Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on GLSEN Day of Silence

On 25 March, I reported on this blog (here) that the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met on 23 March with representatives of Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an organization devoted to challenging homophobia in American schools. GLSEN sponsors the annual Day of Silence to combat school bullying based on sexual orientation. This year’s Day of Silence was held on 17 April.

I’m now pleased to read a report by Jenna Lowenstein at 365Gay (here) noting that Arne Duncan mentioned the Day of Silence on his Education Department blog (here) on 17 April. Mr. Duncan’s blog states,

Yesterday, many Americans paused to remember the senseless death of 32 students at Virginia Tech in 2007. Today, many Americans will honor the Day of Silence called for on behalf of victims of harassment and bullying around issues of sexual orientation, including a recent suicide who would have turned 12 today.

As Jenna Lowenstein reports, Secretary Duncan’s decision to make note of the Day of Silence on his blog is significant, since he is the first Secretary of Education to acknowledge this annual event.

As I’ve noted in a number of previous postings, I have a strong interest in this topic as an educator who has worked in church-sponsored universities with an historic commitment to preparing future teachers. I’ve also noted (here) that I was punished at a United Methodist-owned university for even mentioning GLSEN in a list of many organizations that faculty and students interested in civic engagement might consider studying.

As the Bilgrimage posting to which I’ve just linked, along with many other postings on this blog, notes, universities can and should play a key role in combating school bullying and prejudice based on sexual orientation in American classrooms. They can do so by preparing teachers who understand the mechanisms of discrimination, who are committed to opposing prejudice, and who are proactive about preventing bullying based on sexual orientation.

Church-related institutions should be leading the way here. Sadly, they are often not doing so. Instead, as Martin Luther King noted re: churches in the American South during the Civil Rights struggle, they are functioning as the taillight of necessary social change, rather than the prophetic headlight.

It’s time for our church-related universities to stop promoting homophobic prejudice. The new Secretary of Education is pointing the way, and universities that produce teachers for the American classroom—including church-owned ones—would do well to follow his lead.

Sea-Change in Approach to Anti-Gay Bullying: New Education Secretary Meets with GLSEN

As my set of interests in the profile section of this blog indicates, I have a strong concern to stop bullying of LGBT youth in schools. I’ve blogged repeatedly about that concern. I’ve also noted how, when as an academic administrator in a university, I was given an assignment of leading faculty in a project to encourage the civic engagement of students, I was punished for recommending GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) as one resource among many that faculty might study as they guided students in civic engagement projects (here).

I was told that mentioning this organization as one among many others from which faculty and students might learn as they dealt with community problems was “putting my lifestyle in the face” of the campus community. This took place in a Methodist university that proclaims to be concerned about healing social wounds and challenging social divisions, in line with the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church. When I told my supervisor, in response to her statement about my “lifestyle,” that I have a life and not a lifestyle, I incurred even more serious punishment.

This is a school whose Education Department is required by its accrediting body to teach prospective teachers to combat anti-gay discrimination, and to model respect for diversity in its own faculty. It also happens to be a school that has no written public policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

Because of my interest in combating bullying of gay students in schools, and because of my own history with this topic, I am very happy to read that the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard earlier this week (here). Byard was accompanied by students and teachers interested in stopping bullying of LGBT youth in schools.

This was an historic meeting. It is the first time a Secretary of Education has met with LGBT advocates. The Bush administration rejected calls for such meetings.

Eliza Byard reports that Secretary Duncan listened compassionately to the testimony of students who have been bullied due to their sexual orientation, and committed himself to making schools safe for all students, regardless of sexual orientation. He also expressed interest in finding ways to combat anti-gay bullying, and requested information about interventions that have been tried by GLSEN and other groups.

For those interested in hearing recent first-hand testimony by a high-school student who has experienced bullying in school due to his sexual orientation, I recommend the testimony of 17-year old James Neilly of Charlotte, Vermont (here), at the Vermont Senate hearing last week as that body deliberated on a same-sex marriage bill (it passed the Senate by a vote of 26-4). Neilly speaks about how locker-room bullying due to his sexual orientation evoked a “ripping, nagging feeling that I am inferior.”

No young person should be made to feel that way in our schools. It continues to appall me that any university owned by a church which professes to decry prejudice against gay human beings lacks policies forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, and punishes academic leaders who encourage faculty to consider organizations devoted to ending bullying of gay students, among other organizations promoting constructive social change, as faculty study civic engagement project for students.

