Where does education fit into the Bill of Rights and the Constitution?

YES, another victim of the Great CoronaVirus Pandemic and Panic. Among her many other crimes, the recent degree by that evil monster in the form of a human woman who rules Michigan with an increasingly iron rod includes some zingers.

It, among other things bans ALL “in-person” teaching for grades K-12 for ALL schools; public and private. According to a WND article, home schools are legally defined in Michigan as “non-public” schools, and EO 2020-35 orders those as well as the public schools closed. (The dictator has published more than 60 executive orders this year, micromanaging the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to live in “her” State.

This is, of course, being fought. In the courts. And at least somewhat “in the streets.” Though peacefully, so far: it is reported that as many as 30,000 vehicles participated in the “Gridlock” protest in Lancing on Wednesday the 15th, with perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 people participating. Reportedly, 300,000 people have signed petitions demanding the tyrant be removed from office.

I suspect that many homeschooling families are flat-out ignoring her illegal, immoral demands on “in-person” instruction. And probably in a lot more things.

The Great Lakes Justice Center is leading the legal battle. Among other matters, they point out the dictator is violating Michigan’s own State Constitution in MORE than just Michigan’s Bill of Rights. They point out that Constitution gives authority over public education in the State to the State Board of Education, NOT the governor. (Actually, Article VIII of the Michigan Constitution specifies a State Superintendent of Education, appointed and supervised by an ELECTED State Board of Education. (See below))

Even though parents may be using internet methods of instruction (and therefore skirting the “in-person” prohibition, they still run afoul of her megalomaniacal decree, for she dictates the content of the “other than in-person” education.

Great Lakes Justice spokesman David Kallman said (as quoted in the WND article): “The governor has no authority to direct nonpublic schools (i.e., private schools and home schools) to operate their educational programs and processes in any particular way. Further, parents have a fundamental constitutional right to raise and educate their children.”

While this is clearly a Ninth/Tenth Amendment matter, it is also a First Amendment – freedom of speech and association – matter. (That is sections 3 and 5 of the Michigan Declaration of Rights (1863 Constitution).) It is probably also a violation of section 4, religious liberty.

Which raises the even larger question: Where does the Constitution (or even the Common Law) state that ANY government body has control over how parents educate their children – or how ANYone is educated?

I submit that neither of these constitutions (US or Michigan) or the Common Law give ANY AUTHORITY TO GOVERNMENT to regulate or control ANY aspect of home or private schooling – the government is AUTHORIZED by the Michigan government to create and operate a public school system, and PROHIBITED from funding (or apparently, controlling, a sectarian school. (Although Section 1 of Article VIII says:    Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. Which means that the State is to ENCOURAGE religious AND private schools. Just not fund them.

And schooling at home, privately, and anything related to that is PROTECTED by freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and

That is a FAR cry from what the State of Michigan is letting its governor-tyrant do. Next week, they need 50,000 cars and trucks out shutting down state government the way she had shut down their lives.

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Tenure Is Dying

At this writing no one knows the precise financial damage that the COVID-19 pandemic will inflict on American colleges and universities, and how much governments at the federal, state and local level will come to their aid (those governments themselves are seriously stressed from reduced tax collections and rising public assistance and costs).

One thing is likely: higher education is in for severe belt-tightening. Enrollments are likely going to decline—maybe a little, possibly a lot. State subsidy monies will likely decline given the financial blow governments are suffering. Private gifts will decline, as will, in time, endowment income (in the short run, schools will probably raid their endowments some to assist with cash flow shortfalls).

Cutting costs is difficult for colleges, partly because some costs are fixed by long term obligations, most importantly tenure for faculty and often large interest payments on bonds occurred during a building spree over recent decades. Falling revenues but less rapidly falling costs mean schools will be facing huge budget deficits.

Faculty tenure became a part of American universities in the early and mid 20th centuries when enrollments were growing robustly and the demand for college professors was substantial. In the golden years when I went onto the job market (in the 1960s), the demand for professors was growing faster than the supply of new ones, so young untried assistant professors like me got double digit annual salary increases and achieved tenure quickly—for me at 28.

