the CSU's furlough proposal

The CSU has proposed a "furlough" plan to their employee unions, as part of a program for dealing with the net half-billion dollar cut to the CSU budget for this coming academic year. The Chancellor's office plan is similar to plans proposed by other state agencies - cutting two days a month from employees' work schedules, without compensation obviously. The Chancellor's office informed the union leaders that the furlough would save about $275 million for the whole CSU. The proposal is to cut two Fridays from each month.

On its face, a furlough plan for the CSU is absurd. Anybody who knows anything about higher education knows that classes are almost always grouped by days of the week. Some classes are taught on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, some are taught on Tuesday and Thursday. On a few campuses, classes are taught only Monday-Wednesday and Tuesday-Thursday, with special all day classes, labs, or other activities scheduled on Friday. In short, cutting two Fridays a month for the academic year would make gobbledygook out of every academic calendar.

My first reaction to this, about a week ago when I first heard about it, was that this was typical of the Chancellor's office: they have no idea how higher education works, and no idea what academic calendars are, or really, what faculty labor is like. For instance, let's compare three faculty members. Faculty member A teaches four classes each day Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That faculty member would have Friday classes cut two times each month, for around 6 void Fridays a semester. Faculty member B teaches three classes on Tuesday and Thursday, and one on Wednesday night. For that faculty member, the cut to the Friday work schedule means - well, what? Faculty member C teaches only night classes, including one that meets every Friday night. The two-Fridays-a-month furlough means that that faculty members Friday class will miss six sessions over a semester. On our campus, that's nearly half the course.

But this week, I've been getting email updates about meetings between union leaders and campus presidents, and now the CSU administration's strategy for the furlough is more clear: it's a way to cut pay without calling it a pay cut.

The furlough would mean that faculty would have their pay cut relative to the amount of work they do while they are working - during the 10-month academic year. Two days a month from that 10-month year results in around 10.75% cut in salary for faculty. But there can't be any effective way to cut the actual work, and what we're hearing is that the CSU has absolutely no intention of identifying or giving account of the cuts to the faculty work.

Let me put this in context: like most faculty I know, I actually work, during the academic year, at least 6 days a week. That's because I teach Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and need to prepare to teach those classes on days when I'm not teaching them. (Contrary to what some people, notably the Chancellor of the CSU, seem to think, faculty work outside the classroom in order to be able to teach while in the classroom.) They might cut Friday classes twice each month, but there's no way they can meaningfully cut faculty workload during an academic year.

They're simply taking the opportunity of the budget catastrophe to extract more work for less pay. If I was a little more paranoid, I'd suggest that this is also helpful in attempting to undermine the power CFA generated by successfully organizing a contract fight in 2005-2006, or furthering a union-busting effort.

Oh, and what is the carrot in this proposal? The Chancellor's office threatened the employee unions that if we didn't accept furloughs, there would be mass layoffs. And if we do? No guarantee that there won't be layoffs. Meanwhile, of course, the CSU is still not subject to meaningful public scrutiny of its books.

I would have written about this earlier, but I've had this hideous chest cold all week. I haven't had real sleep in two days. But I figured, if I don't write about this, then the chest cold will have won.

summertime blues

They say there ain't no cure.

So far this has been the summer of miscellaneous busy-ness. The result: I have a chest cold.

It's also been the summer of updating, sprucing, and in general making happy little improvements in the material conditions of life. We bought grass-fed meat. I made a new batch of demi-glace. I have my new contact lenses, which I'm adjusting to fairly well. Lauren has new glasses. I have a new guitar, I'm futzing with several new tunes.

This has all involved a lot of driving hither and yon, culminating in the week of Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer's visit, during which I drove approximately 23,400 miles.

So, as I sit here resting and recuperating, with little energy to do much else, it occurred to me that I do have all that to recuperate from. That makes a little more sense, which somehow makes it a little bit better.

things that are unhealthy

A 4:30 am coughing fit left me unable to teach classes Monday morning. Luckily I had previously put together a group discussion that would run itself, so I set those classes to it. I came back to campus and taught my Contemporary Moral Issues class in mime. I had a brief text-to-speech discussion with my honors class, then came home, utterly exhausted.

This illness has a very strange rhythm. The mornings are terrible. I have a massive headache, I've been up since 6:30 (vast improvement over 4:30) drinking tea to keep the coughing down. By 5 pm I'll feel just about fine, but then by 10 pm I'll be back in hell. It's frustrating.

Anyway, I found an item of note this morning.

The San Francisco Chronic published a story from the Washington Post about the EPA sending a scientific finding to the Obama administration showing that global climate change does actually pose danger. The story is cast mainly in terms of the reversal of the Bush administration's environmental policy, which can be summed up briefly as: "just say no." (It's about time that slogan made a difference somewhere!)

But that wasn't the funny part. The funny part was this:

But business groups decried the move as an economic disaster.

"By moving forward with the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, EPA is putting in motion a set of decisions that may have far-reaching unintended consequences," said Bill Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Specifically, once the finding is made, no matter how limited, some environmental groups will sue to make sure it is applied to all aspects of the Clean Air Act.

"This will mean that all infrastructure projects, including those under the president's stimulus initiative, will be subject to environmental review for greenhouse gases. Since not one of the projects has been subjected to that review, it is possible that the projects under the stimulus initiative will cease. This will be devastating to the economy."

Hi-Larious. That Ernie Kovacs!

Huh? Whazzat? Bill Kovacs? Never heard of him.

you give me fever...

... and, apparently, I hallucinate.

Tuesday night I really came down with teh Sick, and spent the better part of Lauren's annual St. Patrick's Day feast reclining, with a cool rag on my face, barely following conversation or events around me. Eventually, I had to leave altogether, and went upstairs to lie down in bed.

That night I didn't so much sleep as lose consciousness between bouts of delirium. The hallucinations went on for several hours, and as weird as it may sound, they felt absolutely real, as though I had made fundamental realizations about the nature of the world.

What happened was I lost entirely any sense of my personality or of having an ego or will. At first I struggled against this, and it was nauseating to feel - because it was a feeling, not an abstract idea.*

Instead, I was forced to recognize that I was a moving part, a necessary part that had to do its job, in a machine that makes illness. A machine part clearly has no ego or will, and although I had a bizarre memory of having once been rational and autonomous, I eventually became convinced this was a mistake, that I had always been a part in this machine, that this machine always was an illness-machine, and that I had somehow been wired up wrongly before. This convincing wasn't dialogical or logical, it was the convincing that happens as a result of a machine repeating the same mechanical motions over and over again.

Accepting that was strangely calming, and by around 2 or 3 in the morning (I guess), I was able to sleep.

By around noon, I started to feel human again. Last night I slept, not particularly well, and dreamed, rather than hallucinated. Much better.

* From what I've been able to gather, I'm a rare dreamer who dreams not only in color, but with all senses - particularly smell and taste. I also dream in abstract ideas, and once dreamt Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

the sick, and more banishments

My loveliest has been battling Teh Sick for a couple weeks now. I've been trying to help out, but frankly, also doing a fair amount of gleefully-not-being-sick. Last night, after a loooong day, I was coughing a bit, and chalked it up to having talked all day. I was fooling myself. I woke up this morning feeling basically crappy.

And that's about it for now: basically crappy. That is my typical mode of illness going back many a year. I get all the annoying pain, exhaustion, and muddle-headedness of being properly sick, without any of the diverting sneezing, hacking, wheezing and drippiness. Few things are more frustrating to me than being useless, but there it is: basically crappy.

On another subject altogether, Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymous Bosch, and James Ensor (not to say especially James Ensor) are not allowed in the house.