facts

[NB: I offer no explanation for my lengthy absence from this space, or for my return.]

I tried, and mostly failed, to exercise my honors class this spring about the topic: what is a fact? (Every handful of years, a cohort passes through this class with little enthusiasm for the course. This was the year.)

There is, of course, a current semi-academic discourse about the issue. Many critics disparage “alternative facts” as cherry-picked, phony, or simply lies. More strategic critics counterattack campaigns that enlist alleged facts in the prosecution of ideological warfare. Still more sophisticated critics debate the meaning of facts in what some call a possibly “post-fact” political era.

On the whole, the discussion is premised on the notion that facts are patent, objective, knowable truths that exist in the world. According to this notion, facts are discovered, as though they were mineral deposits simply to be found. They are the antibody of fabrication—any artifice or production rules out a thing being a fact.

This positivism is found in fringes of the fact discussion, where it crosses the border into academic discourse, and the demise of facts is blamed on one or another development of social, literary, and philosophical thought—“postmodernism” or “deconstruction” or even “feminism” or “gender studies.” Generally, this charge is made by academics who have not read the main texts attributed to these developments, but have the vague idea that they all spell doom for scientific knowledge, truth, and disciplinary method—if not also for cardinal direction, physical laws, and matter. (I used to try to educate my colleagues about these “movements,” even going so far as to suggest that they try reading Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report commissioned by the government of Québec and published in 1977. It would seem odd that it took 40-50 years for deconstruction and postmodernism to destroy facts, but perhaps the US is just that much in the intellectual rear-guard.)

The fact is, facts are produced. They are assembled from observation, hypothesis, theory, and, often enough, “common sense.” They are debated, using methods of inquiry, by experts in every discipline. They are never final, even when they are firmly established. Everyone who understands any form of respectable method of inquiry should know this.

Instead, the discussion of facts usually takes the treacherous shortcut of assertion: there are facts, there are no “alternative facts,” there are multiple versions of facts, there are no facts, there is no difference between facts and opinions, etc. None of these assertions acknowledges the complexity of facts themselves. That’s too bad, especially for critics of the current President and the “alt-right,” since it is precisely the lack of any reasonable methodology for establishing their assertions of fact that is most vexing. (Hint: someone saying it on Fox News does not count as a reasonable methodology.) The political left has its (smaller) share of those who seek to establish facts through bald assertion, too, and these people are not helping.

I don’t have a lot of confidence that an honest discussion of the construction of facts would improve the political situation. Too many people have been trained to react to the dog whistles of demagogues and advertisers. But the movement of high school students demanding that elected representatives enact legislation that would make schools safer from gun violence might make us optimistic. They have realized that thoughts and prayers are not making them safer, and they seem to want change based on what to many seems like a clear pattern of facts. They are much smarter than the dominating elite in the country credit them to be. Perhaps there is a larger interest in rational discussion of debatable facts, and debatable hypotheses to explain those facts.

On the other hand, that didn't move my students this term.

x

a brief interpretation of higher education, inspired by Georg Lukács

As long as higher education is construed through ideology, it will be impossible to develop the basis for overturning the social relations within. The ideology prevents us from confronting the contradictions of education in capitalist society.

1. Education provides access to socially produced goods—job security and income being the most commonly cited. The ideology tells us that this access is on the basis of merit earned by students’ academic and social-benefit work through the auspices of the institution. In fact, education is an institutional state apparatus that determines access to goods through sorting candidates, then subjecting those admitted to disciplines that produce a consciousness perfectly suited to the tasks of upholding and reproducing status quo predominant social relations. Power, wealth, and prestige are reproduced in a docile subject.

2. Education develops democratic citizenship. The ideology addresses democratic virtues of critical thinking, autonomy, and social responsibility. It develops these as the skills of individuals, in service to the prevailing social order. The possibilities of collective action are marginalized both by institutional policy and architecture, but also by the standards and protocols of evaluation. The democratic citizen produced by education is a individualist-bourgeois consciousness, prepared for fulfilling a role established by nationalist, capitalist aims. Meanwhile, this consciousness believes in individualist concepts of rights, merit, property, etc.—i.e., it does not believe in collectivism, cosmopolitanism, or the free ability to form social bonds through the collective will.

3. Education creates whole human beings through transformative experience. The ideology refers to the individual as a being whose transformation is needed and valuable. The self-regard of this form of consciousness further naturalizes individualism by producing a reality effect in which the individual is held up in opposition to the social whole. The cult of the fetishized individual makes it unintelligible that this effect is the result of being caught up in the social whole that is constructed through education (among other institutional state apparatuses). In fact, even the individualism worshipped in education is a false and mistaken one—individualism as the development of a “personality” composed of “lifestyle choices” which are nothing more than selections of consumer objects.

4. Education creates public good. The least tangible and plausible claim of the education ideology is that it benefits the social whole. Because education reproduces and recapitulates the class divisions in capitalist society, and naturalizes these along with the notions of merit, productivity, individual responsibility, etc., the product of education can only serve the class interests of capitalist society. The “public good” so named is an orderly (i.e. compliant) society where class divisions themselves can be occluded.

Yet these self-destructive, exploitative principles are marshaled in defense of education by “progressive” educators and their collaborators. Tax support of so-called public higher education is advocated on the grounds that education is the key to economic and social progress—for individuals, entry into the “middle class;” for society, creation of an army of professionals to provide ameliorations for various ills.

Here yet another contradiction is hidden: the ills for which the “middle class” needs amelioration are created by “middle class” consumption. Indeed, the ills of the society as a whole, and of the planet, are created by religious devotion to consumption. That consumption further drives worldwide exploitation of people and planet that enriches capitalists while it impoverishes everyone else. While those in the “middle class” perceive themselves to be beneficiaries of consumer society because they live among technological means, it is nearly impossible to discover, and really impossible to perceive the real effects and costs of consumption.

