Après Marseille, retrouvons-nous à Rome les 24 et 25 juin 2020 !

Valeria Pinto, membre de l’IDST, a lancé en compagnie d’autres universitaires un appel intitulé « Désintoxiquons-nous. Le Savoir pour le futur », déjà soutenu par plus de 1300 signataires.

L’un des objectifs de cet appel est d’organiser une rencontre à Rome les 24 et 25 juin 2020, au moment même où se tiendra dans la capitale italienne une énième conférence ministérielle liée au processus de Bologne. Évoquée lors de notre congrès de Marseille en novembre dernier, cette rencontre sera l’occasion d’élargir le front de contestation et de résistance aux politiques néolibérales de formation et de recherche et de penser une nouvelle politique de la connaissance, celle des savoirs de tous, par tous, et pour tous.

De nombreux contacts, en Europe et dans le monde, sont en cours et la rencontre promet d’être belle et galvanisante !

N’hésitez donc pas à vous joindre à cet appel, publié ici en italien, anglais, allemand, espagnol et français, en envoyant un courriel à l’adresse indiquée au bas de l’appel.

La Rédaction du blog

Valeria Pinto, member of the International of Knowledge for All (IKA), together with other academics, launched a call entitled "Let's detoxify ourselves. Knowledge for the future", already supported by more than 1300 signatories.

One of the objectives of this call is to organize a meeting in Rome on 24 and 25 June 2020, at the same time as the umpteenth ministerial conference linked to the Bologna process will be held in the Italian capital. Evoked during our congress in Marseille last November, this meeting will be an opportunity to broaden the front of protest and resistance to neo-liberal education and research policies and to think about a new knowledge policy, that of a society of knowledge from all, by all, and for all.

Many contacts, in Europe and in the world, are underway and the meeting promises to be beautiful and galvanizing!

So do not hesitate to join this call, published here in Italian, English, German, Spanish and French, by sending an email to the address at the bottom of the call.

Blog Editorial Team

Valeria Pinto, Mitglied des « Internationales Netzwerk Wissen für Alle » (INWA), hat zusammen mit anderen Akademikern einen Aufruf mit dem Titel “Entgiften wir uns – Wissen für die Zukunft” , das bereits von mehr als 1300 Unterzeichnern unterstützt wird.

Eines der Ziele dieses Aufrufs ist die Organisation eines Treffens in Rom am 24. und 25. Juni 2020, zeitgleich mit der x-ten Ministerkonferenz im Zusammenhang mit dem Bologna-Prozess, die in der italienischen Hauptstadt stattfinden wird. Dieses Treffen, das auf unserem Kongress in Marseille im vergangenen November ins Leben gerufen wurde, bietet die Gelegenheit, die Front des Protests und Widerstands gegen die neoliberale Bildungs- und Forschungspolitik zu erweitern und über eine neue Wissenspolitik nachzudenken, die des Wissens für alle, von allen und für alle.

Viele Kontakte, in Europa und in der Welt, sind im Gange, und das Treffen verspricht, schön und aufregend zu werden!

Zögern Sie also nicht, sich diesem Aufruf, der hier in Italienisch, Deutsch, Englisch, Spanisch und Französisch, indem Sie eine E-Mail an die am Ende des Aufrufs angegebene Adresse senden.

Blogredaktion

Valeria Pinto, miembro de la IDST, junto con otros académicos, lanzó un llamamiento titulado "Desintoxiquémonos". Conocimiento para el futuro", ya apoyado por más de 1300 firmantes.

Uno de los objetivos de esta convocatoria es organizar una reunión en Roma los días 24 y 25 de junio de 2020, al mismo tiempo que se celebrará en la capital italiana la enésima conferencia ministerial vinculada al proceso de Bolonia. Evocada en nuestro congreso de Marsella el pasado mes de noviembre, esta reunión será una oportunidad para ampliar el frente de protesta y resistencia a las políticas neoliberales de educación e investigación y para pensar en una nueva política del conocimiento, la del conocimiento de todos, por todos y para todos.

Muchos contactos, en Europa y en el mundo, están en marcha y el encuentro promete ser hermoso y galvanizador!

Así que no duden en unirse a esta llamada, publicada aquí en italiano, inglés, alemán, francés y español, enviando un correo electrónico a la dirección que aparece al final de la llamada.

La redacción del blog

Valeria Pinto, membro dell’ L'Internazionale della Conoscenza per Tutti (ICT), ha lanciato, insieme ad altri universitari, un appello dal titolo “Disintossichiamoci. Sapere per il futuro”, già sostenuto da più di 1300 firmatari.

Uno degli obiettivi di questo appello è l’organizzazione di un incontro a Roma, il 24 e il 25 giugno 2020, in concomitanza con la prossima conferenza ministeriale del processo di Bologna. Già evocato durante il nostro congresso di Marsiglia dello scorso novembre, questo incontro costituirà l’occasione di estendere il fronte della contestazione e della resistenza alle politiche neoliberali della formazione e della ricerca, e di pensare una nuova politica della conoscenza, quella dei saperi di tutti, per tutti, a opera di tutti.

La rete internazionale di contatti si sta sviluppando in Europa e nel mondo, e l’incontro di Roma si annuncia bello e galvanizzante!

Non esitate dunque à sostenere questo appello, qui pubblicato in italiano, inglese, tedesco, spagnolo e francese, inviando una mail all’indirizzo indicato in calce all’appello.

La redazione del blog

Désintoxiquons-nous – Le Savoir pour le futur

« Economics are the methods. The object is to change the soul ». Se référant aux politiques de la connaissance, de l’éducation et de la recherche (mais pas seulement), cette formule de Margaret Thatcher résume bien le processus qui a caractérisé les dernières décennies.

La méthode économique, la pénurie comme condition normale, à la limite de survie ou en dessous, est visible par tous. L’objectif est moins visible. Le changement des âmes est si profond que nous ne remarquons même plus la destruction qui se produit autour de nous et à travers nous : le paradoxe de la fin — dans la « société de la connaissance » — d’un monde consacré aux choses de la connaissance. Même l’oreille s’est habituée à une dévastation linguistique programmatique, où un jargon technico-managérial et bureaucratique appauvri répète des expressions ayant valeur opératoire précise, qui semble cependant difficile à saisir : amélioration de la qualité, excellence, compétence, transparence, produits de la recherche, offre d’enseignement... Et autonomie, c’est-à- dire — selon les mots de Thomas Piketty — l’imposture qui a lancé le processus de destruction du modèle européen d’université. Une destruction qui a pris comme prétexte rhétorique certains maux — réels ou non — de l’ancienne université, mais bien sûr sans y remédier, car le but visé n’était pas celui-là.

Trente ans après l’introduction de l’autonomie, justement, et vingt ans après le processus de Bologne, dix ans après la « loi Gelmini », la littérature critique sur cette destruction est sans limite. La recherche et l’enseignement — c’est un fait, et pourtant il semble tabou de le rendre explicite — ne sont plus libres depuis longtemps. Soumise à une pression insensée pour « produire » de plus en plus chaque année (en Italie : VQR, ASN, etc.), la recherche est en proie à une véritable bulle de titres, qui transforme de plus en plus les déjà exemplaires publish or perish en rubbish or perish. Dans le même temps, la pression continue à « délivrer » une formation entièrement adaptée aux exigences du monde productiviste. La modernisation qui a arraché de manière programmatique l’université à la « tour d’ivoire » – la rendant « responsive », « service university » — n’a signifié rien de plus que la voie, la « troisième voie », vers le monde des intérêts privés. Vidées de leur valeur, l’éducation et la recherche sont évaluées, c’est-à-dire « valorisées » par le marché et le quasi- marché de l’évaluation, qui, dans sa meilleure forme institutionnelle, ne sert qu’à « favoriser (...) l’effet du contrôle social et le développement de logiques de marché positives » (CRUI 2001).

C’est précisément grâce à l’imposition de ces logiques de marché que la liberté de recherche et d’enseignement – bien que protégée par l’article 33 de la Constitution – est réduite désormais à la liberté d’entreprendre. Le modèle auquel elle est tenue de se soumettre est un régime de production de connaissances utiles (utiles d’abord pour accroître le profit privé), qui commande les méthodes, les temps et les lieux de cette production, selon un management autoritaire qui va jusqu’à exproprier les chercheurs et les universitaires de leur propre faculté de jugement, désormais soumis à des critères sans justification interne mais vendus comme étant objectifs. Ce sont des chiffres et des mesures qui, comme chacun sait, n’ont rien de scientifique et ne garantissent rien en termes de valeur et de qualité de la connaissance. Définir des pourcentages d’excellence et d’inacceptabilité, diviser avec des médianes ou prescrire des seuils, trier les revues en classements, les diviser selon le ranking, tout cela, tout comme pratiquer le contrôle les plus vexatoires sous forme de certifications, d’accréditations, de rapports, de révisions, etc., a une seule fonction : la mise en concurrence forcée des individus, des groupes ou des institutions au sein de la seule réalité à laquelle nous attribuons aujourd’hui un titre pour établir des valeurs, c’est-à-dire le marché, en l’occurrence le marché mondial de l’éducation et de la recherche, qui est une invention récente.

