Category Archives: Economics

#UBC operating under ‘constrained funding’ means what? #ubcnews #ubc100 #highered #bced #bcpoli

In the opaque cloud of process, the University of British Columbia announced yesterday that it is operating “in a constrained funding environment.” So what in the world does “constrained funding” mean?

Of course, UBC’s faculty and students have grown accustomed to “constrained funding” if this means few to no internal funds for research and teaching despite millions in revenue for more administrators and capital projects. Yes, we know what “constrained funding” means in that sense.

But what exactly does “a constrained funding environment” mean at the University level? Does it mean a $120m deficit? $30m deficit?

Does it simply mean that the economy and Loonie and are nosediving, so expect the worst in 2016-17?

Quite an elusive report on UBC finances

CFP: Critical Theories for the 21st Century

Critical Education is proud to be the sponsor journal for Critical Theories in the 21st Century

4th annual:
critical theories in the twenty first century:
a conference of transformative pedagogies
november 6th & 7th

location:


West Chester University
700 South High St, West Chester, PA 19383

2015 THEME:
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY VS. CAPITAL:
REIGNITING THE CONVERSATION

Sponsored by:
Educational Foundations
The Department of Professional and Secondary Education
West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Closing Conference Keynote (November 7th):
Dave Hill

Call For Papers
The 4th Annual Conference on Critical Theories in the 21st Century aims to reinvigorate the field of critical pedagogy. The primary question driving this conference is: What is to be done to make critical pedagogy an effective educational weapon in the current struggle against capitalism and imperialism?

There is no doubt that we are at a critical juncture in history in terms of the limits of nature’s vital ecosystems, the physical limits of the progressive accumulation of capital, and the deepening reactionary ideology and scapegoating that exacerbates the oppression of youth of color. If critical pedagogy is to play a significant role in intervening in the current context, then a sharpened sense of purpose and direction is needed.

Some examples of possible topics include:

  • Marxism
  • Post-structuralism/post-modernism
  • Anarchism
  • Challenging the unholy trinity of state, capital, and religion
  • Class and the capital-labor dialectic
  • Identity and economics
  • Hierarchical and vertical forms of organization (i.e., vanguards versus networks)
  • Reform versus revolution
  • Socialism, communism, & democracy
  • Affect theory and the new materialisms
  • The knowledge economy, post-Fordism, and “cognitive capitalism”
  • Critical geography

While this conference will include important presentations and debates in critical pedagogy, it will not be limited to this focus. In other words, as critical theory becomes more inclusive, global, and all encompassing, this conference welcomes more than just academics as important contributors. That is, we recognize students and youth groups as possessing authentic voices based on their unique relationship to capitalism and will therefore be open to them as presenters and discussion leaders.

While this conference will include important presentations and challenging discussions based in critical pedagogy, it will not be limited to this focus. In other words, as critical theory becomes more inclusive, global, and all encompassing, this conference welcomes more than just academics as important contributors.

Please submit abstract proposals (500-1000 words) to:
Curry Malott (cmalott@wcupa.edu)

Proposal due date: September 27th, 2015

Adult Basic Education is a basic right

Adult Basic Education is a Basic Right is a collaboratively authored by researchers and educators in the adult education field in British Columbia. Our aim to gather and share information about how ABE tuition cuts and adult education policy in BC effects people, programs, depending inequity and socio-economic participation.

Read Lynn Horvat’s paper: “Re-Framing the Conversation: Respecting Adult Basic Education in British Columbia”

Vancouver Community College ESL teachers expect layoffs #bced #bcpoli #yteubc

Emily Jackson, Metro, May 5, 2014– Teachers will lose their jobs due to a funding shortage for Vancouver Community College’s ESL program, the faculty union announced Wednesday.

Even though the program has waiting lists and full classes, VCC’s faculty association fears 15 to 25 jobs will be lost by the end of March due to federal government changes to ESL training, chief steward Frank Cosco said.

“People are tremendously worried and concerned,” Cosco said, noting there are about 120 full-time ESL teachers at VCC. “A year from now, we might be talking about the end of the whole program completely.”

Instead of training new immigrants to speak English at colleges, the government will directly administer programs through community services.

The province has already provided one-time funding of $4.67 million so VCC can keep running ESL classes past April 1, but the faculty association believes it should fill the funding gap to maintain the busy program. It needs about $3.3 million extra.

VCC confirmed in an emailed statement it has offered faculty buyouts in light of the changes, but doesn’t know what the full impact will be.

“We have begun consulting with our unions to explore options that will minimize the impact to our faculty, staff, and students.”

VCC also hopes the province will fork over more cash.

“We understand that the Ministry continues to pursue other sources of one-time funding to support the transition of ESL services and they hope to report more information soon.”

But in an emailed statement Wednesday, Minister of Advanced Education Amrik Virk did not indicate the province would offer more than the one-time $10.5 million it gave to colleges across B.C. in February.

“Our focus remains on the students, and like those students, the post-secondary institutions, and their faculties and staff, we are still waiting to hear from the federal government how it plans to go forward,” Virk said.

#BCed budget shortchanges students and families #caut #ubc #ubced #bcpoli #yteubc

Robert Clift, CUFA BC, February 18, 2014– The 2014/15 provincial budget continues to shortchange students and their families according to the organization representing professors, librarians and other academic staff at BC’s public research universities.

“In a time when we should be increasing investment in the people and research necessary to diversify our economy and support local communities, this budget cuts funding to post-secondary institutions and does nothing to help us keep BC’s best and brightest at home,” said Richard Kool, President of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC (CUFA BC).

“By 2016, per student operating grants to universities, colleges and institutes will have dropped 20% in real terms since the Liberals formed government,” Kool added. “Students have already lost support services and learning opportunities due to inadequate funding and these new cuts will shortchange students even further.”

“Moreover, we are losing some of the best and brightest BC students to other provinces because we don’t have a provincial graduate fellowship program to support tomorrow’s innovators,” Kool said.

The creation of the BC Training and Education Savings Grant will do little to help students and their families, say the professors.