Education provides the ways and means of consumption: consumers and consumer objects. And of course, the amelioration of the ills of consumption is brought about by more consumption. For alienation from other people, consume “communications media” devices! For physiological and psychological malaise, consume medicine!

Meanwhile, real power and wealth not only remain in the hands of capitalists, but they accumulate still more. Their own false consciousness prevents understanding that their own power and wealth is dependent upon a fatal addiction to consumption and is destined to end. A despoiled, smoldering planet uninhabitable by humans is also uninhabitable by capitalists.

To the extent that any of this is true, education as it is currently formulated can not benefit anyone. The only form of education that could, would be a thoroughly critical education, aiming not to contribute to the prevailing social order but to bring about its destruction. This critical education could not promise any individual a better life, because the destruction needed will be costly and painful, and the conclusion of the revolutionary period is in an unknowably distant future. Critical education could not promise any kind of advance in the power or wealth of individuals—on the contrary, it would lead them to be ill-suited to the labor routines and compliance demanded by every workplace. Critical education could promise pain and suffering. It could promise exposure to forms of thinking that are unrecognizable in bourgeois culture. It could promise exposure to severe disciplinary tactics and state violence.

then it's war!

The "War on Terror" doesn't seem to have gone so well, after all. Whodathunkit?

No doubt, it's the wrong target. No, I don't mean that the US has bombed the wrong brown people, although in large part that's true. And I don't meant that bombing brown people isn't solving the problem, although that's true too. I also don't mean that there's no moral justification for the policy, although that's abundantly clear.

I mean "Terror." Maybe we can't really commit war against "Terror." Plus, I don't know, but isn't war itself kind of terrifying? It's certainly terrible.

Terror is paralyzing. So - follow me here - it's not the people in terror who are turning into terrorists. It's more like people who have something wrong with their lives, and they can think of no other way to solve it but to lash out violently against the supposed perpetrators, in an atavistic and doomed attempt to kill their way out of their problems.

To target the right affect, what we need, I've realized at last, is this: a War on Malaise.

university education and opportunities to do stuff on campus

This is the text of something I posted for my students to read. It's related to class discussions in my Philosophy and Education class (aka Phil and Ed, nice guys, really), and starting Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and other stuff goin' on.

Last Thursday was the Academic Freedom Forum that I organized. One of the primary goals of the event was to contribute to the intellectual life of the university at large, and to invite all members of the university to take part. By my count, 8 of my 108 students attended. I expect there are basically three reasons more of my students didn’t attend: because they weren’t interested, because they had a schedule conflict, or because they didn’t feel comfortable going.

Those who were uninterested may not have understood what the event was about, or why it would be relevant to their lives. They might also have not cared about the issue. I expect that some didn’t care because they don’t consider education to be about doing anything except attending classes and fulfilling requirements for graduation. What is the purpose of university education? How does that purpose relate to fulfilling graduation requirements? Is that purpose related to doing anything outside of fulfilling graduation requirements?

Those who had schedule conflicts may have had a class at the time of the event, but many had work or family obligations. It’s obviously impossible to schedule anything such that no one has any conflicting events. But scheduling is made more difficult by the many obligations most of our students confront daily. Many of those obligations should take precedence over engaging in the intellectual life of the university. What is the relative value of engaging in that intellectual life of the university compared to these other obligations?

Those who were uncomfortable about attending may feel alienated from the life of the university. That could be because of language or culture gaps: even the notion of “intellectual life” may make someone feel unwanted or uninvited. Others may have a health or mental health related reason. I know I often skip events on campus, even events I am interested in, because of anxiety. I know it’s not avoiding anxious situations is not a very positive response to anxiety, but after a long work day, with my energy reserves low, it’s sometimes too much of a burden to summon the fortitude to tough it out. Whose university is it? Whose intellectual life is it?

This is a complex issue. I usually think about it in simple terms, based on my own experience as an undergraduate student. My life as an undergraduate student was not similar to most here at Stan State. I come from a relatively privileged background, and my parents paid my tuition to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (tuition would have been a bit higher there, in constant dollars, than tuition here at Stan State now). I had a job, 20 hours a week, in the library, to pay for books and other expenses. I lived on campus. In addition to classes and work, I spent hours and hours every week, on campus, talking to my professors in their offices, reading in the library, and just prowling around the academic buildings, seeing what was going on. I went to some kind of university academic-related event about every other week—a public lecture by a visiting scholar, a film screening, a play, an art display, a poetry reading, you name it, I would go, especially if there was free food. None of this was for class, or for graduation requirements, or for credit, but just because I saw there were opportunities to do these things, and I wanted to do them. It mattered to me because I had an actively curious intellect, and because I wanted to be an active member of the university. Not only that, but I felt like the university was mine to explore and even exploit in those ways. My feeling was that faculty in their offices were fair game for me to go talk to, about anything at all; that the library was an open invitation to read anything at all about anything at all; and that the art studios, theaters, and architecture department were there for my own entertainment and stimulation. Nobody told me I wasn’t allowed in.

My way of approaching college life was unusual then, and would be even more unusual now. For one thing, my economic situation was very different from what a larger and larger majority of students face today. A lot has changed about the financing of so-called public higher education: fees are higher, and textbook costs are astronomically higher. A lot has changed about the economic conditions of everyday life, and about public funding for a great many human needs.

I imagine it is also the case that the culturally prevailing ideas about the value of higher education have changed. If it was unusual in my undergrad days for students to think of college as an intentional, transformative set of experiences, I think now it sounds almost goofy to suggest this. The cultural idea we have of higher education now emphasizes job preparation to such an extent, that it’s hard for many people to imagine it can do anything else.

