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.

new song!

First time in a long time. I've been playing around with this for over a year, thinking I might write a lyric, but have never been satisfied with anything I've come up with. So I think it's just going to remain a tune.

I'm trying to get at a feeling of exhilaration and joy that I get only in large cities, and that I've mainly had living in or visiting people who live mainly outside their apartments - in the city itself. If the city is your home, you have the biggest living space you could ask for.

the CSU's furlough proposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

summertime blues

They say there ain't no cure.

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

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

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

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

demi-glace

One of the oddest things about me (if I'm any judge) is that I make my own demi-glace. I don't actually do it right, in part because I don't have a kitchen that makes it possible to do the whole thing right, and in part because my procedures are a bastardization of Escoffier's directions, but the results are not only suitable, they're diabolical.

I finished a batch last night. 6 quarts of home-brewed beef stock, reduced to two trays of demi-glace ice cubes. The ice cubes are a convenient way to store and use the demi-glace, which is an idea I got reading chef whore Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential. To make various sauces, I just toss an ice cube of demi-glace into the pan, and simmer away. It's fabulous, and a basic necessity for the various compounds sauces, and simply a terrific way to turn a standard pan sauce into a meat orgy.

Any excuse for a good meat orgy.

everything must go!

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

We ended up at the mall today, for no really good reason, other than already finding ourselves in Modesto, and thinking of a trip to Trader Joe's. We went to a closing sale at a local department store, a chain with stores mainly in the Central Valley, called Gottschalks. They tried to sell out to somebody last fall, and no one took them up on it. So they're clearing out everything.

And I mean everything: all the stuff on the floor, in warehouses, all the store furnishings and equipment, all the manikins, racks, display tables, fixtures - even the dollies the stock staff (in jeans and t-shirts) were using had price tags on them.

All the desperation of trying to sell the place past, all attempts at dignity, polish and shine ended, the store was reduced to dishevelment, or, to coin an appropriate term, disshelvement.

What was revealed by this series of events are the basic tricks of retail: controlling perception. Because, you see, they'd given up on it. The normal look of a retail department store, which prevents you from seeing in depth, which fills as much of every direction with images, words of inducement, merchandise displays, was gone. All the racks were at the same level, and there were items stacked on floors or behind counters where they didn't belong.

The staff were disgruntled, and joined by this invading army of overly-casual employees (in dress and in work status, no doubt), hired by a group a cashier identified as "the liquidators" to move stock around. The muzak was on a weirdly upbeat channel doing lots of late 70s, heavy on the disco.

Aside from the sudden elimination of the usual fetishization of commodities - the pornography that takes place routinely in retail - what struck me was that, with the pretense gone, the impoverishment, callousness, and shabbiness of it was impossible to deny. For instance, in the pile of cast-off and for-sale display tables and racks, without being covered with brightly colored stuff as was their function, you could see how poorly made, how scuffed, how tatty all of it is. The conceits of fashion and elegance, which is the basic come-on of retail seduction, no longer hide this.

Especially thrilling to me was that you could buy literally anything in the store, including giant cardboard hearts covered in red and pink tissue paper roses used as Valentine's Day decorations, metal sign frames with signs still in them, hat dummies, segments of manikins, and those weird partial manikins - just a torso, or just legs, or - the one I wanted most - just a butt (I thought it would make a nice gift). My loveliest (known today by one of my random endearments for her - Pinky) was looking for and buying ladies' unmentionables, and the racks they were on were on sale too. For some reason, the whole thing struck us as hilarious.

fear and loathing: academic year 2008-09

I'll get to the fear and loathing momentarily. For the sake of continuity, I'd like to remark on the occasion for this bit of reportage.

I think I can, at this point, declare a provisional end to the academic year. The provisions are as follows: (1) I have yet to file final grades, (2) I have a handful of papers and other assignments still pending, but mainly from students I don't expect to hear from.

I started the academic year in my usual fashion. I went to the general faculty meeting, where the campus president announced that Clearwire had given us big bucks, and the university was flush, though looking ahead to uncertain times because of the state budget deadlock (one of these assertions was true, another was more true than anyone imagined at the time, and the third was in most respects divorced from reality).

That week, I sent the academic senate my legislative agenda for the year. I don't think most of the academic senate reps do this, but I do. This year my agenda was to revise the lecturer range elevation policy, to establish a faculty award for contributions to university governance, and to broaden lecturer eligibility to serve on university committees. The range elevation issue took all year to resolve, and that fairly unfortunately because of the compromises I had to make (and even so, it hasn't been signed by the president yet). The faculty and administration approved the faculty governance award, and the committee stuff is all pending. Mixed results, after a year of struggle on all that.

By November, the budget deficit that the president announced was gone in September had somehow re-emerged. Suddenly, the jobs of dozens of faculty were at risk because of an urgent need to eliminate a $5 million deficit (or something like that - reports varied). Over a couple weeks, we activated a fierce resistance to budget cuts that would slash lecturer jobs for Spring of 2009. It looked like we won.

Meanwhile, I was handling a grievance that I ultimately lost for no good reason I can discern, and which I've since been more or less told I handled improperly - even though I followed what I thought the advice I was getting said to do.

The following month I heard from a lecturer who was having a conflict with a student, that escalated into a spurious complaint against the lecturer and an administrative investigation. The investigation turned out to be inappropriately handled, so I tried to pull in the reigns as much as I could on it, with a lot of help from my friends. The interview came and went with no real consequence, perhaps in a small way as a result of our effort. It looked like we won.

Then the budget issue came back, with a vengeance. All Spring I was embroiled in the effort to organize and strategize resistance. The end result was that the full force of the cuts is going to be realized anyway. The lecturer we helped is likely to be out of work next year.

As that was coming to its hideous fruition, my students were starting to submit final papers and projects. Normally this is a somewhat painful process - students misconstrue assignments, or don't do as well as they expect, or their lives blow up on them... But in the context of the end of this particular academic year, it's all hitting me like more tumult, angst, distress and trouble, and in the end, I feel like I've run out of resources to deal with it productively. I'm no use to anyone at this point.

It feels like I've been in conflict with someone, in some way, every moment I've spent on campus, all year. From the moment I wandered into the general faculty meeting, taking notes in my usual suspicious/paranoid fashion on the official administration line on the state of the university, to the last instant I spent today, in an otherwise perfectly ordinary and amiable meeting - constant, incessant conflict.

I'd be tempted to compare it to a play by Mamet or Pinter, but my pal Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer is coming to visit in a couple weeks, and he hates those guys, so instead, I've chosen to misappropriate Hunter Thompson's line instead.

Thompson gets the last word tonight. In a 1990 interview with William Keen, Thompson replied to the inevitable question about the drug use depicted in his work with inevitable cagey avoidance and cruel insight. His finely tuned sense of rage has helped me through a lot of hard times, as has, I'm fairly ashamed to admit, his heroic fatalism. I quoted this in a paper on the decadence of the professions of journalism and academia, presented at a conference a couple years ago.

