some extremely dark thoughts for the start of the school year

Yesterday I spent the day at the CFA Fall Kick-Off, where we learned of plans to protect faculty rights through contract bargaining and political activities. It's a fairly dire situation, because the CSU administration's hired union-busting consultants are taking advantage of the bad economic times to attempt to gut basically every protection of faculty. Most frighteningly, their attacks have a coherence that previously the CSU didn't seem to have, or to be so all-in for.

Overall, what we're facing is an attack on education. Absolutely consistently with what I've been calling the legitimation crisis in education, the CSU's proposals contemplate faculty labor as though we were course-delivery mechanisms. No: badly-designed, noisy course-delivery mechanisms. The reason for this, in turn, is that the CSU administration, and apparently also the board of trustees, believes that knowledge is not only a commodity, but one that is available in equivalent modular packages. Now, if there are two competing packages, one of which costs the university in terms of tenure, enforceable rights, benefits, and so forth, and the other never complains because it's a software package sold by a publishing company, then the better option is clearly, from this standpoint, the software package.

What this says about the value of faculty labor is insulting, demeaning, dehumanizing, and ignorant. But most of what the public at large understands about faculty labor coincides just about exactly with the CSU's position, because in general the public, I would venture to say, believes the same thing about knowledge. This is the source of CSU's tremendous advantage over CFA, when bargaining our contract turns to the more arcane issues of faculty rights over curriculum, workload, class size, tenure protections, evaluations, and other non-fiscal issues.

Never mind that the theory of knowledge operating in this approach is absolutely absurd. One does not come to know something by purchasing information about it. That this is a prevailing view, dismissing completely the significance of critical thinking, being able to communicate, or being able to understand in broad and integrative terms - the kind of terms that would help a person understand complex systems like economies or ecological environments. If Pearson textbook publishers can sell the university a package that it can turn around and sell to students, called "Economics" or "Ecology," for less than the cost of hiring an expert to teach those courses, then, from that crudely economic perspective that understands all goals in terms of bottom-line "throughput," that's the best "delivery mechanism."

Delivery, I always want to ask, of what?

Face facts: As a delivery mechanism, a person with a PhD in philosophy is about totally useless. I can't deliver much of anything, excepts a set of not-very-compelling facts about the biographies and histories of a few philosophers. Nothing in philosophy beyond that is, really, a fact. Theoretical thinking is not reducible to monologue, and there is no consensus in philosophy about anything - not even how to interpret the basic works and theories of great philosophers.

But Pearson's philosophy-in-a-box would solve all those problems by simply eliminating any ambiguity, or reducing it to a statement that "it's complicated," and presenting students philosophy as a set of facts about philosophy. The relevant analogy here is whether presenting a person a series of facts about you would be equivalent to knowing you, and I think it's not.

Philosophy is not so unlike other disciplines. If it were, then sciences would never change.

Ergo, whatever is being sold to students in prepackaged courses, it is not knowledge, as understood within the learned disciplines themselves.

So, faculty clearly win the argument. Experts are experts precisely in so far as non-experts do not know or understand what the experts know and understand. You need experts to explain their expertise for exactly that reason. QED.

None of which matters at all, because the typical college administrator knows the typical college student sees only per-unit cost, time-to-graduation, and the cash value of the diploma, as relevant measures of "college." The typical college student is not in college to learn, and many do not understand what learning is or how to do it, and administrators understand this. So it is easy for administrators to sell Pearson's cheaper prepackaged non-education, to a great degree, because it's exactly what most people want from college.

I was going to conclude with a statement of hope, but I don't wanna.

this is the week that was

And oh what a week it was.

Has the album of the day been 'disappeared'?

These rumors are baseless. What's happened is I've completely lost track of the Album of the Day feature. I'm at the start of the Fs now, and the big highlights of this week are lost in a haze of meetings, class sessions, and grading, and grating.

And the semester, how goes it?

I've hit the perpetual-motion chunk of the semester, and from here until just about the very end there's no respite from the constant shifting tides of student work. So if anyone sees me on campus, or walking around Turlock, wearing bright yellow ducky water wings, it's because I'm trying to float.

You do realize those are not meant to be life-saving floatation devices for adults, right?

Oh.

Yeah, it's more of a novelty item for little kids spashing about in backyard pools.

Now you tell me.

Any new revelations or epiphanies to report? You were up to two or three a week during the high point of the summer.

Huh?

All my epiphantic powers are now focused on the problem of How To Work With Bunches And Bunches Of Assholes - which would be a guaranteed best-selling title - rather than the more pleasurable discoveries of the philosophic life. Plus, I keep playing this same riff, over and over again, that is clearly desperate to turn into a song. I got nothin'.

Still, sanity remains intact, right?

Let's see. This week I've told my students to spend a week not consuming anything made in Asia; suggested it would be a good idea to jam their bodies into the ceiling of elevators whenever they ride them; insisted to them that 10 years ago I was also still male, causing grievous confusion on the part of some, and gender paranoia on the part of others; and I told one class I resented being there because it was Lauren's birthday, then retracted that and said I was just upset because I was longing for the strawberry tart I'd made. In a class discussion of the professional obligation to maintain client confidentiality, I urged a student to tell us the juicy gossip she'd heard about a faculty member.

So, yeah.

What's the outlook for next week?

30% chance of pain!
Grading this afternoon, tapering off in the late afternoon. Pizza this evening, followed by fizzy liquids. Saturday and Sunday, expected in the foothills, followed by the return of grading Sunday evening or Monday morning.
70% chance of thunder-grading Monday night.
For the rest of the week, intermittent grading between classes. For Tuesday's Academic Senate game, expect dense fog, low visibility, and darkness.

Apparently, there's also a 0.00010374% chance of Apocalypse by Wednesday. Be sure to bring your hat.

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.

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.

guess we'll see how this goes

We're now former Washington Mutual customers, since they bit the big one last night and were forcibly sold to JPMorgan (as they call the conglomeration of former banks and financial institutions). It's the largest failure in US history as of 6:48 PDT today, but there's no really good reason at this point to believe they'll hold the record all that long.

So, the question I have is, how do I pay my rent? What happens to the automatic bills paid out of that account?

It's gonna be an interesting month.