The cultural role of higher education has changed also because the demographics of college student populations have changed. Back when I attended, UNCC had more than the usual number of “non-traditional” students—which means students who are not 18-22 years old, and who did not begin college immediately after high school and expect to complete college in four years. At Stan State today, most of our students are non-traditional students. On top of that, a huge majority are first-generation college students, many are immigrants, many more are the children of immigrants, and many do not primarily speak English (the de facto language of teaching on our campus).

When I take all that into consideration, I realize that my own experience of undergraduate education was incredibly privileged, but also that I took every last advantage of it that I could. That immeasurably enriched my education and my life. Because I know how full, rich, and happy the experience of participation in the intellectual life of the university was for me, I want that for everyone. This also indicates what I think university education is, what it is for, and what value it has.

But who is it for? Remember, I was privileged. I didn’t doubt where my next meal was coming from (not until grad school). I had the resources to take advantage of the university. I didn’t receive the message, not once, never ever ever, that university education was not for me.

What do you value about university education? What are you getting from it? What could you get from it? How?

If you did not attend the Academic Freedom Forum because you couldn’t afford to (i.e., your schedule made it impossible), because you weren’t interested, or because you were uncomfortable about coming, this is not your problem. It is a problem concerning the institution as a whole and all of our relations to it. It is a problem regarding our economic, cultural, and social statuses, and, yes, of classism, racism, sexism, prejudice against different ethnicities, against different linguistic groups. The university is not somehow outside of the society, and the social conflicts and problems in our society are reflected in everything that goes on in the university.

My question is what we can do to make university education as valuable to you as it can be, and as it should be?

some skeptical doubts about tenure as protection of academic freedom

I started in earnest reading about academic freedom a couple months ago. I'm quite perplexed. Lemme try to sort out a couple perplexities.

Historically, in the US, academic freedom and tenure have been intricately linked. Tenure's key legitimating purpose, it is said, is to protect academic freedom: a tenured professor cannot be fired without due process, so that professor cannot be eliminated by a university administration merely for unpopular, controversial, or critical utterances. (If true, this would mean that non-tenured faculty and all contingent faculty have no de jure right to academic freedom.) An immediate question that arises is: what kinds of utterance? Critical of the university administration? Critical of colleagues? Unpopular in one's disciplinary field of research? Unpopular politically according to dominant ideologies in the US? Controversial regarding electoral politics or political issues? Or regarding sexual mores, or the high cost of gasoline?

In significant and well-known cases of tenured professors being fired, typically what has led to the firing are comments that are rather outrageous, from the standpoint of dominant political ideology in the US. For instance, Ward Churchill called the dead from the World Trade Center terrorist attack "little Eichmanns," which was nasty of him.

It is not clear that due process is routinely followed in these cases. Instead, an administration abruptly fires a professor, and legal and quasi-legal proceedings ensue. AAUP is called in to investigate, lawsuits are filed, all hell breaks loose. But it isn't tenure that protects this professor from being fired.

The cases in which tenure does protect a professor are probably not well-known, precisely because the effort to fire a professor that runs afoul of academic freedom fails because due process is followed and protects the professor. Because we don't hear about the case (no doubt the process would be confidential), such cases don't present evidence that tenure protects academic freedom.

My skeptical assessment of this situation is that one would take tenure to protect academic freedom basically on faith. One would also take on faith what kinds of utterance would be protected.

Thus my first perplexity: whether tenure, viewed as a process, is something that can protect academic freedom. Not if tenure works the way Marc Bousquet describes the process in How the University Works. My own take on it is maybe slightly less trenchant than the always delightfully trenchant (to me anyway; he rubs a whole lotta people the wrong way) Bousquet.

When I've heard or talked to tenure-track professors, candidates for tenure, about their work lives, academic freedom does not come up. Workload is about all they can talk about, and they barely have time to talk about that. They are desperate to publish as much as they can, to teach whatever they are told to teach, and to do whatever mundane committee work they are told they have to do, in order to satisfy and overwhelmingly exceed stated requirements for tenure. If academic freedom is supposed to cover unpopular, controversial, or critical utterances, tenure candidates do not have academic freedom, because they would never go anywhere near such utterances before reaching tenure. Plus, everyone they talk to tells them this.

So, once tenured, professors have academic freedom, and let that criticism flow forth, yes? No. Once tenured, professors seek promotion to full professor status, and they do so by continuing the work they did as tenure candidates. Although they may acknowledge that tenure protects them from dismissal, they know it doesn't protect them from not being promoted.

Besides their own pecuniary interests, tenured professors who are more obliging would be prudent to consider what consequences their critical comments might bring upon their academic departments, colleagues, research funding, and other benefits bestowed by administration. Very nice tenured, full professors are extremely cautious to avoid critical intramural utterance because they believe that administration will punish their criticism by denying tenure to their colleagues, or by denying their departments a much-needed tenure-track employment "line," or by cutting their budgets outright.

This leads me to a second perplexity, for another day: Perhaps academic freedom is not supposed to protect intramural utterance? Or is only meant to protect utterance within an academic discipline?

something is rotten

For [Adorno], the question of how to live a good life in a bad life, how to persist subjectively in a good life when the world is poorly organized, is but a different way of claiming that moral worth cannot be considered apart from its conditions and consequences. In his words, "anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. We might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today." -- Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 133

Butler states the fairly obvious connection between Adorno and Foucault to what she calls "the critical tradition," meaning the tradition skeptical of Enlightenment conceptions of Reason as ultimate principle and savior of subjective agency, responsibility, universal morality, and political ends. I like very much the phrase "how to live a good life in a bad life," because of its simplistic expression of a basic urge of "the critical tradition," namely, that ethical reflection begins with the intuition that something is wrong.

I spend a lot of time and energy focused on what is wrong. From my standpoint, there appears to be a lot that is wrong: social inequity and discrimination, exploitation, hypocrisy, domination of individuals, the public, and the polity by extremely wealthy people, etc. This is not a pretty world.

