Response to Rome Hartman

Abstract

Rome Hartman can rest easy. No student was shortchanged, and student teaching evaluations continue to rank me as excel lent. The research and writing of my essay was conducted during the summer months when I do not teach and for which I receive no salary. What troubles me in Hartman 's flippant remark, however, is the tacit assumption that the professoriate should go on with business as usual while standards of academic freedom are imperilled, when tenure is in jeopardy, and when our conditions of employment are deteriorat ing to the point that we cannot serve our students well. Not to write and speak out about these dangerous trends would be both professionally and ethically irresponsible. To be sure, I used the Get Real segment as a frame for my defense of tenure. That said, let me be clear that my essay was never intended as an attack on either Lesley Stahl or 60 Minutes, both of which have performed heroic service in uncovering news stories of major impor tance. As the essay indicated, my underlying concern was with the right wing's successful campaign to capture the public conversation over education in general and to undermine public confidence in higher education specifically. As a result, even a distinguished 60 Minutes investigative team appeared to accept simplistic and inherendy inaccu rate explanations for the problems now plaguing academe. But the real purpose of my essay was to alert readers to a far more disturbing story. The story that needs to be reported is the story of the steady dismanding of this nation's public higher education system through underfunding and defunding. Let me give you some sense of what that means?not in statistics but in human terms: Each year, I encounter more and more undergraduates who are holding down thirty to forty hour per week jobs. In some cases, these are the brightest students in the class, but too often they are overwhelmed by exhaustion and do not consistendy perform to their capacities. These students are neither foolhardy nor greedy. They are poor. And they are the victims of policies that, since 1980, cut federal student aid and effectively eroded the nation's commitment to equalizing access to higher education. Nowa days, according to a special report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the approximately $35 billion that the government spends each year on