A Plan for the Pandemic and Beyond: Interview with John Warner

Dan:     My guest is John Warner, former contingent college writing instructor with 20 years of experience and author of “Why they can’t write: killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities.” He blogs about writing pedagogy and issues of academic labor at Inside Higher Ed and is a senior analyst and communication strategist for Willow Research of Chicago. You can find him on Twitter @biblioracle. John, welcome to the podcast.

John:    Thanks for having me.

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Dan:  I’m delighted you’re here. I’ve enjoyed your column in Inside Higher Ed for a long time, and it’s actually very often that I read it and I think, “Oh my goodness, I would love to talk to him on the show.” You recently published an article about higher education needing a bailout due to the coronavirus, and I thought that that one pushed me over the edge, because I thought, now that is a very interesting subject actually given the sheer amount of money involved. And so I’m just delighted you’re here. For our listeners who have not read your article, can you take some time to explain your position on higher ed bailouts and why you think they’re needed?

John:    Sure. I think the first thing to start with is that the coronavirus pandemic has not created a new problem. What it’s really has done, in my view, is rip the mask off and intensified an existing problem that I trace back 30, even 35 years. The system, particularly among our public higher education institutions, has already proven unsustainable. We have a system where a majority of faculty are adjunct or contingent. We have a system where 70% of graduates graduate with student loan debt. That average is $30,000, which just to put that in perspective, $30,000 of debt is three-and-a-half times more than my entire four years of college tuition when I went to a flagship state university in the late eighties and early nineties. And we’ve seen the effects in the lives of graduates, who are saddled with the sort of debt and getting their lives started under conditions that make it difficult to live the “middle-class lifestyle.” So that was happening. The pandemic comes along, and now we have this sudden shock that will have significant effects on institutional revenue. The revenue drops and cuts are going to be by any measure catastrophic. I think it’s a little difficult to know what’s going to happen in terms of enrollment. There’s a lot of concern about that right now. We’ll see what happens over the summer, in terms of what happens with the virus, in terms of what happens if the virus is still around, if there are alternatives for students. I think if there aren’t, they’re likely to enroll, start college or continue college anyway, even if those courses are online and less than ideal. But even if enrollment is not as bad as some fear, state education budgets are going to be crushed, and the place states go to cut is education, primarily K-12 and higher education. It happened in 2008. Most state institutions have not recovered from the recession; they’re below pre-recession funding, and this is far worse. So we want these institutions to be around post-pandemic. They need funding, and the only place money’s going to come from at this point is the federal government.

Dan:     Well, the CARES Act, which I know you’re familiar with, provided $14 billion to higher ed. That’s actually, I guess, only about 1% of higher education expenditures nationwide. I know that it’s always difficult to figure out how, how much should be provided when resources are scarce, but how much more than that is needed?

John:    Yeah, it is, it’s very difficult to sort of put a number on this. I’ll say it’s a, it’s a number larger than anybody wants to contemplate. The money that’s been already made available in some cases can be barely enough to cover drops in like summer revenue, let alone what’s going to happen in the fall. Because it’s difficult to put a number on it, I think it’s helpful to think of it in terms of a framework. How do we figure out a number or, or what is this number supposed to do or allow us to do in the future? And I think there’s two phases: One is the pandemic phase, the crisis phase where I think the goal is to preserve and protect institutions while they’re going through the crisis, so we aren’t looking at permanently hobbled institutions on the other side of this where they have done things that are irreversible; laying off vast swaths of faculty are consolidating programs that we may want on the other side of this. You know, this is money that should be sufficient to keep institutions relatively whole. I think that, you know, to match budgets as they were exactly prior to the pandemic is probably a stretch, but to get them to a level where we’re not looking at decimating them while we are managing this crisis, I think that’s phase one. Phase two, for me, involves a fundamental rethinking around how we fund and manage these institutions. And again, I’m primarily talking about public institutions. We have to start thinking about a new model that makes these institutions sustainable and resilient. So we aren’t looking at an endless series and constant cycle of bailouts as we go through what looks to be a rocky period. Have been going through a rocky period; the recession was, was you know, 10, 12 years ago, and here we are in another one that’s much worse. It’s my view that public higher education must return to being largely funded with public money, as it was almost exclusively in my parents’ generation or even when I went to college. I just turned 50 this year. I graduated from college in 1992. You know, a majority of the University of Illinois, my alma mater, was funded with public money when I attended there. They’re now under 15% in terms of state appropriations funding their operations. So this “rethink” is going to require us to look at some different ways of how we fund these institutions and just like the “bailout money” to keep them afloat while we navigate the crisis, that’s going to require federal money combined with state funds. I don’t see any way around it.

