The Clot at the Top

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Doug Henwood, the economist behind the Left Business Observer, has long claimed that one of the most intractable problems in U.S. culture and economics is our loss of an upper class with some sort of long term point of view beyond next quarter profits. Capitalism, Henwood suggests, has forgotten that domestic economic inequity is self-destructive.

Any reasonable oligarch would be unconcerned by the end of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; they don’t threaten long term profits. Any reasonable oligarch would want to shrink the gap between rich and poor, and wages to rise; if workers are poor economic growth is impossible. Any reasonable oligarch would favor the huge money saved through a single payer health care plan.

I am not sure the rich were ever really helpful but they did allow most of the New Deal to get through and Medicaire and so on. Reading this piece from a California professor, I feel the same way about university administrators. As a class they once saw their interests and the interests of the professors and students as aligned in some fundamental sense.

Now, as the writer points out, they’ve swallowed so much of the business and market Kool Aid, it seems almost impossible to imagine how they might change, short of being forced by a well organized faculty. That would provide the necessary counter-weight, but I am not sure that it would solve the more fundamental cultural problems. What is good administration?

Posted in: Professional, Union

Simple Truisms

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Along with this reminder, the struggles of the Progressive Era offer several lessons for today: First, the conditions academic workers enjoyed at mid-century did not emerge organically as the American university developed; they had to be fought for and won, and they require continuous defense. Rather than describing tenure as an “eroding” institution, for instance, we should see it as being dismantled. We need to locate and hold accountable the people and policies responsible for today’s retrenchment.

Second, professionalism cuts both ways. While organizing as professionals (as did the early AAUP) can provide and protect some autonomy and power, it can also promote the sense that professionals are above the rank of ordinary workers, thereby discouraging participation in labor-related struggles and encouraging a steep hierarchy within the work force.

“Intellectual Proletarians in the 20th Century,” Heather Steffen, Chronicle of Higher Education

I admit it. It’s the holidays and between the work that I didn’t get done over Thanksgiving and the shopping trip with The Child this afternoon, I am pressed for time. So I am going to cheat a little bit and simply point to a very helpful article by Heather Steffen that’s full of some very basic truths that I think we cannot be reminded of too often.

I was particularly happy to see her emphasis on struggle (over so-called organic development) and on holding ourselves and our administrators responsible for the choices that got us into this mess. Ms. Steffen implies something very hopeful: if we are in fact in more or less the same position that academics were a century or so ago, perhaps we are also on the cusp of a new progressive era.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Professional

Silos

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There was a point– I think in the late 1070s– when I realized that events and ideas and concerns seem to come in waves. If I remember correctly, I was struck then by a wave of explosions in grain silos. There seemed to be a period, perhaps over a year or more, when the things exploded one after the other. More recently, I’ve been struck by a what looks like an endless string of mining disasters. My students might call this sort of thing ironic, but it’s really happenstance.

Happenstance isn’t meaningless. So when I start seeing patterns, I pay attention. Most recently, as the last few posts would suggest, there’s been a suite of stories discussing the market, and the market’s relationship to education. Obviously, as a teacher in propitiatory education, this is a subject that I find relevant. Educators tend to see themselves as existing in a space or even a world separate from commerce, of course, even though the separation is apparent rather than real.

Still, education is supposed to give a student some distance from commerce, a perspective that puts the profit motive, with its short term thinking and often brutal self-interest, into a larger perspective. A market ideology would like us to believe, at some level, that the market epitomizes human nature and, as such, should be an object of veneration if not worship. It doesn’t, of course, any more than, say, a game of football sums up human nature.

Still, as Marx noted, exchange or trade is too deeply rooted in human culture to disappear anytime soon. Educators may not want to be business people, and we may believe that the market risks corruption, but we can’t ignore it. That’s why I like this piece on the University College London’s so-called technology transfer program. I think it shows that, with careful thought, the profit and not-for-profit motives can peacefully co-exist. It’s difficult but it’s possible.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

Another Market Fable

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Market irrationality’s darkest side is the way it so often so violently kills the geese that’s laid its golden eggs. The financial folks keep reinventing ways of making absurd amounts of money because their most successful inventions, derivatives being the most recent example, tend to explode. This time, too, due to another market innovation– the interlocking global capital markets– the self-destruction has led to a continuing world wide meltdown, from Iceland to Portugal.

In the wake of all of this we must be developing a whole slew of new aphorisms that all say something like, “when the banks mess up, the poor pay the bills.” Of course, there’s really nothing new in that at all. This, I think, ought to be the context through which we think about net-neutrality in general and Tim Berners-Lee’s recent piece, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” first published in the Scientific American.

Berner’ persuasively suggests that we are reaching an important turning point. If we kill the goose we won’t get any more eggs. It’s not too complicated, in the end, although the ramifications might be very completed as well as damaging. “The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth,” Berners says, is universality.” If it’s not universal; it’s not the web. If it’s not the web, (digital communications) innovation slows to a crawl or stops altogether.

Posted in: Economics, Professional