Drugs enhance or strengthen my perceptions and reactions, for good or ill. They’ve given me the resilience to withstand repeated shocks to my innocence gland. The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs. They’ve given me the strength to deal with those shocking realities guaranteed to shatter anyone’s beliefs in the higher idealistic shibboleths of our time and the “American Century.” Anyone who covers his beat for twenty years – and my beat is “The Death of the American Dream” – needs every goddamned crutch he can find.
As a journalist, I somehow managed to break most of the rules and still succeed. It’s a hard thing for most of today’s journeymen journalists to understand, but only because they can’t do it. The smart ones understood immediately. (Kingdom of Fear, 187)

Conan O'Brien: Is he Satan?

I've been an on-again, off-again fan of late-night TV since I was 10 or so. I remember fondly when David Letterman was funny.

Anyway, when Johnny Carson announced his retirement, apparently a fairly ugly competition arose between Letterman and Jay Leno. Leno won, Dave split for CBS, and into Letterman's slot NBC hired a weird-looking comedy writer with no interview experience. At first, the funniest things about Conan were his name and his hair.

Anyway, that's been a long time, and somehow O'Brien has managed to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of late-night humor (I wanted to say "jerry-rig," but that isn't ethnically-appropriate). His best bits, from the beginning, have been just like Letterman's best bits from his time at NBC: bizarre, or stupid, or juvenile - and preferably all three.

So we watched the beginning of O'Brien's first "Tonight Show." And we soon started to believe that there was something sinister going on.

Exhibit A: Rumors circulate that O'Brien forced Leno out, by threatening to leave for another gig. I don't really care whether that's true, but if it is true, it's fairly sinister. It has shades of the old Letterman/Leno fiasco. Only this time it somehow looked more like The Larry Sanders Show. Viz.: Andy Richter.

Exhibit B: The lengthy, absurd, forced, and ultimately not funny opening shtick, with Conan running across the country to get to LA for the first show because he forgot to move and couldn't catch a cab. This was the first indication what the show's bass note would be: cruelty. Pain and cruelty. As elements of humor, these aren't at all bad. Some of the best humor is painful and cruel. Viz.: Andy Richter.

Exhibit C: His hair, which was made weirder than normal - presumably to frighten young children and the elderly. Plus, it's red - the color of the hair of evil since time immemorial.

Exhibit D: The show is being filmed on the Universal Studios lot. For a first-night stunt (first of many, no doubt), O'Brien took over the play-by-play duties from a tour guide. He proceeded to have the tram buses run in a circle, while the tourists chanted "Circle! Circle! Circle!" in an offer of praise and an indication of their submission to Conan's authority. He then had the buses drive off the lot, through city streets, to a 99¢ store, where he bought every tourist their own personal piece of crap. Viz.: Andy Richter.

Exhibit E: Will Ferrell.

hot!

I don't know why it took this long, but today, for the first time, I created my own hot sauce.

I've been a fanatic for Melinda's habanero sauce (especially the reserve and the XXXX) for years now. To me, the ideal hot sauce is just like the Figueroa brothers' (makers of "Melinda's"): the heat is esophageal, rather than lingual, dental, nasal, or guttural (okay, frankly, there's some guttural heat as well), and the sauce itself is not just about welt-raising, pain-inducing scorching. It has a delicate balance of flavor, for having the amount of Scoville units it punches.

Theirs is a habanero sauce, and I find I definitely prefer them. But since we're growing serrano chiles, I made a hot sauce from our first batch of those.

(There's a story behind my affection for serranos. I first grew them by accident, as an unlabeled pepper, in Pittsburgh. The plant doesn't look like most pepper plants, and I was surprised to find it fruited at all. The fruits were short, slightly thicker than crayons, about 2 inches long, and when I casually bit into one from a day's harvest one languid Pittsburgh summer night, I instantly dubbed the unknown beasties "Little Green Hot Fuckers." And so they remain.)

So, today's sauce:

11 serrano chiles (stemmed, but with seeds remaining)
1 large tomato
1/2 a medium onion
3 cloves of garlic
All of the above wrapped in foil and roasted for about 20 minutes at 375˚.

Tossed in a blender with:
kosher salt to taste
black pepper to taste
about 1/2 tsp honey
about 1 tsp double-strength tomato paste
juice of a lime
a tsp or so of white wine vinegar

Liquefied. Shazam.

It's decent. It's hot, but not as hot as I'd like, and doesn't quite have the balance of taste I want. It's still a good first attempt, and promising enough to lead me to think I'll be pursuing this venture.

why I'm a better choice than Sotomayor

Dear President Obama,

Now that Sonia Sotomayor's unfortunate statement, in a 2001 speech, that having grown up as she did might make her decisions better than a white man's, has become the big news of her nomination to the Supreme Court, it's clearly time for you to reconsider her as your pick. By Newt Gingrich's logic, her claim is racist, and therefore equally racist to any other racist speech or action - which is to say, the word "better," in this context, is like Sotomayor was lynching all white men. How could anyone deny Gingrich's logic? I mean, he's Newt Gingrich! He has an impeccable record on ethics!

In any case, this nomination-debilitating scandal will no doubt require a new nominee, despite the fact that there's little groundswell of objection other than from people of Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh's ilk. In politics, the loudest voice wins, right?

So, if you're looking for a nominee with absolutely no skeletons in his or her closet, and especially no embarrassing public speaking past, I'm your man. No one records anything I say publicly, and if they did, they'd find a consistent record of saying nothing that would indicate any particular bias against anyone or anything, except marriage, child-bearing, the CSU administration, the Gubernator, members of the California and federal legislatures, Wal-Mart, equal marriage rights opponents, Dodge vehicles, the McDonald's corporation, drivers in Tulare and Madera counties, air travel, and Brussels sprouts.

Furthermore, I myself keep no record of any kind - electronic, analog recording, written, or in memory - of anything I say, in public or private. I am a clean slate. Again, I'm your man.

Enclosed, please find additional materials in support of my candidacy for the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The recipe for mahi-mahi in tomato and cream sauce is excellent, if I do say so myself.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Nagel

wearing latex gloves

It's the start of exam week!

I stay away from the campus as much as possible during exam week. I collect final papers via email, read them on my iBook, and return to campus to file grades (I do it the old fashioned way, on paper).

Unfortunately, it's not going to happen that way this week. I have to be on campus two whole days during exams. Well, okay, for a couple hours each day. Alright, 90 minutes each day. The point is, I hafta be in Ickyschoolblecchfehyuckyland on two separate occasions.

This has been a looooooooooooooong academic year, so if I'm feeling petulant, and a little childish, I think it is understandable.

public intellectuals

Today's Inside Higher Ed newsletter published a story about Boyce Watkins, a finance prof at Syracuse who has had a feud with Bill O'Reilly, over some fairly stupid comments by O'Reilly. Apparently, Watkins is a bit of a firebrand. He's also a self-styled "public intellectual."

I believe randomly, this phrase has crossed my path a few times recently, which is a few more times than it usually does. During the last three weeks of sessions, the Cow State Santa Claus academic senate heard a resolution in support of Tom Ammiano's bill legalizing marijuana in California. During the debate over the resolution a couple faculty argued that the senate had no business considering the issue, but they were countered by an unchallenged claim that such matters are the business of the senate, because faculty are public intellectuals with the privilege and duty to speak on matters of public concern.