“The BC Training and Education Savings Grant is completely inadequate”, Kool said. “The value of the government’s contribution will not even cover the projected increase in tuition fees for one year by the time a child born today reaches age 18. We should be able to do better.”

“Using the government’s numbers, the value of the government’s contribution will fall $473 short of the projected tuition fee increases. Using more realistic calculations, the gap is $754,” Kool added. “This is on top of tuition fees that have already doubled under the Liberals.”

“Our society and economy demands educated citizens,” Kool said. “Simply training people for resource-dependent jobs, as proposed by this budget, ignores the need to prepare people for the social, economic and environmental changes in front of us. The provincial government’s narrow focus limits our possibilities and ill-prepares us for an ever changing world.”

The Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC represents 4,600 professors, librarians, instructors, lecturers and other academic staff at BC’s five public research universities – UBC (Vancouver and Kelowna), SFU (Burnaby, Surrey, Vancouver), UVic (Victoria), UNBC (Prince George, Quesnel, Terrace, Fort St. John) and Royal Roads (Victoria).

Read More: CUFA BC

#Berkeley and the myth of the activist life #highered #occupyeducation #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #yteubc

Alexandra McGee, Counterpunch, February 14, 2014– On February 13th, 2014, I attended a UC Berkeley protest against the appointment of Janet Napolitano as President of the UC system.* The qualms against her appointment fall outside of my purview to describe here. This piece is much larger than Napolitano, or the protest itself. Instead, lets look at how systemic economic inequality has affected the mentality (and thereby the capability for action) of my generation.

Organized by the Associated Students of the University of California, the protest attracted upward of 500 people, purported thousands if you count onlookers and those who bore witness momentarily. With protest signs, cloth banners, megaphones and fists of solidarity, this crowd of young students had been protesting since 10 am. I started asking onlookers what their motivations were for being there and what they thought of the movement until I realized, this was no real protest.

Napolitano was in Sutardja Dai Hall. Protesters had taken the nearby Blum Center For Developing Economies. We stood, fists held high and shouting into a megaphone, all pointed in the opposite direction from our supposed target. Sutardja Dai Hall was inconveniently guarded, with five large men guarding the bottom entrance, doors locked on the second floor, three cops with shiny sunglasses glaring down at us from the top floor and two cops on bikes circling the building. News reporters stood aside, pointing their video camera into the disjointed group, many of whom were unaware of what our strategy was, or what our demands were.

Why aren’t we occupying Sutardja Dai Hall?

I began to ask those around me. The ASUC had emphasized that they were “not going to negotiate with Napolitano on the issue of her resignation.” But how would occupying a nearby building do anything at all? Why are we not engaging in constructive dialogue? “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” But how will chanting together do anything but stroke our own egos? “But this is Berkeley, radicals. All of us!” Pure ideological masturbation unless you do something provocative to cause change.

I am frustrated that Berkeley continues to perpetuate the myth of its activist lifestyle for economic gain. It sells an image of the rebel protester, the ideological martyr, to a generation of youth that cannot find their way four blocks north without GPS, never mind find their way past the bureaucratic labyrinth to create substantial change. With their tuition and the gradual privatization of education (see: millions of dollars from ecologically destructive corporations like BP), they perpetuate the inequality of wealth and even endorse human rights abusers, as they have by allowing Napolitano to be their system president.

If Mario Savio were amongst us, he would hang his head in absolute shame. Not just at the cafe on campus toting his name as a publicity stunt, but at our failure to question the status quo. To disturb the system, you don’t occupy a building which poses no strategical advantage, you don’t chant just to make yourself feel good, and you do not boast that you are creating community when really all you’re doing is attracting people who want to update their facebooks with a new “rebel” profile picture.

This frustration is also fueled by great hope that I once had in the Occupy movement. Surrounded by well-intentioned, intelligent people, I was sure that change was in our grasp, but we were outlasted in our patience, overcome by our fragmentation, and overconfident in our abilities. Now, I was ready to rush the police to occupy a space of power for those who couldn’t. To represent those who had been deported from their country because of Napolitano’s discriminatory policies. To recognize our own humanity in a space where we would not be welcome. To demand recognition and respect as a human being rather than an authorized citizen.

But doing so would require facing down strongmen of the establishment. To do so would put in jeopardy our clean police records with some nonsense charge of non-compliance. As a fellow protester said, she worried that if we actually tried to change something, she wouldn’t be able to get a job because it would show up on her record. She didn’t actually think anything would change.

Bulls eye. Compliance to capitalism fueled by fear. The threat of economic punishment if we are labeled as radical.

Read More: Counterpunch

Administrative bloat @ 28% boom in #highered #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #bced

Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2014– Thirty-four pages of research, branded with a staid title and rife with complicated graphs, might not seem like a scintillating read, but there’s no doubt that a report released on Wednesday will punch higher education’s hot buttons in a big way.

The report, “Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive: Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education,” says that new administrative positions—particularly in student services—drove a 28-percent expansion of the higher-ed work force from 2000 to 2012. The report was released by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science organization whose researchers analyze college finances.

What’s more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.

Full-time faculty members also lost ground to part-time instructors (who now compose half of the instructional staff at most types of colleges), particularly at public master’s and bachelor’s institutions.

And the kicker: You can’t blame faculty salaries for the rise in tuition. Faculty salaries were “essentially flat” from 2000 to 2012, the report says. And “we didn’t see the savings that we would have expected from the shift to part-time faculty,” said Donna M. Desrochers, an author of the report.

The rise in tuition was probably driven more by the cost of benefits, the addition of nonfaculty positions, and, of course, declines in state support.

Howard J. Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Collective Bargaining Congress, wasn’t surprised by the conclusions of the study.

“You see it on every campus—an increase in administration and a decrease in full-time faculty, and an increase in the use of part-time faculty,” he said. With that trend, along with rising tuition and falling state support, “you’re painting a pretty fair picture of higher ed,” he continued. “It’s not what it should be. What’s broken in higher ed is the priorities, and it’s been broken for a long time.”