New Administration of Barack Obama: Challenges to American Higher Education

As the inauguration of the new president nears, I’m wondering what effect the change in government will have for education. I’ve just read a thought-provoking article in the Chronicle for Higher Education that addresses some of the questions confronting higher education today in the wake of serious economic downturn. This is Jeff Abernathy’s “Into the Wild.” Abernathy is vice-president and dean of Augustana College in Illinois.

I blogged some time ago about my hopes for the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/ive-been-ho-hum-about-most-of-mr.html). In that posting, I reflected on what I hope will happen in the Department of Education, given the new Secretary’s promising history in the area of early childhood education.

My thoughts this week have turned to higher education, a subject about which I have blogged repeatedly here. I’m thinking of the crisis of American higher education these days (a crisis of leadership that I’ve addressed in numerous postings) because more and more stories are breaking regarding the effects of the economic downturn on higher education. I believe these stories will become more numerous in the coming year.

I also think they will call on us to look carefully at what we have allowed higher education to become—to examine how we are letting university leaders with little understanding of or respect for academic life reduce higher education to a numbers game, thereby betraying historic commitments to academic excellence. If we address the growing economic crisis in higher education as a purely economic matter, we will contribute to a serious problem that has developed in our university and college life in recent decades, and will further undermine American higher education.

The problem? As many of my postings on this theme in the past year have noted, our institutions of higher learning are increasingly led by boards and presidents whose claim to fame is numbers crunching. Ask faculty, who do the actual work of teaching and of carrying on the legacy of the founders of universities, what is wrong with higher education, and you will get an earful. And a consistent one at that. And an instructive one, which could well be used as a model for reform, if anyone chose to listen to faculty and not the big women and big men on top, for a change.

Faculty in many institutions note increasing workloads and decreasing support for their classroom work: frozen salaries, tenure on hold, imperatives from on high to teach ever-increasing numbers of students with ever dwindling resources. And as these challenges to the pursuit of academic excellence—serious, fundamental ones—face teachers in many universities, the salaries of top administrators, including presidents and CFOs, skyrocket.

Frozen faculty salaries while those at the top are augmented when they are already grossly out of proportion with the salaries of those who do the real work of keeping academic traditions and founders’ legacies alive . . . . This demoralizes faculty, makes faculty cynical, siphons off commitment as they pursue their important teaching tasks; it raises questions about what universities really value, and whether academic excellence is really what presidents and boards wish to highlight. And these considerations of grossly overpaid top administrators do not even take into account the considerable perks and lavish benefit packages enjoyed by many top leaders of universities, many of which are not even disclosed to faculty, staff, and students, particularly in private colleges and universities.

As this situation has developed—and as it has unfolded in direct relation to similar trends in corporate economic life under the neoconservative political administrations of recent years—what has been the response of university boards, who are charged with ultimate supervision of their institutions, of assuring that academic goals remain paramount in the institution? Boards have generally been part of the problem. Many boards are dominated, after all, by the very culture of neoconservatism that has gotten American higher education into the mess it is now in.

Boards are increasingly dominated by powerful business and political leaders who see the dollar as the bottom line. Who give carte blanche to ruthless top administrators who assure profit in a university, even if that profit is earned at the cost of shoving faculty into a quasi-feudal status in which faculty rights are violated and faculty voices are muted . . . .

Many university boards are now under the control of those who have little understanding of or sympathy for academic life and academic excellence, and who appoint and defend presidents who are equally unqualified to lead academic institutions. Under the leadership of such boards and such presidents and CFOs, academic institutions in the United States are now in serious danger—danger of losing their souls, of selling themselves out as institutions committed to academic excellence and to shaping culture by imparting to students the core values necessary to keep democracy alive. Some universities I am monitoring—rare ones, I’ll admit, but they do exist—have sold their soul to neoconservative polity to such an extent that they have placed their chief academic officer under the supervision of their CFO!