I don't seriously doubt faculty have the right, as individuals, to speak publicly, in any forum they like, about any issue they like, expressing any view they like. I also agree with the implicit premise that faculty have expertise and ability to think rationally and clarify and articulate issues in ways that could be a boon to the level of public discourse. I do wonder about this public intellectual business, though.

For one thing, there isn't much of a tradition in the US of public intellectualism. The fact that one of Watkins' credentials as a public intellectual is that he has appeared on O'Reilly's show suggests something about how much weight we give to public intellectuals. Their cultural currency doesn't have a high exchange rate.

Watkins' tenure battle might also indicate that those who stake a claim to being public intellectuals aren't terribly well regarded by their colleagues or their institutions. This is dicier, because it isn't so much his being a public figure that's at stake here, as the tone of the nonsense with O'Reilly, and, apparently, his use of the phrase "magic Negro." In the article, Watkins says, "The rules of academia change when you are part of a powerless group." True, and no one knows this better than the 70%+ of college faculty in the US who are not on the tenure track. It's hard to imagine a large number of my part-time and job-security-less colleagues experiencing the privilege and duty to speak publicly about anything. They probably wouldn't be recognized as intellectuals in the first place.

I'm not saying this is the fault of tenured faculty whose privilege it is to determine who has this privilege, what it means, and what legitimately can be done with it. It is largely their fault, but that's not my point. My point is that this ideological self-conception grossly overestimates faculty's political authority, where it doesn't misconstrue public intellectualism as speaking as an expert in a particular, narrow field of specialization. Other than the alleged effect on his candidacy for tenure at Syracuse (and other than the firing of Ward Churchill, to cite another example), it profoundly doesn't matter what the public intellectual says.

(The academic senate passed the resolution in support of the marijuana bill. No word yet on whether, as one faculty senator put it, the local community now regards us as a bunch of pot-heads.)

finally, some good environmental news

Hooray! We're slightly less doomed!

If sea levels only rise 10 feet, rather than 16 feet, well then, everything will be just peachy. I plan to carry this in my heart through the weekend.

That and Governor Schwarzedoofus' latest budget plan farce. The basic gist here is that he's threatening the folks opposing the nonsensical ballot propositions that were part of the equally nonsensical February budget deal. If those don't pass, the budget is back to the drawing board, almost at the end of the fiscal year, and the Gubernator is antagonizing voters and the opponents of the insane ballot props by offering a new plan (same as the old plan, incidentally).

His ransom demand "budget proposal" cuts education (including $1 billion from higher ed), releases prisoners, requires every household in the state currently earning more than $45,000 to take in at least one prisoner or one college student without compensation for room and board, and will sequester 37% of all state tax receipts for a special fund with the line-item name "Public Employee Butt-Kicking."

In a few years, we'll all be paupers out here, especially in the Central Valley, but hey, we'll have ocean-front property by then.

a second open letter to President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President,

I have yet to receive a reply to my letter of 1 May, applying for the position of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. I am writing today to re-affirm my interest in the position, amid ongoing public and media speculation about potential candidates. Let me be quite candid: I am the best qualified candidate available.

And when I say available, I mean that I may be imminently available, for this or any other position, I mean, like maybe in a week or so. (Many of my colleagues will definitely be looking for work as well, but, you know, screw them. This is a nation built on the principle of competition.)

As a reminder, my qualifications include:
* I am not an attorney.
* Thus, I am not inclined toward legalistic obscurantism.
* Which means, I don't buy their mumbo-jumbo.
* Thus, I am not going to be tricked by some fancy-pants who argues in Court.
* My legal opinions, such as they are, shall therefore remain unaffected by sleazy legal come-ons, gifts, favors, offers of free hookers and booze, etc., unlike some Supreme Court Justices I could mention.
* In fact, because I am immovable, I will be able to spend hours in Court doing valuable service for the nation, like polishing the furnishings of the Court and/or Justices Breyer's and Scalia's foreheads.
* In addition, because I am not an attorney, whatever my own foibles, they simply can't compare, right? You've never seen me in one of Rehnquist's private clubs!

Rest assured, I have mastered the essential legal concepts guiding this country, and would be ready, willing, and able to begin applying them to every case that comes before the Court, continuing our nation's history of justice. I am totally familiar with "don't ask, don't tell," "three-fifths compromise," "administrative immunity," "sanctity of marriage," and "separate but equal."

Most of all, I am willing, as I said before, to take the position at a discount. I am now willing to accept $85,000 as a starting salary. You can't beat that with a stick.

The media report that you'll be likely to want to appoint a woman, preferably Latina. I understand that. I can work with that. My partner thinks I look good in a skirt, and I have got long hair, if that helps. I can speak a little Spanish, too.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Nagel

an open letter to President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to apply for the position of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. I trust that you will give my application serious consideration, and I thank you in advance for your time and energy.

Because I am not a certified member of the Bar, in any state, nor in possession of a juris doctorate or other law degree, I feel I am uniquely qualified to serve on the Court. Because I have not studied law, I am free from bias with regard to case-law precedent in most areas, which will allow me to weigh the legal issues with greater care. In those areas where I am somewhat knowledgeable of Court rulings (mainly First Amendment rights and certain decisions regarding rights of patients), my biases are informed by my years of having taught philosophy classes, rather than by ideology.

Indeed, after 13 years of college teaching, all of it as temporary faculty, it's no longer possible for me to afford an ideology. I teach whatever I'm required to teach, whether I believe in it or not. Consequently, Senate confirmation will be a breeze: I'll tell them whatever they want to hear.

I understand the meanings of terms like Miranda rights and habeas corpus, ex post facto and gerrymandering. I can both read and write legalese. I can decipher some legislation.

Current salary for associate justices is $208,100 (which is less than each of the 23 Presidents of the CSUs make). I'll gladly accept a discounted salary, which has to help in tough economic times. Let's say $120,000. I think I can live with that, seeing as how it's more than double what I've ever made in a year.

Enclosed, find my curriculum vitae, letters of reference, a writing sample, and 3 8x10 glossies - 1 black-and-white head shot, 1 color posed shot (reclining), and 1 color 1/4 profile.

Sincerely,
Chris Nagel

ready to go

The CFA Budget summit is, as of now, prepared.

'tweren't easy. It seemed that, at every turn, one snafu or other emerged. For instance, there have been oodles of delicious bureaucratic madness, topped with whipped cream (okay, actually, it was CoolWhip ^TM - this is a bureaucracy, after all). There have also been overworked colleagues unable to participate in deliberative processes, essentially leaving me - a mere lecturer - in the uncomfortable position of deciding how my union will put on this function. There have also been the usual thousands of doubts, misplaced anxieties, and so forth, that make events like this, and my life in general, always a little uncomfortable.

But the planning is as done as it can get. After 1:30 tomorrow, by the time the dust has settled, for good or ill, no matter who I've pissed off or how much, the thing will be well and completely done.