Read More: Chronicle of Higher Ed

The just-in-time professor #highered #edstudies #criticaled #ubc #bced

THE JUST-IN-TIME PROFESSOR:
A Staff Report Summarizing eForum Responses on the Working Conditions of Contingent Faculty in Higher Education
January 2014

The post-secondary academic workforce has undergone a remarkable change over the last several decades. The tenure-track college professor with a stable salary, firmly grounded in the middle or upper-middle class, is becoming rare. Taking her place is the contingent faculty: nontenure-track teachers, such as part-time adjuncts or graduate instructors, with no job security from one semester to the next, working at a piece rate with few or no benefits across multiple workplaces, and far too often struggling to make ends meet. In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty. Today, they represent half.

Read more: The JIT Professor

Overuse and Abuse of Adjunct Faculty #highered #adjunct #edstudies #criticaled #ubc #bced #bcpoli

Richard Moser, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 2014– The increasing exploitation of contingent faculty members is one dimension of an employment strategy sometimes called the “two-tiered” or “multitiered” labor system.

This new labor system is firmly established in higher education and constitutes a threat to the teaching profession. If left unchecked, it will undermine the university’s status as an institution of higher learning because the overuse of adjuncts and their lowly status and compensation institutionalize disincentives to quality education, threaten academic freedom and shared governance, and disqualify the campus as an exemplar of democratic values. These developments in academic labor are the most troubling expressions of the so-called corporatization of higher education.

“Corporatization” is the name sometimes given to what has happened to higher education over the last 30 years. Corporatization is the reorganization of our great national resources, including higher education, in accordance with a shortsighted business model. Three decades of decline in public funding for higher education opened the door for increasing corporate influence, and since then the work of the university has been redirected to suit the corporate vision.

The most striking symptoms of corporatization shift costs and risks downward and direct capital and authority upward. Rising tuition and debt loads for students limit access to education for working-class students. The faculty and many other campus workers suffer lower compensation as the number of managers, and their pay, rises sharply. Campus management concentrates resources on areas where wealth is created, and new ideas and technologies developed at public cost become the entitlement of the corporate sector. The privatization and outsourcing of university functions and jobs from food service to bookstores to instruction enrich a few businessmen and create more low-wage nonunion jobs. Increasingly authoritarian governance practices have become the “new normal.”

Read More: Chronicle of Higher Ed

Academic job market decimated, crashing #highered #edstudies #criticaled #caut #aaup #bced #bcpoli

Oftentimes, the academic job market for full-time (FT) faculty is inversely related to economic recessions. Not anymore. In this prolonged Great Recession, turned Great Depression II in parts of North America and across the world, youth have been particularly hard hit, more pronounced by race. The most common description for this current economy for youth is “a precipitous decline in employment and a corresponding increase in unemployment.” In Canada and the US, unemployment rates for the 16-19 year olds exceeds 25%. At the same time, one of the most common descriptions for postsecondary enrollment and participation in Canada and the US is “tremendous growth at the undergraduate level… the number of graduate students has grown significantly faster than the number of undergraduate students over the last 30 years.” With “school-to-work” and “youth employment” oxymoronic, corporate academia and the education industry are capitalizing on masses of students returning to desperately secure advanced credentials in hard times, but no longer does this matter to the professoriate.

If higher education enrollment has been significant, increases in online or e-learning enrollment have been phenomenal. Postsecondary institutions in North America commonly realized 100% increases in online course enrollment from the early 2000s to the present with the percentage of total registrations increasing to 25% for some universities. In Canada, this translates to about 250,000 postsecondary students currently taking online courses but has not translated into FT faculty appointments. More pointedly, it has eroded the FT faculty job market and fueled the part-time (PT) job economy of higher education. About 50% of all faculty in North America are PT but this seems to jump to about 85%-90% for those teaching online courses. For example, in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Master of Educational Technology (MET), where there are nearly 1,000 registrations per year, 85% of all sections are taught by PT faculty. In its decade of existence, not a single FT faculty member has been hired for this revenue generating program. Mirroring trends across North America, support staff doubling as adjunct or sessional teach about 45% of MET courses in addition to their 8:30-4:30 job functions in the service units. These indicators are of a larger scope of trends in the automation of intellectual work.

Given these practices across Canada, in the field of Education for example, there has been a precipitous decline in employment of FT faculty, which corresponds with the precipitous decline in employment of youth (Figure 1). Education is fairly reflective of the overall academic job market for doctorates in Canada. Except for short-term trends in certain disciplines, the market for PhDs is bleak. Trends and an expansion of the Great Recession predict that the market will worsen for graduates looking for FT academic jobs in all disciplines. A postdoctoral appointment market is very unlikely to materialize at any scale to offset trends. For instance, Education at UBC currently employs just a handful (i.e., 4-5) of postdocs.

To put it in mild, simple terms: Universities changed their priorities and values by devaluing academic budget lines. Now in inverse relationship to the increases in revenue realized by universities through the 2000s, academic budgets were progressively reduced from 40% or more to just around 20% for many of these institutions. One indicator of this trend is the expansion of adjunct labor or PT academics. In some colleges or faculties, such as Education at UBC, the number of PT faculty, which approached twice that of FT in 2008, teach from 33% to 85% of all sections, depending on the program.

Another indicator is the displacement of tenure track research faculty by non-tenure track, teaching-intensive positions. For example, in Education at UBC, about 18 of the last 25 FT faculty hires were for non-tenure track teaching-intensive positions (i.e., 10 courses per year for Instructor, Lecturer, etc.). This was partially to offset a trend of PT faculty hires pushing Education well over its faculty salary budget (e.g., 240 PT appointments in 2008). Measures in North America have been so draconian that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was compelled to report in 2010 that “the tenure system has all but collapsed…. the proportion of teaching-intensive to research-intensive appointments has risen sharply. However, the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system.” What is faculty governance, other than an oligarchy, with a handful of faculty governing or to govern?

Read More: Petrina, S. & Ross, E. W. (2014). Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth. Workplace, 23, 62-71.

