visas, mean that we can expect numbers to further decline in the coming year. To put up blocks against international students does not make any economic sense when they help balance the higher education budget, leave alone the benefits of greater understanding across cultures. 

The final piece that makes for the perfect storm is this—over the past couple of years, the political rhetoric in the country has turned intensely anti-intellectual. “We need more welders and less philosophers” has become a mantra. Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful. 

Tragically, we seem to be in denial even as the storm is gathering force. This means that when the recession hits, it will result in a destruction of public universities, for which there will be no disaster relief. I hope educators and political leaders will begin to prepare for the coming storm, keeping in mind the best interests of the state’s children and youth who are our collective future. 

Was I ready for an unscripted future?

Continuing with the series that started here, I am amazed that I lasted this long in higher education while writing commentaries in which I was championing the ultimate loser--liberal education.  All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called liberal education, but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  Once I found it, I latched on to it pretty strongly.

Now, liberal education at my university is rapidly sinking and there is no flotation device for me who doesn't know how to swim!

The following commentary of mine was published in March 2016.
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The price of crude oil and of gasoline have been tumbling to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling for $147 and “experts” predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric price of $200. Now some of those same “experts” are wondering whether it might get closer to $20. There is also a strong feeling that when the prices climb again, $50 might be the ceiling.

A belief that oil prices would climb forever propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering programs. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline.

But over the past few months, news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who will hire a petroleum engineer now?” Oil and Gas Investor, a trade publication, discussed enrollment declines in U.S. programs offering degrees in petroleum engineering.

This is not new. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As the price of oil rose, and as it stayed in the $100 range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come” said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil prices and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown.

It is not merely about a particular resource. We need to think about technological change, geopolitical issues, the health of the global economy and more, all of which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and their implications for employment are not the best indicators to prepare for the economic conditions and the jobs that lie a few years down the road. Even a few years make a huge difference -- the freshmen who began studying petroleum engineering four years ago face the reality that perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on the economy’s current characteristics are betting against the only thing that we know for sure -- the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the distant future. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving people worrying about their futures.

What, then, can young people do? And what should universities do for the young? As the American Association of Colleges and Universities wonderfully put it, the challenge is “educating for a world of unscripted problems.” They’re unscripted because we do not know what the future holds.

But we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future: We can do it by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely involve serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we conclude that we need more engineers and materials scientists, only to realize a few years later -- as was the case with Hynix in Eugene -- that the entire factory could close down. We seem to consider only the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” those students will have skills that they will be able to apply in industries completely different from those they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is about more than a major. It is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”

I led to my own unemployment?

Maybe it was not an issue of running out of luck, but that I was not working hard enough to make my own job secure. 

Instead of writing commentaries to tell the public how awesome I am, I wrote opinion essays like this one from May 2016 in which I wrote that "college is really not about the major."  Perhaps there is virtue in the pursuit of selfishness.  Nah!

The following commentary was published in May 2016:
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“School teaches you only to be better at school,” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment.

The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

Without even knowing it, the student was channeling Ken Robinson. In a highly entertaining TED talk back in 2006 (way before “TED talk” became a part of our everyday vocabulary), Robinson noted that “you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The composition of the academic credits toward a college degree itself easily gives this away — a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be wrapped up within a year and a half after high school.

Even the preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important — skills like writing, thinking, communicating, researching and more — are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about.

Yet the myth persists and, despite all the research, there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others. Of course, that is the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs like elementary school teaching, for instance. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best — unless one wants to be a college professor.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young and, hence, the country’s future, then the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than art history, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers.

Instead, society needs to pay attention to whether students are mastering the skills that are needed to be gainfully employed, along with a broad understanding in order to be caring citizens. Else it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Layoff is the price for overselling college?

The second in the series in which I think about the real possibility of losing my job. (Click here for the first entry.)

In different ways, I have always been worried that college is being oversold.  Anytime such a commentary was published, while I received appreciatory emails from the general public, it was not the case with the people employed in higher education.

It is not a surprise that the dollars and cents aren't adding up anymore.  Maybe it is a surprise that I had a job this long!

The following is my commentary that was published in the summer of 2007.
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Does U.S. oversell college?

A new school year begins soon. I look forward excitedly to meeting new students and re-establishing connections with those who return. But once again, I start the year with the nagging question: Are we overselling higher education?

Growing up in India, it was quite common to run into people with advanced degrees working in unrelated jobs essentially because, well, there were very few positions to match their educational qualifications. Most of the bank clerks I have met in India have degrees in literature or the sciences. During our trip last December, the telephone salesman my father was talking to was happy that he was able to get that job soon after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Selling phones or working as a bank teller do not require four years of college. So, why the degree?