Then the question will be whether it did any goddamn good at all. The answer to that won't come for at least a couple weeks, I surmise. Which means I'm not really done, because I can't really afford to stop organizing in whatever way I can. People's livelihoods, students' educations, and the university's future seem, to me, to be very much at stake, in how the budget crisis is handled.

I enjoy reading Marc Bousquet's blog about academic politics. I think, in the main, his analyses are spot on. Somehow, though, his post today didn't help.

party time for Arlen Specter

I'm not all that surprised.

Arlen Specter has never struck me as a particularly party-line kinda guy. He was a pro-choice Republican when Republicans routinely made anti-choice a national party platform plank. One year when Specter was up for re-election, pro-choice women in Pennsylvania (who'd normally swing liberal, hence Democratic) voted for him in droves.

He's always struck me as a bit of a flake, too.

But now he's a Democrat. So there you go.

Specter is losing to a right-wing-backed candidate in the Republican primary, Pat Toomey, so his party switch is clearly tied to his political ambitions. But as much as the Republicans are exaggerating this claim, Specter's own claim that the Republicans have moved too far to the right is also suspect.

What's really happened is that the Democrats have moved so far to the right that the party platform of the Republicans, circa 1984, now looks like the Democrats'. The Republicans may have left Specter behind, but the Democrats have moved right into his lane.

Which means that there's almost no discernible ideological divide between the parties. They vie for power, party power, and really, nothing else.

Coke or Pepsi?

word of the day

The word of the day is "boilerplate."

I subscribe to Merriam-Webster's word of the day email service, basically because it supplied me with wordplay fodder. I haven't done much with it for a while, for a number of reasons.

Beyond that, the service is pretty much useless. I don't mean that I already know what "boilerplate" means, so I don't need the M-W people to tell me it means a standard text that you repeat. I mean that the definitions and sample usage sentences they come up with are frequently so twisted as to render the word of the day unintelligible.

("Tartlets? Tartlets? Tartlets? No, the word's lost all meaning.")

Today, f'rinstance, the derivation of "boilerplate" included this gem:

In the days before computers, small, local newspapers around the U.S. relied heavily on feature stories, editorials, and other printed material supplied by large publishing syndicates.

(It goes on to tell us that the material was supplied on "boilerplates." In case you were wondering.)

Of course, this practice is no longer followed, now that there are computers. Nowadays, local newspapers consist of almost nothing but material supplied by large publishing syndicates. Just read the Modesto Bee some day. Better yet, don't.

you know, sometimes, I just don't know

My entry titles are getting more and more elliptical.

But that's beside the point.

I have been toying around with writing new news satire for a while. I last wrote stuff about the early days of the Bush administration and a series about the 2000 election. Then it seemed that the Bush people would be self-parodying. Then it all just got too depressing. I mean, I've been watching the Daily Show, but even that's pretty painful sometimes.

Now that Obama is president, for whatever reason a bunch of people have decided to convince themselves and others that he's a crazed socialist maniac, when in fact his actual policies are marginally different from Bush's on the economy and the middle east - a point that escapes most of what is sold as political commentary these days. Anyway, the level of unhingedness of these Obama-mad weirdos has got me writing a bit.

It started with Michele Bachmann (R - Crazyville), and I had to make up something about the "tea party" protests that have been referred to by Fox News commentators as "teabagging" - to the great delight of people who think that kind of thing is funny. Which I do.

Anyway, I followed the recipe for political satire type 3 (inflate cockamamie idea to the point of grotesque, absurd excess, for comedic effect and fun and profit) on the whole teabagging fiasco. Both these entries I've written as a blog that I'm calling "The Real Story." I think the conceit of it works pretty well. Lauren wants me to invent a history of the reporter, Neil "Red" Perskit, to explain that his previous blog was suddenly deleted under mysterious circs, etc., etc.

Read the comments on the teabagging story. Tell me I'm wrong: these people don't understand that it's a joke.

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.

spring=broken

It's spring break.

I have, lessee... 120 papers to grade. The last regular-season NHL games happen tomorrow and Sunday, and the playoffs start Wednesday - during spring break, which is deeply weird to me.

It's also time for a bit of a break from this year's CSU Budget Crapfest, and all that comes along with it (just this week: lies from the administration about a CFA grievance, in an attempt to make it seem CFA is causing budget problems, when, obviously, CFA doesn't decide how to spend the CSU's money, the CSU does - [rant omitted]).

I'm gonna try to actually, you know, take a break. I played a couple guitars for about an hour this evening, and may hit a few others. Why not?

And at some point, I intend to get back to writing anything of substance. I'm just fresh out of substance at the moment.

further update, downdate, sidedate, whatever

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

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

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

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

busy

I'm in the throes of the university's budget catastrophe, trying to generate some awareness, publicity, activism, noise, etc.

brb

facebook spring

I've just returned tonight from the California Faculty Association's 70th Assembly.

The California State University is in peril. My own campus, Stanislaus, is at the precipice of catastrophe. Terrible economic times are only the beginning of the story, and anyone who has paid attention to the trends in public higher education in the US over the past 20 years or more would be able to tell you that this is no sudden crisis. Public higher education has been systematically de-funded all this time. Our current depress/recession has only brought the whole thing to its horrific climax.

For longer than I've taught at the CSU, the state budget has underfunded its mission. Considering that the CSU's mission is to educate the citizens of California so they become productive, tax-paying members of society, this clearly makes no sense... unless you believe public institutions are ipso facto essentially and irretrievably corrupt... and you believe that increasing state revenues only creates more of the same corruption.

Corruption: you know, like teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, public servants.

This is not just a matter of the budget crisis that California, like every other state, is facing. This is what happens when a budget crisis hits an institution that has been fighting for its life for years.

Within the next 2 years, California will spend more on prisons than on all forms of public higher education.

The state's bizarre budget priorities are the major cause of the CSU's catastrophic condition. The CSU's astounding level of mismanagement is another.

So here's an interesting catch-22: The CSU desperately needs additional funding from the state. My colleagues' livelihoods, our students' educations, and the state's future economic health basically depend on better funding for this primary engine of California's economy. But CSU's management has demonstrated time and again that it is uninterested in either securing the CSU's future, or spending the ever-reduced funding the CSU receives wisely.

Nevertheless, the CFA works tirelessly to improve the standing of the CSU in the state, to make the case that the CSU contributes to, rather than costs, the state economy. We constantly seek new ways to send our message, to make our case, and to push the point.

This weekend, facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (or maybe worse), facing the worst possible budget outlook for the CSU, and locally, facing a quintuple crisis from the state and campus budget crises, the CFA launched a new campaign.

Facebook. We've launched a campaign to fight the catastrophe of the CSU, on Facebook.

I'm not being critical. I think this is a smart move. I believe using Facebook will create an ongoing sense of virtual CFA community, and may extend our connections to students and staff, and the public we ultimately serve. As they told us at the Assembly, Barack Obama's campaign used Facebook. It seems to have helped.

Tonight, I friended a number of CFA colleagues on Facebook, and I now have many more friends. I'll diligently check in on Facebook to read their status updates, their notes on my wall or theirs, read what's on their minds (TM), and swap stories, links, and tactics. It will be a good tool, they told us, for organizing.

