nano nano nano nano nano nano nano

Hey kids! It's National Novel Writing Month!

Is Doc Nagel engaging in this madness? You betcha! In fact, I'm writing a contemporary, quasi-autobiographical Don Quixote, crossed with Samuel Beckett and Charles Bukowski. For folks that know me very very well, this will make real and terrible sense. I think it's a little alarming to my Loveliest. Working titles have come and gone: Peripatetic, Peripatetics, Picaresque, Walk, and now, for what seems to be the settled version, The Solipsists. (Two solipsists walk into a bar...)

But to hell with it. I'm just jumping in, and whatever happens, happens. I'm having a good time writing about cats and walking.

I'm writing it in fragments, all in first person, that include letters, entries in a diary, and direct narration. There are two main characters, who have the same name, both have cats with the same name, are both in relationships with a woman with the same name, and who both have a best friend/cousin of the same name. At first, I had a hard time distinguishing the two main characters, their narrative voices, or their life stories. Then they became very clearly distinct, and now, they're losing distinction again. So, everything's going along swimmingly.

I am not sure their paths will cross. I kinda doubt it. So far, none of the identically-named cats, friends, or lovers are identical persons.

And this'll creep y'all out: so far, the lover has appeared on one single page. I know whose lover it is, and approximately when in his life she appeared, and disappeared, and when this event took place, but otherwise, of her(s), I've been entirely silent. This disturbs me, but it's how it is.

There's more madness. I wrote and recorded a song last night, when I meant to be writing, that I am calling "Quixotic." It's a whole lotta John Fahey goof.

There's yet more madness, but you don't get to see it.

sure sign I'm trying to work on an article

I went on a brief walk just after my office hour this morning, since I had been reading about phenomenology of the body and wanted to clear my head and re-orient myself. Plus, I wanted to see if I had something right in my own analysis of the way the lived body "disappears" from awareness.

Naturally, I spent a lot of the time mentally critiquing the university's entry signage.

A few years ago the new administration announced it was getting rid of the old "books-S" logo.



The admin thought it was corny, which it is. I never thought much about it until it was gone, and in retrospect, it says something about this institution: it's humble, simple, unassuming, and in a direct way says something about education. The new logo, which I won't link to, is a generic Your College or University Here design that could be from any institution from a county community college to frickin' Harvard.

Underneath it, on our entry signs, is the name of the institution, in Palatino font:

Cow State University, Santa Claus

(I hope you have Palatino installed on your computer, or at least Microsoft's commissioned knock-off, Constantia, so you can see this thing.)

Now, I adore Palatino. It's one of Hermann Zapf's two masterworks (the other being Optima), both of which involve a brilliant resolution of contradictory elements. Like Optima, Palatino owes a large measure of its design to Romanesque, monumental fonts, like the kind of thing chiseled into stone. The pointy serifs on the capital C and S have a three-dimensional depth and weight to them that's most noticeable, for instance.

But these aspects are almost totally overcome by the humanist elements, like the varying weights on the uprights and the cute little tails on the lower-case uprights. This makes the font approachable and warm.

Yet it works to brilliant effect. That may be why Palatino was the font of choice for 1990s post-structuralist publications (check it out iffin you don't believe me): humanism and anti-humanism somehow co-exist.

As a font for brass lettering on a red brick sign outside a small comprehensive public university in the middle of the Central Valley, they are totally inappropriate, even obnoxiously so. Because Palatino was commonly used, including in university documents, until the dreaded Calibri epidemic began, the font on the sign looks like it was copied and pasted from an old memo. Yet because it has those monumental aspects, it looks like it's out to be grand, but can't be, left there as a mere caption to the proudly displayed Your College or University Here emblem. In this usage, Palatino is in a losing battle with itself, Zapf's perfectly balanced resolution - or better, Aufhebung - is split into impotently struggling thesis and antithesis.

(Don't even get me started on the siting of the sign at the main entrance, where it occupies what might be the geometric/linear center of the span of the roadway, but is permanently off-kilter in the visual field of a driver or pedestrian approaching the campus.)

You might be wondering if I have a recommendation for changing the font, if I'm so smart. And I do. Comic Sans.

national novel writing month

So, I'm writing a 50,000 word novel this month. I started on Tuesday, and I've reached 23,000 words. More later on this insanity.

privacy

Is your garbage private?

