Sharon Van Etten – Save Yourself
Permanent Austerity
The adjuncts tend to teach core classes at Duquesne, and Cech noted the adjuncts’ lack job security because if their classes do not fill up, they are not guaranteed employment. Adjunct faculty members make up 40 percent of the liberal arts instructors and can earn up to no more than $10,224 in yearly salaries while full-time assistant professors within the liberal arts make a yearly salary of $65,300.
“Part-Timers At Duquesne Unionize With the United Steelworkers“
I’m always thinking that I sound crabby if not permanently angry so I go in search of good news. This piece, from Adjunct Nation, is in fact very good news insofar as it reports on six schools in the Pittsburgh area that are unionizing in affiliation with the United Steel Workers. It’s good news for a lot of reasons. I don’t think we’ll make any real progress until we have a national labor movement, and for that we need Card Check, but six schools in a city can at least begin to make a difference. Labor markets are very regional.
I like the idea of primary and secondary industry labor– the people who brought us the weekend, ended child labor, created the minimum wage– working directly with tertiary industry people, especially education. Solidarity is important, of course, and the traditional unions have a lot of expertise that we can all use. Even more importantly, we need a broadly representative labor movement that recognizes the necessity of a diverse economy. Any economy overly focused on the so-called service industry is by definition a weak economy.
I also believe that these sorts of coalitions will eventually get us to the next important stage in the labor movement, which is a push to a shorter work week. (Occupy Wall Street, are you listening?) It’s great that technology makes us more and more productive but if we don’t cut the labor week down to size this sort of progress will only lead to more unemployment. In the long run, the only real way to ensure some degree of equity will be to cut down the work week. If 20 hours were considered full-time, we’d really be on to something…
On the other hand it’s not all rainbows and unicorns… The contrast between full-time and adjunct work at Duquesne and elsewhere illustrates a permanent state of austerity endemic in U.S. universities and growing worse each year. These employment and salary disparities need to be widely known and ought to alarm everyone; if the austerity folks have their way our future is an economy in which fewer and fewer workers have full-time positions while more and more are under-employed and, of course, under-paid and over-worked.
Corporate Greed? There’s a App for That
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times
[Apple]… paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)
By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.
“How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes,” Charles Duhigg and David Kocientewski, New York Times
I might have missed these articles if it weren’t for the New Faculty Majority blog, which pointed me to the “Remaking the University” blog, a site focused on California Education… I’ve been thinking about the links among consumerism, technology, and education for some time but this is a slightly different angle that I had not considered in any depth. That is, there’s a direct link between contemporary consumerism and the economic destruction of higher education.
I think that using technology in the classroom is a good idea but I suspect that the push for technology is also fed by simple consumerism. In some cases, pedagogy seems to get lost in the ongoing push for the newest sexy consumer electronics. Sherry Turkle (caution, the video plays automatically) has famously argued, for example, that technology can inhibit the sociability and the self-refection necessary for learning. Call it Facebook alienation.
I have never been seduced by Apple’s closed-system. I was one of those people willing to put up with a computer that broke now and again rather than use a computer whose workings were hidden. Aesthetically, Apple has always seemed like one of those creepy, upper-middle class families I run into now and again, insular and self-satisfied. Standing in line for the next Apple bauble is to me a symbol of the worst sort of meaningless U.S. conformity.
Apple’s “progressive” image, particularly its support of higher education, is in fact more assumed than real. Apple is a corporation that, like most other corporations, has taken full advantage of tax loopholes to maximize profits. Ironically, then, as Apple was busily promoting its products as harbingers of “the next chapter in learning,” it was busily using the ““Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” to strip mine government budgets for its shareholders.
Boehner’s Slush
“Students and families are struggling in President Obama’s economy. Nearly half of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and laws like ObamaCare have only made it harder for small businesses to hire them. That’s why House Republicans voted to extend current student loan rates and to pay for it by eliminating an ObamaCare slush fund President Obama himself proposed cutting from his budget. It’s time for the president and Democrats in Congress to stop exploiting the challenges facing young Americans for political gain, and start working with Republicans to create a better environment for private-sector job growth.”
Apr 27, 2012, Press Release from the Office of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner
There’s seems to be an emerging consensus that the first presidential election after the Citizen’s United ruling, which unleashed a flood of corporate money, is going to be the ugliest in history. Apparently, if you have an endless flow of cash you won’t use it to educate and inform. I think, then, that we should start keeping track of the key terms of the vitriol. Maybe a little knowledge can diffuse the toxins. Boehner sounded angry and out of control but his terms are clearly carefully chosen to create a particular effect.
First on my list is the term “slush fund,” particularly as associated with the word “ObamaCare,” which has long been a term of art in Republican rhetoric. The two are closely related. “ObamaCare,” suggests that the Healthcare Reform Act is nothing but the product of a single (Black) man’s power and ambition and not the democratic process; it echos Medicare, too, which “everyone knows” is on the verge of collapse. This is designed to give these limited market reforms the air of wasteful and dangerous despotism.
It all hints of high taxes and imminent threats to liberty, paranoid mainstays of the Tea Party. The term “slush fund” makes sense, then, because it suggests another truism: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s an ugly, slithering word that’s reptilian if not evil. It’s a deeply Orwellian trope, too, because Boehner is talking about money designated for preventative care programs, the very programs that will cut medical costs and so help businesses, large and small, while preventing suffering and disease.
The main goal seems to be to give any attempt at reform– the Healthcare Reform Act is by no means a revolutionary act–an ugly, even dangerous feeling. Ironically, this sort of rhetoric is itself a kind of political preventive care, an attempt to inoculate public discussion against the possibility of substantive change. It’s both tactical and strategic. It’s a tactic to defeat a minor change in tax policy but, more importantly, it’s a long-term strategy for forestalling a feared redistribution of wealth.