The Great Brain Drain

The ideology of the brain drain, I guess, is that a nation that is a world leader needs to be at the cutting edge of research and development, and in order to do so, it must attract and keep the best and most talented scholars not just in the domestic contexts of the 50 US states, but globally from every nation in the world. The academic brain drain that lures in thousands of new Americans every year at upper middle-class lifestyles, is really part of a larger phenomenon of American-led globalization that was up until the collapse of the Internet bubble a few short years ago bringing in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of technical experts, engineers and other computer techies with the promise of solid middle-class incomes. Now, the shift is towards "out-sourcing" labor, even more profitable than "in-sourcing" brains and without the rising controversy over violated and meaningless immigration laws, uncontrolled overpopulation and self-induced over-saturation of the social systems. But the brain drain itself, focused in Higher Education, continues today even worse than it did a quarter century ago.

For the last 25 years, about 50 percent of all academic jobs in higher education in the US (grades 13 and above) have been going to foreign born scholars, many of whom were not event trained in the US, and in the last decade, this percentage has even increased to as much as 60 or 70% in some fields of scholarship. These are statistics that are not overtly advertised--they are "privileged access" only reserved for Administrators with sufficient security clearance to be trusted with the inside truth. But one can do one's own calculations if enough of the facts are available between the lines of publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education or if one merely attends classes year in and out long enough to count the number of new professors being hired and where they come from.

With the curtailing of positions and the administrative restructuring of how higher education is taught, this has meant a dramatic bottlenecking of jobs available for qualified American candidates in American schools. In my own field, for instance, a decade ago about 600 new PhD's were produced each year, to fill on average about 250 open positions--at least half of these open positions were preferentially reserved or provided for foreign scholars, de facto by being foreign, thus turning the chance of realistically landing any one of the remaining 125 positions or so a real beauty contest, especially when it is considered that the backlog of qualified but unemployed candidates had been growing with each passing year for a decade previously.

This bottlenecking was even more exacerbated when somewhat mindless Affirmative Action committees has a final say in the selection process. One instance of a friend, in 1989, who was a well published American socio-linguist from Edinborough, who could only beat a far less qualified Black woman from the position by obtaining a doctor's certification that he had a mild form of cerebral palsy. For those of you who still need the obvious explained, he was not hired for a junior position in an English department on the basis of his qualifications as a scholar and linguist, but because "a disabled" card beats a "black queen" card. Aggressive, sycophantic affirmative action that handicapped both minority and standard White American scholars, albeit in reverse and different ways, not only structurally embedded double-standards in otherwise open systems, but it had the effect of further bottle-necking what few remaining positions leftover that were available for the "Average" Heinz-57 American scholar.

If one was really lucky, one could hope to get stuck in a trajectory of taking part-time, temporary positions for the rest of one's career, to become Freeway Jockey's working two or three different Junior Colleges on a schedule that permitted little latitude for further writing and publication and had no hope of ever gaining promotion to a tenurable position. If not all scholars were treated equal, neither were all positions equal as well.

A true beauty contest it was, as during this time it was not unusually for departments to receive hundreds of applications from qualified candidates for only single position. Hardest hit in fact were the traditional "pure" sciences, Physics, Chemistry, but also the Social Sciences and Humanities. Accompanying this was a shift of effort and focus by departments and by specialists, away from theoretical and methodological issues, towards "peanut butter" improvement efforts, with the final measure of status and success being the size of one's grant.

Of course, this restructuring occurred in other ways--we needed to bring in a new class of administrator, one who could be sycophantic and loyal enough to do government bidding, keep class secrets, and operate effectively both behind and in front of closed doors. Therefore, administrators were deliberately recruited from senior ex-military staff as well as from other government agencies like the CIA.

If this smacks of something of a grand "holocaust" like conspiracy, it in fact was a deliberate, planned and well coordinated effort by agencies and parties within the Federal Government. And the degree to which this deliberate, planned effort was acted upon in blanket collusion across the country is indeed remarkable. It lead indirectly to the situation where people of the ilk of the 9/11 terrorists could easily obtain student visas, supported by their national representatives in the various institutions. It was obvious that many Arab people's new the plot of 9/11 before it unfolded, as demonstrated by their sudden jumping ship the weeks before, and it is most probably that the Federal government at the highest and most "secretist" levels also new about the plot, or at least of a plot, but decided to wait and let it happen, providing the current administration the excuse they needed to perpetrate their own war-making agenda. Of course the information and facts needed to prove these allegations will never be presented in public context, but the pattern is there to arrive at sound conclusions in a deductive manner.

The consequences of the restructuring of Higher Education have been numerous and have set in motion an entire train of reverberatory changes for our Great Society as a whole. The main consequence has been to foist somewhat arbitrary and hypocritical double standards on selection practices/policies in different fields of study. Specialists and experts in the field of study were no longer allowed the final say or privilege of choosing their own candidates, but this became a major political decision subject to an administrative committee. We can speak accurately of the academic banalization of once respectable academic fields and the institutions that supported these fields. The expectation was no longer that one might work on the problem of a unified field theory, but that one could engineer a better depleted uranium projectile or even focus more exclusively on non-trivial topics like the "the plight of middle class women with red hair in the air-line industry."

There has been a grand paradox about all this, though it is harder and harder to gain entry into club paradise, the scholars performing at higher and higher levels are increasingly mediocre and less productive in non-trivial ways. This is completely parallel to another pattern predominant in Higher Education, the restructuring of the business management, especially of publicly mandated/funded institutions, for generating profits and increasing revenues.