My question is: how many of them will disappear from CFA in the next year?

And many of these are not the Facebook kind of friend, but actual friends (no insult meant to Facebook friends), actual flesh, blood, brains, and heart friends that I've strategized with and talked late into the night with, and laughed with and eaten and drunk with, and argued with, and fought with, and fought alongside. And I am sore afraid, they will Facebook their fight, Youtube their dissent, email their legislators, flashmob their campuses, and then they will disappear.

I love my union siblings. I wish them better fates.

legal nooz

Also from the Chronic, renowned Roseville scholar Jeanne Caldwell and her husband Larry's lawsuit against UC Berkeley for hosting a web page (that's a page) noting that evolution could be compatible with religious beliefs was turned down without comment by the US Supremes.

The Caldwells are very disappointed. No word yet on whether they'll reconcile with reality at some point.

things that are unhealthy

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

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

Anyway, I found an item of note this morning.

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

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

But business groups decried the move as an economic disaster.

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

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

Hi-Larious. That Ernie Kovacs!

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

update; strange harmony

The hallucinations have stopped. The coughing fits have begun. I was forced from my cozy bed this morning by them, down the stairway and into two big mugs of tea. More of that to follow. I have things to get done this weekend, dammit.

Today is the birthday of both J.S. Bach and Modest Mussorgsky (or however one wants to spell it). That's pretty weird. I don't really know classical music, but I do love Bach, especially the Brandenburg Concertos, which I realize is overdone to death, but I just don't care. I still love them. I also love Pictures at an Exhibition - in particular, the 1950s Sofia concert performance by Sviatislav Richter, which crackles and zaps and gets silly and profound. Bach is 324, Mussorgsky is 170. Maybe we'll bake them a cake!

you give me fever...

... and, apparently, I hallucinate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the sick, and more banishments

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

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

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

pink, but no slip

I hope I see some people on campus wearing pink today in solidarity with public school teachers across the state. Today is Pink Friday, when 26,000 layoff notices are expected to be sent to teachers, due mainly to budget cuts.

Again and again the argument is made that everyone is hurting in this depression, so public employees shouldn't be immune. My response is that cuts to state budgets still represent political choices, and the choice being made is to cut education spending.

Granted, in some districts there are compound problems - Modesto's schools have lost enrollment because families with children are being forced out of town by the house price collapse and bad mortgage crisis, for instance. But overall, the state is basically reneging on agreements to fund education at a certain level, and with certain student-to-faculty ratios. It's not as though education stops being important when the economy tanks. Some might argue that it's most important precisely when the economy tanks.

So, I'm wearing pink high-tops and a pink vest today - more to express my sympathy than as an act of protest. However, I refuse to wear a slip.

unemployment

The story in the Modesto Bee was headlined Brutal.

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

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

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

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

In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.

is Bleak House Norm Coleman's favorite book?

The saga continues. Norm Coleman, who narrowly lost the Minnesota senate race to former comedian Al Franken, has proposed yet another bizarre legal challenge to Franken's election. After challenging absentee ballots (which resulted in an increase in Franken's margin), and after challenging the state's standard for legality of votes (double-cast ballots, ballots cast because someone miscast a first ballot, etc., etc., ad nauseam), Coleman now wants the court to throw the whole election out and start over.

In some circles, this would draw comparisons to George W. Bush's having been declared President by the Supreme Court in 2000. But I see something far more creative going on. Coleman obviously plans to continue challenge after challenge, effectively preventing Franken from being certified by Minnesota and taking his seat in the US Senate. He'll file any kind of lawsuit he can dream up, then challenge Franken's residency, then his citizenship, then his sanity (ironically enough), then his non-feloniousness - and then he'll take the gloves off. He'll just keep that up, for 6 years, and then run in 2014 on the platform that Franken never showed up for work in the Senate. It's totally insane, but it's also genius!

it's the economy, stupid

On my short drive home from campus today (I almost never drive, but it was raining and I'm exhausted), I heard a report on American Public Radio's show Marketplace about saving money and bartering will slow economic recovery because, as it was explained, if you have your friend cut your hair instead of going to a salon, and if you cook dinner for your friend in exchange, instead of your friend going out to a restaurant, you reduce economic activity, because you reduce the demand for goods and services.

Wrongo! Bartering is economic activity! The Missourian they discussed on the program had a demand for a service, and produced a good in exchange. In fact, I had a friend cut my hair in exchange for a dinner once in graduate school, and we constantly bartered to one another our goods and services - growing food, brewing beer, moving, pet care, child care, even construction, plumbing, electrical work, mechanics. None of us had any cash, because we were impoverished grad students. We had no lack of demand for goods and services, and we engaged in a great deal of economic, productive activity to meet our own and one another's needs. I spent several summers during grad school "unemployed," but without collecting unemployment or welfare. I didn't try to set a dollar value on the amount of my productivity and how much I "earned" in that way, but I do know I rarely needed to buy vegetables, for instance.

What they mean to say, properly put, is that the more we produce for ourselves rather than consume from another source, and the more we exchange with one another rather than purchase, the less monetary activity there is. Money is not equal to economy.

Amazing how easily these ideological words and ideas about economy are rolled out in our culture, and how easily we forget, or neglect that the basis for economy is production and exchange, not just money or share prices.

two days in the life of a conference-goer

I'm taking a couple moments to note that academic conferences make for terrific arm-chair sociology and cultural anthropology, by which I really mean terrific arm-chair psychoanalysis. Here at the 11th annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, there are about as many such opportunities per capita as one might expect, but maybe somewhat less.

I was scheduled for first thing Thursday morning. On the way here, I finally returned a message to the conference organizer, who asked if I would be willing to present later that day. I said I was, and I was grateful, because my loveliest and I had been up since before 4 am, and would be traveling for more than 12 hours, etc., etc. (it's not longer from Turlock to DC than from Helsinki - where our furthest-flung participant comes from -, but you can't get anywhere from Turlock). I was shifted to Thursday afternoon sometime. That didn't sort out, by the time we arrived at the conference, so I was put in a slot Friday over lunch at a café where they do poetry readings and such, as a weird addendum to a panel my theme didn't fit. The problem there was that I wouldn't be able to connect my laptop's audio jack to their sound system to play the ads that are central to my presentation (on political campaign ads and news coverage).

So I would be "sometime in the afternoon," which turned out to be right after a paper, without any warning. I was a little flustered, but got Yaptop (my laptop's nickname) up and running without too much ado. I felt like I was visibly shaking. It took all of my introduction, and showing the first ad and news piece before I settled into the stuff I was doing and could relax (this same thing happens before every single class session, with the significant difference that I usually know when class starts). The ads and coverage went over well. The ads were from the Elizabeth Dole-Kay Hagan NC senate race from 2008, in which Dole, in the final days of a losing campaign (she had to explain why she supported the Bush agenda, which was unpopular even in NC), disseminated ads on TV that insinuated some connection between Hagan and a group called Godless Americans.

The whole trip is pretty insane, and can be seen (along with another, randomly selected news story montage about atheist ads) in a youtube playlist I put together (I can't seem to get youtube to save them in order, so it's not in the order I presented them).