Là où les marchés n’existaient pas traditionnellement (éducation et recherche, mais aussi santé, sécurité, etc.), l’impératif était de les créer ou d’en simuler leur existence. La logique du marché concurrentiel s’est imposée comme un véritable commandement éthique, s’y opposer a signifié, pour les quelques personnes qui l’ont essayé, devoir se défendre contre les accusations d’inefficacité, d’irresponsabilité, de gaspillage de l’argent public, de défense des privilèges corporatistes et de castes. Le laissez-faire n’a pour autant pas triomphé : un « evaluative State » policier a opéré pour que cette logique soit intériorisée dans la conduite des études et des recherches, opérant une véritable déprofessionnalisation, qui a transformé les universitaires engagés dans leurs recherches en entrepreneurial researchers selon les diktats de la corporate university. Pour les gratifier, une précarité économique et existentielle qui se décline avec le nom d’excellence, le cadre aujourd’hui fonctionnel à un « darwinisme compétitif » explicitement théorisé et, grâce aussi à la couverture morale offerte par l’idéologie du mérite, rendu par abus de langage « normal ».

Beaucoup de gens pensent aujourd’hui que ce modèle de gestion des connaissances est toxique et non durable à long terme. Les dispositifs de mesure des performances et d’évaluation convertissent la recherche scientifique (le fait de demander pour savoir) en recherche d’un avantage concurrentiel (demander pour obtenir), mettant en danger la signification et le rôle de la connaissance pour la société. De plus en plus souvent aujourd’hui, les chercheurs écrivent et font des recherches pour atteindre un seuil de productivité plutôt que pour ajouter des connaissances à l’humanité : « Jamais auparavant dans l’histoire de l’humanité, autant de personnes ont écrit autant malgré ils aient si peu à dire à si peu de monde » (Alvesson et al., 2017). Ainsi, la recherche est fatalement condamnée à ne pas être pertinente, ce qui a pour effet de dissiper la reconnaissance sociale dont elle a bénéficié jusqu’à présent et de générer une profonde crise de confiance. Le temps est venu de procéder à un changement radical si l’on veut éviter l’implosion du système de la connaissance dans son ensemble. La bureaucratisation de la recherche et la managérialisation de l’enseignement supérieur risquent de devenir le Tchernobyl de notre modèle d’organisation sociale.

Ce dont on a besoin aujourd’hui, c’est réaffirmer les principes qui protègent le droit de l’ensemble de la société à un savoir, un enseignement et une recherche libres — afin de protéger le tissu même de la démocratie — et, pour cette raison, protéger ceux qui se consacrent à la connaissance. Ce qu’il faut, c’est un choix de domaine, capable de distinguer d’en bas ce qui résiste en tant que force critique, la capacité à discriminer, à distinguer ce qui ne peut plus être tenu ensemble : partage et excellence, liberté de recherche et néo-évaluation, formation de qualité et fourniture rapide de main- d’œuvre bon marché, libre accès à la connaissance et monopoles du marché.

Nous devons marquer un certain nombre d’étapes pour œuvrer dans ce sens.

S’il y a une adhésion préliminaire suffisante — disons en termes symboliques 100 personnes au début — nous organiserons bientôt une réunion pour réfléchir à des politiques radicalement alternatives en termes d’évaluation, de calendrier et de formes de production des connaissances.

Dans ce sens, nous organisons en juin une initiative qui coïncidera avec la prochaine conférence ministérielle du processus de Bologne, qui se tiendra cette année à Rome, afin de faire progresser avec force – en collaboration avec d’autres mouvements européens de chercheurs et d’universitaires (des contacts en ce sens sont déjà pris) – une refonte des politiques de la connaissance.

Valeria Pinto – Davide Borrelli – Maria Chiara Pievatolo – Federico Bertoni + 1300
https://www.roars.it/online/piu-1-000-firme-disintossichiamoci-un-appello-per-ripensare-le-politiche-della-conoscenza/

Pour adhérer : sapereperilfuturo@gmail.com en précisant l’institution d’affiliation.

Traduction française de Cristina del Biaggio
https://academia.hypotheses.org/16015

Let’s detoxify ourselves – Knowledge for the Future

"Economics are the methods. The object is to change the soul". Margaret Thatcher’s formula sums up well the process that characterized the policies of knowledge, education and research (but not only) in the last decades.

The economic method, the shortage as a normal condition, at the survival limit or below it, is visible to everyone. Also clearly visible, together with the financial one, is the bureaucratic strangulation. Less visible is the target. So deep is the change of our soul that we no longer even notice the destruction that has taken place around and through us: the paradox of the end - inside the "knowledge society" - of a world dedicated to the things of knowledge. Our very hearing has become accustomed to a programmatic linguistic devastation, where an impoverished technical-managerial and bureaucratic jargon reiterates expressions having a precise operational value, which however seems to be difficult to grasp: quality improvement, excellence, competence, transparency, research products, teaching provision... And autonomy, or - to take up Thomas Piketty's words - the imposture that initiated the process of destruction of the European university model. A destruction that has taken as a rhetorical pretext some faults - real and not - of the old university, but of course without remedying them, because its goal was not this one but another one.

Thirty years since the introduction of “autonomy”, twenty since the Bologna process, ten since the "Gelmini Act" (in Italy), the critical literature about this destruction is boundless. Research and teaching - it is a fact, although making it explicit seems a taboo - are no longer free. Research, subjected to senseless pressure that pushes us to "produce" more every year, with every turn more (in Italy VQR, ASN etc.), is in the grip of a real bubble of titles, which transforms an already fatal "publish or perish" into a "rubbish or perish". At the same time, pressure is exerted to "deliver" an education entirely modeled on the demands of the productive world. The modernization that programmatically tore the university away from every "ivory tower" - making it "responsive", "service university" - meant nothing but the way, the "third way", to the world of private interests. Emptied of their value, education and research are evaluated, that is to say "valued", through the market and the quasi-market of evaluation, which, in its best institutional capacity, serves only to "favor (...) the effect of social control and the development of positive market logic "(CRUI 2001).

Due to the imposition of this market logic, the freedom of research and teaching - although protected by art. 33 of the Italian Constitution - is now reduced to freedom of enterprise, submitted to a regime of production of useful knowledge (useful above all to increase private profit), which controls the ways, times and places of this production. An authoritarian management expropriates researchers and scholars of their own faculty of judgment. Criteria deprived from internal justification are smuggled as objective ones: numbers and measures that, everyone knows, have no scientific basis and do not guarantee in any respect the value and quality of knowledge. Pre-defining percentages of excellence and unacceptability, dividing with medians or prescribing thresholds, sorting in rankings, dividing magazines into ratings, all this, together with the most vexatious control practices in the form of certifications, accreditations, reports, reviews, etc., has only one function: the forced competition of individuals, groups or institutions within the only reality to which today the title to establish values is attributed, that is the market, in this case the global market of education and research, which it is a completely recent invention.

As a matter of fact, where traditionally the markets did not exist (education and research, but also health, safety and so on) the imperative was to create them or simulate their existence. The logic of the competitive market has established itself as a real ethical command, opposing which has meant, for the few who have tried it, having to defend themselves from accusations of inefficiency, irresponsibility, waste of public money, defense of corporate and caste privileges. Far from the triumph of laissez faire: a police “evaluative state” has worked to ensure that this logic is internalized in normal study and research practices, operating a real de-professionalisation, which has transformed scholars engaged in their research into compliant entrepreneurial researcher, obedient to the diktats of the corporate university. To gratify them they are offered an economic and existential precariousness that goes under the name of excellence: the functional framework to a "competitive Darwinism" that is explicitly theorized and, also thanks to the moral coverage offered by the ideology of merit, forcedly made normal.

Many now believe that this knowledge management model is toxic and unsustainable in the long term. The performance measurement and reward evaluation devices convert scientific research (asking for knowledge) into the search for competitive advantages (asking for obtaining), thus jeopardizing the meaning and role of knowledge for society. More and more today we write and do research to reach a productivity threshold rather than to add knowledge to humanity: "never before in the history of humanity have so many written so much despite having so little to say to so few" (Alvesson et al., 2017). In this way, research is fatally condemned to irrelevance, dispelling the social appreciation it has enjoyed so far and generating a deep crisis of trust. The time has come for a radical change if we want to avoid the implosion of the knowledge system as a whole. The bureaucratization of research and the managerialization of higher education risk becoming the Chernobyl of our model of social organization.

What is needed today is to reaffirm the principles that protect the right of all society to have free knowledge, teaching, research - to protect, that is, the very stuff of which a democracy is made - and for this reason to protect those who dedicate themselves to knowledge. A standpoint is needed to bring together what resists as a critical force, as the ability to discriminate, distinguish what cannot be held together: sharing and excellence, freedom of research and new evaluation, good higher education and rapid supply of low-cost workforce, free access to knowledge and market monopolies.

In this direction some stages are outlined.

The first one is an assessment of the actual existence and consistency of our field. A project cannot move forward unless a minimum mass of people willing to commit to it is reached. If there is an adequate preliminary adhesion - let's say 100 people in symbolic terms - we organize a meeting to discuss alternative policies about evaluation, times and forms of knowledge production, recruitment and organization.

Looking ahead, we carry out an initiative in June, concomitant with the next ministerial conference of the Bologna process, which will be held in Rome this year, with the aim of demanding - in conjunction with other European movements of researchers and scholars - a radical rethinking of knowledge policies.

