death throes

The CSU has been underfunded systemically for a decade or more. The campuses and the academic departments have struggled to make do, hired more contingent faculty like me, and simply had less resources and provided less service to students.

Now the CSU is under direct attack. The attack isn't coming from insane neocons like David Horowitz and his paranoid mob of anti-intellectual zealots (no link - he's unworthy of any attention). It's not coming - at least not directly - from the neocons in the legislature, who have already done their part anyway by assuring that the CSU continues to starve, slowly, to death.

No, this is an attack on the CSU by the CSU. Specifically, an attack on core programs and majors by CSU administrators. At Dominguez Hills, they're running through an accelerated program review, with whole departments on the chopping block. At Pomona, I just found out, they're going to do the same thing, with the criterion that any major with fewer than 150 undergraduate students will be put on the table for discontinuance.

The arbitrariness of the methods demonstrates pretty clearly that the future of the CSU, in these people's hands, is to become just like a for-profit proprietary technical school. They don't understand, don't respect, and will not defend the values of intellectual enterprise, for research or for teaching and learning. It's as our campus prez put it in his infamous Chronicle of Higher Ed piece a couple weeks ago. They view public higher education with any component of rigor, academic integrity, or intellectual reaching, as a privilege that neither the public, nor our students, nor the faculty, have any business expecting.

In addition, it shows how prudent they are. Do they have any reason to believe the new markets they imagine will come to the universities for technical training (rather than proprietary institutions we used to pride ourselves on not resembling)? Not that I can see.

So I'm on the philosophy teaching job market, which means I'm throwing myself to the four winds. I could end up in Buffalo, or Ohio, or British Columbia - anywhere.

That's personally distressing, of course. Being on the philosophy job market is its own kind of torture. But what's even more upsetting is that this is the result of a direct, unnecessary, opportunistic attack on the idea of public higher education, on the pretext of the budget cuts but in practice far more extensive.

further update, downdate, sidedate, whatever

I've spent some time this week informing students about the current state of the budget cut debate on our campus, and the double-dip of state cuts and the campus' own "budget gap" (used to be "structural deficit," but now we're not using that kind of talk). The dialog on campus has basically consisted of administrators telling people they have to cut part-time faculty down to just about zero. That might sound more like a monologue.

I also talked about the fact that after months of investigation and consideration, the University Budget Advisory Committee was finalizing its recommendations to the president about budget reductions this week, and that the only proposal that has apparently been given serious consideration has been the original proposal. That might sound more like non-consideration.

Anyway, this news displeased some of my students, some of them so much that they created a Facebook group to develop some organization and maybe do a little agit-prop. That group is here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=68856262140

I love agit-prop. I am trying very hard to avoid any feeling of nostalgia for the various rabble-rousings of my checkered past. Ah, them were them days, then.

unemployment

The story in the Modesto Bee was headlined Brutal.

Stanislaus County unemployment reached 16% in January. Merced County had 18.9%.

The kicker: Unemployment rates don't count seasonal work, for instance, farm labor. So how many people are actually unemployed right now in the Central Valley?

The second kicker: Unemployment rates don't count those who have used up all their eligibility, those who for whatever reason don't apply, or those who are under-employed rather than unemployed.

The third kicker: It doesn't count students, including those who are students because they lost their jobs.

In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.

if you like the global economic depression, you'll love...

... the global drought. Of particular interest to me:

And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don't forget northern California which "produces 50 percent of the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes." Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%.

Observers are predicting that it may prove to be the worst drought in the history of a region "already reeling from housing foreclosures, the credit crisis, and a plunge in construction and manufacturing jobs." January, normally California's wettest month, has been wretchedly dry and the snowpack in the northern Sierra Mountains, crucial to the state's water supplies and its agricultural health, is at less than half normal levels.

It has rained a lot this week, and it looks to continue to rain later this week and the weekend, but seasonally, we're down about half of our normal precipitation, following two years of similar conditions.

The quotation above misstates, or, better, hyperbolizes, regarding the reduction in water deliveries. The state has taken some fairly draconian measures - like 85% cuts in deliveries - but most ag areas get most of their water from local irrigation districts. Mass-scale fallowing of land is restricted to only a few areas, mainly in the Southern Central Valley, particularly in the Western portion of Kern County. From what I understand, that's not terribly good or vital ag land anyway. Up here is where we should be concerned, especially those of us who like almonds, peaches, apricots, grapes and grape products (if ya know what I mean). Water deliveries by irrigiation districts have been cut here too, but not nearly as much.

There's another side of this, too. When you wander around the San Joaquin Valley in the morning, between, say, April and October, you see field after field and orchard after orchard covered in several inches of water. Because, you see, they still use flood irrigation here. I don't know what it would mean here, but a study comparing drip irrigation to furrow irrigation in Uzbek cotton fields concluded the increased water use efficiency of drip irrigation was (depending on local conditions) between 34 and 104%.