One could chalk this tendency up to a reactive habit of anxiety instilled prior to any memory. This would be dismissive and reductive. I would not deny that a pre-reflective and pre-rational outlook on the world subtends every observation and interpretation we each make. There are, on the other hand, objectivities to observe. Ultimately, I think it's futile to try to separate and correct completely for the pre-thetic sensibilities through which we observe the world.

Besides, such a reductive view would miss a fundamental point. To the extent that my habitual self is pre-thetically oriented toward the world as "poorly organized," that orientation is the condition of my habitus (the condition that subjected me to the "bad life"), and thus of my having any moral outlook whatsoever. The world I find myself always to have inhabited is "poorly organized."

The ethical question is not about assigning blame for this "bad life;" neither is it about my responsibility for fixing it (which would seem to be both an impossible task and a performative contradiction, if you dig that). By "right form of politics," Adorno can't mean that those in this situation know precisely what is wrong and how to fix it, because that isn't politics at all, but the dissolution of politics. Politics would be, instead, the ethical discourse concerning how worlds can and ought to be organized, and how subjects in those worlds could act ethically and responsibly in them.

The critical approach thus asserts that the world and ourselves are out of joint, that ethics and ethical responsibility for an individual do not gear into the world as presently constructed. The task of ethics is not to make the world conform to my subjective conception of what is right, nor to make my subjective conception conform to the world as I find it. The task is to respond to that condition of being out-of-joint.

politics

It is rather amazing that there have been only two viable political parties in the US for lo these many years, especially since they offer virtually no choice regarding policy (look it the hell up: Obamacare is practically a carbon copy of the bill Romney signed in Massachusetts, and both of them will make their friends donors in the insurance industry very happy).

So, I'd like to ask my readers for their help, guidance, and support, as I kick off a brand new venture, a new political party that I think will be a viable third option. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I believe I have a strategy that will get our candidates elected, help us raise all-important campaign dollars, and draw even-more-all-important media attention.

It's too late to really make an impact on this year's general election, but we can get a start, and this is where you come in. What I want you to do is, on your ballot, write in a candidate of your choice, but, more importantly, state that candidate's party: Full Of Shit.

Here's what I have so far as the party platform of the Full Of Shit Party:

We will lower taxes on wealthy people. This will make them happy. It will not create jobs, but say, over and over, that it will. Call these wealthy people something like "job creators," but don't use those words, because the Republicans have a copyright on them, and that'd just get messy. How about "slave wage providers"? Or "tricklers"? (Remember "trickle-down"? Remember how that worked?)

Lower the deficit. We won't say how.

The Full of Shit Party will continue to make America a place where small businesses can thrive. The entrepreneurial spirit is, after all, what makes America great, and as we all know, America is the greatest nation on earth. It's also what has made Chevron, Walmart, and Comcast such lucrative firms. Their contributions to our economy and society need to be encouraged, through effective tax rates of zero or below.

Maintain the $7.25 minimum wage, since, obviously, any increase in the minimum wage will hurt small businesses and force manufacturing jobs, like putting together a Big Mac, overseas. If you don't want to see fast food manufacturing jobs end up in China or Bangladesh, you have to support maintaining a minimum wage that would provide a full-time income of $14,500 a year (though none of those jobs would be full-time, of course).

Cut government services wherever possible. DId I say "services"? I meant "waste," of course. As everyone knows, any time the government spends a dollar, God kills a kitten it is entirely wasted and no economic activity is created as a result. (Of course, this is not true at all regarding the defense department. Every time the government spends a dollar on the defense department, God kills three kittens God kills terror the world becomes safer for capitalist accumulation democracy.

The Full of Shit Party believes in equality and freedom. We believe it is every American's right to pursue happiness. We support the rights of same-sex couples the unborn undocumented workers donors all true Americans whose behavior we tolerate who have donated to the Party. However, we won't do jack shit to advance their cause.


Remember, on election day, write in "Full Of Shit."

current events

I've been away awhile. How are you? You look well. Really? Sorry to hear that.

It's not all cycling here at Doc Nagel, Inc. No indeed: there's classes to teach, papers to grade, and proposition 30 to vote for and proposition 32 to vote against.

Times are tough for prop 30, which could mean times will become very much tougher at the CSU, at the UC, at the community colleges, and at K-12 schools. Honestly, the only way I can conceive of someone who doesn't make $250,000 a year choosing to vote against prop 30 is stupidity. To me it looks like this: either you can have a bowl of yummy ice cream, or a shiv to the neck, and about half of Californians say they want the shiv.

"Really?" I say to them in my fantasy, "'cuz, ya know, the shiv'll hurt, like, bad."

"I know. Want the shiv," says half of California.

"Look at this ice cream, though," says I. "It's way more delicious than being stabbed in the neck, don't you think?"

"I do," says half of California. "Want the shiv."

"It's a stab wound, you realize that, right?"

"Shiv."

Etc.

This is like a brief conversation I had the other day about prop 34, which would ban the death penalty in California. The pro-34 arguments are as follows: (1) the death penalty costs far more than life imprisonment would, (2) sometimes innocent people are convicted of murder, and so, when we execute those innocent people, our society effectively commits a murder of its own, (3) in states with the death penalty, it's likely that the murder rate is higher, so it does not serve as a deterrent. The student understood all these, but was still against 34. In fact, the student said that a person who has committed murder loses all rights to live -- a position I hear again and again, and which is entirely baseless in our political heritage of natural rights. I suggested that this assumes we only convict the actually and legally guilty, when things like the Innocence Project have determined that many death-row inmates are wrongfully convicted. The student repeated that a murderer has no rights -- completely ignoring my argument.

