Category: Rants

When I meet new people and tell them what I do for a living, one of the first questions I tend to get asked is what it's like to have college athletes in class. This is apparently the higher education equivalent of asking a cop, "Have you ever shot anybody?" and I enjoy answering it approximately as much.
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Are the athletes dumb? Do they come to class? Ever have any Famous ones? Here's my experience.

In general, student-athletes (the NCAA has cloyingly rebranded them "scholar-athletes") get a really bad rap. Most people don't understand how many hours per day their sport takes up. You don't have to feel sorry for them – in many cases they're getting a free education out of the deal – but their non-athlete peers are not getting up at 5 AM to work out for 3 hours before going to class and then practicing for 5 more after class. Compared to the average college kid who rolls out of bed at 11 AM with great difficulty, that's a heroic display of discipline.

And athletes come to class. They come to every class. Again comparing them to regular students, they are far better in this area. Most NCAA schools give them plenty of tutoring and academic help so it's fairly difficult to fail (and lose academic eligibility to play sports) as long as they show up. So most athletic departments have a near-zero tolerance policy for absences. We are asked to fill out progress reports for athletes constantly. Have they missed class? What are their grades? And so on. College students tend to skip class at the drop of a hat, of course.

Students who attend every class stand out. Sure, sometimes they're half-asleep in class (see above). I promise you there is nothing unusual about sleeping undergrads.

So. Are they as dumb as everyone assumes?

Not really. At my current institution, the two best students I've had so far are athletes. Certainly not every student-athlete is brilliant.

Some of them are the proverbial bag of hammers. Most of them are average. In other words, they're no different than any other group of undergraduates; they range from brilliant to how-did-you-graduate-high-school with most falling in the middle. It's a normal distribution, as far as I can tell. And unlike most students I don't have to ask them a half-dozen times to do the assigned work. Even the ones who are not very good at academic work try really hard in most cases, which is refreshing. These are competitive kids who don't like to lose. Compared to the general population their effort levels are off the charts.

Now, I'm not naive. I am certain that there are sports-crazy schools where athletes are given extensive leeway and strings are pulled to keep them eligible. It's equally certain that there are individuals, usually of the Superstar Athlete variety, who get every manner of special treatment imaginable and rarely appear in a classroom. That's a small group, though. The vast majority of NCAA athletes are anonymous and play sports in which "going pro" is not even a realistic option. For every famous Reggie Bush or Kevin Durant there are a thousand people on a tennis or track scholarship who you wouldn't recognize if you tripped over them.

The best part, in my experience, is that most Scholar-Athletes get it. They know they're not in line to make millions in the pros. Even at the giant SEC Football School I worked at, the football players I encountered knew exactly what odds they had of making the NFL. Or even the CFL. Or even Arena Football. They broadly understand, as the cheesy-ass NCAA slogan says, that they are going to go pro in something other than sports. So surprisingly few have that "Fuck it, I don't need this" attitude about classes and the work required to pass them.

In short, people who expect college athletes to be dumb and lazy should probably take an honest look at their own (or their own kids') performance as students. If athletes are dumb, they're no dumber than the other students. If they're lazy or they act entitled, it's because all students are pretty lazy and entitled these days. I just don't see any way in which student-athletes, even if they are bad students, are any worse than students in general. And in a number of ways they are clearly better – they show up and do what they're asked to do. Believe it or not, that's becoming an increasingly rare commodity these days.
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Let's put it this way: if I could get a class full of football players or a regular class I'd take the former. It would certainly be no worse and would most likely be better.

As a kid I made annual trips to Oak Brook, IL in mid-November with my family to knock out the Christmas shopping. Oak Brook was home to the Fancy Mall. People of the suburbs understand the typography of malls; there is the standard mall against which others are judged, the Good mall (with a Banana Republic instead of a Gap), the Bad mall (read: patronized by black people and mostly Foot Locker derivatives) and then the Fancy Mall containing exotic and expensive stores unknown to peasants. Oak Brook was a logical location for Fanciness, being the global headquarters of McDonald's. It will not surprise you to learn that those McDonald's folks have some serious money. Accordingly, Oak Brook is crammed with seven-figure homes and the kind of high end retail and "corporate campuses" that wealth attracts.

