Month: March 2014

There is nothing so ridiculous as the stereotype of the College Professor held by individuals who have never been to college. As with most stereotypes it takes a tiny kernel of truth (Yes, we are, on balance, more liberal than conservative) and takes it to an extreme so ludicrous that only a true dolt would mistake it for reality. And there are no bigger dolts than the people who sit around typing up apocryphal yarns that become memes and chain emails that you will eventually be forwarded by your Aunt.

Gawker is drawing some attention to "Marine Todd", a mind-numbingly stupid fake anecdote that has been around since the dawn of the internet and probably earlier. In it, a Marine college student shows his libtard atheist ACLU member professor who's boss by knocking him unconscious in the middle of class. It's your classic impotent white redneck revenge fantasy, a condensed meme version of the entire Death Wish series. Don't Christians believe in not physically assaulting people? Never mind.

Because a substantial number of Americans are dumb enough (or motivated enough) to believe such nonsense, I feel compelled to tell you what the daily life of a college professor is actually like here in the ol' Ivory Tower.
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My experience may not be applicable to every professor or institution, but I hope it is informative nonetheless.

The average class begins with the singing of the Communist Internationale or, when I feel like punching things up a bit, "Solidarity Forever." On most days I'll start off with reminders of the usual stuff they've heard a million times – God is gay and evil and also does not exist. Then I force students to reveal their religious affiliations and dress them down for being stupid enough to believe in the opiate of the masses. Around this time I will start a fire with Bibles and nativity scenes and all of the girls will burn their bras; male students are paired off and forced to kiss. I give extra credit if they go farther but "Heavy Petting" is the minimum level of Gay for anyone who expects to pass the course. Which course? It doesn't matter, this is how they all go.

Next I do the armpit hair check on the female students to make sure that they are not secretly using razors on their body hair – the final exam is braiding armpit hair into several required patterns.

Then we do some Man-Hating and study the blueprints of Ed Begley's solar car. The male students occupy themselves making dresses and then modeling the dresses for one another.
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If the weather's nice we'll go outside, sit in a circle on the Communal Tarp, and pray to Gaia for a few minutes to end the class on a positive note. If there's any time left we'll admire Andres Serrano's masterpiece Piss Christ and discuss reasons why taxpayer dollars should be funneled into the perverted or blasphemous arts.

In really large lecture-type classes I make some adjustments, of course, spending more time talking about the ACLU and looking at Mapplethorpe's work and a bit less time on cross-dressing. When we get far enough into the semester that the entire course has renounced God and religion, I force them all to convert to Islam. The whole course, though, is really designed to lead up to the final exam, which is to perform an abortion and a gay marriage simultaneously. There is also an essay component to explain why no one should be allowed to say "Merry Christmas."

All in all, being a college professor is nothing like most Americans think. It's a rather unexciting and repetitive process of making sure students reject Christianity and pledge their lives to secular humanism and Allah. I wouldn't describe it as an easy job, but it is highly rewarding to reach the end of a semester and see a classroom full of man-hating lesbian ACLU members where bright-eyed Patriots once sat.

That's when I know I've made a difference.

No matter how hard we try to change them, some things in life reek of inevitability. When you and your friends can't think of anything to do, you're going to end up sitting around getting drunk.
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When you can't decide what you want to eat, you're going to order the chicken. After auditioning everyone else on the planet, the Cowboys will go with Tony Romo again. And no matter how hard anyone tries, Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican nominee for president at some point.
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If not 2016, then 2020. If not 2020, then 2024. If he dies soon, then it will be one of his awful children. It's as if the nomination of Jeb Bush was foretold by a goddamn prophecy; absolutely nothing can be done to stop it.

Anointing a "Candidate of Inevitability" didn't work out terribly well in 2008 when we were all assured that the Democratic nomination was a mere formality on the path to coronating Hillary. Historically, though, Republican primaries tend to be much more predictable. Much as all the sound and fury in the world couldn't alter the inevitability of John McCain or Mitt Romney, the end of the brief love affair with Chris Christie has the GOP staring at a familiar set of options: they can nominate a total lunatic or they can go with an empty vessel, a rich, old white guy who sorta Looks President-ish and won't say anything completely insane into a microphone.

The push to "draft" Jeb is starting in earnest just as the gaggle of space-fillers shuffled off to Las Vegas to kiss Sheldon Adelson's ass in the hopes of being 2016's candidate who gets a blank check from the aging billionaire to stay in the race no matter how badly and often they lose. Perhaps the combined effect of seeing all of these losers in one place made the lightbulb go on for the seven-figure donors. Any hope that Christie will stop being a political liability was dashed by…Christie:

Invoking a 2012 trip he and his family took to Israel, Christie recalled in the speech: "I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories across and just felt personally how extraordinary that was to understand, the military risk that Israel faces every day."

That's what a smart man says to curry favor with billionaire right-wing ultra-Zionists.

