{"id":43477,"date":"2021-02-17T14:00:37","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/higher-education-covid-19-collin-college\/"},"modified":"2021-02-17T14:29:03","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T14:29:03","slug":"the-amazonification-of-higher-education-has-arrived-its-not-pretty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/17\/the-amazonification-of-higher-education-has-arrived-its-not-pretty\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cAmazonification\u201d of Higher Education Has Arrived. It\u2019s Not Pretty."},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

At Collin College, an institution of higher learning in McKinney, Texas where two professors involved in union organizing were recently fired, the president proudly boasts of the school's \"Amazonification.\" The episode offers a dire picture of the direction higher ed is rapidly heading nationwide.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n As they lower labor costs and eliminate faculty job security, institutions of higher education are moving toward \"Amazonification\" where students are treated like customers. (Brunel University \/ Flickr)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Suzanne Jones and Audra Heaslip are professors at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. Or, rather, they were until<\/a> January 28, 2021. That afternoon, college administrators informed both of them, one after the other, that their employment contracts would not be renewed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as I know, I\u2019ve never had a single student complaint in over a decade \u2014 which is rare, almost everyone has at least one,\u201d says Heaslip, a humanities professor. She adds that she\u2019s \u201ca go-to person for volunteering and for leadership\u201d on campus, and has previously been asked to mentor other faculty. Jones, for her part, says that the only mark on her record came from her signing an open letter to the Dallas City Council in 2017 that argued for the removal<\/a> of Confederate statues, though, she adds, she was one of a dozen Collin College faculty members to sign onto the letter.<\/p>\n

The only explanation the two educators have for their firing is that they are both leaders of the Collin College chapter of Texas Faculty Association (TFA): Jones is the organization\u2019s secretary, and Heaslip is the vice president. While faculty in Texas cannot collectively bargain, associations like TFA, which is an affiliate of the National Education Association, can provide legal support, and otherwise function like unions, strengthening workers\u2019 hands against employers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very positive that our organizing efforts are what was threatening the [Collin College] president,\u201d says Jones. Collin College faculty do not have tenure, but longtime professors usually have a multiyear contract. Jones and Heaslip say that they have not found any prior cases of long-serving faculty failing to have their contracts renewed without warning.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually the most humiliating thing that can happen is getting knocked down to a one-year contract,\u201d says Heaslip, explaining that when there are disciplinary issues, \u201cthere\u2019s always a process, there\u2019s always paperwork, or a warning, or ‘here\u2019s the rule that you\u2019re breaking’ and ‘here\u2019s the path to get better.’\u201d But in their cases, \u201cthere was none of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collin College administration, for its part, insists there is no story here. In an email<\/a> to Inside Higher Ed<\/i>, a Collin spokesperson wrote that the college \u201cdid not fire\u201d Jones, \u201cdespite any misrepresentation you may have received.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day Jones and Heaslip were let go was the same day their local TFA chapter had scheduled its first recruitment meeting. They had helped officially form the Collin College chapter in the summer of 2020, spurred in large part by the college\u2019s lackluster response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, they say the school\u2019s administration had come up with a reopening plan that did not require mask wearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey also said \u2018you\u2019re not allowed to tell your students to wear masks. If we find out you\u2019re pressuring your students to wear masks, you\u2019ll be disciplined,\u2019\u201d says Heaslip. Faculty were \u201cstunned,\u201d she says, not least because the school had not solicited their input in creating the plan. As a member of the faculty council, the college\u2019s mechanism for shared governance, Heaslip wrote a resolution<\/a> expressing concern for the reopening plan. Around one-third of the college\u2019s full-time faculty added their name to the document, including Jones, who is also a member of the faculty council.<\/p>\n

There was reason for concern. On November 14, 2020, Iris Meda, a nursing professor who had come out of retirement to teach home health care aides in-person at Collin College, died of COVID-19. In an email to staff a week after her passing, Collin College president H. Neil Matkin did not mention Meda\u2019s passing until the twenty-second paragraph of his message, drawing sharp criticism<\/a> from faculty.<\/p>\n

Feeling that their efforts in the faculty council were going nowhere, Jones and Heaslip hoped building their TFA chapter could help hold that body accountable, offering another means for faculty to raise concerns and look after one another.<\/p>\n

That is still their hope. Both Jones and Heaslip have retained counsel from TFA, and they are demanding reinstatement at Collin College. A petition<\/a> sponsored by TFA describes the pair\u2019s \u201cwrongful, retaliatory terminations\u201d as \u201ca blatant and dangerous strifling of academic freedom, shared governance, and safe working conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

But beyond this immediate demand, the duo want to keep organizing to push back on the corporatization of higher education, a process that undermines such institution\u2019s claims of free speech and assembly.<\/p>\n

Collin College president Matkin \u201cuses the word \u2018Amazonification,\u2019\u201d says Heaslip. \u201cHe\u2019s really proud about the \u2018Amazonification\u2019 of the college, and he wants to streamline treating students as customers. We\u2019re there to provide services.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Matkin\u2019s sentiments are extreme, they\u2019re also refreshingly honest about the direction institutions of higher education are heading as they lower labor costs and eliminate faculty job security. Reversing that transformation will be a major fight, but it starts with defending professors like Jones and Heaslip.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suzanne Jones and Audra Heaslip are professors at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. Or, rather, they were until January 28, 2021. That afternoon, college administrators informed both of them, one after the other, that their employment contracts would not be renewed. \u201cAs far as I know, I\u2019ve never had a single student complaint in over [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1639,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1639"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43478,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43477\/revisions\/43478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}