The funny thing about Oak Brook to me – I was a perceptive little bastard, and greatly unpleasant to be around no doubt – was that for a place built on the fortunes of a fast food megacorporation, there didn't seem to be any fast food places.

An eight year old, when picturing the World Headquarters of McDonald's, envisions the biggest Playland on Earth or perhaps a McDonald's with an eight lane drive-thru and seating for 1000.

But It was just a bunch of well maintained if totally bland office buildings. There wasn't even a regular McDonald's in sight. In fact there were hardly any fast food restaurants at all.

The irony that I grew to understand with age is that upper-middle class people who have made great sums of money building the McDonald's empire are, almost without exception, people who would not be caught dead in a McDonald's. Nor would they consent to having one in their neighborhood, with its gaudy, plasticky exterior dragging down property values and attracting Undesirables. They don't eat that stuff and they would never feed it to their kids. There are no McDonald's restaurants in swanky neighborhoods for the same reason there are no car title loan places or drive-thru liquor stores – because these establishments were invented by the well-to-do as a means to screw poor people for profit. I often say half-jokingly that if you see a product, service, or social institution that is enthusiastically supported, but not used, by rich white people then it's a safe bet that it exists to screw you.

Which, in an analogy that probably makes sense only in my mind, brings us to the School Reform industry. Why is it that the very wealthy are so vocal these days about reforming public schools that they would never send their children to anyway? Why are they so enthusiastic about "charter schools" and for-profit education models when they and their kids continue to go to elite, expensive private schools? Do you think the CEO of Kaplan, now extracting money from the masses under the guise of "Kaplan University", is going to send his kids to Harvard or to the school run by the company that has made him so rich?

I'll believe that McDonald's thinks its products are healthy when I see some statistics about how often its white collar employees eat there. I'll believe that online schools, for-profit colleges, and charter schools are superior educational options when I see a university president or EduCorporation executive with a degree from one or with kids enrolled in one.

A cynic might suggest that their tremendous enthusiasm for replacing traditional publicly funded education – which, to be certain, has plenty of problems – with privatized alternatives has less to do with academic excellence and more to do with money. They don't want to pay for public K-12 institutions and they want to figure out a way to line their own pockets with the money funneled toward higher education.

Education reformers are a mix of well intentioned if somewhat naive young people and hard, cynical predators who know a cash cow when they see one. Next time you encounter one, ask them where they went to school.

More importantly, ask them where their kids are enrolled. More often than not, the names of expensive private schools and elite public schools will roll off their lips in much greater numbers than any of the bogus alternatives they hawk to their social inferiors. That, in a dramatic oversimplification, tells you everything you need to know about School Reform.

Whether or not my senioritis-stricken students are getting anything out of it I can't be certain, but my seminar on political literature has given me a great opportunity to re-read some of The Classics. This week we're doing The Jungle. Everyone is assigned it at some point and I doubt many people read it. That's a shame.

The reason it's important goes beyond its rather ham-fisted message – Oliver Stone took most of his lessons in subtlety from Upton Sinclair – to accomplish things its author never intended. Sinclair lamented the fact that the message about socialism was largely lost on his audience. Not many people seemed concerned with the workers, whereas most readers were in an uproar about food safety. The author gave all of the characters flaws in order to make them more believable. As a consequence, many readers were more apt to moralize about personal responsibility than to sympathize with the extent to which the characters were brutally and systematically destroyed. Stop me if that sounds familiar.

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

This is what I mean when I describe college students, when I'm forced to generalize, as extremely conservative. They aren't necessarily hardcore political conservatives in the context of Washington politics, but they have thoroughly internalized the message that their parents and the media have been hammering them with since birth: everything that happens to you is your fault. There are no innocent victims of anything. This is a coping mechanism / cognitive bias called the Just World Phenomenon, wherein people victim-blame as a means of coping with the random cruelty of the world. Rather than accept that horrible things happen to good people – and, thus, that a horrible fate could befall them at any moment – people choose to retreat into the comforts of believing that everyone Had It Coming.