Valeria Pinto Davide Borrelli Maria Chiara Pievatolo Federico Bertoni + 1300
https://www.roars.it/online/piu-1-000-firme-disintossichiamoci-un-appello-per-ripensare-le-politiche-della-conoscenza/

to join: sapereperilfuturo@gmail.com specifying the university you belong to.

Entgiften wir uns – Wissen für die Zukunft

“Economics are the methods. The object is to change the soul”. Diese Formel Margaret Thatchers spiegelt den Prozess der letzten Jahrzehnte im Bereich der Wissens-, der Bildungs-, und Forschungspolitik (wenn auch nicht nur in diesen Bereichen) gut wider.

Die Sparmethode, der Mangel als Normalzustand, der an oder unter der Überlebensgrenze liegt, ist sichtbar für alle. Ebenso sichtbar ist außer der finanziellen auch die bürokratische Strangulierung. Weniger sichtbar ist das Ziel. Unsere Gemüter haben sich derart verändert, dass wir nicht einmal mehr bemerken, was um uns herum und durch uns zerstört worden ist: das Paradox, dass eine dem Wissen gewidmete Welt – in einer Wissensgesellschaft – ihrem Ende zugeht. Auch das Ohr hat sich an eine programmatische Sprachverwüstung gewöhnt, wo der verarmte verwaltungstechnisch- bürokratische Jargon immer wieder auf eine Ausdrucksweise zurückgreift, die eine präzise operative Valenz hat, aber dennoch schwer zu fassen scheint: Qualitätssteigerung, Exzellenz, Kompetenz, Transparenz, Forschungsprodukte, Erteilung von Lehrinhalten... Und Autonomie, bzw. – um mit den Worten Thomas Pikettys zu sprechen – der Schwindel, der die Zerstörung des europäischen Universitätsmodells in Gang gesetzt hat. Eine Zerstörung, die gewisse – mehr oder weniger tatsächliche – Missstände der alten Universität rhetorisch zum Vorwand nahm, natürlich ohne sie abzuschaffen, denn nicht dies, sondern anderes war ihr Ziel.

Dreißig Jahre nach der Einführung der Autonomie, zwanzig Jahre nach dem Bologna-Prozess, zehn Jahre nach dem [in Italien] „Gelmini Gesetz“ gibt es eine unendliche Fülle von kritischen Abhandlungen zu diesem Thema. Lehre und Forschung sind seit langem nicht mehr frei – das ist eine Tatsache, aber es ist tabu, darüber zu sprechen. Es wird ein sinnloser Druck auf die Forschung ausgeübt, der sie dazu antreibt, jedes Jahr, bei jeder Runde (in Italien VQR, ASN, etc.) mehr zu „produzieren“. Die Forschung geht in einer regelrechten Titelflut unter, und das an sich schon letale publish or perish ist zu einem rubbish or perishgeworden. Gleichzeitig nimmt der Druck zu, eine Bildung zu „erteilen“, die gänzlich auf die Bedürfnisse der Wirtschaft abgestellt ist. Die Modernisierung, die die Universität programmatisch aus jedem „Elfenbeinturm“ gezerrt hat und sie „responsive“ und zur „service university“ machte, war nichts anderes als das Bemühen, einen Weg – den „dritten Weg“ – in die Welt der Privatinteressen einzuschlagen. Lehre und Forschung, ihrer Werte entleert, werden bewertet, besser „aufgewertet“ durch den Markt und den Quasi-Markt der Evaluierung, der in seiner besten institutionellen Form zu nichts weiter dient, als „den sozialen Kontrolleffekt und die Entwicklung einer positiven Marktlogik zu fördern“ (CRUI [Italienische Rektorenkonferenz], 2001).

Gerade weil diese Marktlogik sich durchgesetzt hat, ist die Freiheit von Lehre und Forschung (die zwar durch Art. 33 der Italienischen Verfassung garantiert ist) inzwischen zur Unternehmensfreiheit geworden. Das Modell, dem sie sich anpassen soll, ist ein Regime, das von ihr verlangt, nützliche (vor allem dem privaten Profit nützliche) Kenntnisse zu vermitteln und das in einem autoritären Management vorschreibt, wie, wann und wo dies zu geschehen hat. Auf diese Weise wird den Forschenden und Studierenden ihr eigenes Urteilsvermögen abgesprochen und angeblich objektiven Kriterien unterworfen, die keine innere Rechtfertigung haben. Es handelt sich um Zahlen und Maßnahmen, die, wie jeder weiß, nichts Wissenschaftliches haben und keinerlei Garantie für Wert und Qualität des Wissens bieten. Es werden Prozentsätze der Exzellenz und der Zurückstufung vorgegeben, Aufspaltungen über Mittelwerte vorgenommen, Schwellen gesetzt und Klassifizierungen eingerichtet, die Zeitschriften unterliegen einem Rating-System, es gibt die verschiedensten schikanösen Kontrollformen, wie Zertifizierungen, Akkreditierungsverfahren, Rechenschaftspflicht, Überprüfungen, Revisionen usw., und all das hat nur die eine Funktion, und zwar eine Konkurrenz zu erzwingen zwischen den Individuen, Gruppen oder Institutionen, die auf dem einzigen Gebiet tätig sind, dem heute das Recht zugesprochen wird, Werte zu bestimmen, nämlich dem Markt, in unserem Fall dem globalen Bildungs- und Forschungsmarkt, der eine Erfindung der allerjüngsten Zeit ist.

Dort, wo nämlich traditionsgemäß kein Markt vorhanden war (Bildung, Forschung, aber auch Gesundheits- sowie Sicherheitswesen und ähnliches) lautete der Imperativ, einen solchen zu schaffen oder dessen Existenz vorzutäuschen. Die Marktlogik der Konkurrenz hat sich geradezu als ethisches Gebot etabliert, dem sich zu widersetzen für die wenigen, die es gewagt haben, bedeutete, dass man ihnen Ineffizienz, Unverantwortlichkeit, Verschwendung öffentlicher Gelder und die Inanspruchnahme von korporativen und Kastenprivilegien zum Vorwurf machte. Das ist alles andere als ein Siegeszug des laissez faire: ein polizeiähnlicher „evaluative State“ hat darauf hingewirkt, dass diese Logik in allen normalen Studien- und Forschungstätigkeiten verinnerlicht wurde und dass eine regelrechte Ent-Professionalisierung stattfand, die aus engagierten Forschern entrepreneurial researcher machte, die mit den Vorgaben der corporate universitykonform gingen. Die Gegenleistung besteht in einer wirtschaftlichen und existenziellen Prekarität, die unter dem Namen Exzellenz läuft, und den funktionellen Rahmen für ein „darwinistisches Konkurrenzsystem“ bildet, das ausdrücklich theoretisch untermauert, auch dank der moralischen Stützung durch die Meritokratie notgedrungen zur Normalität wurde.

Dieses Verwaltungsmodell des Wissens wird von vielen als Gift gesehen und auf lange Sicht als unhaltbar beurteilt. Die Verfahren der Leistungsmessung und Prämierung gestalten die wissenschaftliche Forschung (das Fragen, um zu wissen) in die Suche nach Wettbewerbsvorteilen um (das Fragen, um zu bekommen), bis wir so weit sind, dass der Sinn und die Rolle des Wissens für die Gesellschaft aufs Spiel gesetzt werden. Immer öfter wird heutzutage geschrieben und geforscht, um eine Produktivitätsschwelle zu erreichen, statt vielmehr die Menschheit um Kenntnisse zu bereichern: „Nie zuvor in der Geschichte haben so viele Menschen so viel geschrieben, obwohl sie so wenig zu sagen haben“ (Alvesson u.a., 2017). Auf diese fatale Weise wird die Forschung zur Bedeutungslosigkeit verurteilt, die soziale Anerkennung, die sie bisher genossen hat, geht verloren und macht einer tiefen Vertrauenskrise Platz. Der Moment einer radikalen Wende ist gekommen, wenn die Implosion des Wissenssystems in seiner Gesamtheit verhindert werden soll. Die Bürokratisierung der Forschung und die „Managerisierung“ der höheren Ausbildungsgänge laufen die Gefahr, zum Tschernobyl unseres Gesellschaftsmodells zu werden.

Was es heute braucht, ist die Besinnung auf die Grundsätze, die der gesamten Gesellschaft das Recht auf Wissen, auf Unterricht und auf freie Forschung garantieren, die also für das Wesen selbst der Demokratie und damit für diejenigen bürgen, die sich dem Wissen widmen. Es gilt, Partei zu ergreifen, damit von der Basis her das gerettet wird, was an Kritik- und Unterscheidungsfähigkeit übrig geblieben ist und das zu erkennen, was nicht zusammengehalten werden kann: Gemeinsamkeit und Exzellenz, freie Forschung und Neoevaluierung, gute Ausbildung und schnelle Versorgung mit billiger Arbeitskraft, freier Zugang zum Wissen und Marktmonopole.

In dieser Richtung lassen sich einige Zwischenziele ausmachen.

Das erste ist, sich darüber klarzuwerden, wie viele wir tatsächlich sind. Man kann kein Projekt vorantreiben, wenn es nicht eine Mindestzahl von Personen gibt, die bereit sind, sich zu engagieren. Wenn sich im Vorfeld eine angemessene Gruppe unseren Vorstellungen anschließt, sagen wir für den Anfang symbolisch 100 Personen, organisieren wir kurzfristig ein Treffen, um über Verfahren zu diskutieren, die in Hinsicht auf Evaluierung, Zeiten und Formen der Wissensproduktion, Rekrutierung und Organisation eine radikale Wende darstellen.

