 Welcome everybody to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a fantastic guest who has written a barn burner of a book that everyone in higher education should be reading. And I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Since the beginning of the Future Transform, we've been thinking about the value of higher education, and we're thinking about its position in global politics and what it means. Today's guest offers a powerful and fierce argument that in many ways we are all participating in the creation and maintenance of a myth. The myth is that higher education is the best way for anybody to get into the middle class. And John Shelton's book, The Higher Education Myth, is a powerful argument describing how that came to be and what it gets wrong and how this leads us. So without any further ado, let me bring Professor John Shelton on stage. And I hope where he is, it's starting to warm up a little bit. Professor Shelton, so glad you could join us. Hey everybody, it's so great to be here. This is a really cool technology. This is awesome. And warming up a little bit, still kind of gray outside. If people are in parts of the country where it's really getting warm, I would appreciate a vicarious note in the chat so that I can be jealous. Well, you've heard the gentleman. Everyone down in Texas and Florida. We've got Glenn McGee and a Florida pen handle. Please say hi. Please say hi. And I told him just about how pleasant it is where you are. Professor Shelton, it's great to see you. And thank you so much for making the time to be with us. I'm a huge fan of your book. But before we get into that, let me ask you to introduce yourself. What are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big projects and the big ideas for you? Yeah, I love this question. And although I have to say that when we were talking about this ahead of time, Brian, it kind of stressed me out to think about all the stuff that I'm going to be doing in the next year. But I would answer that question in two ways. So first of all, I have a future book project I'm really interested in and we'll get into this. I think this kind of laser focus on economic security for the vast majority of working people in this country is so central. So one of the things that I'm interested in doing moving forward is a book that's kind of a dual biography of Augustus Hawkins and Hubert Humphrey, who pushed for a jobs guarantee in the 1970s. And I see this as really a big kind of missed opportunity. I don't know if I'm going to get to that so much in the next year, but that's a long-term project. Now, over the next year, one thing that I do know I'm going to do, and I talk about this in the preface to the book, you know, I come at this book very much as a labor leader. So I'm president of my own local union here at UW Green Bay and I'm also vice president of higher education for AFT Wisconsin. And, you know, so, you know, we're thinking about some really big things next year. First of all, at our own local here at UW Green Bay, we've got a pretty big initiative to boost adjunct pay for folks who are non-tenure track faculty. And that's so important because to have this sort of enterprise that we all agree is important. We have to make sure that everybody teaching it is treated with dignity and has the capacity to teach well. And then at the state level, we've got some really important things happening in Wisconsin that my union is involved in. Number one, we've got a state Supreme Court election in April, which is a pivotal election and everything's on the table from reproductive rights to gerrymandered maps and the possibility of overturning Act 10, which was this law that took away collective bargaining rights from higher education faculty in 2011. So we're working on that. And then this is a budget year. We have two-year budget cycles in Wisconsin. And the future of higher education in this state is very much going to be determined by, you know, how much we get of the governor's budget proposal, Governor Evers. And so those are the things that we're going to really be working on over the next year, both my local and state higher education locals in Wisconsin. And it's going to be a lot of work, but I think we're poised to really, you know, kind of defend and deepen what we really value in the next year. And I'm really looking forward to that work. Well, that's fantastic. I'm so glad you hear that. That sounds like that's that's a lot of time for a lot of work while you're still being a full-time professor. It is, but I don't do it all myself. I have colleagues here who, you know, are basically decided they want to fight for their future. And both on my campus and on other campuses, and it's really been pretty powerful to see the kind of work that people have been able to do to fight for these things. I mean, we're in a very different place than we were 10 years ago. So it's a group effort. It really is an exercise in building solidarity and we're doing it. Well, in the education myth, for those of you who haven't read it, one of the themes or tropes running through it is a history of Wisconsin. It's one example of what John is talking about. And it's very vivid and very detailed. And now I can see why. What's the, I can just make this out. There's a green and white pin on your chest. Is that for the human? Yeah. So I put this on here. This is Starbucks Workers United. And I've been wearing this to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are organizing in all those Starbucks locals. We have a, it's very exciting. Just last fall, one of the Starbucks here in Green Bay voted to unionize and to collectively bargain. And so I try to show as much support for them as I can and make sure people are paying attention to this because we'll get into the book. But to me, the Starbucks organizing drives really show how young people, many of them in college or just out of college are organizing to fight for a better future in which they've got a secure economic outlook. And so I think it's really important that we support them. Well, that's terrific. Thank you for explaining that. And just came up in the chat. On the bottom left of the screen, you should see a tan colored box that says the education myth. And that will pop up a link to the Cornell University Press website for the book. So you can get, John, this sounds like a great, great future for you. I'm so excited that you're working on this. Well, but let's talk about your book for it now. We pose this as a