On Other Campuses: SUNY-Albany

Editor
Letters to the Editor
Times Union
Albany, NY 12212

To The Editors:

In his comments on educational policies and practices ("Innovative reform, not rhetoric, is need in state education," Times Union Sunday 17 September 1995 E-5), Harry Rosenfeld rehearses some familiar views on the emerging educational policies and reviews available options for what he regards to be necessary changes. But these changes are, in actuality, accomodations of corporate needs and the conservative social agenda. His text never touches on the root problems involved.

No educational policies (whether at the elementary or the university level) can be set through merely pragmatic and ad hoc day-to-day juggling. They must be based on philosophical principles and go beyond the administrative gimmicks of how to hire or fire two more instructors, drop another program, or "bring in private money," which is just another way for business interests to shape public education policies.

I believe, a rigorous and committed thinking about educational policy should engage, above all, the emerging material contradictions of the international division of labor, which is the fundamental issue in the current so called "crisis” of education. This "crisis" is caused not by a shift in cultural attitudes (ideology), as the right-wing has it, but by material labor relations and the struggle of transnational capitalism to appropriate an ever larger share of the labor of workers. All the available statistics unambiguously show that while the profits of corporations are up, the earnings of wage laborers are down. Resources, in other words, have not in any way diminished (the "production” regime has not been transformed). Rather, the distribution of resources (the amount of profit) is increasingly being shifted to corporations and away from the public. The "crisis," in short, is a fabricated "crisis." Or, to put it in terms of another analytical frame, there is nothing new about this "crisis," because "crises" are endemic to capitalism. The "crisis” is being used as an alibi to legitimate increasing the "profits” of corporations through Republican legislation to reduce taxes by cutting collective expenditures such as education. Given the intellectual confusion and passivity of many of the administrators at SUNY-Albany, setting educational policies for the University has, therefore, become a name for accommodating the demands of this new aggressive capitalism. Instead of affirming the role of public education in a democratic society, SUNY-Albany has retreated more and more into accepting the status quo. Its administrators are now competing with each other to demonstrate their value to the system by seeing who can most effectively adjust to the new “realities." But the reality of these new "realities” is not being questioned by the educators who are supposed to be critical intellectuals. Consequently, many SUNY-Albany administrators now openly talk about privatizing public education or, at least, adopting the ideals and methods of the “private sector" as the only way of dealing with the current “crisis."

In setting its educational agenda, a progressive university should not shy away from the "big picture"—a concern that is routinely dismissed at SUNY-Albany as “impractical," in a cover-up for lack of intellectual rigor. It should insist on the root questions of material life in a democratic society by asserting the priority of collective needs over private profit. A progressive university should develop an educational policy that can relate these collective needs to the fundamental ideals of democratic citizenship and to the new issues shaping the collective life of people in the context of the Post-Fordist international division of labor.

A post-corporate university (and a public university is constituted as post-corporate) should clearly and without hesitation critique the race for profit and declare that a liberal education in a democracy is the pedagogy of collective life in a "good society." Furthermore, it should understand “society” not in a nativist and chauvinistic way but in terms of a new internationalism. Contrary to the frightened administrators of SUNY-Albany, educational policy should be a blueprint for training critical citizens and not simply a means for processing young people, according to the least expensive methods, into skills that are useful to corporations but alienating and dehumanizing to people.

Educational policy, in short, should be more than a series of plans for painless downsizing, hiring and firing, shifting the numbers of FTE's, etc. It should be more than finding ways to privatize public education. It should be a policy for reaffirming the role of public education in building a society of justice and equality in which every citizen is educated as a critical human being and not simply as bearers of skills that are attractive to corporations depending on how much profit they generate.

Teresa L. Ebert 
Department of English 
University at Albany 
State University of New York 
Albany, NY 12222