These are young adults who believe sincerely that since they have made Good Choices, nothing bad can happen to them for reasons beyond their control. The idea of being unemployed is literally incomprehensible to many of them – I'm in college and I even get decent grades, of course someone is going to hire me. This is where, as critics both liberal and conservative have often moaned, the constant self-esteem building of kids born in the 1990s shows its ugly side. Each student tends to believe that he or she is special and smart and the world, being a meritocracy, cannot fail to recognize this. Some of this simply is the normal naivety of youth that only life experience can erase. I honestly believe, strictly as a matter of opinion, that the hyper-individualism that dominates post-Carter politics is influential as well.

Sometimes I try to push back when this rears its head in the classroom, despite the obvious futility. What if your job gets outsourced to Asia? Well, I would never enter a field where that could happen, or I would Get More Education and change fields. Oh, I see. That should do it. It does not occur to them that their employers will be able to cornhole them with abandon, as they see themselves and unique, irreplaceable, and thus able to dictate their own terms. If they don't like it, they can quit and find another job. How hard could that be? They see the bleakness of the economy all around them, yet they see themselves as impervious to it.

This is the real value of reading The Jungle for kids of this generation – the message about unions and socialism may be lost on them, but it's hard to miss the message that shit happens. Bad things are going to happen to you. People are going to screw you and you won't be able to do anything about it. As you age, the market will do all that it can to purge you from the workforce. You will get sick. The fine print Terms & Conditions that no one, anywhere, ever reads will bite you in the ass at the worst possible times. There is much we can do to prepare ourselves to weather everything that life is going to throw at us, but we can't make ourselves invincible.

This is a generation that sees everything they do wrong as someone else's fault but everything that happens to other people as a matter of personal responsibility. Reading a tale of hard working, well intentioned people getting reamed by a corrupt system even as they work themselves to literal death might be an eye-opener. Sure, it will sail right over the heads of some of them. I feel, though, that the understanding that the world is not fair, life is hard, and getting by is often a tremendous struggle is a necessary precondition to having meaningful political attitudes. The idea that everything that happens to individuals in our society is their own fault poisons our entire culture, from our politics to our communities. People like Sinclair saw through this over a century ago, but somewhere along the way we chose to forget.

My current city is essentially a company town.
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There is a bit more here than simply Caterpillar, but everything else lags far behind one of the fifty largest corporations on Earth with $100 billion in assets and operations in something like 100 countries. It is not an overstatement to say that Cat runs the show around here; all local governing is done with the company's blessing and most of the very small number of things to do here are funded directly or indirectly by the company coffers.

As is the case with all company towns, the city has risen and fallen with the fortunes of its great patron.

At least it used to, that is. Now the company continues to rise and the city continues to fall, as it has followed the trend of closing up facilities here in its Midwestern home and shifting them to developing countries or, if they really feel like slumming it, the deep South. In fact, on the day I moved from Athens to Peoria, Cat announced the closure of a Peoria manufacturing facility to be replaced by a new facility in Athens complete with the usual Southern governments' buffet of free money, tax abatements, infrastructure investments, and promises of a docile $10/hr workforce. I can say without exaggeration that I was traded to Peoria for a major industry to be named later.

So while the city lives and dies by the company, there is less of the company here with each passing year. Part of the reason is the quest for cheaper labor and more obsequious state and local governments. Another part of the reason is that Peoria is a world-class dump. Think Flint, MI or Youngstown, OH with the headquarters of a major global corporation plopped in the center. I've said enough about it to fill volumes; suffice it to say here that Caterpillar does not relish bringing leaders in the business world to Peoria. It's pretty embarrassing.

This isn't idle speculation; I know a handful of white-collar Caterpillar folks, and they complain regularly about the condition of the city.

They have berated the city government for lacking suitable hotels (now being built or remodeled downtown with plenty of "incentives"), restaurants, entertainment, or airport. The downtown looks neat from a distance but up close is an abandoned Scooby-Doo ghost town. They have legitimate complaints.

However, they also seem ignorant of their own role – arguably the leading role – in the city's decline from the post-War boom years to its present sorry state. Whenever Cat people, be they acquaintances or the top executives on TV and at city council meetings, complain about what a dump they inhabit I have to suppress the urge to say, "That's funny, because it looked a lot less like a dump when you had 30,000 factory workers here compared to the few hundred here now." And by "suppress the urge to say" I mean that is what I say.

