You mention English courses taken at DMACC and how that is a sensitive subject. You are quite right there. Iowa's concurrent enrollment program is almsot entirely driven by financial motivations, not education, and thus pervasively lacks genuine oversight. And you are right to question those credentials, as the local high schools are not held accountable to collegaite standards through that program, and DMACC does not hold them to account. For instance, it doesn't have course standards to hold anyone to account, and resists doing so.
This speaks to your overall theme of the monetization of education, the soul-rending moral compromises that educators face, and the general lack of integrity that ensues under these conditions.
Indeed, it seems that many students are taking the discount approach to their degrees, accumulating credits at less rigorous and less expensive schools and then trying to trade up as transfers. Tuition-dependent schools don't want to seem unwelcoming, so there is a lot of pressure placed on registrars and faculty to accept as many of these credits as possible. I often found that when a syllabus was available, the requirements for an online course (especially during the summer) were less than half what one of our regular offerings required: half as many required readings, half as many formal writing assignments. Accepting these courses had real implications for our department, since we depended on non-majors to meet enrollment for many of our courses. The more of those potential students who opted for the flyover method, the lower our enrollments were, which led to reductions in staffing and budget resources. Uversity doesn't offer credit-bearing courses, to my knowledge, but it offers shortcuts, as SparkNotes does, which tend to undermine, rather than bolster, efforts by a primary instructor.
And, speaking as a person in the middle of all this, there is a general unwillingness of most faculty to be rigorous. (It leads to perverse incentives for us.). Even in the face of low completion rates. And an unwillingness to perform basic oversight at the institutional or even state level.
My larger fear is that this will become self-perpetuating to the point where faculty of low-tier institutions won't even recognize their own lack of rigor--it won't even be a conscious choice anymore. I think we've already been there for at least a decade, where "we" means America.
I write as a person with direct access to the state data, and not idle speculation.
Finally, I see myself in the mirror. I was that first-generation rural student. I see the small door leading out of poverty, through which I escaped, closing behind me. I can keep my foot in the door only so long.
All of my comments are from a humanities/liberal arts perspective.
But if we shift to the sciences, engineering, etc., many of these issues change and are reduced. My undergraduate is in the sciences. And when I talk to my science peers, it's clearly a different world.
What I'm getting at is that we, as a people, expect vastly less rigor from them liberal arts than we do from the sciences, engineering, etc. Expecting something like that level of rigor is not well received at most places.
Yes, quite right. Humanities people are typically the ones promoting things like waiving standardized test scores for admission. But there are real consequences for doing that in some cases, if students without adequate preparation are being admitted to programs where they have little chance of succeeding. This conversation is often framed by things like systemic racism, and I see my colleagues in STEM trying to find a way to express their concerns without seeming indifferent to cultural equity.
My former employer went through a period maybe ten years ago of intentionally admitting some lower performing students because they paid a higher rate of tuition. I thought it was unconscionable. One of my advisees had scored a 10 on the ACT, and I was asking him to read Jerome Bruner's "Self-Making Narratives" in a first-year seminar. I'm not sure that admission was a more compassionate choice for him.
Once, after years of publishing my creative work for "bupkus," I received an award for a poem in the amount of $1000. I was very happy, and so I told one of the men who worked where I worked -- I was in an hourly lowest-paid position and he was in a salaried higher-paid regional-sales position: "I won $1000!" I told him, and I explained the details. He shook his head sadly at me and said "you really shouldn't be doing it for the money -- art isn't about money."
I was fucking speechless because obviously and of course it had NEVER been about money! I'd spent more on my art than I'd ever make from it. And I never wrote with dollar signs in my mind. But to be acknowledged with what was for me an enormous amount of money was an honor!
Sometimes money is a widow's mite -- and what it means comes from its precarity. I've given a homeless men two dollars on the street when I only had maybe six dollars in bills and change in my pocket. That meant a lot, and that guy was really appreciative.