Equity, Governance, Economics and Critical University Studies #criticaled #edstudies #ubc #bced #yteubc

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Equity, Governance, Economics and Critical University Studies
No 23 (2014)

As we state in our Commentary, “This Issue marks a couple of milestones and crossroads for Workplace. We are celebrating fifteen years of dynamic, insightful, if not inciting, critical university studies (CUS). Perhaps more than anything, and perhaps closer to the ground than any CUS publication of this era, Workplace documents changes, crossroads, and the hard won struggles to maintain academic dignity, freedom, justice, and integrity in this volatile occupation we call higher education.” Workplace and Critical Education are published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES).

Commentary

  • Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth
    • Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross

Articles

  • Differences in Black Faculty Rank in 4-Year Texas Public Universities: A Multi-Year Analysis
    • Brandolyn E Jones & John R Slate
  • Academic Work Revised: From Dichotomies to a Typology
    • Elias Pekkola
  • No Free Set of Steak Knives: One Long, Unfinished Struggle to Build Education College Faculty Governance
    • Ishmael Munene & Guy B Senese
  • Year One as an Education Activist
    • Shaun Johnson
  • Rethinking Economics Education: Challenges and Opportunities
    • Sandra Ximena Delgado-Betancourth
  • Review of Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think
    • C. A. Bowers

Podcast CBC: The income gap between tenure faculty & adjunct contract professors in Canadian universities #ubc #ubced#bced #criticaled #edstudies

The Current, CBC– If you’ve got a university student in the family, increasingly they may be being taught by a highly educated professional who can’t get full time work. Or make a living wage. Today, Project Money looks at impoverished professors.

Many people who’ve earned advanced degrees are astonished at how little some universities value their graduates.

“Our working conditions are your learning conditions. I will give you an A plus right now if you promise to agitate on behalf of adjunct equity and rights.”

Fordham adjunct professor Alan Trevithick teases students

In Canada, climbing the Ivory tower has never been harder. More people graduate with PhDs, but full-time tenure track faculty positions are harder to get. Many highly educated Canadians struggle to find adequate-paying work that meets their credentials.

And for those who dream of chalk-boards, lecture halls, and tweed jackets… the best they can get is work as a part-time instructor.

It’s estimated that about half of all teaching in the country is done by contract professors — instead of permanent full time professors.

  • Beth Parton left teaching in search of greener pastures… along with stable work and good pay. She is a former university professor with a doctorate in religion and culture. Beth Parton was in Toronto.
  • Elizabeth Hodgson is a tenured professor at the University of British Columbia but spent 9 years teaching there as an adjunct professor. She is also a member of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee at the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Elizabeth Hodgson was in our Vancouver studio.
  • Ian Lee says there are many reasons adjunct professors are falling behind. He is an Assistant Professor in Strategic Management and International Business at the Sprott School of Business. Ian Lee was in Ottawa.

Listen: CBC The Current

Henry Giroux | Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging Casino Capitalism’s Punishing Factories # criticaleducation #occupywallstreet #occupyeducation #idlenomore

Henry Giroux, Thruthout, January 13, 2014– The Gilded Age is back, with huge profits for the ultrarich, hedge fund managers and the major players in the financial service industries. In the new landscapes of wealth, exclusion and fraud, the commanding institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state and wage a counter revolution against the principles of social citizenship and democracy. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dreamworlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance and deregulation. For instance, banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other investment companies including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and UBS prosper from subterfuge and corruption. They also have been transformed into punishing factories that erode the welfare state while pushing millions into hardship and misery and relegating an entire generation of young people into a state of massive unemployment, debt, and repression.  The profits seem endless and the lack of moral responsibility unchecked as the rich go on buying sprees soaking up luxury goods in record numbers. The New York Times reports that dealers of high-end luxury cars cannot keep up with the demand. Indulging in luxury items is no longer a dirty word for the ultrarich in spite of living in a society wracked by massive unemployment, inequality and poverty. One example provided by the Times, without either irony or criticism, points to “Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife.”[1]  This example of shameless consumption reads like a scene out of Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays the financial elite as infantilized frat boys out of control in their unquenchable craving for greed, sex, power, and every other debauchery imaginable.[2] At a time when the United States has descended into forms of political and moral amnesia, massive inequity and high levels of poverty, coupled with narratives of excess and over-the-top material indulgence, have become normalized and barely receive any critical commentary in the mainstream media.

It gets worse. As the zombies of casino capitalism rake in unprecedented amounts of wealth, they appear to take delight in mocking and humiliating the poor and disadvantaged as if they are not only responsible for their suffering but deserve such hardships in spite of the fact they are not accountable for the difficulties in which they find themselves. Those with little power or wealth are now seen not only as morally degenerates but as disposable, subject to the whims of the market and outside any consideration of compassion or justice. Yet there is more at work here than a moral deficit or the kind of pathological daring and willingness to remove oneself from any sense of compassion for others. There is also a culture of cruelty willfully reproduced by a rabid form of casino capitalism that measures human worth in cost-benefit analysis and accrues and consolidates power in the interests of the top one percent of the population.

The new extremists balk at extending unemployment benefits or providing food stamps for young children. Yet, they have no trouble offering millions in subsidies to corporate interests or lowering taxes for the ultrarich corporations. Obscene wealth couples with the arrogance of power as billionaires such as the Koch brothers make 3 million dollars an hour from their investments while simultaneously calling for the abolishment of the minimum wage.[3] CEO salaries reach into the financial stratosphere, while the middle and working classes increasingly face impoverishment and misery.  In 2012, the “top 10 percent took in half of the country’s total income” while the top 1 percent took more than one-fifth (22.5 percent) of the income earned by Americans. [4] In the midst of the upward redistribution of wealth, misery proliferates, and the commanding institutions of society are increasingly more divorced from maters of ethics, social responsibility and social costs. This is evident as the ranks of homeless children grow exponentially, while corporate fat cats fund various groups to lobby against health care policies and social provisions for the poor. It is also evident in the growing ranks of people on food stamps, an increase in the homeless population, especially among children. Moreover, 46.2 percent of the American population lives in poverty. [5]

Republicans claim they are now concerned about addressing poverty, especially since the general public rightly views them as heartless, cruel and indifferent to the hardships experienced by people who are unemployed and lack food, shelter, health care and any sense of hope. Yet, the hypocrisy of the apostles of casino capitalism is on full display in a commentary by The New York Times which states: “But at the same time that the party is shifting its focus to poverty, many Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to food assistance programs and unemployment insurance, while 11 million Americans are jobless and poverty rates remain elevated in the wake of the recession.” [6] For the right-wing extremists dominating government, the courts and cultural life, talk about choice and agency is divorced from social responsibility and the emphasis on individual responsibility is nothing more than a cheap trick to divert the public’s attention away from larger structural and systemic problems facing the United States.