Vorausschau: für Juni ist eine Initiative geplant, die gleichzeitig mit der nächsten Ministerialkonferenz zum Bologna-Prozess stattfindet, die dieses Jahr in Rom tagen soll. Unser Ziel ist, gemeinsam mit anderen europäischen Bewegungen von Forschern und Studierenden (die entsprechenden Kontakte bestehen bereits) ein Umdenken in der Wissenspolitik zu bewirken.

Valeria Pinto - Davide Borrelli - Maria Chiara Pievatolo - Federico Bertoni + 1300
https://www.roars.it/online/piu-1-000-firme-disintossichiamoci-un-appello-per-ripensare-le-politiche-della-conoscenza/

Senden Sie Ihre Zustimmung (mit Angabe der jeweiligen Institution) an:
sapereperilfuturo@gmail.com

Wir danken Maria Böhmer und Daniel Elon für die Übersetzung

Desintoxiquémonos – Un saber para el futuro

“Economics are the methods. Theobjectistochangethesoul”. Esta frase de Margaret Thatcher resume bien el proceso que se ha producido en estas últimas décadas en el terreno de las políticas educativas, universitarias y de investigación (aunque no únicamente en estos terrenos).

El método económico, -que propugna la escasez como norma, casi al límite de la condición de supervivencia- es algo conocido por todos. También lo es la asfixia burocrática y financiera. Sin embargo, el objetivo que cumplen estos procesos no resulta tan evidente. El cambio en las conductas es tan profundo que ya no nos damos cuenta ni siquiera de la destrucción que se ha producido en nuestro entorno y en nosotros mismos. Vivimos, paradójicamente, en un mundo donde declina el conocimiento, justo en una época que llamamos “sociedad del conocimiento”. Incluso nuestros oídos se han acostumbrado a una sistemática devastación lingüística, en la cual una empobrecedora jerga de gestión burocrática reitera expresiones con un supuesto valor operativo cuyo sentido, sin embargo, es difícil de entender: mejora de la calidad, excelencia, competencia, transparencia, producción de investigación, gestión de la didáctica…y autonomía, o –por retomar las palabras de Thomas Piketty: la impostura ha emprendido el proceso de destrucción del modelo europeo de universidad. Una destrucción que ha tomado como excusa la solución de ciertos problemas –reales o no- de la vieja universidad, pero no para solucionarlos, ya que no era este su objetivo, sino otro bien distinto.

Casi a treinta años de la introducción de la autonomía universitaria, a veinte del proceso de Bolonia, a diez de la “Ley Gelmini”, se ha escrito un sinfín de literatura crítica sobre este proceso de destrucción. Es un hecho evidente, aunque parece tabú mencionarlo, que la libertad docente e investigadora han entrado en declive desde hace un tiempo. Sometida a una insensata presión (por parte de las agencias de calidad y evaluación de la investigación) que apremia a “producir” cada año más, cada vez más, la investigación está atrapada en una verdadera burbuja de publicaciones que transforma el ya fatídico publishorperish en un ulterior rubbishorperish. Al mismo tiempo, continúa la presión de “administrar” una formación totalmente ajustada a las demandas del mundo empresarial.

El programa sistemático de modernización que ha bajado a la universidad de su torre de marfil –convirtiéndola en “responsive”, "service university”- no ha significado otra cosa que la vía, la “tercera vía”, que la encamina a satisfacer los intereses del sector privado. Vaciadas de su valor, la enseñanza y la docencia son valoradas, podría decirse “valorizadas”, mediante el mercado y el cuasi-mercado de la evaluación, que, con sus mejores ropajes institucionales no sirve para otra cosa que para “favorecer el efecto de control social y de desarrollo de lógicas mercantiles”. (CRUI - Conferencia de los Rectores de las Universidades Italianas 2001).

Realmente, gracias a la imposición de estas lógicas de mercado, la libertad de investigación y docencia, -aunque protegidas por el art. 33 de la Constitución- ahora se reducen a la libertad de empresa.El régimen al que deben someterse es el de producir conocimiento útil (sobre todo, para aumentar el beneficio privado), que controla las formas, tiempos y lugares de esta producción, de acuerdo con una gestión autoritaria que llega a expropiar a los investigadores y académicos de su facultad de juicio, ahora sujeta a criterios sin ninguna justificación interna que se hacen pasar por objetivos. Estos toman la forma de cifras y medidas que, todo el mundo sabe, no tienen nada de científico, ni son garantía del valor y la calidad del conocimiento. Fijar percentiles de excelencia, establecer umbrales, calcular medianas, crear clasificaciones de revistas, a esto se le suman las prácticas de control más irritantes en forma de certificaciones, acreditaciones, informes, revisiones, etc., con una única función: forzar a individuos, grupos e instituciones a competir en ventaja de la única institución a la que hoy se le otorga el derecho a fijar el valor: el mercado. En este caso, el mercado global de la educación y la investigación, que ha sido inventado en estos últimos tiempos.

En los sectores donde tradicionalmente no existían los mercados (educación e investigación y también salud, protección social, etc.), el imperativo ha sido crearlos o simular su existencia. La lógica del mercado competitivo se ha establecido como un verdadero mandato ético incuestionable, oponerse a ella significa ser acusado de ineficiencia, irresponsabilidad, derroche de dinero público o de defender privilegios corporativos. Esta lógica se ha impuesto mediante un “evaluative state” policial que ha trabajado para garantizar que dicha lógica se internalice en las prácticas normales de estudio e investigación, operando una verdadera desprofesionalización, que ha transformado a los investigadores en emprendedores adaptados a los preceptos de la universidad corporativa. Como recompensa, estos investigadores han obtenido una precariedad económica y existencial que se conoce con el nombre de excelencia, un marco funcional para el actual “darwinismo competitivo", acompañado, además, por la ideología meritocrática que se ha normalizado a la fuerza.

Son muchos los que piensan que este modelo de gestión del conocimiento es tóxico e insostenible a largo plazo. Los dispositivos de medición del rendimiento y de evaluación de recompensas convierten la investigación científica (la pregunta por el saber) en la búsqueda de una superioridad competitiva (la obtención de ventajas), poniendo en peligro el significado y el papel del conocimiento para la sociedad. Cada vez más, hoy escribimos e investigamos para alcanzar un umbral de productividad en lugar de agregar conocimiento a la humanidad: "nunca antes en la historia de la humanidad, tantos han escrito tanto a pesar de tener tan poco que decir a tan pocos" (Alvesson et al., 2017).De esta manera, la investigación está condenada fatalmente a la irrelevancia, disipando el reconocimiento social que ha disfrutado hasta ahora y generando una profunda crisis de confianza. Ha llegado el momento de un cambio radical si queremos evitar la implosión del sistema de conocimiento en su conjunto. La burocratización de la investigación y la educación superior managerializada se convierten en el Chernobyl de nuestro modelo de organización social.

Por lo tanto, lo que se necesita hoy es reafirmar los principios que protegen el derecho de toda sociedad a tener libre conocimiento, enseñanza e investigación (es decir, proteger el tejido mismo del que está hecha una democracia) y, por esta razón, proteger a quienes se dedican al conocimiento. Necesitamos establecer preferencias, que posibiliten de articular desde la base las resistencias críticas con capacidad para deslindar lo que se puede o no se puede mantener unido: conocimiento común y compartido o excelencia, libertad de investigación o nueva evaluación de resultados, formación de estudiantes con sentido o suministro rápido de mano de obra de bajo costo, libre acceso al conocimiento o monopolios de saber mercantil.

En esta línea se perfilan algunas etapas.

La primera es una verificación de la existencia real y de la consistencia de este campo. Un proyecto no puede avanzar a menos que se alcance una masa mínima de personas dispuestas a comprometerse con él.

Si hay una adhesión preliminar adecuada, -digamos, en términos simbólicos, que reúna a 100 personas, podría organizarse una reunión para razonar sobre políticas radicalmente alternativas en términos de evaluación, tiempos y formas de producción de conocimiento, reclutamiento y organización.

De cara al futuro, en junio de 2020 se celebrará un encuentro en Roma -que se hará coincidir con la próxima conferencia ministerial del proceso de Bolonia- para avanzar con fuerza, junto con otros movimientos europeos de investigadores y académicos (ya existen contactos en este sentido) hacia un replanteamiento de las políticas de conocimiento.

Valeria Pinto - Davide Borrelli - Maria Chiara Pievatolo - Federico Bertoni + 1300
>https://www.roars.it/online/piu-1-000-firme-disintossichiamoci-un-appello-per-ripensare-le-politiche-della-conoscenza/

Para accesiones: sapereperilfuturo@gmail.com especificando la institución de origen.

Disintossichiamoci - Sapere per il futuro

“Economics are the methods. The object is to change the soul”. Riferita alle politiche della conoscenza, istruzione e ricerca (ma non soltanto), questa formula di Margaret Thatcher ben riassume il processo che ha contraddistinto gli ultimi decenni.