The solution? In the situation of increasing stress that academic institutions will be going through now as a result of economic downturn, it would be advisable for boards to reassess the performance of presidents in areas other than the economic (and even there, in the economic area, it would be advisable for boards to look beyond glitzy charts prepared by presidents and their CFOs and to do some sober numbers-crunching of their own). It would be advisable for boards to ask how presidents are actually (as opposed to rhetorically) strengthening the academic life of their universities, and serving the mission of their universities. To look at what students are learning, and whether they are learning, and how the values the university professes to cherish are being transmitted to students—effectively (as opposed to rhetorically) transmitted.

Will this solution be applied in many universities, under the impetus of economic downturn? I doubt it. From my experience as an academic administrator whose work has required him to interact closely with university boards, I do not have much confidence that many boards will begin to look carefully at the growing discrepancy between what their institutions profess and what they practice. I do not expect university boards, on the whole, to call to accountability presidents who are grossly undermining academic excellence. It was those boards who placed the presidents in the positions of power the presidents enjoy, after all.

What I do look for in coming days, and am already seeing in some institutions, is this: more freezing of faculty salaries, more setting tenure aside, increased teaching loads for faculty, and more draconian penalties for faculty who dare to protest. In a few institutions, I am seeing worrisome signs that the economic downturn may be used as a pretext by some presidents (with board approval) to target and dismiss faculty who are critical of those presidents’ betrayal of academic excellence and of the legacy of their universities’ founders.

If this happens—and I expect it to happen on some campuses I am monitoring—I also do not expect to see accrediting bodies doing their job and protecting academic freedom of faculty. Some accrediting bodies—notably the Southern Association (SACS), which oversees colleges and universities in the Southeast—have a history of giving generous benefit of the doubt to presidents and boards, in situations of conflict in which faculty allege that their academic freedom has been violated. In states that afford faculty no legal protection against unjust dismissal—so-called right-to-work states, which are numerous in the very geographic area covered by SACS—faculty also lack any strong legal recourse when they are dismissed for reasons that are clearly spurious.

If the economic downturn does not result in attempts to address the crisis of soul in American higher education, and if university presidents and boards are continued to be allowed to get away with attempts to rob faculty of rights necessary to assure academic freedom, I do not foresee a bright future for American higher education. I do not see a bright future because the problems of higher education have become systemic, deeply entrenched, and intertwined with issues of economic power and prestige that are not easily resolved.

There was a time in which I held hope for a fix to the substantial problems I’m describing. I did so because I saw them as rooted primarily in the lust for power on the part of out-of-control egotistical top administrators intent on shoring up their power over others. The longer I have worked in academic administration, however, the more I have come to recognize that these problems are rooted in both unjust use of power over others and in economic motives that encourage top administrators and boards to turn too many universities into feeding troughs for those at the top.

One of the reasons faculty have to be relegated to quasi-feudal status in universities reorganizing themselves along neoconservative economic principles is that more and more money has to flow to the top, to support the lavish (and increasing) salaries and perks of those at the top. That money has to come from somewhere. When no questions can or will be raised about the inequity of salary distribution from the top down to the lowly faculty, then cuts will always be made at the bottom, if economic times are grim.

And boards will not protest or demand a reconsideration of the unequal distribution of salaries within the university, because many members of university boards are there not merely for the power they expect to enjoy as board members, but for the economic perks, as well. It has taken me some time to recognize many of the ramifications of the economic games being played with some college boards, because those games are skillfully hidden.

At several institutions at which I have worked and with whose boards I have interacted, for instance, it has seemed strange to me that fundraising has been carefully controlled—and even discouraged—at precisely this time in which a developing economic crunch has been on the horizon in the past five years. At such a time, one would expect a president and her or his board to turn intently to a strong fundraising program. Then I began to think about why these particular presidents and their boards were unwilling to empower and support their fundraising officers, particularly when they had outstanding fundraisers at their disposal with proven track records of success in that area.

As I reflected on this anomalous situation, I began to realize that key board members did not want strong fundraising programs, insofar as those programs would threaten those board members’ control of the university’s fundraising activities—and would threaten, as well, the perks those key board members received when they brought in grants. What had appeared to me as all about (and only about) ego and power—the need of the president and key board members to take all credit for any fundraising coups—began to appear in a different light, as I observed the economic benefits coming to board members who sought to control the fundraising of the university, and even to run off talented fundraisers with a proven track record of success.