Compare that with the 21st century academic environment. Higher education is a mature industry. Enrollments are stagnant or declining. Exuberant late 20th century growth of Ph.D. programs by schools seeking prestige and research grant monies led to an oversupply of scholars with newly minted doctoral degrees. A favorite undergraduate student of mine is just finishing his Ph.D. at Duke and, pre-COVID-19, signed a contract at Penn (Wharton School) to be an assistant professor this fall. If he is granted tenure in a few years, Penn will be making a commitment with a lifetime present value of several million dollars—a huge unfunded liability. Few schools can afford to do this anymore.

A tenured professor in a decent quality school probably typically teaches perhaps six classes a year and annually costs more than $100,000, counting fringe benefits, or about $17,000 a course (and sometimes twice that much). An adjunct professor with a doctorate might cost $4,000 a course. As schools suddenly are incurring huge budget deficits because of COVID-19, there will be a virtual freeze on hiring expensive tenured professors, and indeed incentive programs are being developed to bribe them to retire early. In some cases, schools are likely to declare financial exigency, allowing them to break the contractual tie and ease out tenured faculty. Hiring cheap adjuncts to preserve expensive tenured faculty makes little economic sense.

Tenure has been in relative, and probably now, absolute, decline for decades. Fewer than one-fourth of the faculty in 1970 taught part-time; now it is about one-half. This has led to the development of two classes of teachers: the academic aristocrats, well paid tenured professors with relatively light teaching loads; and the academic underclass, the contingent faculty with very high teaching loads and modest pay.

There are two traditionally good arguments for tenure. First, it is a major fringe benefit, a guarantee of job security, valuable to risk-averse academics. This lowers the salary that must be paid to attract professors—they receive deferred compensation by trading off some salary now for reduced risk of unemployment in the future. Second, tenure allows professors to speak unpopular thoughts—it enhances the diversity of viewpoints on campus, making colleges truly vibrant marketplaces of ideas.

The rise in political correctness has been accompanied by a decline in tolerance of alternative points of view—the First Amendment is not revered on campuses as it once was, which probably makes tenure more important than ever for promoting intellectual diversity.

The financial reality is this: colleges are going to have to change, for example by shedding massive administrative bloat or by having some classes taught online very cheaply by foreign academics working for a fraction of American academic pay. COVID-19 may hasten the demise of a distinctive academic institution, tenure.

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Harvard grad students say remote teaching can bring ‘workplace abuses’

A month ago, Chance Bonar had never heard of Zoom, let alone taught a Harvard class using it. He’d never had to answer questions from students on an online chatboard during class, or edit a professor’s recorded lecture to post online.

But now the Harvard PhD candidate is doing all those things and more as he navigates the world of remote teaching during the pandemic. And that includes helping professors who are relying heavily on him and other graduate student teachers — known as teaching fellows — to help them figure it out, too.

“There’s this expectation that the younger future professors . . . have a better grasp on this technology than they do,” said Bonar, 27, who helps teach three courses at the Harvard Divinity School. “Especially in a time of a pandemic, it’s very obvious how much of the burden of teaching and scholarship falls on the teaching fellows.”

Graduate student teachers have been grappling with this added workload as they continue their fight for their first union contract, a contract that would be likely to provide protections for such increased duties. In fact, the university and the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers recently reached a tentative agreement following a virtual bargaining session in March; it states that grad students would not be required to teach more than two courses or work more than 20 hours a week.

Without a contract in place, however, there’s no mechanism to enforce this, or to provide additional compensation if they exceed the threshold.

Several schools are paying graduate student teachers extra during the pandemic. The history department at Pennsylvania State University gave its graduate students $1,200 apiece. At the University of California Berkeley, teaching assistants at the Goldman School of Public Policy, who are unionized, are being compensated for the four extra hours a week, on average, that they’re now working.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the graduate student union is calling for the school to pay student workers through the summer and guarantee job security for next year.