The press release today from the CSU Stanislaus administration suggests that CSU Stanislaus Foundation Executive Director Susana Gajic-Bruyea's garbage is private. The press release omits the information that Gajic-Bruyea is also Vice President for University Advancement - that is, an employee of the CSU, with an office in the CSU Stanislaus administration building. That's important, because the administration is claiming that the Foundation Board and the university are really separate entities.

It's important because, in the press release, the allegation is presented that the allegedly non-existent document state senator Leland Yee acquired outlining some of the details of the university's contract with Sarah Palin was discovered to be missing from Gajic-Bruyea's recycling bin in her office.

AFTER Leland Yee's press conference, in which documents related to the Palin fund-raiser were presented to the press, the university's Vice President for Advancement (who also serves as the Executive Director for the Foundation Board) looked through the recycle bin in her office for the relevant pages of the contract, and found that they were missing. The university has launched an investigation into, basically, who could have stolen documents from the recycle bin...

Here's what I imagine happens to my garbage and what I pitch into the recycle bin in my department office, in my narrow-minded rationalistic conception of the world and causality: I imagine that people take it away and recycle it, or take it to the dump, as appropriate. When I return to my office days after having thrown something away, and find that it's not there, my first thought is not that it's been stolen. I'm not generally surprised when documents I put in the recycling bin aren't there afterwards. That's because, to me, a recycling bin is a place to put things I expect other people to take away and recycle, and a garbage can is place to put things I am throwing away that I expect other people to take away and compost, burn, or put in a landfill.

Do I retain a privacy right, or property right, or any other kind of right over the things I thus discard?

What could be the basis of the assertion of such a right? Do I have it only if I've discarded or recycled something the discovery of which is embarrassing to me? So, can I throw away, hypothetically speaking, gloves I've worn while committing a crime, and when these are later found in my trash, assert that my trash can is, as it were, my confessor, and throwing my bloody gloves in the trash tantamount to a protected confidence?

Let me offer another analogy. Let's say I've just shot Tony Danza to death in cold blood. (I most certainly did not. This is the kind of thing some philosophers like to call a thought experiment.) I then throw my pistol into a dumpster. Someone finds my pistol, and police begin an investigation, using the pistol as evidence. Do I have, at that point, legitimate grounds to say that the pistol I threw away was my private trash, not meant for anyone else to have, to see, or to use against me in legal action?

Let's say I throw the pistol away in my office (which is a place of public accommodation, where I have very little right to privacy). How legitimate are my grounds to say this is private material of my own?

I'm not at all sure I've got a good analogy going here, but I suppose I was seduced by the trope of the smoking gun.

gala event this summer at Santa Claus!

Late last week, just before a staff furlough day, the university's Foundation Board announced that Sarah Palin would speak at this summer's 50th anniversary celebration, as a fund-raiser. This has provoked the kind of reaction you might expect from faculty -- anger that someone of her ilk was chosen to speak as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of a public university.

The conversation on campus has largely consisted of faculty and some staff saying she's inappropriate because she's demonstrated the intellectual integrity and curiosity of a deranged sociopathic muskox in heat, and other staff and administrative people saying that her detractors are leftists and should shut up because her invitation restores political balance to campus events. I think the balance of truth on these issues is clearly on the side of the muskox, but I also think this debate misses the point.

The other topic of conversation is whether she's going to be a viable fund-raiser, given that the event as described involves her speaking (at an amount the university refuses to disclose, although she commands $100,000 speaking fees), a five-course dinner, and dancing. At $500 a ticket, the university would have to sell 200 tickets to make up her speaking fee -- and never mind the tremendous amount it would cost for the dinner, dancing, rentals, security, etc. The university Foundation Board has responded to this issue by saying that not one red cent of public money would pay for her speaking fee, and that the event is to raise money, not to address the university. I don't think that's the point, either. (Although it's obviously also not an intellectually honest response, since the money in the Foundation Board is meant to be used prudently for the advancement of the public good served by the university. Claiming that the university community and their values aren't important in making this decision suggests that the only business the university believes it's in is business.)

Today it was revealed that Fox News' new Sarah Palin show (which isn't, yet, called "The Sarah Palin Show") had planned to air a segment edited to make it appear Palin had interviewed LL Cool J about his being a real American. LL Cool J discovered this, made a fuss about it, and Fox News pulled his segment, expressing their disappointment that he didn't want to be associated with a program that could inspire Americans. Interesting.