I offered that the only logical argument I could see in favor of the death penalty is if you assumed the only way to restore justice is with a reciprocal act (Kant argued this). This did not impress, apparently, because the student did not need or want a rational position. The student wanted vengeance. And a shiv.

when is a sex scandal not a sex scandal?

I turned on my hotel TV this morning, like I always do when I’m alone in a hotel room, and the first thing that confronted me was the Andrew Wiener “sexting” scandal. Not only did he tweet his underpants to a woman somewhere or other, but he also apparently had an ongoing text flirtation with a casino card dealer. On my screen was an outpouring of moral revulsion and condemnation. It was quite festive.

I don’t care about Anthony Wiener. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing that we’ve become so culutrally obsessed with this bizarre romantic/moral expectation that no reasonable person could ever engage in extra-curricular fantasy, flirtation, or even attraction. I heard Wiener’s texting equated to “cheating” on his wife. Really?

To me, this looks more like an attack on imagination than anything, which is no great surprise in a society that demands simplistic black-and-white moral distinctions. A spouse is either faithful or faithless – and to be faithful apparently means having no other attractions or affections of any kind outside of the marital bond. There is no room for ambiguity, and no forgiveness for even the mildest flirtation or shared fantasy.

On one hand, that attitude is frankly and utterly stupid. I can no more refrain from haphazard and random attractions than I can stop seeing. It doesn’t mean I’m faithless. Beyond that, I can’t begin to fathom why it’s become an unimaginable moral monstrosity that anyone could possibly get erotically entangled in fantasy with someone not sanctioned officially for it. Our culture has a driving need to judge, I guess.

Not that I’m sending anyone pictures of my underpants – because I’m not quite that stupid or foolhardy. Besides, sometimes a few words are worth a thousand pictures.

down with negativity!

For the last couple weeks I've suffered an unaccountable bout of depression.

All depression is unaccountable, as anyone who's had any kind of treatment for it can tell you. There are only "factors" in depression, no "causes," and no "cures."

One such "factor" is having previously been depressed, which is kind of like saying that there's a correlation between the sun rising Wednesday and the sun rising all over again on Thursday. (Which it has.) My first actually acknowledged and treated depression happened when I was 9. Then again at 14, 19, 22, 27, 29,... you get the general idea.

A major "factor" this time around is that every day I am immersed in a tub full of the vomit and excrement of powerful people. In the media, this mainly takes the form of the resentiment of an ownership class so paranoid and jealous of its wealth and control that it foments fake populisms to pervert democratic processes. At the university, it's the mind-warping inversion of all meanings to preclude any real public accountability or responsibility. On the streets of this town, it's mainly in the trickle-down form of bumper stickers, like the one I see in a parking lot telling me that the driver will keep his guns and money, while I keep the change.

(Which - HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR! Keep the Change!! HAR HAR HAR! I have insane urges to grab people like this and shake them, shove them up against their own vehicles and sneer into their faces while I mutter in barely-withheld violence, "Oh, don't doubt it for a second, buddy. That crazy [derogatory word for African American] in Washington is going to come and take your guns away. And your money.... And your truck.... And your daughters....!" I don't do these things, you understand.)

So, I'm going to try to take a vacation from all that vomit and excrement, give myself a thorough wash. For me, that generally means a refreshing dip in a cool satire pool.

For the next little while, Paul Krassner is my co-pilot.

exciting new ideas for your (political) party!

Among the mysteries surrounding the so-called Tea Party movement is what exactly these self-styled zealots stand for. Usually, zealots are zealots because they believe in something with the core of their being - in the holiness of a, the abomination of b, the - uh - zestiness of c, etc. But as far as I can tell, GOP candidates who have associated themselves with this movement, especially successful ones, have no identifiable political beliefs, let alone a considered, coherent ideology. They're sort of wandering in a vast, vacant desert of politics, and apparently, they hate it.

So, as a service to anyone among them, or just anyone who shares their livid, if not altogether conscientious or self-reflective, anger at their existential bereftitude, I'm offering some new positions, expressed in convenient, poster-board-n-magic-marker-ready slogan format.

7¢ NICKEL NOW!

This marvel of economic and fiscal policy has its roots in Marxism, specifically in Animal Crackers (1930). Groucho expounds the prudence of the 7¢ nickel: you could buy a 2-cent newspaper, and get the same nickel back again as change. As Mr. Marx put it, a single nickel, carefully spent, could last a family for years. Obviously, prices have changed since the last Depression, so perhaps what we need here is a $7 $5 bill. But you get the idea. The slogan is symbolic.

US OUT OF CANADA

Foreign policy is often so complex as to defy forecasting, let alone policy-making. Ending conflict with Canada is an easy policy goal to understand, and a campaign promise any aspiring candidate could defend.

OBAMA IS A SECRET AMISH

The depths of rumor-mongering about President Obama have yet to be plumbed. The great thing about insinuating or directly claiming Obama is secretly Amish is that, if you restrict yourself to screaming about it in the media, the Amish will never come forward with proof. Plus, you could demand that Obama prove he was never at a barn-raising, point out that the Amish don't have cameras, and that therefore he can't possibly prove it. QED.

DON'T ASK WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK TO SUPERSIZE YOUR ORDER

Since most Americans already seem to agree that the primary legitimating purpose of government is to assure their access to an endless supply of fries, this is sure to win popular support.

FREE MARYLAND

Poor Maryland!

TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO!

Campaign proven! Especially useful if your name is Harrison, for some reason.

KILLING PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD IS MURDER!

Let folks know where you stand. Someone's got to be bold enough to tell the truth about this issue. All these career politicians try to bend words and line their pockets! But the truth needs to be told! (This is also a terrific slogan to include in any candidates' debate, or city council meeting, or any other occasion when more than one person occupies a defined space: the train, an elevator, waiting for the crosswalk light, intimate moments...)

