Earlier this week, I noted that the decision by instructors in the Los Angeles Unified School District to back the "Occupy" protests was just one more example of how California teachers unions consistently act against the interests of the Golden State's students (in this case by opposing education reform up to and including charter schools in some of the state's most blighted neighborhoods). According to a story published today by California Watch, that trend doesn't abate when it comes to higher education:
As a small cadre of University of California faculty prepares to deliver the first online classes in a systemwide experiment, the effort is stirring both excitement and controversy among instructors and administrators...
But leaders of the University Council -- American Federation of Teachers, which represents the system's more than 3,000 non-tenured lecturers and librarians, are concerned the university's push toward online instruction could threaten lecturers' jobs and degrade the quality of a UC education...
"We keep hearing these rumors," [Union President Bob Samuels] said. "One is to hire graduate students from any discipline to man these courses. Then get a famous professor to do a lecture, put it online and then have all the interaction done by a graduate student. I think that's a very bad extension of some of the bad aspects of large classes."While the UC pilot program will doubtlessly have hits and misses, the union's instinctive reaction is instructive. Here we have that rarest of things -- a large public university attempting to become more responsive to the needs of its students by offering a product that has the potential to be both cheaper and more convenient -- and all that labor can think about is the implications for job security,
The union reps who dismissively refer to this attempt at innovation as setting the UC system on the road to becoming the University of Phoenix are considerably wide of the mark. If they view Phoenix as insubstantial, they can always compete on the quality of the UC system's instruction. But the monopoly that has sheltered their expensive, time-consuming approach to higher ed is crumbling around them -- and better meeting the needs of their students is essential to saving a higher education process that takes too long, costs too much money, and provides an insufficient return on investment. The ideal measure for how many lecturers should be in the UC system is what maximizes learning, not what maximizes payroll.
As long as the AFT has its way, that won't be the standard, however. There's nothing quite as sad as seeing a cadre of self-styled 'intellectuals' so vehemently opposed to progress.
Join the conversation