kind of naive question. It's been a consensus for quite some time as you document that higher education is a great way for Americans to enter or stay in the middle class. It's the ticket to prosperity and you articulate how this is a bipartisan thing. We've heard this from the second Bush administration, the Obama administration. That sounds, it's not a fantasy. It's based on a lot of reality about the education premium and hirings over lifetime. What's wrong with it? Why is this a myth and why is it so dangerous? Yeah, so I want to get one thing out of the way sort of at the start. And when you read the book, you'll see I do this very early in the book because when I was writing this, you know, I got this question a lot, which was, so are you saying that you're anti-education? Should people not go to college? And that's, that's far from what I'm saying, right? I mean, I'm a university educator. I'm in a, I'm the chair of a really terrific program that enables students to go on and do all kinds of different things. One of my students, former students is here, although he wasn't even in my program. He was just the student Lorenzo. I'll give him a shout out who was at UW Green Bay who, you know, I just got to know. So, you know, higher education, of course, enables people to do all kinds of great things. You know, what I call the education myth is this idea that education alone will allow us to overcome all of the other structural inequalities that exist in our country, right? Whether that's racial inequality, gender inequality, whether that's lack of jobs. So, you know, one example I drawn in the 1960s is the Johnson administration and the Great Society. And so at the same time that, you know, you had, say, African Americans in a lot of urban areas and actually rural areas too, but also like whites in rural areas. And there weren't jobs in those places. The Johnson administration was pushing education and job training as sort of the answer to that inequality without doing anything to make sure that there were good jobs in those places. And so, you know, that's, I kind of chart the history of that, right? There are good reasons to say that education does provide people new skills. Of course, that's a true thing. But this idea that education by itself can overcome all of these things and that as a political system we can stop paying attention to the other reforms that are necessary, both for people without college degrees but actually now as the Starbucks workers organizing testifies to now increasingly people with college degrees, the things that they need to have good lives moving forward. And so those are things like, you know, the possibility of a jobs guarantee, labor reforms to make it easier for workers to unionize and get higher wages and more job security. And universal healthcare, which so many workers, you know, I think it's been deeply problematic for that to, for healthcare to be tied to people's place of employment. And so those are just a few examples, childcare, universal childcare, right? We should be thinking big picture about all of these things as a society to make sure that every single person has the possibility of a good job and what the philosopher Michael Sandell calls social esteem. And then we fit education into that system. And of course, it's important and it does open up all kinds of different opportunities. We just can't rely on it to do everything. And for too long over the past, you know, 40 or 50 years, I argue, that's been our primary argument about how to how to solve social and social and economic inequality, and it's deeply problematic. Well, that's a powerful, powerful charge. Friends, I'm going to open the floor up to you in just a minute. I just want to ask one more, one more follow up question, and then I'll get out of the way. That's a, that's a powerful critique. And, and it emerged in many ways from a range of powerful sources that had very good intentions thinking of the Johnson administration thinking. But also it's one that often comes from the right. You described how the Spelling's Commission was a major player in this and its language became very important. Of course, you talk about in your own state, at least one lamentable governor, Walker played a role in this. And one of the problems there that I had trying to work out was that on the one hand, you have Republicans saying, yes, this is the only way to enter the middle class or it's the best way to solve all these problems. On the other hand, they're doing their best to restrict access to higher education by privatizing it and by trying to restrict faculty organizing and all kinds of things. How, how do Republicans manage to square that circle? Yeah, so that's such a good question. And I would, I would say that the Republican Party is not monolithic. That's, that's actually the answer here. So, you know, as I document in the book, this education myth, it actually really kind of starts with economists like Gary Becker, Theodore Schultz out of the Chicago School. Of course, Becker is conservative, probably would call himself more libertarian. But, but, you know, they sort of push these ideas. And, and again, they're based on a kernel of truth, right, which is that education and job training do give people more capabilities. So the Johnson administration picks it up in the 60s. And then there's some shifts that happen in the Democratic Party in the 70s, if you can go more into later if you want. But then, you know, put a lot of more sort of like professional class people, you know, leading the Democratic Party, people like Carter, and then in the 90s people like Clinton and then beyond with Obama. You know, these sort of figures who come out of this meritocracy, right, who, who, you know, start as being very much non elites, but then, you know, rise these, you know, high levels of leadership by, you know, going through elite institutions. And so, you know, it's really, it really is the Democrat, it really is Democrats kind of driving this narrative. But what happens in the 80s and 90s is that Republicans in the, you know, especially after the Reagan years where there were these, you know, pretty hard cuts to social services. And the two big Republicans here were the George Bushes, right, HW and W, who see a lane for Republicans to say this is how we're going to be kind of more moderate to use the term that George W Bush use compassionate conservatives. And so, you know, you can imagine things that were unpalatable to them like labor reform in