This is not new; General Motors has been doing it to Detroit for years, as have General Electric, Kodak, Dow, and other companies that make up the crumbling cities of upstate New York.
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They openly pine for the neatly manicured office buildings, suburbs, and downtown chain restaurants of a Phoenix, Dallas, or anywhere-in-Florida. And they criticize their cities – cities and people that have bent over backwards to make them the enormous successes that they have been for a century or more – as though some exogenous force (alien invasions, perhaps) have destroyed everything. It never occurs to them that if they would like the city to be full of the kinds of things that sprout up wherever sizable populations with disposable income exist then perhaps they should stop cutting the workforce and perhaps even consider expanding it. Of course, that suggestion inevitably leads into the race to the bottom that is modern competitive federalism – why stay here when Alabama's politicians are willing to write blank checks and its people are willing to work for half as much because Freedom?

For people and institutions who hold the principles of capitalism so dear, they sure do seem to struggle with "You get what you pay for."

Recently we had a campus visit day, the highlight of which is watching high school students try to act cool while walking around campus with their parents. As this is scientifically proven to be impossible, hilarity ensues.

As I walked to my car I saw a group being led around by a student tour guide who I recognized from class. I said hello and made some sort of PG joke like, "You didn't show them the dorms with the mold problem, did you?" Oh, Ed. You card. She explained to the group that I was one of her professors last year.

Side note: I have a pretty swell car. It was not terribly expensive (more on that in a minute) but I take exceptional care of it. Having just spent the Labor Day weekend working it over with an orbital buffer, it currently looks like it just rolled out of the factory. Eyeing the car, one of the parents said "Well I guess that's why tuition is so high!" Ha ha ha. Good one. Laughs all around. Here's the thing. Two, actually.

First, it's ridiculous to assume that I bought the car new.
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I bought it used after stalking it on eBay for six goddamn months and getting the dealer to agree to a ridiculous deal. I paid less for a used BMW than, for example, a new compact car like a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla. If I was getting into a 2013 Honda Civic, would anyone be making jokes about my extravagant Professor Lifestyle?

Second, although it was clearly intended as a harmless joke, parents (and students) are constantly telling us we make too much money. To our faces. Students will flat-out tell us, "Tuition keeps going up because of professor salaries." This is not only beyond inaccurate – tuition increases are happening because of the money schools spend on 1) administrators and administrative salaries, which have increased five-fold since 1990, and 2) infrastructure. The money essentially goes to people the students never see and to their fancy new gyms and dorms and classrooms and all the other stuff they demand to turn college into the four-year middle class kids' vacation that it is becoming.

The implication is that I don't look poor enough. As a professor, if they see me in anything other than a Carter-era sportcoat as I load my dilapidated briefcase into a 1983 Volvo station wagon, then clearly they're being ripped off. If I can afford anything other than tuna and ramen, then obviously the school needs to pay me less. Professors shouldn't have anything new or fancy-looking; those are our tuition dollars!

This is a mild version of something I see and hear constantly – complaints that The Poor don't look sufficiently poor. God help you if you're within earshot of a Hard Working American when they see a poor person with an iPhone or a fresh hairdo. WHY ARE YOU SPENDING MY HARD EARNED TAX DOLLARS ON BLAH BLAH BLAH. Maybe her friend did her hair for her, or maybe she bought the iPhone second-hand or received it as a gift. But the point is, this poor person does not look sufficiently poor. If you're on food stamps or Medicaid or anything that even tangentially involves a tax dollar, Americans want to see you wearing rags, smeared with dirt, and eating gruel. How dare anyone who's poor try to have some self-respect and look decent.

Certainly I have things a lot easier than the poor people everyone loves to judge as a spectator sport. But the principle at the heart of this kind of self-important behavior is the same: that people should look a certain way based on their perceived status. How dare poor people wear, eat, or own anything nice. We don't just want people to be poor, we want them to look poor so we can feel better about our own status. Everybody just loves a good bitch-and-moan about what the undeserving Others are doing with their Hard Earned Money.
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It never occurs to them that I also have to work hard to earn money (conservatives in particular believe that they personally invented the concept of hard work and nobody except them has ever done a day of hard work worthy of the compensation received) or that I might not be as well-off as something superficial like the brand of car I drive suggests. It never occurs to them that maybe my income is pretty modest but I happen to have no dependents, a low cost of living, and a fondness for ludicrously fast German sports cars. No, it must be that my nonexistent Professor Union guarantees me a six-figure salary that necessitates annual tuition increases.
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But that's where we're at after thirty years of lurching to the right as a nation. We see public employees attacked for having pensions and insurance, as anything other than a subsistence wage for people who take Our Hard Earned Money is too extravagant. How it must please our financial elite to see us shrieking at our peers for earning too much money like crabs pulling one another back down into the bucket.

