Posted By BillHeise on February 11, 2010

This is a response to something I saw on Dean Dad’s Confessions of a Community College Dean. It is in response to the following quote:

One of the Chronicle pieces quotes Cary Nelson, the President of the AAUP, as liken[ing] the for-profit sector to “the blob,” an alien life form that consumed everything in its path in the 1958 Steve McQueen movie of the same name.

“The blob would shimmer and then be half again as big as before,” Mr. Nelson says. “You’d turn your attention away and look back and suddenly, it’s blocking out most of the sun.”

Exactly wrong. The for-profits didn’t come from outer space, or for no particular reason. They emerged to fill gaps in the nonprofit system. Their growth is a direct and predictable reflection of the existing system’s failures. If the best the AAUP can come up with is an analogy to space aliens, they just don’t get it. And if they don’t get it, they won’t stop it. Which, so far, they haven’t.

Dean Dad gets it a bit wrong, here. It’s not that they appeared to fill the gaps in the non-profit system. It’s that everyone in the non-profit system is basing their actions on a false premise. The “problem” of the for-profits is that they have a reasonable explanation for the values they are foisting on their students. This is a “the-students-are-right” model. I myself don’t believe this is the best model for a general education, and it doesn’t surprise me that Dean Dad feels overwhelmed by the system that is pressing against and down on him. I have worked for for-profits and have felt the same pressures.

That being said, the problem with the GenEd model in the public university that I came up in is that it tends to foster an anti-capitalist ethos in its ranks. I got my PhD at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where people like Michael Berubé and Cary Nelson were the drivers of the department, the avant-garde, whom all others aspired to imitate.

Now I didn’t and don’t have a problem with Michael Berubé (whose blog I read every day) or Cary Nelson, nor do I have a problem with Marxism; but the running joke in the department in 1994 when I left was that Nelson the Marxist was driving an expensive Mercedes (or some expensive car; I really don’t know much about cars). The joke seems to me to arise from a problem with the Marxist point of view.

Money in that system was opposed to the ideal. Businessmen were a necessary part of the economy, but they did not have any moral authority because of their travel in the base world of commerce. Only those who had foregone commerce for a “higher” ideal could be said to have any moral authority. [This argument sounds a lot like the argument that had Knecht flinging himself into cold mountain waters in an act of self-sacrifice in The Glass Bead Game.] But alas the world is a fallen place and the selfish outnumber the idealists. Idealists like Cary Nelson can only see money as the specter of as a Blob” that blocks out the Platonic sun that would shine brightly in another world than ours.

I have plenty of friends who believe this, or versions of this; but that is not what’s going on here. The for-profits have a clearer and more transparent point of view on the value of education than do the idealists, who are struggling to balance all the conflicting perspectives without leaving any aside. In the course of their struggle, they aren’t doing as much sorting of their ideals as their for-profit compatriots. This may be amanable to the humanist, but it presents a disorganized mess for students to sort through.

The public universities, then, are simply less organized than their private sector, for-profit universities are. Should they ever get an organized and transparent system which students could understand and could make choices over which of the competing systems they were presented with, I have no doubt that the competitive pressures would yield a far better argument for the now-public sector universities than the really weak arguments which drive private for-profits.

My argument here has to do with the source of monetary value. Monetary value is not driven by reflection of value in the natural world. This was a problem that stumped Plato, who ended up having to found his metaphysics on a principle that his successor (the invention of science, Aristotle) found to be merely an instance of ”poetic metaphor.”

When Adam Smith first recognized this fact in his Wealth of Nations, he decided to divide into “value in use” and “value in exchange.” Water, Smith said, has infinite value and use, since we needed to survive, but it does not have any value exchange, since it is everywhere. Diamonds, on the other hand, have no value in use, but are very valuable in an exchange system. This was a better system, but it had its own problems.

