MLK

[Edward Biberman (1904–1986), I Had a Dream, c. 1968. Oil on Masonite. 24" x 30". Los Angeles County Museum of Art.]

I saw this painting at LACMA last summer. It is not currently on display.

Why I am skeptical about tuition-free community college

President Obama’s proposal of two years of tuition-free community college comes with greater complications than brief news reports allow. One such complication: the plan would cover only coursework that provides job-training or that transfers to four-year schools. Thus the “developmental” (read: remedial) classes that begin (and end) many a community-college student’s coursework would appear not to be included.

Greater access to higher education ought to look like an unqualified good. Yet I find myself deeply skeptical about whether tuition-free community college (hereafter TFCC) will serve any purpose but greater economic and social stratification. I see in this proposal (which probably has little chance of becoming law) the same logic that underwrites MOOCs: a four-year residential experience gets reserved for a privileged few, with something else for the rest of us. A family of modest means, faced with a choice between free and far from it, would find it difficult not to choose free. It’s already well known that capable students from disadvantaged families tend to aim low and think locally when applying to colleges. TFCC would do much to encourage diminished educational choices: community college rather than, say, a four-year state school. It seems to me a higher-ed version of tracking.

And there’s good reason to wonder whether TFCC is likely to prepare students for academic success. Great things can happen at community colleges — I have taught brilliant students who studied there. But for most students who start at community colleges, the chances of moving on to a four-year degree are small. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College has the dispiriting numbers, with thirteen percent of community-college students earning a bachelor’s degree in five years, fifteen percent earning the degree within six.

Another problem with TFCC involves instruction. The overwhelming majority of community-college faculty are adjunct instructors being paid a pittance for their work — according to The Adjunct Project, an average of $2100 per course at public two-year schools, or $140 a week. TFCC, which allots no additional funds for instruction, would serve to further the adjunctification of teaching. A greater influx of students into community colleges would require ever more adjuncts, each with the small courseload that institutions assign to avoid having to pay into health insurance. Call it the academic version of the twenty-nine-hour week.

A bolder proposal (which would stand even less chance of passing than the Obama proposal) would offer, in the spirit of the GI Bill, free tuition for two years of coursework wherever a student chooses to go (call it TFP: tuition-free, period). TFP could be made available to students whose families earn under, say, $100,000 a year. And the dollar amount could be capped, which might encourage institutions to lower tuition. Like TFCC, TFP would do nothing to reverse higher education’s increasing reliance on adjunct instructors. But TFP would at least encourage greater choice and greatly reduce the cost of college for students at both two-year and four-year schools.¹

Bolder yet would be a revamping of K-12 education that addresses the cruel inequities of school funding. As Jonathan Kozol has often observed, there’s something deeply wrong with a culture in which the accident of one’s birth determines the quality of one’s education.² TFCC will change none of that. Those who can afford to go from high school to a four-year college will continue to do so, and everyone else will have less reason to aspire to do so.

¹ Pipedreams ought not to require details. These details are the best I can do.

² I realized only after writing that “cruel inequities” is an unconscious variation on the title of Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.

Related posts
The Adjunct Project
“A fully-realized adult person”
The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else

[I have voted three times for Barack Obama. I have knocked on doors for him in two cities and have made substantial contributions to his presidential campaigns. But when it comes to education, I find him an utter disappointment.]

Domestic comedy

“That’s not Aunt Bee!”

“That’s the Anti-Bee.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It was Dorothy Konrad as Flora, in an episode of Mayberry R.F.D., a show so unremittingly, sickeningly wholesome that it makes The Andy Griffith Show look like film noir.]

Words of the year

The Economist rounds up the words of the year: culture, exposure, vape, #blacklivesmatter.

National Send a Handwritten Letter Day (?)

January 17th — and every 17th this year — is (supposedly) National Send a Handwritten Letter Day. Having written three letters in the last six days, I will probably take the day off.

Coming just six days before National Handwriting Day, NSHLD seems oddly placed. Does it have an official sponsor? Is that sponsor trying to steal NHD’s thunder? If thunder thunders and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

In 2015 there’s something decidedly artificial about keeping in touch by letter. I don’t mind: I like writing and receiving letters. One of the great friendships of my life — with my pal Aldo Carrasco — got started in letters.

Related reading
All OCA letter posts (Pinboard)

[National Send a Handwritten Letter Day is such an ungainly name. How about Handwritten Letter Day?)

Goodbye and good riddance, Glass

BBC News reports that Google is ending sales of Google Glass:

The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but will stop producing Glass in its present form.

Instead it will focus on “future versions of Glass” with work carried out by a different division to before.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC describes his life with the hideous eyewear:

As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects — in particular the camera. There is however one huge disadvantage — it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience.

Perhaps Google Glass, like Odysseus, will someday return. But I can’t imagine many people pining away in the interim.

[Did you notice the British “different to”? The Glass website and the Google blog carry no news of Glass’s imminent disappearance.]

The German Doctor

[Florencia Bado as Lilith. Click for a larger view.]

The German Doctor (original title: Wakolda, dir. Lucía Puenzo, 2013) is a quietly terrifying film. The premise: in 1960, Helmut Gregor (Àlex Brendemühl), a German émigré doctor, takes a room in an Argentine family’s hotel. The family’s twelve-year-old daughter Lilith (Florencia Bado) finds the doctor fascinating. Indeed, with his dark mustache and perfect hair, he looks like a young girl’s idea of a movie star. The doctor begins to devote greater and greater attention to this family. He is concerned about Lilith’s short stature. He is concerned about her mother Eva (Natalia Oreiro), who is pregnant with twins. And he arranges to mass-produce the dolls that Lilith’s father Enzo (Diego Peretti) makes by hand. They have wind-up beating hearts.

The German Doctor reminds me of Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). A secret childhood world, an increasingly close relationship between a family and a magical benefactor who is not what he appears to be: these are the ingredients of a deeply disturbing story.

Like so many trailers, the trailer for this film is misleading: The Good Doctor is quietly terrifying. The slow pace and a preference for implication to statement make the film all the more powerful. In Spanish and German, with English subtitles.

[Wakolda: the name of Lilith’s doll. The film is adapted from Puenzo’s novel of that name.]

W4

A long look at revising Webster’s Third: Stefan Fatsis, The Definition of a Dictionary (Slate).

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Orange batik art

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the [yester]Day is Judith Kngwarreye’s Tharrakarre . That’s a mere smidgen of it to the left.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

A house is not a home

I winced this morning to hear the newsreader at our NPR member-station refer to our new governor Bruce Rauner’s “nine homes.” Properties, yes: condos, houses, a penthouse, ranches, a farm. Homes, no.

Garner’s Modern American Usage makes the point nicely: its entry for home reads, in its entirety, “See house.” And that entry explains: “In the best usage, the structure is always called a house. . . . The word home connotes familial ties.”

One cannot have nine “homes” without a very complicated (messy) private life. I am not accusing the governor of that.