A corporation grudgingly handing over $20,000 for the unique and irreplaceable lives of your parents, via the courts, and willing to pay less if they can, is the obverse-inverse-upside-down of the widow's mite.
Somewhere between these extremes is a money-made acknowledgment of gratitude -- a "tip."
And then there is the green space that many academic creative writers (this describes me) enjoy, where my work is salaried, keeps me involved in my art no matter my ups and downs, and if I receive a financial acknowledgement of my work, I am pleased, but I am not going to run myself ragged to get it. I also, with full respect to those who labor on literary magazines, do not like to pay a "reading fee" or submission fee -- and have done so maybe three times in the past 10 years. (I wish they felt as honored by my $3 as I would be if they'd replied to me with a $3 Venmo of appreciation! Ha!)
Capitalism always demands we non-utilitarians carve our crazy paths around its orderly system. I have to pay to eat, but I refuse to prostrate myself to the almighty dollarbuck. So I have to wiggle around in the middle. And that salesman back then was right: don't do art for money. But don't scold an artist for being happy about a money prize either. Appreciation can take many forms.
Quite right: appreciation can take many forms. I think what I'm reacting to is a change in what used to be a mutual understanding among editors and writers. No one was getting paid, really, and everyone accepted those terms. The more one-sided dynamic of the submission fee changed that. I didn't think about it much at first, but the move to online submissions has also increased the rejection:acceptance ratio for most writers. People now set goals of getting 200+ rejections per year, which is quite a lot to be paying for the chance to be published for free.
Peer-review also used to be something everyone gladly did pro-bono. Blurbing, too. But those defaults have tended to create similar inequities to caregiving: women often bear more of the uncompensated labor in academe than men. A case in point was my first book. All of the men whom my publisher invited to blurb it declined; one of them was a mentor. Three women, two of them more casual professional acquaintances than close colleagues, and one of them a complete stranger, agreed to do it. They wrote lovely blurbs, and I sent heartfelt thank-you cards. But was that fair?
As I hope to illustrate with Speck, corporations often profit from the notion that we shouldn't do art for the money. Spotify exploits musicians, and Amazon makes money from used books that never trickles back to the author, Facebook has profited hugely from creators. If it's not obvious, I'm torn about using a paywall on Substack. But at least the platform is set up in a way to give mutual benefit to the host and the creator. I'm not sure I think of what I write here as art, so much as a service. But if I were to attempt to serialize a novel, as some others have, I think Substack offers a different formulation. Which is not to write for money, per se, but to contemplate a writing life that isn't purely gratis. For me, it's a work in progress.
You mention English courses taken at DMACC and how that is a sensitive subject. You are quite right there. Iowa's concurrent enrollment program is almsot entirely driven by financial motivations, not education, and thus pervasively lacks genuine oversight. And you are right to question those credentials, as the local high schools are not held accountable to collegaite standards through that program, and DMACC does not hold them to account. For instance, it doesn't have course standards to hold anyone to account, and resists doing so.
This speaks to your overall theme of the monetization of education, the soul-rending moral compromises that educators face, and the general lack of integrity that ensues under these conditions.
Remember how we had to press to get our books sold at the Spirt Shoppe? Finally they were put in a crate on the floor beneath a sweatshirt rack. I interpreted it as a "micro aggression." I went to retrieve mine recently but was told they had sold and in fact, yours were gone, too. I finally got paid for mine. Did you?
Yes, that was irritating, though I am trying to avoid sharing too many sour grapes of that kind. I think I pulled mine back off the shelf so I could sell them elsewhere. In a case like that, the consignment arrangement -- which didn't come with any paperwork, that I recall -- was more concerning to me. Committing to the book as part of the inventory, even a single copy at a time, would be more respectful than the lack of any financial commitment. It would be a low stakes investment with high yields in mutuality.
