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We Don't Need No Edukasshun

ETS!,

I'm writing in support of Geov Parrish's "right-on" critique of the U.W.'s flirtation with U.P.S., and the larger threat of the corporatization of higher education. Although much has been said, rightly, about the increasing sell-out of higher education to the highest corporate bidder--in the form of endowed chairs, domination of research grant money, etc.--it should be remembered that most of the students enrolled in higher ed in this state, and around the country, are enrolled at the far less glamorous two-year junior, community and technical colleges. Coupled with these higher enrollment numbers, one finds a higher and more explicitly corporate set of interests coming to dominate these institutions.

Two examples of such, in Washington state, are the following:

1) With the passage of the Initiative 601 spending cap, each of this state's 32 community and technical college administrations formed privately funded investment foundations, so as not to be as dependent on unstable state funding. What is the primary purpose of these foundations? To support scholarships, library resources, equipment, faculty teaching awards, and incentives for innovation in curriculum, among other related things. In other words, these foundations are set up to fund exactly the things which, one might naively think, the state ought to fund. Who is funding them? Airborne Express, Boeing, AT&T, Safeco, and other corporate donors. What are these schools' administrators offering to these corporations to secure their contributions to these foundations?

2) Last year, Rep. Tom Huff, the head of the Washington State Legislature's House Appropriations Committee, led an effort to implement what has come to be called "Performance Funding." The idea behind this is that the state wants its community and technical colleges to be "more accountable." Every school in the state was required, this year, to produce a plan detailing how it was going to streamline its operations in accordance with this drive for accountability. The goals which the legislature has mandated are as follows:

a) the average wage of someone with an A.A. degree must be $12.00/hour; b) 67% of students who state intention to transfer to a four-year school must do successfully; c) 85% of the students at the state's two-year colleges must complete the core courses (e.g., Basic Math, English, etc.); d) 95% of a given student's courses must be directly applicable toward that student's major.

Schools which do not meet these accountability measures will suffer cuts in their state funding.

This means that community and technical college programs which provide training in fields whose average wage is below $12.00/hour (e.g., childcare teacher education programs) are imperiled.

This means that schools have an incentive to discourage students who don't fit the "model" of the successful Bachelor's degree recipient from even stating intentions for transfering to a four-year school for such a degree.

This means that schools have an incentive to water down their core courses so as to meet the 85% standard, without necessarily providing students with anything useful in such courses.

This means that schools will now have an incentive to prevent student exploration and investigation in a number of different fields of study.

The corporate view of "education" is a means by which to obtain a compliant, subservient, "well-trained," authority-respecting, myopically minded, profitable working class. These two examples illustrate the extent to which such corporate interests have come to dominate our state's community and technical college system.

--Dick Burton, Philosophy Teacher, Seattle Central Community College

The Revolution, Cont'd

ETS!,

Just read Geov Parrish's response to John Persak.

The kind of left wing back biting Mr. Anarchy is pushing is precisely the BS that has marginalized any kind of meaningful opposition on the left. How long will we have to endure these interminable conversations about process and legitimacy? Isn't it way past the time for this? How much time did Geov spend writing that (great) response? How much space went to the exchange that could have gone to some other more 'legitimate' purpose?

ETS!, I think, is a publication that connects me "with other people that are building real community..." and it has nothing to do with tortured definitions of who actually qualifies as a "worker," and pointed questions from over-privileged elites about the political viability of my retirement fund. Is it really necessary that people on the left agree totally with each other about what utopia looks like? Can't we just say the enemy of my enemy is my friend for the time being and get on with it?

In the meantime, corporate/government oligarchies are basically diddling the public at will. ETS! seems to be doing a great job at calling our attention to that fact. It's a great publication. Keep up the good work.

Thanks, Geov, for articulating the frustration. I hope you don't have to do it often.

--Jamie Alls, Beacon Hill

The Good News

Dear ETS!

Many weeks ago I sent you a letter, expressing a desperate need for more voices of hope. Today, on the day after the equinox, I wanted to send you a voice of hope myself.

From where I work, on the sixth floor of a downtown office building, outside my window I can see the roof of an old stone building that now houses a Key Bank branch. There, for the past four years that I have worked here, sea gulls return each year and build their nests, lay their eggs, raise their young. Every year a new generation of gulls is borne, grows, learns to fly, on sea-cliffs made of stone, by human hands. Grass grows lush and green, fed by rain and guano, among the mounds where they make their nests.

On the other side, another building, rigid International-style steel and glass, lies with a roof covered in a layer of moss so thick that the rainwater never quite dries.

Life returns, untamed, uncontrolled, whenever the misguided disease they call civilization rests its deadly vigilance for even a moment. Log the forests, clog the streams with mud and poison, cover the earth with concrete and stone--but let them rest for a moment and roots will break the concrete, moss will grow in the cracks where steel meets glass, animals will live in the walls and find purchase on the rooftops, bacteria will grow that feed on the most toxic mess.

Should humans, in our folly, destroy this world with nuclear fire, whole ecosystems will still live in cracks in the deepest part of the sea, and life will thrive five miles beneath the earth, needing only time to reclaim the surface again.

Liberation, like life, is undefeatable. It takes huge armies to crush the human spirit; whole empires, military or commercial, to control a peoples. Yet let them falter for an instant, and human liberation breaks forth from every crack in the empire.

Despite our losses, despite the immense and undeniable suffering, in the end life and liberation prevail.

And on the equinox, no matter what we do to this planet or each other, night and day are equal.

Yours in liberation,

--John Chapman, Seattle