Advocate Online

Public support for higher education has been on the decline, and many Americans don't know what college faculty actually do.

The California Faculty Association is out to change all that with a series of hearings that call public attention to the crises of the California State University and articulate an alternate vision of the university to the corporate model promoted by many administrators.

Hearings have been held so far in San Jose and Los Angeles last spring. A third will be held November 16 in Sacramento.

At the spring hearings, faculty, students, retirees, community representatives, legislators, and higher education policy analysts focused in on what the people of the California see as the real role of the university in society.

The hearings revealed widespread dismay at the deterioration of teaching and learning conditions amid the corporatization of the university. The corporate model, with its jury-rigged incentive systems and skewed curricula, "seems like the theater of the absurd," noted one emeritus professor.

But the hearings also reveal a large reservoir of support for functions people entrust to the university. The people of California see higher education not only as a preparation for future jobs, but as "the main engine for economic and social advancement" and a "port of entry for people from disenfranchised communities."

Californians also see higher education as a resource for local communities, a school for citizenship, and the "conscience of the society." And they expect universities to broaden their horizons, teach them to "think in ways I never imagined," and "help us all become better as individuals."

Already, the hearings have produced some new ideas for legislation. They've also sparked student organizing and provided a public interest framework for CFA's collective bargaining and legislative activities.

At the conclusion of the hearings, the CFA will present a report on its alternative agenda for the CSU to legislators, the chancellor, and the governor.

If faculty, students, staff, and their public allies are organized, as Ralph Nader has noted, "there is no power in this country that can take our institutions of higher learning away from their most noble purposes and pursuits."

View hearing transcripts at www.calfac.org.

Jeff Lustig, secretary of the California Faculty Association, is a professor of government at CSU Sacramento, and author of Corporate Liberalism,Origins of Modern American Political Theory.

I'd like to say!

The idea that we should teach students only what they wish to learn (August Dialogue) is problematic.

We have all heard students say they took a certain course because it "really sounded interesting" to them only to become highly disappointed.

Likewise, many of us have heard students say they took a particular course because of a desirable time slot or because it was required, only to discover that they loved the course and the professor. Allowing students to take courses based only on their personal interests would result in ill-prepared and less than well-rounded graduates.
—Sam Torres
Long Beach State University

An editing change in the August Thriving in Academe resulted in a misrepresentation of the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory defines "flow" as a sense of "effortless buoyancy" stemming from involvement in an appropriately challenging activity that is neither too simple (and thus boring) nor too difficult (and thus frustrating).

In the edited version of the article, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of flow was reversed.

We thank Beth G. Tipton. Ph.D, a licensed clinical psychologist and a former student of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's, for pointing this out.