particular, higher minimum wages, things that, frankly, the corporate donors behind them wanted to resist that, you know, they could count education and say, look, we're going to give people opportunity and try to take some of the thunder of Democrats who they perceived like Clinton as being very successful. So you've got that kind of strand in the Republican Party. I talk about Tommy Thompson, who is the governor of Wisconsin in the 90s and how he kind of pervade that myth. But then when you get to the 20 teens, and a lot of a good part of what I'm trying to do in this book is explain how we got the 2016 election. And really, both parties kind of cracked open, right? I mean, the Republicans with Trump and the Democrats with the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. But on the Republican side, one of the things that I point out is that Walker was able to mobilize a lot of working class Wisconsinites without college degrees, people who felt a lot of resentment toward folks who have things comparably better than them, especially public sector employees, many of whom were like teachers and university professors and famously Walker in the election of election campaign of 2010 said public employees were the haves and the workers in the private sector were the have nots. So Walker sort of consciously employed that strategy. To a certain extent Trump did to right I mean arguing that, you know, blue collar workers had been let down by a system that didn't do anything to try and keep their jobs in the country. Of course, Trump was really mainly selling fantasies right he's going to go and talk to corporate leaders and keep the jobs in the US. But the point is, is that, you know, what the Trump phenomenon kind of building on Walker represented was a different direction in the Republican Party, right? You don't hear really mainstream Republicans kind of talking about the education myth anymore. And you're actually hearing fewer and fewer Democrats talking about it too. So when Biden, in his most recent State of the Union address talked about is this was a very important departure from the way previous Democrats have operated over the past few decades. He said something like, you shouldn't have to move to be able to get a good job. Right. And that was the, that was the kind of thing that like Clinton in the 90s said, Okay, we're going to negotiate NAFTA. But, you know, we're going to retrain you, we're going to, you can move and find a better job, follow the jobs. And what Biden was was sort of I think learned to a certain extent is that's not actually what most blue collar Americans want. Right. And so we've got to, we've got to put blue collar livelihoods more front and center. So, so that's, that's how I answer that. I think things are changing in both. Right before our eyes, which is huge. So I mean, you remind me of Trump's famous comment. I love the poorly educated. But, but instead, we've actually seen three governors of three states. I want to say Maryland, Utah and Pennsylvania, which just opened up hiring for state jobs to people without college degrees. Yep, very smart. And that's a bipartisan thing so far. Well, friends, I have more questions to her old, but this is a place for you for your questions and your comments. Again, if you're new to the form, please in the bottom of the screen along that white strip. You know, just use the raised hand button if you want to join us on stage and use the question mark button to type in a question. Our author here will be glad to, glad to talk with you. While people are doing that, I want to share a couple of thoughts of camp in the chat so far. Our good friend in the Houston area, by the way, John, so if you want some warmth, just just think of that. Tom Hame says that the real threat to blue collar livelihood is automation. I'm curious what you see of the role of automation in this story of the education myth and the alternatives you propose. Yeah, you know, it's fascinating because back in the 1960s, there was a lot of discussion on the left. And by the left, I mean the center left, right, about automation and the threat that it would pose to blue collar jobs. If you want to read a great speech, go back to 1963 to the March on Washington and not King's speech, read a Philip Randolph speech. He was the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a very prominent African American labor leader and really the brain child behind the March on Washington. And when he gave that speech, one of the things he talked about is he said, what good is it going to be for African Americans to be able to sit at the same lunch counter as white people if automation is destroying their jobs? Because he understood that black people were kind of at the lower end of the labor market. And so he understood that automation was kind of a threat, a major threat to blue collar livelihoods. So I agree with Tom to the extent that automation does threaten blue collar livelihoods, but this is what I would say. I talk about this in the books. One of the things that Americans on the left talked about in the 70s and 80s was the idea of an industrial policy. The idea that the nation, similar to like how things are kind of done in Germany, should think proactively about ensuring that there are good in collar jobs. There are good manufacturing jobs. And this was something that was taken out by labor leaders in the late 1970s when you had capital flight, lots of corporations moving jobs overseas because they could find cheaper labor elsewhere. And who else was a major proponent of an industrial policy in the early 80s was Robert Reich, who later became the Secretary of Labor. One of the things that I show is that that Reich's thinking on this really shifted from the early 80s until actually into the late 80s, right, into the 90s. And his idea of investing in education really structured the way that the Clinton administration thought about jobs. So it enabled them to negotiate NAFTA, which, sure, automation, you're absolutely right, but trade policies like NAFTA, which were pushed over the objections of organized labor and might very well have played a big role in costing Clinton Congress in 1994. You know, that kind of signaling to working class people and the reality that like that made it harder for blue collar people to have jobs has played an enormous role in politics. When I was knocking on doors in 2016 for a political candidate for the presidential candidate, one of the things I heard a lot and I was knocking