Whatever the reason, a handful of these people apparently have enough contact with reality to realize that there are no winning horses in this stable. And so the inevitable is on its way:

Many if not most of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s major donors are reaching out to Bush and his confidants with phone calls, e-mails and invitations to meet, according to interviews with 30 senior Republicans. One bundler estimated that the “vast majority” of Romney’s top 100 donors would back Bush in a competitive nomination fight.
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Suddenly the only thing standing between America and eight years of Jeb Bush or, god forbid, Rand Paul is a 66 year old woman with health problems and almost equal numbers of people who like and despise her.
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There's no way this ends well.

Having grown up in (and returned to, like a bizarro-world Prodigal Son) the Midwest I am all too well acquainted with dying cities.
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All of the signs of torpor, the economic drain-circling, and the post-industrial malaise of the Daytons and Fort Waynes of the world are well known to me by this point. Or at least I thought I could spot them all; in the past year I've discovered a new Big Red Flag: boasts about the growing "health care sector" of the economy. It turns out that a booming health care sector is a way of saying "All the young people have left and someone has to care for our elderly, dying population."

Visit the website of any derelict Rust Belt city and search for references to the number of hospitals or the strength of the health care sector. It won't take long to find them. It turns out that along with local government and, of course, prisons, hospitals are one of the few things that remain open when everything else closes. They may not have jobs anymore, but someone still needs to lock 'em up and occasionally stitch 'em up. The hundreds of Fast Company-style articles in the business media over the past few years proclaiming nursing as THE NEXT BIG THING in the job market always puzzled me…is it really a sign of the strength of our economy when the best job (supposedly) is to take care of the rapidly increasing number of dying old people? There's reason to be alarmed when reading things like this:

Americans spent $2.6 trillion on health care in 2010 — ten times more than in 1980. That revenue boost has, in turn, driven job growth; the health care industry last year created more than 540,000 jobs in Michigan alone, making it the largest private employer in the state, according to the Detroit News. The trend holds true at the national level too, with the health care industry remaining one of the few reliant drivers of job growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis, according to The New York Times.

Hear that, Michigan? The auto industry may be gone but there's a good buck to be made sticking tubes and needles into the people too old, too poor, or both to flee the state.
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What is a quote like this other than an admission that our population is aging and, given our level of material wealth as a society, staggeringly unhealthy?
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We're number one! …in elderly diabetics.

No one seems to know what we'll do with all of these nurses and "home health care professionals" when the Elder Care Bubble bursts; thinking that far ahead has never been our strong suit.
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If the best thing that can be said about the economic condition of a city is that it has a lot of hospitals – you know, because a lot of its residents are on the verge of dying – then that city might not have a lot going for it. On the national level, if the best thing we can tell college students and adult job-seekers is that America is going gangbusters at generating sick people, we might want to step back for a moment and ask if that's the kind of growth industry that defines a strong economy.

Back in the early Aughts higher education administrators dreamed of online degree programs as the cash cow of the future, the goose that would never stop laying golden eggs. Universities everywhere, from community colleges to the lowliest four-year institutions to Top 50 AAU schools, began setting up online "extension" programs. These were marketed aggressively to non-traditional college students – working adults who might have a Bachelor's or Master's standing between them and a promotion or pay raise. Of course online education has grown exponentially since then, largely targeting the same audience (Drive around any major city and count the billboards with some combination of the terms Nursing, MBA, and Online and you will get some sense of just how big the industry of selling degrees has become). For the most part, however, after some brief forays at the insistence of the more profit-driven members of their administrations, Good schools have withdrawn from the market.

The obvious problem is that the quality of a Good school is linked to its reputation and, to a lesser extent, its selectivity. Part of the value of a Michigan or a Yale degree is that not any asshole with a credit card and a GED can buy one. And while online education programs are cheap to run – in almost any instance the instructor is a grad student or unemployed PhD working as an adjunct and earning as little as $1000 on a per-course basis – they are also terrible and generally target a population that requires the best (not the cheapest and least effective) teaching to succeed. Adult learners, by the numbers, rarely finish degree programs that they begin online. Poor and lower-class students attracted to online programs by low prices are the least likely to be able to self-direct through college with next to no guidance or one-on-one instruction.

But the greatest sin from the perspective of elite universities is that online programs cheapen the brand. Fairly or unfairly, an online degree program reeks of Cheap. It screams "rinky-dink." And if your school has an online program that gives it something in common with the Billboard Schools hawking Executive MBAs in as Little as Nine Months, then it becomes harder to attract traditional students to the much more expensive Brick & Mortar experience. Part of convincing parents and students to cough up $200,000 for four years of undergrad is being able to sell an image, and online degrees do not fit that image. Top-ranked universities can't sell degrees online for the same reason that Mercedes-Benz doesn't sell a $10,000 compact hatchback with plastic hubcaps and 80s-style vinyl seats; it doesn't change the fact that the $150,000 Mercedes S-Class is an amazing vehicle, but it sure changes the way people look at the brand.