LEGALIZE PAT

In this day and age, it's just unfounded prejudice that keeps us from making Pat legal. If the government would legalize, regulate, and tax Pat, a large portion of our deficit could be fixed. Everybody knows this.

next year

Only 7 class sessions left in my academic year. I'll get there.

This has been one of the worst years of my career. From the start it looked terminal. By October I was told to look for employment elsewhere for 2010-11. I did, and found almost no teaching positions I could reasonably qualify for, and none I particularly wanted. But I applied, and received my rejection letters, and worried, and tried to keep doing my work.

Sometime in January I learned that a new possibility was arising that I would return next academic year. This is not because of the Governor's January budget request dissociative hallucination drug-crazed fit waste-of-time adding $305 million to the CSU budget. I don't believe the Governor has any intention of keeping his promises. I don't believe the Governor, no matter what he says. I can barely believe in the Governor, let alone the crapola he present to the public.

No, what I heard was that faculty in the department were finalists for other positions. They got them. So the department is shrinking by about 1/4 of its full-time faculty, and thus my job became 25% cut-proof. That's not to say I'm sure I'll have a job next year, again, despite the May release of the Governor's revised budget gambling addiction masquerade obscenity continuing to call for the $305 million additional for the CSU. Given the state of the state, the university's budget, the university's administration, and all the politics involved, I won't be entirely at rest until I not only have an appointment letter in hand, but have actually gone and taught my first classes in the Fall.

I can't wait to get the hell outta this place this Spring. This has been a terrible year. And now, weirdly, I can't wait to get back in the Fall to start the whole thing over again.

Oh yeah, and the collective bargaining agreement between CSU and CFA expires June 30th. We'll be in bargaining this Fall. So the fighting will simply continue, on more and other fronts. Can't wait for that, either.

text of a speech I didn't give at the CFA Assembly

The 72nd CFA Assembly was held in Los Angeles this weekend, so yes, it was our second trip down to LA in 9 days. We just drove back up through Kern County dust and windstorms (which badly scratched the passenger side door of Eddie Jetta by nearly impaling us with a tumbleweed), and hard rain through Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus counties. It was harrowing, and now I've got to try to calm myself, and get some work done for my long class day tomorrow.

Luckily, last night I hardly slept. I was up half the night thinking about what a hellish academic year this has been for us and for our families and students. In particular it's been hell on lecturers.

I spoke last night to a lecturer activist whose campus is contemplating cutting 80% of the remaining lecturers for next academic year. It brought back so much of the strife we've dealt with at Santa Claus the last couple years, and my own personal worries about the end of my job here, and of the end of my academic career - a real possibility still, but more remote for me.

It got me thinking about the relative risks, rewards, and stress levels of faculty activists who are on the tenure track versus those of us on the tenuous track. This isn't to say the tenure-line faculty have been anything less than superb in their support -- for the most part. But they haven't so immediately faced loss of employment, loss of their colleagues, and the guilt and unfair blame we feel.

At the Assembly we discussed the CSU Chancellor's latest scheme to invent a problem and impose a draconian solution that helps to blame faculty - this "deliverology" nonsense they've bought from Michael Barber. CFA brought in a Barber critic named John Seddon to speak about how deliverology has worked in the UK (a key example: their public health service is now much worse and the cost management controls imposed by deliverology have resulted in increased costs).

So, there lie in bed, thinking that after all we've done to try to help preserve as many jobs of our fellow lecturers as we can, along comes a new plan that will necessarily result (is planned to result) in even greater loss of faculty work. And I got up and wrote a few words to say at the Assembly. I wouldn't have read it, but I would have used it to speak from - so I'd be more loose and spontaneous, which I like. Anyway, since I didn't say it, here's the text I wrote:

Good morning fellow faculty activists. I wanted to say something this morning about what has been, for me at least, the elephant in the room this whole weekend. Could I have all the lecturer activists please stand for a moment?

[Presumably, they'd stand. They're about 33% of the Assembly.]

I've spoken to many of my fellow lecturer activists at the Assembly this weekend, and not a single one expressed any confidence at all of returning to work, and to our struggle, next academic year. This is important to me because all of the troubles and stress we've dealt with has been compounded for lecturers who know their jobs are even more precarious now than a year ago, despite our fighting back. I hope to see all of you next fall. Thanks, you can sit down again now if you like.

We know why our situation is as precarious as ever next year: deliverology. I don't know about anyone else here, but I think the original version of this story by Franz Kafka is much better written. It also has a happier ending.

Because all of us are exhausted, and all of us can't afford to stop fighting, and all of us are facing the potential futility of our fight, I wanted, finally, to offer something I've been telling myself all year, for what it's worth. No matter the outcome for ourselves and for our colleagues, we haven't failed. We haven't failed ourselves, we haven't failed our colleagues or students, and we haven't failed our universities. And no matter the outcome, we should have hope. I don't have hope because I think the outcome will be good - I don't, in fact. I have hope because we're here now, and because we have fought, in solidarity and in love, and no matter what happens, we still won that solidarity and that love.

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.

face-to-face politics

To the driver who honked his horn, shot me the bird, and proceeded to yell at me about Barack Obama at the corner of Crowell and Monte Vista this evening at 8:58 PM:

Your approach to political discussion is interesting. Obviously, you noticed the Obama/Biden magnet on my trunk, and decided I was an appropriate person to talk to. As an invitation to dialogue, a blaring car horn and a fuck-you gesture significantly inform, as did your initial shouted question, "You actually like what this guy is doing to the country?" I rolled up my window and didn't engage with you because I don't believe the complexity of the issue of health care reform could probably be meaningfully discussed in those circumstances.

Now I'm remembering how I responded to all those "W '04" bumper stickers I saw absolutely everywhere here as the economy tanked and the Iraq fiasco dragged on in 2007 and 2008. I kept driving.

