Let us be dissatisfied

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So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. [,et us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home… Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied.

“Where do we go from here?” Dr. Martin Luther King, Speech, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 16 August 1967

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Professional, Union

Professors Talk About Adjuncts Shrugging

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Boston — Michael Bérubé’s address at this year’s Modern Language Association convention was one of a handful of times that I felt some real solidarity in the profession against the exploitation of the majority of our students and colleagues…

So hearing Bérubé as the president of the MLA call out higher education for more than 40 years of exploitation was a watershed moment for me, and, I am sure, many others in that packed ballroom: the first time I remember seeing an MLA president receive a standing ovation. I kept thinking of Jesse Jackson crying during Barack Obama’s presidential acceptance speech in 2008.

“What if the Adjuncts Shrugged?” William Pannapacker

I have to acknowledge this as a real watershed moment. Michael Bérubé’s MLA presidency and now this speech shows that the graduate student labor movement has gone from fighting the MLA to taking it over. I was around for some of that (here’s a piece I wrote about our efforts in 1998) although I was also never as fully enthusiastic about it as some of my friends and colleagues. Professional organizations have very limited powers.

In many ways, it seemed then– and now– that the MLA is largely a venue for the minority of guilty-minded tenured professors to bemoan the labor exploitation of the majority of their colleagues and then go home to their SUV’s and giant houses and job security and cats named Trotsky. I don’t want to appear as cynical as that might sound, but while I admire Bérubé and Neslon and the like, they swam in a vast sea of academic indifference.

That indifference, as the article says, has ment that most of us who were in graduate school in the 1990’s ended up outside of the tenure system without job security or much pay or health insurance. Bérubé’s speech suggests how far we have come, but as the article also points out the victory will have little practical effect. The MLA is finally on the right side of history, but it cannot provide the organizations we need to re-make higher education.

Posted in: Writing

Show Me the (Research) Money

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Alarmed by growing scientific research on the health risks created by the widespread prevalence of guns, the NRA and its Congressional allies stripped all funding for the Center for Disease Control’s gun research budget. They also inserted a provision into the CDC appropriation bills that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” deterring the CDC from providing significant funds to gun research ever since. As a result, the New York Times reports, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.” This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence, and the N.R.A. is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

“Biden: The White House Will Fight NRA’s War On Science” Zack Beauchamp

We know from other areas– evolution and climate change would have to top the list– that the American right is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-science. They don’t want public funding of science (unless it supports corporate profit) and when science tells them something they don’t want to hear, they start disinformation campaigns. They force religious dogma– creationism– into the school textbooks and they pretend to debunk climate science.

The damage this has done to our intellectual life is probably best measured by the damage to our coastlines, amplified by the public’s unwillingness to support measures that might slow down the global rise in temperature. We are more ignorant, as a culture, than we ought to be and we will be paying the price for decades. I suppose that I knew this but it turns out the right has long used the same tactics in the science of gun violence.

Here, the enforced ignorance, sponsored by the right, has cost us in the sorts of scientific knowledge we might have used to prevent the recent gun massacres. It also makes effective gun control measures now much less effective, which I suppose is the point. I think that restoring this research has to be high on the agenda if we have any hope of real change. It ought to be obvious that We can’t prevent gun violence unless we understand it.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Writing