Union turf was about how Hillary Clinton was connected to NAFTA, right? So this is something that people definitely remember. And so I think there's a way to think about something like automation and trade policy and think about it in a way where if you put the livelihoods of working people, if you keep a laser focus on that front and center, that can change the trajectory of American politics in a way that, you know, frankly leads working people not feeling like they're left out of the conversation. Well, first of all, that's a rich and thoughtful response to Tom's question. And Tom, thank you for that. He has a follow up or a development of that. I want to put on the table before until anybody else has one to add. I mean, are we entering an era where digital technology will change their requirements for future workers? Is this an industrial argument in a post-industrial world? What if capitalism shifts? Yeah, so that's a fabulous question. And I know a lot of other people have written about that. I'm not as probably as qualified to answer that question as a lot of people. I will tell you that the way I think about this question, and I think it's a very important one, you know, there's a book that came out a couple of years ago by John Nichols and Robert McChesney. And the book talks about the possibility of a jobless future and how what livelihoods might look like if technology really does, you know, diminish the number of jobs available to people without, say, college degrees. And, you know, and we're certainly at a moment where we have to think about that, right? I mean, one of the things that Nichols and McChesney talk about is, you know, what it means for transportation when you have automated, you know, driverless cars. And I think we're probably a little further away than that than we might have thought a few years ago given, you know, all the negative press about driverless cars. But it doesn't undercut the point, which is that, you know, in the next few years, even a lot of jobs that we might think of as, you know, kind of somewhat skilled white collar jobs could potentially be done through automation. ChatGPD is a good example of how that could take over a lot of things. But here's what I would say about this. And this is what Nichols and McChesney say. They say, okay, like liberating people from some of these jobs is a good idea. We shouldn't be, you know, luddites about this. But we have to center everything in terms of how we are going to make sure that every single person in this country has a livelihood. Right. And so I don't know what that looks like, but that has to be our central question at the same time. And Brian, you'll appreciate this. We're thinking about how that connects to environmental sustainability and fighting climate change. So we have to think about both of those things together. But those need to be our questions, right? Not like how do we just leave people to fend for themselves? Or are we going to just leave people to fend for themselves if technology eliminates their job or trade policy eliminates their job? How can we put their livelihoods front and center? That's the thing that's been missing from the center of American politics for too long. Well, thank you. As usual, Tom asks very, very deep questions. John, thank you for where that went. What's the title on that Nichols and McChesney book? They've got a few books out. It's called People Get Ready, and I don't remember the long subtitle after the colon, but it's something about a jobless future and a citizenless democracy or something like that. Nice. Thank you. Thank you. We have some more questions bubbling up and also some comments. Sheila Malouli recommends that we think about universal basic income. And Ed Webb, our good friend in Pennsylvania, says the most important role for most in the economy now is as consumers, not producers. Can I respond to those? Please, please. So the UBI question, I think, is fascinating, and I think I'm not necessarily opposed to that in the long term. I think when we're thinking about the kinds of jobs people do, I think, what is it that David Graber called them bullshit jobs? So much of the work that we do every day as a society are things that probably don't need to be done and we could be liberated from. So, you know, and as somebody who thinks about, you know, labor politics and power asymmetries, liberating people from bosses is also a good idea in the long term. I do think, though, you know, we have to be a little cautious about this because we have to be careful. We have to make sure of two things. Number one, Americans and really all people want to be productive. They want to do something that contributes every day. And so that doesn't mean that it has to look like it has traditionally, you know, that everybody goes to a nine to five job and punches a clock and works for a boss. But people have to have some kind of path to make sure that they're doing something in which they feel like they're making a contribution every day. Now, maybe that's more care work. I mean, the needs that we have in this point of care work moving forward are going to be extreme in the next few decades. Maybe that's liberating people to do more creative work. And honestly, maybe this is where a tuition free college university college becomes really important because if you think about universities instead as like places for job training and instead as places that can really help to open up new capacities and opportunities for people, then colleges and universities can very much be a part of that solution. The other thing we have to make sure is we're thinking about universal basic income and this idea that people are producers and instead of consumers. That leads that leads to a place very quickly and Nicholson McChesney talk about this, where the vast majority of people are not seen as full citizens. You know, that's getting a handout that, you know, you think about Andrew Yang's UBI, for example, which number one wouldn't actually be enough for people to make ends meet. But number two leads them to a place where they don't feel like or where they're not treated as full citizens. They're treated as people who are basically getting handouts from rich tech companies like Apple and Facebook who are making these extravagant profits. We cannot have that. So any sort of path that we're thinking about again has to center the livelihoods, the needs of and the capacities of every single citizen in this country in order to be successful. Or