Il metodo economico, la penuria come condizione normale, al limite o al di sotto del limite della sopravvivenza, è visibile a tutti. Anche ben visibile, insieme a quello finanziario, è lo strangolamento burocratico. Meno visibile l’obiettivo. Il cambiamento degli animi è così profondo che non ci accorgiamo nemmeno più della distruzione compiutasi intorno e attraverso di noi: il paradosso della fine – nella “società della conoscenza” – di un mondo dedicato alle cose della conoscenza. Anche l’udito si è assuefatto a una programmatica devastazione linguistica, dove un impoverito gergo tecnico-gestionale e burocratico reitera espressioni dalla precisa valenza operativa, che però sembra essere difficile cogliere: miglioramento della qualità, eccellenza, competenza, trasparenza, prodotti della ricerca, erogazione della didattica... E autonomia, ovvero – per riprendere le parole di Thomas Piketty – l’impostura che ha avviato il processo di distruzione del modello europeo di università. Una distruzione che ha assunto come pretesto retorico alcuni mali – reali e no – della vecchia università, ma naturalmente senza porvi rimedio, perché non questo ma altro era il suo l’obbiettivo.

A trenta anni appunto dall’introduzione dell’autonomia, a venti dal processo di Bologna, a dieci dalla “Legge Gelmini”, la letteratura critica su questa distruzione è sconfinata. Ricerca e insegnamento – è un fatto, eppure sembra un tabù esplicitarlo – da tempo non sono più liberi. Sottoposta a una insensata pressione che incalza a “produrre” ogni anno di più, a ogni giro (da noi VQR, ASN ecc) di più, la ricerca è in preda a una vera e propria bolla di titoli, che trasforma sempre più il già esiziale publish or perish in un rubbish or perish. Nello stesso tempo, è continua la pressione ad “erogare” una formazione interamente modellata sulle richieste del mondo produttivo. La modernizzazione che ha programmaticamente strappato l’università via da ogni “torre di avorio” – facendone “responsive”, “service university” – ha significato non altro che la via, la “terza via”, verso il mondo degli interessi privati. Svuotate del loro valore, istruzione e ricercasono valutate, vale a dire “valorizzate” tramite il mercato e il quasi-mercato della valutazione, che, nella sua migliore veste istituzionale, non serve ad altro che «a favorire (...) l’effetto di controllo sociale e di sviluppo di positive logiche di mercato» (CRUI 2001).

Proprio grazie all’imporsi di queste logiche di mercato, la libertà di ricerca e di insegnamento – sebbene tutelata dall’art. 33 della Costituzione – è ridotta oramai a libertà di impresa. Il modello al quale le è richiesto sottomettersi è un regime di produzione di conoscenze utili (utili anzitutto a incrementare il profitto privato), che comanda modi tempi e luoghi di questa produzione, secondo un management autoritario che arriva ad espropriare ricercatori e studiosi della loro stessa facoltà di giudizio, ora assoggettata a criteri privi di interna giustificazione contrabbandati per oggettivi. Si tratta di numeri e misure che di scientifico, lo sanno tutti, non hanno nulla e nulla garantiscono in termini valore e qualità della conoscenza. Predefinire percentuali di eccellenza e di inaccettabilità, dividere con mediane o prescrivere soglie, ordinare in classifiche, ripartire in rating le riviste, tutto questo, insieme alle più vessatorie pratiche di controllo sotto forma di certificazioni, accreditamenti, rendicontazioni, riesami, revisioni ecc., ha un’unica funzione: la messa in concorrenza forzata di individui gruppi o istituzioni all’interno dell’unica realtà cui oggi si attribuisce titolo per stabilire valori, ossia il mercato, in questo caso il mercato globale dell’istruzione e della ricerca, che è un’invenzione del tutto recente.

Là dove infatti tradizionalmente i mercati non esistevano (istruzione e ricerca, ma anche sanità, sicurezza e così via), l’imperativo è stato quello di crearli o di simularne l’esistenza. La logica del mercato concorrenziale si è imposta come vero e proprio comando etico, opporsi al quale ha comportato, per i pochi che vi hanno provato, doversi difendere da accuse di inefficienza, irresponsabilità, spreco di danaro pubblico, difesa di privilegi corporativi e di casta. Tutt’altro che il trionfo del laissez faire: un “evaluative State” poliziesco ha operato affinché questa logica venisse interiorizzata nelle normali pratiche di studio e ricerca, operando una vera e propria deprofessionalizzazione, che ha trasformato studiosi impegnati nella loro ricerca in entrepreneurial researcher conformi ai diktat della corporate university. A gratificarli una precarietà economica ed esistenziale che va sotto il nome di eccellenza, la cornice oggi funzionale a un “darwinismo concorrenziale” esplicitamente teorizzato e, anche grazie alla copertura morale offerta dall’ideologia del merito, reso forzatamente normalità.

Sono in molti ormai a ritenere che questo modello di gestione della conoscenza sia tossico e insostenibile a lungo termine. I dispositivi di misurazione delle performance e valutazione premiale convertono la ricerca scientifica (il chiedere per sapere) nella ricerca di vantaggi competitivi (il chiedere per ottenere), giungendo a mettere a rischio il senso e il ruolo del sapere per la società. Sempre più spesso oggi si scrive e si fa ricerca per raggiungere una soglia di produttività piuttosto che per aggiungere una conoscenza all’umanità: “mai prima nella storia dell'umanità tanti hanno scritto così tanto pur avendo così poco da dire a così pochi” (Alvesson et al., 2017). In questo modo la ricerca si condanna fatalmente all’irrilevanza, dissipando il riconoscimento sociale di cui finora ha goduto e generando una profonda crisi di fiducia. È giunto il momento di un cambiamento radicale, se si vuole scongiurare l’implosione del sistema della conoscenza nel suo complesso. La burocratizzazione della ricerca e la managerializzazione dell’istruzione superiore rischiano di diventare la Chernobyl del nostro modello di organizzazione sociale.

Quel che serve oggi è quindi riaffermare i principi che stanno a tutela del diritto di tutta la società ad avere un sapere, un insegnamento, una ricerca liberi – a tutela, cioè, del tessuto stesso di cui è fatta una democrazia – e per questo a tutela di chi si dedica alla conoscenza. Serve una scelta di campo, capace di rammagliare dal basso quello che resiste come forza critica, capacità di discriminare, distinguere quello che non si può tenere insieme: condivisione ed eccellenza, libertà di ricerca e neovalutazione, formazione di livello e rapida fornitura di forza lavoro a basso costo, accesso libero al sapere e monopoli del mercato.

In questa direzione si delineano alcune tappe.

La prima è una verifica dell’effettiva sussistenza e consistenza di questo campo. Un progetto non può avanzare se non si raggiunge una massa minima di persone disposte ad impegnarvisi.

Se c’è un’adeguata adesione preliminare – diciamo in termini simbolici 100 persone per partire – organizziamo un incontro a breve per ragionare su politiche radicalmente alternative in fatto di valutazione, tempi e forme della produzione del sapere, reclutamento e organizzazione.

In prospettiva, realizziamo a giugno un’iniziativa in concomitanza con la prossima conferenza ministeriale del processo di Bologna, che quest’anno si tiene a Roma, per avanzare con forza – in raccordo con altri movimenti europei di ricercatori e studiosi (già sussistono contatti in questo senso) – un ripensamento delle politiche della conoscenza.

Valeria Pinto Davide Borrelli Maria Chiara Pievatolo Federico Bertoni + 1300
https://www.roars.it/online/piu-1-000-firme-disintossichiamoci-un-appello-per-ripensare-le-politiche-della-conoscenza/

per adesioni: sapereperilfuturo@gmail.com specificando l’università di appartenenza

https://www.linternationaledessavoirspourtous.org

Entradas populares de este blog

Météo des Luttes – mai-juin 2019 –

World

fr-FR en-EN de-DE es-ES it-IT pt-PT

Météo des Luttes – mai-juin 2019 –

La Rédaction du blog

30 juin 2019

Barometer of struggles – May-June 2019 –

Blog editorial team

June 30, 2019

Streikwetterdienst – Mai-Juni 2019 –

Blogredaktion

30 Juni 2019

Barómetro de las luchas – mayo-junio de 2019 –

La redacción del blog

30 de juniol de 2019

Meteo delle lotte – maggio-giugno 2019 –

La redazione del blog

30 giugno 2019

Clima das lutas – Maio-Junho de 2019 –

A redação do blog

30 de junho de 2019

Aux quatre coins de la planète, des étudiants, des universitaires, des chercheurs, mais aussi des lycéens ou des enseignants, se mobilisent pour s’opposer aux politiques néolibérales et conquérir de nouveaux droits. Et la plupart du temps, nous n’en savons rien ou si peu…
Nous nous proposons donc de tenir sur ce blog une « météo des luttes », organisée sous la forme de textes courts, de « brèves », suivis de liens à consulter ou de documents à télécharger.
Dans ce bulletin météo, nous vous signalons quelques-uns de ces combats, locaux et universels...

All over the world, students, academics, researchers, as well as high school students and teachers are mobilizing to oppose neoliberal policies and conquer new rights. But most of the time, we hear little or no wind of it...
We therefore propose to keep on this blog a “barometer of struggles” organized in the form of news in brief, followed by links to consult or documents to download.
In this weathercast, we signal to you a few of these recent fights, local and universal…

Überall auf der Welt kämpfen Studierende, Lehrende und Forschende, aber auch SchülerInnen oder gar Eltern, gegen neoliberale Politik und für neue Rechte. Davon erfahren wir in der Regel nur wenig…
Auf dieser Seite verzeichnen wir also einen wissenschaftlichen Streikwetterdienst aus kurzen Texten und Meldungen mit Links und Dokumenten zum Herunterladen.
In diesem Bericht stellen wir Euch einige dieser lokalen und allgemeinen Kämpfe vor.