I won't get into the analysis here. It seemed to go over pretty well, too, and generated some good questions and feedback, for which there wasn't time to discuss.

Then we went to a brew pub so loud it was difficult to hear the person sitting right next to you, and which was gigantic in every way - the size of the store, the size of the kettles behind the bar (no doubt as props), the size of the portions and prices, the faces of patrons, the TVs above their heads tuned to various sports and newz channels. It struck me, at the time, as incredibly oppressive. I didn't want to be in noise after my two days.

Whew.

I'm also thinking about the difference in the way I prepare for a day of teaching and the way I prepare for a day of conference-going - the kinds and levels of tension I feel, where it locates in my body, how it focuses attention, how I dress, how I arrive (walking in both cases, thankfully), and what my expectations are.

the budget to end all budgetsuh-oh

Early Thursday morning, the state legislature finally voted for a budget deal through 2010. It raises income tax 0.25% and raises sales tax 1% - both regressive taxes - and cuts about $15 billion in spending, including cuts to education funding.

In the 1970s, when California was the future, the state spent more on education than any other in the US. California schools were also the envy of every other state, renowned worldwide, and understood by politicians, government officials, and the public at large as the best investment we could make in the state's economy. Now, California's per-student expenditure on education is 49th among 50 states. Sometime soon, spending on prisons will exceed education.

The budget deal also calls for a special election on propositions allowing the state to eliminate the requirement that lottery funds all go toward education, and to impose a spending cap on the state. If the spending cap passes, and since there is no political will to cut spending on prisons, and the prison population continues to increase, one of the few discretionary parts of the budget - education - will have to be cut more as prison spending goes up.

I'm not an economist, so the logic of this escapes me. Spending on the CSU, we've learned, ultimately repays the state more than four-fold, because people with college educations earn more, thus they spend more, and also pay more personal income tax, property tax, etc. So, I'd think, funding education, including higher ed, is a way to increase the state's revenue. But apparently, for reasons I can't fathom, putting money into prisons, where inmates don't earn incomes, where they don't contribute to the productivity of the state's workforce, is somehow a higher budget priority.

That's not to say I'm necessarily anti-prison. I don't think I'm an abolitionist. I imagine that there are people who are deliberately criminal, rather than out of desperation or insanity.

But really, is this the best we can do for our society?

Anyway, it's Friday, and I'm off to cellblock H campus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California's budget

HAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLPPP!!!!!!!!!

an open letter to a concerned California teacher

Dear Jeanne Caldwell,

I see you and your attorney husband are appealing to the US Supreme Court to hear your lawsuit against UC Berkeley for violating the separation of church and state. Berkeley has a web site presenting information on evolution, and from that site one can link to a page which presents an argument that evolution is not incompatible with religious positions about divine creation. That, according to you and your husband, is a violation of church and state.

I realize that your argument is that the violation is that it contradicts a your religious position that evolution and (your) religion are contradictory - that is, that it says something about the relationship of science to religion that your religion disagrees with. But I think you've hit on something much deeper.

You see, you're absolutely right that religion and the state should be divided by a wall of separation. In fact, the UC Berkeley web site should not have mentioned the issue at all, since there is no scientific controversy about evolution: evolution is the only scientific theory of the development of life. Religious views have no place whatsoever in the discussion, as your law suit helpfully points out. You no doubt support the independence of all public schools from any incursion of religion, too. For instance: no instruction on creationism in biology classes. I'm right, aren't I?

The only way the state can protect your religious freedom is to keep the state free from any religious affiliation at all. Equal protection, right? Which of course means removing "under god" from the Pledge of Allegiance - another move I'm sure you're ready to support, since obviously the mention of god in the Pledge affiliates the state with religion.

While you're at it, maybe you should sue the federal government for granting tax money to faith-based social services groups that discriminate in employment, which would be a violation of federal equal opportunity statutes for a public agency to do. That's an obvious case of a violation of the separation of church and state, innit?

Wow, there's a lot for you great activists for liberty and the constitution to do! I can only wish you the best of luck, because there are lots of people who seem to think the separation of church and state is a principle they can bend and twist in all sorts of shapes to basically any particular outcome they want.

Yours in the Jeffersonian spirit,
Doc Nagel

relaxing and enjoying my shoes

I gots me new shoes.



Last Christmas, my loveliest gave me a pair of hot pink high tops from a sweatshop-free clothing company called, obviously enough, No Sweat Apparel. There stuff is 100% union made - including not only the people sewing stuff together, but the vendors who sell them the materials - all the way down. The pinks were a limited-edition breast cancer awareness and research item, and I really love them. I love them so much, I decided to look into getting a couple other pairs from No Sweat. Sadly, once I got to their shoes, I found that they are sold out of my size (which is 13) in any color but red and pink - which they are closing out. So I picked up two spare pairs of the pinks, and the red ones featured here.

They're dandy. They're also my MoJo shoes, as you might be able to read on the label. The tongue spells out the MoJo connection for you: Mother Jones, the great muckraking and activism rag. Brilliant!

And now I can put them on and declare to the world: I got my MoJo workin'! Even more brilliant!

what I learned at Disneyland

I learned a few things at Disneyland, mainly about myself, but also about Disneyland.

1. I don't like roller coasters.

After getting in the car to drive back from Disneyland to Harbor City, I told Lauren, "It turns out that if you want to make me miserable, you can put me in a vehicle I can't control, stop be from being able to see which way it's going, and then make the ride turbulent and really loud." Basically, a roller coaster is everything I hate about air travel (except for 'security') and everything I hate about going to the movies, rolled into one.

Lauren suggested this was mainly a psychological issue about control, but to me a key factor is perception. If I can look forward and out of a vehicle, I don't mind it. I like boats, for instance. I enjoyed being in a teeny tiny two-seater prop plane. I don't mind being a front-seat passenger in a fast-moving car, as long as I can predict where the vehicle will go and can see where it's going and it's not incredibly rough. Take one of those away, and I'm less happy. Take all three away, and you've got a foolproof recipe for making me miserable.

2. I really like carousels.

I had no idea. I'm not certain I've been on an honest-to-Moose carousel before, because I think I would have remembered. Carousels always looked like pleasant, but rather dull, rides. Indeed, it wasn't thrilling riding the big Mary Poppins carousel, but it was much nicer than it seemed it ought to be, if that makes any sense. For as simple and un-thrilling as it is, just going in a circle, it was inordinately pleasant.

3. Disneyland's main purpose is to sell you Disneyland.

I suppose I should've seen this coming. After all, I'd read Peter Steeves' "A Phenomenologist in the Magic Kingdom" before, and remembered his sense of the packaging and sale of experience as a fundamental feature of Disneyland. But I wasn't prepared for the full reality. Every major ride ends in or immediate in front of a souvenir shop selling you ride-related crapola. Famously, Space Mountain ends at a video display of stills of you riding the thing, and a booth where you can plunk down 15 bucks for a copy of the image - selling you your own experience.