Say you were the president of a large, middling public university and you had to find a way to compensate for declining state funding. If your first reaction is, "We should build a $246,000,000 football stadium for our thoroughly mediocre team!" then you might have a future in university administration, at least at Colorado State University.

In much the same way that "Tax cuts create jobs!" is an article of faith among conservatives despite all evidence to the contrary, "The athletic program will draw out-of-state students" is an article of faith among the university brass. State universities rarely have trouble attracting enough in-state enrollment, as "cheap and close to home" are two powerful selling points for the parents of college-bound students. However, what universities and state legislatures really love are the out-of-state students who can be socked for two, three, even four times as much tuition. State legislators know that their constituents will be angry if in-state tuition rises. And the people affected by out-of-state tuition don't vote for the Colorado state legislature so the political cost is zero.

The question, however, is what would draw kids from other states to Colorado State. No offense to CSU, which I'm sure has fine programs, but there isn't much to make it stand out among the hundreds of other similar, and often cheaper, public universities. People from all over the country will apply to elite schools like UC-Berkeley or Michigan, but the many universities that fall into the Average category are nearly indistinguishable. What distinguishes Colorado State from Washington State from Illinois State from Southern Florida? We could argue that one is as good as any other, and therein lies the rub.

Despite low attendance (sub-30,000) at the current stadium, CSU boosters appear to think that a quarter-billion dollar 40,000 seater will soon be filled with fans and drawing in students from all over. This logic is questionable at best for reasons that should be obvious. The string of assumptions is perilously thin – that great football stars will start choosing CSU because of its stadium, that the team will become a powerhouse, and that a good team will bring in students from California and so on. That certainly could work. It also very easily might not work. There are dozens of other big universities trying the same trick, many of which – Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Auburn, Wisconsin, Ohio State, UCLA, and so on – are quite good at it, way ahead of an upstart program, and, not insignificantly, not located in Fort Collins, CO.

The science of trying to define what high school kids look for when choosing a college is the closest thing to alchemy that one can get paid to do these days. It's tough to model irrational or quasi-rational decision making, and who knows what combination of factors will or will not bring more applications to CSU. What is certain is that the $250 million stadium will be an enormous yoke around the university's neck for years to come, and it might be a crushing burden if it hosts half-empty football games. Having a big-time athletic program is indeed a good drawing card, but CSU's booster appear to be overestimating the ease with which an Alabama-caliber football program can be built.

This week I'm checking an item off the bucket list: assigning Watchmen to a bunch of college students and getting paid to talk about it. It's a delightful tale of – spoiler! – the dangers inherent in disregarding all morality to further what one perception of the greater good. A story in which deeply flawed characters, and one in particular, act on the belief that they've figured out what's best for society is a compelling way to explore ends-justify-means morality. It might even be applicable to current events. Somehow.

The House Republicans' position for the past few weeks is simple to understand: They've decided that health care reform shouldn't happen and it's OK to subvert the democratic process or fly the economy into a skyscraper in order to stop it because goddammit we're right. They know better than the courts, the president, the voters, or the Congress that passed the law.

They have Truth and Rightness and Freedom and Bald Eagles on their side, so anything they do is justified. If people end up dying, so be it.

They can make a disingenuous "I've made myself feel every death… see every innocent face I've murdered to save humanity" speech when their imagined victory comes.

Conservatives are motivated solely by fear. That's it. Fear of the unknown, fear of things that are different, fear of change, fear that the government is coming to take what they inherited, and fear of a world in which they're not guaranteed social superiority and the institutions of society do not cater to them. Right now they're afraid and they've talked themselves into a pseudo-religious frenzy to (over) compensate for it. The House Republican caucus looks like a group of kamikaze pilots attending their own funeral before their voyage into immortality. True, the actual kamikazes just flew obsolete planes into the ocean and accomplished nothing. But this time will be different!

