Academic Capitalism Meets Volunteer Work: Why I Hate the Co-Curricular Record

A few years ago, I read Denise Clark Pope's book Doing School, an ethnography of high-achieving high school students in Silicon Valley. One of the more memorable anecdotes concerned one of the high-achieving students, Eve Lin, who was very careful to conceal the fact that she had been volunteering at a hospital from her friends. It was not out of modesty that she did this--her primary concern was that her friends would start to volunteer at the hospital as well, thereby robbing her of any edge that she would have in the college application resumé arms race. After all, if everyone's got "hospital volunteer" on their resumé, the exchange value of this designation would go down significantly.

Although I found Eve's story pretty interesting, I figured that it was at the safely at the margins of student life. One expects to hear about these sorts of things happening in places like Silicon Valley and New York City. However, I was recently surprised to hear that the same sort of thing, which we might call "resumé building charity capitalism," (if I'm in a good mood) is now being given substantial institutional support at several Canadian universities. At Dalhousie University, for example, the student services office now offers a document called the "Co-Curricular Record," which is basically an official transcript of your volunteer service. If you've done hospital volunteering, student services now wants you to "get accredited" so that this activity will appear on an official "co-curricular" transcript issued by the university.

Just check out this handy little video that Dalhousie University (a much longer version of the video can be found here) made in order to justify the existence of this ridiculous document:

Med school wants to know whether people have done volunteer work, and this must surely mean that there is a pressing need for accreditation of this type of work. Otherwise, how shall we separate the real hospital volunteers from the fake ones? In addition, if we don't monitor and accredit all of this goodness and selflessness, how can it possibly be turned into academic capital? I mean, don't the students who pile up the most volunteer hours in the most places deserve to be rewarded in terms of some serious exchange value? That's surely what the spirit of volunteerism is all about. I mean, folks like Jesus and the disciples may not have been very strong in terms of their academic transcripts, but imagine their outstanding performance on their co-curricular records! We'd definitely give them lots of points for an outstanding effort as President and Executive Officers of the Loaves and Fishes Club, but we might have to avoid certifying their leadership roles in the Anti-Usury League. Employers might not like all that moneylenders-out-of-the-temple stuff, after all.

Serve the Rich! A Comment on Ann Beattie

I'm a sucker for book lists. I was scanning the latest list from Slate, of the best books of 2010 and found Ann Beattie's New Yorker Stories listed.

Now I will admit that I am an Ann Beattie fan, and an avid reader of both The New Yorker and of the contemporary American short story more generally. (It helps sustain my appreciation that Ann's husband, Lincoln Perry, was my first painting teacher, in 1976).

So I was struck by this line:

Beattie's characters of the '70s are young people foundering in nostalgia and quiet loss, trying to figure out how to move forward in a world where every choice is open but no markers of adulthood seem fixed.

I think the situation is much worse today, especially after the recession. And I don't think things will get better anytime soon.

The young coming of age in the 2010s are finding that no markers of adulthood seem any more fixed than in 1970, and yet very few choices are open. In the 1970s you could still go to college and grad school, study something you loved, and eventually maybe find a job you loved, too. But those pathways were already shutting down.

Today a few who are bright, ambitious, and vicious enough can "move forward" working for and serving the rich -- in investment banking, gourmet food, high fashion, personal coaching or whatever. I recently read one of those US News items of "news you can use" about future careers (I have a twenty year old son in college) and the advice was "serve the rich - they're going to be the only ones left with any money."

Nostalgia has given way to postmodern irony or worse, cynicism, and quiet loss has in many cases been replaced by desperation.

For a Progressive President, a Very Nonprogressive Educational Policy

Cross-posted from the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog.

The progressive language implicit in many of President Obama's programs was no where to be found in the educational policy that he unveiled recently in his speech on education. Rather than an imaginative vision on what we need for public schools in a complex 21st century democracy, President Obama fell back on the language of neoconservatives for things like rewarding teachers and more school choice at least through more charter schools. Essentially, his proposal for new mechanisms for making changes in the educational system lacked any discussion on what these changes were meant to accomplish. For example, a recommendation for more charter schools is a rather neutral suggestion. The real question is: for what purpose and to what end? That requires a much deeper conversation about the public purposes of education for a democracy that is constantly reinventing itself. For some, it is an opportunity to introduce new ideas and innovative approaches. For others, it provides an avenue for choices within our public school system that can meet the diverse needs, aspirations and talents of our children. For still others, charter schools have been seen as a path to privatization and the dismantling of the public schools and teacher unions.

But more importantly, lurking behind President Obama's educational policy are the silent assumptions that have controlled the national debate for decades. A genuine national discussion on educational reform requires that we start to discuss that which has been undiscussable, namely, that the language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. But, as educational critic, John Goodlad, has constantly pointed out from surveys taken to determine parents' desires for their children, parents' visions are not limited to seeing their children as human capital or workers for a competitive market force. They consistently say that they want their children treated as whole human beings, nurtured in their growth, inspired in their dreams, and empowered in their civic voice. Of course, the usual retort here is that such goals are not inconsistent with the goal of producing a working force for the labor market. That is true. And so is the response by parents whose children have been marginalized in the schools. They very rightly are demanding that their children succeed in a competitive labor market at the same level that the children of the more privileged have succeeded. Both of these responses are legitimate. But the force of the arguments is to silence the national conversation that we should be having. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. It is that conversation that the public needs to have. Nations are guided by the stories they tell about themselves. What story are we telling ourselves about the public purposes of our schools?