It’s about a feeding trough, sad to say, at which the privileged few intend to keep feeding, as they shove the many away. And this is not lost on faculty, who see the clear disproportion between the amount of work they are required to do and the amount done at the top (though those at the top are loud about how hard they work for their high salaries). The reduction of the university to a feeding trough for the big men and big women on top is not lost on faculty, who see the discrepancy between what they are paid for doing the real work of the university, and what presidents and CFOs are paid.

And so to the Augustana story with which I began this posting: the story Jeff Abernathy tells is a powerful one, because it sketches an alternative future for institutions of higher education faced with economic downturn. Abernathy notes that Augustana has responded to the current downturn both by tightening its belt significantly, and by hiring more faculty.

Why the latter? In Abernathy’s view, keeping a strong faculty even (and especially) in times of economic crisis is essential to keeping academic excellence alive, because gifted and devoted faculty are a college’s greatest asset. Augustana College has decided that, even (and especially) in times of economic crisis, it must build towards the future—and it is doing so by hiring the best faculty possible in as many numbers as the college can afford:

Building on the faculty strength that is already here, we're hoping to be excellent for generations. Being greedy now, in this most fearful of markets, might just be the right path to the kind of riches we value most: excellence in student learning and growth.

My hope for the new administration in the area of higher education? Study the Augustana model. Do all in the government’s power to encourage academic excellence in higher education. See that faculty are valued and rewarded, and that academic freedom is promoted.

But be aware that in doing this, the greatest foes you will encounter will be within the academy itself: they will be sitting on university boards and in the top administrative positions in universities. And if you open the can of worms—the economic can of worms—that several generations of neoconservative political and economic models have created within our universities and colleges, be prepared for a fight. People who have created a comfortable feeding trough for themselves and have shoved everyone else away from that trough will not relinquish the trough and allow others to share without a fight.

But take heart as you do battle. Listen to the courageous, prophetic words of the founder of Bethune-Cookman University, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that (emphasis in original).*

It is, in the final analysis, all about creating democratic institutions (including academic ones) that keep nobody out. Our democracy depends on offering strong educations to everyone. And it depends on building academic institutions that do not serve the needs of the few—that become feeding troughs for a privileged elite, and shamefully, for an elite administering the university rather than for an elite served by the university—but that recognize and reward the merits of everyone. The task of remaking the world of our participatory democracy demands nothing less.

*"Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament," July 1954, Caux, Switzerland.

Arne Duncan as Education Secretary: Reflections on Obama's Cabinet Choices

I’ve been ho-hum about most of Mr. Obama’s cabinet appointments. But the choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary interests me and even gives me reason for muted hope. It’s not that any of the previous selections have struck me as particularly bad. They have just been unexciting.

Most seem sound enough, if weighted a bit more on the side of centrist expertise than I’d have hoped. And by “centrist,” I’m referring not only to the ideological orientation of the cabinet choices. I’m referring as well to the provenance of those being selected. They’re from the usual power centers of American society; they have the predictable educational pedigree of such selections. They represent, in other words, the very folks who have led us right to the brink of economic collapse—and that concerns me.

The appointment of Arne Duncan does grab my attention, though. I knew next to nothing about Duncan before the appointment. What I’m reading strikes me as hopeful. I like that he has managed to maintain positive ties to the teachers’ union in Chicago while running a major metropolitan school system. He supported the failed plan to start a high school for gay-lesbian youth in Chicago—a good plan for a valuable project, which should have been implemented.

And, according to today’s New York Times, Duncan is a strong advocate for an initiative dear to the new president’s heart—an enhanced early childhood education program for youth across the nation (www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?partner=p). This is an initiative we sorely need.

It’s no secret that the American educational system is in trouble—dire trouble. And at all levels. What seems to escape the attention of a public infatuated with scores “proving” that pupils can read, write, and cipher adequately (or proving the opposite, which is, unfortunately, more often the case) is that a good education is about more than acquiring basic skills.

It’s about entrée. It’s about ability to contribute in a participatory democracy. It’s about access to power and privilege in a society in which power and privilege (and the world’s goods) are inequitably distributed.

The most scandalous failure of our current educational system is its apparent inability to level the playing field by drawing the youth of marginalized communities inside. We have spent several decades lamenting the lack of basic skills among American students, and punishing educators and schools that work hard to inculcate those skills, while ignoring the most salient—the central and glaring—fact about our schools’ shortcomings. This is their inability to begin the process of educating youth on the margins at the critical early-childhood threshold—to begin the educational process in a way that draws these young folks into education and into the participatory structures of democracy for their entire lives.