it's going to lead to the, you know, really the kind of destruction of society as we know it. I really do think that. Wow. Well, thank you. Thank you for those responses to those comments. And thank you, Sheila, for that really, really quick observation. And thank you, Ed. Again, if you're new to the forum, this is how we work. You all share your thoughts and our guests bombarded in all sides gets to share theirs. We had a question that came in from our friend Gregory Shuckman who had to leave, but he wanted me to ask this. If you could speak about the Wisconsin idea and quote, does your book comport with that philosophy or not? Yes. And I am maybe the biggest advocate for the Wisconsin idea out there, except for maybe my friend at the University of Wisconsin Madison Chad Goldberg, who actually wrote a book about it. Highly recommend you check out his book on the Wisconsin idea. But yes, and here's what's really important about the Wisconsin idea. It's thrown around a lot. You know, so last year I was actually on the search committee for the next UW system president because I'm the campus, UW Green Bay's faculty representative to the system. And so I was picked to be on the search committee. And every single candidate out of there were probably 20 candidates, you know, who we did at least a phone interview with, talked about the Wisconsin idea, Wisconsin idea, Wisconsin idea, right? And it's been used so much in our state that in many ways it's kind of meaningless at this point. You know, I talked about this in the book in the 90s. Tommy Thompson talked about the new Wisconsin idea, which was effectively the idea that the university would partner with, you know, corporate employers to sync up various aspects of the curriculum to the needs of employers, and, you know, find ways to do these sort of partnerships with corporations for, you know, different kinds of business development. That's not the Wisconsin idea. The Wisconsin idea as it was constructed in the late 19th century was inherently political. Okay. And so the view was, we have these big problems that exist in the late 19th century. We've got industrialization. We've got, and tell me if any of this sounds familiar, environmental degradation. We've got massive economic quality that's leading workers to organize and leading to labor conflict. We have corporations that have too much power, wealth inequalities out of control. The government doesn't do enough, do enough to support the needs of working people. And so into this sort of mix came some, you know, very prominent university folks, but people like Richard T. Ealy, who is the sociologist, but also fighting Bob LaFollette, this governor and senator who put through a lot of progressive legislation. And the way they saw the Wisconsin idea was that university faculty and students, by the way, would use their expertise and use the research process to give evidence based solutions all across the state to whatever problems the state was facing. And there's this sort of, there's a book that folks should read if they're really into this aside from Chad's. By this, he was the head of the Legislative Reference Bureau in the early 20th century named Charles McCarthy. And it's called The Wisconsin Idea. And it charts the way that research in the University of Wisconsin connected to legislation that then improved the lives of workers. So we're the first state that had a workers' compensation law and that came out of the Wisconsin Idea, essentially. And then many of these ideas in the 1920s, in the 1930s, sorry, end up in the New Deal in various different versions of course. Social security, there's a good argument that social security is directly tied to the Wisconsin Idea. Read Dan Kaufman's book, The Fall of Wisconsin, if you want that story. So that's the Wisconsin Idea. It's how do we as knowledge producers and our students take the expertise that we have and use it to solve some of the biggest problems that exist in our society. That's where I think the UW system and frankly all at least public universities today can be really valuable. And if we can get away from this notion that all universities are there to do is to train students for a very narrow variety of jobs. We can recommit to that and make the universities in this country just completely, completely relevant, honestly, to all of these problems. All the things that we're talking about today. Universities should be taking the lead on helping to structure what those solutions are going to look like. This is my call on climate change, but this is much broader. Thank you for that passionate and if I may say evidence-based answer. And thank you for the two book recommendations as well. Gregory, thank you for the great question. I'm really glad. I think you'll enjoy the Book of Great Deal. We also, one question from a dear friend of ours who couldn't make it today. And this is more of a personal question for you. This is from Don Charlis that asks, it appears that you are much more than a scholar. What other historians have inspired you? For example, E.P. Thompson or Howard Zen? Yeah, that's a good question. E.P. Thompson is why I became a labor historian actually. So in 1963, I read that in graduate school and it just blew my mind because it connected culture and ideas with labor politics and it really, I think, helped me to understand. It gave me a richer understanding of class dynamics beyond at least the kind of narrow ways that we think about Marx. So that's number one, I think. If so many I could talk about, I would be remiss if I didn't mention two other people. So my graduate school advisor is a historian named Julie Green who she's got a fabulous book. It's about a decade old now, but it's about the construction of the Panama Canal. Which you might think, what does that have to do with labor history? Well, what she did is she reframed the conversation where you had all these books by historians like, I think, David McCullough and other people like that, about the engineering achievements and all those things. And what she said is, this story becomes a lot different if we center this on the workers. And so we did this history of the Caribbean workers who were really central to building this canal, this sort of massive feat of American empire and American power, and said, we're not getting the full story unless we actually center this from the perspective of workers. So I learned so much about the craft from her and that book is one that's geared toward audiences that are