The key, then, for university administrators has been to find a way to sell a substandard product that is cheap to produce but doesn't degrade the image of the school by handing out suspect degrees. That, my child, is where "lifetime learning" programs come into play.

I'm willing to bet you've never heard of Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI), but it has programs at over 120 universities right now ranging from elite private schools like Northwestern to run-of-the-mill state schools. OLLI is a program that offers courses to the elderly and/or retired – their mission statement says anyone over 50, but in practice the program attracts people of traditional retirement age, i.e. 70 and over – but does not give grades, assignments, or degrees. The students complete no work and get no credit for the class. It is, from what I imagine to be the students' perspective, an interesting way to fill some time. From the schools' perspective, it's a way to get people to pay tuition without having to give them a grade, credit, or a degree in return. And it looks great to the marketing department because it's, you know, Community Engagement and Outreach or whatever.

While not every university has an OLLI-affiliated program, hundreds of other schools have similar programs operating under a different acronym. And this market will only continue to grow in the future as higher education demands more Revenue Streams without increasing costs or making it more difficult for the school to attract 18 year-olds to the tune of $25,000+ per year. Adult programs like OLLI are ideal because they are invisible, making no mark on the school's enrollment or graduation figures and often meeting on nights and weekends at off-campus locations. The traditional undergrads, in many cases, won't even know the programs exist.

There's nothing intellectually dishonest about the idea; the elderly students know up-front that they are not receiving anything but a set amount of class time in exchange for their money. And that is precisely why programs like this will spread like wildfire in the next decade. The school looks good and makes money. The alumni and traditional students are unaffected even in the abstract. The older people who enroll get to learn something or go on rants before an audience or simply be entertained. It takes the original aims of adding online degree programs – generating revenue far in excess of the overhead costs by targeting students that aren't likely to finish what they start – and does away with even the pretense of seeking or awarding a degree.

Now when you see what looks like an airport shuttle bus with a university name and logo painted on its sides parked in front of a retirement home you won't have to wonder.

The conservative's answer to any and all complaints about working conditions and compensation is as familiar as it is invariant: "If you don't like it, quit." This is the kind of response that shows us the capacity (and fondness) for deep thought among the members of the Party of Ideas, the keenness with which they recognize the complexity of an issue and structure a response accordingly. For those of us who recognize that, you know, people usually have a job because they need it, issues about compensation, working conditions, and the like are not quite so black and white.

The remark reflects the central tenet of the conservative faith: that markets are efficient. Certainly the need to attract the best workers will drive wages upward, whereas if the job requires no particular skills the market will drive wages lower. Rather than debate the kindergarten-level simplicity of that worldview, I have a better question: If one's choices are reduced to working at a given job or being unemployed, is the labor "market" a market at all?

In a market, labor could choose among opportunities just as businesses choose among the labor pool.
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In the glorious New Economy, we are a nation full of people who know goddamn well that if they lose their current job it may be a very long time before they see another one. "If you don't like it, quit" makes sense in some ways if we assume alternatives; the guy who doesn't like what Ford pays can go to work for Toyota. If we replace that alternative with "Sit at home and go broke" or "Work for minimum wage in the service industry and not be able to support yourself anyway" then quitting isn't really a means of letting the market mete out some economic justice. It's a way of saying that your only option is to commit financial suicide.

I think about this a lot, and I hear it a lot from my (non-random sample of) friends and acquaintances in careers ranging from writing to food service to skilled trades to White Collar. The job I have right now took me four years to get. During that time I supported myself with temp work that barely kept me out of legally-defined poverty. If my employer treated me like shit (note: they don't) what would my options be, really? The odds of getting another job offer are statistically zero, even for the most successful people in this profession. I could choose between being gainfully employed or…quitting, and being unemployed. Alternatively, I could return to the herd of adjuncts making $11,000 per year. I'm fortunate to have a good job, but I have to be frank (Hi! I'm Frank!)…it really doesn't feel like I have any freedom, and the Job Market doesn't feel like much of a market at all. It feels like a thousand people in the water scrambling for 50 spots on a lifeboat. If you make it on board, someone else controls your fate. If you don't like it, you can always jump back into the water and drown.

I've never been one for broad conspiracies about a They that secretly controls all of our lives. It certainly is a better time to be an Owner than a worker bee, though. With the long-term unemployed numbering in the millions, most of us who don't live on a cushion of trust funds and inherited wealth cling to any stable employment we can find – and we're continually reminded that we should feel thankful to have it. In an actual market, an employee could do something about being underpaid or overworked or mistreated or stuck with a low standard of living.

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I'm no economist, but if that option is unavailable to all but a small segment of the labor force (bonus points for the first person who uses the comment section to brag about how you're in such high demand that you're sick of being offered jobs!) then the concept of market efficiency isn't even relevant.

If you have one job and it's the only job you can get, you could be in a true market and very bad at your job. That's what we're encouraged to think. But that changes if we reject the flawed premise that the "Labor Market" is anything close to what its name suggests.