I think the real issue here is how this decision was made, by whom, when, involving what kinds of planning processes, with whose input. A current university employee with GOP political aspirations works on that side of the house, for instance. That person has consistently vilified the faculty and dismissed student concerns about budget priorities, the unilateral change to our academic calendar, and other issues that have plagued the university in the last several years. The decision has been made with absolutely no consideration of the actual community the university serves, the actual community the university is, or the real working and learning lives of the members of the university. This is not my interpretation, it is the Foundation Board's own claim about their choice.

What this illustrates is how universities have evolved as organizations (for it is a widespread tendency, not at all isolated to this campus). One part of the university engages in the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, where students and faculty engage in the challenge of education, in what are almost uniformly uncomfortable, poorly-equipped, poorly-maintained, inadequate and impoverished spaces -- because resources are not spent on improving the teaching and learning environment until absolutely necessary, or funded by a prominent, elite donor. Every month I encounter classrooms without supplies, or without working equipment, and the staff charged with those essential background activities can't keep up. Another part of the university spends large quantities of money on raising money, and does not have any legal requirement to account for its activities. My part of the university claims that the money-raising part of the university should be working in the interest of the university. The money-raising part of the university claims I have no right to ask about their activities, and that their activities aren't relevant to me, aren't addressed to me, and aren't for me.

Nominally, the university is in the business of education - teaching, learning, research, scholarship, creative activity, cultural re-production, the development of citizens. There is another, shadowy university that has no other purpose than fund-raising. And its purposes beyond that are not something they can be called upon to discuss.

scholarship opportunity at the CSU

Given the recent news of the CSU's great success at getting students to apply for admission to the university campuses they won't be able to attend, I thought it'd be timely to present again the:

Schwarzenegger-Reed Scholarships

PURPOSE:
The Schwarzenegger-Reed Scholarships honor California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California State University Chancellor Charles Reed for their leadership in, and commitment to higher education in California.

ELIGIBILITY:
All California residents qualified to attend the California State University under the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education (i.e., those graduating in the top third of their high school classes), who are denied admission to the California State University due to enrollment reductions.

AWARD:
The Schwarzenegger-Reed Scholarship will fund full tuition and fees for any qualified student who has been denied admission to a California State University because of enrollment cuts.


TERMS:
The Schwarzenegger-Reed Scholarship will be revoked at such time as the recipient becomes admitted to, and enrolled in a California State University.


APPLICATION:
Send letter of application explaining the circumstances of your being refused admission to the California State University, along with a copy of a high school transcript showing qualification under the 1960 Master Plan, to:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814

Here's the actual press release from the CSU:

CSU Breaks Record for Student Applications

A record 609,000 prospective students have applied for admission to the California State University, up 28 percent from last year. The largest increase came from community college transfer students whose applications increased 87 percent over last year with a total 195,113 applicants. First-time freshmen applications were up 12 percent with just over 412,000 submissions.

A large number of students—nearly 74,000—applied on Nov. 30, the final day of the priority application period which began Oct. 1. Ten thousand of those came in between 10 and 11 p.m., the highest volume of the day. Applications from African American, Latino and Native American students rose by more than 24 percent from the previous year.

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.

the awesome leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger

Yesterday, after threatening for weeks not to sign any bills because the legislature wasn't passing a bill he wanted, Governor Schwarzenegger finally acted on the 700 bills on his desk. Demonstrating the kind of political courage only he could, he vetoed SB 86 and SB 218, despite their broad bipartisan support. Clearly, Schwarzenegger will not follow political fads by signing bills just because they are politically popular.

Indeed, in this case, the bills were wildly popular. SB 218 passed the state Assembly and Senate with only 1 negative vote! But the Governor looked at it and realized how wrong it would be. SB 218 would have required the California State University - the largest publicly-funded university system in the world - to inform the public what it does with public funds. Specifically, it would have required CFA administrations to inform the public of the balances, investments, and amounts of money in their "foundations" - which is the public-university version of an endowment.

SB 86, which also received wide support, would have prohibited the CSU from giving raises to executives in years when the CSU budget is cut. Again, Schwarzenegger vetoed this wrong-headed bill, despite its popularity, since it would have prevented the CSU from rewarding administrators for making the hard decisions we pay administrators big bucks to make (in this case, the hard decision to pay administrators more big bucks).