non-academic, which is very much what I was trying to do here. And then the third person I would mention is my colleague who just retired here a couple of years ago at UW-Green Bay, hard VK, who at this point, he's written a number of books, started off thinking about Marxism, but his last two books are his two most prominent books. One is a biography of Thomas Paine and the Radical Promise of America, and the other is about FDR and it's called FDR and what makes the greatest generation truly great. And so I talk about social democracy in the book and this idea that we have to kind of center the economic rights of Americans and everything that we do. And so much of that developed from my relationship with Harvey, reading his stuff, of course, but really a lot of just the conversations I had. So I highly recommend people check out his stuff. He's still a very active scholar, does like a million podcasts now, even though he's an emeritus professor. Excellent, excellent. Thank you for that outline. And Don, as always, thank you for your support and thank you for that really good question. We have more questions coming in and I want to make sure that people get a chance to ask them. This is one from Gil Donch, who asks, John supports getting rid of degree requirements from any jobs. Fewer people getting degrees is not just good news for higher ed. I'd like John's comment on this threat to illness. Okay, so I have to think more about the question of degree requirements for jobs, to be honest with you. This is a great question. And I kind of reflexively said, you know, that the news about government jobs in Pennsylvania and degree requirements was good. And I do think that, but I don't want to take that too far. You know, so for example, one of the proposals for doing something about the teacher shortage in this country is, you know, we see this a lot in our state from Republicans is we'll just lower credentials for teachers. I don't want that actually. I mean, I don't, you know, nothing against people who don't have, you know, a university degree. But I kind of want the people who are teaching, you know, my daughter who's in high school right now and just started in ninth grade. I want them to have college degree I want them to have more advanced learning. Now what I what I what I want to say is that there should be good jobs for everybody whether they have a college degree or not. And so that might mean reassessing some of the credentials we have for jobs, but I think in many cases there are really good reasons to have credentials for certain jobs. What I would say about enrollments though, okay, you know, and the premise of this question is one that has deeply affected the trajectory of higher education, I think in some negative ways, which is that we should be sort of hyper focused on the and the reason that we're focused on that is because in virtually every state, I don't know, I don't know what state you're from, it's a great question. I don't know what state you're from. But in Wisconsin, we have had to be deeply attentive to enrollment all the time because what we've seen is a massive decline in state funding. When I talk to my students now one of the things that I point out is, you know, because because they all have what I hear from students a lot is, you know, I got to work like crazy so I don't have any debt so I can pay all tuition. Because I had an uncle or a grandfather who worked his way through college and didn't have any debt and he says I should do that too. And it's like, no, back in 1975, the state was paying two thirds of his education so he was getting a subsidy that you're not getting right you're having to pay for that. So this is a political class. And I don't mean to suggest that, you know, enrollments aren't important, of course they are. We're laser focused on it on our campus because of the budget declines that we face. But I don't think we solved this problem by saying that, you know, that, you know, by sort of doubling down on the idea that university education is the only path to the middle class the only opportunity for somebody to have a good job because that's put us in a very weak position as an institution, right, because that's, and it totally makes sense why people have made that argument for decades, right, you've got declining enrollments. So what you have to do, what you have to pitch to students and say, hey, this is how you're going to get a good job. The problem is, is that, well, there's two problems. Number one, when a state like mine, 65% of the working adults don't have a college degree, you're really telling them is, you don't really, and I know you're not saying this. I forget the person's name to ask the question. What was it? Keel. Thank you. I know you're not saying this keel, but I think this is how sometimes people hear it, which is that, you know, people don't care about them if they don't have a college degree and don't care about their reality. Number two, it's actually becoming empirically less true that a college degree guarantees a good job. That's why you have baristas at Starbucks who are organizing in unions because they've got a college degree and they're working as baristas at Starbucks, which is a very important job. But it's not the kind of degree, it's not the kind of job that requires a college degree. And that's the reality for a lot of our economy is that those are the jobs that exist and we have to do something to make those jobs better. And so to me, it's like, we can't deal with this question of enrollments narrowly. We have to think about it in this sort of broader context and make the bigger political argument and organize around that political argument so that we can make the university into something that isn't narrowly connected to enrollments. But the last thing I want to say about this, and this is really important, I think this conversation about enrollments has focused us more on how we can be accessible to new generations of students. And that's a good thing. That's a very good thing. Our campus UW-Green Bay just broke where the first UW campus to do this. And I'll give our administration a lot of credit for it because I think it's a great idea. Just guaranteed admission for any student who graduates from a Green Bay public school. That's a really good idea because what that means is that those barriers for some students who might be sort of more marginal, you're reducing a barrier. And we've got to make sure our campus is ready for first-gen students and