We now live under a form of casino capitalism that revels in deception, kills the radical imagination, depoliticizes the American public and promulgates what might be called disimagination factories and punishing machines. Idealism has been replaced by a repressive punishing machine and a surveillance state that turns every space into a war zone, criminalizes social problems and legitimates state violence as the most important practice for addressing important social issues. Racism now fuels a mass incarceration system that expands the reach of the punishing state to those viewed as excess and excluded from American society. The carceral state and the surveillance state now work together to trump security over freedom and justice while solidifying the rule of the financial elite and the reigning financial services such as banks, investment houses and hedge funds, all of which profit from the expanding reach of the punishing state. The drug war has become a war on racial minorities just as the war on poverty has become a war on the poor.

Chris Hedges is right when he argues that “any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through [the] control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian.” [7]  While Hedges is aware that this disciplinary culture of fear and repression is rooted in a political economy that treats people as objects and makes the accumulation of capital the subjects of history, he underestimates one important element of the new authoritarianism produced by casino capitalism. That is, what is novel about existing registers of discipline and control is that they operate in a new historical conjuncture in which the relationship among political power, cultural institutions and everyday life has become more powerful and intense in the ability to undermine the radical imagination and the power and capacities of individuals to resist repression and make the crucial decisions necessary to take control over the forces that shape their lives. The machineries of public pedagogy and consent have taken on an Orwellian presence in the age of digital technologies, and when challenges to authoritarian rule emerges, the state resorts to the overt and unapologetic repression of critical thought and dissent.

The anonymity of the corporate state becomes invisible as historical and public memory are erased and the American public is increasingly infantilized. Stupidity is normalized through a consumer/celebrity culture, and where that does not work, the machinery of state repression, with its endless culture of fear, punishes those willing to question authority. Authorities try to blind people to the courage exhibited by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, painting them instead as traitors. Courage is now under attack by the sterile and dangerous call for unchecked security. Fear becomes the only value left in the arsenal of the machinery of surveillance, control and social death. David Graeber is right in arguing that the call for public dialogue, dissent and critical exchange in order to hold power accountable no longer provokes informed judgement and outrage among the public or thoughtful responses from politicians and popular pundits. On the contrary, he writes:

Objections to such arrangements are to be met with truncheons, lasers, and police dogs. It’s no coincidence that marketization has been accompanied by a new ethos where challenge is met with an instant appeal to violence. In the end, despite endless protests to the contrary, our rulers understand that the market is not a natural social arrangement. It has always had to be imposed at the point of a gun . . . The question to ask now is not, how do we bring it back. That’s impossible and quite undesirable. The question is what new forms of genuinely democratic self-organization might rise from its ashes? To even begin to ask this question we must first of all get rid of the police. [8]

American politics and culture have been handed over to the rich, lobbyists for the corporate elite, and now function largely to produce a state that offers the ultrawealthy and powerful all of the benefits they need to accumulate even more capital, regardless of the massive inequality in wealth, income and suffering such policies produce. In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, unfettered casino capitalism remains a dominant force and continues to produce runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering and the reinforcement of what Charles Ferguson has called “finance as a criminalized, rogue industry. [9] And, yet, while resistance to such measures is growing, it is far too weak to offer a significant challenge to the new authoritarianism.

All over the world, the forces of casino capitalism are invoking austerity measures that produce a kind of social and civil death as they dismantle the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, expanding the role of corporate money in politics, waging an assault on unions, augmenting the military-security state, overseeing widening social inequality, promoting the erosion of civil liberties, and undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy. The script is not new, but the intensity of the assault on democratic values, civic engagement and public service has taken a dangerous turn and provides the ideological, political and cultural foundation for a society that seems unaware it is in the midst of an authoritarian stranglehold on all of its most cherished institutions, ranging from schools and health care to the very foundation of democracy. Austerity has become the weapon of choice, an economic poison designed to punish the middle and working classes while making clear that casino capitalism will administer the most severe penalties to those who challenge its authority. The police have become the new private armies of the rich, designed to keep the public in check hoping to make them fearful of being exposed to police brutality, state violence or the expanding mechanisms of the multiple surveillance apparatuses that now collect every piece of information that circulates electronically. Conformity has become the order of the day and fear the new norm, reinforced by a disimagination machine and the punishing state now mutually informing each other.

Within the last 30 years, the United States has been transformed from a society that included a market economy subject to the rule of the state to a society and government that are now dominated almost exclusively by market values and corporate power. We now live in what Robert Jay Lifton once described as a “death-saturated age.” [10] Political authority and power have been transformed into a sovereignty of corporate governance and rule. The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the social contract are under attack, and politics is ruled by the irrational notion that casino capitalism should govern not simply the economy but the entirety of social life.  With the return of the new Gilded Age, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of disappearing altogether.

