OPINION: What’s wrong with Stonehill and how we can fix it

By Prof. Corey Dolgon

A few years ago, I wrote that the increased corporatization of higher education would result in the degradation of teaching and learning. Treating students as customers doesn't empower them; it merely obfuscates their function as a “final product” in the knowledge production industry. Meanwhile, the workers in our factories—faculty, staff, facilities, kitchen employees, etc.—bear the brunt of cost-saving, deskilling, automation, privatization and other forms of what has become known short-handedly as neoliberalism.

Colleges such as Stonehill save money by not filling vacant full-time faculty positions and hiring adjunct teachers at less than half the cost. This trend exploits full-timers who have to take on more advising and administrative duties while also exploiting adjuncts who teach courses at a fraction of fair wages with no benefits. Administrative staff, too, are not replaced or asked to work less hours yet accomplish more tasks. And facilities workers are constantly required to clean more buildings, cover more territory, while administrations refuse to bargain fairly on salary and benefits. As more and more jobs are broken down into part-time work with no health or retirement benefits, students are run through increasingly stressful diploma mills. They get less attention from fewer faculty already overwhelmed by increased workloads, and the College hires more and more low and mid-level administrators to manage the ensuing chaos. Everybody loses, but no one seems to care or can even consider an alternative.

Scholar Henry Giroux wrote that higher education has “surrendered to an empirical reality aligned with a savage neoliberalism, and College Presidents “govern as if running Goldman-Sachs.” Research is measured by grants received and faculty are forced to preach market values and guide career trajectories, not teach critical approaches to disciplinary knowledge and social ills. Instead of students being provided with opportunities to be civically and critically responsible citizens, they get higher tuition costs, student centers that look more and more like shopping malls, and massive debts that defer any dreams of a dignified future. Everything runs like a business and students are less customers and more the finished products we provide for the labor market.

The result at a place like Stonehill College is stressed out and bewildered students, a demoralized and degraded faculty, and a struggling, marginalized staff. Giroux concludes, however, that, “there is nothing inevitable about this process.” What gets lost, according to Giroux, “are not only radical ideas, socially engaged students, and socially responsible academics, but also the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present.”

As the student movement for LGBTQ+ rights at Stonehill once demanded, “It Needs to Get Better at Stonehill.” Students, faculty, and staff can begin by demanding transparency and democracy. We must ask questions about why cuts to employee compensation are being made when the endowment has grown by $90 million and we have a significant surplus left from last year’s operating budget. We need to know where the money goes and why, and then acquire the power to impact those decisions. We have to be willing to support one another in the kinds of actions that force administrators to think outside the box and offer alternative visions for education and social justice.

In 1964, students at the University of California—Berkeley began a Free Speech Movement [FSM] to end administrative restrictions on their ability to protest campus policies and establish democratic means of decision making. In encouraging student action, FSM leader, Mario Savio, proclaimed that, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!”

In 2012, LGBTQ+ students and their allies won significant changes at Stonehill by demonstrating on and off-campus: flanking entrances and protesting outside of Board of Trustees meetings. They even started their own social media movement and encouraged people to stop donating to the College until it created a fair and just policy for everyone. They won!”

Taking such actions may again be necessary to restore teaching and learning to the core of the College’s mission—not bottom-line corporate banditry. Organizing and action may be necessary to save Stonehill College from itself.