Hogan’s Run: Doing Well by Doing Bad

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I’ve lost jobs immediately after receiving excellent assessments from both colleagues and students. In one case, one or two teachers were able to manipulate the system for their own obscure purposes. That sort of petty, narcissistic power is probably always obscure if not inexplicable. In the second case, it was administrative power run amok. That too was obscure, but my guess is that they went for whoever talked the most.

I didn’t have the power– I should say “we” didn’t have the organizational power, that is, the faculty involved didn’t have the power–to fight either case but in each case my treatment was rewarded with severance pay.  There’s no real justice, this seemed to be saying, but at least you can leave with a little money. Academia isn’t a meritocracy any more than any other job. Merit is just the pretty paint job covering up the nastiness lying just beneath the surface.

There’s no surprise in the news that the University of Illinois President Michael Hogan would be paid off with a nice stipend. The difference, of course, is that he is leaving after completely messing up his job, and he was given a year off, and full pay for the next several months, and nearly a $300,000 tenured faculty position too. One month of his current salary is greater than a year’s median salary in the U.S. Things are different up in the 1%.

Hogan will no doubt spend the next year considering head-hunter offers or book deals and then quietly move on.  We still have questions that need answers. Did Hogan use spoofed email to try to influence a faculty debate? Did he use his henchwoman, Lisa Troyer, to spoof the email? Why would a university administrator know how to spoof email? Was she paid off with a tenured position too? Is this sort of deceit common practice?

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Hill Makes A Mountain

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I see something once and then see it again and…  You don’t see anyone in a cast for months and then you see them everywhere you go for the next week… Maybe that’s why I am finding so many small-minded thinkers this week. This piece, “Parsing Santorum’s Statistic on God and College: Looks as if It’s Wrong,” by Jonathan P. Hill in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems almost militant in its pursuit of a meaningless question.

I’m almost– not quite–shocked by Hill’s seeming lack of  perspective. He seems to have not noticed that the Republican candidates aren’t in the least worried about veracity. If all you do is try to test the truth of the hypothesis that U.S. universities are “atheist factories” then you’ve already fallen prey to a very basic political tactic that has proven widely successful at least since the War Department was renamed the Department of Defense.

If academics interested in truth-based argument are going to get anywhere we are going to have to stop letting these truthiness advocates set the agenda. Santorum didn’t imply that college destroys faith because he read a study that suggested it might. He’s saying this because it resonates with a politics of  misplaced resentment and anger. Higher education has a lot to answer for among working people and we need to articulate our own response.

You can’t counter these folks by measuring the size of the domestic oil supply or its impact on domestic prices; it does no good to try to assess the impact of the death tax.  There is no death tax, there’s a relatively toothless estate tax;  oil prices are set internationally.  At the very best, it would take decades of research, development, and drilling in the United States to have any impact on the world market. Santorum should be ignored.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional

Shallow Hal

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I continue my pursuit of back-reading with s a piece called, “A Letter to Barrack Obama,” in the September 2001 issue of Harper’s, by George McGovern. Even at the distance of less than a year, it’s a remarkable piece, well-worth reading. McGovern, who says he’s never seen a president thwarted by “the kind of narrow partisanship that has beset Obama,” offers a kind of laundry list of proposals that might help the president, “on the road to greatness.”

What’s so refreshing about McGovern’s ideas is their ambitiousness, particularly after a long season of the Republican primaries, a debate poisoned by the worst sort of reactionary small-mindedness imaginable. One moment they are debating the morality of birth control and insisting on invasive medical procedures and the next Candidate Santorum is telling Puerto Rican’s that they are welcome to statehood anytime, all they have to do is learn English.

So maybe I was reading with a bit of angry skepticism this morning when I came across, “Wanted: Dedicated Deep Thinkers,” by By Peter A. Coclanis, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Coclanis is thinking about the so-called glut of Ph.D.’s and, perhaps in a half-ironic fashion, proposing that corporate America embrace academia’s lost children as what he calls, “CIAO, or chief intellectual-arbitrage officer,” on the model of the “CINO, or chief innovation officer.”

The CIAO would “ask new questions, identify new trends, explore new niches, expand geocultural boundaries, project forward, and remember the past.” I can’t help but see this as the same small=-mindedness that McGovern’s piece so effectively rejects. If were to really cut the U.S. military budget, McGovern argues, for example, by 300 or even 400 billions dollars a year we would still have the largest military in the world and probably the largest in history.

That’s money for expanding access to education, bullet trains, Medicaid for all. If Coclanis is interested in dealing with the problems of academia, he too should get out of the tiny ideas sandbox and start thinking at the scale of cutting the U.S. military budget by 2/3’s. Why can’t we begin investigating proposals to restore tenure, full-time employment, and academic freedom of speech? Perhaps we could do that by cutting administrative budgets by, say, 1/2…

Posted in: Economics, Professional