increasingly diverse numbers of students. That's a good thing. But I think we can have that conversation without also being kind of focused on, we've got to bring in students. We've got to bring in students. If college isn't ready for somebody, they should still be able to have a good life. And our enrollments can't drive what it means for the futures of every person in this country. Wow, that's a mini essay by itself, John. And Keele, as always, thank you for your persistent focus on this. We have friends, we've got about 11 minutes, so I'll make sure that people get a chance to ask their questions. We have two questions from Glenn McGee. He has a short question and a long question. A short question is, do you know Hal Hansen? I don't. I feel like I probably should though, so please tell me who that is. Well, Glenn will probably share with us a bibliography on that. His longer question comes back to your main point and he asks, if the education myth is falling, if we can truly dismantle the education myth, the bigger question moving forward is, what will replace it at the center of our politics? What do you think? What would be there at the center? So, you know, this book is a book that may be different than a lot of other histories. I'm very open in the beginning about what my agenda is. I'm very open about the advocacy for, you know, the thing that I want to see come out of this. And so the way I frame it in the conclusion, or I guess it's technically the epilogue, but check out the book and you can read more about it. But the way I frame it is, we really kind of have two choices, right? Because our political system has failed to acknowledge the reality for too many working people in this country for far too long. And those are many of them without college degrees, but also people with college degrees. And so one version, okay, one version is reactionary populism. It's Scott Walker dividing public sector workers from private sector workers. It's Donald Trump, you know, scapegoating, you know, undocumented immigrants and saying that he's going to, you know, bring back jobs in this country while not doing any of, while not doing that. That's one option, right? The other option is to kind of, is essentially social democracy. You know, it's centering economic and social livelihoods for the vast majority of Americans. And I think the Biden administration has done some good things as far as this goes. I don't think it's been enough though. And I think this is, this is still kind of an open question. But the agenda that I would like to see, right? Go back to, and I talk about this in the book too, FDR's proposal for economic bill of rights in 1944. Obviously our society is very different than it is now. And I'll give a shout out to Harvey because Harvey has written about this, Harvey Kaye. I highly recommend again checking out his stuff. But FDR's second bill of rights talks about the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to a secure retirement. And by the way, it's the right to a remunerative job, a job that pays you enough to make ends meet. The right to housing. And it's very interesting because the last right is the right to education. And so FDR believed in education, but jobs and all these other things that people need, housing, health care, they were not contingent on the kind of education you got for FDR. And so that's the kind of, that's to me is what needs to be centered. It's jobs, health care, you know, union rights, right, a job with democracy in the workplace. It's economic security in a nutshell for everybody. And that's, and I think frankly, I don't see much hope that the Republican Party is going to do this, so I'll just be blunt about it. I think if the Democratic Party can do that, then they can rebuild the kind of majority that FDR had, but hopefully without the racial inequalities and problematic gender norms that were at the core of the New Deal. Well, that's a great answer. I'm sure Glenn will have a lot more to say in response, but thank you. Thank you very much. I just shared the FDR second bill of rights. I just shared that and I'll link to that in the chat. Glenn does note that higher education, sorry. We have a different question coming in from Sheila Malouli. And she asked, this is a deep question from you with sociology of knowledge, I think. Epistemological pluralism is part of the complexity of admissions funnel declines. Perspective students aren't as interested in positivism and the decadence of disciplines. Please comment. Okay, there's a lot of... I think what you're kind of saying there basically, Sheila, is that students seem to be thinking about job skills more than sort of holistic kind of education that they might have had in the past, right? And also that the way that we think about university educations may not be as relevant, structuring university education may not be as relevant for students. I think both of those things are right. Number one, if you're a student right now, and let's say you're a first gen student and you're thinking about going to college and what you've been told for decades is that college is this path to the middle class, you're probably predisposed to think pretty pragmatically about it. Why wouldn't you be? That's a rational sort of decision. And so I think it's our job in our universities not to try to talk students into anything. I mean, if a student comes here to UW Green Bay, for example, and wants to major in engineering or social work or nursing, something that's very sort of centered on a career, I'm not going to talk them out of that. I mean, those are all things that our society needs. They're worthwhile endeavors and I wish those students the best. But when you have students who come in and are saying, you know, I feel like I've got to major in computer science because I've got to have a degree where I can get a job. This is where we can explain to them how the labor markets work, the bigger kind of picture, right? We're not going to tell them things that are unrealistic to advance our own intellectual agendas, but to give them the kind of mentoring that helps them to understand the bigger picture in the labor market and the kinds of things that might actually be available to them. Number two, in terms of disciplines, I agree with you 110%. My department is a department here at UW Green Bay called Democracy and Justice Studies. It's an interdisciplinary department and we have people from both humanities and social science fields. It's so exciting, like