Of course, I did sometimes express to other passengers in my own car that I thought the economic, social, and global policies of the Bush administration were terrible, sometimes illegal, sometimes unethical. I never flipped anybody off and yelled at them because of a "W '04" sticker, and I frankly believe taxing people in the top 3% or so of income in order to extend health care to people who are susceptible of going bankrupt over an illness is a much better idea than invading a country on the basis of a series of false pretexts.

I'm sure you're really genuinely angry that health care reform has passed, and that you genuinely believe expanding health care coverage for more people is somehow illegal, unethical, and terrible. (It follows that you'll refuse to accept any benefits that may accrue to you as a result of passing the bill.)

But we can't talk, not on your terms.

tax burden

I just filed our taxes for 2009. We're getting our usual sizable refund.

As I was filing, I was thinking about the way people complain bitterly about the burden of taxation that US citizens are prone to feeling they're under. People complain that 1/3 or some absurd amount is taken away from them by the greedy government. Like most people, I do object to some of what the government spends money on, though my list is different from most tax revolutionaries' lists. (I like roads and schools, not so much prisons and wars.) But the notion that the government is paupering us to spend like drunken sailors doesn't really fit the fact pattern in my life.

This year, a typical year for me, my effective rate of taxation, after all the deductions and so forth, was a grand total of 11.34%. Now, if you look just at the very much reduced federal "taxable" income (which is about 1/3 less than my adjusted gross income), I pay about 12.97% of that to the feds. But if you take the tax amount from the adjusted gross, my total federal tax is a quite reasonable and doable 8.95%. My rent per month is more than double what I pay in federal income tax.

The state tax is even more interesting. Californians of a certain political stripe love to harp on the incredibly high tax burden of Californians. This is a lie, there's no other word for it. The actual rate of property tax here is below every other state I'm familiar with. And the income tax is even lower. My income tax rate this year, versus my taxable income, was 2.7%. In relation to my adjusted gross income, it was 2.4%.

You know what? I pay about the same amount per month for satellite TV as for state income taxes. (And again, I'd prefer more schools than prisons...)

There are governments that impose serious taxes on people, and do things like fund universal health care, strong educational systems, programs to eliminate the urge to commit crimes, and to rehabilitate people who do. Given how much of our tax dollars go to the military-industrial complex, and how little goes to helping ordinary people's lives, the social services portion of our tax dollars are stretched incredibly thinly. And most of us should shut the hell up about burdensome taxes.

the future of the CSU, part 2

Today, let's look at

Deliverology
Deliverology is the name of Chancellor Reed's latest, greatest initiative to... uh... to...

Well, on one hand, Deliverology is supposed to be a way to improve graduation rates, by cutting budgets and eliminating faculty authority over courses. If it's not clear why improving graduation rates depends on cutting budgets and eliminating faculty authority, then I suppose you're not up to date with the most recent trends in corporatized public institutional management.

Deliverology is the "make the trains run on time" practice developed in Great Britain by Sir Michael Barber, as a way to run trains on time. You get the idea. It turns out to be rather simple: to make the trains run on time, you eliminate stations, eliminate employees, and reduce service. And voilà! Trains. Running. On. Time.

Apparently, the basic evidence that Deliverology works is that customers figured out how to get around the system. The ingenuity of people should not be underestimated.

Anyway, since trains are exactly like higher education in every conceivable way, it's obvious that using these strategies will work perfectly to make higher ed work better in California. And "work better" here means... um... you know, better. Like, better.

How about we let Sir Michael Barber speak for himself on the need for Deliverology in higher education:

Obsessions with policies that are wrong and expensive, such as continuing marginal reductions in class size or protecting teachers' "rights" to teach as they wish in the citadel of their own classrooms, is widespread. Many still cling to the demonstrably false view that creativity consists of each teacher making it up in the classroom. This is not creativity, it is betrayal.

You see, it's simple. The basic problem in higher ed is that faculty insist on "making it up in the classroom," that is, "the citadel of their own classrooms" where they presume to have "'rights'" to... uh... to...

So, Deliverology is a theory which states that:

(1) Faculty do not have the right to determine what they teach, or how

(2) When faculty do determine what and how they teach, they betray (uh..., someone...)

(3) Faculty must be controlled, and their teaching determined by someone who knows better than faculty what faculty should teach (in their own areas of specialization, because they... don't... er... know?... their fields?

(4) Students get more from their educations when faculty don't use their expertise to determine what and how to teach in the classes they are... experts... uh... in?

You might wonder, why? At least, I do.

the future of the CSU

The CSU administration has begun rolling out a strategy for dismantling faculty power and gutting the last vestiges of the integrity of disciplines, in particular in the liberal arts and humanities. It has several elements. Today we'll look at

Restructuring

Restructuring refers to the CSU administration's intention to replace as many faculty-taught university classes as possible with online courses with much higher enrollments, taught through extended education. Most of the courses slated for restructuring are general education courses. Restructuring has several implications for faculty work.

(1) The faculty who had taught those courses through the regular university are often "temporary" faculty, who, at the CSU, are a relatively stable workforce some of whose members have preference for work (a right to be re-hired to the same or similar assignment of work and amount of work). That is to say, these are faculty who have taught at the CSU for long enough to establish that they are competent professionals. Their primary employment is typically at the CSU. Many of them have careers that parallel the tenure-track faculty in every way except that they are never eligible for tenure. Restructuring eliminates their work through the regular university, so it eliminates the job protections they have earned.

(2) By shifting regular faculty work into extended education, and eliminating these positions for untenured "lecturer" faculty, the CSU cuts their academic budget. In addition, because teaching work through extended education does not earn benefits, the CSU eliminates its costs in that regard. For the instructional faculty affected, this changes their work from relatively stable, relatively dignified, relatively regular work, earning benefits (for very many - you have to work at least 40% of full-time to earn benefits), to work that is as precarious as casual labor, temp work.