Public and higher education, however deficient, were once viewed as the bedrock for educating young people to be critical and engaged citizens. Schooling was valued as a public good, not a private right. Many educators in the ’70s and ’80s took seriously Paulo Freire’s notion of problematizing education, in which he called for students to be taught modes of critical literacy in which they could not only read the word but also read the world critically. [11] According to Freire, young people should be taught to read and write from a position of agency.  This meant learning how to engage in a culture of questioning, restaging power in productive ways, and connecting knowledge to the exercise of self-determination and self-development. Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy and education for freedom denounced banking education because it viewed students as passive containers into which knowledge was endlessly deposited. Rather than allow students to develop their own meanings, banking education assigned meanings for them, largely to memorize and spit out on intellectually bankrupt forms of testing. [12] Banking education is back with a vengeance and ironically parades under the name of educational reform, common standards and race to the top.   Public education has become a site of pedagogical repression, robbing students of the ability to think critically as a result of the two political business parties’ emphasis on education as mainly a project of mindless testing, standardization and the de-skilling of teachers. In addition, school reform has become a euphemism for turning public schools over to private investors who are more concerned about making money than they are about educating young people.  On the other hand, low-income and poor minority students increasingly find themselves in schools in which the line between prison culture and school culture is blurred.

Higher education, especially in the post-World War II period through the ’60s and ’70s, was, however ideally, considered a place where young people were taught how to think, engage in critical dialogue, and take on the responsibilities of informed and critical citizens. Now such students are subject to a technically trained docility, defined largely as consumers and told that the only value education has is to prepare them to be workers and consumers ready and eager to serve the ideological and financial interests of the global economy.  Critical thought and the radical imagination have become a liability under casino capitalism and for a growing number of institutions the enemy of public and higher education because they hold the potential to be at odds with the reproduction of a criminogenc culture in which greed, unchecked power, political illiteracy and unbridled self-interest work to benefit the wealthy and corporate elite. Under such circumstances, education becomes simply a business, developing an obsession with accountability schemes, measurable utility, authoritarian governing structures, and a crude empiricism for defining what counts as research.

How else to explain the following comment made by the president of Macomb Community College in Michigan: “Macomb is working with the federal government and other community colleges to better prepare students for the world that exists, not the world they want to live in.” [13] Or for that matter the blatant anti-intellectual bias imposed on colleges in Florida where Governor Rick Scott wants to push students toward business-friendly degrees by lowering tuition for academic fields and subjects that “steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market.” [14] Of course, those areas such as philosophy, sociology, music, the arts, and other mainstays of the liberal arts would be more costly and their demise would intensify. Graeber argues that this assault on higher education has now become an object of intense state violence. He writes:

Make no mistake: to threaten someone with a stick is the ultimate anti-intellectual gesture. And if one thing has become clear in recent months, this is the first – really the only – impulse of the current government when faced with challenges to their vision for higher education. Police infiltration, surveillance, elected student leaders banned from political activities on campus, the arrest of students for simple acts of expression like chalking slogans on sidewalks, send a clear and constant message. There can be no reasoned discussion on these issues. There is no longer anything to talk about. Certainly, democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding have been declared nothing but a consumer product, or else a form of technical training to increase overall economic productivity; these are the only way these matters can be discussed; if anyone wishes to gather to object to this, to gather in places of learning to insist that knowledge and understanding are not mere economic goods but something precious and valuable in their own right, they can only do so by permission of those who are telling them otherwise; otherwise, they can expect to be physically attacked. [15]

Similarly, higher education has become a dead zone for killing the imagination, a place where ideas that don’t have practical results go to die and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent and holding power accountable. Faculty in most universities have been reduced to part-time jobs and function as indentured servants with no benefits, shockingly low salaries and no power to shape the conditions under which they work. With over 70 percent of faculty now holding the status of contingent labor, they are increasingly becoming one of the largest groups of professionals that qualify for food stamps to survive. These contingent and debt-ridden faculty live in a culture in which time is a burden rather than a luxury and have few opportunities to research, write and engage important social issues. At the same time, they live under both a survivalist mode and a culture of fear knowing that they can be dismissed arbitrarily at any time for the slightest infraction. Even tenured faculty are feeling the heat of a business-oriented de-democratizing university. For example, the Kansas Board of regents recently drastically curtailed tenure and academic freedom by claiming that both tenured and non-tenured faculty who used social media in ways that were not in the interest of the university, decided exclusively by the CEO of the university, were subject to dismissal. Speech that now impairs or reduces the university’s “efficiency” overrides the right of faculty to exercise free speech or address issues they deem socially and politically important.  For all intent and purposes, this signifies not only the end of tenure but academic freedom. Moreover, as William Black points out, “in both substance and dishonesty of presentation, the Regents’ policy is literally Orwellian.” [16]

Read More: Truthout

Skills shortage more fiction than fact #ubc #yteubc

Jessica Barrett, Vancouver Sun, December 31, 2013– For Stephen Tarrant, fears of a looming skills shortage in Canada, particularly in the lucrative natural resources sector, are downright laughable.

After six years of expensive, intensive post-secondary training, Tarrant graduated last year from Memorial University with a degree in economic geology, a published honours thesis and several terms of paid fieldwork under his belt.

But in the year since leaving school, the 24-year-old has learned a harsh truth – a degree tailor-made for the much-touted mining and energy sector does not guarantee a job in it.

“I’ve probably had, without exaggeration, 300 applications sent to different companies across the country, and basically heard nothing back,” a weary Tarrant said by phone earlier this month. He had just finished a long day serving Christmas shoppers for minimum wage at a Target store in St. John’s.

Tarrant’s retail reality – he holds another part-time gig at a Starbucks location – is particularly bitter given the seemingly never-ending talk of skills shortages in a sector advertised as the future of Canada’s economy. For him, each news story or government announcement on the topic feels like the twist of a knife.

“I’m just flabbergasted,” he said. “I don’t understand how they’re pumping this into students when I couldn’t buy a job right now if I wanted one.”
Read more: Vancouver Sun

Canadian universities sacrifice principles in pursuing collaborations #bced #bcpoli #education

CAUT, November 20, 2013– In their drive to attract new revenues by collaborating with corporations, donors, and governments, Canadian universities are entering into agreements that place unacceptable limits on academic freedom and sacrifice fundamental academic principles, according to a report released today by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

Open for Business: On What Terms examines twelve research and program collaboration agreements between universities, corporations, donors and governments to determine if universities have protected their academic integrity.

“Our findings should raise alarm bells on campuses across the country,” said CAUT executive director James Turk. “In the majority of the agreements we reviewed, universities have agreed to terms that violate basic academic values.”