Schwarzenegger was elected in the Gray Davis recall debacle on the promise of reforming government. He's certainly done that. This set of reforms sets a clear precedent for CSU execs, one consistent with the Governor's political ideology. Public university administrators, like their counterparts in corporate America, are an elite class a royal class, whose actions should never be overseen or regulated by the public their subjects. The only political principle, and the only acknowledged concept of governance, is their privilege to rule over their fiefdoms without let or hindrance.

I think I know who's getting my next furlough letter.

presidential imperial authority

I just heard a story from BBC news about the failure of the Obama administration to launch a criminal investigation into torture techniques employed under the authority of the Bush administration. Their various political and academic experts/talking heads came to the consensus position that there is every legal reason to go forward with an investigation, but every political reason not to.

The elephant in the room: presidents are effectively above the law. Now, progressive Bush critics have been saying for several years that Bush had placed himself above the law, on this and a host of other issues (for instance, the unprecedented level of his use of signing statements), but it struck a different tone for me after hearing this story.

For purposes of this little flight of imagination, suppose that torture is both morally wrong and illegal under federal and international law. Suppose further that some president - call him President Lush for purposes of illustration - had ordered that torture be used in an attempt to extract information about planned terrorist operations in the US (in this case, let's suppose further that we are referring to foreign terrorists, trained and motivated by a ruthless religion-exploiting leader who was in turn trained by the CIA - you know, just for the sake of illustration - and not domestic terrorists trained and motivated by a completely different ruthless religion-exploiting leader).

If you're following so far, the scenario is: (a) President Lush ordered torture to be done, and (b) that torture is illegal. What the BBC story made clear is that, under these conditions, no future President in his or her right mind would attempt to prosecute these crimes, because that future President's political viability would be instantly destroyed by the party of President Lush and their media blowhards.

This leaves no domestic avenue for criminal justice to apply to President Lush. Meanwhile, President Lush might be prosecuted by an international criminal court - say, a war crimes court. This might well work, except that the military power of the US makes President Lush above international law as well. It's unimaginable that any sitting president would turn over President Lush to the international court, and it's unimaginable that any international body would, or could, come grab him.

So there you have it: we no longer have a Presidency. We have an elected Emperor, whose domestic power is limited by Congress, but whose international, military and paramilitary power is unchecked, unlimited, and beyond any meaningful legal authority or oversight of any kind. Let me remind that the military budget of the US is 48% of all the world's military spending - and it's not clear that this represents the entirety of the military and paramilitary budget. That's trillions of dollars of unchecked power.

are we gonna get sued?

Andrew brought it up, I think. The impact of the state budget cuts to the CSU, and of the furlough deemed necessary to achieve salary savings to make ends meet, is that the CSU is admittedly doing all that it can to cut enrollment and reduce class offerings. What no one ever seems to make a fuss about is that these budget-cutting policies probably violate state law and executive orders from the CSU Chancellor's office.

For instance, executive order 523 (EO 523 in pdf), issued in 1988, sets out formulas for determining eligibility for regular admission to the CSU. The goal of that EO is to create a policy that will permit the CSU to comply with California ed code sections 40753, 40754, and 40601 (at the time; I'm not sure the numbering has remained consistent).

Some deans have proposed shifting basic courses to extended education, across a number of departments. These are regular, credit-bearing courses, so shifting them over to extension would save some bucks - students would pay an additional fee per unit, and faculty would be paid much lower extension rates and receive no benefits. But the policy would also probably violate EO 804 and relevant ed code sections.

The furlough program will make it very challenging for the CSU faculty to comply with EO 79, Individual Faculty Obligation to Meet Classes. (This is one of my favorites. It's fun to speculate exactly what was going on in 1969 - when the EO was promulgated - that required this policy.)

This academic year, the entire CSU - 23 campuses, maybe 18,000 faculty when all the contingent faculty are caused to disappear, around 400,000 students - will almost certainly fail to follow its own policies, and may violate state law regarding higher education. So, does this possibly subject the CSU to a massive law suit, say, a class action, literally, on behalf of the students? Or a criminal investigation by the attorney general? (Is the CSU about to commit massive fraud?)

firebombed

So, the house my parents lived in in Ohio a few years back was firebombed this week. I hope the photos are large enough to show that the roof is, well, gone in the middle. The bomb was apparently through through a rear window, possibly upstairs. The master suite is was located in the rear. The bomb burned through that entirely, and also a bedroom in the front of the house.