Readers who are interested in looking at the issues associated with "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," may want to read our Volume 3 Number 1 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Academic capitalism: College Acceptance Letters Glitzy - Rejection Letters Brutal

In these economically perilous times colleges are more worried than ever that the most desirable students will reject them in favor of other suitors.

The response has been an upgrade in the acceptance "packages" set to students. As these get more glitzy the rejection letters (or emails!) are getting more brutal, according to an article today from the Associated Press and syndicated in Yahoo News.

AP: College admissions officers are jazzing up their acceptance notifications--sending out fancy certificates, T-shirts, tubes of confetti, or Internet links to videos of fireworks--in an effort to inspire loyalty and lock in commitments from today's fickle and worried high school seniors.

Some admissions officers say rising competition and the economic downturn are forcing them to devote more money and attention in paper acceptance packets. Worried that the economic downturn might scare some students away from private schools like St. Bonaventure, admissions director James M. DiRisio upgraded his college's T-shirt package this year.

Meanwhile, Rick Shaw, Stanford's director of admissions, says the college is trying to reduce waste by encouraging the 20,000 or so rejected applicants to take their bad news electronically, though it will send a formal letter if a student asks. "We are saving a lot of trees," he explained.

Academic Capitalism Watch: More Gold Standard Research

The New York Times reports that Wyeth, the big pharma company, has developed a novel system for producing medical research. The Times article states that Wyeth hires out the research to a ghost writing firm, DesignWrite. That subcontractor takes the idea from Wyeth, drafts the article targetted for a particular journal, and then recruits a prominent "medical researcher" to sign it.

The Times states:

One article was published as an “Editors’ Choice” feature in May 2003 in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, more than a year after a big federal study called the Women’s Health Initiative linked Wyeth’s Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, to breast cancer. The May 2003 article said there was “no definitive evidence” that progestins cause breast cancer and added that hormone users had a better chance of surviving cancer.

The issue of ghostwriting for medical journals has been raised in the past, involving various companies and drugs, including the Merck painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn in 2004 after it was linked to heart problems, and Wyeth’s diet pills, Redux and Pomdimin, withdrawn in 1997 after being linked to heart and lung problems.

One top medical researcher with more than a thousand articles to her credit, when confronted with evidence gathered by Senator Grassley's senate committee that she had signed on to ghostwritten articles plugging Wyeth drugs, said "It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break."

And that's the gold standard in attitude!

Academic Capitalism Watch: Corruption in Medical Research

The New York Times reports that high profile, influential medical leaders have hidden from their universities their incomes from high-pay consulting contracts with leading pharmaceutical companies.

The Times reports that Howard Nemeroff, one of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists, earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, but failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules.

Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline to comply with federal rules. In fact he earned $170,000 that year from that company — 17 times the figure he had reported.

Senator Charles Grassley, Repoublican of Iowa, said that “after questioning about 20 doctors and research institutions, it looks like problems with transparency are everywhere . . . The current system for tracking financial relationships isn’t working.” His report suggests, says the Times, that universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty’s conflicts of interest. It adds that "almost every major medical school and medical society is now reassessing its relationships with drug and device makers."

I find this incoherent. If they are really incapable of monitoring the situation, how could any re-assessment of their policies make a difference?

It is more likely that universities have been turning a blind eye to gross violations of academic ethics and federal law in order to profit from the lavish contributions of big pharma to so-called medical reasearch -- which is really the marketing program of the industry.

No wonder they call medical research the "gold standard".

Academic Capitalism Watch I: Stanford Restricts Drug Marketing in Medical Education

Stanford University's program in medical continuing education will, according to the New York Times, announce today that it will no longer permit drug companies to pick and choose the continuing education courses they support. Going forward, any drug company wishing to support medical continuing education will contribute to a general pool. It can support the continuing education effort, but can no longer shape it to deliver its own carefully tailored marketing messages.

Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, dean of Stanford’s School of Medicine, said in an interview that the school wanted to take a firm stand on the issue, even if it meant that drug and device companies might no longer contribute to the educational effort if they could not specify which classes they wanted to support.

“I want to make sure we’re not marketing for industry or being influenced by their marketing,” Dr. Pizzo said.

The Times states that doctors have grown accustomed to getting their continuing education classes free and getting a nice lunch thrown in as an added inducement. "Separating commercial influences from doctor education might require doctors to pay their own way," the Times adds, "which some doctors have said they would resist."

You heard that! Feed me or you won't even be able to drag me to continuing education! How is that for entitlement? Corruption breeds corruption.

Dr. Murray Kopelow, chief executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, said that Stanford’s new policy was part of a growing push in medical education to further separate crucial medical information from marketing messages.

“It’s a good plan, and it’s a big deal that a place like Stanford has adopted it,” Dr. Kopelow said. “When this is all over, medical education will not be the same as what it’s been.”

Actually, medical education may be taking a small step back to what it was until recently, an honest and professional attempt (not without its own biases, of course) to educate doctors and keep them up to speed.