En todas partes del mundo, estudiantes, académicos, investigadores, pero también estudiantes y profesores de secundaria se movilizan para oponerse a las políticas neoliberales y conquistar nuevos derechos. Pero la mayor parte del tiempo, no sabemos nada o muy poco....
Por lo tanto, proponemos mantener en este blog un "barómetro de las luchas", organizado en forma de resúmenes, seguidos de enlaces para consultar o documentos para descargar.
En este reporte meteorológico, señalamos algunas de estas luchas, locales y universales…

In tutto il mondo, studenti, accademici, ricercatori, ma anche studenti delle scuole superiori e insegnanti si stanno mobilitando per contrastare le politiche neoliberali e conquistare nuovi diritti. E il più delle volte non ne sappiamo nulla, o molto poco...
Proponiamo quindi di tenere su questo blog un "meteo delle lotte", organizzato in forma di brevi testi, seguiti da link da consultare o documenti da scaricare.
In questo bollettino meteorologico, diamo notizia di alcune lotte, locali e universali…

Em todo o mundo, estudantes, acadêmicos, pesquisadores, mas também estudantes do ensino médio e professores estão se mobilizando para se opor às políticas neoliberais e conquistar novos direitos. E, na maioria das vezes, não sabemos nada ou tão pouco acerca disso...
Propomos portanto manter neste blog um "clima das lutas", composto por textos curtos, "resumos", seguidos de links para consulta ou documentos para download.
Neste boletim meteorológico, relatamos algumas dessas batalhas, locais e universais…

  1. Monde

    La lutte mondiale des jeunes pour le climat s’intensifie

    Le vendredi 24 mai a eu lieu la 2e journée de grève internationale de la jeunesse pour le climat, après la mobilisation très réussie du 15 mars. Plus de 620 grèves ont été suivies partout dans le monde.

    Une semaine mondiale d’action est organisée du 20 au 27 septembre 2019 avec grève scolaire mondiale le 20 septembre et grève totale le 27 septembre.

  2. Afrique
  3. Amérique du Sud
    • Brazil
      BrazilNationwide Student Strike began in Brazil Over Bolsonaro’s budget cuts. Many demonstrations took place on May 15, in 15 on 17 of Brazil’s states with particularly large ones in major cities like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte. Despite the cuts affecting only federal institutions, the protest movement has been joined by many private universities such as Rio’s Pontifical University which voted last week to join the nationwide demonstration.
      Em defensa da universidades públicas brasileiras, circulam petições. A de Daniel Peres, (Salvador-Bahia) dirigida em particular ao Congresso Nacional, já recolheu mais de um milhão e meio de assinaturas.

      TheGuardian 30.05.2019, Tens of thousands of students, academics and teachers have taken to the streets of Brazil for their latest mass protest against what they call far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on education.
      Up and down the country – from Amazon cities to small towns in Brazil’s deep south – demonstrators turned out to condemn Bolsonaro’s highly controversial moves to slash funding for public education and science.

      The Conversation 05.06.2019, Tens of thousands of students and professors protested nationwide on May 30 against a Jair Bolsonaro administration proposal to slash Brazil’s public education budget and starve university humanities departments of resources.
      It was the second mass demonstration in two weeks against the education policies of Brazil’s divisive new president.
      Protesters in cities and towns across Brazil took to the streets to condemn an education ministry proposal to reduce funding for Brazilian public universities by 30% during the remainder of 2019. The ministry is also considering withdrawing financing entirely from the philosophy and sociology departments of public universities.
      The objective would be to “focus on areas that generate immediate return to the taxpayer such as veterinary, engineering and medicine,” Bolsonaro wrote on Twitter on April 26.

    • Chile
      ChileEn todo el país, se contesta mucho la Reforma de la Educación Superior y de Universidades Estatales llevada por el Mineduc (Ministerio de Educación).
      En Santiago el 6 de junio, profesores y estudiantes marchan contra el presidente Piñera que mantiene su silencio frente a las demandas. "Nos estamos manifestando por los problemas graves de la educación pública", dijo durante la marcha Mario Aguilar, presidente del Colegio de Profesores, mientras un docente grita "Chile no es una empresa y nosotros no somos los empleados de su empresa".
      "Avanzar hacia una educación pública, gratuita y sin deuda" es el lema bajo el cual miles de estudiantes universitarios y secundarios del país se movilizaron el 20 de junio a la llammada de la Confech (Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile).
    • Honduras
      TegucigalpaEl Heraldo, 22.05.2019 Tegucigalpa. Este miércoles, un nutrido grupo de docentes, médicos y estudiantes del sector público llevaron a cabo desde horas de la mañana una marcha para evitar la supuesta privatización del sistema educativo y exigir la derogación de los decretos ejecutivos que le dieron vida a las comisiones especiales de transformación en las secretarías de Salud y Educación.
      Los maestros y docentes son apoyados en sus pretensiones por estudiantes, padres de familia y sindicatos.
      Las universidades, colegios y escuelas de la capital cerraron sus puertas en Tegucigalpa y muchos lugares del territorio hondureño.
      El caos, zozobra y vandalismo se apoderó de la capital este jueves (30 mayo). Un grupo de manifestantes protagonizó violentos enfrentamientos con policías, enfrente del Aeropuerto Internacional Toncontín, en la capital de Honduras.
    • Santo Domingo
      SantoDomingoNoticias SIN, 06.06.2019, Santo Domingo. Tras intentar cruzar el cerco de seguridad, la situación pasó de pacífica a disturbios. Los manifestantes lanzaban botellas de agua a los policías pero cuando comenzaron a lanzarles piedras, los agentes respondieron con bombas lacrimógenas. Las pedradas alcanzaron la cara de uno de los uniformados.
      La escuela de medicina de la UASD y el Colegio Médico se oponen al proyecto de ley porque aseguran que este quitará a la universidad del Estado la potestad de impartir y calificar la prueba para dejarlo en manos del sector privado.

      Estudiantes de medicina de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo luchan contra el Examen Único de Residencias Médicas que conocen los diputados.

  4. Europe
    • France
      Contre la Réforme Blanquer, les enseignants des filières professionnelles et générales poursuivent leur lutte. Certains s’organisent pour une grève des corrections ou une rétention de notes du baccalauréat. Rappelons qu’en 2019, ce sont 743 000 élèves, qui passent cet examen final remis en cause par la réforme Blanquer dès la rentrée​ 2020.
      On ne lâchera pas ! Un programme d’action bien rempli en ce mois de juin pour défendre les filières professionnelles. Les professeurs d’histoire-géographie des filières générales de l’académie de Dijon votent quant à eux pour une rétention des notes comme moyen d’action. Dans l’académie de Créteil, les professeurs de philosophie votent également pour une rétention des notes pour une durée illimitée.
  5. Océanie

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Dakar Call for an Exceptional World Research Program

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Dakar Call for an Exceptional World Research Program

Appel de Dakar pour un Projet de recherche mondial exceptionnel

January 19, 2019

19 janvier 2019

Assembly of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW)

Assemblée Générale de la Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS)

The 22nd General Assembly of the World Federation of Scientific Workers met in Dakar on December 8th, 2017. It agreed to call upon governments, the world scientific community and all the inhabitants of our planet facing a serious environmental crisis, in order to launch an exceptional research project to an amount of about 1200 billion euros per year, based on the principles of cooperation and solidarity. It is a global and urgent requirement.

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Climate, biosphere, oceans…, the Earth system is destabilized. It enters unknown territory. The living conditions of all humanity and even that of all animal and vegetal beings are threatened. Ultimately, the very survival of the human species could be posed. The way that human activities are currently carried out is at the root of this situation. A rapid and deep transformation of how these activities are being developed is indispensable. A technical, ecological and even civilizational transition, that benefits all human beings, must bring about a change in the relationship between humanity and the Earth system, ensuring the conditions for its survival, for peace, well-being and life fulfillment of all populations. These stakes are global. They require a takeover by and mobilization of all nations, all populations and all sectors of activity. Such a transition requires that:
– the principles of solidarity and cooperation overcome the principle of competition;
– new financing and technology transfer mechanisms be implemented adapted to the needs and trajectories of the different countries;
– procedures be developed that take into account the needs, uses and specific knowledges of populations;
– inequalities be reduced.

A major contribution of research – including the social and human sciences – is essential for such a transition. With that aim, it is important to put an end to policies primarily focused on meeting the demands of multinational companies and on promoting the competitiveness of the territories subject to extreme international economic competition created by free trade agreements. Key sectors, such as education, energy, health, agriculture, food, industry, are strategic for the future of humanity. They require the establishment, under the umbrella of the United Nations, of an agency, with the necessary legal and financial resources, responsible for an international program of the transition, based on global aims and with enough flexibility to consider, and be enriched by, local and national specificities. This transition program must include exceptionally major research programs of a size unmatched by current ones, and subordinated to the principles of cooperation and solidarity. Such major international research programs shall also be supported by current national and international research networks and programs. It is urgent to reach exceptional levels of financial investments of the order of 1200 billion euros, about the 2% of the world PIB, to mobilize the world scientific power towards these projects, without any exclusion, allowing for the participation of all countries.