I wonder what you do after a house is firebombed. Do you rebuild it? In this case, you'd be essentially rebuilding the entire place, so perhaps it's just as easy to raze the damn thing. And is it difficult to sell a place after something like that? Apparently, they're having a hard time selling a house in San Francisco that was the site of a triple murder a few years ago... I'd think firebombing would maybe lower property values.

Anyway, I didn't spend a lot of time there, but my recollection is that it was a really nice house.

ethics and the CSU budget crisis

The CSU administration and Board of Trustees come up pretty often as examples in my Professional Ethics course. Their ways of handling the CSU budget, personnel issues, and policies affecting students raise ethical questions. For example, the CSU administration's usual bargaining strategy is to say that whatever the faculty want - increased pay, job protections for lecturers - is entirely impossible. We spent 2 years bargaining our last contract, with our first raises in years (which we've stopped receiving as of last year). We settled mainly because the faculty voted to strike, and at about the same time, the CSU administration was publicly embarrassed by the revelation that they had a $2 billion reserve fund, while claiming they had no money to pay for faculty raises. This kind of thing raises some ethical questions for my students.

My students ask how ethical it is that the CSU administration and Board of Trustees continues to make them pay larger fees, while making it harder to get a good quality education. They ask how ethical it is for the administration to cut faculty and staff, raise student fees, and seemingly suffer less than anyone else. They ask why each of the campus presidents receives a housing allowance equal to my gross salary.

I tend to evade these questions. I don't think a Professional Ethics course should be focused on making moral judgments of people, and the tone of the questions always seems judgmental. I understand why my students would be upset to hear about the ways the CSU administration has handled budgeting of the university, even in relatively good budget years. I'm just not convinced we achieve very much by calling particular administrators unethical.

It's a different story this year, too. The budget problems are enormous. So, if I'm lucky enough to have a job teaching Professional Ethics this year, I think the questions will be focused differently:

What exactly are the ethical implications of having to make massive cuts to the budget, lay off hundreds of employees, turn away thousands of students, and essentially abandon the mission of the CSU? How to go about doing good in such circumstances? How to go about assessing the actions people take?

I'm going to set aside what I think is the obvious case of the Chancellor's Office refusing to offer any substantive details of the furlough proposal to address faculty concerns about its feasibility, or its beneficial effect in reducing layoffs, class cancellations, and other havoc. The CO routinely ignores calls for open discussion or cooperation. Instead, I want to ask, what would be a good way for the CO to handle cutting the budget, and why?

I have two basic impulses for framing this. One is to identify whose good we should be concerned with, and the other is to identify what kind of good we're talking about.

As a starting point, I'm gonna assume that doing good involves doing what one can not to cause avoidable harm to others. This is a fairly uncontroversial utilitarian position (I've stolen the phrasing from Gene James). I think we can also prioritize which others we want to avoid harming, by saying the most innocent should be spared the most harm. Innocent here means being most susceptible or vulnerable, having the least choice about the situation, and/or being to a reasonable degree ignorant of the causes and effects of the situation. In this case, that points to students - students, not taxpayers. This leads to an initial question: how do you handle a $583 million cut (on top of last year's $300 million cut), while avoiding harm to students?

Now, what kind of good is higher education? The 1960 Master Plan for education in California suggests that education is a public good. Well educated citizens make valuable and productive employees in information-based economies. The individual students who go to the CSU and get degrees benefit economically from that opportunity, but beyond that, their contributions to the economy of the state benefit everyone else as well.

I don't hear much in the current discussion that suggests these are central concerns. The bottom line appears to be the bottom line. Thus, it seems reasonable to the Board of Trustees, to many in the legislature, to the governor, to the chancellor, to add yet another student fee increase. Education is in the students' interest to pursue, so they should pay for it, is how the fantastically simplistic argument goes. Meanwhile, cutting employees' hours (or, effectively, their pay - since it is hard to see how faculty workload would genuinely be reduced) denies students a portion of the education that they are going to be paying more for. Add to that the havoc and disruption that would follow from current proposals to cut programs, merge departments, or possibly shut down entire campuses.

I'm not saying the state should absolutely not cut the CSU budget. Given the times, I would only be asking for someone else to suffer more. But the proposals floating now seem to cause a lot of avoidable harm to students, and to deny the public good served by education.