I love my department so much. And it's a vestige of this really kind of funky way that our university was structured back in the late 1960s where there were no disciplines. Students had to major in interdisciplinary problems, we called them. And unfortunately for a variety of reasons, many of which I kind of document in the book implicitly, you know, this push toward professionalism. So many of our departments on campus have moved away from that. But our department is geared around this question of democracy and social justice from a lot of different angles and our students go on to do incredible things. They become labor organizers, lawyers. They do social, some cases they go into various kinds of, you know, social organizing. They do political work, they run for office. In fact, one of our graduating seniors right now ran for state assembly seat last fall, right? I mean, these are the kinds of students that we have. Some of them become corrections officers too, though, right? They become police officers, right? I mean, because our program just opens these things up into so many different areas. And our program is so relevant because you're right, students don't think about the world. They think about them in terms of questions. And you know, if there are campuses out there where people have the ability to move in an interdisciplinary, problem-focused way the way we have, I highly suggest it. I really do because the kind of work that I get to do every day is incredible. That sounds like an amazing program. Sheila, thank you for that very, very deep question. Yeah, thank you. That's a great answer. We have time for one more question from our dear friend Sarah Sanger-Gorio. She says, I think about this sometimes as a PhD candidate. My other master's degrees are more job-ready. Why pursue a degree that is made for academia's perpetuation in this anti-education culture? Yeah, that's such a good question. And I have conversations too. Some of our students go into PhD programs, ultimately. And I try to have very unalloyed conversations with them about this. A PhD enables you to do things that virtually no other experience prepares you for. There's just no other way to put it. With all of the inequalities that exist in higher education and all the deeply problematic things, what a PhD prepared me to do was to think critically and systematically in a way that no other experience ever did. There's just no way to replicate it. Reading deeply in a field, I know it was probably hard to have PhDs that are doing it. I know comprehensive exams are really stressful. They were stressful for me too, but I remember that time fondly because I didn't have any other time in my life where I had the space to sit down and actually think about how a field is put together. How a set of questions are put together and how people have answered them. And then to be able to craft the dissertation where you're writing an interpretive argument that transcends the kind of effort of a couple of papers or something like that. That stuff has so much value. Now, I do think anybody going for a PhD in any field right now needs to understand that there's a very good chance that you will not get an academic job. If you're going into this because you think you're going to absolutely get an academic job, don't do a PhD. Do it because you recognize that even if you get a PhD and don't get an academic job, you are going to be able to do things that you were not able to do before. And that's going to help you, number one, in any other job, but also help you think about the world in ways that are different. I understand in some ways that's a very privileged kind of thing to say. And I do not come from a privileged place socioeconomically myself. So I think it doesn't make sense to pay tuition and do that. I'm not saying that. But if you have the opportunity to get into a program where you can do those things, that has value that transcends the job market. And hopefully you can be part of the effort to organize and change the way we do things. That would be my answer to that. That's a really thoughtful response. John, thank you. And Sarah, we love you. Thank you for bearing your soul and asking that really, really great question. Unfortunately, we have to wrap things up. Somehow we've just gone through an hour at top speed. And John, you've been so generous with your thinking, your politics, and your research. Thank you so much. What's the best way to keep up with you? Should we stalk you on Twitter or is there another way? Well, you can always email me. SheldonJ at uwgb.edu. I'll put that in the chat. But on Twitter, it's at prof underbar Sheldon. I'll put both of those in there. Excellent. We'd love to hear from any of you. So thank you so much for being here. And Brian, thank you so much for organizing this. Oh, well, thank you. We got it in the chat. Thanks for sharing that. Thank you so much. And everybody, thank you for your great conversation. The chat has just been really, really thoughtful. We've gone from protocol and marks through biography, through scholarly publishing. So there's an awful lot going on there. John, thank you. And good luck this year. Good luck. Fight the good fight. Thank you so much. Take care, everybody. And don't leave yet, friends. I'm going to just point out where things are headed next. If you want to keep talking about this, from everything from the Wisconsin idea to the purpose of education, just keep out us on Twitter. Use the hashtag FTTE. You can tweet at me, Brian Alexander, or at Shendig events. Here's me on Mastodon. And here's my blog. If you'd like to dive into our previous session about all of this, take a look at the tinyurl.com. FTF archive. And if you want to look for specific topics there, just go to the forum website for more. If you'd like to dive into some of these topics in detail, look at our research enterprise, the future trend in technology and education report, ftte.us. And if you want to support this kind of work, support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com. Brian Alexander. Looking ahead, we've got a whole series of topics coming up. Just sign up on the forum website. And if you want to share any of your own work, just email me. I'd be glad to share with the whole community. In the meantime, thank you again for a great conversation. I hope everybody's well. I hope you're warm when you need to be warm and cool when you need to chill. Take care, everybody. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.