Thinkers like Marx decided that the value in exchange that Smith had brought about in his new system of capitalism represtented a distortion of the natural value in use, and he decided to devise a system for regaining balance in our exchange values to get them back to their natural value in use. But since nature is not the true measure of value (it is a purely human measure which relies on human desires rather than any sort of natural value), Marx’s system gave far too much control to the natural system and not enough control to the system on which value exchange is actually based.

The difference between the private sector and the public sector is not the situation dictated by Plato, where an elite sector is composed people who follow the true ideal (which resides in a fictional universe in Socrates’ mind  (see Timaeus, Republic) but which could never exist in actual fact) and a hoard of ignoramuses who follow lesser paths. Value in the public sector is decided by committee of those in the know the value of toasters and toast (The Knowers) as opposed to those who rely on their base desires (The Don’t Knows).

Value in the private sector is decided by how much someone will pay for a toaster. The public sector person may decide that toast is good for you, but if people want to buy enormous wide-screen television sets and not buy toasters to fill themselves up with good-for-you toast, then the price of toasters will fall or supply will go down.

Prices are relative in both the public sector and the private sector. The issue is one of who controls the prices: the consumer, with his or her errant and often flawed notion of what he needs, or a committee sitting on the commanding heights, who knows better than the people know themselves. The consumer position is not bothered about the metaphysics of need. The mind knows what it wants without much (or any) examination. The Platonic position is one which relies metaphysics to sort out its position in a rational manner.

The fact is, whether we like it or not, that discussions of relative values do not fit easily into discussions of absolute metaphysical systems. This is why questions of price and value of always confounded idealists from Aristotle, to Thomas Aquinas, to The New Industrial State of John Kenneth Galbraith. They confuse Cary Nelson and Michael Berubé, too. There is no natural balance in the human desires that drive human needs. All you have to do is turn on Dr. Drew Pinsky to be convinced of that. So the system that works best to drive economies in the world is not the which takes the power of choice away from the individual and gives it to the more rational state. The system that works best is one which is least palatable to intellectuals and educated elites: a system that relies on individuals to make their own (sometimes really bad) choices.

This is not to say that the public sector hasn’t dimly grasped that fact; it’s just to say that they haven’t grasped it nearly as well as the private sector. The public sector workers are still holding on to old metaphysical systems that the private sector has done away with. My suspicion is that they will never grasp it as well as the private sector, simply because the academics in my experience who were driving the University of Illinois’ English Department (Michael Berubé and Cary Nelson) were the most wedded to the idealist position. Others were attempting to hop on board the Berubé/Nelson bandwagon. No one was listening to me.

So my advice to Dean Dad would be that you can do better much much than the for-profit system, and my experience as a teacher is that if you present a solid case for your system and let your students decide for themselves which of the competing systems they want to gamble their future on, you will find that your system will thrive over more narrow-minded positions of the for-profit competitors.

But you need to wean yourself from the idealist position in which you (or those with similar positions to yours), as a teacher, thinker, philosopher, as community college administrator, as a dean, as a dad (the list could go on forever) have a better idea about what you want to teach than your students. All that you and yours can do is to present a clear and transparent set of educational values to your students. And you need to be able to tell them why your values are so important that they should forego their short-term interests for longer-term goals. And you must be prepared to fail to reach all your students. Since this is the goal of a true general education, this shouldn’t cause you much of a problem.

My point is certainly not that capitalism which drives the for-profits is anything close to perfect. There is room (and a real need) for idealism, because as I say in my forthcoming book, capitalism operates on principles whereby capital flows from the many to the few, and we need idealists to correct the imbalance in our society. Otherwise, our society would, as happened in ancient Rome, travel from a republic to an autocracy. But idealism cannot stand outside of what we know—and we do know—about the operation of value simply on account of academic obstinacy or ignorance. Just because people like Cary Nelson and Michael Berubé, the smartest people in the room in my experience, think they can fit a round peg into a square hole doesn’t make it so.

My point is that the answer is not to flee the profit system because no one you know uses it.

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