At stake it is the achievement of the following objectives:
– increasing energy efficiency and reducing cost of generating, storing and transporting renewable energy, while drastically minimizing adverse environmental and health effects; stopping all exploitation of fossil fuels as soon as possible;
– increasing uptake of carbon dioxide by agricultural soils and through reforestation, and using CO2 as a raw material to obtain carbon based chemicals, fuels and materials;
– reducing agricultural methane emissions; improving the nutritional and sanitary quality of the diet; strongly reducing the negative effects on health and the environment resulting from human activities;
– preserving freshwater sources, rivers and oceans and allowing universal access to drinking water; preserving biodiversity;
– developing technologies and techniques adapted to the diversity of local situations, especially in their cultural, environmental and climatic conditions (for instance, housing or energy).

In this twenty-first century, the preservation of the Earth system and of all the common goods of humanity, the lasting well-being and the life fulfillment of all human beings, shall be the objectives and the compass that guide the scientific community, and beyond it all the human community. The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) works to define, promote and implement strategies to achieve the above mentioned goals. It calls on scientists from all countries to be committed to this task and, in cooperation, contribute to the achievement of these goals, and more broadly to the development of an unstoppable international movement capable of achieving them. The WFSW will direct this call to UN organizations and promote it through international NGOs, regional and international labor movements and labor confederations, and appeal to the world citizens to bring the call to the attention of their respective governments.

La 22e Assemblée Générale de la Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS) s’est tenue à Dakar, en décembre 2017. Face à la crise environnementale, elle a décidé d’appeler la communauté scientifique et toutes les populations de la planète à la mise en place d’un projet de recherche international exceptionnel, d’une hauteur de 2% du PIB mondial, soit environ 1200 milliards d’euros annuels, fondé sur les principes de coopération et de solidarité. Il s’agit d’une exigence mondiale et urgente.

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Climat, biosphère, océans…, le système Terre est déstabilisé. Il entre dans une ère inconnue. Les conditions de vie de l’ensemble de l’humanité et des autres espèces animales et végétales sont menacées. A terme, la survie même de l’espèce humaine est posée. Le type d’activités humaines actuel constitue la cause de cette situation. Une transformation rapide et profonde de celles-ci est indispensable. Une transition technique, écologique et civilisationnelle, bénéficiant à tous les êtres humains, doit permettre une évolution du rapport entre l’humanité et le système Terre, assurant à l’humanité les conditions de sa survie, de la paix, du bien-être et de l’épanouissement de chacune de ses populations. L’enjeu est planétaire. Il exige une appropriation et une mobilisation de l’ensemble des nations, des populations et des secteurs d’activité. Il nécessite :
– que les principes de solidarité et de coopération doivent supplanter celui de concurrence ;
– la mise en œuvre de mécanismes de financement et de transfert de technologies adaptés aux besoins et aux trajectoires des différents pays ;
– le développement de dispositifs permettant de prendre en considération les besoins, les usages et les savoirs des populations ;
– une réduction des inégalités.

Une contribution majeure de la recherche – y compris en sciences humaines et sociales – est indispensable à cette transition. Pour ce faire, un terme doit être mis aux politiques qui tendent à principalement orienter la recherche vers la satisfaction des demandes des entreprises multinationales, et vers le soutien à la compétitivité des territoires soumis à une concurrence économique internationale aggravée par les accords de libre-échange. Des secteurs clés tels que l’éducation, l’énergie, la santé, l’agriculture, l’alimentation, l’industrie, sont stratégiques pour le devenir de l’humanité. Ils nécessitent la mise en place, sous l’égide de l’ONU, d’une agence – disposant des moyens juridiques contraignants et financiers nécessaires – en charge d’une programmation internationale de la transition, fondée sur des objectifs globaux et sur une flexibilité permettant de prendre en considération – et de s’enrichir- des spécificités nationales et locales. Cette programmation doit inclure des programmes de recherche internationaux d’une ampleur exceptionnelle, sans commune mesure avec les programmes actuels, organisés selon les principes de coopération et de solidarité. Ces programmes de recherche internationaux doivent être soutenus par les programmes et les réseaux de recherche internationaux et nationaux existants. il est urgent de passer à un niveau exceptionnel d’investissement financier – de l’ordre de 1 200 milliards d’euros, soit 2 % du PIB mondial – pour mobiliser les forces scientifiques mondiales dans ces projets, sans exclusive, avec la participation de tous les pays.

Il s’agit de contribuer à la réalisation des objectifs suivants :
– augmenter l’efficacité énergétique et diminuer le coût de la production, du stockage et du transport des énergies renouvelables tout en réduisant drastiquement les effets négatifs aux plans environnemental et sanitaire ; cesser au plus vite toute exploitation d’énergies fossiles ;
– augmenter la captation de dioxyde de carbone par les sols agricoles et la reforestation, utiliser le CO2 comme une matière première pour produire des composés chimiques, des combustibles et des matériaux à base de carbone ;
– réduire les émissions agricoles de méthane ; améliorer la qualité nutritive et sanitaire de l’alimentation ; réduire fortement les effets négatifs aux plans environnemental et sanitaire de l’ensemble des activités humaines ;
– préserver les sources d’eau douce, les rivières et les océans et assurer un accès universel à l’eau potable ; préserver la biodiversité ;
– développer des technologies et des techniques adaptées à la diversité des situations locales, notamment dans leurs dimensions culturelle, environnementale et climatique (par exemple dans les domaines de l’habitation ou de l’énergie).

En ce XXIe siècle, la préservation du système Terre et de l’ensemble des biens communs de l’humanité, le bien être durable et l’épanouissement de l’ensemble des humains, constituent les objectifs et la boussole devant orienter la communauté scientifique, et au-delà l’ensemble de la communauté humaine. La Fédération Mondiale des Travailleurs Scientifiques (FMTS) se mobilise pour la définition, la promotion et la mise en œuvre de stratégies visant ces objectifs. Elle appelle les scientifiques de tous les pays à s’engager dans des coopérations contribuant à la réalisation de ces objectifs, et plus largement dans le développement d’un mouvement international puissant en capacité de les atteindre. La FMTS portera les exigences de cet appel auprès des organisations de l’ONU et en fera la promotion auprès des ONG internationales et des fédérations et confédérations syndicales internationales et régionales. Elle appelle les citoyens du monde à porter cet appel devant leurs gouvernements.

Posted on February 12, 2018 at https://fmts-wfsw.org/

Publié le 12 février 2018 sur https://fmts-wfsw.org/

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Why Is College in America So Expensive?

Université et argent
Before the automobile, before the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges existed, the rising cost of higher education was shocking the American conscience: “Gentlemen have to pay for their sons in one year more than they spent themselves in the whole four years of their course,” The New York Times lamented in 1875.

Decadence was to blame, the writer argued: fancy student apartments, expensive meals, and “the mania for athletic sports.”

Today, the U.S. spends more on college than almost any other country, according to the 2018 Education at a Glance report released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

All told, including the contributions of individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants, and other assistance), Americans spend about $30,000 per student a year — nearly twice as much as the average developed country. “The U.S. is in a class of its own,” says Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD, and he does not mean this as a compliment. “Spending per student is exorbitant, and it has virtually no relationship to the value that students could possibly get in exchange.”

Only one country spends more per student, and that country is Luxembourg — where tuition is nevertheless free for students, thanks to government outlays. In fact, a third of developed countries offer college free of charge to their citizens. (And another third keep tuition very cheap — less than $2,400 a year.) The farther away you get from the United States, the more baffling it looks.

This back-to-school season, The Atlantic is investigating a classic American mystery: Why does college cost so much? And is it worth it?

At first, like the 19th-century writer of yore, I wanted to blame the curdled indulgences of campus life: fancy dormitories, climbing walls, lazy rivers, dining halls with open-fire-pit grills. And most of all — college sports. Certainly sports deserved blame.

On first glance, the new international data provide some support for this narrative. The U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world for spending on student-welfare services such as housing, meals, health care, and transportation, a category of spending that the OECD lumps together under “ancillary services.” All in all, American taxpayers and families spend about $3,370 on these services per student — more than three times the average for the developed world.

NewImageOne reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”

But on closer inspection, the data suggest a bigger problem than fancy room and board. Even if we were to zero out all these ancillary services tomorrow, the U.S. would still spend more per college student than any other country (except, again, Luxembourg). It turns out that the vast majority of American college spending goes to routine educational operations — like paying staff and faculty — not to dining halls. These costs add up to about $23,000 per student a year — more than twice what Finland, Sweden, or Germany spends on core services. “Lazy rivers are decadent and unnecessary, but they are not in and of themselves the main culprit,” says Kevin Carey, the author of The End of College and the director of the education-policy program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank.

The business of providing an education is so expensive because college is different from other things that people buy, argue Feldman and his colleague Robert Archibald in their 2011 book, Why Does College Cost So Much? College is a service, for one thing, not a product, which means it doesn’t get cheaper along with changes in manufacturing technology (economists call this affliction “cost disease”). And college is a service delivered mostly by workers with college degrees — whose salaries have risen more dramatically than those of low-skilled service workers over the past several decades.

College is not the only service to have gotten wildly more expensive in recent decades, Feldman and Archibald point out. Since 1950, the real prices of the services of doctors, dentists, and lawyers have risen at similar rates as the price of higher education, according to Feldman and Archibald’s book. “The villain, as much as there is one, is economic growth itself,” they write.