Steeves also points out the obvious self-referentiality of the place, which if anything is apparently on the increase (Small World now includes Disney characters, for instance). But more than that, what Disney sells you is your trip to Disney, your being in Disney - at every single moment. It's rather like ads on TV telling you to watch TV, or ads in the mall for the mall, telling you how great it is being in the mall. The big tagline all over the place was "Celebrate Today."

4. Ultimately, amusement parks don't have anything I need.

This is rather sad for my loveliest, because she grew up with and adores Disneyland. I can see that, I really can. I didn't grow up with it, or with other amusement parks. We went to Cedar Point in Ohio all of two or three times when I was a kid. I went to Disneyworld sick as a friggin' dog when I was 9 or 10. I don't have warm childhood associations with it, and unlike Mexican restaurants (the only childhood memories of which were of traumas at my parents' favorite dive in Toledo, called Loma Linda), there isn't something inherent to amusement parks that I can learn to love.

I don't mean that it was a terrible experience, or even mostly bad. I liked Pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn't disturbingly Disneyfied to the point of being hard to take. I was never accosted by a guy in a Mickey suit.

Plus, you know, it's $69 to get in to the place.

goin' to Disneyland

In all frankness, I can hardly believe that I'm going to Disneyland on Wednesday. (If you're there, say hi!) And that about sums it up.

certainly better than last January

January, and Winter Term, are coming to a quick end. For a variety of reasons, it hasn't been a really terrific January. I'm more than a bit anxious about the depression (or is it depressed about the anxiety? who can tell?), for one thing. I've had to deal with an unspeakably angering faculty rights case, which has cost time, energy, and some little anxiety as well.

But you know what, so far this Obama guy looks to be trying to do some good. Plus, I haven't had to euthanize anybody. I made two exemplary meatloaves and numerous terrific batches of bread. Guerin's beer should be just about ready to eat. Good stuff.

I'm plodding along with re-learning fundamentals of fingerpicking, to adapt my playing to the kind of fingerstyle guitar I have aspired to, and admired from afar, and which is frequently very badly represented in guitar tabulature to be found online. (I found a tab for John Fahey's number "Sligo River Blues" that was apparently transcribed by a tone-deaf music-hating arhythmic maniac just prior to overdosing on barbiturates. Thankfully, helpfully, some French dude videocapped himself playing the thing and youtubed it. I'm about 1/4 of 1% done learning it.)

I'm getting around to the presentation I have to prepare for the Society for Phenomenology and Media's 11th - count 'em! - conference, next month near DC. It'll be nice to go to DC again. The last time we were there was just after the 2004 election, and we spent a lot of time explaining away our disparaging remarks about the Bush administration, speaking clearly and distinctly into various lamps, lightswitches, bedside tables, Gideon's Bibles, and ceiling tiles that, we felt certain, had no doubt been wiretapped For The Safety Of The Homeland And In Support Of Our Troops. We'll at least feel like things have changed.

That's where I am at present: I at least feel like I've helped a faculty colleague, like the new president has good ideas and intentions, like I'm advancing my guitar playing, like it's been a better January. I hold my final judgment in abeyance. Time will tell.

I wonder if this is how it felt to be Nick Drake.

proud to be union, plus, pain

Friday I cut class short, to drive us up to Sac ("The Town So Nice, They Named It Sac") for the CFA Joint Council meeting of the Lecturers and the Affirmative Action* councils. There was the usual dinner-n-speaker on Friday, then the all-day meeting of the Lecturers' Council on Saturday.

It wasn't a meeting chock full of epiphanies. For one thing, there's been a bit of turnover among the council personnel, which is good - new blood, even if it's not exactly young blood, is always a good thing. So some of the meeting's agenda was set with that in mind.

Plus, at this point, given the economic straits, given the impasse in the re-opener "negotiations" with the CSU on salaries (of which more in a sec), the proper focus is on technical matters of contract enforcement, and building the union's capacity. "Capacity building" is the new watchword, a broader notion than recruiting membership, because it involves recruiting activists, improving communications, creating political power - a large-scale, multi-layered, munificently-hyphenated effort.

I like it. I've been getting really upset about the coming economic apocalypse, and now I feel like I've got specific things to do. I'm starting with the spring. Actually, I'm starting this week.

So, okay. We came within a week of striking for the first time, but finally won the best contract in the history of CFA, two springs ago. We got raises that would give us salaries slightly more in keeping with other faculty in comparable institutions (and raises for the first time in years). Then the economy, predictably, tanked, and the CSU, predictably, re-opened the salary article in response. Their first offer was to eliminate the raises we bargained. Their last, best offer, tendered last week, was to eliminate the raises we bargained. That's CSU bargaining.

In any case, the CSU is saying that they have money, and could pay the raises, but there are "competing priorities" for spending the money. Which, I think, means "we could pay you the raises you bargained, but we're not gonna."

Now, I'm totally sympathetic to the needs of the staff, and the need to try to keep student fees lower. My problem with the CSU's move at this point is that once again, this public institution is refusing to be transparent, or even forthcoming, about its books. Someone this weekend put the absurdity and insult of it pretty well: not only is this a violation of the public trust, but it's also ignoring the presence, right here in the CSU, of expertise the CSU administration could consult about budget management. (Locally, the admin at Santa Claus is moving toward being more forthcoming, and relying on the expertise of a faculty-majority committee for budget advice.)

Anyway, back home Saturday night after a quick trip to a hoidy-toidy yarn store and the Sac IKEA, then off this afternoon for the Townsend Opera Players's production of The Magic Flute. Then back home, to grade papers. I'm pretty tired. And my wrist and little fingers on my left hand have hurt for three days. I think driving is aggravating my previous bout of carpal pain.

*"Affirmative Action" is not a legally recognized model for achieving diversity in public institutions in California, per a ballot initiative passed by voters many years ago. However, the CSU and CFA jointly put together a policy which continues to acknowledge affirmative action as an important value in hiring faculty and staff, and in enrolling students. I don't think CSU does a great job (and the numbers demonstrate that), but the population of CFA is sure getting more and more diverse and interesting.

the news story everybody is talking about today

The CSU is drafting information security and system use policy for all the 23 campuses, and today the academic senate of CSU Stanislaus (a.k.a. the ork-o-demic senate at Cow State Santa Claus) discussed the draft policy. I would characterize the senate's mood as unimpressed.

I was vaguely insulted by the draft policy, as I scanned through it, because it seemed to contemplate, if not actually assume, that the main info security issue the CSU has is that users (i.e., faculty and staff) treat information access like a personal playground for nefarious and illegal deeds. I hadn't put it together before the meeting, when one of my colleagues pointed out that the basic flaw in the draft policy is its failure to address universities as though teaching, research, and scholarship happened there. In the corporate environment, he noted, the assumption is that the corporation owns all information users may have some access to. In a university environment, that's not really the case, especially when faculty enjoy (as we still do, to a limited extent) academic freedom.

More to the point, it's another example of the way university administrations look at the life and work of universities: as problems, mainly generated by faculty (when not generated by students), that can generate chaos and create civil liability. As another colleague put it, sotto voce, during the senate meeting, the CSU is looking for one pedophile in San Bernardino, and we're all going to pay for it. (This is not to suggest that there is a pedophile working for or attending CSU San Bernardino. My colleague was making what is usually called a joke.)