Two reasons stand out.

First, there's the faith that college is the path toward prosperity, and that therefore everyone needs to go to college. Thus, parents do all they can to ensure that their children attend college. Second, college education serves as a filter for employers who are faced with the daunting task of selecting from among the many, many applicants for jobs. This further reinforces the notion that college degree is important.

Against such a background, I can't help but wonder whether our drive to get more high school students to college is a variation of the Indian blind faith that college degree will lead to economic prosperity. Déjà vu all over again!

Ironically, while we "elders" are focused on getting more high school graduates to college, it appears that practically every student I meet in my university is familiar with the joke about college degrees and jobs - you know, with the punch line, "Would you like fries with that?"

Students are aware that a college degree might not get them a job after all. This reality that students see is a total contrast to, and disconnected from, our focus on college.

Perhaps employers here in the United States use the college degree as a sorting tool just as employers in India do. By demonstrating that they successfully negotiated hazards like me, students implicitly tell prospective employers that they have the requisite skills to do the job. But then all we have done is unnecessarily raise the entry-level educational requirement, when in reality a degree is not really required and a high school diploma would have sufficed.

Studies show that the average life-time earnings of college graduates are significantly higher than those of high school graduates. But the studies do not seem to account for the possibility of inflated requirements of educational qualifications.

Further, if the recent preoccupation with outsourcing is what is driving us to focus on college, that is all the more the reason why we ought to focus on jobs that cannot be outsourced, many of which do not require a degree. Plumbing, auto repair and caring for the elderly cannot be outsourced to India. Here again, we are all too familiar with the complaints about how expensive plumbers are, or how difficult it is to find people who can help with the rapidly growing elderly population. Yet we choose not to steer more youngsters into such lucrative careers because we are fixated on college degrees that don't always guarantee jobs.

In India, too, there are boundless opportunities for people interested in plumbing, caring for the elderly and other occupations that don't require college diplomas. Urban India is increasingly short of such help. Samad, the plumber on whose services my parents rely, has become so successful that he has made a career change and is now a real estate agent. Samad did not even complete the eighth grade, a total contrast to the newly graduated mechanical engineer selling telephones.

Of course, university education is not merely about economic productivity. It is also to develop a culture of learning and an appreciation of various aspects of life. Personally, I am immensely thankful for the opportunity that I have to pursue learning as my vocation. But at a huge cost to the youth, are we incorrectly advocating that college education is the only avenue for individuals to be economically productive?

Running out of luck!

A month ago, I authored a commentary about the coming layoffs at the university where I teach.  I wrote there:

Will I never set forth toward class again and work with students, like how I have been doing since joining WOU in 2002? Only time will tell.

We are now a month away from the final decision.  As the doomsday clock winds down, I thought I would re-visit some of my education-related commentaries.

The following was published in March 2008.
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An Honored Ambassador For All of India

When a freshman student in the honors program said, "Dr. Khe, you are the first nonwhite teacher I have ever had," two others immediately jumped in with "mine, too."

Of course, even a kindergartner will easily figure out from my appearance and accent that I am from another country. But until that chance conversation, it had never occurred to me that I would be quite a few college students' first nonwhite instructor ever.

When I left India, I came to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the graduate student population was so multinational that race and ethnicity were nonfactors in my daily life.

After completing graduate school, we lived in Bakersfield, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. While not the ethnic salad bowl that Los Angeles is, Bakersfield, too, had a significant nonwhite population. Every once in a while I ran into people who thought I was Latino until my accent gave it away.

It is more than five years since we moved to Oregon. Living here has been a wonderful experience, and all my interactions have been pleasant. If all of a sudden I am the personification of "diversity" to my students, it is because for the first time I am at a university where only about 13 percent of the students are nonwhite.

This percentage reflects the demographic characteristics of Oregon; according to the 2000 census, whites accounted for almost 87 percent of the population. It is therefore quite possible that both white and ethnic students had nothing but white teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade.

My lack of experience with such an educational environment - despite all the discussions of diversity and multiculturalism - meant that I was not quite prepared for the idea that I am the embodiment of "diversity" to many students. Later, when I engaged my upper division students about this topic during the warm-up before class, their responses were similar to those of the freshmen.

James, a nontraditional student who had initially kept quiet, suddenly came alive with a question: "Hey, Dr. Khe, does this mean you feel a huge responsibility now?"