Too many of our citizens are left outside. Too many of us not only live on the margins: we are left on the margins. We are left there by an educational system that does almost nothing to educate us, even when it graduates us and offers us degrees.

Early childhood education is critical because the early childhood phase is the make-or-break moment in the educational process. Fail to induct a youngster into the educational system at this threshold moment, and you’ve lost him or her for life. Society has lost this valuable citizen, and the talents this citizen brings to us, forever.

What strikes me as particularly promising about the choice of Arne Duncan for secretary of education is not so much his potential to address the manifold problems of our educational system. It’s his focus on what is the problem of the system, the core problem: its failure to reach children on the margins, particularly at the key moment of early childhood education.

The various educational reforms of recent neoconservative administrations have been, frankly, shell games. They have been shell games because they begin with the assumption that the most significant thing wrong with our educational system is its failure to teach basic skills. From there, they move to the punitive (and polarizing) assumption that schools should be rewarded or penalized on the basis of students’ scores on standardized tests.

What this neoconservative strategy entirely misses is the fact that many American students will never get to the point of meeting society's benchmarks in the areas of reading, writing, and doing math because they have not been reached at all by the educational system. Not, that is, in any way that counts, in any way that allows them to understand the importance of education to their entire lives. Not in any way that allows them to become educated.

They were not reached at the moment when reaching out and drawing in is most important: at the very beginning of their schooling. They will never be adequately taught, these students left behind, because our society and its schools have not cared enough to demonstrate to these marginalized young people their importance to all of us, as they begin their educations.

Until we address that social assumption—the assumption that we can live with marginality and do nothing about it—we will not being educating the majority of our citizens. Not adequately, that is.

And addressing that assumption is definitely going to take reform of how we train those who teach. The education departments of too many of our universities are, frankly, laughable. They are too often staffed by people too woefully uneducated themselves to educate any other human being.

And they are staffed that way from the top down. There are wonderful educators in many of our education departments. There are people in those departments who are willing to wear themselves out trying to reach students.

But these educators rarely control or even exercise much influence over the direction of schools of education. Instead, “professional” “educators” tend to predominate at the top of such departments—and at the helms of universities that sponsor schools of education. “Professional” as in trained—trained bureaucrats.

Many of those heading education departments and entire universities are people with doctorates in fields like education who are shockingly devoid of even the basics of education—of the depth and breadth of a liberal education that comprises wide reading, of interaction with educated people from many different schools of thought, and so forth. Too many professional educators approach the task of education as an administrative game. Too few understand it as what it is when it is done right: the challenge of reaching out and drawing in, particularly of reaching to and drawing in those on the margins.

Too many educators lack this perspective on what education is all about because their educational “training” has taught them to create nifty slide presentations or to crunch numbers in salary scales or how to craft a memo to avoid legal entanglements. But it has not taught them to understand how social structures work or how the human mind and heart function. The education of far too many educational bureaucrats is simply not education at all, in the classic sense of that term.

I hope that Obama and Duncan begin addressing these problems. It is high time that they do so. It is imperative that they do so, if we’re going to begin recovering our democracy.

Doing so will not be easy, however. It will require that they go up against the most powerful and least educated elites in our educational system—folks like the presidents and boards of trustees who run the universities. The folks who command the high salaries while assigning the hard work of education to shockingly underpaid and exploited faculty members such as those Gina Nahai discusses in a Huffington Post article earlier this week (www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-nahai/the-great-shame-of-americ_b_150940.html). (Here's where the good relationship with the Chicago teachers' union will be valuable: the "professional" educators at the top are there because, on the whole, they resist adequate pay for the real educators beneath them.)

As long as the system producing the "educators" who have failed to educate several generations of American youth remains in place, not much is going to change. Nothing much has changed as we have allowed—forced is a better word—our schools to play the numbers game with standardized scores while failing to reach scads of our youngsters in any meaningful way.

And nothing at all will change as long as we allow grossly overpaid, soulless—and yes, corrupt; corrupted by their privilege and power over others—educational “experts” to run our educational shows. How can someone who does not understand or value what his or her own soul says—who does not have the tools to do that, tools provided by a real education—touch the souls of others?