What they're afraid of is simple: they are afraid that everyone is about to discover how full of shit they are. This pattern repeats itself. Think about every time there have been changes to the legal status of gays and lesbians. The right has predicted the downfall of western civilization each time, and each time the law changes and…crickets. Tumbleweeds. Nothing happens. It turns out that the military wasn't brought to its knees by the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". The troops are not too busy cross-dressing and 69ing each other to do their jobs.
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All of their dire end-of-world predictions came to absolutely nothing. And that's what will happen again when this law goes into effect. More people will funnel money toward insurers – Remember how the Commie Socialist law is actually a handjob for the insurance industry? – and more people will enjoy the same frustrating, generally lousy, better-than-nothing health insurance that the rest of us have.

The death panels, the rationing, the six-month waits to see a doctor (which people with HMOs already have, but I digress), the skyrocketing costs, the doctors going out of business…none of it is going to happen. The Republicans are now backed into a corner; they are forced to recognize among themselves that they've been feeding the public a giant ration (see what I did there?) of horseshit at the behest of their beloved Job Creators and now the jig is up. They absolutely must stop the law at all costs or else face a future of half-assed explanations to Fox News hosts about why the dire predictions didn't come to pass. Maybe Dr. Manhattan/Ronald Reagan saved America with his super powers.
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Because they're afraid they've convinced themselves that this is a jihad, an epic quest of principle and morality. In reality it is nothing more than a political ploy, a smattering of dilatory tactics arising from too many late-night masturbation sessions with a copy of Robert's Rules of Order during their formative years interning for the Heritage Foundation and dad's company. The only principle at play here is the basest kind of self-interest; they are terrified to be revealed for what they really are, and now they are scrambling. At first glance they might appear to be willing to burn down the village in order to save it. In reality, they're willing to burn it down in order to save themselves.

How noble.

Most "Government 101" type textbooks begin with a wordy introductory chapter about why government exists. This takes students through basic concepts like the use of politics to solve problems without resorting to violence and collective action problems. CAPs are a very basic kind of problem wherein what is good for an individual (especially in the short term) is not good for the whole. As the recently-mocked Ezra Klein notes, the study of Congress is basically the study of CAPs. The current "efforts" (inasmuch as political kabuki theater counts) to shut down the government are a perfect example; each individual Republican benefits from trying to shut down the government but the party as a whole is likely to suffer badly if it happens.

Individual Republican legislators benefit because trying to shut down the government appeases Teabagging types and lessens the odds of a primary challenge from the right. This situation has been a challenge for the congressional leadership structure for 230 years. Leaders like Boehner & Co. traditionally rely on persuasion to keep members in line. As Klein says, "Threats, flattery, fundraising money, and plum committee assignments are all deployed to keep members of Congress from undermining the group in order to help themselves." In other words, the ability to talk individual members into supporting the collective good depends on the leadership being able to offer rewards that members cannot get elsewhere.

One of the problems the current House GOP is discovering, aside from the general recognition that Boehner is terrible and the backbenchers are a collection of rubes, zealots, and morons, is the fact that fundraising money is no longer an effective carrot. For that, the party has only itself to blame. By fighting so hard for the changes that were ushered in by the Citizens United decision, Republicans created a system in which individual candidates or members of Congress can get gobs of money without the party's help. All they need is a cranky billionaire in their corner or sufficient ideological extremity to ensure access to the Tea Party / FreedomWorks / Koch Industries trough of money. John Boehner's threat to withhold funds from the National Republican Congressional Committee doesn't exactly leave any members, even freshmen, quaking in their boots.

Whatever misfortunes befall the House GOP at this point are rooted in their decades of advocacy for unlimited campaign spending. They got what they wanted and now it is coming back to bite them in the ass. There's only so much the Speaker and Majority Leader can do to sway members with talk of committee seats. When the ability to get elected and re-elected depends more on groups outside of the party than on the party itself, you're not going to have a very cohesive party. If, hypothetically, your members were mostly none-too-bright extremists, you might end up with quite a mess on your hands. When the members are more afraid of the donors and Tea Party groups than the leadership, the collective action problem becomes nearly impossible to resolve.

They have made their bed – let them lie in it. With a Koch brother of their choice. I hear Charles is a cuddler.

This story about Margaret Mary Vojtko, a recently deceased former adjunct faculty member at Duquesne University ($32,000 annual tuition, exclusive of room and board), made the rounds on the internet late last week. Eventually NPR picked up on it, which makes perfect sense. It's a hanging slider in the strike zone of NPR's core demographic, touching on higher education, poverty, and people falling through the cracks of society.

I am glad this story has gotten exposure. The "adjunctification" of higher education has happened rapidly and mostly in the shadows for the past twenty years. Some estimates now suggest that half of all college courses are taught by adjuncts or other non-permanent faculty. For the unaware, adjuncts reside on the bottom of the academic totem pole. They have no formal affiliation at the schools where they teach. They are paid a flat rate per course with no guarantee of future employment and no access to the benefits available to full-time employees. They are essentially migrant workers; they often spend careers wandering from place to place and it is not unusual for adjuncts to make ends meet by teaching at multiple institutions simultaneously. An adjunct who picks up four courses per semester and perhaps another two in the summer might clear $25,000-30,000 before taxes without insurance, retirement plan, or transportation costs.

There are many reasons one becomes an adjunct. Many adjuncts are outstanding teachers who end up adjuncting because of bad luck, bad timing, or family factors (i.e., the need to stay in a city where no jobs are available because of a spouse's job). Others could not finish their Ph.D. and thus are limited in the type of employment they can obtain in higher ed. Some are adjuncts because they're not very good at their job. In other words they are like the workforce in any other industry: some are outstanding, most are average, and some are bad.

From administrators' perspective, adjuncts are great. They have no power, they cost next to nothing, and undergraduates rarely know the difference among the various "classes" of faculty. Hiring adjuncts saves valuable resources that administrators can spend on their own salaries, more administrators, new buildings, and other non-essential, non-academic things. The number of adjuncts is somewhat limited at prestigious institutions, as their presence hurts the school in magazine rankings and overall reputation. But at schools that don't care about prestige and operate on volume (especially the kind that teach non-traditional students (read: grown ups with jobs) adjuncts can make up almost the entire faculty. Words like "extension", "online", "night classes", "branch campus" and any adjective indicating a direction on a compass are a giveaway that few permanent, full-time faculty will be found in classrooms.

In a world in which we have "permanent temps" in the workforce it's not surprising to find quasi-permanent adjuncts as well. Vojtko was at Duquesne for over 30 years. The school was probably glad to have her; she taught essentially a full professor's courseload for 1/3 the total cost. She was probably glad to have, at least informally, regular work in one place. Between the low pay and lack of benefits, it is neither unusual nor surprising to hear that a lifetime adjunct in her eighties died in poverty, especially given that she had cancer. You can read the sad story in the original op-ed piece.

With all that said, two things jump out at me as I read and re-read this story.

First, the implication that the university should have continued to employ her is dubious. I can count on zero fingers the number of people who teach effectively at age 83 in my career. A small percentage of professors teach well into their late seventies and beyond, but they are outnumbered by the ones who should have hung up their spurs years ago. In Vojtko's case I can't imagine that an 80+ year old with cancer – a person who probably belongs in an assisted living facility – was effective in the classroom. I don't know her. She may have been a good teacher. There is reason to be skeptical, though.

Second, where are Medicare and Social Security in this story? As far as I understand these programs, an 83 year old should have been more than a decade into her eligibility for both. Social Security certainly doesn't provide for a luxurious lifestyle, but it's enough to keep the power on. Medicare might not be the finest insurance plan on the planet, but certainly it should have given her access to hospital care and prescription drugs. How was this woman completely uninsured?

A few odd details aside, this is a story that needs to be told. Academia is not different than the rest of the economy, constantly drifting toward the elite utopia where salaries are low, job security is nonexistent, benefits are a dream, and the people at the top are rewarded ever more handsomely for their combination of stinginess and sheer ignorance. It's a world in which the people who do the actual work are treated as disposable and the con men in Management require ever-growing compensation to keep doing the grueling work of cutting costs.

This is the future. We have seen it, and it blows.