What other solutions are there? I don't have one in hand. For one thing, I'm not privy to the real budgets of the CSU's 23 campuses - no one is. So I don't know whether every resource is being used effectively. How much money could be diverted into educational programs if we suspend extremely expensive (and not well regarded) programs for outcomes assessment? Or halted expansion of degree programs, particularly graduate degrees? And could this be the moment to reconsider the top-heavy growth of management (expanding over the last 10 years at 15 times the pace of faculty)? Or to reconsider the fact that on most CSU campuses, only about half the budget goes toward instruction?

basement

No news is no good news on the CSU budget front. We're still looking at the same $583 million cut, and the word on the street is massive faculty layoffs are about to be issued. I know already that many of my friends and colleagues will be out of work, and I'm not at all sure I'll have a job this coming academic year, even though 9 of the 33 classes scheduled for fall by the department are, for now, being taught by people below me on the hiring food chain. Even if I knew that the department wasn't facing more than a 30% cut, this would obviously be an incredibly cold comfort.

And of course, the years to follow look as bad, or worse.

I'll omit the rant that I think should rightfully follow here, against short-sighted fiscal policy, terrible management, bizarre legislative priorities, and the crazed, ignorant public sentiment that taxation is extortion (especially given that California, despite all the protestations, imposes relatively light income and property tax burdens). I'm not up for a rant at this point.

When I was a kid in Ohio, about the scariest random occurrence in my life was tornado warnings. I was, and remain, deathly afraid of tornadoes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms (despite having lived a couple of the one, one big of the other, and innumerable of the third).

There's nothing you can do if a tornado is on its way. You go into the basement and hope it doesn't remove everything above your head. You listen to the scratchy radio Emergency Broadcast System announcements, and you wonder how long you might have to live on the big cup of water you've just gotten from the tap. You listen for the long uninterrupted blast from the old Civil Defense siren that warns of the twister on its way.

That's where I am right now, hiding in the basement. And about 13,000 other CSU faculty are there with me.

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.

irksome

I'm grading a set of Professional Ethics papers. I have received about 10 from students who are not attending, or not attentive, and who evidently believe that they can write nonsense, throw in the word "ethical" a few times, along with the names of a couple authors they were required to read, and that I'll see those words and let it pass.

It's driving me a little crazy this evening, because these crappy papers were, randomly, predominant among the last 20 or so I graded.

And I don't mean these are papers by folks who tried and failed, because they don't understand the language or they can't wrap their minds around the concepts, or because they just blew it interpreting the question. These are people who have decided that they will sign up for the course, not come to class, not do the work, and then try to trick me by writing things they think I'll skate over or will flatter what they wrongly imagine to be my prejudices. I've given them grades like 29 and 38 out of 100, but frankly, I don't think that's quite low enough. They deserve grades in negative numbers.

It's strangely like the end of the Flyers-Penguins game tonight, which the Pens won 4-1. With the game out of hand, the Flyers did what the Flyers always do - take cheap shots to try to injure or just to vent. With less than 30 seconds in the game, two Flyers took penalties on the same play on the ice, and another took a penalty while sitting on the bench during that play. Right off the next faceoff, another Flyer took another penalty. All three on-ice penalties could easily have resulted in injuries. They somehow deserve to have their goal taken away, and another one for good measure. Final score: Penguins 4, Flyers -1.

And it's for the same reason, really: disrespect, manifested as an obvious, lame attempt to get away with whatever they can get away with.

It's also strangely like the neo-conservative political maniacs lately, but that's another story.

marriage fear, etc.

I have not had the stomach to watch any of the crazy people's ads about same-sex marriage. I didn't have the stomach to read all of this San Francisco Chronic op-ed piece about the ads.

However, I can inform all who blunder across this page about the homosexual agenda. You see, I've known several actual gay people. I know what the homosexual agenda is.

Ready? Sitting down? Seriously, I'm about to reveal the deep, hidden perversion of the homosexual agenda.

Okay, I warned you.

They want to lead their own lives and to be left alone by crazy intolerant people.

Disgusting, isn't it? Yucky yuck yuck!

Also in the news today: the shocking revelation that a woman from Tracy who has been arrested for murdering her daughter is a Christian who taught Bible study.

I believe these are related stories.

an open letter to the governor

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

I realize you have difficult choices to make during this fiscal and economic crisis. As a member of the California Faculty Association, and a member of the Alliance for the CSU, I have already let you know that I believe cutting the budget for the CSU is a shortsighted and ultimately destructive move. The CSU contributes to the state's economy. It's the best, most secure investment the public can make.