A Harvard spokesman did not respond directly to students’ concerns about additional workloads, but noted the university had sent a letter to faculty instructing them not to ask teaching fellows to take on “substantial additional time commitments.”

The union recently surveyed members to get a sense of what they were facing since classes went online March 23 and found a number of what one member describes as “workplace abuses.” Along with being expected to deal with technical issues, teaching fellows said they are often asked to teach multiple sessions to accommodate students in different time zones, hold longer office hours, and adapt experiments and projects.

One graduate teacher said he was asked to cover a lecture for a professor who didn’t feel comfortable using Zoom, said Max Ehrenfreund, a third-year graduate student in the History of Science department. If the contract were in place, he noted, the union would be filing grievances. “I’m happy to do the work to help my students get through this,” he said. “I do wish Harvard would show that it values that work.”

Heavy workloads are a sensitive subject for grad students to tackle on their own, said Cory McCartan, a first-year PhD student in statistics who is part of the union’s bargaining committee. The professors the teaching fellows work for are often their advisers, who one day will be writing them letters of recommendation and evaluating their dissertations. That makes it difficult for students to push back.

“If you don’t have the full-throated support of [your adviser], your academic career is going to be curtailed,” McCartan said. “

Much of the graduate students’ research has been put on hold due to the inability to do field work or access labs, creating the possibility they will have to stay in school longer than expected. Some also worry about losing their funding.

Harvard, along with many other universities, has granted professors on the tenure track an additional year to complete their tenure requirements, but no such extension has been offered to grad students. More than 1,000 Harvard grad students have signed a letter asking for their funding to be extended for a year. In most cases, Harvard PhD students’ tuition, health insurance, and living expenses are fully funded for five years — and more in some programs — by grants, stipends, teaching fellowships, and research assistantships.

“It’s a bitter pill to swallow to think that I’d have to pay them more of my own money to stay here," said Thomas Plumb-Reyes, 29, a seventh-year PhD candidate in applied physics who was set to graduate in May but hasn’t been able to get to the lab to complete his dissertation.

Plumb-Reyes and his co-teachers are “rewriting everything on the fly” for their introductory physics class, including redesigning the final project, which typically would include building a spectrometer to measure light. With no access to materials in the lab, however, students are now trying to make optical measurements with what they can "scrounge around at home,” said Plumb-Reyes, noting that his workload has gone up at least 50 percent.

Harvard, whose roughly $41 billion endowment is the largest in the academic world, took steps to ensure that student workers didn’t lose access to health care or compensation during the spring semester, even if they couldn’t complete their work, the spokesman said. A letter sent to faculty asking them to “look out for” their student teachers also noted that professors might need to take over a section themselves to avoid working grad students too hard.

And yet, grad students say, the extra work is piling up.  Avriel Epps-Darling, a 30-year-old PhD student in education, spent her entire spring break getting her adolescent development course up and running online. She has had to figure out how to set up and manually assign students to breakout rooms each week on Zoom. And when students have technical difficulties, she is the one they contact. Epps-Darling also had to help redesign students’ final projects, in addition to taking two classes in the computer science department and working on her own research.

The professor Epps-Darling works for, Nancy Hill, a developmental psychologist who is also her adviser, said the abrupt transition to remote teaching created more work for everyone at first. But assignments have been reduced, which means the amount of grading has also gone down. “By semester’s end, it will have balanced out," she said.

Regardless, Harvard has not properly supported its graduate student teachers or responded to concerns about funding and job security, said Epps-Darling, who lives in a 500-square-foot apartment in Central Square with her husband, an attorney who works across the dining room table from her, and their 16-month-old son.

“It seems odd to me,” she said, “that the most wealthy university in the history of the world is having a hard time saying, ‘Hey guys, you’re going to be OK. We won’t let you go hungry or be forced to drop out.’ ”

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