The answer was a no-brainer. "Yes, because I now feel that if I mess up, there is a good chance that students might think all Indians are awful." With such a responsibility, it is no wonder that I have nagging shoulder pain!

I am concerned about making a good impression, particularly because of the saying in the Tamil tradition in which I grew up, which translates to, "You need to sample only one grain to ensure that the rice is cooked." That one small piece tells us whether the entire pot of rice is ready for consumption.

Of course, the rice analogy does not translate well to human experience. Statistically speaking, we ought to have a random sample that can then substitute for the entire population before we can draw a conclusion. However, I would guess that it is not uncommon for people to draw conclusions based on strange events. We are humans - and we err!

Thus, to a large extent, I now have an opportunity that is presented to very few people. To my students, I am now the metaphorical single grain of rice representing a billion-plus Indians. In the months that have passed since that conversation with freshmen in the honors program, I feel a constant reminder that every day in the classroom could easily be a make-or-break situation for the planet's Indians.

While this is a huge, and perhaps unfair, burden, it is an incredible honor and privilege to fill such an ambassadorial role. I am hoping to make the best of this newly discovered honorary position that I never knew I had.

Wish me luck.

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PS: Click here to read about the demographics of the faculty at my university.

To set forth toward class

It does not look like the following essay will be published anywhere other than here in my blog :(
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With the novel coronavirus firmly establishing itself in the country, and with my university’s budget managers contemplating laying off a few faculty, I have been waking up these past summer mornings wondering if I will ever “set forth toward class,” to use the memorable phrase from William Stafford’s charming poem Old Prof.

Early last March was the last time I “set forth toward class.”  During that final face-to-face meeting in the winter quarter, students had questions in plenty, from arrangements for the final exams, to whether they will be able to come back to the dorms.  I suggested to them that they should take all their valuables when they go back to their homes and assume that they would not be back on campus for a very long time.

Their facial expressions and body language broke my heart.  “Keep calm and carry on” was one of the many clichéd words of wisdom that I shared with them.

The spring quarter that followed was completely virtual.  Logging into the learning management  system from my “home office” was all I had to do in order to set forth toward class.

Virtual classes are not new to me—I have been teaching courses online for two decades, starting at  California State University, Bakersfield, when having a DSL line at home was a luxury and when most had only dial-up modems.  However, twenty years of online teaching did not prepare me for a  completely virtual term with students I had never met in the real world, including a section of  true freshman.  It was unsettling.

Like William Stafford’s “old prof,” will I ever “set forth toward class” again after drinking freshly brewed coffee in my office?

It has been five months since I last saw my office, which, I imagine, would be gathering cobwebs but for the custodial staff keeping calm and carrying on.  In my office and in the classroom, will I be able to once again have meaningful interactions with students, especially the likes of Samantha and Nellie?  (Real names withheld.)

At the end of spring, which also marked the end of a lengthy and circuitous road to her degree, Nellie, a mother of three, wrote in a touching email, “The next time I am on campus (and it is open again) I would enjoy stopping by to say hello, if that's okay.”  Will there be a next time when we will be on campus?

Samantha did not want to wait.  She emailed requesting my home address to which she wanted to send a gift and a thank-you note.  A couple of days later, the parcel arrived.  The thank-you note  was a two-page letter!  “You have set me on new paths, and a little bit of you will be pushing me along in every step of the journey ahead,” Samantha wrote at the end of her letter.

I have prominently displayed Samantha’s gift and letter in the dining room, where we used to  entertain friends before the coronavirus arrived.

There is one other, and more important, reason for me to worry whether I will ever “set forth  toward class.”  Like many regional public universities in the United States, my university too is  dealing with a financial crisis.  “Our goal is to retain as many employees as possible,” noted the president in mid-spring, in a three-page, single-spaced memo to the campus about the process of rightsizing the university. Two months later, another three-page memo arrived in early summer, in which the president described how the program curtailment and retrenchment process will be carried out.  The fact that faculty who will be pink-slipped will get a 12 months’ notice was not comforting.

Will I be informed that I will not be needed after a year?  How will I feel if I stayed on, but favorite colleagues are laid off?

The weather outside does not care for the coronavirus nor for dollars and cents.  The glorious  summer in the Willamette Valley here in Oregon is back after the months of overcast and misty  conditions that characterize this part of the Pacific Northwest.  But, instead of the usual celebration that summer is here, there is a constant nagging worry in the background that I might never “set forth toward class” again.

William Stafford has prepared me for such situations too.  In The Way It Is, Stafford wrote:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I will hold on to the thread. Ever so tightly.