Local experience suggests something quite different. The main problems with information security we've had have involved accidental release and insecurity of personal data. About five years ago, while changing servers, employee data were for several hours left on an unsecured server. About three years ago, our food-service concessionaire used unsecured internet access for credit and debit card transactions.

What the new CSU info security policy seems to aim for is to identify and exploit every avenue for limiting the university's potential liability.

Our mission? Eh.

educational fascism,and what Stanley Fish is gonna do about it

When I first contemplated grad school, one of my undergrad profs advised me about what to expect. Among the things he told me (almost all of which turned out to be true) was that my chances of getting a tenure-track job teaching philosophy at the other end of grad school were remote - not because of some failing of mine, but because, in his view, there simply weren't going to be very many tenure-track jobs out there. When I first came to California to teach, it was as a one-year full-time "lecturer." I've retained this position, through hard work, a bit of luck, and some struggle. Now I'm an activist in the union and an advocate for the rights of faculty, like me, in "temporary" positions - the majority of the faculty.

Over the years, I've gone through some important changes of mind. Regarding "temporary" employment in academia, I've come to the conclusion that tenure is disappearing completely. This is the last generation to see tenure. (It may be the last generation among affluent nations to see electricity, central heat, mass-scale economies, and abundant food, but that's a tale for another day.) Already, the vast majority of college faculty in the US work with little or no job security, and little or no hope of attaining it. The trend is also increasing its pace.

Some observers believe there is an open question of why this is happening. Some assert that no one is causing this trend - that "market forces" or an irrevocable cultural shift are to blame. To me, this is patent hogwash. Tenure is going away because powerful people want it to go away. They want it to go away because tenured faculty cost more, have more authority, cannot be told what to do - in theory, at least (many tenured faculty I know are astonishingly timorous and quiescent, especially in contrast to the unprotected contingent faculty activists I know, and admittedly vastly prefer). The casualization of faculty labor is especially acute in humanities, where tenure is becoming the badge of elite status and where the bulk of teaching is done by tenuous-track faculty. Why in the humanities? I think the answers are obvious: What else can an MA or PhD in humanities do for a living? Where else can cost savings be so easily achieved by universities? And the big one: what other disciplines deliberately focus on developing critical reasoning abilities that may lead students to wonder about their educations, careers, and roles in society?

Recently, someone clued Stanley Fish in on this, and he even read a book about it, by a former student named Frank Donoghue. Fish seems to endorse Donoghue's conclusion, which is that humanities departments will soon be peopled entirely with education's equivalent of migrant workers. This, Fish explains, is because of social changes that have ruled out education being for any non-instrumental purpose - that is, education is understood as only for the sake of developing job skills. Fish contrasts this with education in humanities being for no purpose - just for the sake of explaining and understanding, which issues in no change in the world at all.

Fish doesn't say much about the implicit fascism of the "instrumental" model of education, but instead considers the end of tenure in the humanities. In concluding, he seems to express a vague air of wistfulness about it:

People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early. After reading Donoghue’s book, I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.

Goody for you, Stan.

The article pisses me off, not, as one might imagine, because of Fish's blasé attitude toward the fairly lousy working lives of the majority faculty on whose labor Fish's own elite status utterly depends - though indeed that pisses me off. What really irked me was the ignorance of his argument. He poses a clearly false dichotomy: humanities education must be either for the sake of saleable skills, or for purposeless understanding. That he can make this argument, with an apparently straight face, what? 70? years after The Dialectic of Enlightenment is impossible for me to grasp. Hello? Stanley? Remember the debates with Habermas?

Asshole.

Anyway, humanities education can be, often is, fascistic. But it needn't be "instrumental" in that sense alone. There is a critical use of reason, as well - one that, contrary to Fish's elitism, does issue in social change. At least, we're trying...

So, think I'll add Stanley Fish to the list: not allowed in the house. You blew it, Stan.

winter term quietly moves along

Nothing to see here, for some odd reason.

I'm knee-deep in Winter Term, the four-week inter-session Cow State Santa Claus crams between Fall and Spring semesters, in order to wreak utter havoc on the Collective Bargaining Agreement's provisions on salary and benefits. But that's another story for another day.

I've taught in Winter Term every year but two. It's fairly tiring: a full semester's credit bearing course, taught three days a week, three hours each day.

By way of some unknown concatenation of unseen forces, this Winter Term is doing its own thing, and otherwise my academic life and the university seem very still. In my usual paranoia about such matters, I've naturally assumed this is the calm before the storm (indeed, the 2009-2010 budget proposal from the gub cuts the CSU budget another $66 million).

It's a peculiar rhythm.

Oh yes, and it's stopped raining. We've gotten about 10% of normal rainfall for the month.

life being what it is

I'm listening to a Kaki King song called "Life Being What It Is." It's really good. She's a fantastic guitar player, and I wish I could play as well as she does.

But I borrow the title for reasons having nothing to do with my appreciation for Kaki King, or the super-duper-cool percussion-n-harmonic solo on this number, which is excellent.

No, indeed. The title just speaks to the situation.

There's a guy named Keith Hoeller who teaches philosophy for a living, much like I do, up in Washington. He also spends a lot of time reading everything, apparently, published about the plight of contingent faculty in the US. For weeks, he's been sending links to the "adjunct" faculty listserv that connect to stories about universities around the country planning to cut faculty, salaries, or both, and it's just kind of overwhelming.

University of Urbana and Skidmore College were tonight's pair. Urbana is planning to ask faculty to voluntarily give back 6 percent of their salaries, and cutting non-faculty staff salaries (10 percent for salaries over $75,000). Urbana and Skidmore are both planning to cut or consider cutting temporary faculty, beginning this spring semester.

Every day, there are more reports. Part-time or full-time, non-tenurable college and university faculty everywhere in the US are losing their jobs, day by day. The press coverage of this is spotty, local, and in no way connects the various dots. Not only is there almost no concern about the impact of the layoffs on either the faculty or the students affected, there's no big picture being painted of what this means, or says, about either the economy or our public values.

It's sad to me, because I've spent my entire career as a contingent academic, and the better part of a decade as an advocate for contingent faculty. All those faculty are simply disappearing. They'll be taking unemployment, looking for other ways to make a living - and sometimes having advanced degrees is a hindrance to employment, I know from my own experience.

But above that, it's eerie. I am wondering how many of my close friends and colleagues will just be gone next year, or next month, or in two weeks when the CFA Lecturers' Council meets in Sacramento.

another one

It's 2009, they tell me, and I've already started by Winter Term class. Winter Term tends to go by extremely quickly, and then Spring commences its interminable slog in mid-February (it actually is Spring here then, unlike in most places in the US, where "Spring" semesters begin in the middle of Winter).

I plan to put fewer things on my plate for the remainder of the Academic Year. Fall was a drag.

On the other hand, it's barely over a week before we get the governor's initial budget farce proposal farce. That'll set more sturm und drang in motion, no doubt, because of the drastic and delusional cuts he'll call for, in order to scare the legislature.