It's important that you have all the information pertinent to these decisions, and that is the reason I'm writing to you today.

I earned a PhD in philosophy at Duquesne University in 1996. I have taught philosophy at CSU Stanislaus for 10 years. Teaching philosophy may not make any direct, sizable contribution to the economy, and I can't say I'm responsible for much economic growth, but I am at least a marginally functional member of society, and a taxpayer.

Cuts to the CSU budget would threaten my job. Since what I teach is philosophy, I'm sure you'll recognize that I clearly have no marketable skills outside of higher education. Certainly corporate America has no place for me.

I would have no choice but to turn to a life of crime. I would be forced out of quasi-productive employment into anomic, desperate felony. From being somewhat-less-than-thoroughly-useless to the many students at the CSU, I would be thrust out into the world, totally unhinged, having utterly lost any sense of right and wrong, and with no prospects for any job (did I mention: philosophy), would simply have to begin burgling, thieving, and mugging.

I hasten to point out that, although I have no criminal record, I do have some relevant experience, particularly of picking locks, breaking & entering, vandalism, petty larceny, and loitering and vagrancy.

I don't mean to threaten anything, of course. I just wanted to make sure you were properly informed about the potential impact of the fiscal choices you and the legislature have to make.

Thank you for your consideration,

Chris Nagel, PhD

I mean, consider these options:



I don't want any of those. I'm not angry/crazy enough, for starters.

laugh riot! or maybe just plain riot

Turns out that proposed Fed regulations of mortgages might cool down the subprime mortgage market to the dismay of mortgage companies. It might be hard to understand why representatives of a crumbling financial services infrastructure would want to prevent changes to the rules that made the crumbling possible in the first place.

It's not all that hard to explain. See, the mortgage company gets to keep the interest you pay no matter what, so there's an incredibly strong vested interest for them in being able to make loans to absolutely anybody. Continuing to make predatory loans to people who really don't have the means, and selling them on the idea that the housing market will continue to skyrocket, and all the rest of it, is was very lucrative.

Okay, I'll try again. After I finished my Ph.D., I spent two years teaching for per-class "adjunct"* pay - $1700 a course, $2000 a course, that kind of thing. One academic year I made about $10,000. My student loans were coming due. My (now ex-)wife was unemployed. And I had a credit card with a $28,000 limit.

What I figure is, the mortgage people took a long hard look at Citibank, Chase, Discover, and other credit card companies' business models, and said to themselves, "Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff." (They got me, too. By the time I made it to California, having been underpaid for my labor for four years - which is way under the standard for advance-degree candidates in the humanities - I owed north of $30,000 on credit. Obviously, more income would have helped, but that's another, very long and tedious story.)

It's not exactly creative genius, I'll admit. The mortgage people just took up the credit card plan, applied it to housing, convinced federal regulators to look the other way, created a huge inflation in housing prices by giving out absurdly large loans, and then sold the debt on an open, speculative market that everyone admitted nobody really understood.

You know, I quoted that line from Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, thinking it was just a funny way to express the epiphany mortgage lenders may have experienced, but now I think it has more parallels than I initially intended.

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more then ten to twenty million killed, tops. Depending on the breaks."

--

*The term "adjunct," as a name for contingent academic labor, is regarded as deeply offensive by most in the contingent academic labor movement. It connotes being disconnected, non-essential, merely additive, when in fact the contemporary higher education system across the US, Canada, and Mexico absolutely depends on a large quantity of non-tenure-track, non-permanent academic employees. The most proper name for this class might be "faculty experiencing highest levels of exploitation and least rewards and security," but that's a bit unwieldy. I like to refer to us jokingly as "tenuous-track." How about "screwed"?

even more disturbing evidence

The kittoises have doubled in size, and although I don't think they've doubled in cuteness, they've certainly taken to some extremely cute



mutual face-biting


sleeping


waking up

and lens-cap attacking.

math problems

It turns out that abstinence-only sex education programs are, at best, worthless for reducing rates of sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy. The reason for drawing this conclusion is that the $1.3 billion spent on them since the late 1990s have resulted in no positive change in the rates of these.

Time to rethink the programs? Nah.

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems "rather elitist" that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. "I don't think it's something we should abandon," he said of abstinence-only funding.

In other news, Rep. Duncan also questioned the judgments of his 9-year old son's teacher, saying it seemed "rather elitist" that the teacher claimed to know better what the product of 8 times 7 is.