You mention English courses taken at DMACC and how that is a sensitive subject. You are quite right there. Iowa's concurrent enrollment program is almsot entirely driven by financial motivations, not education, and thus pervasively lacks genuine oversight. And you are right to question those credentials, as the local high schools are not held accountable to collegaite standards through that program, and DMACC does not hold them to account. For instance, it doesn't have course standards to hold anyone to account, and resists doing so.
This speaks to your overall theme of the monetization of education, the soul-rending moral compromises that educators face, and the general lack of integrity that ensues under these conditions.
Indeed, it seems that many students are taking the discount approach to their degrees, accumulating credits at less rigorous and less expensive schools and then trying to trade up as transfers. Tuition-dependent schools don't want to seem unwelcoming, so there is a lot of pressure placed on registrars and faculty to accept as many of these credits as possible. I often found that when a syllabus was available, the requirements for an online course (especially during the summer) were less than half what one of our regular offerings required: half as many required readings, half as many formal writing assignments. Accepting these courses had real implications for our department, since we depended on non-majors to meet enrollment for many of our courses. The more of those potential students who opted for the flyover method, the lower our enrollments were, which led to reductions in staffing and budget resources. Uversity doesn't offer credit-bearing courses, to my knowledge, but it offers shortcuts, as SparkNotes does, which tend to undermine, rather than bolster, efforts by a primary instructor.
And, speaking as a person in the middle of all this, there is a general unwillingness of most faculty to be rigorous. (It leads to perverse incentives for us.). Even in the face of low completion rates. And an unwillingness to perform basic oversight at the institutional or even state level.
My larger fear is that this will become self-perpetuating to the point where faculty of low-tier institutions won't even recognize their own lack of rigor--it won't even be a conscious choice anymore. I think we've already been there for at least a decade, where "we" means America.
I write as a person with direct access to the state data, and not idle speculation.
Finally, I see myself in the mirror. I was that first-generation rural student. I see the small door leading out of poverty, through which I escaped, closing behind me. I can keep my foot in the door only so long.
I'd like to preface my comments.
All of my comments are from a humanities/liberal arts perspective.
But if we shift to the sciences, engineering, etc., many of these issues change and are reduced. My undergraduate is in the sciences. And when I talk to my science peers, it's clearly a different world.
What I'm getting at is that we, as a people, expect vastly less rigor from them liberal arts than we do from the sciences, engineering, etc. Expecting something like that level of rigor is not well received at most places.
Yes, quite right. Humanities people are typically the ones promoting things like waiving standardized test scores for admission. But there are real consequences for doing that in some cases, if students without adequate preparation are being admitted to programs where they have little chance of succeeding. This conversation is often framed by things like systemic racism, and I see my colleagues in STEM trying to find a way to express their concerns without seeming indifferent to cultural equity.
My former employer went through a period maybe ten years ago of intentionally admitting some lower performing students because they paid a higher rate of tuition. I thought it was unconscionable. One of my advisees had scored a 10 on the ACT, and I was asking him to read Jerome Bruner's "Self-Making Narratives" in a first-year seminar. I'm not sure that admission was a more compassionate choice for him.
Once, after years of publishing my creative work for "bupkus," I received an award for a poem in the amount of $1000. I was very happy, and so I told one of the men who worked where I worked -- I was in an hourly lowest-paid position and he was in a salaried higher-paid regional-sales position: "I won $1000!" I told him, and I explained the details. He shook his head sadly at me and said "you really shouldn't be doing it for the money -- art isn't about money."
I was fucking speechless because obviously and of course it had NEVER been about money! I'd spent more on my art than I'd ever make from it. And I never wrote with dollar signs in my mind. But to be acknowledged with what was for me an enormous amount of money was an honor!
Sometimes money is a widow's mite -- and what it means comes from its precarity. I've given a homeless men two dollars on the street when I only had maybe six dollars in bills and change in my pocket. That meant a lot, and that guy was really appreciative.