According to Turk, seven of the twelve agreements provide no specific protection for academic freedom, and only one requires the disclosure of conflicts of interest. Only five of the agreements give academic staff the unrestricted right to publish their research findings and just half provide that the university maintains control over academic matters affecting staff and students.

“Universities have allowed private donor and corporate partners to take on roles that should be played by academic staff,” stated Turk. “They have signed agreements that side-step traditional university decision-making processes and undermine academic freedom.”

The report concludes by recommending a set of guiding principles for university collaborations to better protect academic integrity and the public interest.

“Collaborations can be beneficial to faculty, students, institutions, and the public, but only if they are set up properly,” Turk added.  “Universities owe it to the academic community and to the public to do more to safeguard the independence and integrity of teaching and research.”

The research and program collaborations examined in the report were:

  • Alberta Ingenuity Centre for In-Situ Energy (AICISE)
  • Centre for Oil Sands Innovation (COSI)
  • Consortium for Heavy Oil Research by University Scientists (CHORUS)
  • Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ)
  • Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability
  • Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU)
  • Vancouver Prostate Centre
  • Balsillie School of International Affairs
  • Munk School of Global Affairs
  • Partnership: University of Ontario Institute of Technology/Durham College/Ontario Power Generation
  • Partnership: University of Toronto/Pierre Lassonde—Goldcorp Inc.
  • Partnership: Western University/Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP

Copies of the report are available on-line.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is the national voice of more than 68,000 academic and general staff at over 120 universities and colleges across the country.

– See more at: CAUT

Tell the Dept. of Ed to Drop Sallie Mae!

Even in the face of 14,000 activists urging Sallie Mae to break up with ALEC, more news articles exposing their relationship, and my personal phone call this week to Sallie Mae executive Martha Holler asking the company directly to end ties with the powerful “Stand Your Ground,” anti-democratic, pay-to-play front group for right-wing corporate interests… Sallie Mae just won’t quit ALEC.

But that membership has its price. By not formally disclosing its role in ALEC to the Department of Education, Sallie Mae is in breach of its contract with the government.

Since 2009 Sallie Mae has had a contract with the Department of Education to administer federal student loans. Sallie Mae has netted over $300 million in taxpayer money through this lucrative contract while simultaneously lobbying against affordable higher education.1

Join us in demanding that the Department of Education enforce the “conflict of interest” disclosure clause in the contract. Tell U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to drop Sallie Mae!

Beyond its membership in ALEC, Sallie Mae is also likely in breach of its Department of Education contract because of two major legal violations. This month, public disclosure reports revealed that Sallie Mae has been accused of overcharging active duty service members on their student loan interest rates.2 News reports confirm that federal regulators will file a formal complaint against Sallie Mae for these violations within weeks, and a Department of Justice investigation of Sallie Mae is underway. As if that weren’t enough, Sallie Mae has already faced numerous class action lawsuits alleging predatory and racially discriminatory lending and was issued a cease-and-desist letter from the FDIC for redlining.3

We think the government shouldn’t be in business with a company whose lending practices are shameful and illegal. And even the Secretary of Education agrees. During a meeting earlier this year where students were raising concerns about Sallie Mae, Secretary Duncan personally told us, “We don’t want to do business with people who violate the law.”4

Tell Arne Duncan to live up to his words and terminate the department’s contract with Sallie Mae NOW!

Our urgency is real. In two weeks, students around the country will be arriving on campuses, and soon after they’ll receive information on who will be managing their loans. That means the Department of Education has a narrow window to end its contract with Sallie Mae and reallocate loan administration and collection duties to another bank before the school year begins.

Sallie Mae is supposed to be in the business of making education a reality. Instead the company profiteers off its student borrowers by granting risky loans with high interest rates. Last year, U.S. student debt hit $1 trillion – meanwhile, Sallie Mae cleared $1 billion in profits. So to recap: Sallie Mae is taking advantage of taxpayers, students, members of the military, and people of color.

The government shouldn’t be outsourcing loan administration jobs to a big bank in the first place, and it definitely shouldn’t be awarding contracts worth hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to a shady company like Sallie Mae.

Even though its own policies dictate that it should drop Sallie Mae, the Department of Education won’t end this contract without public pressure. So we’re pulling out all the stops. We’re mobilizing a coalition of consumer watchdogs, military and veterans’ advocates, student activists, and labor groups to join us. We’re reaching out to Members of Congress and have put even more journalists on their trail. Can we count on you to encourage the Department of Education to do the right thing and stop doing business with Sallie Mae?

Send your message today to ensure Sallie Mae will be held accountable.

Sophia Zaman
USSA President

1 http://www.usaspending.gov
2 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/us/sallie-mae-to-be-accused-of-overcharging-military-personnel-on-loans.html?_r=0
3 http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/enforcement/2008-08-10.pdf
4 http://www.aft.org/newspubs/news/2013/051413studentdebt.cfm

Elizabeth Warren’s QE for Students: Populist Demagoguery or Economic Breakthrough?

Ellen Brown, Truthout, 17 June 2013– On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act.” This bill has been dismissed out of hand as “shameless populist demagoguery” and “a cheap political gimmick,” but is it? Or could Warren’s outside-the-box bill represent the sort of game-changing thinking sorely needed to turn the economy around?

Warren and her co-sponsor John Tierney propose that students be allowed to borrow directly from the government at the same rate that banks get from the Federal Reserve — 0.75 percent. They argue:

Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans every single day — they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent, while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.

This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year — more than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.

The archly critical Brookings Institute says the bill “confuses market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student loan program.”

Those criticisms would be valid if the provider of funds were either a private bank or the American taxpayer; but in this case, it is the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Warren and Tierney assert, “For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the Department of Education to make these loans to our students.” For the Fed, completely different banking rules apply. As “lender of last resort,” it can expand its balance sheet by buying all the assets it likes. The Fed bought over $1 trillion in “toxic” mortgage-backed securities in QE 1, and reportedly turned a profit on them.  It could just as easily buy $1 trillion in student debt and refinance it at 0.75%.