Though these same institutions have restructured themselves for the sake of generating greater yearly revenues, they are increasingly in greater debt at year's end due to bad spending habits. And the money being spent doesn't all go into the classroom or translate directly or necessarily into improvement of the average student's quality or enrichment of education for their educational dollar. No, it has gone into grandiose construction projects, new Stadiums, Parking Structures, Alumni Centers, in which cost overruns are exorbitant and expected.

It was a grand paradox indeed, that the Institutions of Higher Education could not keep up with rising costs, even though they were themselves generating the increased costs through their own deliberate planning and misspending. There was no sense of conservative management of spending and blanket budgeting of resources, of postponement of large-scale construction projects for the sake of saving the music program or the positions of a few up and coming scholars. There was even less sense of public or open accountability of the public funds that were being misappropriated.

Accompanying the initial push towards academic restructuring, those with Master's degrees (traditionally considered to be "teaching" degrees) were systematically pushed out of the halls of paradise, to make room for the influx of foreign PhDs, etc. This essentially meant down-grading, almost destroying, the social value that was attached to holding or obtaining a Master's degree, for Americans mostly, and everything below it (Bachelor's, Associates) and it meant at the same time raising the Bar on entrance requirements for tenured lectureship/professorial positions, such that every school, even otherwise very local and minor institutions, were seeking the biggest names possible, the largest ego for their dollar, the most academic bang for their buck. Institutions began setting unrealistic and unobtainable standards for paradise, and this has largely served to obfuscate the systematic promotion of double standards through mindless affirmative action quotas and closed door manipulative practices that has bordered on outright conspiracy and corruption. This essentially closed the gates of paradise and eliminated further any preparatory or internship platforms that provided new and upcoming scholars the means to further their education and research to more mature levels of development.

At the same time, the mandate to have long lists of publication at junior and beginning levels was also received and acted upon, thus excluding de facto the majority of beginning scholars who were just at the start of their publishing career rather than at the end of it. Publish or Perish became the survivalist imperative the 1980's and early 1990's, no matter what the forum of publication or the intrinsic quality of what was being published. This imperative disguised the fact that the selective biases affecting who and what got published during this time, as a part of the predominant culture of correctness, was as strong as and largely reflected in profile the similar kinds of selective biases influencing hiring committees in the academic institutions in the first place. This was a wonderful marriage of fortuitous happenstance, and no one bothered to ask any questions or point any fingers at obvious double standards then fully promulgated.

The outcome was, amidst the wonderful "celebration of a new-found sense of diversity" with the importation of foreign scholars, often with dubious degrees and credentials, with no true understanding of American culture or values and little sense of loyalty to anything but their own advancement, the smuggling of a covert and strict culture of conformity, that one must do one's bidding, participate in the hierarchy of power, and manipulate like hell in the raging corridor grape-vines. The sense of hypocrisy and ego-aggrandizement this generated--the puffery and poofery of self-possessed scholars who could do no wrong except think for themselves, was astounding and remains even more so.

Of course, the functional role of higher education being in part the reproduction of the common knowledge stock, and the symbolic legitimization of the received reality of the larger social order, the administrators and their henchmen could count on the fact of turning the mind of the public through misinformation, through rationalization and through justification of policies on rather shallow and fragile platforms of defense. Thus what developed was an all powerful culture of correctness, that, while not overtly constraining freedom of thought and speech, at least implicitly put such freedoms on the annual budget chopping block. And of course, because modern academicians are not known so much for their courage as for their armchair hypocrisy and funding self-interest, there has been very little resistance to the predominant trends towards conservative conformism.

There is therefore more than a little bit of self-fulfilling prophecy in all this, as long as one buys enough into the grand illusion of our Great Society. De facto those who get the job must be the best and the brightest, and those who have no chance of a job must simply not be good enough. I've had fairly senior anthropologists, who should know better, and in fact secretly do, express publicly these kinds of opinions to me. In such justification, there can be no sense of contradiction or double-standard at play, for to admit such double-standards would be to admit one's own hypocrisy and complicity in such a culture. De facto those who keep the job, year after year, however truly mediocre, do become better than those who are, year after year, denied a job, and this itself becomes proof that the system has been working the right way--there is in this a modus tollens fallacy of a consequence being used to prove a cause.

Experience of the last couple of years is demonstrating clearly to me as well that the same model that was "successfully" articulated upon Higher Education, to such astounding consequences as blanket Academic banalization, are now being foisted in a concerted manner from federal and state levels upon most public institutions of lower education, even to the point of surreptitiously importing and preferentially hiring foreign born and foreign trained teachers, while simultaneously and consistently raising the bar on standards to be met by domestic American born teachers. Of course, accomplishing the same grand goals at the local level of most elementary schools is a far more challenging task than it proved to be for the most prestigious academic institutions in the nation and the world, but we can only "hope" for outcomes that will be much further reaching and more intractable than any of the reforms done in relation to higher education.

The net consequence is bound to be the destruction of public education upon all levels as a viable institution and platform of democratic society, and the shift toward privatization of education, with all the attendant problems of profit-making institutions involved in collective areas of responsibility, as has been demonstrated in medicine, communications, transportation, etc., from which the Federal government has consistently washed its hands in the area of centralized control and regulatory functions.