The reason we can be confident that this will happen -- that is, that the faculty work will be shifted to extended education rather than eliminated outright -- is that the demand for higher education is not significantly lower in California than it was before the economic recession and state budget crisis. In fact, it is higher, and has continued to grow. Not that that matters. The CSU has had the plan in place long before, and was waiting for the economic crisis to provide the opportunity and excuse to implement it. "Oh no!" administrators lament, "our budget has been slashed! We must do everything we can to make sure our students can continue their educations, but we just can't afford these pricey faculty employees! We have to outsource their work -- it's the only way!" Given that most CSUs spend less than half their income (much less) on instructional faculty, this is shameless lying.

(3) So, the upshot is, the official faculty of the university will shrink, drastically (more than 20% at CSU Stanislaus from Fall 2008 to Fall 2009, with 15% cuts planned for 2010-11 academic year!). Meanwhile, many of the same people will be re-hired by the university to teach the same classes for a fraction of their previous wages, without benefits. Much of their teaching work will be online, with little or no support for technology, little or no access to university resources (library, etc.). But many of us have families, or are in the habit of paying rent or eating, and we'll have to choose this worst-case-scenario employment.

For students, the implications are pretty devastating as well:

(1) Extended education courses are often called "self-support," which is a euphemism that means students will get no state funding to support their education in those courses, and will have no access to most kinds of financial aid. What most students and the public do not realize is that the state budget allocation to the CSU pays for around 70% of the cost of their education; they pay 30%. If they must pay 100% of the cost, the cost obviously goes way up for them. Add to that that they will not be eligible for aid. Add further that they will still have to enroll in the regular university in order to earn their degrees and take courses for their majors. Essentially, the CSU will require them to pay fees twice, while providing a lower quality of service and less access to that service.

(2) This means, pretty obviously to me at least, that students who have fewer financial resources will be increasingly left out of opportunities for CSU education. Some have said that the CSU administration are not at all secretly pleased with this result, since it will leave the CSU with a "more desirable" student body. This is another euphemism that I shall not unpack because the very idea of it is too disgusting to me to contemplate.

(3) Like my lecturer colleagues, students will be left with the worst-case-scenario option for continuing their educations at the CSU. They'll simply have no choice but to pay and pay again, or else give up.

Why?

(You have to read that with Cindy Lou Who's voice.)

I believe the CSU administration's agenda is to achieve the following:

(1) break down faculty labor into modular components

(2) outsource faculty labor to cheapest available vendors

(3) maximize the extraction of funds from consumers of their services

(4) maximize flexibility in the allocation of public funds

This is the same agenda that has been pursued by privateers of such governmental functions as defense, and such public functions as provision of utilities and services. The CSU's refusal of public accountability (for instance, in the case of their million-dollar political efforts to resist Senate Bill 218, which would have required CSU to give public audits of their foundation boards) is a strong indicator of their intentions.

marriage ban

Proposition 8 is on trial. The judge in the case is asking its supporters for evidence that it will, as it was claimed, protect the institution of marriage from damage that same-sex marriage would cause. So far, defenders of Prop 8 have testified that same-sex marriage would be good for couples and children, and that there is no actual evidence that same-sex marriage will disrupt heterosexual couples. They just kinda know it will, they say.

Prop 8 supporters have also claimed that marriage is invalidated by couples who do not have biological children, since the sole purpose of marriage, according to them, is for sexual reproduction and child-rearing. These are obviously specious and intellectually dishonest claims, but hey, it's politics. It's not about telling the truth about your policy goals or motivations, it's about manipulating people to vote for them. However, the tide turned.

Today the San Francisco Chronic reported on the testimony of a long-time same-sex marriage opponent who claimed in court that same-sex marriage would increase divorce rates, again, without presenting any actual evidence. One might think you'd need evidence to support a claim like that.

One might be wrong! Face the facts: 100% of divorces are the result of marriages! Expanding marriage rights is going to increase the number of couples who divorce, because, as my statistics prove, marriage causes divorce.

The trial is making it increasingly clear that the only way to save the institution of marriage is to destroy it. Marriage is the leading cause of divorce. Therefore, marriage should be banned. T-shirts and bumper-stickers to follow.

csu, state budget, my future

The governor's January budget proposal stab in the dark ficción calls for a $300 million increase in funding for the CSU, and a further 10% increase in student fees (which is another $350 million or so in revenue, or, in other words, blood drained from our students). This, and other news, has shifted my CSU employment-threat status from "doomed" to "precarious." The governor (in his last year) also said that the state has to stop cutting higher education funding. He claimed it was because he recognizes the significance of education for the state's future, but I think his staffer admitted the truth to the newz media: the student protests got to them.

I'm so frickin' conflicted, it ain't funny. What should I do if one of these jobs comes in, but the likelihood of my current job remaining becomes more certain?

I love my stupid university. I adore our students, I adore the classes I teach, and I adore raising hell there when the opportunity arises. Although I don't love Turlock, I do love fruit, possibly more than is altogether healthy or sane.

I've lived in California almost 12 years, and I miss Pittsburgh and snow (one of which I might possibly get in a move). I've never had job security in any meaningful sense - i.e., tenure - and won't ever get it here. Besides which, the governor's budget proposal pipe dream lame attempt at generating a mass hypnotic spell ficción is certainly not going to come to pass.

Plus, at its current pace, my stupid university will be a broken shell of its former self within 2 years.

And ultimately, I have to face the fact that as long as I am in this position, not only will I be vulnerable to losing my job practically any time, but I will continue to have permanently degraded working conditions that I don't deserve.

It's all rather academic at this point, though, since at the moment I don't have a job offer to contemplate.