Dan:     I think what you’re saying is that what you’re calling a bailout would actually consist of more than one phase. And because you’ve spread that money, those resources over time, that perhaps it’s more doable; it’s more feasible because you’re not talking about the way we think of, say, a bailout of the airline industry, as sort of large infusion of money all at once that that might occur in phase one. You are talking about sustained support, and that is part of the bailout proposal that you’re describing.

John:    I see it that way. I think there’s not much point in dropping money on institutions if we aren’t also thinking about that future sustainability. Particularly because, again, I maintain that these institutions were on an unsustainable trajectory prior to the arrival of the pandemic. Returning – simply resetting to the status quo – is not sustainable in my view. So we need to use this as an opportunity to do some rethinking about how these universities are funded, organized, the sorts of things they prioritize in order to make them sustainable and resilient. Otherwise, you know, what we’re going to see, I think, is just a continuing of the trends that have been happening over the last 35 years, which is essentially a picture of increased austerity in public institutions. You know, when you have a majority of faculty as the sort of faculty – I was a non-tenure track instructor – making in some cases wages that qualify them for public assistance. I was never quite that low. But just by way of reference, the time I worked at Clemson University, and that was from 2005 to 2011, my salary was $25,000 a year as a full-time college instructor. I’ve always been fortunate to have outside income writing and editing and those sorts of things. But this is not a sustainable system where you have a majority of your laborers, your faculty laborers, making such low wages. So we need to change. I believed this before the pandemic; I’ve been writing about it for eight years at Inside Higher Ed saying many of the same things. The pandemic makes it an imperative. Otherwise, I think we’re just going to see a steady evolution of these institutions until we wind up with something that we really don’t recognize, as compared to even today, let alone 20 or 30 years ago.

Dan:     Your idea of increased public funding in the future, which would presumably decrease costs for students, is also coupled, I think, with the idea that past costs should be forgiven in some way. In your article, you wrote that debt cancellation would deliver an immediate macro-economic benefit to the country. Could you share a bit about how that debt cancellation would work?

John:    Sure. Here I’m drawing from a report by some economists at the Levy Institute. They wrote a report called “The Macro-economic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation,” published in February 2018, and some of these economists ultimately went on to shape and inform some of the proposals you saw from candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But essentially, their argument – it’s an argument I share and believe, but I do encourage people to go read the reports for themselves – is you just cancel the debt. This is debt held by the federal government. It can be done administratively, almost literally with the flipping of a switch. You just inform these people that “you are no longer obligated to pay your debt,” and you instantly put some amount of money in every debt-payers pocket, some cases that could be thousands of dollars a month depending on the size of the debt.

The macro-economic benefit of this is pretty clear. When you give people more money, they tend to spend it. It’s the same principle Republicans like to use when they champion tax cuts. The reality of this, I think if you, if you look at some related data New York times did a poll in 2018 as well, where they ask people, why aren’t you having children? And the single most cited reason was the cost of children on the cost of childcare. So if we put more money in these people’s pockets, many of which have degrees, some of which don’t we’re going to see them do things like have kids start businesses, take the kinds of steps that contain some risk but also have upside because they will have the money and cushion to do it. They can do things like take vacations that they can’t.