Maybe we'd consider doing something like that in the most important agricultural region in the nation, and perhaps the world? You know, to avoid turning it into a dust bowl? Anyway, it's a refreshing change of pace from the usual news of fiscal disaster and political obstructionism.

Meanwhile, California agribusiness thanks you for your patronage. Please enjoy our nuts.

California's budget

HAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLPPP!!!!!!!!!

CSU budget cuts, class cuts, faculty cuts, student cutswon't somebody get that razor away from him?!

California's economy and state budget are in the toilet.

The CSU is facing midyear budget cuts, and the administration's response has been to freak the heck out. The Chancellor's office just announced last week that for the first time in its history, the CSU system will turn away eligible students. I think this means the CSU is violating the education code of the state, which specifies that the CSU's mission, as the people's university, is to teach the top 1/3 of high school graduates across the state. If CSU turns away eligible students, I think it could be legally liable. I'd be really interested to see someone sue over it.

Apparently the plan of action on our campus, presented by the administration, is to cut part-time faculty. The part-time faculty teach 315 classes this year, mainly general education classes required to graduate, rather than in majors. Furthermore, the plan is being hatched in secrecy, which is partly why I'm writing about it here. I figure there are CSU lurkers.

The administration has been holding meetings with department chairs to tell them to cut sections of classes and eliminate part-time faculty. But, and here's the tricky part, they have to keep teaching the same number of students. They'll achieve this by stuffing more students into remaining classes.

But there are freaking obvious problems with this plan. For one thing, many classes are being taught at capacity for the classroom. When everybody shows up for my morning Professional Ethics classes, there are no empty seats. I can't accommodate more students in those classes. Plus, as my colleagues Dan pointed out this afternoon, there are fire regulations at stake here too. If the room has a capacity of 45, it has a capacity of 45, period.

It also makes little sense to think that tenure-track faculty will really be able to teach more than they already do. In most departments, they teach 8 courses a year, which is really high for college teaching by tenure-track faculty (my teaching load is 10 per year, but CFA buys 1 of my classes from the university in exchange for the vastly more work than a course would require that I do for CFA).

And then the big one. Our students are not "traditional" four-year college students (almost no students in the US are, any more). They typically have work and family obligations, commute to school either 2 or 3 days a week, and need their class schedules to fit their lives' schedules as well as their academic needs. Cutting class sections will make it more difficult, and in some cases impossible, for them to continue to advance to their degrees.

Plus, plus, plus: While it's taking them longer to graduate, they may be asked to pay non-state-support fees for the same classes, taught off the state books. AND AND AND the longer they take to graduate, the more it costs them, and the longer the credit crisis goes on, the less access they have to student aid or even loans.

So there you have it. The university plans to fix their budget problem by way of an unworkable solution based on faulty assumptions about scheduling, the lives of students, the work of faculty, the ongoing state budget and financial crisis. Aside from that, of course, it's perfectly alright, provided you're completely uncaring about the people who work for you.

hungry

I'm not hungry. Lots of people are. In fact, Reuters is reporting that the UN is concerned 100 million more people are deprived of necessary food as a result of shortages worldwide, the shift to growing crops for biofuels, and market shenanigans (i.e., profiteering, hoarding, manipulating markets, restricting exports).

The hunger is spread across all continents. And even here, food rationing is taking place at places like Costco. We're actually thinking of buying large sacks of beans and rice to store away, just in case, you know, things get even worse.

Up til now, the only real impact on our lives from all this has been the rationing of hops. Yep, farmers worldwide are switching from hops to our good friend #2 field corn to make ethanol. For those of us who enjoy massive doses of irony, here's a fun fact: to grow the #2 corn that is used to create ethanol, farmers use large quantities of fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide, mainly derived from, uh, petroleum; they use great quantities of diesel to run machines to sow, reap, and move crops around; the mills use petroleum to run machines to process the corn.

That this is all driven by a policy (especially in Europe, where the EU has imposed targets for ethanol production) that is justified on basis of concern for the environment is another ginormous dose of irony. I suppose it demonstrates the ultimate folly of trying to produce and consume our way out of environmental destruction caused by production and consumption. Rather than work toward reducing reliance on the fantastic and utterly unsustainable use of resources, we're trying to make changes in which resources we exploit.

Michael Pollan notes, in Omnivore's Dilemma, that from a certain ecological interpretation of matters, we haven't domesticated and come to exploit #2 field corn. The situation is the reverse: it's exploiting us. (It's sort of like the relationship between humans and cats in most of the affluent parts of the world. I'm not sure, at this point, whether biofuel consumption or kitten consumption creates more pollution.)