A corporation grudgingly handing over $20,000 for the unique and irreplaceable lives of your parents, via the courts, and willing to pay less if they can, is the obverse-inverse-upside-down of the widow's mite.
Somewhere between these extremes is a money-made acknowledgment of gratitude -- a "tip."
And then there is the green space that many academic creative writers (this describes me) enjoy, where my work is salaried, keeps me involved in my art no matter my ups and downs, and if I receive a financial acknowledgement of my work, I am pleased, but I am not going to run myself ragged to get it. I also, with full respect to those who labor on literary magazines, do not like to pay a "reading fee" or submission fee -- and have done so maybe three times in the past 10 years. (I wish they felt as honored by my $3 as I would be if they'd replied to me with a $3 Venmo of appreciation! Ha!)
Capitalism always demands we non-utilitarians carve our crazy paths around its orderly system. I have to pay to eat, but I refuse to prostrate myself to the almighty dollarbuck. So I have to wiggle around in the middle. And that salesman back then was right: don't do art for money. But don't scold an artist for being happy about a money prize either. Appreciation can take many forms.
Quite right: appreciation can take many forms. I think what I'm reacting to is a change in what used to be a mutual understanding among editors and writers. No one was getting paid, really, and everyone accepted those terms. The more one-sided dynamic of the submission fee changed that. I didn't think about it much at first, but the move to online submissions has also increased the rejection:acceptance ratio for most writers. People now set goals of getting 200+ rejections per year, which is quite a lot to be paying for the chance to be published for free.
Peer-review also used to be something everyone gladly did pro-bono. Blurbing, too. But those defaults have tended to create similar inequities to caregiving: women often bear more of the uncompensated labor in academe than men. A case in point was my first book. All of the men whom my publisher invited to blurb it declined; one of them was a mentor. Three women, two of them more casual professional acquaintances than close colleagues, and one of them a complete stranger, agreed to do it. They wrote lovely blurbs, and I sent heartfelt thank-you cards. But was that fair?
As I hope to illustrate with Speck, corporations often profit from the notion that we shouldn't do art for the money. Spotify exploits musicians, and Amazon makes money from used books that never trickles back to the author, Facebook has profited hugely from creators. If it's not obvious, I'm torn about using a paywall on Substack. But at least the platform is set up in a way to give mutual benefit to the host and the creator. I'm not sure I think of what I write here as art, so much as a service. But if I were to attempt to serialize a novel, as some others have, I think Substack offers a different formulation. Which is not to write for money, per se, but to contemplate a writing life that isn't purely gratis. For me, it's a work in progress.
$1,000 for a poem?!?!?! 🙌🙌
I know!!! :)
You mention English courses taken at DMACC and how that is a sensitive subject. You are quite right there. Iowa's concurrent enrollment program is almsot entirely driven by financial motivations, not education, and thus pervasively lacks genuine oversight. And you are right to question those credentials, as the local high schools are not held accountable to collegaite standards through that program, and DMACC does not hold them to account. For instance, it doesn't have course standards to hold anyone to account, and resists doing so.
This speaks to your overall theme of the monetization of education, the soul-rending moral compromises that educators face, and the general lack of integrity that ensues under these conditions.
Remember how we had to press to get our books sold at the Spirt Shoppe? Finally they were put in a crate on the floor beneath a sweatshirt rack. I interpreted it as a "micro aggression." I went to retrieve mine recently but was told they had sold and in fact, yours were gone, too. I finally got paid for mine. Did you?
Yes, that was irritating, though I am trying to avoid sharing too many sour grapes of that kind. I think I pulled mine back off the shelf so I could sell them elsewhere. In a case like that, the consignment arrangement -- which didn't come with any paperwork, that I recall -- was more concerning to me. Committing to the book as part of the inventory, even a single copy at a time, would be more respectful than the lack of any financial commitment. It would be a low stakes investment with high yields in mutuality.