Read More: Truthout

Jim Sinclair: The terrible truth about the Liberals’ jobs plan #bcpoli

Jim Sinclair, President, B.C. Federation of Labour, May 10, 2013 — It is perhaps one of the more twisted ironies of this election that Premier Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals are running on their record of job creation, a record they would probably be smarter to run away from.

Their much touted B.C. Jobs Plan has been discredited by the facts — more than 30,000 jobs have been lost since its inception. The latest figures show that B.C. lost 15,000 full-time jobs in March, setting off the largest rise in Canada. What to do when the facts don’t add up? Answer: buy ads.

While the last provincial budget cut money from programs that train workers, the Liberals could find $16 million of taxpayers’ money to try and sell us on the failed jobs plan.

But perhaps the most blatant example of the betrayal by this government on the critical issue of jobs has been its role in promoting the use of temporary foreign workers in British Columbia. Today, our province is breaking Canadian records for growth in the use of foreign workers — more than 74,000 — while at the same time more than 200,000 British Columbians are struggling to find a job and thousands cannot get the training they need.

The most high-profile case in this long, sorry story has been the HD Mining proposal to bring more than 200 miners from China to work in Northern B.C. During her trip to China, Clark announced that the B.C. Jobs Plan was working because the company was investing in the province. Nothing, it turns out, could be farther from the truth.

The facts are well known. The company claimed they could not find one single British Columbian to work at the mine. Not only that, the company claimed it would be four years before a single Canadian would be hired — and 14 years before Canadians would fully run the mine.

Yet more than 70 of the temporary work permits were granted for “low skill” workers. More than 300 Canadians applied, some with years of experience, and not one was hired. In China, HD Mining has a three-month training program for miners.

The more the facts came out, the more the people of B.C. knew something was rotten.

But the smell did not reach Victoria. Did the Liberal government stand up for jobs in our province? Absolutely not. Court documents — available thanks to construction unions spending hundreds of thousands of dollars standing up for us — show clearly that the government secretly supported the plan to bring in the workers. They even went so far as to pressure federal government officials “on a daily basis” to open doors as soon as possible.

They were successful. Within weeks, the company got the permits and British Columbians lost the jobs.

Was this an isolated event? Not in the least. According to briefing notes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, for three years the government held information sessions “for mining companies, concerning labour-market opinion and work-permit processes.”

The truth is that rather than training British Columbians to take the jobs and support their families, the government was training employers to bring in foreign workers to take those jobs.

In their glossy election platform document the Liberals proclaim that “creating jobs is the best thing we can do to protect a brighter future for B.C. families.” British Columbians would be right to ask — jobs for whom? Which families?

We are at the crossroads in British Columbia. The road to prosperity is not allowing companies to bring in temporary foreign workers in record numbers while we starve training programs for British Columbians.

Completion rates for apprenticeships have dropped to 37 per cent, the lowest in decades. Apprenticeship offices were boarded up around the province at a time when need was the greatest.

We need a government that will put British Columbians first, that will work with business and labour together to ensure the benefits of our economic development finds its way into the pockets of British Columbians who spend the money supporting local businesses and communities.

The choice is clear. On May 14, vote for change to ensure that our kids have a chance to proper training, decent jobs and to live in a province were the needs of all British Columbians come first.

NDP Leader Adrian Dix calls for pause in Capilano U program cuts #bcpoli

Posted by Capilano University Faculty Association, May 8, 2013:

Thank you for your letter highlighting your concerns about the future of Capilano University’s Studio Arts and Textile Arts programs. We understand that the university is facing a $1.3 million budget shortfall, which has threatened about 220 classes in the areas of studio arts, textile arts, interactive design, applied business technology programs, and more.

Times have been tough for BC universities for the past few years. The BC Liberals’ 2013 budget cut funding for the Ministry of Advanced Education by 2.5 per cent or $46 million over the next three years. Every president of BC’s 25 universities and colleges signed a letter protesting these planned cutbacks in 2012. Colleges throughout British Columbia have been forced to cut budgets and reduce programs as a result – the cut of Capilano University’s Arts and Textile Arts programs is surely a result of this.

Education and skills training is the number one priority of the BC NDP, and our platform commits to a needs-based student grant program as well as investing in skills training and apprenticeships. Eighty per cent of the jobs of tomorrow will require some form of post-secondary education or training and access to education is key to growing a sustainable economy that will attract investment, create good jobs, and build ladders of opportunity into a strong middle class.

The decision to cut these programs is ultimately the decision of Capilano University’s Board of Governors, but we urge them to wait until after the May 14th election. The plan does not need to be rushed through. The decision should wait until a new government in BC has the chance to discuss the future of these programs with Capilano University and determine if any additional funding is available at that time.

Sincerely,

Adrian Dix, BC NDP Leader
Vancouver Kingsway

Survey on Student Debt

Survey on student debt, put together by One Wisconsin Now & Institute.  The response so far has been amazing, however,  input is still needed!

Some of the insights we hope to ascertain from this project include:

  • How is the trillion-dollar student debt crisis affecting a household’s purchasing ability?
  • Are student loans affecting auto and home ownership?
  • How about savings for retirement, or for the next generation’s college?
  • Are there opportunities to change the way we finance higher education?
  • Do we need a way to alter the existing debt structure on student loans?

If you haven’t already taken the survey, please take a few minutes of your time to complete it by clicking here:  Student Loan Survey

Just seven minutes of your time will be a huge boost for our shared fight to raise awareness and develop real solutions.

The survey questions that follow ask you about your household circumstances, using questions that are similar to those asked by the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey is designed to honor your privacy and does not collect personally identifiable information such as birth date, social security number, address, or, naturally, your name. Survey respondents will be truly anonymous.

After taking the survey, please share it with friends, family, neighbors and co-workers via Twitter, Facebook & email.

If, after taking the survey, you feel that your story is not adequately captured by the survey, feel free to email your specific story to: own@onewisconsinnow.org

Thank you for all you do and for your help on this critical research project.

Sincerely,

Robert Applebaum
StudentDebtCrisis.org