This all makes sense, if we just focus on the U.S. But what about the rest of the world? These broader economic trends exist there, too. So why does college still cost half as much, on average, in other countries?

One oddity of America’s higher-education system is that it is actually three different systems masquerading as one: There is one system of public colleges; another of private, nonprofit institutions; and one made up of for-profit colleges.

The biggest system by far is the public one, which includes two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Three out of every four American college students attend a school in this public system, which is funded through state and local subsidies, along with students’ tuition dollars and some federal aid.

In this public system, the high cost of college has as much to do with politics as economics. Many state legislatures have been spending less and less per student on higher education for the past three decades. Bewitched by the ideology of small government (and forced by law to balance their budgets during a period of mounting health-care costs), states have been leaving once-world-class public universities begging for money. The cuts were particularly stark after the 2008 recession, and they set off a cascading series of consequences, some of which were never intended.

The easiest way for universities to make up for the cuts was to shift some of the cost to students — and to find richer students. “Once that sustainable public funding was taken out from under these schools, they started acting more like businesses,” says Maggie Thompson, the executive director of Generation Progress, a nonprofit education-advocacy group. State cutbacks did not necessarily make colleges more efficient, which was the hope; they made colleges more entrepreneurial.

Some universities began to enroll more full-paying foreign and out-of-state students to make up the difference. Over the past decade, for example, Purdue University has reduced its in-state student population by 4,300 while adding 5,300 out-of-state and foreign students, who pay triple the tuition. “They moved away from working to educate people in their region to competing for the most elite and wealthy students — in a way that was unprecedented,” Thompson says.

This competition eventually crept beyond climbing walls and dining halls into major, long-term operating expenses. For example, U.S. colleges spend, relative to other countries, a startling amount of money on their nonteaching staff, according to the OECD data. Some of these people are librarians or career or mental-health counselors who directly benefit students, but many others do tangential jobs that may have more to do with attracting students than with learning. Many U.S. colleges employ armies of fund-raisers, athletic staff, lawyers, admissions and financial-aid officers, diversity-and-inclusion managers, building-operations and maintenance staff, security personnel, transportation workers, and food-service workers.

The international data is not detailed enough to reveal exactly which jobs are diverting the most money, but we can say that U.S. colleges spend more on nonteaching staff than on teachers, which is upside down compared with every other country that provided data to the OECD (with the exception of Luxembourg, naturally).

In addition, most global rankings of universities heavily weight the amount of research published by faculty — a metric that has no relationship to whether students are learning. But in a heated race for students, these rankings get the attention of college administrators, who push faculty to focus on research and pay star professors accordingly.

Likewise, the new data show that U.S. colleges currently have a slightly lower ratio of students to teachers than the average for the developed world — another metric favored in college rankings. But that is a very expensive way to compete. And among education researchers, there is no clear consensus about whether smaller classes are worth the money.

In the beginning, university administrators may have started competing for full-freight paying students in order to help subsidize other, less affluent students. But once other colleges got into the racket, it became a spending arms race. More and more universities had to participate, including private colleges unaffected by state cuts, just to keep their application numbers up. “There is such a thing as wasteful competition,” Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University professor and the author of Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, wrote me in an email.

All that said, it’s also true that state budget cuts were uneven across the country. Today, in-state tuition in Wyoming is about a third of the cost of Vermont, for example. In places where higher education has not been gutted and the cost of living is low, an American college degree can still be a bargain — especially for students who don’t mind living at home and are poor enough to qualify for federal aid. Taking into account living expenses, says Alex Usher of the consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates, a student at a public university in Mississippi will likely end up with similar out-of-pocket costs as a student in Sweden.

Usher, who is based in Toronto, is one of the few researchers to have looked carefully at the costs of higher education globally. And much of what he finds is surprising. In 2010, he and his colleague Jon Medow created a clever ranking of 15 countries’ higher-education systems — using a variety of ways to assess affordability and access. Reading the report is like peeling an onion. The first layer focuses on the most obvious question: the affordability of college based on the cost of tuition, books, and living expenses divided by the median income in a given country. By this metric, the U.S. does very poorly, ranking third from the bottom. Only Mexico and Japan do worse.

But the U.S. moves up one place when grants and tax credits are included. “Your grants are actually really generous compared to everybody else,” Usher says. Tuition is higher in the U.S., so the grants don’t fully cover the price, but 70 percent of full-time students do receive some kind of grant aid, according to the College Board. From this perspective, sometimes called “net cost,” Australia is more expensive than the U.S.

Next, looking only at our public colleges, the U.S. rises higher still, ranking in the middle of the pack in Usher’s analysis, above Canada and New Zealand. This data is from 2010, and things may look less rosy if he were to redo the study now, Usher cautions. But still, he sounds weirdly hopeful. “The public system in the U.S. is working as well as most systems,” he says. “Parts of the U.S. look like France.”

The problem, of course, is that other parts of the U.S. look more like a Louis Vuitton store. America basically contains 50 different higher-education systems, one per state, each with public, private, and for-profit institutions, making generalizations all but impossible. The U.S. does relatively well on measures of access to college, but the price varies wildly depending on the place and the person. Somehow, students have to find their way through this thicket of competition and choose wisely, or suffer the consequences.

The more I studied America’s baffling higher-education system, the more it reminded me of health care. In both spaces, Americans pay twice as much as people in other developed countries—and get very uneven results. The U.S. spends nearly $10,000 a person on health care each year (25 percent more than Switzerland, the next biggest spender), according to the OECD’s 2017 Health at a Glance report, but our life expectancy is now almost two years below the average for the developed world.

“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.

Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative — but also less coherent and more exploitive. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, rendering both systems bewilderingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very hard for regular people to make informed decisions about either, and yet few decisions could be more important.

In both cases, the most vulnerable people tend to make less-than-ideal decisions. For example, among high-achieving, low-income students (who have grades and test scores that put them in the top 4 percent of U.S. students and would be eligible for generous financial aid at elite colleges), the vast majority apply to no selective colleges at all, according to research by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. “Ironically, these students are often paying more to go to a nonselective four-year college or even a community college than they would pay to go to the most selective, most resource-rich institutions in the United States,” as Hoxby told NPR.

Meanwhile, when it comes to health care, low-income Americans tend to be less familiar with the concepts of deductibles, coinsurance rates, and provider networks, according to a variety of studies, which makes it extremely difficult to choose a health-care plan. “These are both sectors where consumers are too poorly informed and societal costs and benefits too great to leave decision-making entirely in the hands of individuals,” as Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution has written.

Ultimately, college is expensive in the U.S. for the same reason MRIs are expensive: There is no central mechanism to control price increases. “Universities extract money from students because they can,” says Schleicher at the OECD. “It’s the inevitable outcome of an unregulated fee structure.” In places like the United Kingdom, the government limits how much universities can extract by capping tuition. The same is true when it comes to health care in most developed countries, where a centralized government authority contains the prices.

The U.S. federal government has historically been unwilling to perform this role. So Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals — and for college classes. Meanwhile, more and more of the risk gets shifted from government onto families, in both sectors.

At the very least, the American government could do a better job sharing information about the quality of colleges in ways everyone can understand, Schleicher says. “You can’t force people to buy good things or bad things, but they should be able to see what the value is.”

Spending a lot of money can be worth it, if you get something awesome in exchange. “America has the best colleges and universities in the world!” President Donald Trump exclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. Former President Barack Obama said the same thing before him.

But is it actually true? No meaningful data exist on the quality of universities globally. America does have a disproportionate number of elite colleges, which accept fewer than 10 percent of applicants, and these places do employ some brilliant scholars who do groundbreaking research. But fewer than 1 percent of American students attend highly selective colleges like those.

Instead, more than three-quarters of students attend nonselective colleges, which admit at least half of their applicants. No one knows for sure how good these colleges are at their core job of educating students. But in one of the only careful, recent studies on adult skills, the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, Americans under age 35 with a bachelor’s degree performed below their similarly educated peers in 14 other countries on the test of practical math skills. In other words, they did only slightly better than high-school graduates in Finland. America’s college grads did better in reading, performing below just six other countries, but dropped off again in another test, scoring below 13 other countries in their ability to solve problems using digital technology.

If American colleges are not adding obvious and consistent academic value, they are adding financial value. Americans with college degrees earn 75 percent more than those who only completed high school. Over a lifetime, people with bachelor’s degrees earn more than half a million dollars more than people with no college degree in the U.S. In fact, no other country rewards a college degree as richly as the United States, and few other countries punish people so relentlessly for not having one. It’s a diabolical cycle: Colleges are very expensive to run, partly because of the high salaries earned by their skilled workers. But those higher salaries make college degrees extremely valuable, which means Americans will pay a lot to get them. And so colleges can charge more. As Carey, the End of College author, summarizes: “Students are over a barrel.”

Still, the return varies wildly depending on the college one attends. One in four college grads earns no more than the average high-school graduate. Associate’s degrees from for-profit universities lead to smaller salary bumps than associate’s degrees from community colleges, which are cheaper. And two-thirds of students at for-profits drop out before earning their degree anyway, meaning many will spend years struggling with debt they cannot afford to pay off — and cannot, under U.S. law, off-load through bankruptcy.

This convoluted, complicated, inconsistent system continues to exist, and continues to be so expensive because college in America is still worth the price. At certain colleges, for certain people. Especially if they finish. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and almost everywhere else, it isn’t.

First published, September 11, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-is-college-so-expensive-in-america/569884/

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