philanthropirates & education—déjà vu all over again

Venture Philanthropy...it's an epidemic. Reactions have been sprouting up all over as  I noted in Wednesday's post. Read on for more about why. Higher ed has the Koch Bros and is not exactly Gates-free either. ALEC plagues us all as Adjunked Professor explains in "Is ACCJC’s Bumbling a Set Up?" This slides right in with the reading I've been doing to catch up at the Education Bloggers Network since joining. 

As just one (or two) of many examples — more keep coming but I have to stop somewhere or I'll be up all night — here's Educating the Gates Foundation's two part series Prisons & Slavery: How Bill Gates, Gates Foundation and Microsoft Profit from Racism and Human Suffering: 

The #GatesEffect…@Chronicle special

…on How the World's Largest Foundation Is Remaking Higher Education. Wherever you stand on venture philanthropy (or philanthropiracy) and Gates Foundation's influence in higher ed, on community colleges in particular, and shaping U.S. education policy in general, information ~ all perspectives and positions ~ is the indispensable mind tool for our HE defense kits. We apologize in advance for any pay walls you might encounter along the way. 

See also:

• When Billionaires Become Educational Experts: "Venture philanthropists" push for the privatization of public education, Kevin K. Kumashiro in May-June 2012 issue of Academe
• Got Dough? Public School Reform in the Age of Venture Philanthropy, Joanne Barkan, Truth-Out via Dissent Magazine

Community Colleges: Who is having this Warhol Moment?

National leaders, in higher education, and these people called "practitioners," where do they come from? Consider, for instance, the following:

“Many of the full-time faculty who created the current levels of success for community colleges are retiring in hordes, with only a few graduate programs to prepare their replacements.”

Wow, not just a dearth of qualified replacements, for this community college version of the “greatest generation,” but also a dearth of grad programs that can bring them up to snuff.  This alarming, but not entirely accurate, news is from a article in a series on “completion rates,” sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and attributed to “national educational leaders and practitioners.”

The specific leader here, who has constructed his views around the idea that community colleges are enjoying their “Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame,” is Dr. Terry O’Banion of Walden University, a private for-profit. According to Modern Language Association’s handy site on the academic workforce, Walden employs exactly zero full-time tenure or tenure track faculty among its employees and, among the 1800 faculty reported, only 100 full-timers.

What to make of such an educational leader, then, when he writes  this: