Monthly Archives: August 2012

It’s been an embarrassing pull-back-the-curtain week for stereotypical white man rhetoric. First the news that the Sears Catalog Model/ Republican, Mitt Romney, got a 0% in a NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll of African Americans. Earlier in the week Bishop Stephen Blair had declared Creepy Catalog Model/ Republican Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives budget immoral, due to its inadequate concern for “the care of the poor and the vulnerable.”

There’s the weird ambition to push birth control back to pre-Margaret Sanger via so-called “person-hood” laws.  When will they begin to try to prosecute people who talk about contraceptives under obscenity laws, just as they did Sanger? Not too long it seems. One Congresswoman, Lisa Brown, has already been slapped on the wrist for mentioning her vagina in a public debate about restrictive abortion laws.

As if the great shout out to the stereotypical white man weren’t enough, built on the racial trope that Obama “isn’t one of us,” now we toss in the return of the Welfare Queen in Romney’s claim– deemed false by anyone who looks at it– that Obama is eliminating the work requirement in welfare. What welfare? I’ve been unemployed for six months, in Obama’s liberal home state, and all I have gotten is minimal unemployment insurance.

The Sears Catalog Model lies, ignores the poor, and seems to need to control women.  He’s also out of touch with reality, as the “We Built This” night at the Republican convention rattles in the background on as I write , ridiculed by Rachael Maddow, and rightly so. The convention is happening in a publicly financed building and every speaker, despite their denials– like every American–has been helped by government programs.

…the consultants called for a narrow set of career-oriented majors, large teaching loads for faculty members and more hybrid (mixed online and in-person instruction) courses, and for recruitment to focus on traditional-aged, “driven” undergraduate students (the university’s current student body is composed largely of transfer students). Bain also recommended low tuition and increased enrollment.

“No Thanks, Bain” Kevin Kiley

“A significant number of these faculty members were part of a household that fell below the 2009 median household income in the United States: 21.6 percent reported a household income under $35,000, and 30.2 percent reported a household income under $45,000,” said the report. (According to the American Association of University Professors, an associate professor at a master’s-level public university had an average salary of $60,612 in 2010-11.)

“Non-Tenure-Track Economics,” Kaustuv Basu

In all the Republican convention hoopla in the next week, I have a feeling that the steady dissolution of U.S. higher education is not going to come up at all. The same bizarre logic that dismantled the old system– the idea that a business or profit model and not a public service model should be central to education– continues to be presented, again and again, as if it were a new idea, and as if we had no idea what the results would be. The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing again and again and expecting the results to be different.  The sweater-vest make over shouldn’t fool anyone. In the Republican future, everyone’s an adjunct.