Now there is you know, this will increase the deficit. This is one point $6 trillion that the federal government is owed that is not going to be collected. But if you think about it, this is money that was going to be paid over time, many years. It’s not a sudden shock to the deficit in the way the money that’s flowing out right now necessarily money. But the government is writing a one point $6 trillion check out once for this. And the report from the, the levy Institute sees something around a billion, maybe even more in terms of real GDP growth based on this. So you know, if it’s one point 6 trillion in debt forgiveness coupled with one or one point 2 trillion or 1.2 billion of GDP growth where we’re starting to see some, some good effects it really would be a sort of do-over. It would be a recognition that the system we set up that turned public education or higher education into a private good was a mistake, and that orienting it around the public good is a sounder strategy for our collective wellbeing. So as much as it’s a practical step and a necessary step, I think for a lot of reasons, it’s also a meaningful symbolic step into how we view education and the institutions that provide it.

Dan:     You write and speak about many aspects of higher education with what, you know, do you think that the outcome for the fall semester will be mild or severe? I’m really asking you to look beyond the moment and tell us what you see ahead for higher education. You did describe when you talked about the need for bailouts, the long-term effects on higher education. I guess the question is really asking just how pessimistic we should be about this.

John:    Boy, it’s a difficult question and, and I vacillate between extreme pessimism and significant optimism. I’ve been working on a book manuscript that I’m hoping to write very quickly and have out by the fall, that essentially puts forward a blueprint for a renewed public university. And as I write it and imagine it, I become very, very hopeful because it’s entirely doable. It’s mostly a matter of political will more than anything else. You know, sort of admitting that the path we’ve been on has been an unproductive. On the other hand, the problem is very, very severe. We may see institutions – if they cannot realize sufficient tuition revenue – they could disappear. They could be gone, not to come back. So it’s really on a knife’s edge.

If you asked me about the future beyond the crisis, my concern is that we’re essentially looking at the destruction of a kind of high-quality human-centered, student-centered education that is embodied in sort of the traditional college community college or four year college or university, to something that is only available for a select few, either the wealthy or the elite, where if you’re not going to go to an Ivy League school or a wealthy institution that can weather the storm, your first two years are going to be done in a sort of massive open online course and then you’ll get two years at a residential state university if you so desire. Where different segments of the state system have different majors, so you might have all the humanities majors in one school, all the engineers in another, historians in another, who knows. But that sort of destruction, that sort of unbundling, I think, is a mistake. I think it harms the country and the culture in so many ways, not just in terms of the quality of education, but considering what these institutions mean to the communities they sit in and thinking about just as a single school at, at random, the University of Wisconsin Stout (a regional campus of the University of Wisconsin system), which I believe is in Menominee, Wisconsin, where the students at the campus almost outnumber the citizens of the town. And we could lose those sorts of schools. And to lose those schools would be a terrible, terrible thing.

And so I worry about the future. I worry deeply about the future. I worry that we’re going to decide that the difficulty of managing and maintaining these institutions isn’t worth it for some reason. I worry about it because it tends to be the attitude that we’ve adopted for the last 20 or 30 years. But one of the things I think this crisis is revealing is the importance of our institutions. We do not do well in the absence of institutions that bind us together and create this sort of collective spirit. So I try not to be too despairing. I can’t say that I’m hopeful, but I’m hopeful in the extent that there is a way out. There is a route to success, and we can choose to take it. It’s not impossible. You know, we should check in and in eight months or 12 months’ time and see how it plays out. But it’s not hopeless, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of will, and it’ll take a lot of collective effort to prevent the worst from happening.

Dan:     My guest has been John Warner, former contingent college writing instructor with 20 years of experience and author of “Why they can’t write: killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities.” He blogs about writing pedagogy and issues of academic labor at Inside Higher Ed and is a senior analyst and communication strategist for Willow Research of Chicago. You can find him on Twitter @biblioracle. John, thank you very, very much for being with me today.

John: It’s my pleasure.